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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/15931-8.txt b/15931-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1554d8c --- /dev/null +++ b/15931-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,13224 @@ +The Project Gutenberg eBook, A History of English Romanticism in the +Nineteenth Century, by Henry A. Beers + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century + + +Author: Henry A. Beers + +Release Date: May 28, 2005 [eBook #15931] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM +IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY*** + + +E-text prepared by Al Haines + + + +A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY + +by + +HENRY A. BEERS + +Author of _A Suburban Pastoral_, _The Ways of Yale_, etc. + +New York +Henry Holt and Company + +1918 + + + + + + + + ROMANCE + + My love dwelt in a Northern land. + A grey tower in a forest green + Was hers, and far on either hand + The long wash of the waves was seen, + And leagues on leagues of yellow sand, + The woven forest boughs between. + + And through the silver Northern light + The sunset slowly died away, + And herds of strange deer, lily-white, + Stole forth among the branches grey; + About the coming of the light, + They fled like ghosts before the day. + + I know not if the forest green + Still girdles round that castle grey; + I know not if the boughs between + The white deer vanish ere the day; + Above my love the grass is green, + My heart is colder than the clay. + + ANDREW LANG. + + + + + +PREFACE. + +The present volume is a sequel to "A History of English Romanticism in +the Eighteenth Century" (New York; Henry Holt & Co., 1899). References +in the footnotes to "Volume I." are to that work. The difficulties of +this second part of my undertaking have been of a kind just opposite to +those of the first. As it concerns my subject, the eighteenth century +was an age of beginnings; and the problem was to discover what latent +romanticism existed in the writings of a period whose spirit, upon the +whole, was distinctly unromantic. But the temper of the nineteenth +century has been, until recent years, prevailingly romantic in the wider +meaning of the word. And as to the more restricted sense in which I have +chosen to employ it, the mediaevalising literature of the nineteenth +century is at least twenty times as great as that of the eighteenth, both +in bulk and in value. Accordingly the problem here is one of selection; +and of selection not from a list of half-forgotten names, like Warton and +Hurd, but from authors whose work is still the daily reading of all +educated readers. + +As I had anticipated, objection has been made to the narrowness of my +definition of _romanticism_. But every writer has a right to make his +own definitions; or, at least, to say what his book shall be about. I +have not written a history of the "liberal movement in English +literature"; nor of the "renaissance of wonder"; nor of the "emancipation +of the ego." Why not have called the book, then, "A History of the +Mediaeval Revival in England"? Because I have a clear title to the use +of _romantic_ in one of its commonest acceptations; and, for myself, I +prefer the simple dictionary definition, "pertaining to the style of the +Christian and popular literature of the Middle Ages," to any of those +more pretentious explanations which seek to express the true inwardness +of romantic literature by analysing it into its elements, selecting one +of these elements as essential, and rejecting all the rest as accidental. + +M. Brunetière; for instance, identifies romanticism with lyricism. It is +the "emancipation of the ego." This formula is made to fit Victor Hugo, +and it will fit Byron. But M. Brunetière would surely not deny that +Walter Scott's work is objective and dramatic quite as often as it is +lyrical. Yet what Englishman will be satisfied with a definition of +_romantic_ which excludes Scott? Indeed, M. Brunetière himself is +respectful to the traditional meaning of the word. "Numerous +definitions," he says, "have been given of Romanticism, and still others +are continually being offered; and all, or almost all of them, contain a +part of the truth. Mme. de Staël was right when she asserted in her +'Allemagne' that Paganism and Christianity, the North and the South, +antiquity and the Middle Ages, having divided between them the history of +literature, Romanticism in consequence, in contrast to Classicism, was a +combination of chivalry, the Middle Ages, the literatures of the North, +and Christianity. It should be noted, in this connection, that some +thirty years later Heinrich Heine, in the book in which he will rewrite +Mme. de Staël's, will not give such a very different idea of +Romanticism." And if, in an analysis of the romantic movement throughout +Europe, any single element in it can lay claim to the leading place, that +element seems to me to be the return of each country to its national +past; in other words, mediaevalism. + +A definition loses its usefulness when it is made to connote too much. +Professor Herford says that the "organising conception" of his "Age of +Wordsworth" is romanticism. But if Cowper and Wordsworth and Shelley are +romantic, then almost all the literature of the years 1798-1830 is +romantic. I prefer to think of Cowper as a naturalist, of Shelley as an +idealist, and of Wordsworth as a transcendental realist, and to reserve +the name romanticist for writers like Scott, Coleridge, and Keats; and I +think the distinction a serviceable one. Again, I have been censured for +omitting Blake from my former volume. The omission was deliberate, not +accidental, and the grounds for it were given in the preface. Blake was +not discovered until rather late in the nineteenth century. He was not a +link in the chain of influence which I was tracing. I am glad to find my +justification in a passage of Mr. Saintsbury's "History of Nineteenth +Century Literature" (p. 13): "Blake exercised on the literary _history_ +of his time no influence, and occupied in it no position. . . . The +public had little opportunity of seeing his pictures, and less of reading +his books. . . . He was practically an unread man." + +But I hope that this second volume may make more clear the unity of my +design and the limits of my subject. It is scarcely necessary to add +that no absolute estimate is attempted of the writers whose works are +described in this history. They are looked at exclusively from a single +point of view. H. A. B. + +APRIL, 1901. + + + + +TABLE OF CONTENTS. + + +CHAPTER + + I. WALTER SCOTT + + II. COLERIDGE, BOWLES, AND THE POPE CONTROVERSY + + III. KEATS, LEIGH HUNT, AND THE DANTE REVIVAL + + IV. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN GERMANY + + V. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN FRANCE + + VI. DIFFUSED ROMANTICISM IN THE LITERATURE OF + THE NINETEENTH CENTURY + + VII. THE PRE-RAPHAELITES + + VIII. TENDENCIES AND RESULTS + + + + +A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM. + + +CHAPTER I. + +Walter Scott.[1] + +It was reserved for Walter Scott, "the Ariosto of the North," "the +historiographer royal of feudalism," to accomplish the task which his +eighteenth-century forerunners had essayed in vain. He possessed the +true enchanter's wand, the historic imagination. With this in his hand, +he raised the dead past to life, made it once more conceivable, made it +even actual. Before Scott no genius of the highest order had lent itself +wholly or mainly to retrospection. He is the middle point and the +culmination of English romanticism. His name is, all in all, the most +important on our list. "Towards him all the lines of the romantic +revival converge." [2] The popular ballad, the Gothic romance, the +Ossianic poetry, the new German literature, the Scandinavian discoveries, +these and other scattered rays of influence reach a focus in Scott. It +is true that his delineation of feudal society is not final. There were +sides of mediaeval life which he did not know, or understand, or +sympathize with, and some of these have been painted in by later artists. +That his pictures have a coloring of modern sentiment is no arraignment +of him but of the _genre_. All romanticists are resurrectionists; their +art is an elaborate make-believe. It is enough for their purpose if the +world which they re-create has the look of reality, the _verisimile_ if +not the _verum_. That Scott's genius was _in extenso_ rather than _in +intenso_, that his work is largely improvisation, that he was not a +miniature, but a distemper painter, splashing large canvasses with a +coarse brush and gaudy pigments, all these are commonplaces of criticism. +Scott's handling was broad, vigorous, easy, careless, healthy, free. He +was never subtle, morbid, or fantastic, and had no niceties or secrets. +He was, as Coleridge said of Schiller, "master, not of the intense drama +of passion, but the diffused drama of history." Therefore, because his +qualities were popular and his appeal was made to the people, the general +reader, he won a hearing for his cause, which Coleridge or Keats or +Tieck, with his closer workmanship, could never have won. He first and +he alone _popularised_ romance. No literature dealing with the feudal +past has ever had the currency and the universal success of Scott's. At +no time has mediaevalism held so large a place in comparison with other +literary interests as during the years of his greatest vogue, say from +1805 to 1830. + +The first point to be noticed about Scott is the thoroughness of his +equipment. While never a scholar in the academic sense, he was, along +certain chosen lines, a really learned man. He was thirty-four when he +published "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805), the first of his series +of metrical romances and the first of his poems to gain popular favour. +But for twenty years he had been storing his mind with the history, +legends, and ballad poetry of the Scottish border, and was already a +finished antiquarian. The bent and limitations of his genius were early +determined, and it remained to the end wonderfully constant to its +object. At the age of twelve he had begun a collection of manuscript +ballads. His education in romance dated from the cradle. His lullabies +were Jacobite songs; his grandmother told him tales of moss-troopers, and +his Aunt Janet read him ballads from Ramsay's "Tea-table Miscellany," +upon which his quick and tenacious memory fastened eagerly. The ballad +of "Hardiknute," in this collection, he knew by heart before he could +read. "It was the first poem I ever learnt--the last I shall ever +forget." Dr. Blacklock introduced the young schoolboy to the poems of +Ossian and of Spenser, and he committed to memory "whole duans of the one +and cantos of the other." "Spenser," he says, "I could have read +forever. Too young to trouble myself about the allegory, I considered +all the knights and ladies and dragons and giants in their outward and +exoteric sense, and God only knows how delighted I was to find myself in +such society." A little later Percy's "Reliques" fell into his hands, +with results that have already been described.[3] + +As soon as he got access to the circulating library in Edinburgh, he +began to devour its works of fiction, characteristically rejecting love +stories and domestic tales, but laying hold upon "all that was +adventurous and romantic," and in particular upon "everything which +touched on knight-errantry." For two or three years he used to spend his +holidays with his schoolmate, John Irving, on Arthur's Seat or Salisbury +Crags, where they read together books like "The Castle of Otranto" and +the poems of Spenser and Ariosto; or composed and narrated to each other +"interminable tales of battles and enchantments" and "legends in which +the martial and the miraculous always predominated." The education of +Edward Waverley, as described in the third chapter of Scott's first +novel, was confessedly the novelist's own education. In the "large +Gothic room" which was the library of Waverley Honour, the young +book-worm pored over "old historical chronicles" and the writings of +Pulci, Froissart, Brantome, and De la Noue; and became "well acquainted +with Spenser, Drayton, and other poets who have exercised themselves on +romantic fiction--of all themes the most fascinating to a youthful +imagination." + +Yet even thus early, a certain solidity was apparent in Scott's studies. +"To the romances and poetry which I chiefly delighted in," he writes, "I +had always added the study of history, especially as connected with +military events." He interested himself, for example, in the art of +fortification; and when confined to his bed by a childish illness, found +amusement in modelling fortresses and "arranging shells and seeds and +pebbles so as to represent encountering armies. . . . I fought my way +thus through Vertot's 'Knights of Malta'--a book which, as it hovered +between history and romance, was exceedingly dear to me." + +Every genius is self-educated, and we find Scott from the first making +instinctive selections and rejections among the various kinds of +knowledge offered him. At school he would learn no Greek, and wrote a +theme in which he maintained, to the wrath of his teacher, that Ariosto +was a better poet than Homer. In later life he declared that he had +forgotten even the letters of the Greek alphabet. Latin would have fared +as badly, had not his interest in Matthew Paris and other monkish +chroniclers "kept up a kind of familiarity with the language even in its +rudest state." "To my Gothic ear, the 'Stabat Mater,' the 'Dies +Irae,'[4] and some of the other hymns of the Catholic Church are more +solemn and affecting than the fine classical poetry of Buchanan." In our +examination of Scott's early translations from the German,[5] it has been +noticed how exclusively he was attracted by the romantic department of +that literature, passing over, for instance, Goethe's maturer work, to +fix upon his juvenile drama "Götz von Berlichingen." Similarly he +learned Italian just to read in the original the romantic poets Tasso, +Ariosto, Boiardo, and Pulci. When he first went to London in 1799, "his +great anxiety," reports Lockhart, "was to examine the antiquities of the +Tower and Westminster Abbey, and to make some researches among the MSS. +of the British Museum." From Oxford, which he visited in 1803, he +brought away only "a grand but indistinct picture of towers and chapels +and oriels and vaulted halls", having met there a reception which, as he +modestly acknowledges, "was more than such a truant to the classic page +as myself was entitled to expect at the source of classic learning." +Finally, in his last illness, when sent to Rome to recover from the +effects of a paralytic stroke, his ruling passion was strong in death. +He examined with eagerness the remains of the mediaeval city, but +appeared quite indifferent to that older Rome which speaks to the +classical student. It will be remembered that just the contrary of this +was true of Addison, when he was in Italy a century before.[6] Scott was +at no pains to deny or to justify the one-sidedness of his culture. But +when Erskine remonstrated with him for rambling on + + "through brake and maze + With harpers rude, of barbarous days," + +and urged him to compose a regular epic on classical lines, he +good-naturedly but resolutely put aside the advice. + + "Nay, Erskine, nay--On the wild hill + Let the wild heath-bell[7] flourish still . . . . + Though wild as cloud, as stream, as gale, + Flow forth, flow unrestrained, my tale!" [8] + +Scott's letters to Erskine, Ellis, Leyden, Ritson, Miss Seward, and other +literary correspondents are filled with discussions of antiquarian +questions and the results of his favourite reading in old books and +manuscripts. He communicates his conclusions on the subject of "Arthur +and Merlin" or on the authorship of the old metrical romance of "Sir +Tristram." [9] He has been copying manuscripts in the Advocates' Library +at Edinburgh. In 1791 he read papers before the Speculative Society on +"The Origin of the Feudal System," "The Authenticity of Ossian's Poems," +"The Origin of the Scandinavian Mythology." Lockhart describes two +note-books in Scott's hand-writing, with the date 1792, containing +memoranda of ancient court records about Walter Scott and his wife, Dame +Janet Beaton, the "Ladye" of Branksome in the "Lay"; extracts from +"Guerin de Montglave"; copies of "Vegtam's Kvitha" and the "Death-Song of +Regner Lodbrog," with Gray's English versions; Cnut's verses on passing +Ely Cathedral; the ancient English "Cuckoo Song," and other rubbish of +the kind.[10] When in 1803 he began to contribute articles to the +_Edinburgh Review_, his chosen topics were such as "Amadis of Gaul," +Ellis' "Specimens of Ancient English Poetry," Godwin's "Chaucer," +Sibbald's "Chronicle of Scottish Poetry," Evans' "Old Ballads," Todd's +"Spenser," "The Life and Works of Chatterton," Southey's translation of +"The Cid," etc. + +Scott's preparation for the work which he had to do was more than +adequate. His reading along chosen lines was probably more extensive and +minute than any man's of his generation. The introductions and notes to +his poems and novels are even overburdened with learning. But this, +though important, was but the lesser part of his advantage. "The +old-maidenly genius of antiquarianism" could produce a Strutt[11] or even +perhaps a Warton; but it needed the touch of the creative imagination to +turn the dead material of knowledge into works of art that have delighted +millions of readers for a hundred years in all civilised lands and +tongues. + +The key to Scott's romanticism is his intense local feeling.[12] That +attachment to place which, in most men, is a sort of animal instinct, was +with him a passion. To set the imagination at work some emotional +stimulus is required. The angry pride of Byron, Shelley's revolt against +authority, Keats' almost painfully acute sensitiveness to beauty, +supplied the nervous irritation which was wanting in Scott's slower, +stronger, and heavier temperament. The needed impetus came to him from +his love of country. Byron and Shelley were torn up by the roots and +flung abroad, but Scott had struck his roots deep into native soil. His +absorption in the past and reverence for everything that was old, his +conservative prejudices and aristocratic ambitions, all had their source +in this feeling. Scott's Toryism was of a different spring from +Wordsworth's and Coleridge's. It was not a reaction from disappointed +radicalism; nor was it the result of reasoned conviction. It was inborn +and was nursed into a sentimental Jacobitism by ancestral traditions and +by an early prepossession in favour of the Stuarts--a Scottish +dynasty--reinforced by encounters with men in the Highlands who had been +out in the '45. It did not interfere with a practical loyalty to the +reigning house and with what seems like a somewhat exaggerated deference +to George IV. Personally the most modest of men, he was proud to trace +his descent from "auld Wat of Harden" [13] and to claim kinship with the +bold Buccleuch. He used to make annual pilgrimages to Harden Tower, "the +_incunabula_ of his race"; and "in the earlier part of his life," says +Lockhart, "he had nearly availed himself of his kinsman's permission to +fit up the dilapidated _peel_ for his summer residence." + +Byron wrote: "I twine my hope of being remembered in my line with my +land's language." But Scott wished to associate his name with the land +itself. Abbotsford was more to him than Newstead could ever have been to +Byron; although Byron was a peer and inherited his domain, while Scott +was a commoner and created his. Too much has been said in condemnation +of Scott's weakness in this respect; that his highest ambition was to +become a _laird_ and found a family; that he was more gratified when the +King made him a baronet than when the public bought his books, that the +expenses of Abbotsford and the hospitalities which he extended to all +comers wasted his time and finally brought about his bankruptcy. Leslie +Stephen and others have even made merry over Scott's Gothic,[14] +comparing his plaster-of-Paris 'scutcheons and ceilings in imitation of +carved oak with the pinchbeck architecture of Strawberry Hill, and +intimating that the feudalism in his romances was only a shade more +genuine than the feudalism of "The Castle of Otranto." Scott was +imprudent; Abbotsford was his weakness, but it was no ignoble weakness. +If the ideal of the life which he proposed to himself there was scarcely +a heroic one, neither was it vulgar or selfish. The artist or the +philosopher should perhaps be superior to the ambition of owning land and +having "a stake in the country," but the ambition is a very human one and +has its good side. In Scott the desire was more social than personal. +It was not that title and territory were feathers in his cap, but that +they bound him more closely to the dear soil of Scotland and to the +national, historic past. + +The only deep passion in Scott's poetry is patriotism, the passion of +place. In his metrical romances the rush of the narrative and the vivid, +picturesque beauty of the descriptions are indeed exciting to the +imagination; but it is only when the chord of national feeling is touched +that the verse grows lyrical, that the heart is reached, and that tears +come into the reader's eyes, as they must have done into the poet's. A +dozen such passages occur at once to the memory; the last stand of the +Scottish nobles around their king at Flodden; the view of +Edinburgh--"mine own romantic town "--from Blackford Hill; + + "Fitz-Eustace' heart felt closely pent: + As if to give his rapture vent, + The spur he to his charger lent, + And raised his bridle-hand, + And, making demi-volte in air, + Cried, 'Where's the coward that would not dare + To fight for such a land?'" + +and the still more familiar opening of the sixth canto in the +"Lay"--"Breathes there the man," etc.: + + "O Caledonia! stern and wild, + Meet nurse for a poetic child! + Land of brown heath and shaggy wood, + Land of the mountain and the flood, + Land of my sires! what mortal hand + Can e'er untie the filial band + That knits me to thy rugged strand?" + +In such a mood geography becomes poetry and names are music.[15] Scott +said to Washington Irving that if he did not see the heather at least +once a year, he thought he would die. + +Lockhart tells how the sound that he loved best of all sounds was in his +dying ears--the flow of the Tweed over its pebbles. + +Significant, therefore, is Scott's treatment of landscape, and the +difference in this regard between himself and his great contemporaries. +His friend, Mr. Morritt of Rokeby, testifies; "He was but half satisfied +with the most beautiful scenery when he could not connect it with some +local legend." Scott had to the full the romantic love of mountain and +lake, yet "to me," he confesses, "the wandering over the field of +Bannockburn was the source of more exquisite pleasure than gazing upon +the celebrated landscape from the battlements of Stirling Castle. I do +not by any means infer that I was dead to the feeling of picturesque +scenery. . . . But show me an old castle or a field of battle and I was +at home at once." And again: "The love of natural beauty, more +especially when combined with ancient ruins or remains of our fathers' +piety[16] or splendour, became with me an insatiable passion." It was +not in this sense that high mountains were a "passion" to Byron, nor yet +to Wordsworth. In a letter to Miss Seward, Scott wrote of popular +poetry: "Much of its peculiar charm is indeed, I believe, to be +attributed solely to its _locality_. . . . In some verses of that +eccentric but admirable poet Coleridge[17] he talks of + + "'An old rude tale that suited well + The ruins wild and hoary.' + +"I think there are few who have not been in some degree touched with this +local sympathy. Tell a peasant an ordinary tale of robbery and murder, +and perhaps you may fail to interest him; but, to excite his terrors, you +assure him it happened on the very heath he usually crosses, or to a man +whose family he has known, and you rarely meet such a mere image of +humanity as remains entirely unmoved. I suspect it is pretty much the +same with myself." + +Scott liked to feel solid ground of history, or at least of legend, under +his feet. He connected his wildest tales, like "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve +of St. John," with definite names and places. This Antaeus of romance +lost strength, as soon as he was lifted above the earth. With Coleridge +it was just the contrary. The moment his moonlit, vapory enchantments +touched ground, the contact "precipitated the whole solution." In 1813 +Scott had printed "The Bridal of Triermain" anonymously, with a preface +designed to mislead the public; having contrived, by way of a joke, to +fasten the authorship of the piece upon Erskine. This poem is as pure +fantasy as Tennyson's "Day Dream," and tells the story of a knight who, +in obedience to a vision and the instructions of an ancient sage "sprung +from Druid sires," enters an enchanted castle and frees the Princess +Gyneth, a natural daughter of King Arthur, from the spell that has bound +her for five hundred years. But true to his instinct, the poet lays his +scene not _in vacuo_, but near his own beloved borderland. He found, in +Burns' "Antiquities of Westmoreland and Cumberland" mention of a line of +Rolands de Vaux, lords of Triermain, a fief of the barony of Gilsland; +and this furnished him a name for his hero. He found in Hutchinson's +"Excursion to the Lakes" the description of a cluster of rocks in the +Vale of St. John's, which looked, at a distance, like a Gothic castle, +this supplied him with a hint for the whole adventure. Meanwhile +Coleridge had been living in the Lake Country. The wheels of his +"Christabel" had got hopelessly mired, and he now borrowed a horse from +Sir Walter and hitched it to his own wagon. He took over Sir Roland de +Vaux of Triermain and made him the putative father of his mysterious +Geraldine, although, in compliance with Scott's romance, the embassy that +goes over the mountains to Sir Roland's castle can find no trace of it. +In Part I. Sir Leoline's own castle stood nowhere in particular. In Part +II. it is transferred to Cumberland, a mistake in art almost as grave as +if the Ancient Mariner had brought his ship to port at Liverpool. + +Wordsworth visited the "great Minstrel of the Border" at Abbotsford in +1831, shortly before Scott set out for Naples, and the two poets went in +company to the ruins of Newark Castle. It is characteristic that in +"Yarrow Revisited," which commemorates the incident, the Bard of Rydal +should think it necessary to offer an apology for his distinguished +host's habit of romanticising nature--that nature which Wordsworth, +romantic neither in temper nor choice of subject, treated after so +different a fashion. + + "Nor deem that localised Romance + Plays false with our affections; + Unsanctifies our tears--made sport + For fanciful dejections: + Ah no! the visions of the past + Sustain the heart in feeling + Life as she is--our changeful Life, + With friends and kindred dealing." + +The apology, after all, is only half-hearted. For while Wordsworth +esteemed Scott highly and was careful to speak publicly of his work with +a qualified respect, it is well known that, in private, he set little +value upon it, and once somewhat petulantly declared that all Scott's +poetry was not worth sixpence. He wrote to Scott, of "Marmion": "I think +your end has been attained. That it is not the end which I should wish +you to propose to yourself, you will be aware." He had visited Scott at +Lasswade as early as 1803, and in recording his impressions notes that +"his conversation was full of anecdote and averse from disquisition." +The minstrel was a _raconteur_ and lived in the past, the bard was a +moralist and lived in the present. + +There are several poems of Wordsworth's and Scott's touching upon common +ground which serve to contrast their methods sharply and to illustrate in +a striking way the precise character of Scott's romanticism. "Helvellyn" +and "Fidelity" were written independently and celebrate the same +incident. In 1805 a young man lost his way on the Cumberland mountains +and perished of exposure. Three months afterwards his body was found, +his faithful dog still watching beside it. Scott was a lover of +dogs--loved them warmly, individually; so to speak, personally; and all +dogs instinctively loved Scott.[18] + +Wordsworth had a sort of tepid, theoretical benevolence towards the +animal creation in general. Yet as between the two poets, the advantage +in depth of feeling is, as usual, with Wordsworth. Both render, with +perhaps equal power, though in characteristically different ways, the +impression of the austere and desolate grandeur of the mountain scenery. +But the thought to which Wordsworth leads up is the mysterious divineness +of instinct + + ". . . that strength of feeling, great + Above all human estimate:"-- + +while Scott conducts his story to the reflection that Nature has given +the dead man a more stately funeral than the Church could have given, a +comparison seemingly dragged in for the sake of a stanzaful of his +favourite Gothic imagery. + + "When a Prince to the fate of the Peasant has yielded, + The tapestry waves dark round the dim-lighted hall; + With 'scutcheons of silver the coffin is shielded, + And pages stand mute by the canopied pall: + Through the courts at deep midnight the torches are gleaming, + In the proudly arched chapel the banners are beaming, + Far adown the long aisle sacred music is streaming, + Lamenting a chief of the people should fall." + +Wordsworth and Landor, who seldom agreed, agreed that Scott's most +imaginative line was the verse in "Helvellyn": + + "When the wind waved his garment how oft didst thou start!" + +In several of his poems Wordsworth handled legendary subjects, and it is +most instructive here to notice his avoidance of the romantic note, and +to imagine how Scott would have managed the same material. In the +prefatory note to "The White Doe of Rylstone," Wordsworth himself pointed +out the difference. "The subject being taken from feudal times has led +to its being compared to some of Sir Walter Scott's poems that belong to +the same age and state of society. The comparison is inconsiderate. Sir +Walter pursued the customary and very natural course of conducting an +action, presenting various turns of fortune, to some outstanding point on +which the mind might rest as a termination or catastrophe. The course I +attempted to pursue is entirely different. Everything that is attempted +by the principal personages in 'The White Doe' fails, so far as its +object is external and substantial. So far as it is moral and spiritual +it succeeds." + +This poem is founded upon "The Rising in the North," a ballad given in +the "Reliques," which recounts the insurrection of the Earls of +Northumberland and Westmoreland against Elizabeth in 1569. Richard +Norton of Rylstone, with seven stalwart sons, joined in the rising, +carrying a banner embroidered with a red cross and the five wounds of +Christ. The story bristled with opportunities for the display of feudal +pomp, and it is obvious upon what points in the action Scott would have +laid the emphasis; the muster of the tenantry of the great northern +Catholic houses of Percy and Neville; the high mass celebrated by the +insurgents in Durham Cathedral; the march of the Nortons to Brancepeth; +the eleven days' siege of Barden Tower; the capture and execution of +Marmaduke and Ambrose; and--by way of episode--the Battle of Neville's +Cross in 1346.[19] But in conformity to the principle announced in the +preface to the "Lyrical Ballads"--that the feeling should give importance +to the incidents and situation, not the incidents and situation to the +feeling--Wordsworth treats all this outward action as merely preparatory +to the true purpose of his poem, a study of the discipline of sorrow, of +ruin and bereavement patiently endured by the Lady Emily, the only +daughter and survivor of the Norton house. + + "Action is transitory--a step, a blow. . . . + Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, + And has the nature of infinity. + Yet through that darkness (infinite though it seem + And irremoveable) gracious openings lie. . . . + Even to the fountain-head of peace divine." + +With the story of the Nortons the poet connects a local tradition which +he found in Whitaker's "History of the Deanery of Craven"; of a white doe +which haunted the churchyard of Bolton Priory. Between this gentle +creature and the forlorn Lady of Rylstone he establishes the mysterious +and soothing sympathy which he was always fond of imagining between the +soul of man and the things of nature.[20] + +Or take again the "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle," an incident in +the Wars of the Roses. Lord Clifford, who had been hidden away in +infancy from the vengeance of the Yorkists and reared as a shepherd, is +restored to the estates and honours of his ancestors. High in the festal +hall the impassioned minstrel strikes his harp and sings the triumph of +Lancaster, urging the shepherd lord to emulate the warlike prowess of his +forefathers. + + "Armour rusting in his halls + On the blood of Clifford calls; + 'Quell the Scot,' exclaims the Lance-- + Bear me to the heart of France + Is the longing of the Shield." + +Thus far the minstrel, and he has Sir Walter with him; for this is +evidently the part of the poem that he liked and remembered, when he +noted in his journal that "Wordsworth could be popular[21] if he +would--witness the 'Feast at Brougham Castle'--'Song of the Cliffords,' I +think, is the name." But the exultant strain ceases and the poet himself +speaks, and with the transition in feeling comes a change in the verse; +the minstrel's song was in the octosyllabic couplet associated with +metrical romance. But this Clifford was no fighter--none of Scott's +heroes. Nature had educated him. + + "In him the savage virtue of the Race" was dead. + + "Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; + His daily teachers had been woods and rills, + The silence that is in the starry sky, + The sleep that is among the lonely hills." + +Once more, consider the pronounced difference in sentiment between the +description of the chase in "Hartleap Well" and the opening passage of +"The Lady of the Lake": + + "The stag at eve had drunk his fill. + Where danced the moon on Monan's rill," etc.[22] + +Scott was a keen sportsman, and his sympathy was with the hunter.[23] +Wordsworth's, of course, was with the quarry. The knight in his +poem--who bears not unsuggestively the name of "Sir Walter"--has +outstripped all his companions, like Fitz James, and is the only one in +at the death. To commemorate his triumph he frames a basin for the +spring whose waters were stirred by his victim's dying breath; he plants +three stone pillars to mark the creature's hoof-prints in its marvellous +leap from the mountain to the springside; and he builds a pleasure house +and an arbour where he comes with his paramour to make merry in the +summer days. But Nature sets her seal of condemnation upon the cruelty +and vainglory of man. "The spot is curst"; no flowers or grass will grow +there; no beast will drink of the fountain. Part I. tells the story +without enthusiasm but without comment. Part II. draws the lesson + + "Never to blend our pleasure or our pride + With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels." + +The song of Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" derives a pensive sorrow from +"old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago." But to Scott the +battle is not far off, but a vivid and present reality. When he visited +the Trosachs glen, his thought plainly was, "What a place for a fight!" +And when James looks down on Loch Katrine his first reflection is, "What +a scene were here . . . + + "For princely pomp or churchman's pride! + On this bold brow a lordly tower; + In that soft vale a lady's bower; + On yonder meadow, far away, + The turrets of a cloister grey," etc. + +The most romantic scene was not romantic enough for Scott till his +imagination had peopled it with the life of a vanished age. + +The literary forms which Scott made peculiarly his own, and in which the +greater part of his creative work was done, are three: the popular +ballad, the metrical romance, and the historical novel in prose. His +point of departure was the ballad.[24] The material amassed in his +Liddesdale "raids"--begun in 1792 and continued for seven successive +years--was given to the world in the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border" +(Vols. I. and II. in 1802; Vol. III. in 1803), a collection of ballads +historical, legendary, and romantic, with an abundant apparatus in the +way of notes and introductions, illustrating the history, antiquities, +manners, traditions, and superstitions of the Borderers. Forty-three of +the ballads in the "Minstrelsy" had never been printed before; and of the +remainder the editor gave superior versions, choosing with sureness of +taste the best among variant readings, and with a more intimate knowledge +of local ways and language than any previous ballad-fancier had +commanded. He handled his texts more faithfully than Percy, rarely +substituting lines of his own. "From among a hundred corruptions," says +Lockhart, "he seized, with instinctive tact, the primitive diction and +imagery, and produced strains in which the unbroken energy of +half-civilised ages, their stern and deep passions, their daring +adventures and cruel tragedies, and even their rude wild humour are +reflected with almost the brightness of a Homeric mirror." + +In the second volume of the "Minstrelsy" were included what Scott calls +his "first serious attempts in verse," viz., "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of +St. John," which had been already printed in Lewis' "Tales of Wonder." +Both pieces are purely romantic, with a strong tincture of the +supernatural; but the first--Scott himself draws the distinction--is a +"legendary poem," and the second alone a proper "ballad." +"Glenfinlas," [25] founded on a Gaelic legend, tells how a Highland +chieftain while hunting in Perthshire, near the scene of "The Lady of the +Lake," is lured from his bothie at night and torn to pieces by evil +spirits. There is no attempt here to preserve the language of popular +poetry; stanzas abound in a diction of which the following is a fair +example: + + "Long have I sought sweet Mary's heart, + And dropp'd the tear and heaved the sigh: + But vain the lover's wily art + Beneath a sister's watchful eye." + +"The Eve of St. John" employs common ballad stuff, the visit of a +murdered lover's ghost to his lady's bedside-- + + "At the lone midnight hour, when bad spirits have power"-- + +but the poet, as usual, anchors his weird nightmares firmly to real names +and times and places, Dryburgh Abbey, the black rood of Melrose, the +Eildon-tree, the bold Buccleuch, and the Battle of Ancram Moor (1545). +The exact scene of the tragedy is Smailholme Tower, the ruined keep on +the crags above his grandfather's farm at Sandynowe, which left such an +indelible impression on Scott's childish imagination.[26] "The Eve" is +in ballad style and verse: + + "Thou liest, thou liest, thou little foot page, + Loud dost thou lie to me! + For that knight is cold, and low laid in the mould, + All under the Eildon tree." + +In his "Essay on the Imitation of Popular Poetry," Scott showed that he +understood the theory of ballad composition. When he took pains, he +could catch the very manner as well as the spirit of ancient minstrelsy; +but if his work is examined under the microscope it is easy to detect +flaws. The technique of the Pre-Raphaelites and other modern balladists, +like Rossetti and Morris, is frequently finer, they reproduce more +scrupulously the formal characteristics of popular poetry: the burden, +the sing-song repetitions, the quaint turns of phrase, the imperfect +rimes, the innocent, childlike air of the mediaeval tale-tellers. +Scott's vocabulary is not consistently archaic, and he was not always +careful to avoid locutions out of keeping with the style of +_Volkspoesie_.[27] He was by no means a rebel against eighteenth-century +usages.[28] In his prose he is capable of speaking of a lady as an +"elegant female." In his poetry he will begin a ballad thus: + + "The Pope he was saying the high, high mass + All on St. Peter's day"; + +and then a little later fall into this kind of thing: + + "There the rapt poet's step may rove, + And yield the muse the day: + There Beauty, led by timid Love, + May shun the tell-tale ray," etc.[29] + +It is possible to name single pieces like "The Ancient Mariner," and "La +Belle Dame sans Merci," and "Rose-Mary," of a rarer imaginative quality +and a more perfect workmanship than Scott often attains; yet upon the +whole and in the mass, no modern balladry matches the success of his. +The Pre-Raphaelites were deliberate artists, consciously reproducing an +extinct literary form; but Scott had lived himself back into the social +conditions out of which ballad poetry was born. His best pieces of this +class do not strike us as imitations but as original, spontaneous, and +thoroughly alive. Such are, to particularise but a few, "Jock o' +Hazeldean," "Cadyow Castle," on the assassination of the Regent Murray; +"The Reiver's Wedding," a fragment preserved in Lockhart's "Life"; +"Elspeth's Ballad" ("The Red Harlow") in "The Antiquary"; Madge +Wildfire's songs in "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," and David Gellatley's in +"Waverley"; besides the other scraps and snatches of minstrelsy too +numerous for mention, sown through the novels and longer poems. For in +spite of detraction, Walter Scott remains one of the foremost British +lyrists. In Mr. Palgrave's "Treasury" he is represented by a larger +number of selections than either Milton, Byron, Burns, Campbell, Keats, +or Herrick; making an easy fourth to Wordsworth, Shakspere, and Shelley. +And in marked contrast with Shelley especially, it is observable of +Scott's contributions to this anthology that they are not the utterance +of the poet's personal emotion; they are coronachs, pibrochs, gathering +songs, narrative ballads, and the like--objective, dramatic lyrics +touched always with the light of history or legend. + +The step from ballad to ballad-epic is an easy one, and it was by a +natural evolution that the one passed into the other in Scott's hands. +"The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805) was begun as a ballad on the local +tradition of Gilpin Horner and at the request of the Countess of +Dalkeith, who told Scott the story. But his imagination was so full that +the poem soon overflowed its limits and expanded into a romance +illustrative of the ancient manners of the Border. The pranks of the +goblin page run in and out through the web of the tale, a slender and +somewhat inconsequential thread of _diablerie_. Byron had his laugh at +it in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers";[30] and in a footnote on the +passage, he adds: "Never was any plan so incongruous and absurd as the +groundwork of this production." The criticism was not altogether +undeserved; for the "Lay" is a typical example of romantic, as +distinguished from classic, art both in its strength and in its weakness; +brilliant in passages, faulty in architechtonic, and uneven in execution. +Its supernatural machinery--Byron said that it had more "gramarye" than +grammar--is not impressive, if due exception be made of the opening of +Michael Scott's tomb in Canto Second. + +When the "Minstrelsy" was published, it was remarked that it "contained +the elements of a hundred historical romances." It was from such +elements that Scott built up the structure of his poem about the nucleus +which the Countess of Dalkeith had given him. He was less concerned, as +he acknowledged, to tell a coherent story than to paint a picture of the +scenery and the old warlike life of the Border; that _tableau large de la +vie_ which the French romanticists afterwards professed to be the aim of +their novels and dramas. The feud of the Scotts and Carrs furnished him +with a historic background; with this he enwove a love story of the Romeo +and Juliet pattern. He rebuilt Melrose Abbey, and showed it by +moonlight; set Lords Dacre and Howard marching on a Warden-raid, and +roused the border clans to meet them; threw out dramatic character +sketches of "stark moss-riding Scots" like Wat Tinlinn and William of +Deloraine; and finally enclosed the whole in a _cadre_ most happily +invented, the venerable, pathetic figure of the old minstrel who tells +the tale to the Duchess of Monmouth at Newark Castle. + +The love story is perhaps the weakest part of the poem. Henry Cranstoun +and Margaret of Branksome are nothing but lay figures. Scott is always a +little nervous when the lover and the lady are left alone together. The +fair dames in the audience expect a tender scene, but the harper pleads +his age, by way of apology, gets the business over as decently as may be, +and hastens on with comic precipitation to the fighting, which he +thoroughly enjoys.[31] + +The "light-horseman stanza" which Scott employed in his longer poems was +caught from the recitation by Sir John Stoddart of a portion of +Coleridge's "Christabel," then still in manuscript. The norm of the +verse was the eight-syllabled riming couplet used in most of the English +metrical romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is a +form of verse which moves more swiftly than blank verse or the heroic +couplet, and is perhaps better suited for romantic poetry.[32] But it is +liable to grow monotonous in a long poem, and Coleridge's unsurpassed +skill as a metrist was exerted to give it freedom, richness, and variety +by the introduction of anapaestic lines and alternate rimes and triplets, +breaking up the couplets into a series of irregular stanzas. + +With "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" romanticism came of age and entered +on its career of triumph. One wishes that Collins and Tom Warton might +have lived to hail it as the light, at last, towards which they had +struggled through the cold obstruction of the eighteenth century. One +fancies Dr. Johnson's disgust over this new Scotch monstrosity, which had +every quality that he disliked except blank verse; or Gray's delight in +it, tempered by a critical disapproval of its loose construction and +irregularity. Scott's romances in prose and verse are still so +universally known as to make any review of them here individually an +impertinence. Their impact on contemporary Europe was instantaneous and +wide-spread. There is no record elsewhere in literary history of such +success. Their immense sales, the innumerable editions and translations +and imitations of them, are matters of familiar knowledge. Poem followed +poem, and novel, novel in swift and seemingly exhaustless succession, and +each was awaited by the public with unabated expectancy. Here once more +was a poet who could tell the world a story that it wanted to hear; a poet + + "Such as it had + In the ages glad, + Long ago." + +The Homeric[33] quality which criticism has attributed or denied to these +poems is really there. The difference, the inferiority is obvious of +course. They are not in the grand style; they are epic on a lower plane, +ballad-epic, bastard-epic perhaps, but they are epic. No English verse +narrative except Chaucer's ranks, as a whole, above Scott's. Chaucer's +disciple, William Morris, has an equal flow and continuity, and keeps a +more even level of style; but his story-telling is languid compared with +Scott's. The latter is greater in the dynamic than in the static +department--in scenes of rapid action and keen excitement. His show +passages are such as the fight in the Trosachs, Flodden Field, William of +Deloraine's ride to Melrose, the trial of Constance, the muster on the +Borough Moor, Marmion's defiance to Douglas, the combat of James and +Roderick Dhu, the summons of the fiery cross, and the kindling of the +need-fires--those romantic equivalents of the lampadephoroi in the +"Agamemnon." + +In the series of long poems which followed the "Lay," Scott deserted the +Border and brought in new subjects of romantic interest, the traditions +of Flodden and Bannockburn, the manners of the Gaelic clansmen, and the +wild scenery of the Perthshire Highlands, the life of the Western +Islands, and the rugged coasts of Argyle. Only two of these tales are +concerned with the Middle Ages, strictly speaking: "The Lord of the +Isles" (1813), in which the action begins in 1307; and "Harold the +Dauntless" (1817), in which the period is the time of the Danish +settlements in Northumbria. "Rokeby" (1812) is concerned with the Civil +War. The scene is laid in Yorkshire, "Marmion" (1808), and "The Lady of +the Lake" (1810), like "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," had to do with the +sixteenth century, but the poet imported mediaeval elements into all of +these by the frankest anachronisms. He restored St. Hilda's Abbey and +the monastery at Lindisfarne, which had been in ruins for centuries, and +peopled them again with monks and nuns, He revived in De Wilton the +figure of the palmer and the ancient custom of pilgrimage to Palestine. +And he transferred "the wondrous wizard, Michael Scott" from the +thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth. But, indeed, the state +of society in Scotland might be described as mediaeval as late as the +middle of the sixteenth century. It was still feudal, and in great part +Catholic. Particularly in the turbulent Borderland, a rude spirit of +chivalry and a passion for wild adventure lingered among the Eliots, +Armstrongs, Kerrs, Rutherfords, Homes, Johnstons, and other marauding +clans, who acknowledged no law but march law, and held slack allegiance +to "the King of Lothian and Fife." Every owner of a half-ruinous "peel" +or border keep had a band of retainers within call, like the +nine-and-twenty knights of fame who hung their shields in Branksome Hall; +and he could summon them at short notice, for a raid upon the English or +a foray against some neighbouring proprietor with whom he was at feud. + +But the literary form under which Scott made the deepest impression upon +the consciousness of his own generation and influenced most permanently +the future literature of Europe, was prose fiction. As the creator of +the historical novel and the ancestor of Kingsley, Ainsworth, Bulwer, and +G. P. R. James; of Manzoni, Freytag, Hugo, Mérimée, Dumas, Alexis +Tolstoi, and a host of others, at home and abroad, his example is potent +yet. English fiction is directly or indirectly in his debt for "Romola," +"Hypatia," "Henry Esmond," and "The Cloister and the Hearth." In several +countries the historical novel had been trying for centuries to get +itself born, but all its attempts had been abortive. "Waverley" is not +only vastly superior to "Thaddeus of Warsaw" (1803) and "The Scottish +Chiefs" (1809); it is something quite different in kind.[34] The +Waverley Novels, twenty-nine in number, appeared in the years 1814-31. +The earlier numbers of the series, "Waverley," "Guy Mannering," "The +Antiquary," "Old Mortality," "The Black Dwarf," "Rob Roy," "The Heart of +Mid-Lothian," "The Bride of Lammermoor," and "A Legend of Montrose," were +Scotch romances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In +"Ivanhoe" (1819) the author went to England for his scene, and back to +the twelfth century for his period. Thenceforth he ranged over a wide +region in time and space; Elizabethan England ("Kenilworth"), the France +and Switzerland of Louis XI. and Charles the Bold ("Quentin Durward" and +"Anne of Geierstein"), Constantinople and Syria ("Count Robert of Paris," +"The Betrothed," and "The Talisman") in the age of the Crusades. The +fortunes of the Stuarts, interested him specially and engaged him in +"Woodstock," "The Fortunes of Nigel," "The Monastery," and its sequel, +"The Abbot." He seems to have had, in the words of Mr. R. H. Hutton, +"something very like personal experience of a few centuries." + +Scott's formula for the construction of a historical romance was original +with himself, and it has been followed by all his successors. His story +is fictitious, his hero imaginary. Richard I. is not the hero of +"Ivanhoe," nor Louis XI. of "Quentin Durward." Shakspere dramatised +history; Scott romanticised it. Still it is history, the private story +is swept into the stream of large public events, the fate of the lover or +the adventurer is involved with battles and diplomacies, with the rise +and fall of kings, dynasties, political parties, nations. Stevenson +says, comparing Fielding with Scott, that "in the work of the +latter . . . we become suddenly conscious of the background. . . . It +is curious enough to think that 'Tom Jones' is laid in the year '45, and +that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of +soldiers in his hero's way." [35] And it is this background which is, +after all, the important thing in Scott--the leading impression; the +broad canvas, the swarm of life, the spirit of the age, the +reconstitution of an extinct society. This he was able to give with +seeming ease and without any appearance of "cram." Chronicle matter does +not lie about in lumps on the surface of his romance, but is decently +buried away in the notes. In his comments on "Queenhoo Hall" he adverts +to the danger of a pedantic method, and in his "Journal" (October 18th, +1826) he writes as follows of his own numerous imitators: "They have to +read old books and consult antiquarian collections, to get their +knowledge. I write because I have long since read such works and +possess, thanks to a strong memory, the information which they have to +seek for. This leads to a dragging in historical details by head and +shoulders, so that the interest of the main piece is lost in minute +description of events which do not affect its progress." + +Of late the recrudescence of the historical novel has revived the +discussion as to the value of the _genre_. It may be readily admitted +that Scott's best work is realistic, and is to be looked for in such +novels as "The Antiquary," "Old Mortality," "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," +and in characters like Andrew Fairservice, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, Dandie +Dinmont, Dugald Dalgetty, Jeanie Deans, Edie Ochiltrie, which brought +into play his knowledge of men, his humour, observation of life, and +insight into Scotch human nature. Scott knew these people; he had to +divine James I., Louis XI., and Mary Stuart. The historical novel is a +_tour de force_. Exactly how knights-templars, burgomasters, friars, +Saracens, and Robin Hood archers talked and acted in the twelfth century, +we cannot know. But it is just because they are strange to our +experience that they are dear to our imagination. The justification of +romance is its unfamiliarity--"strangeness added to beauty"--"the +pleasure of surprise" as distinguished from "the pleasure of +recognition." Again and again realism returns to the charge and demands +of art that it give us the present and the actual; and again and again +the imagination eludes the demand and makes an ideal world for itself in +the blue distance. + +Two favourite arts, or artifices, of all romantic schools, are "local +colour" and "the picturesque." "Vers l'an de grâce 1827," writes Prosper +Mérimée, "j'étais _romantique_. Nous disions aux _classiques_; vos Grecs +ne sont pas des Grecs, vos Romains ne sont pas des Romains; vous ne savez +pas donner à vos compositions la _couleur locale_. Point de salut sans +la _couleur locale_." [36] + +As to the picturesque--a word that connotes, in its critical uses, some +quality in the objects of sense which strikes us as at once novel, and +characteristic in its novelty--while by no means the highest of literary +arts, it is a perfectly legitimate one.[37] Creçy is not, at bottom, a +more interesting battle than Gettysburg because it was fought with bows +and arrows, but it is more picturesque to the modern imagination just for +that reason. Why else do the idiots in "MacArthur's Hymn" complain that +"steam spoils romance at sea"? Why did Ruskin lament when the little +square at the foot of Giotto's Tower in Florence was made a stand for +hackney coaches? Why did our countryman Halleck at Alnwick Towers resent +the fact that "the Percy deals in salt and hides, the Douglas sells red +herring"? And why does the picturesque tourist, in general, object to +the substitution of naphtha launches for gondolas on the Venetian canals? +Perhaps because the more machinery is interposed between man and the +thing he works on, the more impersonal becomes his relation to nature. + +Carlyle, in his somewhat grudging estimate of Scott, declares that "much +of the interest of these novels results from contrasts of costume. The +phraseology, fashion of arms, of dress, of life belonging to one age is +brought suddenly with singular vividness before the eyes of another. A +great effect this; yet by the very nature of it an altogether temporary +one. Consider, brethren, shall not we too one day be antiques and grow +to have as quaint a costume as the rest? . . . Not by slashed breeches, +steeple hats, buff belts, or antiquated speech can romance-heroes +continue to interest us; but simply and solely, in the long run, by being +_men_. Buff belts and all manner of jerkins and costumes are transitory; +man alone is perennial." [38] Carlyle's dissatisfaction with Scott +arises from the fact that he was not a missionary nor a transcendental +philosopher, but simply a teller of stories. Heine was not troubled in +the same way, but he made the identical criticism, "Like the works of +Walter Scott, so also do Fouqué's romances of chivalry[40] remind us of +the fantastic tapestries known as Gobelins, whose rich texture and +brilliant colors are more pleasing to our eyes than edifying to our +souls. We behold knightly pageantry, shepherds engaged in festive +sports, hand-to-hand combats, and ancient customs, charmingly +intermingled. It is all very pretty and picturesque, but shallow; +brilliant superficiality. Among the imitators of Fouqué, as among the +imitators of Walter Scott, this mannerism of portraying--not the inner +nature of men and things, but merely the outward garb and appearance--was +carried to still greater extremes. This shallow art and frivolous style +is still [1833] in vogue in Germany as well as in England and +France. . . . In lieu of a knowledge of mankind, our recent novelists +evince a profound acquaintance with clothes." [39] + +Elsewhere Heine acknowledges a deeper reason for the popularity of the +Scotch novels. "Their theme . . . is the mighty sorrow for the loss of +national peculiarities swallowed up in the universality of the newer +culture--a sorrow which is now throbbing in the hearts of all peoples. +For national memories lie deeper in the human breast than is generally +thought." But whatever rank may be ultimately assigned to the historical +novel as an art form, Continental critics are at one with the British in +crediting its invention to Scott. "It is an error," says Heine, "not to +recognise Walter Scott as the founder of the so-called historical +romance, and to endeavour to trace it to German imitation." He adds that +Scott was a Protestant, a lawyer and a Scotchman, accustomed to action +and debate, in whose works the aristocratic and democratic elements are +in wholesome balance; "whereas our German romanticists eliminated the +democratic element entirely from their novels, and returned to the ruts +of those crazy romances of knight-errantry that flourished before +Cervantes." [41] "Quel est Fouvrage littéraire," asks Stendhal in +1823,[42] "qui a le plus réussi en France depuis dix ans? Les romans de +Walter Scott. . . . On s'est moqué à Paris pendant vingt ans du roman +historique; l'Académie a prouvé doctement le ridicule de ce genre; nous y +croyions tous, lorsque Walter Scott a paru, son Waverley à la main; et +Balantyne, son libraire vient de mourir millionaire." [43] + +Lastly the service of the Waverley Novels to history was an important +one. Palgrave says that historical fiction is the mortal enemy of +history, and Leslie Stephen adds that it is also the enemy of fiction. +In a sense both sayings are true. Scott was not always accurate as to +facts and sinned freely against chronology. But he rescued a wide realm +from cold oblivion and gave it back to human consciousness and sympathy. +It is treating the past more kindly to misrepresent it in some +particulars, than to leave it a blank to the imagination. The +eighteenth-century historians were incurious of life. Their spirit was +general and abstract; they were in search of philosophical formulas. +Gibbon covers his subject with a lava-flood of stately rhetoric which +stiffens into a uniform stony coating over the soft surface of life. +Scott is primarily responsible for that dramatic, picturesque treatment +of history which we find in Michelet and Carlyle. "These historical +novels," testifies Carlyle, "have taught all men this truth, which looks +like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and +others, till so taught; that the bygone ages of the world were actually +filled by living men, not by protocols, state papers, controversies, and +abstractions of men. . . . It is a great service, fertile in +consequences, this that Scott has done; a great truth laid open by +him." [44] In France, too, historians like Barante and Augustin Thierry, +were Scott's professed disciples. The latter confesses, in a well-known +passage, that "Ivanhoe" was the inspirer of his "Conquête d'Angleterre," +and styles the novelist "le plus grand maître qu'il y ait jamais eu en +fait de divination historique." [45] + +Scott apprehended the Middle Ages on their spectacular, and more +particularly, their military side. He exhibits their large, showy +aspects: battles, processions, hunts, feasts in hall, tourneys,[46] +sieges, and the like. The motley mediaeval world swarms in his pages, +from the king on his throne down to the jester with his cap and bells. +But it was the outside of it that he saw; the noise, bustle, colour, +stirring action that delighted him. Into its spiritualities he did not +penetrate far; its scholasticisms, strange casuistries, shuddering +faiths, grotesque distortions of soul, its religious mysticisms, +asceticisms, agonies; the ecstactic reveries of the cloister, terrors of +hell, and visions of paradise. It was the literature of the knight, not +of the monk, that appealed to him. He felt the awfulness and the beauty +of Gothic sacred architecture and of Catholic ritual. The externalities +of the mediaeval church impressed him, whatever was picturesque in its +ceremonies or august in its power. He pictured effectively such scenes +as the pilgrimage to Melrose in the "Lay"; the immuring of the renegade +nun in "Marmion"; the trial of Rebecca for sorcery by the Grand Master of +the Temple in "Ivanhoe." Ecclesiastical figures abound in his pages, +jolly friars, holy hermits, lordly prelates, grim inquisitors, abbots, +priors, and priests of all descriptions, but all somewhat conventional +and viewed _ab extra_. He could not draw a saint.[47] Significant, +therefore, is his indifference to Dante, the poet _par excellence_ of the +Catholic Middle Age, the epitomizer of mediaeval thought. "The plan" of +the "Divine Comedy," "appeared to him unhappy; the personal malignity and +strange mode of revenge presumptuous and uninteresting." Scott's genius +was antipathetic to Dante's; and he was as incapable of taking a lasting +imprint from his intense, austere, and mystical spirit, as from the +nebulous gloom of the Ossianic poetry. Though conservative, he was not +reactionary after the fashion of the German "throne-and-altar" +romanticists, but remained always a good Church of England man and an +obstinate opponent of Catholic emancipation.[48] "Creeds are data in his +novels," says Bagehot; "people have different creeds but each keeps his +own." + +Scott's interest in popular superstitions was constant. As a young +man--in his German ballad period--they affected his imagination with a +"pleasing horror." But as he grew older, they engaged him less as a poet +than as a student of _Cultur geschichte_. + +A wistful sense of the beauty of these old beliefs--a rational smile at +their absurdity--such is the tone of his "Letters on Demonology and +Witchcraft" (1830), a passage or two from which will give his attitude +very precisely; an attitude, it will be seen, which is after all not so +very different from Addison's, allowing for the distance in time and +place, and for Scott's livelier imagination.[49] Scott had his laugh at +Mrs. Radcliffe, and in his reviews of Hoffmann's "Tales" and Maturin's +"Fatal Revenge" [50] he insists upon the delicacy with which the +supernatural must be treated in an age of disbelief. His own management +of such themes, however, though much superior to Walpole's or Mrs. +Radcliffe's, has not the subtle art of Coleridge. The White Lady of +Avenel, _e.g._, in "The Abbot," is a notorious failure. There was too +much daylight in his imagination for spectres to be quite at home. "The +shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses"; the "night side of things"; +the real shudder are not there, as in Hawthorne or in Poe. Walter +Pater[51] says that Meinhold's "Amber Witch" has more of the true +romantic spirit than Tieck, who was its professional representative. On +the contrary, it has less of the romantic spirit, but more of the +mediaeval fact. It is a literal, realistic handling of the witch +superstition, as Balzac's "Succube," in the "Contes Drolatiques" is a +satirical version of similar material. But Tieck's "Märchen" are the +shadows thrown by mediaeval beliefs across a sensitive, modern +imagination, and are in result, therefore, romantic. Scott's dealing +with subjects of the kind is midway between Meinhold and Tieck. He does +not blink the ugly, childish, stupid, and cruel features of popular +superstition, but throws the romantic glamour over them, precisely as he +does over his "Charlie over the water" Jacobites.[52] + +Again Scott's apprehension of the spirit of chivalry, though less +imperfect than his apprehension of the spirit of mediaeval Catholicism, +was but partial. Of the themes which Ariosto sang-- + + "Le donne, i cavalier, l'arme, gli amori, + Le cortesie, l'audaci imprese io canto"-- + +the northern Ariosto sang bravely the _arme_ and the _audaci imprese_; +less confidently the _amori_ and the _cortesie_. He could sympathise +with the knight-errant's high sense of honour and his love of bold +emprise; not so well with his service of dames. Mediaeval courtship or +"love-drurye," the trembling self-abasement of the lover before his lady, +the fantastic refinements and excesses of gallantry, were alien to +Scott's manly and eminently practical turn of mind. It is hardly +possible to fancy him reading the "Roman de la Rose" with patience--he +thought "Troilus and Creseyde" tedious, which Rossetti pronounces the +finest of English love poems; or selecting for treatment the story of +Heloise or Tristram and Iseult, or of "Le Chevalier de la Charette"; or +such a typical mediaeval life as that of Ulrich von Liechtenstein.[53] +These were quite as truly beyond his sphere as a church legend like the +life of Saint Margaret or the quest of the Sangreal. In the "Talisman" +he praises in terms only less eloquent than Burke's famous words, "that +wild spirit of chivalry which, amid its most extravagant and fantastic +nights, was still pure from all selfish alloy--generous, devoted, and +perhaps only thus far censurable, that it proposed objects and courses of +action inconsistent with the frailties and imperfections of man." In +"Ivanhoe," too, there is something like a dithyrambic lament over the +decay of knighthood--"The 'scutcheons have long mouldered from the +walls," etc.; but even here, enthusiasm is tempered by good sense, and +Richard of the Lion Heart is described as an example of the "brilliant +but useless character of a knight of romance." All this is but to say +that the picture of the Middle Age which Scott painted was not complete. +Still it was more nearly complete than has yet been given by any other +hand; and the artist remains, in Stevenson's phrase, "the king of the +Romantics." + + + +APPENDIX A. + +"Jamais homme de génie n'a eu l'honneur et le bonheur d'être imité par +plus d'hommes de genié, si tous les grands écrivains de l'époque +romantique depuis Victor Hugo jusqu'à Balzac et depuis Alfred de Vigny +jusqu'à Mérimée, lui doivent tous et se sont tous glorifiés de lui devoir +quelque chose. . . . Il doit nous suffire pour l'instant d'affirmer que +l'influence de Walter Scott est à la racine même des grandes oeuvres qui +ont donné au nouveau genre tant d'éclat dans notre littérature; que c'est +elle qui les a inspirées, suscitées, fait éclore; que sans lui nous +n'aurions ni 'Hans d'Islande,' ni 'Cinq-Mars,' ni 'Les Chouans,' ni la +'Chronique de Charles IX.,' ni 'Notre Dame de Paris,' . . . Ce n'est +rien moins que le romantisme lui-même dont elle a hâté l'incubation, +facilité l'eclosion, aidé le développement."--MAIGRON, "Le Roman +Historique," p. 143. + +"Il nous faut d'abord constater que c'est véritablement de Walter Scott, +et de Walter Scott seul, que commence cette fureur des choses du moyen +âge, cette manie de couleur locale qui sévit avec tant d'intensité +quelque temps avant et longtemps après 1830, et donc qu'il reste, au +moins pour ce qui est de la description, le principal initiateur de la +génération nouvelle. Sans doute et de toute part, cette résurrection du +moyen âge était des long-temps préparée. Le 'Génie du Christianisme,' le +'Cours de litterature dramatique' de Schlegel, l''Allemagne' de Mme. de +Staël avaient fait des moeurs chrétiennes et chevaleresques le fondement +et la condition de renouvellement de l'art français. Et, en effet, dès +1802, le moyen âge était découvert, la cathédrale gothique restaurée, +l'art chretien remis à la place éminente d'où il aurait fallu ne jamais +le laisser choir. Mais où sont les oeuvres exécutées d'après ce modèle +et ces principes? S'il est facile d'apercevoir et de déterminer la +cathédrale religieuse de Chateaubriand, est il donc si aisé de distinguer +sa cathédrale poétique? . . . Un courant vigoureux, que le 'Genie du +Christianisme' et les 'Martyrs' ont puissamment contribué à detérminer, +fait dériver les imaginations vers les choses gothiques; volontiers, +l'esprit français se retourne alors vers le passé comme vers la seule +source de poésie; et voici qu'un étranger vient se faire son guide et +fait miroiter, devant tous les yeux éblouis, la fantasmagorie du moyen +âge, donjons et créneaux, cuirasses et belles armures, haquenées et +palefrois, chevaliers resplendissants et mignonnes et délicates +chatelaines. . . . Sur ses traces, on se précipita avec furie dans la +voie qu'il venait subitement d'élargir. Ce moyen age, jusqu'à lui si +convoité et si infécond, devinait enfin une source inépuisable d'émotions +et de productions artistiques. La 'cathédrale' était bien restaurée +cette fois. Elle le fut même trop, et borda trop obstinement tous les +sentiers littéraires. Mais de cet excès, si vite fatigant, c'est Walter +Scott et non Chateaubriand, quoi qu'il en ait pu dire, qui reste le grand +coupable. Il fit plus que découvrir le moyen âge; il le mit à la mode +parmi les Français."--_Ibid_., pp. 195 _ff_. + + + +APPENDIX B. + +"The magical touch and the sense of mystery and all the things that are +associated with the name romance, when that name is applied to 'The +Ancient Mariner,' or 'La Belle Dame sans Merci,' or 'The Lady of +Shalott,' are generally absent from the most successful romances of the +great mediaeval romantic age. . . . The true romantic interest is very +unequally distributed over the works of the Middle Ages, and there is +least of it in the authors who are most representative of the 'age of +chivalry.' There is a disappointment prepared for any one who looks in +the greater romantic authors of the twelfth century for the music of 'The +Faery Queene' or 'La Belle Dame sans Merci.' . . . The greater authors +of the twelfth century have more affinity to the 'heroic romance' of the +school of the 'Grand Cyrus' than to the dreams of Spenser or +Coleridge. . . . The magic that is wanting to the clear and elegant +narrative of Benoit and Chrestien will be found elsewhere; it will be +found in one form in the mystical prose of the 'Queste del St. Graal'--a +very different thing from Chrestien's 'Perceval'--it will be found, again +and again, in the prose of Sir Thomas Malory; it will be found in many +ballads and ballad burdens, in 'William and Margaret,' in 'Binnorie,' in +the 'Wife of Usher's Well,' in the 'Rime of the Count Arnaldos,' in the +'Königskinder'; it will be found in the most beautiful story of the +Middle Ages, 'Aucassin and Nicolette,' one of the few perfectly beautiful +stories in the world."--"Epic and Romance," W. P. Ker, London, 1897, p. +371 _ff_. + + +[1] Scott's translations from the German are considered in the author's +earlier volume, "A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth +Century." Incidental mention of Scott occurs throughout the same volume; +and a few of the things there said are repeated, in substance though not +in form, in the present chapter. It seemed better to risk some +repetition than to sacrifice fulness of treatment here. + +[2] "The Development of the English Novel," by Wilbur L. Cross, p. 131. + +[3] Vol. i., p. 300. + +[4] The sixth canto of the "Lay" closes with a few lines translated from +the "Dies Irae" and chanted by the monks in Melrose Abbey. + +[5] Vol. i., pp. 389-404. + +[6] Vol. i., pp. 48-49. + +[7] "Scott was entirely incapable of entering into the spirit of any +classical scene. He was strictly a Goth and a Scot, and his sphere of +sensation may be almost exactly limited by the growth of +heather."--Ruskin, "Modern Painters," vol. iii., p. 317. + +[8] "Marmion": Introduction to Canto third. In the preface to "The +Bridal of Triermain," the poet says: "According to the author's idea of +Romantic Poetry, as distinguished from Epic, the former comprehends a +fictitious narrative, framed and combined at the pleasure of the writer; +beginning and ending as he may judge best; which neither exacts nor +refuses the use of supernatural machinery; which is free from the +technical rules of the _Epée_. . . . In a word, the author is absolute +master of his country and its inhabitants." + +[9] Scott's ascription of "Sir Tristram" to Thomas the Rhymer, or Thomas +of Erceldoune, was doubtless a mistake. His edition of the romance was +printed in 1804. In 1800 he had begun a prose tale, "Thomas the Rhymer," +a fragment of which is given in the preface to the General Edition of the +Waverley Novels (1829). This old legendary poet and prophet, who +flourished _circa_ 1280, and was believed to have been carried off by the +Queen of Faerie into Eildon Hill, fascinated Scott's imagination +strongly. See his version of the "True Thomas'" story in the +"Minstrelsy," as also the editions of this very beautiful romance in +Child's "Ballads," in the publications of the E. E. Text So.; and by +Alois Brandl, Berlin: 1880. + +[10] See vol. i., p. 390. + +[11] See the General Preface to the Waverley Novels for some remarks on +"Queenhoo Hall" which Strutt began and Scott completed. + +[12] _Cf._ vol. i., p. 344. + +[13] "I am therefore descended from that ancient chieftain whose name I +have made to ring in many a ditty, and from his fair dame, the Flower of +Yarrow--no bad genealogy for a Border minstrel." + +[14] "He neither cared for painting nor sculpture, and was totally +incapable of forming a judgment about them. He had some confused love of +Gothic architecture because it was dark, picturesque, old and like +nature; but could not tell the worst from the best, and built for himself +probably the most incongruous and ugly pile that gentlemanly modernism +ever devised."--Ruskin. "Modern Painters," vol. iii., p. 271. + +[15] See vol. i., p. 200. + +[16] The _Abbey_ of Tintern was irrelevant to Wordsworth.--Herford. "The +Age of Wordsworth," Int., p. xx. + +[17] "Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious, +opposites in this:--that every old ruin, hill, river or tree called up in +his mind a host of historical or biographical associations; . . . +whereas, for myself . . . I believe I should walk over the plain of +Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of +similar features."--Coleridge, "Table Talk," August 4, 1833. + +[18] See the delightful anecdote preserved by Carlyle about the little +Blenheim cocker who hated the "genus acrid-quack" and formed an immediate +attachment to Sir Walter. Wordsworth was far from being an acrid quack, +or even a solemn prig--another genus hated of dogs--but there was +something a little unsympathetic in his personality. The dalesmen liked +poor Hartley Coleridge better. + +[19] Scott could scarcely have forborne to introduce the figure of the +Queen of Scots, to insure whose marriage with Norfolk was one of the +objects of the rising. + +[20] For a full review of "The White Doe" the reader should consult +Principal Shairp's "Aspects of Poetry," 1881. + +[21] Scott averred that Wordsworth offended public taste on system. + +[22] This is incomparable, not only as a masterpiece of romantic +narrative, but for the spirited and natural device by which the hero is +conducted to his adventure. R. L. Stevenson and other critics have been +rather hard upon Scott's defects as an artist. He was indeed no stylist: +least of all a _precieux_. There are no close-set mosaics in his +somewhat slip-shod prose, and he did not seek for the right word "with +moroseness," like Landor. But, in his large fashion, he was skilful in +inventing impressive effects. Another instance is the solitary trumpet +that breathed its "note of defiance" in the lists of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, +which has the genuine melodramatic thrill--like the horn of Hernani or +the bell that tolls in "Venice Preserved." + +[23] See the "Hunting Song" in his continuation of "Queenhoo Hall"-- + + "Waken, lords and ladies gay, + On the mountain dawns the day." + +[24] See vol. i., pp. 277 and 390. + +[25] The Glen of the Green Women. + +[26] "And still I thought that shattered tower + The mightiest work of human power; + And marvelled as the aged hind + With some strange tale bewitched my mind, + Of foragers who, with headlong force, + Down from that strength had spurred their horse, + Their Southern rapine to renew, + Far in the distant Cheviots blue; + And, home returning, filled the hall + With revel, wassail-rout and brawl."--"Marmion." Introduction +to Canto Third. See Lockhart for a description of the view from +Smailholme, _à propos_ of the stanza in "The Eve of St. John": + + "That lady sat in mournful mood; + Looked over hill and vale: + O'ver Tweed's fair flood, and Mertoun's wood, + And all down Teviot dale." + +[27] See vol. i., pp. 394-395. + +[28] Scott's verse "is touched both with the facile redundance of the +mediaeval romances in which he was steeped, and with the meretricious +phraseology of the later eighteenth century, which he was too genuine a +literary Tory wholly to put aside."--"The Age of Wordsworth," C. H. +Herford, London. 1897. + +[29] "The Gray Brother" in vol. iii. of the "Minstrelsy." + +[30] "And goblin brats, of Gilpin Horner's brood, + Decoy young border-nobles through the wood, + And skip at every step, Lord knows how high, + And frighten foolish babes, the Lord knows why." + +[31] "Now leave we Margaret and her knight + To tell you of the approaching fight."--Canto Fifth, xiii. + +[32] Landor says oddly of Warton that he "had lost his ear by laying it +down on low swampy places, on ballads and sonnets." + +[33] Does not the quarrel of Richard and Philip in "The Talisman" remind +one irresistibly of Achilles and Agamemnon in the "Iliad"? + +[34] For a review of English historical fiction before Scott, consult +Professor Cross' "Development of the English Novel," pp. 110-114. + +[35] "Familiar Studies of Men and Books," by R. L. Stevenson. Article, +"Victor Hugo's Romances." + +[36] "Le Roman Historique à l'Epoque Romantique." Essai sur l'influence +de Walter Scott. Par Louis Maigron. Paris (Hachette). 1898, p. 331, +_note_. And _ibid_., p. 330: "Au lieu que les classiques s'efforçaient +toujours, à travers les modifications que les pays, les temps et les +circonstances peuvent apporter aux sentiments et aux passions des hommes, +d'atteindre à ce que ces passions et ces sentiments conservent de +permanent, d'immuable et d'éternel, c'est au contraire à l'expression de +l'accidentel et du relatif que les novateurs devaient les efforts de leur +art. Plus simplement, à la place de la vérité humaine, ils devaient +mettre la vérité locale." Professor Herford says that what Scott "has in +common with the Romantic temper is simply the feeling for the +picturesque, for colour, for contrast." "Age of Wordsworth," p. 121. + +[37] De Quincey defines _picturesque_ as "the characteristic pushed into +a sensible excess." The word began to excite discussion in the last +quarter of the eighteenth century. See vol. i., p. 185, for Gilpin's +"Observations on Picturesque Beauty." See also Uvedale Price, "Essays on +the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful," three +vols., 1794-96. Price finds the character of the picturesque to consist +in roughness, irregularity, intricacy, and sudden variation. Gothic +buildings are more picturesque than Grecian, and a ruin than an entire +building. Hovels, cottages, mills, interiors of old barns are +picturesque. "In mills particularly, such is the extreme intricacy of +the wheels and the wood work: such is the singular variety of forms and +of lights and shadows, of mosses and weather stains from the constant +moisture, of plants springing from the rough joints of the stones--that, +even without the addition of water, an old mill has the greatest charm +for a painter" (i., 55). He mentions, as a striking example of +picturesque beauty, a hollow lane or by-road with broken banks, thickets, +old neglected pollards, fantastic roots bared by the winter torrents, +tangled trailers and wild plants, and infinite variety of tints and +shades (i., 23-29). He denounces the improvements of Capability Brown +(see "Romanticism," vol. i., p. 124): especially the clump, the belt and +regular serpentine walks with smooth turf edges, the made water with +uniformly sloping banks--all as insipidly formal, in their way, as the +old Italian gardens which Brown's landscapes displaced. + +[38] "Essay on Walter Scott." + +[39] Andrew Lang reminds us that, after all, only three of the Waverley +Novels are "chivalry romances." The following are the only numbers of +the series that have to do with the Middle Ages: "Count Robert of Paris," +_circa_ 1090 A.D.; "The Betrothed," 1187; "The Talisman," 1193; +"Ivanhoe," 1194; "The Fair Maid of Perth," 1402; "Quentin Durward," 1470; +"Anne of Geierstein," 1474-77. + +[40] "The Romantic School in Germany," p. 187. _Cf._ Stendhal, "Walter +Scott et la Princesse de Clèves." "Mes reflexions seront mal accueilles. +Une immense troupe de littérateurs est intéressée à porter aux nues Sir +Walter Scott et sa maniere. L'habit et le collier de cuivre d'un serf du +moyen âge sont plus facile à décrire que les mouvements du coeur +humain. . . . N'oublions pas un autre avantage de l'école de Sir Walter +Scott: la description d'un costume et la _pose_ d'un personnage . . . +prennent au moins deux pages. Les mouvements de l'âme fourniraient à +peine quelques lignes. Ouvrez au hazard un cies volumes de la 'Princesse +de Clèves,' prenez dix pages au hasard, et ensuite comparez les aux dix +pages d'Ivanhoe' ou de 'Quentin Durward': ces derniers ouvrages ont un +_mérite historique_. Ils apprennent quelques petites choses sur +l'histoire aux gens qui l'ignorent ou qui le savent mal. Ce mérite +historique a causé un grand plaisir: je ne le nie pas, mais c'est ce +mérite historique qui se fanera le premier. . . . Dans 146 ans, Sir +Walter Scott ne sera pas à la hauteur où Corneille nous apparait 146 ans +après sa mort." "To write a modern romance of chivalry." says Jeffrey, +in his review of "Marmion" in the _Edinburgh_, "seems to be much such a +phantasy as to build a modern abbey or an English pagoda. . . . +[Scott's] genius, seconded by the omnipotence of fashion, has brought +chivalry again into temporary favor. Fine ladies and gentlemen now talk, +indeed, of donjons, keeps, tabards, 'scutcheons, tressures, caps of +maintenance, portcullises, wimples, and we know not what besides; just as +they did, in the days of Dr. Darwin's popularity, of gnomes, sylphs, +oxygen, gossamer, polygynia, and polyandria. That fashion, however, +passed rapidly away, and Mr. Scott should take care that a different sort +of pedantry," etc. + +[41] For an exhaustive review of Scott's influence on the evolution of +historical fiction in France, consult Maigron, "Le Roman Historique," +etc. A longish passage from this work will be found at the end of the +present chapter. For English imitators and successors of the Waverley +Novels, see Cross, "Development of the English Novel," pp. 136-48. See +also De Quincey's "Literary Reminiscences," vol. iii., for an amusing +account of "Walladmor" (1824), a pretended German translation of a +non-existent Waverley novel. + +[42] "Racine et Shakespeare." + +[43] "Don Quixote." + +[44] "Sir Walter Scott." + +[45] "Dix ans d'études historiques": preface. + +[46] Walter Bagehot says that "Ivanhoe" "describes the Middle Ages as we +should have wished them to be," ignoring their discomforts and harsh +barbarism. "Every boy has heard of tournaments and has a firm persuasion +that in an age of tournaments life was thoroughly well understood. A +martial society where men fought hand to hand on good horses with large +lances," etc. ("The Waverley Novels"). + +[47] "Of enthusiasm in religion Scott always spoke very severely. . . . +I do not think there is a single study in all his romances of what may be +fairly called a pre-eminently spiritual character" (R. H. Hutton: "Sir +Walter Scott," p. 126). + +[48] "Unopposed, the Catholic superstition may sink to dust, with all its +absurd ritual and solemnities. Still it is an awful risk. The world is +in fact as silly as ever, and a good competence of nonsense will always +find believers." ("Diary" for 1829). + +[49] See vol. i., p. 42. "We almost envy the credulity of those who in +the gentle moonlight of a summer night in England, amid the tangled +glades of a deep forest, or the turfy swell of her romantic commons, +could fancy they saw the fairies tracing their sportive ring. But it is +in vain to regret illusions which, however engaging, must of necessity +yield their place before the increase of knowledge, like shadows at the +advance of morn." ("Demonology." p. 183). "Tales of ghosts and +demonology are out of date at forty years of age and upward. . . . If I +were to write on the subject at all, it should have been during a period +of life when I could have treated it with more interesting +vivacity. . . . Even the present fashion of the world seems to be +ill-suited for studies of this fantastic nature: and the most ordinary +mechanic has learning sufficient to laugh at the figments which in former +times were believed by persons far advanced in the deepest knowledge of +the age." (_Ibid_., p. 398). + +[50] See vol. i., pp. 249 and 420. + +[51] "Postscript" to "Appreciations." + +[52] For the rarity of the real romantic note in mediaeval writers see +vol. i., pp. 26-28, and Appendix B to the present chapter. + +[53] See "Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature," by Edward T. +McLaughlin, p. 34. + + + + +CHAPTER II. + +Coleridge, Bowles, and the Pope Controversy. + +While Scott was busy collecting the fragments of Border minstrelsy and +translating German ballads,[1] two other young poets, far to the south, +were preparing their share in the literary revolution. In those same +years (1795-98) Wordsworth and Coleridge were wandering together over the +Somerset downs and along the coast of Devon, catching glimpses of the sea +towards Bristol or Linton, and now and then of the skeleton masts and +gossamer sails of a ship against the declining sun, like those of the +phantom bark in "The Ancient Mariner." The first fruits of these walks +and talks was that epoch-making book, the "Lyrical Ballads"; the first +edition of which was published in 1798, and the second, with an +additional volume and the famous preface by Wordsworth, in 1800. The +genesis of the work and the allotment of its parts were described by +Coleridge himself in the "Biographia Literaria" (1817), Chapter XIV. + +"During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours our +conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the +power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to +the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by +the modifying colours of imagination. . . . The thought suggested itself +that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the +incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; . . . +for the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary +life. . . . It was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to +persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic. . . . With +this view I wrote 'The Ancient Mariner,' and was preparing, among other +poems, 'The Dark Ladie' and the 'Christabel,' in which I should have more +nearly realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt." + +Coleridge's contributions to romantic poetry are few though precious. +Weighed against the imposing array of Scott's romances in prose and +verse,[2] they seem like two or three little gold coins put into the +scales to balance a handful of silver dollars. He stands for so much in +the history of English thought, he influenced his own and the following +generation on so many sides, that his romanticism shows like a mere +incident in his intellectual history. His blossoming time was short at +the best, and ended practically with the century. After his return from +Germany in 1799 and his settlement at Keswick in 1800, he produced little +verse of any importance beyond the second part of "Christabel" (written +in 1800, published in 1816). His creative impulse failed him, and he +became more and more involved in theology, metaphysics, political +philosophy, and literary criticism. + +It appears, therefore, at first sight, a little odd that Coleridge's +German biographer, Professor Brandl, should have treated his subject +under this special aspect,[3] and attributed to him so leading a place in +the romantic movement. Walter Scott, if we consider his life-long and +wellnigh exclusive dedication of himself to the work of historic +restoration--Scott, certainly, and not Coleridge was the "high priest of +Romanticism." [4] Brandl is dissatisfied with the term Lake School, or +Lakers, commonly given to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, and +proposes instead to call them the Romantic School, Romanticists +(_Romantiker_), surely something of a misnomer when used of an eclectic +versifier like Southey, or a poet of nature, moral reflection, and humble +life like Wordsworth. Southey, in casting about him for a theme, +sometimes became for the nonce and so far as subject goes, a romancer; as +in "Joan of Arc" (1799), "Madoc" (1805), and "Roderick the Goth" (1814); +not to speak of translations like "Amadis of Gaul," "Palmerin of +England," and "The Chronicle of the Cid." But these were not due to the +compelling bent of his genius, as in Scott. They were miscellaneous +jobs, undertaken in the regular course of his business as a manufacturer +of big, irregular epics, Oriental, legendary, mythological, and what not; +and as an untiring biographer, editor, and hack writer of all +descriptions. Southey was a mechanical poet, with little original +inspiration, and represents nothing in particular. Wordsworth again, +though innovating in practice and theory against eighteenth-century +tradition, is absolutely unromantic in contrast with Scott and Coleridge. + +But it will be fair to let the critic defend his own nomenclature; and +the passage which I shall quote will serve not only as another attempt to +define romanticism, but also to explain why Brandl regards the Lake poets +as our romantic school _par excellence_. "'Lake School' is a name, but +no designation. This was felt in England, where many critics have +accordingly fallen into the opposite extreme, and maintained that the +members of this group of poets had nothing in common beyond their +personal and accidental conditions. As if they had only lived together, +and not worked together! In truth they were bound together by many a +strong tie, and above all by one of a polemical kind, namely, by the +aversion for the monotony that had preceded them, and by the struggle +against merely dogmatic rules. Unbending uniformity is death! Let us be +various and individual as life itself is. . . . Away with dry +Rationalism! Let us fight it with all the powers we possess; whether by +bold Platonism or simple Bible faith; whether by enthusiastic hymns, or +dreamy fairy tales; whether by the fabulous world of distant times and +zones, or by the instincts of the children in the next village. Let us +abjure the ever-recommended nostrum of imitation of the old masters in +poetry, and rather attach ourselves to homely models, and endeavour, with +their help, lovingly and organically to develop their inner life. These +were the aims of Walter Scott and his Scotch school, only with such +changes as local differences demanded. Individuality in person, +nationality, and subject, and therefore the emphasis of all natural +unlikeness, was the motto on both sides of the Tweed. And, as these men, +when confronted by elements peculiar, rare, and marvellous, designated +such elements as 'romantic,' so may they themselves be justly called the +'Romantic School.' But the term is much misused, and requires a little +elucidation. Shakespeare is usually called a romantic poet. He, +however, never used the expression, and would have been surprised if any +one had applied it to him. The term presupposes opposition to the +classic style, to rhetorical deduction, and to measured periods, all of +which were unknown in the time of the Renaissance, and first imported in +that of the French Revolution. On the other hand, Wordsworth, Coleridge, +Southey, Lamb, and Walter Scott's circle all branched off from the +classical path with a directness and consistency which sharply +distinguish them from their predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. +Their predecessors had not broken with the Greek and Latin school, nor +with the school of Pope; Chatterton copied Homer; Cowper translated him; +Burns in his English verses, and Bowles in his sonnets, adhered to what +is called the 'pig-tail period'! The principal poems composed in the +last decennium of the eighteenth century . . . adhered still more to +classic tradition. In London the satires of Mathias and Gifford renewed +the style of the 'Dunciad,' and the moral poems of Rogers that of the +'Essay on Man.' Landor wrote his youthful 'Gebir' in the style of +Virgil, and originally in Latin itself. The amateur in German +literature, William Taylor of Norwich, and Dr. Sayers, interested +themselves especially for those works by Goethe which bear an antique +character--for 'Iphigenia,' 'Proserpina,' 'Alexis and Dora.' Only when +the war with France drew near was the classical feeling interrupted. +Campbell, the Scotchman, and Moore, the Irishman, both well schooled by +translations from the Greek, recalled to mind the songs of their own +people, and rendered them popular with the fashionable world--though only +by clothing them in classic garb. How different to the 'artificial rust' +of 'Christabel'; to the almost exaggerated homeliness of 'We Are Seven'; +and to the rude 'Lay of the Last Minstrel'! When at last, with the fall +of Napoleon, the great stars--Byron, Shelley, Keats, and later the mature +Landor--rose in the hemisphere, they had all imbibed from the Romantic +school a warmer form of thought and feeling, and a number of productive +impulses; though, Euphorion-like, they still regarded the antique as +their parent. They expressed much appreciation of the Romantic school, +but their hearts were with Aeschylus and Pindar. They contended for +national character, but only took pleasure in planting it on classic +soil. Byron's enthusiasm for Pope was not only caprice; nor was it mere +chance that Byron should have died in Greece, and Shelley and Keats in +Italy. Compared with what we may call these classical members of the +Romantic school, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott . . . may be said to +have taken nothing, whether in the form of translation or imitation, from +classical literature; while they drew endless inspiration from the Middle +Ages. In their eyes Pope was only a lucid, able, and clever journeyman. +It is therefore fair to consider them, and them alone, as exponents of +the Romantic school." [5] + +As to Byron and Shelley this criticism may do; as to Chatterton and Keats +it is misleading. Wordsworth more romantic than Chatterton! More +romantic than Keats, because the latter often, and Wordsworth seldom, +treats subjects from the antique! On the contrary, if "the name is +graven on the workmanship," "Michael" and "The Brothers" are as classical +as "Hyperion" or "Laodamia" or "The Hamadryad"; "bald as the bare +mountain-tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur." Bagehot +expressly singles Wordsworth out as an example of pure or classic art, as +distinguished from the ornate art of such poets as Keats and Tennyson. +And Mr. Colvin hesitates to classify him with Landor only because of his +"suggestive and adumbrative manner"--not, indeed, he acknowledges, a +romantic manner, and yet "quite distinct from the classical"; i.e., +because of the transcendental character of a portion of his poetry. But +whatever may be true of the other members of the group, Coleridge at his +best was a romantic poet. "Christabel" and "The Ancient Mariner," +creations so exquisite sprung from the contact of modern imagination with +mediaeval beliefs, are enough in themselves to justify the whole romantic +movement. + +Among the literary influences which gave shape to Coleridge's poetry, +Percy's ballads and Chatterton's "Rowley Poems" are obvious and have +already been mentioned. In his first volume of verse (1796), there is +manifest a still stronger impulse from the sonnets of the Rev. William +Lisle Bowles. We have noticed the reappearance of this discarded stanza +form in the work of Gray, Mason, Edwards, Stillingfleet, and Thomas +Warton, about the middle of the last century.[6] In 1782 Mrs. Charlotte +Smith published a volume of sonnets, treating motives from Milton, Gray, +Collins, Pope's "Eloisa" and Goethe's "Werther." But the writer +who--through his influence upon Wordsworth more especially--contributed +most towards the sonnet revival, was Bowles. In 1789 he had published a +little collection of fourteen sonnets,[7] which reached a second edition +with six pieces additional, in the same year. "His sonnets came into +Wordsworth's hands (1793)," says Brandl, "just as he was leaving London +with some friends for a morning's excursion; he seated himself in a +recess on Westminster Bridge, and was not to be moved from his place till +he had finished the little book. Southey, again, owned in 1832 that for +forty years, he had taken the sweet and artless style of Bowles for a +model." [8] In the first chapter of his "Biographia Literaria" (1817) +Coleridge tells how, when he had just entered on his seventeenth year, +"the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number and just then published in a +quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented" to him by his +school-fellow at Christ's Hospital, Thomas Middleton, afterwards Bishop +of Calcutta. "It was a double pleasure to me . . . that I should have +received, from a friend so revered, the first knowledge of a poet by +whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted and +inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the +undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal with which I laboured to make +proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed, +of whatever rank and in whatever place. As my school finances did not +permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, +more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to +those who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight +did I receive the three or four following publications of the same +author." To Bowles' poems Coleridge ascribes the credit of having +withdrawn him from a too exclusive devotion to metaphysics and also a +strengthened perception of the essentially unpoetic character of Pope's +poetry. "Among those with whom I conversed there were, of course, very +many who had formed their taste and their notions of poetry from the +writings of Pope and his followers; or, to speak more generally, in that +school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by English +understanding, which had predominated from the last century. I was not +blind to the merits of this school, yet . . . they gave me little +pleasure. . . . I saw that the excellence of this kind consisted in just +and acute observations on men and manners in an artificial state of +society, as its matter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed +in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form. . . . The +matter and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic +thoughts as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry." +Coleridge goes on to say that, in a paper written during a Cambridge +vacation, he compared Darwin's "Botanic Garden" to a Russian ice palace, +"glittering, cold, and transitory"; that he expressed a preference for +Collins' odes over those of Gray; and that in his defence of the lines +running into each other, instead of closing at each couplet; and of +natural language . . . such as "_I will remember thee_," instead of + + ". . . Thy image on her wing + Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring" + +he had continually to appeal to the example of the older English poets +from Chaucer to Milton. "The reader," he concludes, "must make himself +acquainted with the general style of composition that was at that time +deemed poetry, in order to understand and account for the effect produced +on me by the sonnets, the 'Monody at Matlock' and the 'Hope' of Mr. +Bowles; for it is peculiar to original genius to become less and less +striking, in proportion to its success in improving the taste and +judgment of its contemporaries. The poems of West, indeed, had the merit +of chaste and manly diction, but they were cold, and, if I may so express +it, only dead-coloured; while in the best of Warton's, there is a +stiffness which too often gives them the appearance of imitations from +the Greek. Whatever relation, therefore, of cause or impulse, Percy's +collection of ballads may bear to the most popular poems of the present +day, yet in the more sustained and elevated style of the then living +poets, Cowper and Bowles were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who +combined natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled +the heart with the head." Coleridge adds in a note that he was not +familiar with Cowper's "Task" till many years after the publication of +Bowles' sonnets, though it had been published before them (1785). + +It would be hard to account for the effect of Bowles' sonnets on +Coleridge, did we not remember that it is not necessarily the greatest +literature that comes home to us most intimately, but that which, for +some reason, touches us where we are peculiarly sensitive. It is a +familiar experience with every reader, that certain books make an appeal +to him which is personal and individual, an appeal which they make to few +other readers--perhaps to no other reader--and which no other books make +to him. It is something in them apart from their absolute value or +charm, or rather it is something in him, some private experience of his +own, some occult association in depths below consciousness. He has a +perfectly just estimate of their small importance in the abstract, they +are not even of the second or third rank. Yet they speak to him; they +seem written to him--are more to him, in a way, than Shakspere and Milton +and all the public library of the world. In the line of light bringers +who pass from hand to hand the torch of intelligential fire, there are +men of most unequal stature, and a giant may stoop to take the precious +flambeau from a dwarf. That Scott should have admired Monk Lewis, and +Coleridge reverenced Bowles, only proves that Lewis and Bowles had +something to give which Scott and Coleridge were peculiarly ready to +receive. + +Bowles' sonnets, though now little read, are not unreadable. They are +tender in feeling, musical in verse, and pure in diction. They were +mostly suggested by natural scenery, and are uniformly melancholy. +Bowles could suck melancholy out of a landscape as a weasel sucks eggs. +His sonnets continue the elegiac strain of Shenstone, Gray, Collins, +Warton, and the whole "Il Penseroso" school, but with a more personal +note, explained by a recent bereavement of the poet. "Those who know +him," says the preface, "know the occasions of them to have been real, to +the public he might only mention the sudden death of a deserving young +woman with whom + + "Sperabat longos heu! ducere soles, + Et fido acclinis consumuisse sinu. . . . + +"This is nothing to the public; but it may serve in some measure to +obviate the common remark on melancholy poetry, that it has been very +often gravely composed, when possibly the heart of the writer had very +little share in the distress he chose to describe. But there is a great +difference between _natural_ and _fabricated_ feelings even in poetry." +Accordingly while the Miltonic group of last-century poets went in search +of dark things--grots, caverns, horrid shades, and twilight vales; +Bowles' mood bestowed its color upon the most cheerful sights and sounds +of nature. The coming of summer or spring; the bells of Oxford and +Ostend; the distant prospect of the Malvern Hills, or the chalk cliffs of +Dover; sunrise on the sea, touching "the lifted oar far off with sudden +gleam"; these and the like move him to tears equally with the glimmer of +evening, the sequestered woods of Wensbeck, the ruins of Netley Abbey,[9] +or the frowning battlements of Bamborough Castle, where + + "Pity, at the dark and stormy hour + Of midnight, when the moon is hid on high, + Keeps her lone watch upon the topmost tower." + +In "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" Byron calls Bowles "the maudlin +prince of mournful sonneteers," whose + + ". . . muse most lamentably tells + What merry sounds proceed from Oxford bells." [10] + +Bowles' attitude had thus something more modern than that of the +eighteenth-century elegiacs, and in unison with Coleridge's doctrine, that + + ". . . we receive but what we give, + And in our life alone does nature live: + Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud." [11] + +A number of Bowles' sonnets were addressed to rivers, the Tweed, the +Cherwell at Oxford, the Wensbeck, and the Itchin near Winton, poems which +stand midway between Thomas Warton's "To the River Lodon" and Coleridge's +"To the River Otter," with Wordsworth's sonnet sequence, "On the River +Duddon." A single sonnet of Bowles will be enough to give a taste of his +quality and to show what Coleridge got from him.[12] + +Bowles was a disciple in the "School of Warton." He was "one of Joseph +Warton's Winchester wonders," says Peter Cunningham, in a note in the +second edition of Campbell's "Specimens of the British Poets"; "and the +taste he imbibed there for the romantic school of poetry was strengthened +and confirmed by his removal to Trinity College, Oxford, when Tom Warton +was master there." Bowles was always prompt to own that he had learned +his literary principles from the Wartons; and among his poems is a monody +written on the death of his old teacher, the master of Winchester +College. His verses abound in Gothic imagery quite in the Wartonian +manner; the "castle gleaming on the distant steep"; "the pale moonlight +in the midnight aisle"; "some convent's ancient walls," along the Rhine. +Weak winds complain like spirits through the ruined arches of Netley +Abbey: + + "The beam + Of evening smiles on the gray battlement, + And yon forsaken tower that time has rent." + +His lines on Shakspere recall Collins in their insistence upon the +"elvish" things in the plays; "The Tempest," "Midsummer Night's Dream," +the weird sisters in "Macbeth," Ophelia's songs, the melancholy Jacques. +The lines to Burke on his "Reflections on the Revolution in France," echo +his celebrated dirge over fallen chivalry: + + "Though now no more proud chivalry recalls + The tourneys bright and pealing festivals; + Though now on high her idle spear is hung, + Though time her mouldering harp has half unstrung," etc.[13] + +The "Hymn to Woden" alludes to Gray's "Fatal Sisters." "St. Michael's +Mount" summons up the forms of the ancient Druids, and sings how Fancy, + + "Sick of the fluttering fancies that engage + The vain pursuits of a degenerate age, . . . + Would fain the shade of elder days recall, + The Gothick battlements, the bannered hall; + Or list of elfin harps the fabling rhyme; + Or, wrapt in melancholy trance sublime, + Pause o'er the working of some wondrous tale, + Or bid the spectres of the castle hail!" + +Bowles' influence is traceable in Coleridge's earliest volume of verse +(1796) in a certain diffused softness and gentle sensibility. This +elegiac tone appears particularly in effusions like "Happiness," "The +Sigh," "To a Young Ass," "To the Autumnal Moon," "Lines on an Autumnal +Evening," "To the Nightingale"; in "Melancholy: A Fragment" and "Elegy; +imitated from Akenside," both in the "Sibylline Leaves" (1797); and in +numerous "lines," "monodies," "epitaphs," "odes," and "stanzas." [14] +Coleridge soon came to recognise the weakness of his juvenile verses, and +parodied himself--and incidentally Bowles--in three sonnets printed at +the end of Chapter I. of the "Biographia Literaria," designed to +burlesque his own besetting sins, a "doleful egotism," an affected +simplicity, and the use of "elaborate and swelling language and imagery." +He never attained much success in the use of the sonnet form. A series +of twelve sonnets in his first collection opens with one to Bowles: + + "My heart has thanked thee, Bowles! for those soft strains + Whose sadness soothes me, like the murmuring + Of wild bees in the sunny showers of spring," etc. + +More important to our inquiries than the poetry of Bowles is the occasion +which he gave to the revival, under new conditions, of the Pope +controversy. For it was over the body of Pope that the quarrel between +classic and romantic was fought out in England, as it was fought out in +France, a few years later, over the question of the dramatic unities and +the mixture of tragedy and comedy in the _drame_. In 1806, just a half +century after Joseph Warton published the first volume of his "Essay on +Pope," Bowles' edition of the same poet appeared. In the life of Pope +which was prefixed, the editor made some severe strictures on Pope's +duplicity, jealousy, and other disagreeable traits, though not more +severe than have been made by Pope's latest editor, Mr. Elwin, who has +backed up his charges with an array of evidence fairly overwhelming. The +edition contained likewise an essay on "The Poetical Character of Pope," +in which Bowles took substantially the same ground that had been taken by +his master, Joseph Warton, fifty years before. He asserted in brief +that, as compared with Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton, Pope was a poet of +the second order; that in his descriptions of nature he was inferior to +Thomson and Cowper, and in lyrical poetry to Dryden and Gray; and that, +except in his "Eloisa" and one or two other pieces, he was the poet of +artificial manners and of didactic maxims, rather than of passions. +Bowles' chief addition to Warton's criticism was the following paragraph, +upon which the controversy that ensued chiefly hinged: "All images drawn +from what is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature are more +beautiful and sublime than any images drawn from art, and they are +therefore _per se_ (abstractedly) more poetical. In like manner those +passions of the human heart, which belong to nature in general, are _per +se_ more adapted to the higher species of poetry than those derived from +incidental and transient manners." + +The admirers of Pope were not slow in joining issue with his critic, not +only upon his general estimate of the poet, but upon the principle here +laid down. Thomas Campbell, in his "Specimens of the British Poets" +(1819), defended Pope both as a man and a poet, and maintained that +"exquisite descriptions of artificial objects are not less characteristic +of genius than the description of simple physical appearances." He +instanced Milton's description of Satan's spear and shield, and gave an +animated picture of the launching of a ship of the line as an example of +the "sublime objects of artificial life." Bowles replied in a letter to +Campbell on "The Invariable Principles of Poetry." He claimed that it +was the appearances of nature, the sea and the sky, that lent sublimity +to the launch of the ship, and asked: "If images derived from art are as +beautiful and sublime as those derived from nature, why was it necessary +to bring your ship off the stocks?" He appealed to his adversary whether +the description of a game of ombre was as poetical as that of a walk in +the forest, and whether "the sylph of Pope, 'trembling over the fumes of +a chocolate pot,' be an image as poetical as that of delicate and quaint +Ariel, who sings 'Where the bee sucks, there lurk (_sic_) I.'" Campbell +replied in the _New Monthly Magazine_, of which he was editor, and this +drew out another rejoinder from Bowles. Meanwhile Byron had also +attacked Bowles in two letters to Murray (1821), to which the +indefatigable pamphleteer made elaborate replies. The elder Disraeli, +Gifford, Octavius Gilchrist, and one Martin M'Dermot also took a hand in +the fight--all against Bowles--and William Roscoe, the author of the +"Life of Lorenzo de Medici," attacked him in an edition of Pope which he +brought out in 1824. The rash detractor of the little Twitnam +nightingale soon found himself engaged single-handed against a host; but +he was equal to the occasion, in volubility if not in logic, and poured +out a series of pamphlets, covering in all some thousand pages, and +concluding with "A Final Appeal to the Literary Public" (1825), followed +by "more last words of Baxter," in the shape of "Lessons in Criticism to +William Roscoe" (1825). + +The opponents of Bowles maintained, in general, that in poetry the +subject is nothing, but the execution is all; that one class of poetry +has, as such, no superiority over another; and that poets are to be +ranked by their excellence as artists, and not according to some +imaginary scale of dignity in the different orders of poetry, as epic, +didactic, satiric, etc. "There is, in fact," wrote Roscoe, "no poetry in +any subject except what is called forth by the genius of the poet. . . . +There are no great subjects but such as are made so by the genius of the +artist." Byron said that to the question "whether 'the description of a +game of cards be as poetical, supposing the execution of the artists +equal, as a description of a walk in a forest,' it may be answered that +the materials are certainly not equal, but that the _artist_ who has +rendered the game of cards poetical is by far the greater of the two. +But all this 'ordering' of poets is purely arbitrary on the part of Mr. +Bowles. There may or may not be, in fact, different 'orders' of poetry, +but the poet is always ranked according to his execution, and not +according to his branch of the art." Byron also contended, like +Campbell, that art is just as poetical as nature, and that it was not the +water that gave interest to the ship but the ship to the water. "What +was it attracted the thousands to the launch? They might have seen the +poetical 'calm water' at Wapping or in the London lock or in the +Paddington Canal or in a horse-pond or in a slop-basin." Without natural +accessories--the sun, the sky, the sea, the wind--Bowles had said, the +ship's properties are only blue bunting, coarse canvas, and tall poles. +"So they are," admits Byron, "and porcelain is clay, and man is dust, and +flesh is grass; and yet the two latter at least are the subjects of much +poesy. . . . Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical, the +Parthenon or the rock on which it stands. . . . Take away Stonehenge +from Salisbury plain and it is nothing more than Hounslow Heath or any +other unenclosed down. . . . There can be nothing more poetical in its +aspect than the city of Venice; does this depend upon the sea or the +canals? . . . Is it the Canal Grande or the Rialto which arches it, the +churches which tower over it, the palaces which line and the gondolas +which glide over the waters, that render this city more poetical than +Rome itself? . . . Without these the water would be nothing but a +clay-coloured ditch. . . . There would be nothing to make the canal of +Venice more poetical than that of Paddington." + +There was something futile about this whole discussion. It was marked +with that fatally superficial and mechanical character which +distinguished all literary criticism in Europe before the time of Lessing +in Germany, and of Wordsworth and Coleridge in England. In particular, +the cardinal point on which Pope's rank as a poet was made to turn was +really beside the question. There is no such essential distinction as +was attempted to be drawn between "natural objects" and "objects of +artificial life," as material for poetry. In a higher synthesis, man and +all his works are but a part of nature, as Shakspere discerned: + + "Nature is made better by no mean + But nature makes that mean: so over that art + Which you say adds to nature, is an art + That nature made: the art itself is nature." + +Shakspere, as well as Pope, dealt with artificial life, _i.e._, with the +life of man in society, but how differently! The reason why Pope's +poetry fails to satisfy the heart and the imagination resides not in his +subjects--so far Campbell and Byron were right--but in his mood; in his +imperfect sense of beauty and his deficiency in the highest qualities of +the poet's soul. I may illustrate this by an arrow from Byron's own +quiver. To prove how much poetry may be associated with "a simple, +household, 'indoor,' artificial, and ordinary image," he cites the famous +stanza in Cowper's poem to Mrs. Unwin: + + "Thy needles, once a shining store, + For my sake restless heretofore. + Now rust disused and shine no more, + My Mary." + +Let us contrast with this a characteristic passage from "The Rape of the +Lock," which also contains an artificial image: + + "On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore + Which Jews might kiss and infidels adore." + +What is the difference? It is in the feeling of the poet Pope's couplet +is very charming, but it is merely gallantry, a neatly turned compliment, +playful, only half sincere, a spice of mockery lurking under the sugared +words; while in Cowper's lines the humble domestic implement is made +sacred by the emotions of pity, sorrow, gratitude, and affection with +which it is associated. The reason why Pope is not a high poet--or +perhaps a poet at all in the best sense of the word--is indicated by +Coleridge with his usual acuteness and profundity in a sentence already +quoted; that Pope's poetry both in matter and diction was "characterised +not so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts _translated_ into the +language of poetry." + +Bowles, on the whole, had hold of the right end of the controversy; his +instinct was correct, but he was a wretched controversialist. As a poet +in the minor key, he was tolerable, but as a prose writer, he was a very +dull person and a bore. He was rude and clumsy; he tried to be sarcastic +and couldn't, he had damnable iteration. Lowell speaks of his +"peculiarly helpless way," and says: "Bowles, in losing his temper, lost +also what little logic he had, and though, in a vague way, aesthetically +right, contrived always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger made worse +confusion in a brain never very clear, and he had neither the scholarship +nor the critical faculty for a vigorous exposition of his own thesis. +Never was wilder hitting than his, and he laid himself open to dreadful +punishment, especially from Byron, whose two letters are masterpieces of +polemic prose." Indeed, the most interesting feature of the Pope +controversy is Byron's part in it and the light which it sheds on his +position in relation to the classic and romantic schools. Before the +definite outbreak of the controversy, Byron had attacked Bowles for his +depreciation of Pope, in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" (1809), in +a passage in which he wished that Bowles had lived in Pope's time, so +that Pope might have put him into the "Dunciad." + +It seems at first sight hard to reconcile Byron's evidently sincere +admiration for Pope with the ultra-romantic cast of his own +poetry--romantic, as Pater says, in mood if not in subject. In his early +fondness for Ossian, his intense passion, his morbid gloom, his +exaltation in wild and solitary places, his love of night and storm, of +the desert and the ocean, in the careless and irregular outpour of his +verse, in his subjectivity, the continual presence of the man in the +work--in all these particulars Byron was romantic and would seem to have +had little in common with Pope. But there was another side to Byron--and +William Rossetti thinks his most characteristic side--viz., his wit and +understanding; and this side sympathised heartily with Pope. It is well +known that when Byron came back from the East he had in his trunk besides +the manuscript of "Childe Harold," which he thought little of, certain +"Hints from Horace" which the world thinks less of, but which he was +eager to have published, while Dallas was urging him to print "Childe +Harold." "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" is a thoroughly Popeian +satire, and "The Vision of Judgment," though not in couplets but in +_ottava rima_, is one of the best personal satires in English. It has +all of Pope's malicious wit, with a sweep and glow, which belonged to +Byron as a poet rather than as a satirist, and which Pope never had. +Lowell thinks, too, that what Byron admired in Pope was "that patience in +careful finish which he felt to be wanting in himself and in most of his +contemporaries." + +With all this there probably mingled something of perversity and +exaggeration in Byron's praises of Pope. He hated the Lakers, and he +delighted to use Pope against them as a foil and a rod. He at least was +everything that they were not. Doubtless in the Pope controversy, his +"object was mainly mischief," as Lowell says. Byron loved a fight; he +thought the Rev. W. L. Bowles an ass, and he determined to have some fun +with him. Besides the two letters to Murray in 1821, an open letter of +Byron's to Isaac Disraeli, dated March 15, 1820, and entitled "Some +Observations upon an article in _Blackwood's Magazine_," [15] contains a +long passage in vindication of Pope and in denunciation of contemporary +poetry--a passage which is important not only as showing Byron's +opinions, but as testifying to the very general change in taste which had +taken place since 1756, when Joseph Warton was so discouraged by the +public hostility to his "Essay on Pope" that he withheld the second +volume for twenty-six years. "The great cause of the present deplorable +state of English poetry," writes Byron, "is to be attributed to that +absurd and systematic depreciation of Pope in which, for the last few +years, there has been a kind of epidemical concurrence. Men of the most +opposite opinions have united upon this topic." He then goes on to +praise Pope and abuse his own contemporaries, especially the Lake poets, +both in the most extravagant terms. Pope he pronounces the most perfect +and harmonious of poets. "Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge," he says, +"had all of them a very natural antipathy to Pope . . . but they have +been joined in it by . . . the whole heterogeneous mass of living English +poets excepting Crabbe, Rogers, Gifford, and Campbell, who, both by +precept and practice, have proved their adherence; and by me, who have +shamefully deviated in practice, but have ever loved and honoured Pope's +poetry with my whole soul." There is ten times more poetry, he thinks, +in the "Essay on Man" than in the "Excursion"; and if you want passion, +where is to be found stronger than in the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard"? +To the sneer that Pope is only the "poet of reason" Byron replies that he +will undertake to find more lines teeming with _imagination_ in Pope than +in any two living poets. "In the mean time," he asks, "what have we got +instead? . . . The Lake school," and "a deluge of flimsy and +unintelligible romances imitated from Scott and myself." He prophesies +that all except the classical poets, Crabbe, Rogers, and Campbell, will +survive their reputation, acknowledges that his own practice as a poet is +not in harmony with his principles, and says; "I told Moore not very long +ago, 'We are all wrong except Rogers, Crabbe, and Campbell.'" In the +first of his two letters to Murray, Byron had taken himself to task in +much the same way. He compared the romanticists to barbarians who had +"raised a mosque by the side of a Grecian temple of the purest +architecture"; and who were "not contented with their own grotesque +edifice unless they destroy the prior and purely beautiful fabric which +preceded, and which shames them and theirs for ever and ever. I shall be +told that amongst those I _have_ been (or it may be still _am_) +conspicuous--true, and I am ashamed of it. I _have_ been amongst the +builders of this Babel . . . but never among the envious destroyers of +the classic temple of our predecessor." "Neither time nor distance nor +grief nor age can ever diminish my veneration for him who is the great +moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all +stages of existence. The delight of my boyhood, the study of my manhood, +perhaps he may be the consolation of my age. His poetry is the Book of +Life." [16] + +Strange language this from the author of "Childe Harold" and "The +Corsair"! But the very extravagance of Byron's claims for Pope makes it +plain that he was pleading a lost cause. When Warton issued the first +volume of his "Essay on Pope," it was easy for leaders of literary +opinion, like Johnson and Goldsmith, to pooh-pooh the critical canons of +the new school. But when Byron wrote, the aesthetic revolution was +already accomplished. The future belonged not to Campbell and Gifford +and Rogers and Crabbe, but to Wordsworth and Scott and Coleridge and +Shelley and Keats; to Byron himself, the romantic poet, but not to Byron +the _laudator temporis acti_. The victory remained with Bowles, not +because he had won it by argument, but because opinion had changed, and +changed probably once and for all.[17] + +Coleridge's four contributions to the "Lyrical Ballads" included his +masterpiece, "The Ancient Mariner." This is the high-water mark of +romantic poetry; and, familiar as it is, cannot be dismissed here without +full examination. As to form, it is a long narrative ballad in seven +"fyts" or parts, and descends from that "Bible of the romantic +reformation," Bishop Percy's "Reliques." The verse is the common ballad +stanza--eights and sixes--enriched by a generous use of medial rhyme and +alliteration: + + "The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, + The furrow followed free: + We were the first that ever burst + Into that silent sea"; + +varied and prolonged, moreover, by the introduction of additional lines +with alternate riming, with couplets and sometimes with triplets. There +are many five-lined and six-lined stanzas, and one--the longest in the +poem--of nine lines. But these metric variations are used with +temperance. The stanza form is never complex; it is built up naturally +from the ballad stanza upon which it rests and to which it constantly +returns as its norm and type. Of the one hundred and forty-two stanzas +in the poem, one hundred and six are the ordinary four-lined stanzas of +popular poetry. The language, too, is not obtrusively archaic as it is +in Chatterton and some of the Spenserians; at most an occasional "wist" +or "eftsoons"; now and then a light accent, in ballad fashion, on the +final syllable of a rime-word like mariner or countrie. There is no +definite burden, which would have been out of place in a poem that is +narrative and not lyrical; but the ballad habits of phrase repetition and +question and answer are sparingly employed.[18] In reproducing the +homely diction of old popular minstrelsy, Coleridge's art was nicer than +Scott's and more perfect at every point. How skilfully studied, _e.g._ +is the simplicity of the following: + + "The moving moon went up the sky + And nowhere did abide: + _Softly she was going up_." + + "Day after day, day after day + _We stuck_." + +"The naive artlessness of the Middle Ages," says Brandl, "became in +the hands of the Romantic school, an intentional form of art." The +impression of antiquity is heightened by the marginal gloss which +the poet added in later editions, composed in a prose that has a +quaint beauty of its own, in its mention of "the creatures of the +calm"; its citation of "the learned Jew Josephus and the Platonic +Constantinopilitan, Michael Psellus," as authorities on invisible +spirits; and in passages like that Dantesque one which tells how the +mariner "in his loneliness and fixedness yearneth towards the journeying +moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onwards; and +everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and +their native country, and their own natural homes, which they enter +unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a +silent joy at their arrival." + +In "The Ancient Mariner" there are present in the highest degree the +mystery, indefiniteness, and strangeness which are the marks of romantic +art. The period is not strictly mediaeval, for mariners in the Middle +Ages did not sail to the south polar regions or lie becalmed in the +equatorial seas. But the whole atmosphere of the poem is mediaeval. The +Catholic idea of penance or expiation is the moral theme enwrought with +the story. The hermit who shrives the mariner, and the little vesper +bell which biddeth him to prayer are Catholic touches, and so are the +numerous pious oaths and ejaculations; + + "By him who died on cross": + + "Heaven's mother send us grace": + + "The very deep did rot. O Christ + That ever this should be!" + +The albatross is hung about the mariner's neck instead of the crucifix, +and drops off only when he blesses the creatures of the calm and is able +to pray. The sleep which refreshes him is sent by "Mary Queen" from +heaven. The cross-bow with which he shoots the bird is a mediaeval +property. The loud bassoon and the bride's garden bower and the +procession of merry minstrels who go nodding their heads before her are +straight out of the old land of balladry. One cannot fancy the wedding +guest dressed otherwise than in doublet and hose, and perhaps wearing +those marvellous pointed shoes and hanging sleeves which are shown in +miniature paintings of the fifteenth century. And it is thus that +illustrators of the poem have depicted him. Place is equally indefinite +with time. What port the ill-fated ship cleared from we do not know or +seek to know; only the use of the word _kirk_ implies that it was +somewhere in "the north countree"--the proper home of ballad poetry. + +Coleridge's romances were very differently conceived from Scott's. He +wove them out of "such stuff as dreams are made on." Industrious +commentators have indeed traced features of "The Ancient Mariner" to +various sources. Coleridge's friend, Mr. Cruikshank. had a dream of a +skeleton ship. Wordsworth told him the incident, which he read in +Shelvocke's voyages, of a certain Captain Simon Hatley who shot a black +albatross south of Terra del Fuego, in hopes that its death might bring +fair weather. Brandl thinks that the wedding banquet in Monk Lewis' +"Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene," furnished a hint; and +surmises--what seems unlikely--that Coleridge had read a certain epistle +by Paulinus, a bishop of the fourth century, describing a vessel which +came ashore on the coast of Lucania with only one sailor on board, who +reported that the ship had been deserted, as a wreck, by the rest of the +crew, and had since been navigated by spirits. + +But all this is nothing and less than nothing. "The Ancient Mariner" is +the baseless fabric of a vision. We are put under a spell, like the +wedding guest, and carried off to the isolation and remoteness of +mid-ocean. Through the chinks of the narrative, the wedding music sounds +unreal and far on. What may not happen to a man alone on a wide, wide +sea? The line between earthly and unearthly vanishes. Did the mariner +really see the spectral bark and hear spirits talking, or was it all but +the phantasmagoria of the calenture, the fever which attacks the sailor +on the tropic main, so that he seems to see green meadows and water +brooks on the level brine? No one can tell; for he is himself the only +witness, and the ship is sunk at the harbour mouth. One conjectures that +no wreckers or divers will ever bring it to the top again. Nay, was not +the mariner, too, a spectre? Now he is gone, and what was all this that +he told me, thinks the wedding guest, as he rises on the morrow morn. Or +did he tell me, or did I only dream it? A light shadow cast by some +invisible thing swiftly traverses the sunny face of nature and is gone. +Did we see it, or imagine it? Even so elusive, so uncertain, so shadowy +and phantom-like is the spiriting of this wonderful poem. "Poetry," says +Coleridge, "gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly +understood. It was so by me with Gray's 'Bard' and Collins' odes. 'The +Bard' once intoxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure." [19] +There is no danger that his own poem will ever lose its attractiveness in +this way. Something inexplicable will remain to tease us, like the white +Pater Noster and St. Peter's sister in Chaucer's night-spell.[20] + +Pater subtly connects Coleridge's poetic method with his philosophical +idealism. "The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world, in almost +all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a kind of +coarseness or crudeness, . . . 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' has the +plausibility, the perfect adaptation to reason and life, which belongs to +the marvellous, when actually presented as part of a credible experience +in our dreams. . . . The spectral object, so crude, so impossible, has +become plausible, as 'the spot upon the brain that will show itself +without,' and is understood to be but a condition of one's own mind, for +which--according to the scepticism latent at least in so much of our +modern philosophy--the so-called real things themselves are but _spectra_ +after all. It is this finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism, +the fruit of his more delicate psychology, which Coleridge infuses into +romantic narrative, itself also then a new or revived thing in English +literature; and with a fineness of weird effect in 'The Ancient Mariner' +unknown in those old, more simple, romantic legends and ballads. It is a +flower of mediaeval, or later German romance, growing up in the +peculiarly compounded atmosphere of modern psychological speculation, and +putting forth in it wholly new qualities." + +In "The Ancient Mariner," as in most purely romantic poetry, the appeal +is more to the imagination than to the heart or the conscience. Mrs. +Barbauld complained that it was improbable and had no moral. Coleridge +admitted its improbability, but said that it had too much moral; that, +artistically speaking, it should have had no more moral than a fairy +tale. The lesson of course is that of kindness to animals--"He prayeth +well who loveth well," etc. But the punishment of the mariner, and still +more of the mariner's messmates, is so out of proportion to the gravity +of the offence as to be slightly ludicrous when stated by Leslie Stephen +thus: "People who approve of the unnecessary killing of an albatross will +die a lingering death by starvation." The moral, as might be guessed, +was foisted upon the poem by Wordsworth, and is identical with that of +"Hart-Leap Well." Wordsworth and Coleridge started to write "The Ancient +Mariner" jointly; and two or three lines in the poem, as it stands, were +contributed by Wordsworth. But he wanted to give the mariner himself +"character and profession"; and to have the dead seamen come to life and +sail the ship into port; and in other ways laid so heavy a hand upon +Coleridge's airy creation that it became plain that a partnership on +these terms was out of the question, and Wordsworth withdrew altogether. +If we must look for spiritual sustenence in the poem, we shall find it +perhaps not so much in any definite warning against cruelty to creatures, +as in the sentiment of the blessedness of human companionship and the +omnipresence of God's mercy; in the passage, _e.g._, + + "O wedding guest! this soul hath been + Alone on a wide, wide sea," etc.-- + +where the thought is the same as in Cowper's "Soliloquy of Alexander +Selkirk," even to the detail of the "church-going bell." + +The first part of "Christabel" was written in 1797; the second in 1800; +and the poem, in its unfinished state, was given to the press in 1816. +Meanwhile it had become widely known in manuscript. Coleridge used to +read it to literary circles, and copies of it had got about. We have +seen its influence upon Scott. Byron too admired it greatly, and it was +by his persuasion that Coleridge finally published it as a fragment, +finding himself unable to complete it, and feeling doubtless that the +public regarded him much as the urchins in Keats' poem regarded the crone + + "Who keepeth close a wondrous riddle book, + As spectacled she sits in chimney nook." + +"Christabel" is more distinctly mediaeval than "The Ancient Mariner," and +is full of Gothic elements: a moated castle, with its tourney court and +its great gate + + . . . "ironed within and without, + Where an army in battle array had marched out": + +a feudal baron with a retinue of harpers, heralds, and pages; a lady who +steals out at midnight into the moon-lit oak wood, to pray for her +betrothed knight; a sorceress who pretends to have been carried off on a +white palfrey by five armed men, and who puts a spelt upon the maiden. + +If "The Ancient Mariner" is a ballad, "Christabel" is, in form, a _roman +d'aventures_, or metrical chivalry tale, written in variations of the +octosyllabic couplet. These variations, Coleridge said, were not +introduced wantonly but "in correspondence with some transition, in the +nature of the imagery or passion." A single passage will illustrate this: + + "They passed the hall that echoes still, + Pass as lightly as you will. + The brands were flat, the brands were dying + Amid their own white ashes lying; + But when the lady passed, there came + A tongue of light, a fit of flame; + And Christabel saw the lady's eye, + And nothing else saw she thereby, + Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall, + Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall. + O softly tread, said Christabel, + My father seldom sleepeth well." + +When, after the hurrying anapaests, the verse returns to the strict +iambic measure in the last couplet, the effect is a hush, in harmony with +the meaning of the words.[21] + +"Christabel" is not so unique and perfect a thing as "The Ancient +Mariner," but it has the same haunting charm, and displays the same +subtle art in the use of the supernatural. Coleridge protested that it +"pretended to be nothing more than a common fairy tale." [22] But Lowell +asserts that it is "tantalising in the suggestion of deeper meanings than +were ever there." There is, in truth, a hint of allegory, like that +which baffles and fascinates in Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market"; a +hint so elusive that the comparison often made between Geraldine and +Spenser's Duessa, is distressing to a reader of sensitive nerves. That +mystery which is a favourite weapon in the romanticist armoury is used +again here with consummate skill. What was it that Christabel saw on the +lady's bosom? We are left to conjecture. It was "a sight to dream of, +not to tell," [23] and the poet keeps his secret. Lamb, whose taste was +very fine in these matters, advised Coleridge never to finish the poem. +Brandl thinks that the idea was taken from the curtained picture in the +"Mysteries of Udolpho"; and he also considers that the general +situation--the castle, the forest, the old father and his young daughter, +and the strange lady--are borrowed from Mrs. Radcliffe's "Romance of the +Forest"; and that Bürger's "Lenore," Lewis' "Alonzo," and some of the +Percy ballads contributed a detail here and there. But +_Quellenforschungen_ of this kind are very unimportant. It is more +important to note the superior art with which the poet excites curiosity +and suspends--not simply, like Mrs. Radcliffe, postpones--the +gratification of it to the end, and beyond the end, of the poem. Was +Geraldine really a witch, or did she only seem so to Christabel? The +angry moan of the mastiff bitch and the tongue of flame that shot up as +the lady passed--were they omens, or accidents which popular superstition +interprets into omens? Was the malignant influence which Geraldine +exerted over the maiden supernatural possession, or the fascination of +terror and repugnance? Did she really utter the words of a charm, or did +her sweet bedfellow dream them? And once more, what was that upon her +breast--"that bosom old--that bosom cold"? Was it a wound, or the mark +of a serpent, or some foul and hideous disfigurement--or was it only the +shadows cast by the swinging lamp? + +That isolation and remoteness, that preparation of the reader's mind for +the reception of incredible things, which Coleridge secured in "The +Ancient Mariner" by cutting off his hero from all human life amid the +solitude of the tropic sea, he here secured--in a less degree, to be +sure--by the lonely midnight in Sir Leoline's castle. Geraldine and her +victim are the only beings awake except the hooting owls. There is dim +moonlight in the wood, dim firelight in the hall, and in Christabel's +chamber "the silver lamp burns dead and dim." + +The second part of the poem was less successful, partly for the reason, +as the reviewers pointed out, that it undertakes the hardest of tasks, +"witchery by daylight." But there were other reasons. Three years had +passed since the poem was begun. Coleridge had been to Germany and had +settled at Keswick. The poet had been lost in the metaphysician, and he +took up his interrupted task without inspiration, putting force upon +himself. The signs of effort are everywhere visible, and it is painfully +manifest that the poet cannot recover the genial, creative mood in which +he had set out. In particular it is observable that, while there is no +mention of place in the first part, now we have frequent references to +Windermere, Borrowdale, Dungeon Ghyll, and other Lake Country localities +familiar enough in Wordsworth's poetry, but strangely out of place in +"Christabel." It was certainly an artistic mistake to transfer Sir +Leoline's castle from fairyland to Cumberland.[24] There is one noble +passage in the second part, the one which Byron prefixed to his +"Farewell" to Lady Byron: + + "Alas! they had been friends in youth," etc. + +But the stress of personal emotion in these lines is not in harmony with +the romantic context. They are like a patch of cloth of gold let into a +lace garment and straining the delicate tissue till it tears. + +The example of "The Ancient Mariner," and in a still greater degree of +"Christabel," was potent upon all subsequent romantic poetry. It is seen +in Scott, in Byron, and in Keats, not only in the modelling of their +tales, but in single lines and images. In the first stanza of the "Lay" +Scott repeats the line which occurs so often in "Christabel"--"Jesu Maria +shield her well!" In the same poem, the passage where the Lady Margaret +steals out of Branksome Tower at dawn to meet her lover in the wood, +gliding down the secret stair and passing the bloodhound at the portal, +will remind all readers of "Christabel." The dialogue between the river +and mountain spirits will perhaps remind them of the ghostly antiphonies +which the "Mariner" hears in his trance. The couplet + + "The seething pitch and molten lead + Reeked like a witch's caldron red." + +is, of course, from Coleridge's + + "The water, like a witch's oils, + Burned green and blue and white." + +In "The Lord of the Isles" Scott describes the "elvish lustre" and "livid +flakes" of the phosphorescence of the sea, and cites, in a note, the +description, in "The Ancient Mariner," of the sea snakes from which + + "The elvish light + Fell off in hoary flakes." + +The most direct descendant of "Christabel" was "The Eve of St. Agnes." +Madeline's chamber, "hushed, silken, chaste," recalls inevitably the +passage in the older poem: + + "The moon shines dim in the open air, + And not a moonbeam enters here. + But they without its light can see + The chamber carved so curiously, + Carved with figures strange and sweet, + All made out of the carver's brain, + For a lady's chamber meet: + The lamp with twofold silver chain + Is fastened to an angel's feet." + +The rest of Coleridge's ballad work is small in quantity and may be +dismissed briefly. "Alice du Clos" has good lines, but is unimportant as +a whole. The very favourite poem "Love" is a modern story enclosing a +mediaeval one. In the moonshine by the ruined tower the guileless +Genevieve leans against the statue of an armed man, while her lover sings +her a tale of a wandering knight who bore a burning brand upon his shield +and went mad for the love of "The Lady of the Land." [25] + +The fragment entitled "The Dark Ladie" was begun as a "sister tale" to +"Love." The hero is a "knight that wears the griffin for his crest." +There are only fifteen stanzas of it, and it breaks off with a picture of +an imaginary bridal procession, whose "nodding minstrels" recall "The +Ancient Mariner," and incidentally some things of Chatterton's. Lines of +a specifically romantic colouring are of course to be found scattered +about nearly everywhere in Coleridge; like the musical little song that +follows the invocation to the soul of Alvar in "Remorse": + + "And at evening evermore, + In a chapel on the shore, + Shall the chanters sad and saintly-- + Yellow tapers burning faintly-- + Doleful masses chant for thee, + _Miserere Domine_!" + +or the wild touch of folk poesy in that marvellous opium dream, "Kubla +Khan"--the "deep romantic chasm": + + "A savage place, as holy and enchanted + As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted + By woman wailing for her demon lover." + +Or the well-known ending of "The Knight's Grave": + + "The knight's bones are dust, + And his good sword rust; + His soul is with the saints, I trust." + +In taking account of Coleridge's services to the cause of romanticism, +his critical writings should not be overlooked. Matthew Arnold declared +that there was something premature about the burst of creative activity +in English literature at the opening of the nineteenth century, and +regretted that the way had not been prepared, as in Germany, by a +critical movement. It is true that the English romantics put forth no +body of doctrine, no authoritative statement of a theory of literary art. +Scott did not pose as the leader of a school, or compose prefaces and +lectures like Hugo and Schlegel.[26] As a contributor to the reviews on +his favourite topics, he was no despicable critic; shrewd, good-natured, +full of special knowledge, anecdote, and illustration. But his criticism +was never polemic, and he had no quarrel with the classics. He cherished +an unfeigned admiration for Dryden, whose life he wrote and whose works +he edited. Doubtless he would cheerfully have admitted the inferiority +of his own poetry to Dryden's and Pope's. He had no programme to +announce, but just went ahead writing romances; in practice an innovator, +but in theory a literary conservative. + +Coleridge, however, was fully aware of the scope of the new movement. He +represented, theoretically as well as practically, the reaction against +eighteenth-century academicism, the Popean tradition[27] in poetry, and +the maxims of pseudo-classical criticism. In his analysis and +vindication of the principles of romantic art, he brought to bear a +philosophic depth and subtlety such as had never before been applied in +England to a merely belletristic subject. He revolutionised, for one +thing, the critical view of Shakspere, devoting several lecture courses +to the exposition of the thesis that "Shakspere's judgment was +commensurate with his genius." These lectures borrowed a number of +passages from A. W. von Schlegel's "Vorlesungen über Dramatische Kunst +und Litteratur," delivered at Vienna in 1808, but engrafted with original +matter of the highest value. Compared with these Shakspere notes, with +the chapters on Wordsworth in the "Biographia Literaria," and with the +_obiter dicta_, sown through Coleridge's prose, all previous English +criticism appears crude and superficial, and the contemporary squabble +over Pope like a scolding match in the nursery. + +Coleridge's acute and sympathetic insight into the principles of +Shaksperian drama did not save him from producing his abortive "Zapolya" +in avowed imitation of the "Winter's Tale." What curse is on the English +stage that men who have done work of the highest grade in other +departments, as soon as they essay playwriting, become capable of +failures like "The Borderers" and "John Woodville" and "Manfred" and +"Zapolya"? As for "Remorse," with its Moorish sea-coasts, wild +mountains, chapel interiors with painted windows, torchlight and +moonlight, dripping caverns, dungeons, daggers and poisoned goblets, the +best that can be said of it is that it is less bad than "Zapolya." And +of both it may be said that they are romantic not after the fashion of +Shakspere, but of those very German melodramas which Coleridge ridiculed +in his "Critique on Bertram." [28] + + +[1] For Coleridge's relations with German romance, see vol. i., pp. +419-21. For his early interest in Percy, Ossian, and Chatterton, ibid., +pp. 299, 328, 368-70. + +[2] "There is as much difference between Coleridge's brief poem +'Christabel' and all the narrative poems of Walter Scott . . . as between +a precious essence and a coarse imitation of it got up for sale." (Leigh +Hunt's "Autobiography," p. 197). + +[3] "Samuel Taylor Coleridge und die Englische Romantik," Alois Brandl, +Berlin, 1886. + +[4] It is in view of his critical attitude, not of his poetry, that +Saintsbury applies this title to Coleridge. "The attitude was that of a +mediaevalism inspired by much later learning, but still more by that +intermediate or decadent Greek philosophy which had so much influence on +the Middle Ages themselves. This is, in other words, the Romantic +attitude, and Coleridge was the high priest of Romanticism, which, +through Scott and Byron, he taught to Europe, repreaching it even to +Germany, from which it had partly come." ("A Short History of English +Literature," by George Saintsbury, London, 1898, p. 656). + +[5] "Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School," by Alois +Brandl. Lady Eastlake's translation, London, 1887, pp. 219-23. + +[6] See vol. i., pp. 160-61. + +[7] "Fourteen Sonnets, written chiefly on Picturesque Spots." Bath, 1789. + +[8] "Samuel Taylor Coleridge," p. 37. _Cf._ Wordsworth's Sonnets "Upon +Westminster Bridge" (1802) and "Scorn Not the Sonnet." + +[9] _Cf._ vol. i., p. 182. + +[10] See Sonnet xvii., "On Revisiting Oxford." + +See also Sonnet xi., "At Ostend:" + + "The mournful magic of their mingled chimes + First waked my wondrous childhood into tears." + +And _Cf._ Francis Mahony's "The Bells of Shandon"-- + + "Whose sounds so wild would, in the days of childhood, + Fling round my cradle their magic spells." + +And Moore's "Those Evening Bells." The twang of the wind-harp also +resounds through Bowles' Sonnets. See for the Aeolus' harp, vol. i., p. +165. and _Cf._ Coleridge's poem, "The Eolian Harp." + +[11] "Dejection: An Ode" (1802). + +[12] SONNET XX. + + _November, 1792_. + + "There is strange music in the stirring wind + When lowers the autumnal eve, and all alone + To the dark wood's cold covert thou art gone + Whose ancient trees, on the rough slope reclined, + Rock, and at times scatter their tresses sear. + If in such shades, beneath their murmuring, + Thou late hast passed the happier hours of spring, + With sadness thou wilt mark the fading year; + Chiefly if one with whom such sweets at morn + Or eve thou'st shared, to distant scenes shall stray. + O Spring, return! return, auspicious May! + But sad will be thy coming, and forlorn, + If she return not with thy cheering ray, + Who from these shades is gone, gone far away." + +[13] _Cf._ Scott's "Harp of the North, that mouldering long hast hung," +etc. "Lady of the Lake," Canto I. + +[14] "Shall gentle Coleridge pass unnoticed here, + To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear?" + --"English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." + +[15] No. xxix., August, 1819, "Remarks on Don Juan." + +[16] "Time was, ere yet in these degenerate days + Ignoble themes obtained mistaken praise. + When sense and wit with poesy allied, + No fabled graces, nourished side by side. . . . + Then, in this happy isle, a Pope's pure strain + Sought the rapt soul to charm, nor sought in vain; + A polished nation's praise aspired to claim, + And raised the people's, as the poet's fame. . . . + [But] Milton, Dryden, Pope, alike forgot, + Resign their hallowed bays to Walter Scott." + --"English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." + +[17] For the benefit of any reader who may wish to follow up the steps of +the Pope controversy, I give the titles of Bowles' successive pamphlets. +"The Invariable Principles of Poetry: A Letter to Thomas Campbell, Esq.," +1819. "A Reply to an 'Unsentimental Sort of Critic,'" Bath, 1820. [This +was in answer to a review of "Spence's Anecdotes" in the _Quarterly_ in +October, 1820.] "A Vindication of the Late Editor of Pope's Works," +London, 1821, second edition. [This was also a reply to the _Quarterly_ +reviewer and to Gilchrist's letters in the _London Magazine_, and was +first printed in vol. xvii., Nos. 33, 34, and 35 of the _Pamphleteer_.] +"An Answer to Some Observations of Thomas Campbell, Esq., in his +Specimens of British Poets" (1822). "An Address to Thomas Campbell, +Esq., Editor of the _New Monthly Magazine_, in Consequence of an Article +in that Publication" (1822). "Letters to Lord Byron on a Question of +Poetical Criticism," London, 1822. "A Final Appeal to the Literary +Public Relative to Pope, in Reply to Certain Observations of Mr. Roscoe," +London, 1823. "Lessons in Criticism to William Roscoe, Esq., with +Further Lessons in Criticism to a Quarterly Reviewer," London, 1826. +Gilchrist's three letters to Bowles were published in 1820-21. +M'Dermot's "Letter to the Rev. W. L. Bowles in Reply to His Letter to +Thomas Campbell, Esq., and to His Two Letters to Lord Byron," was printed +at London, in 1822. + +[18] "With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, + We could not laugh nor wail," etc. + + "With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, + Agape they heard me call," etc. + + "Are those her sails that glance in the sun + Like restless gossamers? + Are those her ribs," etc. + +_Cf._ "Christabel": + + "Is the night chilly and dark? + The night is chilly, but not dark." + +And see vol. i., p. 271. + +[19] "Anima Poetae," 1895, p. 5. This recent collection of marginalia +has an equal interest with Coleridge's well-known "Table Talk." It is +the English equivalent of Hawthorne's "American Note Books," full of +analogies, images, and reflections--topics and suggestions for possible +development in future romances and poems. In particular it shows an +abiding prepossession with the psychology of dreams, apparitions, and +mental illusions of all sorts. + +[20] "Jesu Crist and Seint Benedight + Blisse this hous from every wicked wight, + Fro the nightes mare, the white Pater Noster; + Where wonest thou, Seint Peter's suster." + --"The Miller's Tale." + +[21] _Vide supra_, p. 27. + +[22] "Biographia Literaria," chap. xxiv. + +[23] Keats quotes this line in a letter about Edmund Kean. Forman's ed., +vol. iii., p. 4. + +[24] _Vide supra_, p. 14. + +[25] Brandl thinks that this furnished Keats with a hint or two for his +"Belle Dame sans Merci." Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" is headed with +a stanza from "the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence." + +[26] "The English Romantic critics did not form a school. Like +everything else in the English Romantic movement, its criticism was +individual, isolated, sporadic, unsystematised. It had no official +mouthpiece, like Sainte-Beuve and the _Globe_; its members formed no +compact phalanx like that which, towards the close of our period, threw +itself upon the 'classiques' of Paris. Nor did they, with the one +exception of Coleridge, approach the Romantic critics of Germany in range +of ideas, in grasp of the larger significance of their own movement. It +was only in Germany that the ideas implicit in the great poetic revival +were explicitly thought out in all their many-sided bearing upon society, +history, philosophy, religion; and that the problem of criticism, in +particular, was presented in its full depth and richness of +meaning. . . . As English Romanticism achieved greater things on its +creative than on its critical side, so its criticism was more remarkable +on that side which is akin to creation--in the subtle appreciation of +literary quality--than in the analysis of the principles on which its +appreciation was founded." (C. H. Herford: "The Age of Wordsworth," p. +50). + +[27] See "Biographia Literaria." chap. i. "From the common opinion that +the English style attained its greatest perfection in and about Queen +Anne's reign, I altogether dissent." (Lecture "On Style," March 13, +1818). + +[28] See vol. i., p. 421 ff. + + + + +CHAPTER III. + +Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the Dante Revival. + +In the interchange of literary wares between England and Germany during +the last years of the eighteenth century, it is observable that the +English romantics went no further back than to their own contemporaries +for their knowledge of the _Deutsche Vergangenheit_. They translated or +imitated robber tragedies, chivalry tales, and ghost ballads from the +modern restorers of the Teutonic _Mittelalter_; but they made no draughts +upon the original storehouse of German mediaeval poetry. There was no +such reciprocity as yet between England and the Latin countries. French +romanticism dates, at the earliest, from Chateaubriand's "Genie du +Christianisme" (1802), and hardly made itself felt as a definite force, +even in France, before Victor Hugo's "Cromwell" (1828). But in the first +quarter of the nineteenth century, Italy, Spain, and France began to +contribute material to the English movement in the shape of translations +like Cary's "Divine Comedy" (1814), Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads" (1824); +Southey's "Amadis of Gaul" (1803), "Palmerin of England" (1807), and "The +Chronicle of the Cid" (1808); and Rose's[1] "Partenopex of Blois" (1807). +By far the most influential of these was Cary's "Dante." + +Hitherto the Italian Middle Age had impressed itself upon the English +imagination not directly but through the richly composite art of the +Renaissance schools of painting and poetry; through Raphael and his +followers; through the romances of Ariosto and Tasso and their English +scholar, Spenser. Elizabethan England had been supplied with versions of +the "Orlando Furioso" [2] and the "Gierusalemme Liberata," by Harrington +and Fairfax--the latter still a standard translation and a very +accomplished piece of versification. Warton and Hurd and other +romanticising critics of the eighteenth century were perpetually +upholding Ariosto and Tasso against French detraction: + + "In face of all his foes, the Cruscan quire, + And Boileau, whose rash envy could allow + No strain which shamed his country's creaking lyre, + That whetstone of the teeth--monotony in wire!" [3] + +Scott's eager championship of Ariosto has already been mentioned.[4] But +the stuff of the old Charlemagne epos is sophisticated in the brilliant +pages of Ariosto, who follows Pulci and Boiardo, if not in burlesquing +chivalry outright, yet in treating it with a half irony. Tasso is +serious, but submits his romantic matter--Godfrey of Boulogne and the +First Crusade--to the classical epic mould. It was pollen from Italy, +but not Italy of the Middle Ages, that fructified English poetry in the +sixteenth century. Two indeed of _gli antichi_, "the all Etruscan +three," communicated an impulse both earlier and later. Love +sonneteering, in emulation of Petrarca, began at Henry VIII.'s court. +Chaucer took the substance of "Troilus and Creseyde" and "The Knightes +Tale" from Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and "Teseide"; and Dryden, who never +mentions Dante, versified three stories from the "Decameron." But +Petrarch and Boccaccio were not mediaeval minds. They represent the +earlier stages of humanism and the new learning. Dante was the genuine +_homme du moyen âge_, and Dante was the latest of the great revivals. +"Dante," says Carlyle, "was the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the thought +they lived by stands here in everlasting music." + +The difficulty, not to say obscurity, of the "Divine Comedy"; its +allusive, elliptical style; its scholasticism and allegorical method; its +multitudinous references to local politics and the history of +thirteenth-century Italy, defied approach. Above all, its profound, +austere, mystical spirituality was abhorrent to the clear, shallow +rationalism of the eighteenth century, as well as to the religious +liberalism of the seventeenth and the joyous sensuality of the sixteenth. +Goethe the pagan disliked Dante, no less than Scott the Protestant.[5] +In particular, deistic France, _arbiter elegantiarum_, felt with a shiver +of repulsion, + + "How grim the master was of Tuscan song." + +"I estimate highly," wrote Voltaire to an Italian correspondent, "the +courage with which you have dared to say that Dante was a madman[6] and +his work a monster. . . . There are found among us and in the eighteenth +century, people who strive to admire imaginations so stupid and +barbarous." A French translation of the "Divine Comedy" had been printed +by the Abbé Grangier[7] at Paris in 1596; but Rivarol, whose "Inferno" +was published in 1783, was the first Frenchman, says Lowell, to divine +Dante's greatness. The earliest German version was Bachenschwanz's prose +translation of the "Commedia" (Leipsic, 1767-69),[8] but the German +romantic school were the first to furnish a sympathetic interpretation of +Dante to their countrymen. + +Chaucer was well acquainted with the work of "the grete poet of +Florence," and drew upon him occasionally, though by no means so freely +as upon Boccaccio. Thus in "The Monkes Tale" he re-tells, in a very +inferior fashion, the tragedy of Ugolino. In "The Parliament of Foules" +and "The Hous of Fame" there are distinct imitations of Dante. A passage +from the "Purgatory" is quoted in the "Wif of Bathes Tale," etc. Spenser +probably, and Milton certainly, knew their Dante. Milton's sonnet to +Henry Lawes mentions Dante's encounter with the musician Casella "in the +milder shades of Purgatory." Here and there a reference to the "Divine +Comedy" occurs in some seventeenth-century English prose writer like Sir +Thomas Browne or Jeremy Taylor. It is thought that the description of +Hell in Sackville's "Mirror for Magistrates" shows an acquaintance with +the "Inferno." But Dante had few readers in England before the +nineteenth century. He was practically unknown there and in all of +Europe outside of Italy. "His reputation," said Voltaire, "will go on +increasing because scarce anybody reads him." And half a century later +Napoleon said the same thing in the same words: "His fame is increasing +and will continue to increase because no one ever reads him." + +In the third volume of his "History of English Poetry" (1781), Thomas +Warton had spoken of the "Divine Comedy" as "this wonderful compound of +classical and romantic fancy, of pagan and Christian theology, of real +and fictitious history, of tragical and comic incidents, of familiar and +heroic manners, and of satirical and sublime poetry. But the grossest +improprieties of this poem discover an originality of invention, and its +absurdities often border on sublimity. We are surprised that a poet +should write one hundred cantos on hell, paradise, and purgatory. But +this prolixity is partly owing to the want of art and method, and is +common to all early compositions, in which everything is related +circumstantially and without rejection, and not in those general terms +which are used by modern writers." Warton is shocked at Dante's +"disgusting fooleries" and censures his departure from Virgilian grace. +Milton "avoided the childish or ludicrous excesses of these bold +inventions . . . but rude and early poets describe everything." But +Warton felt Dante's greatness. "Hell," he wrote, "grows darker at his +frown." He singled out for special mention the Francesca and Ugolino +episodes. + +If Warton could write thus it is not surprising to discover among +classical critics either a total silence as to Dante, or else a +systematic depreciation. Addison does not mention him in his Italian +travels; and in his "Saturday papers" misses the very obvious chance for +a comparison between Dante and Milton such as Macaulay afterwards +elaborated in his essay on Milton. Goldsmith, who knew nothing of Dante +at first hand, wrote of him with the usual patronising ignorance of +eighteenth-century criticism as to anything outside of the Greek and +Latin classics: "He addressed a barbarous people in a method suited to +their apprehension, united purgatory and the river Styx, St. Paul and +Virgil, heaven and hell together; and shows a strange mixture of good +sense and absurdity. The truth is, he owes most of his reputation to the +obscurity of the times in which he lived." [1] + +In 1782, William Hayley, the biographer of Cowper and author of that very +mild poem "The Triumphs of Temper," published a verse "Essay on Epic +Poetry" in five epistles. In his notes to the third epistle, he gave an +outline of Dante's life with a translation of his sonnet to Guido +Cavalcanti and of the first three cantos of the "Inferno." "Voltaire," +he says, has spoken of Dante "with that precipitate vivacity which so +frequently led the lively Frenchman to insult the reputation of the +noblest writers." He refers to the "judicious and spirited summary" of +the "Divine Comedy" in Warton, and adds, "We have several versions of the +celebrated story of Ugolino; but I believe no entire canto of Dante has +hitherto appeared in our language. . . . The author has been solicited +to execute an entire translation of Dante, but the extreme inequality of +this poet would render such a work a very laborious undertaking; and it +appears very doubtful how far such a version would interest our country. +Perhaps the reception of these cantos may discover to the translator the +sentiments of the public." Hayley adopted "triple rhyme," _i.e._, the +_terza rima_, and said that he did not recollect it had ever been used +before in English. His translation is by no means contemptible--much +better than Boyd's,--but fails entirely to catch Dante's manner or to +keep the strange precision and picturesqueness of his phrase. Thus he +renders + + "Chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco," + + "Whose voice was like the whisper of a lute"; + +and the poet is made to address Beatrice--O donna di virtu--as "bright +fair," as if she were one of the belles in "The Rape of the Lock." In +this same year a version of the "Inferno" was printed privately and +anonymously by Charles Rogers, a book and art collector and a friend of +Sir Joshua Reynolds. But the first complete translation of the "Comedy" +into English was made by Henry Boyd, a clergyman of the Irish Church; the +"Inferno" in 1785 (with a specimen from Ariosto); the whole in 1802. +Boyd was a quite obscure person, author among other things of a +Spenserian poem entitled "The Woodman's Tale," and his translation +attracted little notice. In his introduction he compares Dante with +Homer, and complains that "the venerable old bard . . . has been long +neglected"; perhaps, he suggests, because his poem could not be tried by +Aristotle's rules or submitted to the usual classical tests. + +"Since the French, the restorers of the art of criticism, cast a damp +upon original invention, the character of Dante has been thrown under a +deeper shade. That agreeable and volatile nation found in themselves an +insuperable aversion to the gloomy and romantic bard, whose genius, +ardent, melancholy, and sublime, was so different from their own." + +Boyd used a six-lined stanza, a singularly ill chosen medium for +rendering the _terza rima_; and his diction was as wordy and vague as +Dante's is concise and sharp of edge. A single passage will illustrate +his manner: + + "So full the symphony of grief arose, + My heart, responsive to the lovers' woes, + With thrilling sympathy convulsed my breast. + Too strong at last for life my passion grew, + And, sickening at the lamentable view, + I fell like one by mortal pangs oppressed." [10] + +The first opportunity which the mere English reader had to form any real +notion of Dante, was afforded by Henry Francis Cary's translation in +blank verse (the "Inferno," with the Italian text in 1805; the entire +"Commedia" in 1814, with the title "The Vision of Hell, Purgatory, and +Paradise"). This was a work of talent, if not of genius; and in spite of +the numerous versions in prose and verse that have since appeared, it +continues the most current and standard Dante in England, if not in +America, where Longfellow naturally challenges precedence. The public +was as yet so unprepared to appreciate Dante that Cary's work received +little attention until brought into notice by Coleridge; and the +translator was deeply chagrined by the indifference, not to say +hostility, with which his labours were acknowledged. In the memoir[11] +of Cary by his son there is a letter from Anne Seward--the Swan of +Lichfield--which throws a singular light upon the critical taste of the +"snug coterie and literary lady" of the period. She writes: "How can you +profess to be charmed with the few faint outlines of landscape painting +in Dante, who are blind to the beautiful, distinct, and profuse scenery +in the pages of Ossian?" She goes on to complain that the poem, in its +English dress, is vulgar and obscure. + +Coleridge devoted to Dante a part of his series of lectures given at +London in 1818, reading copious selections from Cary's version. The +translator had claimed, in his introduction, that the Florentine poet +"leaves to Homer and Shakespeare alone the power of challenging the +preeminence or equality." Coleridge emphasized the "endless, subtle +beauties of Dante"; the vividness, logical connection, strength, and +energy of his style. In this he pronounced him superior to Milton; and +in picturesqueness he affirmed that he surpassed all other poets ancient +or modern. With characteristic penetration he indicated the precise +position of Dante in mediaeval literature; his poetry is "the link +between religion and philosophy"; it is "christianized, but without the +further Gothic accession of proper chivalry"; it has that "inwardness +which . . . distinguishes all the classic from all the modern poetry." +It was perhaps in consequence of Coleridge's praise that Cary's +translation went into its second edition in 1819, the year following this +lecture course. A third was published in 1831. Italians used to +complain that the foreign reader's knowledge of the "Divine Comedy" was +limited to the "Inferno," and generally to the Ugolino and Francesca +passages. Coleridge's quotations are all from the "Inferno," and Lowell +thinks that he had not read beyond it. He testified that the Ugolino and +Francesca stories were already "so well known and admired that it would +be pedantry to analyse them." Sir Joshua Reynolds had made a painting of +the former subject. In 1800 William Blake produced a series of seven +engravings in illustration of the "Inferno." In 1817 Flaxman began his +illustrations of the whole "Commedia," extending to a hundred plates.[12] + +In 1819-20 Byron was living at Ravenna, the place of Dante's death and +burial[13] and of the last years of his exile. He used to ride for hours +together through Ravenna's "immemorial wood," [14] and the associations +of the scene prompted him to put into English (March, 1820) the Francesca +episode, that "thing woven as out of rainbows on a ground of eternal +black." In the letter to Murray, sent with his translation, he wrote: +"Enclosed you will find, line for line, in third rhyme (_terza rima_), of +which your British blackguard reader as yet understands nothing, Fanny of +Rimini. You know that she was born here, and married and slain, from +Cary, Boyd, and such people." In his diary, Byron commented scornfully +on Frederick Schlegel's assertions that Dante had never been a favourite +with his own countrymen; and that his main defect was a want of gentle +feelings. "_Not_ a favourite! Why they talk Dante--write Dante--and +think and dream Dante at this moment (1821) to an excess which would be +ridiculous, but that he deserves it. . . . Of gentle feelings!--and +Francesca of Rimini--and the father's feelings in Ugolino--and +Beatrice--and 'La Pia'! Why there is a gentleness in Dante beyond all +gentleness." Byron had not the patience to be a good translator. His +rendering is closer and, of course, more spirited than Hayley's; but +where long search for the right word was needed, and a delicate shading +of phrase to reproduce without loss the meaning of this most meaning and +least translatable of masters, Byron's work shows haste and imperfection. + + "Love, who to none beloved to love again + Remits." + +is neither an idiomatic nor in any way an adequate englishing of + + "Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona." + +Nor does + + "_Accursed_ was the book and he who wrote," + +fully give the force of the famous + + "Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse." [15] + +The year before Byron had composed "The Prophecy of Dante," an original +poem in four cantos, in _terza rima_, + + ". . . imitative rhyme, + Harsh Runic copy of the Soutb's sublime." [16] + +The poem foretells "the fortunes of Italy in the ensuing centuries," and +is a rheotorical piece, diffuse and declamatory, and therein quite the +opposite of Dante. It manifests Byron's self-conscious habit of +submitting his theme to himself, instead of losing himself in his theme. +_He_ is Dante in exile, and Gemma Donati is Lady Byron-- + + "That fatal she, + Their mother, the cold partner who hath brought + Destruction for a dowry--this to see + And feel and know without repair, hath taught + A bitter lesson; but it leaves me free: + I have not vilely found nor basely sought, + They made an exile not a slave of me." + +Dante's bitter and proud defiance found a response in Byron's nature, but +his spirit, as a whole, the English poet was not well fitted to +interpret. In the preface to "The Prophecy," Byron said that he had not +seen the _terza rima_ tried before in English, except by Hayley, whose +translation he knew only from an extract in the notes to Beckford's +"Vathek." + +Shelley's knowledge and appreciation of Dante might be proved from +isolated images and expressions in many parts of his writings. He +translated the sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti with greater freedom and +elegance than Hayley, and wrote a short copy of verses on the Hunger +Tower at Pisa, the scene of Ugolino's sufferings. In the preface to +"Epipsychidion" he cites the "Vita Nuova" as the utterance of an +idealised and spiritualised love like that which his own poem records. +In the "Defence of Poetry" he pays a glowing tribute to Dante as the +second of epic poets and "the first awakener of entranced Europe." His +poetry is the bridge "which unites the modern and the ancient world." +Contrary to the prevailing critical tradition, Shelley preferred the +"Purgatory" and the "Paradise" to the "Hell." Shelley also employed +_terza rima_ in his fragmentary pieces, "Prince Athanase," "The Triumph +of Life," "The Woodman and the Nightingale," and in one of his best +lyrics, the "Ode to the West Wind," [17] written in 1819 "in a wood that +skirts the Arno, near Florence." This linked measure, so difficult for +the translator and which gives a hampered movement to Byron's and +Hayley's specimens of the "Inferno," Shelley may be said to have really +domesticated in English verse by his splendid handling of it in original +work: + + "Make me thy lyre even as the forest is: + What if my leaves are falling, like its own? + The tumult of thy mighty harmonies + Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, + Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce, + My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!" + +Shelley expressed to Medwin his dissatisfaction with all English +renderings from Dante--even with Cary--and announced his intention, or +desire, to translate the whole of the "Divine Comedy" in _terza rima_. +Two specimens of this projected version he gave in "Ugolino," and +"Matilda Gathering Flowers" ("Purg.," xxviii., 1-51). He also made a +translation of the first canzone of the "Convito." + +After the appearance of Cary's version, critical comprehension of Dante +grew rapidly. In the same year when Coleridge gave his lectures, Hallam +published his "Middle Ages," which contained a just though somewhat +coldly worded estimate of the great Italian. This was amplified in his +later work, "The Literature of Europe" (1838-39). Hallam said that Dante +was the first name in the literature of the Middle Ages, the creator of +his nation's poetry, and the most original of all writers, and the most +concise. But he blamed him for obscurity, forced and unnatural turns of +expression, and barbarous licenses of idiom. The "Paradise" seemed to +him tedious, as a whole, and much of the "Purgatory" heavy. Hallam +repeated, if he did not originate that nice bit of discernment, that in +his "Paradise" Dante uses only three leading ideas--light, music, and +motion. Then came Macaulay's essay "Milton," in the _Edinburgh_ for +1825, with the celebrated parallel between the "Divine Comedy" and the +"Paradise Lost," and the contrast between Dante's "picturesque" and +Milton's "imaginative" method. Macaulay's analysis has been questioned +by Ruskin and others; some of his positions were perhaps mistaken, but +they were the most advanced that English Dante criticism had as yet taken +up. And finally came Carlyle's vivid piece of portrait painting in "Hero +Worship" (1841). The first literal prose translation of any extent from +the "Commedia" was the "Inferno" by Carlyle's brother John (1849). + +Since the middle of the century Dante study and Dante literature in +English-speaking lands have waxed enormously. Dante societies have been +founded in England and America. Almost every year sees another edition, +a new commentary or a fresh translation in prose, in blank verse, in +_terza rima_, or in some form of stanza. It is not exaggerating to say +that there is more public mention of Dante now in a single year than in +all the years of the eighteenth century together. It would be +interesting, if it were possible, to count the times that Dante's name +occurs in English writings of the eighteenth and then of the nineteenth +century; afterwards to do the same with Ariosto and Tasso and compare the +results. It would be found that, while the eighteenth century set no +very high value on Ariosto and Tasso, it ignored Dante altogether; and +that the nineteenth has put aside the superficial mediaevalism of the +Renaissance romancers and gone back to the great religious romancer of +the Italian Middle Age. There is no surer plummet than Dante's to sound +the spiritual depth of a time. It is in the nineteenth century first +that Shakspere and Dante took possession of the European mind. In 1800 +Shakspere was an English, or at most an English and German poet, and +Dante exclusively an Italian. In 1900 they had both become world poets. +Shakspere's foreign conquests were the earlier and are still the wider, +as wide perhaps as the expanse-- + + "That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne." + +But the ground that Dante has won he holds with equal secureness. Not +that he will ever be popular, in Shakspere's way; and yet it is far gone +when the aesthete in a comic opera is described as a "Francesca da Rimini +young man." + +As a stimulus to creative work the influence of Dante, though not +entirely absent, is not conspicuous in the first half of the century. It +is not until the time of the Rossettis in England and of Longfellow and +Dr. Parsons in America that any poetry of a really Dantesque inspiration +and, at the same time, of high original value was added to our +literature.[18] + +The first fruits of the Dante revival in England, in the shape of +original production, was Leigh Hunt's "Story of Rimini" (1816)--"Mr. +Hunt's smutty story of Rimini," as the Tory wits of _Blackwood_ were fond +of calling it in their onslaughts upon the Cockney school. This was a +romaunt in four cantos upon the already familiar episode of Francesca, +that "lily in the mouth of Tartarus." Hunt took Dryden's "Fables" as his +model in versification, employing the heroic couplet with the frequent +variation of the triplet and the alexandrine. The poem is not at all +Dantesque in its lax and fluent sweetness, and in that colloquial, +familiar manner which is constant in all Hunt's writing, both prose and +verse; reminding one, at its best, of Chaucer, who was, indeed, one of +his favourite masters. Hunt softens the ferocity of the tale as given by +Boccaccio, according to whom the husband Giovanni Malatesta was a +cripple, and killed the lovers _in flagrante delicto_. Hunt makes him a +personable man, though of proud and gloomy temper. He slays his brother +Paolo in chivalrous fashion and in single combat, and Francesca dies of a +broken heart. The descriptive portions of the "Story of Rimini" are +charming: the feudal procession with trumpeters, heralds, squires, and +knights, sent to escort home the bride, the pine forest outside Ravenna, +and the garden at Rimini in which the lovers used to meet-- + + "Places of nestling green for poets made." + +Hunt had a quick eye for colour; a fondness, not altogether free from +affectation, for dainty phrases; and a feminine love of little niceties +in dress, tapestry, needlework, and furnishings. The poem was written +mostly in prison where its author spent two years for a libel on the +Prince Regent. Byron used to visit him there and bring him books bearing +on Francesca's history. Hunt brought into the piece romantic stuff from +various sources, including a summary of the book which betrayed the +lovers to their fatal passion, the romance of "Lancelot du Lac." And +Giovanni speaks to his dying brother a paraphrase of the celebrated +eulogy pronounced over Lancelot by Sir Ector in the "Morte Darthur": + + "And, Paulo, thou wert the completest knight + That ever rode with banner to the fight; + And thou wert the most beautiful to see, + That ever came in press of chivalry: + And of a sinful man thou wert the best + That ever for his friend put spear in rest; + And thou wert the most meek and cordial + That ever among ladies eat in hall; + And thou wert still, for all that bosom gored, + The kindest man that ever struck with sword." + +Hunt makes the husband discover his wife's infidelity by overhearing her +talking in her sleep. In many other particulars he enfeebles, dandifies, +and sentimentalises Dante's fierce, abrupt tragedy; holding the reader by +the button while he prattles in his garrulous way of Paulo's "taste"-- + + "The very nose, lightly yet firmly wrought, + Showed taste"-- + +and of + + "The two divinest things in earthly lot, + A lovely woman in a rural spot!" + +a couplet which irresistibly suggests suburban picnics. + +Yet no one in his generation did more than Leigh Hunt to familiarise the +English public with Italian romance. He began the study of Italian when +he was a schoolboy at Christ Hospital, being attracted to Ariosto by a +picture of Angelica and Medoro, in West's studio. Like his friend Keats, +on whose "Eve of St. Agnes" he wrote an enthusiastic commentary,[19] Hunt +was eclectic in his choice of material, drawing inspiration impartially +from the classics and the romantics; but, like Keats, he became early a +declared rebel against eighteenth-century traditions and asserted impulse +against rule. "In antiquarian corners," he says, in writing of the +influences of his childish days, "Percy's 'Reliques' were preparing a +nobler age both in poetry and prose." At school he fell passionately in +love with Collins and Gray, composed a "Winter" in imitation of Thomson, +one hundred stanzas of a "Fairy King" in emulation of Spenser, and a long +poem in Latin inspired by Gray's odes and Malet's "Northern Antiquities." +In 1802 [aetate 18] he published a volume of these _juvenilia_--odes +after Collins and Gray, blank verse after Thomson and Akenside, and a +"Palace of Pleasure" after Spenser's "Bower of Bliss." [20] It was in +this same year that on a visit to Oxford, he was introduced to Kett, the +professor of poetry, who expressed a hope that the youthful bard might be +inspired by "the muse of Warton," whom Hunt had never read. There had +fallen in Hunt's way when he was a young man, Bell's edition of the +poets, which included Chaucer and Spenser. "The omission of these in +Cooke's edition," he says, "was as unpoetical a sign of the times as the +present familiarity with their names is the reverse. It was thought a +mark of good sense; as if good sense, in matters of literature, did not +consist as much in knowing what was poetical poetry, as brilliant wit." +Of his "Feast of the Poets" (1814) he writes:[21] "I offended all the +critics of the old or French school, by objecting to the monotony of +Pope's versification, and all the critics of the new or German school by +laughing at Wordsworth." In the preface to his collected poems [1832] +occurs the following interesting testimony to the recentness of the new +criticism. "So long does fashion succeed in palming its petty instincts +upon the world for those of a nation and of nature, that it is only of +late years that the French have ceased to think some of the most +affecting passages in Shakespeare ridiculous. . . . Yet the English +themselves, no great while since, half blushed at these criticisms, and +were content if the epithet 'bizarre' ('_votre bizarre Shakespeare_') was +allowed to be translated into 'a wild, irregular genius.' Everything was +wild and irregular except rhymesters in toupees. A petty conspiracy of +decorums took the place of what was becoming to humanity." In the summer +of 1822 Hunt went by sailing vessel through the Mediterranean to Italy. +The books which he read chiefly on board ship were "Don Quixote," +Ariosto, and Berni; and his diary records the emotion with which he +coasted the western shores of Spain, the ground of Italian romance, where +the Paynim chivalry used to land to go against Charlemagne: the scene of +Boiardo's "Orlando Inamorato" and Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso." "I +confess I looked at these shores with a human interest, and could not +help feeling that the keel of our vessel was crossing a real line, over +which knights and lovers had passed. And so they have, both real and +fabulous; the former not less romantic, the latter scarcely less +real. . . . Fair speed your sails over the lucid waters, ye lovers, on a +lover-like sea! Fair speed them, yet never land; for where the poet has +left you, there ought ye, as ye are, to be living forever--forever +gliding about a summer sea, touching at its flowery islands and reposing +beneath its moon." + +Hunt's sojourn in Italy, where he lived in close association with Byron +and Shelley, enabled him to _préciser_ his knowledge of the Italian +language and literature. In 1846 he published a volume of "Stories from +the Italian Poets," containing a summary or free paraphrase in prose of +the "Divine Comedy" and the poems of Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, +"with comments throughout, occasional passages versified and critical +notices of the lives and genius of the authors." Like our own +romanticist poet Longfellow, who rediscovered Europe for America, Leigh +Hunt was a sympathetic and interpretative rather than a creative genius; +and like Longfellow, an admirable translator. Among his collected poems +are a number of elegant and spirited versions from various mediaeval +literatures. "The Gentle Armour" is a playful adaptation of a French +fabliau "Les Trois Chevaliers et la Chemise," which tells of a knight +whose hard-hearted lady set him the task of fighting his two rivals in +the lists, armed only in her smock; and, in contrition for this harsh +imposure, went to the altar with her faithful champion, wearing only the +same bloody sark as her bridal garment. At least this is the pretty turn +which Hunt gave to the story. In the original it had a coarser ending. +There are also, among these translations from mediaeval sources, the +Latin drinking song attributed to Walter Map-- + + Mihi est propositum in taberna mori-- + +and Andrea de Basso's terrible "Ode to a Dead Body," in fifteenth-century +Italian; which utters, with extraordinary power, the ascetic thought of +the Middle Age, dwelling with a kind of gloomy exultation on the foulness +of the human frame in decay. + +In the preface to his "Italian Poets," Hunt speaks of "how widely Dante +has re-attracted of late the attention of the world." He pronounces him +"the greatest poet for intensity that ever lived," and complains that his +metrical translators have failed to render his "passionate, practical, +and creative style--a style which may be said to write things instead of +words." Hunt's introduction is a fine piece of critical work. His +alert, sparkling, and nimble intellect--somewhat lacking in concentration +and seriousness--but sensitive above all things to the picturesque, was +keenly awake to Dante's poetic greatness. On the other hand, his +cheerful philosophy and tolerant, not to say easy-going moral nature, was +shocked by the Florentine's bitter pride, and by what he conceives to be +his fanaticism, bigotry, superstition, and personal vindictiveness, when + + "Hell he peoples with his foes, + Dark scourge of many a guilty line." + +Hunt was a Universalist, and Dante was a Catholic Calvinist. There was +a determined optimism about Hunt, and a buoyancy as of a cork or other +light body, sometimes a little exasperating to men of less sanguine +temperament.[22] He ends by protesting that Dante is a semi-barbarian +and his "Divine Comedy" too often an infernal tragedy. "Such a vision as +that of his poem (in a theological point of view) seems no better than +the dream of an hypochondriacal savage." It was some years before this, +in his lecture on "The Hero as Poet," delivered in 1840, that a friend of +Leigh Hunt, of a temperament quite the opposite of his, had spoken a very +different word touching this cruel scorn--this _saeva indignatio_ of +Dante's. Carlyle, like Hunt, discovered _intensity_ to be the prevailing +character of Dante's genius, emblemed by the pinnacle of the city of Dis; +that "red-hot cone of iron glowing through the dim immensity of gloom." +Hunt, the Universalist, said of Dante, "when he is sweet-natured once he +is bitter a hundred times." "Infinite pity," says Carlyle, the +Calvinist, "yet also infinite rigour of law, it is so nature is made; it +is so Dante discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of +his 'Divine Comedy's' being a poor splenetic, impotent terrestrial libel; +putting those into hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth! I +suppose if ever pity tender as a mother's was in the heart of any man, it +was in Dante's. But a man who does not know rigour cannot pity either. +His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic--sentimentality, or little +better. . . . Morally great above all we must call him; it is the +beginning of all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love; +as, indeed, what are they but the _inverse_ or _converse_ of his love?" + +It is interesting to note that, antipathetic as Hunt's nature was, in +many ways, not only to the individual Dante but to the theological +thought of which he was the spokesman, in his view of the sacred art of +the Italian Middle Age he anticipated the Pre-Raphaelites and the modern +interpreters of Dante. Here is a part of what he says of the paintings +in the Campo Santo at Pisa: "The best idea, perhaps, which I can give an +Englishman of the general character of the painting is by referring him +to the engravings of Albert Durer and the serious parts of Chaucer. +There is the same want of proper costume--the same intense feeling of the +human being, both in body and soul--the same bookish, romantic, and +retired character--the same evidences, in short, of antiquity and +commencement, weak (where it is weak) for want of a settled art and +language, but strong for that very reason in first impulses, and in +putting down all that is felt. . . . The manner in which some of the +hoary saints in these pictures pore over their books and carry their +decrepit old age, full of a bent and absorbed feebleness--the set limbs +of the warriors on horseback--the sidelong unequivocal looks of some of +the ladies playing on harps and conscious of their ornaments--the people +of fashion seated in rows, with Time coming up unawares to destroy +them--the other rows of elders and doctors of the Church, forming part of +the array of heaven--the uplifted hand of Christ denouncing the wicked at +the day of judgment--the daring satires occasionally introduced against +monks and nuns--the profusion of attitudes, expressions, incidents, broad +draperies, ornaments of all sorts, visions, mountains, ghastly looking +cities, fiends, angels, sibylline old women, dancers, virgin brides, +mothers and children, princes, patriarchs, dying saints, it would be +simply blind injustice to the superabundance and truth of conception in +all this multitude of imagery not to recognize the real inspirers as well +as harbingers of Raphael and Michael Angelo, instead of confining the +honour to the Masaccios and Peruginos, [who] . . . are no more to be +compared with them than the sonneteers of Henry VIII.'s time are to be +compared with Chaucer. Even in the very rudest of the pictures, where +the souls of the dying are going out of their mouths, in the shape of +little children, there are passages not unworthy of Dante and Michael +Angelo. . . . Giotto, be thou one to me hereafter, of a kindred brevity, +solidity, and stateliness with that of thy friend, Dante!" [23] + +Among all the writers of his generation, Keats was most purely the poet, +the artist of the beautiful. His sensitive imagination thrilled to every +touch of beauty from whatever quarter. That his work is mainly +retrospective and eclectic in subject is because a young poet's mind +responds more readily to books than to life, and this young poet did not +outlive his youth. In the Greek mythology he found a world of lovely +images ready to his hand, in the poetry of Spenser, Chaucer, and Ariosto, +he found another such world. Arcadia and Faeryland--"the realms of +gold"--he rediscovered them both for himself, and he struck into the +paths that wound through their enchanted thickets with the ardour of an +explorer. This was the very mood of the Renaissance--this genial heat +which fuses together the pagan and the Christian systems--this +indifference of the creative imagination to the mere sources and +materials of its creations. Indeed, there is in Keats' style a "natural +magic" which forces us back to Shakspere for comparison, a noticeable +likeness to the diction of the Elizabethans, when the classics were still +a living spring of inspiration, and not a set of copies held _in +terrorem_ over the head of every new poet. + +Keats' break with the classical tradition was early and decisive. In his +first volume (1817) there is a piece entitled "Sleep and Poetry," +composed after a night passed at Leigh Hunt's cottage near Hampstead, +which contains his literary declaration of faith. After speaking of the +beauty that fills the universe, and of the office of Imagination to be +the minister and interpreter of this beauty, as in the old days when +"here her altar shone, even in this isle," and "the muses were nigh +cloyed with honours," he asks: + + "Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism + Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, + Made great Apollo blush for this, his land. + Men were thought wise who could not understand + His glories: with a puling infant's force, + They swayed about upon a rocking horse + And thought it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-souled! + The winds of heaven blew, the ocean rolled + Its gathering waves--ye felt it not. The blue + Bowed its eternal bosom, and the dew + Of summer night collected still, to make + The morning precious. Beauty was awake! + Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead + To things ye knew not of--were closely wed + To musty laws, lined out with wretched rule + And compass vile: so that ye taught a school + Of dolts to smooth, inlay and clip and fit; + Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit, + Their verses tallied. Easy was the task: + A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask + Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race! + That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face, + And did not know it,--no, they went about, + Holding a poor decrepit standard out, + Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and, in large, + The name of one Boileau!" + +This complaint, so far as it relates to the _style_ of the rule-ridden +eighteenth-century poetry, had been made before: by Cowper, by +Wordsworth, by Coleridge. But Keats, with his instinct for beauty, +pierces to the core of the matter. It was because of Pope's defective +sense of the beautiful that the doubt arose whether he was a poet at all. +It was because of its + + ". . . forgetting the great end + Of Poetry, that it should be a friend + To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man," + +that the poetry of the classical school was so unsatisfying. This is one +of the very few passages of Keats that are at all doctrinal[24] or +polemic; and as such it has been repeatedly cited by biographers and +essayists and literary historians. Lowell quotes it, in his essay on +Dryden, and adds; "Keats was the first resolute and wilful heretic, the +true founder of the modern school, which admits no cis-Elizabethan +authority save Milton." Mr. Gosse quotes it and says, "in these lines he +has admirably summed up the conceptions of the first half of the present +century with regard to classical poetry." [25] The passage was still +fresh when Byron, in the letter to Disraeli already quoted[26] (March +15th, 1820), held it up to scorn as the opinion of "a young person +learning to write poetry and beginning by teaching the art. . . . The +writer of this is a tadpole of the Lakes, a young disciple of the six or +seven new schools, in which he has learned to write such lines and such +sentiments as the above. He says 'easy were the task' of imitating Pope, +or it may be of equalling him, I presume. I recommend him to try before +he is so positive on the subject, and then compare what he will have +_then_ written, and what he has now written, with the humblest and +earliest compositions of Pope, produced in years still more youthful than +those of Mr. Keats when he invented his new 'Essay on Criticism,' +entitled 'Sleep and Poetry' (an ominous title) from whence the above +canons are taken." + +In a manuscript note on this passage made after Keats' death, Byron +wrote: "My indignation at Mr. Keats' depreciation of Pope has hardly +permitted me to do justice to his own genius. . . . He is a loss to our +literature, and the more so, as he himself, before his death, is said to +have been persuaded that he had not taken the right line, and was +reforming his style upon the more classical models of the language," +Keats made a study of Dryden's versification before writing "Lamia"; but +had he lived to the age of Methusaleh, he would not have "reformed his +style" upon any such classical models as Lord Byron had in mind. +Classical he might have become, in the sense in which "Hyperion" is +classical; but in the sense in which Pope was classical--never. Pope's +Homer he deliberately set aside for Chapman's-- + + "Yet did I never breathe its pure serene + Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold." [27] + +Keats had read Virgil, but seemingly not much Latin poetry besides, and +he had no knowledge of Greek. He made acquaintance with the Hellenic +world through classical dictionaries and a study of the casts in the +British Museum. But his intuitive grasp of the antique ideal of beauty +stood him in as good stead as Landor's scholarship. In such work as +"Hyperion" and the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" he mediates between the ancient +and the modern spirit, from which Landor's clear-cut marbles stand aloof +in chill remoteness. As concerns his equipment, Keats stands related to +Scott in romance learning much as he does to Landor in classical +scholarship. He was no antiquary, and naturally made mistakes of detail. +In his sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," he makes Cortez, +and not Balboa, the discoverer of the Pacific. _À propos_ of a line in +"The Eve of St. Agnes"-- + + "And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor"-- + +Leigh Hunt called attention to the fact that rushes and not carpets +covered the floors in the Middle Ages. In the same poem, Porphyro sings +to his lute an ancient ditty, + + "In Provençe called 'La Belle Dame sans Merci.'" + +The ditty was by Alain Chartier, who was not a troubadour, but a Norman +by birth and a French court poet of the fifteenth century. The title, +which Keats found in a note in an edition of Chaucer, pleased his fancy +and suggested his ballad,[28] of the same name, which has nothing in +common with Chartier's poem. The latter is a conventional love _estrif_ +in the artificial taste of the time. But errors of this sort, which any +encyclopaedia can correct, are perfectly unimportant. + +Byron's sneer at Keats, as "a tadpole of the Lakes," was ridiculously +wide of the mark. He was nearly of the second generation of romantics; +he was only three years old when "The Ancient Mariner" was published; +"Christabel" and Scott's metrical romances had all been issued before he +put forth his first volume. But though he owes much to Coleridge[29] and +more perhaps to Chatterton, he took no imprint from Wordsworth, and cared +nothing for Scott. Keats, like his friend Hunt, turned instinctively +away from northern to southern Gothic; from rough border minstrelsy to +the mythology and romance of the races that dwelt about the midland sea. +Keats' sensuous nature longed for "a beaker full of the warm South." "I +have tropical blood in my veins," wrote Hunt, deprecating "the criticism +of a Northern climate" as applied to his "Story of Rimini." Keats' death +may be said to have come to him from Scotland, not only by reason of the +brutal attacks in _Blackwood's_--to which there is some reason for +believing that Scott was privy--but because the hardships and exposure of +his Scotch tour laid the foundation of his fatal malady. He brought back +no literary spoils of consequence from the North, and the description of +the journey in his letters makes it evident that his genius could not +find itself there. This uncomfortable feeling of alienation is expressed +in his "Sonnet on Visiting the Tomb of Burns." The Scotch landscape +seems "cold--strange." + + "The short-lived paly Summer is but won + From Winter's ague." + +And in the letter from Dumfries, enclosing the sonnet he writes: "I know +not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem anti-Grecian and +anti-Charlemagnish." _Charlemagnish_ is Keats' word for the true +mediaeval-romantic. It is noteworthy that Keats avoided Scott's +favourite verse forms. "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is not in the minstrel +ballad measure; and when Keats uses the eight-syllabled couplet, he uses +it very differently from Scott, without the alternate riming which +prevails in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" and all the rest of the series. + +A spark from Spenser kindled the flame of poetry in Keats. His friend, +Cowden Clarke, read him the "Epithalamium" one day in 1812 in an arbour +in the old school garden at Enfield, and lent him a copy of "The Faëry +Queene" to take home with him. "He romped through the scenes of the +romance," reports Mr. Clarke, "like a young horse turned into a spring +meadow." There is something almost uncanny--like the visits of a +spirit--about these recurrent appearances of Spenser in English literary +history. It must be confessed that nowadays we do not greatly romp +through "The Faëry Queene." There even runs a story that a certain +professor of literature in an American college, being consulted about +Spenser by one of his scholars, exclaimed impatiently, "Oh, damn +Spenser!" But it is worth while to have him in the literature, if only +as a starter for young poets. Keats' earliest known verses are an +"Imitation of Spenser" in four stanzas. His allusions to him are +frequent, and his fugitive poems include a "Sonnet to Spenser" and a +number of "Spenserian Stanzas." But his only really important experiment +in the measure of "The Faëry Queene" was "The Eve of St. Agnes." It was +with fine propriety that Shelley chose that measure for his elegy on +Keats in "Adonais." Keats made a careful study of Spenser's verse, the + + "Spenserian vowels that elope with ease"-- + +and all the rest of it. His own work in this kind is thought to resemble +most closely the "Psyche" of the Irish poetess, Mary Tighe, published in +1805[30] on the well-known fable of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius. It is +inferred that Keats knew the poem from a mention of the author in one of +his pieces. He also wrote an "Ode to Psyche," which seems, however, to +have been inspired by an engraving in Spenser's "Polymetis." Mrs. Tighe +was one of the latest and best of the professed imitators of Spenser. +There is beauty of a kind in her languidly melodious verse and +over-profuse imagery, but it is not the passionate and quintessential +beauty of Keats. She is quite incapable of such choice and pregnant word +effects as abound in every stanza of "St. Agnes": + + "Unclasps her _warmed_ jewels, one by one": + + "_Buttressed_ from moonlight": + + "The music, _yearning_ like a God in pain": + + "The boisterous, _midnight_, festive clarion." + +Keats' intimate association with Leigh Hunt, whose acquaintance he made +in 1816, was not without influence on his literary development. He +admired the "Story of Rimini," [31] and he adopted in his early verse +epistles and in "Endymion" (1818), that free ante-Popean treatment of the +couplet with _enjambement_, or overflow, double rimes, etc., which Hunt +had practised in the poem itself and advocated in the preface. Many +passages in "Rimini" and in Keats' couplet poems anticipate, in their +easy flow, the relaxed versification of "The Earthly Paradise." This was +the Elizabethan type of heroic couplet, and its extreme instance is seen +in William Chamberlayne's "Pharonnida" (1659). There is no proof of +Keats' alleged indebtedness to Chamberlayne, though he is known to have +been familiar with another specimen of the type, William Browne's +"Britannia's Pastorals." Hunt also confirmed Keats in the love of +Spenser, and introduced him to Ariosto whom he learned to read in the +Italian, five or six stanzas at a time. Dante he read in Cary's +translation, a copy of which was the only book that he took with him on +his Scotch trip. "The fifth canto of Dante," he wrote (March, 1819), +"pleases me more and more; it is that one in which he meets with Paulo +and Francesca." He afterwards dreamed of the story and wrote a sonnet +upon his dream, which Rossetti thought "by far the finest of Keats' +sonnets" next to that on Chapman's "Homer." [32] Mr. J. M. Robertson +thinks that the influence of Gary's "Dante" is visible in "Hyperion," +especially in the recast version "Hyperion: A Vision." [33] And Leigh +Hunt suggests that in the lines in "The Eve of St. Agnes"-- + + "The sculptured dead on each side seem to freeze, + Emprisoned in black, purgatorial rails: + Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries, + He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails + To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails"-- + +the germ of the thought is in Dante.[34] Keats wished that Italian +might take the place of French in English schools. To Hunt's example +was also due, in part, that fondness for neologisms for which the +latter apologises in the preface to "Rimini," and with which Keats was +wont to enrich his diction, as well as with Chattertonian archaisms, +Chapmanese compounds, "taffeta phrases, silken terms precise" from +Elizabethan English, and coinages like _poesied_, _jollying_, +_eye-earnestly_--licenses and affectations which gave dire offence to +Gifford and the classicals generally. + +In the 1820 volume, which includes Keats' maturest work, there was a +story from the "Decameron," "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil," which tells +how a lady exhumes the body of her murdered lover, cuts off the head and +buries it in a pot of sweet basil, which she keeps in her chamber and +waters with her tears. It was perhaps symptomatic of a certain morbid +sensibility in Keats to select this subject from so cheerful a writer as +Boccaccio. This intensity of love surviving in face of leprosy, torment, +decay, and material horrors of all kinds; this passionate clinging of +spirit to body, is a mediaeval note, and is repeated in the neo-romantic +school which derives from Keats; in Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, +O'Shaughnessy, Marzials, and Paine. Think of the unshrinking gaze which +Dante fixes upon the tortures of the souls in pain; of the wasted body of +Christ upon the cross; of the fasts, flagellations, mortifications of +penitents; the unwashed friars, the sufferings of martyrs. Keats +apologises for his endeavour "to make old prose in modern rime more +sweet," and for his departure from the even, unexcited narrative of his +original: + + "O eloquent and famed Boccaccio, + Of thee we now should ask forgiving boon. . . . + For venturing syllables that ill beseem + The quiet glooms of such a piteous theme. . . . + + "Ah! wherefore all this wormy circumstance? + Why linger at the yawning tomb so long? + O for the gentleness of old Romance, + The simple plaining of the minstrel's song." + +But it is just this wormy circumstance that rivets the poet's attention; +his imagination lingers over Isabella kissing the dead face, pointing +each eyelash, and washing away the loam that disfigures it with her +tears; over the basil tufts growing rankly from the mouldering head, + + "The thing was vile with green and livid spot," + +but Keats' tenderness pierces the grave. + +It is instructive to compare "Isabella" with Dryden's "Sigismonda and +Guiscardo," also from the "Decameron" and surcharged with the physically +horrible. In this tale Tancred sends his daughter her lover's heart in a +golden goblet. She kisses the heart, fills the cup with poison, drinks, +and dies. The two poems are typical examples of romantic and classical +handling, though neither is quite a masterpiece in its kind. The +treatment in Dryden is cool, unimpassioned, objective--like Boccaccio's, +in fact. The story is firmly told, with a masculine energy of verse and +language. Sigismonda and Tancred are characters, confronted wills, as in +drama, and their speeches are like _tirades_ from a tragedy of Racine. +But here Dryden's rhetorical habit and his fondness for reasoning in rime +run away with him, and make his art inferior to Boccaccio's. Sigismonda +argues her case like counsel for the defendant. She even enjoys her own +argument and carries it out with a gusto into abstractions. + + "But leaving that: search we the secret springs, + And backward trace the principles of things; + There shall we find, that when the world began + One common mass composed the mould of man," etc. + +Dryden's grossness of taste mars his narrative at several points. The +satirist in him will not let him miss the chance for a sneer at priests +and another at William III.'s standing army. He makes his heroine's love +ignobly sensual. She is a widow, who having "tasted marriage joys," is +unwilling to live single. Dryden's _bourgeois_ manner is capable even of +ludicrous descents. + + "The sudden bound awaked the sleeping sire, + And showed a sight no parent can desire." + +In Keats' poem there are no characters dramatically opposed. Lorenzo and +Isabella have no individuality apart from their love; passion has +absorbed character. The tale is not evolved firmly and continuously, but +with lyrical outbursts, a poignancy of sympathy at the points of highest +tragic tensity and a swooning sensibility all through, that sometimes +breaks into weakness. There can be no question, however, which poem is +the more _felt_; no question, either, as to which method is superior--at +least as between these two artists, and as applied to subjects of this +particular kind. + +"Isabella" is in _ottava rima_, "The Eve of St. Agnes" in the Spenserian +stanza. This exquisite creation has all the insignia of romantic art and +has them in a dangerous degree. It is brilliant with colour, richly +ornate, tremulous with emotion. Only the fine instinct of the artist +saved it from the overladen decoration and cloying sweetness of +"Endymion," and kept it chaste in its warmth. As it is, the story is +almost too slight for its descriptive mantle "rough with gems and gold." +Such as it is, it is of Keats' invention and of the "Romeo and Juliet" +variety of plot. A lover who is at feud with his mistress' clan ventures +into his foemen's castle while a revel is going on, penetrates by the aid +of her nurse to his lady's bower, and carries her off while all the +household are sunk in drunken sleep. All this in a night of wild weather +and on St. Agnes' Eve, when, according to popular belief, maidens might +see their future husbands in their dreams, on the performance of certain +conditions. The resemblance of this poem to "Christabel" at several +points, has already been mentioned,[35] and especially in the description +of the heroine's chamber. But the differences are even more apparent. +Coleridge's art is temperate and suggestive, spiritual, too, with an +unequalled power of haunting the mind with a sense of ghostly presences. +In his scene the touches are light and few; all is hurried, mysterious, +shadowy. But Keats was a word painter, his treatment more sensuous than +Coleridge's, and fuller of imagery. He lingers over the figure of the +maiden disrobing, and over the furnishings of her room. The Catholic +elegancies of his poem, as Hunt called them, and the architectural +details are there for their own sake--as pictures; the sculptured dead in +the chapel, the foot-worn stones, the cobwebbed arches, broad hall +pillar, and dusky galleries; the "little moonlight room, pale, +_latticed_, chill"; the chain-drooped lamp: + + "The carven angels ever eager-eyed" + +that + + "Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests, + With hair blown back and wings put crosswise on their breasts." + +Possibly "La Belle Dame sans Merci" borrows a hint from the love-crazed +knight in Coleridge's "Love," who is haunted by a fiend in the likeness +of an angel; but here the comparison is to Keats' advantage. Not even +Coleridge sang more wildly well than the singer of this weird ballad +strain, which has seemed to many critics[36] the masterpiece of this +poet, wherein his "natural magic" reaches its most fascinating subtlety +and purity of expression. + +The famous picture of the painted "casement, high and triple-arched" in +Madeline's chamber, "a burst of richness, noiseless, coloured, suddenly +enriching the moonlight, as if a door of heaven were opened," [37] should +be compared with Scott's no less famous description of the east oriel of +Melrose Abbey by moonlight, and the comparison will illustrate a +distinction similar to that already noted between the romanticism of +Coleridge and Scott. The latter is here depicting an actual spot, one of +the great old border abbeys; national pride and the pathos of historic +ruins mingle with the description. Madeline's castle stood in the +country of dream; and it was an "elfin storm from fairyland" that came to +aid the lovers' flight,[38] and all the creatures of his tale are but the + + "Shadows haunting fairily + The brain new stuffed in youth with triumphs gay + Of old Romance." + +In Keats is the romantic escape, the longing to + + "leave the world unseen. + And with thee fade away into the forest dim." [39] + +Keats cared no more for history than he did for contemporary politics. +Courthope[40] quotes a passage from "Endymion" to illustrate his +indifference to everything but art; + + "Hence, pageant history! Hence, gilded cheat! . . . + Many old rotten-timbered boats there be + Upon thy vaporous bosom, magnified + To goodly vessels, many a sail of pride, + And golden-keeled, is left unlaunched and dry. + But wherefore this? What care, though owl did fly + About the great Athenian admiral's mast? + What care though striding Alexander past + The Indus with his Macedonian numbers? + . . . Juliet leaning + Amid her window-flowers,--sighing,--weaning + Tenderly her fancy from its maiden snow, + Doth more avail than these: the silver flow + Of Hero's tears, the swoon of Imogen, + Fair Pastorella in the bandit's den, + Are things to brood on with more ardency + Than the death-day of empires." + +This passage should be set beside the complaint in "Lamia" of the +disenchanting touch of science: + + "There was an awful rainbow once in heaven," etc. + +Keats is the poet of romantic emotion, as Scott of romantic action. +Professor Gates says that Keats' heroes never _do_ anything.[41] It +puzzles the reader of "The Eve of St. Agnes" to know just why Porphyro +sets out the feast of cates on the little table by Madeline's bedside +unless it be to give the poet an opportunity for his luscious description +of "the lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon" and other like delicacies. In +the early fragment "Calidore," the hero--who gets his name from +Spenser--does nothing in some hundred and fifty lines but assist two +ladies to dismount from their palfreys. To revert, as before, to +Ariosto's programme, it was not the _arme_ and _audaci imprese_ which +Keats sang, but the _donne_, the _amori_, and the _cortesie_. Feudal war +array was no concern of his, but the "argent revelry" of masque and +dance, and the "silver-snarling trumpets" in the musicians' gallery. He +was the poet of the lute and the nightingale, rather than of the shock of +spear in tourney and crusade. His "Specimen of an Induction to a Poem" +begins + + "Lo! I must tell a tale of chivalry." + +But he never tells it. The piece evaporates in visions of pure +loveliness; "large white plumes"; sweet ladies on the worn tops of old +battlements; light-footed damsels standing in sixes and sevens about the +hall in courtly talk. Meanwhile the lance is resting against the wall. + + "Ah! shall I ever tell its cruelty, + When the fire flashes from a warrior's eye, + And his tremendous hand is grasping it?" + +"No," answers the reader, "I don't think you ever will. Leave that sort +of thing to Walter Scott, and go on and finish your charming fragment of +'The Eve of St. Mark,' which stops provokingly just where Bertha was +reading the illuminated manuscript, as she sat in her room of an April +evening, when + + "'On the western window panes, + The chilly sunset faintly told + Of unmatured green valleys cold.'" [42] + +This quaintly attractive fragment of Keats was written while he was +living in the old cathedral and college city of Winchester. "Some time +since," he writes to his brother George, September, 1819, "I began a poem +called 'The Eve of St. Mark,' quite in the spirit of town quietude. I +think it will give you the sensation of walking about an old country town +in a coolish evening." The letter describes the maiden-lady-like air of +the side streets, with doorsteps fresh from the flannel, the doors +themselves black, with small brass handles and lion's head or ram's head +knockers, seldom disturbed. He speaks of his walks through the cathedral +yard and two college-like squares, grassy and shady, dwelling-places of +deans and prebendaries, out to St. Cross Meadows with their Gothic tower +and Alms Square. Mr. Colvin thinks that Keats "in this piece anticipates +in a remarkable degree the feeling and method of the modern +pre-Raphaelite schools"; and that it is "perfectly in the spirit of +Rossetti (whom we know that the fragment deeply impressed and +interested)." Mr. Forman, indeed, quotes Rossetti's own _dictum_ (works +of John Keats, vol. ii., p. 320) that the poem "shows astonishingly real +mediaevalism for one not bred as an artist." + +It is in the Pre-Raphaelites that Keats' influence on our later poetry is +seen in its most concentrated shape. But it is traceable in Tennyson, in +Hood, in the Brownings, and in many others, where his name is by no means +written in water. "Wordsworth," says Lowell, "has influenced most the +ideas of succeeding poets; Keats their forms." + + +[1] Scott's friend, William Stewart Rose--to whom the first verse epistle +in "Marmion" is addressed. He also translated the "Orlando Furioso" +(1823-31). His "Partenopex" was made from a version in modern French. + +[2] A new translation of the "Orlando," by Hoole, appeared in 1773-83; of +Tasso's "Jerusalem" in 1763; and of Metastasio's dramas in 1767. These +were in the heroic couplets of Pope. + +[3] "Childe Harold," Canto iv., xxxviii. And _Cf._ vol. i., pp. 25, 49, +100, 170, 219, 222-26. + +[4] _Vide supra_, p. 5. + +[5] _Vide supra_, p. 40. Goethe pronounced the "Inferno" abominable, the +"Purgatorio" doubtful, and the "Paradise" tiresome (Plumptre's "Dante," +London, 1887, vol. ii., p. 484). + +[6] See Walpole's opinion, vol. i., p. 235. + +[7] For early manuscript renderings see "Les Plus Anciennes Traductions +Françaises de la Divine Comédie," par C. Morel, Paris, 1897. + +[8] Lowell says Kannegiesser's, 1809. + +[9] "Present State of Polite Learning" (1759). + +[10] "Mentre che l'uno spirto questo disse, + L'altro piangeva sì, che di pietade + I venni men, così com' io morisse: + E cadde come corpo morte cade." + --"Inferno," Canto v. + +[11] Vol. i., p. 236. + +[12] Plumptre's "Dante," vol. ii., p. 439. + +[13] "Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar, + Like Scipio, buried, by the upbraiding shore." + --"Childe Harold," iv., 57. + +[14] See vol. i., p. 49; and "Purgatorio," xxviii., 19-20. + + "Tal, qual di ramo in ramo si raccoglie + Per la pineta in sal lito di Chiassi." + +[15] He did better in free paraphrase than in literal translation. _Cf._ +Stanza cviii., in "Don Juan," Canto iii.-- + + "Soft hour! which wakes the wish and melts the heart"-- + +with its original in the "Purgatorio," viii., 1-6. + +[16] Dedication to La Guiccioli. + +[17] But in this poem each thirteenth and fourteenth line make a couplet, +thus breaking up the whole into a series of loose sonnets. + +[18] T. W. Parsons' "Lines on a Bust of Dante" appeared in the Boston +_Advertiser_ in 1841. His translation of the first ten cantos of the +"Inferno" was published in 1843: later instalments in 1867 and 1893. +Longfellow's version of the "Divine Comedy" with the series of sonnets by +the translator came out in 1867-70. For the Dante work of the Rossettis, +_vide infra_, pp. 282 ff. + +[19] "The Seer." + +[20] He named a daughter, born while he was in prison, after Spenser's +Florimel. + +[21] "Autobiography," p. 200 (ed. of 1870). + +[22] See Dickens' caricature of him as Harold Skimpole in "Bleak House." + +[23] "When I was last at Haydon's," wrote Keats to his brother George in +1818-19, "I looked over a book of prints taken from the fresco of the +church at Milan, the name of which I forget. In it were comprised +specimens of the first and second age of art in Italy. I do not think I +ever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare; full of romance and the most +tender feeling; magnificence of drapery beyond everything I ever saw, not +excepting Raphael's--but grotesque to a curious pitch--yet still making +up a fine whole, even finer to me than more accomplished works, as there +was left so much room for imagination." + +[24] Against the hundreds of maxims from Pope, Keats furnishes a single +motto--the first line of "Endymion"-- + + "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." + +[25] "From Shakespeare to Pope." See also Sidney Colvin's "Keats." New +York, 1887, pp. 61-64. + +[26] _Vide supra_, p. 70. + +[27] That he knew Pope's version is evident from a letter to Haydon of +May, 1817, given in Lord Houghton's "Life." + +[28] He could have known extremely little of mediaeval literature; yet +there is nothing anywhere, even in the far more instructed Pre-Raphaelite +school which catches up the whole of the true mediaeval romantic +spirit--the spirit which animates the best parts of the Arthurian legend, +and of the wild stories which float through mediaeval tale-telling, and +make no small figure in mediaeval theology--as does the short piece of +'La Belle Dame sans Merci'. (Saintsbury: "A Short History of English +Literature," p. 673). + +[29] _Vide supra_, p. 85. And for Keats' interest in Chatterton see vol. +i., pp. 370-72. + +[30] The Dict. Nat. Biog. mentions doubtfully an earlier edition in 1795. + +[31] See "Sonnet on Leigh Hunt's Poem 'The Story of Rimini.'" Forman's +ed., vol. ii., p. 229. + +[32] See Forman's ed., vol. ii., p. 334. + +[33] "New Essays toward a Critical Method," London, 1897, p. 256. + +[34] "Come, per sostentar solaio o tetto, + Per mensola talvolta una figura + Si vede giunger le ginocchia al petto, + La qual fa del non ver vera rancura + Nascere in chi la vede." + --"Purgatorio," Canto x., 130-34. + +[35] _Vide supra_, p. 85. + +[36] Rossetti, Colvin, Gates, Robertson, Forman, and others. + +[37] Leigh Hunt. It has been objected to this passage that moonlight is +not strong enough to transmit _colored_ rays, like sunshine (see Colvin's +"Keats," p. 160). But the mistake--if it is one--is shared by Scott. + + "The moonbeam kissed the holy pane + And threw on the pavement a bloody stain." + --"Lay of the Last Minstrel," Canto ii., xi. + +[38] It is interesting to learn that the line + + "For o'er the Southern moors + I have a home for thee" + +read in the original draught "Over the bleak Dartmoor," etc. Dartmoor +was in sight of Teignmouth where Keats once spent two months; but he +cancelled the local allusion in obedience to a correct instinct. + +[39] "Ode to a Nightingale," + +[40] "The Liberal Movement in English Literature," London, 1885, p. 181. + +[41] "Studies and Appreciations." Lewis G. Gates. New York, 1890, p. 17. + +[42] See vol. i., p. 371, and for Cumberland's poem, on the same +superstition, _ibid._, 177. + + + + +CHAPTER IV. + +The Romantic School in Germany.[1] + +Cross-fertilization, at least in these modern eras, is as necessary in +the life of a literature as in that of an animal or a plant. English +romanticism, though it started independently, did not remain an isolated +phenomenon; it was related to the general literary movement in Europe. +Even Italy had its romantic movement; Manzoni began, like Walter Scott, +by translating Bürger's "Lenore" and "Wild Huntsman", and afterwards, +like Schlegel in Germany and Hugo in France, attacked the classical +entrenchments in his "Discourse of the Three Unities." It is no part of +our undertaking to write the history of the romantic schools in Germany +and France. But in each of those countries the movement had points of +likeness and unlikeness which shed light upon our own; and an outline +sketch of the German and French schools will help the reader better to +understand both what English romanticism was, and what it was not. + +In Germany, as in England, during the eighteenth century, the history of +romanticism is a history of arrested development. Romanticism existed in +solution, but was not precipitated and crystallised until the closing +years of the period. The current set flowing by Bürger's ballads and +Goethe's "Götz," was met and checked by a counter-current, the new +enthusiasm for the antique promoted by Winckelmann's[2] works on classic +art, by the neo-paganism of Goethe's later writings, and by the influence +of Lessing's[3] clear, rationalising, and thoroughly Protestant spirit.[4] + +We may note, at the outset, the main features in which the German +romanticism differed from the English. First, then, it was more +definitely a _movement_. It was organised, self-conscious, and critical. +Indeed, it was in criticism and not in creative literature that its +highest successes were won. Coleridge, Scott, and Keats, like their +English forerunners in the eighteenth century,[5] worked independently of +one another. They did not conspire to a common end; had little personal +contact--were hardly acquaintances, and in no sense a "school." But the +German romanticists constituted a compact group with coherent aims. They +were intimate friends and associates; travelled, lived, and worked +together; edited each other's books and married each other's sisters.[6] +They had a theory of art, a programme, and a propaganda, were aggressive +and polemical, attacking their adversaries in reviews, and in satirical +tales,[7] poems, and plays. Their headquarters were at Jena, "the +central point," says Heine, "from which the new aesthetic dogma radiated. +I advisedly say dogma, for this school began with a criticism of the art +productions of the past, and with recipes for the art works of the +future." Their organ was the _Athenaeum_, established by Friedrich +Schlegel at Berlin in 1798, the date of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's +"Lyrical Ballads," and the climacteric year of English and German +romanticism. + +The first number of the _Athenaeum_ contained the manifesto of the new +school, written by Friedrich Schlegel, the seminal mind of the coterie. +The terms of this pronunciamento are somewhat rapt and transcendental; +but through its mist of verbiage, one discerns that the ideal of romantic +art is announced to be: beauty for beauty's sake, the union of poetry and +life, and the absolute freedom of the artist to express himself. +"Romantic poetry," says Schlegel--"and, in a certain sense, all poetry +ought to be romantic--should, in representing outward objects, also +represent itself." There is nothing here to indicate the precise line +which German romantic poetry was to take, but there is the same rejection +of authority, the same assertion of the right of original genius to break +a path for itself, which was made, in their various ways, by Wordsworth +and Coleridge in the "Lyrical Ballads," by Keats in "Sleep and Poetry," +and by Victor Hugo in the preface to "Cromwell." + +A second respect in which German romanticism differed from English was in +its thoroughgoing character. It is the disposition of the German mind to +synthesise thought and life, to carry out theory into practice. Each of +those imposing systems of philosophy, Kant's, Fichte's, Schelling's, +Hegel's, has its own _aesthetik_ as well as its own _ethik_. It seeks to +interpret all human activities from a central principle; to apply its +highest abstractions to literature, government, religion, the fine arts, +and society. The English mind is practical rather than theoretical. It +is sensible, cautious, and willing to compromise; distrusting alike the +logical habit of the French to push out premises into conclusions at all +hazards; and the German habit of system-building. The Englishman has no +system, he has his whim, and is careless of consistency. It is quite +possible for him to have an aesthetic liking for the Middle Ages, without +wishing to restore them as an actual state of society. It is hard for an +Englishman to understand to what degree a literary man, like Schiller, +was influenced in his writings by the critical philosophy of Kant; or how +Schelling's transcendental idealism was used to support Catholicism, and +Hegel made a prop to Protestant orthodoxy and Junkerism. "Tragedies and +romances," wrote Mme. de Staël, "have more importance in Germany than in +any other country. They take them seriously there; and to read such and +such a book, or see such and such a play, has an influence on the destiny +and the life. What they admire as art, they wish to introduce into real +life; and poetry, philosophy, the ideal, in short, have often an even +greater empire over the Germans than nature and the passions." In proof +of this, she adduces the number of young Germans who committed suicide in +consequence of reading "Werther"; or took to highway robbery in emulation +of "Die Räuber." + +In England, accordingly, romanticism was a merely literary revolution and +kept strictly within the domain of art. Scott's political conservatism +was indeed, as we have seen, not unrelated to his antiquarianism and his +fondness for the feudal past; but he remained a Protestant Tory. And as +to his Jacobitism, if a Stuart pretender had appeared in Scotland in +1815, we may be sure that the canny Scott would not have taken arms in +his behalf against the Hanoverian king. Coleridge's reactionary politics +had nothing to do with his romanticism; though it would perhaps be going +too far to deny that his reverence for what was old and tested by time in +the English church and constitution may have had its root in the same +temper of mind which led him to compose archaic ballad-romances like +"Christabel" and "The Dark Ladye." But in Germany "throne and altar" +became the shibboleth of the school; half of the romanticists joined the +Catholic Church, and the new literature rallied to the side of +aristocracy and privilege. + +A third respect in which the German movement differed from the English is +partly implied in what has been said above. In Germany the romantic +revival was contemporaneous with a great philosophical development which +influenced profoundly even the lighter literature of the time. Hence the +mysticism which is found in the work of many of the romanticists, and +particularly in the writings of Novalis. Novalis was a disciple of +Schelling, and Schelling the continuator of Fichte. Fichte's +"Wissenschaftslehre" (1794) is the philosophical corner-stone of the +German romantic school. The freedom of the fancy from the thraldom of +the actual world; the right of the Ego to assert itself fully; the +principle formulated by Friedrich Schlegel, that "the caprice of the poet +knows no law"; all these literary doctrines were corollaries of Fichte's +objective idealism.[8] It is needless to say that, while romantic art +usually partakes of the mysterious, there is nothing of this +philosophical or transcendental mysticism in the English romanticists. +If we were to expect it anywhere it would be in Coleridge, who became the +mediator between German and English thought. But Coleridge's poetry was +mainly written before he visited Germany and made acquaintance with the +systems of Kant and Schelling; and in proportion as his speculative +activity increased, his creative force declined. There is enough of the +marvellous and the unexplained in "Christabel," and "The Ancient +Mariner"; but the "mystic ruby" and the "blue flower" of the Teutonic +symbolists are not there. + +The German romantic school, in the limited and precise sense of the term, +consisted of the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig +Tieck, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Johann Dietrich Gries, Tieck's +friend Wackenroder, and--at a distance--Zacharias Werner, the dramatist; +besides a few others, their associates or disciples, whose names need not +here be mentioned. These were, as has been said, personal friends, they +began to be heard of about 1795; and their quarters were at Jena and +Berlin. A later or younger group (_Spätromantiker_) gathered in 1808 +about the _Zeitung für Einsiedler_, published at Heidelberg. These were +Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, Ludwig Uhland, Joseph Görres, and the +brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Arnim, Brentano, and Görres were +residing at the time at Heidelberg; the others contributed from a +distance. Arnim edited the _Einsiedler_; Görres was teaching in the +university. There were, of course, many other adherents of the school, +working individually at different times and places, scattered indeed all +over Germany, and of various degrees of importance or unimportance, of +whom I need mention only Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, the popular +novelist and author of "Undine." + +The history of German romanticism has been repeatedly told. There are +exhaustive treatments of the subject by Julian Schmidt, Koberstein, +Hettner ("Die Romantische Schule," Braunschweig, 1850); Haym ("Die +Romantische Schule," Berlin, 1870); by the Danish critic, Georg Brandes +("Den Romantiske Skole i Tydskland"). But the most famous review of this +passage of literary history is the poet Heine's brilliant little book, +"Die Romantische Schule," [9] published at Paris in 1833. This was +written as a kind of supplement to Mme. de Staël's "L'Allemagne" (1813), +and was intended to instruct the French public as to some +misunderstandings in Mme. de Staël's book, and to explain what German +romanticism really was. Professor Boyesen cautions us to be on our guard +against the injustice and untrustworthiness of Heine's report. The +warning is perhaps not needed, for the animus of his book is sufficiently +obvious. Heine had begun as a romantic poet, but he had parted company +with the romanticists because of the reactionary direction which the +movement took. He had felt the spell, and he renders it with wonderful +vividness in his history of the school. But, at the same time, the +impatience of the political radical and the religious sceptic--the +"valiant soldier in the war for liberty"--and the bitterness of the exile +for opinion's sake, make themselves felt. His sparkling and malicious +wit turns the whole literature of romanticism into sport; and his abuse +of his former teacher, A. W. Schlegel, is personal and coarse beyond +description. Twenty years ago, he said, when he was a lad, what +overflowing enthusiasm he would have lavished upon Uhland! He used to +sit on the ruins of the old castle at Düsseldorf declaiming Uhland's poem + + "A wandering shepherd young and fair + Beneath the royal castle strayed." + +"But so much has happened since then! What then seemed to me so grand; +all that chivalry and Catholicism; those cavaliers that hack and hew at +each other in knightly tournaments; those gentle squires and virtuous +dames of high degree; the Norseland heroes and minnesingers; the monks +and nuns; ancestral tombs thrilling with prophetic powers; colourless +passion, dignified by the high-sounding title of renunciation, and set to +the accompaniment of tolling bells; a ceaseless whining of the +'Miserere'; how distasteful all that has become to me since then!" +And--of Fouqué's romances--"But our age turns away from all fairy +pictures, no matter how beautiful. . . . This reactionary tendency, this +continual praise of the nobility, this incessant glorification of the +feudal system, this everlasting knight-errantry balderdash . . . this +everlasting sing-song of armours, battle-steeds, high-born virgins, +honest guild-masters, dwarfs, squires, castles, chapels, minnesingers, +faith, and whatever else that rubbish of the Middle Ages may be called, +wearied us." + +It is a part of the irony of things that this satirist of romance should +have been precisely the one to compose the most popular of all romantic +ballads; and that the most current of all his songs should have been the +one in which he sings of the enchantress of the Rhine, + + "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten + Dass ich so traurig bin." + +The "Loreley" is translated into many tongues, and is sung everywhere. +In Germany it is a really national song. And yet the tale on which it is +founded is not an ancient folk legend--"ein Mährchen aus alten +Zeiten"--but a modern invention of Clemens Brentano, who first published +it in 1802 in the form of a ballad inserted in one of his novels: + + "Zu Bacharach am Rheine + Wohnt' eine Zauberin: + Sie war so schön und feine + Und riss viel Herzen hin." + +A certain forgotten romanticist, Graf Loeben, made a lyrical tale out of +it in 1821, and Heine composed his ballad in 1824, afterwards set to the +mournful air in which it is now universally familiar. + +It has been mentioned that Heine's "Romantische Schule" was a sort of +continuation and correction of Mme. de Staël's "L'Allemagne." That very +celebrated book was the result of the distinguished lady's residence in +Germany, and of her determination to reveal Germany to France. It has +been compared in its purpose to the "Germania" of Tacitus, in which the +historian held up the primitive virtues of the Teutonic race as a lesson +and a warning to corrupt Rome. Mme. de Staël had arranged to publish her +book in 1810, and the first impression of ten thousand copies had already +been printed, when the whole edition was seized and destroyed by the +police, and the author was ordered to quit France within twenty-four +hours. All this, of course, was at the instance of Napoleon, who was by +no means above resenting the hostility of a lady author. But the +Minister of Police, General Savary, assumed the responsibility of the +affair; and to Mme. de Staël's remonstrance he wrote in reply: "It +appeared to me that the air of this country did not agree with you, and +we are not yet reduced to seek for models amongst the people you admire +[the Germans]. Your last work is not French." It was not, accordingly, +until 1813 that Mme. de Staël's suppressed work on Germany saw the light. + +The only passages in it that need engage our attention are those in which +the author endeavours to interpret to a classical people the literature +of a Gothic race. In her chapter entitled "Of Classic and Romantic +Poetry," she says: "The word romantic has been lately introduced in +Germany to designate that kind of poetry which is derived from the songs +of the troubadours; that which owes its birth to the union of chivalry +and Christianity." She mentions the comparison--evidently derived from +Schlegel's lectures which she had attended--of ancient poetry to +sculpture and modern to painting; explains that the French incline +towards classic poetry, and the English--"the most illustrious of the +Germanic nations"--towards "that which owes its birth to chivalry and +romance." "The English poets of our times, without entering into concert +with the Germans, have adopted the same system. Didactic poetry has +given place to the fictions of the Middle Ages." She observes that +simplicity and definiteness, that a certain corporeality and +externality--or what in modern critical dialect we would call +objectivity--are notes of antique art; while variety and shading of +colour, and a habit of self-reflection developed by Christianity +[subjectivity], are the marks of modern art. "Simplicity in the arts +would, among the moderns, easily degenerate into coldness and +abstraction, while that of the ancients was full of life and animation. +Honour and love, valour and pity, were the sentiments which distinguished +the Christianity of chivalrous ages; and those dispositions of the soul +could only be displayed by dangers, exploits, love, misfortunes--that +romantic interest, in short, by which pictures are incessantly varied." +Mme. de Staël's analysis here does not go very deep, and her expression +is lacking in precision; but her meaning will be obvious to those who +have well considered the various definitions and expositions of these +contrasted terms with which we set out. Without deciding between the +comparative merits of modern classic and romantic work, Mme. de Staël +points out that the former must necessarily be imitative. "The +literature of the ancients is, among the moderns, a transplanted +literature; that of chivalry and romance is indigenous. . . . The +literature of romance is alone capable of further improvement, because, +being rooted in our own soil, that alone can continue to grow and acquire +fresh life; it expresses our religion; it recalls our history." Hence +she notes the fact that while the Spaniards of all classes know by heart +the verses of Calderon; while Shakspere is a popular and national poet +among the English; and the ballads of Goethe and Bürger are set to music +and sung all over Germany, the French classical poets are quite unknown +to the common people, "because the arts in France are not, as elsewhere, +natives of the very country in which their beauties are displayed." In +her review of German poetry she gives a brief description, among other +things, of the "Nibelungen Lied," and a long analysis of Bürger's +"Leonora" and "Wilde Jäger." She says that there are four English +translations of "Leonora," of which William Spenser's is the best. "The +analogy between the English and German allows a complete transfusion of +the originality of style and versification of Bürger. . . . It would be +difficult to obtain the same result in French, where nothing strange or +odd seems natural." She points out that terror is "an inexhaustible +source of poetical effect in Germany. . . . Stories of apparitions and +sorcerers are equally well received by the populace and by men of more +enlightened minds." She notes the fondness of the new school for Gothic +architecture, and describes the principles of Schlegelian criticism. She +transcribes A. W. Schlegel's praises of the ages of faith and the +generous brotherhood of chivalry, and his lament that "the noble energy +of ancient times is lost," and that "our times alas! no longer know +either faith or love." The German critics affirm that the best traits of +the French character were effaced during the reign of Louis XIV.; that +"literature, in ages which are called classical, loses in originality +what it gains in correctness"; that the French tragedies are full of +pompous affectation; and that from the middle of the seventeenth century, +a constrained and affected manner had prevailed throughout Europe, +symbolised by the wig worn by Louis XIV. in pictures and bas-reliefs, +where he is portrayed sometimes as Jupiter and sometimes as Hercules clad +only in his lion's skin--but always with the perruque. Heine complains +that Mme. de Staël fell into the hands of the Schlegels, when in Germany, +and that her account of German literature was coloured by their +prejudices; that William Schlegel, in particular, became her escort at +all the capitals of Europe and won great _éclat_ thereby + +Schlegel's elegiac lament over the decay of chivalry may remind the +English reader of the famous passage in Burke[10] about Marie Antoinette. +"Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen +upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of +cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their +scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the +age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators +has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, +never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that +proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the +heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an +exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of +nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It +is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which +felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated +ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself +lost half its evil by losing all its grossness." [11] + +But Burke's reaction against the levelling spirit of French democracy was +by no means so thoroughgoing as the romanticist protest in Germany. It +was manifestly impossible to revive the orders of chivalry, as a +practical military system; or to recreate the feudal tenures in their +entirety. Nor did even the most romantic of the German romanticists +dream of this. They appealed, however, to the knightly principles of +devotion to church and king, of honour, of religious faith, and of +personal loyalty to the suzerain and the nobility. It was these +political and theological aspects of the movement that disgusted Heine. +He says that just as Christianity was a reaction against Roman +materialism; and the Renaissance a reaction against the extravagances of +Christian spiritualism; and romanticism in turn a reaction against the +vapid imitations of antique classic art, "so also do we now behold a +reaction against the re-introduction of that Catholic, feudal mode of +thought, of that knight-errantry and priestdom, which were being +inculcated through literature and the pictorial arts. . . . For when the +artists of the Middle Ages were recommended as models . . . the only +explanation of their superiority that could be given was that these men +believed in that which they depicted. . . . Hence the artists who were +honest in their devotion to art, and who sought to imitate the pious +distortions of those miraculous pictures, the sacred uncouthness of those +marvel-abounding poems, and the inexplicable mysticisms of those olden +works . . . made a pilgrimage to Rome, where the vicegerent of Christ was +to re-invigorate consumptive German art with asses' milk." + +A number of the romanticists were Catholic by birth. There was Joseph +von Eichendorff, _e.g._, who had a strong admiration for the Middle Ages, +wrote sacred poetry, and published in 1815 a novel entitled "Ahnung und +Gegenwart," the hero of which ends by retiring to a monastery. And +Joseph Görres, who published a work on German _Volksbücher_[12] (1807); a +follower of Schelling and editor of _Der Rheinische Merkur_, a violent +anti-Gallican journal during the war of liberation. Görres, according to +Heine, "threw himself into the arms of the Jesuits," and became the +"chief support of the Catholic propaganda at Munich"; lecturing there on +universal history to an audience consisting chiefly of pupils from the +Romish seminaries. Another _Spätromantiker_, born Catholic, was Clemens +Brentano, whom Heine describes in 1833 as having lived at Frankfort for +the last fifteen years in hermit-like seclusion, as a corresponding +member of the propaganda. For six years (1818-24) Brentano was +constantly at the bedside of the invalid nun, Anna Katharina Emmerich, at +Dülmen. She was a "stigmatic," afflicted, _i.e._, with a mysterious +disease which impressed upon her body marks thought to be miraculous +counterfeits of the wounds of Christ. She had trances and visions, and +uttered revelations which Brentano recorded and afterwards published in +several volumes, that were translated into French and Italian and widely +circulated among the faithful. + +As adherents of the romantic school who were born and bred Protestants, +but became converts to the Catholic faith, Heine enumerates Friedrich +Schlegel, Tieck, Novalis, Werner, Schütz, Carové, Adam Müller, and Count +Stolberg. This list, he says, includes only authors, "the number of +painters who in swarms simultaneously abjured Protestantism and reason +was much larger." But Tieck and Novalis never formally abjured +Protestantism. They detested the Reformation and loved the mediaeval +Church, but looked upon modern Catholicism as a degenerate system. Their +position here was something like that of the English Tractarians in the +earlier stages of the Oxford movement. Novalis composed "Marienlieder." +Tieck complained of the dryness of Protestant ritual and theology, and +said that in the Middle Ages there was a unity (_Einheit_) which ought to +be again recovered. All Europe was then one fatherland with a single +faith. The period of the Arthursage was the blossoming time of romance, +the vernal season of love, religion, chivalry, and--sorcery! He pleaded +for the creation of a new Christian, Catholic mythology. + +In 1808 Friedrich Schlegel became a Roman Catholic--or, as Heine puts +it--"went to Vienna, where he attended mass daily and ate broiled fowl." +His wife, a daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, a Jewess by race, followed her +husband into the Catholic Church. Zacharias Werner, author of a number +of romantic melodramas, the heroes of which are described as monkish +ascetics, religious mystics, and "spirits who wander on earth in the +guise of harp-players"--Zacharias Werner also went to Vienna and joined +the order of Ligorians. This conversion made a prodigious noise in +Germany. It occurred at Rome in 1811, and the convert afterwards +witnessed the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples, that +annual miracle in which Newman expresses so firm a belief. Werner then +spent two years in the study of theology, visited Our Lady's Chapel at +Loretto in 1813; was ordained priest at Aschaffenburg in 1814; and +preached at St. Stephen's Church, Vienna, on the vanity of worldly +pleasures, with fastings many, with castigations and mortifications of +the flesh. The younger Voss declared that Werner's religion was nothing +but a poetic coquetting with God, Mary, the wounds of Christ, and the +holy carbuncle (_Karfunkelstein_). He had been a man of dissolute life +and had been divorced from three wives. "His enthusiasm for the +restoration of the Middle Ages," says Heine, "was one-sided; it applied +only to the hierarchical, Catholic phase of mediaevalism; feudalism did +not so strongly appeal to his fancy. . . . Pater Zacharias died in 1823, +after sojourning for fifty-four years in this wicked, wicked world." +Carlyle contributed to the _Foreign Review_ in 1828 an essay on "Werner's +Life and Writings," with translations of passages from his drama, "The +Templars in Cyprus." + +But the conversion which caused the greatest scandal was that of Count +Friedrich Stolberg, whose apostasy was denounced by his early friend +Voss, the translator of Homer, in a booklet entitled "Wie ward Fritz +Stolberg ein Unfreier?" Voss showed, says Heine, that "Stolberg had +secretly joined an association of the nobility which had for its purpose +to counteract the French ideas of liberty; that these nobles entered into +a league with the Jesuits; that they sought, through the re-establishment +of Catholicism, to advance also the interests of the nobility." [13] + +The German literary historians agree that the fresh outbreak of +romanticism in the last decade of the eighteenth century was the +resumption of an earlier movement which had been interrupted; that it was +furthered by the new feeling of German nationality aroused by the +Bonapartist tyranny; and finally that it was a protest against the flat +mediocrity which ruled in the ultra-evangelical circle headed by Nicolai, +the Berlin bookseller and editor. Into this mere Philistinism had +narrowed itself the nobler rationalism of Lessing, with its distrust of +_Träumerei_ and _Schwärmerei_--of superstition and fanaticism. "Dry +light is best," says Bacon, but the eye is hungry for colour, that has +looked too steadily on the _lumen siccum_ of the reason; and then +imagination becomes the prism which breaks the invisible sunbeam into +beauty. Hence the somewhat extravagant romantic love of colour, and the +determination to believe, at all hazards and even in the teeth of reason. +Hence the imperfectly successful attempt to force back the modern mind +into a posture of child-like assent to the marvellous. Tieck's +"Mährchen" and the Grimm brothers' nursery tales belong to this +"renascence of wonder," like Lewis' "Tales of Terror," Scott's +"Demonology," and Coleridge's "Christabel" in England. "The tendencies +of 1770 to 1780," says Scherer, "which had now quite disappeared, +asserted themselves with new and increased force. The nations which were +groaning under Napoleon's oppression sought comfort in the contemplation +of a fairer and grander past. Patriotism and mediaevalism became for a +long time the watchwords and the dominating fashion of the day." + +Allowing for the differences mentioned, the romantic movements in England +and Germany offer, as might be expected, many interesting parallels. +Carlyle, writing in 1827,[14] says that the recent change in German +literature is only a part of a general change in the whole literature of +Europe. "Among ourselves, for instance, within the last thirty years, +who has not lifted up his voice with double vigour in praise of +Shakespeare and nature, and vituperation of French taste and French +philosophy? Who has not heard of the glories of old English literature; +the wealth of Queen Elizabeth's age; the penury of Queen Anne's; and the +inquiry whether Pope was a poet? A similar temper is breaking out in +France itself, hermetically sealed as that country seemed to be against +all foreign influences; and doubts are beginning to be entertained, and +even expressed, about Corneille and the three unities. It seems to be +substantially the same thing which has occurred in Germany, and been +attributed to Tieck and his associates; only that the revolution which is +here proceeding, and in France commencing, appears in Germany to be +completed." + +In Germany, as in England--in Germany more than in England--other arts +beside literature partook of the new spirit. The brothers Boisserée +agitated for the completion of the "Kölner Dom," and collected their +famous picture gallery to illustrate the German, Dutch, and Flemish art +of the fifteenth century; just as Gothic came into fashion in England +largely in consequence of the writings of Walpole, Scott, and Ruskin. +Like our own later Pre-Raphaelite group, German art critics began to +praise the naive awkwardness of execution and devout spirituality of +feeling in the old Florentine painters, and German artists strove to +paint like Fra Angelico. Friedrich Schlegel gave a strong impulse to the +study of mediaeval art, and Heine scornfully describes him and his friend +Joseph Görres, rummaging about "among the ancient Rhine cities for the +remains of old German pictures and statuary which were superstitiously +worshipped as holy relics." Tieck and his friend Wackenroder brought +back from their pilgrimage to Dresden in 1796 a devotion, a kind of +sentimental Mariolatry, to the celebrated Madonnas of Raphael and Holbein +in the Dresden gallery; and from their explorations in Nürnberg, that +_Perle des Mittelalters_, an enthusiasm for Albrecht Dürer. This found +expression in Wackenroder's "Herzensergiessungen eines Kunstliebenden +Klosterbruders"; and in Tieck's novel, "Sternbald's Wanderungen," in +which he accompanies a pupil of Dürer to Rome. Wackenroder, like Tieck's +other friend, Novalis, was of a consumptive, emotional, and somewhat +womanish constitution of mind and body, and died young. Tieck edited his +remains, including letters on old German art. The standard editions of +their joint writings are illustrated by engravings after Dürer, one of +which in particular, the celebrated "Knight, Death, and the Devil," +symbolizes the mysterious terrors of Tieck's own tales, and of German +romance in general. The knight is in complete armour, and is riding +through a forest. On a hilltop in the distance are the turrets of a +castle; a lean hound follows the knight; on the ground between his +horse's hoofs sprawls a lizard-like reptile; a figure on horseback +approaches from the right, with the face half obliterated or eaten away +to the semblance of a skull, and snakes encircling the temples. Behind +comes on a demon or goblin shape, with a tall curving horn, which is +"neither man nor woman, neither beast nor human," but one of those +grotesque and obscene monsters which the mediaeval imagination sculptured +upon the cathedrals. This famous copperplate prompted Fouqué's romance, +"Sintram and his Companions." He had received a copy of it for a +birthday gift, and brooded for years over its mysterious significance; +which finally shaped itself in his imagination into an allegory of the +soul's conflict with the powers of darkness. His whole narrative leads +up to the description of Dürer's picture, which occupies the +twenty-seventh and climacteric chapter. The school of young German +Pre-Raphaelite art students, associated at Rome in 1810 under the +leadership of Overbeck and Cornelius, was considerably influenced by +Wackenroder's "Herzensergiessungen." + +Music, too, and particularly church music, was affected by the new taste. +The ancient music of the "Dies Irae" and other Latin hymns was revived; +and it would not be far wrong to say that the romantic school sowed the +seed of Wagner's great music-dramas, profoundly Teutonic and romantic in +their subject matter and handling and in their application of the united +arts of poetry, music, and scene-painting to old national legends such as +"Parzival," "Tannhäuser," [15] "The Knight of the Swan," and the +"Nibelungen Hoard." + +History, too, and Germanic philology took impulse from this fresh +interest in the past. Johannes Müller, in his "History of the Swiss +Confederation" (1780-95), drew the first appreciative picture of +mediaeval life, and caught, in his diction, something of the manner of +the old chroniclers. As in England ancient stores of folklore and +popular poetry were gathered and put forth by Percy, Ritson, Ellis, +Scott, and others, so in Germany the Grimm brothers' universally known +collections of fairy tales, legends, and mythology began to appear.[16] +Tieck published in 1803 his "Minnelieder aus dem Schwabischen Zeitalter." +Karl Simrock made modern versions of Middle High German poetry. Uhland, +whose "Walther von der Vogelweide," says Scherer, "gave the first +complete picture of an old German singer," carried the war into Africa by +going to Paris in 1810 and making a study of the French Middle Age. He +introduced the old French epics to the German public, and is regarded, +with A. W. Schlegel, as the founder of romance philology in Germany. + +A pupil of Bodmer,[17] the Swiss Christian Heinrich Myller, had issued a +complete edition of the "Nibelungenlied" in 1784-85. The romantic school +now took up this old national epic and praised it as a German Iliad, +unequalled in sublimity and natural power. Uhland gave a great deal of +study to it, and A. W. Schlegel lectured upon it at Berlin in 1801-2. +Both Schlegel and Tieck made plans to edit it; and Friedrich von der +Hagen, inspired by the former's lectures, published four editions of it, +and a version in modern German. "For a long time," testifies Heine, "the +'Nibelungenlied' was the sole topic of discussion among us. . . . It is +difficult for a Frenchman to form a conception of this work, or even of +the language in which it is written. It is a language of stone, and the +verses are, as it were, blocks of granite." By way of giving his French +readers a notion of the gigantic passions and rude, primitive strength of +the poem, he imagines a battle of all the Gothic cathedrals of Europe on +some vast plain, and adds, "But no! even then you can form no conception +of the chief characters of the 'Nibelungenlied'; no steeple is so high, +no stone so hard as the fierce Hagen, or the revengeful Chrimhilde." + +Another work which corresponds roughly with Percy's "Reliques," as the +"Nibelungenlied" with Macpherson's "Ossian," was "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" +(The Boy's Magic Trumpet), published in 1806-8 by Clemens Brentano and +Achim von Arnim, with a dedication to Goethe. This was a three-volume +collection of German songs, and although it came much later than Percy's, +and after the imitation of old national balladry in Germany was already +well under way, so that its relation to German romanticism is not of an +initial kind, like that of Percy's collection in England; still its +importance was very great. It influenced all the lyrical poetry of the +Romantic school, and especially the ballads of Uhland. "I cannot +sufficiently extol this book," says Heine. "It contains the sweetest +flowers of German poesy. . . . On the title page . . . is the picture of +a lad blowing a horn; and when a German in a foreign land views this +picture, he almost seems to hear the old familiar strains, and +homesickness steals over him. . . . In these ballads one feels the +beating of the German popular heart. Here is revealed all its sombre +merriment, all its droll wit. Here German wrath beats furiously the +drum; here German satire stings, here German love kisses. Here we behold +the sparkling of genuine German wine, and genuine German tears." + +The German romantic school, like the English, but more learnedly and +systematically, sought to reinforce its native stock of materials by +_motifs_ drawn from foreign literatures, and particularly from Norse +mythology and from Spanish romance. Percy's translation of Malet: Gray's +versions from the Welsh and the Scandinavian: Southey's "Chronicles of +the Cid" and Lockhart's translations of the Spanish ballads are +paralleled in Germany by William Schlegel's, and Uhland's, and others' +studies in old Norse mythology and poetry; by Tieck's translation of "Don +Quixote" [18] and by Johann Dietrich Gries' of Calderon. The +romanticists, indeed, and especially Tieck and A. W. Schlegel, were most +accomplished translators. Schlegel's great version of Shakspere is +justly esteemed one of the glories of the German tongue. Heine affirms +that it was undertaken solely for polemical purposes and at a time (1797) +when the enthusiasm for the Middle Ages had not yet reached an +extravagant height, "Later, when this did occur, Calderon was translated +and ranked far above Shakespeare. . . . For the works of Calderon bear +most distinctly the impress of the poetry of the Middle Ages, +particularly of the two principal epochs, knight-errantry and +monasticism. The pious comedies of the Castilian priest-poet, whose +poetical flowers had been besprinkled with holy water and canonical +perfumes . . . were now set up as models, and Germany swarmed with +fantastically pious, insanely profound poems, over which it was the +fashion to work one's self into a mystic ecstasy of admiration, as in +'The Devotion to the Cross'; or to fight in honour of the Madonna, as in +'The Constant Prince.' . . . Our poetry, said the Schlegels, is +superannuated. . . . Our emotions are withered; our imagination is dried +up. . . . We must seek again the choked-up springs of the naive, simple +poetry of the Middle Ages, where bubbles the elixir of youth." Heine +adds that Tieck, following out this prescription, drank so deeply of the +mediaeval folk tales and ballads that he actually became a child again +and fell to lisping. + +There is a suggestive analogy between the position of the Warton brothers +in England and the Schlegel brothers in Germany. The Schlegels, like the +Wartons, were leaders in the romantic movement of their time and country, +and were the inspirers of other men. The two pairs were alike also in +that their best service was done in the field of literary history, +criticism, and exposition, while their creative work was imitative and of +comparatively small value. Friedrich Schlegel's scandalous romance +"Lucinde" is of much less importance than his very stimulating lectures +on the "History of Literature" and the "Wisdom and Languages of +India";[19] and his elder brother, though an accomplished metrist and +translator, was not successful in original verse. But this resemblance +between the Wartons and the Schlegels must not be pressed too far. Here, +as at many other points, the German movement had greater momentum. The +Wartons were men of elegant scholarship after their old-fashioned kind, a +kind which joined the usual classical culture of the English universities +to a liberal--and in their century somewhat paradoxical--enthusiasm in +antiquarian pursuits. But the Schlegels were men of really wide learning +and of depth in criticism. Compared with their scientific method and +grasp of principles, the "Observations" and "Essays" of the Wartons are +mere dilettantism. To the influence of the Schlegels is not unfairly +attributed the origin in Germany of the sciences of comparative philology +and comparative mythology, and the works of scholars like Bopp, Diez, and +the brothers Grimm. Herder[20] had already traced the broad cosmopolitan +lines which German literary scholarship was to follow, with German +thoroughness and independence. And Heine acknowledges that "in +reproductive criticism, where the beauties of a work of art were to be +brought out clearly; where a delicate perception of individualities was +required; and where these were to be made intelligible, the Schlegels +were far superior to Lessing." The one point at which the English +movement outweighed the German was Walter Scott, whose creative vigour +and fertility made an impact upon the mind of Europe to which the +romantic literature of the Continent affords no counterpart. + +The principles of the Schlegelian criticism were first communicated to +the English public by Coleridge; who, in his lectures on Shakspere and +other dramatists, helped himself freely to William Schlegel's +"Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur." [21] Heine +denounces the shallowness of these principles and their failure to +comprehend the modern mind. "When Schlegel seeks to depreciate the poet +Bürger, he compares his ballads with the old English ballads of the Percy +collection, and he shows that the latter are more simple, more naïve, +more antique, and consequently more poetical. . . . But death is not +more poetical than life. The old English ballads of the Percy collection +exhale the spirit of their age, and Bürger's ballads breathe the spirit +of _our_ time. The latter, Schlegel never understood. . . . What +increased Schlegel's reputation still more was the sensation which he +excited in France, where he also attacked the literary authorities of the +French, . . . showed the French that their whole classical literature was +worthless, that Molière was a buffoon and no poet, that Racine likewise +was of no account . . . that the French are the most prosaic people of +the world, and that there is no poetry in France." It is well known that +Coleridge detested the French, as "a light but cruel race", that he +undervalued their literature and even affected an ignorance of the +language. The narrowness of Schlegelian criticism was only the excess of +Teutonism reacting against the previous excesses of Gallic classicism. + +The deficiency of creative imagination in the Schlegels was supplied by +their disciple Ludwig Tieck, who made the "Mährchen," or popular +traditionary tale, his peculiar province. It was Wackenroder who first +drew his attention to "those old, poorly printed _Volksbücher_, with +their coarse wood-cuts which had for centuries been circulating among the +peasantry, and which may still be picked up at the book-stalls of the +Leipzig fairs." [22] Tieck's volume of "Volksmährchen" (1797) gave +reproductions of a number of these old tales, such as the +"Haimonskinder," the "Schöne Magelone," "Tannhäuser," and the +"Schildbürger." His "Phantasus" (1812) contained original tales +conceived in the same spirit. Scherer says that Tieck uttered the +manifesto of German romanticism in the following lines from the overture +of his "Kaiser Octavianus": + + "Mondbeglänzte Zaubernacht, + Die den Sinn gefangen hält, + Wundervolle Mährchenwelt, + Steig auf in der alten Pracht!" + +"Forest solitude" [_Waldeinsamkeit_], says Boyesen,[23] "churchyards at +midnight, ruins of convents and baronial castles; in fact, all the things +which we are now apt to call romantic, are the favourite haunts of +Tieck's muse. . . . Tieck was excessively fond of moonlight and +literally flooded his tales with its soft, dim splendour; therefore +moonlight is now romantic. . . . He never allows a hero to make a +declaration of love without a near or distant accompaniment of a bugle +(_Schalmei_ or _Waldhorn_); accordingly the bugle is called a romantic +instrument." + +"The true tone of that ancient time," says Carlyle,[24] "when man was in +his childhood, when the universe within was divided by no wall of adamant +from the universe without, and the forms of the Spirit mingled and dwelt +in trustful sisterhood with the forms of the Sense, was not easy to seize +and adapt with any fitness of application to the feelings of modern +minds. It was to penetrate into the inmost shrines of Imagination, where +human passion and action are reflected in dim and fitful, but deeply +significant resemblances, and to copy these with the guileless, humble +graces which alone can become them. . . . The ordinary lovers of witch +and fairy matter will remark a deficiency of spectres and enchantments, +and complain that the whole is rather dull. Cultivated free-thinkers, +again, well knowing that no ghosts or elves exist in this country, will +smile at the crack-brained dreamer, with his spelling-book prose and +doggerel verse, and dismiss him good-naturedly as a German Lake poet." +"In these works," says Heine, "there reigns a mysterious intenseness, a +peculiar sympathy with nature, especially with the vegetable and mineral +kingdoms. The reader feels himself transported into an enchanted forest; +he hears the melodious gurgling of subterranean waters; at times he seems +to distinguish his own name in the rustling of the trees. Ever and anon +a nameless dread seizes upon him as the broad-leaved tendrils entwine his +feet; strange and marvellous wild flowers gaze at him with their bright, +languishing eyes; invisible lips mockingly press tender kisses on his +cheeks; gigantic mushrooms, which look like golden bells, grow at the +foot of the trees; large silent birds sway to and fro on the branches +overhead, put on a sapient look and solemnly nod their heads. Everything +seems to hold its breath; all is hushed in awed expectation; suddenly the +soft tones of a hunter's horn are heard, and a lovely female form, with +waving plumes on head and falcon on wrist, rides swiftly by on a +snow-white steed. And this beautiful damsel is so exquisitely lovely, so +fair; her eyes are of the violet's hue, sparkling with mirth and at the +same time earnest, sincere, and yet ironical; so chaste and yet so full +of tender passion, like the fancy of our excellent Ludwig Tieck. Yes, +his fancy is a charming, high-born maiden, who in the forests of +fairyland gives chase to fabulous wild beasts; perhaps she even hunts the +rare unicorn, which may only be caught by a spotless virgin." + +In 1827 Carlyle[25] published translations of five of Tieck's "Mährchen," +viz.: "The Fair-Haired Eckbert," "The Trusty Eckart," "The Elves," "The +Runenberg," and "The Goblet." He mentioned that another tale had been +already Englished--"The Pictures" (Die Gemälde). This version was by +Connop Thirwall, who had also rendered "The Betrothal" in 1824. In spite +of Carlyle's recommendations, Tieck's stories seem to have made small +impression in England. Doubtless they came too late, and the romantic +movement, by 1827, had spent its first force in a country already sated +with Scott's poems and novels. Sarah Austin, a daughter of William +Taylor of Norwich, went to Germany to study German literature in this +same year 1827. In her "Fragments from German Prose Writers" (1841), she +speaks of the small success of Tieck's stories in England, but testifies +that A. W. Schlegel's dramatic lectures had been translated early and the +translation frequently reprinted. Another of the Norwich +Taylors--Edgar--was the translator of Grimm's "Haus- und +Kinder-Mährchen." Julius Hare, who was at school at Weimar in the winter +of 1804-5, rendered three of Tieck's tales, as well as Fouqué's "Sintram" +(1820). + +It is interesting to note that Tieck was not unknown to Hawthorne and +Poe. The latter mentions his "Journey into the Blue Distance" in his +"Fall of the House of Usher", and in an early review of Hawthorne's +"Twice-Told Tales" (1842) and "Mosses from an Old Manse" (1846), at a +time when their author was still, in his own words, "the obscurest man of +letters in America." Poe acutely pointed out a resemblance between +Hawthorne and Tieck; "whose manner," he asserts, "in some of his works, +is absolutely identical with that _habitual_ to Hawthorne." One finds a +confirmation of this _aperçu_--or finds, at least, that Hawthorne was +attracted by Tieck--in passages of the "American Note-Books," where he +speaks of grubbing out several pages of Tieck at a sitting, by the aid of +a German dictionary. Colonel Higginson ("Short Studies"), _à propos_ of +Poe's sham learning and his habit of mystifying the reader by imaginary +citations, confesses to having hunted in vain for this fascinatingly +entitled "Journey into the Blue Distance"; and to having been laughed at +for his pains by a friend who assured him that Poe could scarcely read a +word of German. But Tieck did really write this story, "Das Alte Buch: +oder Reise ins Blaue hinein," which Poe misleadingly refers to under its +alternate title. There is, indeed, a hint of allegory in Tieck's +"Mährchen"--which are far from being mere fairy tales--that reminds one +frequently of Hawthorne's shadowy art--of such things as "Ethan Brand," +or "The Minister's Black Veil," or "The Great Carbuncle of the White +Mountains." There is, _e.g._, "The Elves," in which a little girl does +but step across the foot-bridge over the brook that borders her father's +garden, to find herself in a magic land where she stays, as it seems to +her, a few hours, but returns home to learn that she has been absent +seven years. Or there is "The Runenberg," where a youth wandering in the +mountains, receives from a sorceress, through the casement of a ruined +castle, a wondrous tablet set with gems in a mystic pattern; and years +afterward wanders back into the mountains, leaving home and friends to +search for fairy jewels, only to return again to his village, an old and +broken-down man, bearing a sackful of worthless pebbles which appear to +him the most precious stones. And there is the story of "The Goblet," +where the theme is like that of Hawthorne's "Shaker Bridal," a pair of +lovers whose union is thwarted and postponed until finally, when too +late, they find that only the ghost or the memory of their love is left +to mock their youthful hope. + +But the mystic, _par excellence_, among the German romanticists was +Novalis, of whose writings Carlyle gave a sympathetic account in the +_Foreign Review_ for 1829. Novalis' "Hymns to the Night," written in +Ossianic prose, were perhaps not without influence on Longfellow ("Voices +of the Night"), but his most significant work was his unfinished romance +"Heinrich von Ofterdingen." The hero was a legendary poet of the time of +the Crusades, who was victor in a contest of minstrelsy on the Wartburg. +But in Novalis' romance there is no firm delineation of mediaeval +life--everything is dissolved in a mist of transcendentalism and +allegory. The story opens with the words: "I long to see the blue +flower; it is continually in my mind, and I can think of nothing else." +Heinrich falls asleep, and has a vision of a wondrous cavern and a +fountain, beside which grows a tall, light blue flower that bends towards +him, the petals showing "like a blue spreading ruff in which hovered a +lovely face." This blue flower, says Carlyle, is poetry, "the real +object, passion, and vocation of young Heinrich." Boyesen gives a +subtler interpretation. "This blue flower," he says, "is the watchword +and symbol of the school. It is meant to symbolise the deep and nameless +longings of a poet's soul. Romantic poetry invariably deals with +longing; not a definite formulated desire for some attainable object, but +a dim mysterious aspiration, a trembling unrest, a vague sense of kinship +with the infinite,[26] a consequent dissatisfaction with every form of +happiness which the world has to offer. The object of the romantic +longing, therefore, so far as it has any object, is the ideal. . . . The +blue flower, like the absolute ideal, is never found in this world, poets +may at times dimly feel its nearness, and perhaps even catch a brief +glimpse of it in some lonely forest glade, far from the haunts of men, +but it is in vain to try to pluck it. If for a moment its perfume fills +the air, the senses are intoxicated and the soul swells with poetic +rapture." [27] It would lead us too far afield to follow up the traces +of this mystical symbolism in the writings of our New England +transcendentalists. One is often reminded of Novalis' blue flower in +such a poem as Emerson's "Forerunners," or Lowell's "Footpath," or +Whittier's "Vanishers," or in Thoreau's little parable about the horse, +the hound, and the dove which he had long ago lost and is still seeking. +And again one is reminded of Tieck when Thoreau says: "I had seen the red +election birds brought from their recesses on my comrades' strings and +fancied that their plumage would assume stranger and more dazzling +colours in proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and +solitude of the forest." Heinrich von Ofterdingen travels to Augsburg to +visit his grandfather, conversing on the way with various shadowy +persons, a miner, a hermit, an Eastern maiden named Zulma, who represent +respectively, according to Boyesen, the poetry of nature, the poetry of +history, and the spirit of the Orient. At Augsburg he meets the poet +Klingsohr (the personification, perhaps, of poetry in its full +development). With his daughter Matilda he falls in love, whose face is +that same which he had beheld in his vision, encircled by the petals of +the blue flower. Then he has a dream in which he sees Matilda sink and +disappear in the waters of a river. Then he encounters her in a strange +land and asks where the river is. "Seest thou not its blue waves above +us?" she answers. "He looked up and the blue river was flowing softly +over their heads." "This image of Death, and of the river being the sky +in that other and eternal country" [28]--does it not once more remind us +of the well-known line in Channing's "A Poet's Hope"-- + + "If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea"; + +or of Emerson's "Two Rivers": + + "Thy summer voice, Musketaquit, + Repeats the music of the rain, + But sweeter rivers pulsing flit + Through thee, as thou through Concord plain"? + +But transcendentalism is one thing and romanticism is another, and we may +dismiss Novalis with a reminder of the fact that the _Journal of +Speculative Philosophy_, once published at Concord, took for its motto a +sentence from his "Blüthenstaub" (Flower-pollen): "Philosophy can bake no +bread, but she can procure for us God, freedom, and immortality." [29] + +Brentano and Von Arnim have had practically no influence in England. +Brentano's most popular story was translated by T. W. Appell, under the +title, "Honour, or the Story of the Brave Casper and the Fair Annerl: +With an Introduction and Biographical Notice" (London, 1847). The same +story was rendered into French in the _Correspondant_ for 1859 ("Le Brave +Kasperl et la Belle Annerl"). Three tales of Arnim were translated by +Théophile Gautier, as "Contes Bizarres" (Paris, 1856). Arnim's best +romance is "Die Kronenwächter" (1817). Scherer testifies that this +"combined real knowledge of the Reformation period with graphic power"; +and adds: "It was Walter Scott's great example which, in the second +decade of this century, first made conscientious faithfulness and study +of details the rule in historical novel-writing." Longfellow's "German +Poets and Poetry" (1845) includes nothing from Arnim or Brentano. Nor +did Thomas Roscoe's "German Novelists" (four volumes), nor George Soane's +"Specimens of German Romance," both of which appeared in 1826. + +The most popular of the German romanticists was Friedrich Baron de la +Motte Fouqué, the descendant of a family exiled from France by the +Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and himself an officer in the Prussian +army in the war of liberation. Fouqué's numerous romances, in all of +which he upholds the ideal of Christian knighthood, have been, many of +them, translated into English. "Aslauga's Knight" appeared in Carlyle's +"Specimens of German Romance" (1827); "Sintram," "Undine," and "Der +Zauberring" had been translated even earlier. "Thiodolf the Icelander" +and others have also been current in English circulating libraries. +Carlyle acknowledges that Fouqué's notes are few, and that he is +possessed by a single idea. "The chapel and the tilt yard stand in the +background or the foreground in all the scenes of his universe. He gives +us knights, soft-hearted and strong-armed; full of Christian self-denial, +patience, meekness, and gay, easy daring; they stand before us in their +mild frankness, with suitable equipment, and accompaniment of squire and +dame. . . . Change of scene and person brings little change of subject; +even when no chivalry is mentioned, we feel too clearly the influence of +its unseen presence. Nor can it be said that in this solitary department +his success is of the very highest sort. To body forth the spirit of +Christian knighthood in existing poetic forms; to wed that old +_sentiment_ to modern _thoughts_, was a task which he could not attempt. +He has turned rather to the fictions and machinery of former days." +Heine says that Fouqué's Sigurd the Serpent Slayer has the courage of a +hundred lions and the sense of two asses. But Fouqué's "Undine" (1811) +is in its way a masterpiece and a classic. This story of the lovely +water-sprite, who received a soul when she fell in love with the knight, +and with a soul, a knowledge of human sorrow, has a slight resemblance to +the conception of Hawthorne's "Marble Faun." Coleridge was greatly +fascinated by it. He read the original several times, and once the +American translation, printed at Philadelphia. He said that it was +beyond Scott, and that Undine resembled Shakspere's Caliban in being a +literal _creation_. + +But in general Fouqué's chivalry romances, when compared with Scott's, +have much less vigour, variety, and dramatic force, though a higher +spirituality and a softer sentiment. The Waverley novels are solid with +a right materialistic treatment. It was Scott's endeavour to make the +Middle Ages real. The people are there, as well as chevaliers and their +ladies. The history of the times is there. But in Fouqué the Middle +Ages become even more unreal, fairy-like, fantastic than they are in our +imaginations. There is nothing but tourneying, love-making, and +enchantment. Compare the rumour of the Crusades and Richard the Lion +Heart in "Der Zauberring" with the stalwart flesh-and-blood figures in +"Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." A wavering moonshine lies all over the +world of the Fouqué romances, like the magic light which illumines the +Druda's castle in "Der Zauberring," on whose battlements grow tall white +flowers, and whose courts are filled with unearthly music from the +perpetual revolution of golden wheels. "On the romantic side," wrote +Richter, in his review of "L'Allemagne" in the _Heidelberg Jahrbücher_ +for 1815, "we could not wish the Briton to cast his first glance at us; +for the Briton--to whom nothing is so poetical as the common +weal--requires (being used to the weight of gold), even for a golden age +of poetry, the thick golden wing-cases of his epithet-poets; not the +transparent gossamer wings of the Romanticists; no many-coloured +butterfly dust; but, at lowest, flower-dust that will grow to something." + +Another _Spätromantiker_ who has penetrated to the English literary +consciousness is the Swabian Ludwig Uhland, the sweetest lyric poet of +the romantic school. Uhland studied the poems of Ossian, the Norse +sagas, the "Nibelungenlied" and German hero legends, the Spanish +romances, the poetry of the trouveres and the troubadours, and treated +motives from all these varied sources. His true field, however, was the +ballad, as Tieck's was the popular tale; and many of Uhland's ballads are +favourites with English readers, through excellent translations. Sarah +Austin's version of one of them is widely familiar: + + "Many a year is in its grave + Since I crossed this restless wave," etc. + +Longfellow translated three: "The Black Knight," "The Luck of Edenhall," +and "The Castle by the Sea." It is to be feared that the last-named +belongs to what Scherer calls that "trivial kind of romanticism, full of +sadness and renunciation, in which kings and queens with crimson mantles +and golden crowns, kings' daughters and beautiful shepherds, harpers, +monks, and nuns play a great part." But it has a haunting beauty, and a +dreamy melody like Goethe's "Es war ein König in Thule." The mocking +Heine, who stigmatises Fouqué's knights as combinations of iron and +sentimentality, complains that in Uhland's writings too "the naive, rude, +powerful tones of the Middle Ages are not reproduced with idealised +fidelity, but rather they are dissolved into a sickly, sentimental +melancholy. . . . The women in Uhland's poems are only beautiful +shadows, embodied moonshine; milk flows in their veins, and sweet tears +in their eyes, _i.e._, tears which lack salt. If we compare Uhland's +knights with the knights in the old ballads, it seems to us as if the +former were composed of suits of leaden armour, entirely filled with +flowers, instead of flesh and bones. Hence Uhland's knights are more +pleasing to delicate nostrils than the old stalwarts, who wore heavy iron +trousers and were huge eaters and still huger drinkers." + +Upon the whole it must be concluded that this second invasion of England +by German romance, in the twenties and early thirties of the nineteenth +century, made a lesser impression than the first irruption in, say, 1795 +to 1810, in the days of Bürger and "Götz," and "The Robbers," and Monk +Lewis and the youthful Scott. And the reason is not far to seek. The +newcomers found England in possession of a native romanticism of a very +robust type, by the side of which the imported article showed like a +delicate exotic. Carlyle affirms that Madame de Staël's book was the +precursor of whatever acquaintance with German literature exists in +England. He himself worked valiantly to extend that acquaintance by his +articles in the _Edinburgh_ and _Foreign Review_, and by his translations +from German romance. But he found among English readers an invincible +prejudice against German mysticism and German sentimentality. The +romantic _chiaroscuro_, which puzzled Southey even in "The Ancient +Mariner," became dimmest twilight in Tieck's "Mährchen" and midnight +darkness in the visionary Novalis. The _Weichheit_, _Wehmuth_, and +_Sehnsucht nach der Unendlichkeit_ of the German romanticists were moods +not altogether unfamiliar in English poetry. "Now stirs the feeling +infinite," sings Byron. + + "Now more than ever seems it rich to die, + To cease upon the midnight with no pain," + +cries Keats. But when Novalis, in his _Todessehnsucht_, exclaims, "Death +is the romance of life," the sentiment has an alien sound. There was +something mutually repellent between the more typical phases of English +and German romanticism. Tieck and the Schlegels, we know, cared little +for Scott. We are told that Scott read the _Zeitung für Einsiedler_, but +we are not told what he thought of it. Perhaps romanticism, like +transcendentalism, found a more congenial soil in New than in Old +England. Longfellow spent the winter of 1835-36 in Heidelberg, calling +on A. W. Schlegel at Bonn, on his way thither. "Hyperion" (1839) is +saturated with German romance. Its hero, Paul Flemming, knew "Des Knaben +Wunderhorn" almost by heart. No other German book had ever exercised +such "wild and magic influence upon his imagination." + + +[1] Besides the authorities quoted or referred to in the text, the +materials used in this chapter are drawn mainly from the standard +histories of German literature; especially from Georg Brandes' +"Hauptströmungen in der Litteratur des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts" +(1872-76); Julian Schmidt's "Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur" +(Berlin, 1890); H. J. T. Hettner's "Litteraturgeschichte" (Braunschweig, +1872); Wilhelm Scherer's "History of German Literature" (Conybeare's +translation, New York, 1886); Karl Hillebrand's "German Thought" (trans., +New York, 1880); Vogt und Koch's "Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur" +(Leipzig and Wien, 1897). My own reading in the German romantics is by +no means extensive. I have read, however, a number of Tieck's "Märchen" +and of Fouqué's romances; Novalis' "Hymns to the Night" and "Heinrich von +Ofterdingen"; A. W. Schlegel's "Lectures on Dramatic Literature" and F. +Schlegel's "Lucinde"; all of Uhland's ballads and most of Heine's +writings in verse and prose; a large part of "Des Knaben Wunderhorn," and +the selections from Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, and Joseph Görres +contained in Koch's "Deutsche National Litteratur," 146 Band (Stuttgart, +1891). These last include Brentano's "Die Erfindung des Rosenkranzes," +"Kasperl und Annerl," "Gockel und Hinkerl," etc., and Arnim's +"Kronenwächter," a scene from "Die Päpstin Johanna," etc. I have, of +course, read Madame de Staël's "L'Allemagne"; all of Carlyle's papers on +German literature, with his translations; the Grimm fairy tales and the +like. + +[2] "Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Malerei +und Bildhauerkunst," 1755. "Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums," 1764. + +[3] "Laocoon," 1766. + +[4] See vol. i., chap. xi.; and particularly pp. 383-87. + +[5] See vol. i., pp. 422-23. + +[6] Novalis' and Wackenroder's remains were edited by Tieck and F. +Schlegel. Arnim married Brentano's sister Bettina--Goethe's Bettina. + +[7] _E.g._, Tieck's "Der Gestiefelte Kater," against Nicolai and the +_Aufklarung_. + +[8] As to the much-discussed romantic irony, the theory of which played a +part in the German movement corresponding somewhat to Hugo's doctrine of +the grotesque, it seems to have made no impression in England. I can +discover no mention of it in Coleridge. Carlyle, in the first of his two +essays on Richter (1827), expressly distinguishes true humour from irony, +which he describes as a faculty of caricature, consisting "chiefly in a +certain superficial distortion or reversal of objects"--the method of +Swift or Voltaire. That is, Carlyle uses irony in the common English +sense; the Socratic irony, the irony of the "Modest Proposal." The +earliest attempt that I have encountered to interpret to the English +public what Tieck and the Schlegels meant by "irony" is an article in +_Blackwood's_ for September, 1835, on "The Modern German School of +Irony"; but its analysis is not very _eingehend_. + +[9] An English translation was published in this country in 1882. See +also H. H. Boyesen's "Essays on German Literature" (1892) for three +papers on the "Romantic School in Germany." + +[10] Gentz, "The German Burke," translated the "Reflections on the +Revolution in France" into German in 1796. + +[11] See also in the same tract, Burke's tribute to the value of +hereditary nobility, and remember that these were the words of a Whig +statesman. + +[12] Dream books, medicine books, riddle books, almanacs, craftsmen's +proverbs, fabulous travels, prophecies, legends, romances and the like, +hawked about at fairs. + +[13] For Stolberg see also vol. i., pp. 376-77. + +[14] "Ludwig Tieck": Introductions to "German Romance." + +[15] Brentano's fragment "Die Erfindung des Rosenkranzes," begun in 1803, +deals with the Tannhäuser story. + +[16] "Kinder and Hausmährchen" (1812-15). "Deutsche Sagen" (1816). +"Deutsche Mythologie" (1835). + +[17] See vol. i., pp. 375-76. + +[18] "If Cervantes' purpose," says Heine, "was merely to describe the +fools who sought to restore the chivalry of the Middle Ages, . . . then +it is a peculiarly comic irony of accident that the romantic school +should furnish the best translation of a book in which their own folly is +most amusingly ridiculed." + +[19] F. Schlegel's declamations against printing and gun powder in his +Vienna lectures of 1810 foretoken Ruskin's philippics against railways +and factories. + +[20] See vol. i., pp. 300, 337, 416. + +[21] _Vide supra_, p. 88. A. W. Schlegel was in England in 1823. Tieck +met Coleridge in England in 1818, having made his acquaintance in Italy +some ten years before. + +[22] Boyesen: "Aspects of the Romantic School." + +[23] _Ibid_. + +[24] "Ludwig Tieck," in "German Romance." + +[25] "German Romance," four vols., Edinburgh. + +[26] A. W. Schlegel says that romantic poetry is the representation +(_Darstellung_) of the infinite through symbols. + +[27] "Novalis and the Blue Flower." + +[28] Carlyle. + +[29] Selections from Novalis in an English translation were published at +London in 1891. + + + + +CHAPTER V. + +The Romantic Movement in France.[1] + +French romanticism had aspects of its own which distinguished it from the +English and the German alike. It differed from the former and agreed +with the latter in being organised. In France, as in Germany, there was +a romantic school, whose members were united by common literary +principles and by personal association. There were sharply defined and +hostile factions of classics and romantics, with party cries, watchwords, +and shibboleths; a propaganda carried on and a polemic waged in +pamphlets, prefaces, and critical journals. Above all there was a +leader. Walter Scott was the great romancer of Europe, but he was never +the head of a school in his own country in the sense in which Victor Hugo +was in France, or even in the sense in which the Schlegels were in +Germany. Scott had imitators, but Hugo had disciples. + +One point in which the French movement differed from both the English and +the German was in the suddenness and violence of the outbreak. It was +not so much a gradual development as a revolution, an explosion. The +reason of this is to be found in the firmer hold which academic tradition +had in France, the fountainhead of eighteenth-century classicism. +Romanticism had a special work to do in the land of literary convention +in asserting the freedom of art and the unity of art and life. +Everything that is in life, said Hugo, is, or has a right to be in art. +The French, in political and social matters the most revolutionary people +of Europe, were the most conservative in matters of taste. The +Revolution even intensified the reigning classicism by giving it a +republican turn. The Jacobin orators appealed constantly to the examples +of the Greek and Roman democracies. The Goddess of Reason was enthroned +in place of God, Sunday was abolished, and the names of the months and of +the days of the week were changed. Dress under the Directory was +patterned on antique modes--the liberty cap was Phrygian--and children +born under the Republic were named after Roman patriots, Brutus, Cassius, +etc. The great painter of the Revolution was David,[2] who painted his +subjects in togas, with backgrounds of Greek temples. Voltaire's +classicism was monarchical and held to the Louis XIV. tradition; David's +was republican. And yet the recognised formulae of taste and criticism +were the same in 1800 as in 1775, or in 1675. + +A second distinction of the French romanticism was its local +concentration at Paris. The centripetal forces have always been greater +in France than in England and Germany. The earlier group of German +_Romantiker_ was, indeed, as we have seen, united for a time at Jena and +Berlin; and the _Spätromantiker_ at Heidelberg. But this was dispersion +itself as compared with the intense focussing of intellectual rays from +every quarter of France upon the capital. In England, I hardly need +repeat, there was next to no cohesion at all between the widely scattered +men of letters whose work exhibited romantic traits. + +In one particular the French movement resembled the English more nearly +than the German. It kept itself almost entirely within the domain of +art, and did not carry out its principles with German thoroughness and +consistency into politics and religion. It made no efforts towards a +practical restoration of the Middle Ages. At the beginning, indeed, +French romanticism exhibited something analogous to the Toryism of Scott, +and the reactionary _Junkerism_ and neo-Catholicism of the Schlegels. +Chateaubriand in his "Génie du Christianisme" attempted a sort of +aesthetic revival of Catholic Christianity, which had suffered so heavily +by the deistic teachings of the last century and the atheism of the +Revolution. Victor Hugo began in his "Odes et Ballades" (1822) as an +enthusiastic adherent of monarchy and the church. "L'histoire des +hommes," he wrote, "ne présente de poésie que jugée du haut des idées +monarchiques et religieuses." But he advanced quite rapidly towards +liberalism both in politics and religion. And of the young men who +surrounded him, like Gautier, Labrunie, Sainte-Beuve, Musset, De Vigny, +and others, it can only be affirmed that they were legitimist or +republican, Catholic or agnostic, just as it happened and without +affecting their fidelity to the literary canons of the new school.[3] +The German romanticism was philosophical; the French was artistic and +social. The Parisian _ateliers_ as well as the Parisian _salons_ were +nuclei of revolt against classical traditions. "This intermixture of art +with poetry," says Gautier,[4] "was and remains one of the characteristic +marks of the new school, and enables us to understand why its earliest +recruits were found more among artists than among men of letters. A +multitude of objects, images, comparisons, which were believed to be +irreducible to words, entered into the language and have stayed there. +The sphere of literature was enlarged, and now includes the sphere of art +in its measureless circle." "At that time painting and poetry +fraternised. The artists read the poets and the poets visited the +artists. Shakspere, Dante, Goethe, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott were to +be found in the studio as in the study. There were as many splotches of +colour as of ink on the margins of those beautiful volumes that were so +incessantly thumbed. Imaginations, already greatly excited by +themselves, were heated to excess by the reading of those foreign +writings of a colouring so rich, of a fancy so free and so strong. +Enthusiasm mounted to delirium. It seemed as if we had discovered +poetry, and that was indeed the truth. Now that this fine flame has +cooled and that the positive-minded generation which possesses the world +is preoccupied with other ideas, one cannot imagine what dizziness, what +_éblouissement_ was produced in us by such and such a picture or poem, +which people nowadays are satisfied to approve by a slight nod of the +head. It was so new, so unexpected, so lively, so glowing!" [5] + +The romantic school in France had not only its poets, dramatists, and +critics, but its painters, architects, sculptors, musical composers, and +actors. The romantic artist _par excellence_ was Eugène Delacroix, the +painter of "The Crusaders Entering Jerusalem." "The Greeks and Romans +had been so abused by the decadent school of David that they fell into +complete disrepute at this time. Delacroix's first manner was purely +romantic, that is to say, he borrowed nothing from the recollections or +the forms of the antique. The subjects that he treated were relatively +modern, taken from the history of the Middle Ages, from Dante, Shakspere, +Goethe, Lord Byron, or Walter Scott." He painted "Hamlet," "The Boat of +Dante," "Tasso in Bedlam," "Marino Faliero," "The Death of Sardanapalus," +"The Combat of the Giaour and the Pasha," "The Massacre of the Bishop of +Liége," and similar subjects. Goethe in his conversations with Eckerman +expressed great admiration of Delacroix's interpretations of scenes in +"Faust" (the brawl in Auerbach's cellar, and the midnight ride of Faust +and Mephistopheles to deliver Margaret from prison). Goethe hoped that +the French artist would go on and reproduce the whole of "Faust," and +especially the sorceress' kitchen and the scenes on the Brocken. Other +painters of the romantic school were Camille Roqueplan, who treated +motives drawn from "The Antiquary" and other novels of Walter Scott;[6] +and Eugène Devéria, whose "Birth of Henry IV.," executed in 1827, when +the artist was only twenty-two years of age, was a masterpiece of +colouring and composition. The house of the Devéria brothers was one of +the rallying points of the Parisian romanticists. And then there was +Louis Boulanger, who painted "Mazeppa" and "The Witches' Sabbath" ("La +Ronde du Sabbat" [7]); and the water-colour painter and engraver, +Celestin Nanteuil, who furnished innumerable designs for vignettes, +frontispieces, and book illustrations to the writers of the romantic +school. + +"Of all the arts," says Gautier, "the one that lends itself least to the +expression of the romantic idea is certainly sculpture. It seems to have +received from antiquity its definitive form. . . . What can the statuary +art do without the gods and heroes of mythology who furnish it with +plausible pretexts for the nude, and for such drapery as it needs; things +which romanticism prescribes, or did at least prescribe at that time of +its first fervour? Every sculptor is of necessity a classic." [8] +Nevertheless, he says that the romantic school was not quite unprovided +of sculptors. "In our inner circle (_cénacle_), Jehan du Seigneur +represented this art, austere and rebellious to the fancy. . . . Jehan +du Seigneur--let us leave in his name of Jean this mediaeval _h_ which +made him so happy and made him believe that he wore the apron of Ervein +of Steinbach at work on the sculptures of Strasburg minster." Gautier +mentions among the productions of this Gothic-minded statuary an "Orlando +Furioso," a bust of Victor Hugo, and a group from the latter's romance, +"Notre Dame de Paris," the gipsy girl Esmeralda giving a drink to the +humpback Quasimodo. It was the endeavour of the new school, in the arts +of design as well as in literature, to introduce colour, novelty, +picturesqueness, character. They studied the great Venetian and Flemish +colourists, neglected under the reign of David, and "in the first moments +of their fury against _le poncif classique_, they seemed to have adopted +the theory of art of the witches in 'Macbeth'--Fair is foul and foul is +fair",[9] _i.e._, they neglected a traditional beauty in favour of the +_characteristic_. "They sought the true, the new, the picturesque +perhaps more than the ideal; but this reaction was certainly permissible +after so many Ajaxes, Achilleses, and Philocteteses." + +It is not quite so easy to understand what is meant by romanticism in +music as in literature. But Gautier names a number of composers as +adhering to the romantic school, among others, Hippolyte Monpon, who set +to music "the leaping metres, the echo-rimes, the Gothic counter-points +of Hugo's 'Odes et Ballades' and songs like Musset's 'L'Andalouse'-- + + "'Avez vous vu dans Barcelone,' + +"He believed like us in serenades, alcaldes, mantillas, castinets; in all +that Italy and that Spain, a trifle conventional, which was brought into +fashion by the author of 'Don Paëz,' of 'Portia,' and of the 'Marchioness +of Amalgui,' . . . 'Gastibelza, the Man with the Carabine,' and that +guitar, so profoundly Spanish, of Victor Hugo, had inspired Monpon with a +savage, plaintive air, of a strange character, which long remained +popular, and which no romanticist--if any such is left--has forgotten." +A greater name than Monpon was Hector Berlioz, the composer of "Romeo and +Juliette" and "The Damnation of Faust." Gautier says that Berlioz +represented the romantic idea in music, by virtue of his horror of common +formulas, his breaking away from old models, the complex richness of his +orchestration, his fidelity to local colour (whatever that may mean in +music), his desire to make his art express what it had never expressed +before, "the tumultuous and Shaksperian depth of the passions, reveries +amorous or melancholy, the longings and demands of the soul, the +indefinite and mysterious feelings which words cannot render." Berlioz +was a passionate lover of German music and of the writings of Shakspere, +Goethe, and Scott. He composed overtures to "Waverley," "King Lear," and +"Rob Roy"; a cantata on "Sardanapalus," and music for the ghost scene in +"Hamlet" and for Goethe's ballad, "The Fisher." He married an English +actress whom he had seen in the parts of Ophelia, Portia, and Cordelia. +Berlioz _en revanche_ was better appreciated in Germany than in France, +where he was generally considered mad; where his "Symphonic fantastique" +produced an effect analogous to that of the first pieces of Richard +Wagner; and where "the symphonies of Beethoven were still thought +barbarous, and pronounced by the classicists not to be music, any more +than the verses of Victor Hugo were poetry, or the pictures of Delacroix +painting." And finally there were actors and actresses who came to fill +their roles in the new romantic dramas, of whom I need mention only +Madame Dorval, who took the part of Hugo's Marion Delorme. What Gautier +tells us of her is significant of the art that she interpreted, that her +acting was by sympathy, rather than calculation; that it was intensely +emotional; that she owed nothing to tradition; her tradition was +essentially modern, dramatic rather than tragic.[10] + +Romanticism in France was, in a more special sense than in Germany and +England, an effort for freedom, passion, originality, as against rule, +authority, convention. "Romanticism," says Victor Hugo,[11] "so many +times poorly defined, is nothing else than _liberalism_ in +literature. . . . Literary liberty is the child of political +liberty. . . . After so many great things which our fathers have done +and which we have witnessed, here we are, issued forth from old forms of +society; why should we not issue out of the old forms of poetry? A new +people, a new art. While admiring the literature of Louis XIV., so well +adapted to his monarchy, France will know how to have its own literature, +peculiar, personal, and national--this actual France, this France of the +nineteenth century to which Mirabeau has given its freedom and Napoleon +its power." And again:[12] "What I have been pleading for is the liberty +of art as against the despotism of systems, codes, and rules. It is my +habit to follow at all hazards what I take for inspiration, and to change +the mould as often as I change the composition. Dogmatism in the arts is +what I avoid above all things. God forbid that I should aspire to be of +the number of those, either romantics or classics, who make works +_according to their system_; who condemn themselves never to have more +than one form in mind, to always be _proving_ something, to follow any +other laws than those of their organization and of their nature. The +artificial work of such men as those, whatever talents they may possess, +does not exist for art. It is a theory, not a poetry." It is manifest +that a literary reform undertaken in this spirit would not long consent +to lend itself to the purposes of political or religious reaction, or to +limit itself to any single influence like mediaevalism, but would strike +out freely in a multitude of directions; would invent new forms and adapt +old ones to its material, and would become more and more modern, various, +and progressive. And such, in fact, was the history of Victor Hugo's +intellectual development and of the whole literary movement in France +which began with him and with De Stendhal (Henri Beyle). This assertion +of the freedom of the individual artist was naturally accompanied with +certain extravagances. "To develop freely all the caprices of thought," +says Gautier,[13] "even if they shocked taste, convention, and rule, to +hate and repel to the utmost what Horace calls the _profanum vulgus_, and +what the moustached and hairy _rapins_ call grocers, philistines, or +bourgeois; to celebrate love with warmth enough to burn the paper (that +they wrote on); to set it up as the only end and only means of happiness; +to sanctify and deify art, regarded as a second creator; such are the +_données_ of the programme which each sought to realise according to his +strength; the ideal and the secret postulations of the young +romanticists." + +Inasmuch as the French romantic school, even more than the English and +the German, was a breach with tradition and an insurrection against +existing conditions, it will be well to notice briefly what the +particular situation was which the romanticists in France confronted. +"To understand what this movement was and what it did," says +Saintsbury,[14] "we must point out more precisely what were the faults of +the older literature, and especially of the literature of the late +eighteenth century. They were, in the first place, an extremely +impoverished vocabulary, no recourse being had to the older tongue for +picturesque archaisms, and little welcome being given to new phrases, +however appropriate and distinct. In the second place, the adoption, +especially in poetry, of an exceedingly conventional method of speech, +describing everything where possible by an elaborate periphrasis, and +avoiding direct and simple terms. Thirdly, in all forms of literature, +but especially in poetry and drama, the acceptance for almost every kind +of work of cut-and-dried patterns,[15] to which it was bound to conform. +We have already pointed out that this had all but killed the tragic +drama, and it was nearly as bad in the various accepted forms of poetry, +such as fables, epistles, odes, etc. Each piece was expected to resemble +something else, and originality was regarded as a mark of bad taste and +insufficient culture. Fourthly, the submission to a very limited and +very arbitrary system of versification, adapted only to the production of +tragic alexandrines, and limiting even that form of verse to one +monotonous model. Lastly, the limitation of the subject to be treated to +a very few classes and kinds." If to this description be added a +paragraph from Gautier's "Histoire du Romantisme," we shall have a +sufficient idea of the condition of French literature and art before the +appearance of Victor Hugo's "Odes et Ballades" (1826). "One cannot +imagine to what a degree of insignificance and paleness literature had +come. Painting was not much better. The last pupils of David were +spreading their wishywashy colours over the old Graeco-Roman patterns. +The classicists found that perfectly beautiful; but in the presence of +these masterpieces, their admiration could not keep them from putting +their hands before their mouths to cover a yawn; a circumstance, however, +that failed to make them any more indulgent to the artists of the new +school, whom they called tattooed savages and accused of painting with a +drunken broom." One is reminded by Mr. Saintsbury's summary of many +features which we have observed in the English academicism of the +eighteenth century; the impoverished vocabulary, _e.g._, which makes +itself evident in the annotations on the text of Spenser and other old +authors; the horror of common terms, and the constant abuse of the +periphrasis--the "gelid cistern," the "stercoraceous heap," the +"spiculated palings," and the "shining leather that encased the limb." +And the heroic couplet in English usage corresponds very closely to the +French alexandrine. In their dissatisfaction with the paleness and +vagueness of the old poetic diction, and the monotony of the classical +verse, the new school innovated boldly, introducing archaisms, +neologisms, and all kinds of exotic words and popular locutions, even +_argot_ or Parisian slang; and trying metrical experiments of many sorts. +Gautier mentions in particular one Théophile Dondey (who, after the +fashion of the school, anagrammatised his name into Philothée O'Neddy) as +presenting this _caractère d'outrance et de tension_. "The word +_paroxyste_, employed for the first time by Nestor Roqueplan, seems to +have been invented with an application to Philothée. Everything is +_poussé_ in tone, high-coloured, violent, carried to the utmost limits of +expression, of an aggressive originality, almost dripping with the +unheard-of (_ruissilant d'inouïsme_); but back of the double-horned +paradoxes, sophistical maxims, incoherent metaphors, swoln hyperboles, +and words six feet long, are the poetic feeling of the time and the +harmony of rhythm." One hears much in the critical writings of that +period, of the _mot propre_, the _vers libre_, and the _rime brisé_. It +was in tragedy especially that the periphrasis reigned most tyrannically, +and that the introduction of the _mot propre_, _i.e._, of terms that were +precise, concrete, familiar, technical even, if needful, horrified the +classicists. It was beneath the dignity of the muse--the elegant muse of +the Abbé Delille--Hugo tells us, to speak naturally. "She underlines," +in sign of disapprobation, "the old Corneille for his way of saying +crudely + + "'Ah, ne me brouillez pas avec la république.' + +"She still has heavy on her heart his _Tout beau, monsieur_. And many a +_seigneur_ and many a _madame_ was needed to make her forgive our +admirable Racine his _chiens_ so monosyllabic. . . . History in her eyes +is in bad tone and taste. How, for example, can kings and queens who +swear be tolerated? They must be elevated from their royal dignity to +the dignity of tragedy. . . . It is thus that the king of the people +(Henri IV.) polished by M. Legouvé, has seen his _ventre-saint-gris_ +shamefully driven from his mouth by two sentences, and has been reduced, +like the young girl in the story, to let nothing fall from this royal +mouth, but pearls, rubies, and sapphires--all of them false, to say the +truth." It seems incredible to an Englishman, but it is nevertheless +true that at the first representations of "Hernani" in 1830, the simple +question and answer + + "Est il minuit?--Minuit bientot" + +raised a tempest of hisses and applause, and that the opposing factions +of classics and romantics "fought three days over this hemistich. It was +thought trivial, familiar, out of place; a king asks what time it is like +a common citizen, and is answered, as if he were a farmer, _midnight_. +Well done! Now if he had only used some fine periphrasis, _e.g._: + + "----l'heure + Atteindra bientot sa dernière demeure.[16] + +"If they could not away with definite words in the verse, they endured +very impatiently, too, epithets, metaphors, comparisons, poetic +words--lyricism, in short; those swift escapes into nature, those +soarings of the soul above the situation, those openings of poetry +athwart drama, so frequent in Shakspere, Calderon, and Goethe, so rare in +our great authors of the eighteenth century." Gautier gives, as one +reason for the adherence of so many artists to the romantic school, the +circumstance that, being accustomed to a language freely intermixed with +technical terms, the _mot propre_ had nothing shocking for them; while +their special education as artists having put them into intimate relation +with nature, "they were prepared to feel the imagery and colours of the +new poetry and were not at all repelled by the precise and picturesque +details so disagreeable to the classicists. . . . You cannot imagine the +storms that broke out in the parterre of the Théâtre Français, when the +'Moor of Venice,' translated by Alfred de Vigny, grinding his teeth, +reiterated his demands for that handkerchief (_mouchoir_) prudently +denominated _bandeau_ (head-band, fillet) in the vague Shakspere +imitation of the excellent Ducis. A bell was called 'the sounding +brass'; the sea was 'the humid element,' or 'the liquid element,' and so +on. The professors of rhetoric were thunderstruck by the audacity of +Racine, who in the 'Dream of Athalie' had spoken of dogs as dogs--molossi +would have been better--and they advised young poets not to imitate this +license of genius. Accordingly the first poet who wrote bell (_cloche_) +committed an enormity; he exposed himself to the risk of being cut by his +friends and excluded from society." [17] + +As to the alexandrine, the recognised verse of French tragedy, Victor +Hugo tells us,[18] that many of the reformers, wearied by its monotony, +advocated the writing of plays in prose. He makes a plea, however, for +the retention of the alexandrine, giving it greater richness and +suppleness by the displacement of the caesura, and the free use of +_enjambement_ or run-over lines; just as Leigh Hunt and Keats broke up +the couplets of Pope into a freer and looser form of verse. "Hernani" +opened with an _enjambement_ + + "Serait ce déja lui? C'est bien à l'escalier + Dérobé." + +This was a signal of fight--a challenge to the classicists--and the +battle began at once, with the very first lines of the play.[19] In his +dramas Hugo used the alexandrine, but in his lyric poems, his wonderful +resources as a metrist were exhibited to the utmost in the invention of +the most bizarre, eccentric, and original verse forms. An example of +this is the poem entitled "The Djinns" included in "Les Orientales" +(1829). The coming and going of the flying cohort of spirits is +indicated by the crescendo effect of the verse, beginning with a stanza +in lines of two syllables, rising gradually to the middle stanza of the +poem in lines of ten syllables, and then dying away by exactly graded +diminutions to the final stanza: + + "On doute + La nuit-- + J'écoute + Tout fuit, + Tout passe: + L'espace + Efface + Le bruit." [20] + +But the earlier volume of "Odes et Ballades" (1826) offers many instances +of metrical experiments hardly less ingenious. In "La Chasse du +Burgrave" every rime is followed by an echo word, alike in sound but +different in sense: + + "Il part, et Madame Isabelle, + Belle, + Dit gaiement du haut des remparts: + 'Pars!' + Tous las chasseurs sont dans la plaine, + Pleine + D'ardents seigneurs, de sénéchaux + Chauds." + +The English reader is frequently reminded by Hugo's verses of the queer, +abrupt, and _outré_ measures, and fantastic rimes of Robert Browning. +Compare with the above, _e.g._, his "Love among the Ruins." + + "Where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles + Miles and miles + On the solitary pastures where our sheep, + Half asleep," etc. + +From the fact, already pointed out, that the romantic movement in France +was, more emphatically than in England and Germany, a breach with the +native literary tradition, there result several interesting +peculiarities. The first of these is that the new French school, instead +of fighting the classicists with weapons drawn from the old arsenal of +mediaeval France, went abroad for allies; went especially to the modern +writers of England and Germany. This may seem strange when we reflect +that French literature in the Middle Ages was the most influential in +Europe; and that, from the old heroic song of Roland in the eleventh +century down to the very popular court allegory, the "Roman de la Rose", +in the fourteenth, and to the poems of Villon in the fifteenth, it +afforded a rich treasure-house of romantic material in the shape of +chronicles, _chansons de geste_, _romans d'aventures_, _fabliaux_, +_lais_, legends of saints, homilies, miracles, songs, farces, +_jeuspartis_, _pastourelles_, _ballades_--of all the literary forms in +fact which were then cultivated. Nor was this mass of work entirely +without influence on the romanticists of 1830. Théophile Dondey, wrote a +poem on Roland, and Gérard de Nerval (Labrunie) hunted up the old popular +songs and folklore of Touraine and celebrated their naïveté and truly +national character. Attention was directed to the Renaissance group of +poets who preceded the Louis XIV. writers--to Ronsard and "The Pleiade." +Later the Old French Text Society was founded for the preservation and +publication of mediaeval remains. But in general the innovating school +sought their inspiration in foreign literatures. Antony Deschamps +translated the "Inferno"; Alfred de Vigny translated "Othello" as the +"Moor of Venice" (1829), and wrote a play on the story of Chatterton,[21] +and a novel, "Cinq Mars," which is the nearest thing in French literature +to the historical romances of Scott.[22] Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo +were both powerfully impressed by Macpherson's "Ossian." Gérard de +Nerval made, at the age of eighteen, a translation of "Faust" (1828), +which Goethe read with admiration, and wrote to the translator, saying +that he had never before understood his own meaning so well. "It was a +difficult task at that time," says Gautier, "to render into our tongue, +which had become excessively timid, the bizarre and mysterious beauties +of this ultra-romantic drama. . . . From his familiarity with Goethe, +Uhland, Bürger and L. Tieck, Gérard retained in his turn of mind a +certain dreamy tinge which sometimes made his own works seem like +translations of unknown poets beyond the Rhine. . . . The sympathies and +the studies of Gérard de Nerval drew him naturally towards Germany, which +he often visited and where he made fruitful sojourns; the shadow of the +old Teutonic oak hovered more than once above his brow with confidential +murmurs; he walked under the lindens with their heart-shaped leaves; on +the margin of fountains he saluted the elf whose white robe trails a hem +bedewed by the green grass; he saw the ravens circling around the +mountain of Kyffhausen; the kobolds came out before him from the rock +clefts of the Hartz, and the witches of the Brocken danced their grand +Walpurgisnight round about the young French poet, whom they took for a +Jena student. . . . He knows how to blow upon the postillion's horn,[23] +the enchanted melodies of Achim von Arnim and Clement Brentano; and if he +stops at the threshold of an inn embowered in hop vines, the _Schoppen_ +becomes in his hands the cup of the King of Thule." Among the French +romanticists of Hugo's circle there was a great enthusiasm for wild +German ballads like Bürger's "Lenore" and Goethe's "Erl-King." The +translation of A. W. Schlegel's "Vorlesungen über Dramatische Kunst und +Litteratur," by Madame Necker de Saussure, in 1814, was doubtless the +first fruits of Madame de Staël's "Allemagne," published the year before. +Gautier himself and his friend Augustus Mac-Keat (Auguste Maguet) +collaborated in a drama founded on Byron's "Parisina." "Walter Scott was +then in the full flower of his success. People were being initiated into +the mysteries of Goethe's 'Faust,' . . . and discovering Shakspere under +the translation, a little dressed up, of Letourneur; and the poems of +Lord Byron, 'The Corsair,' 'Lara,' 'The Giaour,' 'Manfred,' 'Beppo,' 'Don +Juan,' were coming to us from the Orient, which had not yet grown +commonplace." Gautier said that in _le petit cénacle_--the inner circle +of the initiated--if you admired Racine more than Shakspere and Calderon, +it was an opinion that you would do well to keep to yourself. +"Toleration is not the virtue of neophytes." As for himself, who had set +out as a painter--and only later deviated into letters--he was all for +the Middle Ages: "An old iron baron, feudal, ready to take refuge from +the encroachments of the time, in the castle of Goetz von Berlichingen." +Of Bouchardy, the extraordinary author of "Le Sonneur de Saint Paul," who +"was to Hugo what Marlowe was to Shakspere"--and who was playfully +accused of making wooden models of the plots of his melodramas--Gautier +says that he "planned his singular edifice in advance, like a castle of +Anne Radcliffe, with donjon, turrets, underground chambers, secret +passages, corkscrew stairs, vaulted halls, mysterious closets, hiding +places in the thickness of the walls, oubliettes, charnel-houses, crypts +where his heroes and heroines were to meet later on, to love, hate, +fight, set ambushes, assassinate, or marry. . . . He cut masked doors in +the walls for his expected personage to appear through, and trap doors in +the floor for him to disappear through." + +The reasons for this resort to foreign rather than native sources of +inspiration are not far to seek. The romantic movement in France was +belated; it was twenty or thirty years behind the similar movements in +England and Germany. It was easier and more natural for Stendhal or Hugo +to appeal to the example of living masters like Goethe and Scott, whose +works went everywhere in translation and who held the ear of Europe, than +to revive an interest all at once in Villon or Guillaume de Lorris or +Chrestien de Troyes. Again, in no country had the divorce between +fashionable and popular literature been so complete as in France; in none +had so thick and hard a crust of classicism overlain the indigenous +product of the national genius. It was not altogether easy for Bishop +Percy in 1765 to win immediate recognition from the educated class for +Old English minstrelsy; nor for Herder and Bürger in 1770 to do the same +thing for the German ballads. In France it would have been impossible +before the Bourbon restoration of 1815. In England and in Germany, +moreover, the higher literature had always remained more closely in touch +with the people. In both of those countries the stock of ballad poetry +and folklore was much more extensive and important than in France, and +the habit of composing ballads lasted later. The only French writers of +the classical period who produced anything at all analogous to the German +"Mährchen" were Charles Perrault, who published between 1691-97 his +famous fairy tales, including "Blue Beard," "The Sleeping Beauty," +"Little Red Riding-Hood," "Cinderella," and "Puss in Boots"; and the +Countess d'Aulnoy (died 1720), whose "Yellow Dwarf" and "White Cat" +belong to the same department of nursery tales.[24] + +A curious feature of French romanticism was the way in which the +new-found liberty of art asserted itself in manners, costume, and +personal habits. Victor Hugo himself was scrupulously correct and +subdued in dress, but his young disciples affected bright colours and +rich stuffs. They wore Spanish mantillas, coats with large velvet +lapels, pointed doublets or jerkins of satin or damask velvet in place of +the usual waistcoat, long hair after the Merovingian fashion, and pointed +beards. We have seen that Shenstone was regarded as an eccentric, and +perhaps somewhat dangerous, person when at the university, because he +wore his own hair instead of a wig. In France, half a century later, not +only the _perruque_, but the _menton glabre_ was regarded as symptomatic +of the classicist and the academician; while the beard became a badge of +romanticism. At the beginning of the movement, Gautier informs us, +"there were only two full beards in France, the beard of Eugène Devéria +and the beard of Petrus Borel. To wear them required a courage, a +coolness, and a contempt for the crowd truly heroic. . . . It was the +fashion then is the romantic school to be pale, livid, greenish, a trifle +cadaverous, if possible. It gave one an air of doom, Byronic, +_giaourish_, devoured by passion and remorse." It will be remembered +that the rolling Byronic collar, open at the throat, was much affected at +one time by young persons of romantic temperament in England; and that +the conservative classes, who adhered to the old-fashioned stock and high +collar, looked askance upon these youthful innovators as certainly +atheists and libertines, and probably enemies to society--would-be +corsairs or banditti. It is interesting, therefore, to discover that in +France, too, the final touch of elegance among the romantics was not to +have any white linen in evidence; the shirt collar, in particular, being +"considered as a mark of the grocer, the bourgeois, the philistine." A +certain _gilet rouge_ which Gautier wore when he led the _claque_ at the +first performance of "Hernani" has become historic. This flamboyant +garment--a defiance and a challenge to the academicians who had come to +hiss Hugo's play--was, in fact, a _pourpoint_ or jerkin of +cherry-coloured satin, cut in the shape of a Milanese cuirass, pointed, +busked, and arched in front, and fastened behind the back with hooks and +eyes. From the imperturbable disdain with which the wearer faced the +opera-glasses and laughter of the assembly it was evident that it would +not have taken much urging to induce him to come to the second night's +performance decked in a daffodil waistcoat.[25] The young enthusiasts of +_le petit cénacle_ carried their Byronism so far that, in imitation of +the celebrated revels at Newstead, they used to drink from a human skull +in their feasts at _le Petit Moulin Rouge_. It had belonged to a +drum-major, and Gérard de Nerval got it from his father, who had been an +army surgeon. One of the neophytes, in his excitement, even demanded +that it be filled with sea water instead of wine, in emulation of the +hero of Victor Hugo's novel, "Han d'Islande," who "drank the water of the +seas in the skull of the dead." Another _caput mortuum_ stood on Hugo's +mantelpiece in place of a clock.[26] "If it did not tell the hour, at +least it made us think of the irreparable flight of time. It was the +verse of Horace translated into romantic symbolism." There was a decided +flavour of Bohemianism about the French romantic school, and the spirit +of the lives which many of them led may best be studied in Merger's +classic, "La Vie de Boheme." [27] + +As another special feature of French romanticism, we may note the +important part taken by the theatre in the history of the movement. The +stage was the citadel of classical prejudice, and it was about it that +the fiercest battles were fought. The climacteric year was 1830, in +which year Victor Hugo's tragedy, "Hernani, or Castilian Honour," was put +on at the Theatre Français on February 25th, and ran for thirty nights. +The representation was a fight between the classics and the romantics, +and there was almost a mob in the theatre. The dramatic censorship under +Charles X., though strict, was used in the interest of political rather +than aesthetic orthodoxy. But it is said that some of the older +Academicians actually applied to the king to forbid the acting of +"Hernani." Gautier has given a mock-heroic description of this famous +literary battle _quorum pars magna fuit_. He had received from his +college friend, Gérard de Nerval--who had been charged with the duty of +drumming up recruits for the Hugonic _claque_--six tickets to be +distributed only to tried friends of the cause--sure men and true. The +tickets themselves were little squares of red paper, stamped in the +corner with a mysterious countersign--the Spanish word _hierro_, iron, +not only symbolizing the hero of the drama, but hinting that the +ticket-holder was to bear himself in the approaching fray frankly, +bravely, and faithfully like the sword. The proud recipient of these +tokens of confidence gave two of them to a couple of artists--ferocious +romantics, who would gladly have eaten an Academician, if necessary; two +he gave to a brace of young poets who secretly practised _la rime riche_, +_le mot propre_, and _la metaphore exacte_: the other two he reserved for +his cousin and himself. The general attitude of the audience on the +first nights was hostile, "two systems, two parties, two armies, two +civilizations even--it is not saying too much--confronted one +another, . . . and it was not hard to see that yonder young man with long +hair found the smoothly shaved gentleman opposite a disastrous idiot; and +that he would not long be at pains to conceal his opinion of him." The +classical part of the audience resented the touches of Spanish local +colour in the play, the mixture of pleasantries and familiar speeches +with the tragic dialogue, and of heroism and savagery in the character of +Hernani, and they made all manner of fun of the species of pun--_de ta +suite, j'en suis_--which terminated the first act. "Certain lines were +captured and recaptured, like disputed redoubts, by each army with equal +obstinacy. On one day the romantics would carry a passage, which the +enemy would retake the next day, and from which it became necessary to +dislodge them. What uproar, what cries, cat-calls, hisses, hurricanes of +bravos, thunders of applause! The heads of parties blackguarded each +other like Homer's heroes before they came to blows. . . . For this +generation 'Hernani' was what the 'Cid' was for the contemporaries of +Corneille. All that was young, brave, amorous, poetic, caught the +inspiration of it. Those fine exaggerations, heroic, Castilian, that +superb Spanish emphasis; that language so proud and high even in its +familiarity, those images of a dazzling strangeness, threw us into an +ecstasy and intoxicated us with their heady poetry." The victory in the +end was with the new school. Musset, writing in 1838, says that the +tragedies of Corneille and Racine had disappeared from the French stage +for ten years. + +Another triumphant battlefield--a veritable _fête romantique_--was the +first representation in 1831 of Alexandre Dumas' "Anthony." "It was an +agitation, a tumult, an effervescence. . . . The house was actually +delirious; it applauded, sobbed, wept, shouted. A certain famous green +coat was torn from the author's back and rent into shreds by his too +ardent admirers, who wanted pieces of it for memorabilia." [28] + +The English reader who hears of the stubborn resistance offered to the +performance of 'Hernani' will naturally suppose that there must have been +something about it contrary to public policy--some immorality, or some +political references, at least, offensive to the government; and he will +have a difficulty in understanding that the trouble was all about affairs +purely literary. "Hernani" was fought because it violated the unities of +place and time; because its hero was a Spanish bandit; because in the +dialogue a spade was called a spade, and in the verse the lines overlap. +The French are often charged with frivolity in matters of conduct, but to +the discussion of matters of art they bring a most serious conscience. +The scene in "Hernani" shifts from Saragossa to the castle of Don Ruy +Gomez de Silva in the mountains of Arragon, and to the tomb of +Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle. The time of the action, though not +precisely indicated, covers at least a number of months. The dialogue +is, in many parts, nervous, simple, direct, abrupt; in others running +into long _tirades_ and soliloquies, rich with all the poetic resources +of the greatest poet who has ever used the French tongue. The spirit of +the drama, as well as its form, is romantic. The point of honour is +pushed to a fantastic excess; all the characters display the most +delicate chivalry, the noblest magnanimity, the loftiest Castilian pride. +Don Ruy Gomez allows the King to carry off his bride, rather than yield +up the outlaw who has taken refuge in his castle; and that although he +has just caught this same outlaw paying court to this same bride, whose +accepted lover he is. Hernani, not to be outdone in generosity, offers +his life to his enemy and preserver, giving him his horn and promising to +come to meet his death at its summons. There is the same fault here +which is felt in Hugo's novels. Motives are exaggerated, the _dramatis +personae_ strut. They are rather over-dramatic in their +poses---melodramatic, in fact--and do unlikely things. But this fault is +the fault of a great nature, grandeur exalted into grandiosity, till the +heroes of these plays, "Hernani," "Marion Delorme," "Le Roi d'Amuse," +loom and stalk across the scene like epic demigods of more than mortal +stature and mortal passions. But Hugo was not only a great dramatist and +a great poet, but a most clever playwright. "Hernani" is full of +effective stage devices, crises in the action which make an audience hold +its breath or shudder; moments of intense suspense like that in the third +act, where the old hidalgo pauses before his own portrait, behind which +the outlaw is hidden; or that in the fifth, where Hernani hears at first, +faint and far away, the blast of the fatal horn that summons him to leave +his bride at the altar and go to his death. The young romantics of the +day all got "Hernani" by heart and used to rehearse it at their +assemblies, each taking a part; and the famous trumpet, the _cor +d'Hernani_, became a symbol and a rallying call. + +No such scene would have been possible in an English playhouse as that +which attended the first representation of "Hernani" at the Théâtre +Français. For not only is an English audience comparatively indifferent +to rules of art and canons of taste, but the unities had never prevailed +in practice in England, though constantly recommended in theory. The +French had no Shakspere, and the English no Academy. We may construct an +imaginary parallel to such a scene if we will suppose that all reputable +English tragedies from 1600 down to 1830 had been something upon the +model of Addison's "Cato" and Johnson's "Irene", or better still upon the +model of Dryden's heroic plays in rimed couplets; and that then a drama +like "Romeo and Juliet" had been produced upon the boards of Drury Lane, +and a warm spurt of romantic poetry suddenly injected into the icy +current of classic declamation. + +Having considered the chief points in which the French romantic movement +differed from the similar movements in England and Germany, let us now +glance at the history of its beginnings, and at the work of a few of its +typical figures. The presentation of "Hernani" in 1830 was by no means +the first overt act of the new school. Discussion had been going on for +years in the press. De Stendhal says that the classicists had on their +side two-thirds of the Académie Française, and all of the French +journalists; that their leading organ, however, was the very influential +_Journal des Débats_ and its editor, M. Dussant, the general-in-chief of +the classical party. The romanticists, however, were not without organs +of their own; among which are especially mentioned _Le Conservateur +Littéraire_, begun in 1819, _Le Globe_ in 1824, and the _Annales +Romantiques_ in 1823, the last being "practically a kind of annual of the +Muse Française (1823-24), which had pretty nearly the same contributors." +All of these journals were Bourboniste, except _Le Globe_, which was +liberal in politics.[29] The Academy denounced the new literary doctrine +as a heresy and its followers as a sect, but it made head so rapidly that +as early as 1829, a year before "Hernani" was acted, a "Histoire du +Romantisme en France" appeared, written by a certain M. de Toreinx.[30] +It agrees with other authorities in dating the beginning of the movement +from Chateaubriand's "Le Génie du Christianisme" (1802). +"Chateaubriand," says Gautier, "may be regarded as the grandfather, or, +if you prefer it, the sachem of romanticism in France. In the 'Genius of +Christianity' he restored the Gothic cathedral, in the 'Natchez' he +reopened the sublimity of nature, which had been closed, in 'René' he +invented melancholy and modern passion." + +Sprung from an ancient Breton family, Chateaubriand came to America in +1790 with the somewhat singular and very French idea of travelling +overland to the northwest passage. He was diverted from this enterprise, +however, fell in with an Indian tribe and wandered about with them in the +wilderness. He did not discover the north-west passage, but, according +to Lowell, he invented the forest primeval. Chateaubriand gave the first +full utterance to that romantic note which sounds so loudly in Byron's +verse; the restless dissatisfaction with life as it is, the longing for +something undefined and unattainable, the love for solitude and the +desert, the "passion incapable of being converted into action"--in short, +the _maladie du siécle_--since become familiar in "Childe Harold" and in +Sénancour's "Obermann." In one of the chapters[31] of "Le Génie du +Christianisme" he gives an analysis of this modern melancholy, this +Byronic satiety and discontent, which he says was unknown to the +ancients. "The farther nations advance in civilization, the more this +unsettled state of the passions predominates, for then our imagination is +rich, abundant, and full of wonders; but our existence is poor, insipid, +and destitute of charms. With a full heart we dwell in an empty world." +"Penetrate into those forests of America coeval with the world; what +profound silence pervades these retreats when the winds are husht! What +unknown voices when they begin to rise! Stand still and everything is +mute; take but a step and all nature sighs. Night approaches, the shades +thicken; you hear herds of wild beasts passing in the dark; the ground +murmurs under your feet; the pealing thunder rebellows in the deserts; +the forest bows, the trees fall, an unknown river rolls before you. The +moon at length bursts forth in the east; as you proceed at the foot of +the trees, she seems to move before you on their tops and solemnly to +accompany your steps. The wanderer seats himself on the trunk of an oak +to await the return of day; he looks alternately at the nocturnal +luminary, the darkness, and the river; he feels restless, agitated, and +in expectation of something extraordinary; a pleasure never felt before, +an unusual fear, cause his heart to throb, as if he were about to be +admitted to some secret of the Divinity; he is alone in the depth of the +forests, but the mind of man is equal to the expanse of nature, and all +the solitudes of the earth are not too vast for the contemplations of his +heart. There is in man an instinctive melancholy, which makes him +harmonise with the scenery of nature. Who has not spent whole hours +seated on the bank of a river, contemplating its passing waves? Who has +not found pleasure on the seashore in viewing the distant rock whitened +by the billows? How much are the ancients to be pitied, who discovered +in the ocean naught but the palace of Neptune and the cavern of Proteus; +it was hard that they should perceive only the adventures of the Tritons +and the Nereids in the immensity of the seas, which seems to give an +indistinct measure of the greatness of our souls, and which excites a +vague desire to quit this life, that we may embrace all nature and taste +the fulness of joy in the presence of its Author." [32] + +The outbreak of the Revolution recalled Chateaubriand to France. He +joined the army of the _emigrées_ at Coblentz, was wounded at the siege +of Thionville, and escaped into England where he lived (1793-1800) until +the time of the Consulate, when he made his peace with Napoleon and +returned to France. He had been a free-thinker, but was converted to +Christianity by a dying message from his mother who was thrown into +prison by the revolutionists. "I wept," said Chateaubriand, "and I +believed." "Le Génie du Christianisme" was an expression of that +reactionary feeling which drove numbers of Frenchmen back into the +Church, after the blasphemies and horrors of the Revolution. It came out +just when Napoleon was negotiating his _Concordat_ with the Pope, and was +trying to enlist the religious and conservative classes in support of his +government; and it reinforced his purposes so powerfully that he +appointed the author, in spite of his legitimism, to several diplomatic +posts. "Le Génie du Christianisme" is indeed a plea for Christianity on +aesthetic grounds--an attempt, as has been sneeringly said, to recommend +Christianity by making it look pretty. Chateaubriand was not a close +reasoner; his knowledge was superficial and inaccurate; his character was +weakened by vanity and shallowness. He was a sentimentalist and a +rhetorician, but one of the most brilliant of rhetoricians; while his +sentiment, though not always deep or lasting, was for the nonce +sufficiently sincere. He had in particular a remarkable talent for +pictorial description; and his book, translated into many tongues, +enjoyed an extraordinary vogue. The English version, made in 1815, was +entitled "The Beauties of Christianity." For Chateaubriand undertook to +show that the Christian religion had influenced favorably literature and +the fine arts; that it was more poetical than any other system of belief +and worship. He compared Homer and Vergil with Dante, Tasso, Milton, and +other modern poets, and awarded the palm to the latter in the treatment +of the elementary relations and stock characters, such as husband and +wife, father and child, the priest, the soldier, the lover, etc.; +preferring Pope's Eloisa, _e.g._, to Vergil's Dido, and "Paul and +Virginia" to the idyls of Theocritus. He pronounced the Christian +mythology--angels, devils, saints, miracles--superior to the pagan; and +Dante's Hell much more impressive to the imagination than Tartarus. He +dwelt eloquently upon the beauty and affecting significance of Gothic +church architecture, of Catholic ritual and symbolism, the dress of the +clergy, the crucifix, the organ, the church bell, the observances of +Christian festivals, the monastic life, the orders of chivalry, the +country churchyards where the dead were buried, and even upon the +superstitions which the last century had laughed to scorn; such as the +belief in ghosts, the adoration of relics, vows to saints and pilgrimages +to holy places. In his chapter on "The Influence of Christianity upon +Music," he says that the "Christian religion is essentially melodious for +this single reason, that she delights in solitude"; the forests are her +ancient abode, and her musician "ought to be acquainted with the +melancholy notes of the waters and the trees; he ought to have studied +the sound of the winds in cloisters, and those murmurs that pervade the +Gothic temple, the grass of the cemetery, and the vaults of death." He +repeats the ancient fable that the designers of the cathedrals were +applying forest scenery to architecture; "Those ceilings sculptured into +foliage of different kinds, those buttresses which prop the walls and +terminate abruptly like the broken trunks of trees, the coolness of the +vaults, the darkness of the sanctuary, the dim twilight of the aisles, +the chapels resembling grottoes, the secret passages, the low doorways, +in a word everything in a Gothic church reminds you of the labyrinths of +a wood, everything excites a feeling of religious awe, of mystery, and of +the Divinity." The birds perch upon the steeples and towers as if they +were trees, and "the Christian architect, not content with building +forests, has been desirous to retain their murmurs, and by means of the +organ and of bells, he has attached to the Gothic temple the very winds +and the thunders that roll in the recesses of the woods. Past ages, +conjured up by these religious sounds, raise their venerable voices from +the bosom of the stones and sigh in every corner of the vast cathedral. +The sanctuary re-echoes like the cavern of the ancient Sibyl; +loud-tongued bells swing over your head; while the vaults of death under +your feet are profoundly silent." He praises the ideals of chivalry; +gives a sympathetic picture of the training and career of a +knight-errant, and asks: "Is there then nothing worthy of admiration in +the times of a Roland, a Godfrey, a Coucey, and a Joinville; in the times +of the Moors and the Saracens; . . . when the strains of the Troubadours +were mingled with the clash of arms, dances with religious ceremonies, +and banquets and tournaments with sieges and battles?" Chateaubriand +says that the finest Gothic ruins are to be found in the English lake +country, on the Scotch mountains, and in the Orkney Islands; and that +they are more impressive than classic ruins because in the latter the +arches are parallel with the curves of the sky, while in the Gothic or +pointed architecture the arches "form a contrast with the circular arches +of the sky and the curvatures of the horizon. The Gothic being, +moreover, entirely composed of _voids_, the more readily admits of the +decoration of herbage and flowers than the fulness of the Grecian orders. +The clustered columns, the domes carved into foliage, or scooped out in +the form of a fruit-basket, offered so many receptacles into which the +winds carry, with the dust, the seeds of vegetables. The house-leek +fixes itself in the mortar, the mosses cover rugged masses with their +elastic coating; the thistle projects its brown burrs from the embrasure +of a window; and the ivy creeping along the northern cloisters falls in +festoons over the arches." + +All this is romantic enough; we have the note of Catholic mediaevalism +and the note of Ossianic melancholy combined; and this some years before +"The Lay of the Last Minstrel," and when Byron was a boy of fourteen and +still reading his Ossian.[33] But we are precluded from classifying +Chateaubriand among full-fledged romanticists. His literary taste was by +no means emancipated from eighteenth-century standards. In speaking of +Milton, _e.g._, he says that if he had only been born in France in the +reign of Louis XIV., and had "combined with the native grandeur of his +genius the taste of Racine and Boileau," the "Paradise Lost" might have +equalled the "Iliad." + +Chateaubriand never called himself a romantic. It is agreed upon all +hands that the expressions _romantisme_ and _littérature romantique_ were +first invented or imported by Madame de Staël in her "L'Allemagne" +(1813), "pour exprimer l'affranchissement des vieilles formes +littéraires." [34] Some ten years later, or by 1823, when Stendhal +published his "Racine et Shakspere," the issue between the schools had +been joined and the question quite thoroughly agitated in the Parisian +journals. Stendhal announced himself as an adherent of the new, but his +temper was decidedly cool and unromantic. I have quoted his epigrammatic +definition of romanticism.[35] + +In this _brochure_ Stendhal announces that France is on the eve of a +literary revolution and that the last hour of classicism has struck, +although as yet the classicists are in possession of the theatres, and of +all the salaried literary positions under government; and all the +newspapers of all shades of political opinion are shut to the +romanticists. A company of English actors who attempted to give some of +Shakspere's plays at the Porte-Saint-Martin in 1822 were mobbed. "The +hisses and cat-calls began before the performance, of which it was +impossible to hear a single word. As soon as the actors appeared they +were pelted with apples and eggs, and from time to time the audience +called out to them to talk French, and shouted, '_À bas Shakspere! c'est +un aide de camp du duc de Wellington_.'" It will be remembered that in +our own day the first representations of Wagner's operas at Paris were +interrupted with similar cries: "_Pas de Wagner_!," "_À bas les +Allemands_!," etc. + +In 1827 Kemble's company visited Paris and gave, in English, "Hamlet," +"Romeo and Juliet," "Othello," and "The Merchant of Venice." Dumas went +to see them and described the impression made upon him by Shakspere, in +language identical with that which Goethe used about himself.[36] He was +like a man born blind and suddenly restored to sight. Dumas' "Henry +III." (1829), a _drame_ in the manner of Shakspere's historical plays, +though in prose, was the immediate result of this new vision. English +actors were in Paris again in 1828 and 1829; and in 1835 Macready +presented "Hamlet," "Othello," and "Henry IV." with great success. +Previous to these performances, the only opportunities that the French +public had to judge of Shakspere's dramas as acting plays were afforded +by the wretched adaptations of Ducis and other stage carpenters. Ducis +had read Shakspere only in Letourneur's very inadequate translation +(revised by Guizot in 1821). His "Hamlet" was played in 1769; "Macbeth," +1784, "King John," 1791; "Othello" (turned into a comedy), 1792. +Mercier's "Timon" was given in 1794; and Dejaure's "Imogènes"--an +"arrangement" of "Cymbeline"--in 1796. The romanticists labored to put +their countrymen in possession of better versions of Shakspere. Alfred +de Vigny rendered "Othello" (1827), and Emile Deschamps, "Romeo and +Juliet" and "Macbeth." + +Stendhal interviewed a director of one of the French theatres and tried +to persuade him that there would be money in it for any house which would +have the courage to give a season of romantic tragedy. But the director, +who seemed to be a liberal-minded man, assured him that until some stage +manager could be found rich enough to buy up the dramatic criticism of +the _Constitutionnel_ and two or three other newspapers, the law students +and medical students, who were under the influence of those journals, +would never suffer the play to get as far as the third act. "If it were +otherwise," he said, "don't you suppose that we would have tried +Schiller's 'William Tell'? The police would have cut out a quarter of +it; one of our adapters another quarter; and what was left would reach a +hundred representations, _provided it could once secure three_." + +To this the author replied that the immense majority of young society +people had been converted to romanticism by the eloquence of M. Cousin. + +"Sir," said the director, "your young society people don't go into the +parterre to engage in fisticuffs [_faire le coup de poing_], and at the +theatre, as in politics, we despise philosophers who don't fight." +Stendhal adds that the editors of influential journals found their +interest in this state of things, since many of them had pieces of their +own on the stage, written of course in alexandrine verse and on the +classic model; and what would become of these masterpieces if Talma +should ever get permission to play in a prose translation of "Macbeth," +abridged, say, one-third? "I said one day to one of these gentlemen, +28,000,000 men, _i.e._, 18,000,000 in England and 10,000,000 in America, +admire 'Macbeth' and applaud it a hundred times a year. 'The English,' +he answered me with great coolness, 'cannot have real eloquence or poetry +truly admirable; the nature of their language, which is not derived from +the Latin, makes it quite impossible.'" A great part of "Racine et +Shakspere" is occupied with a refutation of the doctrine of the unities +of time and place, and with a discussion of the real nature of dramatic +illusion, on which their necessity was supposed to rest. Stendhal +maintains that the illusion is really stronger in Shakspere's tragedies +than in Racine's. It is not essential here to reproduce his argument, +which is the same that is familiar to us in Lessing and in Coleridge, +though he was an able controversialist, and his logic and irony give a +freshness to the treatment of this hackneyed theme which makes his little +treatise well worth the reading. To illustrate the nature of _real_ +stage illusion, he says that last year (August, 1822) a soldier in a +Baltimore theatre, seeing Othello about to kill Desdemona, cried out, "It +shall never be said that a damned nigger killed a white woman in my +presence," and at the same moment fired his gun and broke an arm of the +actor who was playing Othello. "_Eh bien_, this soldier had illusion: he +believed that the action which was passing on the stage was true." + +Stendhal proposes the following as a definition of romantic tragedy: "It +is written in prose; the succession of events which it presents to the +eyes of the spectators lasts several months, and they happen in different +places." He complains that the French comedies are not funny, do not +make any one laugh; and that the French tragic dialogue is epic rather +than dramatic. He advises his readers to go and see Kean in "Richard" +and "Othello"; and says that since reading Schlegel and Dennis (!) he has +a great contempt for the French critics. He appeals to the usages of the +German and English stage in disregarding the rules of Aristotle, and +cites the great popularity of Walter Scott's romances, which, he says, +are nothing more than romantic tragedies with long descriptions +interspersed, to support his plea for a new kind of French prose-tragedy; +for which he recommends subjects taken from national history, and +especially from the mediaeval chroniclers like Froissart. Nevertheless, +he does not advise the direct imitation of Shakspere. He blames Schiller +for copying Shakspere, and eulogizes Werner's "Luther" as nearer to the +masterpieces of Shakspere than Schiller's tragedies are. He wants the +new French drama to resemble Shakspere only in dealing freely with modern +conditions, as the latter did with the conditions of his time, without +having the fear of Racine or any other authority before its eyes. + +In 1824 the Academy, which was slowly constructing its famous dictionary +of the French language, happened to arrive at the new word _romanticism_ +which needed defining. This was the signal for a heated debate in that +venerable body, and the director, M. Auger, was commissioned to prepare a +manifesto against the new literary sect, to be read at the meeting of the +Institute on the 24th of April next. It was in response to this +manifesto that Stendhal wrote the second part of his "Racine et +Shakspere" (1825), attached to which is a short essay entitled "Qu'est ce +que le Romanticisme?" [37] addressed to the Italian public, and intended +to explain to them the literary situation in France, and to enlist their +sympathies on the romantic side. "Shakspere," he says, "the hero of +romantic poetry, as opposed to Racine, the god of the classicists, wrote +for strong souls; for English hearts which were what Italian hearts were +about 1500, emerging from that sublime Middle Age _questi tempi della +virtu sconosciutta_." Racine, on the contrary, wrote for a slavish and +effeminate court. The author disclaims any wish to impose Shakspere on +the Italians. The day will come, he hopes, when they will have a +national tragedy of their own; but to have that, they will do better to +follow in the footprints of Shakspere than, like Alfieri, in the +footprints of Racine. In spite of the pedants, he predicts that Germany +and England will carry it over France; Shakspere, Schiller, and Lord +Byron will carry it over Racine and Boileau. He says that English poetry +since the French Revolution has become more enthusiastic, more serious, +more passionate. It needed other subjects than those required by the +witty and frivolous eighteenth century, and sought its heroes in the +rude, primitive, inventive ages, or even among savages and barbarians. +It had to have recourse to time or countries when it was permitted to the +higher classes of society to have passions. The Greek and Latin classics +could give no help; since most of them belonged to an epoch as +artificial, and as far removed from the naïve presentation of the +passions, as the eighteenth century itself. The court of Augustus was no +more natural than that of Louis XIV. Accordingly the most successful +poets in England, during the past twenty years, have not only sought +deeper emotions than those of the eighteenth century, but have treated +subjects which would have been scornfully rejected by the age of _bel +esprit_. The anti-romantics can't cheat us much longer. "Where, among +the works of our Italian pedants, are the books that go through seven +editions in two months, like the romantic poems that are coming out in +London at the present moment? Compare, _e.g._, the success of Moore's +'Lalla Rookh,' which appeared in June, 1817, and the eleventh edition of +which I have before me, with the success of the 'Camille' of the highly +classical Mr. Botta!'" + +In 1822, a year before the appearance of Stendhal's "Racine et +Shakspere," Victor Hugo had published his "Odes et Poésies Diverses," and +a second collection followed in 1824. In the prefaces to these two +volumes he protests against the use of the terms classic and romantic, as +_mots de guerre_ and vague words which every one defines in accordance +with his own prejudices. If romanticism means anything, he says, it +means the literature of the nineteenth century, and all the anathemas +launched at the heads of contemporary writers reduce themselves to the +following method of argument. "We condemn the literature of the +nineteenth century because it is romantic. And why is it romantic? +Because it is the literature of the nineteenth century." As to the false +taste which disfigured the eighteenth-century imitations of Racine and +Boileau, he would prefer to distinguish that by the name _scholastic_, a +style which is to the truly classic what superstition and fanaticism are +to religion. The intention of these youthful poems of Hugo was partly +literary and partly political and religious: "The history of mankind +affords no poetry," he says, "except when judged from the vantage-ground +of monarchical ideas and religious beliefs. . . . He has thought +that . . . in substituting for the outworn and false colours of pagan +mythology the new and truthful colours of the Christian theogony, one +could inject into the ode something of the interest of the drama, and +could make it speak, besides, that austere, consoling, and religious +language which is needed by an old society that issues still trembling +from the saturnalia of atheism and anarchy. . . . The literature of the +present, the actual literature, is the expression, by way of +anticipation, of that religious and monarchical society which will issue, +doubtless, from the midst of so many ancient debris, of so many recent +ruins. . . . If the literature of the great age of Louis XIV. had +invoked Christianity in place of worshipping heathen gods . . . the +triumph of the sophistical doctrines of the last century would have been +much more difficult, perhaps even impossible. . . . But France had not +that good fortune; its national poets were almost all pagan poets, and +our literature was rather the expression of an idolatrous and democratic, +than of a monarchical and Christian society." The prevailing note, +accordingly, in these early odes is that of the Bourbon Restoration of +1815-30, and of the Catholic reaction against the sceptical +Éclaircissement of the eighteenth century. The subjects are such as +these: "The Poet in the Times of Revolution"; "La Vendée"; "The Maidens +of Verdun," which chants the martyrdom of three young royalist sisters +who were put to death for sending money and supplies to the _emigres_; +"Quibiron," where a royalist detachment which had capitulated under +promise of being treated like prisoners of war, were shot down in squads +by the Convention soldiery; "Louis XVII."; "The Replacement of the Statue +of Henry IV."; "The Death of the Duke of Berry"; "The Birth of the Duke +of Bourdeaux" and his "Baptism"; "The Funeral of Louis XVIII."; "The +Consecration of Charles X."; "The Death of Mlle. de Sombreuil," the +royalist heroine who saved her father's life by drinking a cupful of +human blood in the days of the Terror; and "La Bande Noire," which +denounces with great bitterness the violation of the tombs of the kings +of France by the regicides, and pleads for the preservation of the ruins +of feudal times: + + "O murs! ô créneaux! ô tourelle! + Remparts, fossés aux ponts mouvants! + Lourds faisceaux de colonnes frêles! + Fiers chateaux! modestes couvents! + Cloîtres poudreux, salles antiques, + Où gémissaient les saints cantiques, + Où riaient les banquets joyeux! + Lieux où le coeur met ses chimères! + Églises où priaient nos mères + Tours où combattaient nos aïeux!" + +In these two ode collections, though the Catholic and legitimist +inspiration is everywhere apparent, there is nothing revolutionary in the +language or verse forms. But in the "Odes et Ballades" of 1826, "the +romantic challenge," says Saintsbury, "is definitely thrown down. The +subjects are taken by preference from times and countries which the +classical tradition had regarded as barbarous. The metres and rhythm are +studiously broken, varied, and irregular; the language has the utmost +possible glow of colour, as opposed to the cold correctness of classical +poetry, the completest disdain of conventional periphrasis, the boldest +reliance on exotic terms and daring neologisms." This description +applies more particularly to the Ballades, many of which, such as "La +Ronde du Sabbat," "La Légende de la Nonne," "La Chasse du Burgrave," and +"Le Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean" are mediaeval studies in which the lawless +_grotesquerie_ of Gothic art runs riot. "The author, in composing them," +says the preface, "has tried to give some idea of what the poems of the +first troubadours of the Middle Ages might have been; those Christian +rhapsodists who had nothing in the world but their swords and their +guitars, and went from castle to castle paying for their entertainment +with their songs." To show that liberty in art does not mean disorder, +the author draws an elaborate contrast between the garden of Versailles +and a primitive forest, in a passage which will remind the reader of +similar comparisons in the writings of Shenstone, Walpole, and other +English romanticists of the eighteenth century. There is as much order, +he asserts, in the forest as in the garden, but it is a live order, not a +dead regularity. "Choose then," he exclaims, "between the masterpiece of +gardening and the work of nature; between that which is beautiful by +convention and that which is beautiful without rule; between an +artificial literature and an original poetry. . . . In two words--and we +shall not object to have judgment passed in accordance with this +observation on the two kinds of literature that are called _classic_ and +_romantic_,--regularity is the taste of mediocrity, order is the taste of +genius. . . . It will be objected to us that the virgin forest hides in +its magnificent solitudes a thousand dangerous animals, while the marshy +basins of the French garden conceal at most a few harmless creatures. +That is doubtless a misfortune; but, taking it all in all, we like a +crocodile better than a frog; we prefer a barbarism of Shakspere to an +insipidity of Campistron." But above all things--such is the doctrine of +this preface--do not imitate anybody--not Shakspere any more than Racine. +"He who imitates a _romantic_ poet becomes thereby a _classic_, and just +because he imitates." In 1823 Hugo had published anonymously his first +prose romance, "Han d'Islande," the story of a Norwegian bandit. He got +up the local colour for this by a careful study of the Edda and the +Sagas, that "poésie sauvage" which was the admiration of the new school +and the horror of the old. But it was in the preface to "Cromwell," +published in 1827, that Hugo issued the full and, as it were, official +manifesto of romanticism. The play itself is hardly actable. It is +modelled, in a sense, upon the historical plays of Shakspere, but its +Cromwell is a very melodramatic person, and its Puritans and Cavaliers +strike the English reader with the same sense of absurdity produced by +the pictures of English society in "L'Homme qui Rit." But of the famous +preface Gautier says: "The Bible among Protestants, the Koran among +Mahometans are not the object of a deeper veneration. It was, indeed, +for us the book of books, the book which contained the pure doctrine." +It consisted in great part of a triumphant attack upon the unities, and +upon the verse and style which classic usage had consecrated to French +tragedy. I need not repeat the argument here. It is already familiar, +and some sentences[38] from this portion of the essay I have quoted +elsewhere. + +The preface also contained a plea for another peculiarity of the romantic +drama, its mixture, viz., of tragedy and comedy. According to Hugo, this +is the characteristic trait, the fundamental difference, which separates +modern from ancient art, romantic from classical literature. Antique +art, he says, rejected everything which was not purely beautiful, but the +Christian and modern spirit feels that there are many things in creation +besides that which is, humanly speaking, beautiful; and that everything +which is in nature is--or has the right to be--in art. It includes in +its picture of life the ugly, the misshapen, the monstrous. Hence +results a new type, the grotesque, and a new literary form, romantic +comedy. He proceeds to illustrate this thesis with his usual wealth of +imaginative detail and pictorial language. The Middle Ages, more than +any other period, are rich in instances of that intimate blending of the +comic and the horrible which we call the grotesque; the witches' Sabbath, +the hoofed and horned devil, the hideous figures of Dante's hell; the +Scaramouches, Crispins, Harlequins of Italian farce; "grimacing +silhouettes of man, quite unknown to grave antiquity"; and "all those +local dragons of our legends, the gargoyle of Rouen, the Taras of +Tarascon, etc. . . . The contact of deformity has given to the modern +sublime something purer, grander, more sublime, in short, than the +antique beauty. . . . Is it not because the modern imagination knows how +to set prowling hideously about our churchyards, the vampires, the ogres, +the erl-kings, the _psylles_, the ghouls, the _brucolaques_, the +_aspioles_, that it is able to give its fays that bodiless form, that +purity of essence which the pagan nymphs approach so little? The antique +Venus is beautiful, admirable, no doubt; but what has spread over the +figures of Jean Goujon that graceful, strange, airy elegance? What has +given them that unfamiliar character of life and grandeur, unless it be +the neighbourhood of the rude and strong carvings of the Middle +Ages? . . . The grotesque imprints its character especially upon that +wonderful architecture which in the Middle Ages takes the place of all +the arts. It attaches its marks to the fronts of the cathedrals; +enframes its hells and purgatories under the portal arches, and sets them +aflame upon the windows; unrolls its monsters, dogs, demons around the +capitals, along the friezes, on the eaves." We find this same bizarre +note in the mediaeval laws, social usages, church institutions, and +popular legends, in the court fools, in the heraldic emblems, the +religious processions, the story of "Beauty and the Beast." It explains +the origin of the Shaksperian drama, the high-water mark of modern art. + +Shakspere does not seem to me an artist of the grotesque. He is by turns +the greatest of tragic and the greatest of comic artists, and his tragedy +and comedy lie close together, as in life, but without that union of the +terrible and the ludicrous in the same figure, and that element of +deformity which is the essence of the proper grotesque. He has created, +however, one specimen of true grotesque, the monster Caliban. Caliban is +a comic figure, but not purely comic; there is something savage, uncouth, +and frightful about him. He has the dignity and the poetry which all +rude, primitive beings have: which the things of nature, rocks and trees +and wild beasts have. It is significant, therefore, that Robert Browning +should have been attracted to Caliban. Browning had little comic power, +little real humour; in him the grotesque is an imperfect form of the +comic. The same criticism applies to Hugo. He gave a capital example of +the grotesque in the four fools in the third act of "Cromwell" and in +Triboulet, the Shaksperian jester of "Le Roi s'Amuse." Their songs and +dialogues are bizarre and fantastic in the highest degree, but they are +not funny; they do not make us laugh like the clowns of Shakspere--they +are not comic, but merely queer. Hugo's defective sense of humour is +shown in the way in which he frequently takes that one step which, +Napoleon said, separates the sublime from the ridiculous--exaggerating +character and motive till the heroic passes into melodrama and melodrama +into absurdity. This fault is felt in his great prose romance +"Notre-Dame de Paris" (1831), a picture of mediaeval Paris, in which the +humpback Quasimodo affords an exact illustration of what the author meant +by the grotesque; another of the same kind is furnished by the hero of +his later romance "L'Homme qui Rit." + +Gautier has left a number of sketches, written in a vein lovingly +humorous, of some of the eccentrics--the _curiosités romantiques_--whose +oddities are perhaps even more instructive as to the many directions +which the movement took, than the more ordered enthusiasm of the less +extreme votaries. There was the architect Jule Vabre, _e.g._, whose +specialty was Shakspere. Shakspere "was his god, his idol, his passion, +a wonder to which he could never grow accustomed." Vabre's life-project +was a French translation of his idol, which should be absolutely true to +the text, reproducing the exact turn and movement of the phrase, +following the alternations of prose, rime, and blank verse in the +original, and shunning neither its euphemistic subtleties nor its +barbaric roughnesses. To fit himself for this task, he went to London +and lived there, striving to submit himself to the atmosphere and the +_milieu_, and learning to think in English; and there Gautier encountered +him about 1843, in a tavern at High-Holborn, drinking stout and eating +_rosbif_ and speaking French with an English accent. Gautier told him +that all he had to do now, to translate Shakspere, was to learn French. +"I am going to work at it," he answered, more struck with the wisdom than +the wit of the suggestion. A few years later Vabre turned up in France +with a project for a sort of international seminary. "He wanted to +explain 'Hernani' to the English and 'Macbeth' to the French. It made +him tired to see the English learning French in 'Telemaque,' and the +French learning English in the 'Vicar of Wakefield.'" Poor Vabre's great +Shakspere translation never materialised; but François-Victor Hugo, the +second son of the great romancer, carried out many of Vabre's principles +of translation in his version of Shakspere. + +Another curious figure was the water-colour painter, Célestin Nanteuil, +who suggested to Gautier the hero of an early piece of his own, written +to accompany an engraving in an English keepsake, representing the Square +of St. Sebald at Nuremberg. This hero, Elias Wildman-stadius, or l'Homme +Moyen-âge, was "in a sort, the Gothic genius of that Gothic town"--a +_retardataire_ or man born out of his own time--who should have been born +in 1460, in the days of Albrecht Dürer. Célestin Nanteuil "had the air +of one of those tall angels carrying a censer or playing on the +_sambucque_, who inhabit the gable ends of cathedrals; and he seemed to +have come down into the city among the busy townsfolk, still wearing his +nimbus plate behind his head in place of a hat, and without having the +least suspicion that it is not perfectly natural to wear one's aureole in +the street." He is described as resembling in figure "the spindling +columns of the church naves of the fifteenth century. . . . The azure of +the frescoes of Fiesole had furnished the blue of his eyes; his hairs, of +the blond of an aureole, seemed painted one by one, with the gold of the +illuminators of the Middle Ages. . . . One would have said, that from +the height of his Gothic pinnacle Célestin Nanteuil overlooked the actual +town, hovering above the sea of roofs, regarding the eddying blue smoke, +perceiving the city squares like a checkerboard, the streets like the +notches of a saw in a stone bench, the passers-by like mice; but all that +confusedly athwart the haze, while from his airy observatory he saw, +close at hand and in all their detail, the rose windows, the bell towers +bristling with crosses, the kings, patriarchs, prophets, saints, angels +of all the orders, the whole monstrous army of demons or chimeras, +nailed, scaled, tushed, hideously winged; _guivres_, taresques, +gargoyles, asses' heads, apes' muzzles, all the strange bestiary of the +Middle Age." Nanteuil furnished illustrations for the books of the +French romanticists. "Hugo's' Notre-Dame de Paris' was the object of his +most fervent admiration, and he drew from it subjects for a large number +of designs and aquarelles." Gautier mentions, as among his rarest +vignettes, the frontispiece of "Albertus," recalling Rembrandt's manner; +and his view of the Palazzo of San Marc in Royer's "Venezia la bella." +Gautier says that one might apply to Nanteuil's aquarelles what Joseph +Delorme[39] said of Hugo's ballads, that they were Gothic window +paintings. "The essential thing in these short fantasies is the +carriage, the shape, the clerical, monastic, royal, seignorial +_awkwardness_ of the figures and their high colouring. . . . Célestin +had made his own the angular anatomy of coats-of-arms, the extravagant +contours of the mantles, the chimerical or monstrous figures of heraldry, +the branchings of the emblazoned skirts, the lofty attitude of the feudal +baron, the modest air of the chatelaine, the sanctimonious physiognomy of +the big Carthusian Carmelite, the furtive mien of the young page with +parti-coloured pantaloons. . . . He excelled also in setting the persons +of poem, drama, or romance in ornamented frames like the Gothic shrines +with triple colonettes, arches, canopied and bracketed niches, with +statuettes, figurines, emblematic animals, male and female saints on a +background of gold. He entered so deeply into the sentiment of the old +Gothic imagery that he could make a Lady of the Pillar in a brocade +dalmatica, a Mater Dolorosa with the seven swords in her breast, a St. +Christopher with the child Jesus on his shoulder and leaning on a palm +tree, worthy to serve as types to the Byzantine painters of Epinal. . . . +Nothing resembled less the clock face and troubadour Middle Age which +flourished about 1825. It is one of the main services of the romantic +school to have thoroughly disembarrassed art from this." Gautier +describes also a manuscript piece of Nerval, for which he furnished a +prologue, and which was an imitation of one of the _Diableries_, or +popular farces of the Middle Ages, in which the devil was introduced. It +contained a piece within the piece, in the fashion of an old mystery +play, with scenery consisting of the mouth of hell, painted red and +surmounted by a blue paradise starred with gold. An angel came down to +play at dice with the devil for souls. In his excess of zeal, the angel +cheated and the devil grew angry and called him a "big booby, a celestial +fowl," and threatened to pull his feathers out ("Le Prince des Sots"). + +In France, as in England and Germany, the romantic revival promoted and +accompanied works of erudition like Raynouard's researches in Provençal +and old French philology and the poetry of the troubadours (1816); Creuzé +de Lesser's "Chevaliers de la Table Ronde"; Marchangy's "La Gaule +Poétique." History took new impulse from that _sens du passé_ which +romanticism did so much to awaken. Augustin Thierry's obligations to +Scott have already been noticed. It was the war chant of the Prankish +warriors in Chateaubriand's "Les Martyrs"-- + + "Pharamond! Pharamond! nous avons combattu avec l'épée"-- + +which first excited his historical imagination and started him upon the +studies which issued in the "Récits Mérovingiens" and the "Conquéte +d'Angleterre." Barante's "Ducs de Bourgogne" (1814-28) confessedly owes +much of its inception to Scott. Michaud's "History of the Crusades" +(1811-22) and the "History of France" (1833-67) by that most romantic of +historians, Michelet, may also be credited to the romantic movement. The +end of the movement, as a definite period in the history of French +literature, is commonly dated from the failure upon the stage of Victor +Hugo's "Les Burgraves" in 1843. The immediate influence of the French +romantic school upon English poetry or prose was slight. Like the German +school, it came too late. The first generation of English romantics was +drawing to its close. Scott died two years after "Hernani" stormed the +French theatre. Two years later still died Coleridge, long since fallen +silent--as a poet--and always deaf to Gallic charming. We shall find the +first impress of French romance among younger men and in the latter half +century. + +In France itself the movement passed on into other phases. Many early +adherents of Hugo's _cénacle_ and _entourage_ fell away from their +allegiance and, like Sainte-Beuve and Musset, took up a critical or even +antagonistic attitude. Musset's "Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet" [40] +turns the whole romantic contention into mockery. Yet no work more +fantastically and gracefully romantic, more Shaksperian in quality, was +produced by any member of the school than Musset produced in such dramas +as "Fantasio" and "Lorenzaccio." + + +[1] It is scarcely necessary to say that no full-length picture of the +French romantic movement is attempted in this chapter, but only such a +sketch as should serve to illustrate its relation to English romanticism. +For the history of the movement, besides the authorities quoted or +referred to in the text, I have relied principally upon the following: +Petit de Julleville: "Histoire de la Littérature Française," Tome vii., +Paris, 1899. Brunetière: "Manual of the History of French Literature" +(authorized translation), New York, 1898. L. Bertrand; "La Fin du +Classicisme," Paris, 1897. Adolphe Jullien: "Le Romantisme et L'Editeur +Renduel," Paris, 1897. I have also read somewhat widely, though not +exhaustively, in the writings of the French romantics themselves, +including Hugo's early poems and most of his dramas and romances; +Nodier's "Contes en prose et en verse "; nearly all of Musset's works in +prose and verse; ditto of Théophile Gautier's; Stendhal's "La Chartreuse +de Parme," "Le Rouge et le Noir," "Racine et Shakespeare," "Lord Byron en +Italie," etc.; Vigny's "Chatterton," "Cinq-Mars," and many of his +Scriptural poems; Balzac's "Les Chouans"; Mérimée's "Chronique de Charles +IX.," and most of his "Nouvelles "; Chateaubriand's "Le Genie du +Christianisme"; some of Lamartine's "Meditations"; most of George Sand's +novels, and a number of Dumas'; many of Sainte-Beuve's critical writings; +and the miscellanies of Gérard de Nerval (Labrunie). Of many of these, +of course, no direct use or mention is made in the present chapter. + +[2] "Il a pour l'art du moyen âge, un mepris voisin de la demence et de +la frénésie. . . . Voir le discours où il propose de mutiler les statues +des rois de la facade de Notre-Dame, pour en former un piédestal à la +statue du peuple français." Bertrand: "La Fin du Classicisme," pp. 302-3 +and _note_. + +[3] But see, for the Catholic reaction in France, the writings of Joseph +de Maistre, especially "Du Pape" (1819). + +[4] "Histoire du Romantisme" (1874). + +[5] _ibid._, 210. + +[6] Heine counted, in the Salon of 1831, more than thirty pictures +inspired by Scott. + +[7] Also "Le Roi Lear" (Salon of 1836) and "La Procession du Pape des +Fous" (aquarelle) for Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris." + +[8] Recall Schlegel's saying that the genius of the classic drama was +plastic and that of the romantic picturesque. + +[9] Gautier, 192. + +[10] This is a distinction more French than English: _la tragédie_ vs. +_le drame_. + +[11] Preface to "Hernani." + +[12] Preface to "Cromwell." + +[13] "Histoire du Romantisme," p. 64. + +[14] "Primer of French Literature," p. 115. + +[15] One of the principles of the romanticists was the _mélange des +genres_, whereby the old lines between tragedy and comedy, _e.g._, were +broken down, lyricism admitted into the drama, etc. + +[16] Stendhal, writing in 1823 ("Racine et Shakspere"), complains that +"it will soon be thought bad form to say, on the French stage, 'Fermez +cette fenêtre' [window]: we shall have to say, 'Fermez cette croisée' +[casement]. Two-thirds of the words used in the parlours of the best +people (_du meilleur ton_) cannot be reproduced in the theatre. M. +Legouvé, in his tragedy 'Henri IV.,' could not make use of the patriot +king's finest saying, 'I could wish that the poorest peasant in my +kingdom might, at the least, have a chicken in his pot of a Sunday.' +English and Italian verse allows the poet to say everything; and this +good French word _pot_ would have furnished a touching scene to +Shakspere's humblest pupil. But _la tragédie racinienne_, with its +_style noble_ and its artificial dignity, has to put it thus,--in four +alexandrines: + + "'Je veux enfin qu'au jour marqué pour le repos, + L'hôte laborieux des modestes hameaux, + Sur sa table moins humble, ait, par ma bienfaisance, + Quelques-uns de ces mets réservés à l'aisance.'" + +It was Stendhal (whose real name was Henri Beyle) who said that Paris +needed a chain of mountains on its horizon. + +[17] Gautier, 188. + +[18] "Cromwell," 1827, + +[19] Gautier, 107. + +[20] Musset's fantastic "Ballade à la Lune," exaggerates the romantic so +decidedly as to seem ironical. It is hard to say whether it is hyperbole +or parody. See Petit de Julleville, vol. vii., p. 652. + +[21] See vol. i., pp. 372-73. + +[22] Gautier, 163. + +[23] "Des Knaben Wunderhorn." + +[24] Charles Nodier vindicated the literary claims of Perrault. + +[25] Gautier, 93. + +[26] Rue Jean-Gougon, where the _cénacle_ met often. + +[27] Nerval hanged himself at Paris, in January, 1855, in the rue de la +Vielle Lanterne. + +[28] Gautier, 167. + +[29] The romanticism of the _Globe_ was of a more conservative stripe +than that of the Muse Française, which was the organ of the group of +young poets who surrounded Hugo. The motto of the latter was _Jam nova +progenies coelo demittitur alto_. The _Globe_ defined romanticism as +Protestantism in letters. The critical battle was on as early as 1824. +On April 24, in that year, Auger, director of the Academy, read at the +annual session of the Institute a discourse on romanticism, which he +denounced as a literary schism. The prospectus of the _Globe_, an +important document on the romantic side, dates from the same year. The +_Constitutionnel_, the most narrowly classical of the opposing journals, +described romanticism as an epidemic malady. To the year 1825, when the +_Cénacle_ had its headquarters at Victor Hugo's house, belong, among +others, the following manifestoes on both sides of the controversy; "Les +Classiques Vengés," De la Touche; "Le Temple du Romantisme," Morel; "Le +Classique et le Romantique" (a satirical comedy in the classical +interest), Baour-Lormian. Cyprien Desmarais' "Essais sur les classiques +et les romantiques" had appeared at Paris in 1823. At Rouen was printed +in 1826 "Du Classique et du Romantique," a collection of papers read at +the Rouen Academy during the year, rather favorable, on the whole, to the +new movement. + +[30] This is now a somewhat rare book; I have never seen a copy of it; +but it was reviewed in The Saturday Review (vol. lxv., p. 369). + +[31] Part ii., Book iii., chap ix. + +[32]Part ii., Book iv., chap. i. + +[33] For Chateaubriand and Ossian see vol. i., pp. 332-33. He made +translations from Ossian, Gray, and Milton. + +[34] "Victor Hugo," par Paul Boudois, p. 32. + +[35] Vol. i., p. 10. + +[36] See vol. i., p. 379. + +[37] The use of this form instead of _romantisme_ is perhaps worth +noticing. + +[38] See vol. i., pp. 19-20. + +[39] Sainte-Beuve's "Confessions de Joseph Delorme," 1829. + +[40] See vol. i., pp. 18-23. + + + + +CHAPTER VI. + +Diffused Romanticism in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century. + +Most of the poetry of the century that has just closed has been romantic +in the wider or looser acceptation of the term. Emotional stress, +sensitiveness to the picturesque, love of natural scenery, interest in +distant times and places, curiosity of the wonderful and mysterious, +subjectivity, lyricism, intrusion of the ego, impatience of the limits of +the _genres_, eager experiment with new forms of art--these and the like +marks of the romantic spirit are as common in the verse literature of the +nineteenth century as they are rare in that of the eighteenth. The same +is true of imaginative prose, particularly during the first half of the +century, the late Georgian and early Victorian period. In contrast with +Addison, Swift, and Goldsmith, De Quincey, Carlyle, and Ruskin are +romanticists. In contrast with Hume, Macaulay is romantic, concrete, +pictorial. The critical work of Hazlitt and Lamb was in line with +Coleridge's. They praised the pre-Augustan writers, the Elizabethan +dramatists, the seventeenth-century humorists and moralists, the Sidneian +amourists and fanciful sonneteers, at the expense of their classical +successors. + +But in the narrower sense of the word--the sense which controls in these +inquiries--the great romantic generation ended virtually with the death +of Scott in 1832. Coleridge followed in 1834, Wordsworth in 1850. Both +had long since ceased to contribute anything of value to imaginative +literature. Byron, Shelley, and Keats had died some years before +Coleridge; Leigh Hunt survived until 1859. The mediaevalism of +Coleridge, Scott, and Keats lived on in dispersed fashion till it +condensed itself a second time, and with redoubled intensity, in the work +of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which belongs to the last half of the +century. The direct line of descent was from Keats to Rossetti; and the +Pre-Raphaelites bear very much such a relation to the elder group, as the +romantic school proper in Germany bears to Bürger and Herder, and to +Goethe and Schiller in their younger days. That is to say, their +mediaevalism was more concentrated, more exclusive, and more final. + +We have come to a point in the chronology of our subject where the +material is so abundant that we must narrow the field of study to +creative work, and to work which is romantic in the strictest meaning. +Henceforth we may leave out of account all works of mere erudition as +such; all those helps which the scholarship of the century has furnished +to a knowledge of the Middle Ages; histories, collections, translations, +reprints of old texts, critical editions. Middle English lexicons and +grammars, studies of special subjects, such as popular myths or miracle +plays or the Arthurian legends, and the like. Numerous and valuable as +these publications have been, they concern us only indirectly. They have +swelled the material available for the student; they have not necessarily +stimulated the imagination of the poet; which sometimes--as in the case +of Chatterton and of Keats--goes off at a touch and carries but a light +charge of learning. In literary history it is the beginnings that count. +Child's great ballad collection is, beyond comparison, more important +from the scholar's point of view than Percy's "Reliques." But in the +history of romanticism it is of less importance, because it came a +century later. Mallet's "Histoire de Dannemarc" has been long since +superseded, and the means now accessible in English for a study of Norse +mythology are infinitely greater than when Gray read and Percy translated +the "Northern Antiquities." But it is not the history of the revival of +the _knowledge_ of mediaeval life that we are following here; it is +rather the history of that part of our modern creative literature which +has been kindled by contact--perhaps a very slight and casual +contact--with the transmitted _image_ of mediaeval life. + +Nor need we concern ourselves further with literary criticism or the +history of opinion. This was worth considering in the infancy of the +movement, when Warton began to question the supremacy of Pope; when Hurd +asserted the fitness for the poet's uses of the Gothic fictions and the +institution of chivalry; and when Percy ventured to hope that cultivated +readers would find something deserving attention in old English +minstrelsy. It was still worth considering a half-century later, when +Coleridge explained away the dramatic unities, and Byron once more took +up the lost cause of Pope. But by 1832 the literary revolution was +complete. Romance was in no further need of vindication, when all +Scott's library of prose and verse stood back of her, and + + "High-piled books in charactery + Held, like rich garners, the full-ripened grain." + +As to Scott's best invention, the historical romance, I shall not pursue +its fortunes to the end. The formula once constituted, its application +was easy, whether the period chosen was the Middle Ages or any old period +B.C. or A.D. Here and there an individual stands forth from the class, +either for its excellent conformity with the Waverley type or for its +originality in deviation. Of the former kind is Charles Reade's "The +Cloister and the Hearth" (1861); and of the latter Mr. Maurice Hewlett's +"The Forest Lovers" (1898). The title page of Reade's novel describes +the book as "a matter-of-fact romance." It is as well documented as any +of Scott's, and reposes especially upon the "Colloquies" of Erasmus, the +betrothal of whose parents, with their subsequent separation by the +monastic vow of celibacy, is the subject of the story. This is somewhat +romanticised, but keeps a firm grip upon historical realities. The +period of the action is the fifteenth century, yet the work is as far as +possible from being a chivalry tale, like the diaphanous fictions of +Fouqué. "In that rude age," writes the novelist, "body prevailing over +mind, all sentiments took material forms. Man repented with scourges, +prayed by bead, bribed the saints with wax tapers, put fish into the body +to sanctify the soul, sojourned in cold water for empire over the +emotions, and thanked God for returning health in 1 cwt, 2 stone, 7 lbs., +3 oz., 1 dwt. of bread and cheese." There is no lack in "The Cloister +and the Hearth" of stirring incident and bold adventure; encounters with +bears and with bandits, sieges, witch trials, gallows hung with thieves, +archery with long bow and arbalest--everywhere fighting enough, as in +Scott; and, also as in Scott, behind the private drama of true love, +intrigue, persecution, the broad picture of society. It is no idealised +version of the Middle Ages. The ugly, sordid side of mediaeval life is +turned outwards; its dirt, discomfort, ignorance, absurdity, brutality, +unreason and insecurity are rendered with crass realism. The burgher is +more in evidence than the chevalier. Less after the manner of the +Waverley novels, and more after that of "Hypatia," "Romola," and "Fathers +and Sons," it depicts the intellectual unrest of the time, the +conflicting ideals of the old and new generations. The printing-press is +being set up, and the hero finds his art of calligraphy, learned in the +scriptorium, no longer in request. The Pope and many of the higher +clergy are infected with the religious scepticism and humanitarian +enthusiasm of the Renaissance. The child Erasmus is the new birth of +reason, destined to make war on monkery and superstition and thereby +avenge his parents' wrongs. Of quite another fashion of mediaevalism is +Mr. Hewlett's story--sheer romance. The wonderful wood of Morgraunt, +with its charcoal burners and wayside shrines, black meres frowned over +by skeleton castles, and gentle hinds milked by the heroine to get food +for her wounded lover, is of no time or country, but almost as unreal as +Spenser's fairy forest. Through its wild ways Isoult la Desirous and +Prosper le Gai go adventuring like Una and her Red Cross knight, or Enid +and Geraint. Or, again, Isoult in her page's dress, and forsaken by her +wedded lord, is like Viola or Imogen or Rosalind, or Constance in +"Marmion," or any lady of old romance. Or sometimes again she is like a +wood spirit, or an elemental creature such as was Undine. The invented +place names, High March, Wanmeeting, Market Basing, etc., with their +transparent air of actuality, sound an echo from William Morris' prose +romances, like "The House of the Wolfings" and "The Sundering Flood." As +in the last named, and in Thomas Hardy's "Return of the Native," the +reader's imagination is assisted by a map of the Morgraunt forest and the +river Wan. Mr. Hewlett has evidently profited, too, by recent romances +of various schools: by "Prince Otto," _e.g._, and "The Prisoner of +Zenda," and possibly by others. His Middle Ages are not the Middle Ages +of history, but of poetic convention; a world where anything may happen +and where the facts of any precise social state are attenuated into +"atmosphere" for the use of the imagination. "The Forest Lovers" is +nearer to "Christabel" or "La Belle Dame sans Merci" than to "Ivanhoe": +is, indeed, a prose poem, though not quite an allegory like "Sintram and +his Companions." + +Among Scott's contemporaries, Byron and Shelley, profoundly romantic in +temper, were not retrospective in their habit of mind; and the Middle +Ages, in particular, had little to say to them. Scott stood for the +past; Byron--a man of his time, a modern man--for the present; Shelley--a +visionary, with a system of philosophical perfectionism--for the future. +Memory, Mnemosyne, mother of the muses, was the nurse of Scott's genius. +Byron lived intensely in the world which he affected to despise. Shelley +prophesied, with eyes fixed upon the coming age. We have found, in +Byron's contributions to the Pope controversy, one expression of his +instinctive sympathy with the classical and contempt for the Gothic. +Shelley, too, was a Hellenist; and to both, in their angry break with +authority and their worship of liberty, the naked freedom, the clear +light, the noble and harmonious forms of the antique were as attractive +as the twilight of the "ages of faith," with their mysticism, asceticism, +and grotesque superstitions, were repulsive. Remote as their own +feverish and exuberant poetry was from the unexcited manner of classical +work, the latter was the ideal towards which they more and more inclined. +The points at which these two poets touch our history, then, are few. +Byron, to be sure, cast "Childe Harold" into Spenserian verse, and gave +it a ballad title.[1] In the first canto there are a few archaisms; +words like _fere_, _shent_, and _losel_ occur, together with Gothic +properties, such as the "eremite's sad cell" and "Paynim shores" and +Newstead's "monastic dome." The ballad "Adieu, adieu my native shore," +was suggested by "Lord Maxwell's Good-Night" in the "Border Minstrelsy," +and introduces some romantic appurtenances: the harp, the falcon, and the +little foot-page. But this kind of falsetto, in the tradition of the +last-century Spenserians, evidently hampered the poet; so he shook +himself free from imitation after the opening stanzas, and spoke in his +natural voice.[2] "Lara" is a tale of feudal days, with a due proportion +of knights, dames, vassals, and pages; and an ancestral hall with gloomy +vaults and portrait galleries, where + + "--the moonbeam shone + Through the dim lattice o'er the floor of stone, + And the high fretted roof and saints that there + O'er Gothic windows knelt in pictured prayer. . . . + The waving banner and the clapping door, + The rustling tapestry and the echoing floor; + The long dim shadows of surrounding trees, + The flapping bats, the night-song of the breeze, + Aught they behold or hear their thought appalls, + As evening saddens o'er the dark grey walls." + +But these things are unimportant in Byron--mere commonplaces of +description inherited from Scott and Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe. Neither +is it of importance that "Parisina" is a tale of the year 1405, and has +an echo in it of convent bells and the death chant of friars; nor that +the first scene of "Manfred" passes in a "Gothic gallery," and includes +an incantation of spirits upon the model of "Faust"; nor that "Marino +Faliero" and "The Two Foscari" are founded on incidents of Venetian +history which happened in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries +respectively; nor yet that Byron translated the Spanish ballad "Woe is me +Alhama" and a passage from Pulci's "Morgante Maggiore." [3] Similarly +Shelley's experimental versions of the "Prolog im Himmel," and +"Walpurgisnacht" in "Faust," and of scenes from Calderon's "Magico +Prodigioso" are felt to be without special significance in comparison +with the body of his writings. "Faust" impressed him, as it did Byron, +and he urged Coleridge to translate it, speaking of the current English +versions as wretched misrepresentations of the original. But in all of +Shelley's poetry the scenery, architecture, and imagery in general are +sometimes Italian, sometimes Asiatic, often wholly fantastic, but never +mediaeval. Their splendour is a classic splendour, and not what Milton +contemptuously calls "a Hunnish and Norwegian stateliness." His +favourite names are Greek: Cythna, Ianthe, and the like. The ruined +cathedral in "Queen Mab"--a poem only in its title romantic--is coupled +with the ruined dungeon, in whose courts the children play; both alike +"works of faith and slavery," symbols of the priestcraft and kingcraft +which Shelley hated, now made harmless by the reign of Reason and Love in +a regenerated universe. How different is the feeling which the empty +cathedral inspires in Lowell; once thronged with worshippers, now +pathetically lonely--a cliff, far inland, from which the sea of faith has +forever withdrawn! At the time when "Queen Mab" was written, Coleridge, +Southey, and Landor's "Gebir" were Shelley's favourite reading. "He was +a lover of the wonderful and wild in literature," says Mrs. Shelley, in +her notes on the poem; "but had not fostered these tastes at their +genuine sources--the romances and chivalry of the Middle Ages--but in the +perusal of such German works as were current in those days.[4] . . . Our +earlier English poetry was almost unknown to him." + +"Queen Mab" begins with a close imitation of the opening lines of +Southey's "Thalaba the Destroyer." The third member of the Lake School +is a standing illustration of Mr. Colvin's contention that the +distinction between classic and romantic is less in subject than in +treatment. Southey regarded himself as, equally with Wordsworth and +Coleridge, an innovator and a rebel against poetic conventions. His big +Oriental epics, "Thalaba" and "The Curse of Kehama," are written in verse +purposely irregular, but so inferior in effect to the irregular verse of +Coleridge and Scott as to prove that irregularity, as such, is only +tolerable when controlled by the subtly varying lyric impulse--not when +it is adopted as a literary method. Southey's worth as a man, his +indefatigable industry, his scholarship, and his excellent work in prose +make him an imposing figure in our literature. But his poetical +reputation has faded more rapidly than that of his greater +contemporaries. He ranged widely in search of subjects and experimented +boldly in forms of verse; but his poems are seldom inspired; they are +manufactures rather than creations, and to-day Southey, the poet, +represents nothing in particular. + +But, like Taylor of Norwich, Southey, by his studies in foreign +literature, added much to the romantic material constantly accumulating +in the English tongue. In his two visits to the Peninsula he made +acquaintance with Spanish and Portuguese; and afterwards by his +translations and otherwise, helped his countrymen to a knowledge of the +old legendary poetry of Spain, the country above all others of chivalry +and romance. Mention has already been made of his versions of "Amadis of +Gaul," "Palmerin of England," and the "Chronicle of the Cid." The last +named was not a translation from any single source, but was put together +from the "Poem of the Cid," which the translator considered to be +"unquestionably the oldest poem in the language" and probably by a writer +contemporary with the great Campeador himself; from the prose "Chronicle" +assigned to the thirteenth century; and from the ballads, which Southey +thought mainly worthless, _i.e._, from the historical point of view. + +Southey's long blank verse poems on mediaeval subjects, partly +historical, partly legendary, "Joan of Arc" (1795), "Madoc" (1805), and +"Roderick, the Last of the Goths" (1814), like his friend Landor's +"Gebir," are examples of romantic themes with classical or, at least, +unromantic handling. The last of them was the same in subject, indeed, +with Landor's drama, "Count Julian." I have spoken of "Thalaba" and "The +Curse of Kehama" as epics; but Southey rejected "the degraded title of +epic" and scouted the rules of Aristotle. Nevertheless, the best +qualities of these blank verse narratives are of the classic-epic kind. +The story is not badly told; the measure is correct if not distinguished; +and the style is simple, clear, and in pure taste. But the spell of +romance, the witchery of Coleridge and Keats is absent; and so are the +glow and movement of Scott. + +Southey got up his history and local colour conscientiously, and his +notes present a formidable array of authorities. While engaged upon +"Madoc," he went to Wales to verify the scenery and even came near to +leasing a cottage and taking up his residence there. "The manners of the +poem," he asserted, "will be found historically true." The hero of +"Madoc" was a legendary Welsh prince of the twelfth century who led a +colony to America. The _motif_ of the poem is therefore nearly the same +as in William Morris's "Earthly Paradise," and it is curious to compare +the two. In Southey's hands the blank verse, which in the last century +had been almost an ear-mark of the romanticising schools, is far more +classical than the heroic couplet which Morris writes. In the Welsh +portion of "Madoc" the historical background is carefully studied from +Giraldus Cambrensis, Evans' "Specimens," the "Triads of Bardism," the +"Cambrian Biography," and similar sources, and in the Aztec portion, from +old Spanish chronicles of the conquest of Mexico and the journals of +modern travellers in America. In "The Earthly Paradise" nothing is +historical except the encounter with Edward III.'s fleet in the channel. +Over all, the dreamlike vagueness and strangeness of romance. Yet the +imaginative impression is more distinct, not an impression of reality, +but as of a soft, bright miniature painting in an old manuscript. + +In common with his literary associates, Southey was prompted by Percy's +"Reliques" to try his hand at the legendary ballad and at longer metrical +tales like "All for Love" and "The Pilgrim to Compostella." Most of +these pieces date from the last years of the century. One of them, "St. +Patrick's Purgatory," was inserted by Lewis in his "Tales of Wonder." +Another of the most popular, and a capital specimen of grotesque, "The +Old Woman of Berkeley," was upon a theme which was also undertaken by +Taylor of Norwich and Dr. Sayers of the same city, when Southey was on a +visit to the former in 1798. The story, told by Olaus Magnus as well as +by William of Malmesbury, was of a witch whose body was carried off by +the devil, though her coffin had been sprinkled with holy water and bound +with a triple chain. For material Southey drew upon Spanish chronicles, +French _fabliaux_, the "Acta Sanctorum," Matthew of Westminster, and many +other sources. His ballads do not compare well with those of Scott and +Coleridge. They abound in the supernatural--miracles of saints, +sorceries, and apparitions; but the matter-of-fact narrative, +common-place diction, and jog-trot verse are singularly out of keeping +with the subject matter. The most wildly romantic situations become +tamely unromantic under Southey's handling. Though in better taste than +Lewis' grisly compositions, yet, as in Lewis, the want of "high +seriousness" or any finer imagination in these legendary tales makes them +turn constantly towards the comic; so that Southey was scandalised to +learn that Mr. Payne Collier had taken his "Old Woman of Berkeley" for a +"mock ballad" or parody. He affected especially a stanza which he +credited to Lewis' invention: + + "Behind a wide column, half breathless with fear + She crept to conceal herself there; + That instant the moon o'er a dark cloud shone clear, + And she saw in the moonlight two ruffians appear, + And between them a corpse did they bear." [5] + +Southey employs no archaisms, no refrains, nor any of the stylistic marks +of ancient minstrelsy. His ballads have the metrical roughness and plain +speech of the old popular ballads, but none of their frequent, peculiar +beauties of thought and phrase, + +Spain, no less than Germany and Italy, was laid under contribution by the +English romantics. Southey's work in this direction was followed by such +things as Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads" (1824), Irving's "Alhambra," and +Bryant's and Longfellow's translations from Spanish lyrical poetry. But +these exotics did not stimulate original creative activity in England in +equal degree with the German and Italian transplantings. They were +imported, not appropriated. Of all European countries Spain had remained +the most Catholic and mediaeval. Her eight centuries of struggle against +the Moors had given her a rich treasure of legendary song and story. She +had a body of popular ballad poetry larger than either England's or +Germany's.[6] But Spain had no modern literature to mediate between the +old and new; nothing at all corresponding with the schools of romance in +Germany, from Herder to Schlegel, which effected a revival of the +Teutonic Middle Age and impressed it upon contemporary England and +France. Neither could the Spanish Middle Age itself show any such +supreme master as Dante, whose direct influence on English poetry has +waxed with the century. There was a time when, for the greater part of a +century, England and Spain were in rather close contact, but it was +mainly a hostile contact, and its tangential points were the ill-starred +marriage of Philip and Mary, the Great Armada of 1588, and the abortive +"Spanish Marriage" negotiations of James I.'s reign. Readers of our +Elizabethan literature, however, cannot fail to remark a knowledge of, +and interest in, Spanish affairs now quite strange to English writers. +The dialogue of the old drama is full of Spanish phrases of convenience +like _bezo los manos_, _paucas palabras_, etc., which were evidently +quite as well understood by the audience as was later the colloquial +French--_savoir faire_, _coup de grâce_, etc.--which began to come in +with Dryden, and has been coming ever since. The comedy Spaniard, like +Don Armado in "Love's Labour's Lost," was a familiar figure on the +English boards. Middleton took the double plot of his "Spanish Gipsy" +from two novels of Cervantes; and his "Game of Chess," a political +allegorical play, aimed against Spanish intrigues, made a popular hit and +was stopped, after a then unexampled run, in consequence of the +remonstrances of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador. Somewhat later the +Restoration stage borrowed situations from the Spanish love-intrigue +comedy, not so much directly as by way of Molière, Thomas Corneille, and +other French playwrights; and the duenna and the _gracioso_ became stock +figures in English performances. The direct influence of Calderon and +Lope de Vega upon our native theatre was infinitesimal. The Spanish +national drama, like the English, was self-developed and unaffected by +classical rules. Like the English, it was romantic in spirit, but was +more religious in subject and more lyrical in form. The land of romance +produced likewise the greatest of all satires upon romance. "Don +Quixote," of course, was early translated and imitated in England; and +the _picaro_ romances had an important influence upon the evolution of +English fiction in De Foe and Smollett; not only directly through books +like "The Spanish Rogue," but by way of Le Sage.[7] But upon the whole, +the relation between English and Spanish literature had been one of +distant respect rather than of intimacy. There was never any such inrush +of foreign domination from this quarter as from Italy in the sixteenth +century, or from France in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and latter half of +the seventeenth. + +The unequalled wealth of Spanish literature in popular ballads is +partially explained by the facility with which such things were composed. +The Spanish ballad, or _romance_, was a stanza (_redondilla_, roundel) of +four eight-syllable lines with a prevailing trachaic movement--just the +metre, in short, of "Locksley Hall." Only the second and fourth lines +rimed, and the rime was merely assonant or vowel rime. Given the subject +and the lyrical impulse, and verses of this sort could be produced to +order and in infinite number by poets of the humblest capacity. The +subjects were furnished mainly by Spanish history and legend, the +exploits of national heroes like the Cid (Ruy Diaz de Bivar), the seven +Princes of Lara, Don Fernán Gonzalez, and Bernaldo del Carpio, the leader +in the Spanish versions of the great fight by Fontarabbia + + "When Rowland brave and Olivier, + And every paladin and peer + On Roncesvalles died." + +Southey thought the Spanish ballads much inferior to the English and +Scotch, a judgment to which students of Spanish poetry will perhaps +hardly agree.[8] The Spanish ballads, like the British, are partly +historical and legendary, partly entirely romantic or fictitious. They +record not only the age-long wars against the Saracen, the common enemy, +but the internecine feuds of the Spanish Christian kingdoms, the quarrels +between the kings and their vassals, and many a dark tale of domestic +treachery or violence. In these respects their resemblance to the +English and Scotch border ballads is obvious; and it has been pointed out +that they sprang from similar conditions, a frontier war for national +independence, maintained for centuries against a stubborn foe. The +traditions concerning Wallace and the Bruce have some analogy with the +chronicles of the Cid; but as to the border fights celebrated in Scott's +"Minstrelsy," they were between peoples of the same race, tongue, and +faith; and were but petty squabbles in comparison with that epic crusade +in which the remnants of the old Gothic conquerors slowly made head +against, and finally overthrew and expelled, an Oriental religion, a +foreign blood, and a civilisation in many respects more brilliant than +anything which Europe could show. The contrast between Castile and +Granada is more picturesque than the difference between Lothian and +Northumberland. The Spanish ballads have the advantage, then, of being +connected with imposing passages of history. In spirit they are +intensely national. Three motives animate them all: loyalty to the king, +devotion to the cross, and the _pundonor_: that sensitive personal +honour--the "Castilian pride" of "Hernani,"--which sometimes ran into +fantastic excess. A rude chivalry occasionally softens the ferocity of +feudal manners in Northern ballad-poetry, as in the speech of Percy over +the dead Douglas in "Chevy Chase." But in the Spanish _romances_ the +knightly feeling is all-pervading. The warriors are _hidalgos_, +gentlemen of a lofty courtesy; the Moorish chieftains are not "heathen +hounds," but chivalrous adversaries, to be treated, in defeat, with a +certain generosity. This refinement and magnanimity are akin to that +ideality of temper which makes Don Quixote at once so noble and so +ridiculous, and which is quite remote from the sincere realism of the +British minstrelsy. In style the Spanish ballads are simple, forcible, +and direct, but somewhat monotonous in their facility. The English and +Scotch have a wider range of subject; the best of them have a condensed +energy of expression and a depth of tragic feeling which is more potent +than the melancholy grace of the Spanish. Women take a more active part +in the former, the Christians of the Peninsula having caught from their +Saracen foes a prejudice in favour of womanly seclusion and retirement. +There is also a wilder imagination in Northern balladry; a much larger +element of the mythological and supernatural. Ghosts, demons, fairies, +enchanters are rare in the Spanish poems. Where the marvellous enters +into them at all, it is mostly in the shape of saintly miracles. St. +James of Compostella appears on horseback among the Christian hosts +battling with the Moors, or even in the army of the Conquistadores in +Mexico--an incident which Macaulay likens to the apparition of the "great +twin Brethren" in the Roman battle of Lake Regillus. The mediaeval +Spaniards were possibly to the full as superstitious as their Scottish +contemporaries, but their superstitions were the legends of the Catholic +Church, not the inherited folklore of Gothic and Celtic heathendom. I +will venture to suggest, as one reason of this difference, the absence of +forests in Spain. The shadowy recesses of northern Europe were the +natural haunts of mystery and unearthly terrors. The old Teutonic +forest, the Schwarzwald and the Hartz, were peopled by the popular +imagination with were-wolves, spectre huntsmen, wood spirits, and all +those nameless creatures which Tieck has revived in his "Mährchen" and +Hauptmann in the Rautendelein of his "Versunkene Glocke." The treeless +plateaus of Spain, and her stony, denuded sierras, all bare and bright +under the hot southern sky, offered no more shelter to such beings of the +mind than they did to the genial life of Robin Hood and his merry men +"all under the greenwood tree." And this mention of the bold archer of +Sherwood recalls one other difference--the last that need here be touched +upon--between the ballads of Spain and of England. Both constitute a +body of popular poetry, _i.e._, of folk poetry. They recount the doings +of the upper classes, princes, nobles, knights, and ladies, as seen from +the angle of observation of humble minstrels of low degree. But the +people count for much more in the English poems. The Spanish are more +aristocratic, more public, less domestic, and many of them composed, it +is thought, by lordly makers. This is perhaps, in part, a difference in +national character; and, in part, a difference in the conditions under +which the social institutions of the two countries were evolved. + +Spain collected her ballads early in numerous songbooks--_cancioneros_, +_romanceros_--the first of which, the "Cancionero" of 1510, is "the +oldest collection of popular poetry, properly so-called, that is to be +found in any European literature." [9] But modern Spain had gone through +her classic period, like England and Germany. She had submitted to the +critical canons of Boileau, and was in leading-strings to France till the +end of the eighteenth century. Spain, too, had her romantic movement, +and incidentally her ballad revival, but it came later than in England +and Germany, later even than in France. Historians of Spanish literature +inform us that the earliest entry of French romanticism into Spain took +place in Martinez de la Rosa's two dramas, "The Conspiracy of Venice" +(1834) and "Aben-Humeya," first written in French and played at Paris in +1830; and that the representation of Duke de Rivas' play, "Don Alvaro" +(1835), was "an event in the history of the modern Spanish drama +corresponding to the production of 'Hernani' at the Theatre Francais" in +1830.[10] Both of these authors had lived in France and had there made +acquaintance with the works of Chateaubriand, Byron, and Walter Scott. +Spain came in time to have her own Byron and her own Scott, the former in +José de Espronceda, author of "The Student of Salamanca," who resided for +a time in London; the latter in José Zorrilla, whose "Granada," "Legends +of the Cid," etc., "were popular for the same reason that 'Marmion' and +'The Lady of the Lake' were popular; for their revival of national +legends in a form both simple and picturesque." [11] Scott himself is +reported to have said that if he had come across in his younger days +Perez de Hita's old historical romance, "The Civil Wars of Granada" +(1595), "he would have chosen Spain as the scene of a Waverley +novel." [12] + +But when Lockhart, in 1824, set himself to + + "--relate + In high-born words the worth of many a knight + From tawny Spain, lost in the world's debate"-- + +her ballad poetry had fallen into disfavour at home, and "no Spanish +Percy, or Ellis, or Ritson," he complains, "has arisen to perform what no +one but a Spaniard can entertain the smallest hope of achieving." [13] +Meanwhile, however, the German romantic school had laid eager hands upon +the old romantic literature of Spain. A. W. Schlegel (1803) and Gries +had made translations from Calderon in assonant verse; and Friedrich +Schlegel--who exalted the Spanish dramatist above Shakspere, much to +Heine's disgust--had written, also in _asonante_, his dramatic poem +"Conde Alarcos" (1802), founded on the well-known ballad. Brentano and +others of the romantics went so far as to practise assonance in their +original as well as translated work. Jacob Grimm (1815) and Depping +(1817) edited selections from the "Romancero" which Lockhart made use of +in his "Ancient Spanish Ballads." With equal delight the French +romanticists--Hugo and Musset in particular--seized upon the treasures of +the "Romancero"; but this was somewhat later. + +Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads," which were bold and spirited paraphrases +rather than close versions of the originals, enjoyed a great success, and +have been repeatedly reprinted. Ticknor pronounced them undoubtedly a +work of genius, as much so as any book of the sort in any literature with +which he was acquainted.[14] In the very same year Sir John Bowring +published his "Ancient Poetry and Romance of Spain." Hookham Frere, that +most accomplished of translators, also gave specimens from the +"Romancero." Of late years versions in increasing numbers of Spanish +poetry of all kinds, ancient and modern, by Ormsby, Gibson, and others +too numerous to name, have made the literature of the country largely +accessible to English readers. But to Lockhart belongs the credit of +having established for the English public the convention of romantic +Spain--the Spain of lattice and guitar, of mantilla and castanet, +articles now long at home in the property room of romance, along with the +gondola of Venice, the "clock-face" troubadour, and the castle on the +Rhine. The Spanish brand of mediaevalism would seem, for a number of +years, to have substituted itself in England for the German, and +doubtless a search through the annuals and gift books and fashionable +fiction and minor poetry generally, of the years from 1825 to 1840, would +disclose a decided Castilian colouring. To such effect, at least, is the +testimony of the Edinburgh reviewer--from whom I have several times +quoted--reviewing in January, 1841, the new and sumptuously illustrated +edition of "Ancient Spanish Ballads." "Mr. Lockhart's success," he +writes, "rendered the subject fashionable; we have, however, no space to +bestow on the minor fry who dabbled in these . . . fountains. Those who +remember their number may possibly deprecate our re-opening the +floodgates of the happily subsided inundation." + +The popular ballad, indeed, is, next after the historical romance, the +literary form to which the romantic movement has given, in the highest +degree, a renewal of prosperous life. Every one has written ballads, and +the "burden" has become a burden even as the grasshopper is such. The +very parodists have taken the matter in hand. The only Calverley made +excellent sport of the particular variety cultivated by Jean Ingelow. +And Sir Frederick Pollock, as though actuated by Lowell's hint, about "a +declaration of love under the forms of a declaration in trover," cast the +law reports into ballad phrase in his "Leading Cases Done into English +(1876): + + "It was Thomas Newman and five his feres + (Three more would have made them nine), + And they entered into John Vaux's house, + That had the Queen's Head to sign. + The birds on the bough sing loud and sing low, + What trespass shall be _ab initio_." + +Of course the great majority of these poems in the ballad form, whether +lyric or narrative, or a mixture of both, are in no sense romantic. They +are like Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads," idyllic; songs of the +affections, of nature, sentiment, of war, the sea, the hunting field, +rustic life, and a hundred other moods and topics. Neither are the +historical or legendary ballads, deriving from Percy and reinforced by +Scott, prevailingly romantic in the sense of being mediaeval. They are +such as Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," in which--with ample +acknowledgment in his introduction both to Scott and to the +"Reliques"--he applies the form of the English minstrel ballad to an +imaginative re-creation of the lost popular poetry of early Rome. Or +they continue Scott's Jacobite tradition, like "Aytoun's Lays of the +Scottish Cavaliers," Browning's "Cavalier Tunes," Thornbury's "Songs of +the Cavaliers and Roundheads" (1857), and a few of Motherwell's ditties. +These last named, except Browning, were all Scotchmen and staunch Tories; +as were likewise Lockhart and Hogg; and, for obvious reasons, it is in +Scotland that the simpler fashion of ballad writing, whether in dialect +or standard English, and more especially as employed upon martial +subjects, has flourished longest. Artifice and ballad preciosity have +been cultivated more sedulously in the south, with a learned use of the +repetend, archaism of style, and imitation of the quaint mediaeval habit +of mind. + +Of the group most immediately connected with Scott and who assisted him, +more or less, in his "Minstrelsy" collection, may be mentioned the +eccentric John Leyden, immensely learned in Border antiquities and +poetry, and James Hogg, the "Ettrick Shepherd." The latter was a peasant +bard, an actual shepherd and afterward a sheep farmer, a self-taught man +with little schooling, who aspired to become a second Burns, and composed +much of his poetry while lying out on the hills, wrapped in his plaid and +tending his flocks like any Corydon or Thyrsis. He was a singular +mixture of genius and vanity, at once the admiration and the butt of the +_Blackwood's_ wits, who made him the mouthpiece of humour and eloquence +which were not his, but Christopher North's. The puzzled shepherd hardly +knew how to take it; he was a little gratified and a good deal nettled. +But the flamboyant figure of him in the _Noctes_ will probably do as much +as his own verses to keep his memory alive with posterity. Nevertheless, +Hogg is one of the best of modern Scotch ballad poets. Having read the +first two volumes of the "Border Minstrelsy," he was dissatisfied with +some of the modern ballad imitations therein and sent his criticisms to +Scott. They were sound criticisms, for Hogg had an intimate knowledge of +popular poetry and a quick perception of what was genuine and what was +spurious in such compositions. Sir Walter called him in aid of his third +volume and found his services of value. + +As a Border minstrel, Hogg ranks next to Scott--is, in fact, a sort of +inferior Scott. His range was narrower, but he was just as thoroughly +saturated with the legendary lore of the countryside, and in some +respects he stood closer to the spirit of that peasant life in which +popular poetry has its source. As a ballad poet, indeed, he is not +always Scott's inferior, though even his ballads are apt to be too long +and without the finish and the instinct for selection which marks the +true artist. When he essayed metrical romances in numerous cantos, his +deficiencies in art became too fatally evident. Scott, in his longer +poems, is often profuse and unequal, but always on a much higher level +than Hogg. The latter had no skill in conducting to the end a fable of +some complexity, involving a number of varied characters and a really +dramatic action. "Mador of the Moor," _e.g._, is a manifest and not very +successful imitation of "The Lady of the Lake"; and it requires a strong +appetite for the romantic to sustain a reader through the six parts of +"Queen Hynde" and the four parts of "The Pilgrims of the Sun." By +general consent, the best of Hogg's more ambitious poems is "The Queen's +Wake," and the best thing in it is "Kilmeny." "The Queen's Wake" (1813) +combines, in its narrative plan, the framework of "The Lay of the Last +Minstrel" with the song competition in its sixth canto. Mary Stuart, on +landing in Scotland, holds a Christmas wake at Holyrood, where seventeen +bards contend before her for the prize of song. The lays are in many +different moods and measures, but all enclosed in a setting of +octosyllabic couplets, closely modelled upon Scott, and the whole ends +with a tribute to the great minstrel who had waked once more the long +silent Harp of the North. The thirteenth bard's song--"Kilmeny"--is of +the type of traditionary tale familiar in "Tarn Lin" and "Thomas of +Ercildoune," and tells how a maiden was spirited away to fairyland, where +she saw a prophetic vision of her country's future (including the +Napoleonic wars) and returned after a seven years' absence. + + "Late, late in a gloamin' when all was still, + When the fringe was red on the westlin hill, + The wood was sere, the moon i' the wane, + The reek o' the cot hung o'er the plain, + Like a little wee cloud in the world its lane; + When the ingle lowed wi' an eiry leme, + Late, late in the gloamin' Kilmeny came hame." + +The Ettrick Shepherd's peculiar province was not so much the romance of +national history as the field of Scottish fairy lore and popular +superstition. It was he, rather than Walter Scott, who carried out the +suggestions long since made to his countryman, John Home, in Collins' +"Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands." His poems are full of +bogles, kelpies, brownies, warlocks, and all manner of "grammarie." "The +Witch of Fife" in "The Queen's Wake," a spirited bit of grotesque, is +repeatedly quoted as authority upon the ways of Scotch witches in the +notes to Croker's "Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland." +Similar themes engaged the poet in his prose tales. Some of these were +mere modern ghost stories, or stories of murder, robbery, death warnings, +etc. Others, like "The Heart of Eildon," dealt with ancient legends of +the supernatural. Still others, like "The Brownie of Bodsbeck: a Tale of +the Covenanters," were historical novels of the Stuart times. Here Hogg +was on Scott's own ground and did not shine by comparison. He +complained, indeed, that in the last-mentioned tale, he had been accused +of copying "Old Mortality", but asserted that he had written his book the +first and had been compelled by the appearance of Sir Walter's, to go +over his own manuscript and substitute another name for Balfour of +Burley, his original hero. Nanny's songs, in "The Brownie of Bodsbeck," +are among Hogg's best ballads. Others are scattered through his various +collections--"The Mountain Bard," "The Forest Minstrel," "Poetical Tales +and Ballads," etc. + +Another Scotch balladist was William Motherwell, one of the most +competent of ballad scholars and editors, whose "Minstrelsy: Ancient and +Modern," was issued at Glasgow in 1827, and led to a correspondence +between the collector and Sir Walter Scott.[15] In 1836 Motherwell was +associated with Hogg in editing Burns' works. His original ballads are +few in number, and their faults and merits are of quite an opposite +nature from his collaborator's. The shepherd was a man of the people, +and lived, so far as any modern can, among the very conditions which +produced the minstrel songs. He inherited the popular beliefs. His +great-grandmother on one side was a notorious witch; his grandfather on +the other side had "spoken with the fairies." His poetry, such as it is, +is fluent and spontaneous. Motherwell's, on the contrary, is the work of +a ballad fancier, a student learned in lyric, reproducing old modes with +conscientious art. His balladry is more condensed and skilful than +Hogg's, but seems to come hard to him. It is literary poetry trying to +be _Volkspoesie_, and not quite succeeding. Many of the pieces in the +southern English, such as "Halbert the Grim," "The Troubadour's Lament," +"The Crusader's Farewell," "The Warthman's Wail," "The Demon Lady," "The +Witches' Joys," and "Lady Margaret," have an echo of Elizabethan music, +or the songs of Lovelace, or, now and then, the verse of Coleridge or +Byron. "True Love's Dirge," _e.g._, borrows a burden from +Shakspere--"Heigho! the Wind and Rain." Others, like "Lord Archibald: A +Ballad," and "Elfinland Wud: An Imitation of the Ancient Scottish +Romantic Ballad," are in archaic Scotch dialect with careful ballad +phrasing. Hogg employs the broad Scotch, but it is mostly the vernacular +of his own time. A short passage from "The Witch of Fife" and one from +"Elfin Wud" will illustrate two very different types of ballad manner: + + "He set ane reid-pipe till his muthe + And he playit se bonnileye, + Till the gray curlew and the black-cock flew + To listen his melodye. + + "It rang se sweit through the grim Lommond, + That the nycht-winde lowner blew: + And it soupit alang the Loch Leven, + And wakenit the white sea-mew. + + "It rang se sweit through the grim Lommond, + Se sweitly but and se shill, + That the wezilis laup out of their mouldy holis, + And dancit on the mydnycht hill." + + + "Around her slepis the quhyte muneschyne, + (Meik is mayden undir kell), + Hir lips bin lyke the blude reid wyne; + (The rois of flouris hes sweitest smell). + + "It was al bricht quhare that ladie stude, + (Far my luve fure ower the sea). + Bot dern is the lave of Elfinland wud, + (The Knicht pruvit false that ance luvit me). + + "The ladie's handis were quhyte als milk, + (Ringis my luve wore mair nor ane). + Hir skin was safter nor the silk; + (Lilly bricht schinis my luve's halse bane)." + +Upon the whole, the most noteworthy of Motherwell's original additions to +the stores of romantic verse were his poems on subjects from Norse legend +and mythology, and particularly the three spirited pieces that stand +first in his collection (1832)--"The Battle-Flag of Sigurd," "The Wooing +Song of Jarl Egill Skallagrim," and "The Sword Chant of Thorstein Randi." +These stand midway between Gray's "Descent of Odin" and the later work of +Longfellow, William Morris and others. Since Gray, little or nothing of +the kind had been attempted; and Motherwell gave perhaps the first +expression in English song of the Berserkir rage and the Viking passion +for battle and sea roving. + +During the nineteenth century English romance received new increments of +heroic legend and fairy lore from the Gaelic of Ireland. It was not +until 1867 that Matthew Arnold, in his essay "On the Study of Celtic +Literature," pleading for a chair of Celtic at Oxford, bespoke the +attention of the English public to those elements in the national +literature which come from the Celtic strain in its blood. Arnold knew +very little Celtic, and his essay abounds in those airy generalisations +which are so irritating to more plodding critics. His theory, e.g., that +English poetry owes its sense for colour to the Celts, when taken up and +stated nakedly by following writers, seems too absolute in its ascription +of colour-blindness to the Teutonic races. Still, Arnold probably +defined fairly enough the distinctive traits of the Celtic genius. He +attributes to a Celtic source much of the turn of English poetry for +style, much of its turn for melancholy, and nearly all its turn for +"natural magic." "The forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the wild +flowers, are everywhere in romance. They have a mysterious life and +grace there; they are Nature's own children, and utter her secret in a +way which makes them something quite different from the woods, waters, +and plants of Greek and Latin poetry. Now, of this delicate magic, +Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a mistress that it seems impossible to +believe the power did not come into romance from the Celts." + +In 1825 T. Crofton Croker published the first volume of his delightful +"Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland." It was +immediately translated into German by the Grimm brothers, and was +received with enthusiasm by Walter Scott, who was introduced to the +author in London in 1826, and a complimentary letter from whom was +printed in the preface to the second edition. + +Croker's book opened a new world of romance, and introduced the English +reader to novel varieties of elf creatures, with outlandish Gaelic names; +the Shefro; the Boggart; the Phooka, or horse-fiend; the Banshee, a +familiar spirit which moans outside the door when a death impends; the +Cluricaune,[16] or cellar goblin; the Fir Darrig (Red Man); the Dullahan, +or Headless Horseman. There are stories of changelings, haunted castles, +buried treasure, the "death coach," the fairy piper, enchanted lakes +which cover sunken cities, and similar matters not unfamiliar in the +folk-lore of other lands, but all with an odd twist to them and set +against a background of the manners and customs of modern Irish +peasantry. The Celtic melancholy is not much in evidence in this +collection. The wild Celtic fancy is present, but in combination with +Irish gaiety and light-heartedness. It was the day of the comedy +Irishman--Lover's and Lever's Irishman--Handy Andy, Rory O'More, Widow +Machree and the like. It took the famine of '49 and the strenuous work +of the Young Ireland Party which gathered about the _Nation_ in 1848, to +displace this traditional figure in favour of a more earnest and tragical +national type. But a single quotation will illustrate the natural magic +of which Arnold speaks: "The Merrow (mermaid) put the comb in her pocket, +and then bent down her head and whispered some words to the water that +was close to the foot of the rock. Dick saw the murmur of the words upon +the top of the sea, going out towards the wide ocean, just like a breath +of wind rippling along, and, says he, in the greatest wonder, 'Is it +speaking you are, my darling, to the salt water?' + +"'It's nothing else,' says she, quite carelessly; 'I'm just sending word +home to my father not to be waiting breakfast for me.'" Except for its +lack of "high seriousness," this is the imagination that makes myths. + +Catholic Ireland still cherishes popular beliefs which in England, and +even in Scotland, have long been merely antiquarian curiosities. In her +poetry the fairies are never very far away. + + "Up the airy mountain, + Down the rushy glen + We daren't go a-hunting + For fear of little men." [17] + +Irish critics, to be sure, tell us that Allingham's fairies are English +fairies, and that he had no Gaelic, though he knew and loved his Irish +countryside. He was a Protestant and a loyalist, and lived in close +association with the English Pre-Raphaelites--with Rossetti especially, +who made the illustration for "The Maids of Elfin-Mere" in Allingham's +volume "The Music Master" (1855). The Irish fairies, it is said, are +beings of a darker and more malignant breed than Shakspere's elves. Yet +in Allingham's poem they stole little Bridget and kept her seven years, +till she died of sorrow and lies asleep on the lake bottom; even as in +Ferguson's weird ballad, "The Fairy Thorn," the good people carry off +fair Anna Grace from the midst of her three companions, who "pined away +and died within the year and day." + +To the latter half of the century belongs the so-called Celtic revival, +which connects itself with the Nationalist movement in politics and is +partly literary and partly patriotic. It may be doubted whether, for +practical purposes, the Gaelic will ever come again into general use. +But the concerted endeavour by a whole nation to win back its ancient, +wellnigh forgotten speech is a most interesting social phenomenon. At +all events, both by direct translations of the Gaelic hero epics and by +original work in which the Gaelic spirit is transfused through English +ballad and other verse forms, a lost kingdom of romance has been +recovered and a bright green thread of Celtic poetry runs through the +British anthology of the century. The names of the pioneers and leading +contributors to this movement are significant of the varied strains of +blood which compose Irish nationality. James Clarence Mangan was a Celt +of the Celts; Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Aubrey de Vere were of +Norman-Irish stock, and the former was the son of a dean of the +Established Church, and himself the editor of a Tory newspaper; Sir +Samuel Ferguson was an Ulster Protestant of Scotch descent; Dr. George +Sigerson is of Norse blood; Whitley Stokes, the eminent Celtic scholar, +and Dr. John Todhunter, author of "Three Bardic Tales" (1896), bear +Anglo-Saxon surnames; the latter is the son of Quaker parents and was +educated at English Quaker schools. + +Mangan's paraphrases from the Gaelic, "Poets and Poetry of Munster," +appeared posthumously in 1850. They include a number of lyrics, wildly +and mournfully beautiful, inspired by the sorrows of Ireland: "Dark +Rosaleen," "Lament for the Princes of Tir-Owen and Tir-Connell," +"O'Hussey's Ode to the Maguire," etc. The ballad form was not practised +by the ancient Gaelic epic poets. In choosing it as the vehicle for +their renderings from vernacular narrative poetry, the modern Irish poets +have departed widely from the English and Scottish model, employing a +variety of metres and not seeking to conform their diction to the manner +of the ballads in the "Reliques" or the "Border Minstrelsy." Ferguson's +"Lays of the Western Gael" (1865) is a series of historical ballads, +original in effect, though based upon old Gaelic chronicles. "Congal" +(1872) is an epic, founded on an ancient bardic tale, and written in +Chapman's "fourteener" and reminding the reader frequently of Chapman's +large, vigorous manner, his compound epithets and spacious Homeric +similes. The same epic breadth of manner was applied to the treatment of +other hero legends, "Conary," "Deirdré," etc., in a subsequent volume +(1880). "Deirdré," the finest of all the old Irish stories, was also +handled independently by the late Dr. R. D. Joyce in the verse and manner +of William Morris' "Earthly Paradise." [18] Among other recent workers +in this field are Aubrey de Vere, a volume of selections from whose +poetry appeared at New York in 1894, edited by Prof. G. E. Woodberry; +George Sigerson, whose "Bards of the Gael and the Gall," a volume of +translations from the Irish in the original metres, was issued in 1897; +Whitley Stokes, an accomplished translator, and the joint editor (with +Windisch) of the "Irische Texte "; John Todhunter, author of "The Banshee +and Other Poems" (1888) and "Three Bardic Tales" (1896); Alfred Perceval +Graves, author of "Irish Folk Songs" (1897), and many other volumes of +national lyrics; and William Larminie--"West Irish Folk Tales and +Romances" (1893), etc. + +The Celtism of this Gaelic renascence is of a much purer and more genuine +character than the Celtism of Macpherson's "Ossian." Yet with all its +superiority in artistic results, it is improbable that it will make any +such impression on Europe or England as Macpherson made. "Ossian" was +the first revelation to the world of the Celtic spirit: sophisticated, +rhetorical, yet still the first; and it is not likely that its success +will be repeated. In the very latest school of Irish verse, represented +by such names as Lionel Johnson, J. B. Yeats, George W. Russell, Nora +Hopper, the mystical spirit which inhabits the "Celtic twilight" turns +into modern symbolism, so that some of their poems on legendary subjects +bear a curious resemblance to the contemporary work of Maeterlinck: to +such things as "Aglivaine et Salysette" or "Les Sept Princesses." [19] + +The narrative ballad is hardly one of the forms of high art, like the +epic, the tragedy, the Pindaric ode. It is simple and not complex like +the sonnet: not of the aristocracy of verse, but popular--not to say +plebeian--in its associations. It is easy to write and, in its commonest +metrical shape of eights and sixes, apt to run into sing-song. Its +limitations, even in the hands of an artist like Coleridge or Rossetti, +are obvious. It belongs to "minor poetry." The ballad revival has not +been an unmixed blessing and is responsible for much slip-shod work. If +Dr. Johnson could come back from the shades and look over our recent +verse, one of his first comments would probably be: "Sir, you have too +many ballads." Be it understood that the romantic ballad only is here in +question, in which the poet of a literary age seeks to catch and +reproduce the tone of a childlike, unself-conscious time, so that his art +has almost inevitably something artificial or imitative. Here and there +one stands out from the mass by its skill or luck in overcoming the +difficulty. There is Hawker's "Song of the Western Men," which Macaulay +and others quoted as historical, though only the refrain was old: + + "And shall Trelawney die? + Here's twenty thousand Cornish men + Will know the reason why!" [20] + +There is Sydney Dobell's "Keith of Ravelston," [21] which haunts the +memory with the insistent iteration of its refrain:-- + + "The murmur of the mourning ghost + That keeps the shadowy kine; + Oh, Keith of Ravelston, + The sorrows of thy line!" + +And again there is Robert Buchanan's "Ballad of Judas Iscariot" which Mr. +Stedman compares for "weird impressiveness and power" with "The Ancient +Mariner." The mediaeval feeling is most successfully captured in this +poem. It recalls the old "Debate between the Body and Soul," and still +more the touches of divine compassion which soften the rigours of +Catholic theology in the legends of the saints. It strikes the keynote, +too, of that most modern ballad mode which employs the narrative only to +emphasize some thought of universal application. There is salvation for +all, is the thought, even for the blackest soul of the world, the soul +that betrayed its Maker.[22] Such, though after a fashion more subtly +intellectual, is the doctrinal use to which this popular form is put by +one of the latest English ballad makers, Mr. John Davidson. Read, e.g., +his "Ballad of a Nun," [23] the story of which was told in several shapes +by the Spanish poet Alfonso the Learned (1226-84). A runaway nun returns +in penitence to her convent, and is met at the gate by the Virgin Mary, +who has taken her likeness and kept her place for her during the years of +her absence. Or read "A New Ballad of Tannhäuser," [24] which +contradicts "the idea of the inherent impurity of nature" by an +interpretation of the legend in a sense quite the reverse of Wagner's. +Tannhäuser's dead staff blossoms not as a sign of forgiveness, but to +show him that "there was no need to be forgiven." The modern balladist +attacks the ascetic Middle Age with a shaft from its own quiver. + +But it is time to turn from minor poets to acknowledged masters; and +above all to the greatest of modern English artists in verse, the +representative poet of the Victorian era. Is Tennyson to be classed with +the romantics? His workmanship, when most truly characteristic, is +romantic in the sense of being pictorial and ornate, rather than +classically simple or severe. He assimilated the rich manner of Keats, +whose influence is perceptible in his early poems. His art, like Keats', +is eclectic and reminiscent, choosing for its exercise with equal +impartiality whatever was most beautiful in the world of Grecian fable or +the world of mediaeval legend. But unlike Keats, he lived to add new +strings to his lyre; he went on to sing of modern life and thought, of +present-day problems in science and philosophy, of contemporary politics, +the doubt, unrest, passion, and faith of his own century. To find work +of Tennyson's that is romantic throughout, in subject, form, and spirit +alike, we must look among his earlier collections (1830, 1832, 1842). +For this was a phase which he passed beyond, as Millais outgrew his +youthful Pre-Raphaelitism, or as Goethe left behind him his "Götz" and +"Werther" period and widened out into larger utterance. Mr. Stedman +speaks of the "Gothic feeling" in "The Lady of Shalott," and in ballads +like "Oriana" and "The Sisters," describing them as "work that in its +kind is fully up to the best of those Pre-Raphaelites who, by some arrest +of development, stop precisely where Tennyson made his second step +forward, and censure him for having gone beyond them." [25] This +estimate may be accepted so far as it concerns "The Lady of Shalott," +which is known to have worked strongly upon Rossetti's imagination; but +surely "The Sisters" and "Oriana" do not rank with the best +Pre-Raphaelite work. The former is little better than a failure; and the +latter, which provokes a comparison, not to Tennyson's advantage, with +the fine old ballad, "Helen of Kirkconnell," is a weak thing. The name +Oriana has romantic associations--it is that of the heroine of "Amadis de +Gaul"--but the damnable iteration of it as a ballad burden is irritating. +Mediaeval _motifs_ are rather slightly handled in "The Golden Supper" +(from the "Decameron," 4th novel, 10th day); "The Beggar Maid" (from the +ballad of "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid" in the "Reliques"); and +more adequately in "Godiva," a blank-verse rendering of the local legend +of Coventry, in which an attempt is made to preserve something of the +antique roughness under the smooth Vergilian elegance of Tennyson's +diction. "The Day Dream" was a recasting of one of Perrault's fairy +tales, "The Sleeping Beauty," under which title a portion of it had +appeared in the "Poems Chiefly Lyrical" of 1830. Tennyson has written +many greater poems than this, but few in which the special string of +romance vibrates more purely. The tableau of the spellbound palace, with +all its activities suspended, gave opportunity for the display of his +unexampled pictorial power in scenes of still life; and the legend itself +supplied that charmed isolation from the sphere of reality which we +noticed as so important a part of the romantic poet's stock-in-trade in +"Christabel" and "The Eve of St. Agnes"-- + + "The hall-door shuts again and all is still." + +Poems like "The Day Dream" and "The Princess" make it evident that Scott +and Coleridge and Keats had so given back the Middle Ages to the +imagination that any future poet, seeking free play in a realm unhampered +by actual conditions--"apart from place, withholding time"--was apt to +turn naturally, if not inevitably, to the feudal times. The action of +"The Day Dream" proceeds no-where and no-when. The garden--if we +cross-examine it--is a Renaissance garden: + + "Soft lustre bathes the range of urns + On every slanting terrace-lawn: + The fountain to its place returns, + Deep in the garden lake withdrawn." + +The furnishings of the palace are a mixture of mediaeval and Louis +Quatorze--clocks, peacocks, parrots, golden mantle pegs:-- + + "Till all the hundred summers pass, + The beams that through the oriel shine + Make prisms in every carven glass + And beaker brimm'd with noble wine." + +But the impression, as a whole, is of the Middle Age of poetic +convention, if not of history; the enchanted dateless era of romance and +fairy legend. + +"St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad," its masculine counterpart, sound the old +Catholic notes of saintly virginity and mystical, religious rapture, the +_Gottesminne_ of mediaeval hymnody. Not since Southwell's "Burning Babe" +and Crashaw's "Saint Theresa" had any English poet given such expression +to those fervid devotional moods which Sir Thomas Browne describes as +"Christian annihilation, ecstasies, exolution, liquefaction, +transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of God and ingression +into the divine shadow." This vein, we have noticed, is wanting in +Scott. On the other hand, it may be noticed in passing, Tennyson's +attitude towards nature is less exclusively romantic--in the narrow +sense--than Scott's. He, too, is conscious of the historic associations +of place. In Tennyson, as in Scott,-- + + "The splendour falls on castle walls + And snowy summits old in story"--[26] + +but, in general, his treatment of landscape, in its human relations, is +subtler and more intimate. + +"St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad" are monologues, but lyric and not dramatic +in Browning's manner. There is a dramatic falsity, indeed, in making Sir +Galahad say of himself-- + + "My strength is as the strength of ten + Because my heart is pure," + +and the poem would be better in the third person. "St. Simeon Stylites" +is a dramatic monologue more upon Browning's model, _i.e._, a piece of +apologetics and self-analysis. But in this province Tennyson is greatly +Browning's inferior. + +"The Princess" (1847) is representative of that "splendid composite of +imagery," and that application of modern ideas to legendary material, or +to invented material arbitrarily placed in an archaic setting, which are +characteristic of this artist. The poem's sub-title is "A Medley," +because it is + + "--made to suit with time and place, + A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house, + A talk of college and of ladies' rights, + A feudal knight in silken masquerade, + And, yonder, shrieks and strange experiments." + +The problem is a modern one--the New Woman. No precise historic period +is indicated. The female university is full of classic lore and art, but +withal there are courts of feudal kings, with barons, knights, and +squires, and shock of armoured champions in the lists. + +But the special service of Tennyson to romantic poetry lay in his being +the first to give a worthy form to the great Arthurian saga; and the +modern masterpiece of that poetry, all things considered, is his "Idylls +of the King." Not so perfect and unique a thing as "The Ancient +Mariner"; less freshly spontaneous, less stirringly alive than "The Lay +of the Last Minstrel," Tennyson's Arthuriad has so much wider a range +than Coleridge's ballad, and is sustained at so much higher a level than +Scott's romance, that it outweighs them both in importance. The +Arthurian cycle of legends, emerging from Welsh and Breton mythology; +seized upon by French romancers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, +who made of Arthur the pattern king, of Lancelot the pattern knight, and +of the Table Round the ideal institute of chivalry; gathering about +itself accretions like the Grail Quest and the Tristram story; passing by +translation into many tongues, but retaining always its scene in Great or +Lesser Britain, the lands of its origin, furnished the modern English +romancer with a groundwork of national, though not Anglo-Saxon epic +stuff, which corresponds more nearly with the Charlemagne epos in France, +and the Nibelung hero Saga in Germany, than anything else which our +literature possesses. And a national possession, in a sense, it had +always remained. The story in outline and in some of its main episodes +was familiar. Arthur, Lancelot, Guinivere, Merlin, Modred, Iseult, +Gawaine, were well-known figures, like Robin Hood or Guy of Warwick, in +Shakspere's time as in Chaucer's. But the epos, as a whole, had never +found its poet. Spenser had evaporated Arthur into allegory. Milton had +dallied with the theme and put it by.[27] The Elizabethan drama, which +went so far afield in search of the moving accident, had strangely missed +its chance here, bringing the Round Table heroes upon its stage only in +masque and pageant (Justice Shallow "was Sir Dagonet in Arthur's show"), +or in some such performance as the rude old Seneca tragedy of "The +Misfortunes of Arthur." In 1695 Sir Richard Blackmore published his +"Prince Arthur," an epic in ten books and in rimed couplets, enlarged in +1697 into "King Arthur" in twelve books. Blackmore professed to take +Vergil as his model. A single passage from his poem will show how much +chance the old chivalry tale had in the hands of a minor poet of King +William's reign. Arthur and his company have landed on the shores of +Albion, where + + "Rich wine of Burgundy and choice champagne + Relieve the toil they suffered on the main; + But what more cheered them than their meats and wine, + Was wise instruction and discourse divine + From Godlike Arthur's mouth." + +There is no need, in taking a summary view of Tennyson's "Idylls," to go +into the question of sources, or to inquire whether Arthur was a +historical chief of North Wales, or whether he signified the Great Bear +(Arcturus) in Celtic mythology, and his Round Table the circle described +by that constellation about the pole star.[28] Tennyson went no farther +back for his authority than Sir Thomas Malory's "Morte Darthur," printed +by Caxton in 1485, a compilation principally from old French Round Table +romances. This was the final mediaeval shape of the story in English. +It is somewhat wandering and prolix as to method, but written in +delightful prose. The story of "Enid," however (under its various titles +and arrangements in successive editions), he took from Lady Charlotte +Guest's translation of the Welsh "Mabinogion" (1838-49). + +Before deciding upon the heroic blank verse and a loosely epic form, as +most fitting for his purpose, Tennyson had retold passages of Arthurian +romance in the ballad manner and in various shapes of riming stanza. The +first of these was "The Lady of Shalott" (1832), identical in subject +with the later idyll of "Lancelot and Elaine," but fanciful and even +allegorical in treatment. Shalott is from Ascalot, a variant of Astolat, +in the old _metrical_ romance--not Malory's--of the "Morte Arthur." The +fairy lady, who sees all passing sights in her mirror and weaves them +into her magic web, has been interpreted as a symbol of art, which has to +do properly only with the reflection of life. When the figure of +Lancelot is cast upon the glass, a personal emotion is brought into her +life which is fatal to her art. She is "sick of shadows," and looks +through her window at the substance. Then her mirror cracks from side to +side and the curse is come upon her. Other experiments of the same kind +were "Sir Galahad" and "Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinivere" (both in 1842). +The beauty of all these ballad beginnings is such that one is hardly +reconciled to the loss of so much romantic music, even by the noble blank +verse and the ampler narrative method which the poet finally adopted. +They stand related to the "Idylls" very much as Morris' "Defence of +Guenevere" stands to his "Earthly Paradise." + +Thoroughly romantic in content, the "Idylls of the King" are classical in +form. They may be compared to Tasso's "Gierusalemme Liberata," in which +the imperfectly classical manner of the Renaissance is applied to a +Gothic subject, the history of the Crusades. The first specimen given +was the "Morte d'Arthur" of 1842, set in a framework entitled "The Epic," +in which "the poet, Everard Hall," reads to his friends a fragment from +his epic, "King Arthur," in twelve books. All the rest he has burned. +For-- + + "Why take the style of those heroic times? + For nature brings not back the Mastodon, + Nor we those times; and why should any man + Remodel models? these twelve books of mine + Were faint Homeric echoes." + +The "fragment" is thus put forward tentatively and with +apologies--apologies which were little needed; for the "Morte d'Arthur," +afterwards embedded in "The Passing of Arthur," remains probably the +best, and certainly the most Homeric passage in the "Idylls." Tennyson's +own quality was more Vergilian than Homeric, but the models which he here +remodels were the Homeric epics. He chose for his measure not the +Spenserian stanza, nor the _ottava rima_ of Tasso, nor the octosyllables +of Scott and the chivalry romances, but the heroic blank verse which +Milton had fixed as the vehicle of English classical epic. He adopts +Homer's narrative practices: the formulated repetitions of phrase, the +pictorial comparisons, the conventional epithets (in moderation), and his +gnomic habit-- + + "O purblind race of miserable men," etc. + +The original four idylls were published in 1859.[29] Thenceforth the +series grew by successive additions and rearrangements up to the +completed "Idylls" of 1888, twelve in number--besides prologue and +epilogue--according to the plan foreshadowed in "The Epic." The story of +Arthur had thus occupied Tennyson for over a half century. Though +modestly entitled "Idylls," by reason of the episodic treatment, the poem +when finished was, in fact, an epic; but an epic that lacked the formal +unity of the "Aeneid" and the "Paradise Lost," or even of the "Iliad." It +resembled the Homeric heroic poems more than the literary epics of Vergil +and Milton, in being not the result of a single act of construction, but +a growth from the gradual fitting together of materials selected from a +vast body of legend. This legendary matter he reduced to an epic unity. +The adventures in Malory's romance are of very uneven value, and it +abounds in inconsistencies and repetitions. He also redistributed the +ethical balance. Lancelot is the real hero of the old "Morte Darthur," +and Guinivere--the Helen of romance--goes almost uncensured. Malory's +Arthur is by no means "the blameless king" of Tennyson, who makes of him +a nineteenth-century ideal of royal knighthood, and finally an +allegorical type of Soul at war with Sense. The downfall of the Round +Table, that order of spiritual knight-errantry through which the king +hopes to regenerate society, happens through the failure of his knights +to rise to his own high level of character; in a degree, also, because +the emprise is diverted from attainable practical aims to the fantastic +quest of the Holy Grail. The sin of Lancelot and the Queen, drawing +after it the treachery of Modred, brings on the tragic catastrophe. This +conception is latent in Malory, but it is central in Tennyson; and +everywhere he subtilises, refines, elevates, and, in short, modernises +the _Motivirung_ in the old story. Does he thereby also weaken it? +Censure and praise have been freely bestowed upon Tennyson's dealings +with Malory. Thus it is complained that his Arthur is a prig, a curate, +who preaches to his queen and lectures his court, and whose virtue is too +conscious; that the harlot Vivien is a poor substitute for the damsel of +the lake who puts Merlin to sleep under a great rock in the land of +Benwick; that the gracious figure of Gawain suffers degradation from the +application of an effeminate moral standard to his shining exploits in +love and war, that modern _convenances_ are imposed upon a society in +which they do not belong and whose joyous, robust _naïveté_ is hurt by +them.[30] + +The allegorical method tried in "The Lady of Shalott," but abandoned in +the earlier "Idylls," creeps in again in the later; particularly in +"Gareth and Lynette" (1872), in the elaborate symbolism of the gates of +Camelot, and in the guardians of the river passes, whom Gareth +successively overcomes, and who seem to represent the temptations +incident to the different ages of man. The whole poem, indeed, has been +interpreted in a parabolic sense, Merlin standing for the intellect, the +Lady of the Lake for religion, etc. Allegory was a favourite mediaeval +mode, and the Grail legend contains an element of mysticism which invites +an emblematic treatment. But the attraction of this fashion for minds of +a Platonic cast is dangerous to art: the temptation to find a meaning in +human life more esoteric than any afforded by the literal life itself. A +delicate balance must be kept between that presentation of the concrete +which makes it significant by making it representative and typical, and +that other presentation which dissolves the individual into the general, +by making it a mere abstraction. Were it not for Dante and Hawthorne and +the second part of "Faust," one would incline to say that no creative +genius of the first order indulges in allegory. Homer is never +allegorical except in the episode of Circe; Shakspere never, with the +doubtful exception of "The Tempest." The allegory in the "Idylls of the +King" is not of the obvious kind employed in the "Faëry Queene"; but +Tennyson, no less than Spenser, appeared to feel that the simple +retelling of an old chivalry tale, without imparting to it some deeper +meaning, was no work for a modern poet. + +Tennyson has made the Arthur Saga, as a whole, peculiarly his own. But +others of the Victorian poets have handled detached portions of it. +William Morris' "Defence of Guenevere" (1858) anticipated the first group +of "Idylls." Swinburne's "Tristram of Lyonesse" (1882) dealt at full +length, and in a very different spirit, with an epicyclic legend which +Tennyson touched incidentally in "The Last Tournament." Matthew Arnold's +"Tristram and Iseult" was a third manipulation of the legend, partly in +dramatic, partly in narrative form, and in changing metres. It follows +another version of Tristram's death, and the story of Vivian and Merlin +which Iseult of Brittany tells her children is quite distinct from the +one in the "Idylls." Iseult of Brittany--not Iseult of Cornwall--is the +heroine of Arnold's poem. Thomas Westwood's "Quest of the Sancgreall" is +still one more contribution to Arthurian poetry of which a mere mention +must here suffice. + +For our review threatens to become a catalogue. To such a degree had +mediaevalism become the fashion, that nearly every Georgian and Victorian +poet of any pretensions tried his hand at it. Robert Browning was not +romantic in Scott's way, nor in Tennyson's. His business was with the +soul. The picturesqueness of the external conditions in which soul was +placed was a matter of indifference. To-day was as good as yesterday. +Now and then occurs a title with romantic implications--"Childe Roland to +the Dark Tower Came," _e.g._, borrowed from a ballad snatch sung by the +Fool in "Lear" (Roland is Roland of the "Chanson"). But the poem proves +to be a weird study in landscape symbolism and the history of some dark +emprise, the real nature of which is altogether undiscoverable. "Count +Gismond," again, is the story of a combat in the lists at Aix in +Provence, in which a knight vindicates a lady's honour with his lance, +and slays her traducer at her feet. But this is a dramatic monologue +like any other, and only accidentally mediaeval. "The Heretic's Tragedy: +A Middle Age Interlude," is mediaeval without being romantic. It +recounts the burning, at Paris, A.D. 1314, of Jacques du Bourg-Molay, +Grand Master of the Templars; and purports to be a sort of canticle, with +solo and chorus, composed two centuries after the event by a Flemish +canon of Ypres, to be sung at hocktide and festivals. The childishness +and devout buffoonery of an old miracle play are imitated here, as in +Swinburne's "Masque of Queen Bersabe." This piece and "Holy Cross Day" +are dramatic, or monodramatic, grotesques; and in their apprehension of +this trait of the mediaeval mind are on a par with Hugo's "Pas d'armes du +Roi Jean" and "La Chasse du Burgrave." But Browning's mousings in the +Middle Ages after queer freaks of conscience or passion were occasional. +If any historical period, more than another, had special interest for +him, it was the period of the Italian Renaissance. Yet Ruskin said: +"Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle +Ages." + +Among Mrs. Browning's poems, which, it needs hardly be said, are not +prevailingly "Gothic," there are three interesting experiments in ballad +romance: "The Romaunt of the Page," "The Lay of the Brown Rosary," and +"The Rime of the Duchess May." In all of these she avails herself of the +mediaeval atmosphere, simply to play variations on her favourite theme, +the devotedness of woman's love. The motive is the same as in poems of +modern life like "Bertha in the Lane" and "Aurora Leigh." The vehemence +of this nobly gifted woman, her nervous and sometimes almost hysterical +emotionalism, are not without a disagreeable quality. With greater range +and fervour, she had not the artistic poise of the Pre-Raphaelite +poetess, Christina Rossetti. In these romances, as elsewhere, she is +sometimes shrill and often mannerised. "The Romaunt of the Page" is the +tale of a lady who attends her knight to the Holy Land, disguised as a +page, and without his knowledge. She saves his life several times, and +finally at the cost of her own. A prophetic accompaniment or burden +comes in ever and anon in the distant chant of nuns over the dead abbess. + + "Beati! beati mortui." + +"The Lay of the Brown Rosary" is a charming but uneven piece, in four +parts and a variety of measures, about a girl who, while awaiting her +lover's return from the war, learns in a dream that she must die, and +purchases seven years of life from the ghost of a wicked nun whose body +has been immured in an old convent wall. The spirit gives the bride a +brown rosary which she wears under her dress, but her kiss kills the +bridegroom at the altar. The most spirited and well-sustained of these +ballad poems is "The Rime of the Duchess May," in which the heroine rides +off the battlements with her husband. "Toll slowly," runs the refrain. +Mrs. Browning employs some archaisms, such as _chapélle_, _chambére_, +_ladié_. The stories are seemingly of her own invention, and have not +quite the genuine accent of folk-song. + +Even Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hood, representatives in their separate +spheres of anti-romantic tendencies, made occasional forays into the +Middle Ages. But who thinks of such things as "The Plea of the Midsummer +Fairies" or "The Two Peacocks of Bedfont" when Hood is mentioned; and not +rather of "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Shirt"? Or who, in +spite of "Balder Dead" and "Tristram and Iseult," would classify Arnold's +clean-cut, reserved, delicately intellectual work as romantic? Hood was +an artist of the terrible as well as of the comic; witness his "Last +Man," "Haunted House," and "Dream of Eugene Aram." If he could have +welded the two moods into a more intimate union, and applied them to +legendary material, he might have been a great artist in mediaeval +grotesque--a species of Gothic Hoffman perhaps. As it is, his one +romantic success is the charming lyric "Fair Ines." His longer poems in +this kind, in modifications of _ottava rima_ or Spenserian stanza, show +Keats' influence very clearly. The imagery is profuse, but too distinct +and without the romantic _chiaroscuro_. "The Water Lady" is a manifest +imitation of "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and employs the same somewhat +unusual stanza form. Hood--incorrigible punster--who had his jest at +everything, jested at romance. He wrote ballad parodies--"The Knight and +the Dragon," etc.--and an ironical "Lament for the Decline of Chivalry": + + "Well hast thou cried, departed Burke, + All chivalrous romantic work + Is ended now and past! + That iron age--which some have thought + Of mettle rather overwrought-- + Is now all overcast." + +And finally, "The Saint's Tragedy" (1848) of Charles Kingsley affords a +case in which mediaeval biography is made the pretext for an assault upon +mediaeval ideas. It is a _tendenz_ drama in five acts, founded upon the +"Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary," as narrated by her contemporary, +Dietrich the Thuringian. Its militant Protestantism is such as might be +predicted from Kingsley's well-known resentment of the Romanist attitude +towards marriage and celibacy; from his regard for freedom of thought; +and from that distrust and contempt of Popish priestcraft which involved +him in his controversy with Newman. "The Middle Age," says the +Introduction, "was, in the gross, a coarse, barbarous, and profligate +age. . . . It was, in fact, the very ferocity and foulness of the time +which, by a natural revulsion, called forth at the same time the +Apostolic holiness and the Manichean asceticism of the mediaeval +saints. . . . So rough and common a life-picture of the Middle Age will, +I am afraid, whether faithful or not, be far from acceptable to those who +take their notions of that period principally from such exquisite dreams +as the fictions of Fouqué, and of certain moderns whose graceful +minds . . . are, on account of their very sweetness and simplicity, +singularly unfitted to convey any true likeness of the coarse and stormy +Middle Age. . . . But really, time enough has been lost in ignorant +abuse of that period, and time enough also, lately, in blind adoration of +it. When shall we learn to see it as it was?" + +Polemic in its purpose and anti-Catholic in temper, "The Saint's Tragedy" +then seeks to dispel the glamour which romance had thrown over mediaeval +life. Kingsley's Middle Age is not the holy Middle Age of the German +"throne-and-altar" men; nor yet the picturesque Middle Age of Walter +Scott. It is the cruel, ignorant, fanatical Middle Age of "The Amber +Witch" and "The Succube." But Kingsley was too much of a poet not to +feel those "last enchantments" which whispered to Arnold from Oxford +towers, maugre his "strong sense of the irrationality of that period." +The saintly, as well as the human side, of Elizabeth's character is +portrayed with sympathy, though poetically the best thing in the drama +are the songs of the Crusaders. + +Kingsley, in effect, was always good at a ballad. His finest work in +this kind is modern, "The Last Buccaneer," "The Sands of Dee," "The Three +Fishers," and the like. But there are the same fire and swing in many of +his romantic ballads on historical or legendary subjects, such as "The +Swan-Neck," "The Red King," "Ballad of Earl Haldan's Daughter," "The Song +of the Little Baltung," and a dozen more. Without the imaginative +witchery of Coleridge, Keats, and Rossetti, in the ballad of action +Kingsley ranks very close to Scott. The same manly delight in outdoor +life and bold adventure, love of the old Teutonic freedom and strong +feeling of English nationality inspire his historical romances, only one +of which, however, "Hereward the Wake" (1866), has to do with the period +of the Middle Ages. + + +[1] "It is almost superfluous to mention that the appellation 'Childe,' +as 'Childe Waters,' 'Childe Childers,' etc., is used as more consonant +with the old structure of versification which I have adopted."--Preface +to "Childe Harold." Byron appeals to a letter of Beattie relating to +"The Minstrel," to justify his choice of the stanza. + +[2] See vol. i., p. 98. + +[3] For Byron's and Shelley's dealings with Dante, _vide supra_, pp. +99-102. + +[4] For the type of prose romance essayed by Shelley, see Vol. i., p. 403. + +[5] "Mary, the Maid of the Inn." + +[6] Duran's great collection, begun in 1828, embraces nearly two thousand +pieces. + +[7] It is hardly necessary to mention early English translations of +"Palmerin of England" (1616) and "Amadis de Gaul" (1580), or to point out +the influence of Montemayor's "Diana Enamorada" upon Sidney, Shakspere, +and English pastoral romance in general. + +[8] "The English and Scotch ballads, with which they may most naturally +be compared, belong to a ruder state of society, where a personal +violence and coarseness prevailed which did not, indeed, prevent the +poetry it produced from being full of energy, and sometimes of +tenderness; but which necessarily had less dignity and elevation than +belong to the character, if not the condition, of a people who, like the +Spanish, were for centuries engaged in a contest ennobled by a sense of +religion and loyalty--a contest which could not fail sometimes to raise +the minds and thoughts of those engaged in it far above such an +atmosphere as settled round the bloody feuds of rival barons or the gross +maraudings of a border warfare. The truth of this will at once be felt, +if we compare the striking series of ballads on Robin Hood with those on +the Cid and Bernardo de Carpio; or if we compare the deep tragedy of Edom +O'Gordon with that of the Conde Alarcos; or, what would be better than +either, if we should sit down to the 'Romancero General,' with its +poetical confusion of Moorish splendours and Christian loyalty, just when +we have come fresh from Percy's 'Reliques' or Scott's 'Minstrelsy'." +("History of Spanish Literature," George Ticknor, vol. i., p. 141, third +American ed., 1866). The "Romancero General" was the great collection of +some thousand ballads and lyrics published in 1602-14. + +[9] "The Ancient Ballads of Spain." R. Ford, in Edinburgh Review, No. +146. + +[10] "A History of Spanish Literature." By James Fitz-Maurice Kelly, New +York, 1898, pp. 366-67. + +[11] _Ibid._, pp. 368-73. + +[12] Kelly, p. 270. + +[13] The collection of Sanchez (1779) is described as an imitation of the +"Reliques" (Edinburgh Review, No. 146). + +[14] He preferred, however, Sir Edmund Head's rendering of the ballad +"Lady Alda's Dream" to Lockhart's version. + +[15] Scott and Motherwell never met in person. + +[16] Mr. Churton Collins thinks that the lines in "Guinevere"-- + + "Down in the cellars merry bloated things + Shouldered the spigot, straddling on the butts + While the wine ran"-- + +was suggested by Croker's description of the Cluricaune. ("Illustrations +of Tennyson" (1891), p. 152.) + +[17] "The Fairies." William Allingham. + +[18] See vol. i., p. 314. Dr. Joyce was for some years a resident of +Boston, where his "Ballads of Irish Chivalry" were published in 1872. +His "Deirdré" received high praise from J. R. Lowell. Tennyson's "Voyage +of Maeldune" (1880) probably had its source in Dr. P. W. Joyce's "Old +Celtic Romances" (1879) (Collins' "Illustrations of Tennyson," p. 163). +Swinburne pronounced Ferguson's "Welshmen of Tirawley" one of the best of +modern ballads. + +[19] For a survey of this department of romantic literature the reader is +referred to "A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue." Edited +by Stopford A. Brooke and T. W. Rolleston (New York, 1900). There are a +quite astonishing beauty and force in many of the pieces in this +collection, though some of the editors' claims seem excessive; as, +_e.g._, that Mr. Yeats is "the first of living writers in the English +language." + +[20] Robert Stephen Hawker was vicar of Morwenstow, near "wild Tintagil +by the Cornish Sea," where Tennyson visited him in 1848. Hawker himself +made contributions to Arthurian poetry, "Queen Gwynnevar's Round" and +"The Quest of the Sangreal" (1864). He was converted to the Roman +Catholic faith on his death-bed. + +[21] Given in Palgrave's "Golden Treasury," second series. Rossetti +wrote of Dobell's ballad in 1868: "I have always regarded that poem as +being one of the finest, of its length, in any modern poet; ranking with +Keats' 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' and the other masterpieces of the +condensed and hinted order so dear to imaginative minds." The use of the +family name Keith in Rossetti's "Rose Mary" was a coincidence. His poem +was published (1854) some years before Dobell's. He thought of +substituting some other name for Keith, but could find none to suit him, +and so retained it. + +[22] _Cf._ Matthew Arnold's "St. Brandan," suggested by a passage in the +old Irish "Voyage of Bran." The traitor Judas is allowed to come up from +hell and cool himself on an iceberg every Christmas night because he had +once given his cloak to a leper in the streets of Joppa. + +[23] "Ballads and Songs," London, 1895. + +[24] "New Ballads," London, 1897. + +[25] "Victorian Poets." By E. C. Stedman. New York, 1886 (tenth ed.), +p. 155. + +[26] This famous lyric, one of the "inserted" songs in "The Princess," +was inspired by the note of a bugle on the Lakes of Killarney. + +[27] See vol. i., pp. 146-47. Dryden, like Milton, had designs upon +Arthur. See introduction to the first canto of "Marmion": + + "--Dryden, in immortal strain, + Had raised the Table Round again, + But that a ribald king and court + Bade him toil on, to make them sport." + +[28] For a discussion of these and similar matters and a bibliography of +Arthurian literature, the reader should consult Dr. H. Oskar Sommer's +scholarly reprint and critical edition of "Le Morte Darthur. By Syr +Thomas Malory," three vols., London, 1889-91. + +[29] Two of them, however, had been printed privately in 1857 under the +title of "Enid and Nimuë": the true and the false. "Nimuë" was the first +form of Vivien. + +[30] Matthew Arnold writes in one of his letters; "I have a strong sense +of the irrationality of that period [the Middle Ages] and of the utter +folly of those who take it seriously and play at restoring it; still it +has poetically the greatest charm and refreshment possible for me. The +fault I find with Tennyson, in his 'Idylls of the King,' is that the +peculiar charm of the Middle Age he does not give in them. There is +something magical about it, and I will do something with it before I have +done." + + + + +CHAPTER VII. + +The Pre-Raphaelites. + +In the latter half of the century the Italian Middle Age and Dante, its +great exemplar, found new interpreters in the Rossetti family; a family +well fitted by its mixture of bloods and its hereditary aptitudes, +literary and artistic, to mediate between the English genius and whatever +seemed to it alien or repellant in Dante's system of thought. The +father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a political refugee, who held the +professorship of Italian in King's College, London, from 1831 to 1845, +and was the author of a commentary on Dante which carried the +politico-allegorical theory of the "Divine Comedy" to somewhat fantastic +lengths. The mother was half English and half Italian, a sister of +Byron's travelling companion, Dr. Polidori. Of the four children of the +marriage, Dante Gabriel and Christina became poets of distinction. The +eldest sister, Maria Francesca, a religious devotee who spent her last +years as a member of a Protestant sisterhood, was the author of that +unpretentious but helpful piece of Dante literature, "A Shadow of Dante." +The younger brother, William Michael, is well known as a biographer, +_littérateur_, and art critic, as an editor of Shelley and of the works +of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. + +Other arts besides the literary art had partaken in the romantic +movement. The eighteenth century had seen the introduction of the new, +or English, school of landscape gardening; and the premature beginnings +of the Gothic revival in architecture, which reached a successful issue +some century later.[1] Painting in France had been romanticised in the +thirties _pari passu_ with poetry and drama; and in Germany, Overbeck and +Cornelius had founded a school of sacred art which corresponds, in its +mediaeval spirit, to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In England painting +was the last of the arts to catch the new inspiration. When the change +came, it evinced that same blending of naturalism and Gothicism which +defined the incipient romantic movement of the previous century. +Painting, like landscape gardening, returned to nature; like +architecture, it went back to the past. Like these, and like literature +itself, it broke away from a tradition which was academic, if not +precisely classic in the way in which David was classic. + +In 1848 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established by three young +painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William +Holman Hunt. The name expresses their admiration of the early +Italian--and notably the early Florentine--religious painters, like +Giotto, Ghiberti, Bellini, and Fra Angelica. In the work of these men +they found a sweetness, depth, and sincerity of devotional feeling, a +self-forgetfulness and humble adherence to truth, which were absent from +the sophisticated art of Raphael and his successors. Even the imperfect +command of technique in these "primitives" had a charm. The stiffness +and awkwardness of their figure painting, their defects of drawing, +perspective, and light and shade, their lack of anatomical science were +like the lispings of childhood or the artlessness of an old ballad. The +immediate occasion of the founding of the Brotherhood was a book of +engravings which Hunt and Rossetti saw at Millais' house, from the +frescoes by Gozzoli, Orcagna, and others in the Campo Santo, at Pisa; the +same frescoes, it will be remembered, which so strongly impressed Leigh +Hunt and Keats. Holman Hunt--though apparently not his associates--had +also read with eager approval the first volume of Ruskin's "Modern +Painters," in which the young artists of England are advised to "go to +nature in all singleness of heart . . . rejecting nothing, selecting +nothing." Pre-Raphaelitism was a practical, as "Modern Painters" was a +theoretical, protest against the academic traditions which kept young +artists making school copies of Raphael, instructed them that a third of +the canvas should be occupied with a principal shadow, and that no two +people's heads in the picture should be turned the same way, and asked, +"Where are you going to put your brown tree?" + +The three original members of the group associated with themselves four +others: Thomas Woolner, the sculptor; James Collinson, a painter; F. G. +Stephens, who began as an artist and ended as an art critic; and +Rossetti's brother William, who was the literary man of the movement. +Woolner was likewise a poet, and contributed to _The Germ_[2] his two +striking pieces, "My Beautiful Lady" and "Of My Lady in Death." Among +other artists not formally enrolled in the Brotherhood, but who worked +more or less in the spirit and principles of Pre-Raphaelitism, were Ford +Madox Brown, an older man, in whose studio Rossetti had, at his own +request, been admitted as a student; Walter Deverell, who took +Collinson's place when the latter resigned his membership in order to +study for the Roman Catholic priesthood; and Arthur Hughes.[3] + +But the main importance of the Pre-Raphaelite movement to romantic +literature resides in the poetry of Rossetti, and in the inspiration +which this communicated to younger men, like Morris and Swinburne, and +through them to other and still younger followers. The history of +English painting is no part of our subject, but Rossetti's painting and +his poetry so exactly reflect each other, that some definition or brief +description of Pre-Raphaelitism seems here to be called for, ill +qualified as I feel myself to give any authoritative account of the +matter.[4] + +And first as to methods: the Pre-Raphaelites rejected the academic system +whereby the canvas was prepared by rubbing in bitumen, and the colours +were laid upon a background of brown, grey, or neutral tints. Instead of +this, they spread their colours directly upon the white, unprepared +canvas, securing transparency by juxtaposition rather than by overlaying. +They painted their pictures bit by bit, as in frescoes or mosaic work, +finishing each portion as they went along, until no part of the canvas +was left blank. The Pre-Raphaelite theory was sternly realistic. They +were not to copy from the antique, but from nature. For landscape +background, they were to take their easels out of doors. In figure +painting they were to work, if possible, from a living model and not from +a lay figure. A model once selected, it was to be painted as it was in +each particular, and without imaginative deviation. "Every +Pre-Raphaelite landscape background," wrote Ruskin, "is painted, to the +last touch, in the open air from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelite +figure, however studied in expression, is a true portrait of some living +person. Every minute accessory is painted in the same manner." [5] In +this fashion their earliest works were executed. In Rossetti's "Girlhood +of Mary Virgin," exhibited in 1849, the figure of St. Anne is a portrait +of the artist's mother; the Virgin, of his sister Christina; and Joseph, +of a man-of-all-work employed in the family. In Millais' "Lorenzo and +Isabella"--a subject from Keats--Isabella's brother, her lover, and one +of the guests, are portraits of Deverell, Stephens, and the two +Rossettis. But this severity of realism was not long maintained. It was +a discipline, not a final method. Even in Rossetti's second painting, +"Ecce Ancilla Domini," the faces of the Virgin and the angel Gabriel are +blendings of several models; although, in its freedom from convention, +its austere simplicity, and endeavour to see the fact as it happened, the +piece is in the purest Pre-Raphaelite spirit. Ruskin insisted that, +while composition was necessarily an affair of the imagination, the +figures and accessories of a picture should be copies from the life. In +the early days of the Brotherhood there was an ostentatious +conscientiousness in observing this rule. We hear a great deal in +Rossetti's correspondence about the brick wall at Chiswick which he +copied into his picture "Found," and about his anxious search for a white +calf for the countryman's cart in the same composition. But all the +Pre-Raphaelites painted from the lay figure as well as from the living +model, and Rossetti, in particular, relied quite as much on memory and +imagination as upon the object before him. W. B. Scott thinks that his +most charming works were the small water-colours on Arthurian subjects; +"done entirely without nature and a good deal in the spirit of +illuminated manuscripts, with very indifferent drawing and perspective +nowhere." As for Millais, he soon departed from rigidly Pre-Raphaelite +principles, and became the most successful and popular of British artists +in genre. In natural talent and cleverness of execution he was the most +brilliant of the three; in imaginative intensity and originality he was +Rossetti's inferior--as in patience and religious earnestness he was +inferior to Hunt. It was Hunt who stuck most faithfully to the programme +of Pre-Raphaelitism. He spent laborious years in the East in order to +secure the exactest local truth of scenery and costume for his Biblical +pieces: "Christ in the Shadow of Death," "Christ in the Temple," and "The +Scapegoat." While executing the last-named, he pitched his tent on the +shores of the Dead Sea and painted the desert landscape and the actual +goat from a model tied down on the edge of the sea. Hunt's "Light of the +World" was one of the masterpieces of the school, and as it is typical in +many ways, may repay description. Ruskin pronounced it "the most perfect +instance of expressional purpose with technical power which the world has +yet produced." + +In this tall, narrow canvas the figure of Christ occupies nearly half the +space. He holds a lantern in his hand and knocks at a cottage door. The +face--said to be a portrait of Venables, curate of St. Paul's, Oxford--is +quite unlike the type which Raphael has made traditional. It is +masculine--even rugged--seamed with lines of care, and filled with an +expression of yearning. There is anxiety and almost timidity in his pose +as he listens for an answer to his knock. The nails and bolts of the +door are rusted; it is overgrown with ivy and the tall stalks and flat +umbels of fennel. The sill is choked with nettles and other weeds, +emblems all of the long sleep of the world which Christ comes to break. +The full moon makes a halo behind his head and shines through the low +boughs of an orchard, whose apples strew the dark grass in the +foreground, sown with spots of light from the star-shaped perforations in +the lantern-cover. They are the apples of Eden, emblems of the Fall. +Everything, in fact, is symbolical. Christ's seamless white robe, with +its single heavy fold, typifies the Church catholic; the jewelled clasps +of the priestly mantle, one square and one oval, are the Old and New +Testaments. The golden crown is enwoven with one of thorns, from which +new leaves are sprouting. The richly embroidered mantle hem has its +meaning, and so have the figures on the lantern. To get the light in +this picture right, Hunt painted out of doors in an orchard every +moonlight night for three months from nine o'clock till five. While +working in his studio, he darkened one end of the room, put a lantern in +the hand of his lay-figure and painted this interior through the hole in +a curtain. On moonlight nights he let the moon shine in through the +window to mix with the lantern light. It was a principle with the +Brotherhood that detail, though not introduced for its own sake, should +be painted with truth to nature. Hunt, especially, took infinite pains +to secure minute exactness in his detail. Ruskin wrote in enthusiastic +praise of the colours of the gems on the mantle clasp in "The Light of +the World," and said that all the Academy critics and painters together +could not have executed one of the nettle leaves at the bottom of the +picture. The lizards in the foreground of Millais' "Ferdinand Lured by +Ariel" (exhibited in 1850) were studied from life, and Scott makes merry +over the shavings on the floor of the carpenter shop in the same artist's +"Christ in the House of his Parents," a composition which was ferociously +ridiculed by Dickens in "Household Words." + +The symbolism which is so pronounced a feature in "The Light of the +World" is common to all the Pre-Raphaelite art. It is a mediaeval note, +and Rossetti learned it from Dante. Symbolism runs through the "Divine +Comedy" in such touches as the rush, emblem of humility, with which +Vergil girds Dante for his journey through Purgatory; the constellation +of four stars-- + + "Non viste mai fuor ch' alla prima gente"-- + +typifying the cardinal virtues; the three different coloured steps to the +door of Purgatory;[6] and thickening into the elaborate apocalyptic +allegory of the griffin and the car of the church, the eagle and the +mystic tree in the last cantos of the "Purgatorio." In Hunt's "Christ in +the Shadow of Death," the young carpenter's son is stretching his arms +after work, and his shadow, thrown upon the wall, is a prophecy of the +crucifixion. In Millais' "Christ in the House of his Parents," the boy +has wounded the palm of his hand upon a nail, another foretokening of the +crucifixion. In Rossetti's "Girlhood of Mary Virgin," Joseph is training +a vine along a piece of trellis in the shape of the cross; Mary is +copying in embroidery a three-flowered white lily plant, growing in a +flower-pot which stands upon a pile of books lettered with the names of +the cardinal virtues. The quaint little child angel who tends the plant +is a portrait of a young sister of Thomas Woolner. Similarly, in "Ecce +Ancilla Domini," the lily of the annunciation which Gabriel holds is +repeated in the piece of needlework stretched upon the 'broidery frame at +the foot of Mary's bed. In "Beata Beatrix" the white poppy brought by +the dove is the symbol at once of chastity and of death; and the shadow +upon the sun-dial marks the hour of Beatrice's beatification. Again, in +"Dante's Dream," poppies strew the floor, emblems of sleep and death; an +expiring lamp symbolises the extinction of life; and a white cloud borne +away by angels is Beatrice's departing soul. Love stands by the couch in +flame-coloured robes, fastened at the shoulder with the scallop shell +which is the badge of pilgrimage. In Millais' "Lorenzo and Isabella" the +salt-box is overturned upon the table, signifying that peace is broken +between Isabella's brothers and their table companion. Doves are +everywhere in Rossetti's pictures, embodiments of the Holy Ghost and the +ministries of the spirit, Rossetti labelled his early manuscript poems +"Poems of the Art Catholic"; and the Pre-Raphaelite heresy was connected +by unfriendly critics with the Anglo-Catholic or Tractarian movement at +Oxford. William Sharp, in speaking of "that splendid outburst of +Romanticism in which Coleridge was the first and most potent +participant," and of the lapse or ebb that followed the death of +Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, resumes: "At last a time came when +a thrill of expectation, of new desire, of hope, passed through the +higher lives of the nation; and what followed thereafter were the Oxford +movement in the Church of England, the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art, +and the far-reaching Gothic revival. Different as these movements were +in their primary aims, and still more differing in the individual +representations of interpreters, they were in reality closely interwoven, +one being the outcome of the other. The study of mediaeval art, which +was fraught with such important results, was the outcome of the +widespread ecclesiastical revival, which in its turn was the outcome of +the Tractarian movement in Oxford. The influence of Pugin was potent in +strengthening the new impulse, and to him succeeded Ruskin with 'Modern +Painters' and Newman with the 'Tracts for the Times.' Primarily the +Pre-Raphaelite movement had its impulse in the Oxford religious revival; +and however strange it may seem to say that such men as Holman Hunt and +Rossetti . . . followed directly in the footsteps of Newman and Pusey and +Keble, it is indubitably so." [7] Ruskin, too, cautioned his young +friends that "if their sympathies with the early artists lead them into +mediaevalism or Romanism, they will of course come to nothing. But I +believe there is no danger of this, at least for the strongest among +them. There may be some weak ones whom the Tractarian heresies may +touch; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branches from a strong +stem." [8] One of these weak ones who dropped off was James Collinson, a +man of an ascetic and mystical piety--like Werner or Brentano. He +painted, among other things, "The Renunciation of St. Elizabeth" from +Kingsley's "Saint's Tragedy." "The picture," writes Scott, "resembled +the feckless dilettanteism of the converts who were then dropping out of +their places in Oxford and Cambridge into Mariolatry and Jesuitism. In +fact, this James Collinson actually did become Romanist, wanted to be a +priest, painted no more, but entered a seminary, where they set him to +clean the boots as an apprenticeship in humility and obedience. They did +not want him as a priest; they were already getting tired of that species +of convert; so he left, turned to painting again, and disappeared." [9] + +M. de la Sizeranne is rather scornful of these metaphysical definitions +of Pre-Raphaelitism; "for to characterise a Pre-Raphaelite picture by +saying that it was inspired by the Oxford movement, is like attempting to +explain the mechanism of a lock by describing the political opinions of +the locksmith." [10] He himself proposes, as the distinguishing +characteristics of Pre-Raphaelite art, originality of gesture and +vividness of colouring. This is the professional point of view; but the +student of literature is less concerned with such technical aspects of +the subject than with those spiritual aspects which connect the work of +the Pre-Raphaelites with the great mediaeval or romantic revival. + +When Ruskin came to the rescue of the P.-R. B. in 1851, in those letters +to the _Times_, afterwards reprinted in pamphlet form under the title +"Pre-Raphaelitism," he recognised the propriety of the name, and the real +affinity between the new school and the early Italian schools of sacred +art. Mediaeval art, he asserted,[11] was religious and truthful, modern +art is profane and insincere. "In mediaeval art, thought is the first +thing, execution is the second; in modern art, execution is the first +thing and thought is the second. And again, in mediaeval art, truth is +first, beauty second; in modern art, beauty is first, truth second." +Ruskin denied that the Pre-Raphaelites were unimaginative, though he +allowed that they had a disgust for popular forms of grace and +prettiness. And he pointed out a danger in the fact that their +principles confined them to foreground work, and called for laborious +finish on a small scale. In "Modern Painters" he complained that the +Pre-Raphaelites should waste a whole summer in painting a bit of oak +hedge or a bed of weeds by a duck pond, which caught their fancy perhaps +by reminding them of a stanza in Tennyson. Nettles and mushrooms, he +said, were good to make nettle soup and fish sauce; but it was too bad +that the nobler aspects of nature, such as the banks of the castled +Rhine, should be left to the frontispieces in the Annuals. Ruskin, +furthermore, denied that the drawing of the Pre-Raphaelites was bad or +their perspective false; or that they imitated the _errors_ of the early +Florentine painters, whom they greatly excelled in technical +accomplishment. Meanwhile be it remarked that the originality of gesture +in Pre-Raphaelite figure painting, which M. de la Sizeranne notices, was +only one more manifestation of the romantic desire for individuality and +concreteness as against the generalising academicism of the eighteenth +century.[12] + +As poets, the Pre-Raphaelites derive from Keats rather than from Scott, +in their exclusive devotion to beauty, to art for art's sake; in their +single absorption in the passion of love; and in their attraction towards +the more esoteric side of mediaeval life, rather than towards its broad, +public, and military aspects.[13] + +Rossetti's position in the romantic literature of the last half of the +ninetenth century is something like Coleridge's in the first half. +Unlike Coleridge, he was the leader of a school, the master of a definite +group of artists and poets. His actual performance, too, far exceeds +Coleridge's in amount, if not in value. But like Coleridge, he was a +seminal mind, a mind rich in original suggestions, which inspired and +influenced younger men to carry out its ideas, often with a fluency of +utterance and a technical dexterity both in art and letters which the +master himself did not possess. Holman Hunt, Millais, and Burne-Jones +among painters, Morris and Swinburne among poets, were disciples of +Rossetti who in some ways outdid him in execution. His pictures were +rarely exhibited, and no collection of his poems was published till 1870. +Meanwhile, however, many of these had circulated in manuscript, and +"secured a celebrity akin in kind and almost equal in extent to that +enjoyed by Coleridge's 'Christabel' during the many years preceding 1816 +in which it lay in manuscript. Like Coleridge's poem in another +important particular, certain of Rossetti's ballads, while still unknown +to the public, so far influenced contemporary poetry that when they did +at length appear, they had all the seeming to the uninitiated of work +imitated from contemporary models, instead of being, as in fact they +were, the primary source of inspiration for writers whose names were +earlier established." [14] William Morris, _e.g._, had printed four +volumes of verse in advance of Rossetti, and the earliest of these, "The +Defence of Guenevere," which contains his most intensely Pre-Raphaelite +work and that most evidently done in the spirit of Rossetti's teachings, +saw the light (1858) twelve years before Rossetti's own. Swinburne, too, +had published three volumes of poetry before 1870, including the "Poems +and Ballads" of 1866, in which Rossetti's influence is plainly manifest; +and he had already secured a wide fame at a time when the elder poet's +reputation was still esoteric and mainly confined to the _cénacle_. +William M. Rossetti, in describing the literary influences which moulded +his brother's tastes, tells us that "in the long run he perhaps enjoyed +and revered Coleridge beyond any other modern poet whatsoever." [15] + +It is worth while to trace these literary influences with some detail, +since they serve to link the neo-romantic poetry of our own time to the +product of that older generation which had passed away before Rossetti +came of age. It is interesting to find then, that at the age of fifteen +(1843) he taught himself enough German to enable him to translate +Bürger's "Lenore," as Walter Scott had done a half-century before. This +devil of a poem so haunts our history that it has become as familiar a +spirit as Mrs. Radcliffe's bugaboo apparitions, and our flesh refuses any +longer to creep at it. It is quite one of the family. It would seem, +indeed, as if Bürger's ballad was set as a school copy for every young +romanticist in turn to try his 'prentice hand upon. Fortunately, +Rossetti's translation has perished, as has also his version--some +hundred lines--of the earlier portion of the "Nibelungenlied." But a +translation which he made about the same time of the old Swabian poet, +Hartmann von Aue's "Der Arme Heinrich" (Henry the Leper) is preserved, +and was first published in 1886. This poem, it will be remembered, was +the basis of Longfellow's "Golden Legend" (1851). Rossetti did not keep +up his German, and in later years he never had much liking for +Scandinavian or Teutonic literature. He was a Latin, and he made it his +special task to interpret to modern Protestant England whatever struck +him as most spiritually intense and characteristic in the Latin Catholic +Middle Age. The only Italian poet whom he "earnestly loved" was Dante. +He did not greatly care for Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Tasso--the +Renaissance poets--though in boyhood he had taken delight in Ariosto, +just as he had in Scott and Byron. But that was a stage through which he +passed; none of these had any ultimate share in Rossetti's culture. At +fifteen he wrote a ballad entitled "Sir Hugh the Heron," founded on a +tale of Allan Cunningham, but taking its name and motto from the lines in +"Marmion"-- + + "Sir Hugh the Heron bold, + Baron of Twisell and of Ford, + And Captain of the Hold." + +A few copies of this were printed for family circulation by his fond +grandfather, G. Polidori. Among French writers he had no modern +favourites beyond Hugo, Musset, and Dumas. But like all the +neo-romanticists, he was strongly attracted by François Villon, that +strange Parisian poet, thief, and murderer of the fifteenth century. He +made three translations from Villon, the best known of which is the +famous "Ballad of Dead Ladies" with its felicitous rendering of the +refrain-- + + "But where are the snows of yester year?" + (Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?) + +There are at least three good English verse renderings of this ballad of +Villon; one by Andrew Lang; one by John Payne, and doubtless innumerable +others, unknown to me or forgotten. In fact, every one translates it +nowadays, as every one used to translate Bürger's ballad. It is the +"Lenore" of the neo-romanticists. Rossetti was a most accomplished +translator, and his version of Dante's "Vita Nuova" and of the "Early +Italian Poets" (1861)--reissued as "Dante and His Circle" (1874)--is a +notable example of his skill. There are two other specimens of old +French minstrelsy, and two songs from Victor Hugo's "Burgraves" among his +miscellaneous translations; and William Sharp testifies that Rossetti at +one time thought of doing for the early poetry of France what he had +already done for that of Italy, but never found the leisure for it.[16] +Rossetti had no knowledge of Greek, and "the only classical poet," says +his brother, "whom he took to in any degree worth speaking of was Homer, +the 'Odyssey' considerably more than the 'Iliad.'" This, I presume, he +knew only in translation, but the preference is significant, since, as we +have seen, the "Odyssey" is the most romantic of epics. Among English +poets, he preferred Keats to Shelley, as might have been expected. +Shelley was a visionary and Keats was an artist; Shelley often abstract, +Keats always concrete. Shelley had a philosophy, or thought he had; +Keats had none, neither had Rossetti. It is quite comprehensible that +the sensuous element in Keats would attract a born colourist like +Rossetti beyond anything in the English poetry of that generation; and I +need not repeat that the latest Gothic or romantic schools have all been +taking Keats' direction rather than Scott's, or even than Coleridge's. +Rossetti's work, I should say, _e.g._, in such a piece as "The Bride's +Prelude," is a good deal more like "Isabella" and "The Eve of St. Agnes" +than it is like "The Ancient Mariner" or "Christabel" or "The Lay of the +Last Minstrel." Rossetti got little from Milton and Dryden, or even from +Chaucer and Spenser. Wordsworth he valued hardly at all. In the last +two or three years of his life he came to have an exaggerated admiration +for Chatterton. Rossetti's taste, like his temperament, was tinctured +with morbidness. He sought the intense, the individual, the symbolic, +the mystical. These qualities he found in a supreme degree in Dante. +Probably it was only his austere artistic conscience which saved him from +the fantastic--the merely peculiar or odd--and kept him from going astray +after false gods like Poe and Baudelaire. Chaucer was a mediaeval poet +and Spenser certainly a romantic one, but their work was too broad, too +general in its appeal, too healthy, one might almost say, to come home to +Rossetti.[17] William Rossetti testifies that "any writing about devils, +spectres, or the supernatural generally . . . had always a fascination +for him." Sharp remarks that work more opposite than Rossetti's to the +Greek spirit can hardly be imagined. "The former [the Greek spirit] +looked to light, clearness, form in painting, sculpture, architecture; to +intellectual conciseness and definiteness in poetry; the latter +[Rossetti] looked mainly to diffused colour, gradated to almost +indefinite shades in his art, finding the harmonies thereof more akin +than severity of outline and clearness of form; while in his poetry the +Gothic love of the supernatural, the Gothic delight in sensuous images, +the Gothic instinct of indefiniteness and elaboration, carried to an +extreme, prevailed. . . . He would take more pleasure in a design +by . . . William Blake . . . than in the more strictly artistic drawing +of some revered classicist; more enjoyment in the weird or dramatic +Scottish ballad than in Pindaric or Horatian ode; and he would certainly +rather have had Shakspere than Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides put +together." + +Rossetti's office in the later and further development of romantic art +was threefold: First, to revive and express, both in painting and poetry, +the religious spirit of the early Florentine schools; secondly, to give a +more intimate interpretation of Dante to the English public, and +especially of Dante's life and personality and of his minor poetry, like +the "Vita Nuova," which had not yet been translated; thirdly, to afford +new illustrations of mediaeval life and thought, partly by treating +legendary matter in the popular ballad form, and partly by treating +romantic matter of his own invention with the rich colour and sensuous +imagery which belonged to his pictorial art. + +"Perhaps," writes Mr. Caine,[18] "Catholicism is itself essentially +mediaeval, and perhaps a man cannot possibly be a 'mediaeval artist, +heart and soul,' without partaking of a strong religious feeling that is +primarily Catholic--so much were the religion and art of the Middle Ages +knit each to each. . . . Rossetti's attitude towards spiritual things +was exactly the reverse of what we call Protestant. . . . He constantly +impressed me during the last days of his life with the conviction that he +was by religious bias of nature a monk of the Middle Ages." All this is +true in a way, yet Rossetti strikes one as being Catholic, without being +religious; as mediaeval rather than Christian. He was agnostic in his +belief and not devout in his practice; so that the wish that he suddenly +expressed in his last illness, to confess himself to a priest, affected +his friends as a singular caprice. It was the romantic quality in the +Italian sacred art of the Middle Ages that attracted him; and it +attracted him as a poet and painter, not as a devotee. There was little +in Rossetti of the mystical and ascetic piety of Novalis or Zacharias +Werner; nor of the steady religious devotion of his friend Holman Hunt, +or his own sister Christina. + +Rossetti, by the way, was never in Italy, though he made several visits +to France and Belgium. A glance at the list of his designs--extending to +some four hundred titles--in oil, water-colour, crayon, pen and ink, +etc., will show how impartially his interest was distributed over the +threefold province mentioned above. There are sacred pieces like "Mary +Magdalen at the Door of Simon the Pharisee," "St. Cecily," a "Head of +Christ," a "Triptych for Llandaff Cathedral"; Dante subjects such as +"Paolo and Francesca," "Beata Beatrix," "La Donna della Finestra," +"Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante"; and, in greater number, +compositions of a purely romantic nature--"Fair Rosamond," "La Belle Dame +sans Merci," "The Chapel before the Lists," "Michael Scott's Wooing," +"Meeting of Sir Tristram and Yseult," "Lady Lilith," "The Damozel of the +Sanct Grail," "Death of Breuse sans Pitié," and the like. + +It will be noticed that some of these subjects are taken from the Round +Table romances. Tennyson was partly responsible for the newly awakened +interest in the Arthurian legend, but the purely romantic manner which he +had abandoned in advancing from "Sir Galahad" and "The Lady of Shalott" +to the "Morte d'Arthur" of 1842 and the first "Idylls" of 1859, continued +to characterise the work of the Pre-Raphaelites both in poetry and in +painting. Malory's "Morte Darthur" was one of Rossetti's favourite +books, and he preferred it to Tennyson, as containing "the _weird_ +element in its perfection. . . . Tennyson _has_ it certainly here and +there in imagery, but there is no great success in the part it plays +through his 'Idylls.'" [19] The five wood-engravings from designs +furnished by Rossetti for the Moxon Tennyson quarto of 1857 include three +Arthurian subjects: "The Lady of Shalott," "King Arthur Sleeping in +Avalon," and "Sir Galahad Praying in the Wood-Chapel." "Interwoven as +were the Romantic revival and the aesthetic movement," writes Mr. Sharp, +"it could hardly have been otherwise but that the young painter-poet +should be strongly attracted to that Arthurian epoch, the legendary +glamour of which has since made itself so widely felt in the Arthurian +idyls of the laureate. . . . Mr. Ruskin speaks, in his lecture on 'The +Relation of Art to Religion' delivered in Oxford, of our indebtedness to +Rossetti as the painter to whose genius we owe the revival of interest in +the cycle of early English legend." + +It was in 1857 that Rossetti, whose acquaintance had been recently sought +by three young Oxford scholars, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and +Algernon Charles Swinburne, volunteered to surround the gallery of the +new Union Club House at Oxford with life-size frescoes from the "Morte +Darthur." [20] He was assisted in this work by a number of enthusiastic +disciples. Burne-Jones had already done some cartoons in colour for +stained glass, and Morris had painted a subject from the "Morte Darthur," +to wit: "Sir Tristram after his Illness, in the Garden of King Mark's +Palace, recognised by the Dog he had given to Iseult." Rossetti's +contribution to the Oxford decorations was "Sir Lancelot before the +Shrine of the Sangreal." Morris' was "Sir Palomides' Jealousy of Sir +Tristram and Iseult," an incident which he also treated in his poetry. +Burne-Jones, Valentine Prinsep, J. H. Pollen, and Arthur Hughes likewise +contributed. Scott says that these paintings were interesting as +designs; that they were "poems more than pictures, being large +illuminations and treated in a mediaeval manner." But he adds that not +one of the band knew anything about wall painting. They laid their +water-colours, not on a plastered surface, but on a rough brick wall, +merely whitewashed. They used no adhesive medium, and in a few months +the colours peeled off and the whole series became invisible. + +A co-partnership in subjects, a duplication of treatment, or +interchange between the arts of poetry and painting characterise +Pre-Raphaelite work. For example, Morris' poems, "The Blue Closet" +and "The Tune of Seven Towers" were inspired by the similarly entitled +designs of Rossetti. They are interpretations in language of pictorial +suggestions--"word-paintings" in a truer meaning than that much-abused +piece of critical slang commonly bears. In one of these compositions--a +water-colour, a study in colour and music symbolism--four damozels in +black and purple, white and green, scarlet and white, and crimson, are +singing or playing on a lute and clavichord in a blue-tiled room; while +in front of them a red lily grows up through the floor. To this interior +Morris' "stunning picture"--as his friend called it--adds an obscurely +hinted love story: the burden of a bell booming a death-knell in the +tower overhead; the sound of wind and sea; and the Christmas snows +outside. Conversely Rossetti's painting, "Arthur's Tomb," was suggested +by Morris' so-named poem in his 1858 volume. + +Or, again, compare Morris' poem, "Sir Galahad: A Christmas Mystery," with +the following description of Rossetti's aquarelle, "How Sir Galahad, Sir +Bors, and Sir Percival were fed with the Sanc Grael; but Sir Percival's +sister died by the way": "On the right is painted the altar, and in front +of it the damsel of the Sanc Grael giving the cup to Sir Galahad, who +stoops forward to take it over the dead body of Sir Percival's sister, +who lies calm and rigid in her green robe and red mantle, and near whose +feet grows from the ground an aureoled lily, while, with his left hand, +the saintly knight leads forward his two companions, him who has lost his +sister, and the good Sir Bors. Behind the white-robed damsel at the +altar, a dove, bearing the sacred casket, poises on outspread pinions; +and immediately beyond the fence enclosing the sacred space, stands a row +of nimbused angels, clothed in white and with crossed scarlet or +flame-coloured wings." [21] + +Rossetti's powerful ballad, "The King's Tragedy," was suggested by the +mural paintings (encaustic) with which William Bell Scott decorated the +circular staircase of Penkill Castle in 1865-68. These were a series of +scenes from "The Kinges Quair" once attributed to James I. of Scotland. +The photogravure reproduction, from a painting by Arthur Hughes of a +section of the Penkill Castle staircase, represents the king looking from +the window of his prison in Windsor Castle at Lady Jane Beaufort walking +with her handmaidens in a very Pre-Raphaelite garden. At the left of the +picture, Cupid aims an arrow at the royal lover. Rossetti, Hunt, and +Millais were all great lovers of Keats. Hunt says that his "Escape of +Madeline and Prospero" was the first subject from Keats ever painted, and +was highly acclaimed by Rossetti. At the formation of the P.-R B. in +1848, it was agreed that the first work of the Brotherhood should be in +illustration of "Isabella," and a series of eight subjects was selected +from the poem. Millais executed at once his "Lorenzo and Isabella," but +Hunt's "Isabella and the Pot of Basil" was not finished till 1867, and +Rossetti's part of the programme was never carried out. Rossetti's "La +Belle Dame sans Merci," Mr. J. M. Strudwick's "Madness of Isabella," +Arthur Hughes' triptych of "The Eve of St. Agnes," and Millais' great +painting, "St. Agnes' Eve," were other tributes of Pre-Raphaelite art to +the young master of romantic verse. + +Whether this interpenetration of poetry and painting is of advantage to +either, may admit of question. Emerson said to Scott: "We [Americans] +scarcely take to the Rossetti poetry; it does not come home to us; it is +exotic." The sonnets of "The House of Life" have appeared to many +readers obscure and artificial, the working out in language of +conceptions more easily expressible by some other art; expressed here, at +all events, through imagery drawn from a special and even technical range +of associations. Such readers are apt to imagine that Rossetti suffers +from a hesitation between poetry and painting; as Sidney Lanier is +thought by some to have been injured artistically by halting midway +between music and verse. The method proper to one art intrudes into the +other; everything that the artist does has the air of an experiment; he +paints poems and writes pictures. + +A department of Rossetti's verse consists of sonnets written for +pictures, pictures by Botticelli, Mantegna, Giorgione, Burne-Jones, and +others, and in many cases by himself, and giving thus a double rendering +of the same invention. But even when not so occasioned, his poems nearly +always suggest pictures. Their figures seem to have stepped down from +some fifteenth-century altar piece bringing their aureoles and golden +backgrounds with them. This is to be pictorial in a very different sense +from that in which Tennyson is said to be a pictorial poet. Hall Caine +informs us that Rossetti "was no great lover of landscape beauty." His +scenery does not, like Wordsworth's or Tennyson's, carry an impression of +life, of the real outdoors. Nature with Rossetti has been passed through +the medium of another art before it comes into his poetry; it is a doubly +distilled nature. It is nature as we have it in the "Roman de la Rose," +or the backgrounds of old Florentine painters: flowery pleasances and +orchard closes, gardens with trellises and singing conduits, where ladies +are playing at the palm play. In his most popular poem, "The Blessed +Damosel"--a theme which he both painted and sang--the feeling is +exquisitely and voraciously human. The maiden is "homesick in heaven," +and yearns back towards the earth and her lover left behind. Even so, +with her symbolic stars and lilies, she is so like the stiff, sweet +angels of Fra Angelico or Perugino, that one almost doubts when the poet +says + + "--her bosom must have made + The bar she leaned on warm." + +The imagery of the poem is right out of the picture world; + + "The clear ranged, unnumbered heads + Bowed with their aureoles." + +The imaginations are Dantesque: + + "And the souls, mounting up to God, + Went by her like thin flames." + + "The light thrilled towards her, filled + With angels in strong, level flight." + +Even in "Jenny," one of the few poems of Rossetti that deal with modern +life, mediaeval art will creep in. + + "Fair shines the gilded aureole + In which our highest painters place + Some living woman's simple face. + And the stilled features thus descried, + As Jenny's long throat droops aside-- + The shadows where the cheeks are thin + And pure wide curve from ear to chin-- + With Raffael's, Leonardo's hand + To show them to men's souls might stand." + +The type of womanly beauty here described is characteristic; it is the +type familiar to all in "Pandora," "Proserpine," "La Ghirlandata," "The +Day Dream," "Our Lady of Pity," and the other life-size, half-length +figure paintings in oil which were the masterpieces of his maturer style. +The languid pose, the tragic eyes with their mystic, brooding intensity +in contrast with the full curves of the lips and throat, give that union +of sensuousness and spirituality which is a constant trait of Rossetti's +poetry. The Pre-Raphaelites were accused of exaggerating the height of +their figures. In Burne-Jones, whose figures are eight and a half heads +high, the exaggeration is deliberate. In Morris' and Swinburne's early +poems all the lines of the female face and figure are long--the hand, the +foot, the throat, the "curve from chin to ear," and above all, the +hair.[22] The hair in these paintings of Rossetti seems a romantic +exaggeration, too; immense, crinkly waves of it spreading off to left and +right. William Morris' beautiful wife is said to have been his model in +the pieces above named. + +The first collection of original poems by Rossetti was published in 1870. +The manuscripts had been buried with his wife in 1862. When he finally +consented to their publication, the coffin had to be exhumed and the +manuscripts removed. In 1881 a new edition was issued with changes and +additions; and in the same year the volume of "Ballads and Sonnets" was +published, including the sonnet sequence of "The House of Life." Of the +poems in these two collections which treat directly of Dante the most +important is "Dante at Verona," a noble and sustained piece in +eighty-five stanzas, slightly pragmatic in manner, in which are enwoven +the legendary and historical incidents of Dante's exile related by the +early biographers, together with many personal allusions from the "Divine +Comedy." But Dante is nowhere very far off either in Rossetti's painting +or in his poetry. In particular, the history of Dante's passion for +Beatrice, as told in the "Vita Nuova," in which the figure of the girl is +gradually transfigured and idealised by death into the type of heavenly +love, made an enduring impression upon Rossetti's imagination. Shelley, +in his "Epipsychidion," had appealed to this great love story, so +characteristic at once of the mediaeval mysticism and of the Platonic +spirit of the early Renaissance. But Rossetti was the first to give a +thoroughly sympathetic interpretation of it to English readers. It +became associated most intimately with his own love and loss. We see it +in a picture like "Beata Beatrix," and a poem like "The Portrait," +written many years before his wife's death, but subsequently retouched. +Who can read the following stanza without thinking of Beatrice and the +"Paradiso"? + + "Even so, where Heaven holds breath and hears + The beating heart of Love's own breast,-- + Where round the secret of all spheres + All angels lay their wings to rest,-- + How shall my soul stand rapt and awed, + When, by the new birth borne abroad + Throughout the music of the suns, + It enters in her soul at once + And knows the silence there for God!" + +Rossetti's ballads and ballad-romances, all intensely mediaeval in +spirit, fall, as regards their manner, into two very different classes. +Pieces like "The Blessed Damozel," "The Bride's Prelude," "Rose Mary," +and "The Staff and Scrip" (from a story in the "Gesta Romanorum") are art +poems, rich, condensed, laden with ornament, pictorial. Every attitude +of every figure is a pose; landscapes and interiors are painted with +minute Pre-Raphaelite finish. "The Bride's Prelude"--a fragment--opens +with the bride's confession to her sister, in the 'tiring-room sumptuous +with gold and jewels and brocade, where the air is heavy with musk and +myrrh, and sultry with the noon. In the pauses of her tale stray lute +notes creep in at the casement, with noises from the tennis court and the +splash of a hound swimming in the moat. In "Rose Mary," which employs +the superstition in the old lapidaries as to the prophetic powers of the +beryl-stone, the colouring and imagery are equally opulent, and, in +passages, Oriental. + +On the other hand, "Stratton Water," "Sister Helen," "The White Ship," +and "The King's Tragedy" are imitations of popular poetry, done with a +simulated roughness and simplicity. The first of these adopts a common +ballad motive, a lover's desertion of his sweetheart through the +contrivances of his wicked kinsfolk: + + "And many's the good gift, Lord Sands, + You've promised oft to me; + But the gift of yours I keep to-day + Is the babe in my body." . . . + + "Look down, look down, my false mother, + That bade me not to grieve: + You'll look up when our marriage fires + Are lit to-morrow eve." + +"Sister Helen" is a ballad in dialogue with a subtly varying repetend, +and introduces the popular belief that a witch could kill a man slowly by +melting a wax figure. Twice Rossetti essayed the historical ballad. +"The White Ship" tells of the drowning of the son and daughter of Henry +I. with their whole ship's company, except one survivor, Berold, the +butcher of Rouen, who relates the catastrophe. The subject of "The +King's Tragedy" is the murder of James I. by Robert Graeme and his men in +the Charterhouse of Perth. The teller of the tale is Catherine Douglas, +known in Scottish tradition as Kate Barlass, who had thrust her arm +through the staple, in place of a bar, to hold the door against the +assassins. A few stanzas of "The Kinges Quair" are fitted into the poem +by shortening the lines two syllables each, to accommodate them to the +ballad metre. It is generally agreed that this was a mistake, as was +also the introduction of the "Beryl Songs" between the narrative parts of +"Rose Mary." These ballads of Rossetti compare well with other modern +imitations of popular poetry. "Sister Helen," _e.g._, has much greater +dramatic force than Tennyson's "Oriana" or "The Sisters." Yet they +impress one, upon the whole, as less characteristic than the poet's +Italianate pieces; as _tours de force_ carefully pitched in the key of +minstrel song, but falsetto in effect. Compared with such things as +"Cadyow Castle" or "Jack o' Hazeldean," they are felt to be the work of +an art poet, resolute to divest himself of fine language and scrupulously +observant of ballad convention in phrase and accent--details of which +Scott was often heedless--but devoid of that hearty, natural sympathy +with the conditions of life from which popular poetry sprang, and wanting +the lyrical pulse that beats in the ballad verse of Scott, Kingsley, and +Hogg. In "The King's Tragedy" Rossetti was poaching on Scott's own +preserves, the territory of national history and legend. If we can guess +how Scott would have handled the same story, we shall have an object +lesson in two contrasted kinds of romanticism. Scott could not have +bettered the grim ferocity of the murder scene, nor have equalled, +perhaps, the tragic shadow of doom which is thrown over Rossetti's poem +by the triple warning of the weird woman. But the sense of the historic +environment, the sense of the actual in places and persons, would have +been stronger in his version. Graeme's retreat would have been the +Perthshire Highlands, and not vaguely "the land of the wild Scots." And +if scenery had been used, it would not have been such as this--a +Pre-Raphaelite background: + + "That eve was clenched for a boding storm, + 'Neath a toilsome moon half seen; + The cloud stooped low and the surf rose high; + And where there was a line of the sky, + Wild wings loomed dark between." + +The historical sense was weak in Rossetti. It is not easy to imagine him +composing a Waverley novel. The life of the community, as distinct from +the life of the individual, had little interest for him. The mellifluous +names of his heroines, Aloyse, Rose Mary, Blanchelys, are pure romance. +In his intense concentration upon the aesthetic aspects of every subject, +Rossetti seemed, to those who came in contact with him, singularly +_borné_. He was indifferent to politics, society, speculative thought, +and the discoveries of modern science--to contemporary matters in +general.[23] It is to this narrow aestheticism that Mr. Courthope refers +when, in comparing Coleridge and Keats with Rossetti and Swinburne, he +finds in the latter an "extraordinary skill in the imitation of antique +forms," but "less liberty of imagination." [24] The contrast is most +striking in the case of Coleridge, whose intellectual interests had so +wide a range. Rossetti cared only for Coleridge's verse; William Morris +spoke with contempt of everything that he had written except two or three +of his poems;[25] and Swinburne regretted that he had lost himself in the +mazes of theology and philosophy, instead of devoting himself wholly to +creative work. Keats, it is true, was exclusively preoccupied with the +beautiful; but he was more eclectic than Rossetti--perhaps also than +Morris, though hardly than Swinburne. The world of classic fable, the +world of outward nature were as dear to his imagination as the country of +romance. Rossetti was not university bred, and, as we have seen, forgot +his Greek early. Morris, like Swinburne, was an Oxford man; yet we hear +him saying that he "loathes all classical art and literature." [26] In +"The Life and Death of Jason" and "The Earthly Paradise" he treats +classical and mediaeval subjects impartially, but treats them both alike +in mediaeval fashion; as Chaucer does, in "The Knightes Tale." [27] As +for Rossetti, he is never classical. He makes Pre-Raphaelite ballads out +of the tale of Troy divine and the Rabbinical legends of Adam's first +wife, Lilith; ballads with quaint burdens-- + + "(O Troy's down, + Tall Troy's on fire)"; + + "(Sing Eden Bower! + Alas the hour!)" + +and whose very titles have an Old English familiarity--"Eden Bower," +"Troy Town," as who says "London Bridge," "Edinboro' Town," etc. +Swinburne has given the _rationale_ of this type of art in his +description of a Bacchus and Ariadne by Lippino Lippi ("Old Masters at +Florence"), "an older legend translated and transformed into mediaeval +shape. More than any others, these painters of the early Florentine +school reproduce in their own art the style of thought and work familiar +to a student of Chaucer and his fellows or pupils. Nymphs have faded +into fairies, and gods subsided into men. A curious realism has grown up +out of that very ignorance and perversion which seemed as if it could not +but falsify whatever thing it touched upon. This study of Fillippino's +has all the singular charm of the romantic school. . . . The clear form +has gone, the old beauty dropped out of sight . . . but the mediaeval or +romantic form has an incommunicable charm of its own. . . . Before +Chaucer could give us a Pandarus or a Cressida, all knowledge and memory +of the son of Lycaon and the daughter of Chryses must have died out, the +whole poem collapsed into romance; but far as these may be removed from +the true tale and the true city of Troy, they are not phantoms." + +But of all this group, the one most thoroughly steeped in +mediaevalism--to repeat his own description of himself--was William +Morris. He was the English equivalent of Gautier's _homme moyen âge_; +and it was his endeavour, in letters and art, to pick up and continue the +mediaeval tradition, interrupted by four hundred years of modern +civilisation. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not attract +him; and as for the eighteenth, it simply did not exist for him.[28] The +ugliness of modern life, with its factories and railroads, its +unpicturesque poverty and selfish commercialism, was hateful to him as it +was to Ruskin--his teacher. He loved to imagine the face of England as +it was in the time of Chaucer--his master; to + + "Forget six counties overhung with smoke, + Forget the snorting steam and piston smoke, . . . + And dream of London, small and white and clean, + The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green." + +The socialistic Utopia depicted in his "News from Nowhere" (1890) is a +regenerated Middle Age, without feudalism, monarchy, and the mediaeval +Church, but also without densely populated cities, with handicrafts +substituted for manufactures, and with mediaeval architecture, house, +decoration, and costume. None of Morris' books deals with modern life, +but all of them with an imaginary future or an almost equally imaginary +past. This same "News from Nowhere" contains a passage of dialogue in +justification of retrospective romance. "'How is it that though we are +so interested with our life for the most part, yet when people take to +writing poems or painting pictures they seldom deal with our modern life, +or if they do, take good care to make their poems or pictures unlike that +life? Are we not good enough to paint ourselves?' . . . 'It always was +so, and I suppose always will be,' said he, 'however, it may be +explained. It is true that in the nineteenth century, when there was so +little art and so much talk about it, there was a theory that art and +imaginative literature ought to deal with contemporary life; but they +never did so; for, if there was any pretence of it, the author always +took care . . . to disguise, or exaggerate, or idealise, and in some way +or another make it strange; so that, for all the verisimilitude there +was, he might just as well have dealt with the times of the +Pharaohs.'" [29] + +The difference between the mediaevalism of Rossetti and of Morris +illustrates, in an interesting way, the varied results produced by the +operation of similar influences on contrasted temperaments. The +comparison which Morris' biographer makes between him and Burne-Jones +holds true as between Morris and Rossetti: "They received or +re-incarnated the Middle Ages through the eyes and brain, in the one case +of a Norman, in the other of a Florentine." Morris was twice a Norman, +in his love for the romancers and Gothic builders of northern France; and +in his enthusiasm for the Icelandic sagas. His visits to Italy left him +cold, and he confessed to a strong preference for the art of the North. +"With the later work of Southern Europe I am quite out of sympathy. In +spite of its magnificent power and energy, I feel it as an enemy, and +this much more in Italy, where there is such a mass of it, than +elsewhere. Yes, and even in these magnificent and wonderful towns I long +rather for the heap of gray stones with a gray roof that we call a house +north-away." Rossetti's Italian subtlety and mysticism are replaced in +Morris by an English homeliness--a materialism which is Teutonic and not +Latin or Celtic, and one surface indication of which is the scrupulously +Saxon vocabulary of his poems and prose romances. "His earliest +enthusiasms," said Burne-Jones, "were his latest. The thirteenth century +was his ideal period always"--the century which produced the lovely +French romances which he translated and the great French cathedrals which +he admired above all other architecture on earth. But this admiration +was aesthetic rather than religious. The Catholic note, so resonant in +Rossetti's poetry, is hardly audible in Morris, at least after his early +Oxford days. The influence of Newman still lingered at Oxford in the +fifties, though the Tractarian movement had spent its force and a +reaction had set in. Morris came up to the university an Anglo-Catholic, +and like his fellow-student and life-long friend, Burne-Jones, had been +destined to holy orders. We find them both, as undergraduates, eagerly +reading the "Acta Sanctorum," the "Tracts for the Times," and Kenelm +Digby's "Mores Catholici," and projecting a kind of monastic community, +where celibacy should be practised and sacred art cultivated. But later +impressions soon crowded out this early religious fervour. Churchly +asceticism and the mediaeval "praise of virginity" made no part of +Morris' social ideal. The body counted for much with him. In "News from +Nowhere," marriage even is so far from being a sacrament, that it is +merely a free arrangement terminable at the will of either party. Morris +had a passionate love of earth and a regard for the natural instincts. +He complains that Swinburne's poetry is "founded on literature, not on +nature." His religion is a reversion to the old Teutonic pagan +earth-worship, and he had the pagan dread of "quick-coming death." His +paradise is an "Earthly Paradise"; it is in search of earthly immortality +that his voyagers set sail. "Of heaven or hell," says his prelude, "I +have no power to sing"; and the great mediaeval singer of heaven and hell +who meant so much to Rossetti, appealed hardly more to Morris than to +Walter Scott. + +Moreover, Morris' work in verse was the precise equivalent of his work as +a decorative artist, who cared little for easel pictures, and regarded +painting as one method out of many for covering wall spaces or other +surfaces.[30] His poetry is mainly narrative, but whether epical or +lyrical in form, is always less lyric in essence than Rossetti's. In its +objective spirit and even distribution of emphasis, it contrasts with +Rossetti's expressional intensity very much as Morris' wall-paper and +tapestry designs contrast with paintings like "Beata Beatrix" and +"Proserpina." Morris--as an artist--cared more for places and things +than for people; and his interest was in the work of art itself, not in +the personality of the artist. + +Quite unlike as was Morris to Scott in temper and mental endowment, his +position in the romantic literature of the second half-century answers +very closely to Scott's in the first. His work resembled Scott's in +volume, and in its easiness for the general reader. For the second time +he made the Middle Ages _popular_. There was nothing esoteric in his +art, as in Rossetti's. It was English and came home to Englishmen. His +poetry, like his decorative work, was meant for the people, and +"understanded of the people." Moreover, like Scott, he was an +accomplished _raconteur_, and a story well told is always sure of an +audience. His first volume, "The Defence of Guenevere" (1858), dedicated +to Rossetti and inspired by him, had little popular success. But when, +like Millais, he abandoned the narrowly Pre-Raphaelite manner and +broadened out, in "The Life and Death of Jason" (1867) and "The Earthly +Paradise" (1868-70), into a fashion of narrative less caviare to the +general, the public response was such as met Millais. + +Morris' share in the Pre-Raphaelite movement was in the special field of +decorative art. His enthusiasm for Gothic architecture had been aroused +at Oxford by a reading of Ruskin's chapter on "The Nature of Gothic" in +"The Stones of Venice." In 1856, acting upon this impulse, he articled +himself to the Oxford architect G. E. Street, and began work in his +office. He did not persevere in the practice of the profession, and +never built a house. But he became and remained a _connoisseur_ of +Gothic architecture and an active member of the Society for the +Protection of Ancient Buildings. His numerous visits to Amiens, +Chartres, Reims, Soissons, and Rouen were so many pilgrimages to the +shrines of mediaeval art. Indeed, he always regarded the various +branches of house decoration as contributory to the master art, +architecture. + +A little later, under the dominating and somewhat overbearing persuasions +of Rossetti, he tried his hand at painting, but never succeeded well in +drawing the human face and figure. The figure designs for his stained +glass, tapestries, etc., were usually made by Burne-Jones, Morris +furnishing floriated patterns and the like. In 1861 was formed the firm +of Morris & Company, which revolutionised English household decoration. +Rossetti and Burne-Jones were among the partners in this concern, which +undertook to supply the public with high art work in wall painting, paper +hangings, embroidery, carpets, tapestries, printed cottons, stamped +leather, carved furniture, tiles, metals, jewelry, etc. In particular, +Morris revived the mediaeval arts of glass-staining, illumination, or +miniature painting, and tapestry-weaving with the high-warp loom. Though +he chose to describe himself as a "dreamer of dreams born out of my due +time," and "the idle singer of an empty day," he was a tireless practical +workman of astonishing cleverness and versatility. He taught himself to +dye and weave. When, in the last decade of the century, he set up the +famous Kelmscott Press, devoted to artistic printing and book-making, he +studied the processes of type-casting and paper manufacture, and actually +made a number of sheets of paper with his own hands. It was his +favourite idea that the division of labour in modern manufactures had +degraded the workman by making him a mere machine; that the divorce +between the art of the designer and the art of the handicraftsman was +fatal to both. To him the Middle Ages meant, not the ages of faith, or +of chivalry, or of bold and free adventure, but of popular art--of "The +Lesser Arts"; when every artisan was an artist of the beautiful and took +pleasure in the thing which his hand shaped; when not only the cathedral +and the castle, but the townsman's dwelling-house and the labourer's +cottage was a thing of beauty. He believed that in those times there +was, as there should be again, an art by the people and for the people. +It was the democratic and not the aristocratic elements of mediaeval life +that he praised. "From the first dawn of history till quite modern +times, art, which nature meant to solace all, fulfilled its purpose; all +men shared in it; that was what made life romantic, as people call it, in +those days; that and not robber-barons and inaccessible kings with their +hierarchy of serving-nobles and other such rubbish." [31] One more +passage will serve to set in sharp contrast the romanticism of Scott and +the romanticism of Ruskin and Morris. "With that literature in which +romance, that is to say humanity, was re-born, there sprang up also a +feeling for the romance of external nature, which is surely strong in us +now, joined with a longing to know something real of the lives of those +who have gone before us; of these feelings united you will find the +broadest expression in the pages of Walter Scott; it is curious, as +showing how sometimes one art will lag behind another in a revival, that +the man who wrote the exquisite and wholly unfettered naturalism of 'The +Heart of Midlothian,' for instance, thought himself continually bound to +seem to feel ashamed of, and to excuse himself for, his love of Gothic +architecture; he felt that it was romantic, and he knew that it gave him +pleasure, but somehow he had not found out that it was art, having been +taught in many ways that nothing could be art that was not done by a +named man under academical rules." [32] + +It is worth while to glance at Morris' culture-history and note the +organic filaments which connect the later with the earlier romanticism. +He had read the Waverley novels as a child, and had even snatched a +fearful joy from Clara Reeve's "Old English Baron." [33] He knew his +Tennyson before he went up to Oxford, but reserved an unqualified +admiration only for such things as "Oriana" and "The Lady of Shalott." +He was greatly excited by the woodcut engraving of Dürer's "Knight, Death +and the Devil" in an English translation of Fouqué's "Sintram." [34] +Rossetti was first made known to him by Ruskin's Edinburgh lectures of +1854 and by the illustration to Allingham's "Maids of Elfin Mere," over +which Morris and Burne-Jones "pored continually." Morris devoured +greedily all manner of mediaeval chronicles and romances, French and +English; but he read little in Elizabethan and later authors. He +disliked Milton and Wordsworth, and held Keats to be the foremost of +modern English poets. He took no interest in mythology, or Welsh poetry +or Celtic literature generally, with the exception of the "Morte +Darthur," which, Rossetti assured him, was second only to the Bible. The +Border ballads had been his delight since childhood. An edition of +these; a selection of English mediaeval lyrics; and a "Morte Darthur," +with a hundred illustrations from designs by Burne-Jones, were among the +unfulfilled purposes of the Kelmscott Press. + +Morris' first volume, "The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems," was put +forth in 1858 (reprint in 1875); "a book," says Saintsbury, "almost as +much the herald of the second school of Victorian poetry as Tennyson's +early work was of the first." [35] "Many of the poems," wrote William +Bell Scott, "represent the mediaeval spirit in a new way, not by a +sentimental, nineteenth-century-revival mediaevalism, but they give a +poetical sense of a barbaric age strongly and sharply real." [36] These +last words point at Tennyson. The first four pieces in the volume are on +Arthurian subjects, but are wholly different in style and conception even +from such poems as "The Lady of Shalott" and "Sir Lancelot and Queen +Guinevere." They are more mannerised, more in the spirit of +Pre-Raphaelite art, than anything in Morris' later work. If the +name-poem is put beside Tennyson's idyl "Guinevere"; or "Sir Galahad, a +Christmas Mystery," beside Tennyson's "Sir Galahad," the difference is +striking. In place of the refined ethics and sentiment, and purely +modern spiritual ideals which find a somewhat rhetorical expression in +Tennyson, Morris endeavours to render the genuine Catholic mediaeval +materialistic religious temper as it appears in Malory; where +unquestioning belief, devotion, childish superstition, and the fear of +hell coexist with fleshly love and hate--a passion of sin and a passion +of repentance. Guenevere's "defence" is, at bottom, the same as Phryne's: + + "See through my long throat how the words go up + In ripples to my mouth: how in my hand + The shadow lies like wine within a cup + Of marvellously colour'd gold." + + "Dost thou reck + That I am beautiful, Lord, even as you + And your dear mother?" [37] + +Morris criticised Tennyson's Galahad, as "rather a mild youth." His own +Galahad is not the rapt seer of the vision beatific, but a more +flesh-and-blood character, who sometimes has cold fits in which he doubts +whether the quest is not a fool's errand; and whether even Sir Palomydes +in his unrequited love, and Sir Lancelot in his guilty love, do not take +greater comfort than he. + +Other poems in the book were inspired by Froissart's "Chronicle" or other +histories of the English wars in France: "Sir Peter Harpdon's End," +"Concerning Geffray Teste Noire," "The Eve of Crecy," etc.[38] Still +others, and these not the least fascinating, were things of pure +invention, lays of "a country lit with lunar rainbows and ringing with +fairy song." [39] These have been thought to owe something to Edgar Poe, +but they much more nearly resemble the work of the latest symbolistic +schools. When reading such poems as "Rapunzel," "Golden Wings," and "The +Tune of Seven Towers," one is frequently reminded of "Serres Chaudes" or +"Pelléas et Mélisande"; and is at no loss to understand why Morris +excepted Maeterlinck from his general indifference to contemporary +writers--Maeterlinck, like himself, a student of Rossetti. There is no +other collection of English poems so saturated with Pre-Raphaelitism. +The flowers are all orchids, strange in shape, violent in colouring. +Rapunzel, _e.g._, is like one of Maeterlinck's spellbound princesses. +She stands at the top of her tower, letting down her hair to the ground, +and her lover climbs up to her by it as by a golden stair. Here is again +the singular Pre-Raphaelite and symbolistic scenery, with its images from +art and not from nature. Tall damozels in white and scarlet walk in +garths of lily and sunflower, or under apple boughs, and feed the swans +in the moat. + + "Moreover, she held scarlet lilies, such + As Maiden Margaret bears upon the light + Of the great church walls." [40] + + "Lord, give Mary a dear kiss, + And let gold Michael, who look'd down, + When I was there, on Rouen town, + From the spire, bring me that kiss + On a lily!" [41] + +The language is as artfully quaint as the imaginations are fantastic: + + "Between the trees a large moon, the wind lows + Not loud, but as a cow begins to low." [42] + + "Pale in the green sky were the stars, I ween, + Because the moon shone like a star she shed + When she dwelt up in heaven a while ago, + And ruled all things but God." [43] + + "Quiet groans + That swell out the little bones + Of my bosom." [44] + + "I sit on a purple bed, + Outside, the wall is red, + Thereby the apple hangs, + And the wasp, caught by the fangs, + Dies in the autumn night. + And the bat flits till light, + And the love-crazed knight + Kisses the long, wet grass." [45] + +A number of these pieces are dramatic in form, monologues or dialogues, +sometimes in the manner of the mediaeval mystery plays.[46] Others are +ballads, not of the popular variety, but after Rossetti's fashion, +employing burdens, English or French: + + "Two red roses across the moon"; + + "Hah! hah! la belle jaune giroflée"; + + "Ah! qu'elle est belle La Marguerite"; etc. + +The only poem in the collection which imitates the style of the old +minstrel ballad is "Welland Water." The name-poem is in _terza rima_; +the longest, "Sir Peter Harpdon's End," in blank verse; "Golden Wings," +in the "In Memoriaro" stanza. + +When Morris again came before the public as a poet, his style had +undergone a change akin to that which transformed the Pre-Raphaelite +painter into the decorative artist. The skeins of vivid romantic colour +had run out into large-pattern tapestries. There was nothing eccentric +or knotty about "The Life and Death of Jason" and "The Earthly Paradise." +On the contrary, nothing so facile, pellucid, pleasant to read had +appeared in modern literature--a poetic lubberland, a "clear, unwrinkled +song." The reader was carried along with no effort and little thought on +the long swell of the verse, his ear lulled by the musical lapse of the +rime, his eye soothed--not excited--by ever-unrolling panoramas of an +enchanted country "east of the sun and west of the moon." Morris wrote +with incredible ease and rapidity. It was a maxim with him, as with +Ruskin, that all good work is done easily and with pleasure to the +workman; and certainly that seems true of him which Lowell said of +Chaucer--that he never "puckered his brow over an unmanageable verse." +Chaucer was his avowed master,[47] and perhaps no English narrative poet +has come so near to Chaucer. Like Chaucer, and unlike Scott, he did not +invent stories, but told the old stories over again with a new charm. +His poetry, as such, is commonly better than Scott's; lacking the fire +and nervous energy of Scott in his great passages, but sustained at a +higher artistic level. He had the copious vein of the mediaeval +chroniclers and romancers, without their tiresome prolixity and with +finer resources of invention. He had none of Chaucer's humour, realism, +or skill in character sketching. In its final impression his poetry +resembles Spenser's more than Chaucer's. Like Spenser's, it grows +monotonous--without quite growing languid--from the steady flow of the +metre and the exhaustless profusion of the imagery. The reader becomes, +somewhat ungratefully, surfeited with beauty, and seeks relief in poetry +more passionate or intellectual. Chaucer and, in a degree, Walter Scott, +have a way of making old things seem near to us. In Spenser and Morris, +though bright and clear in all imagined details, they stand at an +infinite remove, in a world apart-- + + "--a little isle of bliss + Midmost the beating of the steely sea" + +which typifies the weary problems and turmoil of contemporary life. + +"Jason" was a poem of epic dimensions, on the winning of the Golden +Fleece; "The Earthly Paradise," a series of twenty-four narrative poems +set in a framework of the poet's own. Certain gentlemen of Norway, in +the reign of Edward III. of England, set out--like St. Brandan--on a +voyage in search of a land that is free from death. They cross the +Western ocean, and after long years of wandering, come, disappointed of +their hope, to a city founded centuries since by exiles from ancient +Greece. There being hospitably received, hosts and guests interchange +tales in every month of the year; a classical story alternating with a +mediaeval one, till the double sum of twelve is complete. Among the +wanderers are a Breton and a Suabian, so that the mediaeval tales have a +wide range. There are Norse stories like "The Lovers of Gudrun"; French +Charlemagne romances, like "Ogier the Dane"; and late German legends of +the fourteenth century, like "The Hill of Venus," besides miscellaneous +travelled fictions of the Middle Age.[48] But the Hellenic legends are +reduced to a common term with the romance material, so that the reader is +not very sensible of a difference. Many of them are selected for their +marvellous character, and abound in dragons, monsters, transformations, +and enchantments: "The Golden Apples," "Bellerophon," "Cupid and Psyche," +"The Story of Perseus," etc. Even "Jason" is treated as a romance. Of +its seventeen books, all but the last are devoted to the exploits and +wanderings of the Argonauts. Medea is not the wronged, vengeful queen of +the Greek tragic poets, so much as she is the Colchian sorceress who +effects her lover's victory and escape. Her romantic, outweighs her +dramatic character. Sea voyages, emprizes, and wild adventures, like +those of his own wanderers in "The Earthly Paradise," were dearer to +Morris' imagination than conflicts of the will; the _vostos_ or +home-coming of Ulysses, _e.g._ He preferred the "Odyssey" to the +"Iliad," and translated it in 1887 into the thirteen-syllabled line of +the "Nibelungenlied." [49] Of the Greek tales in "The Earthly Paradise," +"The Love of Alcestis" has, perhaps, the most dramatic quality. + +Like Chaucer and like Rossetti,[50] Morris mediaevalised classic fable. +"Troy," says his biographer, "is to his imagination a town exactly like +Bruges or Chartres, spired and gabled, red-roofed, filled (like the city +of King Aeetes in 'The Life and Death of Jason') with towers and swinging +bells. The Trojan princes go out, like knights in Froissart, to tilt at +the barriers." [51] The distinction between classical and romantic +treatment is well illustrated by a comparison of Theocritus' idyl +"Hylas," with the same episode in "Jason." "Soon was he 'ware of a +spring," says the Syracusan poet, "in a hollow land, and the rushes grew +thickly round it, and dark swallow-wort, and green maiden-hair, and +blooming parsley and deer-grass spreading through the marshy land. In +the midst of the water the nymphs were arraying their dances, the +sleepless nymphs, dread goddesses of the country people, Eunice, and +Malis, and Nycheia, with her April eyes. And now the boy was holding out +the wide-mouthed pitcher to the water, intent on dipping it; but the +nymphs all clung to his hand, for love of the Argive lad had fluttered +the soft hearts of all of them. Then down he sank into the black +water." [52] In "Jason," where the episode occupies some two hundred and +seventy lines, one of the nymphs meets the boy in the wood, disguised in +furs like a northern princess, and lulls him to sleep by the stream side +with a Pre-Raphaelite song: + + "I know a little garden close + Set thick with lily and red rose"; + +the loveliest of all the lyrical passages in Morris' narrative poems +except possibly the favourite two-part song in "Ogier the Dane"; + + "In the white-flower'd hawthorne brake, + Love, be merry for my sake: + Twine the blossoms in my hair. + Kiss me where I am most fair-- + Kiss me, love! for who knoweth + What thing cometh after death?" + +This is the strain which recurs in all Morris' poetry with the insistence +of a burden, and lends its melancholy to every season of "the rich year +slipping by." + +Three kinds of verse are employed in "The Earthly Paradise": the +octosyllabic couplet; the rime royal, which was so much a favourite with +Chaucer; and the heroic couplet, handled in the free, "enjambed" fashion +of Hunt and Keats. + +"Love is Enough," in the form of a fifteenth-century morality play, and +treating a subject from the "Mabinogion," appeared in 1873, Mackail +praises its delicate mechanism in the use of "receding planes of action" +(Love is prologue and chorus, and there is a musical accompaniment); but +the dramatic form only emphasises the essentially undramatic quality of +the author's genius. What is the matter with Morris' poetry? For +something is the matter with it. Beauty is there in abundance, a rich +profusion of imagery. The narrative moves without a hitch. Passion is +not absent, passionate love and regret; but it speaks a sleepy language, +and the final impression is dream-like. I believe that the singular lack +which one feels in reading these poems comes from Morris' dislike of +rhetoric and moralising, the two main nerves of eighteenth-century verse. +Left to themselves, these make sad work of poetry; yet poetry includes +eloquence, and life includes morality. The poetry of Morris is sensuous, +as upon the whole poetry should be; but in his resolute abstention from +the generalizing habit of the previous century, the balance is lost +between the general and the concrete, which all really great poetry +preserves. Byron declaims and Wordsworth moralises, both of them perhaps +too much; yet in the end to the advantage of their poetry, which is full +of truths, or of thoughts conceived as true, surcharged with emotion and +uttered with passionate conviction. One looks in vain in Morris' pages +for such things as + + "There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away"; + +or + + "--the good die first, + ----And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust, + Burn to the socket." + +Such coin of universal currency is rare in Morris, as has once before +been said. Not that quotability is an absolute test of poetic value, for +then Pope would rank higher than Spenser or Shelley. But its absence in +Morris is significant in more than one way. + +While "The Earthly Paradise" was in course of composition, a new +intellectual influence came into Morris' life, the influence of the +Icelandic sagas. Much had been done to make Old Norse literature +accessible to English readers since the days when Gray put forth his +Runic scraps and Percy translated Mallet.[53] Walter Scott, e.g., had +given an abstract of the "Eyrbyggja Saga." Amos Cottle had published at +Bristol in 1797 a metrical version of the mythological portion of the +"Elder Edda" ("Icelandic Poetry, or the Edda of Saemund"), with an +introductory verse epistle by Southey. Sir George Dasent's translation +of the "Younger Edda" appeared in 1842; Laing's "Heimskringla" in 1844; +Dasent's "Burnt Nial" in 1861; his "Gisli the Outlaw," and Head's "Saga +of Viga-Glum" in 1866. William and Mary Howitt's "Literature and Romance +of Northern Europe" appeared in 1852. Morris had made the acquaintance +of Thorpe's "Northern Mythology" (1851) and "Yuletide Stories" (1853) at +Oxford; two of the tales in "The Earthly Paradise" were suggested by +them: "The Land East of the Sun" and "The Fostering of Aslaug." These, +however, he had dealt with independently and in an ultra-romantic spirit. +But in 1869 he took up the study of Icelandic under the tuition of Mr. +Erick Magnusson; in collaboration with whom he issued a number of +translations.[54] "The Lovers of Gudrun" in "The Earthly Paradise" was +taken from the "Laxdaela Saga," and is in marked contrast with the other +poems in the collection. There is no romantic glamour about it. It is a +grim, domestic tragedy, moving among the homeliest surroundings. Save +for the lawlessness of a primitive state of society which gave free play +to the workings of the passions, the story might have passed in Yorkshire +or New England. A book like "Wuthering Heights," or "Pembroke," +occasionally exhibits the same obstinate Berserkir rage of the tough old +Teutonic stock, operating under modern conditions. For the men and women +of the sagas are hard as iron; their pride is ferocious, their courage +and sense of duty inflexible, their hatred is as enduring as their love. +The memory of a slight or an injury is nursed for a lifetime, and when +the hour of vengeance strikes, no compunction, not even the commonest +human instincts--such as mother love--can avert the blow. Signy in the +"Völsunga Saga" is implacable as fate. To avenge the slaughter of the +Volsungs is with her an obsession, a fixed idea. When incest seems the +only pathway to her purpose, she takes that path without a moment's +hesitation. The contemptuous indifference with which she hands over her +own little innocent children to death is more terrible than the readiness +of the fierce Medea to sacrifice her young brothers to Jason's safety; +more terrible by far than the matricide of Orestes. + +The colossal mythology of the North had impressed Gray's imagination a +century before, Carlyle in his "Hero Worship" (1840) had given it the +preference over the Greek, as an expression of race character and +imagination. In the preface to his translation of the "Völsunga Saga," +Morris declared his surprise that no version of the story yet existed in +English. He said that it was one of the great stories of the world, and +that to all men of Germanic blood it ought to be what the tale of Troy +had been to the whole Hellenic race. In 1876 he cast it into a poem, +"Sigurd the Volsung," in four books in riming lines of six iambic or +anapaestic feet. "The Lovers of Gudrun" drew its material from one of +that class of sagas which rest upon historical facts. The family +vendetta which it narrates, in the Iceland of the eleventh century, is +hardly more fabulous--hardly less realistic--than any modern blood feud +in the Tennessee mountains. The passions and dramatic situations are +much the same in both. The "Völsunga Saga" belongs not to romantic +literature, strictly speaking, but to the old cycle of hero epics, to +that earlier Middle Age which preceded Christian chivalry. It is the +Scandinavian version of the story of the Niblungs, which Wagner's +music-dramas have rendered in another art. But in common with romance, +it abounds in superhuman wonders. It is full of Eddaic poetry and +mythology. Sigmund and Sinfiotli change themselves into were wolves, +like the people in "William of Palermo": Sigurd slays Fafnir, the dragon +who guards the hoard, and his brother Regni, the last of the Dwarf-kin; +Grimhild bewitches Sigurd with a cup of evil drink; Sigmund draws from +the hall pillar the miraculous sword of Odin, and its shards are +afterwards smithed by Regni for the killing of the monster. + +Morris was so powerfully drawn to the Old Norse literature that he made +two visits to Iceland, to verify the local references in the sagas and to +acquaint himself with the strange Icelandic landscapes whose savage +sublimity is reflected in the Icelandic writings. "Sigurd the Volsung" +is probably the most important contribution of Norse literature to +English poetry; but it met with no such general acceptance as "The +Earthly Paradise." The spirit which created the Northern mythology and +composed the sagas is not extinct in the English descendants of Frisians +and Danes. There is something of it in the minstrel ballads; but it has +been so softened by modern life and tempered with foreign culture +elements, that these old tales in their aboriginal, barbaric sternness +repel. It is hard for any blossom of modern poetry to root itself in the +scoriae of Hecla. + +An indirect result of Morris' Icelandic studies was his translation of +Beowulf (1897), not a success; another was the remarkable series of prose +poems or romances, which he put forth in the last ten years of his +life.[55] There is nothing else quite like these. They are written in a +peculiar archaic English which the author shaped for himself out of +fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century models, like the "Morte Darthur" +and the English translation of the "Gesta Roroanorum," but with an +anxious preference for the Saxon and Danish elements of the vocabulary. +It is a dialect in which a market town is called a "cheaping-stead," a +popular assembly a "folk-mote," foresters are "wood-abiders," sailors are +"ship-carles," a family is a "kindred," poetry is "song-craft," [56] and +any kind of enclosure is a "garth." The prose is frequently interchanged +with verse, not by way of lyrical outbursts, but as a variation in the +narrative method, after the manner of the Old French _cantefables_, such +as "Aucassin et Nicolete"; but more exactly after the manner of the +sagas, in which the azoic rock of Eddaic poetry crops out ever and anon +under the prose strata. This Saxonism of style is in marked contrast +with Scott, who employs without question the highly latinised English +which his age had inherited from the last. Nor are Morris' romances +historical in the manner of the Waverley novels. The first two of the +series, however, are historical in the sense that they endeavour to +reproduce in exact detail the picture of an extinct society. Time and +place are not precisely indicated, but the scene is somewhere in the old +German forest, and the period is early in the Christian era, during the +obscure wanderings and settlements of the Gothic tribes. "The House of +the Wolfings" concerns the life of such a community, which has made a +series of clearings in "Mirkwood" on a stream tributary to the Rhine. +The folk of Midmark live very much as Tacitus describes the ancient +Germans as living. Each kindred dwells in a great common hall, like the +hall of the Niblungs or the Volsungs, or of King Hrothgar in "Beowulf." +Their herding and agriculture are described, their implements and +costumes, feasts in hall, songs, rites of worship, public meetings, and +finally their warfare when they go forth against the invading Romans. In +"The Roots of the Mountains" the tribe of the Wolf has been driven into +the woods and mountains by the vanguard of the Hunnish migrations. In +time they make head against these, drive them back, and retake their +fertile valley. In each case there is a love story and, as in Scott, the +private fortunes of the hero and heroine are enwoven with the ongoings of +public events. But it is the general life of the tribe that is of +importance, and there is little individual characterisation. There is a +class of thralls in "The House of the Wolfings," but no single member of +the class is particularised, like Garth, the thrall of Cedric, in +"Ivanhoe." + +The later numbers of the series have no semblance of actuality. The last +of all, indeed, "The Sundering Flood," is a war story which attains an +air of geographical precision by means of a map--like the plan of Egdon +Heath in "The Return of the Native"--but the region and its inhabitants +are alike fabulous. Romances such as "The Water of the Wondrous Isles" +and "The Wood beyond the World" (the names are not the least imaginative +feature of these curious books) are simply a new kind of fairy tales. +Unsubstantial as Duessa or Armida or Circe or Morgan le Fay are the +witch-queen of the Wood beyond the World and the sorceress of the +enchanted Isle of Increase Unsought. The white Castle of the Quest, with +its three champions and their ladies, Aurea, Atra, and Viridis; the +yellow dwarfs, the magic boat, the wicked Red Knight, and his den, the +Red Hold; the rings and spells and charms and garments of invisibility +are like the wilder parts of Malory or the Arabian Nights. + +Algernon Charles Swinburne was an early adherent of the Pre-Raphaelite +school, although such of his work as is specifically Gothic is to be +found mainly in the first series of "Poems and Ballads" (1866);[57] a +volume which corresponds to Morris' first fruits, "The Defence of +Guenevere." If Morris is prevailingly a Goth--a heathen Norseman or +Saxon--Swinburne is, upon the whole, a Greek pagan. Rossetti and Morris +inherit from Keats, but Swinburne much more from Shelley, whom he +resembles in his Hellenic spirit; as well as in his lyric fervour, his +shrill radicalism--political and religious--and his unchastened +imagination. Probably the cunningest of English metrical artists, his +art is more closely affiliated with music than with painting. Not that +there is any paucity of imagery in his poetry; the imagery is +superabundant, crowded, but it is blurred by an iridescent spray of +melodious verbiage. The confusion of mind which his work often produces +does not arise from romantic vagueness, from the dreamlike and mysterious +impression left by a ballad of Coleridge's or a story of Tieck's, but +rather, as in Shelley's case, from the dizzy splendour and excitement of +the diction. His verse, like Shelley's, is full of foam and flame, and +the result upon the reader is to bewilder and exhaust. He does not +describe in pictures, like Rossetti and Morris, but by metaphors, +comparisons, and hyperboles. Take the following very typical +passage--the portrait of Iseult in "Tristram of Lyonesse" (1882); + + "The very veil of her bright flesh was made + As of light woven and moonbeam-colored shade + More fine than moonbeams; white her eyelids shone + As snow sun-stricken that endures the sun, + And through their curled and coloured clouds of deep, + Luminous lashes, thick as dreams in sleep, + Shone, as the sea's depth swallowing up the sky's, + The springs of unimaginable eyes. + As the wave's subtler emerald is pierced through + With the utmost heaven's inextricable blue, + And both are woven and molten in one sleight + Of amorous colour and implicated light + Under the golden guard and gaze of noon, + So glowed their aweless amorous plenilune, + Azure and gold and ardent grey, made strange + With fiery difference and deep interchange + Inexplicable of glories multiform; + Now, as the sullen sapphire swells towards storm + Foamless, their bitter beauty grew acold, + And now afire with ardour of fine gold. + Her flower-soft lips were meek and passionate, + For love upon them like a shadow sate + Patient, a foreseen vision of sweet things, + A dream with eyes fast shut and plumeless wings + That knew not what man's love or life should be, + Nor had it sight nor heart to hope or see + What thing should come; but, childlike satisfied, + Watched out its virgin vigil in soft pride + And unkissed expectation; and the glad + Clear cheeks and throat and tender temples had + Such maiden heat as if a rose's blood + Beat in the live heart of a lily-bud." + +What distinct image of the woman portrayed does one carry away from all +this squandered wealth of words and tropes? Compare the entire poem with +one of Tennyson's Arthurian "Idyls," or even with Matthew Arnold's not +over-prosperous "Tristram and Iseult," or with any of the stories in "The +Earthly Paradise," and it will be seen how far short it falls of being +good verse narrative--with its excesses of language and retarded +movement. Wordsworth said finely of Shakspere that he could not have +written an epic: "he would have perished from a plethora of thought." It +is not so much plethora of thought as lavishness of style which clogs the +wheels in Swinburne. Too often his tale is + + "Like a tale of the little meaning, + Though the words are strong." + +But his narrative method has analogies, not only with things like +Shelley's "Laon and Cythna," but with Elizabethan poems such as Marlowe +and Chapman's "Hero and Leander." If not so conceited as these, it is +equally encumbered with sticky sweets which keep the story from getting +forward. + +The symbolism which characterises a great deal of Pre-Raphaelite art is +not conspicuous in Swinburne, whose spirit is not mystical. But two +marks of the Pre-Raphaelite--and, indeed, of the romantic manner +generally--are obtrusively present in his early work. One of these is +the fondness for microscopic detail at the expense of the obvious, +natural outlines of the subject. Thus of Proserpine at Enna, in the +piece entitled "At Eleusis," + + "--she lying down, red flowers + Made their sharp little shadows on her sides." + +"Endymion" is, perhaps, partly responsible for this exaggeration of the +picturesque, and in Swinburne, as in Keats, the habit is due to an +excessive impressibility by all forms of sensuous beauty. It is a sign +of riches, but of riches which smother their possessor. It is impossible +to fancy Chaucer or Goethe, or any large, healthy mind dealing thus by +its theme. Or, indeed, contrast the whole passage from "At Eleusis" with +the mention of the rape of Proserpine in the "Winter's Tale" and in +"Paradise Lost." + +Another Pre-Raphaelite trait is that over-intensify of spirit and sense +which was not quite wholesome in Rossetti, but which manifested itself in +Swinburne in a morbid eroticism. The first series of "Poems and Ballads" +was reprinted in America as "Laus Veneris." The name-poem was a version +of the Tannhäuser legend, a powerful but sultry study of animal passion, +and it set the key of the whole volume. It is hardly necessary to say of +the singer of the wonderful choruses in "Atalanta" and the equally +wonderful hexameters of "Hesperia," that his imagination has turned most +persistently to the antique, and that a very small share of his work is +to be brought under any narrowly romantic formula. But there are a few +noteworthy experiments in mediaevalism included among these early lyrics. +"A Christmas Carol" is a ballad of burdens, suggested by a drawing of +Rossetti's, and full of the Pre-Raphaelite colour. The inevitable +damsels, or bower maidens, are combing out the queen's hair with golden +combs, while she sings a song of God's mother; how she, too, had three +women for her bed-chamber-- + + "The first two were the two Maries, + The third was Magdalen," [58] + +who "was the likest God"; and how Joseph, who, likewise had three +workmen, Peter, Paul, and John, said to the Virgin in regular ballad +style: + + "If your child be none other man's, + But if it be very mine, + The bedstead shall be gold two spans, + The bedfoot silver fine." + +"The Masque of Queen Bersabe" is a miracle play, and imitates the rough +_naïveté_ of the old Scriptural drama, with its grotesque stage +directions and innocent anachronisms. Nathan recommends King David to +hear a mass. All the _dramatis personae_ swear by Godis rood, by Paulis +head, and Peter's soul, except "Secundus Miles" (_Paganus quidam_), a bad +man--a species of Vice--who swears by Satan and Mahound, and is finally +carried off by the comic devil: + + "_S. M._ I rede you in the devil's name, + Ye come not here to make men game; + By Termagaunt that maketh grame, + I shall to-bete thine head. + _Hic Diabolus capiat eum_." [59] + +Similarly "St. Dorothy" reproduces the childlike faith and simplicity of +the old martyrologies.[60] Theophilus addresses the Emperor Gabalus with +"Beau Sire, Dieu vous aide." The wicked Gabalus himself, though a +heathen, curses by St. Luke and by God's blood and bones, and quotes +Scripture. Theophilus first catches sight of Dorothy through a latticed +window, holding a green and red psalter among a troop of maidens who play +upon short-stringed lutes. The temple of Venus where he does his +devotions is a "church" with stained-glass windows. Heaven is a walled +pleasance, like the Garden of Delight in the "Roman de la Rose," + + "Thick with companies + Of fair-clothed men that play on shawms and lutes." + +Swinburne has also essayed the minstrel ballad in various forms. There +were some half-dozen pieces of the sort in the "Laus Veneris" volume, of +which several, like "The King's Daughter" and "The Sea-Swallows," were +imitations of Rossetti's and Morris' imitations, artistically overwrought +with elaborate Pre-Raphaelite refrains; others, like "May Janet" and "The +Bloody Son," are closer to popular models. The third series of "Poems +and Ballads" (1889) contains nine of these in the Scotch dialect, two of +them Jacobite songs. That Swinburne has a fine instinct in such matters +and holds the true theory of ballad imitation is evident from his review +of Rossetti's and Morris' work in the same kind.[61] "The highest form +of ballad requires, from a poet," he writes, "at once narrative power, +lyrical and dramatic. . . . It must condense the large, loose fluency of +romantic tale-telling into tight and intense brevity. . . . There can be +no pause in a ballad, and no excess; nothing that flags, nothing that +overflows." He pronounces "Sister Helen" the greatest ballad in modern +English; but he thinks that "Stratton Water," which is less independent +in composition, and copies the formal as well as the essential +characteristics of popular poetry, is "a study after the old manner too +close to be no closer. It is not meant for a perfect and absolute piece +of work in the old Border fashion, . . . and yet it is so far a copy that +it seems hardly well to have gone so far and no farther. On this ground +Mr. Morris has a firmer tread than the great artist by the light of whose +genius and kindly guidance he put forth the first fruits of his work, as +I did afterwards. In his first book, the ballad of 'Welland River,' the +Christmas carol in 'The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon,' +etc., . . . are examples of flawless work in the pure early manner. Any +less absolute and decisive revival of mediaeval form . . . rouses some +sense of failure by excess or default of resemblance." + +Swinburne's own ballads are clever and learned experiments, but he does +not practise the brevity which he recommends; some of them, such as "The +Bloody Son," "The Weary Wedding," and "The Bride's Tragedy," otherwise +most impressive, would be more so if they were shorter or less wordy. +Though his genius is more lyrical than dramatic, the fascination which +the dramatic method has had for him from the first is as evident in his +ballads as in his series of verse dramas, which begins with "The Queen +Mother," and includes the enormous "Mary Stuart" trilogy. Several of +these are mediaeval in subject; the "Rosamond" of his earliest +volume--Fair Rosamond of the Woodstock Maze--the other "Rosamund, Queen +of the Goths" (1899) in which the period of the action is 573 A.D.; and +"Locrine" (1888), the hero of which is that mythic king of Britain whose +story had been once before dramatised for the Elizabethan stage; and +whose daughter, "Sabrina fair," goddess of the Severn, figures in +"Comus." But these are no otherwise romantic than "Chastelard" or "The +Queen Mother." The dramatic diction is fashioned after the Elizabethans, +of whom Swinburne has been an enthusiastic student and expositor, finding +an attraction even in the morbid horrors of Webster, Ford, and +Tourneur.[62] + +Once more the poet touched the Round-Table romances in "The Tale of +Balen" (1896), written in the stanza of "The Lady of Shalott," and in a +style simpler and more direct than "Tristram of Lyonesse." The story is +the same as Tennyson's "Balin and Balan," published with "Tiresias and +Other Poems" in 1885, as an introduction to "Merlin and Vivien." Here +the advantage is in every point with the younger poet. Tennyson's +version is one of the weakest spots in the "Idylls." His hero is a rough +Northumberland warrior who looks with admiration upon the courtly graces +of Lancelot, and borrows a cognisance from Guinevere to wear upon his +shield, in hope that it may help him to keep his temper. But having once +more lost control of this, he throws himself upon the ground + + "Moaning 'My violences, my violences!'"-- + +a bathetic descent not unexampled elsewhere in Tennyson. + +This episode of the old "Morte Darthur" has fine tragic possibilities. +It is the tale of two brothers who meet in single combat, with visors +down, and slay each other unrecognised. It has some resemblance, +therefore, to the plan of "Sohrab and Rustum," but it cannot be said that +either poet avails himself of the opportunity for a truly dramatic +presentation of his theme. Tennyson, as we have seen, aimed to give epic +unity to the wandering and repetitious narrative of Malory, by selecting +and arranging his material with reference to one leading conception; the +effort of the king to establish a higher social state through an order of +Christian knighthood, and his failure through the gradual corruption of +the Round Table. He subdues the history of Balin to this purpose, just +as he does the history of Tristram which he relates incidentally only, +and not for its own sake, in "The Last Tournament." Balin's simple faith +in the ideal chivalry of Arthur's court is rudely dispelled when he hears +from Vivien, and sees for himself, that the two chief objects of his +reverence, Lancelot and the queen, are guilty lovers and false to their +lord; and in his bitter disappointment, he casts his life away in the +first adventure that offers. Moreover, in consonance with his main +design, Tennyson seeks, so far as may be, to discard whatever in Malory +is merely accidental or irrational; whatever is stuff of romance rather +than of epic or drama--whose theatre is the human will. To such elements +of the wonderful as he is obliged to retain he gives, where possible, an +allegorical or spiritual significance. There are very strange things in +the story of Balin, such as the invisible knight Garlon, a "darkling +manslayer"; and the chamber in the castle of King Pellam, where the body +of Joseph of Arimathea lies in state, and where there are a portion of +the blood of Christ and the spear with which his heart was pierced, with +which spear Sir Balin smites King Pellam, whereupon the castle falls and +the two adversaries lie among its ruins three days in a deathlike trance. +All this wild magic--which Tennyson touches lightly--Swinburne gives at +full length; following Malory closely through his digressions and the +roving adventures--most of which Tennyson suppresses entirely--by which +he conducts his hero his end. This is the true romantic method. + +As Rossetti for the Italian and Morris for the Scandinavian, Swinburne +stands for the spirit of French romanticism. At the beginning of the +nineteenth century France, the inventor of "Gothic" architecture and +chivalry romance, whose literature was the most influential of mediaeval +Europe, still represented everything that is most anti-mediaeval and +anti-romantic. Gérard de Nerval thought that the native genius of France +had been buried under two ages of imported classicism; and that Perrault, +who wrote the fairy tales, was the only really original mind in the +French literature of the eighteenth century. M. Brunetière, on the +contrary, holds that the true expression of the national genius is to be +found in the writers of Louis XIV.'s time--that France is instinctively +and naturally classical. However this may be, in the history of the +modern return to the past, French romanticism was the latest to awake. +Somewhat of the chronicles, fabliaux, and romances of old France had +dribbled into England in translations;[63] but Swinburne was perhaps the +first thoroughpaced disciple of the French romantic school. Victor Hugo +is the god of his idolatry, and he has chanted his praise in prose and +verse, in "ode and elegy and sonnet." [64] Gautier and Baudelaire have +also shared his devotion.[65] The French songs in "Rosamond" and +"Chastelard" are full of romantic spirit. "Laus Veneris" follows a +version of the tale given in Maistre Antoine Gaget's "Livre des grandes +merveilles d'amour" (1530), in which the Venusberg is called "le mont +Horsel"; and "The Leper," a very characteristic piece in the same +collection, is founded on a passage in the "Grandes Chroniques de France" +(1505). Swinburne introduced or revived in English verse a number of old +French stanza forms, such as the ballade, the sestina, the rondel, which +have since grown familiar in the hands of Dobson, Lang, Gosse, and +others. In the second series of "Poems and Ballads" (1878) he gave +translations of ten of the ballads of that musical old blackguard + + "Villon, our sad, bad, glad, mad brother's name." [66] + +The range of Swinburne's intellectual interests has been wider than that +of Rossetti and Morris. He is a classical scholar, who writes easily in +Latin and Greek. Ancient mythology and modern politics divide his +attention with the romantic literatures of many times and countries. +Rossetti made but one or two essays in prose criticism, and Morris viewed +the reviewer's art with contempt. But Swinburne has contributed freely +to critical literature, an advocate of the principles of romantic art in +the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as Coleridge, Lamb, and +Hazlitt had been in the first. The manner of his criticism is not at all +judicial. His prose is as lyrical as his verse, and his praise and blame +both in excess--dithyrambic laudation or affluent billingsgate. In +particular, he works the adjective "divine" so hard that it loses +meaning. Yet stripped of its excited superlatives, and reduced to the +cool temperature of ordinary speech, his critical work is found to be +full of insight, and his judgment in matters of poetical technique almost +always right. I may close this chapter with a few sentences of his +defence of retrospective literature.[67] "It is but waste of breath for +the champions of the other party to bid us break the yoke and cast off +the bondage of that past, leave the dead to bury their dead, and turn +from the dust and rottenness of old-world themes, epic or romantic, +classical or feudal, to face the age wherein we live. . . . In vain, for +instance, do the first poetess of England and the first poet of America +agree to urge upon their fellows or their followers the duty of +confronting and expressing the spirit and the secret of their own time, +its meaning, and its need. . . . If a poem cast in the mould of classic +or feudal times, of Greek drama or mediaeval romance, be lifeless and +worthless, it is not because the subject or the form was ancient, but +because the poet was inadequate. . . . For neither epic nor romance of +chivalrous quest or classic war is obsolete yet, or ever can be; there is +nothing in the past extinct . . . [Life] is omnipresent and eternal, and +forsakes neither Athens nor Jerusalem, Camelot nor Troy, Argonaut nor +Crusader, to dwell, as she does with equal good will, among modern +appliances in London and New York." + + +[1] See vol. i., chaps. iv. and vii., "The Landscape Poets" and "The +Gothic Revival." + +[2] This was the organ of the Pre-Raphaelites, started in 1850. Only +four numbers were issued (January, February, March, April), and in the +third and fourth the title was changed to _Art and Poetry_. The contents +included, among other things, poems by Dante Gabriel and Christina +Rossetti. One of the former's twelve contributions was "The Blessed +Damozel." The _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, which ran through the +year 1856 and was edited by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, was +also a Pre-Raphaelite journal and received many contributions from +Rossetti. + +[3] The foreign strain in the English Pre-Raphaelites and in the painters +and poets who descend from them is worth noting. Rossetti was +three-fourths Italian. Millais' parents were Channel Islanders--from +Jersey--and he had two mother tongues, English and French. Burne-Jones +is of Welsh blood, and Alma Tadema of Frisian birth. Among +Neo-Pre-Raphaelite poets, the names of Theophile Marzials and Arthur +O'Shaughnessy speak for themselves. + +[4] Let the reader consult the large and rapidly increasing literature on +the English Pre-Raphaelites. I do not profess to be a very competent +guide here, but I have found the following works all in some degree +enlightening. "Autobiographical Notes of William Bell Scott," two vols., +New York, 1892. "English Contemporary Art." Translated from the French +of R. de la Sizeranne, Westminster, 1898. "D. G. Rossetti as Designer +and Writer." W. M. Rossetti, London, 1889. "The Rossettis." E. L. +Cary, New York, 1900. "Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement." +Esther Wood, New York, 1894. "Pre-Raphaelitism." J. Ruskin, New York, +1860. "The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." Holman Hunt in _Contemporary +Review_, vol. xlix. (three articles). "Encyclopaedia Britannica," +article "Rossetti." by Theodore Watts. Of course the standard lives and +memoirs by William Rossetti, Hall Caine, William Sharp, and Joseph +Knight, as well as Rossetti's "Family Letters," "Letters to William +Allingham," etc., afford criticisms of the movement from various points +of view. Lists of Rossetti's paintings and drawings are given by several +of these authorities, with photographs or engravings of his most famous +masterpieces. + +[5] "Lectures on Architecture and Painting." Delivered at Edinburgh in +1853. Lecture iv., "Pre Raphaelitism." + +[6] _Cf._ Milton: "Each stair mysteriously was meant" ("P. L."). + +[7] "Dante Gabriel Rossetti: a record and a study," London, 1882, pp. +40-41. + +[8] "Pre-Raphaelitism," p. 23, _note_. + +[9] "Autobiographical Notes of William Bell Scott," vol. i., p. 281. + +[10] "English Contemporary Art," p. 58. + +[11] "Lectures on Architecture and Painting," 1853. + +[12] See vol. i., p. 44. + +[13] "The return of this school was to a mediaevalism different from the +tentative and scrappy mediaevalism of Percy, from the genial but slightly +superficial mediaevalism of Scott, and even from the more exact but +narrow and distinctly conventional mediaevalism of Tennyson. . . . +Moreover, though it may seem whimsical or extravagant to say so, these +poets added to the very charm of mediaeval literature, which they thus +revived, a subtle something which differentiates it from--which, to our +perhaps blind sight, seems to be wanting in--mediaeval literature itself. +It is constantly complained (and some of those who cannot go all the way +with the complainants can see what they mean) that the graceful and +labyrinthine stories, the sweet snatches of song, the quaint drama and +legend of the Middle Ages lack--to us--life; that they are shadowy, +unreal, tapestry on the wall, not alive even as living pageants are. By +the strong touch of modernness which these poets and the best of their +followers introduced into their work, they have given the vivification +required" (Saintsbury, "Literature of the Nineteenth Century," p. 439). +Pre-Raphaelitism "is a direct and legitimate development of the great +romantic revival in England. . . . Even Tennyson, much more Scott and +Coleridge and their generation, had entered only very partially into the +treasures of mediaeval literature, and were hardly at all acquainted with +those of mediaeval art. Conybeare, Kemble, Thorpe, Madden were only in +Tennyson's own time reviving the study of Old and Middle English. Early +French and Early Italian were but just being opened up. Above all, the +Oxford Movement directed attention to mediaeval architecture, literature, +thought, as had never been the case before in England, and as has never +been the case at all in any other country" ("A Short History of English +Literature," by G. Saintsbury, London, 1898, p. 779). + +[14] "Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti," by T. Hall Caine, London, +1883, p. 41. + +[15] "The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti." Edited by W. M. +Rossetti, two vols., London, 1886. + +[16] "Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A Record and a Study," p. 305. + +[17] He wrote to Allingham in 1855, apropos of the latter's poem "The +Music Master": "I'm not sure that it is not too noble or too resolutely +healthy. . . . I must confess to a need in narrative dramatic +poetry . . . of something rather 'exciting,' and indeed, I believe, +something of the 'romantic' element, to rouse my mind to anything like +the moods produced by personal emotion in my own life. That sentence is +shockingly ill worded, but Keats' narratives would be of the kind I +mean." Theodore Watts ("Encyclopaedia Britannica," article "Rossetti") +says that "the purely romantic temper was with Rossetti a more permanent +and even a more natural temper than with any other nineteenth-century +poet, even including the author of 'Christabel' himself." He thinks that +all the French romanticists together do not equal the romantic feeling in +a single picture of Rossetti's; and he somewhat capriciously defines the +idea at the core of romanticism as that of the evil forces of nature +assailing man through his sense of beauty. Analysis run mad! As to Poe, +Rossetti certainly preferred him to Wordsworth. Hall Caine testifies +that he used to repeat "Ulalume" and "The Raven" from memory; and that +the latter suggested his "Blessed Damozel." "I saw that Poe had done the +utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and so +I determined to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the +yearning of the loved one in heaven" ("Recollections," p. 384). + +[18] "Recollections," p. 140. + +[19] Caine's "Recollections," p. 266. + +[20] Burne-Jones had been attracted by Rossetti's illustration of +Allingham's poem, "The Maids of Elfinmere," and had obtained an +introduction to him at London in 1856. It was by Rossetti's persuasion +that he gave up the church for the career of an artist. Rossetti and +Swinburne some years later (1862) became housemates for a time at +Chelsea; and Rossetti and Morris for a number of years, off and on, at +Kelmscott. + +[21] Sharp's "Dante Gabriel Rossetti," p. 190. + +[22] See especially Morris' poem "Rapunzel" in "The Defence of Guenevere." + +[23] "I can't say," wrote William Morris, "how it was that Rossetti took +no interest in politics; but so it was: of course he was quite Italian in +his general turn of thought; though I think he took less interest in +Italian politics than in English. . . . The truth is, he cared for +nothing but individual and personal matters; chiefly of course in +relation to art and literature." + +[24] "The Liberal Movement in English Literature," by W. J. Courthope, +London, 1885, p. 230. + +[25] "Keats was a great poet who sometimes nodded. . . . Coleridge was a +muddle-brained metaphysician who, by some strange freak of fortune, +turned out a few real poems amongst the dreary flood of inanity which was +his wont. . . . I have been through the poems, and find that the only +ones which have any interest for me are: (1) 'Ancient Mariner'; (2) +'Christabel'; (3) 'Kubla Khan'; and (4) the poem called 'Love'" +(Mackail's "Life of Morris," vol. ii., p. 310). + +[26] "The Life of William Morris," by W. J. Mackail, London, 1899, vol. +ii., p. 171. + +[27] For the Chaucerian manipulation of classical subjects by +Pre-Raphaelite artists see "Edward Burne-Jones," by Malcolm Bell, London, +1899. + +[28] "The slough of despond which we call the eighteenth century" ("Hopes +and Fears for Art," p. 211). "The English language, which under the +hands of sycophantic verse-makers had been reduced to a miserable +jargon . . . flowed clear, pure, and simple along with the music of Blake +and Coleridge. Take those names, the earliest in date among ourselves, +as a type of the change that has happened in literature since the time of +George II." (_ibid._, p. 82). + +[29] Page 113. + +[30] "Sir Edward Burne-Jones told me that Morris would have liked the +faces in his pictures less highly finished, and less charged with the +concentrated meaning or emotion of the painting . . . and he thought that +the dramatic and emotional interest of a picture ought to be diffused +throughout it as equally as possible. Such, too, was his own practice in +the cognate art of poetry; and this is one reason why his poetry affords +so few memorable single lines, and lends itself so little to quotation" +(Mackail's "Life of William Morris," vol. ii., p. 272). + +[31] "Hopes and Fears for Art," p. 79. + +[32] _Ibid._, p. 83. + +[33] See vol. i., pp. 241-43. + +[34] _Vide supra_, p. 153. + +[35] "A Short History of English Literature," p. 783. + +[36] "Recollections of Rossetti," vol. ii., p. 42. + +[37] "King Arthur's Tomb." + +[38] 0ne of these, "The Haystack in the Floods," has a tragic power +unexcelled by any later work of Morris. + +[39] Saintsbury, p. 785. + +[40] "King Arthur's Tomb." + +[41] "Rapunzel." + +[42] "King Arthur's Tomb." + +[43] _Ibid_. + +[44] "Rapunzel." + +[45] "Golden Wings." + +[46] See "Sir Galahad," "The Chapel in Lyoness," "A Good Knight in +Prison." + +[47] See "Jason," Book xvii., 5-24, and the _Envoi_ to "The Earthly +Paradise." + +[48] Some of Morris' sources were William of Malmesbury, "Mandeville's +Travels," the "Gesta Romanorum," and the "Golden Legend." "The Man Born +to be King" was derived from "The Tale of King Constans, the Emperor" in +a volume of French romances ("Nouvelles françaises en prose du xiii.ième +Siècle," Paris, 1856) of which he afterwards (1896) made a prose +translation. The collection included also "The friendship of Amis and +Amile"; "King Florus and the Fair Jehane"; and "The History of Over Sea"; +besides "Aucassin and Nicolete," which Morris left out because it had +been already rendered into English by Andrew Lang. + +[49] His Vergil's "Aeneid," in the old fourteener of Chapman, was +published in 1876. + +[50] _Vide supra_, p. 315. + +[51] Mackail, i., p. 168. + +[52] Lang's translation. + +[53] See vol. i., pp. 190-92. + +[54] The "Grettis Saga" (1869); the "Völsunga Saga" (1870); "Three +Northern Love Stories" (1875). + +[55] These, in order of publication, were "The House of the Wolfings" +(1889); "The Roots of the Mountains" (1890); "The Story of the Glittering +Plain" (1891); "The Wood Beyond the World" (1894); "The Well at the +World's End" (1896); "The Water of the Wondrous Isles" (1897); and "The +Sundering Flood" (1898). + +[56] Morris became so intolerant of French vocables that he detested and +would "fain" have eschewed the very word literature. + +[57] This collection is made up of Swinburne's earliest work but is +antedated in point of publication by "The Queen Mother, and Rosamond" +(1861) dedicated to Rossetti; and "Atalanta in Calydon" (1865). "Poems +and Ballads" was inscribed to Burne-Jones. + +[58] "Where the lady Mary is, + With her five handmaidens whose names + Are five sweet symphonies, + Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen, + Margaret and Rosalys." + --"The Blessed Damozel." + +[59] _Cf._ Browning's "The Heretic's Tragedy," _supra_, p. 276. + +[60] This was the subject of Massinger's "Virgin Martyr." + +[61] "Essays and Studies," pp. 85-88. + +[62] See "A Study of Ben Jonson"; "John Ford" (in "Essays and Studies"); +and the introductions to "Chapman" and "Middleton" in the Mermaid Series. + +[63] _Vide supra_, pp. 90, 109, 330, and vol. i., pp. 221-22, 301. + +[64] See especially "A Study of Victor Hugo" (1886); the articles on +"L'Homme qui Rit" and "L'Année Terrible" in "Essays and Studies" (1875); +and on Hugo's posthumous writings in "Studies in Prose and Poetry" +(1886); "To Victor Hugo" in "Poems and Ballads" (first series); _Ibid_. +(second series); "Victor Hugo in 1877," _Ibid_. + +[65] See "Ave atque Vale" and the memorial verses in English, French, and +Latin on Gautier's death in "Poems and Ballads" (second series). + +[66] "A Ballad of François Villon." _Vide supra_, pp. 298-99. + +[67] "Essays and Studies," pp. 45-49. + + + + +CHAPTER VIII. + +Tendencies and Results. + +It has been mentioned that romanticism was not purely a matter of +aesthetics, without relation to the movement of religious and political +thought.[1] But it has also been pointed out that, as compared with what +happened in Germany, English romanticism was almost entirely a literary +or artistic, and hardly at all a practical force, that there was no such +_Zusammenhang_ between poetry and life as was asserted by the German +romantic school to be one of their leading principles. Walter Scott, +_e.g._, liked the Middle Ages because they were picturesque; because +their social structure rested on a military basis, permitted great +individual freedom of action and even lawlessness, and thus gave chances +for bold adventure; and because classes and callings were so sharply +differentiated--each with its own characteristic manners, dialect, +dress--that the surface of society presented a rich variety of colour, in +contrast with the drab uniformity of modern life. Perhaps to Scott the +ideal life was that of a feudal baron, dwelling in a Gothic mansion, +surrounded by retainers and guests, keeping open house, and going +a-hunting; and he tried to realise this ideal--so far as it was possible +under modern conditions--at Abbotsford. He respected rank and pedigree, +and liked to own land. He was a Tory and, in Presbyterian Scotland, he +was an Episcopalian. But his mediaeval enthusiasms were checked by all +kinds of good sense. He had no wish to restore mediaeval institutions in +practice. In spite of the glamour which he threw over feudal life, he +knew very well what that life must have been in reality: its insecurity +from violence and oppression, its barbarous discomfort; the life of +nobles in unplumbed stone castles; the life of burghers in walled towns, +without lighting, drainage, or police; the life of countrymen who took +their goods to market over miry roads impassable half the year for any +wheeled vehicle. As to the English poets whom we have passed in review, +from Coleridge to Swinburne, not one of them joined the Catholic Church; +and most of them found romantic literary tastes quite consistent with +varying shades of political liberalism and theological heterodoxy. + +THE ANGLO-CATHOLIC MOVEMENT.--Still even in England, the mediaeval +revival in art and letters was not altogether without influence on +practice and belief in other spheres of thought. Thus the Oxford +Tractarians of 1833 correspond somewhat to the throne-and-altar party in +Germany. At Newcastle in 1845, William Bell Scott visited a +painted-glass manufactory where he found his friend, Francis +Oliphant--afterwards husband of Margaret Oliphant, the novelist--engaged +as a designer. He describes Oliphant as no artist by nature, but a man +of pietistic feelings who had "thrown himself into the Gothic revival +which was, under the Oxford movement, threatening to become a serious +antagonist to our present freedom from clerical domination." Scott adds +that the master of this glass-making establishment was an uncultivated +tradesman, who yet had the business shrewdness to take advantage of "the +clerical and architectural proclivities of the day," and had visited and +studied the French cathedrals. "These workshops were a surprise to me. +Here was the Scotch Presbyterian working-artist, with a short pipe in his +mouth, cursing his fate in having to elaborate continual repetitions of +saints and virgins--Peter with a key as large as a spade, and a yellow +plate behind his head--yet by constant drill in the groove realising the +sentiment of Christian art, and at last able to express the abnegation of +self, the limitless sadness and even tenderness, in every line of drapery +and every twist of the lay figure." + +Here is one among many testimonies to the influence of the Oxford +movement on the fine arts. It would be easy to call witnesses to prove +the reverse--the influence of romance upon the Oxford movement. +Newman[2] quotes an article contributed by him to the _British Critic_ +for April, 1839, in which he had spoken of Tractarianism "as a reaction +from the dry and superficial character of the religious teaching and the +literature of the last generation, or century. . . . First, I mentioned +the literary influence of Walter Scott, who turned men's minds to the +direction of the Middle Ages. 'The general need,' I said, 'of something +deeper and more attractive than what had offered itself elsewhere may be +considered to have led to his popularity; and by means of his popularity +he reacted on his readers, stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their +hopes, setting before them visions which, when once seen, are not easily +forgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which +might afterwards be appealed to as first principles.'" Of Coleridge he +spoke, in the same paper, as having laid a philosophical basis for church +feelings and opinions, and of Southey and Wordsworth as "two living +poets, one of whom in the department of fantastic fiction, the other in +that of philosophical meditation, have addressed themselves to the same +high principles and feelings, and carried forward their readers in the +same direction." Newman, like Ruskin, was fond of Scott's verse as well +as of his prose.[3] + +Professor Gates has well recognised that element in romantic art which +affiliates with Catholic tendencies. "Mediaevalism . . . was a +distinctive note of the Romantic spirit, and, certainly, Newman was +intensely alive to the beauty and the poetic charm of the life of the +Middle Ages. One is sometimes tempted to describe him as a great +mediaeval ecclesiastic astray in the nineteenth century and heroically +striving to remodel modern life in harmony with his temperamental needs. +His imagination was possessed with the romantic vision of the greatness +of the Mediaeval Church--of its splendour and pomp and dignity, and of +its power over the hearts and lives of its members; and the Oxford +movement was in its essence an attempt to reconstruct the English Church +in harmony with this romantic ideal. . . . As Scott's imagination was +fascinated with the picturesque paraphernalia of feudalism--with its +jousts, and courts of love, and its coats of mail and buff-jerkins--so +Newman's imagination was captivated by the gorgeous ritual and +ceremonial, the art and architecture of mediaeval Christianity. . . . +Newman sought to revive in the Church a mediaeval faith in its own divine +mission and the intense spiritual consciousness of the Middle Ages; he +aimed to restore to religion its mystical character, to exalt the +sacramental system as the divinely appointed means for the salvation of +souls, and to impose once more on men's imaginations the mighty spell of +a hierarchical organisation, the direct representative of God in the +world's affairs. . . . Both he and Scott substantially ruined themselves +through their mediaevalism. Scott's luckless attempt was to place his +private and family life upon a feudal basis and to give it mediaeval +colour and beauty; Newman undertook a much nobler and more heroic but +more intrinsically hopeless task--that of re-creating the whole English +Church in harmony with mediaeval conceptions." [4] + +All this is most true, and yet it is easy to exaggerate the share which +romantic feeling had in the Oxford movement. In his famous apostrophe to +Oxford, Matthew Arnold personifies the university as a "queen of +romance," an "adorable dreamer whose heart has been so romantic," +"spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers +the last enchantments of the Middle Age," and "ever calling us nearer +to . . . beauty." Newman himself was a poet, as well as one of the +masters of English prose. The movement left an impress upon general +literature in books like Keble's "Christian Year" (1827) and "Lyra +Innocentium" (1847); in Newman's two novels, "Callista" and "Loss and +Gain" (1848), and his "Verses on Various Occasions" (1867); and even +found an echo in popular fiction. Grey in Hughes' "Tom Brown at Oxford" +represents the Puseyite set. Miss Yonge's "Heir of Redcliffe" and +Shorthouse's "John Inglesant" are surcharged with High-Church sentiment. +Newman said that Keble made the Church of England poetical. "The author +of 'The Christian Year' found the Anglican system all but destitute of +this divine element [poetry]; . . . vestments chucked off, lights +quenched, jewels stolen, the pomp and circumstances of worship +annihilated; . . . the royal arms for the crucifix; huge ugly boxes of +wood, sacred to preachers, frowning on the congregation in place of the +mysterious altar; and long cathedral aisles unused, railed off, like the +tombs (as they were) of what had been and was not." [5] Newman praises +in "The Christian Year" what he calls its "sacramental system"; and to +the unsympathetic reader it seems as though Keble saw all outdoors +through a stained-glass window. The movement had its aesthetic side, and +coincided with the revival of church Gothic and with the effort to make +church music and ritual richer and more impressive. But, upon the whole, +it was more intellectual than aesthetic, an affair of doctrine and church +polity rather than of ecclesiology; while the later phase of ritualism +into which it has tapered down appears to the profane to be largely a +matter of upholstery, given over to people who concern themselves with +the carving of lecterns and the embroidery of chasubles and altar cloths; +with Lent lilies, antiphonal choirs, and what Carlyle calls the "singular +old rubrics" of the English Church and the "three surplices at +All-Hallowmas." + +Newman was, above all things, a theologian; a subtle reasoner whose +relentless logic led him at last to Rome. "From the age of fifteen," he +wrote, "dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion; I know +no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of +religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery." +Discussions concerning church ceremonies, liturgy, ritual, he put aside +with some impatience. His own tastes were simple to asceticism. Mozley +says that Newman and Hurrell Froude induced several of the Oriel fellows +to discontinue the use of wine in the common room. "When I came up at +Easter, 1825, one of the first standing jokes against the college all +over the university was the Oriel tea-pot." [6] Dean Church testifies to +the plainness of the services at St. Mary's.[7] Aubrey de Vere reports +his urging Newman to make an expedition with him among the Wicklow +Mountains, and the latter's "answering with a smile that life was full of +work more important than the enjoyment of mountains and lakes. . . . The +ecclesiastical imagination and the mountain-worshipping imagination are +two very different things. Wordsworth's famous 'Tintern Abbey' describes +the river Wye, etc. . . . The one thing which it did not see was the +great monastic ruin; . . . and now here is this great theologian, who, +when within a few miles of Glendalough Lake, will not visit it." [8] + +There is much gentle satire in "Loss and Gain" at the expense of the +Ritualistic set in the university who were attracted principally by the +external beauty of the Roman Catholic worship. One of these is Bateman, +a solemn bore, who takes great interest in "candlesticks, ciboriums, +faldstools, lecterns, ante-pend turns, piscinas, roodlofts, and sedilia": +wears a long cassock which shows absurdly under the tails of his coat; +and would tolerate no architecture but Gothic in English churches, and no +music but the Gregorian. Bateman is having a chapel restored in pure +fourteenth-century style and dedicated to the Royal Martyr. He is going +to convert the chapel into a chantry, and has bought land about it for a +cemetery, which is to be decorated with mediaeval monuments in sculpture +and painting copied from the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa, of +which he has a portfolio full of drawings. "It will be quite sweet," he +says, "to hear the vesper-bell tolling over the sullen moor every +evening." Then there is White, a weak young aesthete who shocks the +company by declaring: "We have no life or poetry in the Church of +England; the Catholic Church alone is beautiful. You would see what I +mean if you went into a foreign cathedral, or even into one of the +Catholic churches in our large towns. The celebrant, deacon and +sub-deacon, acolytes with lights, the incense and the chanting all +combine to one end, one act of worship." White is much exercised by the +question whether a sacristan should wear the short or the long cotta. +But he finally marries and settles down into a fat preferment. + +Newman's sensitiveness to the beauty of Catholic religion is acute. "Her +very being is poetry," he writes. But equally acute is his sense of the +danger under which religion lies from the ministration of the arts, lest +they cease to be handmaids, and "give the law to Religion." Hence he +praises, from an ecclesiastical point of view, the service of the arts in +their rudimental state--the rude Gothic sculpture, the simple Gregorian +chant.[9] A similar indifference to the merely aesthetic aspects of +Catholicism is recorded of many of Newman's associates; of Hurrell +Froude, _e.g._, and of Ward. When Pugin came to Oxford in 1840 to +superintend some building at Balliol, he saw folio copies of St. +Buenaventura and Aquinas' "Summa Theologiae" lying on Ward's table, and +exclaimed, "What an extraordinary thing that so glorious a man as Ward +should be living in a room without mullions to the windows!" This being +reported to Ward, he asked, "What are mullions? I never heard of them." +Ward cared nothing about rood-screens and lancet windows; Newman and +Faber preferred the Palladian architecture to the Gothic.[10] Pugin, on +the other hand, who had been actually converted to the Roman Church +through his enthusiasm for pointed architecture; and who, when asked to +dinner, stipulated for Gothic puddings, for which he enclosed designs, +was greatly distressed at the carelessness about such matters which he +found at Oxford. A certain Dr. Cox was going to pray for the conversion +of England, in an old French cope. "What is the use," asked Pugin, "of +praying for the Church of England in that cope?" [11] + +Of the three or four hundred Anglican clergymen who went over with Newman +in 1845, or some years later with Manning, on the decision in the Gorham +controversy, few were influenced in any assignable degree by poetic +motives. "As regards my friend's theory about my imaginative sympathies +having led me astray," writes Aubrey de Vere, "I may remark that they had +been repelled, not attracted, by what I thought an excess of ceremonial +in the churches and elsewhere when in Italy. . . . It seemed to me too +sensuous." [12] Indeed, at the outset of the movement it was not the +mediaeval Church, but the primitive Church, the Church of patristic +discipline and doctrine, that appealed to the Tractarians. It was the +Anglican Church of the seventeenth century, the Church of Andrewes and +Herbert and Ken, to which Keble sought to restore the "beauty of +holiness"; and those of the Oxford party who remained within the +establishment continued true to this ideal. "The Christian Year" is the +genuine descendant of George Herbert's "Temple" (1632). What impressed +Newman's imagination in the Roman Catholic Church was not so much the +romantic beauty of its rites and observances as its imposing unity and +authority. He wanted an authoritative standard in matters of belief, a +faith which had been held _semper et ubique et ab omnibus_. The English +Church was an Elizabethan compromise. It was Erastian, a creature of the +state, threatened by the Reform Bill of 1832, threatened by every liberal +wind of opinion. The Thirty-nine Articles meant this to one man and that +to another, and there was no court of final appeal to say what they +meant. Newman was a convert not of his imagination, but of his longing +for consistency and his desire to believe. + +There is nothing romantic in either temper or style about Newman's poems, +all of which are devotional in subject, and one of which--"The Pillar of +the Cloud" ("Lead, Kindly Light") (1833)--is a favourite hymn in most +Protestant communions. The most ambitious of these is "The Dream of +Gerontius," a sort of mystery play which Sir Henry Taylor used to compare +with the "Divine Comedy." Indeed, none but Dante has more poignantly +expressed the purgatorial passion, the desire for pain, which makes the +spirits in the flames of purification unwilling to intermit their +torments even for a moment. The "happy, suffering soul" of Gerontius +lies before the throne of the Crucified and sings: + + "Take me away, and in the lowest deep + There let me be, + And there in hope the lone night-watches keep + Told out for me." [13] + +Some dozen years before the "Tracts for the Times" began to appear at +Oxford, a sporadic case of conversion at the sister university offers a +closer analogy with the catholicising process among the German romantics. +Kenelm Henry Digby, who took his degree at Trinity College in 1819, and +devoted himself to the study of mediaeval antiquities and scholastic +philosophy, was actually led into the Catholic fold by his enthusiasm for +the chivalry romances, as Pugin was by his love of Gothic architecture. +His singular book, "The Broad Stone of Honour," was first published in +1822, and repeatedly afterwards in greatly enlarged form. In its final +edition it consists of four books entitled respectively "Godefridus," +"Tancredus," "Morus" (Sir Thomas More), and "Orlandus," after four +representative paladins of Christian chivalry. The title of the whole +work was suggested by the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, the "Gibraltar of +the Rhine." Like Fouqué, Digby was inspired by the ideal of knighthood, +but he emphasises not so much the gallantry of the knight-errant as his +religious character as the champion of Holy Church. The book is, loosely +speaking, an English "Genié du Christianisme," less brilliantly +rhetorical than Chateaubriand, but more sincerely devout. It is poetic +and descriptive rather than polemical, though the author constantly +expresses his dislike of modern civilisation, and complains with Burke +that this is an age of sophists, calculators, and economists. He quotes +profusely from German and French reactionaries, like Busching,[14] Fritz +Stolberg, Görres, Friedrich Schlegel, Lamennais, and Joseph de Maistre, +and illustrates his topic at every turn from mediaeval chronicles, +legendaries, romances, and manuals of chivalry; from the lives of +Charlemagne, St. Louis, Godfrey of Bouillon, the Chevalier Bayard, St. +Anselm, King Rene, etc., and above all, from the "Morte Darthur." He +defends the Crusades, the Templars, and the monastic orders against such +historians as Muller, Sismondi, and Hume; is very contemptuous of the +Protestant concessions of Bishop Hurd's "Letters on Chivalry and +Romance";[15] and, in short, fights a brave battle against the artillery +of "the moderns" with weapons borrowed from "the armoury of the +invincible knights of old." The book is learned, though unsystematic and +discursive, but its most interesting feature is its curiously personal +note, its pure spirit of honour and Catholic piety. The enthusiasm of +the author extends itself from the institutes of chivalry and the Church +to the social and political constitution of the Middle Ages. He is +anti-democratic as well as anti-Protestant; upholds monarchy, nobility, +the interference of the popes in the affairs of kingdoms, and praises the +times when the doctrines of legislation and government all over Europe +rested on the foundations of the Church. + +A few paragraphs from "The Broad Stone of Honour" will illustrate the +author's entrance into the Church through the door of beauty, and his +identification of romantic art with "the art Catholic." "It is much to +be lamented," he writes, "that the acquaintance of the English reader +with the characters and events of the Middle Ages should, for the most +part, be derived from the writings of men who were either infidels, or +who wrote on every subject connected with religion, with the feelings and +opinions of Scotch Presbyterian preachers of the last century." [16] "A +distinguishing characteristic of everything belonging to the early and +Middle Ages of Christianity is the picturesque. Those who now struggle +to cultivate the fine arts are obliged to have recourse to the despised, +and almost forgotten, houses, towns, and dresses of this period. As soon +as men renounced the philosophy of the Church, it was inevitable that +their taste, that the form of objects under their control, should change +with their religion; for architects had no longer to provide for the love +of solitude, of meditation between sombre pillars, of modesty in +apartments with the lancet-casement. They were not to study duration and +solidity in an age when men were taught to regard the present as their +only concern. When nothing but exact knowledge was sought, the undefined +sombre arches were to be removed to make way for lines which would +proclaim their brevity, and for a blaze of light which might correspond +with the mind of those who rejected every proposition that led beyond the +reach of the senses. . . . So completely is it beyond the skill of the +painter or the poet to render bearable the productions of the +moderns, . . . and so fast are the poor neglected works of Christian +antiquity falling to ruin, that it is hard to conceive how the fine arts +can be cultivated after another century has elapsed; for when children +are taught in infant schools to love accounts from their cradle, and to +study political economy before they have heard of the Red Cross Knight or +the Wild Hunter, the manner and taste of such an age will smother the +sparks of nature." [17] The Church summoned all natural beauty to the +ministry of religion. "Flowers bloomed on the altars; men could behold +the blue heaven through those tall, narrow-pointed eastern windows of the +Gothic choir as they sat at vespers. . . . The cloud of incense breathed +a sweet perfume; the voice of youth was tuned to angelic hymns; and the +golden sun of the morning, shining through the coloured pane, cast its +purple or its verdant beam on the embroidered vestments and marble +pavement." [18] Or read the extended rhapsody which closes the first +volume, where, to counteract the attractions of classic lands, the author +passes in long review the sites and monuments of romance in England, +Germany, Spain, Italy, and France. Aubrey de Vere says that nothing had +been so "impressive, suggestive, and spiritually helpful" to him as +Newman's "Lectures on Anglican Difficulties" (1850), "with the exception +of the 'Divina Commedia' and Kenelm Digby's wholly uncontroversial 'Mores +Catholici'" (1831-40). + +THE STUDY OF MEDIAEVAL ART.--The correlation of romantic poetry, Catholic +worship, and mediaeval art has been indicated in the chapter upon the +Pre-Raphaelites, as well as in the foregoing section of the present +chapter. But the three departments have other tangential points which +should not pass without some further mention. The revival of Gothic +architecture which began with Horace Walpole[19] went on in an +unintelligent way through the eighteenth century. One of the queerest +monuments of this new taste--a successor on a larger scale to Strawberry +Hill--was Fonthill Abbey, near Salisbury, that prodigious folly to which +Beckford, the eccentric author of "Vathek," devoted a great share of his +almost fabulous wealth. It was begun in 1796, took nearly thirty years +in building, employed at one time four hundred and sixty men, and cost +over 273,000 pounds. Its most conspicuous feature was an octagonal tower +278 feet high, so ill constructed that it shortly tumbled down into a +heap of ruins.[20] + +The growing taste for mediaeval architecture was powerfully reinforced by +the popularity of Walter Scott's writings. But Abbotsford is evidence +enough of the superficiality of his own knowledge of the art; and during +the first half of the nineteenth century, Gothic design was applied not +to churches, but to the more ambitious classes of domestic architecture. +The country houses of the nobility and landed gentry were largely built +or rebuilt in what was known as the castellated style.[21] Meanwhile a +truer understanding of the principles of pointed architecture was being +helped by the publication of archaeological works like Britton's +"Cathedral Antiquities" (1814-35), Milner's "Treatise on Ecclesiastical +Architecture" (1811), and Rickman's "Ancient Examples of Gothic +Architecture" (1819). The parts of individual buildings, such as +Westminster Abbey and Lincoln Cathedral, were carefully studied and +illustrated with plans and sections drawn to scale, and measurement was +substituted for guesswork. But the real restorer of ecclesiastical +Gothic in England was Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, an enthusiast, nay, +a fanatic, in the cause; whose "Contrasts" (1836) is not only a landmark +in the history of the revival of mediaeval art, but a most instructive +illustration of the manner in which an aesthetic admiration of the Middle +Ages has sometimes involved an acceptance of their religious beliefs and +social principles. Three generations of this family are associated with +the rise of modern Gothic. The elder Pugin (Augustus Charles) was a +French _emigré_ who came to England during the Revolution, and gained +much reputation as an architectural draughtsman, publishing, among other +things, "Specimens of Gothic Architecture," in 1821. The son of A. W. N. +Pugin, Edward Welby (1834-73), also carried on his father's work as a +practical architect and a writer. + +Pugin joined the Roman Catholic Church just about the time when the +"Tracts for the Times" began to be issued. His "Contrasts: or a Parallel +between the Architecture of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" is +fiercely polemical, and displays all the zeal of a fresh convert. In the +preface to the second edition he says that "when this work was first +brought out [1836], the very name of Christian art was almost unknown"; +and he affirms, in a footnote, that in the whole of the national museum, +"there is not even one room, one _shelf_, devoted to the exquisite +productions of the Middle Ages." The book is a jeremiad over the +condition to which the cathedrals and other remains of English +ecclesiastical architecture had been reduced by the successive +spoliations and mutilations in the times of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and +Cromwell, and by the "vile" restorations of later days. It maintains the +thesis that pointed architecture is not only vastly superior +artistically, but that it is the only style appropriate to Christian +churches; "in it alone we find the faith of Christianity embodied and its +practices illustrated." Pugin denounces alike the Renaissance and the +Reformation, "those two monsters, revived Paganism and Protestantism." +There is no chance, he thinks, for a successful revival of Gothic except +in a return to Catholic faith. "The mechanical part of Gothic +architecture is pretty well understood, but it is the principles which +influenced ancient compositions, and the soul which appears in all the +former works, which is so lamentably deficient. . . . 'Tis they alone +that can restore pointed architecture to its former glorious state; +without it all that is done will be a tame and heartless copy." He +points out the want of sympathy between "these vast edifices" and the +Protestant worship, which might as well be carried on in a barn or +conventicle or square meeting-house. Hence, the nave has been blocked up +with pews, the choir or transept partitioned off to serve as a parish +church, roodloft and chancel screen removed, the altar displaced by a +table, and the sedilia scattered about in odd corners. The contrast +between old and new is strikingly presented, by way of object lessons, in +a series of plates, arranged side by side, and devised with a great deal +of satirical humour. There is, _e.g._, a Catholic town in 1440, rich +with its ancient stone bridge, its battlemented wall and city gate, and +the spires and towers of St. Marie's Abbey, the Guild Hall, Queen's +Cross, St. Cuthbert's Church, and the half-timbered, steep-roofed, gabled +houses of the burgesses. Over against it is the picture of the same town +in 1840, hideous with the New Jail, Gas Works, Lunatic Asylum, Wesleyan +Chapel, New Town Hall, Iron Works, Quaker Meeting-house, Socialist Hall +of Science, and other abominations of a prosperous modern industrial +community. Or there is the beautiful old western doorway of St. Mary +Overies, destroyed in 1838. The door stands invitingly open, showing the +noble interior with kneeling worshippers scattered here and there over +the unobstructed pavement. Opposite is the new door, grimly closed, with +a printed notice nailed upon it: "Divine Service on Sundays. Evening +lecture." A separate plate exhibits a single compartment of the old door +curiously carved in oak; and beside it a compartment of the new door in +painted deal and plain as a pike-staff. + +But the author is forced to confess that the case is not much better in +Catholic countries, where stained windows have been displaced by white +panes, frescoed ceilings covered with a yellow wash, and the "bastard +pagan style" introduced among the venerable sanctities of old religion. +English travellers return from the Continent disgusted with the tinsel +ornament and theatrical trumperies that they have seen in foreign +churches. "I do not think," he concludes, "the architecture of our +English churches would have fared much better under a Catholic +hierarchy. . . . It is a most melancholy truth that there does not exist +much sympathy of idea between a great portion of the present Catholic +body in England and their glorious ancestors. . . . Indeed, such is the +total absence of solemnity in a great portion of modern Catholic +buildings in England, that I do not hesitate to say that a few crumbling +walls and prostrate arches of a religious edifice raised during the days +of faith will convey a far stronger religious impression to the mind than +the actual service of half the chapels in England." + +In short, Pugin's Catholicism, though doubtless sincere, was prompted by +his professional feelings. His reverence was given to the mediaeval +Church, not to her--aesthetically--degenerate daughter; and it extended +to the whole system of life and thought peculiar to the Middle Ages. +"Men must learn," he wrote, "that the period hitherto called dark and +ignorant far excelled our age in wisdom, that art ceased when it is said +to have been revived, that superstition was piety, and bigotry faith." +In many of his views Pugin anticipates Ruskin. He did not like St. +Peter's at Rome, and said: "If those students who journey to Italy to +study art would follow the steps of the great Overbeck,[22] . . . they +would indeed derive inestimable benefit. Italian art of the thirteenth, +fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries is the beau ideal of Christian +purity, and its imitation cannot be too strongly inculcated; but when it +forsook its pure, mystical, and ancient types, to follow those of sensual +Paganism, it sunk to a fearful state of degradation." + +As a practising architect Pugin naturally received and executed many +commissions for Catholic churches. But the Catholic Church in England +did much less, even in proportion to its resources, than the Anglican +establishment towards promoting the Gothic revival. Eastlake says that +Pugin's "strength as an artist lay in the design of ornamental detail"; +and that he helped importantly in the revival of the mediaeval taste in +stained glass, metal work, furniture, carpets, and paper-hangings. +Several of his works have to do with various departments of ecclesiology; +chancel-screens, roodlofts, church ornaments, symbols and costumes, and +the like. But the only one that need here be mentioned is the once very +influential "True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture" +(1841). This revival of ecclesiastical Gothic fell in with the reform of +Anglican ritual, which was one of the features or sequences of the Oxford +movement, and the two tendencies afforded each other mutual support. + +Evidence of a newly awakened interest in mediaeval art is furnished by a +number of works of a more systematic character which appeared about the +middle of the century, dealing not only with architecture, but with the +early schools of sculpture and painting. One of these was "Sketches of +the History of Christian Art" (3 vols., 1847) by Alexander William +Crawford Lindsay, twenty-fifth Earl of Crawford. In the preface to the +reprint of this book in 1885, Lady Crawford speaks of it as a pioneer in +an "early time of unawakened interest." Ruskin refers to it +repeatedly--always with respect--and acknowledges in "Praeterita" that +Lord Lindsay knew a great deal more about Italian art than he himself +did. The book reviews in detail the works of Christian builders, +sculptors and painters, both in Italy and north of the Alps, from the +time of the Roman catacombs and basilicas down to the Renaissance. It +gives likewise a history of Christian mythology, iconography and +symbolism; all that great body of popular beliefs about angels, devils, +saints, martyrs, anchorites, miracles, etc., which Protestant iconoclasm +and the pagan spirit of the _cinque-cento_ had long ago swept into the +dust-bin as sheer idolatry and superstition. Lord Lindsay's treatment of +these matters is reverential, though his own Protestantism is proof +against their charm. His tone is moderate; he has no quarrel with the +Renaissance, and professes respect for classical art, which seems to him, +however, on a lower spiritual plane than the Christian. He remarks that +all mediaeval art was religious; the only concession to the secular being +found in the illuminations of some of the chivalry romances. Gothic +architecture was the expression of Teutonic genius, which is realistic +and stands for the reason, while Italian sacred painting was idealistic +and stands for the imagination. In the most perfect art, as in the +highest type of religion, reason and imagination are in balance. Hence, +the influence of Van Eyck, Memling, and Dürer on Italian painters was +wholesome; and the Reformation, the work of the reasoning Teutonic mind, +is not to be condemned. Reason is to blame only when it goes too far and +extinguishes imagination.[23] + +"The sympathies of the North, or of the Teutonic race, are with Death, as +those of the Southern, or classic, are with Life. . . . The exquisitely +beautiful allegorical tale of 'Sintram and His Companions' by La Motte +Fouqué, was founded on the 'Knight and Death' of Albert Dürer, and I +cannot but think that Milton had the 'Melancholy' in his remembrance +while writing 'Il Penseroso.'" [24] The author thinks that, whatever may +be true of Gothic architecture--an art less national than +ecclesiastical--"sculpture and painting, on the one hand, and the spirit +of chivalry on the other, have usually flourished in an inverse ratio one +to the other, and it is not therefore in England, France, or Spain, but +among the free cities of Italy and Germany that we must look for their +rise." [25] I give these conclusions--so opposite to those of Catholic +mediaevalists like Digby and Pugin--because they illustrate the temper of +Lindsay's book. One more quotation I will venture to add for its +agreement with Uvedale Price's definition of the picturesque:[26] "The +picturesque in art answers to the romantic in poetry; both stand opposed +to the classic or formal school--both may be defined as the triumph of +nature over art, luxuriating in the decay, not of her elemental and +ever-lasting beauty, but of the bonds by which she had been enthralled by +man. It is only in ruin that a building of pure architecture, whether +Greek or Gothic, becomes picturesque." [27] + +Lord Lindsay's "Sketches" contained no illustrations. Mrs. Jameson's +very popular series on "Sacred and Legendary Art" was profusely +embellished with wood-cuts and etchings. The first number of the series, +"Legends of the Saints and Martyrs," was begun in 1842, but issued only +in 1848. "Legends of the Monastic Orders" followed in 1850; "Legends of +the Madonna" in 1852; and the "History of Our Lord" (completed by Lady +Eastlake) in 1860. Mrs. Jameson had an imperfect knowledge of technique, +and her work was descriptive rather than critical. But it probably did +more to enlist the interest of the general reader in Christian art than +Lord Lindsay's more learned volumes; or possibly even than the brilliant +but puzzling rhetoric of Ruskin. + +With Pugin's "Contrasts" began the "Battle of the Styles." This was soon +decided in Pugin's favour, so far as ecclesiastical buildings were +concerned. Fergusson, who is hostile to Gothic, admits that wherever +clerical influence extended, the style came into fashion. The Cambridge +Camden Society was founded in 1839 for the study of church architecture +and ritual, and issued the first number of its magazine, _The +Ecclesiologist_, in 1841. But the first national triumph for secular +Gothic was won when Barry's design for the new houses of Parliament was +selected from among ninety-seven competing plans. The corner-stone was +laid at Westminster in 1840, and much of the detail, as the work went on, +was furnished by Pugin. + +It was not long before the Gothic revival found an ally in the same great +writer who had already come forward as the champion of Pre-Raphaelite +painting. The masterly analysis of "The Nature of Gothic" in "The Stones +of Venice" (vol. i., 1851; vols. ii. and iii., 1853), and the eloquence +and beauty of a hundred passages throughout the three volumes, fascinated +a public which cared little about art, but knew good literature when they +saw it. Eastlake testifies that Ruskin had some practical influence on +English building. Young artists went to Venice to study the remains of +Italian Gothic, and the results of their studies were seen in the surface +treatment of many London facades, especially in the cusped window arches, +and in the stripes of coloured bricks which give a zebra-like appearance +to the architecture of the period. But, in general, working architects +were rather contemptuous of Ruskin's fine-spun theories, which they +ridiculed as fantastic, self-contradictory, and super-subtle; rhetoric or +metaphysics, in short, and not helpful art criticism. + +Ruskin's adhesion to Gothic was without compromise. It was "not only the +best, but the _only rational_ architecture." "I plead for the +introduction of the Gothic form into our domestic architecture, not +merely because it is lovely, but because it is the only form of faithful, +strong, enduring, and honourable building, in such materials as come +daily to our hands." [28] On the other hand, Roman architecture is +essentially base; the study of classical literature is "pestilent"; and +most modern building is the fruit of "the Renaissance poison tree." +"If . . . any of my readers should determine . . . to set themselves to +the revival of a healthy school of architecture in England, and wish to +know in few words how this may be done, the answer is clear and simple. +First, let us cast out utterly whatever is connected with the Greek, +Roman, or Renaissance architecture, in principle or in form. . . . The +whole mass of the architecture, founded on Greek and Roman models, which +we have been in the habit of building for the last three centuries, is +utterly devoid of all life, virtue, honourableness, or power of doing +good. It is base, unnatural, unfruitful, unenjoyable, and impious. +Pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralysed in its +old age." [29] + +Ruskin loved the religious spirit of the mediaeval builders, Byzantine, +Lombard, or Gothic; and the pure and holy faith of the early sacred +painters like Fra Angelico, Orcagna, and Perugino. He thought that +whatever was greatest even in Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo came +from their training in the old religious school, not from the new science +of the Renaissance. "Raphael painted best when he knew least." He +deplored the harm to Catholic and Protestant alike of the bitter +dissensions of the Reformation. But he sorrowfully acknowledged the +corruption of the ancient Church, and had no respect for modern Romanism. +Against the opinion that Gothic architecture was fitted exclusively for +ecclesiastical uses, he strongly protested. On the contrary, he advised +its reintroduction, especially in domestic building. "Most readers . . . +abandon themselves drowsily to the impression that Gothic is a peculiarly +ecclesiastical style. . . . The High Church and Romanist parties . . . +have willingly promulgated the theory that, because all the good +architecture that is now left is expressive of High Church or Romanist +doctrines, all good architecture ever has been and must be so--a piece of +absurdity. . . . Wherever Christian Church architecture has been good +and lovely, it has been merely the perfect development of the common +dwelling-house architecture of the period. . . . The churches were not +separated by any change of style from the buildings round them, as they +are now, but were merely more finished and full examples of a universal +style. . . . Because the Gothic and Byzantine styles are fit for +churches, they are not therefore less fit for dwellings. They are in the +highest sense fit and good for both, nor were they ever brought to +perfection except when they were used for both." [30] + +The influence of Walter Scott upon Ruskin is noteworthy. As a child he +read the Bible on Sundays and the Waverley Novels on week-days, and he +could not recall the time when either had been unknown to him. The +freshness of his pleasure in the first sight of the frescoes of the Campo +Santo he describes by saying that it was like having three new Scott +novels.[31] Ruskin called himself a "king's man," a "violent illiberal," +and a "Tory of the old-fashioned school, the school of Walter Scott." +Like Scott, he was proof against the religious temptations of +mediaevalism. "Although twelfth-century psalters are lovely and right," +he was not converted to Catholic teachings by his admiration for the art +of the great ages; and writes, with a touch of contempt, of those who are +"piped into a new creed by the squeak of an organ pipe." If Scott was +unclassical, Ruskin was anti-classical. The former would learn no Greek; +and the latter complained that Oxford taught him all the Latin and Greek +that he would learn, but did not teach him that fritillaries grew in +Iffley meadow.[32] Even that fondness for costume which has been made a +reproach against Scott finds justification with Ruskin. "The essence of +modern romance is simply the return of the heart and fancy to the things +in which they naturally take pleasure; and half the influence of the best +romances, of 'Ivanhoe,' or 'Marmion,' or 'The Crusaders,' or 'The Lady of +the Lake,' is completely dependent upon the accessories of armour and +costume." [33] Still Ruskin had the critical good sense to rate such as +they below the genuine Scotch novels, like "Old Mortality" and "The Heart +of Mid-Lothian"; and he is quite stern towards the melodramatic Byronic +ideal of Venice. "The impotent feelings of romance, so singularly +characteristic of this century, may indeed gild, but never save the +remains of those mightier ages to which they are attached like climbing +flowers, and they must be torn away from the magnificent fragments, if we +would see them as they stood in their own strength. . . . The Venice of +modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of +decay, a stage dream." [34] For it cannot be too often repeated that the +romance is not in the Middle Ages themselves, but in their strangeness to +our imagination. The closer one gets to them, the less romantic they +appear. + +MEDIEVAL SOCIAL IDEALS.--It is obvious how a fondness for the Middle +Ages, in a man of Scott's conservative temper, might confirm him in his +attachment to high Tory principles and to an aristocratic-feudal ideal of +society; or how, in an enthusiastic artist like Pugin, and a gentleman of +high-strung chivalric spirit like Sir Kenelm Digby, it might even lead to +an adoption of the whole mediaeval religious system. But it is not so +easy, at first sight, to understand why the same thing should have +conducted Ruskin and William Morris to opinions that were more "advanced" +than those of the most advanced Liberal. Orthodox economists looked upon +the theories put forward in Ruskin's "Unto this Last" (1860), "Munera +Pulveris" (1862-63), and "Fors Clavigera" (1871-84), as the +eccentricities of a distinguished art critic, disporting himself in +unfamiliar fields of thought. And when in 1883 the poet of "The Earthly +Paradise" joined the Democratic Federation, and subsequently the +Socialist League, and was arrested and fined one shilling and costs for +addressing open-air meetings, obstructing public highways, and striking +policemen, amusement was mingled with disapproval. What does this +dreamer of dreams and charming decorative artist in a London police court? + +But Socialism, though appearing on the face of it the most modern of +doctrines, is in a sense reactionary, like Catholicism, or +knight-errantry, or Gothic architecture. That is, those who protest +against the individualism of the existing social order are wont to +contrast it unfavourably with the principle of association which is found +everywhere in the Middle Ages. No mediaeval man was free or independent; +all men were members one of another. The feudal system itself was an +elaborate network of interdependent rights and obligations, in which +service was given in return for protection. The vassal did homage to his +lord--became his _homme_ or man--and his lord was bound to take care of +him. In theory, at least, every serf was entitled to a living. In +theory, too, the Church embraced all Christendom. None save Jews were +outside it or could get outside it, except by excommunication; which was +the most terrible of penalties, because it cut a man off from all +spiritual human fellowship. The same principle of co-operation prevailed +in mediaeval industry and commerce, organised into guilds of craftsmen +and trading corporations, which fixed the prices and quality of goods, +the number of apprentices allowed, etc. The manufacturer was not a +capitalist, but simply a master workman. Government was paternal and +interfered continually with the freedom of contract and the rights of the +individual. Here was where Carlyle took issue with modern Liberalism, +which proclaims that the best government is that which governs least. +According to the _laissez-faire_ doctrine, he said, the work of a +government is not that of a father, but of an active parish constable. +The duty of a government is to govern, but this theory makes it its duty +to refrain from governing. Not liberty is good for men, but obedience +and stern discipline under wise rulers, heroes, and heaven-sent kings. +Carlyle took no romantic view of the Middle Ages. He is rather +contemptuous of Scott's mediaeval-picturesque,[35] and his Scotch +Calvinism burns fiercely against the would-be restorers of mediaeval +religious formularies and the mummeries of "the old Pope of Rome"--a +ghastly survival of a dead creed.[36] He said that Newman had the brain +of a good-sized rabbit. But in this matter of collectivism versus +individualism, Carlyle was with the Middle Ages. "For those were rugged, +stalwart ages. . . . Gurth, born thrall of Cedric, it is like, got cuffs +as often as pork-parings; but Gurth did belong to Cedric; no human +creature then went about connected with nobody; left to go his way into +Bastilles or worse, under _Laissez-faire_. . . . That Feudal +Aristocracy, I say, was no imaginary one. . . . It was a Land +Aristocracy; it managed the Governing of this English People, and had the +reaping of the Soil of England in return. . . . Soldiering, Police and +Judging, Church-Extension, nay, real Government and Guidance, all this +was actually _done_ by the Holders of Land in return for their Land. How +much of it is now done by them; done by anybody? Good Heavens! +'_Laissez faire_, Do ye nothing, eat your wages and sleep,' is everywhere +the passionate half-wise cry of this time." [37] + +From 1850 onwards, in which year Ruskin made Carlyle's acquaintance, the +former fell under the dominion of these ideas, and began to preach a +species of Aristocratic Socialism.[38] He denounced competition and +profit-seeking in commerce; the factory system; the capitalistic +organisation of industry. His scheme of a regenerated society, however, +was by no means so democratic as that imagined by Morris in "News from +Nowhere." It was a "new feudalism" with a king at the head of it and a +rural nobility of "the great old families," whose relations to their +tenantry are not very clearly defined.[39] Ruskin took some steps +towards putting into practice his plans for a reorganisation of labour +under improved conditions. "Fors Clavigera" consisted of a series of +letters to workingmen, inviting them to join him in establishing a fund +for rescuing English country life from the tyranny and defilement of +machinery. In pursuance of this project, the St. George's Guild was +formed, about 1870, Ruskin devoting to it 7,000 pounds of his own money. +Trustees were chosen to administer the fund; a building was bought at +Walkley, in the suburbs of Sheffield, for use as a museum; and the money +subscribed was employed in promoting co-operative experiments in +agriculture, manufacturing, and education. + +In 1848 the widespread misery among the English working class, both +agricultural labourers and the operatives in cities, broke out in a +startling way in the Chartist movement. Sympathy with some of the aims +of this movement found literary expression in Charles Kingsley's novels, +"Yeast" and "Alton Locke", in his widely circulated tract, "Cheap Clothes +and Nasty"; in his letters in _Politics for the People_ over the +signature "Parson Lot"; in some of his ballads like "The Three Fishers"; +and in the writings of his friends, F. D. Maurice and Thomas Hughes. But +the Christian Socialism of these Broad Churchmen was by no means of the +mediaeval type. Kingsley was an exponent of "Muscular Christianity." He +hated the asceticism and sacerdotalism of the Oxford set, and challenged +the Tractarian movement with all his might.[40] Neither was this +Christian Socialism of a radical nature, like Morris'. It limited itself +to an endeavour to alleviate distress by an appeal to the good feeling of +the upper classes; and by setting on foot trade-unions, co-operative +societies, and workingmen's colleges. Kingsley himself, like Ruskin, +believed in a landed gentry; and like both Ruskin and Carlyle, he +defended Governor Eyre of Jamaica against the attacks of the radical +press.[41] + +Ruskin and Morris travelled to Socialism by the pathway of art. Carlyle +had early begun his complaints against the mechanical spirit of the age, +and its too great reliance on machinery in all departments of thought and +life.[42] But Ruskin made war on machinery for different reasons. As a +lover of the beautiful, he hated its ugly processes and products. As a +student of art, he mourned over the reduction of the handicraftsman to a +slave of the machine. Factories had poisoned the English sky with their +smoke, and blackened English soil and polluted English rivers with their +refuse. The railroad had spoiled Venice and vulgarised Switzerland. He +would like to tear up all the railroads in Wales and most of those in +England, and pull down the city of New York. He could not live in +America two months--a country without castles. Modern architecture, +modern dress, modern manufactures, modern civilisation, were all utterly +hideous. Worst of all was the effect on the workman, condemned by +competitive commercialism to turn out cheap goods, condemned by division +of labour to spend his life in making the eighteenth part of a pin. Work +without art, said Ruskin, is brutalising. To take pleasure in his work, +said Morris, is the workman's best inducement to labour and his truest +reward. In the Middle Ages every artisan was an artist; the art of the +Middle Ages was popular art. Now that the designer and the +handicraftsman are separate persons, the work of the former is unreal, +and of the latter merely mechanical. + +This point of view is eloquently stated in that chapter on "The Nature of +Gothic" in "The Stones of Venice," which made so deep an impression on +Morris when he was in residence at Oxford.[43] "It is verily this +degradation of the operative into a machine which, more than any other +evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into +vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they +cannot explain the nature to themselves. Their universal outcry against +wealth and against nobility is not forced from them either by the +pressure of famine or the sting of mortified pride. These do much, and +have done much in all ages; but the foundations of society were never yet +shaken as they are at this day. It is not that men are ill-fed, but that +they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and +therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not that +men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure +their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are +condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. . . . +We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilised +invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is +not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men--divided +into mere segments of men--broken into small fragments and crumbs of +life, so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man +is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the +point of a pin, or the head of a nail. . . . And the great cry that +rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, +is all, in very deed, for this--that we manufacture everything there +except men. . . . And all the evil to which that cry is urging our +myriads can be met only . . . by a right understanding, on the part of +all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and +making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or +beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the +workman." [44] + +Morris' contributions to the literature of Socialism include, besides his +romance, "News from Nowhere," two volumes of verse, "Poems by the Way" +(1891)and "The Dream of John Ball"; together with "Socialism: Its Growth +and Outcome" (1893), an historical sketch of the subject written in +collaboration with Mr. E. Belfort Bax. Mackail also describes a +satirical interlude, entitled "The Tables Turned, or Nupkins Awakened," +which was acted thrice at Farringden Road in the autumn of 1887--a +Socialistic farce in the form of a mediaeval miracle play--a conjunction +quite typical of the playwright's political principles and literary +preferences. Morris' ideal society, unlike Ruskin's, included no feudal +elements; there was no room in it for kings, or nobles, or great cities, +or a centralised government. It was primitive Teutonic rather than +mediaeval; resembling the communal type described in "The House of the +Wolfings." There were to be no more classes--no rich or poor. To +ordinary Socialists the reform means a fairer distribution of the joint +product of capital and labour; higher wages for the workingman, shorter +hours, better food and more of it, better clothes, better houses, more +amusements--in short, "beer and skittles" in reasonable amount. The +Socialism of Ruskin and Morris was an outcome of their aesthetic feeling. +They liked to imagine the work people of the future as an intelligent and +artistic body of handicraftsmen, living in pretty Gothic cottages among +gardens of their own, scattered all over England in small rural towns or +villages, and joyfully engaged in making sound and beautiful objects of +use, tools, furniture, woven goods, etc. To the followers of Mr. Hyndman +these motives, if not these aims, must have seemed somewhat unpractical. +And in reading "Fors Clavigera," one sometimes has a difficulty in +understanding just what sort of person Ruskin imagined the British +workman to be. + +THE NEO-ROMANTICISTS.--The literature of each new generation is apt to be +partly an imitation of the last, and partly a reaction against it. The +impulse first given by Rossetti was communicated, through Morris and +Swinburne, to a group of younger poets whom Mr. Stedman distinguishes as +"Neo-Romanticists." [45] The most noteworthy among these are probably +Arthur O'Shaughnessy,[46] John Payne,[47] and Théophile Marzials;[48] +though mention (want of space forbids more) should also be made of George +Augustus Simcox, whose "Poems and Romances" (1869) are in the +Pre-Raphaelite tradition. The work of each of these has pronounced +individuality; yet, as a whole, it reminds one continually now of +Rossetti, now of Morris, and again of Swinburne; not infrequently, too, +of Keats or Leigh Hunt, but never of the older romanticism, never of +Scott nor even of Coleridge or Tennyson. The reminder comes sometimes +through a turn of phrase or the trick of the verse; but more insistently +in the choice of subject and the entire attitude of the poet towards art +and life, an attitude that may be vaguely described as "aesthetic." Even +more distinctly than in Swinburne, English romanticism in these latest +representatives is seen to be taking a French direction. They show the +influence not only of Hugo and Gautier, but of those more recent schools +of "decadents" which exhibit French romanticism in its deliquescent +stage; writers like Theodore de Banville and Charles Baudelaire; books +like Aloysius Bertrand's "Gaspard de la Nuit." Morbid states of passion, +the hectic bloom of fever, heady perfumes of the Orient and the tropics; +the bitter-sweet blossom of love; forced fruits of the hot-house (_serres +chaudes_); the iridescence of standing pools; the fungoidal growths of +decay; such are some of the hackneyed metaphors which render the +impression of this neo-romantic poetry. + +Marzials was born at, Brussels, of French parents. His "Gallery of +Pigeons" is inscribed to the modern Provençal poet Aubanel, and +introduced by a French sonnet. O'Shaughnessy "was half a Frenchman in +his love for, and mastery of, the French language";[49] and on his +frequent visits to Paris, made close acquaintance with Victor Hugo and +the younger school of French poets. O'Shaughnessy and Payne were +intimate friends, and dedicated their first books to each other. In +1870-72 they were members of the literary circle that assembled at the +house of Ford Madox Brown, and there they met the Rossettis, Morris, +Swinburne, and William Bell Scott. O'Shaughnessy emerges most distinctly +from the group by reason of his very original and exquisite lyrical +gift--a gift not fully recognised till Mr. Palgrave accorded him, in the +second series of his "Golden Treasury" (1897), a greater number of +selections than any Victorian poet but Tennyson: a larger space than he +gave either to Browning or Rossetti or Matthew Arnold.[50] Comparatively +little of O'Shaughnessy's work belongs to the department of +mediaeval-romantic. His "Lays of France," five in number, are founded +upon the _lais_ of Marie de France, the Norman poetess of the thirteenth +century whose little fable, "Du coq et du werpil," Chaucer expanded into +his "Nonne Prestes Tale." O'Shaughnessy's versions are not so much +paraphrases as independent poems, following Marie's stories merely in +outline. + +The verse is the eight-syllabled couplet with variations and alternate +riming, the style follows the graceful, fluent simplicity of the Old +French; and in its softly articulated, bright-coloured prolixity, the +narrative frequently suggests "The Earthly Paradise" or "The Story of +Rimini." The most remarkable of these pieces is "Chaitivel," in which +the body of a bride is carried away by a dead lover, while another dead +lover comes back from his grave in Palestine and fights with the +bridegroom for possession of her soul. The song which the lady sings to +the buried man is true to that strange mediaeval materialism, the +cleaving of "soul's love" to "body's love," the tenderness intense that +pierces the "wormy circumstance" of the tomb, and refuses to let the dead +be dead, which was noted in Keats' "Isabella": + + "Hath any loved you well, down there, + Summer or winter through? + Down there, have you found any fair + Laid in the grave with you? + Is death's long kiss a richer kiss + Than mine was wont to be-- + Or have you gone to some far bliss + And quite forgotten me?" + +Of similar inspiration, but more pictorially and externally Gothic, are +such tales as "The Building of the Dream" and "Sir Floris" in Payne's +volume, "The Masque of Shadows." The former of these, introduced by a +quotation from Jehan du Mestre, is the history of a certain squire of +Poitou, who devotes himself to necromancy and discovers a spell in an old +Greek manuscript, whereby, having shod his horse with gold and ridden +seven days into the west, he comes to the enchanted land of Dame Venus +and dwells with her a season. But the bliss is insupportable by a +mortal, and he returns to his home and dies. The poem has analogies with +"The Earthly Paradise" and the Tannhäuser legend. The ancient city of +Poitou, where the action begins, is elaborately described, with its "lazy +grace of old romance"; + + "Fair was the place and old + Beyond the memory of man, with roofs + Tall-peak'd and hung with woofs + Of dainty stone-work, jewell'd with the grace + Of casements, in the face + Of the white gables inlaid, in all hues + Of lovely reds and blues. + At every corner of the winding ways + A carven saint did gaze, + With mild sweet eyes, upon the quiet town, + From niche and shrine of brown; + And many an angel, graven for a charm + To save the folk from harm + Of evil sprites, stood sentinel above + High pinnacle and roof." + +"Sir Floris" is an allegorical romaunt founded on a passage in "Le +Violier des Histoires Provenciaux." The dedication, to the author of +"Lohengrin," praises Wolfram von Eschenbach, the poet of "Parzival," as +"the sweetest of all bards." Sir Floris, obeying a voice heard in sleep, +followed a white dove to an enchanted garden, where he slew seven +monsters, symbolic of the seven deadly sins; from whose blood sprang up +the lily of chastity, the rose of love, the violet of humility, the +clematis of content, the marigold of largesse, the mystic marguerite, and +the holy vervain "that purgeth earth's desire." Sir Galahad then carries +him in a magic boat to the Orient city of Sarras, where the Grail is +enshrined and guarded by a company of virgin knights, Percival, +Lohengrin, Titurel, and Bors. Sir Floris sees the sacred chalice--a +single emerald--lays his nosegay upon the altar, witnesses the mystery of +the eucharist, and is kissed upon the mouth by Christ. This poet is fond +of introducing old French words "to make his English sweet upon his +tongue"; _accueillade_, _valiantise_, _faineant_, _allegresse_, +_gentilesse_, _forte et dure_, and occasionally a phrase like _dieu vous +doint felicité_. Payne's ballads are less characteristic.[51] Perhaps +the most successful of them is "The Rime of Redemption"--in "The Masque +of Shadows" volume. Sir Loibich's love has died in her sins, and he sits +by the fire in bitter repentance. He hears the voice of her spirit +outside in the moonlight, and together they ride through the night on a +black steed, first to Fairyland, then to Purgatory, and then to the gate +of Heaven. Each of these in turn is offered him, but he rejects them +all-- + + "With thee in hell, I choose to dwell"-- + +and thereby works her redemption. The wild night ride has an obvious +resemblance to "Lenore": + + "The wind screams past; they ride so fast, + Like troops of souls in pain + The snowdrifts spin, but none may win + To rest upon the twain." + +Very different from these, and indeed with no pretensions to the formal +peculiarities of popular minstrelsy, is O'Shaughnessy's weird ballad +"Bisclaveret," [52] suggested by the superstition concerning were-wolves: + + "The splendid fearful herds that stray + By midnight"-- + "The multitudinous campaign + Of hosts not yet made fast in Hell." + +_Bisclaveret_ is the Breton word for _loup garou_; and the poem is headed +with a caption to this effect from the "Lais" of Marie. The wild, +mystical beauty of which the Celtic imagination holds the secret is +visible in this lyrist; but it would perhaps be going too far to +attribute his interest in the work of Marie de France to a native +sympathy with the song spirit of that other great branch of the Celtic +race, the ancient Cymry. + +Payne's volume of sonnets, "Intaglios" (a title perhaps prompted by the +chiselled workmanship of Gautier's "Emaux et Camées") bears the clearest +marks of Rossetti's influence--or of the influence of Dante through +Rossetti. The inscription poem is to Dante, and the series named +"Madonna dei Sogni" is particularly full of the imagery and sentiment of +the "Purgatorio" and the "Vita Nuova." Several of the sonnets in the +collection are written for pictures, like Rossetti's. Two are on +Spenserian subjects, "Belphoebe" and "The Garden of Adonis", and one, +"Bride-Night" is suggested by Wagner's "Tristram und Isolde." Payne's +work as a translator is of importance, and includes versions of the +"Decameron," "The Thousand and One Nights," and the poems of François +Villon, all made for the Villon Society. + +Jewels and flowers are set thickly enough in the pages of all this +school; but it is in Théophile Marzials' singular, yet very attractive, +verses that the luxurious colour in which romance delights, and the +decorative features of Pre-Raphaelite art run into the most _bizarre_ +excesses. He wantons in dainty affectations of speech and eccentricities +of phantasy. Here we find again the orchard closes, the pleached +pleasances, and all those queer picture paradises, peopled with tall +lilied maidens, angels with peacock wings and thin gold hoops above their +heads, and court minstrels thrumming lutes, rebecks, and mandolins-- + + "I dreamed I was a virginal-- + The gilt one of Saint Cecily's." + +The book abounds in nocturnes, arabesques, masquerades, bagatelles, +rococo pastorals. The lady in "The Gallery of Pigeons" sits at her +broidery frame and works tapestries for her walls. At night she sleeps +in the northern tower where + + "Above all tracery, carven flower, + And grim gurgoil is her bower-window"; + +and higher up a griffin clings against a cornice, + + "And gnashes and grins in the green moonlight," + +and higher still, the banderolle flutters + + "At the top of the thinnest pinnacle peak." + +In a Pre-Raphaelite heaven the maidens sit in the blessed mother's +chamber and spin garments for the souls in Limbo, or press sweet wine for +the sacrament, or illuminate missals with quaint phantasies. Mr. Stedman +quotes a few lines which he says have the air of parody: + + "They chase them each, below, above,-- + Half madden'd by their minstrelsy,-- + Thro' garths of crimson gladioles; + And, shimmering soft like damoisels, + The angels swarm in glimmering shoals, + And pin them to their aureoles, + And mimick back their ritournels." + +This reads, indeed, hardly less like a travesty than the well-known +verses in _Punch_: + + "Glad lady mine, that glitterest + In shimmer of summer athwart the lawn; + Canst tell me whether is bitterest, + The glamour of eve, or the glimmer of dawn?" + +This stained-glass imagery was so easy to copy that, before long, citoles +and damoisels and aureoles and garths and glamours and all the rest of +the picturesque furniture grew to be a burden. The artistic movement had +invaded dress and upholstery, and Pre-Raphaelitism tapered down into +aestheticism, domestic art, and the wearing of sunflowers. Du Maurier +became its satirist; Bunthorn and Postlethwaite presented it to the +philistine understanding in a grotesque mixture of caricature and +quackery. + +THE REACTION.--Literary epochs overlap at the edges, and contrasting +literary modes coexist. There was some romantic poetry written in Pope's +time; and in the very heat and fury of romantic predominance, Landor kept +a cool chamber apart, where incense was burned to the ancient gods.[53] +But it is the master current which gives tinge and direction to lesser +confluents; and romanticism may be said to have had everything its own +way down to the middle of the century. Then reaction set in and the +stream of romantic tendency ceased to spread itself over the whole +literary territory, but flowed on in the narrower and deeper channels of +Pre-Raphaelitism and its allied movements. This reaction expressed +itself in different ways, of which it will be sufficient here to mention +three: realistic fiction, classical criticism, and the Queen Anne revival. + +The leading literary form of the past fifty years has been the novel of +real life. The failure of "Les Burgraves" in 1843 not more surely +signalised the end of French romanticism, than the appearance of "Vanity +Fair" in 1848 announced that in England, too, the reign of romance was +over. Classicism had given way before romanticism, and now romanticism +in turn was yielding to realism. Realism sets itself against that desire +of escape from actual conditions into an ideal world, which is a note of +the romantic spirit in general; and consequently it refuses to find the +past any more interesting than the present, and has no use for the Middle +Ages. The temperature, too, had cooled; not quite down to the Augustan +grade, yet to a point considerably below the fever heat registered by the +emotional thermometer of the late Georgian era. Byron's contemporaries +were shocked by his wickedness and dazzled by his genius. They +remonstrated admiringly with him; young ladies wept over his poetry and +prayed for the poet's conversion. But young university men of +Thackeray's time discovered that Byron was a _poseur_; Thackeray himself +describes him as "a big, sulky dandy." "The Sorrows of Werther," which +made people cry in the eighteenth century, made Thackeray laugh; and he +summed it up in a doggerel ballad: + + "Charlotte was a married woman + And a moral man was Werther, + And for nothing in creation + Would do anything to hurt her." + + * * * * * + + "Charlotte, having seen his body + Borne before her on a shutter, + Like a well-conducted woman, + Went on cutting bread and butter." + +Mr. Howells in Venice sneers at Byron's theatrical habit of riding +horseback on the Lido in "conspicuous solitude," as recorded in "Julian +and Maddalo." He notices the local traditions about Byron--a window from +which one of his mistresses was said to have thrown herself into the +canal, etc.--and confesses that these matters interest him very little. + +As to the Walter Scott kind of romance, we know what Mr. Howells thinks +of it; and have read "Rebecca and Rowena," Thackeray's travesty of +"Ivanhoe." Thackeray took no print from the romantic generation; he +passed it over, and went back to Addison, Fielding, Goldsmith, Swift. +His masters were the English humourists of the eighteenth century. He +planned a literary history of that century, a design which was carried +out on other lines by his son-in-law, Leslie Stephen. If he wrote +historical novels, their period was that of the Georges, and not of +Richard the Lion Heart. It will not do, of course, to lay too much +stress on Thackeray, whose profession was satire and whose temper purely +anti-romantic. But if we turn to the leaders of the modern schools of +fiction, we shall find that some of them, like George Eliot and Anthony +Trollope, are even more closely realistic than Thackeray--who, says Mr. +Howells, is a caricaturist, not a true realist--and of others such as +Dickens and Meredith, we shall find that, in whatever way they deviate +from realism as strictly understood, it is not in the direction of +romance. + +In Matthew Arnold's critical essays we meet with a restatement of +classical principles and an application of them to the literature of the +last generation. There was something premature, he thinks, about the +burst of creative activity in the first quarter of the nineteenth +century. Byron was empty of matter, Shelley incoherent, Wordsworth +wanting in completeness and variety. He finds much to commend in the +influence of a literary tribunal like the French Academy, which embodies +that ideal of authority so dear to the classical heart. Such an +institution acts as a salutary check on the lawlessness, eccentricity, +self-will, and fantasticality which are the besetting intellectual sins +of Englishmen. It sets the standard and gives the law. "Work done after +men have reached this platform is _classical_; and that is the only work +which, in the long run, can stand." For want of some such organ of +educated opinion, to take care of the qualities of order, balance, +measure, propriety, correctness, English men of genius like Ruskin and +Carlyle, in their national impatience of prescription and routine, run on +into all manner of violence, freak, and extravagance. + +Again, in the preface of the 1853 edition of his poems, Arnold asserts +the superiority of the Greek theory of poetry to the modern. "They +regarded the whole; we regard the parts. With them the action +predominated over the expression of it; with us the expression +predominates over the action. . . . We have poems which seem to exist +merely for the sake of single lines and passages; not for the sake of +producing any total impression." + +"Faust" itself, judged as a whole, is defective. Failing a sure guide, +in the confusion of the present times, the wisest course for the young +writer is to fix his attention upon the best models. But Shakspere is +not so safe a model as the ancients. He has not their purity of method, +and his gift of expression sometimes leads him astray. "Mr. Hallam, than +whom it is impossible to find a saner and more judicious critic, has had +the courage (for at the present day it needs courage) to remark, how +extremely and faultily difficult Shakspere's language often is." Half a +century earlier it would have needed courage to question Hallam's remark; +but the citation shows how thoroughly Coleridge and Hazlitt and Lamb had +shifted the centre of orthodoxy in matters of Shaksperian criticism. +_Now_ the presumption was against any one who ventured a doubt of +Shakspere's impeccability. The romantic victory was complete. "But, I +say," pursues the essayist, "that in the sincere endeavour to learn and +practise . . . what is sound and true in poetical art, I seemed to myself +to find the only sure guidance, the only solid footing, among the +ancients." All this has a familiar look to one at all read in +eighteenth-century criticism; but in 1853 it sounds very much like heresy. + +As an instance of the inferiority of romantic to classical method in +narrative poetry, Arnold refers to Keats' "Isabella." [54] "This one +short poem contains, perhaps, a greater number of happy single +expressions which one could quote than all the extant tragedies of +Sophocles. But the action, the story? The action in itself is an +excellent one; but so feebly is it conceived by the poet, so loosely +constructed, that the effect produced by it, in and for itself, is +absolutely null. Let the reader, after he has finished the poem of +Keats, turn to the same story in the 'Decameron'; he will then feel how +pregnant and interesting the same action has become in the hands of a +great artist who, above all things, delineates his object; who +subordinates expression to that which it is designed to express." + +A sentence or two from Arnold's essay on Heinrich Heine, and we may leave +this part of our subject. "Mr. Carlyle attaches, it seems to me, far too +much importance to the romantic school of Germany--Tieck, Novalis, Jean +Paul Richter. . . . The mystic and romantic school of Germany lost +itself in the Middle Ages, was overpowered by their influence, came to +ruin by its vain dreams of renewing them. Heine, with a far profounder +sense of the mystic and romantic charm of the Middle Age than Görres, or +Brentano, or Arnim; Heine, the chief romantic poet of Germany, is yet +also much more than a romantic poet; he is a great modern poet, he is not +conquered by the Middle Age, he has a talisman by which he can feel, +along with but above the power of the fascinating Middle Age itself, the +power of modern ideas." + +And, finally, the oscillation of the pendulum has brought us back again +for a moment to the age of gayety, and to that very Queen Anne spirit +against which the serious and sentimental Thomson began the revolt. +There is not only at present a renewed appreciation of what was admirable +in the verse of Pope and the prose of Swift, but we discover a quaint +attractiveness in the artificiality of Augustan manners, dress, and +speech. Lace and brocade, powder and patch, Dutch gardens, Reynolds' +portraits, Watteau fans, Dresden china, the sedan chair, the spinet, the +hoop-skirt, the _talon rouge_--all these have receded so far into the +perspective as to acquire picturesqueness. To Scott's generation they +seemed eminently modern and prosaic, while buff jerkins and coats of mail +were poetically remote. But so the whirligig of time brings in its +revenges, and the old-fashioned, as distinguished from the antique, +begins to have a romanticness of its own. It is now some quarter century +since people took to building Queen Anne cottages, and gentlemen at +costume parties to treading minuets in small clothes and perukes, with +ladies in high-cushioned hair and farthingales. Girl babies in large +numbers were baptised Dorothy and Belinda. Book illustrators like Kate +Greenaway, Edwin Abbey, and Hugh Thomson carried the mode into art. The +date of the Queen Anne revival in literature and the beginnings of the +_bric-à-brac_ school of verse are marked with sufficient precision by the +publication of Austin Dobson's "Vignettes in Rhyme" (1873), "Proverbs in +Porcelain" (1877), and the other delightful volumes of the same kind that +have followed. Mr. Dobson has also published, in prose, lives of Steele, +Fielding, Hogarth, and Goldsmith; "Eighteenth-Century Vignettes," and the +like. But his particular ancestor among the Queen Anne wits was Matthew +Prior, of whose metrical tales, epigrams, and _vers de société_ he has +made a little book of selections, and whose gallantry, lightness, and +tone of persiflage, just dashed with sentiment, he has reproduced with +admirable spirit in his own original work. + +It was upon the question of Pope that romantics and classics first joined +issue in the time of Warton, and that the critical battle was fought in +the time of Bowles and Byron; the question of his real place in +literature, and of his title to the name of poet. Mr. Dobson has a word +to say for Pope, and with this our enquiries may fittingly end: + + "Suppose you say your Worst of POPE, declare + His Jewels Paste, his Nature a Parterre, + His Art but Artifice--I ask once more + Where have you seen such artifice before? + Where have you seen a Parterre better grac'd, + Or gems that glitter like his Gems of Paste? + Where can you show, among your Names of Note, + So much to copy and so much to quote? + And where, in Fine, in all our English Verse, + A Style more trenchant and a Sense more terse?" + + "So I, that love the old Augustan Days + Of formal courtesies and formal Phrase; + That like along the finish'd Line to feel + The Ruffle's Flutter and the Flash of Steel; + That like my Couplet as Compact as Clear; + That like my Satire sparkling tho' severe, + Unmix'd with Bathos and unmarr'd by trope, + I fling my Cap for Polish--and for POPE!" [55] + +But ground once gained in a literary movement is never wholly lost; and a +reversion to an earlier type is never complete. The classicism of +Matthew Arnold is not at all the classicism of the eighteenth century; +Thackeray's realism is not the realism of Fielding. It is what it is, +partly just because Walter Scott had written his Waverley Novels in the +mean while. Apart from the works for which it is directly responsible, +the romantic movement had enriched the blood of the literature, and its +results are seen even in writings hostile to the romantic principles. As +to the absolute value of the great romantic output of the nineteenth +century, it may be at once acknowledged that, as "human documents," books +which reflect contemporary life have a superior importance to the +creations of the modern imagination, playing freely over times and places +distant, and attractive through their distance; over ancient Greece or +the Orient or the Middle Age. But that a very beautiful and quite +legitimate product of literary art may spring from this contact of the +present with the past, it is hoped that our history may have shown. + + +[1] See vol. i., pp. 31-32. + +[2] "Apologia pro Vita Sua," p. 139. + +[3] "It would require the . . . magic pen of Sir Walter to catalogue and +to picture . . . that most miserable procession" ("Callista: a Sketch of +the Third Century," 1855; chapter, "Christianos ad Leones"). It is +curious to compare this tale of the early martyrs, Newman's solitary +essay in historical romance, with "Hypatia." It has the intellectual +refinement of everything that came from its author's pen; and it has +strong passages like the one describing the invasion of the locusts. +But, upon the whole, Newman was as inferior to Kingsley as a novelist as +he was superior to him in the dialectics of controversy. + +[4] See the entire section "Selections from Newman," by Lewis G. Gates, +New York, 1895. Introduction, pp. xlvi-lix. + +[5] "Essays Critical and Historical" (1846). + +[6] "Reminiscences," Thomas Mozley, Boston, 1882. + +[7] "Life and Letters of Dean Church," London, 1894. + +[8] "Recollections of Aubrey de Vere," London, 1897. + +[9] "Idea of a University" (1853). See also in "Parochial and Plain +Sermons" the discourse on "The Danger of Accomplishments," and that on +"The Gospel Palaces." In the latter he writes, speaking of the +cathedrals: "Unhappy they who, while they have eyes to admire, admire +them only for their beauty's sake; . . . who regard them as works of art, +not fruits of grace." + +[10] Cardinal Wiseman had a decided preference for Renaissance over +Gothic, and the churches built under his authority were mostly in Italian +styles. + +[11] "William George Ward and the Oxford Movement," London, 1889, pp. +153-55. + +[12] "Recollections," p. 309. + +[13] Frederick William Faber, one of the Oxford men who went over with +Newman in 1845, and became Superior of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, +was a religious poet of some distinction. A collection of his hymns was +published in 1862. + +[14] "Ritterzeit und Ritterwesen." + +[15] See vol. i., pp. 221-26. + +[16] Vol. i., p. 44 (ed. 1846). + +[17] _Ibid._, pp. 315-16. + +[18] _Ibid._, p. 350. + +[19] See vol. i., chap. vii., "The Gothic Revival." + +[20] A view of Fonthill Abbey, as it appeared in 1822, is given in +Fergusson's "History of Modern Architecture," vol. ii., p. 98 (third ed.). + +[21] For Scott's influence on Gothic see Eastlake's "Gothic Revival," pp. +112-16. A typical instance of this castellated style in America was the +old New York University in Washington Square, built in the thirties. +This is the "Chrysalis College" which Theodore Winthrop ridicules in +"Cecil Dreeme" for its "mock-Gothic" pepper-box turrets, and "deciduous +plaster." Fan traceries in plaster and window traceries in cast iron +were abominations of this period. + +[22] _Vide supra_, p. 153. + +[23] "A blast from the icy jaws of Reason, the wolf Fenris of the +Teutonic mind, swept one and all into the Limbo of oblivion--that sole +ante-chamber spared by Protestantism in spoiling Purgatory. Perhaps this +was necessary and inevitable. If we would repair the column, we must cut +away the ivy that clings around the shaft, the flowers and brushwood that +conceal the base; but it does not follow that, when the repairs are +completed, we should isolate it in a desert,--that the flowers and +brushwood should not be allowed to grow up and caress it as before" (vol. +ii., p. 380, second ed.). + +[24] Vol. ii., p. 364, _note_; and _vide supra_, p. 152. + +[25] _Ibid._, p. 289. + +[26] _Vide supra_, p. 34. + +[27] _Ibid._, p. 286, _note_. + +[28] "Stones of Venice," vol. ii., p. 295 (American ed. 1860). + +[29] _Ibid._, vol. iii., p. 213. + +[30] _Ibid._, vol. ii., pp. 109-14. + +[31] See the final instalment of "Praeterita" for an extended eulogy of +Scott's verse and prose. + +[32] "I know what white, what purple fritillaries + The grassy harvest of the river-fields + Above by Ensham, down by Sandford, yields." + --Matthew Arnold, "Thyrsis." + +[33] "Stones of Venice," vol. iii., p. 211. + +[34] _Ibid._, vol. ii., p. 4. + +[35] _Vide supra_, p. 35. + +[36] "I reckon him the remarkablest Pontiff that has darkened God's +daylight. . . . Here is a Supreme Priest who believes God to be--what, +in the name of God, _does_ he believe God to be?--and discerns that all +worship of God is a scenic phantasmagory of wax-candles, organ-blasts, +Gregorian chants, mass-brayings, purple monsignori, etc." ("Past and +Present," Book iii., chap. i.). + +[37] Ibid., Book iv., chap. i. + +[38] With Morris, too, when an Oxford undergraduate, "Carlyle's 'Past and +Present,'" says his biographer, "stood alongside of 'Modern Painters' as +inspired and absolute truth." + +[39] For a systematic exposition of Ruskin's social and political +philosophy, the reader should consult "John Ruskin, Social Reformer," by +J. A. Hobson, London, 1898. + +[40] _Vide supra_, pp. 279, 280. + +[41] For a number of years, beginning with 1854, Ruskin taught drawing +classes in Maurice's Working Man's College. + +[42] See "Characteristics" and "Signs of the Times." + +[43] _Vide supra_, p. 321. + +[44] Vol. ii., chap. vi., section xv., xvi. Morris reprinted the whole +chapter on the Kelmscott Press. + +[45] "Victorian Poets," chap. vii., section vi. + +[46] "An Epic of Women" (1870); "Lays of France" (1872); "Music and +Moonlight" (1874); "Songs of a Worker" (1881). + +[47] "A Masque of Shadows" (1870): "Intaglios" (1871); "Songs of Life and +Death" (1872); "Lautrec" (1878); "New Poems" (1880). + +[48] "A Gallery of Pigeons" (1873). + +[49] "Arthur O'Shaughnessy." By Louise Chandler-Moulton, Cambridge and +Chicago, 1894. + +[50] Swinburne, as a living author, is not represented in the "Treasury." +O'Shaughnessy's metrical originality is undoubted. But one of his finest +lyrics, "The Fountain of Tears," has an echo of Baudelaire's American +master, Edgar Poe, as well as of Swinburne; + + "Very peaceful the place is, and solely + For piteous lamenting and sighing, + And those who come living or dying + Alike from their hopes and their fears: + Full of cypress-like shadows the place is, + And statues that cover their faces; + But out of the gloom springs the holy + And beautiful Fountain of Tears." + +[51] See especially "Sir Erwin's Questing," "The Ballad of May Margaret," +"The Westward Sailing," and "The Ballad of the King's Daughter" in "Songs +of Life and Death." + +[52] In "An Epic of Women." + +[53] "From time to time bright spirits, intolerant of the traditional, +try to alter the bournes of time and space in these respects, and to make +out that the classical, whatever the failings on its part, was always in +its heart rather Romantic, and that the Romantic has always, at its best, +been just a little classical. . . . But such observations are only of +use as guards against a too wooden and matter-of-fact classification; the +great general differences of the periods remain, and can never be removed +in imagination without loss and confusion" ("A Short History of English +Literature," Saintsbury, p. 724). + +[54] _Vide supra_, pp. 123-25. + +[55] "A Dialogue to the Memory of Mr. Alexander Pope." + + + +THE END. + + + + + BIBLIOGRAPHY. + + Allingham, William. "Irish Songs and Poems." London + and New York, 1893. + Arnim, Ludwig Joachim von. Selections in Koch's "Deutsche + National Litteratur." Stuttgart, 1891. Vol. cxlvi. + Arnim, Ludwig Joachim [and Brentano]. "Des Knaben + Wunderhorn." Wiesbaden and Leipzig, 1874-76. 2 vols. + Arnold, Matthew. "Essays in Criticism." London, 1895. + ---------- "On the Study of Celtic Literature." London, 1893. + ---------- Poems. London, 1877. 2 vols. + Austin, Sarah. "Fragments from German Prose Writers." + London, 1841. + + Balzac, Honoré de. 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London, 1877. 2 vols. + + Lindsay, A. W. C., Earl of Crawford. "Sketches of the + History of Christian Art." London, 1885. 2 vols. + Lockhart, J. G. "Ancient Spanish Ballads." New York, 1842. + ---------- "Life of Scott." Boston and Philadephia, 1837-38. + 7 vols. + Longfellow, H. W. "Hyperion." Boston, 1875. + ---------- Poetical Works. Boston, 1889. 6 vols. + ---------- "Poets and Poetry of Europe." Philadelphia, 1845. + ---------- "The Divine Comedy of Dante." (Trans.) Boston, + 1867. 3 vols. + + Macaulay, T. B. "Milton." _Edinburgh Review_. August, 1825. + Mackail, W. J. "The Life of William Morris." London, 1899. + McLaughlin, E. T. "Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature." + New York and London, 1894. + Maigron, Louis. "Le Roman Historique à l'Epoque Romantique." + Paris, 1898. + Marzials, Théophile. "The Gallery of Pigeons." London, 1873. + Meinhold, J. W. "Mary Schweidler, the Amber Witch." (Trans.) + New York, 1845. + Milnes, R. M., Lord Houghton. "Life and Letters of John + Keats." New York, 1848. + Morris, William. "Hopes and Fears for Art." Boston, 1882. + ---------- "Love is Enough." Boston, 1873. + ---------- "News from Nowhere." London, 1891. + ---------- "Old French Romances." (Trans.) New York, 1896. + ---------- [and E. B. Bax]. "Socialism." London, 1896. + ---------- "The Defence of Guenevere." London, 1875. + ---------- "The Earthly Paradise." Boston, 1868-71. 3 vols. + ---------- "The Life and Death of Jason." Boston, 1867. + ---------- "The Story of Sigurd the Volsung." Boston, 1877. + ---------- See p. 337 for list of prose romances. + Motherwell, William. "Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern." + Glasgow, 1827. + Moulton, L. C. "Arthur O'Shaughnessy." Cambridge and + Chicago, 1894. + Musset, L. C. A. de. Oeuvres Complètes. Paris, 1881. + + Newman, J. H. "Callista." London, 1873. + ---------- "Essays, Critical and Historical." London, 1872. + 2 vols. + ---------- "Loss and Gain." London, 1881. + ---------- "Parochial and Plain Sermons." London, 1873-91. + 8 vols. + ---------- "Verses on Various Occasions." London, 1883. + Novalis (F. L. von Hardenberg). "Henry of Ofterdingen." + (Trans.) Cambridge, 1842. + ---------- "Hymns to the Night," etc. (trans. of George + MacDonald), in "Rampolli." London and New York, 1897. + + O'Shaughnessy, Arthur. "An Epic of Women." London, 1870. + ---------- "Lays of France." London, 1874. + ---------- "Music and Moonlight." London, 1874. + + Palgrave, F. T. "The Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrical + Poems." Cambridge, 1863. Second Series, New York, 1897. + Parsons, T. W. "The Divine Comedy of Dante." (Trans.) + Boston, 1893. + Pater, Walter. "Appreciations." London, 1889. + Payne, John. "Intaglios." London, 1884. + ---------- "Lautrec." London, 1878. + ---------- "New Poems." London, 1880. + ---------- "Songs of Life and Death." London, 1884. + ---------- "The Masque of Shadows." London, 1884. + Petit de Julleville, Louis. "Histoire de la Littérature + Française." Paris, 1896-99. 8 vols. + Price, Sir Uvedale. "Essays on the Picturesque." London, 1810. + 3 vols. + Pugin, A. N. W. "Contrasts." Edinburgh, 1898. + ---------- "The True Principles of Pointed Architecture," + Edinburgh, 1895. + + Reade, Charles. "The Cloister and the Hearth." New York, + 1894. 2 vols. + Robertson, J. M. "New Essays toward a Critical Method." + London, 1897. + Roscoe, William. Preface to "Works of Alexander Pope." + London, 1824. 10 vols. + Rossetti, Christina G. "The Goblin Market." London, 1865. + Rossetti, D. G. The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel + Rossetti. Edited by William M. Rossetti. London, 1886. + 2 vols. + Rossetti, D. G. Family Letters, with Memoir by W. M. Rossetti. + Boston, 1895. + Rossetti, Maria F. "A Shadow of Dante." Boston, 1872. + Rossetti, W. M. "Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and + Writer." London, 1889. + Ruskin, John. "Fors Clavigera." New York, 1871-72. 2 vols. + ---------- "Modern Painters." New York, 1857-60. 5 vols. + ---------- "Munera Pulveris." New York, 1872. + ---------- "Praeterita." London, 1899. 3 vols. + ---------- "Pre-Raphaelitism." New York, 1860. + ---------- "Stones of Venice." New York, 1860. 3 vols. + ---------- "Unto this Last." London, 1862. + + Saintsbury, George. "A Primer of French Literature." + Oxford, 1880. + ---------- "A Short History of English Literature." + London, 1898. + Scherer, W. "A History of German Literature." (Trans.) + New York, 1886. 2 vols. + Schlegel, A. W. von. "Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature." + (Trans.) London, 1846. + Schmidt, Julian. "Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur." + Berlin, 1890. + Scott, Sir Walter. "Critical and Miscellaneous Essays." + Philadelphia, 1841. 3 vols. + ---------- Journal. New York, 1891. + ---------- Poetical Works. (Dennis' ed.) London, 1892. + 5 vols. + ---------- "The Waverley Novels." (Dryburgh ed.) Edinburgh, + 1892-93. 25 vols. + Scott, W. B. "Autobiographical Notes." New York, 1892. 2 vols. + Shairp, J. C. "Aspects of Poetry." Boston, 1882. + Sharp, William. "Dante Gabriel Rossetti." London, 1882. + Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Poetical Works. (Centenary ed.) + Boston, 1892. 4 vols. + Shorthouse, J. H. "John Inglesant." New York, 1882. + Sizeranne, R. de la. "English Contemporary Art." (Trans.) + Westminster, 1898. + Smith, Charlotte. "Elegiac Sonnets." London, 1800-06. 2 vols. + Southey, Robert. "Chronicle of the Cid." (Trans.) Lowell, + 1846. (1st Am. ed.) + ---------- Poetical Works. London, 1838. 10 vols. + Staël-Holstein, Mme. A. L. G. de. "Germany." (Trans.) + London, 1814. 3 vols. + Stedman, E. C. "Victorian Poets." Boston, 1876. + Stendhal, De (Marie Henri Beyle). "Racine et Shakspere." + Paris, 1854. + Stevenson, R. L. B. "Familiar Studies of Men and Books." + London, 1882. + Swinburne, A. C. "Essays and Studies." London, 1875. + ---------- "Poems and Ballads." London, 1866. Second + Series, 1878. Third Series, 1889. + ---------- "Studies in Prose and Poetry." New York, 1894. + ---------- "The Tale of Balen." New York, 1896. + ---------- "Tristram of Lyonesse." London, 1882. + ---------- "Victor Hugo." New York, 1886. + + Tennyson, Alfred. Works. London, 1892. (Globe ed.) + Thorpe, Benjamin. "Northern Mythology." London, 1851-52. + 3 vols. + ---------- "Yuletide Stories." London, 1875. + Ticknor, George. "History of Spanish Literature." New York, + 1849. 3 vols. + Tieck, J. Ludwig. "Phantasus." Berlin, 1844-45. 2 vols. + ---------- "Tales" (trans.) in the works of Thomas Carlyle. + 2 vols. London, 1869-72. + Tighe Mary. "Psyche, with Other Poems." London, 1812. + + Uhland, J. Ludwig. Gedichte. Stuttgart, 1875. + + Vere, Aubrey Thomas de. "Recollections." London, 1897. + + Ward, Wilfrid. "William George Ward and the Oxford Movement." + London, 1889. + Watts, Theodore. "Rossetti." _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. + Wood, Esther. "Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite + Movement." New York, 1894. + Wordsworth, William. Poetical Works. (Centenary ed.) + London, 1870. 6 vols. + + Yonge, Charlotte M. "The Heir of Redcliffe." New York, 1871. + 2 vols. + + + + + INDEX. + + Abbot, The, 42 + Aben-Humeya, 246 + Addison, Jos., 95 + Adonais, 120 + Age of Wordsworth, The, 12, 24, 34, 87, 88 + Ahnung und Gegenwart, 147 + Alhambra, The, 239 + Allemagne, L', 139, 141-45, 192, 208 + Allingham, Wm., 258, 300, 304, 324 + Alonzo the Brave, 77, 83 + Alton Locke, 383 + Amadis of Gaul, 236, 241 + Amber Witch, The, 42, 280 + Ancient Mariner, The, 48, 49, 54, 74-80 + Ancient Poetry and Romance of Spain, 248 + Ancient Spanish Ballads, 239, 247-49 + Anima Poetae, 78 + Annales Romantiques, 201 + Anthony, 198 + Antiquary, The, 31, 33, 178 + Appreciations, 42 + Ariosto, Lodovico, 91, 104, 107, 109, 122 + Arme Heinrich, Der, 297 + Arnim, Achim von, 134, 138, 155, 167, 192, 400 + Arnold, Matthew, 255, 256, 263, 274-76, 278, 280, + 356, 378, 398-400, 402 + Arthur's Tomb, 305 + Aslauga's Knight, 168 + Aspects of Poetry, 18 + At Eleusis, 342 + Athenaeum, The, 134 + Aucassin et Nicolete, 330 + Aue, Hartmann von, 297 + Aulnoy, Comtesse d', 194 + Austin, Sarah, 162, 170 + Ave atque Vale, 349 + + Bagehot, Walter, 39 + Balin and Balan, 347, 348 + Ballad of a Nun, 263, 264 + Ballad of Dead Ladies, 298 + Ballad of Judas Iscariot, 263 + Ballade à la Lune, 189 + Ballads and Sonnets (Rossetti), 310 + Ballads of Irish Chivalry, 260 + Balzac, Honoré de, 42 + Bande Noire, La, 216 + Banshee and Other Poems, The, 261 + Banville, Théodore F. de, 388 + Barante, P. A. P. B., 226 + Bards of the Gael and the Gall, 260 + Basso, Andrea de, 110 + Baudelaire, Chas., 388, 389 + Bax, E. B., 386 + Beata Beatrix, 291, 303, 310 + Beckford, Wm., 367 + Belle Dame sans Merci, La, 86, 118, 119, 127, 262, 279, 303, 307 + Berlioz, Hector, l80, 181 + Bertrand, A., 175, 388 + Beyle, Henri. See Stendhal. + Biographia Literaria, 48, 55, 63, 88, 89 + Bisclaveret, 393 + Blackmore, Sir Richard, 269, 270 + Blake, Wm., 99 + Blessed Damozel, The, 285, 301, 308, 311, 343 + Blue Closet, The, 305 + Blüthenstaub, 167 + Boccaccio, Giovanni, 92, 123, 124 + Bowles, W. L., 55-73 + Bowring, Sir Jno., 248 + Boyd, Henry, 96, 97 + Boyesen, H. H., 139, 159, 160, 165 + Brandl, Alois, 50-55, 75, 77, 82, 86 + Brentano, Clemens, 134, 138, 141, 147, 153, 155, 167, 192, + 247, 400 + Bridal of Triermain, The, 6, 13, 14 + Bride's Prelude, The, 300, 311 + Broad Stone of Honour, The, 363-66 + Brooke, Stopford A., 261 + Brown, F. M., 389 + Brownie of Bodsbeck, The, 253 + Browning, Elizabeth B., 277, 278 + Browning, Robert, 190, 221, 276, 277 + Buchanan, Robert, 263 + Building of the Dream, The, 390, 391 + Bürger, G. A., 83, 133, 144, 159, 192, 297 + Burgraves, Les, 226, 299, 396 + Burke, Edmund, 145 + Burne-Jones, Edward, 285, 304, 305, 309, 318-20, 322, 324, 340 + Byron, Geo. Gordon, Lord, 8, 9, 26, 53, 60, 65-73, 81, 84, + 99-101, 106, 116-18, 171, 192, 195, 196, 203, 232-34, 246, + 333, 396-98 + + Caine, T. Hall, 279, 296, 301, 302, 308 + Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 156, 192, 234, 247 + Calidore, 129 + Callista, 355, 357 + Calverley, C. S., 249 + Campbell, Thomas, 64-67, 71, 72 + Cancionero, The, 246 + Carlyle, Thos., 15, 35, 39, 92, 103, 110, 137, 149, 151, 160, + 162, 164, 168, 171, 335, 381, 382, 384, 398, 400 + Cary, Henry F., 97-99, 102 + Castle by the Sea, The 170 + Castle of Otranto, The, 4, 10 + Cecil Dreeme, 367 + Chaitivel, 390 + Chartier, Alain, 118 + Chasse du Burgrave, La, 189, 277 + Chateaubriand, F. A. de, 90, 176, 191, 202-08, 225, 246, 363 + Chatterton, Thos., 52, 54, 86, 119, 191, 300 + Chaucer, Geoffrey, 93, 315-17, 328, 329 + Cheap Clothes and Nasty, 383 + Chevaliers de la Table Ronde, Les, 225 + Childe Harold, 70, 73, 91, 99, 233 + Childe Roland, 276 + Christabel, 14, 27, 49, 53, 54, 75, 80-85, 126, 296 + Christian Year, The, 357, 361 + Christmas Carol, A, 343 + Chronicle of the Cid, 236 + Cinq Mars, 191 + Civil Wars of Granada, The, 247 + Cloister and the Hearth, The, 230, 231 + Coleridge, S. T., 9, 12-14, 27, 48-63, 74-89, 97-99, 119, 126, + 127, 136-38, 158, l59, 168, 291, 295-97, 314, 355 + Collins, J. Churton, 257, 260 + Collinson, Jas., 284, 292, 293 + Colvin, Sidney, 116, 127 + Conde Alarcos, 247 + Congal, 260 + Conquête d'Angleterre, La, 39, 226 + Conservateur Littéraire, Le, 201 + Conspiracy of Venice, The, 246 + Contes Bizarres, 167 + Contes Drolatiques, 42 + Contrasts, 368-71, 375 + Count Gismond, 276 + Courthope, W. J., 314 + Cowper, Wm., 57, 58, 68 + Croker, T. C., 253, 256, 258 + Cromwell, 90, 218, 221 + Cross, W. L., 1, 31, 38 + + Dante, Alighieri, 40, 90-113, 122, 282, 290, 298-301, 310, + 311, 362, 393 + Dante and his Circle, 299, 303 + Dante at Verona, 310 + Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Sharp), 291, 292, 306 + Dante's Dream, 291 + Dark Ladie, The, 49, 86 + Dark Rosaleen, 259 + Dasent, Sir Geo., 334 + Davidson, Jno., 263, 264 + Day Dream, The, 265-67 + Death of Mlle. de Sombreuil, The, 216 + Decameron, The, 123, 124, 393, 400 + Defence of Guenevere, The, 275, 296, 309, 321, 324-28 + Defence of Poetry (Shelley), 101 + Deirdrè, 260 + Dejection: an Ode, 60, 86 + Delacroix, Eugène, 177, 178 + De Quincey, Thos., 38 + Development of the English Novel, The, 1, 31, 38 + Devéria, Eugène, 178, 195 + Dialogue to the Memory of Mr. Alexander Pope, 402 + Dies Irae, 5, 153 + Digby, Kenelm H., 319, 363-66, 379 + Discourse of the Three Unities, 133 + Divine Comedy, The, 92-99, 102, 103, 105, 109, 111, 282, + 290, 310, 362, 366 + Djinns, The, 189 + Dobell, Sydney, 262, 263 + Dobson, Austin, 401, 402 + Don Alvaro, 246 + Dondey, Théophile, 185, 190 + Don Quixote, 156, 241 + Dream of Gerontius, The, 362 + Dream of John Ball, The, 386 + Dryden, Jno., 117, 124, 125, 269 + Ducs de Bourgogne, Les, 226 + Dumas, Alexandre, 198, 209 + Dürer, Albrecht, 152, 153, 324, 373, 374 + + Earthly Paradise, The, 237, 238, 315, 321, 328-32, 334, + 380, 390, 391 + Ecclesiologist, The, 375 + Edda, The, 334 + Eden Bower, 315 + Eichendorff, Joseph von, 146 + Eighteenth Century Vignettes, 401 + Elfinland Wud, 254, 255 + Elves, The, 163 + Emerson, R. W., 165, 166, 307 + Endymion, 121, 126, 128, 342 + English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 26, 60, 63, 69, 70, 72 + English Contemporary Art, 293 + Enid, 270, 272 + Epic and Romance, 46, 47 + Epic of Women, An, 393 + Epipsychidion, 101, 310 + Erfindung des Rosenkranzes, Die, 153 + Erl King, The, 192 + Erskine, Wm., 6, 7, 13 + Espronceda, José de, 246 + Essay on Epic Poetry (Hayley), 95 + Essays and Studies (Swinburne), 349, 351 + Essays on German Literature (Boyesen), 139, 159, 160, 165 + Essays on the Picturesque (Price), 34 + Eve of St. Agnes, The, 85, 107, 120-22, 125-29, 307 + Eve of St. John, The, 13, 22, 23 + Eve of St. Mark, The, 130, 131 + + Faber, F. W., 360, 362 + Faërie Queene, The, 120, 275 + Fairies, The, 258 + Fair Inez, 279 + Fairy Legends of the South of Ireland, 253, 256, 258 + Fairy Thorn, The, 258 + Familiar Studies of Men and Books, 32 + Fantasio, 226 + Faust, 178, 191, 192, 238 + Feast of the Poets, The, 108 + Ferguson, Sir Samuel, 258-60 + Fichte, J. G., 137 + Fin du Classicisme, La, 175 + Ford, R., 246, 248 + Forest Lovers, The, 230-32 + Fors Clavigera, 380, 383, 387 + Fountain of Tears, The, 389 + Fouqué, F. de la M., 36, 139, 140, 153, 162, 167-69, 324, 363, 373 + Fourteen Sonnets (Bowles), 55, 58-61 + Fragments from German Prose Writers, 162 + Frere, Jno. H., 248 + From Shakspere to Pope, 116 + + Gallery of Pigeons, The, 388, 394, 395 + Gareth and Lynette, 274 + Gaspard de la Nuit, 388 + Gates, L. E., 129, 355, 356 + Gaule Poétique, La, 225 + Gautier, Théophile, 167, 176-81, 183-85, 187, 188, 191-93, + 195-98, 202, 219, 221-25, 349, 388, 393 + Gebir, 235, 237 + Génie du Christianisme, Le, 90, 176, 202, 203, 205-08, 363 + Gentle Armour, The, 109, 110 + Germ, The, 284 + German Novelists (Roscoe), 167 + German Poets and Poetry (Longfellow), 167 + German Romance (Carlyle), 162 + Gierusalemme Liberata, 91 + Girlhood of Mary Virgin, The, 287, 290, 291 + Glenfinlas, 13, 22 + Globe, Le, 201, 202 + Goblet, The, 164 + Goblin Market, The, 82 + Godiva, 265 + Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 5, 92, 133, 178, 191, 192 + Golden Legend, The, 297 + Golden Treasury, The, 25, 389 + Golden Wings, 326-28 + Goldsmith, Oliver, 95 + Görres, Joseph, 138, 147, 152, 363, 400 + Gosse, Edmund, 116 + Götz von Berlichingen, 5, 133, 193 + Gries, J. D., 156, 247 + Grimm, Jakob and Wm., 154, 162, 247, 256 + Guest, Lady Charlotte, 270 + + Hallam, Henry, 103, 399 + Han d'Islande, 196, 218 + Hardiknute, 3 + Harold the Dauntless, 29 + Hartleap Well, 19-21, 80 + Hauptmann, Gerhart, 245 + Hawker, R. S., 262, 263 + Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 162-64 + Hayley, Wm., 95, 96 + Haystack in the Floods, The, 326 + Heart of Midlothian, The, 31, 33, 379 + Heine, Heinrich, 35-38, 139-41, 144, 146-49, 152, 154-59, + l6l, 170, 400 + Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 164-66 + Heir of Redcliffe, The, 357 + Helvellyn, 15, l6 + Henri III., 209 + Heretic's Tragedy, The, 276 + Hereward the Wake, 281 + Herford, C. H., 12, 24, 34, 87, 88 + Hernani, 186, 188, 195-200 + Hero Worship, 103, 111, 335 + Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders, 152, 153 + Hewlett, Maurice, 230-32 + Higginson, T. W., 163 + Histoire du Romantisme (Gautier), 176-81, 183-85, 187, 188, + 191-93, 195-98, 22l-25 + Histoire du Romantisme en France (Toreinx), 202 + History of France (Michelet), 226 + History of Literature (Schlegel), 157 + History of Spanish Literature, A (Kelly), 246, 247 + History of Spanish Literature, A (Ticknor), 242, 243, 248 + History of the Crusades, 226 + History of the Swiss Confederation, 153 + Hita, Perez de, 247 + Hogg, Jas., 250-55 + Holy Cross Day, 277 + Homme qui Rit, L', 219, 22l + Hood, Thos., 278, 279 + House of Life, The, 307, 310 + House of the Wolfings, The, 232, 337-39, 387 + Howells, W. D., 397, 398 + Howitt, Chas. and Mary, 334 + Hughes, Arthur, 305-07 + Hughes, Thomas., 357, 383 + Hugo, François V., 222 + Hugo, Victor Marie, 90, 137, 173, 176, 178-82, 188, 189, + 194-96, 200, 214-21, 224, 226, 247, 277, 298, 299, 349, + 388, 389 + Hunt, Jas. Leigh, 49, 105-13, 118, 119, 121-23, 127, 388 + Hunt, Wm. H., 283, 284, 288-90, 292, 302, 306, 307 + Hurd, Richard, 364 + Hutton, R. H., 40 + Hylas, 331 + Hymns to the Night, 164 + Hypatia, 355 + Hyperion (Keats), 117, 122 + Hyperion (Longfellow), 172 + + Idylls of the King, 268-75, 303, 347 + Illustrations of Tennyson, 257, 260 + Il Penseroso, 374 + Imitation of Spenser (Keats), 120 + Inferno, 96, 99, 103, 191 + Intaglios, 393 + Irving, Washington, 239 + Isabella, 123-25, 307, 390, 400 + Ivanhoe, 31, 36, 39, 40, 43, 379, 397 + Jameson, Anna, 374, 375 + Jeffrey, Francis, Lord, 37 + Jenny, 309 + John Inglesant, 357 + Journal des Débats, 201 + Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The, 166 + Journey into the Blue Distance, 162, 163 + Joyce, P. W., 260 + Joyce, R. D., 260 + + Keats (Colvin), 116, 127 + Keats, Jno., 53, 54, 82, 85, 86, 107, 113-31, 172, 228, 262, + 264, 279, 287, 294, 299, 300, 306, 307, 314, 315, 342, 388, + 390, 400 + Kebie, Jno., 292, 357, 361 + Keith of Ravelston, 262, 263 + Kelly, J. F., 246, 247 + Ker, W. P., 46, 47 + Kilmeny, 252 + Kinder und Hausmärchen, 154, 162 + King Arthur's Tomb, 327 + Kinges Quair, The, 306, 312 + Kingsley, Chas., 279-81, 292, 355, 383, 384 + King's Tragedy, The, 306, 311-13 + Knaben Wunderhorn, Des, 155, 172 + Knight, Death, and the Devil, The, 152, 153, 324, 373 + Knight's Grave, The, 87 + Kronenwächter, Die, 167 + Kubia Khan, 87 + + Lady of Shalott, The, 365, 271, 303, 304, 324 + Lady of the Lake, The, 19, 29, 251, 379 + Lament for the Decline of Chivalry, 279 + Lamia, 117, 129 + Landor, W. S., 16, 20, 27, 53, 54, 117, 235, 237, 395 + Lang, Andrew, 330 + Lara, 233 + Laus Veneris, 343, 349 + Lay of the Brown Rosary, The, 277, 278 + Lay of the Last Minstrel, The, 3, 5, 11, 25-28, 40, 53, 85, 252 + Lays of Ancient Rome, 249 + Lays of France, 389, 390 + Lays of the Western Gael, 260 + Leading Cases done into Equity, 249 + Legends of the Cid, 246 + Lenore, 83, 133, 144, 192, 297, 392 + Leper, The, 349 + Lesser, Creuzé de, 225 + Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 364 + Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, 41 + Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet, 226 + Lewis, M. G., 77, 83, 238, 239 + Liberal Movement in English Literature, The, 314 + Life and Death of Jason, The, 315, 321, 328-33 + Life and Letters of Dean Church, The, 358 + Life of William Morris, The (Mackail), 315, 320, 331, 333, 382 + Light of the World, The, 288-90 + Lindsay, A. W. C., 372-74 + Lines on a Bust of Dante, 105 + Literary Reminiscences (De Quincey), 38 + Literature and Romance of Northern Europe, 334 + Literature of Europe, The (Hallam), 103 + Lockhart, J. G., 5, 7, 9, 11, 22, 23, 239, 247, 248 + Locrine, 346 + Longfellow, H. W., 105, 109, 164, 167, 170, 172, 239, 297 + Lord of the Isles, The, 29, 85 + Lorenzaccio, 226 + Lorenzo and Isabella, 287, 291 + Loss and Gain, 357, 359 + Love, 86, 127 + Love is Enough, 332, 333 + Lovers of Gudrun, The, 330, 334-36 + Lowell, J. R., 70, 82, 93, 116, 131, 165, 203, 260 + Lucinde, 157 + Luck of Edenhall, The, 170 + Lürlei, Die, 141 + Lyra Innocentium, 357 + Lyrical Ballads, 18, 48, 74 + + Mabinogion, The, 270, 332 + Macaulay, T. B., 103, 249 + Mackail, W. J., 315, 320, 331, 333, 382 + McLaughlin, E. T., 43 + Madoc, 237 + Mador of the Moor, 251 + Maeterlinck, Maurice, 326 + Maidens of Verdun, The, 216 + Maids of Elfin-Mere, The, 258, 304, 324 + Maigron, L., 33, 34, 44-46 + Mallet, P. H., 107, 229 + Malory, Sir Thos., 270, 272, 303, 347, 348 + Manfred, 234 + Mangan, J. C., 259, 260 + Manzoni, Alessandro, 133 + Märchen (Tieck), 162 + Marie de France, 390, 393 + Marienlieder, 148 + Marino Faliero, 234 + Marion Delorme, 200 + Marmion, 6, 15, 23, 29, 40, 90, 379 + Martyrs, Les, 225 + Marzials, Théophile, 285, 387, 388, 394, 395 + Masque of Queen Bersabe, The, 277, 344 + Masque of Shadows, The, 390, 392 + Meinhold, J. W., 42, 280 + Mérimée, Prosper, 30, 33 + Michaud, J. F., 226 + Michelet, Jules, 226 + Middle Ages, The (Hallam), 103 + Millais, J. E., 283-85, 287, 288, 290, 291, 307 + Milton, Jno., 93, 103, 269, 374 + Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern (Motherwell), 253 + Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 21, 22, 24, 26, 243, 250, 251 + Modern Painters, 6, 10, 284, 292, 294 + Mores Catholici, 319, 366 + Morgante Maggiore, 234 + Morris, Wm., 29, 232, 237, 275, 285, 296, 304-06, 309, + 314-40, 345, 350, 380, 382, 384-89 + Morte Darthur (Malory), 106, 270, 273, 303, 304, 324, 347, 364 + Morte d'Arthur (Tennyson), 271, 272 + Motherwell, Wm., 250, 253-55 + Mozley, T., 358 + Müller, Johannes, 153 + Munera Pulveris, 380 + Muse Française, La, 201 + Music Master, The, 258, 300 + Musset, Alfred de, 180, 189, 198, 226, 247 + Myller, H., 154 + Mysteries of Udolpho, 83 + + Nanteuil, Célestin, 178, 223-25 + Nature of Gothic, The, 321, 375, 385, 386 + Nerval, Gérard de, 190-92, 196, 197, 225, 349 + New Essays toward a Critical Method, 122 + Newman, J. H., 292, 319, 354-62, 366, 381 + News from Nowhere, 317, 319, 382, 386 + Nibelungenlied, The, 154, 155, 297 + Nodier, Chas., 194 + Northern Antiquities, 107, 229 + Northern Mythology. 334 + Notre Dame de Paris, 178, 179, 221, 224 + Novalis, 134, 137, 148, 152, 164-67, 172, 302, 400 + + Ode to a Dead Body, 110 + Ode to a Grecian Urn, 117 + Ode to the West Wind, 102 + Odes et Ballades (Hugo), 176, 180, 189, 217 + Odes et Poésies Diverses (Hugo), 214 + Odyssey, The, 331 + Ogier the Dane, 330, 332 + Old Celtic Romances, 260 + Old Masters at Florence, 316 + Old Mortality, 31, 33, 253, 379 + Old Woman of Berkeley, The, 238, 239 + Oliphant, F., 353 + On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, 117, 122 + Oriana, 265, 313, 324 + Orientales, Les, 189 + Orlando Furioso, 90, 91, 109 + O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 387-90, 393 + Ossian, 208, 261 + + Palgrave, F. T., 25, 389 + Palmerin of England, 236, 241 + Paradise, 311 + Parochial and Plain Sermons, 360 + Parsons, T. W., 105 + Partenopex of Blois, 90 + Past and Present, 381, 382 + Pater, Walter, 42, 79 + Payne, Jno., 387-93 + Perrault, Chas., 194, 265, 349 + Percy, Thos., 3, 54, 57, 74, 159, 238, 295 + Petrarca, Francesco, 92 + Phantasus, 160 + Pillar of the Cloud, The, 362 + Poe, Edgar A., 162, 163, 300, 301, 389 + Poems and Ballads (Swinburne), 296, 339, 343, 345, 349, 350 + Poems and Romances (Simcox), 388 + Poems by the Way, 386 + Poets and Poetry of Munster, 259 + Politics for the People, 383 + Pollock, Sir Frederick, 249 + Pope, Alexander, 52-54, 56, 63-73, 115-17, 402 + Portrait, The, 311 + Praeterita, 372, 378 + Preface to Cromwell, 182, 188, 218-20 + Pre-Raphaelitism (Ruskin), 293 + Price, Sir Uvedale, 34, 374 + Primer of French Literature, A, 183, 184 + Prince Arthur (Blackmore), 270 + Prince des Sots, Le, 225 + Princess, The, 267, 268 + Prior, Matthew, 401 + Prophecy of Dante, The, 100, 101 + Proverbs in Porcelain, 401 + Psyche, 121 + Pugin, A. C., 368 + Pugin, A. W. N., 360, 361, 368-72, 375, 379 + Pugin, E. W., 368 + Purgatorio, 362 + + Queen Gwynnevar's Round, 262 + Queenhoo Hall, 8, 20, 32 + Queen Mab, 235 + Queen's Wake, The, 252, 253 + Quentin Durward, 31, 36 + Quest of the Sancgreall, The (Westwood), 276 + Quest of the Sangreal, The (Hawker), 262 + Quiberon, 216 + + Racine et Shakspere, 38, 186, 208, 211, 213 + Radcliffe, Anne, 41, 42, 82, 193 + Rapunzel, 309, 326, 327 + Raven, The, 301 + Reade, Chas., 230 + Rebecca and Rowena, 397 + Récits Mérovingiens, 226 + Recollections of D. G. Rossetti (Caine), 296, 297, 301, 302, 308 + Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3, 17, 74, 107, 229, + 238, 243, 247 + Reminiscences (Mozley), 358 + Remorse, 86, 89 + Richter, J. P. F., 169 + Rime of Redemption, The, 392 + Rime of the Duchess May, The, 277, 278 + Rivas, Duke de, 246 + Robertson, J. M., 122 + Rogers, Chas., 96 + Roi s'Amuse, Le, 200, 201 + Rokeby, 29 + Romancero General, The, 243, 247 + Roman Historique, Le, 33, 34, 44-46 + Romantische Schule, Die (Heine), 36, 139-41 + Romaunt of the Page, The, 277 + Roots of the Mountains, The, 337, 338 + Rosa, Martinez de la, 246 + Rosamond, 346, 347 + Rosamund, Queen of the Goths, 346 + Roscoe, Wm., 65, 66 + Rose, W. S., 90 + Rose Mary, 263, 311, 312 + Rossetti, Christina, 82, 282, 284, 302 + Rossetti, D. G., 131, 228, 258, 262, 263, 265, 282-88, 290-92, + 295-315, 318-21, 323, 324, 340, 343, 345, 350, 387-89, 393 + Rossetti, Gabriele, 282 + Rossetti, Maria F., 282 + Rossetti, W. M., 282, 284 + Runenberg, The, 163 + Ruskin, Jno., 6, 10, 284, 286-89, 292-94, 304, 317, 321, + 324, 371, 372, 375-80, 382-87, 398 + + Sacred and Legendary Art, 374, 375 + Saint Agnes, 267 + Saint Brandan, 263 + Saint Dorothy, 344 + Saint Patrick's Purgatory, 238 + Saintsbury, George, 50, 118, 183, l84, 295, 324, 326, 395, 396 + Saints' Tragedy, The, 279, 280, 292 + Samuel Taylor Coleridge und die Englische Romantik, 50-55, + 75, 77, 82, 86 + Scherer, Wm., 167, 170 + Schiller, J. C. F., 210, 212 + Schlegel, A. W., 88, 140, 144, 145, 154, 156-59, 162, 165, + 172, 192, 247 + Schlegel, F., 99, 134, 135, 137, 148, 151, 157-59, 172, 247, 363 + Scott, Sir Walter, 1-47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 71, 75, 77, 85, 87, + 88, 90, 91, 119, 120, 127, 129, 136, 158, 167, 169, 172, 173, + 178, 180, 192, 212, 226, 232, 243, 246, 247, 249-53, 256, + 267, 295, 313, 320, 321, 323, 329, 352-56, 367, 378, 379, + 397, 402 + Scott, W. B., 292, 293, 305-07, 353, 389 + Selections from Newman, 355, 356 + Seward, Anne, 98 + Shairp, J. C., 18 + Shaker Bridal, The, 164 + Shakspere, Wm., 210, 222, 399 + Sharp, Wm., 291, 292, 306 + Shelley, P. B., 8, 25, 101, 102, 120, 232-35, 299, 310, 340, 398 + Short History of English Literature, A, 50, 118, 295, 324, + 326, 395, 396 + Shorthouse, J. H., 357 + Short Studies (Higginson), 163 + Sigerson, Jno., 259, 261 + Sigismonda and Guiscardo, 124, 125 + Sigurd the Volsung, 336 + Simcox, G. A., 388 + Sintram and his Companions, 153, 162, 168, 324, 373 + Sir Floris, 390-92 + Sir Galahad (Morris), 306, 325, 328 + Sir Galahad (Tennyson), 267, 271, 325 + Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinivere, 271, 325 + Sir Tristram, 7 + Sister Helen, 311, 312, 345 + Sisters, The, 265, 313 + Sizeranne, R. de la, 293 + Sketches of Christian Art, 372-74 + Sleep and Poetry, 114-16 + Sleeping Beauty, The, 265 + Smith, Charlotte, 55 + Socialism, 386 + Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, 18, 19 + Song of the Western Men, 262 + Sonneur de Saint Paul, Le, 193 + Sorrows of Werther, The, 397 + Southey, Robert, 50, 51, 55, 71, 235-39, 355 + Specimen of an Induction to a Poem, 129 + Specimens of German Romance, 167 + Specimens of Gothic Architecture, 368 + Spenser, Edmund, 3, 4, 93, 107, 120-22, 269, 275, 329 + Staël, Mme. de, 134, 139, 141-45, l71, 192, 208 + Staff and Scrip, 311 + Stedman, E. C., 265, 387 + Stendhal, De, 36-38, 186, 187, 201, 208-14 + Stephen, Leslie, 10, 38, 80 + Sternbald's Wanderungen, 152 + Stevenson, R. L., 32 + Stokes, Whitley, 259, 261 + Stolberg, F. L., Count, 149, 363 + Stones of Venice, 321, 375-79, 385, 386 + Stories from the Italian Poets, 109-11 + Story of Rimini, The, 105-07, 119, 121, 122, 390 + Story of the Brave Casper and the Fair Annerl, The, 167 + Student of Salamanca, The, 246 + Studies and Appreciations, 129 + Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature, 43 + Study of Celtic Literature, On the, 256 + Succube, La, 43 + Sundering Flood, The, 232, 337, 339 + Swinburne, A. C., 275, 276, 296, 304, 309, 314, 315, 319, + 339-51, 387-89 + + Table Talk (Coleridge), 12 + Tables Turned, The, 386 + Tale of Balen, The, 347, 348 + Tale of King Constans, The, 330 + Tales of Wonder, 238 + Talisman, The, 28, 36, 43 + Tannhäuser, 153, 160, 264, 343, 391 + Task, The, 58 + Tasso, Torquato, 91, 104, 109 + Taylor, Edgar, 162 + Taylor, Wm., 53, 162, 238 + Templars in Cyprus, The, 149 + Tennyson, Alfred, 257, 260, 262, 264-75, 295, 303, 324, + 325, 347, 348 + Thackeray, W. M., 397, 398, 402 + Thalaba the Destroyer, 235 + Theocritus, 331 + Thierry, Augustin, 39, 225, 226 + Thomas the Rhymer, 7 + Thoreau, H. D., 165 + Thorpe, Benjamin, 334 + Thousand and One Nights, The, 393 + Three Bardic Tales, 259 + Three Fishers, The, 383 + Thyrsis, 378 + Ticknor, Geo., 242, 243, 248 + Tieck, Ludwig, 42, 134, 137, 148, 150, 152, 154, 156-65, + 172, 245, 400 + Tighe, Mary, 121 + Tintern Abbey, 358 + Todhunter, Jno., 259, 261 + Tom Brown at Oxford, 357 + Tracts for the Times, 292, 319, 363, 368 + Treasury of Irish Poetry, A, 261 + Tristram and Iseult (Arnold), 275, 278, 341 + Tristram of Lyonesse (Swinburne), 275, 340 + Tristram und Isolde (Wagner), 393 + Troy Town, 315 + True Principles of Pointed Architecture, The, 372 + Tune of Seven Towers, The, 305, 326 + Two Foscari, The, 234 + + Uhland, Ludwig, 140, 154-56, 170, 171 + Ulalume, 301 + Undine, 168 + Unto this Last, 380 + + Vabre, Jule, 222 + Vanity Fair, 396 + Vathek, 367 + Vere, Aubrey de, 259, 260, 358, 361, 366 + Verses on Various Occasions (Newman), 357 + Versunkene Glocke, Die, 245 + Victorian Poets, 265, 387 + Vignettes in Rhyme, 401 + Vigny, A. V., Comte de, 188, 191, 210 + Villon, François, 298, 299, 350, 393 + Vision of Judgment, The, 70 + Vita Nuova, La, 101, 299, 302, 310, 393 + Volksmärchen (Tieck), 160 + Völsunga Saga, The, 334, 335 + Voltaire, F. M. A. de, 92, 94, 95 + Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur (Schlegel), 88, + 158, 162, 192 + Voss, J.H., 149 + Voyage of Maeldune, The, 260 + Wackenroder, W. H., 134, 152, 153, 159 + Wagner, Richard, 153, 264, 391, 393 + Walladmor, 38 + Walter Scott et la Princesse de Clèves, 36 + Ward, W. G., 360 + Warton, Joseph, 61, 63, 64, 71, 73, 157, 158 + Warton, Thos., 27, 57, 60, 61, 94, 157, 158 + Water Lady, The, 279 + Water of the Wondrous Isles, The, 337, 339 + Watts, Theodore, 300 + Waverley Novels, The, 30-39, 324, 378, 379, 403 + Welland River, 328, 345 + Welshmen of Tirawley, The, 260 + Werner, Zacharias, 148, 149, 212, 302 + Westwood, Thos., 276 + White Doe of Rylstone, The, 16-18 + White Ship, The, 311, 312 + William George Ward and the Oxford Movement, 361 + Winthrop, Theodore, 367 + Wisdom and Languages of India, The, 157 + Wissenschaftslehre (Fichte), 137 + Witch of Fife, The, 252 + Wood beyond the World, The, 337, 339 + Woolner, Thos., 284 + Wordsworth, Wm., 9, 12, 14-20, 48, 50-55, 71, 77, 80, 89, + 119, 300, 333, 355, 358, 398 + + Yarrow Revisited, 14 + Yeast, 383 + Yeats, J. B., 261 + Yonge, Charlotte M., 357 + Yuletide Stories, 334 + + Zapolya, 89 + Zauberring, Der, 168 + Zeitung für Einsiedler, 138, 172 + Zorrilla, José de, 246 + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM IN +THE NINETEENTH CENTURY*** + + +******* This file should be named 15931-8.txt or 15931-8.zip ******* + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/9/3/15931 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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Thus, we do not necessarily +keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition. + +Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility: + + https://www.gutenberg.org + +This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, +including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary +Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to +subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. + diff --git a/15931-8.zip b/15931-8.zip Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..1ed013e --- /dev/null +++ b/15931-8.zip diff --git a/15931.txt b/15931.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9057fcd --- /dev/null +++ b/15931.txt @@ -0,0 +1,13224 @@ +The Project Gutenberg eBook, A History of English Romanticism in the +Nineteenth Century, by Henry A. Beers + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century + + +Author: Henry A. Beers + +Release Date: May 28, 2005 [eBook #15931] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM +IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY*** + + +E-text prepared by Al Haines + + + +A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY + +by + +HENRY A. BEERS + +Author of _A Suburban Pastoral_, _The Ways of Yale_, etc. + +New York +Henry Holt and Company + +1918 + + + + + + + + ROMANCE + + My love dwelt in a Northern land. + A grey tower in a forest green + Was hers, and far on either hand + The long wash of the waves was seen, + And leagues on leagues of yellow sand, + The woven forest boughs between. + + And through the silver Northern light + The sunset slowly died away, + And herds of strange deer, lily-white, + Stole forth among the branches grey; + About the coming of the light, + They fled like ghosts before the day. + + I know not if the forest green + Still girdles round that castle grey; + I know not if the boughs between + The white deer vanish ere the day; + Above my love the grass is green, + My heart is colder than the clay. + + ANDREW LANG. + + + + + +PREFACE. + +The present volume is a sequel to "A History of English Romanticism in +the Eighteenth Century" (New York; Henry Holt & Co., 1899). References +in the footnotes to "Volume I." are to that work. The difficulties of +this second part of my undertaking have been of a kind just opposite to +those of the first. As it concerns my subject, the eighteenth century +was an age of beginnings; and the problem was to discover what latent +romanticism existed in the writings of a period whose spirit, upon the +whole, was distinctly unromantic. But the temper of the nineteenth +century has been, until recent years, prevailingly romantic in the wider +meaning of the word. And as to the more restricted sense in which I have +chosen to employ it, the mediaevalising literature of the nineteenth +century is at least twenty times as great as that of the eighteenth, both +in bulk and in value. Accordingly the problem here is one of selection; +and of selection not from a list of half-forgotten names, like Warton and +Hurd, but from authors whose work is still the daily reading of all +educated readers. + +As I had anticipated, objection has been made to the narrowness of my +definition of _romanticism_. But every writer has a right to make his +own definitions; or, at least, to say what his book shall be about. I +have not written a history of the "liberal movement in English +literature"; nor of the "renaissance of wonder"; nor of the "emancipation +of the ego." Why not have called the book, then, "A History of the +Mediaeval Revival in England"? Because I have a clear title to the use +of _romantic_ in one of its commonest acceptations; and, for myself, I +prefer the simple dictionary definition, "pertaining to the style of the +Christian and popular literature of the Middle Ages," to any of those +more pretentious explanations which seek to express the true inwardness +of romantic literature by analysing it into its elements, selecting one +of these elements as essential, and rejecting all the rest as accidental. + +M. Brunetiere; for instance, identifies romanticism with lyricism. It is +the "emancipation of the ego." This formula is made to fit Victor Hugo, +and it will fit Byron. But M. Brunetiere would surely not deny that +Walter Scott's work is objective and dramatic quite as often as it is +lyrical. Yet what Englishman will be satisfied with a definition of +_romantic_ which excludes Scott? Indeed, M. Brunetiere himself is +respectful to the traditional meaning of the word. "Numerous +definitions," he says, "have been given of Romanticism, and still others +are continually being offered; and all, or almost all of them, contain a +part of the truth. Mme. de Stael was right when she asserted in her +'Allemagne' that Paganism and Christianity, the North and the South, +antiquity and the Middle Ages, having divided between them the history of +literature, Romanticism in consequence, in contrast to Classicism, was a +combination of chivalry, the Middle Ages, the literatures of the North, +and Christianity. It should be noted, in this connection, that some +thirty years later Heinrich Heine, in the book in which he will rewrite +Mme. de Stael's, will not give such a very different idea of +Romanticism." And if, in an analysis of the romantic movement throughout +Europe, any single element in it can lay claim to the leading place, that +element seems to me to be the return of each country to its national +past; in other words, mediaevalism. + +A definition loses its usefulness when it is made to connote too much. +Professor Herford says that the "organising conception" of his "Age of +Wordsworth" is romanticism. But if Cowper and Wordsworth and Shelley are +romantic, then almost all the literature of the years 1798-1830 is +romantic. I prefer to think of Cowper as a naturalist, of Shelley as an +idealist, and of Wordsworth as a transcendental realist, and to reserve +the name romanticist for writers like Scott, Coleridge, and Keats; and I +think the distinction a serviceable one. Again, I have been censured for +omitting Blake from my former volume. The omission was deliberate, not +accidental, and the grounds for it were given in the preface. Blake was +not discovered until rather late in the nineteenth century. He was not a +link in the chain of influence which I was tracing. I am glad to find my +justification in a passage of Mr. Saintsbury's "History of Nineteenth +Century Literature" (p. 13): "Blake exercised on the literary _history_ +of his time no influence, and occupied in it no position. . . . The +public had little opportunity of seeing his pictures, and less of reading +his books. . . . He was practically an unread man." + +But I hope that this second volume may make more clear the unity of my +design and the limits of my subject. It is scarcely necessary to add +that no absolute estimate is attempted of the writers whose works are +described in this history. They are looked at exclusively from a single +point of view. H. A. B. + +APRIL, 1901. + + + + +TABLE OF CONTENTS. + + +CHAPTER + + I. WALTER SCOTT + + II. COLERIDGE, BOWLES, AND THE POPE CONTROVERSY + + III. KEATS, LEIGH HUNT, AND THE DANTE REVIVAL + + IV. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN GERMANY + + V. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN FRANCE + + VI. DIFFUSED ROMANTICISM IN THE LITERATURE OF + THE NINETEENTH CENTURY + + VII. THE PRE-RAPHAELITES + + VIII. TENDENCIES AND RESULTS + + + + +A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM. + + +CHAPTER I. + +Walter Scott.[1] + +It was reserved for Walter Scott, "the Ariosto of the North," "the +historiographer royal of feudalism," to accomplish the task which his +eighteenth-century forerunners had essayed in vain. He possessed the +true enchanter's wand, the historic imagination. With this in his hand, +he raised the dead past to life, made it once more conceivable, made it +even actual. Before Scott no genius of the highest order had lent itself +wholly or mainly to retrospection. He is the middle point and the +culmination of English romanticism. His name is, all in all, the most +important on our list. "Towards him all the lines of the romantic +revival converge." [2] The popular ballad, the Gothic romance, the +Ossianic poetry, the new German literature, the Scandinavian discoveries, +these and other scattered rays of influence reach a focus in Scott. It +is true that his delineation of feudal society is not final. There were +sides of mediaeval life which he did not know, or understand, or +sympathize with, and some of these have been painted in by later artists. +That his pictures have a coloring of modern sentiment is no arraignment +of him but of the _genre_. All romanticists are resurrectionists; their +art is an elaborate make-believe. It is enough for their purpose if the +world which they re-create has the look of reality, the _verisimile_ if +not the _verum_. That Scott's genius was _in extenso_ rather than _in +intenso_, that his work is largely improvisation, that he was not a +miniature, but a distemper painter, splashing large canvasses with a +coarse brush and gaudy pigments, all these are commonplaces of criticism. +Scott's handling was broad, vigorous, easy, careless, healthy, free. He +was never subtle, morbid, or fantastic, and had no niceties or secrets. +He was, as Coleridge said of Schiller, "master, not of the intense drama +of passion, but the diffused drama of history." Therefore, because his +qualities were popular and his appeal was made to the people, the general +reader, he won a hearing for his cause, which Coleridge or Keats or +Tieck, with his closer workmanship, could never have won. He first and +he alone _popularised_ romance. No literature dealing with the feudal +past has ever had the currency and the universal success of Scott's. At +no time has mediaevalism held so large a place in comparison with other +literary interests as during the years of his greatest vogue, say from +1805 to 1830. + +The first point to be noticed about Scott is the thoroughness of his +equipment. While never a scholar in the academic sense, he was, along +certain chosen lines, a really learned man. He was thirty-four when he +published "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805), the first of his series +of metrical romances and the first of his poems to gain popular favour. +But for twenty years he had been storing his mind with the history, +legends, and ballad poetry of the Scottish border, and was already a +finished antiquarian. The bent and limitations of his genius were early +determined, and it remained to the end wonderfully constant to its +object. At the age of twelve he had begun a collection of manuscript +ballads. His education in romance dated from the cradle. His lullabies +were Jacobite songs; his grandmother told him tales of moss-troopers, and +his Aunt Janet read him ballads from Ramsay's "Tea-table Miscellany," +upon which his quick and tenacious memory fastened eagerly. The ballad +of "Hardiknute," in this collection, he knew by heart before he could +read. "It was the first poem I ever learnt--the last I shall ever +forget." Dr. Blacklock introduced the young schoolboy to the poems of +Ossian and of Spenser, and he committed to memory "whole duans of the one +and cantos of the other." "Spenser," he says, "I could have read +forever. Too young to trouble myself about the allegory, I considered +all the knights and ladies and dragons and giants in their outward and +exoteric sense, and God only knows how delighted I was to find myself in +such society." A little later Percy's "Reliques" fell into his hands, +with results that have already been described.[3] + +As soon as he got access to the circulating library in Edinburgh, he +began to devour its works of fiction, characteristically rejecting love +stories and domestic tales, but laying hold upon "all that was +adventurous and romantic," and in particular upon "everything which +touched on knight-errantry." For two or three years he used to spend his +holidays with his schoolmate, John Irving, on Arthur's Seat or Salisbury +Crags, where they read together books like "The Castle of Otranto" and +the poems of Spenser and Ariosto; or composed and narrated to each other +"interminable tales of battles and enchantments" and "legends in which +the martial and the miraculous always predominated." The education of +Edward Waverley, as described in the third chapter of Scott's first +novel, was confessedly the novelist's own education. In the "large +Gothic room" which was the library of Waverley Honour, the young +book-worm pored over "old historical chronicles" and the writings of +Pulci, Froissart, Brantome, and De la Noue; and became "well acquainted +with Spenser, Drayton, and other poets who have exercised themselves on +romantic fiction--of all themes the most fascinating to a youthful +imagination." + +Yet even thus early, a certain solidity was apparent in Scott's studies. +"To the romances and poetry which I chiefly delighted in," he writes, "I +had always added the study of history, especially as connected with +military events." He interested himself, for example, in the art of +fortification; and when confined to his bed by a childish illness, found +amusement in modelling fortresses and "arranging shells and seeds and +pebbles so as to represent encountering armies. . . . I fought my way +thus through Vertot's 'Knights of Malta'--a book which, as it hovered +between history and romance, was exceedingly dear to me." + +Every genius is self-educated, and we find Scott from the first making +instinctive selections and rejections among the various kinds of +knowledge offered him. At school he would learn no Greek, and wrote a +theme in which he maintained, to the wrath of his teacher, that Ariosto +was a better poet than Homer. In later life he declared that he had +forgotten even the letters of the Greek alphabet. Latin would have fared +as badly, had not his interest in Matthew Paris and other monkish +chroniclers "kept up a kind of familiarity with the language even in its +rudest state." "To my Gothic ear, the 'Stabat Mater,' the 'Dies +Irae,'[4] and some of the other hymns of the Catholic Church are more +solemn and affecting than the fine classical poetry of Buchanan." In our +examination of Scott's early translations from the German,[5] it has been +noticed how exclusively he was attracted by the romantic department of +that literature, passing over, for instance, Goethe's maturer work, to +fix upon his juvenile drama "Goetz von Berlichingen." Similarly he +learned Italian just to read in the original the romantic poets Tasso, +Ariosto, Boiardo, and Pulci. When he first went to London in 1799, "his +great anxiety," reports Lockhart, "was to examine the antiquities of the +Tower and Westminster Abbey, and to make some researches among the MSS. +of the British Museum." From Oxford, which he visited in 1803, he +brought away only "a grand but indistinct picture of towers and chapels +and oriels and vaulted halls", having met there a reception which, as he +modestly acknowledges, "was more than such a truant to the classic page +as myself was entitled to expect at the source of classic learning." +Finally, in his last illness, when sent to Rome to recover from the +effects of a paralytic stroke, his ruling passion was strong in death. +He examined with eagerness the remains of the mediaeval city, but +appeared quite indifferent to that older Rome which speaks to the +classical student. It will be remembered that just the contrary of this +was true of Addison, when he was in Italy a century before.[6] Scott was +at no pains to deny or to justify the one-sidedness of his culture. But +when Erskine remonstrated with him for rambling on + + "through brake and maze + With harpers rude, of barbarous days," + +and urged him to compose a regular epic on classical lines, he +good-naturedly but resolutely put aside the advice. + + "Nay, Erskine, nay--On the wild hill + Let the wild heath-bell[7] flourish still . . . . + Though wild as cloud, as stream, as gale, + Flow forth, flow unrestrained, my tale!" [8] + +Scott's letters to Erskine, Ellis, Leyden, Ritson, Miss Seward, and other +literary correspondents are filled with discussions of antiquarian +questions and the results of his favourite reading in old books and +manuscripts. He communicates his conclusions on the subject of "Arthur +and Merlin" or on the authorship of the old metrical romance of "Sir +Tristram." [9] He has been copying manuscripts in the Advocates' Library +at Edinburgh. In 1791 he read papers before the Speculative Society on +"The Origin of the Feudal System," "The Authenticity of Ossian's Poems," +"The Origin of the Scandinavian Mythology." Lockhart describes two +note-books in Scott's hand-writing, with the date 1792, containing +memoranda of ancient court records about Walter Scott and his wife, Dame +Janet Beaton, the "Ladye" of Branksome in the "Lay"; extracts from +"Guerin de Montglave"; copies of "Vegtam's Kvitha" and the "Death-Song of +Regner Lodbrog," with Gray's English versions; Cnut's verses on passing +Ely Cathedral; the ancient English "Cuckoo Song," and other rubbish of +the kind.[10] When in 1803 he began to contribute articles to the +_Edinburgh Review_, his chosen topics were such as "Amadis of Gaul," +Ellis' "Specimens of Ancient English Poetry," Godwin's "Chaucer," +Sibbald's "Chronicle of Scottish Poetry," Evans' "Old Ballads," Todd's +"Spenser," "The Life and Works of Chatterton," Southey's translation of +"The Cid," etc. + +Scott's preparation for the work which he had to do was more than +adequate. His reading along chosen lines was probably more extensive and +minute than any man's of his generation. The introductions and notes to +his poems and novels are even overburdened with learning. But this, +though important, was but the lesser part of his advantage. "The +old-maidenly genius of antiquarianism" could produce a Strutt[11] or even +perhaps a Warton; but it needed the touch of the creative imagination to +turn the dead material of knowledge into works of art that have delighted +millions of readers for a hundred years in all civilised lands and +tongues. + +The key to Scott's romanticism is his intense local feeling.[12] That +attachment to place which, in most men, is a sort of animal instinct, was +with him a passion. To set the imagination at work some emotional +stimulus is required. The angry pride of Byron, Shelley's revolt against +authority, Keats' almost painfully acute sensitiveness to beauty, +supplied the nervous irritation which was wanting in Scott's slower, +stronger, and heavier temperament. The needed impetus came to him from +his love of country. Byron and Shelley were torn up by the roots and +flung abroad, but Scott had struck his roots deep into native soil. His +absorption in the past and reverence for everything that was old, his +conservative prejudices and aristocratic ambitions, all had their source +in this feeling. Scott's Toryism was of a different spring from +Wordsworth's and Coleridge's. It was not a reaction from disappointed +radicalism; nor was it the result of reasoned conviction. It was inborn +and was nursed into a sentimental Jacobitism by ancestral traditions and +by an early prepossession in favour of the Stuarts--a Scottish +dynasty--reinforced by encounters with men in the Highlands who had been +out in the '45. It did not interfere with a practical loyalty to the +reigning house and with what seems like a somewhat exaggerated deference +to George IV. Personally the most modest of men, he was proud to trace +his descent from "auld Wat of Harden" [13] and to claim kinship with the +bold Buccleuch. He used to make annual pilgrimages to Harden Tower, "the +_incunabula_ of his race"; and "in the earlier part of his life," says +Lockhart, "he had nearly availed himself of his kinsman's permission to +fit up the dilapidated _peel_ for his summer residence." + +Byron wrote: "I twine my hope of being remembered in my line with my +land's language." But Scott wished to associate his name with the land +itself. Abbotsford was more to him than Newstead could ever have been to +Byron; although Byron was a peer and inherited his domain, while Scott +was a commoner and created his. Too much has been said in condemnation +of Scott's weakness in this respect; that his highest ambition was to +become a _laird_ and found a family; that he was more gratified when the +King made him a baronet than when the public bought his books, that the +expenses of Abbotsford and the hospitalities which he extended to all +comers wasted his time and finally brought about his bankruptcy. Leslie +Stephen and others have even made merry over Scott's Gothic,[14] +comparing his plaster-of-Paris 'scutcheons and ceilings in imitation of +carved oak with the pinchbeck architecture of Strawberry Hill, and +intimating that the feudalism in his romances was only a shade more +genuine than the feudalism of "The Castle of Otranto." Scott was +imprudent; Abbotsford was his weakness, but it was no ignoble weakness. +If the ideal of the life which he proposed to himself there was scarcely +a heroic one, neither was it vulgar or selfish. The artist or the +philosopher should perhaps be superior to the ambition of owning land and +having "a stake in the country," but the ambition is a very human one and +has its good side. In Scott the desire was more social than personal. +It was not that title and territory were feathers in his cap, but that +they bound him more closely to the dear soil of Scotland and to the +national, historic past. + +The only deep passion in Scott's poetry is patriotism, the passion of +place. In his metrical romances the rush of the narrative and the vivid, +picturesque beauty of the descriptions are indeed exciting to the +imagination; but it is only when the chord of national feeling is touched +that the verse grows lyrical, that the heart is reached, and that tears +come into the reader's eyes, as they must have done into the poet's. A +dozen such passages occur at once to the memory; the last stand of the +Scottish nobles around their king at Flodden; the view of +Edinburgh--"mine own romantic town "--from Blackford Hill; + + "Fitz-Eustace' heart felt closely pent: + As if to give his rapture vent, + The spur he to his charger lent, + And raised his bridle-hand, + And, making demi-volte in air, + Cried, 'Where's the coward that would not dare + To fight for such a land?'" + +and the still more familiar opening of the sixth canto in the +"Lay"--"Breathes there the man," etc.: + + "O Caledonia! stern and wild, + Meet nurse for a poetic child! + Land of brown heath and shaggy wood, + Land of the mountain and the flood, + Land of my sires! what mortal hand + Can e'er untie the filial band + That knits me to thy rugged strand?" + +In such a mood geography becomes poetry and names are music.[15] Scott +said to Washington Irving that if he did not see the heather at least +once a year, he thought he would die. + +Lockhart tells how the sound that he loved best of all sounds was in his +dying ears--the flow of the Tweed over its pebbles. + +Significant, therefore, is Scott's treatment of landscape, and the +difference in this regard between himself and his great contemporaries. +His friend, Mr. Morritt of Rokeby, testifies; "He was but half satisfied +with the most beautiful scenery when he could not connect it with some +local legend." Scott had to the full the romantic love of mountain and +lake, yet "to me," he confesses, "the wandering over the field of +Bannockburn was the source of more exquisite pleasure than gazing upon +the celebrated landscape from the battlements of Stirling Castle. I do +not by any means infer that I was dead to the feeling of picturesque +scenery. . . . But show me an old castle or a field of battle and I was +at home at once." And again: "The love of natural beauty, more +especially when combined with ancient ruins or remains of our fathers' +piety[16] or splendour, became with me an insatiable passion." It was +not in this sense that high mountains were a "passion" to Byron, nor yet +to Wordsworth. In a letter to Miss Seward, Scott wrote of popular +poetry: "Much of its peculiar charm is indeed, I believe, to be +attributed solely to its _locality_. . . . In some verses of that +eccentric but admirable poet Coleridge[17] he talks of + + "'An old rude tale that suited well + The ruins wild and hoary.' + +"I think there are few who have not been in some degree touched with this +local sympathy. Tell a peasant an ordinary tale of robbery and murder, +and perhaps you may fail to interest him; but, to excite his terrors, you +assure him it happened on the very heath he usually crosses, or to a man +whose family he has known, and you rarely meet such a mere image of +humanity as remains entirely unmoved. I suspect it is pretty much the +same with myself." + +Scott liked to feel solid ground of history, or at least of legend, under +his feet. He connected his wildest tales, like "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve +of St. John," with definite names and places. This Antaeus of romance +lost strength, as soon as he was lifted above the earth. With Coleridge +it was just the contrary. The moment his moonlit, vapory enchantments +touched ground, the contact "precipitated the whole solution." In 1813 +Scott had printed "The Bridal of Triermain" anonymously, with a preface +designed to mislead the public; having contrived, by way of a joke, to +fasten the authorship of the piece upon Erskine. This poem is as pure +fantasy as Tennyson's "Day Dream," and tells the story of a knight who, +in obedience to a vision and the instructions of an ancient sage "sprung +from Druid sires," enters an enchanted castle and frees the Princess +Gyneth, a natural daughter of King Arthur, from the spell that has bound +her for five hundred years. But true to his instinct, the poet lays his +scene not _in vacuo_, but near his own beloved borderland. He found, in +Burns' "Antiquities of Westmoreland and Cumberland" mention of a line of +Rolands de Vaux, lords of Triermain, a fief of the barony of Gilsland; +and this furnished him a name for his hero. He found in Hutchinson's +"Excursion to the Lakes" the description of a cluster of rocks in the +Vale of St. John's, which looked, at a distance, like a Gothic castle, +this supplied him with a hint for the whole adventure. Meanwhile +Coleridge had been living in the Lake Country. The wheels of his +"Christabel" had got hopelessly mired, and he now borrowed a horse from +Sir Walter and hitched it to his own wagon. He took over Sir Roland de +Vaux of Triermain and made him the putative father of his mysterious +Geraldine, although, in compliance with Scott's romance, the embassy that +goes over the mountains to Sir Roland's castle can find no trace of it. +In Part I. Sir Leoline's own castle stood nowhere in particular. In Part +II. it is transferred to Cumberland, a mistake in art almost as grave as +if the Ancient Mariner had brought his ship to port at Liverpool. + +Wordsworth visited the "great Minstrel of the Border" at Abbotsford in +1831, shortly before Scott set out for Naples, and the two poets went in +company to the ruins of Newark Castle. It is characteristic that in +"Yarrow Revisited," which commemorates the incident, the Bard of Rydal +should think it necessary to offer an apology for his distinguished +host's habit of romanticising nature--that nature which Wordsworth, +romantic neither in temper nor choice of subject, treated after so +different a fashion. + + "Nor deem that localised Romance + Plays false with our affections; + Unsanctifies our tears--made sport + For fanciful dejections: + Ah no! the visions of the past + Sustain the heart in feeling + Life as she is--our changeful Life, + With friends and kindred dealing." + +The apology, after all, is only half-hearted. For while Wordsworth +esteemed Scott highly and was careful to speak publicly of his work with +a qualified respect, it is well known that, in private, he set little +value upon it, and once somewhat petulantly declared that all Scott's +poetry was not worth sixpence. He wrote to Scott, of "Marmion": "I think +your end has been attained. That it is not the end which I should wish +you to propose to yourself, you will be aware." He had visited Scott at +Lasswade as early as 1803, and in recording his impressions notes that +"his conversation was full of anecdote and averse from disquisition." +The minstrel was a _raconteur_ and lived in the past, the bard was a +moralist and lived in the present. + +There are several poems of Wordsworth's and Scott's touching upon common +ground which serve to contrast their methods sharply and to illustrate in +a striking way the precise character of Scott's romanticism. "Helvellyn" +and "Fidelity" were written independently and celebrate the same +incident. In 1805 a young man lost his way on the Cumberland mountains +and perished of exposure. Three months afterwards his body was found, +his faithful dog still watching beside it. Scott was a lover of +dogs--loved them warmly, individually; so to speak, personally; and all +dogs instinctively loved Scott.[18] + +Wordsworth had a sort of tepid, theoretical benevolence towards the +animal creation in general. Yet as between the two poets, the advantage +in depth of feeling is, as usual, with Wordsworth. Both render, with +perhaps equal power, though in characteristically different ways, the +impression of the austere and desolate grandeur of the mountain scenery. +But the thought to which Wordsworth leads up is the mysterious divineness +of instinct + + ". . . that strength of feeling, great + Above all human estimate:"-- + +while Scott conducts his story to the reflection that Nature has given +the dead man a more stately funeral than the Church could have given, a +comparison seemingly dragged in for the sake of a stanzaful of his +favourite Gothic imagery. + + "When a Prince to the fate of the Peasant has yielded, + The tapestry waves dark round the dim-lighted hall; + With 'scutcheons of silver the coffin is shielded, + And pages stand mute by the canopied pall: + Through the courts at deep midnight the torches are gleaming, + In the proudly arched chapel the banners are beaming, + Far adown the long aisle sacred music is streaming, + Lamenting a chief of the people should fall." + +Wordsworth and Landor, who seldom agreed, agreed that Scott's most +imaginative line was the verse in "Helvellyn": + + "When the wind waved his garment how oft didst thou start!" + +In several of his poems Wordsworth handled legendary subjects, and it is +most instructive here to notice his avoidance of the romantic note, and +to imagine how Scott would have managed the same material. In the +prefatory note to "The White Doe of Rylstone," Wordsworth himself pointed +out the difference. "The subject being taken from feudal times has led +to its being compared to some of Sir Walter Scott's poems that belong to +the same age and state of society. The comparison is inconsiderate. Sir +Walter pursued the customary and very natural course of conducting an +action, presenting various turns of fortune, to some outstanding point on +which the mind might rest as a termination or catastrophe. The course I +attempted to pursue is entirely different. Everything that is attempted +by the principal personages in 'The White Doe' fails, so far as its +object is external and substantial. So far as it is moral and spiritual +it succeeds." + +This poem is founded upon "The Rising in the North," a ballad given in +the "Reliques," which recounts the insurrection of the Earls of +Northumberland and Westmoreland against Elizabeth in 1569. Richard +Norton of Rylstone, with seven stalwart sons, joined in the rising, +carrying a banner embroidered with a red cross and the five wounds of +Christ. The story bristled with opportunities for the display of feudal +pomp, and it is obvious upon what points in the action Scott would have +laid the emphasis; the muster of the tenantry of the great northern +Catholic houses of Percy and Neville; the high mass celebrated by the +insurgents in Durham Cathedral; the march of the Nortons to Brancepeth; +the eleven days' siege of Barden Tower; the capture and execution of +Marmaduke and Ambrose; and--by way of episode--the Battle of Neville's +Cross in 1346.[19] But in conformity to the principle announced in the +preface to the "Lyrical Ballads"--that the feeling should give importance +to the incidents and situation, not the incidents and situation to the +feeling--Wordsworth treats all this outward action as merely preparatory +to the true purpose of his poem, a study of the discipline of sorrow, of +ruin and bereavement patiently endured by the Lady Emily, the only +daughter and survivor of the Norton house. + + "Action is transitory--a step, a blow. . . . + Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, + And has the nature of infinity. + Yet through that darkness (infinite though it seem + And irremoveable) gracious openings lie. . . . + Even to the fountain-head of peace divine." + +With the story of the Nortons the poet connects a local tradition which +he found in Whitaker's "History of the Deanery of Craven"; of a white doe +which haunted the churchyard of Bolton Priory. Between this gentle +creature and the forlorn Lady of Rylstone he establishes the mysterious +and soothing sympathy which he was always fond of imagining between the +soul of man and the things of nature.[20] + +Or take again the "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle," an incident in +the Wars of the Roses. Lord Clifford, who had been hidden away in +infancy from the vengeance of the Yorkists and reared as a shepherd, is +restored to the estates and honours of his ancestors. High in the festal +hall the impassioned minstrel strikes his harp and sings the triumph of +Lancaster, urging the shepherd lord to emulate the warlike prowess of his +forefathers. + + "Armour rusting in his halls + On the blood of Clifford calls; + 'Quell the Scot,' exclaims the Lance-- + Bear me to the heart of France + Is the longing of the Shield." + +Thus far the minstrel, and he has Sir Walter with him; for this is +evidently the part of the poem that he liked and remembered, when he +noted in his journal that "Wordsworth could be popular[21] if he +would--witness the 'Feast at Brougham Castle'--'Song of the Cliffords,' I +think, is the name." But the exultant strain ceases and the poet himself +speaks, and with the transition in feeling comes a change in the verse; +the minstrel's song was in the octosyllabic couplet associated with +metrical romance. But this Clifford was no fighter--none of Scott's +heroes. Nature had educated him. + + "In him the savage virtue of the Race" was dead. + + "Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; + His daily teachers had been woods and rills, + The silence that is in the starry sky, + The sleep that is among the lonely hills." + +Once more, consider the pronounced difference in sentiment between the +description of the chase in "Hartleap Well" and the opening passage of +"The Lady of the Lake": + + "The stag at eve had drunk his fill. + Where danced the moon on Monan's rill," etc.[22] + +Scott was a keen sportsman, and his sympathy was with the hunter.[23] +Wordsworth's, of course, was with the quarry. The knight in his +poem--who bears not unsuggestively the name of "Sir Walter"--has +outstripped all his companions, like Fitz James, and is the only one in +at the death. To commemorate his triumph he frames a basin for the +spring whose waters were stirred by his victim's dying breath; he plants +three stone pillars to mark the creature's hoof-prints in its marvellous +leap from the mountain to the springside; and he builds a pleasure house +and an arbour where he comes with his paramour to make merry in the +summer days. But Nature sets her seal of condemnation upon the cruelty +and vainglory of man. "The spot is curst"; no flowers or grass will grow +there; no beast will drink of the fountain. Part I. tells the story +without enthusiasm but without comment. Part II. draws the lesson + + "Never to blend our pleasure or our pride + With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels." + +The song of Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" derives a pensive sorrow from +"old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago." But to Scott the +battle is not far off, but a vivid and present reality. When he visited +the Trosachs glen, his thought plainly was, "What a place for a fight!" +And when James looks down on Loch Katrine his first reflection is, "What +a scene were here . . . + + "For princely pomp or churchman's pride! + On this bold brow a lordly tower; + In that soft vale a lady's bower; + On yonder meadow, far away, + The turrets of a cloister grey," etc. + +The most romantic scene was not romantic enough for Scott till his +imagination had peopled it with the life of a vanished age. + +The literary forms which Scott made peculiarly his own, and in which the +greater part of his creative work was done, are three: the popular +ballad, the metrical romance, and the historical novel in prose. His +point of departure was the ballad.[24] The material amassed in his +Liddesdale "raids"--begun in 1792 and continued for seven successive +years--was given to the world in the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border" +(Vols. I. and II. in 1802; Vol. III. in 1803), a collection of ballads +historical, legendary, and romantic, with an abundant apparatus in the +way of notes and introductions, illustrating the history, antiquities, +manners, traditions, and superstitions of the Borderers. Forty-three of +the ballads in the "Minstrelsy" had never been printed before; and of the +remainder the editor gave superior versions, choosing with sureness of +taste the best among variant readings, and with a more intimate knowledge +of local ways and language than any previous ballad-fancier had +commanded. He handled his texts more faithfully than Percy, rarely +substituting lines of his own. "From among a hundred corruptions," says +Lockhart, "he seized, with instinctive tact, the primitive diction and +imagery, and produced strains in which the unbroken energy of +half-civilised ages, their stern and deep passions, their daring +adventures and cruel tragedies, and even their rude wild humour are +reflected with almost the brightness of a Homeric mirror." + +In the second volume of the "Minstrelsy" were included what Scott calls +his "first serious attempts in verse," viz., "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of +St. John," which had been already printed in Lewis' "Tales of Wonder." +Both pieces are purely romantic, with a strong tincture of the +supernatural; but the first--Scott himself draws the distinction--is a +"legendary poem," and the second alone a proper "ballad." +"Glenfinlas," [25] founded on a Gaelic legend, tells how a Highland +chieftain while hunting in Perthshire, near the scene of "The Lady of the +Lake," is lured from his bothie at night and torn to pieces by evil +spirits. There is no attempt here to preserve the language of popular +poetry; stanzas abound in a diction of which the following is a fair +example: + + "Long have I sought sweet Mary's heart, + And dropp'd the tear and heaved the sigh: + But vain the lover's wily art + Beneath a sister's watchful eye." + +"The Eve of St. John" employs common ballad stuff, the visit of a +murdered lover's ghost to his lady's bedside-- + + "At the lone midnight hour, when bad spirits have power"-- + +but the poet, as usual, anchors his weird nightmares firmly to real names +and times and places, Dryburgh Abbey, the black rood of Melrose, the +Eildon-tree, the bold Buccleuch, and the Battle of Ancram Moor (1545). +The exact scene of the tragedy is Smailholme Tower, the ruined keep on +the crags above his grandfather's farm at Sandynowe, which left such an +indelible impression on Scott's childish imagination.[26] "The Eve" is +in ballad style and verse: + + "Thou liest, thou liest, thou little foot page, + Loud dost thou lie to me! + For that knight is cold, and low laid in the mould, + All under the Eildon tree." + +In his "Essay on the Imitation of Popular Poetry," Scott showed that he +understood the theory of ballad composition. When he took pains, he +could catch the very manner as well as the spirit of ancient minstrelsy; +but if his work is examined under the microscope it is easy to detect +flaws. The technique of the Pre-Raphaelites and other modern balladists, +like Rossetti and Morris, is frequently finer, they reproduce more +scrupulously the formal characteristics of popular poetry: the burden, +the sing-song repetitions, the quaint turns of phrase, the imperfect +rimes, the innocent, childlike air of the mediaeval tale-tellers. +Scott's vocabulary is not consistently archaic, and he was not always +careful to avoid locutions out of keeping with the style of +_Volkspoesie_.[27] He was by no means a rebel against eighteenth-century +usages.[28] In his prose he is capable of speaking of a lady as an +"elegant female." In his poetry he will begin a ballad thus: + + "The Pope he was saying the high, high mass + All on St. Peter's day"; + +and then a little later fall into this kind of thing: + + "There the rapt poet's step may rove, + And yield the muse the day: + There Beauty, led by timid Love, + May shun the tell-tale ray," etc.[29] + +It is possible to name single pieces like "The Ancient Mariner," and "La +Belle Dame sans Merci," and "Rose-Mary," of a rarer imaginative quality +and a more perfect workmanship than Scott often attains; yet upon the +whole and in the mass, no modern balladry matches the success of his. +The Pre-Raphaelites were deliberate artists, consciously reproducing an +extinct literary form; but Scott had lived himself back into the social +conditions out of which ballad poetry was born. His best pieces of this +class do not strike us as imitations but as original, spontaneous, and +thoroughly alive. Such are, to particularise but a few, "Jock o' +Hazeldean," "Cadyow Castle," on the assassination of the Regent Murray; +"The Reiver's Wedding," a fragment preserved in Lockhart's "Life"; +"Elspeth's Ballad" ("The Red Harlow") in "The Antiquary"; Madge +Wildfire's songs in "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," and David Gellatley's in +"Waverley"; besides the other scraps and snatches of minstrelsy too +numerous for mention, sown through the novels and longer poems. For in +spite of detraction, Walter Scott remains one of the foremost British +lyrists. In Mr. Palgrave's "Treasury" he is represented by a larger +number of selections than either Milton, Byron, Burns, Campbell, Keats, +or Herrick; making an easy fourth to Wordsworth, Shakspere, and Shelley. +And in marked contrast with Shelley especially, it is observable of +Scott's contributions to this anthology that they are not the utterance +of the poet's personal emotion; they are coronachs, pibrochs, gathering +songs, narrative ballads, and the like--objective, dramatic lyrics +touched always with the light of history or legend. + +The step from ballad to ballad-epic is an easy one, and it was by a +natural evolution that the one passed into the other in Scott's hands. +"The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805) was begun as a ballad on the local +tradition of Gilpin Horner and at the request of the Countess of +Dalkeith, who told Scott the story. But his imagination was so full that +the poem soon overflowed its limits and expanded into a romance +illustrative of the ancient manners of the Border. The pranks of the +goblin page run in and out through the web of the tale, a slender and +somewhat inconsequential thread of _diablerie_. Byron had his laugh at +it in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers";[30] and in a footnote on the +passage, he adds: "Never was any plan so incongruous and absurd as the +groundwork of this production." The criticism was not altogether +undeserved; for the "Lay" is a typical example of romantic, as +distinguished from classic, art both in its strength and in its weakness; +brilliant in passages, faulty in architechtonic, and uneven in execution. +Its supernatural machinery--Byron said that it had more "gramarye" than +grammar--is not impressive, if due exception be made of the opening of +Michael Scott's tomb in Canto Second. + +When the "Minstrelsy" was published, it was remarked that it "contained +the elements of a hundred historical romances." It was from such +elements that Scott built up the structure of his poem about the nucleus +which the Countess of Dalkeith had given him. He was less concerned, as +he acknowledged, to tell a coherent story than to paint a picture of the +scenery and the old warlike life of the Border; that _tableau large de la +vie_ which the French romanticists afterwards professed to be the aim of +their novels and dramas. The feud of the Scotts and Carrs furnished him +with a historic background; with this he enwove a love story of the Romeo +and Juliet pattern. He rebuilt Melrose Abbey, and showed it by +moonlight; set Lords Dacre and Howard marching on a Warden-raid, and +roused the border clans to meet them; threw out dramatic character +sketches of "stark moss-riding Scots" like Wat Tinlinn and William of +Deloraine; and finally enclosed the whole in a _cadre_ most happily +invented, the venerable, pathetic figure of the old minstrel who tells +the tale to the Duchess of Monmouth at Newark Castle. + +The love story is perhaps the weakest part of the poem. Henry Cranstoun +and Margaret of Branksome are nothing but lay figures. Scott is always a +little nervous when the lover and the lady are left alone together. The +fair dames in the audience expect a tender scene, but the harper pleads +his age, by way of apology, gets the business over as decently as may be, +and hastens on with comic precipitation to the fighting, which he +thoroughly enjoys.[31] + +The "light-horseman stanza" which Scott employed in his longer poems was +caught from the recitation by Sir John Stoddart of a portion of +Coleridge's "Christabel," then still in manuscript. The norm of the +verse was the eight-syllabled riming couplet used in most of the English +metrical romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is a +form of verse which moves more swiftly than blank verse or the heroic +couplet, and is perhaps better suited for romantic poetry.[32] But it is +liable to grow monotonous in a long poem, and Coleridge's unsurpassed +skill as a metrist was exerted to give it freedom, richness, and variety +by the introduction of anapaestic lines and alternate rimes and triplets, +breaking up the couplets into a series of irregular stanzas. + +With "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" romanticism came of age and entered +on its career of triumph. One wishes that Collins and Tom Warton might +have lived to hail it as the light, at last, towards which they had +struggled through the cold obstruction of the eighteenth century. One +fancies Dr. Johnson's disgust over this new Scotch monstrosity, which had +every quality that he disliked except blank verse; or Gray's delight in +it, tempered by a critical disapproval of its loose construction and +irregularity. Scott's romances in prose and verse are still so +universally known as to make any review of them here individually an +impertinence. Their impact on contemporary Europe was instantaneous and +wide-spread. There is no record elsewhere in literary history of such +success. Their immense sales, the innumerable editions and translations +and imitations of them, are matters of familiar knowledge. Poem followed +poem, and novel, novel in swift and seemingly exhaustless succession, and +each was awaited by the public with unabated expectancy. Here once more +was a poet who could tell the world a story that it wanted to hear; a poet + + "Such as it had + In the ages glad, + Long ago." + +The Homeric[33] quality which criticism has attributed or denied to these +poems is really there. The difference, the inferiority is obvious of +course. They are not in the grand style; they are epic on a lower plane, +ballad-epic, bastard-epic perhaps, but they are epic. No English verse +narrative except Chaucer's ranks, as a whole, above Scott's. Chaucer's +disciple, William Morris, has an equal flow and continuity, and keeps a +more even level of style; but his story-telling is languid compared with +Scott's. The latter is greater in the dynamic than in the static +department--in scenes of rapid action and keen excitement. His show +passages are such as the fight in the Trosachs, Flodden Field, William of +Deloraine's ride to Melrose, the trial of Constance, the muster on the +Borough Moor, Marmion's defiance to Douglas, the combat of James and +Roderick Dhu, the summons of the fiery cross, and the kindling of the +need-fires--those romantic equivalents of the lampadephoroi in the +"Agamemnon." + +In the series of long poems which followed the "Lay," Scott deserted the +Border and brought in new subjects of romantic interest, the traditions +of Flodden and Bannockburn, the manners of the Gaelic clansmen, and the +wild scenery of the Perthshire Highlands, the life of the Western +Islands, and the rugged coasts of Argyle. Only two of these tales are +concerned with the Middle Ages, strictly speaking: "The Lord of the +Isles" (1813), in which the action begins in 1307; and "Harold the +Dauntless" (1817), in which the period is the time of the Danish +settlements in Northumbria. "Rokeby" (1812) is concerned with the Civil +War. The scene is laid in Yorkshire, "Marmion" (1808), and "The Lady of +the Lake" (1810), like "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," had to do with the +sixteenth century, but the poet imported mediaeval elements into all of +these by the frankest anachronisms. He restored St. Hilda's Abbey and +the monastery at Lindisfarne, which had been in ruins for centuries, and +peopled them again with monks and nuns, He revived in De Wilton the +figure of the palmer and the ancient custom of pilgrimage to Palestine. +And he transferred "the wondrous wizard, Michael Scott" from the +thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth. But, indeed, the state +of society in Scotland might be described as mediaeval as late as the +middle of the sixteenth century. It was still feudal, and in great part +Catholic. Particularly in the turbulent Borderland, a rude spirit of +chivalry and a passion for wild adventure lingered among the Eliots, +Armstrongs, Kerrs, Rutherfords, Homes, Johnstons, and other marauding +clans, who acknowledged no law but march law, and held slack allegiance +to "the King of Lothian and Fife." Every owner of a half-ruinous "peel" +or border keep had a band of retainers within call, like the +nine-and-twenty knights of fame who hung their shields in Branksome Hall; +and he could summon them at short notice, for a raid upon the English or +a foray against some neighbouring proprietor with whom he was at feud. + +But the literary form under which Scott made the deepest impression upon +the consciousness of his own generation and influenced most permanently +the future literature of Europe, was prose fiction. As the creator of +the historical novel and the ancestor of Kingsley, Ainsworth, Bulwer, and +G. P. R. James; of Manzoni, Freytag, Hugo, Merimee, Dumas, Alexis +Tolstoi, and a host of others, at home and abroad, his example is potent +yet. English fiction is directly or indirectly in his debt for "Romola," +"Hypatia," "Henry Esmond," and "The Cloister and the Hearth." In several +countries the historical novel had been trying for centuries to get +itself born, but all its attempts had been abortive. "Waverley" is not +only vastly superior to "Thaddeus of Warsaw" (1803) and "The Scottish +Chiefs" (1809); it is something quite different in kind.[34] The +Waverley Novels, twenty-nine in number, appeared in the years 1814-31. +The earlier numbers of the series, "Waverley," "Guy Mannering," "The +Antiquary," "Old Mortality," "The Black Dwarf," "Rob Roy," "The Heart of +Mid-Lothian," "The Bride of Lammermoor," and "A Legend of Montrose," were +Scotch romances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In +"Ivanhoe" (1819) the author went to England for his scene, and back to +the twelfth century for his period. Thenceforth he ranged over a wide +region in time and space; Elizabethan England ("Kenilworth"), the France +and Switzerland of Louis XI. and Charles the Bold ("Quentin Durward" and +"Anne of Geierstein"), Constantinople and Syria ("Count Robert of Paris," +"The Betrothed," and "The Talisman") in the age of the Crusades. The +fortunes of the Stuarts, interested him specially and engaged him in +"Woodstock," "The Fortunes of Nigel," "The Monastery," and its sequel, +"The Abbot." He seems to have had, in the words of Mr. R. H. Hutton, +"something very like personal experience of a few centuries." + +Scott's formula for the construction of a historical romance was original +with himself, and it has been followed by all his successors. His story +is fictitious, his hero imaginary. Richard I. is not the hero of +"Ivanhoe," nor Louis XI. of "Quentin Durward." Shakspere dramatised +history; Scott romanticised it. Still it is history, the private story +is swept into the stream of large public events, the fate of the lover or +the adventurer is involved with battles and diplomacies, with the rise +and fall of kings, dynasties, political parties, nations. Stevenson +says, comparing Fielding with Scott, that "in the work of the +latter . . . we become suddenly conscious of the background. . . . It +is curious enough to think that 'Tom Jones' is laid in the year '45, and +that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of +soldiers in his hero's way." [35] And it is this background which is, +after all, the important thing in Scott--the leading impression; the +broad canvas, the swarm of life, the spirit of the age, the +reconstitution of an extinct society. This he was able to give with +seeming ease and without any appearance of "cram." Chronicle matter does +not lie about in lumps on the surface of his romance, but is decently +buried away in the notes. In his comments on "Queenhoo Hall" he adverts +to the danger of a pedantic method, and in his "Journal" (October 18th, +1826) he writes as follows of his own numerous imitators: "They have to +read old books and consult antiquarian collections, to get their +knowledge. I write because I have long since read such works and +possess, thanks to a strong memory, the information which they have to +seek for. This leads to a dragging in historical details by head and +shoulders, so that the interest of the main piece is lost in minute +description of events which do not affect its progress." + +Of late the recrudescence of the historical novel has revived the +discussion as to the value of the _genre_. It may be readily admitted +that Scott's best work is realistic, and is to be looked for in such +novels as "The Antiquary," "Old Mortality," "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," +and in characters like Andrew Fairservice, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, Dandie +Dinmont, Dugald Dalgetty, Jeanie Deans, Edie Ochiltrie, which brought +into play his knowledge of men, his humour, observation of life, and +insight into Scotch human nature. Scott knew these people; he had to +divine James I., Louis XI., and Mary Stuart. The historical novel is a +_tour de force_. Exactly how knights-templars, burgomasters, friars, +Saracens, and Robin Hood archers talked and acted in the twelfth century, +we cannot know. But it is just because they are strange to our +experience that they are dear to our imagination. The justification of +romance is its unfamiliarity--"strangeness added to beauty"--"the +pleasure of surprise" as distinguished from "the pleasure of +recognition." Again and again realism returns to the charge and demands +of art that it give us the present and the actual; and again and again +the imagination eludes the demand and makes an ideal world for itself in +the blue distance. + +Two favourite arts, or artifices, of all romantic schools, are "local +colour" and "the picturesque." "Vers l'an de grace 1827," writes Prosper +Merimee, "j'etais _romantique_. Nous disions aux _classiques_; vos Grecs +ne sont pas des Grecs, vos Romains ne sont pas des Romains; vous ne savez +pas donner a vos compositions la _couleur locale_. Point de salut sans +la _couleur locale_." [36] + +As to the picturesque--a word that connotes, in its critical uses, some +quality in the objects of sense which strikes us as at once novel, and +characteristic in its novelty--while by no means the highest of literary +arts, it is a perfectly legitimate one.[37] Crecy is not, at bottom, a +more interesting battle than Gettysburg because it was fought with bows +and arrows, but it is more picturesque to the modern imagination just for +that reason. Why else do the idiots in "MacArthur's Hymn" complain that +"steam spoils romance at sea"? Why did Ruskin lament when the little +square at the foot of Giotto's Tower in Florence was made a stand for +hackney coaches? Why did our countryman Halleck at Alnwick Towers resent +the fact that "the Percy deals in salt and hides, the Douglas sells red +herring"? And why does the picturesque tourist, in general, object to +the substitution of naphtha launches for gondolas on the Venetian canals? +Perhaps because the more machinery is interposed between man and the +thing he works on, the more impersonal becomes his relation to nature. + +Carlyle, in his somewhat grudging estimate of Scott, declares that "much +of the interest of these novels results from contrasts of costume. The +phraseology, fashion of arms, of dress, of life belonging to one age is +brought suddenly with singular vividness before the eyes of another. A +great effect this; yet by the very nature of it an altogether temporary +one. Consider, brethren, shall not we too one day be antiques and grow +to have as quaint a costume as the rest? . . . Not by slashed breeches, +steeple hats, buff belts, or antiquated speech can romance-heroes +continue to interest us; but simply and solely, in the long run, by being +_men_. Buff belts and all manner of jerkins and costumes are transitory; +man alone is perennial." [38] Carlyle's dissatisfaction with Scott +arises from the fact that he was not a missionary nor a transcendental +philosopher, but simply a teller of stories. Heine was not troubled in +the same way, but he made the identical criticism, "Like the works of +Walter Scott, so also do Fouque's romances of chivalry[40] remind us of +the fantastic tapestries known as Gobelins, whose rich texture and +brilliant colors are more pleasing to our eyes than edifying to our +souls. We behold knightly pageantry, shepherds engaged in festive +sports, hand-to-hand combats, and ancient customs, charmingly +intermingled. It is all very pretty and picturesque, but shallow; +brilliant superficiality. Among the imitators of Fouque, as among the +imitators of Walter Scott, this mannerism of portraying--not the inner +nature of men and things, but merely the outward garb and appearance--was +carried to still greater extremes. This shallow art and frivolous style +is still [1833] in vogue in Germany as well as in England and +France. . . . In lieu of a knowledge of mankind, our recent novelists +evince a profound acquaintance with clothes." [39] + +Elsewhere Heine acknowledges a deeper reason for the popularity of the +Scotch novels. "Their theme . . . is the mighty sorrow for the loss of +national peculiarities swallowed up in the universality of the newer +culture--a sorrow which is now throbbing in the hearts of all peoples. +For national memories lie deeper in the human breast than is generally +thought." But whatever rank may be ultimately assigned to the historical +novel as an art form, Continental critics are at one with the British in +crediting its invention to Scott. "It is an error," says Heine, "not to +recognise Walter Scott as the founder of the so-called historical +romance, and to endeavour to trace it to German imitation." He adds that +Scott was a Protestant, a lawyer and a Scotchman, accustomed to action +and debate, in whose works the aristocratic and democratic elements are +in wholesome balance; "whereas our German romanticists eliminated the +democratic element entirely from their novels, and returned to the ruts +of those crazy romances of knight-errantry that flourished before +Cervantes." [41] "Quel est Fouvrage litteraire," asks Stendhal in +1823,[42] "qui a le plus reussi en France depuis dix ans? Les romans de +Walter Scott. . . . On s'est moque a Paris pendant vingt ans du roman +historique; l'Academie a prouve doctement le ridicule de ce genre; nous y +croyions tous, lorsque Walter Scott a paru, son Waverley a la main; et +Balantyne, son libraire vient de mourir millionaire." [43] + +Lastly the service of the Waverley Novels to history was an important +one. Palgrave says that historical fiction is the mortal enemy of +history, and Leslie Stephen adds that it is also the enemy of fiction. +In a sense both sayings are true. Scott was not always accurate as to +facts and sinned freely against chronology. But he rescued a wide realm +from cold oblivion and gave it back to human consciousness and sympathy. +It is treating the past more kindly to misrepresent it in some +particulars, than to leave it a blank to the imagination. The +eighteenth-century historians were incurious of life. Their spirit was +general and abstract; they were in search of philosophical formulas. +Gibbon covers his subject with a lava-flood of stately rhetoric which +stiffens into a uniform stony coating over the soft surface of life. +Scott is primarily responsible for that dramatic, picturesque treatment +of history which we find in Michelet and Carlyle. "These historical +novels," testifies Carlyle, "have taught all men this truth, which looks +like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and +others, till so taught; that the bygone ages of the world were actually +filled by living men, not by protocols, state papers, controversies, and +abstractions of men. . . . It is a great service, fertile in +consequences, this that Scott has done; a great truth laid open by +him." [44] In France, too, historians like Barante and Augustin Thierry, +were Scott's professed disciples. The latter confesses, in a well-known +passage, that "Ivanhoe" was the inspirer of his "Conquete d'Angleterre," +and styles the novelist "le plus grand maitre qu'il y ait jamais eu en +fait de divination historique." [45] + +Scott apprehended the Middle Ages on their spectacular, and more +particularly, their military side. He exhibits their large, showy +aspects: battles, processions, hunts, feasts in hall, tourneys,[46] +sieges, and the like. The motley mediaeval world swarms in his pages, +from the king on his throne down to the jester with his cap and bells. +But it was the outside of it that he saw; the noise, bustle, colour, +stirring action that delighted him. Into its spiritualities he did not +penetrate far; its scholasticisms, strange casuistries, shuddering +faiths, grotesque distortions of soul, its religious mysticisms, +asceticisms, agonies; the ecstactic reveries of the cloister, terrors of +hell, and visions of paradise. It was the literature of the knight, not +of the monk, that appealed to him. He felt the awfulness and the beauty +of Gothic sacred architecture and of Catholic ritual. The externalities +of the mediaeval church impressed him, whatever was picturesque in its +ceremonies or august in its power. He pictured effectively such scenes +as the pilgrimage to Melrose in the "Lay"; the immuring of the renegade +nun in "Marmion"; the trial of Rebecca for sorcery by the Grand Master of +the Temple in "Ivanhoe." Ecclesiastical figures abound in his pages, +jolly friars, holy hermits, lordly prelates, grim inquisitors, abbots, +priors, and priests of all descriptions, but all somewhat conventional +and viewed _ab extra_. He could not draw a saint.[47] Significant, +therefore, is his indifference to Dante, the poet _par excellence_ of the +Catholic Middle Age, the epitomizer of mediaeval thought. "The plan" of +the "Divine Comedy," "appeared to him unhappy; the personal malignity and +strange mode of revenge presumptuous and uninteresting." Scott's genius +was antipathetic to Dante's; and he was as incapable of taking a lasting +imprint from his intense, austere, and mystical spirit, as from the +nebulous gloom of the Ossianic poetry. Though conservative, he was not +reactionary after the fashion of the German "throne-and-altar" +romanticists, but remained always a good Church of England man and an +obstinate opponent of Catholic emancipation.[48] "Creeds are data in his +novels," says Bagehot; "people have different creeds but each keeps his +own." + +Scott's interest in popular superstitions was constant. As a young +man--in his German ballad period--they affected his imagination with a +"pleasing horror." But as he grew older, they engaged him less as a poet +than as a student of _Cultur geschichte_. + +A wistful sense of the beauty of these old beliefs--a rational smile at +their absurdity--such is the tone of his "Letters on Demonology and +Witchcraft" (1830), a passage or two from which will give his attitude +very precisely; an attitude, it will be seen, which is after all not so +very different from Addison's, allowing for the distance in time and +place, and for Scott's livelier imagination.[49] Scott had his laugh at +Mrs. Radcliffe, and in his reviews of Hoffmann's "Tales" and Maturin's +"Fatal Revenge" [50] he insists upon the delicacy with which the +supernatural must be treated in an age of disbelief. His own management +of such themes, however, though much superior to Walpole's or Mrs. +Radcliffe's, has not the subtle art of Coleridge. The White Lady of +Avenel, _e.g._, in "The Abbot," is a notorious failure. There was too +much daylight in his imagination for spectres to be quite at home. "The +shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses"; the "night side of things"; +the real shudder are not there, as in Hawthorne or in Poe. Walter +Pater[51] says that Meinhold's "Amber Witch" has more of the true +romantic spirit than Tieck, who was its professional representative. On +the contrary, it has less of the romantic spirit, but more of the +mediaeval fact. It is a literal, realistic handling of the witch +superstition, as Balzac's "Succube," in the "Contes Drolatiques" is a +satirical version of similar material. But Tieck's "Maerchen" are the +shadows thrown by mediaeval beliefs across a sensitive, modern +imagination, and are in result, therefore, romantic. Scott's dealing +with subjects of the kind is midway between Meinhold and Tieck. He does +not blink the ugly, childish, stupid, and cruel features of popular +superstition, but throws the romantic glamour over them, precisely as he +does over his "Charlie over the water" Jacobites.[52] + +Again Scott's apprehension of the spirit of chivalry, though less +imperfect than his apprehension of the spirit of mediaeval Catholicism, +was but partial. Of the themes which Ariosto sang-- + + "Le donne, i cavalier, l'arme, gli amori, + Le cortesie, l'audaci imprese io canto"-- + +the northern Ariosto sang bravely the _arme_ and the _audaci imprese_; +less confidently the _amori_ and the _cortesie_. He could sympathise +with the knight-errant's high sense of honour and his love of bold +emprise; not so well with his service of dames. Mediaeval courtship or +"love-drurye," the trembling self-abasement of the lover before his lady, +the fantastic refinements and excesses of gallantry, were alien to +Scott's manly and eminently practical turn of mind. It is hardly +possible to fancy him reading the "Roman de la Rose" with patience--he +thought "Troilus and Creseyde" tedious, which Rossetti pronounces the +finest of English love poems; or selecting for treatment the story of +Heloise or Tristram and Iseult, or of "Le Chevalier de la Charette"; or +such a typical mediaeval life as that of Ulrich von Liechtenstein.[53] +These were quite as truly beyond his sphere as a church legend like the +life of Saint Margaret or the quest of the Sangreal. In the "Talisman" +he praises in terms only less eloquent than Burke's famous words, "that +wild spirit of chivalry which, amid its most extravagant and fantastic +nights, was still pure from all selfish alloy--generous, devoted, and +perhaps only thus far censurable, that it proposed objects and courses of +action inconsistent with the frailties and imperfections of man." In +"Ivanhoe," too, there is something like a dithyrambic lament over the +decay of knighthood--"The 'scutcheons have long mouldered from the +walls," etc.; but even here, enthusiasm is tempered by good sense, and +Richard of the Lion Heart is described as an example of the "brilliant +but useless character of a knight of romance." All this is but to say +that the picture of the Middle Age which Scott painted was not complete. +Still it was more nearly complete than has yet been given by any other +hand; and the artist remains, in Stevenson's phrase, "the king of the +Romantics." + + + +APPENDIX A. + +"Jamais homme de genie n'a eu l'honneur et le bonheur d'etre imite par +plus d'hommes de genie, si tous les grands ecrivains de l'epoque +romantique depuis Victor Hugo jusqu'a Balzac et depuis Alfred de Vigny +jusqu'a Merimee, lui doivent tous et se sont tous glorifies de lui devoir +quelque chose. . . . Il doit nous suffire pour l'instant d'affirmer que +l'influence de Walter Scott est a la racine meme des grandes oeuvres qui +ont donne au nouveau genre tant d'eclat dans notre litterature; que c'est +elle qui les a inspirees, suscitees, fait eclore; que sans lui nous +n'aurions ni 'Hans d'Islande,' ni 'Cinq-Mars,' ni 'Les Chouans,' ni la +'Chronique de Charles IX.,' ni 'Notre Dame de Paris,' . . . Ce n'est +rien moins que le romantisme lui-meme dont elle a hate l'incubation, +facilite l'eclosion, aide le developpement."--MAIGRON, "Le Roman +Historique," p. 143. + +"Il nous faut d'abord constater que c'est veritablement de Walter Scott, +et de Walter Scott seul, que commence cette fureur des choses du moyen +age, cette manie de couleur locale qui sevit avec tant d'intensite +quelque temps avant et longtemps apres 1830, et donc qu'il reste, au +moins pour ce qui est de la description, le principal initiateur de la +generation nouvelle. Sans doute et de toute part, cette resurrection du +moyen age etait des long-temps preparee. Le 'Genie du Christianisme,' le +'Cours de litterature dramatique' de Schlegel, l''Allemagne' de Mme. de +Stael avaient fait des moeurs chretiennes et chevaleresques le fondement +et la condition de renouvellement de l'art francais. Et, en effet, des +1802, le moyen age etait decouvert, la cathedrale gothique restauree, +l'art chretien remis a la place eminente d'ou il aurait fallu ne jamais +le laisser choir. Mais ou sont les oeuvres executees d'apres ce modele +et ces principes? S'il est facile d'apercevoir et de determiner la +cathedrale religieuse de Chateaubriand, est il donc si aise de distinguer +sa cathedrale poetique? . . . Un courant vigoureux, que le 'Genie du +Christianisme' et les 'Martyrs' ont puissamment contribue a determiner, +fait deriver les imaginations vers les choses gothiques; volontiers, +l'esprit francais se retourne alors vers le passe comme vers la seule +source de poesie; et voici qu'un etranger vient se faire son guide et +fait miroiter, devant tous les yeux eblouis, la fantasmagorie du moyen +age, donjons et creneaux, cuirasses et belles armures, haquenees et +palefrois, chevaliers resplendissants et mignonnes et delicates +chatelaines. . . . Sur ses traces, on se precipita avec furie dans la +voie qu'il venait subitement d'elargir. Ce moyen age, jusqu'a lui si +convoite et si infecond, devinait enfin une source inepuisable d'emotions +et de productions artistiques. La 'cathedrale' etait bien restauree +cette fois. Elle le fut meme trop, et borda trop obstinement tous les +sentiers litteraires. Mais de cet exces, si vite fatigant, c'est Walter +Scott et non Chateaubriand, quoi qu'il en ait pu dire, qui reste le grand +coupable. Il fit plus que decouvrir le moyen age; il le mit a la mode +parmi les Francais."--_Ibid_., pp. 195 _ff_. + + + +APPENDIX B. + +"The magical touch and the sense of mystery and all the things that are +associated with the name romance, when that name is applied to 'The +Ancient Mariner,' or 'La Belle Dame sans Merci,' or 'The Lady of +Shalott,' are generally absent from the most successful romances of the +great mediaeval romantic age. . . . The true romantic interest is very +unequally distributed over the works of the Middle Ages, and there is +least of it in the authors who are most representative of the 'age of +chivalry.' There is a disappointment prepared for any one who looks in +the greater romantic authors of the twelfth century for the music of 'The +Faery Queene' or 'La Belle Dame sans Merci.' . . . The greater authors +of the twelfth century have more affinity to the 'heroic romance' of the +school of the 'Grand Cyrus' than to the dreams of Spenser or +Coleridge. . . . The magic that is wanting to the clear and elegant +narrative of Benoit and Chrestien will be found elsewhere; it will be +found in one form in the mystical prose of the 'Queste del St. Graal'--a +very different thing from Chrestien's 'Perceval'--it will be found, again +and again, in the prose of Sir Thomas Malory; it will be found in many +ballads and ballad burdens, in 'William and Margaret,' in 'Binnorie,' in +the 'Wife of Usher's Well,' in the 'Rime of the Count Arnaldos,' in the +'Koenigskinder'; it will be found in the most beautiful story of the +Middle Ages, 'Aucassin and Nicolette,' one of the few perfectly beautiful +stories in the world."--"Epic and Romance," W. P. Ker, London, 1897, p. +371 _ff_. + + +[1] Scott's translations from the German are considered in the author's +earlier volume, "A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth +Century." Incidental mention of Scott occurs throughout the same volume; +and a few of the things there said are repeated, in substance though not +in form, in the present chapter. It seemed better to risk some +repetition than to sacrifice fulness of treatment here. + +[2] "The Development of the English Novel," by Wilbur L. Cross, p. 131. + +[3] Vol. i., p. 300. + +[4] The sixth canto of the "Lay" closes with a few lines translated from +the "Dies Irae" and chanted by the monks in Melrose Abbey. + +[5] Vol. i., pp. 389-404. + +[6] Vol. i., pp. 48-49. + +[7] "Scott was entirely incapable of entering into the spirit of any +classical scene. He was strictly a Goth and a Scot, and his sphere of +sensation may be almost exactly limited by the growth of +heather."--Ruskin, "Modern Painters," vol. iii., p. 317. + +[8] "Marmion": Introduction to Canto third. In the preface to "The +Bridal of Triermain," the poet says: "According to the author's idea of +Romantic Poetry, as distinguished from Epic, the former comprehends a +fictitious narrative, framed and combined at the pleasure of the writer; +beginning and ending as he may judge best; which neither exacts nor +refuses the use of supernatural machinery; which is free from the +technical rules of the _Epee_. . . . In a word, the author is absolute +master of his country and its inhabitants." + +[9] Scott's ascription of "Sir Tristram" to Thomas the Rhymer, or Thomas +of Erceldoune, was doubtless a mistake. His edition of the romance was +printed in 1804. In 1800 he had begun a prose tale, "Thomas the Rhymer," +a fragment of which is given in the preface to the General Edition of the +Waverley Novels (1829). This old legendary poet and prophet, who +flourished _circa_ 1280, and was believed to have been carried off by the +Queen of Faerie into Eildon Hill, fascinated Scott's imagination +strongly. See his version of the "True Thomas'" story in the +"Minstrelsy," as also the editions of this very beautiful romance in +Child's "Ballads," in the publications of the E. E. Text So.; and by +Alois Brandl, Berlin: 1880. + +[10] See vol. i., p. 390. + +[11] See the General Preface to the Waverley Novels for some remarks on +"Queenhoo Hall" which Strutt began and Scott completed. + +[12] _Cf._ vol. i., p. 344. + +[13] "I am therefore descended from that ancient chieftain whose name I +have made to ring in many a ditty, and from his fair dame, the Flower of +Yarrow--no bad genealogy for a Border minstrel." + +[14] "He neither cared for painting nor sculpture, and was totally +incapable of forming a judgment about them. He had some confused love of +Gothic architecture because it was dark, picturesque, old and like +nature; but could not tell the worst from the best, and built for himself +probably the most incongruous and ugly pile that gentlemanly modernism +ever devised."--Ruskin. "Modern Painters," vol. iii., p. 271. + +[15] See vol. i., p. 200. + +[16] The _Abbey_ of Tintern was irrelevant to Wordsworth.--Herford. "The +Age of Wordsworth," Int., p. xx. + +[17] "Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious, +opposites in this:--that every old ruin, hill, river or tree called up in +his mind a host of historical or biographical associations; . . . +whereas, for myself . . . I believe I should walk over the plain of +Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of +similar features."--Coleridge, "Table Talk," August 4, 1833. + +[18] See the delightful anecdote preserved by Carlyle about the little +Blenheim cocker who hated the "genus acrid-quack" and formed an immediate +attachment to Sir Walter. Wordsworth was far from being an acrid quack, +or even a solemn prig--another genus hated of dogs--but there was +something a little unsympathetic in his personality. The dalesmen liked +poor Hartley Coleridge better. + +[19] Scott could scarcely have forborne to introduce the figure of the +Queen of Scots, to insure whose marriage with Norfolk was one of the +objects of the rising. + +[20] For a full review of "The White Doe" the reader should consult +Principal Shairp's "Aspects of Poetry," 1881. + +[21] Scott averred that Wordsworth offended public taste on system. + +[22] This is incomparable, not only as a masterpiece of romantic +narrative, but for the spirited and natural device by which the hero is +conducted to his adventure. R. L. Stevenson and other critics have been +rather hard upon Scott's defects as an artist. He was indeed no stylist: +least of all a _precieux_. There are no close-set mosaics in his +somewhat slip-shod prose, and he did not seek for the right word "with +moroseness," like Landor. But, in his large fashion, he was skilful in +inventing impressive effects. Another instance is the solitary trumpet +that breathed its "note of defiance" in the lists of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, +which has the genuine melodramatic thrill--like the horn of Hernani or +the bell that tolls in "Venice Preserved." + +[23] See the "Hunting Song" in his continuation of "Queenhoo Hall"-- + + "Waken, lords and ladies gay, + On the mountain dawns the day." + +[24] See vol. i., pp. 277 and 390. + +[25] The Glen of the Green Women. + +[26] "And still I thought that shattered tower + The mightiest work of human power; + And marvelled as the aged hind + With some strange tale bewitched my mind, + Of foragers who, with headlong force, + Down from that strength had spurred their horse, + Their Southern rapine to renew, + Far in the distant Cheviots blue; + And, home returning, filled the hall + With revel, wassail-rout and brawl."--"Marmion." Introduction +to Canto Third. See Lockhart for a description of the view from +Smailholme, _a propos_ of the stanza in "The Eve of St. John": + + "That lady sat in mournful mood; + Looked over hill and vale: + O'ver Tweed's fair flood, and Mertoun's wood, + And all down Teviot dale." + +[27] See vol. i., pp. 394-395. + +[28] Scott's verse "is touched both with the facile redundance of the +mediaeval romances in which he was steeped, and with the meretricious +phraseology of the later eighteenth century, which he was too genuine a +literary Tory wholly to put aside."--"The Age of Wordsworth," C. H. +Herford, London. 1897. + +[29] "The Gray Brother" in vol. iii. of the "Minstrelsy." + +[30] "And goblin brats, of Gilpin Horner's brood, + Decoy young border-nobles through the wood, + And skip at every step, Lord knows how high, + And frighten foolish babes, the Lord knows why." + +[31] "Now leave we Margaret and her knight + To tell you of the approaching fight."--Canto Fifth, xiii. + +[32] Landor says oddly of Warton that he "had lost his ear by laying it +down on low swampy places, on ballads and sonnets." + +[33] Does not the quarrel of Richard and Philip in "The Talisman" remind +one irresistibly of Achilles and Agamemnon in the "Iliad"? + +[34] For a review of English historical fiction before Scott, consult +Professor Cross' "Development of the English Novel," pp. 110-114. + +[35] "Familiar Studies of Men and Books," by R. L. Stevenson. Article, +"Victor Hugo's Romances." + +[36] "Le Roman Historique a l'Epoque Romantique." Essai sur l'influence +de Walter Scott. Par Louis Maigron. Paris (Hachette). 1898, p. 331, +_note_. And _ibid_., p. 330: "Au lieu que les classiques s'efforcaient +toujours, a travers les modifications que les pays, les temps et les +circonstances peuvent apporter aux sentiments et aux passions des hommes, +d'atteindre a ce que ces passions et ces sentiments conservent de +permanent, d'immuable et d'eternel, c'est au contraire a l'expression de +l'accidentel et du relatif que les novateurs devaient les efforts de leur +art. Plus simplement, a la place de la verite humaine, ils devaient +mettre la verite locale." Professor Herford says that what Scott "has in +common with the Romantic temper is simply the feeling for the +picturesque, for colour, for contrast." "Age of Wordsworth," p. 121. + +[37] De Quincey defines _picturesque_ as "the characteristic pushed into +a sensible excess." The word began to excite discussion in the last +quarter of the eighteenth century. See vol. i., p. 185, for Gilpin's +"Observations on Picturesque Beauty." See also Uvedale Price, "Essays on +the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful," three +vols., 1794-96. Price finds the character of the picturesque to consist +in roughness, irregularity, intricacy, and sudden variation. Gothic +buildings are more picturesque than Grecian, and a ruin than an entire +building. Hovels, cottages, mills, interiors of old barns are +picturesque. "In mills particularly, such is the extreme intricacy of +the wheels and the wood work: such is the singular variety of forms and +of lights and shadows, of mosses and weather stains from the constant +moisture, of plants springing from the rough joints of the stones--that, +even without the addition of water, an old mill has the greatest charm +for a painter" (i., 55). He mentions, as a striking example of +picturesque beauty, a hollow lane or by-road with broken banks, thickets, +old neglected pollards, fantastic roots bared by the winter torrents, +tangled trailers and wild plants, and infinite variety of tints and +shades (i., 23-29). He denounces the improvements of Capability Brown +(see "Romanticism," vol. i., p. 124): especially the clump, the belt and +regular serpentine walks with smooth turf edges, the made water with +uniformly sloping banks--all as insipidly formal, in their way, as the +old Italian gardens which Brown's landscapes displaced. + +[38] "Essay on Walter Scott." + +[39] Andrew Lang reminds us that, after all, only three of the Waverley +Novels are "chivalry romances." The following are the only numbers of +the series that have to do with the Middle Ages: "Count Robert of Paris," +_circa_ 1090 A.D.; "The Betrothed," 1187; "The Talisman," 1193; +"Ivanhoe," 1194; "The Fair Maid of Perth," 1402; "Quentin Durward," 1470; +"Anne of Geierstein," 1474-77. + +[40] "The Romantic School in Germany," p. 187. _Cf._ Stendhal, "Walter +Scott et la Princesse de Cleves." "Mes reflexions seront mal accueilles. +Une immense troupe de litterateurs est interessee a porter aux nues Sir +Walter Scott et sa maniere. L'habit et le collier de cuivre d'un serf du +moyen age sont plus facile a decrire que les mouvements du coeur +humain. . . . N'oublions pas un autre avantage de l'ecole de Sir Walter +Scott: la description d'un costume et la _pose_ d'un personnage . . . +prennent au moins deux pages. Les mouvements de l'ame fourniraient a +peine quelques lignes. Ouvrez au hazard un cies volumes de la 'Princesse +de Cleves,' prenez dix pages au hasard, et ensuite comparez les aux dix +pages d'Ivanhoe' ou de 'Quentin Durward': ces derniers ouvrages ont un +_merite historique_. Ils apprennent quelques petites choses sur +l'histoire aux gens qui l'ignorent ou qui le savent mal. Ce merite +historique a cause un grand plaisir: je ne le nie pas, mais c'est ce +merite historique qui se fanera le premier. . . . Dans 146 ans, Sir +Walter Scott ne sera pas a la hauteur ou Corneille nous apparait 146 ans +apres sa mort." "To write a modern romance of chivalry." says Jeffrey, +in his review of "Marmion" in the _Edinburgh_, "seems to be much such a +phantasy as to build a modern abbey or an English pagoda. . . . +[Scott's] genius, seconded by the omnipotence of fashion, has brought +chivalry again into temporary favor. Fine ladies and gentlemen now talk, +indeed, of donjons, keeps, tabards, 'scutcheons, tressures, caps of +maintenance, portcullises, wimples, and we know not what besides; just as +they did, in the days of Dr. Darwin's popularity, of gnomes, sylphs, +oxygen, gossamer, polygynia, and polyandria. That fashion, however, +passed rapidly away, and Mr. Scott should take care that a different sort +of pedantry," etc. + +[41] For an exhaustive review of Scott's influence on the evolution of +historical fiction in France, consult Maigron, "Le Roman Historique," +etc. A longish passage from this work will be found at the end of the +present chapter. For English imitators and successors of the Waverley +Novels, see Cross, "Development of the English Novel," pp. 136-48. See +also De Quincey's "Literary Reminiscences," vol. iii., for an amusing +account of "Walladmor" (1824), a pretended German translation of a +non-existent Waverley novel. + +[42] "Racine et Shakespeare." + +[43] "Don Quixote." + +[44] "Sir Walter Scott." + +[45] "Dix ans d'etudes historiques": preface. + +[46] Walter Bagehot says that "Ivanhoe" "describes the Middle Ages as we +should have wished them to be," ignoring their discomforts and harsh +barbarism. "Every boy has heard of tournaments and has a firm persuasion +that in an age of tournaments life was thoroughly well understood. A +martial society where men fought hand to hand on good horses with large +lances," etc. ("The Waverley Novels"). + +[47] "Of enthusiasm in religion Scott always spoke very severely. . . . +I do not think there is a single study in all his romances of what may be +fairly called a pre-eminently spiritual character" (R. H. Hutton: "Sir +Walter Scott," p. 126). + +[48] "Unopposed, the Catholic superstition may sink to dust, with all its +absurd ritual and solemnities. Still it is an awful risk. The world is +in fact as silly as ever, and a good competence of nonsense will always +find believers." ("Diary" for 1829). + +[49] See vol. i., p. 42. "We almost envy the credulity of those who in +the gentle moonlight of a summer night in England, amid the tangled +glades of a deep forest, or the turfy swell of her romantic commons, +could fancy they saw the fairies tracing their sportive ring. But it is +in vain to regret illusions which, however engaging, must of necessity +yield their place before the increase of knowledge, like shadows at the +advance of morn." ("Demonology." p. 183). "Tales of ghosts and +demonology are out of date at forty years of age and upward. . . . If I +were to write on the subject at all, it should have been during a period +of life when I could have treated it with more interesting +vivacity. . . . Even the present fashion of the world seems to be +ill-suited for studies of this fantastic nature: and the most ordinary +mechanic has learning sufficient to laugh at the figments which in former +times were believed by persons far advanced in the deepest knowledge of +the age." (_Ibid_., p. 398). + +[50] See vol. i., pp. 249 and 420. + +[51] "Postscript" to "Appreciations." + +[52] For the rarity of the real romantic note in mediaeval writers see +vol. i., pp. 26-28, and Appendix B to the present chapter. + +[53] See "Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature," by Edward T. +McLaughlin, p. 34. + + + + +CHAPTER II. + +Coleridge, Bowles, and the Pope Controversy. + +While Scott was busy collecting the fragments of Border minstrelsy and +translating German ballads,[1] two other young poets, far to the south, +were preparing their share in the literary revolution. In those same +years (1795-98) Wordsworth and Coleridge were wandering together over the +Somerset downs and along the coast of Devon, catching glimpses of the sea +towards Bristol or Linton, and now and then of the skeleton masts and +gossamer sails of a ship against the declining sun, like those of the +phantom bark in "The Ancient Mariner." The first fruits of these walks +and talks was that epoch-making book, the "Lyrical Ballads"; the first +edition of which was published in 1798, and the second, with an +additional volume and the famous preface by Wordsworth, in 1800. The +genesis of the work and the allotment of its parts were described by +Coleridge himself in the "Biographia Literaria" (1817), Chapter XIV. + +"During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours our +conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the +power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to +the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by +the modifying colours of imagination. . . . The thought suggested itself +that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the +incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; . . . +for the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary +life. . . . It was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to +persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic. . . . With +this view I wrote 'The Ancient Mariner,' and was preparing, among other +poems, 'The Dark Ladie' and the 'Christabel,' in which I should have more +nearly realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt." + +Coleridge's contributions to romantic poetry are few though precious. +Weighed against the imposing array of Scott's romances in prose and +verse,[2] they seem like two or three little gold coins put into the +scales to balance a handful of silver dollars. He stands for so much in +the history of English thought, he influenced his own and the following +generation on so many sides, that his romanticism shows like a mere +incident in his intellectual history. His blossoming time was short at +the best, and ended practically with the century. After his return from +Germany in 1799 and his settlement at Keswick in 1800, he produced little +verse of any importance beyond the second part of "Christabel" (written +in 1800, published in 1816). His creative impulse failed him, and he +became more and more involved in theology, metaphysics, political +philosophy, and literary criticism. + +It appears, therefore, at first sight, a little odd that Coleridge's +German biographer, Professor Brandl, should have treated his subject +under this special aspect,[3] and attributed to him so leading a place in +the romantic movement. Walter Scott, if we consider his life-long and +wellnigh exclusive dedication of himself to the work of historic +restoration--Scott, certainly, and not Coleridge was the "high priest of +Romanticism." [4] Brandl is dissatisfied with the term Lake School, or +Lakers, commonly given to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, and +proposes instead to call them the Romantic School, Romanticists +(_Romantiker_), surely something of a misnomer when used of an eclectic +versifier like Southey, or a poet of nature, moral reflection, and humble +life like Wordsworth. Southey, in casting about him for a theme, +sometimes became for the nonce and so far as subject goes, a romancer; as +in "Joan of Arc" (1799), "Madoc" (1805), and "Roderick the Goth" (1814); +not to speak of translations like "Amadis of Gaul," "Palmerin of +England," and "The Chronicle of the Cid." But these were not due to the +compelling bent of his genius, as in Scott. They were miscellaneous +jobs, undertaken in the regular course of his business as a manufacturer +of big, irregular epics, Oriental, legendary, mythological, and what not; +and as an untiring biographer, editor, and hack writer of all +descriptions. Southey was a mechanical poet, with little original +inspiration, and represents nothing in particular. Wordsworth again, +though innovating in practice and theory against eighteenth-century +tradition, is absolutely unromantic in contrast with Scott and Coleridge. + +But it will be fair to let the critic defend his own nomenclature; and +the passage which I shall quote will serve not only as another attempt to +define romanticism, but also to explain why Brandl regards the Lake poets +as our romantic school _par excellence_. "'Lake School' is a name, but +no designation. This was felt in England, where many critics have +accordingly fallen into the opposite extreme, and maintained that the +members of this group of poets had nothing in common beyond their +personal and accidental conditions. As if they had only lived together, +and not worked together! In truth they were bound together by many a +strong tie, and above all by one of a polemical kind, namely, by the +aversion for the monotony that had preceded them, and by the struggle +against merely dogmatic rules. Unbending uniformity is death! Let us be +various and individual as life itself is. . . . Away with dry +Rationalism! Let us fight it with all the powers we possess; whether by +bold Platonism or simple Bible faith; whether by enthusiastic hymns, or +dreamy fairy tales; whether by the fabulous world of distant times and +zones, or by the instincts of the children in the next village. Let us +abjure the ever-recommended nostrum of imitation of the old masters in +poetry, and rather attach ourselves to homely models, and endeavour, with +their help, lovingly and organically to develop their inner life. These +were the aims of Walter Scott and his Scotch school, only with such +changes as local differences demanded. Individuality in person, +nationality, and subject, and therefore the emphasis of all natural +unlikeness, was the motto on both sides of the Tweed. And, as these men, +when confronted by elements peculiar, rare, and marvellous, designated +such elements as 'romantic,' so may they themselves be justly called the +'Romantic School.' But the term is much misused, and requires a little +elucidation. Shakespeare is usually called a romantic poet. He, +however, never used the expression, and would have been surprised if any +one had applied it to him. The term presupposes opposition to the +classic style, to rhetorical deduction, and to measured periods, all of +which were unknown in the time of the Renaissance, and first imported in +that of the French Revolution. On the other hand, Wordsworth, Coleridge, +Southey, Lamb, and Walter Scott's circle all branched off from the +classical path with a directness and consistency which sharply +distinguish them from their predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. +Their predecessors had not broken with the Greek and Latin school, nor +with the school of Pope; Chatterton copied Homer; Cowper translated him; +Burns in his English verses, and Bowles in his sonnets, adhered to what +is called the 'pig-tail period'! The principal poems composed in the +last decennium of the eighteenth century . . . adhered still more to +classic tradition. In London the satires of Mathias and Gifford renewed +the style of the 'Dunciad,' and the moral poems of Rogers that of the +'Essay on Man.' Landor wrote his youthful 'Gebir' in the style of +Virgil, and originally in Latin itself. The amateur in German +literature, William Taylor of Norwich, and Dr. Sayers, interested +themselves especially for those works by Goethe which bear an antique +character--for 'Iphigenia,' 'Proserpina,' 'Alexis and Dora.' Only when +the war with France drew near was the classical feeling interrupted. +Campbell, the Scotchman, and Moore, the Irishman, both well schooled by +translations from the Greek, recalled to mind the songs of their own +people, and rendered them popular with the fashionable world--though only +by clothing them in classic garb. How different to the 'artificial rust' +of 'Christabel'; to the almost exaggerated homeliness of 'We Are Seven'; +and to the rude 'Lay of the Last Minstrel'! When at last, with the fall +of Napoleon, the great stars--Byron, Shelley, Keats, and later the mature +Landor--rose in the hemisphere, they had all imbibed from the Romantic +school a warmer form of thought and feeling, and a number of productive +impulses; though, Euphorion-like, they still regarded the antique as +their parent. They expressed much appreciation of the Romantic school, +but their hearts were with Aeschylus and Pindar. They contended for +national character, but only took pleasure in planting it on classic +soil. Byron's enthusiasm for Pope was not only caprice; nor was it mere +chance that Byron should have died in Greece, and Shelley and Keats in +Italy. Compared with what we may call these classical members of the +Romantic school, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott . . . may be said to +have taken nothing, whether in the form of translation or imitation, from +classical literature; while they drew endless inspiration from the Middle +Ages. In their eyes Pope was only a lucid, able, and clever journeyman. +It is therefore fair to consider them, and them alone, as exponents of +the Romantic school." [5] + +As to Byron and Shelley this criticism may do; as to Chatterton and Keats +it is misleading. Wordsworth more romantic than Chatterton! More +romantic than Keats, because the latter often, and Wordsworth seldom, +treats subjects from the antique! On the contrary, if "the name is +graven on the workmanship," "Michael" and "The Brothers" are as classical +as "Hyperion" or "Laodamia" or "The Hamadryad"; "bald as the bare +mountain-tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur." Bagehot +expressly singles Wordsworth out as an example of pure or classic art, as +distinguished from the ornate art of such poets as Keats and Tennyson. +And Mr. Colvin hesitates to classify him with Landor only because of his +"suggestive and adumbrative manner"--not, indeed, he acknowledges, a +romantic manner, and yet "quite distinct from the classical"; i.e., +because of the transcendental character of a portion of his poetry. But +whatever may be true of the other members of the group, Coleridge at his +best was a romantic poet. "Christabel" and "The Ancient Mariner," +creations so exquisite sprung from the contact of modern imagination with +mediaeval beliefs, are enough in themselves to justify the whole romantic +movement. + +Among the literary influences which gave shape to Coleridge's poetry, +Percy's ballads and Chatterton's "Rowley Poems" are obvious and have +already been mentioned. In his first volume of verse (1796), there is +manifest a still stronger impulse from the sonnets of the Rev. William +Lisle Bowles. We have noticed the reappearance of this discarded stanza +form in the work of Gray, Mason, Edwards, Stillingfleet, and Thomas +Warton, about the middle of the last century.[6] In 1782 Mrs. Charlotte +Smith published a volume of sonnets, treating motives from Milton, Gray, +Collins, Pope's "Eloisa" and Goethe's "Werther." But the writer +who--through his influence upon Wordsworth more especially--contributed +most towards the sonnet revival, was Bowles. In 1789 he had published a +little collection of fourteen sonnets,[7] which reached a second edition +with six pieces additional, in the same year. "His sonnets came into +Wordsworth's hands (1793)," says Brandl, "just as he was leaving London +with some friends for a morning's excursion; he seated himself in a +recess on Westminster Bridge, and was not to be moved from his place till +he had finished the little book. Southey, again, owned in 1832 that for +forty years, he had taken the sweet and artless style of Bowles for a +model." [8] In the first chapter of his "Biographia Literaria" (1817) +Coleridge tells how, when he had just entered on his seventeenth year, +"the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number and just then published in a +quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented" to him by his +school-fellow at Christ's Hospital, Thomas Middleton, afterwards Bishop +of Calcutta. "It was a double pleasure to me . . . that I should have +received, from a friend so revered, the first knowledge of a poet by +whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted and +inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the +undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal with which I laboured to make +proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed, +of whatever rank and in whatever place. As my school finances did not +permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, +more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to +those who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight +did I receive the three or four following publications of the same +author." To Bowles' poems Coleridge ascribes the credit of having +withdrawn him from a too exclusive devotion to metaphysics and also a +strengthened perception of the essentially unpoetic character of Pope's +poetry. "Among those with whom I conversed there were, of course, very +many who had formed their taste and their notions of poetry from the +writings of Pope and his followers; or, to speak more generally, in that +school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by English +understanding, which had predominated from the last century. I was not +blind to the merits of this school, yet . . . they gave me little +pleasure. . . . I saw that the excellence of this kind consisted in just +and acute observations on men and manners in an artificial state of +society, as its matter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed +in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form. . . . The +matter and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic +thoughts as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry." +Coleridge goes on to say that, in a paper written during a Cambridge +vacation, he compared Darwin's "Botanic Garden" to a Russian ice palace, +"glittering, cold, and transitory"; that he expressed a preference for +Collins' odes over those of Gray; and that in his defence of the lines +running into each other, instead of closing at each couplet; and of +natural language . . . such as "_I will remember thee_," instead of + + ". . . Thy image on her wing + Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring" + +he had continually to appeal to the example of the older English poets +from Chaucer to Milton. "The reader," he concludes, "must make himself +acquainted with the general style of composition that was at that time +deemed poetry, in order to understand and account for the effect produced +on me by the sonnets, the 'Monody at Matlock' and the 'Hope' of Mr. +Bowles; for it is peculiar to original genius to become less and less +striking, in proportion to its success in improving the taste and +judgment of its contemporaries. The poems of West, indeed, had the merit +of chaste and manly diction, but they were cold, and, if I may so express +it, only dead-coloured; while in the best of Warton's, there is a +stiffness which too often gives them the appearance of imitations from +the Greek. Whatever relation, therefore, of cause or impulse, Percy's +collection of ballads may bear to the most popular poems of the present +day, yet in the more sustained and elevated style of the then living +poets, Cowper and Bowles were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who +combined natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled +the heart with the head." Coleridge adds in a note that he was not +familiar with Cowper's "Task" till many years after the publication of +Bowles' sonnets, though it had been published before them (1785). + +It would be hard to account for the effect of Bowles' sonnets on +Coleridge, did we not remember that it is not necessarily the greatest +literature that comes home to us most intimately, but that which, for +some reason, touches us where we are peculiarly sensitive. It is a +familiar experience with every reader, that certain books make an appeal +to him which is personal and individual, an appeal which they make to few +other readers--perhaps to no other reader--and which no other books make +to him. It is something in them apart from their absolute value or +charm, or rather it is something in him, some private experience of his +own, some occult association in depths below consciousness. He has a +perfectly just estimate of their small importance in the abstract, they +are not even of the second or third rank. Yet they speak to him; they +seem written to him--are more to him, in a way, than Shakspere and Milton +and all the public library of the world. In the line of light bringers +who pass from hand to hand the torch of intelligential fire, there are +men of most unequal stature, and a giant may stoop to take the precious +flambeau from a dwarf. That Scott should have admired Monk Lewis, and +Coleridge reverenced Bowles, only proves that Lewis and Bowles had +something to give which Scott and Coleridge were peculiarly ready to +receive. + +Bowles' sonnets, though now little read, are not unreadable. They are +tender in feeling, musical in verse, and pure in diction. They were +mostly suggested by natural scenery, and are uniformly melancholy. +Bowles could suck melancholy out of a landscape as a weasel sucks eggs. +His sonnets continue the elegiac strain of Shenstone, Gray, Collins, +Warton, and the whole "Il Penseroso" school, but with a more personal +note, explained by a recent bereavement of the poet. "Those who know +him," says the preface, "know the occasions of them to have been real, to +the public he might only mention the sudden death of a deserving young +woman with whom + + "Sperabat longos heu! ducere soles, + Et fido acclinis consumuisse sinu. . . . + +"This is nothing to the public; but it may serve in some measure to +obviate the common remark on melancholy poetry, that it has been very +often gravely composed, when possibly the heart of the writer had very +little share in the distress he chose to describe. But there is a great +difference between _natural_ and _fabricated_ feelings even in poetry." +Accordingly while the Miltonic group of last-century poets went in search +of dark things--grots, caverns, horrid shades, and twilight vales; +Bowles' mood bestowed its color upon the most cheerful sights and sounds +of nature. The coming of summer or spring; the bells of Oxford and +Ostend; the distant prospect of the Malvern Hills, or the chalk cliffs of +Dover; sunrise on the sea, touching "the lifted oar far off with sudden +gleam"; these and the like move him to tears equally with the glimmer of +evening, the sequestered woods of Wensbeck, the ruins of Netley Abbey,[9] +or the frowning battlements of Bamborough Castle, where + + "Pity, at the dark and stormy hour + Of midnight, when the moon is hid on high, + Keeps her lone watch upon the topmost tower." + +In "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" Byron calls Bowles "the maudlin +prince of mournful sonneteers," whose + + ". . . muse most lamentably tells + What merry sounds proceed from Oxford bells." [10] + +Bowles' attitude had thus something more modern than that of the +eighteenth-century elegiacs, and in unison with Coleridge's doctrine, that + + ". . . we receive but what we give, + And in our life alone does nature live: + Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud." [11] + +A number of Bowles' sonnets were addressed to rivers, the Tweed, the +Cherwell at Oxford, the Wensbeck, and the Itchin near Winton, poems which +stand midway between Thomas Warton's "To the River Lodon" and Coleridge's +"To the River Otter," with Wordsworth's sonnet sequence, "On the River +Duddon." A single sonnet of Bowles will be enough to give a taste of his +quality and to show what Coleridge got from him.[12] + +Bowles was a disciple in the "School of Warton." He was "one of Joseph +Warton's Winchester wonders," says Peter Cunningham, in a note in the +second edition of Campbell's "Specimens of the British Poets"; "and the +taste he imbibed there for the romantic school of poetry was strengthened +and confirmed by his removal to Trinity College, Oxford, when Tom Warton +was master there." Bowles was always prompt to own that he had learned +his literary principles from the Wartons; and among his poems is a monody +written on the death of his old teacher, the master of Winchester +College. His verses abound in Gothic imagery quite in the Wartonian +manner; the "castle gleaming on the distant steep"; "the pale moonlight +in the midnight aisle"; "some convent's ancient walls," along the Rhine. +Weak winds complain like spirits through the ruined arches of Netley +Abbey: + + "The beam + Of evening smiles on the gray battlement, + And yon forsaken tower that time has rent." + +His lines on Shakspere recall Collins in their insistence upon the +"elvish" things in the plays; "The Tempest," "Midsummer Night's Dream," +the weird sisters in "Macbeth," Ophelia's songs, the melancholy Jacques. +The lines to Burke on his "Reflections on the Revolution in France," echo +his celebrated dirge over fallen chivalry: + + "Though now no more proud chivalry recalls + The tourneys bright and pealing festivals; + Though now on high her idle spear is hung, + Though time her mouldering harp has half unstrung," etc.[13] + +The "Hymn to Woden" alludes to Gray's "Fatal Sisters." "St. Michael's +Mount" summons up the forms of the ancient Druids, and sings how Fancy, + + "Sick of the fluttering fancies that engage + The vain pursuits of a degenerate age, . . . + Would fain the shade of elder days recall, + The Gothick battlements, the bannered hall; + Or list of elfin harps the fabling rhyme; + Or, wrapt in melancholy trance sublime, + Pause o'er the working of some wondrous tale, + Or bid the spectres of the castle hail!" + +Bowles' influence is traceable in Coleridge's earliest volume of verse +(1796) in a certain diffused softness and gentle sensibility. This +elegiac tone appears particularly in effusions like "Happiness," "The +Sigh," "To a Young Ass," "To the Autumnal Moon," "Lines on an Autumnal +Evening," "To the Nightingale"; in "Melancholy: A Fragment" and "Elegy; +imitated from Akenside," both in the "Sibylline Leaves" (1797); and in +numerous "lines," "monodies," "epitaphs," "odes," and "stanzas." [14] +Coleridge soon came to recognise the weakness of his juvenile verses, and +parodied himself--and incidentally Bowles--in three sonnets printed at +the end of Chapter I. of the "Biographia Literaria," designed to +burlesque his own besetting sins, a "doleful egotism," an affected +simplicity, and the use of "elaborate and swelling language and imagery." +He never attained much success in the use of the sonnet form. A series +of twelve sonnets in his first collection opens with one to Bowles: + + "My heart has thanked thee, Bowles! for those soft strains + Whose sadness soothes me, like the murmuring + Of wild bees in the sunny showers of spring," etc. + +More important to our inquiries than the poetry of Bowles is the occasion +which he gave to the revival, under new conditions, of the Pope +controversy. For it was over the body of Pope that the quarrel between +classic and romantic was fought out in England, as it was fought out in +France, a few years later, over the question of the dramatic unities and +the mixture of tragedy and comedy in the _drame_. In 1806, just a half +century after Joseph Warton published the first volume of his "Essay on +Pope," Bowles' edition of the same poet appeared. In the life of Pope +which was prefixed, the editor made some severe strictures on Pope's +duplicity, jealousy, and other disagreeable traits, though not more +severe than have been made by Pope's latest editor, Mr. Elwin, who has +backed up his charges with an array of evidence fairly overwhelming. The +edition contained likewise an essay on "The Poetical Character of Pope," +in which Bowles took substantially the same ground that had been taken by +his master, Joseph Warton, fifty years before. He asserted in brief +that, as compared with Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton, Pope was a poet of +the second order; that in his descriptions of nature he was inferior to +Thomson and Cowper, and in lyrical poetry to Dryden and Gray; and that, +except in his "Eloisa" and one or two other pieces, he was the poet of +artificial manners and of didactic maxims, rather than of passions. +Bowles' chief addition to Warton's criticism was the following paragraph, +upon which the controversy that ensued chiefly hinged: "All images drawn +from what is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature are more +beautiful and sublime than any images drawn from art, and they are +therefore _per se_ (abstractedly) more poetical. In like manner those +passions of the human heart, which belong to nature in general, are _per +se_ more adapted to the higher species of poetry than those derived from +incidental and transient manners." + +The admirers of Pope were not slow in joining issue with his critic, not +only upon his general estimate of the poet, but upon the principle here +laid down. Thomas Campbell, in his "Specimens of the British Poets" +(1819), defended Pope both as a man and a poet, and maintained that +"exquisite descriptions of artificial objects are not less characteristic +of genius than the description of simple physical appearances." He +instanced Milton's description of Satan's spear and shield, and gave an +animated picture of the launching of a ship of the line as an example of +the "sublime objects of artificial life." Bowles replied in a letter to +Campbell on "The Invariable Principles of Poetry." He claimed that it +was the appearances of nature, the sea and the sky, that lent sublimity +to the launch of the ship, and asked: "If images derived from art are as +beautiful and sublime as those derived from nature, why was it necessary +to bring your ship off the stocks?" He appealed to his adversary whether +the description of a game of ombre was as poetical as that of a walk in +the forest, and whether "the sylph of Pope, 'trembling over the fumes of +a chocolate pot,' be an image as poetical as that of delicate and quaint +Ariel, who sings 'Where the bee sucks, there lurk (_sic_) I.'" Campbell +replied in the _New Monthly Magazine_, of which he was editor, and this +drew out another rejoinder from Bowles. Meanwhile Byron had also +attacked Bowles in two letters to Murray (1821), to which the +indefatigable pamphleteer made elaborate replies. The elder Disraeli, +Gifford, Octavius Gilchrist, and one Martin M'Dermot also took a hand in +the fight--all against Bowles--and William Roscoe, the author of the +"Life of Lorenzo de Medici," attacked him in an edition of Pope which he +brought out in 1824. The rash detractor of the little Twitnam +nightingale soon found himself engaged single-handed against a host; but +he was equal to the occasion, in volubility if not in logic, and poured +out a series of pamphlets, covering in all some thousand pages, and +concluding with "A Final Appeal to the Literary Public" (1825), followed +by "more last words of Baxter," in the shape of "Lessons in Criticism to +William Roscoe" (1825). + +The opponents of Bowles maintained, in general, that in poetry the +subject is nothing, but the execution is all; that one class of poetry +has, as such, no superiority over another; and that poets are to be +ranked by their excellence as artists, and not according to some +imaginary scale of dignity in the different orders of poetry, as epic, +didactic, satiric, etc. "There is, in fact," wrote Roscoe, "no poetry in +any subject except what is called forth by the genius of the poet. . . . +There are no great subjects but such as are made so by the genius of the +artist." Byron said that to the question "whether 'the description of a +game of cards be as poetical, supposing the execution of the artists +equal, as a description of a walk in a forest,' it may be answered that +the materials are certainly not equal, but that the _artist_ who has +rendered the game of cards poetical is by far the greater of the two. +But all this 'ordering' of poets is purely arbitrary on the part of Mr. +Bowles. There may or may not be, in fact, different 'orders' of poetry, +but the poet is always ranked according to his execution, and not +according to his branch of the art." Byron also contended, like +Campbell, that art is just as poetical as nature, and that it was not the +water that gave interest to the ship but the ship to the water. "What +was it attracted the thousands to the launch? They might have seen the +poetical 'calm water' at Wapping or in the London lock or in the +Paddington Canal or in a horse-pond or in a slop-basin." Without natural +accessories--the sun, the sky, the sea, the wind--Bowles had said, the +ship's properties are only blue bunting, coarse canvas, and tall poles. +"So they are," admits Byron, "and porcelain is clay, and man is dust, and +flesh is grass; and yet the two latter at least are the subjects of much +poesy. . . . Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical, the +Parthenon or the rock on which it stands. . . . Take away Stonehenge +from Salisbury plain and it is nothing more than Hounslow Heath or any +other unenclosed down. . . . There can be nothing more poetical in its +aspect than the city of Venice; does this depend upon the sea or the +canals? . . . Is it the Canal Grande or the Rialto which arches it, the +churches which tower over it, the palaces which line and the gondolas +which glide over the waters, that render this city more poetical than +Rome itself? . . . Without these the water would be nothing but a +clay-coloured ditch. . . . There would be nothing to make the canal of +Venice more poetical than that of Paddington." + +There was something futile about this whole discussion. It was marked +with that fatally superficial and mechanical character which +distinguished all literary criticism in Europe before the time of Lessing +in Germany, and of Wordsworth and Coleridge in England. In particular, +the cardinal point on which Pope's rank as a poet was made to turn was +really beside the question. There is no such essential distinction as +was attempted to be drawn between "natural objects" and "objects of +artificial life," as material for poetry. In a higher synthesis, man and +all his works are but a part of nature, as Shakspere discerned: + + "Nature is made better by no mean + But nature makes that mean: so over that art + Which you say adds to nature, is an art + That nature made: the art itself is nature." + +Shakspere, as well as Pope, dealt with artificial life, _i.e._, with the +life of man in society, but how differently! The reason why Pope's +poetry fails to satisfy the heart and the imagination resides not in his +subjects--so far Campbell and Byron were right--but in his mood; in his +imperfect sense of beauty and his deficiency in the highest qualities of +the poet's soul. I may illustrate this by an arrow from Byron's own +quiver. To prove how much poetry may be associated with "a simple, +household, 'indoor,' artificial, and ordinary image," he cites the famous +stanza in Cowper's poem to Mrs. Unwin: + + "Thy needles, once a shining store, + For my sake restless heretofore. + Now rust disused and shine no more, + My Mary." + +Let us contrast with this a characteristic passage from "The Rape of the +Lock," which also contains an artificial image: + + "On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore + Which Jews might kiss and infidels adore." + +What is the difference? It is in the feeling of the poet Pope's couplet +is very charming, but it is merely gallantry, a neatly turned compliment, +playful, only half sincere, a spice of mockery lurking under the sugared +words; while in Cowper's lines the humble domestic implement is made +sacred by the emotions of pity, sorrow, gratitude, and affection with +which it is associated. The reason why Pope is not a high poet--or +perhaps a poet at all in the best sense of the word--is indicated by +Coleridge with his usual acuteness and profundity in a sentence already +quoted; that Pope's poetry both in matter and diction was "characterised +not so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts _translated_ into the +language of poetry." + +Bowles, on the whole, had hold of the right end of the controversy; his +instinct was correct, but he was a wretched controversialist. As a poet +in the minor key, he was tolerable, but as a prose writer, he was a very +dull person and a bore. He was rude and clumsy; he tried to be sarcastic +and couldn't, he had damnable iteration. Lowell speaks of his +"peculiarly helpless way," and says: "Bowles, in losing his temper, lost +also what little logic he had, and though, in a vague way, aesthetically +right, contrived always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger made worse +confusion in a brain never very clear, and he had neither the scholarship +nor the critical faculty for a vigorous exposition of his own thesis. +Never was wilder hitting than his, and he laid himself open to dreadful +punishment, especially from Byron, whose two letters are masterpieces of +polemic prose." Indeed, the most interesting feature of the Pope +controversy is Byron's part in it and the light which it sheds on his +position in relation to the classic and romantic schools. Before the +definite outbreak of the controversy, Byron had attacked Bowles for his +depreciation of Pope, in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" (1809), in +a passage in which he wished that Bowles had lived in Pope's time, so +that Pope might have put him into the "Dunciad." + +It seems at first sight hard to reconcile Byron's evidently sincere +admiration for Pope with the ultra-romantic cast of his own +poetry--romantic, as Pater says, in mood if not in subject. In his early +fondness for Ossian, his intense passion, his morbid gloom, his +exaltation in wild and solitary places, his love of night and storm, of +the desert and the ocean, in the careless and irregular outpour of his +verse, in his subjectivity, the continual presence of the man in the +work--in all these particulars Byron was romantic and would seem to have +had little in common with Pope. But there was another side to Byron--and +William Rossetti thinks his most characteristic side--viz., his wit and +understanding; and this side sympathised heartily with Pope. It is well +known that when Byron came back from the East he had in his trunk besides +the manuscript of "Childe Harold," which he thought little of, certain +"Hints from Horace" which the world thinks less of, but which he was +eager to have published, while Dallas was urging him to print "Childe +Harold." "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" is a thoroughly Popeian +satire, and "The Vision of Judgment," though not in couplets but in +_ottava rima_, is one of the best personal satires in English. It has +all of Pope's malicious wit, with a sweep and glow, which belonged to +Byron as a poet rather than as a satirist, and which Pope never had. +Lowell thinks, too, that what Byron admired in Pope was "that patience in +careful finish which he felt to be wanting in himself and in most of his +contemporaries." + +With all this there probably mingled something of perversity and +exaggeration in Byron's praises of Pope. He hated the Lakers, and he +delighted to use Pope against them as a foil and a rod. He at least was +everything that they were not. Doubtless in the Pope controversy, his +"object was mainly mischief," as Lowell says. Byron loved a fight; he +thought the Rev. W. L. Bowles an ass, and he determined to have some fun +with him. Besides the two letters to Murray in 1821, an open letter of +Byron's to Isaac Disraeli, dated March 15, 1820, and entitled "Some +Observations upon an article in _Blackwood's Magazine_," [15] contains a +long passage in vindication of Pope and in denunciation of contemporary +poetry--a passage which is important not only as showing Byron's +opinions, but as testifying to the very general change in taste which had +taken place since 1756, when Joseph Warton was so discouraged by the +public hostility to his "Essay on Pope" that he withheld the second +volume for twenty-six years. "The great cause of the present deplorable +state of English poetry," writes Byron, "is to be attributed to that +absurd and systematic depreciation of Pope in which, for the last few +years, there has been a kind of epidemical concurrence. Men of the most +opposite opinions have united upon this topic." He then goes on to +praise Pope and abuse his own contemporaries, especially the Lake poets, +both in the most extravagant terms. Pope he pronounces the most perfect +and harmonious of poets. "Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge," he says, +"had all of them a very natural antipathy to Pope . . . but they have +been joined in it by . . . the whole heterogeneous mass of living English +poets excepting Crabbe, Rogers, Gifford, and Campbell, who, both by +precept and practice, have proved their adherence; and by me, who have +shamefully deviated in practice, but have ever loved and honoured Pope's +poetry with my whole soul." There is ten times more poetry, he thinks, +in the "Essay on Man" than in the "Excursion"; and if you want passion, +where is to be found stronger than in the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard"? +To the sneer that Pope is only the "poet of reason" Byron replies that he +will undertake to find more lines teeming with _imagination_ in Pope than +in any two living poets. "In the mean time," he asks, "what have we got +instead? . . . The Lake school," and "a deluge of flimsy and +unintelligible romances imitated from Scott and myself." He prophesies +that all except the classical poets, Crabbe, Rogers, and Campbell, will +survive their reputation, acknowledges that his own practice as a poet is +not in harmony with his principles, and says; "I told Moore not very long +ago, 'We are all wrong except Rogers, Crabbe, and Campbell.'" In the +first of his two letters to Murray, Byron had taken himself to task in +much the same way. He compared the romanticists to barbarians who had +"raised a mosque by the side of a Grecian temple of the purest +architecture"; and who were "not contented with their own grotesque +edifice unless they destroy the prior and purely beautiful fabric which +preceded, and which shames them and theirs for ever and ever. I shall be +told that amongst those I _have_ been (or it may be still _am_) +conspicuous--true, and I am ashamed of it. I _have_ been amongst the +builders of this Babel . . . but never among the envious destroyers of +the classic temple of our predecessor." "Neither time nor distance nor +grief nor age can ever diminish my veneration for him who is the great +moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all +stages of existence. The delight of my boyhood, the study of my manhood, +perhaps he may be the consolation of my age. His poetry is the Book of +Life." [16] + +Strange language this from the author of "Childe Harold" and "The +Corsair"! But the very extravagance of Byron's claims for Pope makes it +plain that he was pleading a lost cause. When Warton issued the first +volume of his "Essay on Pope," it was easy for leaders of literary +opinion, like Johnson and Goldsmith, to pooh-pooh the critical canons of +the new school. But when Byron wrote, the aesthetic revolution was +already accomplished. The future belonged not to Campbell and Gifford +and Rogers and Crabbe, but to Wordsworth and Scott and Coleridge and +Shelley and Keats; to Byron himself, the romantic poet, but not to Byron +the _laudator temporis acti_. The victory remained with Bowles, not +because he had won it by argument, but because opinion had changed, and +changed probably once and for all.[17] + +Coleridge's four contributions to the "Lyrical Ballads" included his +masterpiece, "The Ancient Mariner." This is the high-water mark of +romantic poetry; and, familiar as it is, cannot be dismissed here without +full examination. As to form, it is a long narrative ballad in seven +"fyts" or parts, and descends from that "Bible of the romantic +reformation," Bishop Percy's "Reliques." The verse is the common ballad +stanza--eights and sixes--enriched by a generous use of medial rhyme and +alliteration: + + "The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, + The furrow followed free: + We were the first that ever burst + Into that silent sea"; + +varied and prolonged, moreover, by the introduction of additional lines +with alternate riming, with couplets and sometimes with triplets. There +are many five-lined and six-lined stanzas, and one--the longest in the +poem--of nine lines. But these metric variations are used with +temperance. The stanza form is never complex; it is built up naturally +from the ballad stanza upon which it rests and to which it constantly +returns as its norm and type. Of the one hundred and forty-two stanzas +in the poem, one hundred and six are the ordinary four-lined stanzas of +popular poetry. The language, too, is not obtrusively archaic as it is +in Chatterton and some of the Spenserians; at most an occasional "wist" +or "eftsoons"; now and then a light accent, in ballad fashion, on the +final syllable of a rime-word like mariner or countrie. There is no +definite burden, which would have been out of place in a poem that is +narrative and not lyrical; but the ballad habits of phrase repetition and +question and answer are sparingly employed.[18] In reproducing the +homely diction of old popular minstrelsy, Coleridge's art was nicer than +Scott's and more perfect at every point. How skilfully studied, _e.g._ +is the simplicity of the following: + + "The moving moon went up the sky + And nowhere did abide: + _Softly she was going up_." + + "Day after day, day after day + _We stuck_." + +"The naive artlessness of the Middle Ages," says Brandl, "became in +the hands of the Romantic school, an intentional form of art." The +impression of antiquity is heightened by the marginal gloss which +the poet added in later editions, composed in a prose that has a +quaint beauty of its own, in its mention of "the creatures of the +calm"; its citation of "the learned Jew Josephus and the Platonic +Constantinopilitan, Michael Psellus," as authorities on invisible +spirits; and in passages like that Dantesque one which tells how the +mariner "in his loneliness and fixedness yearneth towards the journeying +moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onwards; and +everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and +their native country, and their own natural homes, which they enter +unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a +silent joy at their arrival." + +In "The Ancient Mariner" there are present in the highest degree the +mystery, indefiniteness, and strangeness which are the marks of romantic +art. The period is not strictly mediaeval, for mariners in the Middle +Ages did not sail to the south polar regions or lie becalmed in the +equatorial seas. But the whole atmosphere of the poem is mediaeval. The +Catholic idea of penance or expiation is the moral theme enwrought with +the story. The hermit who shrives the mariner, and the little vesper +bell which biddeth him to prayer are Catholic touches, and so are the +numerous pious oaths and ejaculations; + + "By him who died on cross": + + "Heaven's mother send us grace": + + "The very deep did rot. O Christ + That ever this should be!" + +The albatross is hung about the mariner's neck instead of the crucifix, +and drops off only when he blesses the creatures of the calm and is able +to pray. The sleep which refreshes him is sent by "Mary Queen" from +heaven. The cross-bow with which he shoots the bird is a mediaeval +property. The loud bassoon and the bride's garden bower and the +procession of merry minstrels who go nodding their heads before her are +straight out of the old land of balladry. One cannot fancy the wedding +guest dressed otherwise than in doublet and hose, and perhaps wearing +those marvellous pointed shoes and hanging sleeves which are shown in +miniature paintings of the fifteenth century. And it is thus that +illustrators of the poem have depicted him. Place is equally indefinite +with time. What port the ill-fated ship cleared from we do not know or +seek to know; only the use of the word _kirk_ implies that it was +somewhere in "the north countree"--the proper home of ballad poetry. + +Coleridge's romances were very differently conceived from Scott's. He +wove them out of "such stuff as dreams are made on." Industrious +commentators have indeed traced features of "The Ancient Mariner" to +various sources. Coleridge's friend, Mr. Cruikshank. had a dream of a +skeleton ship. Wordsworth told him the incident, which he read in +Shelvocke's voyages, of a certain Captain Simon Hatley who shot a black +albatross south of Terra del Fuego, in hopes that its death might bring +fair weather. Brandl thinks that the wedding banquet in Monk Lewis' +"Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene," furnished a hint; and +surmises--what seems unlikely--that Coleridge had read a certain epistle +by Paulinus, a bishop of the fourth century, describing a vessel which +came ashore on the coast of Lucania with only one sailor on board, who +reported that the ship had been deserted, as a wreck, by the rest of the +crew, and had since been navigated by spirits. + +But all this is nothing and less than nothing. "The Ancient Mariner" is +the baseless fabric of a vision. We are put under a spell, like the +wedding guest, and carried off to the isolation and remoteness of +mid-ocean. Through the chinks of the narrative, the wedding music sounds +unreal and far on. What may not happen to a man alone on a wide, wide +sea? The line between earthly and unearthly vanishes. Did the mariner +really see the spectral bark and hear spirits talking, or was it all but +the phantasmagoria of the calenture, the fever which attacks the sailor +on the tropic main, so that he seems to see green meadows and water +brooks on the level brine? No one can tell; for he is himself the only +witness, and the ship is sunk at the harbour mouth. One conjectures that +no wreckers or divers will ever bring it to the top again. Nay, was not +the mariner, too, a spectre? Now he is gone, and what was all this that +he told me, thinks the wedding guest, as he rises on the morrow morn. Or +did he tell me, or did I only dream it? A light shadow cast by some +invisible thing swiftly traverses the sunny face of nature and is gone. +Did we see it, or imagine it? Even so elusive, so uncertain, so shadowy +and phantom-like is the spiriting of this wonderful poem. "Poetry," says +Coleridge, "gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly +understood. It was so by me with Gray's 'Bard' and Collins' odes. 'The +Bard' once intoxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure." [19] +There is no danger that his own poem will ever lose its attractiveness in +this way. Something inexplicable will remain to tease us, like the white +Pater Noster and St. Peter's sister in Chaucer's night-spell.[20] + +Pater subtly connects Coleridge's poetic method with his philosophical +idealism. "The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world, in almost +all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a kind of +coarseness or crudeness, . . . 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' has the +plausibility, the perfect adaptation to reason and life, which belongs to +the marvellous, when actually presented as part of a credible experience +in our dreams. . . . The spectral object, so crude, so impossible, has +become plausible, as 'the spot upon the brain that will show itself +without,' and is understood to be but a condition of one's own mind, for +which--according to the scepticism latent at least in so much of our +modern philosophy--the so-called real things themselves are but _spectra_ +after all. It is this finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism, +the fruit of his more delicate psychology, which Coleridge infuses into +romantic narrative, itself also then a new or revived thing in English +literature; and with a fineness of weird effect in 'The Ancient Mariner' +unknown in those old, more simple, romantic legends and ballads. It is a +flower of mediaeval, or later German romance, growing up in the +peculiarly compounded atmosphere of modern psychological speculation, and +putting forth in it wholly new qualities." + +In "The Ancient Mariner," as in most purely romantic poetry, the appeal +is more to the imagination than to the heart or the conscience. Mrs. +Barbauld complained that it was improbable and had no moral. Coleridge +admitted its improbability, but said that it had too much moral; that, +artistically speaking, it should have had no more moral than a fairy +tale. The lesson of course is that of kindness to animals--"He prayeth +well who loveth well," etc. But the punishment of the mariner, and still +more of the mariner's messmates, is so out of proportion to the gravity +of the offence as to be slightly ludicrous when stated by Leslie Stephen +thus: "People who approve of the unnecessary killing of an albatross will +die a lingering death by starvation." The moral, as might be guessed, +was foisted upon the poem by Wordsworth, and is identical with that of +"Hart-Leap Well." Wordsworth and Coleridge started to write "The Ancient +Mariner" jointly; and two or three lines in the poem, as it stands, were +contributed by Wordsworth. But he wanted to give the mariner himself +"character and profession"; and to have the dead seamen come to life and +sail the ship into port; and in other ways laid so heavy a hand upon +Coleridge's airy creation that it became plain that a partnership on +these terms was out of the question, and Wordsworth withdrew altogether. +If we must look for spiritual sustenence in the poem, we shall find it +perhaps not so much in any definite warning against cruelty to creatures, +as in the sentiment of the blessedness of human companionship and the +omnipresence of God's mercy; in the passage, _e.g._, + + "O wedding guest! this soul hath been + Alone on a wide, wide sea," etc.-- + +where the thought is the same as in Cowper's "Soliloquy of Alexander +Selkirk," even to the detail of the "church-going bell." + +The first part of "Christabel" was written in 1797; the second in 1800; +and the poem, in its unfinished state, was given to the press in 1816. +Meanwhile it had become widely known in manuscript. Coleridge used to +read it to literary circles, and copies of it had got about. We have +seen its influence upon Scott. Byron too admired it greatly, and it was +by his persuasion that Coleridge finally published it as a fragment, +finding himself unable to complete it, and feeling doubtless that the +public regarded him much as the urchins in Keats' poem regarded the crone + + "Who keepeth close a wondrous riddle book, + As spectacled she sits in chimney nook." + +"Christabel" is more distinctly mediaeval than "The Ancient Mariner," and +is full of Gothic elements: a moated castle, with its tourney court and +its great gate + + . . . "ironed within and without, + Where an army in battle array had marched out": + +a feudal baron with a retinue of harpers, heralds, and pages; a lady who +steals out at midnight into the moon-lit oak wood, to pray for her +betrothed knight; a sorceress who pretends to have been carried off on a +white palfrey by five armed men, and who puts a spelt upon the maiden. + +If "The Ancient Mariner" is a ballad, "Christabel" is, in form, a _roman +d'aventures_, or metrical chivalry tale, written in variations of the +octosyllabic couplet. These variations, Coleridge said, were not +introduced wantonly but "in correspondence with some transition, in the +nature of the imagery or passion." A single passage will illustrate this: + + "They passed the hall that echoes still, + Pass as lightly as you will. + The brands were flat, the brands were dying + Amid their own white ashes lying; + But when the lady passed, there came + A tongue of light, a fit of flame; + And Christabel saw the lady's eye, + And nothing else saw she thereby, + Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall, + Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall. + O softly tread, said Christabel, + My father seldom sleepeth well." + +When, after the hurrying anapaests, the verse returns to the strict +iambic measure in the last couplet, the effect is a hush, in harmony with +the meaning of the words.[21] + +"Christabel" is not so unique and perfect a thing as "The Ancient +Mariner," but it has the same haunting charm, and displays the same +subtle art in the use of the supernatural. Coleridge protested that it +"pretended to be nothing more than a common fairy tale." [22] But Lowell +asserts that it is "tantalising in the suggestion of deeper meanings than +were ever there." There is, in truth, a hint of allegory, like that +which baffles and fascinates in Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market"; a +hint so elusive that the comparison often made between Geraldine and +Spenser's Duessa, is distressing to a reader of sensitive nerves. That +mystery which is a favourite weapon in the romanticist armoury is used +again here with consummate skill. What was it that Christabel saw on the +lady's bosom? We are left to conjecture. It was "a sight to dream of, +not to tell," [23] and the poet keeps his secret. Lamb, whose taste was +very fine in these matters, advised Coleridge never to finish the poem. +Brandl thinks that the idea was taken from the curtained picture in the +"Mysteries of Udolpho"; and he also considers that the general +situation--the castle, the forest, the old father and his young daughter, +and the strange lady--are borrowed from Mrs. Radcliffe's "Romance of the +Forest"; and that Buerger's "Lenore," Lewis' "Alonzo," and some of the +Percy ballads contributed a detail here and there. But +_Quellenforschungen_ of this kind are very unimportant. It is more +important to note the superior art with which the poet excites curiosity +and suspends--not simply, like Mrs. Radcliffe, postpones--the +gratification of it to the end, and beyond the end, of the poem. Was +Geraldine really a witch, or did she only seem so to Christabel? The +angry moan of the mastiff bitch and the tongue of flame that shot up as +the lady passed--were they omens, or accidents which popular superstition +interprets into omens? Was the malignant influence which Geraldine +exerted over the maiden supernatural possession, or the fascination of +terror and repugnance? Did she really utter the words of a charm, or did +her sweet bedfellow dream them? And once more, what was that upon her +breast--"that bosom old--that bosom cold"? Was it a wound, or the mark +of a serpent, or some foul and hideous disfigurement--or was it only the +shadows cast by the swinging lamp? + +That isolation and remoteness, that preparation of the reader's mind for +the reception of incredible things, which Coleridge secured in "The +Ancient Mariner" by cutting off his hero from all human life amid the +solitude of the tropic sea, he here secured--in a less degree, to be +sure--by the lonely midnight in Sir Leoline's castle. Geraldine and her +victim are the only beings awake except the hooting owls. There is dim +moonlight in the wood, dim firelight in the hall, and in Christabel's +chamber "the silver lamp burns dead and dim." + +The second part of the poem was less successful, partly for the reason, +as the reviewers pointed out, that it undertakes the hardest of tasks, +"witchery by daylight." But there were other reasons. Three years had +passed since the poem was begun. Coleridge had been to Germany and had +settled at Keswick. The poet had been lost in the metaphysician, and he +took up his interrupted task without inspiration, putting force upon +himself. The signs of effort are everywhere visible, and it is painfully +manifest that the poet cannot recover the genial, creative mood in which +he had set out. In particular it is observable that, while there is no +mention of place in the first part, now we have frequent references to +Windermere, Borrowdale, Dungeon Ghyll, and other Lake Country localities +familiar enough in Wordsworth's poetry, but strangely out of place in +"Christabel." It was certainly an artistic mistake to transfer Sir +Leoline's castle from fairyland to Cumberland.[24] There is one noble +passage in the second part, the one which Byron prefixed to his +"Farewell" to Lady Byron: + + "Alas! they had been friends in youth," etc. + +But the stress of personal emotion in these lines is not in harmony with +the romantic context. They are like a patch of cloth of gold let into a +lace garment and straining the delicate tissue till it tears. + +The example of "The Ancient Mariner," and in a still greater degree of +"Christabel," was potent upon all subsequent romantic poetry. It is seen +in Scott, in Byron, and in Keats, not only in the modelling of their +tales, but in single lines and images. In the first stanza of the "Lay" +Scott repeats the line which occurs so often in "Christabel"--"Jesu Maria +shield her well!" In the same poem, the passage where the Lady Margaret +steals out of Branksome Tower at dawn to meet her lover in the wood, +gliding down the secret stair and passing the bloodhound at the portal, +will remind all readers of "Christabel." The dialogue between the river +and mountain spirits will perhaps remind them of the ghostly antiphonies +which the "Mariner" hears in his trance. The couplet + + "The seething pitch and molten lead + Reeked like a witch's caldron red." + +is, of course, from Coleridge's + + "The water, like a witch's oils, + Burned green and blue and white." + +In "The Lord of the Isles" Scott describes the "elvish lustre" and "livid +flakes" of the phosphorescence of the sea, and cites, in a note, the +description, in "The Ancient Mariner," of the sea snakes from which + + "The elvish light + Fell off in hoary flakes." + +The most direct descendant of "Christabel" was "The Eve of St. Agnes." +Madeline's chamber, "hushed, silken, chaste," recalls inevitably the +passage in the older poem: + + "The moon shines dim in the open air, + And not a moonbeam enters here. + But they without its light can see + The chamber carved so curiously, + Carved with figures strange and sweet, + All made out of the carver's brain, + For a lady's chamber meet: + The lamp with twofold silver chain + Is fastened to an angel's feet." + +The rest of Coleridge's ballad work is small in quantity and may be +dismissed briefly. "Alice du Clos" has good lines, but is unimportant as +a whole. The very favourite poem "Love" is a modern story enclosing a +mediaeval one. In the moonshine by the ruined tower the guileless +Genevieve leans against the statue of an armed man, while her lover sings +her a tale of a wandering knight who bore a burning brand upon his shield +and went mad for the love of "The Lady of the Land." [25] + +The fragment entitled "The Dark Ladie" was begun as a "sister tale" to +"Love." The hero is a "knight that wears the griffin for his crest." +There are only fifteen stanzas of it, and it breaks off with a picture of +an imaginary bridal procession, whose "nodding minstrels" recall "The +Ancient Mariner," and incidentally some things of Chatterton's. Lines of +a specifically romantic colouring are of course to be found scattered +about nearly everywhere in Coleridge; like the musical little song that +follows the invocation to the soul of Alvar in "Remorse": + + "And at evening evermore, + In a chapel on the shore, + Shall the chanters sad and saintly-- + Yellow tapers burning faintly-- + Doleful masses chant for thee, + _Miserere Domine_!" + +or the wild touch of folk poesy in that marvellous opium dream, "Kubla +Khan"--the "deep romantic chasm": + + "A savage place, as holy and enchanted + As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted + By woman wailing for her demon lover." + +Or the well-known ending of "The Knight's Grave": + + "The knight's bones are dust, + And his good sword rust; + His soul is with the saints, I trust." + +In taking account of Coleridge's services to the cause of romanticism, +his critical writings should not be overlooked. Matthew Arnold declared +that there was something premature about the burst of creative activity +in English literature at the opening of the nineteenth century, and +regretted that the way had not been prepared, as in Germany, by a +critical movement. It is true that the English romantics put forth no +body of doctrine, no authoritative statement of a theory of literary art. +Scott did not pose as the leader of a school, or compose prefaces and +lectures like Hugo and Schlegel.[26] As a contributor to the reviews on +his favourite topics, he was no despicable critic; shrewd, good-natured, +full of special knowledge, anecdote, and illustration. But his criticism +was never polemic, and he had no quarrel with the classics. He cherished +an unfeigned admiration for Dryden, whose life he wrote and whose works +he edited. Doubtless he would cheerfully have admitted the inferiority +of his own poetry to Dryden's and Pope's. He had no programme to +announce, but just went ahead writing romances; in practice an innovator, +but in theory a literary conservative. + +Coleridge, however, was fully aware of the scope of the new movement. He +represented, theoretically as well as practically, the reaction against +eighteenth-century academicism, the Popean tradition[27] in poetry, and +the maxims of pseudo-classical criticism. In his analysis and +vindication of the principles of romantic art, he brought to bear a +philosophic depth and subtlety such as had never before been applied in +England to a merely belletristic subject. He revolutionised, for one +thing, the critical view of Shakspere, devoting several lecture courses +to the exposition of the thesis that "Shakspere's judgment was +commensurate with his genius." These lectures borrowed a number of +passages from A. W. von Schlegel's "Vorlesungen ueber Dramatische Kunst +und Litteratur," delivered at Vienna in 1808, but engrafted with original +matter of the highest value. Compared with these Shakspere notes, with +the chapters on Wordsworth in the "Biographia Literaria," and with the +_obiter dicta_, sown through Coleridge's prose, all previous English +criticism appears crude and superficial, and the contemporary squabble +over Pope like a scolding match in the nursery. + +Coleridge's acute and sympathetic insight into the principles of +Shaksperian drama did not save him from producing his abortive "Zapolya" +in avowed imitation of the "Winter's Tale." What curse is on the English +stage that men who have done work of the highest grade in other +departments, as soon as they essay playwriting, become capable of +failures like "The Borderers" and "John Woodville" and "Manfred" and +"Zapolya"? As for "Remorse," with its Moorish sea-coasts, wild +mountains, chapel interiors with painted windows, torchlight and +moonlight, dripping caverns, dungeons, daggers and poisoned goblets, the +best that can be said of it is that it is less bad than "Zapolya." And +of both it may be said that they are romantic not after the fashion of +Shakspere, but of those very German melodramas which Coleridge ridiculed +in his "Critique on Bertram." [28] + + +[1] For Coleridge's relations with German romance, see vol. i., pp. +419-21. For his early interest in Percy, Ossian, and Chatterton, ibid., +pp. 299, 328, 368-70. + +[2] "There is as much difference between Coleridge's brief poem +'Christabel' and all the narrative poems of Walter Scott . . . as between +a precious essence and a coarse imitation of it got up for sale." (Leigh +Hunt's "Autobiography," p. 197). + +[3] "Samuel Taylor Coleridge und die Englische Romantik," Alois Brandl, +Berlin, 1886. + +[4] It is in view of his critical attitude, not of his poetry, that +Saintsbury applies this title to Coleridge. "The attitude was that of a +mediaevalism inspired by much later learning, but still more by that +intermediate or decadent Greek philosophy which had so much influence on +the Middle Ages themselves. This is, in other words, the Romantic +attitude, and Coleridge was the high priest of Romanticism, which, +through Scott and Byron, he taught to Europe, repreaching it even to +Germany, from which it had partly come." ("A Short History of English +Literature," by George Saintsbury, London, 1898, p. 656). + +[5] "Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School," by Alois +Brandl. Lady Eastlake's translation, London, 1887, pp. 219-23. + +[6] See vol. i., pp. 160-61. + +[7] "Fourteen Sonnets, written chiefly on Picturesque Spots." Bath, 1789. + +[8] "Samuel Taylor Coleridge," p. 37. _Cf._ Wordsworth's Sonnets "Upon +Westminster Bridge" (1802) and "Scorn Not the Sonnet." + +[9] _Cf._ vol. i., p. 182. + +[10] See Sonnet xvii., "On Revisiting Oxford." + +See also Sonnet xi., "At Ostend:" + + "The mournful magic of their mingled chimes + First waked my wondrous childhood into tears." + +And _Cf._ Francis Mahony's "The Bells of Shandon"-- + + "Whose sounds so wild would, in the days of childhood, + Fling round my cradle their magic spells." + +And Moore's "Those Evening Bells." The twang of the wind-harp also +resounds through Bowles' Sonnets. See for the Aeolus' harp, vol. i., p. +165. and _Cf._ Coleridge's poem, "The Eolian Harp." + +[11] "Dejection: An Ode" (1802). + +[12] SONNET XX. + + _November, 1792_. + + "There is strange music in the stirring wind + When lowers the autumnal eve, and all alone + To the dark wood's cold covert thou art gone + Whose ancient trees, on the rough slope reclined, + Rock, and at times scatter their tresses sear. + If in such shades, beneath their murmuring, + Thou late hast passed the happier hours of spring, + With sadness thou wilt mark the fading year; + Chiefly if one with whom such sweets at morn + Or eve thou'st shared, to distant scenes shall stray. + O Spring, return! return, auspicious May! + But sad will be thy coming, and forlorn, + If she return not with thy cheering ray, + Who from these shades is gone, gone far away." + +[13] _Cf._ Scott's "Harp of the North, that mouldering long hast hung," +etc. "Lady of the Lake," Canto I. + +[14] "Shall gentle Coleridge pass unnoticed here, + To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear?" + --"English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." + +[15] No. xxix., August, 1819, "Remarks on Don Juan." + +[16] "Time was, ere yet in these degenerate days + Ignoble themes obtained mistaken praise. + When sense and wit with poesy allied, + No fabled graces, nourished side by side. . . . + Then, in this happy isle, a Pope's pure strain + Sought the rapt soul to charm, nor sought in vain; + A polished nation's praise aspired to claim, + And raised the people's, as the poet's fame. . . . + [But] Milton, Dryden, Pope, alike forgot, + Resign their hallowed bays to Walter Scott." + --"English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." + +[17] For the benefit of any reader who may wish to follow up the steps of +the Pope controversy, I give the titles of Bowles' successive pamphlets. +"The Invariable Principles of Poetry: A Letter to Thomas Campbell, Esq.," +1819. "A Reply to an 'Unsentimental Sort of Critic,'" Bath, 1820. [This +was in answer to a review of "Spence's Anecdotes" in the _Quarterly_ in +October, 1820.] "A Vindication of the Late Editor of Pope's Works," +London, 1821, second edition. [This was also a reply to the _Quarterly_ +reviewer and to Gilchrist's letters in the _London Magazine_, and was +first printed in vol. xvii., Nos. 33, 34, and 35 of the _Pamphleteer_.] +"An Answer to Some Observations of Thomas Campbell, Esq., in his +Specimens of British Poets" (1822). "An Address to Thomas Campbell, +Esq., Editor of the _New Monthly Magazine_, in Consequence of an Article +in that Publication" (1822). "Letters to Lord Byron on a Question of +Poetical Criticism," London, 1822. "A Final Appeal to the Literary +Public Relative to Pope, in Reply to Certain Observations of Mr. Roscoe," +London, 1823. "Lessons in Criticism to William Roscoe, Esq., with +Further Lessons in Criticism to a Quarterly Reviewer," London, 1826. +Gilchrist's three letters to Bowles were published in 1820-21. +M'Dermot's "Letter to the Rev. W. L. Bowles in Reply to His Letter to +Thomas Campbell, Esq., and to His Two Letters to Lord Byron," was printed +at London, in 1822. + +[18] "With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, + We could not laugh nor wail," etc. + + "With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, + Agape they heard me call," etc. + + "Are those her sails that glance in the sun + Like restless gossamers? + Are those her ribs," etc. + +_Cf._ "Christabel": + + "Is the night chilly and dark? + The night is chilly, but not dark." + +And see vol. i., p. 271. + +[19] "Anima Poetae," 1895, p. 5. This recent collection of marginalia +has an equal interest with Coleridge's well-known "Table Talk." It is +the English equivalent of Hawthorne's "American Note Books," full of +analogies, images, and reflections--topics and suggestions for possible +development in future romances and poems. In particular it shows an +abiding prepossession with the psychology of dreams, apparitions, and +mental illusions of all sorts. + +[20] "Jesu Crist and Seint Benedight + Blisse this hous from every wicked wight, + Fro the nightes mare, the white Pater Noster; + Where wonest thou, Seint Peter's suster." + --"The Miller's Tale." + +[21] _Vide supra_, p. 27. + +[22] "Biographia Literaria," chap. xxiv. + +[23] Keats quotes this line in a letter about Edmund Kean. Forman's ed., +vol. iii., p. 4. + +[24] _Vide supra_, p. 14. + +[25] Brandl thinks that this furnished Keats with a hint or two for his +"Belle Dame sans Merci." Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" is headed with +a stanza from "the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence." + +[26] "The English Romantic critics did not form a school. Like +everything else in the English Romantic movement, its criticism was +individual, isolated, sporadic, unsystematised. It had no official +mouthpiece, like Sainte-Beuve and the _Globe_; its members formed no +compact phalanx like that which, towards the close of our period, threw +itself upon the 'classiques' of Paris. Nor did they, with the one +exception of Coleridge, approach the Romantic critics of Germany in range +of ideas, in grasp of the larger significance of their own movement. It +was only in Germany that the ideas implicit in the great poetic revival +were explicitly thought out in all their many-sided bearing upon society, +history, philosophy, religion; and that the problem of criticism, in +particular, was presented in its full depth and richness of +meaning. . . . As English Romanticism achieved greater things on its +creative than on its critical side, so its criticism was more remarkable +on that side which is akin to creation--in the subtle appreciation of +literary quality--than in the analysis of the principles on which its +appreciation was founded." (C. H. Herford: "The Age of Wordsworth," p. +50). + +[27] See "Biographia Literaria." chap. i. "From the common opinion that +the English style attained its greatest perfection in and about Queen +Anne's reign, I altogether dissent." (Lecture "On Style," March 13, +1818). + +[28] See vol. i., p. 421 ff. + + + + +CHAPTER III. + +Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the Dante Revival. + +In the interchange of literary wares between England and Germany during +the last years of the eighteenth century, it is observable that the +English romantics went no further back than to their own contemporaries +for their knowledge of the _Deutsche Vergangenheit_. They translated or +imitated robber tragedies, chivalry tales, and ghost ballads from the +modern restorers of the Teutonic _Mittelalter_; but they made no draughts +upon the original storehouse of German mediaeval poetry. There was no +such reciprocity as yet between England and the Latin countries. French +romanticism dates, at the earliest, from Chateaubriand's "Genie du +Christianisme" (1802), and hardly made itself felt as a definite force, +even in France, before Victor Hugo's "Cromwell" (1828). But in the first +quarter of the nineteenth century, Italy, Spain, and France began to +contribute material to the English movement in the shape of translations +like Cary's "Divine Comedy" (1814), Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads" (1824); +Southey's "Amadis of Gaul" (1803), "Palmerin of England" (1807), and "The +Chronicle of the Cid" (1808); and Rose's[1] "Partenopex of Blois" (1807). +By far the most influential of these was Cary's "Dante." + +Hitherto the Italian Middle Age had impressed itself upon the English +imagination not directly but through the richly composite art of the +Renaissance schools of painting and poetry; through Raphael and his +followers; through the romances of Ariosto and Tasso and their English +scholar, Spenser. Elizabethan England had been supplied with versions of +the "Orlando Furioso" [2] and the "Gierusalemme Liberata," by Harrington +and Fairfax--the latter still a standard translation and a very +accomplished piece of versification. Warton and Hurd and other +romanticising critics of the eighteenth century were perpetually +upholding Ariosto and Tasso against French detraction: + + "In face of all his foes, the Cruscan quire, + And Boileau, whose rash envy could allow + No strain which shamed his country's creaking lyre, + That whetstone of the teeth--monotony in wire!" [3] + +Scott's eager championship of Ariosto has already been mentioned.[4] But +the stuff of the old Charlemagne epos is sophisticated in the brilliant +pages of Ariosto, who follows Pulci and Boiardo, if not in burlesquing +chivalry outright, yet in treating it with a half irony. Tasso is +serious, but submits his romantic matter--Godfrey of Boulogne and the +First Crusade--to the classical epic mould. It was pollen from Italy, +but not Italy of the Middle Ages, that fructified English poetry in the +sixteenth century. Two indeed of _gli antichi_, "the all Etruscan +three," communicated an impulse both earlier and later. Love +sonneteering, in emulation of Petrarca, began at Henry VIII.'s court. +Chaucer took the substance of "Troilus and Creseyde" and "The Knightes +Tale" from Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and "Teseide"; and Dryden, who never +mentions Dante, versified three stories from the "Decameron." But +Petrarch and Boccaccio were not mediaeval minds. They represent the +earlier stages of humanism and the new learning. Dante was the genuine +_homme du moyen age_, and Dante was the latest of the great revivals. +"Dante," says Carlyle, "was the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the thought +they lived by stands here in everlasting music." + +The difficulty, not to say obscurity, of the "Divine Comedy"; its +allusive, elliptical style; its scholasticism and allegorical method; its +multitudinous references to local politics and the history of +thirteenth-century Italy, defied approach. Above all, its profound, +austere, mystical spirituality was abhorrent to the clear, shallow +rationalism of the eighteenth century, as well as to the religious +liberalism of the seventeenth and the joyous sensuality of the sixteenth. +Goethe the pagan disliked Dante, no less than Scott the Protestant.[5] +In particular, deistic France, _arbiter elegantiarum_, felt with a shiver +of repulsion, + + "How grim the master was of Tuscan song." + +"I estimate highly," wrote Voltaire to an Italian correspondent, "the +courage with which you have dared to say that Dante was a madman[6] and +his work a monster. . . . There are found among us and in the eighteenth +century, people who strive to admire imaginations so stupid and +barbarous." A French translation of the "Divine Comedy" had been printed +by the Abbe Grangier[7] at Paris in 1596; but Rivarol, whose "Inferno" +was published in 1783, was the first Frenchman, says Lowell, to divine +Dante's greatness. The earliest German version was Bachenschwanz's prose +translation of the "Commedia" (Leipsic, 1767-69),[8] but the German +romantic school were the first to furnish a sympathetic interpretation of +Dante to their countrymen. + +Chaucer was well acquainted with the work of "the grete poet of +Florence," and drew upon him occasionally, though by no means so freely +as upon Boccaccio. Thus in "The Monkes Tale" he re-tells, in a very +inferior fashion, the tragedy of Ugolino. In "The Parliament of Foules" +and "The Hous of Fame" there are distinct imitations of Dante. A passage +from the "Purgatory" is quoted in the "Wif of Bathes Tale," etc. Spenser +probably, and Milton certainly, knew their Dante. Milton's sonnet to +Henry Lawes mentions Dante's encounter with the musician Casella "in the +milder shades of Purgatory." Here and there a reference to the "Divine +Comedy" occurs in some seventeenth-century English prose writer like Sir +Thomas Browne or Jeremy Taylor. It is thought that the description of +Hell in Sackville's "Mirror for Magistrates" shows an acquaintance with +the "Inferno." But Dante had few readers in England before the +nineteenth century. He was practically unknown there and in all of +Europe outside of Italy. "His reputation," said Voltaire, "will go on +increasing because scarce anybody reads him." And half a century later +Napoleon said the same thing in the same words: "His fame is increasing +and will continue to increase because no one ever reads him." + +In the third volume of his "History of English Poetry" (1781), Thomas +Warton had spoken of the "Divine Comedy" as "this wonderful compound of +classical and romantic fancy, of pagan and Christian theology, of real +and fictitious history, of tragical and comic incidents, of familiar and +heroic manners, and of satirical and sublime poetry. But the grossest +improprieties of this poem discover an originality of invention, and its +absurdities often border on sublimity. We are surprised that a poet +should write one hundred cantos on hell, paradise, and purgatory. But +this prolixity is partly owing to the want of art and method, and is +common to all early compositions, in which everything is related +circumstantially and without rejection, and not in those general terms +which are used by modern writers." Warton is shocked at Dante's +"disgusting fooleries" and censures his departure from Virgilian grace. +Milton "avoided the childish or ludicrous excesses of these bold +inventions . . . but rude and early poets describe everything." But +Warton felt Dante's greatness. "Hell," he wrote, "grows darker at his +frown." He singled out for special mention the Francesca and Ugolino +episodes. + +If Warton could write thus it is not surprising to discover among +classical critics either a total silence as to Dante, or else a +systematic depreciation. Addison does not mention him in his Italian +travels; and in his "Saturday papers" misses the very obvious chance for +a comparison between Dante and Milton such as Macaulay afterwards +elaborated in his essay on Milton. Goldsmith, who knew nothing of Dante +at first hand, wrote of him with the usual patronising ignorance of +eighteenth-century criticism as to anything outside of the Greek and +Latin classics: "He addressed a barbarous people in a method suited to +their apprehension, united purgatory and the river Styx, St. Paul and +Virgil, heaven and hell together; and shows a strange mixture of good +sense and absurdity. The truth is, he owes most of his reputation to the +obscurity of the times in which he lived." [1] + +In 1782, William Hayley, the biographer of Cowper and author of that very +mild poem "The Triumphs of Temper," published a verse "Essay on Epic +Poetry" in five epistles. In his notes to the third epistle, he gave an +outline of Dante's life with a translation of his sonnet to Guido +Cavalcanti and of the first three cantos of the "Inferno." "Voltaire," +he says, has spoken of Dante "with that precipitate vivacity which so +frequently led the lively Frenchman to insult the reputation of the +noblest writers." He refers to the "judicious and spirited summary" of +the "Divine Comedy" in Warton, and adds, "We have several versions of the +celebrated story of Ugolino; but I believe no entire canto of Dante has +hitherto appeared in our language. . . . The author has been solicited +to execute an entire translation of Dante, but the extreme inequality of +this poet would render such a work a very laborious undertaking; and it +appears very doubtful how far such a version would interest our country. +Perhaps the reception of these cantos may discover to the translator the +sentiments of the public." Hayley adopted "triple rhyme," _i.e._, the +_terza rima_, and said that he did not recollect it had ever been used +before in English. His translation is by no means contemptible--much +better than Boyd's,--but fails entirely to catch Dante's manner or to +keep the strange precision and picturesqueness of his phrase. Thus he +renders + + "Chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco," + + "Whose voice was like the whisper of a lute"; + +and the poet is made to address Beatrice--O donna di virtu--as "bright +fair," as if she were one of the belles in "The Rape of the Lock." In +this same year a version of the "Inferno" was printed privately and +anonymously by Charles Rogers, a book and art collector and a friend of +Sir Joshua Reynolds. But the first complete translation of the "Comedy" +into English was made by Henry Boyd, a clergyman of the Irish Church; the +"Inferno" in 1785 (with a specimen from Ariosto); the whole in 1802. +Boyd was a quite obscure person, author among other things of a +Spenserian poem entitled "The Woodman's Tale," and his translation +attracted little notice. In his introduction he compares Dante with +Homer, and complains that "the venerable old bard . . . has been long +neglected"; perhaps, he suggests, because his poem could not be tried by +Aristotle's rules or submitted to the usual classical tests. + +"Since the French, the restorers of the art of criticism, cast a damp +upon original invention, the character of Dante has been thrown under a +deeper shade. That agreeable and volatile nation found in themselves an +insuperable aversion to the gloomy and romantic bard, whose genius, +ardent, melancholy, and sublime, was so different from their own." + +Boyd used a six-lined stanza, a singularly ill chosen medium for +rendering the _terza rima_; and his diction was as wordy and vague as +Dante's is concise and sharp of edge. A single passage will illustrate +his manner: + + "So full the symphony of grief arose, + My heart, responsive to the lovers' woes, + With thrilling sympathy convulsed my breast. + Too strong at last for life my passion grew, + And, sickening at the lamentable view, + I fell like one by mortal pangs oppressed." [10] + +The first opportunity which the mere English reader had to form any real +notion of Dante, was afforded by Henry Francis Cary's translation in +blank verse (the "Inferno," with the Italian text in 1805; the entire +"Commedia" in 1814, with the title "The Vision of Hell, Purgatory, and +Paradise"). This was a work of talent, if not of genius; and in spite of +the numerous versions in prose and verse that have since appeared, it +continues the most current and standard Dante in England, if not in +America, where Longfellow naturally challenges precedence. The public +was as yet so unprepared to appreciate Dante that Cary's work received +little attention until brought into notice by Coleridge; and the +translator was deeply chagrined by the indifference, not to say +hostility, with which his labours were acknowledged. In the memoir[11] +of Cary by his son there is a letter from Anne Seward--the Swan of +Lichfield--which throws a singular light upon the critical taste of the +"snug coterie and literary lady" of the period. She writes: "How can you +profess to be charmed with the few faint outlines of landscape painting +in Dante, who are blind to the beautiful, distinct, and profuse scenery +in the pages of Ossian?" She goes on to complain that the poem, in its +English dress, is vulgar and obscure. + +Coleridge devoted to Dante a part of his series of lectures given at +London in 1818, reading copious selections from Cary's version. The +translator had claimed, in his introduction, that the Florentine poet +"leaves to Homer and Shakespeare alone the power of challenging the +preeminence or equality." Coleridge emphasized the "endless, subtle +beauties of Dante"; the vividness, logical connection, strength, and +energy of his style. In this he pronounced him superior to Milton; and +in picturesqueness he affirmed that he surpassed all other poets ancient +or modern. With characteristic penetration he indicated the precise +position of Dante in mediaeval literature; his poetry is "the link +between religion and philosophy"; it is "christianized, but without the +further Gothic accession of proper chivalry"; it has that "inwardness +which . . . distinguishes all the classic from all the modern poetry." +It was perhaps in consequence of Coleridge's praise that Cary's +translation went into its second edition in 1819, the year following this +lecture course. A third was published in 1831. Italians used to +complain that the foreign reader's knowledge of the "Divine Comedy" was +limited to the "Inferno," and generally to the Ugolino and Francesca +passages. Coleridge's quotations are all from the "Inferno," and Lowell +thinks that he had not read beyond it. He testified that the Ugolino and +Francesca stories were already "so well known and admired that it would +be pedantry to analyse them." Sir Joshua Reynolds had made a painting of +the former subject. In 1800 William Blake produced a series of seven +engravings in illustration of the "Inferno." In 1817 Flaxman began his +illustrations of the whole "Commedia," extending to a hundred plates.[12] + +In 1819-20 Byron was living at Ravenna, the place of Dante's death and +burial[13] and of the last years of his exile. He used to ride for hours +together through Ravenna's "immemorial wood," [14] and the associations +of the scene prompted him to put into English (March, 1820) the Francesca +episode, that "thing woven as out of rainbows on a ground of eternal +black." In the letter to Murray, sent with his translation, he wrote: +"Enclosed you will find, line for line, in third rhyme (_terza rima_), of +which your British blackguard reader as yet understands nothing, Fanny of +Rimini. You know that she was born here, and married and slain, from +Cary, Boyd, and such people." In his diary, Byron commented scornfully +on Frederick Schlegel's assertions that Dante had never been a favourite +with his own countrymen; and that his main defect was a want of gentle +feelings. "_Not_ a favourite! Why they talk Dante--write Dante--and +think and dream Dante at this moment (1821) to an excess which would be +ridiculous, but that he deserves it. . . . Of gentle feelings!--and +Francesca of Rimini--and the father's feelings in Ugolino--and +Beatrice--and 'La Pia'! Why there is a gentleness in Dante beyond all +gentleness." Byron had not the patience to be a good translator. His +rendering is closer and, of course, more spirited than Hayley's; but +where long search for the right word was needed, and a delicate shading +of phrase to reproduce without loss the meaning of this most meaning and +least translatable of masters, Byron's work shows haste and imperfection. + + "Love, who to none beloved to love again + Remits." + +is neither an idiomatic nor in any way an adequate englishing of + + "Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona." + +Nor does + + "_Accursed_ was the book and he who wrote," + +fully give the force of the famous + + "Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse." [15] + +The year before Byron had composed "The Prophecy of Dante," an original +poem in four cantos, in _terza rima_, + + ". . . imitative rhyme, + Harsh Runic copy of the Soutb's sublime." [16] + +The poem foretells "the fortunes of Italy in the ensuing centuries," and +is a rheotorical piece, diffuse and declamatory, and therein quite the +opposite of Dante. It manifests Byron's self-conscious habit of +submitting his theme to himself, instead of losing himself in his theme. +_He_ is Dante in exile, and Gemma Donati is Lady Byron-- + + "That fatal she, + Their mother, the cold partner who hath brought + Destruction for a dowry--this to see + And feel and know without repair, hath taught + A bitter lesson; but it leaves me free: + I have not vilely found nor basely sought, + They made an exile not a slave of me." + +Dante's bitter and proud defiance found a response in Byron's nature, but +his spirit, as a whole, the English poet was not well fitted to +interpret. In the preface to "The Prophecy," Byron said that he had not +seen the _terza rima_ tried before in English, except by Hayley, whose +translation he knew only from an extract in the notes to Beckford's +"Vathek." + +Shelley's knowledge and appreciation of Dante might be proved from +isolated images and expressions in many parts of his writings. He +translated the sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti with greater freedom and +elegance than Hayley, and wrote a short copy of verses on the Hunger +Tower at Pisa, the scene of Ugolino's sufferings. In the preface to +"Epipsychidion" he cites the "Vita Nuova" as the utterance of an +idealised and spiritualised love like that which his own poem records. +In the "Defence of Poetry" he pays a glowing tribute to Dante as the +second of epic poets and "the first awakener of entranced Europe." His +poetry is the bridge "which unites the modern and the ancient world." +Contrary to the prevailing critical tradition, Shelley preferred the +"Purgatory" and the "Paradise" to the "Hell." Shelley also employed +_terza rima_ in his fragmentary pieces, "Prince Athanase," "The Triumph +of Life," "The Woodman and the Nightingale," and in one of his best +lyrics, the "Ode to the West Wind," [17] written in 1819 "in a wood that +skirts the Arno, near Florence." This linked measure, so difficult for +the translator and which gives a hampered movement to Byron's and +Hayley's specimens of the "Inferno," Shelley may be said to have really +domesticated in English verse by his splendid handling of it in original +work: + + "Make me thy lyre even as the forest is: + What if my leaves are falling, like its own? + The tumult of thy mighty harmonies + Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, + Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce, + My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!" + +Shelley expressed to Medwin his dissatisfaction with all English +renderings from Dante--even with Cary--and announced his intention, or +desire, to translate the whole of the "Divine Comedy" in _terza rima_. +Two specimens of this projected version he gave in "Ugolino," and +"Matilda Gathering Flowers" ("Purg.," xxviii., 1-51). He also made a +translation of the first canzone of the "Convito." + +After the appearance of Cary's version, critical comprehension of Dante +grew rapidly. In the same year when Coleridge gave his lectures, Hallam +published his "Middle Ages," which contained a just though somewhat +coldly worded estimate of the great Italian. This was amplified in his +later work, "The Literature of Europe" (1838-39). Hallam said that Dante +was the first name in the literature of the Middle Ages, the creator of +his nation's poetry, and the most original of all writers, and the most +concise. But he blamed him for obscurity, forced and unnatural turns of +expression, and barbarous licenses of idiom. The "Paradise" seemed to +him tedious, as a whole, and much of the "Purgatory" heavy. Hallam +repeated, if he did not originate that nice bit of discernment, that in +his "Paradise" Dante uses only three leading ideas--light, music, and +motion. Then came Macaulay's essay "Milton," in the _Edinburgh_ for +1825, with the celebrated parallel between the "Divine Comedy" and the +"Paradise Lost," and the contrast between Dante's "picturesque" and +Milton's "imaginative" method. Macaulay's analysis has been questioned +by Ruskin and others; some of his positions were perhaps mistaken, but +they were the most advanced that English Dante criticism had as yet taken +up. And finally came Carlyle's vivid piece of portrait painting in "Hero +Worship" (1841). The first literal prose translation of any extent from +the "Commedia" was the "Inferno" by Carlyle's brother John (1849). + +Since the middle of the century Dante study and Dante literature in +English-speaking lands have waxed enormously. Dante societies have been +founded in England and America. Almost every year sees another edition, +a new commentary or a fresh translation in prose, in blank verse, in +_terza rima_, or in some form of stanza. It is not exaggerating to say +that there is more public mention of Dante now in a single year than in +all the years of the eighteenth century together. It would be +interesting, if it were possible, to count the times that Dante's name +occurs in English writings of the eighteenth and then of the nineteenth +century; afterwards to do the same with Ariosto and Tasso and compare the +results. It would be found that, while the eighteenth century set no +very high value on Ariosto and Tasso, it ignored Dante altogether; and +that the nineteenth has put aside the superficial mediaevalism of the +Renaissance romancers and gone back to the great religious romancer of +the Italian Middle Age. There is no surer plummet than Dante's to sound +the spiritual depth of a time. It is in the nineteenth century first +that Shakspere and Dante took possession of the European mind. In 1800 +Shakspere was an English, or at most an English and German poet, and +Dante exclusively an Italian. In 1900 they had both become world poets. +Shakspere's foreign conquests were the earlier and are still the wider, +as wide perhaps as the expanse-- + + "That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne." + +But the ground that Dante has won he holds with equal secureness. Not +that he will ever be popular, in Shakspere's way; and yet it is far gone +when the aesthete in a comic opera is described as a "Francesca da Rimini +young man." + +As a stimulus to creative work the influence of Dante, though not +entirely absent, is not conspicuous in the first half of the century. It +is not until the time of the Rossettis in England and of Longfellow and +Dr. Parsons in America that any poetry of a really Dantesque inspiration +and, at the same time, of high original value was added to our +literature.[18] + +The first fruits of the Dante revival in England, in the shape of +original production, was Leigh Hunt's "Story of Rimini" (1816)--"Mr. +Hunt's smutty story of Rimini," as the Tory wits of _Blackwood_ were fond +of calling it in their onslaughts upon the Cockney school. This was a +romaunt in four cantos upon the already familiar episode of Francesca, +that "lily in the mouth of Tartarus." Hunt took Dryden's "Fables" as his +model in versification, employing the heroic couplet with the frequent +variation of the triplet and the alexandrine. The poem is not at all +Dantesque in its lax and fluent sweetness, and in that colloquial, +familiar manner which is constant in all Hunt's writing, both prose and +verse; reminding one, at its best, of Chaucer, who was, indeed, one of +his favourite masters. Hunt softens the ferocity of the tale as given by +Boccaccio, according to whom the husband Giovanni Malatesta was a +cripple, and killed the lovers _in flagrante delicto_. Hunt makes him a +personable man, though of proud and gloomy temper. He slays his brother +Paolo in chivalrous fashion and in single combat, and Francesca dies of a +broken heart. The descriptive portions of the "Story of Rimini" are +charming: the feudal procession with trumpeters, heralds, squires, and +knights, sent to escort home the bride, the pine forest outside Ravenna, +and the garden at Rimini in which the lovers used to meet-- + + "Places of nestling green for poets made." + +Hunt had a quick eye for colour; a fondness, not altogether free from +affectation, for dainty phrases; and a feminine love of little niceties +in dress, tapestry, needlework, and furnishings. The poem was written +mostly in prison where its author spent two years for a libel on the +Prince Regent. Byron used to visit him there and bring him books bearing +on Francesca's history. Hunt brought into the piece romantic stuff from +various sources, including a summary of the book which betrayed the +lovers to their fatal passion, the romance of "Lancelot du Lac." And +Giovanni speaks to his dying brother a paraphrase of the celebrated +eulogy pronounced over Lancelot by Sir Ector in the "Morte Darthur": + + "And, Paulo, thou wert the completest knight + That ever rode with banner to the fight; + And thou wert the most beautiful to see, + That ever came in press of chivalry: + And of a sinful man thou wert the best + That ever for his friend put spear in rest; + And thou wert the most meek and cordial + That ever among ladies eat in hall; + And thou wert still, for all that bosom gored, + The kindest man that ever struck with sword." + +Hunt makes the husband discover his wife's infidelity by overhearing her +talking in her sleep. In many other particulars he enfeebles, dandifies, +and sentimentalises Dante's fierce, abrupt tragedy; holding the reader by +the button while he prattles in his garrulous way of Paulo's "taste"-- + + "The very nose, lightly yet firmly wrought, + Showed taste"-- + +and of + + "The two divinest things in earthly lot, + A lovely woman in a rural spot!" + +a couplet which irresistibly suggests suburban picnics. + +Yet no one in his generation did more than Leigh Hunt to familiarise the +English public with Italian romance. He began the study of Italian when +he was a schoolboy at Christ Hospital, being attracted to Ariosto by a +picture of Angelica and Medoro, in West's studio. Like his friend Keats, +on whose "Eve of St. Agnes" he wrote an enthusiastic commentary,[19] Hunt +was eclectic in his choice of material, drawing inspiration impartially +from the classics and the romantics; but, like Keats, he became early a +declared rebel against eighteenth-century traditions and asserted impulse +against rule. "In antiquarian corners," he says, in writing of the +influences of his childish days, "Percy's 'Reliques' were preparing a +nobler age both in poetry and prose." At school he fell passionately in +love with Collins and Gray, composed a "Winter" in imitation of Thomson, +one hundred stanzas of a "Fairy King" in emulation of Spenser, and a long +poem in Latin inspired by Gray's odes and Malet's "Northern Antiquities." +In 1802 [aetate 18] he published a volume of these _juvenilia_--odes +after Collins and Gray, blank verse after Thomson and Akenside, and a +"Palace of Pleasure" after Spenser's "Bower of Bliss." [20] It was in +this same year that on a visit to Oxford, he was introduced to Kett, the +professor of poetry, who expressed a hope that the youthful bard might be +inspired by "the muse of Warton," whom Hunt had never read. There had +fallen in Hunt's way when he was a young man, Bell's edition of the +poets, which included Chaucer and Spenser. "The omission of these in +Cooke's edition," he says, "was as unpoetical a sign of the times as the +present familiarity with their names is the reverse. It was thought a +mark of good sense; as if good sense, in matters of literature, did not +consist as much in knowing what was poetical poetry, as brilliant wit." +Of his "Feast of the Poets" (1814) he writes:[21] "I offended all the +critics of the old or French school, by objecting to the monotony of +Pope's versification, and all the critics of the new or German school by +laughing at Wordsworth." In the preface to his collected poems [1832] +occurs the following interesting testimony to the recentness of the new +criticism. "So long does fashion succeed in palming its petty instincts +upon the world for those of a nation and of nature, that it is only of +late years that the French have ceased to think some of the most +affecting passages in Shakespeare ridiculous. . . . Yet the English +themselves, no great while since, half blushed at these criticisms, and +were content if the epithet 'bizarre' ('_votre bizarre Shakespeare_') was +allowed to be translated into 'a wild, irregular genius.' Everything was +wild and irregular except rhymesters in toupees. A petty conspiracy of +decorums took the place of what was becoming to humanity." In the summer +of 1822 Hunt went by sailing vessel through the Mediterranean to Italy. +The books which he read chiefly on board ship were "Don Quixote," +Ariosto, and Berni; and his diary records the emotion with which he +coasted the western shores of Spain, the ground of Italian romance, where +the Paynim chivalry used to land to go against Charlemagne: the scene of +Boiardo's "Orlando Inamorato" and Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso." "I +confess I looked at these shores with a human interest, and could not +help feeling that the keel of our vessel was crossing a real line, over +which knights and lovers had passed. And so they have, both real and +fabulous; the former not less romantic, the latter scarcely less +real. . . . Fair speed your sails over the lucid waters, ye lovers, on a +lover-like sea! Fair speed them, yet never land; for where the poet has +left you, there ought ye, as ye are, to be living forever--forever +gliding about a summer sea, touching at its flowery islands and reposing +beneath its moon." + +Hunt's sojourn in Italy, where he lived in close association with Byron +and Shelley, enabled him to _preciser_ his knowledge of the Italian +language and literature. In 1846 he published a volume of "Stories from +the Italian Poets," containing a summary or free paraphrase in prose of +the "Divine Comedy" and the poems of Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, +"with comments throughout, occasional passages versified and critical +notices of the lives and genius of the authors." Like our own +romanticist poet Longfellow, who rediscovered Europe for America, Leigh +Hunt was a sympathetic and interpretative rather than a creative genius; +and like Longfellow, an admirable translator. Among his collected poems +are a number of elegant and spirited versions from various mediaeval +literatures. "The Gentle Armour" is a playful adaptation of a French +fabliau "Les Trois Chevaliers et la Chemise," which tells of a knight +whose hard-hearted lady set him the task of fighting his two rivals in +the lists, armed only in her smock; and, in contrition for this harsh +imposure, went to the altar with her faithful champion, wearing only the +same bloody sark as her bridal garment. At least this is the pretty turn +which Hunt gave to the story. In the original it had a coarser ending. +There are also, among these translations from mediaeval sources, the +Latin drinking song attributed to Walter Map-- + + Mihi est propositum in taberna mori-- + +and Andrea de Basso's terrible "Ode to a Dead Body," in fifteenth-century +Italian; which utters, with extraordinary power, the ascetic thought of +the Middle Age, dwelling with a kind of gloomy exultation on the foulness +of the human frame in decay. + +In the preface to his "Italian Poets," Hunt speaks of "how widely Dante +has re-attracted of late the attention of the world." He pronounces him +"the greatest poet for intensity that ever lived," and complains that his +metrical translators have failed to render his "passionate, practical, +and creative style--a style which may be said to write things instead of +words." Hunt's introduction is a fine piece of critical work. His +alert, sparkling, and nimble intellect--somewhat lacking in concentration +and seriousness--but sensitive above all things to the picturesque, was +keenly awake to Dante's poetic greatness. On the other hand, his +cheerful philosophy and tolerant, not to say easy-going moral nature, was +shocked by the Florentine's bitter pride, and by what he conceives to be +his fanaticism, bigotry, superstition, and personal vindictiveness, when + + "Hell he peoples with his foes, + Dark scourge of many a guilty line." + +Hunt was a Universalist, and Dante was a Catholic Calvinist. There was +a determined optimism about Hunt, and a buoyancy as of a cork or other +light body, sometimes a little exasperating to men of less sanguine +temperament.[22] He ends by protesting that Dante is a semi-barbarian +and his "Divine Comedy" too often an infernal tragedy. "Such a vision as +that of his poem (in a theological point of view) seems no better than +the dream of an hypochondriacal savage." It was some years before this, +in his lecture on "The Hero as Poet," delivered in 1840, that a friend of +Leigh Hunt, of a temperament quite the opposite of his, had spoken a very +different word touching this cruel scorn--this _saeva indignatio_ of +Dante's. Carlyle, like Hunt, discovered _intensity_ to be the prevailing +character of Dante's genius, emblemed by the pinnacle of the city of Dis; +that "red-hot cone of iron glowing through the dim immensity of gloom." +Hunt, the Universalist, said of Dante, "when he is sweet-natured once he +is bitter a hundred times." "Infinite pity," says Carlyle, the +Calvinist, "yet also infinite rigour of law, it is so nature is made; it +is so Dante discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of +his 'Divine Comedy's' being a poor splenetic, impotent terrestrial libel; +putting those into hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth! I +suppose if ever pity tender as a mother's was in the heart of any man, it +was in Dante's. But a man who does not know rigour cannot pity either. +His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic--sentimentality, or little +better. . . . Morally great above all we must call him; it is the +beginning of all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love; +as, indeed, what are they but the _inverse_ or _converse_ of his love?" + +It is interesting to note that, antipathetic as Hunt's nature was, in +many ways, not only to the individual Dante but to the theological +thought of which he was the spokesman, in his view of the sacred art of +the Italian Middle Age he anticipated the Pre-Raphaelites and the modern +interpreters of Dante. Here is a part of what he says of the paintings +in the Campo Santo at Pisa: "The best idea, perhaps, which I can give an +Englishman of the general character of the painting is by referring him +to the engravings of Albert Durer and the serious parts of Chaucer. +There is the same want of proper costume--the same intense feeling of the +human being, both in body and soul--the same bookish, romantic, and +retired character--the same evidences, in short, of antiquity and +commencement, weak (where it is weak) for want of a settled art and +language, but strong for that very reason in first impulses, and in +putting down all that is felt. . . . The manner in which some of the +hoary saints in these pictures pore over their books and carry their +decrepit old age, full of a bent and absorbed feebleness--the set limbs +of the warriors on horseback--the sidelong unequivocal looks of some of +the ladies playing on harps and conscious of their ornaments--the people +of fashion seated in rows, with Time coming up unawares to destroy +them--the other rows of elders and doctors of the Church, forming part of +the array of heaven--the uplifted hand of Christ denouncing the wicked at +the day of judgment--the daring satires occasionally introduced against +monks and nuns--the profusion of attitudes, expressions, incidents, broad +draperies, ornaments of all sorts, visions, mountains, ghastly looking +cities, fiends, angels, sibylline old women, dancers, virgin brides, +mothers and children, princes, patriarchs, dying saints, it would be +simply blind injustice to the superabundance and truth of conception in +all this multitude of imagery not to recognize the real inspirers as well +as harbingers of Raphael and Michael Angelo, instead of confining the +honour to the Masaccios and Peruginos, [who] . . . are no more to be +compared with them than the sonneteers of Henry VIII.'s time are to be +compared with Chaucer. Even in the very rudest of the pictures, where +the souls of the dying are going out of their mouths, in the shape of +little children, there are passages not unworthy of Dante and Michael +Angelo. . . . Giotto, be thou one to me hereafter, of a kindred brevity, +solidity, and stateliness with that of thy friend, Dante!" [23] + +Among all the writers of his generation, Keats was most purely the poet, +the artist of the beautiful. His sensitive imagination thrilled to every +touch of beauty from whatever quarter. That his work is mainly +retrospective and eclectic in subject is because a young poet's mind +responds more readily to books than to life, and this young poet did not +outlive his youth. In the Greek mythology he found a world of lovely +images ready to his hand, in the poetry of Spenser, Chaucer, and Ariosto, +he found another such world. Arcadia and Faeryland--"the realms of +gold"--he rediscovered them both for himself, and he struck into the +paths that wound through their enchanted thickets with the ardour of an +explorer. This was the very mood of the Renaissance--this genial heat +which fuses together the pagan and the Christian systems--this +indifference of the creative imagination to the mere sources and +materials of its creations. Indeed, there is in Keats' style a "natural +magic" which forces us back to Shakspere for comparison, a noticeable +likeness to the diction of the Elizabethans, when the classics were still +a living spring of inspiration, and not a set of copies held _in +terrorem_ over the head of every new poet. + +Keats' break with the classical tradition was early and decisive. In his +first volume (1817) there is a piece entitled "Sleep and Poetry," +composed after a night passed at Leigh Hunt's cottage near Hampstead, +which contains his literary declaration of faith. After speaking of the +beauty that fills the universe, and of the office of Imagination to be +the minister and interpreter of this beauty, as in the old days when +"here her altar shone, even in this isle," and "the muses were nigh +cloyed with honours," he asks: + + "Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism + Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, + Made great Apollo blush for this, his land. + Men were thought wise who could not understand + His glories: with a puling infant's force, + They swayed about upon a rocking horse + And thought it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-souled! + The winds of heaven blew, the ocean rolled + Its gathering waves--ye felt it not. The blue + Bowed its eternal bosom, and the dew + Of summer night collected still, to make + The morning precious. Beauty was awake! + Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead + To things ye knew not of--were closely wed + To musty laws, lined out with wretched rule + And compass vile: so that ye taught a school + Of dolts to smooth, inlay and clip and fit; + Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit, + Their verses tallied. Easy was the task: + A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask + Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race! + That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face, + And did not know it,--no, they went about, + Holding a poor decrepit standard out, + Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and, in large, + The name of one Boileau!" + +This complaint, so far as it relates to the _style_ of the rule-ridden +eighteenth-century poetry, had been made before: by Cowper, by +Wordsworth, by Coleridge. But Keats, with his instinct for beauty, +pierces to the core of the matter. It was because of Pope's defective +sense of the beautiful that the doubt arose whether he was a poet at all. +It was because of its + + ". . . forgetting the great end + Of Poetry, that it should be a friend + To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man," + +that the poetry of the classical school was so unsatisfying. This is one +of the very few passages of Keats that are at all doctrinal[24] or +polemic; and as such it has been repeatedly cited by biographers and +essayists and literary historians. Lowell quotes it, in his essay on +Dryden, and adds; "Keats was the first resolute and wilful heretic, the +true founder of the modern school, which admits no cis-Elizabethan +authority save Milton." Mr. Gosse quotes it and says, "in these lines he +has admirably summed up the conceptions of the first half of the present +century with regard to classical poetry." [25] The passage was still +fresh when Byron, in the letter to Disraeli already quoted[26] (March +15th, 1820), held it up to scorn as the opinion of "a young person +learning to write poetry and beginning by teaching the art. . . . The +writer of this is a tadpole of the Lakes, a young disciple of the six or +seven new schools, in which he has learned to write such lines and such +sentiments as the above. He says 'easy were the task' of imitating Pope, +or it may be of equalling him, I presume. I recommend him to try before +he is so positive on the subject, and then compare what he will have +_then_ written, and what he has now written, with the humblest and +earliest compositions of Pope, produced in years still more youthful than +those of Mr. Keats when he invented his new 'Essay on Criticism,' +entitled 'Sleep and Poetry' (an ominous title) from whence the above +canons are taken." + +In a manuscript note on this passage made after Keats' death, Byron +wrote: "My indignation at Mr. Keats' depreciation of Pope has hardly +permitted me to do justice to his own genius. . . . He is a loss to our +literature, and the more so, as he himself, before his death, is said to +have been persuaded that he had not taken the right line, and was +reforming his style upon the more classical models of the language," +Keats made a study of Dryden's versification before writing "Lamia"; but +had he lived to the age of Methusaleh, he would not have "reformed his +style" upon any such classical models as Lord Byron had in mind. +Classical he might have become, in the sense in which "Hyperion" is +classical; but in the sense in which Pope was classical--never. Pope's +Homer he deliberately set aside for Chapman's-- + + "Yet did I never breathe its pure serene + Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold." [27] + +Keats had read Virgil, but seemingly not much Latin poetry besides, and +he had no knowledge of Greek. He made acquaintance with the Hellenic +world through classical dictionaries and a study of the casts in the +British Museum. But his intuitive grasp of the antique ideal of beauty +stood him in as good stead as Landor's scholarship. In such work as +"Hyperion" and the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" he mediates between the ancient +and the modern spirit, from which Landor's clear-cut marbles stand aloof +in chill remoteness. As concerns his equipment, Keats stands related to +Scott in romance learning much as he does to Landor in classical +scholarship. He was no antiquary, and naturally made mistakes of detail. +In his sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," he makes Cortez, +and not Balboa, the discoverer of the Pacific. _A propos_ of a line in +"The Eve of St. Agnes"-- + + "And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor"-- + +Leigh Hunt called attention to the fact that rushes and not carpets +covered the floors in the Middle Ages. In the same poem, Porphyro sings +to his lute an ancient ditty, + + "In Provence called 'La Belle Dame sans Merci.'" + +The ditty was by Alain Chartier, who was not a troubadour, but a Norman +by birth and a French court poet of the fifteenth century. The title, +which Keats found in a note in an edition of Chaucer, pleased his fancy +and suggested his ballad,[28] of the same name, which has nothing in +common with Chartier's poem. The latter is a conventional love _estrif_ +in the artificial taste of the time. But errors of this sort, which any +encyclopaedia can correct, are perfectly unimportant. + +Byron's sneer at Keats, as "a tadpole of the Lakes," was ridiculously +wide of the mark. He was nearly of the second generation of romantics; +he was only three years old when "The Ancient Mariner" was published; +"Christabel" and Scott's metrical romances had all been issued before he +put forth his first volume. But though he owes much to Coleridge[29] and +more perhaps to Chatterton, he took no imprint from Wordsworth, and cared +nothing for Scott. Keats, like his friend Hunt, turned instinctively +away from northern to southern Gothic; from rough border minstrelsy to +the mythology and romance of the races that dwelt about the midland sea. +Keats' sensuous nature longed for "a beaker full of the warm South." "I +have tropical blood in my veins," wrote Hunt, deprecating "the criticism +of a Northern climate" as applied to his "Story of Rimini." Keats' death +may be said to have come to him from Scotland, not only by reason of the +brutal attacks in _Blackwood's_--to which there is some reason for +believing that Scott was privy--but because the hardships and exposure of +his Scotch tour laid the foundation of his fatal malady. He brought back +no literary spoils of consequence from the North, and the description of +the journey in his letters makes it evident that his genius could not +find itself there. This uncomfortable feeling of alienation is expressed +in his "Sonnet on Visiting the Tomb of Burns." The Scotch landscape +seems "cold--strange." + + "The short-lived paly Summer is but won + From Winter's ague." + +And in the letter from Dumfries, enclosing the sonnet he writes: "I know +not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem anti-Grecian and +anti-Charlemagnish." _Charlemagnish_ is Keats' word for the true +mediaeval-romantic. It is noteworthy that Keats avoided Scott's +favourite verse forms. "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is not in the minstrel +ballad measure; and when Keats uses the eight-syllabled couplet, he uses +it very differently from Scott, without the alternate riming which +prevails in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" and all the rest of the series. + +A spark from Spenser kindled the flame of poetry in Keats. His friend, +Cowden Clarke, read him the "Epithalamium" one day in 1812 in an arbour +in the old school garden at Enfield, and lent him a copy of "The Faery +Queene" to take home with him. "He romped through the scenes of the +romance," reports Mr. Clarke, "like a young horse turned into a spring +meadow." There is something almost uncanny--like the visits of a +spirit--about these recurrent appearances of Spenser in English literary +history. It must be confessed that nowadays we do not greatly romp +through "The Faery Queene." There even runs a story that a certain +professor of literature in an American college, being consulted about +Spenser by one of his scholars, exclaimed impatiently, "Oh, damn +Spenser!" But it is worth while to have him in the literature, if only +as a starter for young poets. Keats' earliest known verses are an +"Imitation of Spenser" in four stanzas. His allusions to him are +frequent, and his fugitive poems include a "Sonnet to Spenser" and a +number of "Spenserian Stanzas." But his only really important experiment +in the measure of "The Faery Queene" was "The Eve of St. Agnes." It was +with fine propriety that Shelley chose that measure for his elegy on +Keats in "Adonais." Keats made a careful study of Spenser's verse, the + + "Spenserian vowels that elope with ease"-- + +and all the rest of it. His own work in this kind is thought to resemble +most closely the "Psyche" of the Irish poetess, Mary Tighe, published in +1805[30] on the well-known fable of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius. It is +inferred that Keats knew the poem from a mention of the author in one of +his pieces. He also wrote an "Ode to Psyche," which seems, however, to +have been inspired by an engraving in Spenser's "Polymetis." Mrs. Tighe +was one of the latest and best of the professed imitators of Spenser. +There is beauty of a kind in her languidly melodious verse and +over-profuse imagery, but it is not the passionate and quintessential +beauty of Keats. She is quite incapable of such choice and pregnant word +effects as abound in every stanza of "St. Agnes": + + "Unclasps her _warmed_ jewels, one by one": + + "_Buttressed_ from moonlight": + + "The music, _yearning_ like a God in pain": + + "The boisterous, _midnight_, festive clarion." + +Keats' intimate association with Leigh Hunt, whose acquaintance he made +in 1816, was not without influence on his literary development. He +admired the "Story of Rimini," [31] and he adopted in his early verse +epistles and in "Endymion" (1818), that free ante-Popean treatment of the +couplet with _enjambement_, or overflow, double rimes, etc., which Hunt +had practised in the poem itself and advocated in the preface. Many +passages in "Rimini" and in Keats' couplet poems anticipate, in their +easy flow, the relaxed versification of "The Earthly Paradise." This was +the Elizabethan type of heroic couplet, and its extreme instance is seen +in William Chamberlayne's "Pharonnida" (1659). There is no proof of +Keats' alleged indebtedness to Chamberlayne, though he is known to have +been familiar with another specimen of the type, William Browne's +"Britannia's Pastorals." Hunt also confirmed Keats in the love of +Spenser, and introduced him to Ariosto whom he learned to read in the +Italian, five or six stanzas at a time. Dante he read in Cary's +translation, a copy of which was the only book that he took with him on +his Scotch trip. "The fifth canto of Dante," he wrote (March, 1819), +"pleases me more and more; it is that one in which he meets with Paulo +and Francesca." He afterwards dreamed of the story and wrote a sonnet +upon his dream, which Rossetti thought "by far the finest of Keats' +sonnets" next to that on Chapman's "Homer." [32] Mr. J. M. Robertson +thinks that the influence of Gary's "Dante" is visible in "Hyperion," +especially in the recast version "Hyperion: A Vision." [33] And Leigh +Hunt suggests that in the lines in "The Eve of St. Agnes"-- + + "The sculptured dead on each side seem to freeze, + Emprisoned in black, purgatorial rails: + Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries, + He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails + To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails"-- + +the germ of the thought is in Dante.[34] Keats wished that Italian +might take the place of French in English schools. To Hunt's example +was also due, in part, that fondness for neologisms for which the +latter apologises in the preface to "Rimini," and with which Keats was +wont to enrich his diction, as well as with Chattertonian archaisms, +Chapmanese compounds, "taffeta phrases, silken terms precise" from +Elizabethan English, and coinages like _poesied_, _jollying_, +_eye-earnestly_--licenses and affectations which gave dire offence to +Gifford and the classicals generally. + +In the 1820 volume, which includes Keats' maturest work, there was a +story from the "Decameron," "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil," which tells +how a lady exhumes the body of her murdered lover, cuts off the head and +buries it in a pot of sweet basil, which she keeps in her chamber and +waters with her tears. It was perhaps symptomatic of a certain morbid +sensibility in Keats to select this subject from so cheerful a writer as +Boccaccio. This intensity of love surviving in face of leprosy, torment, +decay, and material horrors of all kinds; this passionate clinging of +spirit to body, is a mediaeval note, and is repeated in the neo-romantic +school which derives from Keats; in Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, +O'Shaughnessy, Marzials, and Paine. Think of the unshrinking gaze which +Dante fixes upon the tortures of the souls in pain; of the wasted body of +Christ upon the cross; of the fasts, flagellations, mortifications of +penitents; the unwashed friars, the sufferings of martyrs. Keats +apologises for his endeavour "to make old prose in modern rime more +sweet," and for his departure from the even, unexcited narrative of his +original: + + "O eloquent and famed Boccaccio, + Of thee we now should ask forgiving boon. . . . + For venturing syllables that ill beseem + The quiet glooms of such a piteous theme. . . . + + "Ah! wherefore all this wormy circumstance? + Why linger at the yawning tomb so long? + O for the gentleness of old Romance, + The simple plaining of the minstrel's song." + +But it is just this wormy circumstance that rivets the poet's attention; +his imagination lingers over Isabella kissing the dead face, pointing +each eyelash, and washing away the loam that disfigures it with her +tears; over the basil tufts growing rankly from the mouldering head, + + "The thing was vile with green and livid spot," + +but Keats' tenderness pierces the grave. + +It is instructive to compare "Isabella" with Dryden's "Sigismonda and +Guiscardo," also from the "Decameron" and surcharged with the physically +horrible. In this tale Tancred sends his daughter her lover's heart in a +golden goblet. She kisses the heart, fills the cup with poison, drinks, +and dies. The two poems are typical examples of romantic and classical +handling, though neither is quite a masterpiece in its kind. The +treatment in Dryden is cool, unimpassioned, objective--like Boccaccio's, +in fact. The story is firmly told, with a masculine energy of verse and +language. Sigismonda and Tancred are characters, confronted wills, as in +drama, and their speeches are like _tirades_ from a tragedy of Racine. +But here Dryden's rhetorical habit and his fondness for reasoning in rime +run away with him, and make his art inferior to Boccaccio's. Sigismonda +argues her case like counsel for the defendant. She even enjoys her own +argument and carries it out with a gusto into abstractions. + + "But leaving that: search we the secret springs, + And backward trace the principles of things; + There shall we find, that when the world began + One common mass composed the mould of man," etc. + +Dryden's grossness of taste mars his narrative at several points. The +satirist in him will not let him miss the chance for a sneer at priests +and another at William III.'s standing army. He makes his heroine's love +ignobly sensual. She is a widow, who having "tasted marriage joys," is +unwilling to live single. Dryden's _bourgeois_ manner is capable even of +ludicrous descents. + + "The sudden bound awaked the sleeping sire, + And showed a sight no parent can desire." + +In Keats' poem there are no characters dramatically opposed. Lorenzo and +Isabella have no individuality apart from their love; passion has +absorbed character. The tale is not evolved firmly and continuously, but +with lyrical outbursts, a poignancy of sympathy at the points of highest +tragic tensity and a swooning sensibility all through, that sometimes +breaks into weakness. There can be no question, however, which poem is +the more _felt_; no question, either, as to which method is superior--at +least as between these two artists, and as applied to subjects of this +particular kind. + +"Isabella" is in _ottava rima_, "The Eve of St. Agnes" in the Spenserian +stanza. This exquisite creation has all the insignia of romantic art and +has them in a dangerous degree. It is brilliant with colour, richly +ornate, tremulous with emotion. Only the fine instinct of the artist +saved it from the overladen decoration and cloying sweetness of +"Endymion," and kept it chaste in its warmth. As it is, the story is +almost too slight for its descriptive mantle "rough with gems and gold." +Such as it is, it is of Keats' invention and of the "Romeo and Juliet" +variety of plot. A lover who is at feud with his mistress' clan ventures +into his foemen's castle while a revel is going on, penetrates by the aid +of her nurse to his lady's bower, and carries her off while all the +household are sunk in drunken sleep. All this in a night of wild weather +and on St. Agnes' Eve, when, according to popular belief, maidens might +see their future husbands in their dreams, on the performance of certain +conditions. The resemblance of this poem to "Christabel" at several +points, has already been mentioned,[35] and especially in the description +of the heroine's chamber. But the differences are even more apparent. +Coleridge's art is temperate and suggestive, spiritual, too, with an +unequalled power of haunting the mind with a sense of ghostly presences. +In his scene the touches are light and few; all is hurried, mysterious, +shadowy. But Keats was a word painter, his treatment more sensuous than +Coleridge's, and fuller of imagery. He lingers over the figure of the +maiden disrobing, and over the furnishings of her room. The Catholic +elegancies of his poem, as Hunt called them, and the architectural +details are there for their own sake--as pictures; the sculptured dead in +the chapel, the foot-worn stones, the cobwebbed arches, broad hall +pillar, and dusky galleries; the "little moonlight room, pale, +_latticed_, chill"; the chain-drooped lamp: + + "The carven angels ever eager-eyed" + +that + + "Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests, + With hair blown back and wings put crosswise on their breasts." + +Possibly "La Belle Dame sans Merci" borrows a hint from the love-crazed +knight in Coleridge's "Love," who is haunted by a fiend in the likeness +of an angel; but here the comparison is to Keats' advantage. Not even +Coleridge sang more wildly well than the singer of this weird ballad +strain, which has seemed to many critics[36] the masterpiece of this +poet, wherein his "natural magic" reaches its most fascinating subtlety +and purity of expression. + +The famous picture of the painted "casement, high and triple-arched" in +Madeline's chamber, "a burst of richness, noiseless, coloured, suddenly +enriching the moonlight, as if a door of heaven were opened," [37] should +be compared with Scott's no less famous description of the east oriel of +Melrose Abbey by moonlight, and the comparison will illustrate a +distinction similar to that already noted between the romanticism of +Coleridge and Scott. The latter is here depicting an actual spot, one of +the great old border abbeys; national pride and the pathos of historic +ruins mingle with the description. Madeline's castle stood in the +country of dream; and it was an "elfin storm from fairyland" that came to +aid the lovers' flight,[38] and all the creatures of his tale are but the + + "Shadows haunting fairily + The brain new stuffed in youth with triumphs gay + Of old Romance." + +In Keats is the romantic escape, the longing to + + "leave the world unseen. + And with thee fade away into the forest dim." [39] + +Keats cared no more for history than he did for contemporary politics. +Courthope[40] quotes a passage from "Endymion" to illustrate his +indifference to everything but art; + + "Hence, pageant history! Hence, gilded cheat! . . . + Many old rotten-timbered boats there be + Upon thy vaporous bosom, magnified + To goodly vessels, many a sail of pride, + And golden-keeled, is left unlaunched and dry. + But wherefore this? What care, though owl did fly + About the great Athenian admiral's mast? + What care though striding Alexander past + The Indus with his Macedonian numbers? + . . . Juliet leaning + Amid her window-flowers,--sighing,--weaning + Tenderly her fancy from its maiden snow, + Doth more avail than these: the silver flow + Of Hero's tears, the swoon of Imogen, + Fair Pastorella in the bandit's den, + Are things to brood on with more ardency + Than the death-day of empires." + +This passage should be set beside the complaint in "Lamia" of the +disenchanting touch of science: + + "There was an awful rainbow once in heaven," etc. + +Keats is the poet of romantic emotion, as Scott of romantic action. +Professor Gates says that Keats' heroes never _do_ anything.[41] It +puzzles the reader of "The Eve of St. Agnes" to know just why Porphyro +sets out the feast of cates on the little table by Madeline's bedside +unless it be to give the poet an opportunity for his luscious description +of "the lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon" and other like delicacies. In +the early fragment "Calidore," the hero--who gets his name from +Spenser--does nothing in some hundred and fifty lines but assist two +ladies to dismount from their palfreys. To revert, as before, to +Ariosto's programme, it was not the _arme_ and _audaci imprese_ which +Keats sang, but the _donne_, the _amori_, and the _cortesie_. Feudal war +array was no concern of his, but the "argent revelry" of masque and +dance, and the "silver-snarling trumpets" in the musicians' gallery. He +was the poet of the lute and the nightingale, rather than of the shock of +spear in tourney and crusade. His "Specimen of an Induction to a Poem" +begins + + "Lo! I must tell a tale of chivalry." + +But he never tells it. The piece evaporates in visions of pure +loveliness; "large white plumes"; sweet ladies on the worn tops of old +battlements; light-footed damsels standing in sixes and sevens about the +hall in courtly talk. Meanwhile the lance is resting against the wall. + + "Ah! shall I ever tell its cruelty, + When the fire flashes from a warrior's eye, + And his tremendous hand is grasping it?" + +"No," answers the reader, "I don't think you ever will. Leave that sort +of thing to Walter Scott, and go on and finish your charming fragment of +'The Eve of St. Mark,' which stops provokingly just where Bertha was +reading the illuminated manuscript, as she sat in her room of an April +evening, when + + "'On the western window panes, + The chilly sunset faintly told + Of unmatured green valleys cold.'" [42] + +This quaintly attractive fragment of Keats was written while he was +living in the old cathedral and college city of Winchester. "Some time +since," he writes to his brother George, September, 1819, "I began a poem +called 'The Eve of St. Mark,' quite in the spirit of town quietude. I +think it will give you the sensation of walking about an old country town +in a coolish evening." The letter describes the maiden-lady-like air of +the side streets, with doorsteps fresh from the flannel, the doors +themselves black, with small brass handles and lion's head or ram's head +knockers, seldom disturbed. He speaks of his walks through the cathedral +yard and two college-like squares, grassy and shady, dwelling-places of +deans and prebendaries, out to St. Cross Meadows with their Gothic tower +and Alms Square. Mr. Colvin thinks that Keats "in this piece anticipates +in a remarkable degree the feeling and method of the modern +pre-Raphaelite schools"; and that it is "perfectly in the spirit of +Rossetti (whom we know that the fragment deeply impressed and +interested)." Mr. Forman, indeed, quotes Rossetti's own _dictum_ (works +of John Keats, vol. ii., p. 320) that the poem "shows astonishingly real +mediaevalism for one not bred as an artist." + +It is in the Pre-Raphaelites that Keats' influence on our later poetry is +seen in its most concentrated shape. But it is traceable in Tennyson, in +Hood, in the Brownings, and in many others, where his name is by no means +written in water. "Wordsworth," says Lowell, "has influenced most the +ideas of succeeding poets; Keats their forms." + + +[1] Scott's friend, William Stewart Rose--to whom the first verse epistle +in "Marmion" is addressed. He also translated the "Orlando Furioso" +(1823-31). His "Partenopex" was made from a version in modern French. + +[2] A new translation of the "Orlando," by Hoole, appeared in 1773-83; of +Tasso's "Jerusalem" in 1763; and of Metastasio's dramas in 1767. These +were in the heroic couplets of Pope. + +[3] "Childe Harold," Canto iv., xxxviii. And _Cf._ vol. i., pp. 25, 49, +100, 170, 219, 222-26. + +[4] _Vide supra_, p. 5. + +[5] _Vide supra_, p. 40. Goethe pronounced the "Inferno" abominable, the +"Purgatorio" doubtful, and the "Paradise" tiresome (Plumptre's "Dante," +London, 1887, vol. ii., p. 484). + +[6] See Walpole's opinion, vol. i., p. 235. + +[7] For early manuscript renderings see "Les Plus Anciennes Traductions +Francaises de la Divine Comedie," par C. Morel, Paris, 1897. + +[8] Lowell says Kannegiesser's, 1809. + +[9] "Present State of Polite Learning" (1759). + +[10] "Mentre che l'uno spirto questo disse, + L'altro piangeva si, che di pietade + I venni men, cosi com' io morisse: + E cadde come corpo morte cade." + --"Inferno," Canto v. + +[11] Vol. i., p. 236. + +[12] Plumptre's "Dante," vol. ii., p. 439. + +[13] "Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar, + Like Scipio, buried, by the upbraiding shore." + --"Childe Harold," iv., 57. + +[14] See vol. i., p. 49; and "Purgatorio," xxviii., 19-20. + + "Tal, qual di ramo in ramo si raccoglie + Per la pineta in sal lito di Chiassi." + +[15] He did better in free paraphrase than in literal translation. _Cf._ +Stanza cviii., in "Don Juan," Canto iii.-- + + "Soft hour! which wakes the wish and melts the heart"-- + +with its original in the "Purgatorio," viii., 1-6. + +[16] Dedication to La Guiccioli. + +[17] But in this poem each thirteenth and fourteenth line make a couplet, +thus breaking up the whole into a series of loose sonnets. + +[18] T. W. Parsons' "Lines on a Bust of Dante" appeared in the Boston +_Advertiser_ in 1841. His translation of the first ten cantos of the +"Inferno" was published in 1843: later instalments in 1867 and 1893. +Longfellow's version of the "Divine Comedy" with the series of sonnets by +the translator came out in 1867-70. For the Dante work of the Rossettis, +_vide infra_, pp. 282 ff. + +[19] "The Seer." + +[20] He named a daughter, born while he was in prison, after Spenser's +Florimel. + +[21] "Autobiography," p. 200 (ed. of 1870). + +[22] See Dickens' caricature of him as Harold Skimpole in "Bleak House." + +[23] "When I was last at Haydon's," wrote Keats to his brother George in +1818-19, "I looked over a book of prints taken from the fresco of the +church at Milan, the name of which I forget. In it were comprised +specimens of the first and second age of art in Italy. I do not think I +ever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare; full of romance and the most +tender feeling; magnificence of drapery beyond everything I ever saw, not +excepting Raphael's--but grotesque to a curious pitch--yet still making +up a fine whole, even finer to me than more accomplished works, as there +was left so much room for imagination." + +[24] Against the hundreds of maxims from Pope, Keats furnishes a single +motto--the first line of "Endymion"-- + + "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." + +[25] "From Shakespeare to Pope." See also Sidney Colvin's "Keats." New +York, 1887, pp. 61-64. + +[26] _Vide supra_, p. 70. + +[27] That he knew Pope's version is evident from a letter to Haydon of +May, 1817, given in Lord Houghton's "Life." + +[28] He could have known extremely little of mediaeval literature; yet +there is nothing anywhere, even in the far more instructed Pre-Raphaelite +school which catches up the whole of the true mediaeval romantic +spirit--the spirit which animates the best parts of the Arthurian legend, +and of the wild stories which float through mediaeval tale-telling, and +make no small figure in mediaeval theology--as does the short piece of +'La Belle Dame sans Merci'. (Saintsbury: "A Short History of English +Literature," p. 673). + +[29] _Vide supra_, p. 85. And for Keats' interest in Chatterton see vol. +i., pp. 370-72. + +[30] The Dict. Nat. Biog. mentions doubtfully an earlier edition in 1795. + +[31] See "Sonnet on Leigh Hunt's Poem 'The Story of Rimini.'" Forman's +ed., vol. ii., p. 229. + +[32] See Forman's ed., vol. ii., p. 334. + +[33] "New Essays toward a Critical Method," London, 1897, p. 256. + +[34] "Come, per sostentar solaio o tetto, + Per mensola talvolta una figura + Si vede giunger le ginocchia al petto, + La qual fa del non ver vera rancura + Nascere in chi la vede." + --"Purgatorio," Canto x., 130-34. + +[35] _Vide supra_, p. 85. + +[36] Rossetti, Colvin, Gates, Robertson, Forman, and others. + +[37] Leigh Hunt. It has been objected to this passage that moonlight is +not strong enough to transmit _colored_ rays, like sunshine (see Colvin's +"Keats," p. 160). But the mistake--if it is one--is shared by Scott. + + "The moonbeam kissed the holy pane + And threw on the pavement a bloody stain." + --"Lay of the Last Minstrel," Canto ii., xi. + +[38] It is interesting to learn that the line + + "For o'er the Southern moors + I have a home for thee" + +read in the original draught "Over the bleak Dartmoor," etc. Dartmoor +was in sight of Teignmouth where Keats once spent two months; but he +cancelled the local allusion in obedience to a correct instinct. + +[39] "Ode to a Nightingale," + +[40] "The Liberal Movement in English Literature," London, 1885, p. 181. + +[41] "Studies and Appreciations." Lewis G. Gates. New York, 1890, p. 17. + +[42] See vol. i., p. 371, and for Cumberland's poem, on the same +superstition, _ibid._, 177. + + + + +CHAPTER IV. + +The Romantic School in Germany.[1] + +Cross-fertilization, at least in these modern eras, is as necessary in +the life of a literature as in that of an animal or a plant. English +romanticism, though it started independently, did not remain an isolated +phenomenon; it was related to the general literary movement in Europe. +Even Italy had its romantic movement; Manzoni began, like Walter Scott, +by translating Buerger's "Lenore" and "Wild Huntsman", and afterwards, +like Schlegel in Germany and Hugo in France, attacked the classical +entrenchments in his "Discourse of the Three Unities." It is no part of +our undertaking to write the history of the romantic schools in Germany +and France. But in each of those countries the movement had points of +likeness and unlikeness which shed light upon our own; and an outline +sketch of the German and French schools will help the reader better to +understand both what English romanticism was, and what it was not. + +In Germany, as in England, during the eighteenth century, the history of +romanticism is a history of arrested development. Romanticism existed in +solution, but was not precipitated and crystallised until the closing +years of the period. The current set flowing by Buerger's ballads and +Goethe's "Goetz," was met and checked by a counter-current, the new +enthusiasm for the antique promoted by Winckelmann's[2] works on classic +art, by the neo-paganism of Goethe's later writings, and by the influence +of Lessing's[3] clear, rationalising, and thoroughly Protestant spirit.[4] + +We may note, at the outset, the main features in which the German +romanticism differed from the English. First, then, it was more +definitely a _movement_. It was organised, self-conscious, and critical. +Indeed, it was in criticism and not in creative literature that its +highest successes were won. Coleridge, Scott, and Keats, like their +English forerunners in the eighteenth century,[5] worked independently of +one another. They did not conspire to a common end; had little personal +contact--were hardly acquaintances, and in no sense a "school." But the +German romanticists constituted a compact group with coherent aims. They +were intimate friends and associates; travelled, lived, and worked +together; edited each other's books and married each other's sisters.[6] +They had a theory of art, a programme, and a propaganda, were aggressive +and polemical, attacking their adversaries in reviews, and in satirical +tales,[7] poems, and plays. Their headquarters were at Jena, "the +central point," says Heine, "from which the new aesthetic dogma radiated. +I advisedly say dogma, for this school began with a criticism of the art +productions of the past, and with recipes for the art works of the +future." Their organ was the _Athenaeum_, established by Friedrich +Schlegel at Berlin in 1798, the date of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's +"Lyrical Ballads," and the climacteric year of English and German +romanticism. + +The first number of the _Athenaeum_ contained the manifesto of the new +school, written by Friedrich Schlegel, the seminal mind of the coterie. +The terms of this pronunciamento are somewhat rapt and transcendental; +but through its mist of verbiage, one discerns that the ideal of romantic +art is announced to be: beauty for beauty's sake, the union of poetry and +life, and the absolute freedom of the artist to express himself. +"Romantic poetry," says Schlegel--"and, in a certain sense, all poetry +ought to be romantic--should, in representing outward objects, also +represent itself." There is nothing here to indicate the precise line +which German romantic poetry was to take, but there is the same rejection +of authority, the same assertion of the right of original genius to break +a path for itself, which was made, in their various ways, by Wordsworth +and Coleridge in the "Lyrical Ballads," by Keats in "Sleep and Poetry," +and by Victor Hugo in the preface to "Cromwell." + +A second respect in which German romanticism differed from English was in +its thoroughgoing character. It is the disposition of the German mind to +synthesise thought and life, to carry out theory into practice. Each of +those imposing systems of philosophy, Kant's, Fichte's, Schelling's, +Hegel's, has its own _aesthetik_ as well as its own _ethik_. It seeks to +interpret all human activities from a central principle; to apply its +highest abstractions to literature, government, religion, the fine arts, +and society. The English mind is practical rather than theoretical. It +is sensible, cautious, and willing to compromise; distrusting alike the +logical habit of the French to push out premises into conclusions at all +hazards; and the German habit of system-building. The Englishman has no +system, he has his whim, and is careless of consistency. It is quite +possible for him to have an aesthetic liking for the Middle Ages, without +wishing to restore them as an actual state of society. It is hard for an +Englishman to understand to what degree a literary man, like Schiller, +was influenced in his writings by the critical philosophy of Kant; or how +Schelling's transcendental idealism was used to support Catholicism, and +Hegel made a prop to Protestant orthodoxy and Junkerism. "Tragedies and +romances," wrote Mme. de Stael, "have more importance in Germany than in +any other country. They take them seriously there; and to read such and +such a book, or see such and such a play, has an influence on the destiny +and the life. What they admire as art, they wish to introduce into real +life; and poetry, philosophy, the ideal, in short, have often an even +greater empire over the Germans than nature and the passions." In proof +of this, she adduces the number of young Germans who committed suicide in +consequence of reading "Werther"; or took to highway robbery in emulation +of "Die Raeuber." + +In England, accordingly, romanticism was a merely literary revolution and +kept strictly within the domain of art. Scott's political conservatism +was indeed, as we have seen, not unrelated to his antiquarianism and his +fondness for the feudal past; but he remained a Protestant Tory. And as +to his Jacobitism, if a Stuart pretender had appeared in Scotland in +1815, we may be sure that the canny Scott would not have taken arms in +his behalf against the Hanoverian king. Coleridge's reactionary politics +had nothing to do with his romanticism; though it would perhaps be going +too far to deny that his reverence for what was old and tested by time in +the English church and constitution may have had its root in the same +temper of mind which led him to compose archaic ballad-romances like +"Christabel" and "The Dark Ladye." But in Germany "throne and altar" +became the shibboleth of the school; half of the romanticists joined the +Catholic Church, and the new literature rallied to the side of +aristocracy and privilege. + +A third respect in which the German movement differed from the English is +partly implied in what has been said above. In Germany the romantic +revival was contemporaneous with a great philosophical development which +influenced profoundly even the lighter literature of the time. Hence the +mysticism which is found in the work of many of the romanticists, and +particularly in the writings of Novalis. Novalis was a disciple of +Schelling, and Schelling the continuator of Fichte. Fichte's +"Wissenschaftslehre" (1794) is the philosophical corner-stone of the +German romantic school. The freedom of the fancy from the thraldom of +the actual world; the right of the Ego to assert itself fully; the +principle formulated by Friedrich Schlegel, that "the caprice of the poet +knows no law"; all these literary doctrines were corollaries of Fichte's +objective idealism.[8] It is needless to say that, while romantic art +usually partakes of the mysterious, there is nothing of this +philosophical or transcendental mysticism in the English romanticists. +If we were to expect it anywhere it would be in Coleridge, who became the +mediator between German and English thought. But Coleridge's poetry was +mainly written before he visited Germany and made acquaintance with the +systems of Kant and Schelling; and in proportion as his speculative +activity increased, his creative force declined. There is enough of the +marvellous and the unexplained in "Christabel," and "The Ancient +Mariner"; but the "mystic ruby" and the "blue flower" of the Teutonic +symbolists are not there. + +The German romantic school, in the limited and precise sense of the term, +consisted of the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig +Tieck, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Johann Dietrich Gries, Tieck's +friend Wackenroder, and--at a distance--Zacharias Werner, the dramatist; +besides a few others, their associates or disciples, whose names need not +here be mentioned. These were, as has been said, personal friends, they +began to be heard of about 1795; and their quarters were at Jena and +Berlin. A later or younger group (_Spaetromantiker_) gathered in 1808 +about the _Zeitung fuer Einsiedler_, published at Heidelberg. These were +Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, Ludwig Uhland, Joseph Goerres, and the +brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Arnim, Brentano, and Goerres were +residing at the time at Heidelberg; the others contributed from a +distance. Arnim edited the _Einsiedler_; Goerres was teaching in the +university. There were, of course, many other adherents of the school, +working individually at different times and places, scattered indeed all +over Germany, and of various degrees of importance or unimportance, of +whom I need mention only Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, the popular +novelist and author of "Undine." + +The history of German romanticism has been repeatedly told. There are +exhaustive treatments of the subject by Julian Schmidt, Koberstein, +Hettner ("Die Romantische Schule," Braunschweig, 1850); Haym ("Die +Romantische Schule," Berlin, 1870); by the Danish critic, Georg Brandes +("Den Romantiske Skole i Tydskland"). But the most famous review of this +passage of literary history is the poet Heine's brilliant little book, +"Die Romantische Schule," [9] published at Paris in 1833. This was +written as a kind of supplement to Mme. de Stael's "L'Allemagne" (1813), +and was intended to instruct the French public as to some +misunderstandings in Mme. de Stael's book, and to explain what German +romanticism really was. Professor Boyesen cautions us to be on our guard +against the injustice and untrustworthiness of Heine's report. The +warning is perhaps not needed, for the animus of his book is sufficiently +obvious. Heine had begun as a romantic poet, but he had parted company +with the romanticists because of the reactionary direction which the +movement took. He had felt the spell, and he renders it with wonderful +vividness in his history of the school. But, at the same time, the +impatience of the political radical and the religious sceptic--the +"valiant soldier in the war for liberty"--and the bitterness of the exile +for opinion's sake, make themselves felt. His sparkling and malicious +wit turns the whole literature of romanticism into sport; and his abuse +of his former teacher, A. W. Schlegel, is personal and coarse beyond +description. Twenty years ago, he said, when he was a lad, what +overflowing enthusiasm he would have lavished upon Uhland! He used to +sit on the ruins of the old castle at Duesseldorf declaiming Uhland's poem + + "A wandering shepherd young and fair + Beneath the royal castle strayed." + +"But so much has happened since then! What then seemed to me so grand; +all that chivalry and Catholicism; those cavaliers that hack and hew at +each other in knightly tournaments; those gentle squires and virtuous +dames of high degree; the Norseland heroes and minnesingers; the monks +and nuns; ancestral tombs thrilling with prophetic powers; colourless +passion, dignified by the high-sounding title of renunciation, and set to +the accompaniment of tolling bells; a ceaseless whining of the +'Miserere'; how distasteful all that has become to me since then!" +And--of Fouque's romances--"But our age turns away from all fairy +pictures, no matter how beautiful. . . . This reactionary tendency, this +continual praise of the nobility, this incessant glorification of the +feudal system, this everlasting knight-errantry balderdash . . . this +everlasting sing-song of armours, battle-steeds, high-born virgins, +honest guild-masters, dwarfs, squires, castles, chapels, minnesingers, +faith, and whatever else that rubbish of the Middle Ages may be called, +wearied us." + +It is a part of the irony of things that this satirist of romance should +have been precisely the one to compose the most popular of all romantic +ballads; and that the most current of all his songs should have been the +one in which he sings of the enchantress of the Rhine, + + "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten + Dass ich so traurig bin." + +The "Loreley" is translated into many tongues, and is sung everywhere. +In Germany it is a really national song. And yet the tale on which it is +founded is not an ancient folk legend--"ein Maehrchen aus alten +Zeiten"--but a modern invention of Clemens Brentano, who first published +it in 1802 in the form of a ballad inserted in one of his novels: + + "Zu Bacharach am Rheine + Wohnt' eine Zauberin: + Sie war so schoen und feine + Und riss viel Herzen hin." + +A certain forgotten romanticist, Graf Loeben, made a lyrical tale out of +it in 1821, and Heine composed his ballad in 1824, afterwards set to the +mournful air in which it is now universally familiar. + +It has been mentioned that Heine's "Romantische Schule" was a sort of +continuation and correction of Mme. de Stael's "L'Allemagne." That very +celebrated book was the result of the distinguished lady's residence in +Germany, and of her determination to reveal Germany to France. It has +been compared in its purpose to the "Germania" of Tacitus, in which the +historian held up the primitive virtues of the Teutonic race as a lesson +and a warning to corrupt Rome. Mme. de Stael had arranged to publish her +book in 1810, and the first impression of ten thousand copies had already +been printed, when the whole edition was seized and destroyed by the +police, and the author was ordered to quit France within twenty-four +hours. All this, of course, was at the instance of Napoleon, who was by +no means above resenting the hostility of a lady author. But the +Minister of Police, General Savary, assumed the responsibility of the +affair; and to Mme. de Stael's remonstrance he wrote in reply: "It +appeared to me that the air of this country did not agree with you, and +we are not yet reduced to seek for models amongst the people you admire +[the Germans]. Your last work is not French." It was not, accordingly, +until 1813 that Mme. de Stael's suppressed work on Germany saw the light. + +The only passages in it that need engage our attention are those in which +the author endeavours to interpret to a classical people the literature +of a Gothic race. In her chapter entitled "Of Classic and Romantic +Poetry," she says: "The word romantic has been lately introduced in +Germany to designate that kind of poetry which is derived from the songs +of the troubadours; that which owes its birth to the union of chivalry +and Christianity." She mentions the comparison--evidently derived from +Schlegel's lectures which she had attended--of ancient poetry to +sculpture and modern to painting; explains that the French incline +towards classic poetry, and the English--"the most illustrious of the +Germanic nations"--towards "that which owes its birth to chivalry and +romance." "The English poets of our times, without entering into concert +with the Germans, have adopted the same system. Didactic poetry has +given place to the fictions of the Middle Ages." She observes that +simplicity and definiteness, that a certain corporeality and +externality--or what in modern critical dialect we would call +objectivity--are notes of antique art; while variety and shading of +colour, and a habit of self-reflection developed by Christianity +[subjectivity], are the marks of modern art. "Simplicity in the arts +would, among the moderns, easily degenerate into coldness and +abstraction, while that of the ancients was full of life and animation. +Honour and love, valour and pity, were the sentiments which distinguished +the Christianity of chivalrous ages; and those dispositions of the soul +could only be displayed by dangers, exploits, love, misfortunes--that +romantic interest, in short, by which pictures are incessantly varied." +Mme. de Stael's analysis here does not go very deep, and her expression +is lacking in precision; but her meaning will be obvious to those who +have well considered the various definitions and expositions of these +contrasted terms with which we set out. Without deciding between the +comparative merits of modern classic and romantic work, Mme. de Stael +points out that the former must necessarily be imitative. "The +literature of the ancients is, among the moderns, a transplanted +literature; that of chivalry and romance is indigenous. . . . The +literature of romance is alone capable of further improvement, because, +being rooted in our own soil, that alone can continue to grow and acquire +fresh life; it expresses our religion; it recalls our history." Hence +she notes the fact that while the Spaniards of all classes know by heart +the verses of Calderon; while Shakspere is a popular and national poet +among the English; and the ballads of Goethe and Buerger are set to music +and sung all over Germany, the French classical poets are quite unknown +to the common people, "because the arts in France are not, as elsewhere, +natives of the very country in which their beauties are displayed." In +her review of German poetry she gives a brief description, among other +things, of the "Nibelungen Lied," and a long analysis of Buerger's +"Leonora" and "Wilde Jaeger." She says that there are four English +translations of "Leonora," of which William Spenser's is the best. "The +analogy between the English and German allows a complete transfusion of +the originality of style and versification of Buerger. . . . It would be +difficult to obtain the same result in French, where nothing strange or +odd seems natural." She points out that terror is "an inexhaustible +source of poetical effect in Germany. . . . Stories of apparitions and +sorcerers are equally well received by the populace and by men of more +enlightened minds." She notes the fondness of the new school for Gothic +architecture, and describes the principles of Schlegelian criticism. She +transcribes A. W. Schlegel's praises of the ages of faith and the +generous brotherhood of chivalry, and his lament that "the noble energy +of ancient times is lost," and that "our times alas! no longer know +either faith or love." The German critics affirm that the best traits of +the French character were effaced during the reign of Louis XIV.; that +"literature, in ages which are called classical, loses in originality +what it gains in correctness"; that the French tragedies are full of +pompous affectation; and that from the middle of the seventeenth century, +a constrained and affected manner had prevailed throughout Europe, +symbolised by the wig worn by Louis XIV. in pictures and bas-reliefs, +where he is portrayed sometimes as Jupiter and sometimes as Hercules clad +only in his lion's skin--but always with the perruque. Heine complains +that Mme. de Stael fell into the hands of the Schlegels, when in Germany, +and that her account of German literature was coloured by their +prejudices; that William Schlegel, in particular, became her escort at +all the capitals of Europe and won great _eclat_ thereby + +Schlegel's elegiac lament over the decay of chivalry may remind the +English reader of the famous passage in Burke[10] about Marie Antoinette. +"Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen +upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of +cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their +scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the +age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators +has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, +never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that +proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the +heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an +exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of +nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It +is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which +felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated +ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself +lost half its evil by losing all its grossness." [11] + +But Burke's reaction against the levelling spirit of French democracy was +by no means so thoroughgoing as the romanticist protest in Germany. It +was manifestly impossible to revive the orders of chivalry, as a +practical military system; or to recreate the feudal tenures in their +entirety. Nor did even the most romantic of the German romanticists +dream of this. They appealed, however, to the knightly principles of +devotion to church and king, of honour, of religious faith, and of +personal loyalty to the suzerain and the nobility. It was these +political and theological aspects of the movement that disgusted Heine. +He says that just as Christianity was a reaction against Roman +materialism; and the Renaissance a reaction against the extravagances of +Christian spiritualism; and romanticism in turn a reaction against the +vapid imitations of antique classic art, "so also do we now behold a +reaction against the re-introduction of that Catholic, feudal mode of +thought, of that knight-errantry and priestdom, which were being +inculcated through literature and the pictorial arts. . . . For when the +artists of the Middle Ages were recommended as models . . . the only +explanation of their superiority that could be given was that these men +believed in that which they depicted. . . . Hence the artists who were +honest in their devotion to art, and who sought to imitate the pious +distortions of those miraculous pictures, the sacred uncouthness of those +marvel-abounding poems, and the inexplicable mysticisms of those olden +works . . . made a pilgrimage to Rome, where the vicegerent of Christ was +to re-invigorate consumptive German art with asses' milk." + +A number of the romanticists were Catholic by birth. There was Joseph +von Eichendorff, _e.g._, who had a strong admiration for the Middle Ages, +wrote sacred poetry, and published in 1815 a novel entitled "Ahnung und +Gegenwart," the hero of which ends by retiring to a monastery. And +Joseph Goerres, who published a work on German _Volksbuecher_[12] (1807); a +follower of Schelling and editor of _Der Rheinische Merkur_, a violent +anti-Gallican journal during the war of liberation. Goerres, according to +Heine, "threw himself into the arms of the Jesuits," and became the +"chief support of the Catholic propaganda at Munich"; lecturing there on +universal history to an audience consisting chiefly of pupils from the +Romish seminaries. Another _Spaetromantiker_, born Catholic, was Clemens +Brentano, whom Heine describes in 1833 as having lived at Frankfort for +the last fifteen years in hermit-like seclusion, as a corresponding +member of the propaganda. For six years (1818-24) Brentano was +constantly at the bedside of the invalid nun, Anna Katharina Emmerich, at +Duelmen. She was a "stigmatic," afflicted, _i.e._, with a mysterious +disease which impressed upon her body marks thought to be miraculous +counterfeits of the wounds of Christ. She had trances and visions, and +uttered revelations which Brentano recorded and afterwards published in +several volumes, that were translated into French and Italian and widely +circulated among the faithful. + +As adherents of the romantic school who were born and bred Protestants, +but became converts to the Catholic faith, Heine enumerates Friedrich +Schlegel, Tieck, Novalis, Werner, Schuetz, Carove, Adam Mueller, and Count +Stolberg. This list, he says, includes only authors, "the number of +painters who in swarms simultaneously abjured Protestantism and reason +was much larger." But Tieck and Novalis never formally abjured +Protestantism. They detested the Reformation and loved the mediaeval +Church, but looked upon modern Catholicism as a degenerate system. Their +position here was something like that of the English Tractarians in the +earlier stages of the Oxford movement. Novalis composed "Marienlieder." +Tieck complained of the dryness of Protestant ritual and theology, and +said that in the Middle Ages there was a unity (_Einheit_) which ought to +be again recovered. All Europe was then one fatherland with a single +faith. The period of the Arthursage was the blossoming time of romance, +the vernal season of love, religion, chivalry, and--sorcery! He pleaded +for the creation of a new Christian, Catholic mythology. + +In 1808 Friedrich Schlegel became a Roman Catholic--or, as Heine puts +it--"went to Vienna, where he attended mass daily and ate broiled fowl." +His wife, a daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, a Jewess by race, followed her +husband into the Catholic Church. Zacharias Werner, author of a number +of romantic melodramas, the heroes of which are described as monkish +ascetics, religious mystics, and "spirits who wander on earth in the +guise of harp-players"--Zacharias Werner also went to Vienna and joined +the order of Ligorians. This conversion made a prodigious noise in +Germany. It occurred at Rome in 1811, and the convert afterwards +witnessed the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples, that +annual miracle in which Newman expresses so firm a belief. Werner then +spent two years in the study of theology, visited Our Lady's Chapel at +Loretto in 1813; was ordained priest at Aschaffenburg in 1814; and +preached at St. Stephen's Church, Vienna, on the vanity of worldly +pleasures, with fastings many, with castigations and mortifications of +the flesh. The younger Voss declared that Werner's religion was nothing +but a poetic coquetting with God, Mary, the wounds of Christ, and the +holy carbuncle (_Karfunkelstein_). He had been a man of dissolute life +and had been divorced from three wives. "His enthusiasm for the +restoration of the Middle Ages," says Heine, "was one-sided; it applied +only to the hierarchical, Catholic phase of mediaevalism; feudalism did +not so strongly appeal to his fancy. . . . Pater Zacharias died in 1823, +after sojourning for fifty-four years in this wicked, wicked world." +Carlyle contributed to the _Foreign Review_ in 1828 an essay on "Werner's +Life and Writings," with translations of passages from his drama, "The +Templars in Cyprus." + +But the conversion which caused the greatest scandal was that of Count +Friedrich Stolberg, whose apostasy was denounced by his early friend +Voss, the translator of Homer, in a booklet entitled "Wie ward Fritz +Stolberg ein Unfreier?" Voss showed, says Heine, that "Stolberg had +secretly joined an association of the nobility which had for its purpose +to counteract the French ideas of liberty; that these nobles entered into +a league with the Jesuits; that they sought, through the re-establishment +of Catholicism, to advance also the interests of the nobility." [13] + +The German literary historians agree that the fresh outbreak of +romanticism in the last decade of the eighteenth century was the +resumption of an earlier movement which had been interrupted; that it was +furthered by the new feeling of German nationality aroused by the +Bonapartist tyranny; and finally that it was a protest against the flat +mediocrity which ruled in the ultra-evangelical circle headed by Nicolai, +the Berlin bookseller and editor. Into this mere Philistinism had +narrowed itself the nobler rationalism of Lessing, with its distrust of +_Traeumerei_ and _Schwaermerei_--of superstition and fanaticism. "Dry +light is best," says Bacon, but the eye is hungry for colour, that has +looked too steadily on the _lumen siccum_ of the reason; and then +imagination becomes the prism which breaks the invisible sunbeam into +beauty. Hence the somewhat extravagant romantic love of colour, and the +determination to believe, at all hazards and even in the teeth of reason. +Hence the imperfectly successful attempt to force back the modern mind +into a posture of child-like assent to the marvellous. Tieck's +"Maehrchen" and the Grimm brothers' nursery tales belong to this +"renascence of wonder," like Lewis' "Tales of Terror," Scott's +"Demonology," and Coleridge's "Christabel" in England. "The tendencies +of 1770 to 1780," says Scherer, "which had now quite disappeared, +asserted themselves with new and increased force. The nations which were +groaning under Napoleon's oppression sought comfort in the contemplation +of a fairer and grander past. Patriotism and mediaevalism became for a +long time the watchwords and the dominating fashion of the day." + +Allowing for the differences mentioned, the romantic movements in England +and Germany offer, as might be expected, many interesting parallels. +Carlyle, writing in 1827,[14] says that the recent change in German +literature is only a part of a general change in the whole literature of +Europe. "Among ourselves, for instance, within the last thirty years, +who has not lifted up his voice with double vigour in praise of +Shakespeare and nature, and vituperation of French taste and French +philosophy? Who has not heard of the glories of old English literature; +the wealth of Queen Elizabeth's age; the penury of Queen Anne's; and the +inquiry whether Pope was a poet? A similar temper is breaking out in +France itself, hermetically sealed as that country seemed to be against +all foreign influences; and doubts are beginning to be entertained, and +even expressed, about Corneille and the three unities. It seems to be +substantially the same thing which has occurred in Germany, and been +attributed to Tieck and his associates; only that the revolution which is +here proceeding, and in France commencing, appears in Germany to be +completed." + +In Germany, as in England--in Germany more than in England--other arts +beside literature partook of the new spirit. The brothers Boisseree +agitated for the completion of the "Koelner Dom," and collected their +famous picture gallery to illustrate the German, Dutch, and Flemish art +of the fifteenth century; just as Gothic came into fashion in England +largely in consequence of the writings of Walpole, Scott, and Ruskin. +Like our own later Pre-Raphaelite group, German art critics began to +praise the naive awkwardness of execution and devout spirituality of +feeling in the old Florentine painters, and German artists strove to +paint like Fra Angelico. Friedrich Schlegel gave a strong impulse to the +study of mediaeval art, and Heine scornfully describes him and his friend +Joseph Goerres, rummaging about "among the ancient Rhine cities for the +remains of old German pictures and statuary which were superstitiously +worshipped as holy relics." Tieck and his friend Wackenroder brought +back from their pilgrimage to Dresden in 1796 a devotion, a kind of +sentimental Mariolatry, to the celebrated Madonnas of Raphael and Holbein +in the Dresden gallery; and from their explorations in Nuernberg, that +_Perle des Mittelalters_, an enthusiasm for Albrecht Duerer. This found +expression in Wackenroder's "Herzensergiessungen eines Kunstliebenden +Klosterbruders"; and in Tieck's novel, "Sternbald's Wanderungen," in +which he accompanies a pupil of Duerer to Rome. Wackenroder, like Tieck's +other friend, Novalis, was of a consumptive, emotional, and somewhat +womanish constitution of mind and body, and died young. Tieck edited his +remains, including letters on old German art. The standard editions of +their joint writings are illustrated by engravings after Duerer, one of +which in particular, the celebrated "Knight, Death, and the Devil," +symbolizes the mysterious terrors of Tieck's own tales, and of German +romance in general. The knight is in complete armour, and is riding +through a forest. On a hilltop in the distance are the turrets of a +castle; a lean hound follows the knight; on the ground between his +horse's hoofs sprawls a lizard-like reptile; a figure on horseback +approaches from the right, with the face half obliterated or eaten away +to the semblance of a skull, and snakes encircling the temples. Behind +comes on a demon or goblin shape, with a tall curving horn, which is +"neither man nor woman, neither beast nor human," but one of those +grotesque and obscene monsters which the mediaeval imagination sculptured +upon the cathedrals. This famous copperplate prompted Fouque's romance, +"Sintram and his Companions." He had received a copy of it for a +birthday gift, and brooded for years over its mysterious significance; +which finally shaped itself in his imagination into an allegory of the +soul's conflict with the powers of darkness. His whole narrative leads +up to the description of Duerer's picture, which occupies the +twenty-seventh and climacteric chapter. The school of young German +Pre-Raphaelite art students, associated at Rome in 1810 under the +leadership of Overbeck and Cornelius, was considerably influenced by +Wackenroder's "Herzensergiessungen." + +Music, too, and particularly church music, was affected by the new taste. +The ancient music of the "Dies Irae" and other Latin hymns was revived; +and it would not be far wrong to say that the romantic school sowed the +seed of Wagner's great music-dramas, profoundly Teutonic and romantic in +their subject matter and handling and in their application of the united +arts of poetry, music, and scene-painting to old national legends such as +"Parzival," "Tannhaeuser," [15] "The Knight of the Swan," and the +"Nibelungen Hoard." + +History, too, and Germanic philology took impulse from this fresh +interest in the past. Johannes Mueller, in his "History of the Swiss +Confederation" (1780-95), drew the first appreciative picture of +mediaeval life, and caught, in his diction, something of the manner of +the old chroniclers. As in England ancient stores of folklore and +popular poetry were gathered and put forth by Percy, Ritson, Ellis, +Scott, and others, so in Germany the Grimm brothers' universally known +collections of fairy tales, legends, and mythology began to appear.[16] +Tieck published in 1803 his "Minnelieder aus dem Schwabischen Zeitalter." +Karl Simrock made modern versions of Middle High German poetry. Uhland, +whose "Walther von der Vogelweide," says Scherer, "gave the first +complete picture of an old German singer," carried the war into Africa by +going to Paris in 1810 and making a study of the French Middle Age. He +introduced the old French epics to the German public, and is regarded, +with A. W. Schlegel, as the founder of romance philology in Germany. + +A pupil of Bodmer,[17] the Swiss Christian Heinrich Myller, had issued a +complete edition of the "Nibelungenlied" in 1784-85. The romantic school +now took up this old national epic and praised it as a German Iliad, +unequalled in sublimity and natural power. Uhland gave a great deal of +study to it, and A. W. Schlegel lectured upon it at Berlin in 1801-2. +Both Schlegel and Tieck made plans to edit it; and Friedrich von der +Hagen, inspired by the former's lectures, published four editions of it, +and a version in modern German. "For a long time," testifies Heine, "the +'Nibelungenlied' was the sole topic of discussion among us. . . . It is +difficult for a Frenchman to form a conception of this work, or even of +the language in which it is written. It is a language of stone, and the +verses are, as it were, blocks of granite." By way of giving his French +readers a notion of the gigantic passions and rude, primitive strength of +the poem, he imagines a battle of all the Gothic cathedrals of Europe on +some vast plain, and adds, "But no! even then you can form no conception +of the chief characters of the 'Nibelungenlied'; no steeple is so high, +no stone so hard as the fierce Hagen, or the revengeful Chrimhilde." + +Another work which corresponds roughly with Percy's "Reliques," as the +"Nibelungenlied" with Macpherson's "Ossian," was "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" +(The Boy's Magic Trumpet), published in 1806-8 by Clemens Brentano and +Achim von Arnim, with a dedication to Goethe. This was a three-volume +collection of German songs, and although it came much later than Percy's, +and after the imitation of old national balladry in Germany was already +well under way, so that its relation to German romanticism is not of an +initial kind, like that of Percy's collection in England; still its +importance was very great. It influenced all the lyrical poetry of the +Romantic school, and especially the ballads of Uhland. "I cannot +sufficiently extol this book," says Heine. "It contains the sweetest +flowers of German poesy. . . . On the title page . . . is the picture of +a lad blowing a horn; and when a German in a foreign land views this +picture, he almost seems to hear the old familiar strains, and +homesickness steals over him. . . . In these ballads one feels the +beating of the German popular heart. Here is revealed all its sombre +merriment, all its droll wit. Here German wrath beats furiously the +drum; here German satire stings, here German love kisses. Here we behold +the sparkling of genuine German wine, and genuine German tears." + +The German romantic school, like the English, but more learnedly and +systematically, sought to reinforce its native stock of materials by +_motifs_ drawn from foreign literatures, and particularly from Norse +mythology and from Spanish romance. Percy's translation of Malet: Gray's +versions from the Welsh and the Scandinavian: Southey's "Chronicles of +the Cid" and Lockhart's translations of the Spanish ballads are +paralleled in Germany by William Schlegel's, and Uhland's, and others' +studies in old Norse mythology and poetry; by Tieck's translation of "Don +Quixote" [18] and by Johann Dietrich Gries' of Calderon. The +romanticists, indeed, and especially Tieck and A. W. Schlegel, were most +accomplished translators. Schlegel's great version of Shakspere is +justly esteemed one of the glories of the German tongue. Heine affirms +that it was undertaken solely for polemical purposes and at a time (1797) +when the enthusiasm for the Middle Ages had not yet reached an +extravagant height, "Later, when this did occur, Calderon was translated +and ranked far above Shakespeare. . . . For the works of Calderon bear +most distinctly the impress of the poetry of the Middle Ages, +particularly of the two principal epochs, knight-errantry and +monasticism. The pious comedies of the Castilian priest-poet, whose +poetical flowers had been besprinkled with holy water and canonical +perfumes . . . were now set up as models, and Germany swarmed with +fantastically pious, insanely profound poems, over which it was the +fashion to work one's self into a mystic ecstasy of admiration, as in +'The Devotion to the Cross'; or to fight in honour of the Madonna, as in +'The Constant Prince.' . . . Our poetry, said the Schlegels, is +superannuated. . . . Our emotions are withered; our imagination is dried +up. . . . We must seek again the choked-up springs of the naive, simple +poetry of the Middle Ages, where bubbles the elixir of youth." Heine +adds that Tieck, following out this prescription, drank so deeply of the +mediaeval folk tales and ballads that he actually became a child again +and fell to lisping. + +There is a suggestive analogy between the position of the Warton brothers +in England and the Schlegel brothers in Germany. The Schlegels, like the +Wartons, were leaders in the romantic movement of their time and country, +and were the inspirers of other men. The two pairs were alike also in +that their best service was done in the field of literary history, +criticism, and exposition, while their creative work was imitative and of +comparatively small value. Friedrich Schlegel's scandalous romance +"Lucinde" is of much less importance than his very stimulating lectures +on the "History of Literature" and the "Wisdom and Languages of +India";[19] and his elder brother, though an accomplished metrist and +translator, was not successful in original verse. But this resemblance +between the Wartons and the Schlegels must not be pressed too far. Here, +as at many other points, the German movement had greater momentum. The +Wartons were men of elegant scholarship after their old-fashioned kind, a +kind which joined the usual classical culture of the English universities +to a liberal--and in their century somewhat paradoxical--enthusiasm in +antiquarian pursuits. But the Schlegels were men of really wide learning +and of depth in criticism. Compared with their scientific method and +grasp of principles, the "Observations" and "Essays" of the Wartons are +mere dilettantism. To the influence of the Schlegels is not unfairly +attributed the origin in Germany of the sciences of comparative philology +and comparative mythology, and the works of scholars like Bopp, Diez, and +the brothers Grimm. Herder[20] had already traced the broad cosmopolitan +lines which German literary scholarship was to follow, with German +thoroughness and independence. And Heine acknowledges that "in +reproductive criticism, where the beauties of a work of art were to be +brought out clearly; where a delicate perception of individualities was +required; and where these were to be made intelligible, the Schlegels +were far superior to Lessing." The one point at which the English +movement outweighed the German was Walter Scott, whose creative vigour +and fertility made an impact upon the mind of Europe to which the +romantic literature of the Continent affords no counterpart. + +The principles of the Schlegelian criticism were first communicated to +the English public by Coleridge; who, in his lectures on Shakspere and +other dramatists, helped himself freely to William Schlegel's +"Vorlesungen ueber dramatische Kunst und Litteratur." [21] Heine +denounces the shallowness of these principles and their failure to +comprehend the modern mind. "When Schlegel seeks to depreciate the poet +Buerger, he compares his ballads with the old English ballads of the Percy +collection, and he shows that the latter are more simple, more naive, +more antique, and consequently more poetical. . . . But death is not +more poetical than life. The old English ballads of the Percy collection +exhale the spirit of their age, and Buerger's ballads breathe the spirit +of _our_ time. The latter, Schlegel never understood. . . . What +increased Schlegel's reputation still more was the sensation which he +excited in France, where he also attacked the literary authorities of the +French, . . . showed the French that their whole classical literature was +worthless, that Moliere was a buffoon and no poet, that Racine likewise +was of no account . . . that the French are the most prosaic people of +the world, and that there is no poetry in France." It is well known that +Coleridge detested the French, as "a light but cruel race", that he +undervalued their literature and even affected an ignorance of the +language. The narrowness of Schlegelian criticism was only the excess of +Teutonism reacting against the previous excesses of Gallic classicism. + +The deficiency of creative imagination in the Schlegels was supplied by +their disciple Ludwig Tieck, who made the "Maehrchen," or popular +traditionary tale, his peculiar province. It was Wackenroder who first +drew his attention to "those old, poorly printed _Volksbuecher_, with +their coarse wood-cuts which had for centuries been circulating among the +peasantry, and which may still be picked up at the book-stalls of the +Leipzig fairs." [22] Tieck's volume of "Volksmaehrchen" (1797) gave +reproductions of a number of these old tales, such as the +"Haimonskinder," the "Schoene Magelone," "Tannhaeuser," and the +"Schildbuerger." His "Phantasus" (1812) contained original tales +conceived in the same spirit. Scherer says that Tieck uttered the +manifesto of German romanticism in the following lines from the overture +of his "Kaiser Octavianus": + + "Mondbeglaenzte Zaubernacht, + Die den Sinn gefangen haelt, + Wundervolle Maehrchenwelt, + Steig auf in der alten Pracht!" + +"Forest solitude" [_Waldeinsamkeit_], says Boyesen,[23] "churchyards at +midnight, ruins of convents and baronial castles; in fact, all the things +which we are now apt to call romantic, are the favourite haunts of +Tieck's muse. . . . Tieck was excessively fond of moonlight and +literally flooded his tales with its soft, dim splendour; therefore +moonlight is now romantic. . . . He never allows a hero to make a +declaration of love without a near or distant accompaniment of a bugle +(_Schalmei_ or _Waldhorn_); accordingly the bugle is called a romantic +instrument." + +"The true tone of that ancient time," says Carlyle,[24] "when man was in +his childhood, when the universe within was divided by no wall of adamant +from the universe without, and the forms of the Spirit mingled and dwelt +in trustful sisterhood with the forms of the Sense, was not easy to seize +and adapt with any fitness of application to the feelings of modern +minds. It was to penetrate into the inmost shrines of Imagination, where +human passion and action are reflected in dim and fitful, but deeply +significant resemblances, and to copy these with the guileless, humble +graces which alone can become them. . . . The ordinary lovers of witch +and fairy matter will remark a deficiency of spectres and enchantments, +and complain that the whole is rather dull. Cultivated free-thinkers, +again, well knowing that no ghosts or elves exist in this country, will +smile at the crack-brained dreamer, with his spelling-book prose and +doggerel verse, and dismiss him good-naturedly as a German Lake poet." +"In these works," says Heine, "there reigns a mysterious intenseness, a +peculiar sympathy with nature, especially with the vegetable and mineral +kingdoms. The reader feels himself transported into an enchanted forest; +he hears the melodious gurgling of subterranean waters; at times he seems +to distinguish his own name in the rustling of the trees. Ever and anon +a nameless dread seizes upon him as the broad-leaved tendrils entwine his +feet; strange and marvellous wild flowers gaze at him with their bright, +languishing eyes; invisible lips mockingly press tender kisses on his +cheeks; gigantic mushrooms, which look like golden bells, grow at the +foot of the trees; large silent birds sway to and fro on the branches +overhead, put on a sapient look and solemnly nod their heads. Everything +seems to hold its breath; all is hushed in awed expectation; suddenly the +soft tones of a hunter's horn are heard, and a lovely female form, with +waving plumes on head and falcon on wrist, rides swiftly by on a +snow-white steed. And this beautiful damsel is so exquisitely lovely, so +fair; her eyes are of the violet's hue, sparkling with mirth and at the +same time earnest, sincere, and yet ironical; so chaste and yet so full +of tender passion, like the fancy of our excellent Ludwig Tieck. Yes, +his fancy is a charming, high-born maiden, who in the forests of +fairyland gives chase to fabulous wild beasts; perhaps she even hunts the +rare unicorn, which may only be caught by a spotless virgin." + +In 1827 Carlyle[25] published translations of five of Tieck's "Maehrchen," +viz.: "The Fair-Haired Eckbert," "The Trusty Eckart," "The Elves," "The +Runenberg," and "The Goblet." He mentioned that another tale had been +already Englished--"The Pictures" (Die Gemaelde). This version was by +Connop Thirwall, who had also rendered "The Betrothal" in 1824. In spite +of Carlyle's recommendations, Tieck's stories seem to have made small +impression in England. Doubtless they came too late, and the romantic +movement, by 1827, had spent its first force in a country already sated +with Scott's poems and novels. Sarah Austin, a daughter of William +Taylor of Norwich, went to Germany to study German literature in this +same year 1827. In her "Fragments from German Prose Writers" (1841), she +speaks of the small success of Tieck's stories in England, but testifies +that A. W. Schlegel's dramatic lectures had been translated early and the +translation frequently reprinted. Another of the Norwich +Taylors--Edgar--was the translator of Grimm's "Haus- und +Kinder-Maehrchen." Julius Hare, who was at school at Weimar in the winter +of 1804-5, rendered three of Tieck's tales, as well as Fouque's "Sintram" +(1820). + +It is interesting to note that Tieck was not unknown to Hawthorne and +Poe. The latter mentions his "Journey into the Blue Distance" in his +"Fall of the House of Usher", and in an early review of Hawthorne's +"Twice-Told Tales" (1842) and "Mosses from an Old Manse" (1846), at a +time when their author was still, in his own words, "the obscurest man of +letters in America." Poe acutely pointed out a resemblance between +Hawthorne and Tieck; "whose manner," he asserts, "in some of his works, +is absolutely identical with that _habitual_ to Hawthorne." One finds a +confirmation of this _apercu_--or finds, at least, that Hawthorne was +attracted by Tieck--in passages of the "American Note-Books," where he +speaks of grubbing out several pages of Tieck at a sitting, by the aid of +a German dictionary. Colonel Higginson ("Short Studies"), _a propos_ of +Poe's sham learning and his habit of mystifying the reader by imaginary +citations, confesses to having hunted in vain for this fascinatingly +entitled "Journey into the Blue Distance"; and to having been laughed at +for his pains by a friend who assured him that Poe could scarcely read a +word of German. But Tieck did really write this story, "Das Alte Buch: +oder Reise ins Blaue hinein," which Poe misleadingly refers to under its +alternate title. There is, indeed, a hint of allegory in Tieck's +"Maehrchen"--which are far from being mere fairy tales--that reminds one +frequently of Hawthorne's shadowy art--of such things as "Ethan Brand," +or "The Minister's Black Veil," or "The Great Carbuncle of the White +Mountains." There is, _e.g._, "The Elves," in which a little girl does +but step across the foot-bridge over the brook that borders her father's +garden, to find herself in a magic land where she stays, as it seems to +her, a few hours, but returns home to learn that she has been absent +seven years. Or there is "The Runenberg," where a youth wandering in the +mountains, receives from a sorceress, through the casement of a ruined +castle, a wondrous tablet set with gems in a mystic pattern; and years +afterward wanders back into the mountains, leaving home and friends to +search for fairy jewels, only to return again to his village, an old and +broken-down man, bearing a sackful of worthless pebbles which appear to +him the most precious stones. And there is the story of "The Goblet," +where the theme is like that of Hawthorne's "Shaker Bridal," a pair of +lovers whose union is thwarted and postponed until finally, when too +late, they find that only the ghost or the memory of their love is left +to mock their youthful hope. + +But the mystic, _par excellence_, among the German romanticists was +Novalis, of whose writings Carlyle gave a sympathetic account in the +_Foreign Review_ for 1829. Novalis' "Hymns to the Night," written in +Ossianic prose, were perhaps not without influence on Longfellow ("Voices +of the Night"), but his most significant work was his unfinished romance +"Heinrich von Ofterdingen." The hero was a legendary poet of the time of +the Crusades, who was victor in a contest of minstrelsy on the Wartburg. +But in Novalis' romance there is no firm delineation of mediaeval +life--everything is dissolved in a mist of transcendentalism and +allegory. The story opens with the words: "I long to see the blue +flower; it is continually in my mind, and I can think of nothing else." +Heinrich falls asleep, and has a vision of a wondrous cavern and a +fountain, beside which grows a tall, light blue flower that bends towards +him, the petals showing "like a blue spreading ruff in which hovered a +lovely face." This blue flower, says Carlyle, is poetry, "the real +object, passion, and vocation of young Heinrich." Boyesen gives a +subtler interpretation. "This blue flower," he says, "is the watchword +and symbol of the school. It is meant to symbolise the deep and nameless +longings of a poet's soul. Romantic poetry invariably deals with +longing; not a definite formulated desire for some attainable object, but +a dim mysterious aspiration, a trembling unrest, a vague sense of kinship +with the infinite,[26] a consequent dissatisfaction with every form of +happiness which the world has to offer. The object of the romantic +longing, therefore, so far as it has any object, is the ideal. . . . The +blue flower, like the absolute ideal, is never found in this world, poets +may at times dimly feel its nearness, and perhaps even catch a brief +glimpse of it in some lonely forest glade, far from the haunts of men, +but it is in vain to try to pluck it. If for a moment its perfume fills +the air, the senses are intoxicated and the soul swells with poetic +rapture." [27] It would lead us too far afield to follow up the traces +of this mystical symbolism in the writings of our New England +transcendentalists. One is often reminded of Novalis' blue flower in +such a poem as Emerson's "Forerunners," or Lowell's "Footpath," or +Whittier's "Vanishers," or in Thoreau's little parable about the horse, +the hound, and the dove which he had long ago lost and is still seeking. +And again one is reminded of Tieck when Thoreau says: "I had seen the red +election birds brought from their recesses on my comrades' strings and +fancied that their plumage would assume stranger and more dazzling +colours in proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and +solitude of the forest." Heinrich von Ofterdingen travels to Augsburg to +visit his grandfather, conversing on the way with various shadowy +persons, a miner, a hermit, an Eastern maiden named Zulma, who represent +respectively, according to Boyesen, the poetry of nature, the poetry of +history, and the spirit of the Orient. At Augsburg he meets the poet +Klingsohr (the personification, perhaps, of poetry in its full +development). With his daughter Matilda he falls in love, whose face is +that same which he had beheld in his vision, encircled by the petals of +the blue flower. Then he has a dream in which he sees Matilda sink and +disappear in the waters of a river. Then he encounters her in a strange +land and asks where the river is. "Seest thou not its blue waves above +us?" she answers. "He looked up and the blue river was flowing softly +over their heads." "This image of Death, and of the river being the sky +in that other and eternal country" [28]--does it not once more remind us +of the well-known line in Channing's "A Poet's Hope"-- + + "If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea"; + +or of Emerson's "Two Rivers": + + "Thy summer voice, Musketaquit, + Repeats the music of the rain, + But sweeter rivers pulsing flit + Through thee, as thou through Concord plain"? + +But transcendentalism is one thing and romanticism is another, and we may +dismiss Novalis with a reminder of the fact that the _Journal of +Speculative Philosophy_, once published at Concord, took for its motto a +sentence from his "Bluethenstaub" (Flower-pollen): "Philosophy can bake no +bread, but she can procure for us God, freedom, and immortality." [29] + +Brentano and Von Arnim have had practically no influence in England. +Brentano's most popular story was translated by T. W. Appell, under the +title, "Honour, or the Story of the Brave Casper and the Fair Annerl: +With an Introduction and Biographical Notice" (London, 1847). The same +story was rendered into French in the _Correspondant_ for 1859 ("Le Brave +Kasperl et la Belle Annerl"). Three tales of Arnim were translated by +Theophile Gautier, as "Contes Bizarres" (Paris, 1856). Arnim's best +romance is "Die Kronenwaechter" (1817). Scherer testifies that this +"combined real knowledge of the Reformation period with graphic power"; +and adds: "It was Walter Scott's great example which, in the second +decade of this century, first made conscientious faithfulness and study +of details the rule in historical novel-writing." Longfellow's "German +Poets and Poetry" (1845) includes nothing from Arnim or Brentano. Nor +did Thomas Roscoe's "German Novelists" (four volumes), nor George Soane's +"Specimens of German Romance," both of which appeared in 1826. + +The most popular of the German romanticists was Friedrich Baron de la +Motte Fouque, the descendant of a family exiled from France by the +Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and himself an officer in the Prussian +army in the war of liberation. Fouque's numerous romances, in all of +which he upholds the ideal of Christian knighthood, have been, many of +them, translated into English. "Aslauga's Knight" appeared in Carlyle's +"Specimens of German Romance" (1827); "Sintram," "Undine," and "Der +Zauberring" had been translated even earlier. "Thiodolf the Icelander" +and others have also been current in English circulating libraries. +Carlyle acknowledges that Fouque's notes are few, and that he is +possessed by a single idea. "The chapel and the tilt yard stand in the +background or the foreground in all the scenes of his universe. He gives +us knights, soft-hearted and strong-armed; full of Christian self-denial, +patience, meekness, and gay, easy daring; they stand before us in their +mild frankness, with suitable equipment, and accompaniment of squire and +dame. . . . Change of scene and person brings little change of subject; +even when no chivalry is mentioned, we feel too clearly the influence of +its unseen presence. Nor can it be said that in this solitary department +his success is of the very highest sort. To body forth the spirit of +Christian knighthood in existing poetic forms; to wed that old +_sentiment_ to modern _thoughts_, was a task which he could not attempt. +He has turned rather to the fictions and machinery of former days." +Heine says that Fouque's Sigurd the Serpent Slayer has the courage of a +hundred lions and the sense of two asses. But Fouque's "Undine" (1811) +is in its way a masterpiece and a classic. This story of the lovely +water-sprite, who received a soul when she fell in love with the knight, +and with a soul, a knowledge of human sorrow, has a slight resemblance to +the conception of Hawthorne's "Marble Faun." Coleridge was greatly +fascinated by it. He read the original several times, and once the +American translation, printed at Philadelphia. He said that it was +beyond Scott, and that Undine resembled Shakspere's Caliban in being a +literal _creation_. + +But in general Fouque's chivalry romances, when compared with Scott's, +have much less vigour, variety, and dramatic force, though a higher +spirituality and a softer sentiment. The Waverley novels are solid with +a right materialistic treatment. It was Scott's endeavour to make the +Middle Ages real. The people are there, as well as chevaliers and their +ladies. The history of the times is there. But in Fouque the Middle +Ages become even more unreal, fairy-like, fantastic than they are in our +imaginations. There is nothing but tourneying, love-making, and +enchantment. Compare the rumour of the Crusades and Richard the Lion +Heart in "Der Zauberring" with the stalwart flesh-and-blood figures in +"Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." A wavering moonshine lies all over the +world of the Fouque romances, like the magic light which illumines the +Druda's castle in "Der Zauberring," on whose battlements grow tall white +flowers, and whose courts are filled with unearthly music from the +perpetual revolution of golden wheels. "On the romantic side," wrote +Richter, in his review of "L'Allemagne" in the _Heidelberg Jahrbuecher_ +for 1815, "we could not wish the Briton to cast his first glance at us; +for the Briton--to whom nothing is so poetical as the common +weal--requires (being used to the weight of gold), even for a golden age +of poetry, the thick golden wing-cases of his epithet-poets; not the +transparent gossamer wings of the Romanticists; no many-coloured +butterfly dust; but, at lowest, flower-dust that will grow to something." + +Another _Spaetromantiker_ who has penetrated to the English literary +consciousness is the Swabian Ludwig Uhland, the sweetest lyric poet of +the romantic school. Uhland studied the poems of Ossian, the Norse +sagas, the "Nibelungenlied" and German hero legends, the Spanish +romances, the poetry of the trouveres and the troubadours, and treated +motives from all these varied sources. His true field, however, was the +ballad, as Tieck's was the popular tale; and many of Uhland's ballads are +favourites with English readers, through excellent translations. Sarah +Austin's version of one of them is widely familiar: + + "Many a year is in its grave + Since I crossed this restless wave," etc. + +Longfellow translated three: "The Black Knight," "The Luck of Edenhall," +and "The Castle by the Sea." It is to be feared that the last-named +belongs to what Scherer calls that "trivial kind of romanticism, full of +sadness and renunciation, in which kings and queens with crimson mantles +and golden crowns, kings' daughters and beautiful shepherds, harpers, +monks, and nuns play a great part." But it has a haunting beauty, and a +dreamy melody like Goethe's "Es war ein Koenig in Thule." The mocking +Heine, who stigmatises Fouque's knights as combinations of iron and +sentimentality, complains that in Uhland's writings too "the naive, rude, +powerful tones of the Middle Ages are not reproduced with idealised +fidelity, but rather they are dissolved into a sickly, sentimental +melancholy. . . . The women in Uhland's poems are only beautiful +shadows, embodied moonshine; milk flows in their veins, and sweet tears +in their eyes, _i.e._, tears which lack salt. If we compare Uhland's +knights with the knights in the old ballads, it seems to us as if the +former were composed of suits of leaden armour, entirely filled with +flowers, instead of flesh and bones. Hence Uhland's knights are more +pleasing to delicate nostrils than the old stalwarts, who wore heavy iron +trousers and were huge eaters and still huger drinkers." + +Upon the whole it must be concluded that this second invasion of England +by German romance, in the twenties and early thirties of the nineteenth +century, made a lesser impression than the first irruption in, say, 1795 +to 1810, in the days of Buerger and "Goetz," and "The Robbers," and Monk +Lewis and the youthful Scott. And the reason is not far to seek. The +newcomers found England in possession of a native romanticism of a very +robust type, by the side of which the imported article showed like a +delicate exotic. Carlyle affirms that Madame de Stael's book was the +precursor of whatever acquaintance with German literature exists in +England. He himself worked valiantly to extend that acquaintance by his +articles in the _Edinburgh_ and _Foreign Review_, and by his translations +from German romance. But he found among English readers an invincible +prejudice against German mysticism and German sentimentality. The +romantic _chiaroscuro_, which puzzled Southey even in "The Ancient +Mariner," became dimmest twilight in Tieck's "Maehrchen" and midnight +darkness in the visionary Novalis. The _Weichheit_, _Wehmuth_, and +_Sehnsucht nach der Unendlichkeit_ of the German romanticists were moods +not altogether unfamiliar in English poetry. "Now stirs the feeling +infinite," sings Byron. + + "Now more than ever seems it rich to die, + To cease upon the midnight with no pain," + +cries Keats. But when Novalis, in his _Todessehnsucht_, exclaims, "Death +is the romance of life," the sentiment has an alien sound. There was +something mutually repellent between the more typical phases of English +and German romanticism. Tieck and the Schlegels, we know, cared little +for Scott. We are told that Scott read the _Zeitung fuer Einsiedler_, but +we are not told what he thought of it. Perhaps romanticism, like +transcendentalism, found a more congenial soil in New than in Old +England. Longfellow spent the winter of 1835-36 in Heidelberg, calling +on A. W. Schlegel at Bonn, on his way thither. "Hyperion" (1839) is +saturated with German romance. Its hero, Paul Flemming, knew "Des Knaben +Wunderhorn" almost by heart. No other German book had ever exercised +such "wild and magic influence upon his imagination." + + +[1] Besides the authorities quoted or referred to in the text, the +materials used in this chapter are drawn mainly from the standard +histories of German literature; especially from Georg Brandes' +"Hauptstroemungen in der Litteratur des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts" +(1872-76); Julian Schmidt's "Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur" +(Berlin, 1890); H. J. T. Hettner's "Litteraturgeschichte" (Braunschweig, +1872); Wilhelm Scherer's "History of German Literature" (Conybeare's +translation, New York, 1886); Karl Hillebrand's "German Thought" (trans., +New York, 1880); Vogt und Koch's "Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur" +(Leipzig and Wien, 1897). My own reading in the German romantics is by +no means extensive. I have read, however, a number of Tieck's "Maerchen" +and of Fouque's romances; Novalis' "Hymns to the Night" and "Heinrich von +Ofterdingen"; A. W. Schlegel's "Lectures on Dramatic Literature" and F. +Schlegel's "Lucinde"; all of Uhland's ballads and most of Heine's +writings in verse and prose; a large part of "Des Knaben Wunderhorn," and +the selections from Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, and Joseph Goerres +contained in Koch's "Deutsche National Litteratur," 146 Band (Stuttgart, +1891). These last include Brentano's "Die Erfindung des Rosenkranzes," +"Kasperl und Annerl," "Gockel und Hinkerl," etc., and Arnim's +"Kronenwaechter," a scene from "Die Paepstin Johanna," etc. I have, of +course, read Madame de Stael's "L'Allemagne"; all of Carlyle's papers on +German literature, with his translations; the Grimm fairy tales and the +like. + +[2] "Gedanken ueber die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Malerei +und Bildhauerkunst," 1755. "Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums," 1764. + +[3] "Laocoon," 1766. + +[4] See vol. i., chap. xi.; and particularly pp. 383-87. + +[5] See vol. i., pp. 422-23. + +[6] Novalis' and Wackenroder's remains were edited by Tieck and F. +Schlegel. Arnim married Brentano's sister Bettina--Goethe's Bettina. + +[7] _E.g._, Tieck's "Der Gestiefelte Kater," against Nicolai and the +_Aufklarung_. + +[8] As to the much-discussed romantic irony, the theory of which played a +part in the German movement corresponding somewhat to Hugo's doctrine of +the grotesque, it seems to have made no impression in England. I can +discover no mention of it in Coleridge. Carlyle, in the first of his two +essays on Richter (1827), expressly distinguishes true humour from irony, +which he describes as a faculty of caricature, consisting "chiefly in a +certain superficial distortion or reversal of objects"--the method of +Swift or Voltaire. That is, Carlyle uses irony in the common English +sense; the Socratic irony, the irony of the "Modest Proposal." The +earliest attempt that I have encountered to interpret to the English +public what Tieck and the Schlegels meant by "irony" is an article in +_Blackwood's_ for September, 1835, on "The Modern German School of +Irony"; but its analysis is not very _eingehend_. + +[9] An English translation was published in this country in 1882. See +also H. H. Boyesen's "Essays on German Literature" (1892) for three +papers on the "Romantic School in Germany." + +[10] Gentz, "The German Burke," translated the "Reflections on the +Revolution in France" into German in 1796. + +[11] See also in the same tract, Burke's tribute to the value of +hereditary nobility, and remember that these were the words of a Whig +statesman. + +[12] Dream books, medicine books, riddle books, almanacs, craftsmen's +proverbs, fabulous travels, prophecies, legends, romances and the like, +hawked about at fairs. + +[13] For Stolberg see also vol. i., pp. 376-77. + +[14] "Ludwig Tieck": Introductions to "German Romance." + +[15] Brentano's fragment "Die Erfindung des Rosenkranzes," begun in 1803, +deals with the Tannhaeuser story. + +[16] "Kinder and Hausmaehrchen" (1812-15). "Deutsche Sagen" (1816). +"Deutsche Mythologie" (1835). + +[17] See vol. i., pp. 375-76. + +[18] "If Cervantes' purpose," says Heine, "was merely to describe the +fools who sought to restore the chivalry of the Middle Ages, . . . then +it is a peculiarly comic irony of accident that the romantic school +should furnish the best translation of a book in which their own folly is +most amusingly ridiculed." + +[19] F. Schlegel's declamations against printing and gun powder in his +Vienna lectures of 1810 foretoken Ruskin's philippics against railways +and factories. + +[20] See vol. i., pp. 300, 337, 416. + +[21] _Vide supra_, p. 88. A. W. Schlegel was in England in 1823. Tieck +met Coleridge in England in 1818, having made his acquaintance in Italy +some ten years before. + +[22] Boyesen: "Aspects of the Romantic School." + +[23] _Ibid_. + +[24] "Ludwig Tieck," in "German Romance." + +[25] "German Romance," four vols., Edinburgh. + +[26] A. W. Schlegel says that romantic poetry is the representation +(_Darstellung_) of the infinite through symbols. + +[27] "Novalis and the Blue Flower." + +[28] Carlyle. + +[29] Selections from Novalis in an English translation were published at +London in 1891. + + + + +CHAPTER V. + +The Romantic Movement in France.[1] + +French romanticism had aspects of its own which distinguished it from the +English and the German alike. It differed from the former and agreed +with the latter in being organised. In France, as in Germany, there was +a romantic school, whose members were united by common literary +principles and by personal association. There were sharply defined and +hostile factions of classics and romantics, with party cries, watchwords, +and shibboleths; a propaganda carried on and a polemic waged in +pamphlets, prefaces, and critical journals. Above all there was a +leader. Walter Scott was the great romancer of Europe, but he was never +the head of a school in his own country in the sense in which Victor Hugo +was in France, or even in the sense in which the Schlegels were in +Germany. Scott had imitators, but Hugo had disciples. + +One point in which the French movement differed from both the English and +the German was in the suddenness and violence of the outbreak. It was +not so much a gradual development as a revolution, an explosion. The +reason of this is to be found in the firmer hold which academic tradition +had in France, the fountainhead of eighteenth-century classicism. +Romanticism had a special work to do in the land of literary convention +in asserting the freedom of art and the unity of art and life. +Everything that is in life, said Hugo, is, or has a right to be in art. +The French, in political and social matters the most revolutionary people +of Europe, were the most conservative in matters of taste. The +Revolution even intensified the reigning classicism by giving it a +republican turn. The Jacobin orators appealed constantly to the examples +of the Greek and Roman democracies. The Goddess of Reason was enthroned +in place of God, Sunday was abolished, and the names of the months and of +the days of the week were changed. Dress under the Directory was +patterned on antique modes--the liberty cap was Phrygian--and children +born under the Republic were named after Roman patriots, Brutus, Cassius, +etc. The great painter of the Revolution was David,[2] who painted his +subjects in togas, with backgrounds of Greek temples. Voltaire's +classicism was monarchical and held to the Louis XIV. tradition; David's +was republican. And yet the recognised formulae of taste and criticism +were the same in 1800 as in 1775, or in 1675. + +A second distinction of the French romanticism was its local +concentration at Paris. The centripetal forces have always been greater +in France than in England and Germany. The earlier group of German +_Romantiker_ was, indeed, as we have seen, united for a time at Jena and +Berlin; and the _Spaetromantiker_ at Heidelberg. But this was dispersion +itself as compared with the intense focussing of intellectual rays from +every quarter of France upon the capital. In England, I hardly need +repeat, there was next to no cohesion at all between the widely scattered +men of letters whose work exhibited romantic traits. + +In one particular the French movement resembled the English more nearly +than the German. It kept itself almost entirely within the domain of +art, and did not carry out its principles with German thoroughness and +consistency into politics and religion. It made no efforts towards a +practical restoration of the Middle Ages. At the beginning, indeed, +French romanticism exhibited something analogous to the Toryism of Scott, +and the reactionary _Junkerism_ and neo-Catholicism of the Schlegels. +Chateaubriand in his "Genie du Christianisme" attempted a sort of +aesthetic revival of Catholic Christianity, which had suffered so heavily +by the deistic teachings of the last century and the atheism of the +Revolution. Victor Hugo began in his "Odes et Ballades" (1822) as an +enthusiastic adherent of monarchy and the church. "L'histoire des +hommes," he wrote, "ne presente de poesie que jugee du haut des idees +monarchiques et religieuses." But he advanced quite rapidly towards +liberalism both in politics and religion. And of the young men who +surrounded him, like Gautier, Labrunie, Sainte-Beuve, Musset, De Vigny, +and others, it can only be affirmed that they were legitimist or +republican, Catholic or agnostic, just as it happened and without +affecting their fidelity to the literary canons of the new school.[3] +The German romanticism was philosophical; the French was artistic and +social. The Parisian _ateliers_ as well as the Parisian _salons_ were +nuclei of revolt against classical traditions. "This intermixture of art +with poetry," says Gautier,[4] "was and remains one of the characteristic +marks of the new school, and enables us to understand why its earliest +recruits were found more among artists than among men of letters. A +multitude of objects, images, comparisons, which were believed to be +irreducible to words, entered into the language and have stayed there. +The sphere of literature was enlarged, and now includes the sphere of art +in its measureless circle." "At that time painting and poetry +fraternised. The artists read the poets and the poets visited the +artists. Shakspere, Dante, Goethe, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott were to +be found in the studio as in the study. There were as many splotches of +colour as of ink on the margins of those beautiful volumes that were so +incessantly thumbed. Imaginations, already greatly excited by +themselves, were heated to excess by the reading of those foreign +writings of a colouring so rich, of a fancy so free and so strong. +Enthusiasm mounted to delirium. It seemed as if we had discovered +poetry, and that was indeed the truth. Now that this fine flame has +cooled and that the positive-minded generation which possesses the world +is preoccupied with other ideas, one cannot imagine what dizziness, what +_eblouissement_ was produced in us by such and such a picture or poem, +which people nowadays are satisfied to approve by a slight nod of the +head. It was so new, so unexpected, so lively, so glowing!" [5] + +The romantic school in France had not only its poets, dramatists, and +critics, but its painters, architects, sculptors, musical composers, and +actors. The romantic artist _par excellence_ was Eugene Delacroix, the +painter of "The Crusaders Entering Jerusalem." "The Greeks and Romans +had been so abused by the decadent school of David that they fell into +complete disrepute at this time. Delacroix's first manner was purely +romantic, that is to say, he borrowed nothing from the recollections or +the forms of the antique. The subjects that he treated were relatively +modern, taken from the history of the Middle Ages, from Dante, Shakspere, +Goethe, Lord Byron, or Walter Scott." He painted "Hamlet," "The Boat of +Dante," "Tasso in Bedlam," "Marino Faliero," "The Death of Sardanapalus," +"The Combat of the Giaour and the Pasha," "The Massacre of the Bishop of +Liege," and similar subjects. Goethe in his conversations with Eckerman +expressed great admiration of Delacroix's interpretations of scenes in +"Faust" (the brawl in Auerbach's cellar, and the midnight ride of Faust +and Mephistopheles to deliver Margaret from prison). Goethe hoped that +the French artist would go on and reproduce the whole of "Faust," and +especially the sorceress' kitchen and the scenes on the Brocken. Other +painters of the romantic school were Camille Roqueplan, who treated +motives drawn from "The Antiquary" and other novels of Walter Scott;[6] +and Eugene Deveria, whose "Birth of Henry IV.," executed in 1827, when +the artist was only twenty-two years of age, was a masterpiece of +colouring and composition. The house of the Deveria brothers was one of +the rallying points of the Parisian romanticists. And then there was +Louis Boulanger, who painted "Mazeppa" and "The Witches' Sabbath" ("La +Ronde du Sabbat" [7]); and the water-colour painter and engraver, +Celestin Nanteuil, who furnished innumerable designs for vignettes, +frontispieces, and book illustrations to the writers of the romantic +school. + +"Of all the arts," says Gautier, "the one that lends itself least to the +expression of the romantic idea is certainly sculpture. It seems to have +received from antiquity its definitive form. . . . What can the statuary +art do without the gods and heroes of mythology who furnish it with +plausible pretexts for the nude, and for such drapery as it needs; things +which romanticism prescribes, or did at least prescribe at that time of +its first fervour? Every sculptor is of necessity a classic." [8] +Nevertheless, he says that the romantic school was not quite unprovided +of sculptors. "In our inner circle (_cenacle_), Jehan du Seigneur +represented this art, austere and rebellious to the fancy. . . . Jehan +du Seigneur--let us leave in his name of Jean this mediaeval _h_ which +made him so happy and made him believe that he wore the apron of Ervein +of Steinbach at work on the sculptures of Strasburg minster." Gautier +mentions among the productions of this Gothic-minded statuary an "Orlando +Furioso," a bust of Victor Hugo, and a group from the latter's romance, +"Notre Dame de Paris," the gipsy girl Esmeralda giving a drink to the +humpback Quasimodo. It was the endeavour of the new school, in the arts +of design as well as in literature, to introduce colour, novelty, +picturesqueness, character. They studied the great Venetian and Flemish +colourists, neglected under the reign of David, and "in the first moments +of their fury against _le poncif classique_, they seemed to have adopted +the theory of art of the witches in 'Macbeth'--Fair is foul and foul is +fair",[9] _i.e._, they neglected a traditional beauty in favour of the +_characteristic_. "They sought the true, the new, the picturesque +perhaps more than the ideal; but this reaction was certainly permissible +after so many Ajaxes, Achilleses, and Philocteteses." + +It is not quite so easy to understand what is meant by romanticism in +music as in literature. But Gautier names a number of composers as +adhering to the romantic school, among others, Hippolyte Monpon, who set +to music "the leaping metres, the echo-rimes, the Gothic counter-points +of Hugo's 'Odes et Ballades' and songs like Musset's 'L'Andalouse'-- + + "'Avez vous vu dans Barcelone,' + +"He believed like us in serenades, alcaldes, mantillas, castinets; in all +that Italy and that Spain, a trifle conventional, which was brought into +fashion by the author of 'Don Paez,' of 'Portia,' and of the 'Marchioness +of Amalgui,' . . . 'Gastibelza, the Man with the Carabine,' and that +guitar, so profoundly Spanish, of Victor Hugo, had inspired Monpon with a +savage, plaintive air, of a strange character, which long remained +popular, and which no romanticist--if any such is left--has forgotten." +A greater name than Monpon was Hector Berlioz, the composer of "Romeo and +Juliette" and "The Damnation of Faust." Gautier says that Berlioz +represented the romantic idea in music, by virtue of his horror of common +formulas, his breaking away from old models, the complex richness of his +orchestration, his fidelity to local colour (whatever that may mean in +music), his desire to make his art express what it had never expressed +before, "the tumultuous and Shaksperian depth of the passions, reveries +amorous or melancholy, the longings and demands of the soul, the +indefinite and mysterious feelings which words cannot render." Berlioz +was a passionate lover of German music and of the writings of Shakspere, +Goethe, and Scott. He composed overtures to "Waverley," "King Lear," and +"Rob Roy"; a cantata on "Sardanapalus," and music for the ghost scene in +"Hamlet" and for Goethe's ballad, "The Fisher." He married an English +actress whom he had seen in the parts of Ophelia, Portia, and Cordelia. +Berlioz _en revanche_ was better appreciated in Germany than in France, +where he was generally considered mad; where his "Symphonic fantastique" +produced an effect analogous to that of the first pieces of Richard +Wagner; and where "the symphonies of Beethoven were still thought +barbarous, and pronounced by the classicists not to be music, any more +than the verses of Victor Hugo were poetry, or the pictures of Delacroix +painting." And finally there were actors and actresses who came to fill +their roles in the new romantic dramas, of whom I need mention only +Madame Dorval, who took the part of Hugo's Marion Delorme. What Gautier +tells us of her is significant of the art that she interpreted, that her +acting was by sympathy, rather than calculation; that it was intensely +emotional; that she owed nothing to tradition; her tradition was +essentially modern, dramatic rather than tragic.[10] + +Romanticism in France was, in a more special sense than in Germany and +England, an effort for freedom, passion, originality, as against rule, +authority, convention. "Romanticism," says Victor Hugo,[11] "so many +times poorly defined, is nothing else than _liberalism_ in +literature. . . . Literary liberty is the child of political +liberty. . . . After so many great things which our fathers have done +and which we have witnessed, here we are, issued forth from old forms of +society; why should we not issue out of the old forms of poetry? A new +people, a new art. While admiring the literature of Louis XIV., so well +adapted to his monarchy, France will know how to have its own literature, +peculiar, personal, and national--this actual France, this France of the +nineteenth century to which Mirabeau has given its freedom and Napoleon +its power." And again:[12] "What I have been pleading for is the liberty +of art as against the despotism of systems, codes, and rules. It is my +habit to follow at all hazards what I take for inspiration, and to change +the mould as often as I change the composition. Dogmatism in the arts is +what I avoid above all things. God forbid that I should aspire to be of +the number of those, either romantics or classics, who make works +_according to their system_; who condemn themselves never to have more +than one form in mind, to always be _proving_ something, to follow any +other laws than those of their organization and of their nature. The +artificial work of such men as those, whatever talents they may possess, +does not exist for art. It is a theory, not a poetry." It is manifest +that a literary reform undertaken in this spirit would not long consent +to lend itself to the purposes of political or religious reaction, or to +limit itself to any single influence like mediaevalism, but would strike +out freely in a multitude of directions; would invent new forms and adapt +old ones to its material, and would become more and more modern, various, +and progressive. And such, in fact, was the history of Victor Hugo's +intellectual development and of the whole literary movement in France +which began with him and with De Stendhal (Henri Beyle). This assertion +of the freedom of the individual artist was naturally accompanied with +certain extravagances. "To develop freely all the caprices of thought," +says Gautier,[13] "even if they shocked taste, convention, and rule, to +hate and repel to the utmost what Horace calls the _profanum vulgus_, and +what the moustached and hairy _rapins_ call grocers, philistines, or +bourgeois; to celebrate love with warmth enough to burn the paper (that +they wrote on); to set it up as the only end and only means of happiness; +to sanctify and deify art, regarded as a second creator; such are the +_donnees_ of the programme which each sought to realise according to his +strength; the ideal and the secret postulations of the young +romanticists." + +Inasmuch as the French romantic school, even more than the English and +the German, was a breach with tradition and an insurrection against +existing conditions, it will be well to notice briefly what the +particular situation was which the romanticists in France confronted. +"To understand what this movement was and what it did," says +Saintsbury,[14] "we must point out more precisely what were the faults of +the older literature, and especially of the literature of the late +eighteenth century. They were, in the first place, an extremely +impoverished vocabulary, no recourse being had to the older tongue for +picturesque archaisms, and little welcome being given to new phrases, +however appropriate and distinct. In the second place, the adoption, +especially in poetry, of an exceedingly conventional method of speech, +describing everything where possible by an elaborate periphrasis, and +avoiding direct and simple terms. Thirdly, in all forms of literature, +but especially in poetry and drama, the acceptance for almost every kind +of work of cut-and-dried patterns,[15] to which it was bound to conform. +We have already pointed out that this had all but killed the tragic +drama, and it was nearly as bad in the various accepted forms of poetry, +such as fables, epistles, odes, etc. Each piece was expected to resemble +something else, and originality was regarded as a mark of bad taste and +insufficient culture. Fourthly, the submission to a very limited and +very arbitrary system of versification, adapted only to the production of +tragic alexandrines, and limiting even that form of verse to one +monotonous model. Lastly, the limitation of the subject to be treated to +a very few classes and kinds." If to this description be added a +paragraph from Gautier's "Histoire du Romantisme," we shall have a +sufficient idea of the condition of French literature and art before the +appearance of Victor Hugo's "Odes et Ballades" (1826). "One cannot +imagine to what a degree of insignificance and paleness literature had +come. Painting was not much better. The last pupils of David were +spreading their wishywashy colours over the old Graeco-Roman patterns. +The classicists found that perfectly beautiful; but in the presence of +these masterpieces, their admiration could not keep them from putting +their hands before their mouths to cover a yawn; a circumstance, however, +that failed to make them any more indulgent to the artists of the new +school, whom they called tattooed savages and accused of painting with a +drunken broom." One is reminded by Mr. Saintsbury's summary of many +features which we have observed in the English academicism of the +eighteenth century; the impoverished vocabulary, _e.g._, which makes +itself evident in the annotations on the text of Spenser and other old +authors; the horror of common terms, and the constant abuse of the +periphrasis--the "gelid cistern," the "stercoraceous heap," the +"spiculated palings," and the "shining leather that encased the limb." +And the heroic couplet in English usage corresponds very closely to the +French alexandrine. In their dissatisfaction with the paleness and +vagueness of the old poetic diction, and the monotony of the classical +verse, the new school innovated boldly, introducing archaisms, +neologisms, and all kinds of exotic words and popular locutions, even +_argot_ or Parisian slang; and trying metrical experiments of many sorts. +Gautier mentions in particular one Theophile Dondey (who, after the +fashion of the school, anagrammatised his name into Philothee O'Neddy) as +presenting this _caractere d'outrance et de tension_. "The word +_paroxyste_, employed for the first time by Nestor Roqueplan, seems to +have been invented with an application to Philothee. Everything is +_pousse_ in tone, high-coloured, violent, carried to the utmost limits of +expression, of an aggressive originality, almost dripping with the +unheard-of (_ruissilant d'inouisme_); but back of the double-horned +paradoxes, sophistical maxims, incoherent metaphors, swoln hyperboles, +and words six feet long, are the poetic feeling of the time and the +harmony of rhythm." One hears much in the critical writings of that +period, of the _mot propre_, the _vers libre_, and the _rime brise_. It +was in tragedy especially that the periphrasis reigned most tyrannically, +and that the introduction of the _mot propre_, _i.e._, of terms that were +precise, concrete, familiar, technical even, if needful, horrified the +classicists. It was beneath the dignity of the muse--the elegant muse of +the Abbe Delille--Hugo tells us, to speak naturally. "She underlines," +in sign of disapprobation, "the old Corneille for his way of saying +crudely + + "'Ah, ne me brouillez pas avec la republique.' + +"She still has heavy on her heart his _Tout beau, monsieur_. And many a +_seigneur_ and many a _madame_ was needed to make her forgive our +admirable Racine his _chiens_ so monosyllabic. . . . History in her eyes +is in bad tone and taste. How, for example, can kings and queens who +swear be tolerated? They must be elevated from their royal dignity to +the dignity of tragedy. . . . It is thus that the king of the people +(Henri IV.) polished by M. Legouve, has seen his _ventre-saint-gris_ +shamefully driven from his mouth by two sentences, and has been reduced, +like the young girl in the story, to let nothing fall from this royal +mouth, but pearls, rubies, and sapphires--all of them false, to say the +truth." It seems incredible to an Englishman, but it is nevertheless +true that at the first representations of "Hernani" in 1830, the simple +question and answer + + "Est il minuit?--Minuit bientot" + +raised a tempest of hisses and applause, and that the opposing factions +of classics and romantics "fought three days over this hemistich. It was +thought trivial, familiar, out of place; a king asks what time it is like +a common citizen, and is answered, as if he were a farmer, _midnight_. +Well done! Now if he had only used some fine periphrasis, _e.g._: + + "----l'heure + Atteindra bientot sa derniere demeure.[16] + +"If they could not away with definite words in the verse, they endured +very impatiently, too, epithets, metaphors, comparisons, poetic +words--lyricism, in short; those swift escapes into nature, those +soarings of the soul above the situation, those openings of poetry +athwart drama, so frequent in Shakspere, Calderon, and Goethe, so rare in +our great authors of the eighteenth century." Gautier gives, as one +reason for the adherence of so many artists to the romantic school, the +circumstance that, being accustomed to a language freely intermixed with +technical terms, the _mot propre_ had nothing shocking for them; while +their special education as artists having put them into intimate relation +with nature, "they were prepared to feel the imagery and colours of the +new poetry and were not at all repelled by the precise and picturesque +details so disagreeable to the classicists. . . . You cannot imagine the +storms that broke out in the parterre of the Theatre Francais, when the +'Moor of Venice,' translated by Alfred de Vigny, grinding his teeth, +reiterated his demands for that handkerchief (_mouchoir_) prudently +denominated _bandeau_ (head-band, fillet) in the vague Shakspere +imitation of the excellent Ducis. A bell was called 'the sounding +brass'; the sea was 'the humid element,' or 'the liquid element,' and so +on. The professors of rhetoric were thunderstruck by the audacity of +Racine, who in the 'Dream of Athalie' had spoken of dogs as dogs--molossi +would have been better--and they advised young poets not to imitate this +license of genius. Accordingly the first poet who wrote bell (_cloche_) +committed an enormity; he exposed himself to the risk of being cut by his +friends and excluded from society." [17] + +As to the alexandrine, the recognised verse of French tragedy, Victor +Hugo tells us,[18] that many of the reformers, wearied by its monotony, +advocated the writing of plays in prose. He makes a plea, however, for +the retention of the alexandrine, giving it greater richness and +suppleness by the displacement of the caesura, and the free use of +_enjambement_ or run-over lines; just as Leigh Hunt and Keats broke up +the couplets of Pope into a freer and looser form of verse. "Hernani" +opened with an _enjambement_ + + "Serait ce deja lui? C'est bien a l'escalier + Derobe." + +This was a signal of fight--a challenge to the classicists--and the +battle began at once, with the very first lines of the play.[19] In his +dramas Hugo used the alexandrine, but in his lyric poems, his wonderful +resources as a metrist were exhibited to the utmost in the invention of +the most bizarre, eccentric, and original verse forms. An example of +this is the poem entitled "The Djinns" included in "Les Orientales" +(1829). The coming and going of the flying cohort of spirits is +indicated by the crescendo effect of the verse, beginning with a stanza +in lines of two syllables, rising gradually to the middle stanza of the +poem in lines of ten syllables, and then dying away by exactly graded +diminutions to the final stanza: + + "On doute + La nuit-- + J'ecoute + Tout fuit, + Tout passe: + L'espace + Efface + Le bruit." [20] + +But the earlier volume of "Odes et Ballades" (1826) offers many instances +of metrical experiments hardly less ingenious. In "La Chasse du +Burgrave" every rime is followed by an echo word, alike in sound but +different in sense: + + "Il part, et Madame Isabelle, + Belle, + Dit gaiement du haut des remparts: + 'Pars!' + Tous las chasseurs sont dans la plaine, + Pleine + D'ardents seigneurs, de senechaux + Chauds." + +The English reader is frequently reminded by Hugo's verses of the queer, +abrupt, and _outre_ measures, and fantastic rimes of Robert Browning. +Compare with the above, _e.g._, his "Love among the Ruins." + + "Where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles + Miles and miles + On the solitary pastures where our sheep, + Half asleep," etc. + +From the fact, already pointed out, that the romantic movement in France +was, more emphatically than in England and Germany, a breach with the +native literary tradition, there result several interesting +peculiarities. The first of these is that the new French school, instead +of fighting the classicists with weapons drawn from the old arsenal of +mediaeval France, went abroad for allies; went especially to the modern +writers of England and Germany. This may seem strange when we reflect +that French literature in the Middle Ages was the most influential in +Europe; and that, from the old heroic song of Roland in the eleventh +century down to the very popular court allegory, the "Roman de la Rose", +in the fourteenth, and to the poems of Villon in the fifteenth, it +afforded a rich treasure-house of romantic material in the shape of +chronicles, _chansons de geste_, _romans d'aventures_, _fabliaux_, +_lais_, legends of saints, homilies, miracles, songs, farces, +_jeuspartis_, _pastourelles_, _ballades_--of all the literary forms in +fact which were then cultivated. Nor was this mass of work entirely +without influence on the romanticists of 1830. Theophile Dondey, wrote a +poem on Roland, and Gerard de Nerval (Labrunie) hunted up the old popular +songs and folklore of Touraine and celebrated their naivete and truly +national character. Attention was directed to the Renaissance group of +poets who preceded the Louis XIV. writers--to Ronsard and "The Pleiade." +Later the Old French Text Society was founded for the preservation and +publication of mediaeval remains. But in general the innovating school +sought their inspiration in foreign literatures. Antony Deschamps +translated the "Inferno"; Alfred de Vigny translated "Othello" as the +"Moor of Venice" (1829), and wrote a play on the story of Chatterton,[21] +and a novel, "Cinq Mars," which is the nearest thing in French literature +to the historical romances of Scott.[22] Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo +were both powerfully impressed by Macpherson's "Ossian." Gerard de +Nerval made, at the age of eighteen, a translation of "Faust" (1828), +which Goethe read with admiration, and wrote to the translator, saying +that he had never before understood his own meaning so well. "It was a +difficult task at that time," says Gautier, "to render into our tongue, +which had become excessively timid, the bizarre and mysterious beauties +of this ultra-romantic drama. . . . From his familiarity with Goethe, +Uhland, Buerger and L. Tieck, Gerard retained in his turn of mind a +certain dreamy tinge which sometimes made his own works seem like +translations of unknown poets beyond the Rhine. . . . The sympathies and +the studies of Gerard de Nerval drew him naturally towards Germany, which +he often visited and where he made fruitful sojourns; the shadow of the +old Teutonic oak hovered more than once above his brow with confidential +murmurs; he walked under the lindens with their heart-shaped leaves; on +the margin of fountains he saluted the elf whose white robe trails a hem +bedewed by the green grass; he saw the ravens circling around the +mountain of Kyffhausen; the kobolds came out before him from the rock +clefts of the Hartz, and the witches of the Brocken danced their grand +Walpurgisnight round about the young French poet, whom they took for a +Jena student. . . . He knows how to blow upon the postillion's horn,[23] +the enchanted melodies of Achim von Arnim and Clement Brentano; and if he +stops at the threshold of an inn embowered in hop vines, the _Schoppen_ +becomes in his hands the cup of the King of Thule." Among the French +romanticists of Hugo's circle there was a great enthusiasm for wild +German ballads like Buerger's "Lenore" and Goethe's "Erl-King." The +translation of A. W. Schlegel's "Vorlesungen ueber Dramatische Kunst und +Litteratur," by Madame Necker de Saussure, in 1814, was doubtless the +first fruits of Madame de Stael's "Allemagne," published the year before. +Gautier himself and his friend Augustus Mac-Keat (Auguste Maguet) +collaborated in a drama founded on Byron's "Parisina." "Walter Scott was +then in the full flower of his success. People were being initiated into +the mysteries of Goethe's 'Faust,' . . . and discovering Shakspere under +the translation, a little dressed up, of Letourneur; and the poems of +Lord Byron, 'The Corsair,' 'Lara,' 'The Giaour,' 'Manfred,' 'Beppo,' 'Don +Juan,' were coming to us from the Orient, which had not yet grown +commonplace." Gautier said that in _le petit cenacle_--the inner circle +of the initiated--if you admired Racine more than Shakspere and Calderon, +it was an opinion that you would do well to keep to yourself. +"Toleration is not the virtue of neophytes." As for himself, who had set +out as a painter--and only later deviated into letters--he was all for +the Middle Ages: "An old iron baron, feudal, ready to take refuge from +the encroachments of the time, in the castle of Goetz von Berlichingen." +Of Bouchardy, the extraordinary author of "Le Sonneur de Saint Paul," who +"was to Hugo what Marlowe was to Shakspere"--and who was playfully +accused of making wooden models of the plots of his melodramas--Gautier +says that he "planned his singular edifice in advance, like a castle of +Anne Radcliffe, with donjon, turrets, underground chambers, secret +passages, corkscrew stairs, vaulted halls, mysterious closets, hiding +places in the thickness of the walls, oubliettes, charnel-houses, crypts +where his heroes and heroines were to meet later on, to love, hate, +fight, set ambushes, assassinate, or marry. . . . He cut masked doors in +the walls for his expected personage to appear through, and trap doors in +the floor for him to disappear through." + +The reasons for this resort to foreign rather than native sources of +inspiration are not far to seek. The romantic movement in France was +belated; it was twenty or thirty years behind the similar movements in +England and Germany. It was easier and more natural for Stendhal or Hugo +to appeal to the example of living masters like Goethe and Scott, whose +works went everywhere in translation and who held the ear of Europe, than +to revive an interest all at once in Villon or Guillaume de Lorris or +Chrestien de Troyes. Again, in no country had the divorce between +fashionable and popular literature been so complete as in France; in none +had so thick and hard a crust of classicism overlain the indigenous +product of the national genius. It was not altogether easy for Bishop +Percy in 1765 to win immediate recognition from the educated class for +Old English minstrelsy; nor for Herder and Buerger in 1770 to do the same +thing for the German ballads. In France it would have been impossible +before the Bourbon restoration of 1815. In England and in Germany, +moreover, the higher literature had always remained more closely in touch +with the people. In both of those countries the stock of ballad poetry +and folklore was much more extensive and important than in France, and +the habit of composing ballads lasted later. The only French writers of +the classical period who produced anything at all analogous to the German +"Maehrchen" were Charles Perrault, who published between 1691-97 his +famous fairy tales, including "Blue Beard," "The Sleeping Beauty," +"Little Red Riding-Hood," "Cinderella," and "Puss in Boots"; and the +Countess d'Aulnoy (died 1720), whose "Yellow Dwarf" and "White Cat" +belong to the same department of nursery tales.[24] + +A curious feature of French romanticism was the way in which the +new-found liberty of art asserted itself in manners, costume, and +personal habits. Victor Hugo himself was scrupulously correct and +subdued in dress, but his young disciples affected bright colours and +rich stuffs. They wore Spanish mantillas, coats with large velvet +lapels, pointed doublets or jerkins of satin or damask velvet in place of +the usual waistcoat, long hair after the Merovingian fashion, and pointed +beards. We have seen that Shenstone was regarded as an eccentric, and +perhaps somewhat dangerous, person when at the university, because he +wore his own hair instead of a wig. In France, half a century later, not +only the _perruque_, but the _menton glabre_ was regarded as symptomatic +of the classicist and the academician; while the beard became a badge of +romanticism. At the beginning of the movement, Gautier informs us, +"there were only two full beards in France, the beard of Eugene Deveria +and the beard of Petrus Borel. To wear them required a courage, a +coolness, and a contempt for the crowd truly heroic. . . . It was the +fashion then is the romantic school to be pale, livid, greenish, a trifle +cadaverous, if possible. It gave one an air of doom, Byronic, +_giaourish_, devoured by passion and remorse." It will be remembered +that the rolling Byronic collar, open at the throat, was much affected at +one time by young persons of romantic temperament in England; and that +the conservative classes, who adhered to the old-fashioned stock and high +collar, looked askance upon these youthful innovators as certainly +atheists and libertines, and probably enemies to society--would-be +corsairs or banditti. It is interesting, therefore, to discover that in +France, too, the final touch of elegance among the romantics was not to +have any white linen in evidence; the shirt collar, in particular, being +"considered as a mark of the grocer, the bourgeois, the philistine." A +certain _gilet rouge_ which Gautier wore when he led the _claque_ at the +first performance of "Hernani" has become historic. This flamboyant +garment--a defiance and a challenge to the academicians who had come to +hiss Hugo's play--was, in fact, a _pourpoint_ or jerkin of +cherry-coloured satin, cut in the shape of a Milanese cuirass, pointed, +busked, and arched in front, and fastened behind the back with hooks and +eyes. From the imperturbable disdain with which the wearer faced the +opera-glasses and laughter of the assembly it was evident that it would +not have taken much urging to induce him to come to the second night's +performance decked in a daffodil waistcoat.[25] The young enthusiasts of +_le petit cenacle_ carried their Byronism so far that, in imitation of +the celebrated revels at Newstead, they used to drink from a human skull +in their feasts at _le Petit Moulin Rouge_. It had belonged to a +drum-major, and Gerard de Nerval got it from his father, who had been an +army surgeon. One of the neophytes, in his excitement, even demanded +that it be filled with sea water instead of wine, in emulation of the +hero of Victor Hugo's novel, "Han d'Islande," who "drank the water of the +seas in the skull of the dead." Another _caput mortuum_ stood on Hugo's +mantelpiece in place of a clock.[26] "If it did not tell the hour, at +least it made us think of the irreparable flight of time. It was the +verse of Horace translated into romantic symbolism." There was a decided +flavour of Bohemianism about the French romantic school, and the spirit +of the lives which many of them led may best be studied in Merger's +classic, "La Vie de Boheme." [27] + +As another special feature of French romanticism, we may note the +important part taken by the theatre in the history of the movement. The +stage was the citadel of classical prejudice, and it was about it that +the fiercest battles were fought. The climacteric year was 1830, in +which year Victor Hugo's tragedy, "Hernani, or Castilian Honour," was put +on at the Theatre Francais on February 25th, and ran for thirty nights. +The representation was a fight between the classics and the romantics, +and there was almost a mob in the theatre. The dramatic censorship under +Charles X., though strict, was used in the interest of political rather +than aesthetic orthodoxy. But it is said that some of the older +Academicians actually applied to the king to forbid the acting of +"Hernani." Gautier has given a mock-heroic description of this famous +literary battle _quorum pars magna fuit_. He had received from his +college friend, Gerard de Nerval--who had been charged with the duty of +drumming up recruits for the Hugonic _claque_--six tickets to be +distributed only to tried friends of the cause--sure men and true. The +tickets themselves were little squares of red paper, stamped in the +corner with a mysterious countersign--the Spanish word _hierro_, iron, +not only symbolizing the hero of the drama, but hinting that the +ticket-holder was to bear himself in the approaching fray frankly, +bravely, and faithfully like the sword. The proud recipient of these +tokens of confidence gave two of them to a couple of artists--ferocious +romantics, who would gladly have eaten an Academician, if necessary; two +he gave to a brace of young poets who secretly practised _la rime riche_, +_le mot propre_, and _la metaphore exacte_: the other two he reserved for +his cousin and himself. The general attitude of the audience on the +first nights was hostile, "two systems, two parties, two armies, two +civilizations even--it is not saying too much--confronted one +another, . . . and it was not hard to see that yonder young man with long +hair found the smoothly shaved gentleman opposite a disastrous idiot; and +that he would not long be at pains to conceal his opinion of him." The +classical part of the audience resented the touches of Spanish local +colour in the play, the mixture of pleasantries and familiar speeches +with the tragic dialogue, and of heroism and savagery in the character of +Hernani, and they made all manner of fun of the species of pun--_de ta +suite, j'en suis_--which terminated the first act. "Certain lines were +captured and recaptured, like disputed redoubts, by each army with equal +obstinacy. On one day the romantics would carry a passage, which the +enemy would retake the next day, and from which it became necessary to +dislodge them. What uproar, what cries, cat-calls, hisses, hurricanes of +bravos, thunders of applause! The heads of parties blackguarded each +other like Homer's heroes before they came to blows. . . . For this +generation 'Hernani' was what the 'Cid' was for the contemporaries of +Corneille. All that was young, brave, amorous, poetic, caught the +inspiration of it. Those fine exaggerations, heroic, Castilian, that +superb Spanish emphasis; that language so proud and high even in its +familiarity, those images of a dazzling strangeness, threw us into an +ecstasy and intoxicated us with their heady poetry." The victory in the +end was with the new school. Musset, writing in 1838, says that the +tragedies of Corneille and Racine had disappeared from the French stage +for ten years. + +Another triumphant battlefield--a veritable _fete romantique_--was the +first representation in 1831 of Alexandre Dumas' "Anthony." "It was an +agitation, a tumult, an effervescence. . . . The house was actually +delirious; it applauded, sobbed, wept, shouted. A certain famous green +coat was torn from the author's back and rent into shreds by his too +ardent admirers, who wanted pieces of it for memorabilia." [28] + +The English reader who hears of the stubborn resistance offered to the +performance of 'Hernani' will naturally suppose that there must have been +something about it contrary to public policy--some immorality, or some +political references, at least, offensive to the government; and he will +have a difficulty in understanding that the trouble was all about affairs +purely literary. "Hernani" was fought because it violated the unities of +place and time; because its hero was a Spanish bandit; because in the +dialogue a spade was called a spade, and in the verse the lines overlap. +The French are often charged with frivolity in matters of conduct, but to +the discussion of matters of art they bring a most serious conscience. +The scene in "Hernani" shifts from Saragossa to the castle of Don Ruy +Gomez de Silva in the mountains of Arragon, and to the tomb of +Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle. The time of the action, though not +precisely indicated, covers at least a number of months. The dialogue +is, in many parts, nervous, simple, direct, abrupt; in others running +into long _tirades_ and soliloquies, rich with all the poetic resources +of the greatest poet who has ever used the French tongue. The spirit of +the drama, as well as its form, is romantic. The point of honour is +pushed to a fantastic excess; all the characters display the most +delicate chivalry, the noblest magnanimity, the loftiest Castilian pride. +Don Ruy Gomez allows the King to carry off his bride, rather than yield +up the outlaw who has taken refuge in his castle; and that although he +has just caught this same outlaw paying court to this same bride, whose +accepted lover he is. Hernani, not to be outdone in generosity, offers +his life to his enemy and preserver, giving him his horn and promising to +come to meet his death at its summons. There is the same fault here +which is felt in Hugo's novels. Motives are exaggerated, the _dramatis +personae_ strut. They are rather over-dramatic in their +poses---melodramatic, in fact--and do unlikely things. But this fault is +the fault of a great nature, grandeur exalted into grandiosity, till the +heroes of these plays, "Hernani," "Marion Delorme," "Le Roi d'Amuse," +loom and stalk across the scene like epic demigods of more than mortal +stature and mortal passions. But Hugo was not only a great dramatist and +a great poet, but a most clever playwright. "Hernani" is full of +effective stage devices, crises in the action which make an audience hold +its breath or shudder; moments of intense suspense like that in the third +act, where the old hidalgo pauses before his own portrait, behind which +the outlaw is hidden; or that in the fifth, where Hernani hears at first, +faint and far away, the blast of the fatal horn that summons him to leave +his bride at the altar and go to his death. The young romantics of the +day all got "Hernani" by heart and used to rehearse it at their +assemblies, each taking a part; and the famous trumpet, the _cor +d'Hernani_, became a symbol and a rallying call. + +No such scene would have been possible in an English playhouse as that +which attended the first representation of "Hernani" at the Theatre +Francais. For not only is an English audience comparatively indifferent +to rules of art and canons of taste, but the unities had never prevailed +in practice in England, though constantly recommended in theory. The +French had no Shakspere, and the English no Academy. We may construct an +imaginary parallel to such a scene if we will suppose that all reputable +English tragedies from 1600 down to 1830 had been something upon the +model of Addison's "Cato" and Johnson's "Irene", or better still upon the +model of Dryden's heroic plays in rimed couplets; and that then a drama +like "Romeo and Juliet" had been produced upon the boards of Drury Lane, +and a warm spurt of romantic poetry suddenly injected into the icy +current of classic declamation. + +Having considered the chief points in which the French romantic movement +differed from the similar movements in England and Germany, let us now +glance at the history of its beginnings, and at the work of a few of its +typical figures. The presentation of "Hernani" in 1830 was by no means +the first overt act of the new school. Discussion had been going on for +years in the press. De Stendhal says that the classicists had on their +side two-thirds of the Academie Francaise, and all of the French +journalists; that their leading organ, however, was the very influential +_Journal des Debats_ and its editor, M. Dussant, the general-in-chief of +the classical party. The romanticists, however, were not without organs +of their own; among which are especially mentioned _Le Conservateur +Litteraire_, begun in 1819, _Le Globe_ in 1824, and the _Annales +Romantiques_ in 1823, the last being "practically a kind of annual of the +Muse Francaise (1823-24), which had pretty nearly the same contributors." +All of these journals were Bourboniste, except _Le Globe_, which was +liberal in politics.[29] The Academy denounced the new literary doctrine +as a heresy and its followers as a sect, but it made head so rapidly that +as early as 1829, a year before "Hernani" was acted, a "Histoire du +Romantisme en France" appeared, written by a certain M. de Toreinx.[30] +It agrees with other authorities in dating the beginning of the movement +from Chateaubriand's "Le Genie du Christianisme" (1802). +"Chateaubriand," says Gautier, "may be regarded as the grandfather, or, +if you prefer it, the sachem of romanticism in France. In the 'Genius of +Christianity' he restored the Gothic cathedral, in the 'Natchez' he +reopened the sublimity of nature, which had been closed, in 'Rene' he +invented melancholy and modern passion." + +Sprung from an ancient Breton family, Chateaubriand came to America in +1790 with the somewhat singular and very French idea of travelling +overland to the northwest passage. He was diverted from this enterprise, +however, fell in with an Indian tribe and wandered about with them in the +wilderness. He did not discover the north-west passage, but, according +to Lowell, he invented the forest primeval. Chateaubriand gave the first +full utterance to that romantic note which sounds so loudly in Byron's +verse; the restless dissatisfaction with life as it is, the longing for +something undefined and unattainable, the love for solitude and the +desert, the "passion incapable of being converted into action"--in short, +the _maladie du siecle_--since become familiar in "Childe Harold" and in +Senancour's "Obermann." In one of the chapters[31] of "Le Genie du +Christianisme" he gives an analysis of this modern melancholy, this +Byronic satiety and discontent, which he says was unknown to the +ancients. "The farther nations advance in civilization, the more this +unsettled state of the passions predominates, for then our imagination is +rich, abundant, and full of wonders; but our existence is poor, insipid, +and destitute of charms. With a full heart we dwell in an empty world." +"Penetrate into those forests of America coeval with the world; what +profound silence pervades these retreats when the winds are husht! What +unknown voices when they begin to rise! Stand still and everything is +mute; take but a step and all nature sighs. Night approaches, the shades +thicken; you hear herds of wild beasts passing in the dark; the ground +murmurs under your feet; the pealing thunder rebellows in the deserts; +the forest bows, the trees fall, an unknown river rolls before you. The +moon at length bursts forth in the east; as you proceed at the foot of +the trees, she seems to move before you on their tops and solemnly to +accompany your steps. The wanderer seats himself on the trunk of an oak +to await the return of day; he looks alternately at the nocturnal +luminary, the darkness, and the river; he feels restless, agitated, and +in expectation of something extraordinary; a pleasure never felt before, +an unusual fear, cause his heart to throb, as if he were about to be +admitted to some secret of the Divinity; he is alone in the depth of the +forests, but the mind of man is equal to the expanse of nature, and all +the solitudes of the earth are not too vast for the contemplations of his +heart. There is in man an instinctive melancholy, which makes him +harmonise with the scenery of nature. Who has not spent whole hours +seated on the bank of a river, contemplating its passing waves? Who has +not found pleasure on the seashore in viewing the distant rock whitened +by the billows? How much are the ancients to be pitied, who discovered +in the ocean naught but the palace of Neptune and the cavern of Proteus; +it was hard that they should perceive only the adventures of the Tritons +and the Nereids in the immensity of the seas, which seems to give an +indistinct measure of the greatness of our souls, and which excites a +vague desire to quit this life, that we may embrace all nature and taste +the fulness of joy in the presence of its Author." [32] + +The outbreak of the Revolution recalled Chateaubriand to France. He +joined the army of the _emigrees_ at Coblentz, was wounded at the siege +of Thionville, and escaped into England where he lived (1793-1800) until +the time of the Consulate, when he made his peace with Napoleon and +returned to France. He had been a free-thinker, but was converted to +Christianity by a dying message from his mother who was thrown into +prison by the revolutionists. "I wept," said Chateaubriand, "and I +believed." "Le Genie du Christianisme" was an expression of that +reactionary feeling which drove numbers of Frenchmen back into the +Church, after the blasphemies and horrors of the Revolution. It came out +just when Napoleon was negotiating his _Concordat_ with the Pope, and was +trying to enlist the religious and conservative classes in support of his +government; and it reinforced his purposes so powerfully that he +appointed the author, in spite of his legitimism, to several diplomatic +posts. "Le Genie du Christianisme" is indeed a plea for Christianity on +aesthetic grounds--an attempt, as has been sneeringly said, to recommend +Christianity by making it look pretty. Chateaubriand was not a close +reasoner; his knowledge was superficial and inaccurate; his character was +weakened by vanity and shallowness. He was a sentimentalist and a +rhetorician, but one of the most brilliant of rhetoricians; while his +sentiment, though not always deep or lasting, was for the nonce +sufficiently sincere. He had in particular a remarkable talent for +pictorial description; and his book, translated into many tongues, +enjoyed an extraordinary vogue. The English version, made in 1815, was +entitled "The Beauties of Christianity." For Chateaubriand undertook to +show that the Christian religion had influenced favorably literature and +the fine arts; that it was more poetical than any other system of belief +and worship. He compared Homer and Vergil with Dante, Tasso, Milton, and +other modern poets, and awarded the palm to the latter in the treatment +of the elementary relations and stock characters, such as husband and +wife, father and child, the priest, the soldier, the lover, etc.; +preferring Pope's Eloisa, _e.g._, to Vergil's Dido, and "Paul and +Virginia" to the idyls of Theocritus. He pronounced the Christian +mythology--angels, devils, saints, miracles--superior to the pagan; and +Dante's Hell much more impressive to the imagination than Tartarus. He +dwelt eloquently upon the beauty and affecting significance of Gothic +church architecture, of Catholic ritual and symbolism, the dress of the +clergy, the crucifix, the organ, the church bell, the observances of +Christian festivals, the monastic life, the orders of chivalry, the +country churchyards where the dead were buried, and even upon the +superstitions which the last century had laughed to scorn; such as the +belief in ghosts, the adoration of relics, vows to saints and pilgrimages +to holy places. In his chapter on "The Influence of Christianity upon +Music," he says that the "Christian religion is essentially melodious for +this single reason, that she delights in solitude"; the forests are her +ancient abode, and her musician "ought to be acquainted with the +melancholy notes of the waters and the trees; he ought to have studied +the sound of the winds in cloisters, and those murmurs that pervade the +Gothic temple, the grass of the cemetery, and the vaults of death." He +repeats the ancient fable that the designers of the cathedrals were +applying forest scenery to architecture; "Those ceilings sculptured into +foliage of different kinds, those buttresses which prop the walls and +terminate abruptly like the broken trunks of trees, the coolness of the +vaults, the darkness of the sanctuary, the dim twilight of the aisles, +the chapels resembling grottoes, the secret passages, the low doorways, +in a word everything in a Gothic church reminds you of the labyrinths of +a wood, everything excites a feeling of religious awe, of mystery, and of +the Divinity." The birds perch upon the steeples and towers as if they +were trees, and "the Christian architect, not content with building +forests, has been desirous to retain their murmurs, and by means of the +organ and of bells, he has attached to the Gothic temple the very winds +and the thunders that roll in the recesses of the woods. Past ages, +conjured up by these religious sounds, raise their venerable voices from +the bosom of the stones and sigh in every corner of the vast cathedral. +The sanctuary re-echoes like the cavern of the ancient Sibyl; +loud-tongued bells swing over your head; while the vaults of death under +your feet are profoundly silent." He praises the ideals of chivalry; +gives a sympathetic picture of the training and career of a +knight-errant, and asks: "Is there then nothing worthy of admiration in +the times of a Roland, a Godfrey, a Coucey, and a Joinville; in the times +of the Moors and the Saracens; . . . when the strains of the Troubadours +were mingled with the clash of arms, dances with religious ceremonies, +and banquets and tournaments with sieges and battles?" Chateaubriand +says that the finest Gothic ruins are to be found in the English lake +country, on the Scotch mountains, and in the Orkney Islands; and that +they are more impressive than classic ruins because in the latter the +arches are parallel with the curves of the sky, while in the Gothic or +pointed architecture the arches "form a contrast with the circular arches +of the sky and the curvatures of the horizon. The Gothic being, +moreover, entirely composed of _voids_, the more readily admits of the +decoration of herbage and flowers than the fulness of the Grecian orders. +The clustered columns, the domes carved into foliage, or scooped out in +the form of a fruit-basket, offered so many receptacles into which the +winds carry, with the dust, the seeds of vegetables. The house-leek +fixes itself in the mortar, the mosses cover rugged masses with their +elastic coating; the thistle projects its brown burrs from the embrasure +of a window; and the ivy creeping along the northern cloisters falls in +festoons over the arches." + +All this is romantic enough; we have the note of Catholic mediaevalism +and the note of Ossianic melancholy combined; and this some years before +"The Lay of the Last Minstrel," and when Byron was a boy of fourteen and +still reading his Ossian.[33] But we are precluded from classifying +Chateaubriand among full-fledged romanticists. His literary taste was by +no means emancipated from eighteenth-century standards. In speaking of +Milton, _e.g._, he says that if he had only been born in France in the +reign of Louis XIV., and had "combined with the native grandeur of his +genius the taste of Racine and Boileau," the "Paradise Lost" might have +equalled the "Iliad." + +Chateaubriand never called himself a romantic. It is agreed upon all +hands that the expressions _romantisme_ and _litterature romantique_ were +first invented or imported by Madame de Stael in her "L'Allemagne" +(1813), "pour exprimer l'affranchissement des vieilles formes +litteraires." [34] Some ten years later, or by 1823, when Stendhal +published his "Racine et Shakspere," the issue between the schools had +been joined and the question quite thoroughly agitated in the Parisian +journals. Stendhal announced himself as an adherent of the new, but his +temper was decidedly cool and unromantic. I have quoted his epigrammatic +definition of romanticism.[35] + +In this _brochure_ Stendhal announces that France is on the eve of a +literary revolution and that the last hour of classicism has struck, +although as yet the classicists are in possession of the theatres, and of +all the salaried literary positions under government; and all the +newspapers of all shades of political opinion are shut to the +romanticists. A company of English actors who attempted to give some of +Shakspere's plays at the Porte-Saint-Martin in 1822 were mobbed. "The +hisses and cat-calls began before the performance, of which it was +impossible to hear a single word. As soon as the actors appeared they +were pelted with apples and eggs, and from time to time the audience +called out to them to talk French, and shouted, '_A bas Shakspere! c'est +un aide de camp du duc de Wellington_.'" It will be remembered that in +our own day the first representations of Wagner's operas at Paris were +interrupted with similar cries: "_Pas de Wagner_!," "_A bas les +Allemands_!," etc. + +In 1827 Kemble's company visited Paris and gave, in English, "Hamlet," +"Romeo and Juliet," "Othello," and "The Merchant of Venice." Dumas went +to see them and described the impression made upon him by Shakspere, in +language identical with that which Goethe used about himself.[36] He was +like a man born blind and suddenly restored to sight. Dumas' "Henry +III." (1829), a _drame_ in the manner of Shakspere's historical plays, +though in prose, was the immediate result of this new vision. English +actors were in Paris again in 1828 and 1829; and in 1835 Macready +presented "Hamlet," "Othello," and "Henry IV." with great success. +Previous to these performances, the only opportunities that the French +public had to judge of Shakspere's dramas as acting plays were afforded +by the wretched adaptations of Ducis and other stage carpenters. Ducis +had read Shakspere only in Letourneur's very inadequate translation +(revised by Guizot in 1821). His "Hamlet" was played in 1769; "Macbeth," +1784, "King John," 1791; "Othello" (turned into a comedy), 1792. +Mercier's "Timon" was given in 1794; and Dejaure's "Imogenes"--an +"arrangement" of "Cymbeline"--in 1796. The romanticists labored to put +their countrymen in possession of better versions of Shakspere. Alfred +de Vigny rendered "Othello" (1827), and Emile Deschamps, "Romeo and +Juliet" and "Macbeth." + +Stendhal interviewed a director of one of the French theatres and tried +to persuade him that there would be money in it for any house which would +have the courage to give a season of romantic tragedy. But the director, +who seemed to be a liberal-minded man, assured him that until some stage +manager could be found rich enough to buy up the dramatic criticism of +the _Constitutionnel_ and two or three other newspapers, the law students +and medical students, who were under the influence of those journals, +would never suffer the play to get as far as the third act. "If it were +otherwise," he said, "don't you suppose that we would have tried +Schiller's 'William Tell'? The police would have cut out a quarter of +it; one of our adapters another quarter; and what was left would reach a +hundred representations, _provided it could once secure three_." + +To this the author replied that the immense majority of young society +people had been converted to romanticism by the eloquence of M. Cousin. + +"Sir," said the director, "your young society people don't go into the +parterre to engage in fisticuffs [_faire le coup de poing_], and at the +theatre, as in politics, we despise philosophers who don't fight." +Stendhal adds that the editors of influential journals found their +interest in this state of things, since many of them had pieces of their +own on the stage, written of course in alexandrine verse and on the +classic model; and what would become of these masterpieces if Talma +should ever get permission to play in a prose translation of "Macbeth," +abridged, say, one-third? "I said one day to one of these gentlemen, +28,000,000 men, _i.e._, 18,000,000 in England and 10,000,000 in America, +admire 'Macbeth' and applaud it a hundred times a year. 'The English,' +he answered me with great coolness, 'cannot have real eloquence or poetry +truly admirable; the nature of their language, which is not derived from +the Latin, makes it quite impossible.'" A great part of "Racine et +Shakspere" is occupied with a refutation of the doctrine of the unities +of time and place, and with a discussion of the real nature of dramatic +illusion, on which their necessity was supposed to rest. Stendhal +maintains that the illusion is really stronger in Shakspere's tragedies +than in Racine's. It is not essential here to reproduce his argument, +which is the same that is familiar to us in Lessing and in Coleridge, +though he was an able controversialist, and his logic and irony give a +freshness to the treatment of this hackneyed theme which makes his little +treatise well worth the reading. To illustrate the nature of _real_ +stage illusion, he says that last year (August, 1822) a soldier in a +Baltimore theatre, seeing Othello about to kill Desdemona, cried out, "It +shall never be said that a damned nigger killed a white woman in my +presence," and at the same moment fired his gun and broke an arm of the +actor who was playing Othello. "_Eh bien_, this soldier had illusion: he +believed that the action which was passing on the stage was true." + +Stendhal proposes the following as a definition of romantic tragedy: "It +is written in prose; the succession of events which it presents to the +eyes of the spectators lasts several months, and they happen in different +places." He complains that the French comedies are not funny, do not +make any one laugh; and that the French tragic dialogue is epic rather +than dramatic. He advises his readers to go and see Kean in "Richard" +and "Othello"; and says that since reading Schlegel and Dennis (!) he has +a great contempt for the French critics. He appeals to the usages of the +German and English stage in disregarding the rules of Aristotle, and +cites the great popularity of Walter Scott's romances, which, he says, +are nothing more than romantic tragedies with long descriptions +interspersed, to support his plea for a new kind of French prose-tragedy; +for which he recommends subjects taken from national history, and +especially from the mediaeval chroniclers like Froissart. Nevertheless, +he does not advise the direct imitation of Shakspere. He blames Schiller +for copying Shakspere, and eulogizes Werner's "Luther" as nearer to the +masterpieces of Shakspere than Schiller's tragedies are. He wants the +new French drama to resemble Shakspere only in dealing freely with modern +conditions, as the latter did with the conditions of his time, without +having the fear of Racine or any other authority before its eyes. + +In 1824 the Academy, which was slowly constructing its famous dictionary +of the French language, happened to arrive at the new word _romanticism_ +which needed defining. This was the signal for a heated debate in that +venerable body, and the director, M. Auger, was commissioned to prepare a +manifesto against the new literary sect, to be read at the meeting of the +Institute on the 24th of April next. It was in response to this +manifesto that Stendhal wrote the second part of his "Racine et +Shakspere" (1825), attached to which is a short essay entitled "Qu'est ce +que le Romanticisme?" [37] addressed to the Italian public, and intended +to explain to them the literary situation in France, and to enlist their +sympathies on the romantic side. "Shakspere," he says, "the hero of +romantic poetry, as opposed to Racine, the god of the classicists, wrote +for strong souls; for English hearts which were what Italian hearts were +about 1500, emerging from that sublime Middle Age _questi tempi della +virtu sconosciutta_." Racine, on the contrary, wrote for a slavish and +effeminate court. The author disclaims any wish to impose Shakspere on +the Italians. The day will come, he hopes, when they will have a +national tragedy of their own; but to have that, they will do better to +follow in the footprints of Shakspere than, like Alfieri, in the +footprints of Racine. In spite of the pedants, he predicts that Germany +and England will carry it over France; Shakspere, Schiller, and Lord +Byron will carry it over Racine and Boileau. He says that English poetry +since the French Revolution has become more enthusiastic, more serious, +more passionate. It needed other subjects than those required by the +witty and frivolous eighteenth century, and sought its heroes in the +rude, primitive, inventive ages, or even among savages and barbarians. +It had to have recourse to time or countries when it was permitted to the +higher classes of society to have passions. The Greek and Latin classics +could give no help; since most of them belonged to an epoch as +artificial, and as far removed from the naive presentation of the +passions, as the eighteenth century itself. The court of Augustus was no +more natural than that of Louis XIV. Accordingly the most successful +poets in England, during the past twenty years, have not only sought +deeper emotions than those of the eighteenth century, but have treated +subjects which would have been scornfully rejected by the age of _bel +esprit_. The anti-romantics can't cheat us much longer. "Where, among +the works of our Italian pedants, are the books that go through seven +editions in two months, like the romantic poems that are coming out in +London at the present moment? Compare, _e.g._, the success of Moore's +'Lalla Rookh,' which appeared in June, 1817, and the eleventh edition of +which I have before me, with the success of the 'Camille' of the highly +classical Mr. Botta!'" + +In 1822, a year before the appearance of Stendhal's "Racine et +Shakspere," Victor Hugo had published his "Odes et Poesies Diverses," and +a second collection followed in 1824. In the prefaces to these two +volumes he protests against the use of the terms classic and romantic, as +_mots de guerre_ and vague words which every one defines in accordance +with his own prejudices. If romanticism means anything, he says, it +means the literature of the nineteenth century, and all the anathemas +launched at the heads of contemporary writers reduce themselves to the +following method of argument. "We condemn the literature of the +nineteenth century because it is romantic. And why is it romantic? +Because it is the literature of the nineteenth century." As to the false +taste which disfigured the eighteenth-century imitations of Racine and +Boileau, he would prefer to distinguish that by the name _scholastic_, a +style which is to the truly classic what superstition and fanaticism are +to religion. The intention of these youthful poems of Hugo was partly +literary and partly political and religious: "The history of mankind +affords no poetry," he says, "except when judged from the vantage-ground +of monarchical ideas and religious beliefs. . . . He has thought +that . . . in substituting for the outworn and false colours of pagan +mythology the new and truthful colours of the Christian theogony, one +could inject into the ode something of the interest of the drama, and +could make it speak, besides, that austere, consoling, and religious +language which is needed by an old society that issues still trembling +from the saturnalia of atheism and anarchy. . . . The literature of the +present, the actual literature, is the expression, by way of +anticipation, of that religious and monarchical society which will issue, +doubtless, from the midst of so many ancient debris, of so many recent +ruins. . . . If the literature of the great age of Louis XIV. had +invoked Christianity in place of worshipping heathen gods . . . the +triumph of the sophistical doctrines of the last century would have been +much more difficult, perhaps even impossible. . . . But France had not +that good fortune; its national poets were almost all pagan poets, and +our literature was rather the expression of an idolatrous and democratic, +than of a monarchical and Christian society." The prevailing note, +accordingly, in these early odes is that of the Bourbon Restoration of +1815-30, and of the Catholic reaction against the sceptical +Eclaircissement of the eighteenth century. The subjects are such as +these: "The Poet in the Times of Revolution"; "La Vendee"; "The Maidens +of Verdun," which chants the martyrdom of three young royalist sisters +who were put to death for sending money and supplies to the _emigres_; +"Quibiron," where a royalist detachment which had capitulated under +promise of being treated like prisoners of war, were shot down in squads +by the Convention soldiery; "Louis XVII."; "The Replacement of the Statue +of Henry IV."; "The Death of the Duke of Berry"; "The Birth of the Duke +of Bourdeaux" and his "Baptism"; "The Funeral of Louis XVIII."; "The +Consecration of Charles X."; "The Death of Mlle. de Sombreuil," the +royalist heroine who saved her father's life by drinking a cupful of +human blood in the days of the Terror; and "La Bande Noire," which +denounces with great bitterness the violation of the tombs of the kings +of France by the regicides, and pleads for the preservation of the ruins +of feudal times: + + "O murs! o creneaux! o tourelle! + Remparts, fosses aux ponts mouvants! + Lourds faisceaux de colonnes freles! + Fiers chateaux! modestes couvents! + Cloitres poudreux, salles antiques, + Ou gemissaient les saints cantiques, + Ou riaient les banquets joyeux! + Lieux ou le coeur met ses chimeres! + Eglises ou priaient nos meres + Tours ou combattaient nos aieux!" + +In these two ode collections, though the Catholic and legitimist +inspiration is everywhere apparent, there is nothing revolutionary in the +language or verse forms. But in the "Odes et Ballades" of 1826, "the +romantic challenge," says Saintsbury, "is definitely thrown down. The +subjects are taken by preference from times and countries which the +classical tradition had regarded as barbarous. The metres and rhythm are +studiously broken, varied, and irregular; the language has the utmost +possible glow of colour, as opposed to the cold correctness of classical +poetry, the completest disdain of conventional periphrasis, the boldest +reliance on exotic terms and daring neologisms." This description +applies more particularly to the Ballades, many of which, such as "La +Ronde du Sabbat," "La Legende de la Nonne," "La Chasse du Burgrave," and +"Le Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean" are mediaeval studies in which the lawless +_grotesquerie_ of Gothic art runs riot. "The author, in composing them," +says the preface, "has tried to give some idea of what the poems of the +first troubadours of the Middle Ages might have been; those Christian +rhapsodists who had nothing in the world but their swords and their +guitars, and went from castle to castle paying for their entertainment +with their songs." To show that liberty in art does not mean disorder, +the author draws an elaborate contrast between the garden of Versailles +and a primitive forest, in a passage which will remind the reader of +similar comparisons in the writings of Shenstone, Walpole, and other +English romanticists of the eighteenth century. There is as much order, +he asserts, in the forest as in the garden, but it is a live order, not a +dead regularity. "Choose then," he exclaims, "between the masterpiece of +gardening and the work of nature; between that which is beautiful by +convention and that which is beautiful without rule; between an +artificial literature and an original poetry. . . . In two words--and we +shall not object to have judgment passed in accordance with this +observation on the two kinds of literature that are called _classic_ and +_romantic_,--regularity is the taste of mediocrity, order is the taste of +genius. . . . It will be objected to us that the virgin forest hides in +its magnificent solitudes a thousand dangerous animals, while the marshy +basins of the French garden conceal at most a few harmless creatures. +That is doubtless a misfortune; but, taking it all in all, we like a +crocodile better than a frog; we prefer a barbarism of Shakspere to an +insipidity of Campistron." But above all things--such is the doctrine of +this preface--do not imitate anybody--not Shakspere any more than Racine. +"He who imitates a _romantic_ poet becomes thereby a _classic_, and just +because he imitates." In 1823 Hugo had published anonymously his first +prose romance, "Han d'Islande," the story of a Norwegian bandit. He got +up the local colour for this by a careful study of the Edda and the +Sagas, that "poesie sauvage" which was the admiration of the new school +and the horror of the old. But it was in the preface to "Cromwell," +published in 1827, that Hugo issued the full and, as it were, official +manifesto of romanticism. The play itself is hardly actable. It is +modelled, in a sense, upon the historical plays of Shakspere, but its +Cromwell is a very melodramatic person, and its Puritans and Cavaliers +strike the English reader with the same sense of absurdity produced by +the pictures of English society in "L'Homme qui Rit." But of the famous +preface Gautier says: "The Bible among Protestants, the Koran among +Mahometans are not the object of a deeper veneration. It was, indeed, +for us the book of books, the book which contained the pure doctrine." +It consisted in great part of a triumphant attack upon the unities, and +upon the verse and style which classic usage had consecrated to French +tragedy. I need not repeat the argument here. It is already familiar, +and some sentences[38] from this portion of the essay I have quoted +elsewhere. + +The preface also contained a plea for another peculiarity of the romantic +drama, its mixture, viz., of tragedy and comedy. According to Hugo, this +is the characteristic trait, the fundamental difference, which separates +modern from ancient art, romantic from classical literature. Antique +art, he says, rejected everything which was not purely beautiful, but the +Christian and modern spirit feels that there are many things in creation +besides that which is, humanly speaking, beautiful; and that everything +which is in nature is--or has the right to be--in art. It includes in +its picture of life the ugly, the misshapen, the monstrous. Hence +results a new type, the grotesque, and a new literary form, romantic +comedy. He proceeds to illustrate this thesis with his usual wealth of +imaginative detail and pictorial language. The Middle Ages, more than +any other period, are rich in instances of that intimate blending of the +comic and the horrible which we call the grotesque; the witches' Sabbath, +the hoofed and horned devil, the hideous figures of Dante's hell; the +Scaramouches, Crispins, Harlequins of Italian farce; "grimacing +silhouettes of man, quite unknown to grave antiquity"; and "all those +local dragons of our legends, the gargoyle of Rouen, the Taras of +Tarascon, etc. . . . The contact of deformity has given to the modern +sublime something purer, grander, more sublime, in short, than the +antique beauty. . . . Is it not because the modern imagination knows how +to set prowling hideously about our churchyards, the vampires, the ogres, +the erl-kings, the _psylles_, the ghouls, the _brucolaques_, the +_aspioles_, that it is able to give its fays that bodiless form, that +purity of essence which the pagan nymphs approach so little? The antique +Venus is beautiful, admirable, no doubt; but what has spread over the +figures of Jean Goujon that graceful, strange, airy elegance? What has +given them that unfamiliar character of life and grandeur, unless it be +the neighbourhood of the rude and strong carvings of the Middle +Ages? . . . The grotesque imprints its character especially upon that +wonderful architecture which in the Middle Ages takes the place of all +the arts. It attaches its marks to the fronts of the cathedrals; +enframes its hells and purgatories under the portal arches, and sets them +aflame upon the windows; unrolls its monsters, dogs, demons around the +capitals, along the friezes, on the eaves." We find this same bizarre +note in the mediaeval laws, social usages, church institutions, and +popular legends, in the court fools, in the heraldic emblems, the +religious processions, the story of "Beauty and the Beast." It explains +the origin of the Shaksperian drama, the high-water mark of modern art. + +Shakspere does not seem to me an artist of the grotesque. He is by turns +the greatest of tragic and the greatest of comic artists, and his tragedy +and comedy lie close together, as in life, but without that union of the +terrible and the ludicrous in the same figure, and that element of +deformity which is the essence of the proper grotesque. He has created, +however, one specimen of true grotesque, the monster Caliban. Caliban is +a comic figure, but not purely comic; there is something savage, uncouth, +and frightful about him. He has the dignity and the poetry which all +rude, primitive beings have: which the things of nature, rocks and trees +and wild beasts have. It is significant, therefore, that Robert Browning +should have been attracted to Caliban. Browning had little comic power, +little real humour; in him the grotesque is an imperfect form of the +comic. The same criticism applies to Hugo. He gave a capital example of +the grotesque in the four fools in the third act of "Cromwell" and in +Triboulet, the Shaksperian jester of "Le Roi s'Amuse." Their songs and +dialogues are bizarre and fantastic in the highest degree, but they are +not funny; they do not make us laugh like the clowns of Shakspere--they +are not comic, but merely queer. Hugo's defective sense of humour is +shown in the way in which he frequently takes that one step which, +Napoleon said, separates the sublime from the ridiculous--exaggerating +character and motive till the heroic passes into melodrama and melodrama +into absurdity. This fault is felt in his great prose romance +"Notre-Dame de Paris" (1831), a picture of mediaeval Paris, in which the +humpback Quasimodo affords an exact illustration of what the author meant +by the grotesque; another of the same kind is furnished by the hero of +his later romance "L'Homme qui Rit." + +Gautier has left a number of sketches, written in a vein lovingly +humorous, of some of the eccentrics--the _curiosites romantiques_--whose +oddities are perhaps even more instructive as to the many directions +which the movement took, than the more ordered enthusiasm of the less +extreme votaries. There was the architect Jule Vabre, _e.g._, whose +specialty was Shakspere. Shakspere "was his god, his idol, his passion, +a wonder to which he could never grow accustomed." Vabre's life-project +was a French translation of his idol, which should be absolutely true to +the text, reproducing the exact turn and movement of the phrase, +following the alternations of prose, rime, and blank verse in the +original, and shunning neither its euphemistic subtleties nor its +barbaric roughnesses. To fit himself for this task, he went to London +and lived there, striving to submit himself to the atmosphere and the +_milieu_, and learning to think in English; and there Gautier encountered +him about 1843, in a tavern at High-Holborn, drinking stout and eating +_rosbif_ and speaking French with an English accent. Gautier told him +that all he had to do now, to translate Shakspere, was to learn French. +"I am going to work at it," he answered, more struck with the wisdom than +the wit of the suggestion. A few years later Vabre turned up in France +with a project for a sort of international seminary. "He wanted to +explain 'Hernani' to the English and 'Macbeth' to the French. It made +him tired to see the English learning French in 'Telemaque,' and the +French learning English in the 'Vicar of Wakefield.'" Poor Vabre's great +Shakspere translation never materialised; but Francois-Victor Hugo, the +second son of the great romancer, carried out many of Vabre's principles +of translation in his version of Shakspere. + +Another curious figure was the water-colour painter, Celestin Nanteuil, +who suggested to Gautier the hero of an early piece of his own, written +to accompany an engraving in an English keepsake, representing the Square +of St. Sebald at Nuremberg. This hero, Elias Wildman-stadius, or l'Homme +Moyen-age, was "in a sort, the Gothic genius of that Gothic town"--a +_retardataire_ or man born out of his own time--who should have been born +in 1460, in the days of Albrecht Duerer. Celestin Nanteuil "had the air +of one of those tall angels carrying a censer or playing on the +_sambucque_, who inhabit the gable ends of cathedrals; and he seemed to +have come down into the city among the busy townsfolk, still wearing his +nimbus plate behind his head in place of a hat, and without having the +least suspicion that it is not perfectly natural to wear one's aureole in +the street." He is described as resembling in figure "the spindling +columns of the church naves of the fifteenth century. . . . The azure of +the frescoes of Fiesole had furnished the blue of his eyes; his hairs, of +the blond of an aureole, seemed painted one by one, with the gold of the +illuminators of the Middle Ages. . . . One would have said, that from +the height of his Gothic pinnacle Celestin Nanteuil overlooked the actual +town, hovering above the sea of roofs, regarding the eddying blue smoke, +perceiving the city squares like a checkerboard, the streets like the +notches of a saw in a stone bench, the passers-by like mice; but all that +confusedly athwart the haze, while from his airy observatory he saw, +close at hand and in all their detail, the rose windows, the bell towers +bristling with crosses, the kings, patriarchs, prophets, saints, angels +of all the orders, the whole monstrous army of demons or chimeras, +nailed, scaled, tushed, hideously winged; _guivres_, taresques, +gargoyles, asses' heads, apes' muzzles, all the strange bestiary of the +Middle Age." Nanteuil furnished illustrations for the books of the +French romanticists. "Hugo's' Notre-Dame de Paris' was the object of his +most fervent admiration, and he drew from it subjects for a large number +of designs and aquarelles." Gautier mentions, as among his rarest +vignettes, the frontispiece of "Albertus," recalling Rembrandt's manner; +and his view of the Palazzo of San Marc in Royer's "Venezia la bella." +Gautier says that one might apply to Nanteuil's aquarelles what Joseph +Delorme[39] said of Hugo's ballads, that they were Gothic window +paintings. "The essential thing in these short fantasies is the +carriage, the shape, the clerical, monastic, royal, seignorial +_awkwardness_ of the figures and their high colouring. . . . Celestin +had made his own the angular anatomy of coats-of-arms, the extravagant +contours of the mantles, the chimerical or monstrous figures of heraldry, +the branchings of the emblazoned skirts, the lofty attitude of the feudal +baron, the modest air of the chatelaine, the sanctimonious physiognomy of +the big Carthusian Carmelite, the furtive mien of the young page with +parti-coloured pantaloons. . . . He excelled also in setting the persons +of poem, drama, or romance in ornamented frames like the Gothic shrines +with triple colonettes, arches, canopied and bracketed niches, with +statuettes, figurines, emblematic animals, male and female saints on a +background of gold. He entered so deeply into the sentiment of the old +Gothic imagery that he could make a Lady of the Pillar in a brocade +dalmatica, a Mater Dolorosa with the seven swords in her breast, a St. +Christopher with the child Jesus on his shoulder and leaning on a palm +tree, worthy to serve as types to the Byzantine painters of Epinal. . . . +Nothing resembled less the clock face and troubadour Middle Age which +flourished about 1825. It is one of the main services of the romantic +school to have thoroughly disembarrassed art from this." Gautier +describes also a manuscript piece of Nerval, for which he furnished a +prologue, and which was an imitation of one of the _Diableries_, or +popular farces of the Middle Ages, in which the devil was introduced. It +contained a piece within the piece, in the fashion of an old mystery +play, with scenery consisting of the mouth of hell, painted red and +surmounted by a blue paradise starred with gold. An angel came down to +play at dice with the devil for souls. In his excess of zeal, the angel +cheated and the devil grew angry and called him a "big booby, a celestial +fowl," and threatened to pull his feathers out ("Le Prince des Sots"). + +In France, as in England and Germany, the romantic revival promoted and +accompanied works of erudition like Raynouard's researches in Provencal +and old French philology and the poetry of the troubadours (1816); Creuze +de Lesser's "Chevaliers de la Table Ronde"; Marchangy's "La Gaule +Poetique." History took new impulse from that _sens du passe_ which +romanticism did so much to awaken. Augustin Thierry's obligations to +Scott have already been noticed. It was the war chant of the Prankish +warriors in Chateaubriand's "Les Martyrs"-- + + "Pharamond! Pharamond! nous avons combattu avec l'epee"-- + +which first excited his historical imagination and started him upon the +studies which issued in the "Recits Merovingiens" and the "Conquete +d'Angleterre." Barante's "Ducs de Bourgogne" (1814-28) confessedly owes +much of its inception to Scott. Michaud's "History of the Crusades" +(1811-22) and the "History of France" (1833-67) by that most romantic of +historians, Michelet, may also be credited to the romantic movement. The +end of the movement, as a definite period in the history of French +literature, is commonly dated from the failure upon the stage of Victor +Hugo's "Les Burgraves" in 1843. The immediate influence of the French +romantic school upon English poetry or prose was slight. Like the German +school, it came too late. The first generation of English romantics was +drawing to its close. Scott died two years after "Hernani" stormed the +French theatre. Two years later still died Coleridge, long since fallen +silent--as a poet--and always deaf to Gallic charming. We shall find the +first impress of French romance among younger men and in the latter half +century. + +In France itself the movement passed on into other phases. Many early +adherents of Hugo's _cenacle_ and _entourage_ fell away from their +allegiance and, like Sainte-Beuve and Musset, took up a critical or even +antagonistic attitude. Musset's "Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet" [40] +turns the whole romantic contention into mockery. Yet no work more +fantastically and gracefully romantic, more Shaksperian in quality, was +produced by any member of the school than Musset produced in such dramas +as "Fantasio" and "Lorenzaccio." + + +[1] It is scarcely necessary to say that no full-length picture of the +French romantic movement is attempted in this chapter, but only such a +sketch as should serve to illustrate its relation to English romanticism. +For the history of the movement, besides the authorities quoted or +referred to in the text, I have relied principally upon the following: +Petit de Julleville: "Histoire de la Litterature Francaise," Tome vii., +Paris, 1899. Brunetiere: "Manual of the History of French Literature" +(authorized translation), New York, 1898. L. Bertrand; "La Fin du +Classicisme," Paris, 1897. Adolphe Jullien: "Le Romantisme et L'Editeur +Renduel," Paris, 1897. I have also read somewhat widely, though not +exhaustively, in the writings of the French romantics themselves, +including Hugo's early poems and most of his dramas and romances; +Nodier's "Contes en prose et en verse "; nearly all of Musset's works in +prose and verse; ditto of Theophile Gautier's; Stendhal's "La Chartreuse +de Parme," "Le Rouge et le Noir," "Racine et Shakespeare," "Lord Byron en +Italie," etc.; Vigny's "Chatterton," "Cinq-Mars," and many of his +Scriptural poems; Balzac's "Les Chouans"; Merimee's "Chronique de Charles +IX.," and most of his "Nouvelles "; Chateaubriand's "Le Genie du +Christianisme"; some of Lamartine's "Meditations"; most of George Sand's +novels, and a number of Dumas'; many of Sainte-Beuve's critical writings; +and the miscellanies of Gerard de Nerval (Labrunie). Of many of these, +of course, no direct use or mention is made in the present chapter. + +[2] "Il a pour l'art du moyen age, un mepris voisin de la demence et de +la frenesie. . . . Voir le discours ou il propose de mutiler les statues +des rois de la facade de Notre-Dame, pour en former un piedestal a la +statue du peuple francais." Bertrand: "La Fin du Classicisme," pp. 302-3 +and _note_. + +[3] But see, for the Catholic reaction in France, the writings of Joseph +de Maistre, especially "Du Pape" (1819). + +[4] "Histoire du Romantisme" (1874). + +[5] _ibid._, 210. + +[6] Heine counted, in the Salon of 1831, more than thirty pictures +inspired by Scott. + +[7] Also "Le Roi Lear" (Salon of 1836) and "La Procession du Pape des +Fous" (aquarelle) for Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris." + +[8] Recall Schlegel's saying that the genius of the classic drama was +plastic and that of the romantic picturesque. + +[9] Gautier, 192. + +[10] This is a distinction more French than English: _la tragedie_ vs. +_le drame_. + +[11] Preface to "Hernani." + +[12] Preface to "Cromwell." + +[13] "Histoire du Romantisme," p. 64. + +[14] "Primer of French Literature," p. 115. + +[15] One of the principles of the romanticists was the _melange des +genres_, whereby the old lines between tragedy and comedy, _e.g._, were +broken down, lyricism admitted into the drama, etc. + +[16] Stendhal, writing in 1823 ("Racine et Shakspere"), complains that +"it will soon be thought bad form to say, on the French stage, 'Fermez +cette fenetre' [window]: we shall have to say, 'Fermez cette croisee' +[casement]. Two-thirds of the words used in the parlours of the best +people (_du meilleur ton_) cannot be reproduced in the theatre. M. +Legouve, in his tragedy 'Henri IV.,' could not make use of the patriot +king's finest saying, 'I could wish that the poorest peasant in my +kingdom might, at the least, have a chicken in his pot of a Sunday.' +English and Italian verse allows the poet to say everything; and this +good French word _pot_ would have furnished a touching scene to +Shakspere's humblest pupil. But _la tragedie racinienne_, with its +_style noble_ and its artificial dignity, has to put it thus,--in four +alexandrines: + + "'Je veux enfin qu'au jour marque pour le repos, + L'hote laborieux des modestes hameaux, + Sur sa table moins humble, ait, par ma bienfaisance, + Quelques-uns de ces mets reserves a l'aisance.'" + +It was Stendhal (whose real name was Henri Beyle) who said that Paris +needed a chain of mountains on its horizon. + +[17] Gautier, 188. + +[18] "Cromwell," 1827, + +[19] Gautier, 107. + +[20] Musset's fantastic "Ballade a la Lune," exaggerates the romantic so +decidedly as to seem ironical. It is hard to say whether it is hyperbole +or parody. See Petit de Julleville, vol. vii., p. 652. + +[21] See vol. i., pp. 372-73. + +[22] Gautier, 163. + +[23] "Des Knaben Wunderhorn." + +[24] Charles Nodier vindicated the literary claims of Perrault. + +[25] Gautier, 93. + +[26] Rue Jean-Gougon, where the _cenacle_ met often. + +[27] Nerval hanged himself at Paris, in January, 1855, in the rue de la +Vielle Lanterne. + +[28] Gautier, 167. + +[29] The romanticism of the _Globe_ was of a more conservative stripe +than that of the Muse Francaise, which was the organ of the group of +young poets who surrounded Hugo. The motto of the latter was _Jam nova +progenies coelo demittitur alto_. The _Globe_ defined romanticism as +Protestantism in letters. The critical battle was on as early as 1824. +On April 24, in that year, Auger, director of the Academy, read at the +annual session of the Institute a discourse on romanticism, which he +denounced as a literary schism. The prospectus of the _Globe_, an +important document on the romantic side, dates from the same year. The +_Constitutionnel_, the most narrowly classical of the opposing journals, +described romanticism as an epidemic malady. To the year 1825, when the +_Cenacle_ had its headquarters at Victor Hugo's house, belong, among +others, the following manifestoes on both sides of the controversy; "Les +Classiques Venges," De la Touche; "Le Temple du Romantisme," Morel; "Le +Classique et le Romantique" (a satirical comedy in the classical +interest), Baour-Lormian. Cyprien Desmarais' "Essais sur les classiques +et les romantiques" had appeared at Paris in 1823. At Rouen was printed +in 1826 "Du Classique et du Romantique," a collection of papers read at +the Rouen Academy during the year, rather favorable, on the whole, to the +new movement. + +[30] This is now a somewhat rare book; I have never seen a copy of it; +but it was reviewed in The Saturday Review (vol. lxv., p. 369). + +[31] Part ii., Book iii., chap ix. + +[32]Part ii., Book iv., chap. i. + +[33] For Chateaubriand and Ossian see vol. i., pp. 332-33. He made +translations from Ossian, Gray, and Milton. + +[34] "Victor Hugo," par Paul Boudois, p. 32. + +[35] Vol. i., p. 10. + +[36] See vol. i., p. 379. + +[37] The use of this form instead of _romantisme_ is perhaps worth +noticing. + +[38] See vol. i., pp. 19-20. + +[39] Sainte-Beuve's "Confessions de Joseph Delorme," 1829. + +[40] See vol. i., pp. 18-23. + + + + +CHAPTER VI. + +Diffused Romanticism in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century. + +Most of the poetry of the century that has just closed has been romantic +in the wider or looser acceptation of the term. Emotional stress, +sensitiveness to the picturesque, love of natural scenery, interest in +distant times and places, curiosity of the wonderful and mysterious, +subjectivity, lyricism, intrusion of the ego, impatience of the limits of +the _genres_, eager experiment with new forms of art--these and the like +marks of the romantic spirit are as common in the verse literature of the +nineteenth century as they are rare in that of the eighteenth. The same +is true of imaginative prose, particularly during the first half of the +century, the late Georgian and early Victorian period. In contrast with +Addison, Swift, and Goldsmith, De Quincey, Carlyle, and Ruskin are +romanticists. In contrast with Hume, Macaulay is romantic, concrete, +pictorial. The critical work of Hazlitt and Lamb was in line with +Coleridge's. They praised the pre-Augustan writers, the Elizabethan +dramatists, the seventeenth-century humorists and moralists, the Sidneian +amourists and fanciful sonneteers, at the expense of their classical +successors. + +But in the narrower sense of the word--the sense which controls in these +inquiries--the great romantic generation ended virtually with the death +of Scott in 1832. Coleridge followed in 1834, Wordsworth in 1850. Both +had long since ceased to contribute anything of value to imaginative +literature. Byron, Shelley, and Keats had died some years before +Coleridge; Leigh Hunt survived until 1859. The mediaevalism of +Coleridge, Scott, and Keats lived on in dispersed fashion till it +condensed itself a second time, and with redoubled intensity, in the work +of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which belongs to the last half of the +century. The direct line of descent was from Keats to Rossetti; and the +Pre-Raphaelites bear very much such a relation to the elder group, as the +romantic school proper in Germany bears to Buerger and Herder, and to +Goethe and Schiller in their younger days. That is to say, their +mediaevalism was more concentrated, more exclusive, and more final. + +We have come to a point in the chronology of our subject where the +material is so abundant that we must narrow the field of study to +creative work, and to work which is romantic in the strictest meaning. +Henceforth we may leave out of account all works of mere erudition as +such; all those helps which the scholarship of the century has furnished +to a knowledge of the Middle Ages; histories, collections, translations, +reprints of old texts, critical editions. Middle English lexicons and +grammars, studies of special subjects, such as popular myths or miracle +plays or the Arthurian legends, and the like. Numerous and valuable as +these publications have been, they concern us only indirectly. They have +swelled the material available for the student; they have not necessarily +stimulated the imagination of the poet; which sometimes--as in the case +of Chatterton and of Keats--goes off at a touch and carries but a light +charge of learning. In literary history it is the beginnings that count. +Child's great ballad collection is, beyond comparison, more important +from the scholar's point of view than Percy's "Reliques." But in the +history of romanticism it is of less importance, because it came a +century later. Mallet's "Histoire de Dannemarc" has been long since +superseded, and the means now accessible in English for a study of Norse +mythology are infinitely greater than when Gray read and Percy translated +the "Northern Antiquities." But it is not the history of the revival of +the _knowledge_ of mediaeval life that we are following here; it is +rather the history of that part of our modern creative literature which +has been kindled by contact--perhaps a very slight and casual +contact--with the transmitted _image_ of mediaeval life. + +Nor need we concern ourselves further with literary criticism or the +history of opinion. This was worth considering in the infancy of the +movement, when Warton began to question the supremacy of Pope; when Hurd +asserted the fitness for the poet's uses of the Gothic fictions and the +institution of chivalry; and when Percy ventured to hope that cultivated +readers would find something deserving attention in old English +minstrelsy. It was still worth considering a half-century later, when +Coleridge explained away the dramatic unities, and Byron once more took +up the lost cause of Pope. But by 1832 the literary revolution was +complete. Romance was in no further need of vindication, when all +Scott's library of prose and verse stood back of her, and + + "High-piled books in charactery + Held, like rich garners, the full-ripened grain." + +As to Scott's best invention, the historical romance, I shall not pursue +its fortunes to the end. The formula once constituted, its application +was easy, whether the period chosen was the Middle Ages or any old period +B.C. or A.D. Here and there an individual stands forth from the class, +either for its excellent conformity with the Waverley type or for its +originality in deviation. Of the former kind is Charles Reade's "The +Cloister and the Hearth" (1861); and of the latter Mr. Maurice Hewlett's +"The Forest Lovers" (1898). The title page of Reade's novel describes +the book as "a matter-of-fact romance." It is as well documented as any +of Scott's, and reposes especially upon the "Colloquies" of Erasmus, the +betrothal of whose parents, with their subsequent separation by the +monastic vow of celibacy, is the subject of the story. This is somewhat +romanticised, but keeps a firm grip upon historical realities. The +period of the action is the fifteenth century, yet the work is as far as +possible from being a chivalry tale, like the diaphanous fictions of +Fouque. "In that rude age," writes the novelist, "body prevailing over +mind, all sentiments took material forms. Man repented with scourges, +prayed by bead, bribed the saints with wax tapers, put fish into the body +to sanctify the soul, sojourned in cold water for empire over the +emotions, and thanked God for returning health in 1 cwt, 2 stone, 7 lbs., +3 oz., 1 dwt. of bread and cheese." There is no lack in "The Cloister +and the Hearth" of stirring incident and bold adventure; encounters with +bears and with bandits, sieges, witch trials, gallows hung with thieves, +archery with long bow and arbalest--everywhere fighting enough, as in +Scott; and, also as in Scott, behind the private drama of true love, +intrigue, persecution, the broad picture of society. It is no idealised +version of the Middle Ages. The ugly, sordid side of mediaeval life is +turned outwards; its dirt, discomfort, ignorance, absurdity, brutality, +unreason and insecurity are rendered with crass realism. The burgher is +more in evidence than the chevalier. Less after the manner of the +Waverley novels, and more after that of "Hypatia," "Romola," and "Fathers +and Sons," it depicts the intellectual unrest of the time, the +conflicting ideals of the old and new generations. The printing-press is +being set up, and the hero finds his art of calligraphy, learned in the +scriptorium, no longer in request. The Pope and many of the higher +clergy are infected with the religious scepticism and humanitarian +enthusiasm of the Renaissance. The child Erasmus is the new birth of +reason, destined to make war on monkery and superstition and thereby +avenge his parents' wrongs. Of quite another fashion of mediaevalism is +Mr. Hewlett's story--sheer romance. The wonderful wood of Morgraunt, +with its charcoal burners and wayside shrines, black meres frowned over +by skeleton castles, and gentle hinds milked by the heroine to get food +for her wounded lover, is of no time or country, but almost as unreal as +Spenser's fairy forest. Through its wild ways Isoult la Desirous and +Prosper le Gai go adventuring like Una and her Red Cross knight, or Enid +and Geraint. Or, again, Isoult in her page's dress, and forsaken by her +wedded lord, is like Viola or Imogen or Rosalind, or Constance in +"Marmion," or any lady of old romance. Or sometimes again she is like a +wood spirit, or an elemental creature such as was Undine. The invented +place names, High March, Wanmeeting, Market Basing, etc., with their +transparent air of actuality, sound an echo from William Morris' prose +romances, like "The House of the Wolfings" and "The Sundering Flood." As +in the last named, and in Thomas Hardy's "Return of the Native," the +reader's imagination is assisted by a map of the Morgraunt forest and the +river Wan. Mr. Hewlett has evidently profited, too, by recent romances +of various schools: by "Prince Otto," _e.g._, and "The Prisoner of +Zenda," and possibly by others. His Middle Ages are not the Middle Ages +of history, but of poetic convention; a world where anything may happen +and where the facts of any precise social state are attenuated into +"atmosphere" for the use of the imagination. "The Forest Lovers" is +nearer to "Christabel" or "La Belle Dame sans Merci" than to "Ivanhoe": +is, indeed, a prose poem, though not quite an allegory like "Sintram and +his Companions." + +Among Scott's contemporaries, Byron and Shelley, profoundly romantic in +temper, were not retrospective in their habit of mind; and the Middle +Ages, in particular, had little to say to them. Scott stood for the +past; Byron--a man of his time, a modern man--for the present; Shelley--a +visionary, with a system of philosophical perfectionism--for the future. +Memory, Mnemosyne, mother of the muses, was the nurse of Scott's genius. +Byron lived intensely in the world which he affected to despise. Shelley +prophesied, with eyes fixed upon the coming age. We have found, in +Byron's contributions to the Pope controversy, one expression of his +instinctive sympathy with the classical and contempt for the Gothic. +Shelley, too, was a Hellenist; and to both, in their angry break with +authority and their worship of liberty, the naked freedom, the clear +light, the noble and harmonious forms of the antique were as attractive +as the twilight of the "ages of faith," with their mysticism, asceticism, +and grotesque superstitions, were repulsive. Remote as their own +feverish and exuberant poetry was from the unexcited manner of classical +work, the latter was the ideal towards which they more and more inclined. +The points at which these two poets touch our history, then, are few. +Byron, to be sure, cast "Childe Harold" into Spenserian verse, and gave +it a ballad title.[1] In the first canto there are a few archaisms; +words like _fere_, _shent_, and _losel_ occur, together with Gothic +properties, such as the "eremite's sad cell" and "Paynim shores" and +Newstead's "monastic dome." The ballad "Adieu, adieu my native shore," +was suggested by "Lord Maxwell's Good-Night" in the "Border Minstrelsy," +and introduces some romantic appurtenances: the harp, the falcon, and the +little foot-page. But this kind of falsetto, in the tradition of the +last-century Spenserians, evidently hampered the poet; so he shook +himself free from imitation after the opening stanzas, and spoke in his +natural voice.[2] "Lara" is a tale of feudal days, with a due proportion +of knights, dames, vassals, and pages; and an ancestral hall with gloomy +vaults and portrait galleries, where + + "--the moonbeam shone + Through the dim lattice o'er the floor of stone, + And the high fretted roof and saints that there + O'er Gothic windows knelt in pictured prayer. . . . + The waving banner and the clapping door, + The rustling tapestry and the echoing floor; + The long dim shadows of surrounding trees, + The flapping bats, the night-song of the breeze, + Aught they behold or hear their thought appalls, + As evening saddens o'er the dark grey walls." + +But these things are unimportant in Byron--mere commonplaces of +description inherited from Scott and Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe. Neither +is it of importance that "Parisina" is a tale of the year 1405, and has +an echo in it of convent bells and the death chant of friars; nor that +the first scene of "Manfred" passes in a "Gothic gallery," and includes +an incantation of spirits upon the model of "Faust"; nor that "Marino +Faliero" and "The Two Foscari" are founded on incidents of Venetian +history which happened in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries +respectively; nor yet that Byron translated the Spanish ballad "Woe is me +Alhama" and a passage from Pulci's "Morgante Maggiore." [3] Similarly +Shelley's experimental versions of the "Prolog im Himmel," and +"Walpurgisnacht" in "Faust," and of scenes from Calderon's "Magico +Prodigioso" are felt to be without special significance in comparison +with the body of his writings. "Faust" impressed him, as it did Byron, +and he urged Coleridge to translate it, speaking of the current English +versions as wretched misrepresentations of the original. But in all of +Shelley's poetry the scenery, architecture, and imagery in general are +sometimes Italian, sometimes Asiatic, often wholly fantastic, but never +mediaeval. Their splendour is a classic splendour, and not what Milton +contemptuously calls "a Hunnish and Norwegian stateliness." His +favourite names are Greek: Cythna, Ianthe, and the like. The ruined +cathedral in "Queen Mab"--a poem only in its title romantic--is coupled +with the ruined dungeon, in whose courts the children play; both alike +"works of faith and slavery," symbols of the priestcraft and kingcraft +which Shelley hated, now made harmless by the reign of Reason and Love in +a regenerated universe. How different is the feeling which the empty +cathedral inspires in Lowell; once thronged with worshippers, now +pathetically lonely--a cliff, far inland, from which the sea of faith has +forever withdrawn! At the time when "Queen Mab" was written, Coleridge, +Southey, and Landor's "Gebir" were Shelley's favourite reading. "He was +a lover of the wonderful and wild in literature," says Mrs. Shelley, in +her notes on the poem; "but had not fostered these tastes at their +genuine sources--the romances and chivalry of the Middle Ages--but in the +perusal of such German works as were current in those days.[4] . . . Our +earlier English poetry was almost unknown to him." + +"Queen Mab" begins with a close imitation of the opening lines of +Southey's "Thalaba the Destroyer." The third member of the Lake School +is a standing illustration of Mr. Colvin's contention that the +distinction between classic and romantic is less in subject than in +treatment. Southey regarded himself as, equally with Wordsworth and +Coleridge, an innovator and a rebel against poetic conventions. His big +Oriental epics, "Thalaba" and "The Curse of Kehama," are written in verse +purposely irregular, but so inferior in effect to the irregular verse of +Coleridge and Scott as to prove that irregularity, as such, is only +tolerable when controlled by the subtly varying lyric impulse--not when +it is adopted as a literary method. Southey's worth as a man, his +indefatigable industry, his scholarship, and his excellent work in prose +make him an imposing figure in our literature. But his poetical +reputation has faded more rapidly than that of his greater +contemporaries. He ranged widely in search of subjects and experimented +boldly in forms of verse; but his poems are seldom inspired; they are +manufactures rather than creations, and to-day Southey, the poet, +represents nothing in particular. + +But, like Taylor of Norwich, Southey, by his studies in foreign +literature, added much to the romantic material constantly accumulating +in the English tongue. In his two visits to the Peninsula he made +acquaintance with Spanish and Portuguese; and afterwards by his +translations and otherwise, helped his countrymen to a knowledge of the +old legendary poetry of Spain, the country above all others of chivalry +and romance. Mention has already been made of his versions of "Amadis of +Gaul," "Palmerin of England," and the "Chronicle of the Cid." The last +named was not a translation from any single source, but was put together +from the "Poem of the Cid," which the translator considered to be +"unquestionably the oldest poem in the language" and probably by a writer +contemporary with the great Campeador himself; from the prose "Chronicle" +assigned to the thirteenth century; and from the ballads, which Southey +thought mainly worthless, _i.e._, from the historical point of view. + +Southey's long blank verse poems on mediaeval subjects, partly +historical, partly legendary, "Joan of Arc" (1795), "Madoc" (1805), and +"Roderick, the Last of the Goths" (1814), like his friend Landor's +"Gebir," are examples of romantic themes with classical or, at least, +unromantic handling. The last of them was the same in subject, indeed, +with Landor's drama, "Count Julian." I have spoken of "Thalaba" and "The +Curse of Kehama" as epics; but Southey rejected "the degraded title of +epic" and scouted the rules of Aristotle. Nevertheless, the best +qualities of these blank verse narratives are of the classic-epic kind. +The story is not badly told; the measure is correct if not distinguished; +and the style is simple, clear, and in pure taste. But the spell of +romance, the witchery of Coleridge and Keats is absent; and so are the +glow and movement of Scott. + +Southey got up his history and local colour conscientiously, and his +notes present a formidable array of authorities. While engaged upon +"Madoc," he went to Wales to verify the scenery and even came near to +leasing a cottage and taking up his residence there. "The manners of the +poem," he asserted, "will be found historically true." The hero of +"Madoc" was a legendary Welsh prince of the twelfth century who led a +colony to America. The _motif_ of the poem is therefore nearly the same +as in William Morris's "Earthly Paradise," and it is curious to compare +the two. In Southey's hands the blank verse, which in the last century +had been almost an ear-mark of the romanticising schools, is far more +classical than the heroic couplet which Morris writes. In the Welsh +portion of "Madoc" the historical background is carefully studied from +Giraldus Cambrensis, Evans' "Specimens," the "Triads of Bardism," the +"Cambrian Biography," and similar sources, and in the Aztec portion, from +old Spanish chronicles of the conquest of Mexico and the journals of +modern travellers in America. In "The Earthly Paradise" nothing is +historical except the encounter with Edward III.'s fleet in the channel. +Over all, the dreamlike vagueness and strangeness of romance. Yet the +imaginative impression is more distinct, not an impression of reality, +but as of a soft, bright miniature painting in an old manuscript. + +In common with his literary associates, Southey was prompted by Percy's +"Reliques" to try his hand at the legendary ballad and at longer metrical +tales like "All for Love" and "The Pilgrim to Compostella." Most of +these pieces date from the last years of the century. One of them, "St. +Patrick's Purgatory," was inserted by Lewis in his "Tales of Wonder." +Another of the most popular, and a capital specimen of grotesque, "The +Old Woman of Berkeley," was upon a theme which was also undertaken by +Taylor of Norwich and Dr. Sayers of the same city, when Southey was on a +visit to the former in 1798. The story, told by Olaus Magnus as well as +by William of Malmesbury, was of a witch whose body was carried off by +the devil, though her coffin had been sprinkled with holy water and bound +with a triple chain. For material Southey drew upon Spanish chronicles, +French _fabliaux_, the "Acta Sanctorum," Matthew of Westminster, and many +other sources. His ballads do not compare well with those of Scott and +Coleridge. They abound in the supernatural--miracles of saints, +sorceries, and apparitions; but the matter-of-fact narrative, +common-place diction, and jog-trot verse are singularly out of keeping +with the subject matter. The most wildly romantic situations become +tamely unromantic under Southey's handling. Though in better taste than +Lewis' grisly compositions, yet, as in Lewis, the want of "high +seriousness" or any finer imagination in these legendary tales makes them +turn constantly towards the comic; so that Southey was scandalised to +learn that Mr. Payne Collier had taken his "Old Woman of Berkeley" for a +"mock ballad" or parody. He affected especially a stanza which he +credited to Lewis' invention: + + "Behind a wide column, half breathless with fear + She crept to conceal herself there; + That instant the moon o'er a dark cloud shone clear, + And she saw in the moonlight two ruffians appear, + And between them a corpse did they bear." [5] + +Southey employs no archaisms, no refrains, nor any of the stylistic marks +of ancient minstrelsy. His ballads have the metrical roughness and plain +speech of the old popular ballads, but none of their frequent, peculiar +beauties of thought and phrase, + +Spain, no less than Germany and Italy, was laid under contribution by the +English romantics. Southey's work in this direction was followed by such +things as Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads" (1824), Irving's "Alhambra," and +Bryant's and Longfellow's translations from Spanish lyrical poetry. But +these exotics did not stimulate original creative activity in England in +equal degree with the German and Italian transplantings. They were +imported, not appropriated. Of all European countries Spain had remained +the most Catholic and mediaeval. Her eight centuries of struggle against +the Moors had given her a rich treasure of legendary song and story. She +had a body of popular ballad poetry larger than either England's or +Germany's.[6] But Spain had no modern literature to mediate between the +old and new; nothing at all corresponding with the schools of romance in +Germany, from Herder to Schlegel, which effected a revival of the +Teutonic Middle Age and impressed it upon contemporary England and +France. Neither could the Spanish Middle Age itself show any such +supreme master as Dante, whose direct influence on English poetry has +waxed with the century. There was a time when, for the greater part of a +century, England and Spain were in rather close contact, but it was +mainly a hostile contact, and its tangential points were the ill-starred +marriage of Philip and Mary, the Great Armada of 1588, and the abortive +"Spanish Marriage" negotiations of James I.'s reign. Readers of our +Elizabethan literature, however, cannot fail to remark a knowledge of, +and interest in, Spanish affairs now quite strange to English writers. +The dialogue of the old drama is full of Spanish phrases of convenience +like _bezo los manos_, _paucas palabras_, etc., which were evidently +quite as well understood by the audience as was later the colloquial +French--_savoir faire_, _coup de grace_, etc.--which began to come in +with Dryden, and has been coming ever since. The comedy Spaniard, like +Don Armado in "Love's Labour's Lost," was a familiar figure on the +English boards. Middleton took the double plot of his "Spanish Gipsy" +from two novels of Cervantes; and his "Game of Chess," a political +allegorical play, aimed against Spanish intrigues, made a popular hit and +was stopped, after a then unexampled run, in consequence of the +remonstrances of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador. Somewhat later the +Restoration stage borrowed situations from the Spanish love-intrigue +comedy, not so much directly as by way of Moliere, Thomas Corneille, and +other French playwrights; and the duenna and the _gracioso_ became stock +figures in English performances. The direct influence of Calderon and +Lope de Vega upon our native theatre was infinitesimal. The Spanish +national drama, like the English, was self-developed and unaffected by +classical rules. Like the English, it was romantic in spirit, but was +more religious in subject and more lyrical in form. The land of romance +produced likewise the greatest of all satires upon romance. "Don +Quixote," of course, was early translated and imitated in England; and +the _picaro_ romances had an important influence upon the evolution of +English fiction in De Foe and Smollett; not only directly through books +like "The Spanish Rogue," but by way of Le Sage.[7] But upon the whole, +the relation between English and Spanish literature had been one of +distant respect rather than of intimacy. There was never any such inrush +of foreign domination from this quarter as from Italy in the sixteenth +century, or from France in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and latter half of +the seventeenth. + +The unequalled wealth of Spanish literature in popular ballads is +partially explained by the facility with which such things were composed. +The Spanish ballad, or _romance_, was a stanza (_redondilla_, roundel) of +four eight-syllable lines with a prevailing trachaic movement--just the +metre, in short, of "Locksley Hall." Only the second and fourth lines +rimed, and the rime was merely assonant or vowel rime. Given the subject +and the lyrical impulse, and verses of this sort could be produced to +order and in infinite number by poets of the humblest capacity. The +subjects were furnished mainly by Spanish history and legend, the +exploits of national heroes like the Cid (Ruy Diaz de Bivar), the seven +Princes of Lara, Don Fernan Gonzalez, and Bernaldo del Carpio, the leader +in the Spanish versions of the great fight by Fontarabbia + + "When Rowland brave and Olivier, + And every paladin and peer + On Roncesvalles died." + +Southey thought the Spanish ballads much inferior to the English and +Scotch, a judgment to which students of Spanish poetry will perhaps +hardly agree.[8] The Spanish ballads, like the British, are partly +historical and legendary, partly entirely romantic or fictitious. They +record not only the age-long wars against the Saracen, the common enemy, +but the internecine feuds of the Spanish Christian kingdoms, the quarrels +between the kings and their vassals, and many a dark tale of domestic +treachery or violence. In these respects their resemblance to the +English and Scotch border ballads is obvious; and it has been pointed out +that they sprang from similar conditions, a frontier war for national +independence, maintained for centuries against a stubborn foe. The +traditions concerning Wallace and the Bruce have some analogy with the +chronicles of the Cid; but as to the border fights celebrated in Scott's +"Minstrelsy," they were between peoples of the same race, tongue, and +faith; and were but petty squabbles in comparison with that epic crusade +in which the remnants of the old Gothic conquerors slowly made head +against, and finally overthrew and expelled, an Oriental religion, a +foreign blood, and a civilisation in many respects more brilliant than +anything which Europe could show. The contrast between Castile and +Granada is more picturesque than the difference between Lothian and +Northumberland. The Spanish ballads have the advantage, then, of being +connected with imposing passages of history. In spirit they are +intensely national. Three motives animate them all: loyalty to the king, +devotion to the cross, and the _pundonor_: that sensitive personal +honour--the "Castilian pride" of "Hernani,"--which sometimes ran into +fantastic excess. A rude chivalry occasionally softens the ferocity of +feudal manners in Northern ballad-poetry, as in the speech of Percy over +the dead Douglas in "Chevy Chase." But in the Spanish _romances_ the +knightly feeling is all-pervading. The warriors are _hidalgos_, +gentlemen of a lofty courtesy; the Moorish chieftains are not "heathen +hounds," but chivalrous adversaries, to be treated, in defeat, with a +certain generosity. This refinement and magnanimity are akin to that +ideality of temper which makes Don Quixote at once so noble and so +ridiculous, and which is quite remote from the sincere realism of the +British minstrelsy. In style the Spanish ballads are simple, forcible, +and direct, but somewhat monotonous in their facility. The English and +Scotch have a wider range of subject; the best of them have a condensed +energy of expression and a depth of tragic feeling which is more potent +than the melancholy grace of the Spanish. Women take a more active part +in the former, the Christians of the Peninsula having caught from their +Saracen foes a prejudice in favour of womanly seclusion and retirement. +There is also a wilder imagination in Northern balladry; a much larger +element of the mythological and supernatural. Ghosts, demons, fairies, +enchanters are rare in the Spanish poems. Where the marvellous enters +into them at all, it is mostly in the shape of saintly miracles. St. +James of Compostella appears on horseback among the Christian hosts +battling with the Moors, or even in the army of the Conquistadores in +Mexico--an incident which Macaulay likens to the apparition of the "great +twin Brethren" in the Roman battle of Lake Regillus. The mediaeval +Spaniards were possibly to the full as superstitious as their Scottish +contemporaries, but their superstitions were the legends of the Catholic +Church, not the inherited folklore of Gothic and Celtic heathendom. I +will venture to suggest, as one reason of this difference, the absence of +forests in Spain. The shadowy recesses of northern Europe were the +natural haunts of mystery and unearthly terrors. The old Teutonic +forest, the Schwarzwald and the Hartz, were peopled by the popular +imagination with were-wolves, spectre huntsmen, wood spirits, and all +those nameless creatures which Tieck has revived in his "Maehrchen" and +Hauptmann in the Rautendelein of his "Versunkene Glocke." The treeless +plateaus of Spain, and her stony, denuded sierras, all bare and bright +under the hot southern sky, offered no more shelter to such beings of the +mind than they did to the genial life of Robin Hood and his merry men +"all under the greenwood tree." And this mention of the bold archer of +Sherwood recalls one other difference--the last that need here be touched +upon--between the ballads of Spain and of England. Both constitute a +body of popular poetry, _i.e._, of folk poetry. They recount the doings +of the upper classes, princes, nobles, knights, and ladies, as seen from +the angle of observation of humble minstrels of low degree. But the +people count for much more in the English poems. The Spanish are more +aristocratic, more public, less domestic, and many of them composed, it +is thought, by lordly makers. This is perhaps, in part, a difference in +national character; and, in part, a difference in the conditions under +which the social institutions of the two countries were evolved. + +Spain collected her ballads early in numerous songbooks--_cancioneros_, +_romanceros_--the first of which, the "Cancionero" of 1510, is "the +oldest collection of popular poetry, properly so-called, that is to be +found in any European literature." [9] But modern Spain had gone through +her classic period, like England and Germany. She had submitted to the +critical canons of Boileau, and was in leading-strings to France till the +end of the eighteenth century. Spain, too, had her romantic movement, +and incidentally her ballad revival, but it came later than in England +and Germany, later even than in France. Historians of Spanish literature +inform us that the earliest entry of French romanticism into Spain took +place in Martinez de la Rosa's two dramas, "The Conspiracy of Venice" +(1834) and "Aben-Humeya," first written in French and played at Paris in +1830; and that the representation of Duke de Rivas' play, "Don Alvaro" +(1835), was "an event in the history of the modern Spanish drama +corresponding to the production of 'Hernani' at the Theatre Francais" in +1830.[10] Both of these authors had lived in France and had there made +acquaintance with the works of Chateaubriand, Byron, and Walter Scott. +Spain came in time to have her own Byron and her own Scott, the former in +Jose de Espronceda, author of "The Student of Salamanca," who resided for +a time in London; the latter in Jose Zorrilla, whose "Granada," "Legends +of the Cid," etc., "were popular for the same reason that 'Marmion' and +'The Lady of the Lake' were popular; for their revival of national +legends in a form both simple and picturesque." [11] Scott himself is +reported to have said that if he had come across in his younger days +Perez de Hita's old historical romance, "The Civil Wars of Granada" +(1595), "he would have chosen Spain as the scene of a Waverley +novel." [12] + +But when Lockhart, in 1824, set himself to + + "--relate + In high-born words the worth of many a knight + From tawny Spain, lost in the world's debate"-- + +her ballad poetry had fallen into disfavour at home, and "no Spanish +Percy, or Ellis, or Ritson," he complains, "has arisen to perform what no +one but a Spaniard can entertain the smallest hope of achieving." [13] +Meanwhile, however, the German romantic school had laid eager hands upon +the old romantic literature of Spain. A. W. Schlegel (1803) and Gries +had made translations from Calderon in assonant verse; and Friedrich +Schlegel--who exalted the Spanish dramatist above Shakspere, much to +Heine's disgust--had written, also in _asonante_, his dramatic poem +"Conde Alarcos" (1802), founded on the well-known ballad. Brentano and +others of the romantics went so far as to practise assonance in their +original as well as translated work. Jacob Grimm (1815) and Depping +(1817) edited selections from the "Romancero" which Lockhart made use of +in his "Ancient Spanish Ballads." With equal delight the French +romanticists--Hugo and Musset in particular--seized upon the treasures of +the "Romancero"; but this was somewhat later. + +Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads," which were bold and spirited paraphrases +rather than close versions of the originals, enjoyed a great success, and +have been repeatedly reprinted. Ticknor pronounced them undoubtedly a +work of genius, as much so as any book of the sort in any literature with +which he was acquainted.[14] In the very same year Sir John Bowring +published his "Ancient Poetry and Romance of Spain." Hookham Frere, that +most accomplished of translators, also gave specimens from the +"Romancero." Of late years versions in increasing numbers of Spanish +poetry of all kinds, ancient and modern, by Ormsby, Gibson, and others +too numerous to name, have made the literature of the country largely +accessible to English readers. But to Lockhart belongs the credit of +having established for the English public the convention of romantic +Spain--the Spain of lattice and guitar, of mantilla and castanet, +articles now long at home in the property room of romance, along with the +gondola of Venice, the "clock-face" troubadour, and the castle on the +Rhine. The Spanish brand of mediaevalism would seem, for a number of +years, to have substituted itself in England for the German, and +doubtless a search through the annuals and gift books and fashionable +fiction and minor poetry generally, of the years from 1825 to 1840, would +disclose a decided Castilian colouring. To such effect, at least, is the +testimony of the Edinburgh reviewer--from whom I have several times +quoted--reviewing in January, 1841, the new and sumptuously illustrated +edition of "Ancient Spanish Ballads." "Mr. Lockhart's success," he +writes, "rendered the subject fashionable; we have, however, no space to +bestow on the minor fry who dabbled in these . . . fountains. Those who +remember their number may possibly deprecate our re-opening the +floodgates of the happily subsided inundation." + +The popular ballad, indeed, is, next after the historical romance, the +literary form to which the romantic movement has given, in the highest +degree, a renewal of prosperous life. Every one has written ballads, and +the "burden" has become a burden even as the grasshopper is such. The +very parodists have taken the matter in hand. The only Calverley made +excellent sport of the particular variety cultivated by Jean Ingelow. +And Sir Frederick Pollock, as though actuated by Lowell's hint, about "a +declaration of love under the forms of a declaration in trover," cast the +law reports into ballad phrase in his "Leading Cases Done into English +(1876): + + "It was Thomas Newman and five his feres + (Three more would have made them nine), + And they entered into John Vaux's house, + That had the Queen's Head to sign. + The birds on the bough sing loud and sing low, + What trespass shall be _ab initio_." + +Of course the great majority of these poems in the ballad form, whether +lyric or narrative, or a mixture of both, are in no sense romantic. They +are like Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads," idyllic; songs of the +affections, of nature, sentiment, of war, the sea, the hunting field, +rustic life, and a hundred other moods and topics. Neither are the +historical or legendary ballads, deriving from Percy and reinforced by +Scott, prevailingly romantic in the sense of being mediaeval. They are +such as Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," in which--with ample +acknowledgment in his introduction both to Scott and to the +"Reliques"--he applies the form of the English minstrel ballad to an +imaginative re-creation of the lost popular poetry of early Rome. Or +they continue Scott's Jacobite tradition, like "Aytoun's Lays of the +Scottish Cavaliers," Browning's "Cavalier Tunes," Thornbury's "Songs of +the Cavaliers and Roundheads" (1857), and a few of Motherwell's ditties. +These last named, except Browning, were all Scotchmen and staunch Tories; +as were likewise Lockhart and Hogg; and, for obvious reasons, it is in +Scotland that the simpler fashion of ballad writing, whether in dialect +or standard English, and more especially as employed upon martial +subjects, has flourished longest. Artifice and ballad preciosity have +been cultivated more sedulously in the south, with a learned use of the +repetend, archaism of style, and imitation of the quaint mediaeval habit +of mind. + +Of the group most immediately connected with Scott and who assisted him, +more or less, in his "Minstrelsy" collection, may be mentioned the +eccentric John Leyden, immensely learned in Border antiquities and +poetry, and James Hogg, the "Ettrick Shepherd." The latter was a peasant +bard, an actual shepherd and afterward a sheep farmer, a self-taught man +with little schooling, who aspired to become a second Burns, and composed +much of his poetry while lying out on the hills, wrapped in his plaid and +tending his flocks like any Corydon or Thyrsis. He was a singular +mixture of genius and vanity, at once the admiration and the butt of the +_Blackwood's_ wits, who made him the mouthpiece of humour and eloquence +which were not his, but Christopher North's. The puzzled shepherd hardly +knew how to take it; he was a little gratified and a good deal nettled. +But the flamboyant figure of him in the _Noctes_ will probably do as much +as his own verses to keep his memory alive with posterity. Nevertheless, +Hogg is one of the best of modern Scotch ballad poets. Having read the +first two volumes of the "Border Minstrelsy," he was dissatisfied with +some of the modern ballad imitations therein and sent his criticisms to +Scott. They were sound criticisms, for Hogg had an intimate knowledge of +popular poetry and a quick perception of what was genuine and what was +spurious in such compositions. Sir Walter called him in aid of his third +volume and found his services of value. + +As a Border minstrel, Hogg ranks next to Scott--is, in fact, a sort of +inferior Scott. His range was narrower, but he was just as thoroughly +saturated with the legendary lore of the countryside, and in some +respects he stood closer to the spirit of that peasant life in which +popular poetry has its source. As a ballad poet, indeed, he is not +always Scott's inferior, though even his ballads are apt to be too long +and without the finish and the instinct for selection which marks the +true artist. When he essayed metrical romances in numerous cantos, his +deficiencies in art became too fatally evident. Scott, in his longer +poems, is often profuse and unequal, but always on a much higher level +than Hogg. The latter had no skill in conducting to the end a fable of +some complexity, involving a number of varied characters and a really +dramatic action. "Mador of the Moor," _e.g._, is a manifest and not very +successful imitation of "The Lady of the Lake"; and it requires a strong +appetite for the romantic to sustain a reader through the six parts of +"Queen Hynde" and the four parts of "The Pilgrims of the Sun." By +general consent, the best of Hogg's more ambitious poems is "The Queen's +Wake," and the best thing in it is "Kilmeny." "The Queen's Wake" (1813) +combines, in its narrative plan, the framework of "The Lay of the Last +Minstrel" with the song competition in its sixth canto. Mary Stuart, on +landing in Scotland, holds a Christmas wake at Holyrood, where seventeen +bards contend before her for the prize of song. The lays are in many +different moods and measures, but all enclosed in a setting of +octosyllabic couplets, closely modelled upon Scott, and the whole ends +with a tribute to the great minstrel who had waked once more the long +silent Harp of the North. The thirteenth bard's song--"Kilmeny"--is of +the type of traditionary tale familiar in "Tarn Lin" and "Thomas of +Ercildoune," and tells how a maiden was spirited away to fairyland, where +she saw a prophetic vision of her country's future (including the +Napoleonic wars) and returned after a seven years' absence. + + "Late, late in a gloamin' when all was still, + When the fringe was red on the westlin hill, + The wood was sere, the moon i' the wane, + The reek o' the cot hung o'er the plain, + Like a little wee cloud in the world its lane; + When the ingle lowed wi' an eiry leme, + Late, late in the gloamin' Kilmeny came hame." + +The Ettrick Shepherd's peculiar province was not so much the romance of +national history as the field of Scottish fairy lore and popular +superstition. It was he, rather than Walter Scott, who carried out the +suggestions long since made to his countryman, John Home, in Collins' +"Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands." His poems are full of +bogles, kelpies, brownies, warlocks, and all manner of "grammarie." "The +Witch of Fife" in "The Queen's Wake," a spirited bit of grotesque, is +repeatedly quoted as authority upon the ways of Scotch witches in the +notes to Croker's "Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland." +Similar themes engaged the poet in his prose tales. Some of these were +mere modern ghost stories, or stories of murder, robbery, death warnings, +etc. Others, like "The Heart of Eildon," dealt with ancient legends of +the supernatural. Still others, like "The Brownie of Bodsbeck: a Tale of +the Covenanters," were historical novels of the Stuart times. Here Hogg +was on Scott's own ground and did not shine by comparison. He +complained, indeed, that in the last-mentioned tale, he had been accused +of copying "Old Mortality", but asserted that he had written his book the +first and had been compelled by the appearance of Sir Walter's, to go +over his own manuscript and substitute another name for Balfour of +Burley, his original hero. Nanny's songs, in "The Brownie of Bodsbeck," +are among Hogg's best ballads. Others are scattered through his various +collections--"The Mountain Bard," "The Forest Minstrel," "Poetical Tales +and Ballads," etc. + +Another Scotch balladist was William Motherwell, one of the most +competent of ballad scholars and editors, whose "Minstrelsy: Ancient and +Modern," was issued at Glasgow in 1827, and led to a correspondence +between the collector and Sir Walter Scott.[15] In 1836 Motherwell was +associated with Hogg in editing Burns' works. His original ballads are +few in number, and their faults and merits are of quite an opposite +nature from his collaborator's. The shepherd was a man of the people, +and lived, so far as any modern can, among the very conditions which +produced the minstrel songs. He inherited the popular beliefs. His +great-grandmother on one side was a notorious witch; his grandfather on +the other side had "spoken with the fairies." His poetry, such as it is, +is fluent and spontaneous. Motherwell's, on the contrary, is the work of +a ballad fancier, a student learned in lyric, reproducing old modes with +conscientious art. His balladry is more condensed and skilful than +Hogg's, but seems to come hard to him. It is literary poetry trying to +be _Volkspoesie_, and not quite succeeding. Many of the pieces in the +southern English, such as "Halbert the Grim," "The Troubadour's Lament," +"The Crusader's Farewell," "The Warthman's Wail," "The Demon Lady," "The +Witches' Joys," and "Lady Margaret," have an echo of Elizabethan music, +or the songs of Lovelace, or, now and then, the verse of Coleridge or +Byron. "True Love's Dirge," _e.g._, borrows a burden from +Shakspere--"Heigho! the Wind and Rain." Others, like "Lord Archibald: A +Ballad," and "Elfinland Wud: An Imitation of the Ancient Scottish +Romantic Ballad," are in archaic Scotch dialect with careful ballad +phrasing. Hogg employs the broad Scotch, but it is mostly the vernacular +of his own time. A short passage from "The Witch of Fife" and one from +"Elfin Wud" will illustrate two very different types of ballad manner: + + "He set ane reid-pipe till his muthe + And he playit se bonnileye, + Till the gray curlew and the black-cock flew + To listen his melodye. + + "It rang se sweit through the grim Lommond, + That the nycht-winde lowner blew: + And it soupit alang the Loch Leven, + And wakenit the white sea-mew. + + "It rang se sweit through the grim Lommond, + Se sweitly but and se shill, + That the wezilis laup out of their mouldy holis, + And dancit on the mydnycht hill." + + + "Around her slepis the quhyte muneschyne, + (Meik is mayden undir kell), + Hir lips bin lyke the blude reid wyne; + (The rois of flouris hes sweitest smell). + + "It was al bricht quhare that ladie stude, + (Far my luve fure ower the sea). + Bot dern is the lave of Elfinland wud, + (The Knicht pruvit false that ance luvit me). + + "The ladie's handis were quhyte als milk, + (Ringis my luve wore mair nor ane). + Hir skin was safter nor the silk; + (Lilly bricht schinis my luve's halse bane)." + +Upon the whole, the most noteworthy of Motherwell's original additions to +the stores of romantic verse were his poems on subjects from Norse legend +and mythology, and particularly the three spirited pieces that stand +first in his collection (1832)--"The Battle-Flag of Sigurd," "The Wooing +Song of Jarl Egill Skallagrim," and "The Sword Chant of Thorstein Randi." +These stand midway between Gray's "Descent of Odin" and the later work of +Longfellow, William Morris and others. Since Gray, little or nothing of +the kind had been attempted; and Motherwell gave perhaps the first +expression in English song of the Berserkir rage and the Viking passion +for battle and sea roving. + +During the nineteenth century English romance received new increments of +heroic legend and fairy lore from the Gaelic of Ireland. It was not +until 1867 that Matthew Arnold, in his essay "On the Study of Celtic +Literature," pleading for a chair of Celtic at Oxford, bespoke the +attention of the English public to those elements in the national +literature which come from the Celtic strain in its blood. Arnold knew +very little Celtic, and his essay abounds in those airy generalisations +which are so irritating to more plodding critics. His theory, e.g., that +English poetry owes its sense for colour to the Celts, when taken up and +stated nakedly by following writers, seems too absolute in its ascription +of colour-blindness to the Teutonic races. Still, Arnold probably +defined fairly enough the distinctive traits of the Celtic genius. He +attributes to a Celtic source much of the turn of English poetry for +style, much of its turn for melancholy, and nearly all its turn for +"natural magic." "The forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the wild +flowers, are everywhere in romance. They have a mysterious life and +grace there; they are Nature's own children, and utter her secret in a +way which makes them something quite different from the woods, waters, +and plants of Greek and Latin poetry. Now, of this delicate magic, +Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a mistress that it seems impossible to +believe the power did not come into romance from the Celts." + +In 1825 T. Crofton Croker published the first volume of his delightful +"Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland." It was +immediately translated into German by the Grimm brothers, and was +received with enthusiasm by Walter Scott, who was introduced to the +author in London in 1826, and a complimentary letter from whom was +printed in the preface to the second edition. + +Croker's book opened a new world of romance, and introduced the English +reader to novel varieties of elf creatures, with outlandish Gaelic names; +the Shefro; the Boggart; the Phooka, or horse-fiend; the Banshee, a +familiar spirit which moans outside the door when a death impends; the +Cluricaune,[16] or cellar goblin; the Fir Darrig (Red Man); the Dullahan, +or Headless Horseman. There are stories of changelings, haunted castles, +buried treasure, the "death coach," the fairy piper, enchanted lakes +which cover sunken cities, and similar matters not unfamiliar in the +folk-lore of other lands, but all with an odd twist to them and set +against a background of the manners and customs of modern Irish +peasantry. The Celtic melancholy is not much in evidence in this +collection. The wild Celtic fancy is present, but in combination with +Irish gaiety and light-heartedness. It was the day of the comedy +Irishman--Lover's and Lever's Irishman--Handy Andy, Rory O'More, Widow +Machree and the like. It took the famine of '49 and the strenuous work +of the Young Ireland Party which gathered about the _Nation_ in 1848, to +displace this traditional figure in favour of a more earnest and tragical +national type. But a single quotation will illustrate the natural magic +of which Arnold speaks: "The Merrow (mermaid) put the comb in her pocket, +and then bent down her head and whispered some words to the water that +was close to the foot of the rock. Dick saw the murmur of the words upon +the top of the sea, going out towards the wide ocean, just like a breath +of wind rippling along, and, says he, in the greatest wonder, 'Is it +speaking you are, my darling, to the salt water?' + +"'It's nothing else,' says she, quite carelessly; 'I'm just sending word +home to my father not to be waiting breakfast for me.'" Except for its +lack of "high seriousness," this is the imagination that makes myths. + +Catholic Ireland still cherishes popular beliefs which in England, and +even in Scotland, have long been merely antiquarian curiosities. In her +poetry the fairies are never very far away. + + "Up the airy mountain, + Down the rushy glen + We daren't go a-hunting + For fear of little men." [17] + +Irish critics, to be sure, tell us that Allingham's fairies are English +fairies, and that he had no Gaelic, though he knew and loved his Irish +countryside. He was a Protestant and a loyalist, and lived in close +association with the English Pre-Raphaelites--with Rossetti especially, +who made the illustration for "The Maids of Elfin-Mere" in Allingham's +volume "The Music Master" (1855). The Irish fairies, it is said, are +beings of a darker and more malignant breed than Shakspere's elves. Yet +in Allingham's poem they stole little Bridget and kept her seven years, +till she died of sorrow and lies asleep on the lake bottom; even as in +Ferguson's weird ballad, "The Fairy Thorn," the good people carry off +fair Anna Grace from the midst of her three companions, who "pined away +and died within the year and day." + +To the latter half of the century belongs the so-called Celtic revival, +which connects itself with the Nationalist movement in politics and is +partly literary and partly patriotic. It may be doubted whether, for +practical purposes, the Gaelic will ever come again into general use. +But the concerted endeavour by a whole nation to win back its ancient, +wellnigh forgotten speech is a most interesting social phenomenon. At +all events, both by direct translations of the Gaelic hero epics and by +original work in which the Gaelic spirit is transfused through English +ballad and other verse forms, a lost kingdom of romance has been +recovered and a bright green thread of Celtic poetry runs through the +British anthology of the century. The names of the pioneers and leading +contributors to this movement are significant of the varied strains of +blood which compose Irish nationality. James Clarence Mangan was a Celt +of the Celts; Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Aubrey de Vere were of +Norman-Irish stock, and the former was the son of a dean of the +Established Church, and himself the editor of a Tory newspaper; Sir +Samuel Ferguson was an Ulster Protestant of Scotch descent; Dr. George +Sigerson is of Norse blood; Whitley Stokes, the eminent Celtic scholar, +and Dr. John Todhunter, author of "Three Bardic Tales" (1896), bear +Anglo-Saxon surnames; the latter is the son of Quaker parents and was +educated at English Quaker schools. + +Mangan's paraphrases from the Gaelic, "Poets and Poetry of Munster," +appeared posthumously in 1850. They include a number of lyrics, wildly +and mournfully beautiful, inspired by the sorrows of Ireland: "Dark +Rosaleen," "Lament for the Princes of Tir-Owen and Tir-Connell," +"O'Hussey's Ode to the Maguire," etc. The ballad form was not practised +by the ancient Gaelic epic poets. In choosing it as the vehicle for +their renderings from vernacular narrative poetry, the modern Irish poets +have departed widely from the English and Scottish model, employing a +variety of metres and not seeking to conform their diction to the manner +of the ballads in the "Reliques" or the "Border Minstrelsy." Ferguson's +"Lays of the Western Gael" (1865) is a series of historical ballads, +original in effect, though based upon old Gaelic chronicles. "Congal" +(1872) is an epic, founded on an ancient bardic tale, and written in +Chapman's "fourteener" and reminding the reader frequently of Chapman's +large, vigorous manner, his compound epithets and spacious Homeric +similes. The same epic breadth of manner was applied to the treatment of +other hero legends, "Conary," "Deirdre," etc., in a subsequent volume +(1880). "Deirdre," the finest of all the old Irish stories, was also +handled independently by the late Dr. R. D. Joyce in the verse and manner +of William Morris' "Earthly Paradise." [18] Among other recent workers +in this field are Aubrey de Vere, a volume of selections from whose +poetry appeared at New York in 1894, edited by Prof. G. E. Woodberry; +George Sigerson, whose "Bards of the Gael and the Gall," a volume of +translations from the Irish in the original metres, was issued in 1897; +Whitley Stokes, an accomplished translator, and the joint editor (with +Windisch) of the "Irische Texte "; John Todhunter, author of "The Banshee +and Other Poems" (1888) and "Three Bardic Tales" (1896); Alfred Perceval +Graves, author of "Irish Folk Songs" (1897), and many other volumes of +national lyrics; and William Larminie--"West Irish Folk Tales and +Romances" (1893), etc. + +The Celtism of this Gaelic renascence is of a much purer and more genuine +character than the Celtism of Macpherson's "Ossian." Yet with all its +superiority in artistic results, it is improbable that it will make any +such impression on Europe or England as Macpherson made. "Ossian" was +the first revelation to the world of the Celtic spirit: sophisticated, +rhetorical, yet still the first; and it is not likely that its success +will be repeated. In the very latest school of Irish verse, represented +by such names as Lionel Johnson, J. B. Yeats, George W. Russell, Nora +Hopper, the mystical spirit which inhabits the "Celtic twilight" turns +into modern symbolism, so that some of their poems on legendary subjects +bear a curious resemblance to the contemporary work of Maeterlinck: to +such things as "Aglivaine et Salysette" or "Les Sept Princesses." [19] + +The narrative ballad is hardly one of the forms of high art, like the +epic, the tragedy, the Pindaric ode. It is simple and not complex like +the sonnet: not of the aristocracy of verse, but popular--not to say +plebeian--in its associations. It is easy to write and, in its commonest +metrical shape of eights and sixes, apt to run into sing-song. Its +limitations, even in the hands of an artist like Coleridge or Rossetti, +are obvious. It belongs to "minor poetry." The ballad revival has not +been an unmixed blessing and is responsible for much slip-shod work. If +Dr. Johnson could come back from the shades and look over our recent +verse, one of his first comments would probably be: "Sir, you have too +many ballads." Be it understood that the romantic ballad only is here in +question, in which the poet of a literary age seeks to catch and +reproduce the tone of a childlike, unself-conscious time, so that his art +has almost inevitably something artificial or imitative. Here and there +one stands out from the mass by its skill or luck in overcoming the +difficulty. There is Hawker's "Song of the Western Men," which Macaulay +and others quoted as historical, though only the refrain was old: + + "And shall Trelawney die? + Here's twenty thousand Cornish men + Will know the reason why!" [20] + +There is Sydney Dobell's "Keith of Ravelston," [21] which haunts the +memory with the insistent iteration of its refrain:-- + + "The murmur of the mourning ghost + That keeps the shadowy kine; + Oh, Keith of Ravelston, + The sorrows of thy line!" + +And again there is Robert Buchanan's "Ballad of Judas Iscariot" which Mr. +Stedman compares for "weird impressiveness and power" with "The Ancient +Mariner." The mediaeval feeling is most successfully captured in this +poem. It recalls the old "Debate between the Body and Soul," and still +more the touches of divine compassion which soften the rigours of +Catholic theology in the legends of the saints. It strikes the keynote, +too, of that most modern ballad mode which employs the narrative only to +emphasize some thought of universal application. There is salvation for +all, is the thought, even for the blackest soul of the world, the soul +that betrayed its Maker.[22] Such, though after a fashion more subtly +intellectual, is the doctrinal use to which this popular form is put by +one of the latest English ballad makers, Mr. John Davidson. Read, e.g., +his "Ballad of a Nun," [23] the story of which was told in several shapes +by the Spanish poet Alfonso the Learned (1226-84). A runaway nun returns +in penitence to her convent, and is met at the gate by the Virgin Mary, +who has taken her likeness and kept her place for her during the years of +her absence. Or read "A New Ballad of Tannhaeuser," [24] which +contradicts "the idea of the inherent impurity of nature" by an +interpretation of the legend in a sense quite the reverse of Wagner's. +Tannhaeuser's dead staff blossoms not as a sign of forgiveness, but to +show him that "there was no need to be forgiven." The modern balladist +attacks the ascetic Middle Age with a shaft from its own quiver. + +But it is time to turn from minor poets to acknowledged masters; and +above all to the greatest of modern English artists in verse, the +representative poet of the Victorian era. Is Tennyson to be classed with +the romantics? His workmanship, when most truly characteristic, is +romantic in the sense of being pictorial and ornate, rather than +classically simple or severe. He assimilated the rich manner of Keats, +whose influence is perceptible in his early poems. His art, like Keats', +is eclectic and reminiscent, choosing for its exercise with equal +impartiality whatever was most beautiful in the world of Grecian fable or +the world of mediaeval legend. But unlike Keats, he lived to add new +strings to his lyre; he went on to sing of modern life and thought, of +present-day problems in science and philosophy, of contemporary politics, +the doubt, unrest, passion, and faith of his own century. To find work +of Tennyson's that is romantic throughout, in subject, form, and spirit +alike, we must look among his earlier collections (1830, 1832, 1842). +For this was a phase which he passed beyond, as Millais outgrew his +youthful Pre-Raphaelitism, or as Goethe left behind him his "Goetz" and +"Werther" period and widened out into larger utterance. Mr. Stedman +speaks of the "Gothic feeling" in "The Lady of Shalott," and in ballads +like "Oriana" and "The Sisters," describing them as "work that in its +kind is fully up to the best of those Pre-Raphaelites who, by some arrest +of development, stop precisely where Tennyson made his second step +forward, and censure him for having gone beyond them." [25] This +estimate may be accepted so far as it concerns "The Lady of Shalott," +which is known to have worked strongly upon Rossetti's imagination; but +surely "The Sisters" and "Oriana" do not rank with the best +Pre-Raphaelite work. The former is little better than a failure; and the +latter, which provokes a comparison, not to Tennyson's advantage, with +the fine old ballad, "Helen of Kirkconnell," is a weak thing. The name +Oriana has romantic associations--it is that of the heroine of "Amadis de +Gaul"--but the damnable iteration of it as a ballad burden is irritating. +Mediaeval _motifs_ are rather slightly handled in "The Golden Supper" +(from the "Decameron," 4th novel, 10th day); "The Beggar Maid" (from the +ballad of "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid" in the "Reliques"); and +more adequately in "Godiva," a blank-verse rendering of the local legend +of Coventry, in which an attempt is made to preserve something of the +antique roughness under the smooth Vergilian elegance of Tennyson's +diction. "The Day Dream" was a recasting of one of Perrault's fairy +tales, "The Sleeping Beauty," under which title a portion of it had +appeared in the "Poems Chiefly Lyrical" of 1830. Tennyson has written +many greater poems than this, but few in which the special string of +romance vibrates more purely. The tableau of the spellbound palace, with +all its activities suspended, gave opportunity for the display of his +unexampled pictorial power in scenes of still life; and the legend itself +supplied that charmed isolation from the sphere of reality which we +noticed as so important a part of the romantic poet's stock-in-trade in +"Christabel" and "The Eve of St. Agnes"-- + + "The hall-door shuts again and all is still." + +Poems like "The Day Dream" and "The Princess" make it evident that Scott +and Coleridge and Keats had so given back the Middle Ages to the +imagination that any future poet, seeking free play in a realm unhampered +by actual conditions--"apart from place, withholding time"--was apt to +turn naturally, if not inevitably, to the feudal times. The action of +"The Day Dream" proceeds no-where and no-when. The garden--if we +cross-examine it--is a Renaissance garden: + + "Soft lustre bathes the range of urns + On every slanting terrace-lawn: + The fountain to its place returns, + Deep in the garden lake withdrawn." + +The furnishings of the palace are a mixture of mediaeval and Louis +Quatorze--clocks, peacocks, parrots, golden mantle pegs:-- + + "Till all the hundred summers pass, + The beams that through the oriel shine + Make prisms in every carven glass + And beaker brimm'd with noble wine." + +But the impression, as a whole, is of the Middle Age of poetic +convention, if not of history; the enchanted dateless era of romance and +fairy legend. + +"St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad," its masculine counterpart, sound the old +Catholic notes of saintly virginity and mystical, religious rapture, the +_Gottesminne_ of mediaeval hymnody. Not since Southwell's "Burning Babe" +and Crashaw's "Saint Theresa" had any English poet given such expression +to those fervid devotional moods which Sir Thomas Browne describes as +"Christian annihilation, ecstasies, exolution, liquefaction, +transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of God and ingression +into the divine shadow." This vein, we have noticed, is wanting in +Scott. On the other hand, it may be noticed in passing, Tennyson's +attitude towards nature is less exclusively romantic--in the narrow +sense--than Scott's. He, too, is conscious of the historic associations +of place. In Tennyson, as in Scott,-- + + "The splendour falls on castle walls + And snowy summits old in story"--[26] + +but, in general, his treatment of landscape, in its human relations, is +subtler and more intimate. + +"St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad" are monologues, but lyric and not dramatic +in Browning's manner. There is a dramatic falsity, indeed, in making Sir +Galahad say of himself-- + + "My strength is as the strength of ten + Because my heart is pure," + +and the poem would be better in the third person. "St. Simeon Stylites" +is a dramatic monologue more upon Browning's model, _i.e._, a piece of +apologetics and self-analysis. But in this province Tennyson is greatly +Browning's inferior. + +"The Princess" (1847) is representative of that "splendid composite of +imagery," and that application of modern ideas to legendary material, or +to invented material arbitrarily placed in an archaic setting, which are +characteristic of this artist. The poem's sub-title is "A Medley," +because it is + + "--made to suit with time and place, + A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house, + A talk of college and of ladies' rights, + A feudal knight in silken masquerade, + And, yonder, shrieks and strange experiments." + +The problem is a modern one--the New Woman. No precise historic period +is indicated. The female university is full of classic lore and art, but +withal there are courts of feudal kings, with barons, knights, and +squires, and shock of armoured champions in the lists. + +But the special service of Tennyson to romantic poetry lay in his being +the first to give a worthy form to the great Arthurian saga; and the +modern masterpiece of that poetry, all things considered, is his "Idylls +of the King." Not so perfect and unique a thing as "The Ancient +Mariner"; less freshly spontaneous, less stirringly alive than "The Lay +of the Last Minstrel," Tennyson's Arthuriad has so much wider a range +than Coleridge's ballad, and is sustained at so much higher a level than +Scott's romance, that it outweighs them both in importance. The +Arthurian cycle of legends, emerging from Welsh and Breton mythology; +seized upon by French romancers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, +who made of Arthur the pattern king, of Lancelot the pattern knight, and +of the Table Round the ideal institute of chivalry; gathering about +itself accretions like the Grail Quest and the Tristram story; passing by +translation into many tongues, but retaining always its scene in Great or +Lesser Britain, the lands of its origin, furnished the modern English +romancer with a groundwork of national, though not Anglo-Saxon epic +stuff, which corresponds more nearly with the Charlemagne epos in France, +and the Nibelung hero Saga in Germany, than anything else which our +literature possesses. And a national possession, in a sense, it had +always remained. The story in outline and in some of its main episodes +was familiar. Arthur, Lancelot, Guinivere, Merlin, Modred, Iseult, +Gawaine, were well-known figures, like Robin Hood or Guy of Warwick, in +Shakspere's time as in Chaucer's. But the epos, as a whole, had never +found its poet. Spenser had evaporated Arthur into allegory. Milton had +dallied with the theme and put it by.[27] The Elizabethan drama, which +went so far afield in search of the moving accident, had strangely missed +its chance here, bringing the Round Table heroes upon its stage only in +masque and pageant (Justice Shallow "was Sir Dagonet in Arthur's show"), +or in some such performance as the rude old Seneca tragedy of "The +Misfortunes of Arthur." In 1695 Sir Richard Blackmore published his +"Prince Arthur," an epic in ten books and in rimed couplets, enlarged in +1697 into "King Arthur" in twelve books. Blackmore professed to take +Vergil as his model. A single passage from his poem will show how much +chance the old chivalry tale had in the hands of a minor poet of King +William's reign. Arthur and his company have landed on the shores of +Albion, where + + "Rich wine of Burgundy and choice champagne + Relieve the toil they suffered on the main; + But what more cheered them than their meats and wine, + Was wise instruction and discourse divine + From Godlike Arthur's mouth." + +There is no need, in taking a summary view of Tennyson's "Idylls," to go +into the question of sources, or to inquire whether Arthur was a +historical chief of North Wales, or whether he signified the Great Bear +(Arcturus) in Celtic mythology, and his Round Table the circle described +by that constellation about the pole star.[28] Tennyson went no farther +back for his authority than Sir Thomas Malory's "Morte Darthur," printed +by Caxton in 1485, a compilation principally from old French Round Table +romances. This was the final mediaeval shape of the story in English. +It is somewhat wandering and prolix as to method, but written in +delightful prose. The story of "Enid," however (under its various titles +and arrangements in successive editions), he took from Lady Charlotte +Guest's translation of the Welsh "Mabinogion" (1838-49). + +Before deciding upon the heroic blank verse and a loosely epic form, as +most fitting for his purpose, Tennyson had retold passages of Arthurian +romance in the ballad manner and in various shapes of riming stanza. The +first of these was "The Lady of Shalott" (1832), identical in subject +with the later idyll of "Lancelot and Elaine," but fanciful and even +allegorical in treatment. Shalott is from Ascalot, a variant of Astolat, +in the old _metrical_ romance--not Malory's--of the "Morte Arthur." The +fairy lady, who sees all passing sights in her mirror and weaves them +into her magic web, has been interpreted as a symbol of art, which has to +do properly only with the reflection of life. When the figure of +Lancelot is cast upon the glass, a personal emotion is brought into her +life which is fatal to her art. She is "sick of shadows," and looks +through her window at the substance. Then her mirror cracks from side to +side and the curse is come upon her. Other experiments of the same kind +were "Sir Galahad" and "Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinivere" (both in 1842). +The beauty of all these ballad beginnings is such that one is hardly +reconciled to the loss of so much romantic music, even by the noble blank +verse and the ampler narrative method which the poet finally adopted. +They stand related to the "Idylls" very much as Morris' "Defence of +Guenevere" stands to his "Earthly Paradise." + +Thoroughly romantic in content, the "Idylls of the King" are classical in +form. They may be compared to Tasso's "Gierusalemme Liberata," in which +the imperfectly classical manner of the Renaissance is applied to a +Gothic subject, the history of the Crusades. The first specimen given +was the "Morte d'Arthur" of 1842, set in a framework entitled "The Epic," +in which "the poet, Everard Hall," reads to his friends a fragment from +his epic, "King Arthur," in twelve books. All the rest he has burned. +For-- + + "Why take the style of those heroic times? + For nature brings not back the Mastodon, + Nor we those times; and why should any man + Remodel models? these twelve books of mine + Were faint Homeric echoes." + +The "fragment" is thus put forward tentatively and with +apologies--apologies which were little needed; for the "Morte d'Arthur," +afterwards embedded in "The Passing of Arthur," remains probably the +best, and certainly the most Homeric passage in the "Idylls." Tennyson's +own quality was more Vergilian than Homeric, but the models which he here +remodels were the Homeric epics. He chose for his measure not the +Spenserian stanza, nor the _ottava rima_ of Tasso, nor the octosyllables +of Scott and the chivalry romances, but the heroic blank verse which +Milton had fixed as the vehicle of English classical epic. He adopts +Homer's narrative practices: the formulated repetitions of phrase, the +pictorial comparisons, the conventional epithets (in moderation), and his +gnomic habit-- + + "O purblind race of miserable men," etc. + +The original four idylls were published in 1859.[29] Thenceforth the +series grew by successive additions and rearrangements up to the +completed "Idylls" of 1888, twelve in number--besides prologue and +epilogue--according to the plan foreshadowed in "The Epic." The story of +Arthur had thus occupied Tennyson for over a half century. Though +modestly entitled "Idylls," by reason of the episodic treatment, the poem +when finished was, in fact, an epic; but an epic that lacked the formal +unity of the "Aeneid" and the "Paradise Lost," or even of the "Iliad." It +resembled the Homeric heroic poems more than the literary epics of Vergil +and Milton, in being not the result of a single act of construction, but +a growth from the gradual fitting together of materials selected from a +vast body of legend. This legendary matter he reduced to an epic unity. +The adventures in Malory's romance are of very uneven value, and it +abounds in inconsistencies and repetitions. He also redistributed the +ethical balance. Lancelot is the real hero of the old "Morte Darthur," +and Guinivere--the Helen of romance--goes almost uncensured. Malory's +Arthur is by no means "the blameless king" of Tennyson, who makes of him +a nineteenth-century ideal of royal knighthood, and finally an +allegorical type of Soul at war with Sense. The downfall of the Round +Table, that order of spiritual knight-errantry through which the king +hopes to regenerate society, happens through the failure of his knights +to rise to his own high level of character; in a degree, also, because +the emprise is diverted from attainable practical aims to the fantastic +quest of the Holy Grail. The sin of Lancelot and the Queen, drawing +after it the treachery of Modred, brings on the tragic catastrophe. This +conception is latent in Malory, but it is central in Tennyson; and +everywhere he subtilises, refines, elevates, and, in short, modernises +the _Motivirung_ in the old story. Does he thereby also weaken it? +Censure and praise have been freely bestowed upon Tennyson's dealings +with Malory. Thus it is complained that his Arthur is a prig, a curate, +who preaches to his queen and lectures his court, and whose virtue is too +conscious; that the harlot Vivien is a poor substitute for the damsel of +the lake who puts Merlin to sleep under a great rock in the land of +Benwick; that the gracious figure of Gawain suffers degradation from the +application of an effeminate moral standard to his shining exploits in +love and war, that modern _convenances_ are imposed upon a society in +which they do not belong and whose joyous, robust _naivete_ is hurt by +them.[30] + +The allegorical method tried in "The Lady of Shalott," but abandoned in +the earlier "Idylls," creeps in again in the later; particularly in +"Gareth and Lynette" (1872), in the elaborate symbolism of the gates of +Camelot, and in the guardians of the river passes, whom Gareth +successively overcomes, and who seem to represent the temptations +incident to the different ages of man. The whole poem, indeed, has been +interpreted in a parabolic sense, Merlin standing for the intellect, the +Lady of the Lake for religion, etc. Allegory was a favourite mediaeval +mode, and the Grail legend contains an element of mysticism which invites +an emblematic treatment. But the attraction of this fashion for minds of +a Platonic cast is dangerous to art: the temptation to find a meaning in +human life more esoteric than any afforded by the literal life itself. A +delicate balance must be kept between that presentation of the concrete +which makes it significant by making it representative and typical, and +that other presentation which dissolves the individual into the general, +by making it a mere abstraction. Were it not for Dante and Hawthorne and +the second part of "Faust," one would incline to say that no creative +genius of the first order indulges in allegory. Homer is never +allegorical except in the episode of Circe; Shakspere never, with the +doubtful exception of "The Tempest." The allegory in the "Idylls of the +King" is not of the obvious kind employed in the "Faery Queene"; but +Tennyson, no less than Spenser, appeared to feel that the simple +retelling of an old chivalry tale, without imparting to it some deeper +meaning, was no work for a modern poet. + +Tennyson has made the Arthur Saga, as a whole, peculiarly his own. But +others of the Victorian poets have handled detached portions of it. +William Morris' "Defence of Guenevere" (1858) anticipated the first group +of "Idylls." Swinburne's "Tristram of Lyonesse" (1882) dealt at full +length, and in a very different spirit, with an epicyclic legend which +Tennyson touched incidentally in "The Last Tournament." Matthew Arnold's +"Tristram and Iseult" was a third manipulation of the legend, partly in +dramatic, partly in narrative form, and in changing metres. It follows +another version of Tristram's death, and the story of Vivian and Merlin +which Iseult of Brittany tells her children is quite distinct from the +one in the "Idylls." Iseult of Brittany--not Iseult of Cornwall--is the +heroine of Arnold's poem. Thomas Westwood's "Quest of the Sancgreall" is +still one more contribution to Arthurian poetry of which a mere mention +must here suffice. + +For our review threatens to become a catalogue. To such a degree had +mediaevalism become the fashion, that nearly every Georgian and Victorian +poet of any pretensions tried his hand at it. Robert Browning was not +romantic in Scott's way, nor in Tennyson's. His business was with the +soul. The picturesqueness of the external conditions in which soul was +placed was a matter of indifference. To-day was as good as yesterday. +Now and then occurs a title with romantic implications--"Childe Roland to +the Dark Tower Came," _e.g._, borrowed from a ballad snatch sung by the +Fool in "Lear" (Roland is Roland of the "Chanson"). But the poem proves +to be a weird study in landscape symbolism and the history of some dark +emprise, the real nature of which is altogether undiscoverable. "Count +Gismond," again, is the story of a combat in the lists at Aix in +Provence, in which a knight vindicates a lady's honour with his lance, +and slays her traducer at her feet. But this is a dramatic monologue +like any other, and only accidentally mediaeval. "The Heretic's Tragedy: +A Middle Age Interlude," is mediaeval without being romantic. It +recounts the burning, at Paris, A.D. 1314, of Jacques du Bourg-Molay, +Grand Master of the Templars; and purports to be a sort of canticle, with +solo and chorus, composed two centuries after the event by a Flemish +canon of Ypres, to be sung at hocktide and festivals. The childishness +and devout buffoonery of an old miracle play are imitated here, as in +Swinburne's "Masque of Queen Bersabe." This piece and "Holy Cross Day" +are dramatic, or monodramatic, grotesques; and in their apprehension of +this trait of the mediaeval mind are on a par with Hugo's "Pas d'armes du +Roi Jean" and "La Chasse du Burgrave." But Browning's mousings in the +Middle Ages after queer freaks of conscience or passion were occasional. +If any historical period, more than another, had special interest for +him, it was the period of the Italian Renaissance. Yet Ruskin said: +"Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle +Ages." + +Among Mrs. Browning's poems, which, it needs hardly be said, are not +prevailingly "Gothic," there are three interesting experiments in ballad +romance: "The Romaunt of the Page," "The Lay of the Brown Rosary," and +"The Rime of the Duchess May." In all of these she avails herself of the +mediaeval atmosphere, simply to play variations on her favourite theme, +the devotedness of woman's love. The motive is the same as in poems of +modern life like "Bertha in the Lane" and "Aurora Leigh." The vehemence +of this nobly gifted woman, her nervous and sometimes almost hysterical +emotionalism, are not without a disagreeable quality. With greater range +and fervour, she had not the artistic poise of the Pre-Raphaelite +poetess, Christina Rossetti. In these romances, as elsewhere, she is +sometimes shrill and often mannerised. "The Romaunt of the Page" is the +tale of a lady who attends her knight to the Holy Land, disguised as a +page, and without his knowledge. She saves his life several times, and +finally at the cost of her own. A prophetic accompaniment or burden +comes in ever and anon in the distant chant of nuns over the dead abbess. + + "Beati! beati mortui." + +"The Lay of the Brown Rosary" is a charming but uneven piece, in four +parts and a variety of measures, about a girl who, while awaiting her +lover's return from the war, learns in a dream that she must die, and +purchases seven years of life from the ghost of a wicked nun whose body +has been immured in an old convent wall. The spirit gives the bride a +brown rosary which she wears under her dress, but her kiss kills the +bridegroom at the altar. The most spirited and well-sustained of these +ballad poems is "The Rime of the Duchess May," in which the heroine rides +off the battlements with her husband. "Toll slowly," runs the refrain. +Mrs. Browning employs some archaisms, such as _chapelle_, _chambere_, +_ladie_. The stories are seemingly of her own invention, and have not +quite the genuine accent of folk-song. + +Even Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hood, representatives in their separate +spheres of anti-romantic tendencies, made occasional forays into the +Middle Ages. But who thinks of such things as "The Plea of the Midsummer +Fairies" or "The Two Peacocks of Bedfont" when Hood is mentioned; and not +rather of "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Shirt"? Or who, in +spite of "Balder Dead" and "Tristram and Iseult," would classify Arnold's +clean-cut, reserved, delicately intellectual work as romantic? Hood was +an artist of the terrible as well as of the comic; witness his "Last +Man," "Haunted House," and "Dream of Eugene Aram." If he could have +welded the two moods into a more intimate union, and applied them to +legendary material, he might have been a great artist in mediaeval +grotesque--a species of Gothic Hoffman perhaps. As it is, his one +romantic success is the charming lyric "Fair Ines." His longer poems in +this kind, in modifications of _ottava rima_ or Spenserian stanza, show +Keats' influence very clearly. The imagery is profuse, but too distinct +and without the romantic _chiaroscuro_. "The Water Lady" is a manifest +imitation of "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and employs the same somewhat +unusual stanza form. Hood--incorrigible punster--who had his jest at +everything, jested at romance. He wrote ballad parodies--"The Knight and +the Dragon," etc.--and an ironical "Lament for the Decline of Chivalry": + + "Well hast thou cried, departed Burke, + All chivalrous romantic work + Is ended now and past! + That iron age--which some have thought + Of mettle rather overwrought-- + Is now all overcast." + +And finally, "The Saint's Tragedy" (1848) of Charles Kingsley affords a +case in which mediaeval biography is made the pretext for an assault upon +mediaeval ideas. It is a _tendenz_ drama in five acts, founded upon the +"Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary," as narrated by her contemporary, +Dietrich the Thuringian. Its militant Protestantism is such as might be +predicted from Kingsley's well-known resentment of the Romanist attitude +towards marriage and celibacy; from his regard for freedom of thought; +and from that distrust and contempt of Popish priestcraft which involved +him in his controversy with Newman. "The Middle Age," says the +Introduction, "was, in the gross, a coarse, barbarous, and profligate +age. . . . It was, in fact, the very ferocity and foulness of the time +which, by a natural revulsion, called forth at the same time the +Apostolic holiness and the Manichean asceticism of the mediaeval +saints. . . . So rough and common a life-picture of the Middle Age will, +I am afraid, whether faithful or not, be far from acceptable to those who +take their notions of that period principally from such exquisite dreams +as the fictions of Fouque, and of certain moderns whose graceful +minds . . . are, on account of their very sweetness and simplicity, +singularly unfitted to convey any true likeness of the coarse and stormy +Middle Age. . . . But really, time enough has been lost in ignorant +abuse of that period, and time enough also, lately, in blind adoration of +it. When shall we learn to see it as it was?" + +Polemic in its purpose and anti-Catholic in temper, "The Saint's Tragedy" +then seeks to dispel the glamour which romance had thrown over mediaeval +life. Kingsley's Middle Age is not the holy Middle Age of the German +"throne-and-altar" men; nor yet the picturesque Middle Age of Walter +Scott. It is the cruel, ignorant, fanatical Middle Age of "The Amber +Witch" and "The Succube." But Kingsley was too much of a poet not to +feel those "last enchantments" which whispered to Arnold from Oxford +towers, maugre his "strong sense of the irrationality of that period." +The saintly, as well as the human side, of Elizabeth's character is +portrayed with sympathy, though poetically the best thing in the drama +are the songs of the Crusaders. + +Kingsley, in effect, was always good at a ballad. His finest work in +this kind is modern, "The Last Buccaneer," "The Sands of Dee," "The Three +Fishers," and the like. But there are the same fire and swing in many of +his romantic ballads on historical or legendary subjects, such as "The +Swan-Neck," "The Red King," "Ballad of Earl Haldan's Daughter," "The Song +of the Little Baltung," and a dozen more. Without the imaginative +witchery of Coleridge, Keats, and Rossetti, in the ballad of action +Kingsley ranks very close to Scott. The same manly delight in outdoor +life and bold adventure, love of the old Teutonic freedom and strong +feeling of English nationality inspire his historical romances, only one +of which, however, "Hereward the Wake" (1866), has to do with the period +of the Middle Ages. + + +[1] "It is almost superfluous to mention that the appellation 'Childe,' +as 'Childe Waters,' 'Childe Childers,' etc., is used as more consonant +with the old structure of versification which I have adopted."--Preface +to "Childe Harold." Byron appeals to a letter of Beattie relating to +"The Minstrel," to justify his choice of the stanza. + +[2] See vol. i., p. 98. + +[3] For Byron's and Shelley's dealings with Dante, _vide supra_, pp. +99-102. + +[4] For the type of prose romance essayed by Shelley, see Vol. i., p. 403. + +[5] "Mary, the Maid of the Inn." + +[6] Duran's great collection, begun in 1828, embraces nearly two thousand +pieces. + +[7] It is hardly necessary to mention early English translations of +"Palmerin of England" (1616) and "Amadis de Gaul" (1580), or to point out +the influence of Montemayor's "Diana Enamorada" upon Sidney, Shakspere, +and English pastoral romance in general. + +[8] "The English and Scotch ballads, with which they may most naturally +be compared, belong to a ruder state of society, where a personal +violence and coarseness prevailed which did not, indeed, prevent the +poetry it produced from being full of energy, and sometimes of +tenderness; but which necessarily had less dignity and elevation than +belong to the character, if not the condition, of a people who, like the +Spanish, were for centuries engaged in a contest ennobled by a sense of +religion and loyalty--a contest which could not fail sometimes to raise +the minds and thoughts of those engaged in it far above such an +atmosphere as settled round the bloody feuds of rival barons or the gross +maraudings of a border warfare. The truth of this will at once be felt, +if we compare the striking series of ballads on Robin Hood with those on +the Cid and Bernardo de Carpio; or if we compare the deep tragedy of Edom +O'Gordon with that of the Conde Alarcos; or, what would be better than +either, if we should sit down to the 'Romancero General,' with its +poetical confusion of Moorish splendours and Christian loyalty, just when +we have come fresh from Percy's 'Reliques' or Scott's 'Minstrelsy'." +("History of Spanish Literature," George Ticknor, vol. i., p. 141, third +American ed., 1866). The "Romancero General" was the great collection of +some thousand ballads and lyrics published in 1602-14. + +[9] "The Ancient Ballads of Spain." R. Ford, in Edinburgh Review, No. +146. + +[10] "A History of Spanish Literature." By James Fitz-Maurice Kelly, New +York, 1898, pp. 366-67. + +[11] _Ibid._, pp. 368-73. + +[12] Kelly, p. 270. + +[13] The collection of Sanchez (1779) is described as an imitation of the +"Reliques" (Edinburgh Review, No. 146). + +[14] He preferred, however, Sir Edmund Head's rendering of the ballad +"Lady Alda's Dream" to Lockhart's version. + +[15] Scott and Motherwell never met in person. + +[16] Mr. Churton Collins thinks that the lines in "Guinevere"-- + + "Down in the cellars merry bloated things + Shouldered the spigot, straddling on the butts + While the wine ran"-- + +was suggested by Croker's description of the Cluricaune. ("Illustrations +of Tennyson" (1891), p. 152.) + +[17] "The Fairies." William Allingham. + +[18] See vol. i., p. 314. Dr. Joyce was for some years a resident of +Boston, where his "Ballads of Irish Chivalry" were published in 1872. +His "Deirdre" received high praise from J. R. Lowell. Tennyson's "Voyage +of Maeldune" (1880) probably had its source in Dr. P. W. Joyce's "Old +Celtic Romances" (1879) (Collins' "Illustrations of Tennyson," p. 163). +Swinburne pronounced Ferguson's "Welshmen of Tirawley" one of the best of +modern ballads. + +[19] For a survey of this department of romantic literature the reader is +referred to "A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue." Edited +by Stopford A. Brooke and T. W. Rolleston (New York, 1900). There are a +quite astonishing beauty and force in many of the pieces in this +collection, though some of the editors' claims seem excessive; as, +_e.g._, that Mr. Yeats is "the first of living writers in the English +language." + +[20] Robert Stephen Hawker was vicar of Morwenstow, near "wild Tintagil +by the Cornish Sea," where Tennyson visited him in 1848. Hawker himself +made contributions to Arthurian poetry, "Queen Gwynnevar's Round" and +"The Quest of the Sangreal" (1864). He was converted to the Roman +Catholic faith on his death-bed. + +[21] Given in Palgrave's "Golden Treasury," second series. Rossetti +wrote of Dobell's ballad in 1868: "I have always regarded that poem as +being one of the finest, of its length, in any modern poet; ranking with +Keats' 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' and the other masterpieces of the +condensed and hinted order so dear to imaginative minds." The use of the +family name Keith in Rossetti's "Rose Mary" was a coincidence. His poem +was published (1854) some years before Dobell's. He thought of +substituting some other name for Keith, but could find none to suit him, +and so retained it. + +[22] _Cf._ Matthew Arnold's "St. Brandan," suggested by a passage in the +old Irish "Voyage of Bran." The traitor Judas is allowed to come up from +hell and cool himself on an iceberg every Christmas night because he had +once given his cloak to a leper in the streets of Joppa. + +[23] "Ballads and Songs," London, 1895. + +[24] "New Ballads," London, 1897. + +[25] "Victorian Poets." By E. C. Stedman. New York, 1886 (tenth ed.), +p. 155. + +[26] This famous lyric, one of the "inserted" songs in "The Princess," +was inspired by the note of a bugle on the Lakes of Killarney. + +[27] See vol. i., pp. 146-47. Dryden, like Milton, had designs upon +Arthur. See introduction to the first canto of "Marmion": + + "--Dryden, in immortal strain, + Had raised the Table Round again, + But that a ribald king and court + Bade him toil on, to make them sport." + +[28] For a discussion of these and similar matters and a bibliography of +Arthurian literature, the reader should consult Dr. H. Oskar Sommer's +scholarly reprint and critical edition of "Le Morte Darthur. By Syr +Thomas Malory," three vols., London, 1889-91. + +[29] Two of them, however, had been printed privately in 1857 under the +title of "Enid and Nimue": the true and the false. "Nimue" was the first +form of Vivien. + +[30] Matthew Arnold writes in one of his letters; "I have a strong sense +of the irrationality of that period [the Middle Ages] and of the utter +folly of those who take it seriously and play at restoring it; still it +has poetically the greatest charm and refreshment possible for me. The +fault I find with Tennyson, in his 'Idylls of the King,' is that the +peculiar charm of the Middle Age he does not give in them. There is +something magical about it, and I will do something with it before I have +done." + + + + +CHAPTER VII. + +The Pre-Raphaelites. + +In the latter half of the century the Italian Middle Age and Dante, its +great exemplar, found new interpreters in the Rossetti family; a family +well fitted by its mixture of bloods and its hereditary aptitudes, +literary and artistic, to mediate between the English genius and whatever +seemed to it alien or repellant in Dante's system of thought. The +father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a political refugee, who held the +professorship of Italian in King's College, London, from 1831 to 1845, +and was the author of a commentary on Dante which carried the +politico-allegorical theory of the "Divine Comedy" to somewhat fantastic +lengths. The mother was half English and half Italian, a sister of +Byron's travelling companion, Dr. Polidori. Of the four children of the +marriage, Dante Gabriel and Christina became poets of distinction. The +eldest sister, Maria Francesca, a religious devotee who spent her last +years as a member of a Protestant sisterhood, was the author of that +unpretentious but helpful piece of Dante literature, "A Shadow of Dante." +The younger brother, William Michael, is well known as a biographer, +_litterateur_, and art critic, as an editor of Shelley and of the works +of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. + +Other arts besides the literary art had partaken in the romantic +movement. The eighteenth century had seen the introduction of the new, +or English, school of landscape gardening; and the premature beginnings +of the Gothic revival in architecture, which reached a successful issue +some century later.[1] Painting in France had been romanticised in the +thirties _pari passu_ with poetry and drama; and in Germany, Overbeck and +Cornelius had founded a school of sacred art which corresponds, in its +mediaeval spirit, to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In England painting +was the last of the arts to catch the new inspiration. When the change +came, it evinced that same blending of naturalism and Gothicism which +defined the incipient romantic movement of the previous century. +Painting, like landscape gardening, returned to nature; like +architecture, it went back to the past. Like these, and like literature +itself, it broke away from a tradition which was academic, if not +precisely classic in the way in which David was classic. + +In 1848 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established by three young +painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William +Holman Hunt. The name expresses their admiration of the early +Italian--and notably the early Florentine--religious painters, like +Giotto, Ghiberti, Bellini, and Fra Angelica. In the work of these men +they found a sweetness, depth, and sincerity of devotional feeling, a +self-forgetfulness and humble adherence to truth, which were absent from +the sophisticated art of Raphael and his successors. Even the imperfect +command of technique in these "primitives" had a charm. The stiffness +and awkwardness of their figure painting, their defects of drawing, +perspective, and light and shade, their lack of anatomical science were +like the lispings of childhood or the artlessness of an old ballad. The +immediate occasion of the founding of the Brotherhood was a book of +engravings which Hunt and Rossetti saw at Millais' house, from the +frescoes by Gozzoli, Orcagna, and others in the Campo Santo, at Pisa; the +same frescoes, it will be remembered, which so strongly impressed Leigh +Hunt and Keats. Holman Hunt--though apparently not his associates--had +also read with eager approval the first volume of Ruskin's "Modern +Painters," in which the young artists of England are advised to "go to +nature in all singleness of heart . . . rejecting nothing, selecting +nothing." Pre-Raphaelitism was a practical, as "Modern Painters" was a +theoretical, protest against the academic traditions which kept young +artists making school copies of Raphael, instructed them that a third of +the canvas should be occupied with a principal shadow, and that no two +people's heads in the picture should be turned the same way, and asked, +"Where are you going to put your brown tree?" + +The three original members of the group associated with themselves four +others: Thomas Woolner, the sculptor; James Collinson, a painter; F. G. +Stephens, who began as an artist and ended as an art critic; and +Rossetti's brother William, who was the literary man of the movement. +Woolner was likewise a poet, and contributed to _The Germ_[2] his two +striking pieces, "My Beautiful Lady" and "Of My Lady in Death." Among +other artists not formally enrolled in the Brotherhood, but who worked +more or less in the spirit and principles of Pre-Raphaelitism, were Ford +Madox Brown, an older man, in whose studio Rossetti had, at his own +request, been admitted as a student; Walter Deverell, who took +Collinson's place when the latter resigned his membership in order to +study for the Roman Catholic priesthood; and Arthur Hughes.[3] + +But the main importance of the Pre-Raphaelite movement to romantic +literature resides in the poetry of Rossetti, and in the inspiration +which this communicated to younger men, like Morris and Swinburne, and +through them to other and still younger followers. The history of +English painting is no part of our subject, but Rossetti's painting and +his poetry so exactly reflect each other, that some definition or brief +description of Pre-Raphaelitism seems here to be called for, ill +qualified as I feel myself to give any authoritative account of the +matter.[4] + +And first as to methods: the Pre-Raphaelites rejected the academic system +whereby the canvas was prepared by rubbing in bitumen, and the colours +were laid upon a background of brown, grey, or neutral tints. Instead of +this, they spread their colours directly upon the white, unprepared +canvas, securing transparency by juxtaposition rather than by overlaying. +They painted their pictures bit by bit, as in frescoes or mosaic work, +finishing each portion as they went along, until no part of the canvas +was left blank. The Pre-Raphaelite theory was sternly realistic. They +were not to copy from the antique, but from nature. For landscape +background, they were to take their easels out of doors. In figure +painting they were to work, if possible, from a living model and not from +a lay figure. A model once selected, it was to be painted as it was in +each particular, and without imaginative deviation. "Every +Pre-Raphaelite landscape background," wrote Ruskin, "is painted, to the +last touch, in the open air from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelite +figure, however studied in expression, is a true portrait of some living +person. Every minute accessory is painted in the same manner." [5] In +this fashion their earliest works were executed. In Rossetti's "Girlhood +of Mary Virgin," exhibited in 1849, the figure of St. Anne is a portrait +of the artist's mother; the Virgin, of his sister Christina; and Joseph, +of a man-of-all-work employed in the family. In Millais' "Lorenzo and +Isabella"--a subject from Keats--Isabella's brother, her lover, and one +of the guests, are portraits of Deverell, Stephens, and the two +Rossettis. But this severity of realism was not long maintained. It was +a discipline, not a final method. Even in Rossetti's second painting, +"Ecce Ancilla Domini," the faces of the Virgin and the angel Gabriel are +blendings of several models; although, in its freedom from convention, +its austere simplicity, and endeavour to see the fact as it happened, the +piece is in the purest Pre-Raphaelite spirit. Ruskin insisted that, +while composition was necessarily an affair of the imagination, the +figures and accessories of a picture should be copies from the life. In +the early days of the Brotherhood there was an ostentatious +conscientiousness in observing this rule. We hear a great deal in +Rossetti's correspondence about the brick wall at Chiswick which he +copied into his picture "Found," and about his anxious search for a white +calf for the countryman's cart in the same composition. But all the +Pre-Raphaelites painted from the lay figure as well as from the living +model, and Rossetti, in particular, relied quite as much on memory and +imagination as upon the object before him. W. B. Scott thinks that his +most charming works were the small water-colours on Arthurian subjects; +"done entirely without nature and a good deal in the spirit of +illuminated manuscripts, with very indifferent drawing and perspective +nowhere." As for Millais, he soon departed from rigidly Pre-Raphaelite +principles, and became the most successful and popular of British artists +in genre. In natural talent and cleverness of execution he was the most +brilliant of the three; in imaginative intensity and originality he was +Rossetti's inferior--as in patience and religious earnestness he was +inferior to Hunt. It was Hunt who stuck most faithfully to the programme +of Pre-Raphaelitism. He spent laborious years in the East in order to +secure the exactest local truth of scenery and costume for his Biblical +pieces: "Christ in the Shadow of Death," "Christ in the Temple," and "The +Scapegoat." While executing the last-named, he pitched his tent on the +shores of the Dead Sea and painted the desert landscape and the actual +goat from a model tied down on the edge of the sea. Hunt's "Light of the +World" was one of the masterpieces of the school, and as it is typical in +many ways, may repay description. Ruskin pronounced it "the most perfect +instance of expressional purpose with technical power which the world has +yet produced." + +In this tall, narrow canvas the figure of Christ occupies nearly half the +space. He holds a lantern in his hand and knocks at a cottage door. The +face--said to be a portrait of Venables, curate of St. Paul's, Oxford--is +quite unlike the type which Raphael has made traditional. It is +masculine--even rugged--seamed with lines of care, and filled with an +expression of yearning. There is anxiety and almost timidity in his pose +as he listens for an answer to his knock. The nails and bolts of the +door are rusted; it is overgrown with ivy and the tall stalks and flat +umbels of fennel. The sill is choked with nettles and other weeds, +emblems all of the long sleep of the world which Christ comes to break. +The full moon makes a halo behind his head and shines through the low +boughs of an orchard, whose apples strew the dark grass in the +foreground, sown with spots of light from the star-shaped perforations in +the lantern-cover. They are the apples of Eden, emblems of the Fall. +Everything, in fact, is symbolical. Christ's seamless white robe, with +its single heavy fold, typifies the Church catholic; the jewelled clasps +of the priestly mantle, one square and one oval, are the Old and New +Testaments. The golden crown is enwoven with one of thorns, from which +new leaves are sprouting. The richly embroidered mantle hem has its +meaning, and so have the figures on the lantern. To get the light in +this picture right, Hunt painted out of doors in an orchard every +moonlight night for three months from nine o'clock till five. While +working in his studio, he darkened one end of the room, put a lantern in +the hand of his lay-figure and painted this interior through the hole in +a curtain. On moonlight nights he let the moon shine in through the +window to mix with the lantern light. It was a principle with the +Brotherhood that detail, though not introduced for its own sake, should +be painted with truth to nature. Hunt, especially, took infinite pains +to secure minute exactness in his detail. Ruskin wrote in enthusiastic +praise of the colours of the gems on the mantle clasp in "The Light of +the World," and said that all the Academy critics and painters together +could not have executed one of the nettle leaves at the bottom of the +picture. The lizards in the foreground of Millais' "Ferdinand Lured by +Ariel" (exhibited in 1850) were studied from life, and Scott makes merry +over the shavings on the floor of the carpenter shop in the same artist's +"Christ in the House of his Parents," a composition which was ferociously +ridiculed by Dickens in "Household Words." + +The symbolism which is so pronounced a feature in "The Light of the +World" is common to all the Pre-Raphaelite art. It is a mediaeval note, +and Rossetti learned it from Dante. Symbolism runs through the "Divine +Comedy" in such touches as the rush, emblem of humility, with which +Vergil girds Dante for his journey through Purgatory; the constellation +of four stars-- + + "Non viste mai fuor ch' alla prima gente"-- + +typifying the cardinal virtues; the three different coloured steps to the +door of Purgatory;[6] and thickening into the elaborate apocalyptic +allegory of the griffin and the car of the church, the eagle and the +mystic tree in the last cantos of the "Purgatorio." In Hunt's "Christ in +the Shadow of Death," the young carpenter's son is stretching his arms +after work, and his shadow, thrown upon the wall, is a prophecy of the +crucifixion. In Millais' "Christ in the House of his Parents," the boy +has wounded the palm of his hand upon a nail, another foretokening of the +crucifixion. In Rossetti's "Girlhood of Mary Virgin," Joseph is training +a vine along a piece of trellis in the shape of the cross; Mary is +copying in embroidery a three-flowered white lily plant, growing in a +flower-pot which stands upon a pile of books lettered with the names of +the cardinal virtues. The quaint little child angel who tends the plant +is a portrait of a young sister of Thomas Woolner. Similarly, in "Ecce +Ancilla Domini," the lily of the annunciation which Gabriel holds is +repeated in the piece of needlework stretched upon the 'broidery frame at +the foot of Mary's bed. In "Beata Beatrix" the white poppy brought by +the dove is the symbol at once of chastity and of death; and the shadow +upon the sun-dial marks the hour of Beatrice's beatification. Again, in +"Dante's Dream," poppies strew the floor, emblems of sleep and death; an +expiring lamp symbolises the extinction of life; and a white cloud borne +away by angels is Beatrice's departing soul. Love stands by the couch in +flame-coloured robes, fastened at the shoulder with the scallop shell +which is the badge of pilgrimage. In Millais' "Lorenzo and Isabella" the +salt-box is overturned upon the table, signifying that peace is broken +between Isabella's brothers and their table companion. Doves are +everywhere in Rossetti's pictures, embodiments of the Holy Ghost and the +ministries of the spirit, Rossetti labelled his early manuscript poems +"Poems of the Art Catholic"; and the Pre-Raphaelite heresy was connected +by unfriendly critics with the Anglo-Catholic or Tractarian movement at +Oxford. William Sharp, in speaking of "that splendid outburst of +Romanticism in which Coleridge was the first and most potent +participant," and of the lapse or ebb that followed the death of +Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, resumes: "At last a time came when +a thrill of expectation, of new desire, of hope, passed through the +higher lives of the nation; and what followed thereafter were the Oxford +movement in the Church of England, the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art, +and the far-reaching Gothic revival. Different as these movements were +in their primary aims, and still more differing in the individual +representations of interpreters, they were in reality closely interwoven, +one being the outcome of the other. The study of mediaeval art, which +was fraught with such important results, was the outcome of the +widespread ecclesiastical revival, which in its turn was the outcome of +the Tractarian movement in Oxford. The influence of Pugin was potent in +strengthening the new impulse, and to him succeeded Ruskin with 'Modern +Painters' and Newman with the 'Tracts for the Times.' Primarily the +Pre-Raphaelite movement had its impulse in the Oxford religious revival; +and however strange it may seem to say that such men as Holman Hunt and +Rossetti . . . followed directly in the footsteps of Newman and Pusey and +Keble, it is indubitably so." [7] Ruskin, too, cautioned his young +friends that "if their sympathies with the early artists lead them into +mediaevalism or Romanism, they will of course come to nothing. But I +believe there is no danger of this, at least for the strongest among +them. There may be some weak ones whom the Tractarian heresies may +touch; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branches from a strong +stem." [8] One of these weak ones who dropped off was James Collinson, a +man of an ascetic and mystical piety--like Werner or Brentano. He +painted, among other things, "The Renunciation of St. Elizabeth" from +Kingsley's "Saint's Tragedy." "The picture," writes Scott, "resembled +the feckless dilettanteism of the converts who were then dropping out of +their places in Oxford and Cambridge into Mariolatry and Jesuitism. In +fact, this James Collinson actually did become Romanist, wanted to be a +priest, painted no more, but entered a seminary, where they set him to +clean the boots as an apprenticeship in humility and obedience. They did +not want him as a priest; they were already getting tired of that species +of convert; so he left, turned to painting again, and disappeared." [9] + +M. de la Sizeranne is rather scornful of these metaphysical definitions +of Pre-Raphaelitism; "for to characterise a Pre-Raphaelite picture by +saying that it was inspired by the Oxford movement, is like attempting to +explain the mechanism of a lock by describing the political opinions of +the locksmith." [10] He himself proposes, as the distinguishing +characteristics of Pre-Raphaelite art, originality of gesture and +vividness of colouring. This is the professional point of view; but the +student of literature is less concerned with such technical aspects of +the subject than with those spiritual aspects which connect the work of +the Pre-Raphaelites with the great mediaeval or romantic revival. + +When Ruskin came to the rescue of the P.-R. B. in 1851, in those letters +to the _Times_, afterwards reprinted in pamphlet form under the title +"Pre-Raphaelitism," he recognised the propriety of the name, and the real +affinity between the new school and the early Italian schools of sacred +art. Mediaeval art, he asserted,[11] was religious and truthful, modern +art is profane and insincere. "In mediaeval art, thought is the first +thing, execution is the second; in modern art, execution is the first +thing and thought is the second. And again, in mediaeval art, truth is +first, beauty second; in modern art, beauty is first, truth second." +Ruskin denied that the Pre-Raphaelites were unimaginative, though he +allowed that they had a disgust for popular forms of grace and +prettiness. And he pointed out a danger in the fact that their +principles confined them to foreground work, and called for laborious +finish on a small scale. In "Modern Painters" he complained that the +Pre-Raphaelites should waste a whole summer in painting a bit of oak +hedge or a bed of weeds by a duck pond, which caught their fancy perhaps +by reminding them of a stanza in Tennyson. Nettles and mushrooms, he +said, were good to make nettle soup and fish sauce; but it was too bad +that the nobler aspects of nature, such as the banks of the castled +Rhine, should be left to the frontispieces in the Annuals. Ruskin, +furthermore, denied that the drawing of the Pre-Raphaelites was bad or +their perspective false; or that they imitated the _errors_ of the early +Florentine painters, whom they greatly excelled in technical +accomplishment. Meanwhile be it remarked that the originality of gesture +in Pre-Raphaelite figure painting, which M. de la Sizeranne notices, was +only one more manifestation of the romantic desire for individuality and +concreteness as against the generalising academicism of the eighteenth +century.[12] + +As poets, the Pre-Raphaelites derive from Keats rather than from Scott, +in their exclusive devotion to beauty, to art for art's sake; in their +single absorption in the passion of love; and in their attraction towards +the more esoteric side of mediaeval life, rather than towards its broad, +public, and military aspects.[13] + +Rossetti's position in the romantic literature of the last half of the +ninetenth century is something like Coleridge's in the first half. +Unlike Coleridge, he was the leader of a school, the master of a definite +group of artists and poets. His actual performance, too, far exceeds +Coleridge's in amount, if not in value. But like Coleridge, he was a +seminal mind, a mind rich in original suggestions, which inspired and +influenced younger men to carry out its ideas, often with a fluency of +utterance and a technical dexterity both in art and letters which the +master himself did not possess. Holman Hunt, Millais, and Burne-Jones +among painters, Morris and Swinburne among poets, were disciples of +Rossetti who in some ways outdid him in execution. His pictures were +rarely exhibited, and no collection of his poems was published till 1870. +Meanwhile, however, many of these had circulated in manuscript, and +"secured a celebrity akin in kind and almost equal in extent to that +enjoyed by Coleridge's 'Christabel' during the many years preceding 1816 +in which it lay in manuscript. Like Coleridge's poem in another +important particular, certain of Rossetti's ballads, while still unknown +to the public, so far influenced contemporary poetry that when they did +at length appear, they had all the seeming to the uninitiated of work +imitated from contemporary models, instead of being, as in fact they +were, the primary source of inspiration for writers whose names were +earlier established." [14] William Morris, _e.g._, had printed four +volumes of verse in advance of Rossetti, and the earliest of these, "The +Defence of Guenevere," which contains his most intensely Pre-Raphaelite +work and that most evidently done in the spirit of Rossetti's teachings, +saw the light (1858) twelve years before Rossetti's own. Swinburne, too, +had published three volumes of poetry before 1870, including the "Poems +and Ballads" of 1866, in which Rossetti's influence is plainly manifest; +and he had already secured a wide fame at a time when the elder poet's +reputation was still esoteric and mainly confined to the _cenacle_. +William M. Rossetti, in describing the literary influences which moulded +his brother's tastes, tells us that "in the long run he perhaps enjoyed +and revered Coleridge beyond any other modern poet whatsoever." [15] + +It is worth while to trace these literary influences with some detail, +since they serve to link the neo-romantic poetry of our own time to the +product of that older generation which had passed away before Rossetti +came of age. It is interesting to find then, that at the age of fifteen +(1843) he taught himself enough German to enable him to translate +Buerger's "Lenore," as Walter Scott had done a half-century before. This +devil of a poem so haunts our history that it has become as familiar a +spirit as Mrs. Radcliffe's bugaboo apparitions, and our flesh refuses any +longer to creep at it. It is quite one of the family. It would seem, +indeed, as if Buerger's ballad was set as a school copy for every young +romanticist in turn to try his 'prentice hand upon. Fortunately, +Rossetti's translation has perished, as has also his version--some +hundred lines--of the earlier portion of the "Nibelungenlied." But a +translation which he made about the same time of the old Swabian poet, +Hartmann von Aue's "Der Arme Heinrich" (Henry the Leper) is preserved, +and was first published in 1886. This poem, it will be remembered, was +the basis of Longfellow's "Golden Legend" (1851). Rossetti did not keep +up his German, and in later years he never had much liking for +Scandinavian or Teutonic literature. He was a Latin, and he made it his +special task to interpret to modern Protestant England whatever struck +him as most spiritually intense and characteristic in the Latin Catholic +Middle Age. The only Italian poet whom he "earnestly loved" was Dante. +He did not greatly care for Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Tasso--the +Renaissance poets--though in boyhood he had taken delight in Ariosto, +just as he had in Scott and Byron. But that was a stage through which he +passed; none of these had any ultimate share in Rossetti's culture. At +fifteen he wrote a ballad entitled "Sir Hugh the Heron," founded on a +tale of Allan Cunningham, but taking its name and motto from the lines in +"Marmion"-- + + "Sir Hugh the Heron bold, + Baron of Twisell and of Ford, + And Captain of the Hold." + +A few copies of this were printed for family circulation by his fond +grandfather, G. Polidori. Among French writers he had no modern +favourites beyond Hugo, Musset, and Dumas. But like all the +neo-romanticists, he was strongly attracted by Francois Villon, that +strange Parisian poet, thief, and murderer of the fifteenth century. He +made three translations from Villon, the best known of which is the +famous "Ballad of Dead Ladies" with its felicitous rendering of the +refrain-- + + "But where are the snows of yester year?" + (Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?) + +There are at least three good English verse renderings of this ballad of +Villon; one by Andrew Lang; one by John Payne, and doubtless innumerable +others, unknown to me or forgotten. In fact, every one translates it +nowadays, as every one used to translate Buerger's ballad. It is the +"Lenore" of the neo-romanticists. Rossetti was a most accomplished +translator, and his version of Dante's "Vita Nuova" and of the "Early +Italian Poets" (1861)--reissued as "Dante and His Circle" (1874)--is a +notable example of his skill. There are two other specimens of old +French minstrelsy, and two songs from Victor Hugo's "Burgraves" among his +miscellaneous translations; and William Sharp testifies that Rossetti at +one time thought of doing for the early poetry of France what he had +already done for that of Italy, but never found the leisure for it.[16] +Rossetti had no knowledge of Greek, and "the only classical poet," says +his brother, "whom he took to in any degree worth speaking of was Homer, +the 'Odyssey' considerably more than the 'Iliad.'" This, I presume, he +knew only in translation, but the preference is significant, since, as we +have seen, the "Odyssey" is the most romantic of epics. Among English +poets, he preferred Keats to Shelley, as might have been expected. +Shelley was a visionary and Keats was an artist; Shelley often abstract, +Keats always concrete. Shelley had a philosophy, or thought he had; +Keats had none, neither had Rossetti. It is quite comprehensible that +the sensuous element in Keats would attract a born colourist like +Rossetti beyond anything in the English poetry of that generation; and I +need not repeat that the latest Gothic or romantic schools have all been +taking Keats' direction rather than Scott's, or even than Coleridge's. +Rossetti's work, I should say, _e.g._, in such a piece as "The Bride's +Prelude," is a good deal more like "Isabella" and "The Eve of St. Agnes" +than it is like "The Ancient Mariner" or "Christabel" or "The Lay of the +Last Minstrel." Rossetti got little from Milton and Dryden, or even from +Chaucer and Spenser. Wordsworth he valued hardly at all. In the last +two or three years of his life he came to have an exaggerated admiration +for Chatterton. Rossetti's taste, like his temperament, was tinctured +with morbidness. He sought the intense, the individual, the symbolic, +the mystical. These qualities he found in a supreme degree in Dante. +Probably it was only his austere artistic conscience which saved him from +the fantastic--the merely peculiar or odd--and kept him from going astray +after false gods like Poe and Baudelaire. Chaucer was a mediaeval poet +and Spenser certainly a romantic one, but their work was too broad, too +general in its appeal, too healthy, one might almost say, to come home to +Rossetti.[17] William Rossetti testifies that "any writing about devils, +spectres, or the supernatural generally . . . had always a fascination +for him." Sharp remarks that work more opposite than Rossetti's to the +Greek spirit can hardly be imagined. "The former [the Greek spirit] +looked to light, clearness, form in painting, sculpture, architecture; to +intellectual conciseness and definiteness in poetry; the latter +[Rossetti] looked mainly to diffused colour, gradated to almost +indefinite shades in his art, finding the harmonies thereof more akin +than severity of outline and clearness of form; while in his poetry the +Gothic love of the supernatural, the Gothic delight in sensuous images, +the Gothic instinct of indefiniteness and elaboration, carried to an +extreme, prevailed. . . . He would take more pleasure in a design +by . . . William Blake . . . than in the more strictly artistic drawing +of some revered classicist; more enjoyment in the weird or dramatic +Scottish ballad than in Pindaric or Horatian ode; and he would certainly +rather have had Shakspere than Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides put +together." + +Rossetti's office in the later and further development of romantic art +was threefold: First, to revive and express, both in painting and poetry, +the religious spirit of the early Florentine schools; secondly, to give a +more intimate interpretation of Dante to the English public, and +especially of Dante's life and personality and of his minor poetry, like +the "Vita Nuova," which had not yet been translated; thirdly, to afford +new illustrations of mediaeval life and thought, partly by treating +legendary matter in the popular ballad form, and partly by treating +romantic matter of his own invention with the rich colour and sensuous +imagery which belonged to his pictorial art. + +"Perhaps," writes Mr. Caine,[18] "Catholicism is itself essentially +mediaeval, and perhaps a man cannot possibly be a 'mediaeval artist, +heart and soul,' without partaking of a strong religious feeling that is +primarily Catholic--so much were the religion and art of the Middle Ages +knit each to each. . . . Rossetti's attitude towards spiritual things +was exactly the reverse of what we call Protestant. . . . He constantly +impressed me during the last days of his life with the conviction that he +was by religious bias of nature a monk of the Middle Ages." All this is +true in a way, yet Rossetti strikes one as being Catholic, without being +religious; as mediaeval rather than Christian. He was agnostic in his +belief and not devout in his practice; so that the wish that he suddenly +expressed in his last illness, to confess himself to a priest, affected +his friends as a singular caprice. It was the romantic quality in the +Italian sacred art of the Middle Ages that attracted him; and it +attracted him as a poet and painter, not as a devotee. There was little +in Rossetti of the mystical and ascetic piety of Novalis or Zacharias +Werner; nor of the steady religious devotion of his friend Holman Hunt, +or his own sister Christina. + +Rossetti, by the way, was never in Italy, though he made several visits +to France and Belgium. A glance at the list of his designs--extending to +some four hundred titles--in oil, water-colour, crayon, pen and ink, +etc., will show how impartially his interest was distributed over the +threefold province mentioned above. There are sacred pieces like "Mary +Magdalen at the Door of Simon the Pharisee," "St. Cecily," a "Head of +Christ," a "Triptych for Llandaff Cathedral"; Dante subjects such as +"Paolo and Francesca," "Beata Beatrix," "La Donna della Finestra," +"Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante"; and, in greater number, +compositions of a purely romantic nature--"Fair Rosamond," "La Belle Dame +sans Merci," "The Chapel before the Lists," "Michael Scott's Wooing," +"Meeting of Sir Tristram and Yseult," "Lady Lilith," "The Damozel of the +Sanct Grail," "Death of Breuse sans Pitie," and the like. + +It will be noticed that some of these subjects are taken from the Round +Table romances. Tennyson was partly responsible for the newly awakened +interest in the Arthurian legend, but the purely romantic manner which he +had abandoned in advancing from "Sir Galahad" and "The Lady of Shalott" +to the "Morte d'Arthur" of 1842 and the first "Idylls" of 1859, continued +to characterise the work of the Pre-Raphaelites both in poetry and in +painting. Malory's "Morte Darthur" was one of Rossetti's favourite +books, and he preferred it to Tennyson, as containing "the _weird_ +element in its perfection. . . . Tennyson _has_ it certainly here and +there in imagery, but there is no great success in the part it plays +through his 'Idylls.'" [19] The five wood-engravings from designs +furnished by Rossetti for the Moxon Tennyson quarto of 1857 include three +Arthurian subjects: "The Lady of Shalott," "King Arthur Sleeping in +Avalon," and "Sir Galahad Praying in the Wood-Chapel." "Interwoven as +were the Romantic revival and the aesthetic movement," writes Mr. Sharp, +"it could hardly have been otherwise but that the young painter-poet +should be strongly attracted to that Arthurian epoch, the legendary +glamour of which has since made itself so widely felt in the Arthurian +idyls of the laureate. . . . Mr. Ruskin speaks, in his lecture on 'The +Relation of Art to Religion' delivered in Oxford, of our indebtedness to +Rossetti as the painter to whose genius we owe the revival of interest in +the cycle of early English legend." + +It was in 1857 that Rossetti, whose acquaintance had been recently sought +by three young Oxford scholars, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and +Algernon Charles Swinburne, volunteered to surround the gallery of the +new Union Club House at Oxford with life-size frescoes from the "Morte +Darthur." [20] He was assisted in this work by a number of enthusiastic +disciples. Burne-Jones had already done some cartoons in colour for +stained glass, and Morris had painted a subject from the "Morte Darthur," +to wit: "Sir Tristram after his Illness, in the Garden of King Mark's +Palace, recognised by the Dog he had given to Iseult." Rossetti's +contribution to the Oxford decorations was "Sir Lancelot before the +Shrine of the Sangreal." Morris' was "Sir Palomides' Jealousy of Sir +Tristram and Iseult," an incident which he also treated in his poetry. +Burne-Jones, Valentine Prinsep, J. H. Pollen, and Arthur Hughes likewise +contributed. Scott says that these paintings were interesting as +designs; that they were "poems more than pictures, being large +illuminations and treated in a mediaeval manner." But he adds that not +one of the band knew anything about wall painting. They laid their +water-colours, not on a plastered surface, but on a rough brick wall, +merely whitewashed. They used no adhesive medium, and in a few months +the colours peeled off and the whole series became invisible. + +A co-partnership in subjects, a duplication of treatment, or +interchange between the arts of poetry and painting characterise +Pre-Raphaelite work. For example, Morris' poems, "The Blue Closet" +and "The Tune of Seven Towers" were inspired by the similarly entitled +designs of Rossetti. They are interpretations in language of pictorial +suggestions--"word-paintings" in a truer meaning than that much-abused +piece of critical slang commonly bears. In one of these compositions--a +water-colour, a study in colour and music symbolism--four damozels in +black and purple, white and green, scarlet and white, and crimson, are +singing or playing on a lute and clavichord in a blue-tiled room; while +in front of them a red lily grows up through the floor. To this interior +Morris' "stunning picture"--as his friend called it--adds an obscurely +hinted love story: the burden of a bell booming a death-knell in the +tower overhead; the sound of wind and sea; and the Christmas snows +outside. Conversely Rossetti's painting, "Arthur's Tomb," was suggested +by Morris' so-named poem in his 1858 volume. + +Or, again, compare Morris' poem, "Sir Galahad: A Christmas Mystery," with +the following description of Rossetti's aquarelle, "How Sir Galahad, Sir +Bors, and Sir Percival were fed with the Sanc Grael; but Sir Percival's +sister died by the way": "On the right is painted the altar, and in front +of it the damsel of the Sanc Grael giving the cup to Sir Galahad, who +stoops forward to take it over the dead body of Sir Percival's sister, +who lies calm and rigid in her green robe and red mantle, and near whose +feet grows from the ground an aureoled lily, while, with his left hand, +the saintly knight leads forward his two companions, him who has lost his +sister, and the good Sir Bors. Behind the white-robed damsel at the +altar, a dove, bearing the sacred casket, poises on outspread pinions; +and immediately beyond the fence enclosing the sacred space, stands a row +of nimbused angels, clothed in white and with crossed scarlet or +flame-coloured wings." [21] + +Rossetti's powerful ballad, "The King's Tragedy," was suggested by the +mural paintings (encaustic) with which William Bell Scott decorated the +circular staircase of Penkill Castle in 1865-68. These were a series of +scenes from "The Kinges Quair" once attributed to James I. of Scotland. +The photogravure reproduction, from a painting by Arthur Hughes of a +section of the Penkill Castle staircase, represents the king looking from +the window of his prison in Windsor Castle at Lady Jane Beaufort walking +with her handmaidens in a very Pre-Raphaelite garden. At the left of the +picture, Cupid aims an arrow at the royal lover. Rossetti, Hunt, and +Millais were all great lovers of Keats. Hunt says that his "Escape of +Madeline and Prospero" was the first subject from Keats ever painted, and +was highly acclaimed by Rossetti. At the formation of the P.-R B. in +1848, it was agreed that the first work of the Brotherhood should be in +illustration of "Isabella," and a series of eight subjects was selected +from the poem. Millais executed at once his "Lorenzo and Isabella," but +Hunt's "Isabella and the Pot of Basil" was not finished till 1867, and +Rossetti's part of the programme was never carried out. Rossetti's "La +Belle Dame sans Merci," Mr. J. M. Strudwick's "Madness of Isabella," +Arthur Hughes' triptych of "The Eve of St. Agnes," and Millais' great +painting, "St. Agnes' Eve," were other tributes of Pre-Raphaelite art to +the young master of romantic verse. + +Whether this interpenetration of poetry and painting is of advantage to +either, may admit of question. Emerson said to Scott: "We [Americans] +scarcely take to the Rossetti poetry; it does not come home to us; it is +exotic." The sonnets of "The House of Life" have appeared to many +readers obscure and artificial, the working out in language of +conceptions more easily expressible by some other art; expressed here, at +all events, through imagery drawn from a special and even technical range +of associations. Such readers are apt to imagine that Rossetti suffers +from a hesitation between poetry and painting; as Sidney Lanier is +thought by some to have been injured artistically by halting midway +between music and verse. The method proper to one art intrudes into the +other; everything that the artist does has the air of an experiment; he +paints poems and writes pictures. + +A department of Rossetti's verse consists of sonnets written for +pictures, pictures by Botticelli, Mantegna, Giorgione, Burne-Jones, and +others, and in many cases by himself, and giving thus a double rendering +of the same invention. But even when not so occasioned, his poems nearly +always suggest pictures. Their figures seem to have stepped down from +some fifteenth-century altar piece bringing their aureoles and golden +backgrounds with them. This is to be pictorial in a very different sense +from that in which Tennyson is said to be a pictorial poet. Hall Caine +informs us that Rossetti "was no great lover of landscape beauty." His +scenery does not, like Wordsworth's or Tennyson's, carry an impression of +life, of the real outdoors. Nature with Rossetti has been passed through +the medium of another art before it comes into his poetry; it is a doubly +distilled nature. It is nature as we have it in the "Roman de la Rose," +or the backgrounds of old Florentine painters: flowery pleasances and +orchard closes, gardens with trellises and singing conduits, where ladies +are playing at the palm play. In his most popular poem, "The Blessed +Damosel"--a theme which he both painted and sang--the feeling is +exquisitely and voraciously human. The maiden is "homesick in heaven," +and yearns back towards the earth and her lover left behind. Even so, +with her symbolic stars and lilies, she is so like the stiff, sweet +angels of Fra Angelico or Perugino, that one almost doubts when the poet +says + + "--her bosom must have made + The bar she leaned on warm." + +The imagery of the poem is right out of the picture world; + + "The clear ranged, unnumbered heads + Bowed with their aureoles." + +The imaginations are Dantesque: + + "And the souls, mounting up to God, + Went by her like thin flames." + + "The light thrilled towards her, filled + With angels in strong, level flight." + +Even in "Jenny," one of the few poems of Rossetti that deal with modern +life, mediaeval art will creep in. + + "Fair shines the gilded aureole + In which our highest painters place + Some living woman's simple face. + And the stilled features thus descried, + As Jenny's long throat droops aside-- + The shadows where the cheeks are thin + And pure wide curve from ear to chin-- + With Raffael's, Leonardo's hand + To show them to men's souls might stand." + +The type of womanly beauty here described is characteristic; it is the +type familiar to all in "Pandora," "Proserpine," "La Ghirlandata," "The +Day Dream," "Our Lady of Pity," and the other life-size, half-length +figure paintings in oil which were the masterpieces of his maturer style. +The languid pose, the tragic eyes with their mystic, brooding intensity +in contrast with the full curves of the lips and throat, give that union +of sensuousness and spirituality which is a constant trait of Rossetti's +poetry. The Pre-Raphaelites were accused of exaggerating the height of +their figures. In Burne-Jones, whose figures are eight and a half heads +high, the exaggeration is deliberate. In Morris' and Swinburne's early +poems all the lines of the female face and figure are long--the hand, the +foot, the throat, the "curve from chin to ear," and above all, the +hair.[22] The hair in these paintings of Rossetti seems a romantic +exaggeration, too; immense, crinkly waves of it spreading off to left and +right. William Morris' beautiful wife is said to have been his model in +the pieces above named. + +The first collection of original poems by Rossetti was published in 1870. +The manuscripts had been buried with his wife in 1862. When he finally +consented to their publication, the coffin had to be exhumed and the +manuscripts removed. In 1881 a new edition was issued with changes and +additions; and in the same year the volume of "Ballads and Sonnets" was +published, including the sonnet sequence of "The House of Life." Of the +poems in these two collections which treat directly of Dante the most +important is "Dante at Verona," a noble and sustained piece in +eighty-five stanzas, slightly pragmatic in manner, in which are enwoven +the legendary and historical incidents of Dante's exile related by the +early biographers, together with many personal allusions from the "Divine +Comedy." But Dante is nowhere very far off either in Rossetti's painting +or in his poetry. In particular, the history of Dante's passion for +Beatrice, as told in the "Vita Nuova," in which the figure of the girl is +gradually transfigured and idealised by death into the type of heavenly +love, made an enduring impression upon Rossetti's imagination. Shelley, +in his "Epipsychidion," had appealed to this great love story, so +characteristic at once of the mediaeval mysticism and of the Platonic +spirit of the early Renaissance. But Rossetti was the first to give a +thoroughly sympathetic interpretation of it to English readers. It +became associated most intimately with his own love and loss. We see it +in a picture like "Beata Beatrix," and a poem like "The Portrait," +written many years before his wife's death, but subsequently retouched. +Who can read the following stanza without thinking of Beatrice and the +"Paradiso"? + + "Even so, where Heaven holds breath and hears + The beating heart of Love's own breast,-- + Where round the secret of all spheres + All angels lay their wings to rest,-- + How shall my soul stand rapt and awed, + When, by the new birth borne abroad + Throughout the music of the suns, + It enters in her soul at once + And knows the silence there for God!" + +Rossetti's ballads and ballad-romances, all intensely mediaeval in +spirit, fall, as regards their manner, into two very different classes. +Pieces like "The Blessed Damozel," "The Bride's Prelude," "Rose Mary," +and "The Staff and Scrip" (from a story in the "Gesta Romanorum") are art +poems, rich, condensed, laden with ornament, pictorial. Every attitude +of every figure is a pose; landscapes and interiors are painted with +minute Pre-Raphaelite finish. "The Bride's Prelude"--a fragment--opens +with the bride's confession to her sister, in the 'tiring-room sumptuous +with gold and jewels and brocade, where the air is heavy with musk and +myrrh, and sultry with the noon. In the pauses of her tale stray lute +notes creep in at the casement, with noises from the tennis court and the +splash of a hound swimming in the moat. In "Rose Mary," which employs +the superstition in the old lapidaries as to the prophetic powers of the +beryl-stone, the colouring and imagery are equally opulent, and, in +passages, Oriental. + +On the other hand, "Stratton Water," "Sister Helen," "The White Ship," +and "The King's Tragedy" are imitations of popular poetry, done with a +simulated roughness and simplicity. The first of these adopts a common +ballad motive, a lover's desertion of his sweetheart through the +contrivances of his wicked kinsfolk: + + "And many's the good gift, Lord Sands, + You've promised oft to me; + But the gift of yours I keep to-day + Is the babe in my body." . . . + + "Look down, look down, my false mother, + That bade me not to grieve: + You'll look up when our marriage fires + Are lit to-morrow eve." + +"Sister Helen" is a ballad in dialogue with a subtly varying repetend, +and introduces the popular belief that a witch could kill a man slowly by +melting a wax figure. Twice Rossetti essayed the historical ballad. +"The White Ship" tells of the drowning of the son and daughter of Henry +I. with their whole ship's company, except one survivor, Berold, the +butcher of Rouen, who relates the catastrophe. The subject of "The +King's Tragedy" is the murder of James I. by Robert Graeme and his men in +the Charterhouse of Perth. The teller of the tale is Catherine Douglas, +known in Scottish tradition as Kate Barlass, who had thrust her arm +through the staple, in place of a bar, to hold the door against the +assassins. A few stanzas of "The Kinges Quair" are fitted into the poem +by shortening the lines two syllables each, to accommodate them to the +ballad metre. It is generally agreed that this was a mistake, as was +also the introduction of the "Beryl Songs" between the narrative parts of +"Rose Mary." These ballads of Rossetti compare well with other modern +imitations of popular poetry. "Sister Helen," _e.g._, has much greater +dramatic force than Tennyson's "Oriana" or "The Sisters." Yet they +impress one, upon the whole, as less characteristic than the poet's +Italianate pieces; as _tours de force_ carefully pitched in the key of +minstrel song, but falsetto in effect. Compared with such things as +"Cadyow Castle" or "Jack o' Hazeldean," they are felt to be the work of +an art poet, resolute to divest himself of fine language and scrupulously +observant of ballad convention in phrase and accent--details of which +Scott was often heedless--but devoid of that hearty, natural sympathy +with the conditions of life from which popular poetry sprang, and wanting +the lyrical pulse that beats in the ballad verse of Scott, Kingsley, and +Hogg. In "The King's Tragedy" Rossetti was poaching on Scott's own +preserves, the territory of national history and legend. If we can guess +how Scott would have handled the same story, we shall have an object +lesson in two contrasted kinds of romanticism. Scott could not have +bettered the grim ferocity of the murder scene, nor have equalled, +perhaps, the tragic shadow of doom which is thrown over Rossetti's poem +by the triple warning of the weird woman. But the sense of the historic +environment, the sense of the actual in places and persons, would have +been stronger in his version. Graeme's retreat would have been the +Perthshire Highlands, and not vaguely "the land of the wild Scots." And +if scenery had been used, it would not have been such as this--a +Pre-Raphaelite background: + + "That eve was clenched for a boding storm, + 'Neath a toilsome moon half seen; + The cloud stooped low and the surf rose high; + And where there was a line of the sky, + Wild wings loomed dark between." + +The historical sense was weak in Rossetti. It is not easy to imagine him +composing a Waverley novel. The life of the community, as distinct from +the life of the individual, had little interest for him. The mellifluous +names of his heroines, Aloyse, Rose Mary, Blanchelys, are pure romance. +In his intense concentration upon the aesthetic aspects of every subject, +Rossetti seemed, to those who came in contact with him, singularly +_borne_. He was indifferent to politics, society, speculative thought, +and the discoveries of modern science--to contemporary matters in +general.[23] It is to this narrow aestheticism that Mr. Courthope refers +when, in comparing Coleridge and Keats with Rossetti and Swinburne, he +finds in the latter an "extraordinary skill in the imitation of antique +forms," but "less liberty of imagination." [24] The contrast is most +striking in the case of Coleridge, whose intellectual interests had so +wide a range. Rossetti cared only for Coleridge's verse; William Morris +spoke with contempt of everything that he had written except two or three +of his poems;[25] and Swinburne regretted that he had lost himself in the +mazes of theology and philosophy, instead of devoting himself wholly to +creative work. Keats, it is true, was exclusively preoccupied with the +beautiful; but he was more eclectic than Rossetti--perhaps also than +Morris, though hardly than Swinburne. The world of classic fable, the +world of outward nature were as dear to his imagination as the country of +romance. Rossetti was not university bred, and, as we have seen, forgot +his Greek early. Morris, like Swinburne, was an Oxford man; yet we hear +him saying that he "loathes all classical art and literature." [26] In +"The Life and Death of Jason" and "The Earthly Paradise" he treats +classical and mediaeval subjects impartially, but treats them both alike +in mediaeval fashion; as Chaucer does, in "The Knightes Tale." [27] As +for Rossetti, he is never classical. He makes Pre-Raphaelite ballads out +of the tale of Troy divine and the Rabbinical legends of Adam's first +wife, Lilith; ballads with quaint burdens-- + + "(O Troy's down, + Tall Troy's on fire)"; + + "(Sing Eden Bower! + Alas the hour!)" + +and whose very titles have an Old English familiarity--"Eden Bower," +"Troy Town," as who says "London Bridge," "Edinboro' Town," etc. +Swinburne has given the _rationale_ of this type of art in his +description of a Bacchus and Ariadne by Lippino Lippi ("Old Masters at +Florence"), "an older legend translated and transformed into mediaeval +shape. More than any others, these painters of the early Florentine +school reproduce in their own art the style of thought and work familiar +to a student of Chaucer and his fellows or pupils. Nymphs have faded +into fairies, and gods subsided into men. A curious realism has grown up +out of that very ignorance and perversion which seemed as if it could not +but falsify whatever thing it touched upon. This study of Fillippino's +has all the singular charm of the romantic school. . . . The clear form +has gone, the old beauty dropped out of sight . . . but the mediaeval or +romantic form has an incommunicable charm of its own. . . . Before +Chaucer could give us a Pandarus or a Cressida, all knowledge and memory +of the son of Lycaon and the daughter of Chryses must have died out, the +whole poem collapsed into romance; but far as these may be removed from +the true tale and the true city of Troy, they are not phantoms." + +But of all this group, the one most thoroughly steeped in +mediaevalism--to repeat his own description of himself--was William +Morris. He was the English equivalent of Gautier's _homme moyen age_; +and it was his endeavour, in letters and art, to pick up and continue the +mediaeval tradition, interrupted by four hundred years of modern +civilisation. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not attract +him; and as for the eighteenth, it simply did not exist for him.[28] The +ugliness of modern life, with its factories and railroads, its +unpicturesque poverty and selfish commercialism, was hateful to him as it +was to Ruskin--his teacher. He loved to imagine the face of England as +it was in the time of Chaucer--his master; to + + "Forget six counties overhung with smoke, + Forget the snorting steam and piston smoke, . . . + And dream of London, small and white and clean, + The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green." + +The socialistic Utopia depicted in his "News from Nowhere" (1890) is a +regenerated Middle Age, without feudalism, monarchy, and the mediaeval +Church, but also without densely populated cities, with handicrafts +substituted for manufactures, and with mediaeval architecture, house, +decoration, and costume. None of Morris' books deals with modern life, +but all of them with an imaginary future or an almost equally imaginary +past. This same "News from Nowhere" contains a passage of dialogue in +justification of retrospective romance. "'How is it that though we are +so interested with our life for the most part, yet when people take to +writing poems or painting pictures they seldom deal with our modern life, +or if they do, take good care to make their poems or pictures unlike that +life? Are we not good enough to paint ourselves?' . . . 'It always was +so, and I suppose always will be,' said he, 'however, it may be +explained. It is true that in the nineteenth century, when there was so +little art and so much talk about it, there was a theory that art and +imaginative literature ought to deal with contemporary life; but they +never did so; for, if there was any pretence of it, the author always +took care . . . to disguise, or exaggerate, or idealise, and in some way +or another make it strange; so that, for all the verisimilitude there +was, he might just as well have dealt with the times of the +Pharaohs.'" [29] + +The difference between the mediaevalism of Rossetti and of Morris +illustrates, in an interesting way, the varied results produced by the +operation of similar influences on contrasted temperaments. The +comparison which Morris' biographer makes between him and Burne-Jones +holds true as between Morris and Rossetti: "They received or +re-incarnated the Middle Ages through the eyes and brain, in the one case +of a Norman, in the other of a Florentine." Morris was twice a Norman, +in his love for the romancers and Gothic builders of northern France; and +in his enthusiasm for the Icelandic sagas. His visits to Italy left him +cold, and he confessed to a strong preference for the art of the North. +"With the later work of Southern Europe I am quite out of sympathy. In +spite of its magnificent power and energy, I feel it as an enemy, and +this much more in Italy, where there is such a mass of it, than +elsewhere. Yes, and even in these magnificent and wonderful towns I long +rather for the heap of gray stones with a gray roof that we call a house +north-away." Rossetti's Italian subtlety and mysticism are replaced in +Morris by an English homeliness--a materialism which is Teutonic and not +Latin or Celtic, and one surface indication of which is the scrupulously +Saxon vocabulary of his poems and prose romances. "His earliest +enthusiasms," said Burne-Jones, "were his latest. The thirteenth century +was his ideal period always"--the century which produced the lovely +French romances which he translated and the great French cathedrals which +he admired above all other architecture on earth. But this admiration +was aesthetic rather than religious. The Catholic note, so resonant in +Rossetti's poetry, is hardly audible in Morris, at least after his early +Oxford days. The influence of Newman still lingered at Oxford in the +fifties, though the Tractarian movement had spent its force and a +reaction had set in. Morris came up to the university an Anglo-Catholic, +and like his fellow-student and life-long friend, Burne-Jones, had been +destined to holy orders. We find them both, as undergraduates, eagerly +reading the "Acta Sanctorum," the "Tracts for the Times," and Kenelm +Digby's "Mores Catholici," and projecting a kind of monastic community, +where celibacy should be practised and sacred art cultivated. But later +impressions soon crowded out this early religious fervour. Churchly +asceticism and the mediaeval "praise of virginity" made no part of +Morris' social ideal. The body counted for much with him. In "News from +Nowhere," marriage even is so far from being a sacrament, that it is +merely a free arrangement terminable at the will of either party. Morris +had a passionate love of earth and a regard for the natural instincts. +He complains that Swinburne's poetry is "founded on literature, not on +nature." His religion is a reversion to the old Teutonic pagan +earth-worship, and he had the pagan dread of "quick-coming death." His +paradise is an "Earthly Paradise"; it is in search of earthly immortality +that his voyagers set sail. "Of heaven or hell," says his prelude, "I +have no power to sing"; and the great mediaeval singer of heaven and hell +who meant so much to Rossetti, appealed hardly more to Morris than to +Walter Scott. + +Moreover, Morris' work in verse was the precise equivalent of his work as +a decorative artist, who cared little for easel pictures, and regarded +painting as one method out of many for covering wall spaces or other +surfaces.[30] His poetry is mainly narrative, but whether epical or +lyrical in form, is always less lyric in essence than Rossetti's. In its +objective spirit and even distribution of emphasis, it contrasts with +Rossetti's expressional intensity very much as Morris' wall-paper and +tapestry designs contrast with paintings like "Beata Beatrix" and +"Proserpina." Morris--as an artist--cared more for places and things +than for people; and his interest was in the work of art itself, not in +the personality of the artist. + +Quite unlike as was Morris to Scott in temper and mental endowment, his +position in the romantic literature of the second half-century answers +very closely to Scott's in the first. His work resembled Scott's in +volume, and in its easiness for the general reader. For the second time +he made the Middle Ages _popular_. There was nothing esoteric in his +art, as in Rossetti's. It was English and came home to Englishmen. His +poetry, like his decorative work, was meant for the people, and +"understanded of the people." Moreover, like Scott, he was an +accomplished _raconteur_, and a story well told is always sure of an +audience. His first volume, "The Defence of Guenevere" (1858), dedicated +to Rossetti and inspired by him, had little popular success. But when, +like Millais, he abandoned the narrowly Pre-Raphaelite manner and +broadened out, in "The Life and Death of Jason" (1867) and "The Earthly +Paradise" (1868-70), into a fashion of narrative less caviare to the +general, the public response was such as met Millais. + +Morris' share in the Pre-Raphaelite movement was in the special field of +decorative art. His enthusiasm for Gothic architecture had been aroused +at Oxford by a reading of Ruskin's chapter on "The Nature of Gothic" in +"The Stones of Venice." In 1856, acting upon this impulse, he articled +himself to the Oxford architect G. E. Street, and began work in his +office. He did not persevere in the practice of the profession, and +never built a house. But he became and remained a _connoisseur_ of +Gothic architecture and an active member of the Society for the +Protection of Ancient Buildings. His numerous visits to Amiens, +Chartres, Reims, Soissons, and Rouen were so many pilgrimages to the +shrines of mediaeval art. Indeed, he always regarded the various +branches of house decoration as contributory to the master art, +architecture. + +A little later, under the dominating and somewhat overbearing persuasions +of Rossetti, he tried his hand at painting, but never succeeded well in +drawing the human face and figure. The figure designs for his stained +glass, tapestries, etc., were usually made by Burne-Jones, Morris +furnishing floriated patterns and the like. In 1861 was formed the firm +of Morris & Company, which revolutionised English household decoration. +Rossetti and Burne-Jones were among the partners in this concern, which +undertook to supply the public with high art work in wall painting, paper +hangings, embroidery, carpets, tapestries, printed cottons, stamped +leather, carved furniture, tiles, metals, jewelry, etc. In particular, +Morris revived the mediaeval arts of glass-staining, illumination, or +miniature painting, and tapestry-weaving with the high-warp loom. Though +he chose to describe himself as a "dreamer of dreams born out of my due +time," and "the idle singer of an empty day," he was a tireless practical +workman of astonishing cleverness and versatility. He taught himself to +dye and weave. When, in the last decade of the century, he set up the +famous Kelmscott Press, devoted to artistic printing and book-making, he +studied the processes of type-casting and paper manufacture, and actually +made a number of sheets of paper with his own hands. It was his +favourite idea that the division of labour in modern manufactures had +degraded the workman by making him a mere machine; that the divorce +between the art of the designer and the art of the handicraftsman was +fatal to both. To him the Middle Ages meant, not the ages of faith, or +of chivalry, or of bold and free adventure, but of popular art--of "The +Lesser Arts"; when every artisan was an artist of the beautiful and took +pleasure in the thing which his hand shaped; when not only the cathedral +and the castle, but the townsman's dwelling-house and the labourer's +cottage was a thing of beauty. He believed that in those times there +was, as there should be again, an art by the people and for the people. +It was the democratic and not the aristocratic elements of mediaeval life +that he praised. "From the first dawn of history till quite modern +times, art, which nature meant to solace all, fulfilled its purpose; all +men shared in it; that was what made life romantic, as people call it, in +those days; that and not robber-barons and inaccessible kings with their +hierarchy of serving-nobles and other such rubbish." [31] One more +passage will serve to set in sharp contrast the romanticism of Scott and +the romanticism of Ruskin and Morris. "With that literature in which +romance, that is to say humanity, was re-born, there sprang up also a +feeling for the romance of external nature, which is surely strong in us +now, joined with a longing to know something real of the lives of those +who have gone before us; of these feelings united you will find the +broadest expression in the pages of Walter Scott; it is curious, as +showing how sometimes one art will lag behind another in a revival, that +the man who wrote the exquisite and wholly unfettered naturalism of 'The +Heart of Midlothian,' for instance, thought himself continually bound to +seem to feel ashamed of, and to excuse himself for, his love of Gothic +architecture; he felt that it was romantic, and he knew that it gave him +pleasure, but somehow he had not found out that it was art, having been +taught in many ways that nothing could be art that was not done by a +named man under academical rules." [32] + +It is worth while to glance at Morris' culture-history and note the +organic filaments which connect the later with the earlier romanticism. +He had read the Waverley novels as a child, and had even snatched a +fearful joy from Clara Reeve's "Old English Baron." [33] He knew his +Tennyson before he went up to Oxford, but reserved an unqualified +admiration only for such things as "Oriana" and "The Lady of Shalott." +He was greatly excited by the woodcut engraving of Duerer's "Knight, Death +and the Devil" in an English translation of Fouque's "Sintram." [34] +Rossetti was first made known to him by Ruskin's Edinburgh lectures of +1854 and by the illustration to Allingham's "Maids of Elfin Mere," over +which Morris and Burne-Jones "pored continually." Morris devoured +greedily all manner of mediaeval chronicles and romances, French and +English; but he read little in Elizabethan and later authors. He +disliked Milton and Wordsworth, and held Keats to be the foremost of +modern English poets. He took no interest in mythology, or Welsh poetry +or Celtic literature generally, with the exception of the "Morte +Darthur," which, Rossetti assured him, was second only to the Bible. The +Border ballads had been his delight since childhood. An edition of +these; a selection of English mediaeval lyrics; and a "Morte Darthur," +with a hundred illustrations from designs by Burne-Jones, were among the +unfulfilled purposes of the Kelmscott Press. + +Morris' first volume, "The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems," was put +forth in 1858 (reprint in 1875); "a book," says Saintsbury, "almost as +much the herald of the second school of Victorian poetry as Tennyson's +early work was of the first." [35] "Many of the poems," wrote William +Bell Scott, "represent the mediaeval spirit in a new way, not by a +sentimental, nineteenth-century-revival mediaevalism, but they give a +poetical sense of a barbaric age strongly and sharply real." [36] These +last words point at Tennyson. The first four pieces in the volume are on +Arthurian subjects, but are wholly different in style and conception even +from such poems as "The Lady of Shalott" and "Sir Lancelot and Queen +Guinevere." They are more mannerised, more in the spirit of +Pre-Raphaelite art, than anything in Morris' later work. If the +name-poem is put beside Tennyson's idyl "Guinevere"; or "Sir Galahad, a +Christmas Mystery," beside Tennyson's "Sir Galahad," the difference is +striking. In place of the refined ethics and sentiment, and purely +modern spiritual ideals which find a somewhat rhetorical expression in +Tennyson, Morris endeavours to render the genuine Catholic mediaeval +materialistic religious temper as it appears in Malory; where +unquestioning belief, devotion, childish superstition, and the fear of +hell coexist with fleshly love and hate--a passion of sin and a passion +of repentance. Guenevere's "defence" is, at bottom, the same as Phryne's: + + "See through my long throat how the words go up + In ripples to my mouth: how in my hand + The shadow lies like wine within a cup + Of marvellously colour'd gold." + + "Dost thou reck + That I am beautiful, Lord, even as you + And your dear mother?" [37] + +Morris criticised Tennyson's Galahad, as "rather a mild youth." His own +Galahad is not the rapt seer of the vision beatific, but a more +flesh-and-blood character, who sometimes has cold fits in which he doubts +whether the quest is not a fool's errand; and whether even Sir Palomydes +in his unrequited love, and Sir Lancelot in his guilty love, do not take +greater comfort than he. + +Other poems in the book were inspired by Froissart's "Chronicle" or other +histories of the English wars in France: "Sir Peter Harpdon's End," +"Concerning Geffray Teste Noire," "The Eve of Crecy," etc.[38] Still +others, and these not the least fascinating, were things of pure +invention, lays of "a country lit with lunar rainbows and ringing with +fairy song." [39] These have been thought to owe something to Edgar Poe, +but they much more nearly resemble the work of the latest symbolistic +schools. When reading such poems as "Rapunzel," "Golden Wings," and "The +Tune of Seven Towers," one is frequently reminded of "Serres Chaudes" or +"Pelleas et Melisande"; and is at no loss to understand why Morris +excepted Maeterlinck from his general indifference to contemporary +writers--Maeterlinck, like himself, a student of Rossetti. There is no +other collection of English poems so saturated with Pre-Raphaelitism. +The flowers are all orchids, strange in shape, violent in colouring. +Rapunzel, _e.g._, is like one of Maeterlinck's spellbound princesses. +She stands at the top of her tower, letting down her hair to the ground, +and her lover climbs up to her by it as by a golden stair. Here is again +the singular Pre-Raphaelite and symbolistic scenery, with its images from +art and not from nature. Tall damozels in white and scarlet walk in +garths of lily and sunflower, or under apple boughs, and feed the swans +in the moat. + + "Moreover, she held scarlet lilies, such + As Maiden Margaret bears upon the light + Of the great church walls." [40] + + "Lord, give Mary a dear kiss, + And let gold Michael, who look'd down, + When I was there, on Rouen town, + From the spire, bring me that kiss + On a lily!" [41] + +The language is as artfully quaint as the imaginations are fantastic: + + "Between the trees a large moon, the wind lows + Not loud, but as a cow begins to low." [42] + + "Pale in the green sky were the stars, I ween, + Because the moon shone like a star she shed + When she dwelt up in heaven a while ago, + And ruled all things but God." [43] + + "Quiet groans + That swell out the little bones + Of my bosom." [44] + + "I sit on a purple bed, + Outside, the wall is red, + Thereby the apple hangs, + And the wasp, caught by the fangs, + Dies in the autumn night. + And the bat flits till light, + And the love-crazed knight + Kisses the long, wet grass." [45] + +A number of these pieces are dramatic in form, monologues or dialogues, +sometimes in the manner of the mediaeval mystery plays.[46] Others are +ballads, not of the popular variety, but after Rossetti's fashion, +employing burdens, English or French: + + "Two red roses across the moon"; + + "Hah! hah! la belle jaune giroflee"; + + "Ah! qu'elle est belle La Marguerite"; etc. + +The only poem in the collection which imitates the style of the old +minstrel ballad is "Welland Water." The name-poem is in _terza rima_; +the longest, "Sir Peter Harpdon's End," in blank verse; "Golden Wings," +in the "In Memoriaro" stanza. + +When Morris again came before the public as a poet, his style had +undergone a change akin to that which transformed the Pre-Raphaelite +painter into the decorative artist. The skeins of vivid romantic colour +had run out into large-pattern tapestries. There was nothing eccentric +or knotty about "The Life and Death of Jason" and "The Earthly Paradise." +On the contrary, nothing so facile, pellucid, pleasant to read had +appeared in modern literature--a poetic lubberland, a "clear, unwrinkled +song." The reader was carried along with no effort and little thought on +the long swell of the verse, his ear lulled by the musical lapse of the +rime, his eye soothed--not excited--by ever-unrolling panoramas of an +enchanted country "east of the sun and west of the moon." Morris wrote +with incredible ease and rapidity. It was a maxim with him, as with +Ruskin, that all good work is done easily and with pleasure to the +workman; and certainly that seems true of him which Lowell said of +Chaucer--that he never "puckered his brow over an unmanageable verse." +Chaucer was his avowed master,[47] and perhaps no English narrative poet +has come so near to Chaucer. Like Chaucer, and unlike Scott, he did not +invent stories, but told the old stories over again with a new charm. +His poetry, as such, is commonly better than Scott's; lacking the fire +and nervous energy of Scott in his great passages, but sustained at a +higher artistic level. He had the copious vein of the mediaeval +chroniclers and romancers, without their tiresome prolixity and with +finer resources of invention. He had none of Chaucer's humour, realism, +or skill in character sketching. In its final impression his poetry +resembles Spenser's more than Chaucer's. Like Spenser's, it grows +monotonous--without quite growing languid--from the steady flow of the +metre and the exhaustless profusion of the imagery. The reader becomes, +somewhat ungratefully, surfeited with beauty, and seeks relief in poetry +more passionate or intellectual. Chaucer and, in a degree, Walter Scott, +have a way of making old things seem near to us. In Spenser and Morris, +though bright and clear in all imagined details, they stand at an +infinite remove, in a world apart-- + + "--a little isle of bliss + Midmost the beating of the steely sea" + +which typifies the weary problems and turmoil of contemporary life. + +"Jason" was a poem of epic dimensions, on the winning of the Golden +Fleece; "The Earthly Paradise," a series of twenty-four narrative poems +set in a framework of the poet's own. Certain gentlemen of Norway, in +the reign of Edward III. of England, set out--like St. Brandan--on a +voyage in search of a land that is free from death. They cross the +Western ocean, and after long years of wandering, come, disappointed of +their hope, to a city founded centuries since by exiles from ancient +Greece. There being hospitably received, hosts and guests interchange +tales in every month of the year; a classical story alternating with a +mediaeval one, till the double sum of twelve is complete. Among the +wanderers are a Breton and a Suabian, so that the mediaeval tales have a +wide range. There are Norse stories like "The Lovers of Gudrun"; French +Charlemagne romances, like "Ogier the Dane"; and late German legends of +the fourteenth century, like "The Hill of Venus," besides miscellaneous +travelled fictions of the Middle Age.[48] But the Hellenic legends are +reduced to a common term with the romance material, so that the reader is +not very sensible of a difference. Many of them are selected for their +marvellous character, and abound in dragons, monsters, transformations, +and enchantments: "The Golden Apples," "Bellerophon," "Cupid and Psyche," +"The Story of Perseus," etc. Even "Jason" is treated as a romance. Of +its seventeen books, all but the last are devoted to the exploits and +wanderings of the Argonauts. Medea is not the wronged, vengeful queen of +the Greek tragic poets, so much as she is the Colchian sorceress who +effects her lover's victory and escape. Her romantic, outweighs her +dramatic character. Sea voyages, emprizes, and wild adventures, like +those of his own wanderers in "The Earthly Paradise," were dearer to +Morris' imagination than conflicts of the will; the _vostos_ or +home-coming of Ulysses, _e.g._ He preferred the "Odyssey" to the +"Iliad," and translated it in 1887 into the thirteen-syllabled line of +the "Nibelungenlied." [49] Of the Greek tales in "The Earthly Paradise," +"The Love of Alcestis" has, perhaps, the most dramatic quality. + +Like Chaucer and like Rossetti,[50] Morris mediaevalised classic fable. +"Troy," says his biographer, "is to his imagination a town exactly like +Bruges or Chartres, spired and gabled, red-roofed, filled (like the city +of King Aeetes in 'The Life and Death of Jason') with towers and swinging +bells. The Trojan princes go out, like knights in Froissart, to tilt at +the barriers." [51] The distinction between classical and romantic +treatment is well illustrated by a comparison of Theocritus' idyl +"Hylas," with the same episode in "Jason." "Soon was he 'ware of a +spring," says the Syracusan poet, "in a hollow land, and the rushes grew +thickly round it, and dark swallow-wort, and green maiden-hair, and +blooming parsley and deer-grass spreading through the marshy land. In +the midst of the water the nymphs were arraying their dances, the +sleepless nymphs, dread goddesses of the country people, Eunice, and +Malis, and Nycheia, with her April eyes. And now the boy was holding out +the wide-mouthed pitcher to the water, intent on dipping it; but the +nymphs all clung to his hand, for love of the Argive lad had fluttered +the soft hearts of all of them. Then down he sank into the black +water." [52] In "Jason," where the episode occupies some two hundred and +seventy lines, one of the nymphs meets the boy in the wood, disguised in +furs like a northern princess, and lulls him to sleep by the stream side +with a Pre-Raphaelite song: + + "I know a little garden close + Set thick with lily and red rose"; + +the loveliest of all the lyrical passages in Morris' narrative poems +except possibly the favourite two-part song in "Ogier the Dane"; + + "In the white-flower'd hawthorne brake, + Love, be merry for my sake: + Twine the blossoms in my hair. + Kiss me where I am most fair-- + Kiss me, love! for who knoweth + What thing cometh after death?" + +This is the strain which recurs in all Morris' poetry with the insistence +of a burden, and lends its melancholy to every season of "the rich year +slipping by." + +Three kinds of verse are employed in "The Earthly Paradise": the +octosyllabic couplet; the rime royal, which was so much a favourite with +Chaucer; and the heroic couplet, handled in the free, "enjambed" fashion +of Hunt and Keats. + +"Love is Enough," in the form of a fifteenth-century morality play, and +treating a subject from the "Mabinogion," appeared in 1873, Mackail +praises its delicate mechanism in the use of "receding planes of action" +(Love is prologue and chorus, and there is a musical accompaniment); but +the dramatic form only emphasises the essentially undramatic quality of +the author's genius. What is the matter with Morris' poetry? For +something is the matter with it. Beauty is there in abundance, a rich +profusion of imagery. The narrative moves without a hitch. Passion is +not absent, passionate love and regret; but it speaks a sleepy language, +and the final impression is dream-like. I believe that the singular lack +which one feels in reading these poems comes from Morris' dislike of +rhetoric and moralising, the two main nerves of eighteenth-century verse. +Left to themselves, these make sad work of poetry; yet poetry includes +eloquence, and life includes morality. The poetry of Morris is sensuous, +as upon the whole poetry should be; but in his resolute abstention from +the generalizing habit of the previous century, the balance is lost +between the general and the concrete, which all really great poetry +preserves. Byron declaims and Wordsworth moralises, both of them perhaps +too much; yet in the end to the advantage of their poetry, which is full +of truths, or of thoughts conceived as true, surcharged with emotion and +uttered with passionate conviction. One looks in vain in Morris' pages +for such things as + + "There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away"; + +or + + "--the good die first, + ----And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust, + Burn to the socket." + +Such coin of universal currency is rare in Morris, as has once before +been said. Not that quotability is an absolute test of poetic value, for +then Pope would rank higher than Spenser or Shelley. But its absence in +Morris is significant in more than one way. + +While "The Earthly Paradise" was in course of composition, a new +intellectual influence came into Morris' life, the influence of the +Icelandic sagas. Much had been done to make Old Norse literature +accessible to English readers since the days when Gray put forth his +Runic scraps and Percy translated Mallet.[53] Walter Scott, e.g., had +given an abstract of the "Eyrbyggja Saga." Amos Cottle had published at +Bristol in 1797 a metrical version of the mythological portion of the +"Elder Edda" ("Icelandic Poetry, or the Edda of Saemund"), with an +introductory verse epistle by Southey. Sir George Dasent's translation +of the "Younger Edda" appeared in 1842; Laing's "Heimskringla" in 1844; +Dasent's "Burnt Nial" in 1861; his "Gisli the Outlaw," and Head's "Saga +of Viga-Glum" in 1866. William and Mary Howitt's "Literature and Romance +of Northern Europe" appeared in 1852. Morris had made the acquaintance +of Thorpe's "Northern Mythology" (1851) and "Yuletide Stories" (1853) at +Oxford; two of the tales in "The Earthly Paradise" were suggested by +them: "The Land East of the Sun" and "The Fostering of Aslaug." These, +however, he had dealt with independently and in an ultra-romantic spirit. +But in 1869 he took up the study of Icelandic under the tuition of Mr. +Erick Magnusson; in collaboration with whom he issued a number of +translations.[54] "The Lovers of Gudrun" in "The Earthly Paradise" was +taken from the "Laxdaela Saga," and is in marked contrast with the other +poems in the collection. There is no romantic glamour about it. It is a +grim, domestic tragedy, moving among the homeliest surroundings. Save +for the lawlessness of a primitive state of society which gave free play +to the workings of the passions, the story might have passed in Yorkshire +or New England. A book like "Wuthering Heights," or "Pembroke," +occasionally exhibits the same obstinate Berserkir rage of the tough old +Teutonic stock, operating under modern conditions. For the men and women +of the sagas are hard as iron; their pride is ferocious, their courage +and sense of duty inflexible, their hatred is as enduring as their love. +The memory of a slight or an injury is nursed for a lifetime, and when +the hour of vengeance strikes, no compunction, not even the commonest +human instincts--such as mother love--can avert the blow. Signy in the +"Voelsunga Saga" is implacable as fate. To avenge the slaughter of the +Volsungs is with her an obsession, a fixed idea. When incest seems the +only pathway to her purpose, she takes that path without a moment's +hesitation. The contemptuous indifference with which she hands over her +own little innocent children to death is more terrible than the readiness +of the fierce Medea to sacrifice her young brothers to Jason's safety; +more terrible by far than the matricide of Orestes. + +The colossal mythology of the North had impressed Gray's imagination a +century before, Carlyle in his "Hero Worship" (1840) had given it the +preference over the Greek, as an expression of race character and +imagination. In the preface to his translation of the "Voelsunga Saga," +Morris declared his surprise that no version of the story yet existed in +English. He said that it was one of the great stories of the world, and +that to all men of Germanic blood it ought to be what the tale of Troy +had been to the whole Hellenic race. In 1876 he cast it into a poem, +"Sigurd the Volsung," in four books in riming lines of six iambic or +anapaestic feet. "The Lovers of Gudrun" drew its material from one of +that class of sagas which rest upon historical facts. The family +vendetta which it narrates, in the Iceland of the eleventh century, is +hardly more fabulous--hardly less realistic--than any modern blood feud +in the Tennessee mountains. The passions and dramatic situations are +much the same in both. The "Voelsunga Saga" belongs not to romantic +literature, strictly speaking, but to the old cycle of hero epics, to +that earlier Middle Age which preceded Christian chivalry. It is the +Scandinavian version of the story of the Niblungs, which Wagner's +music-dramas have rendered in another art. But in common with romance, +it abounds in superhuman wonders. It is full of Eddaic poetry and +mythology. Sigmund and Sinfiotli change themselves into were wolves, +like the people in "William of Palermo": Sigurd slays Fafnir, the dragon +who guards the hoard, and his brother Regni, the last of the Dwarf-kin; +Grimhild bewitches Sigurd with a cup of evil drink; Sigmund draws from +the hall pillar the miraculous sword of Odin, and its shards are +afterwards smithed by Regni for the killing of the monster. + +Morris was so powerfully drawn to the Old Norse literature that he made +two visits to Iceland, to verify the local references in the sagas and to +acquaint himself with the strange Icelandic landscapes whose savage +sublimity is reflected in the Icelandic writings. "Sigurd the Volsung" +is probably the most important contribution of Norse literature to +English poetry; but it met with no such general acceptance as "The +Earthly Paradise." The spirit which created the Northern mythology and +composed the sagas is not extinct in the English descendants of Frisians +and Danes. There is something of it in the minstrel ballads; but it has +been so softened by modern life and tempered with foreign culture +elements, that these old tales in their aboriginal, barbaric sternness +repel. It is hard for any blossom of modern poetry to root itself in the +scoriae of Hecla. + +An indirect result of Morris' Icelandic studies was his translation of +Beowulf (1897), not a success; another was the remarkable series of prose +poems or romances, which he put forth in the last ten years of his +life.[55] There is nothing else quite like these. They are written in a +peculiar archaic English which the author shaped for himself out of +fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century models, like the "Morte Darthur" +and the English translation of the "Gesta Roroanorum," but with an +anxious preference for the Saxon and Danish elements of the vocabulary. +It is a dialect in which a market town is called a "cheaping-stead," a +popular assembly a "folk-mote," foresters are "wood-abiders," sailors are +"ship-carles," a family is a "kindred," poetry is "song-craft," [56] and +any kind of enclosure is a "garth." The prose is frequently interchanged +with verse, not by way of lyrical outbursts, but as a variation in the +narrative method, after the manner of the Old French _cantefables_, such +as "Aucassin et Nicolete"; but more exactly after the manner of the +sagas, in which the azoic rock of Eddaic poetry crops out ever and anon +under the prose strata. This Saxonism of style is in marked contrast +with Scott, who employs without question the highly latinised English +which his age had inherited from the last. Nor are Morris' romances +historical in the manner of the Waverley novels. The first two of the +series, however, are historical in the sense that they endeavour to +reproduce in exact detail the picture of an extinct society. Time and +place are not precisely indicated, but the scene is somewhere in the old +German forest, and the period is early in the Christian era, during the +obscure wanderings and settlements of the Gothic tribes. "The House of +the Wolfings" concerns the life of such a community, which has made a +series of clearings in "Mirkwood" on a stream tributary to the Rhine. +The folk of Midmark live very much as Tacitus describes the ancient +Germans as living. Each kindred dwells in a great common hall, like the +hall of the Niblungs or the Volsungs, or of King Hrothgar in "Beowulf." +Their herding and agriculture are described, their implements and +costumes, feasts in hall, songs, rites of worship, public meetings, and +finally their warfare when they go forth against the invading Romans. In +"The Roots of the Mountains" the tribe of the Wolf has been driven into +the woods and mountains by the vanguard of the Hunnish migrations. In +time they make head against these, drive them back, and retake their +fertile valley. In each case there is a love story and, as in Scott, the +private fortunes of the hero and heroine are enwoven with the ongoings of +public events. But it is the general life of the tribe that is of +importance, and there is little individual characterisation. There is a +class of thralls in "The House of the Wolfings," but no single member of +the class is particularised, like Garth, the thrall of Cedric, in +"Ivanhoe." + +The later numbers of the series have no semblance of actuality. The last +of all, indeed, "The Sundering Flood," is a war story which attains an +air of geographical precision by means of a map--like the plan of Egdon +Heath in "The Return of the Native"--but the region and its inhabitants +are alike fabulous. Romances such as "The Water of the Wondrous Isles" +and "The Wood beyond the World" (the names are not the least imaginative +feature of these curious books) are simply a new kind of fairy tales. +Unsubstantial as Duessa or Armida or Circe or Morgan le Fay are the +witch-queen of the Wood beyond the World and the sorceress of the +enchanted Isle of Increase Unsought. The white Castle of the Quest, with +its three champions and their ladies, Aurea, Atra, and Viridis; the +yellow dwarfs, the magic boat, the wicked Red Knight, and his den, the +Red Hold; the rings and spells and charms and garments of invisibility +are like the wilder parts of Malory or the Arabian Nights. + +Algernon Charles Swinburne was an early adherent of the Pre-Raphaelite +school, although such of his work as is specifically Gothic is to be +found mainly in the first series of "Poems and Ballads" (1866);[57] a +volume which corresponds to Morris' first fruits, "The Defence of +Guenevere." If Morris is prevailingly a Goth--a heathen Norseman or +Saxon--Swinburne is, upon the whole, a Greek pagan. Rossetti and Morris +inherit from Keats, but Swinburne much more from Shelley, whom he +resembles in his Hellenic spirit; as well as in his lyric fervour, his +shrill radicalism--political and religious--and his unchastened +imagination. Probably the cunningest of English metrical artists, his +art is more closely affiliated with music than with painting. Not that +there is any paucity of imagery in his poetry; the imagery is +superabundant, crowded, but it is blurred by an iridescent spray of +melodious verbiage. The confusion of mind which his work often produces +does not arise from romantic vagueness, from the dreamlike and mysterious +impression left by a ballad of Coleridge's or a story of Tieck's, but +rather, as in Shelley's case, from the dizzy splendour and excitement of +the diction. His verse, like Shelley's, is full of foam and flame, and +the result upon the reader is to bewilder and exhaust. He does not +describe in pictures, like Rossetti and Morris, but by metaphors, +comparisons, and hyperboles. Take the following very typical +passage--the portrait of Iseult in "Tristram of Lyonesse" (1882); + + "The very veil of her bright flesh was made + As of light woven and moonbeam-colored shade + More fine than moonbeams; white her eyelids shone + As snow sun-stricken that endures the sun, + And through their curled and coloured clouds of deep, + Luminous lashes, thick as dreams in sleep, + Shone, as the sea's depth swallowing up the sky's, + The springs of unimaginable eyes. + As the wave's subtler emerald is pierced through + With the utmost heaven's inextricable blue, + And both are woven and molten in one sleight + Of amorous colour and implicated light + Under the golden guard and gaze of noon, + So glowed their aweless amorous plenilune, + Azure and gold and ardent grey, made strange + With fiery difference and deep interchange + Inexplicable of glories multiform; + Now, as the sullen sapphire swells towards storm + Foamless, their bitter beauty grew acold, + And now afire with ardour of fine gold. + Her flower-soft lips were meek and passionate, + For love upon them like a shadow sate + Patient, a foreseen vision of sweet things, + A dream with eyes fast shut and plumeless wings + That knew not what man's love or life should be, + Nor had it sight nor heart to hope or see + What thing should come; but, childlike satisfied, + Watched out its virgin vigil in soft pride + And unkissed expectation; and the glad + Clear cheeks and throat and tender temples had + Such maiden heat as if a rose's blood + Beat in the live heart of a lily-bud." + +What distinct image of the woman portrayed does one carry away from all +this squandered wealth of words and tropes? Compare the entire poem with +one of Tennyson's Arthurian "Idyls," or even with Matthew Arnold's not +over-prosperous "Tristram and Iseult," or with any of the stories in "The +Earthly Paradise," and it will be seen how far short it falls of being +good verse narrative--with its excesses of language and retarded +movement. Wordsworth said finely of Shakspere that he could not have +written an epic: "he would have perished from a plethora of thought." It +is not so much plethora of thought as lavishness of style which clogs the +wheels in Swinburne. Too often his tale is + + "Like a tale of the little meaning, + Though the words are strong." + +But his narrative method has analogies, not only with things like +Shelley's "Laon and Cythna," but with Elizabethan poems such as Marlowe +and Chapman's "Hero and Leander." If not so conceited as these, it is +equally encumbered with sticky sweets which keep the story from getting +forward. + +The symbolism which characterises a great deal of Pre-Raphaelite art is +not conspicuous in Swinburne, whose spirit is not mystical. But two +marks of the Pre-Raphaelite--and, indeed, of the romantic manner +generally--are obtrusively present in his early work. One of these is +the fondness for microscopic detail at the expense of the obvious, +natural outlines of the subject. Thus of Proserpine at Enna, in the +piece entitled "At Eleusis," + + "--she lying down, red flowers + Made their sharp little shadows on her sides." + +"Endymion" is, perhaps, partly responsible for this exaggeration of the +picturesque, and in Swinburne, as in Keats, the habit is due to an +excessive impressibility by all forms of sensuous beauty. It is a sign +of riches, but of riches which smother their possessor. It is impossible +to fancy Chaucer or Goethe, or any large, healthy mind dealing thus by +its theme. Or, indeed, contrast the whole passage from "At Eleusis" with +the mention of the rape of Proserpine in the "Winter's Tale" and in +"Paradise Lost." + +Another Pre-Raphaelite trait is that over-intensify of spirit and sense +which was not quite wholesome in Rossetti, but which manifested itself in +Swinburne in a morbid eroticism. The first series of "Poems and Ballads" +was reprinted in America as "Laus Veneris." The name-poem was a version +of the Tannhaeuser legend, a powerful but sultry study of animal passion, +and it set the key of the whole volume. It is hardly necessary to say of +the singer of the wonderful choruses in "Atalanta" and the equally +wonderful hexameters of "Hesperia," that his imagination has turned most +persistently to the antique, and that a very small share of his work is +to be brought under any narrowly romantic formula. But there are a few +noteworthy experiments in mediaevalism included among these early lyrics. +"A Christmas Carol" is a ballad of burdens, suggested by a drawing of +Rossetti's, and full of the Pre-Raphaelite colour. The inevitable +damsels, or bower maidens, are combing out the queen's hair with golden +combs, while she sings a song of God's mother; how she, too, had three +women for her bed-chamber-- + + "The first two were the two Maries, + The third was Magdalen," [58] + +who "was the likest God"; and how Joseph, who, likewise had three +workmen, Peter, Paul, and John, said to the Virgin in regular ballad +style: + + "If your child be none other man's, + But if it be very mine, + The bedstead shall be gold two spans, + The bedfoot silver fine." + +"The Masque of Queen Bersabe" is a miracle play, and imitates the rough +_naivete_ of the old Scriptural drama, with its grotesque stage +directions and innocent anachronisms. Nathan recommends King David to +hear a mass. All the _dramatis personae_ swear by Godis rood, by Paulis +head, and Peter's soul, except "Secundus Miles" (_Paganus quidam_), a bad +man--a species of Vice--who swears by Satan and Mahound, and is finally +carried off by the comic devil: + + "_S. M._ I rede you in the devil's name, + Ye come not here to make men game; + By Termagaunt that maketh grame, + I shall to-bete thine head. + _Hic Diabolus capiat eum_." [59] + +Similarly "St. Dorothy" reproduces the childlike faith and simplicity of +the old martyrologies.[60] Theophilus addresses the Emperor Gabalus with +"Beau Sire, Dieu vous aide." The wicked Gabalus himself, though a +heathen, curses by St. Luke and by God's blood and bones, and quotes +Scripture. Theophilus first catches sight of Dorothy through a latticed +window, holding a green and red psalter among a troop of maidens who play +upon short-stringed lutes. The temple of Venus where he does his +devotions is a "church" with stained-glass windows. Heaven is a walled +pleasance, like the Garden of Delight in the "Roman de la Rose," + + "Thick with companies + Of fair-clothed men that play on shawms and lutes." + +Swinburne has also essayed the minstrel ballad in various forms. There +were some half-dozen pieces of the sort in the "Laus Veneris" volume, of +which several, like "The King's Daughter" and "The Sea-Swallows," were +imitations of Rossetti's and Morris' imitations, artistically overwrought +with elaborate Pre-Raphaelite refrains; others, like "May Janet" and "The +Bloody Son," are closer to popular models. The third series of "Poems +and Ballads" (1889) contains nine of these in the Scotch dialect, two of +them Jacobite songs. That Swinburne has a fine instinct in such matters +and holds the true theory of ballad imitation is evident from his review +of Rossetti's and Morris' work in the same kind.[61] "The highest form +of ballad requires, from a poet," he writes, "at once narrative power, +lyrical and dramatic. . . . It must condense the large, loose fluency of +romantic tale-telling into tight and intense brevity. . . . There can be +no pause in a ballad, and no excess; nothing that flags, nothing that +overflows." He pronounces "Sister Helen" the greatest ballad in modern +English; but he thinks that "Stratton Water," which is less independent +in composition, and copies the formal as well as the essential +characteristics of popular poetry, is "a study after the old manner too +close to be no closer. It is not meant for a perfect and absolute piece +of work in the old Border fashion, . . . and yet it is so far a copy that +it seems hardly well to have gone so far and no farther. On this ground +Mr. Morris has a firmer tread than the great artist by the light of whose +genius and kindly guidance he put forth the first fruits of his work, as +I did afterwards. In his first book, the ballad of 'Welland River,' the +Christmas carol in 'The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon,' +etc., . . . are examples of flawless work in the pure early manner. Any +less absolute and decisive revival of mediaeval form . . . rouses some +sense of failure by excess or default of resemblance." + +Swinburne's own ballads are clever and learned experiments, but he does +not practise the brevity which he recommends; some of them, such as "The +Bloody Son," "The Weary Wedding," and "The Bride's Tragedy," otherwise +most impressive, would be more so if they were shorter or less wordy. +Though his genius is more lyrical than dramatic, the fascination which +the dramatic method has had for him from the first is as evident in his +ballads as in his series of verse dramas, which begins with "The Queen +Mother," and includes the enormous "Mary Stuart" trilogy. Several of +these are mediaeval in subject; the "Rosamond" of his earliest +volume--Fair Rosamond of the Woodstock Maze--the other "Rosamund, Queen +of the Goths" (1899) in which the period of the action is 573 A.D.; and +"Locrine" (1888), the hero of which is that mythic king of Britain whose +story had been once before dramatised for the Elizabethan stage; and +whose daughter, "Sabrina fair," goddess of the Severn, figures in +"Comus." But these are no otherwise romantic than "Chastelard" or "The +Queen Mother." The dramatic diction is fashioned after the Elizabethans, +of whom Swinburne has been an enthusiastic student and expositor, finding +an attraction even in the morbid horrors of Webster, Ford, and +Tourneur.[62] + +Once more the poet touched the Round-Table romances in "The Tale of +Balen" (1896), written in the stanza of "The Lady of Shalott," and in a +style simpler and more direct than "Tristram of Lyonesse." The story is +the same as Tennyson's "Balin and Balan," published with "Tiresias and +Other Poems" in 1885, as an introduction to "Merlin and Vivien." Here +the advantage is in every point with the younger poet. Tennyson's +version is one of the weakest spots in the "Idylls." His hero is a rough +Northumberland warrior who looks with admiration upon the courtly graces +of Lancelot, and borrows a cognisance from Guinevere to wear upon his +shield, in hope that it may help him to keep his temper. But having once +more lost control of this, he throws himself upon the ground + + "Moaning 'My violences, my violences!'"-- + +a bathetic descent not unexampled elsewhere in Tennyson. + +This episode of the old "Morte Darthur" has fine tragic possibilities. +It is the tale of two brothers who meet in single combat, with visors +down, and slay each other unrecognised. It has some resemblance, +therefore, to the plan of "Sohrab and Rustum," but it cannot be said that +either poet avails himself of the opportunity for a truly dramatic +presentation of his theme. Tennyson, as we have seen, aimed to give epic +unity to the wandering and repetitious narrative of Malory, by selecting +and arranging his material with reference to one leading conception; the +effort of the king to establish a higher social state through an order of +Christian knighthood, and his failure through the gradual corruption of +the Round Table. He subdues the history of Balin to this purpose, just +as he does the history of Tristram which he relates incidentally only, +and not for its own sake, in "The Last Tournament." Balin's simple faith +in the ideal chivalry of Arthur's court is rudely dispelled when he hears +from Vivien, and sees for himself, that the two chief objects of his +reverence, Lancelot and the queen, are guilty lovers and false to their +lord; and in his bitter disappointment, he casts his life away in the +first adventure that offers. Moreover, in consonance with his main +design, Tennyson seeks, so far as may be, to discard whatever in Malory +is merely accidental or irrational; whatever is stuff of romance rather +than of epic or drama--whose theatre is the human will. To such elements +of the wonderful as he is obliged to retain he gives, where possible, an +allegorical or spiritual significance. There are very strange things in +the story of Balin, such as the invisible knight Garlon, a "darkling +manslayer"; and the chamber in the castle of King Pellam, where the body +of Joseph of Arimathea lies in state, and where there are a portion of +the blood of Christ and the spear with which his heart was pierced, with +which spear Sir Balin smites King Pellam, whereupon the castle falls and +the two adversaries lie among its ruins three days in a deathlike trance. +All this wild magic--which Tennyson touches lightly--Swinburne gives at +full length; following Malory closely through his digressions and the +roving adventures--most of which Tennyson suppresses entirely--by which +he conducts his hero his end. This is the true romantic method. + +As Rossetti for the Italian and Morris for the Scandinavian, Swinburne +stands for the spirit of French romanticism. At the beginning of the +nineteenth century France, the inventor of "Gothic" architecture and +chivalry romance, whose literature was the most influential of mediaeval +Europe, still represented everything that is most anti-mediaeval and +anti-romantic. Gerard de Nerval thought that the native genius of France +had been buried under two ages of imported classicism; and that Perrault, +who wrote the fairy tales, was the only really original mind in the +French literature of the eighteenth century. M. Brunetiere, on the +contrary, holds that the true expression of the national genius is to be +found in the writers of Louis XIV.'s time--that France is instinctively +and naturally classical. However this may be, in the history of the +modern return to the past, French romanticism was the latest to awake. +Somewhat of the chronicles, fabliaux, and romances of old France had +dribbled into England in translations;[63] but Swinburne was perhaps the +first thoroughpaced disciple of the French romantic school. Victor Hugo +is the god of his idolatry, and he has chanted his praise in prose and +verse, in "ode and elegy and sonnet." [64] Gautier and Baudelaire have +also shared his devotion.[65] The French songs in "Rosamond" and +"Chastelard" are full of romantic spirit. "Laus Veneris" follows a +version of the tale given in Maistre Antoine Gaget's "Livre des grandes +merveilles d'amour" (1530), in which the Venusberg is called "le mont +Horsel"; and "The Leper," a very characteristic piece in the same +collection, is founded on a passage in the "Grandes Chroniques de France" +(1505). Swinburne introduced or revived in English verse a number of old +French stanza forms, such as the ballade, the sestina, the rondel, which +have since grown familiar in the hands of Dobson, Lang, Gosse, and +others. In the second series of "Poems and Ballads" (1878) he gave +translations of ten of the ballads of that musical old blackguard + + "Villon, our sad, bad, glad, mad brother's name." [66] + +The range of Swinburne's intellectual interests has been wider than that +of Rossetti and Morris. He is a classical scholar, who writes easily in +Latin and Greek. Ancient mythology and modern politics divide his +attention with the romantic literatures of many times and countries. +Rossetti made but one or two essays in prose criticism, and Morris viewed +the reviewer's art with contempt. But Swinburne has contributed freely +to critical literature, an advocate of the principles of romantic art in +the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as Coleridge, Lamb, and +Hazlitt had been in the first. The manner of his criticism is not at all +judicial. His prose is as lyrical as his verse, and his praise and blame +both in excess--dithyrambic laudation or affluent billingsgate. In +particular, he works the adjective "divine" so hard that it loses +meaning. Yet stripped of its excited superlatives, and reduced to the +cool temperature of ordinary speech, his critical work is found to be +full of insight, and his judgment in matters of poetical technique almost +always right. I may close this chapter with a few sentences of his +defence of retrospective literature.[67] "It is but waste of breath for +the champions of the other party to bid us break the yoke and cast off +the bondage of that past, leave the dead to bury their dead, and turn +from the dust and rottenness of old-world themes, epic or romantic, +classical or feudal, to face the age wherein we live. . . . In vain, for +instance, do the first poetess of England and the first poet of America +agree to urge upon their fellows or their followers the duty of +confronting and expressing the spirit and the secret of their own time, +its meaning, and its need. . . . If a poem cast in the mould of classic +or feudal times, of Greek drama or mediaeval romance, be lifeless and +worthless, it is not because the subject or the form was ancient, but +because the poet was inadequate. . . . For neither epic nor romance of +chivalrous quest or classic war is obsolete yet, or ever can be; there is +nothing in the past extinct . . . [Life] is omnipresent and eternal, and +forsakes neither Athens nor Jerusalem, Camelot nor Troy, Argonaut nor +Crusader, to dwell, as she does with equal good will, among modern +appliances in London and New York." + + +[1] See vol. i., chaps. iv. and vii., "The Landscape Poets" and "The +Gothic Revival." + +[2] This was the organ of the Pre-Raphaelites, started in 1850. Only +four numbers were issued (January, February, March, April), and in the +third and fourth the title was changed to _Art and Poetry_. The contents +included, among other things, poems by Dante Gabriel and Christina +Rossetti. One of the former's twelve contributions was "The Blessed +Damozel." The _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, which ran through the +year 1856 and was edited by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, was +also a Pre-Raphaelite journal and received many contributions from +Rossetti. + +[3] The foreign strain in the English Pre-Raphaelites and in the painters +and poets who descend from them is worth noting. Rossetti was +three-fourths Italian. Millais' parents were Channel Islanders--from +Jersey--and he had two mother tongues, English and French. Burne-Jones +is of Welsh blood, and Alma Tadema of Frisian birth. Among +Neo-Pre-Raphaelite poets, the names of Theophile Marzials and Arthur +O'Shaughnessy speak for themselves. + +[4] Let the reader consult the large and rapidly increasing literature on +the English Pre-Raphaelites. I do not profess to be a very competent +guide here, but I have found the following works all in some degree +enlightening. "Autobiographical Notes of William Bell Scott," two vols., +New York, 1892. "English Contemporary Art." Translated from the French +of R. de la Sizeranne, Westminster, 1898. "D. G. Rossetti as Designer +and Writer." W. M. Rossetti, London, 1889. "The Rossettis." E. L. +Cary, New York, 1900. "Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement." +Esther Wood, New York, 1894. "Pre-Raphaelitism." J. Ruskin, New York, +1860. "The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." Holman Hunt in _Contemporary +Review_, vol. xlix. (three articles). "Encyclopaedia Britannica," +article "Rossetti." by Theodore Watts. Of course the standard lives and +memoirs by William Rossetti, Hall Caine, William Sharp, and Joseph +Knight, as well as Rossetti's "Family Letters," "Letters to William +Allingham," etc., afford criticisms of the movement from various points +of view. Lists of Rossetti's paintings and drawings are given by several +of these authorities, with photographs or engravings of his most famous +masterpieces. + +[5] "Lectures on Architecture and Painting." Delivered at Edinburgh in +1853. Lecture iv., "Pre Raphaelitism." + +[6] _Cf._ Milton: "Each stair mysteriously was meant" ("P. L."). + +[7] "Dante Gabriel Rossetti: a record and a study," London, 1882, pp. +40-41. + +[8] "Pre-Raphaelitism," p. 23, _note_. + +[9] "Autobiographical Notes of William Bell Scott," vol. i., p. 281. + +[10] "English Contemporary Art," p. 58. + +[11] "Lectures on Architecture and Painting," 1853. + +[12] See vol. i., p. 44. + +[13] "The return of this school was to a mediaevalism different from the +tentative and scrappy mediaevalism of Percy, from the genial but slightly +superficial mediaevalism of Scott, and even from the more exact but +narrow and distinctly conventional mediaevalism of Tennyson. . . . +Moreover, though it may seem whimsical or extravagant to say so, these +poets added to the very charm of mediaeval literature, which they thus +revived, a subtle something which differentiates it from--which, to our +perhaps blind sight, seems to be wanting in--mediaeval literature itself. +It is constantly complained (and some of those who cannot go all the way +with the complainants can see what they mean) that the graceful and +labyrinthine stories, the sweet snatches of song, the quaint drama and +legend of the Middle Ages lack--to us--life; that they are shadowy, +unreal, tapestry on the wall, not alive even as living pageants are. By +the strong touch of modernness which these poets and the best of their +followers introduced into their work, they have given the vivification +required" (Saintsbury, "Literature of the Nineteenth Century," p. 439). +Pre-Raphaelitism "is a direct and legitimate development of the great +romantic revival in England. . . . Even Tennyson, much more Scott and +Coleridge and their generation, had entered only very partially into the +treasures of mediaeval literature, and were hardly at all acquainted with +those of mediaeval art. Conybeare, Kemble, Thorpe, Madden were only in +Tennyson's own time reviving the study of Old and Middle English. Early +French and Early Italian were but just being opened up. Above all, the +Oxford Movement directed attention to mediaeval architecture, literature, +thought, as had never been the case before in England, and as has never +been the case at all in any other country" ("A Short History of English +Literature," by G. Saintsbury, London, 1898, p. 779). + +[14] "Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti," by T. Hall Caine, London, +1883, p. 41. + +[15] "The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti." Edited by W. M. +Rossetti, two vols., London, 1886. + +[16] "Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A Record and a Study," p. 305. + +[17] He wrote to Allingham in 1855, apropos of the latter's poem "The +Music Master": "I'm not sure that it is not too noble or too resolutely +healthy. . . . I must confess to a need in narrative dramatic +poetry . . . of something rather 'exciting,' and indeed, I believe, +something of the 'romantic' element, to rouse my mind to anything like +the moods produced by personal emotion in my own life. That sentence is +shockingly ill worded, but Keats' narratives would be of the kind I +mean." Theodore Watts ("Encyclopaedia Britannica," article "Rossetti") +says that "the purely romantic temper was with Rossetti a more permanent +and even a more natural temper than with any other nineteenth-century +poet, even including the author of 'Christabel' himself." He thinks that +all the French romanticists together do not equal the romantic feeling in +a single picture of Rossetti's; and he somewhat capriciously defines the +idea at the core of romanticism as that of the evil forces of nature +assailing man through his sense of beauty. Analysis run mad! As to Poe, +Rossetti certainly preferred him to Wordsworth. Hall Caine testifies +that he used to repeat "Ulalume" and "The Raven" from memory; and that +the latter suggested his "Blessed Damozel." "I saw that Poe had done the +utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and so +I determined to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the +yearning of the loved one in heaven" ("Recollections," p. 384). + +[18] "Recollections," p. 140. + +[19] Caine's "Recollections," p. 266. + +[20] Burne-Jones had been attracted by Rossetti's illustration of +Allingham's poem, "The Maids of Elfinmere," and had obtained an +introduction to him at London in 1856. It was by Rossetti's persuasion +that he gave up the church for the career of an artist. Rossetti and +Swinburne some years later (1862) became housemates for a time at +Chelsea; and Rossetti and Morris for a number of years, off and on, at +Kelmscott. + +[21] Sharp's "Dante Gabriel Rossetti," p. 190. + +[22] See especially Morris' poem "Rapunzel" in "The Defence of Guenevere." + +[23] "I can't say," wrote William Morris, "how it was that Rossetti took +no interest in politics; but so it was: of course he was quite Italian in +his general turn of thought; though I think he took less interest in +Italian politics than in English. . . . The truth is, he cared for +nothing but individual and personal matters; chiefly of course in +relation to art and literature." + +[24] "The Liberal Movement in English Literature," by W. J. Courthope, +London, 1885, p. 230. + +[25] "Keats was a great poet who sometimes nodded. . . . Coleridge was a +muddle-brained metaphysician who, by some strange freak of fortune, +turned out a few real poems amongst the dreary flood of inanity which was +his wont. . . . I have been through the poems, and find that the only +ones which have any interest for me are: (1) 'Ancient Mariner'; (2) +'Christabel'; (3) 'Kubla Khan'; and (4) the poem called 'Love'" +(Mackail's "Life of Morris," vol. ii., p. 310). + +[26] "The Life of William Morris," by W. J. Mackail, London, 1899, vol. +ii., p. 171. + +[27] For the Chaucerian manipulation of classical subjects by +Pre-Raphaelite artists see "Edward Burne-Jones," by Malcolm Bell, London, +1899. + +[28] "The slough of despond which we call the eighteenth century" ("Hopes +and Fears for Art," p. 211). "The English language, which under the +hands of sycophantic verse-makers had been reduced to a miserable +jargon . . . flowed clear, pure, and simple along with the music of Blake +and Coleridge. Take those names, the earliest in date among ourselves, +as a type of the change that has happened in literature since the time of +George II." (_ibid._, p. 82). + +[29] Page 113. + +[30] "Sir Edward Burne-Jones told me that Morris would have liked the +faces in his pictures less highly finished, and less charged with the +concentrated meaning or emotion of the painting . . . and he thought that +the dramatic and emotional interest of a picture ought to be diffused +throughout it as equally as possible. Such, too, was his own practice in +the cognate art of poetry; and this is one reason why his poetry affords +so few memorable single lines, and lends itself so little to quotation" +(Mackail's "Life of William Morris," vol. ii., p. 272). + +[31] "Hopes and Fears for Art," p. 79. + +[32] _Ibid._, p. 83. + +[33] See vol. i., pp. 241-43. + +[34] _Vide supra_, p. 153. + +[35] "A Short History of English Literature," p. 783. + +[36] "Recollections of Rossetti," vol. ii., p. 42. + +[37] "King Arthur's Tomb." + +[38] 0ne of these, "The Haystack in the Floods," has a tragic power +unexcelled by any later work of Morris. + +[39] Saintsbury, p. 785. + +[40] "King Arthur's Tomb." + +[41] "Rapunzel." + +[42] "King Arthur's Tomb." + +[43] _Ibid_. + +[44] "Rapunzel." + +[45] "Golden Wings." + +[46] See "Sir Galahad," "The Chapel in Lyoness," "A Good Knight in +Prison." + +[47] See "Jason," Book xvii., 5-24, and the _Envoi_ to "The Earthly +Paradise." + +[48] Some of Morris' sources were William of Malmesbury, "Mandeville's +Travels," the "Gesta Romanorum," and the "Golden Legend." "The Man Born +to be King" was derived from "The Tale of King Constans, the Emperor" in +a volume of French romances ("Nouvelles francaises en prose du xiii.ieme +Siecle," Paris, 1856) of which he afterwards (1896) made a prose +translation. The collection included also "The friendship of Amis and +Amile"; "King Florus and the Fair Jehane"; and "The History of Over Sea"; +besides "Aucassin and Nicolete," which Morris left out because it had +been already rendered into English by Andrew Lang. + +[49] His Vergil's "Aeneid," in the old fourteener of Chapman, was +published in 1876. + +[50] _Vide supra_, p. 315. + +[51] Mackail, i., p. 168. + +[52] Lang's translation. + +[53] See vol. i., pp. 190-92. + +[54] The "Grettis Saga" (1869); the "Voelsunga Saga" (1870); "Three +Northern Love Stories" (1875). + +[55] These, in order of publication, were "The House of the Wolfings" +(1889); "The Roots of the Mountains" (1890); "The Story of the Glittering +Plain" (1891); "The Wood Beyond the World" (1894); "The Well at the +World's End" (1896); "The Water of the Wondrous Isles" (1897); and "The +Sundering Flood" (1898). + +[56] Morris became so intolerant of French vocables that he detested and +would "fain" have eschewed the very word literature. + +[57] This collection is made up of Swinburne's earliest work but is +antedated in point of publication by "The Queen Mother, and Rosamond" +(1861) dedicated to Rossetti; and "Atalanta in Calydon" (1865). "Poems +and Ballads" was inscribed to Burne-Jones. + +[58] "Where the lady Mary is, + With her five handmaidens whose names + Are five sweet symphonies, + Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen, + Margaret and Rosalys." + --"The Blessed Damozel." + +[59] _Cf._ Browning's "The Heretic's Tragedy," _supra_, p. 276. + +[60] This was the subject of Massinger's "Virgin Martyr." + +[61] "Essays and Studies," pp. 85-88. + +[62] See "A Study of Ben Jonson"; "John Ford" (in "Essays and Studies"); +and the introductions to "Chapman" and "Middleton" in the Mermaid Series. + +[63] _Vide supra_, pp. 90, 109, 330, and vol. i., pp. 221-22, 301. + +[64] See especially "A Study of Victor Hugo" (1886); the articles on +"L'Homme qui Rit" and "L'Annee Terrible" in "Essays and Studies" (1875); +and on Hugo's posthumous writings in "Studies in Prose and Poetry" +(1886); "To Victor Hugo" in "Poems and Ballads" (first series); _Ibid_. +(second series); "Victor Hugo in 1877," _Ibid_. + +[65] See "Ave atque Vale" and the memorial verses in English, French, and +Latin on Gautier's death in "Poems and Ballads" (second series). + +[66] "A Ballad of Francois Villon." _Vide supra_, pp. 298-99. + +[67] "Essays and Studies," pp. 45-49. + + + + +CHAPTER VIII. + +Tendencies and Results. + +It has been mentioned that romanticism was not purely a matter of +aesthetics, without relation to the movement of religious and political +thought.[1] But it has also been pointed out that, as compared with what +happened in Germany, English romanticism was almost entirely a literary +or artistic, and hardly at all a practical force, that there was no such +_Zusammenhang_ between poetry and life as was asserted by the German +romantic school to be one of their leading principles. Walter Scott, +_e.g._, liked the Middle Ages because they were picturesque; because +their social structure rested on a military basis, permitted great +individual freedom of action and even lawlessness, and thus gave chances +for bold adventure; and because classes and callings were so sharply +differentiated--each with its own characteristic manners, dialect, +dress--that the surface of society presented a rich variety of colour, in +contrast with the drab uniformity of modern life. Perhaps to Scott the +ideal life was that of a feudal baron, dwelling in a Gothic mansion, +surrounded by retainers and guests, keeping open house, and going +a-hunting; and he tried to realise this ideal--so far as it was possible +under modern conditions--at Abbotsford. He respected rank and pedigree, +and liked to own land. He was a Tory and, in Presbyterian Scotland, he +was an Episcopalian. But his mediaeval enthusiasms were checked by all +kinds of good sense. He had no wish to restore mediaeval institutions in +practice. In spite of the glamour which he threw over feudal life, he +knew very well what that life must have been in reality: its insecurity +from violence and oppression, its barbarous discomfort; the life of +nobles in unplumbed stone castles; the life of burghers in walled towns, +without lighting, drainage, or police; the life of countrymen who took +their goods to market over miry roads impassable half the year for any +wheeled vehicle. As to the English poets whom we have passed in review, +from Coleridge to Swinburne, not one of them joined the Catholic Church; +and most of them found romantic literary tastes quite consistent with +varying shades of political liberalism and theological heterodoxy. + +THE ANGLO-CATHOLIC MOVEMENT.--Still even in England, the mediaeval +revival in art and letters was not altogether without influence on +practice and belief in other spheres of thought. Thus the Oxford +Tractarians of 1833 correspond somewhat to the throne-and-altar party in +Germany. At Newcastle in 1845, William Bell Scott visited a +painted-glass manufactory where he found his friend, Francis +Oliphant--afterwards husband of Margaret Oliphant, the novelist--engaged +as a designer. He describes Oliphant as no artist by nature, but a man +of pietistic feelings who had "thrown himself into the Gothic revival +which was, under the Oxford movement, threatening to become a serious +antagonist to our present freedom from clerical domination." Scott adds +that the master of this glass-making establishment was an uncultivated +tradesman, who yet had the business shrewdness to take advantage of "the +clerical and architectural proclivities of the day," and had visited and +studied the French cathedrals. "These workshops were a surprise to me. +Here was the Scotch Presbyterian working-artist, with a short pipe in his +mouth, cursing his fate in having to elaborate continual repetitions of +saints and virgins--Peter with a key as large as a spade, and a yellow +plate behind his head--yet by constant drill in the groove realising the +sentiment of Christian art, and at last able to express the abnegation of +self, the limitless sadness and even tenderness, in every line of drapery +and every twist of the lay figure." + +Here is one among many testimonies to the influence of the Oxford +movement on the fine arts. It would be easy to call witnesses to prove +the reverse--the influence of romance upon the Oxford movement. +Newman[2] quotes an article contributed by him to the _British Critic_ +for April, 1839, in which he had spoken of Tractarianism "as a reaction +from the dry and superficial character of the religious teaching and the +literature of the last generation, or century. . . . First, I mentioned +the literary influence of Walter Scott, who turned men's minds to the +direction of the Middle Ages. 'The general need,' I said, 'of something +deeper and more attractive than what had offered itself elsewhere may be +considered to have led to his popularity; and by means of his popularity +he reacted on his readers, stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their +hopes, setting before them visions which, when once seen, are not easily +forgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which +might afterwards be appealed to as first principles.'" Of Coleridge he +spoke, in the same paper, as having laid a philosophical basis for church +feelings and opinions, and of Southey and Wordsworth as "two living +poets, one of whom in the department of fantastic fiction, the other in +that of philosophical meditation, have addressed themselves to the same +high principles and feelings, and carried forward their readers in the +same direction." Newman, like Ruskin, was fond of Scott's verse as well +as of his prose.[3] + +Professor Gates has well recognised that element in romantic art which +affiliates with Catholic tendencies. "Mediaevalism . . . was a +distinctive note of the Romantic spirit, and, certainly, Newman was +intensely alive to the beauty and the poetic charm of the life of the +Middle Ages. One is sometimes tempted to describe him as a great +mediaeval ecclesiastic astray in the nineteenth century and heroically +striving to remodel modern life in harmony with his temperamental needs. +His imagination was possessed with the romantic vision of the greatness +of the Mediaeval Church--of its splendour and pomp and dignity, and of +its power over the hearts and lives of its members; and the Oxford +movement was in its essence an attempt to reconstruct the English Church +in harmony with this romantic ideal. . . . As Scott's imagination was +fascinated with the picturesque paraphernalia of feudalism--with its +jousts, and courts of love, and its coats of mail and buff-jerkins--so +Newman's imagination was captivated by the gorgeous ritual and +ceremonial, the art and architecture of mediaeval Christianity. . . . +Newman sought to revive in the Church a mediaeval faith in its own divine +mission and the intense spiritual consciousness of the Middle Ages; he +aimed to restore to religion its mystical character, to exalt the +sacramental system as the divinely appointed means for the salvation of +souls, and to impose once more on men's imaginations the mighty spell of +a hierarchical organisation, the direct representative of God in the +world's affairs. . . . Both he and Scott substantially ruined themselves +through their mediaevalism. Scott's luckless attempt was to place his +private and family life upon a feudal basis and to give it mediaeval +colour and beauty; Newman undertook a much nobler and more heroic but +more intrinsically hopeless task--that of re-creating the whole English +Church in harmony with mediaeval conceptions." [4] + +All this is most true, and yet it is easy to exaggerate the share which +romantic feeling had in the Oxford movement. In his famous apostrophe to +Oxford, Matthew Arnold personifies the university as a "queen of +romance," an "adorable dreamer whose heart has been so romantic," +"spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers +the last enchantments of the Middle Age," and "ever calling us nearer +to . . . beauty." Newman himself was a poet, as well as one of the +masters of English prose. The movement left an impress upon general +literature in books like Keble's "Christian Year" (1827) and "Lyra +Innocentium" (1847); in Newman's two novels, "Callista" and "Loss and +Gain" (1848), and his "Verses on Various Occasions" (1867); and even +found an echo in popular fiction. Grey in Hughes' "Tom Brown at Oxford" +represents the Puseyite set. Miss Yonge's "Heir of Redcliffe" and +Shorthouse's "John Inglesant" are surcharged with High-Church sentiment. +Newman said that Keble made the Church of England poetical. "The author +of 'The Christian Year' found the Anglican system all but destitute of +this divine element [poetry]; . . . vestments chucked off, lights +quenched, jewels stolen, the pomp and circumstances of worship +annihilated; . . . the royal arms for the crucifix; huge ugly boxes of +wood, sacred to preachers, frowning on the congregation in place of the +mysterious altar; and long cathedral aisles unused, railed off, like the +tombs (as they were) of what had been and was not." [5] Newman praises +in "The Christian Year" what he calls its "sacramental system"; and to +the unsympathetic reader it seems as though Keble saw all outdoors +through a stained-glass window. The movement had its aesthetic side, and +coincided with the revival of church Gothic and with the effort to make +church music and ritual richer and more impressive. But, upon the whole, +it was more intellectual than aesthetic, an affair of doctrine and church +polity rather than of ecclesiology; while the later phase of ritualism +into which it has tapered down appears to the profane to be largely a +matter of upholstery, given over to people who concern themselves with +the carving of lecterns and the embroidery of chasubles and altar cloths; +with Lent lilies, antiphonal choirs, and what Carlyle calls the "singular +old rubrics" of the English Church and the "three surplices at +All-Hallowmas." + +Newman was, above all things, a theologian; a subtle reasoner whose +relentless logic led him at last to Rome. "From the age of fifteen," he +wrote, "dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion; I know +no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of +religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery." +Discussions concerning church ceremonies, liturgy, ritual, he put aside +with some impatience. His own tastes were simple to asceticism. Mozley +says that Newman and Hurrell Froude induced several of the Oriel fellows +to discontinue the use of wine in the common room. "When I came up at +Easter, 1825, one of the first standing jokes against the college all +over the university was the Oriel tea-pot." [6] Dean Church testifies to +the plainness of the services at St. Mary's.[7] Aubrey de Vere reports +his urging Newman to make an expedition with him among the Wicklow +Mountains, and the latter's "answering with a smile that life was full of +work more important than the enjoyment of mountains and lakes. . . . The +ecclesiastical imagination and the mountain-worshipping imagination are +two very different things. Wordsworth's famous 'Tintern Abbey' describes +the river Wye, etc. . . . The one thing which it did not see was the +great monastic ruin; . . . and now here is this great theologian, who, +when within a few miles of Glendalough Lake, will not visit it." [8] + +There is much gentle satire in "Loss and Gain" at the expense of the +Ritualistic set in the university who were attracted principally by the +external beauty of the Roman Catholic worship. One of these is Bateman, +a solemn bore, who takes great interest in "candlesticks, ciboriums, +faldstools, lecterns, ante-pend turns, piscinas, roodlofts, and sedilia": +wears a long cassock which shows absurdly under the tails of his coat; +and would tolerate no architecture but Gothic in English churches, and no +music but the Gregorian. Bateman is having a chapel restored in pure +fourteenth-century style and dedicated to the Royal Martyr. He is going +to convert the chapel into a chantry, and has bought land about it for a +cemetery, which is to be decorated with mediaeval monuments in sculpture +and painting copied from the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa, of +which he has a portfolio full of drawings. "It will be quite sweet," he +says, "to hear the vesper-bell tolling over the sullen moor every +evening." Then there is White, a weak young aesthete who shocks the +company by declaring: "We have no life or poetry in the Church of +England; the Catholic Church alone is beautiful. You would see what I +mean if you went into a foreign cathedral, or even into one of the +Catholic churches in our large towns. The celebrant, deacon and +sub-deacon, acolytes with lights, the incense and the chanting all +combine to one end, one act of worship." White is much exercised by the +question whether a sacristan should wear the short or the long cotta. +But he finally marries and settles down into a fat preferment. + +Newman's sensitiveness to the beauty of Catholic religion is acute. "Her +very being is poetry," he writes. But equally acute is his sense of the +danger under which religion lies from the ministration of the arts, lest +they cease to be handmaids, and "give the law to Religion." Hence he +praises, from an ecclesiastical point of view, the service of the arts in +their rudimental state--the rude Gothic sculpture, the simple Gregorian +chant.[9] A similar indifference to the merely aesthetic aspects of +Catholicism is recorded of many of Newman's associates; of Hurrell +Froude, _e.g._, and of Ward. When Pugin came to Oxford in 1840 to +superintend some building at Balliol, he saw folio copies of St. +Buenaventura and Aquinas' "Summa Theologiae" lying on Ward's table, and +exclaimed, "What an extraordinary thing that so glorious a man as Ward +should be living in a room without mullions to the windows!" This being +reported to Ward, he asked, "What are mullions? I never heard of them." +Ward cared nothing about rood-screens and lancet windows; Newman and +Faber preferred the Palladian architecture to the Gothic.[10] Pugin, on +the other hand, who had been actually converted to the Roman Church +through his enthusiasm for pointed architecture; and who, when asked to +dinner, stipulated for Gothic puddings, for which he enclosed designs, +was greatly distressed at the carelessness about such matters which he +found at Oxford. A certain Dr. Cox was going to pray for the conversion +of England, in an old French cope. "What is the use," asked Pugin, "of +praying for the Church of England in that cope?" [11] + +Of the three or four hundred Anglican clergymen who went over with Newman +in 1845, or some years later with Manning, on the decision in the Gorham +controversy, few were influenced in any assignable degree by poetic +motives. "As regards my friend's theory about my imaginative sympathies +having led me astray," writes Aubrey de Vere, "I may remark that they had +been repelled, not attracted, by what I thought an excess of ceremonial +in the churches and elsewhere when in Italy. . . . It seemed to me too +sensuous." [12] Indeed, at the outset of the movement it was not the +mediaeval Church, but the primitive Church, the Church of patristic +discipline and doctrine, that appealed to the Tractarians. It was the +Anglican Church of the seventeenth century, the Church of Andrewes and +Herbert and Ken, to which Keble sought to restore the "beauty of +holiness"; and those of the Oxford party who remained within the +establishment continued true to this ideal. "The Christian Year" is the +genuine descendant of George Herbert's "Temple" (1632). What impressed +Newman's imagination in the Roman Catholic Church was not so much the +romantic beauty of its rites and observances as its imposing unity and +authority. He wanted an authoritative standard in matters of belief, a +faith which had been held _semper et ubique et ab omnibus_. The English +Church was an Elizabethan compromise. It was Erastian, a creature of the +state, threatened by the Reform Bill of 1832, threatened by every liberal +wind of opinion. The Thirty-nine Articles meant this to one man and that +to another, and there was no court of final appeal to say what they +meant. Newman was a convert not of his imagination, but of his longing +for consistency and his desire to believe. + +There is nothing romantic in either temper or style about Newman's poems, +all of which are devotional in subject, and one of which--"The Pillar of +the Cloud" ("Lead, Kindly Light") (1833)--is a favourite hymn in most +Protestant communions. The most ambitious of these is "The Dream of +Gerontius," a sort of mystery play which Sir Henry Taylor used to compare +with the "Divine Comedy." Indeed, none but Dante has more poignantly +expressed the purgatorial passion, the desire for pain, which makes the +spirits in the flames of purification unwilling to intermit their +torments even for a moment. The "happy, suffering soul" of Gerontius +lies before the throne of the Crucified and sings: + + "Take me away, and in the lowest deep + There let me be, + And there in hope the lone night-watches keep + Told out for me." [13] + +Some dozen years before the "Tracts for the Times" began to appear at +Oxford, a sporadic case of conversion at the sister university offers a +closer analogy with the catholicising process among the German romantics. +Kenelm Henry Digby, who took his degree at Trinity College in 1819, and +devoted himself to the study of mediaeval antiquities and scholastic +philosophy, was actually led into the Catholic fold by his enthusiasm for +the chivalry romances, as Pugin was by his love of Gothic architecture. +His singular book, "The Broad Stone of Honour," was first published in +1822, and repeatedly afterwards in greatly enlarged form. In its final +edition it consists of four books entitled respectively "Godefridus," +"Tancredus," "Morus" (Sir Thomas More), and "Orlandus," after four +representative paladins of Christian chivalry. The title of the whole +work was suggested by the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, the "Gibraltar of +the Rhine." Like Fouque, Digby was inspired by the ideal of knighthood, +but he emphasises not so much the gallantry of the knight-errant as his +religious character as the champion of Holy Church. The book is, loosely +speaking, an English "Genie du Christianisme," less brilliantly +rhetorical than Chateaubriand, but more sincerely devout. It is poetic +and descriptive rather than polemical, though the author constantly +expresses his dislike of modern civilisation, and complains with Burke +that this is an age of sophists, calculators, and economists. He quotes +profusely from German and French reactionaries, like Busching,[14] Fritz +Stolberg, Goerres, Friedrich Schlegel, Lamennais, and Joseph de Maistre, +and illustrates his topic at every turn from mediaeval chronicles, +legendaries, romances, and manuals of chivalry; from the lives of +Charlemagne, St. Louis, Godfrey of Bouillon, the Chevalier Bayard, St. +Anselm, King Rene, etc., and above all, from the "Morte Darthur." He +defends the Crusades, the Templars, and the monastic orders against such +historians as Muller, Sismondi, and Hume; is very contemptuous of the +Protestant concessions of Bishop Hurd's "Letters on Chivalry and +Romance";[15] and, in short, fights a brave battle against the artillery +of "the moderns" with weapons borrowed from "the armoury of the +invincible knights of old." The book is learned, though unsystematic and +discursive, but its most interesting feature is its curiously personal +note, its pure spirit of honour and Catholic piety. The enthusiasm of +the author extends itself from the institutes of chivalry and the Church +to the social and political constitution of the Middle Ages. He is +anti-democratic as well as anti-Protestant; upholds monarchy, nobility, +the interference of the popes in the affairs of kingdoms, and praises the +times when the doctrines of legislation and government all over Europe +rested on the foundations of the Church. + +A few paragraphs from "The Broad Stone of Honour" will illustrate the +author's entrance into the Church through the door of beauty, and his +identification of romantic art with "the art Catholic." "It is much to +be lamented," he writes, "that the acquaintance of the English reader +with the characters and events of the Middle Ages should, for the most +part, be derived from the writings of men who were either infidels, or +who wrote on every subject connected with religion, with the feelings and +opinions of Scotch Presbyterian preachers of the last century." [16] "A +distinguishing characteristic of everything belonging to the early and +Middle Ages of Christianity is the picturesque. Those who now struggle +to cultivate the fine arts are obliged to have recourse to the despised, +and almost forgotten, houses, towns, and dresses of this period. As soon +as men renounced the philosophy of the Church, it was inevitable that +their taste, that the form of objects under their control, should change +with their religion; for architects had no longer to provide for the love +of solitude, of meditation between sombre pillars, of modesty in +apartments with the lancet-casement. They were not to study duration and +solidity in an age when men were taught to regard the present as their +only concern. When nothing but exact knowledge was sought, the undefined +sombre arches were to be removed to make way for lines which would +proclaim their brevity, and for a blaze of light which might correspond +with the mind of those who rejected every proposition that led beyond the +reach of the senses. . . . So completely is it beyond the skill of the +painter or the poet to render bearable the productions of the +moderns, . . . and so fast are the poor neglected works of Christian +antiquity falling to ruin, that it is hard to conceive how the fine arts +can be cultivated after another century has elapsed; for when children +are taught in infant schools to love accounts from their cradle, and to +study political economy before they have heard of the Red Cross Knight or +the Wild Hunter, the manner and taste of such an age will smother the +sparks of nature." [17] The Church summoned all natural beauty to the +ministry of religion. "Flowers bloomed on the altars; men could behold +the blue heaven through those tall, narrow-pointed eastern windows of the +Gothic choir as they sat at vespers. . . . The cloud of incense breathed +a sweet perfume; the voice of youth was tuned to angelic hymns; and the +golden sun of the morning, shining through the coloured pane, cast its +purple or its verdant beam on the embroidered vestments and marble +pavement." [18] Or read the extended rhapsody which closes the first +volume, where, to counteract the attractions of classic lands, the author +passes in long review the sites and monuments of romance in England, +Germany, Spain, Italy, and France. Aubrey de Vere says that nothing had +been so "impressive, suggestive, and spiritually helpful" to him as +Newman's "Lectures on Anglican Difficulties" (1850), "with the exception +of the 'Divina Commedia' and Kenelm Digby's wholly uncontroversial 'Mores +Catholici'" (1831-40). + +THE STUDY OF MEDIAEVAL ART.--The correlation of romantic poetry, Catholic +worship, and mediaeval art has been indicated in the chapter upon the +Pre-Raphaelites, as well as in the foregoing section of the present +chapter. But the three departments have other tangential points which +should not pass without some further mention. The revival of Gothic +architecture which began with Horace Walpole[19] went on in an +unintelligent way through the eighteenth century. One of the queerest +monuments of this new taste--a successor on a larger scale to Strawberry +Hill--was Fonthill Abbey, near Salisbury, that prodigious folly to which +Beckford, the eccentric author of "Vathek," devoted a great share of his +almost fabulous wealth. It was begun in 1796, took nearly thirty years +in building, employed at one time four hundred and sixty men, and cost +over 273,000 pounds. Its most conspicuous feature was an octagonal tower +278 feet high, so ill constructed that it shortly tumbled down into a +heap of ruins.[20] + +The growing taste for mediaeval architecture was powerfully reinforced by +the popularity of Walter Scott's writings. But Abbotsford is evidence +enough of the superficiality of his own knowledge of the art; and during +the first half of the nineteenth century, Gothic design was applied not +to churches, but to the more ambitious classes of domestic architecture. +The country houses of the nobility and landed gentry were largely built +or rebuilt in what was known as the castellated style.[21] Meanwhile a +truer understanding of the principles of pointed architecture was being +helped by the publication of archaeological works like Britton's +"Cathedral Antiquities" (1814-35), Milner's "Treatise on Ecclesiastical +Architecture" (1811), and Rickman's "Ancient Examples of Gothic +Architecture" (1819). The parts of individual buildings, such as +Westminster Abbey and Lincoln Cathedral, were carefully studied and +illustrated with plans and sections drawn to scale, and measurement was +substituted for guesswork. But the real restorer of ecclesiastical +Gothic in England was Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, an enthusiast, nay, +a fanatic, in the cause; whose "Contrasts" (1836) is not only a landmark +in the history of the revival of mediaeval art, but a most instructive +illustration of the manner in which an aesthetic admiration of the Middle +Ages has sometimes involved an acceptance of their religious beliefs and +social principles. Three generations of this family are associated with +the rise of modern Gothic. The elder Pugin (Augustus Charles) was a +French _emigre_ who came to England during the Revolution, and gained +much reputation as an architectural draughtsman, publishing, among other +things, "Specimens of Gothic Architecture," in 1821. The son of A. W. N. +Pugin, Edward Welby (1834-73), also carried on his father's work as a +practical architect and a writer. + +Pugin joined the Roman Catholic Church just about the time when the +"Tracts for the Times" began to be issued. His "Contrasts: or a Parallel +between the Architecture of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" is +fiercely polemical, and displays all the zeal of a fresh convert. In the +preface to the second edition he says that "when this work was first +brought out [1836], the very name of Christian art was almost unknown"; +and he affirms, in a footnote, that in the whole of the national museum, +"there is not even one room, one _shelf_, devoted to the exquisite +productions of the Middle Ages." The book is a jeremiad over the +condition to which the cathedrals and other remains of English +ecclesiastical architecture had been reduced by the successive +spoliations and mutilations in the times of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and +Cromwell, and by the "vile" restorations of later days. It maintains the +thesis that pointed architecture is not only vastly superior +artistically, but that it is the only style appropriate to Christian +churches; "in it alone we find the faith of Christianity embodied and its +practices illustrated." Pugin denounces alike the Renaissance and the +Reformation, "those two monsters, revived Paganism and Protestantism." +There is no chance, he thinks, for a successful revival of Gothic except +in a return to Catholic faith. "The mechanical part of Gothic +architecture is pretty well understood, but it is the principles which +influenced ancient compositions, and the soul which appears in all the +former works, which is so lamentably deficient. . . . 'Tis they alone +that can restore pointed architecture to its former glorious state; +without it all that is done will be a tame and heartless copy." He +points out the want of sympathy between "these vast edifices" and the +Protestant worship, which might as well be carried on in a barn or +conventicle or square meeting-house. Hence, the nave has been blocked up +with pews, the choir or transept partitioned off to serve as a parish +church, roodloft and chancel screen removed, the altar displaced by a +table, and the sedilia scattered about in odd corners. The contrast +between old and new is strikingly presented, by way of object lessons, in +a series of plates, arranged side by side, and devised with a great deal +of satirical humour. There is, _e.g._, a Catholic town in 1440, rich +with its ancient stone bridge, its battlemented wall and city gate, and +the spires and towers of St. Marie's Abbey, the Guild Hall, Queen's +Cross, St. Cuthbert's Church, and the half-timbered, steep-roofed, gabled +houses of the burgesses. Over against it is the picture of the same town +in 1840, hideous with the New Jail, Gas Works, Lunatic Asylum, Wesleyan +Chapel, New Town Hall, Iron Works, Quaker Meeting-house, Socialist Hall +of Science, and other abominations of a prosperous modern industrial +community. Or there is the beautiful old western doorway of St. Mary +Overies, destroyed in 1838. The door stands invitingly open, showing the +noble interior with kneeling worshippers scattered here and there over +the unobstructed pavement. Opposite is the new door, grimly closed, with +a printed notice nailed upon it: "Divine Service on Sundays. Evening +lecture." A separate plate exhibits a single compartment of the old door +curiously carved in oak; and beside it a compartment of the new door in +painted deal and plain as a pike-staff. + +But the author is forced to confess that the case is not much better in +Catholic countries, where stained windows have been displaced by white +panes, frescoed ceilings covered with a yellow wash, and the "bastard +pagan style" introduced among the venerable sanctities of old religion. +English travellers return from the Continent disgusted with the tinsel +ornament and theatrical trumperies that they have seen in foreign +churches. "I do not think," he concludes, "the architecture of our +English churches would have fared much better under a Catholic +hierarchy. . . . It is a most melancholy truth that there does not exist +much sympathy of idea between a great portion of the present Catholic +body in England and their glorious ancestors. . . . Indeed, such is the +total absence of solemnity in a great portion of modern Catholic +buildings in England, that I do not hesitate to say that a few crumbling +walls and prostrate arches of a religious edifice raised during the days +of faith will convey a far stronger religious impression to the mind than +the actual service of half the chapels in England." + +In short, Pugin's Catholicism, though doubtless sincere, was prompted by +his professional feelings. His reverence was given to the mediaeval +Church, not to her--aesthetically--degenerate daughter; and it extended +to the whole system of life and thought peculiar to the Middle Ages. +"Men must learn," he wrote, "that the period hitherto called dark and +ignorant far excelled our age in wisdom, that art ceased when it is said +to have been revived, that superstition was piety, and bigotry faith." +In many of his views Pugin anticipates Ruskin. He did not like St. +Peter's at Rome, and said: "If those students who journey to Italy to +study art would follow the steps of the great Overbeck,[22] . . . they +would indeed derive inestimable benefit. Italian art of the thirteenth, +fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries is the beau ideal of Christian +purity, and its imitation cannot be too strongly inculcated; but when it +forsook its pure, mystical, and ancient types, to follow those of sensual +Paganism, it sunk to a fearful state of degradation." + +As a practising architect Pugin naturally received and executed many +commissions for Catholic churches. But the Catholic Church in England +did much less, even in proportion to its resources, than the Anglican +establishment towards promoting the Gothic revival. Eastlake says that +Pugin's "strength as an artist lay in the design of ornamental detail"; +and that he helped importantly in the revival of the mediaeval taste in +stained glass, metal work, furniture, carpets, and paper-hangings. +Several of his works have to do with various departments of ecclesiology; +chancel-screens, roodlofts, church ornaments, symbols and costumes, and +the like. But the only one that need here be mentioned is the once very +influential "True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture" +(1841). This revival of ecclesiastical Gothic fell in with the reform of +Anglican ritual, which was one of the features or sequences of the Oxford +movement, and the two tendencies afforded each other mutual support. + +Evidence of a newly awakened interest in mediaeval art is furnished by a +number of works of a more systematic character which appeared about the +middle of the century, dealing not only with architecture, but with the +early schools of sculpture and painting. One of these was "Sketches of +the History of Christian Art" (3 vols., 1847) by Alexander William +Crawford Lindsay, twenty-fifth Earl of Crawford. In the preface to the +reprint of this book in 1885, Lady Crawford speaks of it as a pioneer in +an "early time of unawakened interest." Ruskin refers to it +repeatedly--always with respect--and acknowledges in "Praeterita" that +Lord Lindsay knew a great deal more about Italian art than he himself +did. The book reviews in detail the works of Christian builders, +sculptors and painters, both in Italy and north of the Alps, from the +time of the Roman catacombs and basilicas down to the Renaissance. It +gives likewise a history of Christian mythology, iconography and +symbolism; all that great body of popular beliefs about angels, devils, +saints, martyrs, anchorites, miracles, etc., which Protestant iconoclasm +and the pagan spirit of the _cinque-cento_ had long ago swept into the +dust-bin as sheer idolatry and superstition. Lord Lindsay's treatment of +these matters is reverential, though his own Protestantism is proof +against their charm. His tone is moderate; he has no quarrel with the +Renaissance, and professes respect for classical art, which seems to him, +however, on a lower spiritual plane than the Christian. He remarks that +all mediaeval art was religious; the only concession to the secular being +found in the illuminations of some of the chivalry romances. Gothic +architecture was the expression of Teutonic genius, which is realistic +and stands for the reason, while Italian sacred painting was idealistic +and stands for the imagination. In the most perfect art, as in the +highest type of religion, reason and imagination are in balance. Hence, +the influence of Van Eyck, Memling, and Duerer on Italian painters was +wholesome; and the Reformation, the work of the reasoning Teutonic mind, +is not to be condemned. Reason is to blame only when it goes too far and +extinguishes imagination.[23] + +"The sympathies of the North, or of the Teutonic race, are with Death, as +those of the Southern, or classic, are with Life. . . . The exquisitely +beautiful allegorical tale of 'Sintram and His Companions' by La Motte +Fouque, was founded on the 'Knight and Death' of Albert Duerer, and I +cannot but think that Milton had the 'Melancholy' in his remembrance +while writing 'Il Penseroso.'" [24] The author thinks that, whatever may +be true of Gothic architecture--an art less national than +ecclesiastical--"sculpture and painting, on the one hand, and the spirit +of chivalry on the other, have usually flourished in an inverse ratio one +to the other, and it is not therefore in England, France, or Spain, but +among the free cities of Italy and Germany that we must look for their +rise." [25] I give these conclusions--so opposite to those of Catholic +mediaevalists like Digby and Pugin--because they illustrate the temper of +Lindsay's book. One more quotation I will venture to add for its +agreement with Uvedale Price's definition of the picturesque:[26] "The +picturesque in art answers to the romantic in poetry; both stand opposed +to the classic or formal school--both may be defined as the triumph of +nature over art, luxuriating in the decay, not of her elemental and +ever-lasting beauty, but of the bonds by which she had been enthralled by +man. It is only in ruin that a building of pure architecture, whether +Greek or Gothic, becomes picturesque." [27] + +Lord Lindsay's "Sketches" contained no illustrations. Mrs. Jameson's +very popular series on "Sacred and Legendary Art" was profusely +embellished with wood-cuts and etchings. The first number of the series, +"Legends of the Saints and Martyrs," was begun in 1842, but issued only +in 1848. "Legends of the Monastic Orders" followed in 1850; "Legends of +the Madonna" in 1852; and the "History of Our Lord" (completed by Lady +Eastlake) in 1860. Mrs. Jameson had an imperfect knowledge of technique, +and her work was descriptive rather than critical. But it probably did +more to enlist the interest of the general reader in Christian art than +Lord Lindsay's more learned volumes; or possibly even than the brilliant +but puzzling rhetoric of Ruskin. + +With Pugin's "Contrasts" began the "Battle of the Styles." This was soon +decided in Pugin's favour, so far as ecclesiastical buildings were +concerned. Fergusson, who is hostile to Gothic, admits that wherever +clerical influence extended, the style came into fashion. The Cambridge +Camden Society was founded in 1839 for the study of church architecture +and ritual, and issued the first number of its magazine, _The +Ecclesiologist_, in 1841. But the first national triumph for secular +Gothic was won when Barry's design for the new houses of Parliament was +selected from among ninety-seven competing plans. The corner-stone was +laid at Westminster in 1840, and much of the detail, as the work went on, +was furnished by Pugin. + +It was not long before the Gothic revival found an ally in the same great +writer who had already come forward as the champion of Pre-Raphaelite +painting. The masterly analysis of "The Nature of Gothic" in "The Stones +of Venice" (vol. i., 1851; vols. ii. and iii., 1853), and the eloquence +and beauty of a hundred passages throughout the three volumes, fascinated +a public which cared little about art, but knew good literature when they +saw it. Eastlake testifies that Ruskin had some practical influence on +English building. Young artists went to Venice to study the remains of +Italian Gothic, and the results of their studies were seen in the surface +treatment of many London facades, especially in the cusped window arches, +and in the stripes of coloured bricks which give a zebra-like appearance +to the architecture of the period. But, in general, working architects +were rather contemptuous of Ruskin's fine-spun theories, which they +ridiculed as fantastic, self-contradictory, and super-subtle; rhetoric or +metaphysics, in short, and not helpful art criticism. + +Ruskin's adhesion to Gothic was without compromise. It was "not only the +best, but the _only rational_ architecture." "I plead for the +introduction of the Gothic form into our domestic architecture, not +merely because it is lovely, but because it is the only form of faithful, +strong, enduring, and honourable building, in such materials as come +daily to our hands." [28] On the other hand, Roman architecture is +essentially base; the study of classical literature is "pestilent"; and +most modern building is the fruit of "the Renaissance poison tree." +"If . . . any of my readers should determine . . . to set themselves to +the revival of a healthy school of architecture in England, and wish to +know in few words how this may be done, the answer is clear and simple. +First, let us cast out utterly whatever is connected with the Greek, +Roman, or Renaissance architecture, in principle or in form. . . . The +whole mass of the architecture, founded on Greek and Roman models, which +we have been in the habit of building for the last three centuries, is +utterly devoid of all life, virtue, honourableness, or power of doing +good. It is base, unnatural, unfruitful, unenjoyable, and impious. +Pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralysed in its +old age." [29] + +Ruskin loved the religious spirit of the mediaeval builders, Byzantine, +Lombard, or Gothic; and the pure and holy faith of the early sacred +painters like Fra Angelico, Orcagna, and Perugino. He thought that +whatever was greatest even in Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo came +from their training in the old religious school, not from the new science +of the Renaissance. "Raphael painted best when he knew least." He +deplored the harm to Catholic and Protestant alike of the bitter +dissensions of the Reformation. But he sorrowfully acknowledged the +corruption of the ancient Church, and had no respect for modern Romanism. +Against the opinion that Gothic architecture was fitted exclusively for +ecclesiastical uses, he strongly protested. On the contrary, he advised +its reintroduction, especially in domestic building. "Most readers . . . +abandon themselves drowsily to the impression that Gothic is a peculiarly +ecclesiastical style. . . . The High Church and Romanist parties . . . +have willingly promulgated the theory that, because all the good +architecture that is now left is expressive of High Church or Romanist +doctrines, all good architecture ever has been and must be so--a piece of +absurdity. . . . Wherever Christian Church architecture has been good +and lovely, it has been merely the perfect development of the common +dwelling-house architecture of the period. . . . The churches were not +separated by any change of style from the buildings round them, as they +are now, but were merely more finished and full examples of a universal +style. . . . Because the Gothic and Byzantine styles are fit for +churches, they are not therefore less fit for dwellings. They are in the +highest sense fit and good for both, nor were they ever brought to +perfection except when they were used for both." [30] + +The influence of Walter Scott upon Ruskin is noteworthy. As a child he +read the Bible on Sundays and the Waverley Novels on week-days, and he +could not recall the time when either had been unknown to him. The +freshness of his pleasure in the first sight of the frescoes of the Campo +Santo he describes by saying that it was like having three new Scott +novels.[31] Ruskin called himself a "king's man," a "violent illiberal," +and a "Tory of the old-fashioned school, the school of Walter Scott." +Like Scott, he was proof against the religious temptations of +mediaevalism. "Although twelfth-century psalters are lovely and right," +he was not converted to Catholic teachings by his admiration for the art +of the great ages; and writes, with a touch of contempt, of those who are +"piped into a new creed by the squeak of an organ pipe." If Scott was +unclassical, Ruskin was anti-classical. The former would learn no Greek; +and the latter complained that Oxford taught him all the Latin and Greek +that he would learn, but did not teach him that fritillaries grew in +Iffley meadow.[32] Even that fondness for costume which has been made a +reproach against Scott finds justification with Ruskin. "The essence of +modern romance is simply the return of the heart and fancy to the things +in which they naturally take pleasure; and half the influence of the best +romances, of 'Ivanhoe,' or 'Marmion,' or 'The Crusaders,' or 'The Lady of +the Lake,' is completely dependent upon the accessories of armour and +costume." [33] Still Ruskin had the critical good sense to rate such as +they below the genuine Scotch novels, like "Old Mortality" and "The Heart +of Mid-Lothian"; and he is quite stern towards the melodramatic Byronic +ideal of Venice. "The impotent feelings of romance, so singularly +characteristic of this century, may indeed gild, but never save the +remains of those mightier ages to which they are attached like climbing +flowers, and they must be torn away from the magnificent fragments, if we +would see them as they stood in their own strength. . . . The Venice of +modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of +decay, a stage dream." [34] For it cannot be too often repeated that the +romance is not in the Middle Ages themselves, but in their strangeness to +our imagination. The closer one gets to them, the less romantic they +appear. + +MEDIEVAL SOCIAL IDEALS.--It is obvious how a fondness for the Middle +Ages, in a man of Scott's conservative temper, might confirm him in his +attachment to high Tory principles and to an aristocratic-feudal ideal of +society; or how, in an enthusiastic artist like Pugin, and a gentleman of +high-strung chivalric spirit like Sir Kenelm Digby, it might even lead to +an adoption of the whole mediaeval religious system. But it is not so +easy, at first sight, to understand why the same thing should have +conducted Ruskin and William Morris to opinions that were more "advanced" +than those of the most advanced Liberal. Orthodox economists looked upon +the theories put forward in Ruskin's "Unto this Last" (1860), "Munera +Pulveris" (1862-63), and "Fors Clavigera" (1871-84), as the +eccentricities of a distinguished art critic, disporting himself in +unfamiliar fields of thought. And when in 1883 the poet of "The Earthly +Paradise" joined the Democratic Federation, and subsequently the +Socialist League, and was arrested and fined one shilling and costs for +addressing open-air meetings, obstructing public highways, and striking +policemen, amusement was mingled with disapproval. What does this +dreamer of dreams and charming decorative artist in a London police court? + +But Socialism, though appearing on the face of it the most modern of +doctrines, is in a sense reactionary, like Catholicism, or +knight-errantry, or Gothic architecture. That is, those who protest +against the individualism of the existing social order are wont to +contrast it unfavourably with the principle of association which is found +everywhere in the Middle Ages. No mediaeval man was free or independent; +all men were members one of another. The feudal system itself was an +elaborate network of interdependent rights and obligations, in which +service was given in return for protection. The vassal did homage to his +lord--became his _homme_ or man--and his lord was bound to take care of +him. In theory, at least, every serf was entitled to a living. In +theory, too, the Church embraced all Christendom. None save Jews were +outside it or could get outside it, except by excommunication; which was +the most terrible of penalties, because it cut a man off from all +spiritual human fellowship. The same principle of co-operation prevailed +in mediaeval industry and commerce, organised into guilds of craftsmen +and trading corporations, which fixed the prices and quality of goods, +the number of apprentices allowed, etc. The manufacturer was not a +capitalist, but simply a master workman. Government was paternal and +interfered continually with the freedom of contract and the rights of the +individual. Here was where Carlyle took issue with modern Liberalism, +which proclaims that the best government is that which governs least. +According to the _laissez-faire_ doctrine, he said, the work of a +government is not that of a father, but of an active parish constable. +The duty of a government is to govern, but this theory makes it its duty +to refrain from governing. Not liberty is good for men, but obedience +and stern discipline under wise rulers, heroes, and heaven-sent kings. +Carlyle took no romantic view of the Middle Ages. He is rather +contemptuous of Scott's mediaeval-picturesque,[35] and his Scotch +Calvinism burns fiercely against the would-be restorers of mediaeval +religious formularies and the mummeries of "the old Pope of Rome"--a +ghastly survival of a dead creed.[36] He said that Newman had the brain +of a good-sized rabbit. But in this matter of collectivism versus +individualism, Carlyle was with the Middle Ages. "For those were rugged, +stalwart ages. . . . Gurth, born thrall of Cedric, it is like, got cuffs +as often as pork-parings; but Gurth did belong to Cedric; no human +creature then went about connected with nobody; left to go his way into +Bastilles or worse, under _Laissez-faire_. . . . That Feudal +Aristocracy, I say, was no imaginary one. . . . It was a Land +Aristocracy; it managed the Governing of this English People, and had the +reaping of the Soil of England in return. . . . Soldiering, Police and +Judging, Church-Extension, nay, real Government and Guidance, all this +was actually _done_ by the Holders of Land in return for their Land. How +much of it is now done by them; done by anybody? Good Heavens! +'_Laissez faire_, Do ye nothing, eat your wages and sleep,' is everywhere +the passionate half-wise cry of this time." [37] + +From 1850 onwards, in which year Ruskin made Carlyle's acquaintance, the +former fell under the dominion of these ideas, and began to preach a +species of Aristocratic Socialism.[38] He denounced competition and +profit-seeking in commerce; the factory system; the capitalistic +organisation of industry. His scheme of a regenerated society, however, +was by no means so democratic as that imagined by Morris in "News from +Nowhere." It was a "new feudalism" with a king at the head of it and a +rural nobility of "the great old families," whose relations to their +tenantry are not very clearly defined.[39] Ruskin took some steps +towards putting into practice his plans for a reorganisation of labour +under improved conditions. "Fors Clavigera" consisted of a series of +letters to workingmen, inviting them to join him in establishing a fund +for rescuing English country life from the tyranny and defilement of +machinery. In pursuance of this project, the St. George's Guild was +formed, about 1870, Ruskin devoting to it 7,000 pounds of his own money. +Trustees were chosen to administer the fund; a building was bought at +Walkley, in the suburbs of Sheffield, for use as a museum; and the money +subscribed was employed in promoting co-operative experiments in +agriculture, manufacturing, and education. + +In 1848 the widespread misery among the English working class, both +agricultural labourers and the operatives in cities, broke out in a +startling way in the Chartist movement. Sympathy with some of the aims +of this movement found literary expression in Charles Kingsley's novels, +"Yeast" and "Alton Locke", in his widely circulated tract, "Cheap Clothes +and Nasty"; in his letters in _Politics for the People_ over the +signature "Parson Lot"; in some of his ballads like "The Three Fishers"; +and in the writings of his friends, F. D. Maurice and Thomas Hughes. But +the Christian Socialism of these Broad Churchmen was by no means of the +mediaeval type. Kingsley was an exponent of "Muscular Christianity." He +hated the asceticism and sacerdotalism of the Oxford set, and challenged +the Tractarian movement with all his might.[40] Neither was this +Christian Socialism of a radical nature, like Morris'. It limited itself +to an endeavour to alleviate distress by an appeal to the good feeling of +the upper classes; and by setting on foot trade-unions, co-operative +societies, and workingmen's colleges. Kingsley himself, like Ruskin, +believed in a landed gentry; and like both Ruskin and Carlyle, he +defended Governor Eyre of Jamaica against the attacks of the radical +press.[41] + +Ruskin and Morris travelled to Socialism by the pathway of art. Carlyle +had early begun his complaints against the mechanical spirit of the age, +and its too great reliance on machinery in all departments of thought and +life.[42] But Ruskin made war on machinery for different reasons. As a +lover of the beautiful, he hated its ugly processes and products. As a +student of art, he mourned over the reduction of the handicraftsman to a +slave of the machine. Factories had poisoned the English sky with their +smoke, and blackened English soil and polluted English rivers with their +refuse. The railroad had spoiled Venice and vulgarised Switzerland. He +would like to tear up all the railroads in Wales and most of those in +England, and pull down the city of New York. He could not live in +America two months--a country without castles. Modern architecture, +modern dress, modern manufactures, modern civilisation, were all utterly +hideous. Worst of all was the effect on the workman, condemned by +competitive commercialism to turn out cheap goods, condemned by division +of labour to spend his life in making the eighteenth part of a pin. Work +without art, said Ruskin, is brutalising. To take pleasure in his work, +said Morris, is the workman's best inducement to labour and his truest +reward. In the Middle Ages every artisan was an artist; the art of the +Middle Ages was popular art. Now that the designer and the +handicraftsman are separate persons, the work of the former is unreal, +and of the latter merely mechanical. + +This point of view is eloquently stated in that chapter on "The Nature of +Gothic" in "The Stones of Venice," which made so deep an impression on +Morris when he was in residence at Oxford.[43] "It is verily this +degradation of the operative into a machine which, more than any other +evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into +vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they +cannot explain the nature to themselves. Their universal outcry against +wealth and against nobility is not forced from them either by the +pressure of famine or the sting of mortified pride. These do much, and +have done much in all ages; but the foundations of society were never yet +shaken as they are at this day. It is not that men are ill-fed, but that +they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and +therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not that +men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure +their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are +condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. . . . +We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilised +invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is +not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men--divided +into mere segments of men--broken into small fragments and crumbs of +life, so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man +is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the +point of a pin, or the head of a nail. . . . And the great cry that +rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, +is all, in very deed, for this--that we manufacture everything there +except men. . . . And all the evil to which that cry is urging our +myriads can be met only . . . by a right understanding, on the part of +all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and +making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or +beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the +workman." [44] + +Morris' contributions to the literature of Socialism include, besides his +romance, "News from Nowhere," two volumes of verse, "Poems by the Way" +(1891)and "The Dream of John Ball"; together with "Socialism: Its Growth +and Outcome" (1893), an historical sketch of the subject written in +collaboration with Mr. E. Belfort Bax. Mackail also describes a +satirical interlude, entitled "The Tables Turned, or Nupkins Awakened," +which was acted thrice at Farringden Road in the autumn of 1887--a +Socialistic farce in the form of a mediaeval miracle play--a conjunction +quite typical of the playwright's political principles and literary +preferences. Morris' ideal society, unlike Ruskin's, included no feudal +elements; there was no room in it for kings, or nobles, or great cities, +or a centralised government. It was primitive Teutonic rather than +mediaeval; resembling the communal type described in "The House of the +Wolfings." There were to be no more classes--no rich or poor. To +ordinary Socialists the reform means a fairer distribution of the joint +product of capital and labour; higher wages for the workingman, shorter +hours, better food and more of it, better clothes, better houses, more +amusements--in short, "beer and skittles" in reasonable amount. The +Socialism of Ruskin and Morris was an outcome of their aesthetic feeling. +They liked to imagine the work people of the future as an intelligent and +artistic body of handicraftsmen, living in pretty Gothic cottages among +gardens of their own, scattered all over England in small rural towns or +villages, and joyfully engaged in making sound and beautiful objects of +use, tools, furniture, woven goods, etc. To the followers of Mr. Hyndman +these motives, if not these aims, must have seemed somewhat unpractical. +And in reading "Fors Clavigera," one sometimes has a difficulty in +understanding just what sort of person Ruskin imagined the British +workman to be. + +THE NEO-ROMANTICISTS.--The literature of each new generation is apt to be +partly an imitation of the last, and partly a reaction against it. The +impulse first given by Rossetti was communicated, through Morris and +Swinburne, to a group of younger poets whom Mr. Stedman distinguishes as +"Neo-Romanticists." [45] The most noteworthy among these are probably +Arthur O'Shaughnessy,[46] John Payne,[47] and Theophile Marzials;[48] +though mention (want of space forbids more) should also be made of George +Augustus Simcox, whose "Poems and Romances" (1869) are in the +Pre-Raphaelite tradition. The work of each of these has pronounced +individuality; yet, as a whole, it reminds one continually now of +Rossetti, now of Morris, and again of Swinburne; not infrequently, too, +of Keats or Leigh Hunt, but never of the older romanticism, never of +Scott nor even of Coleridge or Tennyson. The reminder comes sometimes +through a turn of phrase or the trick of the verse; but more insistently +in the choice of subject and the entire attitude of the poet towards art +and life, an attitude that may be vaguely described as "aesthetic." Even +more distinctly than in Swinburne, English romanticism in these latest +representatives is seen to be taking a French direction. They show the +influence not only of Hugo and Gautier, but of those more recent schools +of "decadents" which exhibit French romanticism in its deliquescent +stage; writers like Theodore de Banville and Charles Baudelaire; books +like Aloysius Bertrand's "Gaspard de la Nuit." Morbid states of passion, +the hectic bloom of fever, heady perfumes of the Orient and the tropics; +the bitter-sweet blossom of love; forced fruits of the hot-house (_serres +chaudes_); the iridescence of standing pools; the fungoidal growths of +decay; such are some of the hackneyed metaphors which render the +impression of this neo-romantic poetry. + +Marzials was born at, Brussels, of French parents. His "Gallery of +Pigeons" is inscribed to the modern Provencal poet Aubanel, and +introduced by a French sonnet. O'Shaughnessy "was half a Frenchman in +his love for, and mastery of, the French language";[49] and on his +frequent visits to Paris, made close acquaintance with Victor Hugo and +the younger school of French poets. O'Shaughnessy and Payne were +intimate friends, and dedicated their first books to each other. In +1870-72 they were members of the literary circle that assembled at the +house of Ford Madox Brown, and there they met the Rossettis, Morris, +Swinburne, and William Bell Scott. O'Shaughnessy emerges most distinctly +from the group by reason of his very original and exquisite lyrical +gift--a gift not fully recognised till Mr. Palgrave accorded him, in the +second series of his "Golden Treasury" (1897), a greater number of +selections than any Victorian poet but Tennyson: a larger space than he +gave either to Browning or Rossetti or Matthew Arnold.[50] Comparatively +little of O'Shaughnessy's work belongs to the department of +mediaeval-romantic. His "Lays of France," five in number, are founded +upon the _lais_ of Marie de France, the Norman poetess of the thirteenth +century whose little fable, "Du coq et du werpil," Chaucer expanded into +his "Nonne Prestes Tale." O'Shaughnessy's versions are not so much +paraphrases as independent poems, following Marie's stories merely in +outline. + +The verse is the eight-syllabled couplet with variations and alternate +riming, the style follows the graceful, fluent simplicity of the Old +French; and in its softly articulated, bright-coloured prolixity, the +narrative frequently suggests "The Earthly Paradise" or "The Story of +Rimini." The most remarkable of these pieces is "Chaitivel," in which +the body of a bride is carried away by a dead lover, while another dead +lover comes back from his grave in Palestine and fights with the +bridegroom for possession of her soul. The song which the lady sings to +the buried man is true to that strange mediaeval materialism, the +cleaving of "soul's love" to "body's love," the tenderness intense that +pierces the "wormy circumstance" of the tomb, and refuses to let the dead +be dead, which was noted in Keats' "Isabella": + + "Hath any loved you well, down there, + Summer or winter through? + Down there, have you found any fair + Laid in the grave with you? + Is death's long kiss a richer kiss + Than mine was wont to be-- + Or have you gone to some far bliss + And quite forgotten me?" + +Of similar inspiration, but more pictorially and externally Gothic, are +such tales as "The Building of the Dream" and "Sir Floris" in Payne's +volume, "The Masque of Shadows." The former of these, introduced by a +quotation from Jehan du Mestre, is the history of a certain squire of +Poitou, who devotes himself to necromancy and discovers a spell in an old +Greek manuscript, whereby, having shod his horse with gold and ridden +seven days into the west, he comes to the enchanted land of Dame Venus +and dwells with her a season. But the bliss is insupportable by a +mortal, and he returns to his home and dies. The poem has analogies with +"The Earthly Paradise" and the Tannhaeuser legend. The ancient city of +Poitou, where the action begins, is elaborately described, with its "lazy +grace of old romance"; + + "Fair was the place and old + Beyond the memory of man, with roofs + Tall-peak'd and hung with woofs + Of dainty stone-work, jewell'd with the grace + Of casements, in the face + Of the white gables inlaid, in all hues + Of lovely reds and blues. + At every corner of the winding ways + A carven saint did gaze, + With mild sweet eyes, upon the quiet town, + From niche and shrine of brown; + And many an angel, graven for a charm + To save the folk from harm + Of evil sprites, stood sentinel above + High pinnacle and roof." + +"Sir Floris" is an allegorical romaunt founded on a passage in "Le +Violier des Histoires Provenciaux." The dedication, to the author of +"Lohengrin," praises Wolfram von Eschenbach, the poet of "Parzival," as +"the sweetest of all bards." Sir Floris, obeying a voice heard in sleep, +followed a white dove to an enchanted garden, where he slew seven +monsters, symbolic of the seven deadly sins; from whose blood sprang up +the lily of chastity, the rose of love, the violet of humility, the +clematis of content, the marigold of largesse, the mystic marguerite, and +the holy vervain "that purgeth earth's desire." Sir Galahad then carries +him in a magic boat to the Orient city of Sarras, where the Grail is +enshrined and guarded by a company of virgin knights, Percival, +Lohengrin, Titurel, and Bors. Sir Floris sees the sacred chalice--a +single emerald--lays his nosegay upon the altar, witnesses the mystery of +the eucharist, and is kissed upon the mouth by Christ. This poet is fond +of introducing old French words "to make his English sweet upon his +tongue"; _accueillade_, _valiantise_, _faineant_, _allegresse_, +_gentilesse_, _forte et dure_, and occasionally a phrase like _dieu vous +doint felicite_. Payne's ballads are less characteristic.[51] Perhaps +the most successful of them is "The Rime of Redemption"--in "The Masque +of Shadows" volume. Sir Loibich's love has died in her sins, and he sits +by the fire in bitter repentance. He hears the voice of her spirit +outside in the moonlight, and together they ride through the night on a +black steed, first to Fairyland, then to Purgatory, and then to the gate +of Heaven. Each of these in turn is offered him, but he rejects them +all-- + + "With thee in hell, I choose to dwell"-- + +and thereby works her redemption. The wild night ride has an obvious +resemblance to "Lenore": + + "The wind screams past; they ride so fast, + Like troops of souls in pain + The snowdrifts spin, but none may win + To rest upon the twain." + +Very different from these, and indeed with no pretensions to the formal +peculiarities of popular minstrelsy, is O'Shaughnessy's weird ballad +"Bisclaveret," [52] suggested by the superstition concerning were-wolves: + + "The splendid fearful herds that stray + By midnight"-- + "The multitudinous campaign + Of hosts not yet made fast in Hell." + +_Bisclaveret_ is the Breton word for _loup garou_; and the poem is headed +with a caption to this effect from the "Lais" of Marie. The wild, +mystical beauty of which the Celtic imagination holds the secret is +visible in this lyrist; but it would perhaps be going too far to +attribute his interest in the work of Marie de France to a native +sympathy with the song spirit of that other great branch of the Celtic +race, the ancient Cymry. + +Payne's volume of sonnets, "Intaglios" (a title perhaps prompted by the +chiselled workmanship of Gautier's "Emaux et Camees") bears the clearest +marks of Rossetti's influence--or of the influence of Dante through +Rossetti. The inscription poem is to Dante, and the series named +"Madonna dei Sogni" is particularly full of the imagery and sentiment of +the "Purgatorio" and the "Vita Nuova." Several of the sonnets in the +collection are written for pictures, like Rossetti's. Two are on +Spenserian subjects, "Belphoebe" and "The Garden of Adonis", and one, +"Bride-Night" is suggested by Wagner's "Tristram und Isolde." Payne's +work as a translator is of importance, and includes versions of the +"Decameron," "The Thousand and One Nights," and the poems of Francois +Villon, all made for the Villon Society. + +Jewels and flowers are set thickly enough in the pages of all this +school; but it is in Theophile Marzials' singular, yet very attractive, +verses that the luxurious colour in which romance delights, and the +decorative features of Pre-Raphaelite art run into the most _bizarre_ +excesses. He wantons in dainty affectations of speech and eccentricities +of phantasy. Here we find again the orchard closes, the pleached +pleasances, and all those queer picture paradises, peopled with tall +lilied maidens, angels with peacock wings and thin gold hoops above their +heads, and court minstrels thrumming lutes, rebecks, and mandolins-- + + "I dreamed I was a virginal-- + The gilt one of Saint Cecily's." + +The book abounds in nocturnes, arabesques, masquerades, bagatelles, +rococo pastorals. The lady in "The Gallery of Pigeons" sits at her +broidery frame and works tapestries for her walls. At night she sleeps +in the northern tower where + + "Above all tracery, carven flower, + And grim gurgoil is her bower-window"; + +and higher up a griffin clings against a cornice, + + "And gnashes and grins in the green moonlight," + +and higher still, the banderolle flutters + + "At the top of the thinnest pinnacle peak." + +In a Pre-Raphaelite heaven the maidens sit in the blessed mother's +chamber and spin garments for the souls in Limbo, or press sweet wine for +the sacrament, or illuminate missals with quaint phantasies. Mr. Stedman +quotes a few lines which he says have the air of parody: + + "They chase them each, below, above,-- + Half madden'd by their minstrelsy,-- + Thro' garths of crimson gladioles; + And, shimmering soft like damoisels, + The angels swarm in glimmering shoals, + And pin them to their aureoles, + And mimick back their ritournels." + +This reads, indeed, hardly less like a travesty than the well-known +verses in _Punch_: + + "Glad lady mine, that glitterest + In shimmer of summer athwart the lawn; + Canst tell me whether is bitterest, + The glamour of eve, or the glimmer of dawn?" + +This stained-glass imagery was so easy to copy that, before long, citoles +and damoisels and aureoles and garths and glamours and all the rest of +the picturesque furniture grew to be a burden. The artistic movement had +invaded dress and upholstery, and Pre-Raphaelitism tapered down into +aestheticism, domestic art, and the wearing of sunflowers. Du Maurier +became its satirist; Bunthorn and Postlethwaite presented it to the +philistine understanding in a grotesque mixture of caricature and +quackery. + +THE REACTION.--Literary epochs overlap at the edges, and contrasting +literary modes coexist. There was some romantic poetry written in Pope's +time; and in the very heat and fury of romantic predominance, Landor kept +a cool chamber apart, where incense was burned to the ancient gods.[53] +But it is the master current which gives tinge and direction to lesser +confluents; and romanticism may be said to have had everything its own +way down to the middle of the century. Then reaction set in and the +stream of romantic tendency ceased to spread itself over the whole +literary territory, but flowed on in the narrower and deeper channels of +Pre-Raphaelitism and its allied movements. This reaction expressed +itself in different ways, of which it will be sufficient here to mention +three: realistic fiction, classical criticism, and the Queen Anne revival. + +The leading literary form of the past fifty years has been the novel of +real life. The failure of "Les Burgraves" in 1843 not more surely +signalised the end of French romanticism, than the appearance of "Vanity +Fair" in 1848 announced that in England, too, the reign of romance was +over. Classicism had given way before romanticism, and now romanticism +in turn was yielding to realism. Realism sets itself against that desire +of escape from actual conditions into an ideal world, which is a note of +the romantic spirit in general; and consequently it refuses to find the +past any more interesting than the present, and has no use for the Middle +Ages. The temperature, too, had cooled; not quite down to the Augustan +grade, yet to a point considerably below the fever heat registered by the +emotional thermometer of the late Georgian era. Byron's contemporaries +were shocked by his wickedness and dazzled by his genius. They +remonstrated admiringly with him; young ladies wept over his poetry and +prayed for the poet's conversion. But young university men of +Thackeray's time discovered that Byron was a _poseur_; Thackeray himself +describes him as "a big, sulky dandy." "The Sorrows of Werther," which +made people cry in the eighteenth century, made Thackeray laugh; and he +summed it up in a doggerel ballad: + + "Charlotte was a married woman + And a moral man was Werther, + And for nothing in creation + Would do anything to hurt her." + + * * * * * + + "Charlotte, having seen his body + Borne before her on a shutter, + Like a well-conducted woman, + Went on cutting bread and butter." + +Mr. Howells in Venice sneers at Byron's theatrical habit of riding +horseback on the Lido in "conspicuous solitude," as recorded in "Julian +and Maddalo." He notices the local traditions about Byron--a window from +which one of his mistresses was said to have thrown herself into the +canal, etc.--and confesses that these matters interest him very little. + +As to the Walter Scott kind of romance, we know what Mr. Howells thinks +of it; and have read "Rebecca and Rowena," Thackeray's travesty of +"Ivanhoe." Thackeray took no print from the romantic generation; he +passed it over, and went back to Addison, Fielding, Goldsmith, Swift. +His masters were the English humourists of the eighteenth century. He +planned a literary history of that century, a design which was carried +out on other lines by his son-in-law, Leslie Stephen. If he wrote +historical novels, their period was that of the Georges, and not of +Richard the Lion Heart. It will not do, of course, to lay too much +stress on Thackeray, whose profession was satire and whose temper purely +anti-romantic. But if we turn to the leaders of the modern schools of +fiction, we shall find that some of them, like George Eliot and Anthony +Trollope, are even more closely realistic than Thackeray--who, says Mr. +Howells, is a caricaturist, not a true realist--and of others such as +Dickens and Meredith, we shall find that, in whatever way they deviate +from realism as strictly understood, it is not in the direction of +romance. + +In Matthew Arnold's critical essays we meet with a restatement of +classical principles and an application of them to the literature of the +last generation. There was something premature, he thinks, about the +burst of creative activity in the first quarter of the nineteenth +century. Byron was empty of matter, Shelley incoherent, Wordsworth +wanting in completeness and variety. He finds much to commend in the +influence of a literary tribunal like the French Academy, which embodies +that ideal of authority so dear to the classical heart. Such an +institution acts as a salutary check on the lawlessness, eccentricity, +self-will, and fantasticality which are the besetting intellectual sins +of Englishmen. It sets the standard and gives the law. "Work done after +men have reached this platform is _classical_; and that is the only work +which, in the long run, can stand." For want of some such organ of +educated opinion, to take care of the qualities of order, balance, +measure, propriety, correctness, English men of genius like Ruskin and +Carlyle, in their national impatience of prescription and routine, run on +into all manner of violence, freak, and extravagance. + +Again, in the preface of the 1853 edition of his poems, Arnold asserts +the superiority of the Greek theory of poetry to the modern. "They +regarded the whole; we regard the parts. With them the action +predominated over the expression of it; with us the expression +predominates over the action. . . . We have poems which seem to exist +merely for the sake of single lines and passages; not for the sake of +producing any total impression." + +"Faust" itself, judged as a whole, is defective. Failing a sure guide, +in the confusion of the present times, the wisest course for the young +writer is to fix his attention upon the best models. But Shakspere is +not so safe a model as the ancients. He has not their purity of method, +and his gift of expression sometimes leads him astray. "Mr. Hallam, than +whom it is impossible to find a saner and more judicious critic, has had +the courage (for at the present day it needs courage) to remark, how +extremely and faultily difficult Shakspere's language often is." Half a +century earlier it would have needed courage to question Hallam's remark; +but the citation shows how thoroughly Coleridge and Hazlitt and Lamb had +shifted the centre of orthodoxy in matters of Shaksperian criticism. +_Now_ the presumption was against any one who ventured a doubt of +Shakspere's impeccability. The romantic victory was complete. "But, I +say," pursues the essayist, "that in the sincere endeavour to learn and +practise . . . what is sound and true in poetical art, I seemed to myself +to find the only sure guidance, the only solid footing, among the +ancients." All this has a familiar look to one at all read in +eighteenth-century criticism; but in 1853 it sounds very much like heresy. + +As an instance of the inferiority of romantic to classical method in +narrative poetry, Arnold refers to Keats' "Isabella." [54] "This one +short poem contains, perhaps, a greater number of happy single +expressions which one could quote than all the extant tragedies of +Sophocles. But the action, the story? The action in itself is an +excellent one; but so feebly is it conceived by the poet, so loosely +constructed, that the effect produced by it, in and for itself, is +absolutely null. Let the reader, after he has finished the poem of +Keats, turn to the same story in the 'Decameron'; he will then feel how +pregnant and interesting the same action has become in the hands of a +great artist who, above all things, delineates his object; who +subordinates expression to that which it is designed to express." + +A sentence or two from Arnold's essay on Heinrich Heine, and we may leave +this part of our subject. "Mr. Carlyle attaches, it seems to me, far too +much importance to the romantic school of Germany--Tieck, Novalis, Jean +Paul Richter. . . . The mystic and romantic school of Germany lost +itself in the Middle Ages, was overpowered by their influence, came to +ruin by its vain dreams of renewing them. Heine, with a far profounder +sense of the mystic and romantic charm of the Middle Age than Goerres, or +Brentano, or Arnim; Heine, the chief romantic poet of Germany, is yet +also much more than a romantic poet; he is a great modern poet, he is not +conquered by the Middle Age, he has a talisman by which he can feel, +along with but above the power of the fascinating Middle Age itself, the +power of modern ideas." + +And, finally, the oscillation of the pendulum has brought us back again +for a moment to the age of gayety, and to that very Queen Anne spirit +against which the serious and sentimental Thomson began the revolt. +There is not only at present a renewed appreciation of what was admirable +in the verse of Pope and the prose of Swift, but we discover a quaint +attractiveness in the artificiality of Augustan manners, dress, and +speech. Lace and brocade, powder and patch, Dutch gardens, Reynolds' +portraits, Watteau fans, Dresden china, the sedan chair, the spinet, the +hoop-skirt, the _talon rouge_--all these have receded so far into the +perspective as to acquire picturesqueness. To Scott's generation they +seemed eminently modern and prosaic, while buff jerkins and coats of mail +were poetically remote. But so the whirligig of time brings in its +revenges, and the old-fashioned, as distinguished from the antique, +begins to have a romanticness of its own. It is now some quarter century +since people took to building Queen Anne cottages, and gentlemen at +costume parties to treading minuets in small clothes and perukes, with +ladies in high-cushioned hair and farthingales. Girl babies in large +numbers were baptised Dorothy and Belinda. Book illustrators like Kate +Greenaway, Edwin Abbey, and Hugh Thomson carried the mode into art. The +date of the Queen Anne revival in literature and the beginnings of the +_bric-a-brac_ school of verse are marked with sufficient precision by the +publication of Austin Dobson's "Vignettes in Rhyme" (1873), "Proverbs in +Porcelain" (1877), and the other delightful volumes of the same kind that +have followed. Mr. Dobson has also published, in prose, lives of Steele, +Fielding, Hogarth, and Goldsmith; "Eighteenth-Century Vignettes," and the +like. But his particular ancestor among the Queen Anne wits was Matthew +Prior, of whose metrical tales, epigrams, and _vers de societe_ he has +made a little book of selections, and whose gallantry, lightness, and +tone of persiflage, just dashed with sentiment, he has reproduced with +admirable spirit in his own original work. + +It was upon the question of Pope that romantics and classics first joined +issue in the time of Warton, and that the critical battle was fought in +the time of Bowles and Byron; the question of his real place in +literature, and of his title to the name of poet. Mr. Dobson has a word +to say for Pope, and with this our enquiries may fittingly end: + + "Suppose you say your Worst of POPE, declare + His Jewels Paste, his Nature a Parterre, + His Art but Artifice--I ask once more + Where have you seen such artifice before? + Where have you seen a Parterre better grac'd, + Or gems that glitter like his Gems of Paste? + Where can you show, among your Names of Note, + So much to copy and so much to quote? + And where, in Fine, in all our English Verse, + A Style more trenchant and a Sense more terse?" + + "So I, that love the old Augustan Days + Of formal courtesies and formal Phrase; + That like along the finish'd Line to feel + The Ruffle's Flutter and the Flash of Steel; + That like my Couplet as Compact as Clear; + That like my Satire sparkling tho' severe, + Unmix'd with Bathos and unmarr'd by trope, + I fling my Cap for Polish--and for POPE!" [55] + +But ground once gained in a literary movement is never wholly lost; and a +reversion to an earlier type is never complete. The classicism of +Matthew Arnold is not at all the classicism of the eighteenth century; +Thackeray's realism is not the realism of Fielding. It is what it is, +partly just because Walter Scott had written his Waverley Novels in the +mean while. Apart from the works for which it is directly responsible, +the romantic movement had enriched the blood of the literature, and its +results are seen even in writings hostile to the romantic principles. As +to the absolute value of the great romantic output of the nineteenth +century, it may be at once acknowledged that, as "human documents," books +which reflect contemporary life have a superior importance to the +creations of the modern imagination, playing freely over times and places +distant, and attractive through their distance; over ancient Greece or +the Orient or the Middle Age. But that a very beautiful and quite +legitimate product of literary art may spring from this contact of the +present with the past, it is hoped that our history may have shown. + + +[1] See vol. i., pp. 31-32. + +[2] "Apologia pro Vita Sua," p. 139. + +[3] "It would require the . . . magic pen of Sir Walter to catalogue and +to picture . . . that most miserable procession" ("Callista: a Sketch of +the Third Century," 1855; chapter, "Christianos ad Leones"). It is +curious to compare this tale of the early martyrs, Newman's solitary +essay in historical romance, with "Hypatia." It has the intellectual +refinement of everything that came from its author's pen; and it has +strong passages like the one describing the invasion of the locusts. +But, upon the whole, Newman was as inferior to Kingsley as a novelist as +he was superior to him in the dialectics of controversy. + +[4] See the entire section "Selections from Newman," by Lewis G. Gates, +New York, 1895. Introduction, pp. xlvi-lix. + +[5] "Essays Critical and Historical" (1846). + +[6] "Reminiscences," Thomas Mozley, Boston, 1882. + +[7] "Life and Letters of Dean Church," London, 1894. + +[8] "Recollections of Aubrey de Vere," London, 1897. + +[9] "Idea of a University" (1853). See also in "Parochial and Plain +Sermons" the discourse on "The Danger of Accomplishments," and that on +"The Gospel Palaces." In the latter he writes, speaking of the +cathedrals: "Unhappy they who, while they have eyes to admire, admire +them only for their beauty's sake; . . . who regard them as works of art, +not fruits of grace." + +[10] Cardinal Wiseman had a decided preference for Renaissance over +Gothic, and the churches built under his authority were mostly in Italian +styles. + +[11] "William George Ward and the Oxford Movement," London, 1889, pp. +153-55. + +[12] "Recollections," p. 309. + +[13] Frederick William Faber, one of the Oxford men who went over with +Newman in 1845, and became Superior of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, +was a religious poet of some distinction. A collection of his hymns was +published in 1862. + +[14] "Ritterzeit und Ritterwesen." + +[15] See vol. i., pp. 221-26. + +[16] Vol. i., p. 44 (ed. 1846). + +[17] _Ibid._, pp. 315-16. + +[18] _Ibid._, p. 350. + +[19] See vol. i., chap. vii., "The Gothic Revival." + +[20] A view of Fonthill Abbey, as it appeared in 1822, is given in +Fergusson's "History of Modern Architecture," vol. ii., p. 98 (third ed.). + +[21] For Scott's influence on Gothic see Eastlake's "Gothic Revival," pp. +112-16. A typical instance of this castellated style in America was the +old New York University in Washington Square, built in the thirties. +This is the "Chrysalis College" which Theodore Winthrop ridicules in +"Cecil Dreeme" for its "mock-Gothic" pepper-box turrets, and "deciduous +plaster." Fan traceries in plaster and window traceries in cast iron +were abominations of this period. + +[22] _Vide supra_, p. 153. + +[23] "A blast from the icy jaws of Reason, the wolf Fenris of the +Teutonic mind, swept one and all into the Limbo of oblivion--that sole +ante-chamber spared by Protestantism in spoiling Purgatory. Perhaps this +was necessary and inevitable. If we would repair the column, we must cut +away the ivy that clings around the shaft, the flowers and brushwood that +conceal the base; but it does not follow that, when the repairs are +completed, we should isolate it in a desert,--that the flowers and +brushwood should not be allowed to grow up and caress it as before" (vol. +ii., p. 380, second ed.). + +[24] Vol. ii., p. 364, _note_; and _vide supra_, p. 152. + +[25] _Ibid._, p. 289. + +[26] _Vide supra_, p. 34. + +[27] _Ibid._, p. 286, _note_. + +[28] "Stones of Venice," vol. ii., p. 295 (American ed. 1860). + +[29] _Ibid._, vol. iii., p. 213. + +[30] _Ibid._, vol. ii., pp. 109-14. + +[31] See the final instalment of "Praeterita" for an extended eulogy of +Scott's verse and prose. + +[32] "I know what white, what purple fritillaries + The grassy harvest of the river-fields + Above by Ensham, down by Sandford, yields." + --Matthew Arnold, "Thyrsis." + +[33] "Stones of Venice," vol. iii., p. 211. + +[34] _Ibid._, vol. ii., p. 4. + +[35] _Vide supra_, p. 35. + +[36] "I reckon him the remarkablest Pontiff that has darkened God's +daylight. . . . Here is a Supreme Priest who believes God to be--what, +in the name of God, _does_ he believe God to be?--and discerns that all +worship of God is a scenic phantasmagory of wax-candles, organ-blasts, +Gregorian chants, mass-brayings, purple monsignori, etc." ("Past and +Present," Book iii., chap. i.). + +[37] Ibid., Book iv., chap. i. + +[38] With Morris, too, when an Oxford undergraduate, "Carlyle's 'Past and +Present,'" says his biographer, "stood alongside of 'Modern Painters' as +inspired and absolute truth." + +[39] For a systematic exposition of Ruskin's social and political +philosophy, the reader should consult "John Ruskin, Social Reformer," by +J. A. Hobson, London, 1898. + +[40] _Vide supra_, pp. 279, 280. + +[41] For a number of years, beginning with 1854, Ruskin taught drawing +classes in Maurice's Working Man's College. + +[42] See "Characteristics" and "Signs of the Times." + +[43] _Vide supra_, p. 321. + +[44] Vol. ii., chap. vi., section xv., xvi. Morris reprinted the whole +chapter on the Kelmscott Press. + +[45] "Victorian Poets," chap. vii., section vi. + +[46] "An Epic of Women" (1870); "Lays of France" (1872); "Music and +Moonlight" (1874); "Songs of a Worker" (1881). + +[47] "A Masque of Shadows" (1870): "Intaglios" (1871); "Songs of Life and +Death" (1872); "Lautrec" (1878); "New Poems" (1880). + +[48] "A Gallery of Pigeons" (1873). + +[49] "Arthur O'Shaughnessy." By Louise Chandler-Moulton, Cambridge and +Chicago, 1894. + +[50] Swinburne, as a living author, is not represented in the "Treasury." +O'Shaughnessy's metrical originality is undoubted. But one of his finest +lyrics, "The Fountain of Tears," has an echo of Baudelaire's American +master, Edgar Poe, as well as of Swinburne; + + "Very peaceful the place is, and solely + For piteous lamenting and sighing, + And those who come living or dying + Alike from their hopes and their fears: + Full of cypress-like shadows the place is, + And statues that cover their faces; + But out of the gloom springs the holy + And beautiful Fountain of Tears." + +[51] See especially "Sir Erwin's Questing," "The Ballad of May Margaret," +"The Westward Sailing," and "The Ballad of the King's Daughter" in "Songs +of Life and Death." + +[52] In "An Epic of Women." + +[53] "From time to time bright spirits, intolerant of the traditional, +try to alter the bournes of time and space in these respects, and to make +out that the classical, whatever the failings on its part, was always in +its heart rather Romantic, and that the Romantic has always, at its best, +been just a little classical. . . . But such observations are only of +use as guards against a too wooden and matter-of-fact classification; the +great general differences of the periods remain, and can never be removed +in imagination without loss and confusion" ("A Short History of English +Literature," Saintsbury, p. 724). + +[54] _Vide supra_, pp. 123-25. + +[55] "A Dialogue to the Memory of Mr. Alexander Pope." + + + +THE END. + + + + + BIBLIOGRAPHY. + + Allingham, William. "Irish Songs and Poems." London + and New York, 1893. + Arnim, Ludwig Joachim von. Selections in Koch's "Deutsche + National Litteratur." Stuttgart, 1891. Vol. cxlvi. + Arnim, Ludwig Joachim [and Brentano]. "Des Knaben + Wunderhorn." Wiesbaden and Leipzig, 1874-76. 2 vols. + Arnold, Matthew. "Essays in Criticism." London, 1895. + ---------- "On the Study of Celtic Literature." London, 1893. + ---------- Poems. London, 1877. 2 vols. + Austin, Sarah. "Fragments from German Prose Writers." + London, 1841. + + Balzac, Honore de. 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London, 1877. 2 vols. + + Lindsay, A. W. C., Earl of Crawford. "Sketches of the + History of Christian Art." London, 1885. 2 vols. + Lockhart, J. G. "Ancient Spanish Ballads." New York, 1842. + ---------- "Life of Scott." Boston and Philadephia, 1837-38. + 7 vols. + Longfellow, H. W. "Hyperion." Boston, 1875. + ---------- Poetical Works. Boston, 1889. 6 vols. + ---------- "Poets and Poetry of Europe." Philadelphia, 1845. + ---------- "The Divine Comedy of Dante." (Trans.) Boston, + 1867. 3 vols. + + Macaulay, T. B. "Milton." _Edinburgh Review_. August, 1825. + Mackail, W. J. "The Life of William Morris." London, 1899. + McLaughlin, E. T. "Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature." + New York and London, 1894. + Maigron, Louis. "Le Roman Historique a l'Epoque Romantique." + Paris, 1898. + Marzials, Theophile. "The Gallery of Pigeons." London, 1873. + Meinhold, J. W. "Mary Schweidler, the Amber Witch." (Trans.) + New York, 1845. + Milnes, R. M., Lord Houghton. "Life and Letters of John + Keats." New York, 1848. + Morris, William. "Hopes and Fears for Art." Boston, 1882. + ---------- "Love is Enough." Boston, 1873. + ---------- "News from Nowhere." London, 1891. + ---------- "Old French Romances." (Trans.) New York, 1896. + ---------- [and E. B. Bax]. "Socialism." London, 1896. + ---------- "The Defence of Guenevere." London, 1875. + ---------- "The Earthly Paradise." Boston, 1868-71. 3 vols. + ---------- "The Life and Death of Jason." Boston, 1867. + ---------- "The Story of Sigurd the Volsung." Boston, 1877. + ---------- See p. 337 for list of prose romances. + Motherwell, William. "Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern." + Glasgow, 1827. + Moulton, L. C. "Arthur O'Shaughnessy." Cambridge and + Chicago, 1894. + Musset, L. C. A. de. Oeuvres Completes. Paris, 1881. + + Newman, J. H. "Callista." London, 1873. + ---------- "Essays, Critical and Historical." London, 1872. + 2 vols. + ---------- "Loss and Gain." London, 1881. + ---------- "Parochial and Plain Sermons." London, 1873-91. + 8 vols. + ---------- "Verses on Various Occasions." London, 1883. + Novalis (F. L. von Hardenberg). "Henry of Ofterdingen." + (Trans.) Cambridge, 1842. + ---------- "Hymns to the Night," etc. (trans. of George + MacDonald), in "Rampolli." London and New York, 1897. + + O'Shaughnessy, Arthur. "An Epic of Women." London, 1870. + ---------- "Lays of France." London, 1874. + ---------- "Music and Moonlight." London, 1874. + + Palgrave, F. T. "The Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrical + Poems." Cambridge, 1863. Second Series, New York, 1897. + Parsons, T. W. "The Divine Comedy of Dante." (Trans.) + Boston, 1893. + Pater, Walter. "Appreciations." London, 1889. + Payne, John. "Intaglios." London, 1884. + ---------- "Lautrec." London, 1878. + ---------- "New Poems." London, 1880. + ---------- "Songs of Life and Death." London, 1884. + ---------- "The Masque of Shadows." London, 1884. + Petit de Julleville, Louis. "Histoire de la Litterature + Francaise." Paris, 1896-99. 8 vols. + Price, Sir Uvedale. "Essays on the Picturesque." London, 1810. + 3 vols. + Pugin, A. N. W. "Contrasts." Edinburgh, 1898. + ---------- "The True Principles of Pointed Architecture," + Edinburgh, 1895. + + Reade, Charles. "The Cloister and the Hearth." New York, + 1894. 2 vols. + Robertson, J. M. "New Essays toward a Critical Method." + London, 1897. + Roscoe, William. Preface to "Works of Alexander Pope." + London, 1824. 10 vols. + Rossetti, Christina G. "The Goblin Market." London, 1865. + Rossetti, D. G. The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel + Rossetti. Edited by William M. Rossetti. London, 1886. + 2 vols. + Rossetti, D. G. Family Letters, with Memoir by W. M. Rossetti. + Boston, 1895. + Rossetti, Maria F. "A Shadow of Dante." Boston, 1872. + Rossetti, W. M. "Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and + Writer." London, 1889. + Ruskin, John. "Fors Clavigera." New York, 1871-72. 2 vols. + ---------- "Modern Painters." New York, 1857-60. 5 vols. + ---------- "Munera Pulveris." New York, 1872. + ---------- "Praeterita." London, 1899. 3 vols. + ---------- "Pre-Raphaelitism." New York, 1860. + ---------- "Stones of Venice." New York, 1860. 3 vols. + ---------- "Unto this Last." London, 1862. + + Saintsbury, George. "A Primer of French Literature." + Oxford, 1880. + ---------- "A Short History of English Literature." + London, 1898. + Scherer, W. "A History of German Literature." (Trans.) + New York, 1886. 2 vols. + Schlegel, A. W. von. "Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature." + (Trans.) London, 1846. + Schmidt, Julian. "Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur." + Berlin, 1890. + Scott, Sir Walter. "Critical and Miscellaneous Essays." + Philadelphia, 1841. 3 vols. + ---------- Journal. New York, 1891. + ---------- Poetical Works. (Dennis' ed.) London, 1892. + 5 vols. + ---------- "The Waverley Novels." (Dryburgh ed.) Edinburgh, + 1892-93. 25 vols. + Scott, W. B. "Autobiographical Notes." New York, 1892. 2 vols. + Shairp, J. C. "Aspects of Poetry." Boston, 1882. + Sharp, William. "Dante Gabriel Rossetti." London, 1882. + Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Poetical Works. (Centenary ed.) + Boston, 1892. 4 vols. + Shorthouse, J. H. "John Inglesant." New York, 1882. + Sizeranne, R. de la. "English Contemporary Art." (Trans.) + Westminster, 1898. + Smith, Charlotte. "Elegiac Sonnets." London, 1800-06. 2 vols. + Southey, Robert. "Chronicle of the Cid." (Trans.) Lowell, + 1846. (1st Am. ed.) + ---------- Poetical Works. London, 1838. 10 vols. + Stael-Holstein, Mme. A. L. G. de. "Germany." (Trans.) + London, 1814. 3 vols. + Stedman, E. C. "Victorian Poets." Boston, 1876. + Stendhal, De (Marie Henri Beyle). "Racine et Shakspere." + Paris, 1854. + Stevenson, R. L. B. "Familiar Studies of Men and Books." + London, 1882. + Swinburne, A. C. "Essays and Studies." London, 1875. + ---------- "Poems and Ballads." London, 1866. Second + Series, 1878. Third Series, 1889. + ---------- "Studies in Prose and Poetry." New York, 1894. + ---------- "The Tale of Balen." New York, 1896. + ---------- "Tristram of Lyonesse." London, 1882. + ---------- "Victor Hugo." New York, 1886. + + Tennyson, Alfred. Works. London, 1892. (Globe ed.) + Thorpe, Benjamin. "Northern Mythology." London, 1851-52. + 3 vols. + ---------- "Yuletide Stories." London, 1875. + Ticknor, George. "History of Spanish Literature." New York, + 1849. 3 vols. + Tieck, J. Ludwig. "Phantasus." Berlin, 1844-45. 2 vols. + ---------- "Tales" (trans.) in the works of Thomas Carlyle. + 2 vols. London, 1869-72. + Tighe Mary. "Psyche, with Other Poems." London, 1812. + + Uhland, J. Ludwig. Gedichte. Stuttgart, 1875. + + Vere, Aubrey Thomas de. "Recollections." London, 1897. + + Ward, Wilfrid. "William George Ward and the Oxford Movement." + London, 1889. + Watts, Theodore. "Rossetti." _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. + Wood, Esther. "Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite + Movement." New York, 1894. + Wordsworth, William. Poetical Works. (Centenary ed.) + London, 1870. 6 vols. + + Yonge, Charlotte M. "The Heir of Redcliffe." New York, 1871. + 2 vols. + + + + + INDEX. + + Abbot, The, 42 + Aben-Humeya, 246 + Addison, Jos., 95 + Adonais, 120 + Age of Wordsworth, The, 12, 24, 34, 87, 88 + Ahnung und Gegenwart, 147 + Alhambra, The, 239 + Allemagne, L', 139, 141-45, 192, 208 + Allingham, Wm., 258, 300, 304, 324 + Alonzo the Brave, 77, 83 + Alton Locke, 383 + Amadis of Gaul, 236, 241 + Amber Witch, The, 42, 280 + Ancient Mariner, The, 48, 49, 54, 74-80 + Ancient Poetry and Romance of Spain, 248 + Ancient Spanish Ballads, 239, 247-49 + Anima Poetae, 78 + Annales Romantiques, 201 + Anthony, 198 + Antiquary, The, 31, 33, 178 + Appreciations, 42 + Ariosto, Lodovico, 91, 104, 107, 109, 122 + Arme Heinrich, Der, 297 + Arnim, Achim von, 134, 138, 155, 167, 192, 400 + Arnold, Matthew, 255, 256, 263, 274-76, 278, 280, + 356, 378, 398-400, 402 + Arthur's Tomb, 305 + Aslauga's Knight, 168 + Aspects of Poetry, 18 + At Eleusis, 342 + Athenaeum, The, 134 + Aucassin et Nicolete, 330 + Aue, Hartmann von, 297 + Aulnoy, Comtesse d', 194 + Austin, Sarah, 162, 170 + Ave atque Vale, 349 + + Bagehot, Walter, 39 + Balin and Balan, 347, 348 + Ballad of a Nun, 263, 264 + Ballad of Dead Ladies, 298 + Ballad of Judas Iscariot, 263 + Ballade a la Lune, 189 + Ballads and Sonnets (Rossetti), 310 + Ballads of Irish Chivalry, 260 + Balzac, Honore de, 42 + Bande Noire, La, 216 + Banshee and Other Poems, The, 261 + Banville, Theodore F. de, 388 + Barante, P. A. P. B., 226 + Bards of the Gael and the Gall, 260 + Basso, Andrea de, 110 + Baudelaire, Chas., 388, 389 + Bax, E. B., 386 + Beata Beatrix, 291, 303, 310 + Beckford, Wm., 367 + Belle Dame sans Merci, La, 86, 118, 119, 127, 262, 279, 303, 307 + Berlioz, Hector, l80, 181 + Bertrand, A., 175, 388 + Beyle, Henri. See Stendhal. + Biographia Literaria, 48, 55, 63, 88, 89 + Bisclaveret, 393 + Blackmore, Sir Richard, 269, 270 + Blake, Wm., 99 + Blessed Damozel, The, 285, 301, 308, 311, 343 + Blue Closet, The, 305 + Bluethenstaub, 167 + Boccaccio, Giovanni, 92, 123, 124 + Bowles, W. L., 55-73 + Bowring, Sir Jno., 248 + Boyd, Henry, 96, 97 + Boyesen, H. H., 139, 159, 160, 165 + Brandl, Alois, 50-55, 75, 77, 82, 86 + Brentano, Clemens, 134, 138, 141, 147, 153, 155, 167, 192, + 247, 400 + Bridal of Triermain, The, 6, 13, 14 + Bride's Prelude, The, 300, 311 + Broad Stone of Honour, The, 363-66 + Brooke, Stopford A., 261 + Brown, F. M., 389 + Brownie of Bodsbeck, The, 253 + Browning, Elizabeth B., 277, 278 + Browning, Robert, 190, 221, 276, 277 + Buchanan, Robert, 263 + Building of the Dream, The, 390, 391 + Buerger, G. A., 83, 133, 144, 159, 192, 297 + Burgraves, Les, 226, 299, 396 + Burke, Edmund, 145 + Burne-Jones, Edward, 285, 304, 305, 309, 318-20, 322, 324, 340 + Byron, Geo. Gordon, Lord, 8, 9, 26, 53, 60, 65-73, 81, 84, + 99-101, 106, 116-18, 171, 192, 195, 196, 203, 232-34, 246, + 333, 396-98 + + Caine, T. Hall, 279, 296, 301, 302, 308 + Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 156, 192, 234, 247 + Calidore, 129 + Callista, 355, 357 + Calverley, C. S., 249 + Campbell, Thomas, 64-67, 71, 72 + Cancionero, The, 246 + Carlyle, Thos., 15, 35, 39, 92, 103, 110, 137, 149, 151, 160, + 162, 164, 168, 171, 335, 381, 382, 384, 398, 400 + Cary, Henry F., 97-99, 102 + Castle by the Sea, The 170 + Castle of Otranto, The, 4, 10 + Cecil Dreeme, 367 + Chaitivel, 390 + Chartier, Alain, 118 + Chasse du Burgrave, La, 189, 277 + Chateaubriand, F. A. de, 90, 176, 191, 202-08, 225, 246, 363 + Chatterton, Thos., 52, 54, 86, 119, 191, 300 + Chaucer, Geoffrey, 93, 315-17, 328, 329 + Cheap Clothes and Nasty, 383 + Chevaliers de la Table Ronde, Les, 225 + Childe Harold, 70, 73, 91, 99, 233 + Childe Roland, 276 + Christabel, 14, 27, 49, 53, 54, 75, 80-85, 126, 296 + Christian Year, The, 357, 361 + Christmas Carol, A, 343 + Chronicle of the Cid, 236 + Cinq Mars, 191 + Civil Wars of Granada, The, 247 + Cloister and the Hearth, The, 230, 231 + Coleridge, S. T., 9, 12-14, 27, 48-63, 74-89, 97-99, 119, 126, + 127, 136-38, 158, l59, 168, 291, 295-97, 314, 355 + Collins, J. Churton, 257, 260 + Collinson, Jas., 284, 292, 293 + Colvin, Sidney, 116, 127 + Conde Alarcos, 247 + Congal, 260 + Conquete d'Angleterre, La, 39, 226 + Conservateur Litteraire, Le, 201 + Conspiracy of Venice, The, 246 + Contes Bizarres, 167 + Contes Drolatiques, 42 + Contrasts, 368-71, 375 + Count Gismond, 276 + Courthope, W. J., 314 + Cowper, Wm., 57, 58, 68 + Croker, T. C., 253, 256, 258 + Cromwell, 90, 218, 221 + Cross, W. L., 1, 31, 38 + + Dante, Alighieri, 40, 90-113, 122, 282, 290, 298-301, 310, + 311, 362, 393 + Dante and his Circle, 299, 303 + Dante at Verona, 310 + Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Sharp), 291, 292, 306 + Dante's Dream, 291 + Dark Ladie, The, 49, 86 + Dark Rosaleen, 259 + Dasent, Sir Geo., 334 + Davidson, Jno., 263, 264 + Day Dream, The, 265-67 + Death of Mlle. de Sombreuil, The, 216 + Decameron, The, 123, 124, 393, 400 + Defence of Guenevere, The, 275, 296, 309, 321, 324-28 + Defence of Poetry (Shelley), 101 + Deirdre, 260 + Dejection: an Ode, 60, 86 + Delacroix, Eugene, 177, 178 + De Quincey, Thos., 38 + Development of the English Novel, The, 1, 31, 38 + Deveria, Eugene, 178, 195 + Dialogue to the Memory of Mr. Alexander Pope, 402 + Dies Irae, 5, 153 + Digby, Kenelm H., 319, 363-66, 379 + Discourse of the Three Unities, 133 + Divine Comedy, The, 92-99, 102, 103, 105, 109, 111, 282, + 290, 310, 362, 366 + Djinns, The, 189 + Dobell, Sydney, 262, 263 + Dobson, Austin, 401, 402 + Don Alvaro, 246 + Dondey, Theophile, 185, 190 + Don Quixote, 156, 241 + Dream of Gerontius, The, 362 + Dream of John Ball, The, 386 + Dryden, Jno., 117, 124, 125, 269 + Ducs de Bourgogne, Les, 226 + Dumas, Alexandre, 198, 209 + Duerer, Albrecht, 152, 153, 324, 373, 374 + + Earthly Paradise, The, 237, 238, 315, 321, 328-32, 334, + 380, 390, 391 + Ecclesiologist, The, 375 + Edda, The, 334 + Eden Bower, 315 + Eichendorff, Joseph von, 146 + Eighteenth Century Vignettes, 401 + Elfinland Wud, 254, 255 + Elves, The, 163 + Emerson, R. W., 165, 166, 307 + Endymion, 121, 126, 128, 342 + English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 26, 60, 63, 69, 70, 72 + English Contemporary Art, 293 + Enid, 270, 272 + Epic and Romance, 46, 47 + Epic of Women, An, 393 + Epipsychidion, 101, 310 + Erfindung des Rosenkranzes, Die, 153 + Erl King, The, 192 + Erskine, Wm., 6, 7, 13 + Espronceda, Jose de, 246 + Essay on Epic Poetry (Hayley), 95 + Essays and Studies (Swinburne), 349, 351 + Essays on German Literature (Boyesen), 139, 159, 160, 165 + Essays on the Picturesque (Price), 34 + Eve of St. Agnes, The, 85, 107, 120-22, 125-29, 307 + Eve of St. John, The, 13, 22, 23 + Eve of St. Mark, The, 130, 131 + + Faber, F. W., 360, 362 + Faerie Queene, The, 120, 275 + Fairies, The, 258 + Fair Inez, 279 + Fairy Legends of the South of Ireland, 253, 256, 258 + Fairy Thorn, The, 258 + Familiar Studies of Men and Books, 32 + Fantasio, 226 + Faust, 178, 191, 192, 238 + Feast of the Poets, The, 108 + Ferguson, Sir Samuel, 258-60 + Fichte, J. G., 137 + Fin du Classicisme, La, 175 + Ford, R., 246, 248 + Forest Lovers, The, 230-32 + Fors Clavigera, 380, 383, 387 + Fountain of Tears, The, 389 + Fouque, F. de la M., 36, 139, 140, 153, 162, 167-69, 324, 363, 373 + Fourteen Sonnets (Bowles), 55, 58-61 + Fragments from German Prose Writers, 162 + Frere, Jno. H., 248 + From Shakspere to Pope, 116 + + Gallery of Pigeons, The, 388, 394, 395 + Gareth and Lynette, 274 + Gaspard de la Nuit, 388 + Gates, L. E., 129, 355, 356 + Gaule Poetique, La, 225 + Gautier, Theophile, 167, 176-81, 183-85, 187, 188, 191-93, + 195-98, 202, 219, 221-25, 349, 388, 393 + Gebir, 235, 237 + Genie du Christianisme, Le, 90, 176, 202, 203, 205-08, 363 + Gentle Armour, The, 109, 110 + Germ, The, 284 + German Novelists (Roscoe), 167 + German Poets and Poetry (Longfellow), 167 + German Romance (Carlyle), 162 + Gierusalemme Liberata, 91 + Girlhood of Mary Virgin, The, 287, 290, 291 + Glenfinlas, 13, 22 + Globe, Le, 201, 202 + Goblet, The, 164 + Goblin Market, The, 82 + Godiva, 265 + Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 5, 92, 133, 178, 191, 192 + Golden Legend, The, 297 + Golden Treasury, The, 25, 389 + Golden Wings, 326-28 + Goldsmith, Oliver, 95 + Goerres, Joseph, 138, 147, 152, 363, 400 + Gosse, Edmund, 116 + Goetz von Berlichingen, 5, 133, 193 + Gries, J. D., 156, 247 + Grimm, Jakob and Wm., 154, 162, 247, 256 + Guest, Lady Charlotte, 270 + + Hallam, Henry, 103, 399 + Han d'Islande, 196, 218 + Hardiknute, 3 + Harold the Dauntless, 29 + Hartleap Well, 19-21, 80 + Hauptmann, Gerhart, 245 + Hawker, R. S., 262, 263 + Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 162-64 + Hayley, Wm., 95, 96 + Haystack in the Floods, The, 326 + Heart of Midlothian, The, 31, 33, 379 + Heine, Heinrich, 35-38, 139-41, 144, 146-49, 152, 154-59, + l6l, 170, 400 + Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 164-66 + Heir of Redcliffe, The, 357 + Helvellyn, 15, l6 + Henri III., 209 + Heretic's Tragedy, The, 276 + Hereward the Wake, 281 + Herford, C. H., 12, 24, 34, 87, 88 + Hernani, 186, 188, 195-200 + Hero Worship, 103, 111, 335 + Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders, 152, 153 + Hewlett, Maurice, 230-32 + Higginson, T. W., 163 + Histoire du Romantisme (Gautier), 176-81, 183-85, 187, 188, + 191-93, 195-98, 22l-25 + Histoire du Romantisme en France (Toreinx), 202 + History of France (Michelet), 226 + History of Literature (Schlegel), 157 + History of Spanish Literature, A (Kelly), 246, 247 + History of Spanish Literature, A (Ticknor), 242, 243, 248 + History of the Crusades, 226 + History of the Swiss Confederation, 153 + Hita, Perez de, 247 + Hogg, Jas., 250-55 + Holy Cross Day, 277 + Homme qui Rit, L', 219, 22l + Hood, Thos., 278, 279 + House of Life, The, 307, 310 + House of the Wolfings, The, 232, 337-39, 387 + Howells, W. D., 397, 398 + Howitt, Chas. and Mary, 334 + Hughes, Arthur, 305-07 + Hughes, Thomas., 357, 383 + Hugo, Francois V., 222 + Hugo, Victor Marie, 90, 137, 173, 176, 178-82, 188, 189, + 194-96, 200, 214-21, 224, 226, 247, 277, 298, 299, 349, + 388, 389 + Hunt, Jas. Leigh, 49, 105-13, 118, 119, 121-23, 127, 388 + Hunt, Wm. H., 283, 284, 288-90, 292, 302, 306, 307 + Hurd, Richard, 364 + Hutton, R. H., 40 + Hylas, 331 + Hymns to the Night, 164 + Hypatia, 355 + Hyperion (Keats), 117, 122 + Hyperion (Longfellow), 172 + + Idylls of the King, 268-75, 303, 347 + Illustrations of Tennyson, 257, 260 + Il Penseroso, 374 + Imitation of Spenser (Keats), 120 + Inferno, 96, 99, 103, 191 + Intaglios, 393 + Irving, Washington, 239 + Isabella, 123-25, 307, 390, 400 + Ivanhoe, 31, 36, 39, 40, 43, 379, 397 + Jameson, Anna, 374, 375 + Jeffrey, Francis, Lord, 37 + Jenny, 309 + John Inglesant, 357 + Journal des Debats, 201 + Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The, 166 + Journey into the Blue Distance, 162, 163 + Joyce, P. W., 260 + Joyce, R. D., 260 + + Keats (Colvin), 116, 127 + Keats, Jno., 53, 54, 82, 85, 86, 107, 113-31, 172, 228, 262, + 264, 279, 287, 294, 299, 300, 306, 307, 314, 315, 342, 388, + 390, 400 + Kebie, Jno., 292, 357, 361 + Keith of Ravelston, 262, 263 + Kelly, J. F., 246, 247 + Ker, W. P., 46, 47 + Kilmeny, 252 + Kinder und Hausmaerchen, 154, 162 + King Arthur's Tomb, 327 + Kinges Quair, The, 306, 312 + Kingsley, Chas., 279-81, 292, 355, 383, 384 + King's Tragedy, The, 306, 311-13 + Knaben Wunderhorn, Des, 155, 172 + Knight, Death, and the Devil, The, 152, 153, 324, 373 + Knight's Grave, The, 87 + Kronenwaechter, Die, 167 + Kubia Khan, 87 + + Lady of Shalott, The, 365, 271, 303, 304, 324 + Lady of the Lake, The, 19, 29, 251, 379 + Lament for the Decline of Chivalry, 279 + Lamia, 117, 129 + Landor, W. S., 16, 20, 27, 53, 54, 117, 235, 237, 395 + Lang, Andrew, 330 + Lara, 233 + Laus Veneris, 343, 349 + Lay of the Brown Rosary, The, 277, 278 + Lay of the Last Minstrel, The, 3, 5, 11, 25-28, 40, 53, 85, 252 + Lays of Ancient Rome, 249 + Lays of France, 389, 390 + Lays of the Western Gael, 260 + Leading Cases done into Equity, 249 + Legends of the Cid, 246 + Lenore, 83, 133, 144, 192, 297, 392 + Leper, The, 349 + Lesser, Creuze de, 225 + Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 364 + Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, 41 + Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet, 226 + Lewis, M. G., 77, 83, 238, 239 + Liberal Movement in English Literature, The, 314 + Life and Death of Jason, The, 315, 321, 328-33 + Life and Letters of Dean Church, The, 358 + Life of William Morris, The (Mackail), 315, 320, 331, 333, 382 + Light of the World, The, 288-90 + Lindsay, A. W. C., 372-74 + Lines on a Bust of Dante, 105 + Literary Reminiscences (De Quincey), 38 + Literature and Romance of Northern Europe, 334 + Literature of Europe, The (Hallam), 103 + Lockhart, J. G., 5, 7, 9, 11, 22, 23, 239, 247, 248 + Locrine, 346 + Longfellow, H. W., 105, 109, 164, 167, 170, 172, 239, 297 + Lord of the Isles, The, 29, 85 + Lorenzaccio, 226 + Lorenzo and Isabella, 287, 291 + Loss and Gain, 357, 359 + Love, 86, 127 + Love is Enough, 332, 333 + Lovers of Gudrun, The, 330, 334-36 + Lowell, J. R., 70, 82, 93, 116, 131, 165, 203, 260 + Lucinde, 157 + Luck of Edenhall, The, 170 + Luerlei, Die, 141 + Lyra Innocentium, 357 + Lyrical Ballads, 18, 48, 74 + + Mabinogion, The, 270, 332 + Macaulay, T. B., 103, 249 + Mackail, W. J., 315, 320, 331, 333, 382 + McLaughlin, E. T., 43 + Madoc, 237 + Mador of the Moor, 251 + Maeterlinck, Maurice, 326 + Maidens of Verdun, The, 216 + Maids of Elfin-Mere, The, 258, 304, 324 + Maigron, L., 33, 34, 44-46 + Mallet, P. H., 107, 229 + Malory, Sir Thos., 270, 272, 303, 347, 348 + Manfred, 234 + Mangan, J. C., 259, 260 + Manzoni, Alessandro, 133 + Maerchen (Tieck), 162 + Marie de France, 390, 393 + Marienlieder, 148 + Marino Faliero, 234 + Marion Delorme, 200 + Marmion, 6, 15, 23, 29, 40, 90, 379 + Martyrs, Les, 225 + Marzials, Theophile, 285, 387, 388, 394, 395 + Masque of Queen Bersabe, The, 277, 344 + Masque of Shadows, The, 390, 392 + Meinhold, J. W., 42, 280 + Merimee, Prosper, 30, 33 + Michaud, J. F., 226 + Michelet, Jules, 226 + Middle Ages, The (Hallam), 103 + Millais, J. E., 283-85, 287, 288, 290, 291, 307 + Milton, Jno., 93, 103, 269, 374 + Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern (Motherwell), 253 + Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 21, 22, 24, 26, 243, 250, 251 + Modern Painters, 6, 10, 284, 292, 294 + Mores Catholici, 319, 366 + Morgante Maggiore, 234 + Morris, Wm., 29, 232, 237, 275, 285, 296, 304-06, 309, + 314-40, 345, 350, 380, 382, 384-89 + Morte Darthur (Malory), 106, 270, 273, 303, 304, 324, 347, 364 + Morte d'Arthur (Tennyson), 271, 272 + Motherwell, Wm., 250, 253-55 + Mozley, T., 358 + Mueller, Johannes, 153 + Munera Pulveris, 380 + Muse Francaise, La, 201 + Music Master, The, 258, 300 + Musset, Alfred de, 180, 189, 198, 226, 247 + Myller, H., 154 + Mysteries of Udolpho, 83 + + Nanteuil, Celestin, 178, 223-25 + Nature of Gothic, The, 321, 375, 385, 386 + Nerval, Gerard de, 190-92, 196, 197, 225, 349 + New Essays toward a Critical Method, 122 + Newman, J. H., 292, 319, 354-62, 366, 381 + News from Nowhere, 317, 319, 382, 386 + Nibelungenlied, The, 154, 155, 297 + Nodier, Chas., 194 + Northern Antiquities, 107, 229 + Northern Mythology. 334 + Notre Dame de Paris, 178, 179, 221, 224 + Novalis, 134, 137, 148, 152, 164-67, 172, 302, 400 + + Ode to a Dead Body, 110 + Ode to a Grecian Urn, 117 + Ode to the West Wind, 102 + Odes et Ballades (Hugo), 176, 180, 189, 217 + Odes et Poesies Diverses (Hugo), 214 + Odyssey, The, 331 + Ogier the Dane, 330, 332 + Old Celtic Romances, 260 + Old Masters at Florence, 316 + Old Mortality, 31, 33, 253, 379 + Old Woman of Berkeley, The, 238, 239 + Oliphant, F., 353 + On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, 117, 122 + Oriana, 265, 313, 324 + Orientales, Les, 189 + Orlando Furioso, 90, 91, 109 + O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 387-90, 393 + Ossian, 208, 261 + + Palgrave, F. T., 25, 389 + Palmerin of England, 236, 241 + Paradise, 311 + Parochial and Plain Sermons, 360 + Parsons, T. W., 105 + Partenopex of Blois, 90 + Past and Present, 381, 382 + Pater, Walter, 42, 79 + Payne, Jno., 387-93 + Perrault, Chas., 194, 265, 349 + Percy, Thos., 3, 54, 57, 74, 159, 238, 295 + Petrarca, Francesco, 92 + Phantasus, 160 + Pillar of the Cloud, The, 362 + Poe, Edgar A., 162, 163, 300, 301, 389 + Poems and Ballads (Swinburne), 296, 339, 343, 345, 349, 350 + Poems and Romances (Simcox), 388 + Poems by the Way, 386 + Poets and Poetry of Munster, 259 + Politics for the People, 383 + Pollock, Sir Frederick, 249 + Pope, Alexander, 52-54, 56, 63-73, 115-17, 402 + Portrait, The, 311 + Praeterita, 372, 378 + Preface to Cromwell, 182, 188, 218-20 + Pre-Raphaelitism (Ruskin), 293 + Price, Sir Uvedale, 34, 374 + Primer of French Literature, A, 183, 184 + Prince Arthur (Blackmore), 270 + Prince des Sots, Le, 225 + Princess, The, 267, 268 + Prior, Matthew, 401 + Prophecy of Dante, The, 100, 101 + Proverbs in Porcelain, 401 + Psyche, 121 + Pugin, A. C., 368 + Pugin, A. W. N., 360, 361, 368-72, 375, 379 + Pugin, E. W., 368 + Purgatorio, 362 + + Queen Gwynnevar's Round, 262 + Queenhoo Hall, 8, 20, 32 + Queen Mab, 235 + Queen's Wake, The, 252, 253 + Quentin Durward, 31, 36 + Quest of the Sancgreall, The (Westwood), 276 + Quest of the Sangreal, The (Hawker), 262 + Quiberon, 216 + + Racine et Shakspere, 38, 186, 208, 211, 213 + Radcliffe, Anne, 41, 42, 82, 193 + Rapunzel, 309, 326, 327 + Raven, The, 301 + Reade, Chas., 230 + Rebecca and Rowena, 397 + Recits Merovingiens, 226 + Recollections of D. G. Rossetti (Caine), 296, 297, 301, 302, 308 + Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3, 17, 74, 107, 229, + 238, 243, 247 + Reminiscences (Mozley), 358 + Remorse, 86, 89 + Richter, J. P. F., 169 + Rime of Redemption, The, 392 + Rime of the Duchess May, The, 277, 278 + Rivas, Duke de, 246 + Robertson, J. M., 122 + Rogers, Chas., 96 + Roi s'Amuse, Le, 200, 201 + Rokeby, 29 + Romancero General, The, 243, 247 + Roman Historique, Le, 33, 34, 44-46 + Romantische Schule, Die (Heine), 36, 139-41 + Romaunt of the Page, The, 277 + Roots of the Mountains, The, 337, 338 + Rosa, Martinez de la, 246 + Rosamond, 346, 347 + Rosamund, Queen of the Goths, 346 + Roscoe, Wm., 65, 66 + Rose, W. S., 90 + Rose Mary, 263, 311, 312 + Rossetti, Christina, 82, 282, 284, 302 + Rossetti, D. G., 131, 228, 258, 262, 263, 265, 282-88, 290-92, + 295-315, 318-21, 323, 324, 340, 343, 345, 350, 387-89, 393 + Rossetti, Gabriele, 282 + Rossetti, Maria F., 282 + Rossetti, W. M., 282, 284 + Runenberg, The, 163 + Ruskin, Jno., 6, 10, 284, 286-89, 292-94, 304, 317, 321, + 324, 371, 372, 375-80, 382-87, 398 + + Sacred and Legendary Art, 374, 375 + Saint Agnes, 267 + Saint Brandan, 263 + Saint Dorothy, 344 + Saint Patrick's Purgatory, 238 + Saintsbury, George, 50, 118, 183, l84, 295, 324, 326, 395, 396 + Saints' Tragedy, The, 279, 280, 292 + Samuel Taylor Coleridge und die Englische Romantik, 50-55, + 75, 77, 82, 86 + Scherer, Wm., 167, 170 + Schiller, J. C. F., 210, 212 + Schlegel, A. W., 88, 140, 144, 145, 154, 156-59, 162, 165, + 172, 192, 247 + Schlegel, F., 99, 134, 135, 137, 148, 151, 157-59, 172, 247, 363 + Scott, Sir Walter, 1-47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 71, 75, 77, 85, 87, + 88, 90, 91, 119, 120, 127, 129, 136, 158, 167, 169, 172, 173, + 178, 180, 192, 212, 226, 232, 243, 246, 247, 249-53, 256, + 267, 295, 313, 320, 321, 323, 329, 352-56, 367, 378, 379, + 397, 402 + Scott, W. B., 292, 293, 305-07, 353, 389 + Selections from Newman, 355, 356 + Seward, Anne, 98 + Shairp, J. C., 18 + Shaker Bridal, The, 164 + Shakspere, Wm., 210, 222, 399 + Sharp, Wm., 291, 292, 306 + Shelley, P. B., 8, 25, 101, 102, 120, 232-35, 299, 310, 340, 398 + Short History of English Literature, A, 50, 118, 295, 324, + 326, 395, 396 + Shorthouse, J. H., 357 + Short Studies (Higginson), 163 + Sigerson, Jno., 259, 261 + Sigismonda and Guiscardo, 124, 125 + Sigurd the Volsung, 336 + Simcox, G. A., 388 + Sintram and his Companions, 153, 162, 168, 324, 373 + Sir Floris, 390-92 + Sir Galahad (Morris), 306, 325, 328 + Sir Galahad (Tennyson), 267, 271, 325 + Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinivere, 271, 325 + Sir Tristram, 7 + Sister Helen, 311, 312, 345 + Sisters, The, 265, 313 + Sizeranne, R. de la, 293 + Sketches of Christian Art, 372-74 + Sleep and Poetry, 114-16 + Sleeping Beauty, The, 265 + Smith, Charlotte, 55 + Socialism, 386 + Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, 18, 19 + Song of the Western Men, 262 + Sonneur de Saint Paul, Le, 193 + Sorrows of Werther, The, 397 + Southey, Robert, 50, 51, 55, 71, 235-39, 355 + Specimen of an Induction to a Poem, 129 + Specimens of German Romance, 167 + Specimens of Gothic Architecture, 368 + Spenser, Edmund, 3, 4, 93, 107, 120-22, 269, 275, 329 + Stael, Mme. de, 134, 139, 141-45, l71, 192, 208 + Staff and Scrip, 311 + Stedman, E. C., 265, 387 + Stendhal, De, 36-38, 186, 187, 201, 208-14 + Stephen, Leslie, 10, 38, 80 + Sternbald's Wanderungen, 152 + Stevenson, R. L., 32 + Stokes, Whitley, 259, 261 + Stolberg, F. L., Count, 149, 363 + Stones of Venice, 321, 375-79, 385, 386 + Stories from the Italian Poets, 109-11 + Story of Rimini, The, 105-07, 119, 121, 122, 390 + Story of the Brave Casper and the Fair Annerl, The, 167 + Student of Salamanca, The, 246 + Studies and Appreciations, 129 + Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature, 43 + Study of Celtic Literature, On the, 256 + Succube, La, 43 + Sundering Flood, The, 232, 337, 339 + Swinburne, A. C., 275, 276, 296, 304, 309, 314, 315, 319, + 339-51, 387-89 + + Table Talk (Coleridge), 12 + Tables Turned, The, 386 + Tale of Balen, The, 347, 348 + Tale of King Constans, The, 330 + Tales of Wonder, 238 + Talisman, The, 28, 36, 43 + Tannhaeuser, 153, 160, 264, 343, 391 + Task, The, 58 + Tasso, Torquato, 91, 104, 109 + Taylor, Edgar, 162 + Taylor, Wm., 53, 162, 238 + Templars in Cyprus, The, 149 + Tennyson, Alfred, 257, 260, 262, 264-75, 295, 303, 324, + 325, 347, 348 + Thackeray, W. M., 397, 398, 402 + Thalaba the Destroyer, 235 + Theocritus, 331 + Thierry, Augustin, 39, 225, 226 + Thomas the Rhymer, 7 + Thoreau, H. D., 165 + Thorpe, Benjamin, 334 + Thousand and One Nights, The, 393 + Three Bardic Tales, 259 + Three Fishers, The, 383 + Thyrsis, 378 + Ticknor, Geo., 242, 243, 248 + Tieck, Ludwig, 42, 134, 137, 148, 150, 152, 154, 156-65, + 172, 245, 400 + Tighe, Mary, 121 + Tintern Abbey, 358 + Todhunter, Jno., 259, 261 + Tom Brown at Oxford, 357 + Tracts for the Times, 292, 319, 363, 368 + Treasury of Irish Poetry, A, 261 + Tristram and Iseult (Arnold), 275, 278, 341 + Tristram of Lyonesse (Swinburne), 275, 340 + Tristram und Isolde (Wagner), 393 + Troy Town, 315 + True Principles of Pointed Architecture, The, 372 + Tune of Seven Towers, The, 305, 326 + Two Foscari, The, 234 + + Uhland, Ludwig, 140, 154-56, 170, 171 + Ulalume, 301 + Undine, 168 + Unto this Last, 380 + + Vabre, Jule, 222 + Vanity Fair, 396 + Vathek, 367 + Vere, Aubrey de, 259, 260, 358, 361, 366 + Verses on Various Occasions (Newman), 357 + Versunkene Glocke, Die, 245 + Victorian Poets, 265, 387 + Vignettes in Rhyme, 401 + Vigny, A. V., Comte de, 188, 191, 210 + Villon, Francois, 298, 299, 350, 393 + Vision of Judgment, The, 70 + Vita Nuova, La, 101, 299, 302, 310, 393 + Volksmaerchen (Tieck), 160 + Voelsunga Saga, The, 334, 335 + Voltaire, F. M. A. de, 92, 94, 95 + Vorlesungen ueber dramatische Kunst und Litteratur (Schlegel), 88, + 158, 162, 192 + Voss, J.H., 149 + Voyage of Maeldune, The, 260 + Wackenroder, W. H., 134, 152, 153, 159 + Wagner, Richard, 153, 264, 391, 393 + Walladmor, 38 + Walter Scott et la Princesse de Cleves, 36 + Ward, W. G., 360 + Warton, Joseph, 61, 63, 64, 71, 73, 157, 158 + Warton, Thos., 27, 57, 60, 61, 94, 157, 158 + Water Lady, The, 279 + Water of the Wondrous Isles, The, 337, 339 + Watts, Theodore, 300 + Waverley Novels, The, 30-39, 324, 378, 379, 403 + Welland River, 328, 345 + Welshmen of Tirawley, The, 260 + Werner, Zacharias, 148, 149, 212, 302 + Westwood, Thos., 276 + White Doe of Rylstone, The, 16-18 + White Ship, The, 311, 312 + William George Ward and the Oxford Movement, 361 + Winthrop, Theodore, 367 + Wisdom and Languages of India, The, 157 + Wissenschaftslehre (Fichte), 137 + Witch of Fife, The, 252 + Wood beyond the World, The, 337, 339 + Woolner, Thos., 284 + Wordsworth, Wm., 9, 12, 14-20, 48, 50-55, 71, 77, 80, 89, + 119, 300, 333, 355, 358, 398 + + Yarrow Revisited, 14 + Yeast, 383 + Yeats, J. B., 261 + Yonge, Charlotte M., 357 + Yuletide Stories, 334 + + Zapolya, 89 + Zauberring, Der, 168 + Zeitung fuer Einsiedler, 138, 172 + Zorrilla, Jose de, 246 + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM IN +THE NINETEENTH CENTURY*** + + +******* This file should be named 15931.txt or 15931.zip ******* + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/9/3/15931 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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