Wordsworth rightly describes this sense) it was _this_, I suggest, that,
unknown to himself, arrested him in the child's persistent ignoring of
the fact of death. The poem is thus allied to the Immortality _Ode_. The
child is in possession of one of those 'truths that wake to perish
never,' though the tyranny of the senses and the deadening influence of
custom obscure them as childhood passes away. When the conversation took
place (in 1793), and even when the poem was written (1798), Wordsworth
had not yet come to regard the experiences of his own childhood as he
saw them later (_Tintern Abbey_, 1798, shows this), and so he gave to
the poem a moral which is not adequate to it. Or perhaps he accepted
from Coleridge a formulation of his moral which was not quite true even
to his own thoughts at that time. It is just worth observing as possibly
significant that the child in _We are Seven_ is not described as showing
any particular 'animal vivacity': she strikes one as rather a quiet,
though determined, little person.

These remarks, of course, can have no interest for those readers who
feel no misgivings, such as I have always felt, in reading the poem. But
many, I think, must feel them.

FOOTNOTES:

  [1] The following pages reproduce the two concluding lectures of a
    short course on the Age of Wordsworth, given at Oxford in April,
    1903, and intended specially for undergraduates in the School of
    English Language and Literature. A few passages from the other
    lectures appear elsewhere in this volume. On the subject of the
    course may I advise any reader who may need the advice to consult
    Professor Herford's _The Age of Wordsworth_, a little book which is
    familiar to students of the history of English Literature, and the
    more admired the more they use it?

  [2] These statements, with the exception of the last, were chosen
    partly because they all say, with the most manifest seriousness, much
    the same thing that is said, with a touch of playful exaggeration, in
    _The Tables Turned_, where occurs that outrageous stanza about 'one
    impulse from a vernal wood' which Mr. Raleigh has well defended. When
    all fitting allowance has been made for the fact that these
    statements, and many like them, are 'poetic,' they ought to remain
    startling. Two of them--that from the story of Margaret (_Excursion_,
    I.), and that from the _Ode_, 1815--were made less so, to the injury
    of the passages, by the Wordsworth of later days, who had forgotten
    what he felt, or yielded to the objections of others.

  [3] _Goody Blake_, to my mind, tries vainly to make the kind of
    impression overwhelmingly made by Coleridge's _Three Graves_. The
    question as to the _Anecdote for Fathers_ is not precisely whether it
    makes you laugh, but whether it makes you laugh at the poet, and in
    such a way that the end fails to restore your sobriety. The danger is
    in the lines,

      And five times to the child I said,
      Why, Edward, tell me why?

    The reiteration, with the struggle between the poet and his victim,
    is thoroughly Wordsworthian, and there are cases where it is managed
    with perfect success, as we shall see; but to me it has here the
    effect so delightfully reproduced in _Through the Looking-glass_
    ('I'll tell thee everything I can').

  [4] Some remarks on _We are seven_ are added in a note at the end of
    the lecture.

  [5] The phrases quoted in this paragraph are taken chiefly from
    Hazlitt and De Quincey.

  [6] The publication of the _Excursion_ seems to have been postponed
    for financial reasons. One edition of a thousand copies sufficed the
    world for thirteen years.

  [7] _Evening Voluntaries_, iv. We know that he refers to Byron.

  [8] _Poems on the Naming of Places_, iv. Keats need not have been
    ashamed to write the last line.

  [9] ''Tis past, that melancholy dream,'--so he describes his sojourn
    in Germany.

  [10] Wordsworth's Letter to Major-General Pasley (_Prose Works_, i.)
    contains an excellent statement both of his views on this duty and of
    his hostility to mere militarism.

  [11] I am writing of the years of the Napoleonic War. Later, he lost
    courage, as he himself said. But it is not true that he ever ceased
    to sympathise with the cause of national independence in Europe.

  [12] [This great line, as I am reminded, refers to the Welsh
    (_Comus_, 33); but it does not seem necessary to change the
    quotation.]

  [13] In saying that what Wordsworth could not bear was torpor, of
    course I do not mean that he could bear faithlessness, ingratitude,
    cruelty, and the like. He had no tolerance for such things, either in
    his poetry or in his life. 'I could kick such a man across England
    with my naked foot,' the old poet burst forth when he heard of a base
    action. This reminds one of Browning, whose antinomian morality was
    not so very unlike Wordsworth's. And neither poet would have found it
    difficult to include the worst vices under the head of torpor or 'the
    unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.'

  [14] The third quotation is from a speech by the Solitary
    (_Excursion_, vi.).

  [15] The second half of this sentence, true of the Wordsworth of the
    _Excursion_, is perhaps not quite true of his earlier mind.

  [16] This is just the opposite of the 'wise passiveness' of
    imaginative but unreflective feeling.

  [17] Nature.

  [18] I add here some notes which would have disturbed the lecture,
    but may be of use to the student of Wordsworth's mind who cares to
    return to them.

    The collocation of the last two quotations shows how, for Wordsworth,
    'the visionary power' arises from, and testifies to, the mind's
    infinity, and how the feeling of this is, or involves, or is united
    with, a feeling or idea of _the_ infinite or 'one mind,' and of union
    with it. This connection of ideas (as to which I purposely use vague
    alternative terms, because I do not want to theorise the poet's
    experience), is frequent or constant in Wordsworth, and it ought
    always to be borne in mind in regard to his language about
    'immortality' or 'eternity.' His sense or consciousness of
    'immortality,' that is to say, is at once a consciousness that he (in
    some sense of that word) is potentially infinite, and a consciousness
    that 'he' belongs to, is part of, is the home of, or is, an 'active
    principle' which is eternal, indivisible, and the 'soul of all the
    worlds' (cf. opening of _Excursion_, ix.). Whatever we may make of
    this connection of ideas, unless we realise it we shall remain
    entirely outside Wordsworth's mind in passages like that just
    referred to, and in passages where he talks of 'acts of immortality
    in Nature's course,' or says that to the Wanderer 'all things among
    the mountains breathed immortality,' or says that he has been
    unfolding 'far-stretching views of immortality,' though he may not
    appear to us to have touched in any way on the subject. Nature and
    Man (in one sense) are for Wordsworth 'transitory,' but Nature always
    and everywhere _reveals_ 'immortality,' and Man (in another sense) is
    'immortal.' Unquestionably for Wordsworth he is so. In what precise
    sense he is so for Wordsworth may not be discoverable, but the only
    chance of discovering it is to forget what we or anybody else, except
    Wordsworth, may mean by 'man' and 'immortal,' and to try to get into
    _his_ mind.

    There is an illuminating passage on 'the visionary power' and the
    mind's infinity or immortality, in _Prelude_, ii.:

              and hence, from the same source,
      Sublimer joy; for I would walk alone,
      Under the quiet stars, and at that time
      Have felt whate'er there is of power in sound
      To breathe an elevated mood, by form
      Or image unprofaned; and I would stand,
      If the night blackened with a coming storm,
      Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are
      The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
      Or make their dim abode in distant winds.
      Thence did I drink the visionary power;
      And deem not profitless those fleeting moods
      Of shadowy exultation: not for this,
      That they are kindred to our purer mind
      And intellectual life; but that the soul,
      Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
      Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
      Of possible sublimity, whereto
      With growing faculties she doth aspire,
      With faculties still growing, feeling still
      That whatsoever point they gain, they yet
      Have something to pursue.

    An interesting point, worth fuller treatment, is the connection of
    this feeling of infinity and the endless passing of limits with
    Wordsworth's love of wandering, wanderers, and high roads. See, for
    instance, _Prelude_, xiii., 'Who doth not love to follow with his eye
    The windings of a public way?' And compare the enchantment of the
    question, _What, are you stepping westward_?

                         'twas a sound
      Of something without place or bound.

  [19] _Yes, it was the mountain echo_, placed in Arnold's selection,
    with his usual taste, next to the earlier poem _To the Cuckoo_.

  [20] This was Coleridge's opinion.

SHELLEY'S VIEW OF POETRY

SHELLEY'S VIEW OF POETRY

The ideas of Wordsworth and of Coleridge about poetry have often been
discussed and are familiar. Those of Shelley are much less so, and in
his eloquent exposition of them there is a radiance which almost
conceals them from many readers. I wish, at the cost of all the
radiance, to try to see them and show them rather more distinctly. Even
if they had little value for the theory of poetry, they would still have
much as material for it, since they allow us to look into a poet's
experience in conceiving and composing. And, in addition, they throw
light on some of the chief characteristics of Shelley's own poetry.

His poems in their turn form one of the sources from which his ideas on
the subject may be gathered. We have also some remarks in his letters
and in prose pieces dealing with other topics. We have the prefaces to
those of his works which he himself published. And, lastly, there is the
_Defence of Poetry_. This essay was written in reply to an attack made
on contemporary verse by Shelley's friend Peacock,--not a favourable
specimen of Peacock's writing. The _Defence_, we can see, was hurriedly
composed, and it remains a fragment, being only the first of three
projected parts. It contains a good deal of historical matter, highly
interesting, but too extensive to be made use of here. Being polemical,
it no doubt exaggerates such of Shelley's views as collided with those
of his antagonist. But, besides being the only full expression of these
views, it is the most mature, for it was written within eighteen months
of his death. It appears to owe very little either to Wordsworth's
Prefaces or to Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_; but there are a few
reminiscences of Sidney's _Apology_, which Shelley had read just before
he wrote his own _Defence_; and it shows, like much of his mature
poetry, how deeply he was influenced by the more imaginative dialogues
of Plato.

  1.

Any one familiar with the manner in which Shelley in his verse
habitually represents the world could guess at his general view of
poetry. The world to him is a melancholy place, a 'dim vast vale of
tears,' illuminated in flashes by the light of a hidden but glorious
power. Nor is this power, as that favourite metaphor would imply, wholly
outside the world. It works within it as a soul contending with
obstruction and striving to penetrate and transform the whole mass. And
though the fulness of its glory is concealed, its nature is known in
outline. It is the realised perfection of everything good and beautiful
on earth; or, in other words, all such goodness and beauty is its
partial manifestation. 'All,' I say: for the splendour of nature, the
love of lovers, every affection and virtue, any good action or just law,
the wisdom of philosophy, the creations of art, the truths deformed by
superstitious religion,--all are equally operations or appearances of
the hidden power. It is of the first importance for the understanding of
Shelley to realise how strong in him is the sense and conviction of this
unity in life: it is one of his Platonic traits. The intellectual Beauty
of his _Hymn_ is absolutely the same thing as the Liberty of his _Ode_,
the 'Great Spirit' of Love that he invokes to bring freedom to Naples,
the One which in _Adonaïs_ he contrasts with the Many, the Spirit of
Nature of _Queen Mab_, and the Vision of _Alastor_ and _Epipsychidion_.
The skylark of the famous stanzas is free from our sorrows, not because
it is below them, but because, as an embodiment of that perfection, it
knows the rapture of love without its satiety, and understands death as
we cannot. The voice of the mountain, if a whole nation could hear it
with the poet's ear, would 'repeal large codes of fraud and woe'; it is
the same voice as the reformer's and the martyr's. And in the far-off
day when the 'plastic stress' of this power has mastered the last
resistance and is all in all, outward nature, which now suffers with
man, will be redeemed with him, and man, in becoming politically free,
will become also the perfect lover. Evidently, then, poetry, as the
world now is, must be one of the voices of this power, or one tone of
its voice. To use the language so dear to Shelley, it is the revelation
of those eternal ideas which lie behind the many-coloured, ever-shifting
veil that we call reality or life. Or rather, it is one such revelation
among many.

When we turn to the _Defence of Poetry_ we meet substantially the same
view. There is indeed a certain change; for Shelley is now
philosophising and writing prose, and he wishes not to sing from the
mid-sky, but, for a while at least, to argue with his friend on the
earth. Hence at first we hear nothing of that perfect power at the heart
of things, and poetry is considered as a creation rather than a
revelation. But for Shelley, we soon discover, this would be a false
antithesis. The poet creates, but this creation is no mere fancy of his;
it represents 'those forms which are common to universal nature and
existence,' and 'a poem is the very image of life expressed in its
eternal truth.' We notice, further, that the more voluntary and
conscious work of invention and execution is regarded as quite
subordinate in the creative process. In that process the mind, obedient
to an influence which it does not understand and cannot control, is
driven to produce images of perfection which rather form themselves in
it than are formed by it. The greatest stress is laid on this influence
or inspiration; and in the end we learn that the origin of the whole
process lies in certain exceptional moments when visitations of thought
and feeling, elevating and delightful beyond all expression, but always
arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, reach the soul; that these
are, as it were, the inter-penetration of a diviner nature through our
own; and that the province of the poet is to arrest these apparitions,
to veil them in language, to colour every other form he touches with
their evanescent hues, and so to 'redeem from decay the visitations of
the divinity in man.'

Even more decided is the emphasis laid on the unity of all the forms in
which the 'divinity' or ideal power thus attests its presence. Indeed,
throughout a large part of the essay, that 'Poetry' which Shelley is
defending is something very much wider than poetry in the usual sense.
The enemy he has to meet is the contention that poetry and its influence
steadily decline as civilisation advances, and that they are giving
place, and ought to give place, to reasoning and the pursuit of utility.
His answer is that, on the contrary, imagination has been, is, and
always will be, the prime source of everything that has intrinsic value
in life. Reasoning, he declares, cannot create, it can only operate upon
the products of imagination. Further, he holds that the predominance of
mere reasoning and mere utility has become in great part an evil; for
while it has accumulated masses of material goods and moral truths, we
distribute the goods iniquitously and fail to apply the truths, because,
for want of imagination, we have not sympathy in our hearts and do not
feel what we know. The 'Poetry' which he defends, therefore, is the
whole creative imagination with all its products. And these include not
merely literature in verse, but, first, whatever prose writing is allied
to that literature; and, next, all the other fine arts; and, finally,
all actions, inventions, institutions, and even ideas and moral
dispositions, which imagination brings into being in its effort to
satisfy the longing for perfection. Painters and musicians are poets.
Plato and Bacon, even Herodotus and Livy, were poets, though there is
much in their works which is not poetry. So were the men who invented
the arts of life, constructed laws for tribes or cities, disclosed, as
sages or founders of religion, the excellence of justice and love. And
every one, Shelley would say, who, perceiving the beauty of an imagined
virtue or deed, translates the image into a fact, is so far a poet. For
all these things come from imagination.

Shelley's exposition of this, which is probably the most original part
of his theory, is not very clear; but, if I understand his meaning, that
which he takes to happen in all these cases might be thus described. The
imagination--that is to say, the soul imagining--has before it, or feels
within it, something which, answering perfectly to its nature, fills it
with delight and with a desire to realise what delights it. This
something, for the sake of brevity, we may call an idea, so long as we
remember that it need not be distinctly imagined and that it is always
accompanied by emotion. The reason why such ideas delight the imagining
soul is that they are, in fact, images or forebodings of its own
perfection--of itself become perfect--in one aspect or another. These
aspects are as various as the elements and forms of its own inner life
and outward existence; and so the idea may be that of the perfect
harmony of will and feeling (a virtue), or of the perfect union of soul
with soul (love), or of the perfect order of certain social relations
or forces (a law or institution), or of the perfect adjustment of
intellectual elements (a truth); and so on. The formation and expression
of any such idea is thus the work of Poetry in the widest sense; while
at the same time (as we must add, to complete Shelley's thought) any
such idea is a gleam or apparition of the perfect Intellectual Beauty.

I choose this particular title of the hidden power or divinity in order
to point out (what the reader is left to observe for himself) that the
imaginative idea is always regarded by Shelley as beautiful. It is, for
example, desirable for itself and not merely as a means to a further
result; and it has the formal characters of beauty. For, as will have
been noticed in the instances given, it is always the image of an order,
or harmony, or unity in variety, of the elements concerned. Shelley
sometimes even speaks of their 'rhythm.' For example, he uses this word
in reference to an action; and I quote the passage because, though it
occurs at some distance from the exposition of his main view, it
illustrates it well. He is saying that the true poetry of Rome, unlike
that of Greece, did not fully express itself in poems. 'The true poetry
of Rome lived in its institutions: for whatever of beautiful, true and
majestic they contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which
creates the order in which they consist. The life of Camillus; the death
of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their god-like state, of
the victorious Gauls; the refusal of the Republic to make peace with
Hannibal after the battle of Cannæ'--these he describes as 'a rhythm and
order in the shows of life,' an order not arranged with a view to
utility or outward result, but due to the imagination, which, 'beholding
the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according to its own
idea.'

  2.

If this, then, is the nature of Poetry in the widest sense, how does the
poet, in the special sense, differ from other unusually creative souls?
Not essentially in the inspiration and general substance of his poetry,
but in the kind of expression he gives to them. In so far as he is a
poet, his medium of expression, of course, is not virtue, or action, or
law; poetry is one of the acts. And, again, it differs from the rest,
because its particular vehicle is language. We have now to see,
therefore, what Shelley has to say of the form of poetry, and especially
of poetic language.

First, he claims for language the highest place among the vehicles of
artistic expression, on the ground that it is the most direct and also
the most plastic. It is itself produced by imagination instead of being
simply encountered by it, and it has no relation except to imagination;
whereas any more material medium has a nature of its own, and relations
to other things in the material world, and this nature and these
relations intervene between the artist's conception and his expression
of it in the medium. It is to the superiority of its vehicle that
Shelley attributes the greater fame which poetry has always enjoyed as
compared with other arts. He forgets (if I may interpose a word of
criticism) that the media of the other arts have, on their side, certain
advantages over language, and that these perhaps counterbalance the
inferiority which he notices. He would also have found it difficult to
show that language, on its physical side, is any more a product of
imagination than stone or pigments. And his idea that the medium in the
other arts is an obstacle intervening between conception and expression
is, to say the least, one-sided. A sculptor, painter, or musician, would
probably reply that it is only the qualities of his medium that enable
him to express at all; that what he expresses is inseparable from the
vehicle of expression; and that he has no conceptions which are not from
the beginning sculpturesque, pictorial, or musical. It is true, no
doubt, that his medium is an obstacle as well as a medium; but this is
also true of language.

But to resume. Language, Shelley goes on to say, receives in poetry a
peculiar form. As it represents in its meaning a perfection which is
always an order, harmony, or rhythm, so it itself, as so much sound,
_is_ an order, harmony, or rhythm. It is measured language, which is not
the proper vehicle for the mere recital of facts or for mere reasoning.
For Shelley, however, this measured language is not of necessity
metrical. The order or measure may remain at the stage which it reaches
in beautiful prose, like that of Plato, the melody of whose language,
Shelley declares, is the most intense it is possible to conceive. It may
again advance to metre; and he admits that metrical form is convenient,
popular, and preferable, especially in poetry containing much action.
But he will not have any new great poet tied down to it. It is not
essential, while measure is absolutely so. For it is no mere accident of
poetry that its language is measured, nor does a delight in this measure
mean little. As sensitiveness to the order of the relations of sounds is
always connected with sensitiveness to the order of the relations of
thoughts, so also the harmony of the words is scarcely less
indispensable than their meaning to the communication of the influence
of poetry. 'Hence,' says Shelley, 'the vanity of translation: it were as
wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal
principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one
language into another the creations of a poet.' Strong words to come
from the translator of the _Hymn to Mercury_ and of Agathon's speech in
the _Symposium_![1] And is not all that Shelley says of the difference
between measured and unrhythmical language applicable, at least in some
degree, to the difference between metrical and merely measured language?
Could he really have supposed that metre is no more than a
'convenience,' which contributes nothing of any account to the influence
of poetry? But I will not criticise. Let me rather point out how
surprising, at first sight, and how significant, is Shelley's insistence
on the importance of measure or rhythm. No one could assert more
absolutely than he the identity of the general substance of poetry with
that of moral life and action, of the other arts, and of the higher
kinds of philosophy. And yet it would be difficult to go beyond the
emphasis of his statement that the formal element (as he understood it)
is indispensable to the effect of poetry.

Shelley, however, nowhere considers this element more at length. He has
no discussions, like those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, on diction. He
never says, with Keats, that he looks on fine phrases like a lover. We
hear of his deep-drawn sigh of satisfaction as he finished reading a
passage of Homer, but not of his shouting his delight, as he ramped
through the meadows of Spenser, at some marvellous flower. When in his
letters he refers to any poem he is reading, he scarcely ever mentions
particular lines or expressions; and we have no evidence that, like
Coleridge and Keats, he was a curious student of metrical effects or the
relations of vowel-sounds. I doubt if all this is wholly accidental.
Poetry was to him so essentially an effusion of aspiration, love and
worship, that we can imagine his feeling it almost an impiety to break
up its unity even for purposes of study, and to give a separate
attention to its means of utterance. And what he does say on the
subject confirms this impression. In the first place, as we have seen,
he lays great stress on inspiration; and his statements, if exaggerated
and misleading, must still reflect in some degree his own experience. No
poem, he asserts, however inspired it may be, is more than a feeble
shadow of the original conception; for when composition begins,
inspiration is already on the decline. And so in a letter he speaks of
the detail of execution destroying all wild and beautiful visions.
Still, inspiration, if diminished by composition, is not wholly
dispelled; and he appeals to the greatest poets of his day whether it is
not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced
by labour and study. Such toil he would restrict to those parts which
connect the inspired passages, and he speaks with contempt of the
fifty-six various readings of the first line of the _Orlando Furioso_.
He seems to exaggerate on this matter because in the _Defence_ his foe
is cold reason and calculation. Elsewhere he writes more truly of the
original conception as being obscure as well as intense;[2] from which
it would seem to follow that the feeble shadow, if darker, is at least
more distinct than the original. He forgets, too, what is certainly the
fact, that the poet in reshaping and correcting is able to revive in
some degree the fire of the first impulse. And we know from himself that
his greatest works cost him a severe labour not confined to the
execution, while his manuscripts show plenty of various readings, if
never so many as fifty-six in one line.

Still, what he says is highly characteristic of his own practice in
composition. He allowed the rush of his ideas to have its way, without
pausing to complete a troublesome line or to find a word that did not
come; and the next day (if ever) he filled up the gaps and smoothed the
ragged edges. And the result answers to his theory. Keats was right in
telling him that he might be more of an artist. His language, indeed,
unlike Wordsworth's or Byron's, is, in his mature work, always that of a
poet; we never hear his mere speaking voice; but he is frequently
diffuse and obscure, and even in fine passages his constructions are
sometimes trailing and amorphous. The glowing metal rushes into the
mould so vehemently that it overleaps the bounds and fails to find its
way into all the little crevices. But no poetry is more manifestly
inspired, and even when it is plainly imperfect it is sometimes so
inspired that it is impossible to wish it changed. It has the rapture of
the mystic, and that is too rare to lose. Tennyson quaintly said of the
hymn _Life of Life_: 'He seems to go up into the air and burst.' It is
true: and, if we are to speak of poems as fireworks, I would not compare
_Life of Life_ with a great set piece of Homer or Shakespeare that
illumines the whole sky; but, all the same, there is no more thrilling
sight than the heavenward rush of a rocket, and it bursts at a height no
other fire can reach.

In addition to his praise of inspiration Shelley has some scattered
remarks on another point which show the same spirit. He could not bear
in poetic language any approach to artifice, or any sign that the writer
had a theory or system of style. He thought Keats's earlier poems faulty
in this respect, and there is perhaps a reference to Wordsworth in the
following sentence from the Preface to the _Revolt of Islam_: 'Nor have
I permitted any system relating to mere words to divert the attention of
the reader, from whatever interest I may have succeeded in creating, to
my own ingenuity in contriving,--to disgust him according to the rules
of criticism. I have simply clothed my thoughts in what appeared to me
the most obvious and appropriate language. A person familiar with
nature, and with the most celebrated productions of the human mind, can
scarcely err in following the instinct, with respect to selection of
language, produced by that familiarity.'[3] His own poetic style
certainly corresponds with his intention. It cannot give the kind of
pleasure afforded by what may be called without disparagement a learned
and artful style, such as Virgil's or Milton's; but, like the best
writing of Shakespeare and Goethe, it is, with all its individuality,
almost entirely free from mannerism and the other vices of
self-consciousness, and appears to flow so directly from the thought
that one is ashamed to admire it for itself. This is equally so whether
the appropriate style is impassioned and highly figurative, or simple
and even plain. It is indeed in the latter case that Shelley wins his
greatest, because most difficult, triumph. In the dialogue part of
_Julian and Maddalo_ he has succeeded remarkably in keeping the style
quite close to that of familiar though serious conversation, while
making it nevertheless unmistakably poetic. And the _Cenci_ is an
example of a success less complete only because the problem was even
harder. The ideal of the style of tragic drama in the nineteenth or
twentieth century should surely be, not to reproduce with modifications
the style of Shakespeare, but to do what Shakespeare did--to idealise,
without deserting, the language of contemporary speech. Shelley in the
_Cenci_ seems to me to have come nearest to this ideal.

  3.

So much for general exposition. If now we consider more closely what
Shelley says of the substance of poetry, a question at once arises. He
may seem to think of poetry solely as the direct expression of
perfection in some form, and accordingly to imagine its effect as simply
joy or delighted aspiration. Much of his own poetry, too, is such an
expression; and we understand when we find him saying that Homer
embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character, and
unveiled in Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses 'the truth and beauty of
friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object.' But
poetry, it is obvious, is not wholly, perhaps not even mainly, of this
kind. What is to be said, on Shelley's theory, of his own melancholy
lyrics, those 'sweetest songs' that 'tell of saddest thought'? What of
satire, of the epic of conflict and war, or of tragic exhibitions of
violent and destructive passion? Does not his theory reflect the
weakness of his own practice, his tendency to portray a thin and
abstract ideal instead of interpreting the concrete detail of nature and
life; and ought we not to oppose to it a theory which would consider
poetry simply as a representation of fact?

To this last question I should answer No. Shelley's theory, rightly
understood, will take in, I think, everything really poetic. And to a
considerable extent he himself shows the way to meet these doubts. He
did not mean that the _immediate_ subject of poetry must be perfection
in some form. The poet, he says, can colour with the hues of the ideal
everything he touches. If so, he may write of absolutely anything so
long as he _can_ so colour it, and nothing would be excluded from his
province except those things (if any such exist) in which no positive
relation to the ideal, however indirect, can be shown or intimated. Thus
to take the instance of Shelley's melancholy lyrics, clearly the lament
which arises from loss of the ideal, and mourns the evanescence of its
visitations or the desolation of its absence, is indirectly an
expression _of_ the ideal; and so on his theory is the simplest song of
unhappy love or the simplest dirge. Further, he himself observes that,
though the joy of poetry is often unalloyed, yet the pleasure of the
'highest portions of our being is frequently connected with the pain of
the inferior,' that 'the pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the
pleasure of pleasure itself,' and that not sorrow only, but 'terror,
anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an
approximation to the highest good.' That, then, which appeals poetically
to such painful emotions will again be an indirect portrayal of the
ideal; and it is clear, I think, that this was how Shelley in the
_Defence_ regarded heroic and tragic poetry, whether narrative or
dramatic, with its manifestly imperfect characters and its exhibition of
conflict and wild passion. He had, it is true, another and an
unsatisfactory way of explaining the presence of these things in poetry;
and I will refer to this in a moment. But he tells us that the Athenian
tragedies represent the highest idealisms (his name for ideals) of
passion and of power (not merely of virtue); and that in them we behold
ourselves, 'under a thin disguise of circumstance, stripped of all but
that ideal perfection and energy which every one feels to be the
internal type of all that he loves, admires, and would become.' He
writes of Milton's Satan in somewhat the same strain. The Shakespearean
tragedy from which he most often quotes is one in which evil holds the
stage, _Macbeth_; and he was inclined to think _King Lear_, which
certainly is no direct portrait of perfection, the greatest drama in the
world. Lastly, in the Preface to his own _Cenci_ he truly says that,
while the story is fearful and monstrous, 'the poetry which exists in
these tempestuous sufferings and crimes,' if duly brought out,
'mitigates the pain of the contemplation of moral deformity': so that he
regards Count Cenci himself as a _poetic_ character, and therefore as in
_some_ sense an expression of the ideal. He does not further explain his
meaning. Perhaps it was that the perfection which poetry is to exhibit
includes, together with those qualities which win our immediate and
entire approval or sympathy, others which are capable of becoming the
instruments of evil. For these, the energy, power and passion of the
soul, though they may be perverted, are in themselves elements of
perfection; and so, even in their perversion or their combination with
moral deformity, they retain their value, they are not simply ugly or
horrible, but appeal through emotions predominantly painful to the same
love of the ideal which is directly satisfied by pictures of goodness
and beauty. Now to these various considerations we shall wish to add
others; but if we bear these in mind, I believe we shall find Shelley's
theory wide enough, and must hold that the substance of poetry is never
mere fact, but is always ideal, though its method of representation is
sometimes more direct, sometimes more indirect.

Nevertheless, he does not seem to have made his view quite clear to
himself, or to hold to it consistently. We are left with the impression,
not merely that he personally preferred the direct method (as he was, of
course, entitled to do), but that his use of it shows a certain
weakness, and also that even in theory he unconsciously tends to regard
it as the primary and proper method, and to admit only by a reluctant
after-thought the representation of imperfection. Let me point out some
signs of this. He considered his own _Cenci_ as a poem inferior in kind
to his other main works, even as a sort of accommodation to the public.
With all his modesty he knew what to think of the neglected
_Prometheus_ and _Adonaïs_, but there is no sign that he, any more than
the world, was aware that the character of Cenci was a creation without
a parallel in our poetry since the seventeenth century. His enthusiasm
for some second-rate and third-rate Italian paintings, and his failure
to understand Michael Angelo, seem to show the same tendency. He could
not enjoy comedy: it seemed to him simply cruel: he did not perceive
that to show the absurdity of the imperfect is to glorify the perfect.
And, as I mentioned just now, he wavers in his view of the
representation of heroic and tragic imperfection. We find in the Preface
to _Prometheus Unbound_ the strange notion that Prometheus is a more
poetic character than Milton's Satan because he is free from Satan's
imperfections, which are said to interfere with the interest. And in the
_Defence_ a similar error appears. Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, though
they exhibit ideal virtues, are, he admits, imperfect. Why, then, did
Homer make them so? Because, he seems to reply, Homer's contemporaries
regarded their vices (_e.g._ revengefulness and deceitfulness) as
virtues. Homer accordingly had to conceal in the costume of these vices
the unspotted beauty that he himself imagined; and, like Homer, 'few
poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their
conceptions in its naked truth and splendour.' Now, this idea, to say
nothing of its grotesque improbability in reference to Homer, and its
probable baselessness in reference to most other poets, is quite
inconsistent with that truer view of heroic and tragic character which
was explained just now. It is an example of Shelley's tendency to
abstract idealism or spurious Platonism. He is haunted by the fancy that
if he could only get at the One, the eternal Idea, in complete aloofness
from the Many, from life with all its change, decay, struggle, sorrow
and evil, he would have reached the true object of poetry: as if the
whole finite world were a mere mistake or illusion, the sheer opposite
of the infinite One, and in no way or degree its manifestation. Life, he
says--

  Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
  Stains the white radiance of eternity;

but the other side, the fact that the many colours _are_ the white light
broken, he tends to forget, by no means always, but in one, and that not
the least inspired, of his moods. This is the source of that thinness
and shallowness of which his view of the world and of history is justly
accused, a view in which all imperfect being is apt to figure as
absolutely gratuitous, and everything and everybody as pure white or
pitch black. Hence also his ideals of good, whether as a character or as
a mode of life, resting as they do on abstraction from the mass of real
existence, tend to lack body and individuality; and indeed, if the
existence of the many is a mere calamity, clearly the next best thing to
their disappearance is that they should all be exactly alike and have as
little character as possible. But we must remember that Shelley's
strength and weakness are closely allied, and it may be that the very
abstractness of his ideal was a condition of that quivering intensity of
aspiration towards it in which his poetry is unequalled. We must not go
for this to Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe; and if we go for it to
Dante, we shall find, indeed, a mind far vaster than Shelley's, but also
that dualism of which we complain in him, and the description of a
heaven which, equally with Shelley's regenerated earth, is no place for
mere mortality. In any case, as we have seen, the weakness in his
poetical practice, though it occasionally appears also as a defect in
his poetical theory, forms no necessary part of it.

  4.

I pass to his views on a last point. If the business of poetry is
somehow to express ideal perfection, it may seem to follow that the
poet should embody in his poems his beliefs about this perfection and
the way to approach it, and should thus have a moral purpose and aim to
be a teacher. And in regard to Shelley this conclusion seems the more
natural because his own poetry allows us to see clearly some of his
beliefs about morality and moral progress. Yet alike in his Prefaces and
in the _Defence_ he takes up most decidedly the position that the poet
ought neither to affect a moral aim nor to express his own conceptions
of right and wrong. 'Didactic poetry,' he declares, 'is my abhorrence:
nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and
supererogatory in verse.'[4] 'There was little danger,' he tells us in
the _Defence_, 'that Homer or any of the eternal poets' should make a
mistake in this matter; but 'those in whom the poetical faculty, though
great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have
frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is
diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to
advert to this purpose.' These statements may appeal to us, but are they
consistent with Shelley's main views of poetry? To answer this question
we must observe what exactly it is that he means to condemn.

Shelley was one of the few persons who can literally be said to _love_
their kind. He held most strongly, too, that poetry does benefit men,
and benefits them morally. The moral purpose, then, to which he objects
cannot well be a poet's general purpose of doing moral as well as other
good through his poetry--such a purpose, I mean, as he may cherish when
he contemplates his life and his life's work. And, indeed, it seems
obvious that nobody with any humanity or any sense can object to that,
except through some intellectual confusion. Nor, secondly, does Shelley
mean, I think, to condemn even the writing of a particular poem with a
view to a particular moral or practical effect; certainly, at least, if
this was his meaning he was condemning some of his own poetry. Nor,
thirdly, can he be referring to the portrayal of moral ideals; for that
he regarded as one of the main functions of poetry, and in the very
place where he says that didactic poetry is his abhorrence he also says,
by way of contrast, that he has tried to familiarise the minds of his
readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence. It appears,
therefore, that what he is really attacking is the attempt to give, in
the strict sense, moral _instruction_, to communicate doctrines, to
offer argumentative statements of opinion on right and wrong, and more
especially, I think, on controversial questions of the day. An example
would be Wordsworth's discourse on education at the end of the
_Excursion_, a discourse of which Shelley, we know, had a very low
opinion. In short, his enemy is not the purpose of producing a moral
effect, it is the appeal made for this purpose to the reasoning
intellect. He says to the poet: By all means aim at bettering men; you
are a man, and are bound to do so; but you are also a poet, and
therefore your proper way of doing so is not by reasoning and preaching.
His idea is of a piece with his general championship of imagination, and
it is quite consistent with his main view of poetry.[5]

What, then, are the _grounds_ of this position? They are not clearly set
out, but we can trace several, and they are all solid. Reasoning on
moral subjects, moral philosophy, was by no means 'tedious' to Shelley;
it seldom is to real poets. He loved it, and (outside his _Defence_) he
rated its value very high.[6] But he thought it tedious and out of place
in poetry, because it can be equally well expressed in 'unmeasured'
language--much better expressed, one may venture to add. You invent an
art in order to effect by it a particular purpose which nothing else can
effect as well. How foolish, then, to use this art for a purpose better
served by something else! I know no answer to this argument, and its
application is far wider than that given to it by Shelley. Secondly,
Shelley remarks that a poet's own conceptions on moral subjects are
usually those of his place and time, while the matter of his poem ought
to be eternal, or, as we say, of permanent and universal interest. This,
again, seems true, and has a wide application; and it holds good even
when the poet, like Shelley himself, is in rebellion against orthodox
moral opinion; for his heterodox opinions will equally show the marks of
his place and time, and constitute a perishable element in his work.
Doubtless no poetry can be without a perishable element; but that poetry
has least of it which interprets life least through the medium of
systematic and doctrinal ideas. The veil which time and place have hung
between Homer or Shakespeare and the general reader of to-day is almost
transparent, while even a poetry so intense as that of Dante and Milton
is impeded in its passage to him by systems which may be unfamiliar,
and, if familiar, may be distasteful.

Lastly--and this is Shelley's central argument--as poetry itself is
directly due to imaginative inspiration and not to reasoning, so its
true moral effect is produced through imagination and not through
doctrine. Imagination is, for Shelley, 'the great instrument of moral
good.' The 'secret of morals is love.' It is not 'for want of admirable
doctrines that men hate and despise and censure and deceive and
subjugate one another': it is for want of love. And love is 'a going out
of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful
which exists in thought, action or person not our own.' 'A man,'
therefore, 'to be greatly good must imagine intensely and
comprehensively.' And poetry ministers to moral good, the effect, by
acting on its cause, imagination. It strengthens imagination as exercise
strengthens a limb, and so it indirectly promotes morality. It also
fills the imagination with beautiful impersonations of all that we
should wish to be. But moral reasoning does not act upon the cause, it
only analyses the effect; and the poet has no right to be content to
analyse what he ought indirectly to create. Here, again, in his
eagerness, Shelley cuts his antitheses too clean, but the defect is
easily made good, and the main argument is sound.

Limits of time will compel me to be guilty of the same fault in adding a
consideration which is in the spirit of Shelley's. The chief moral
effect claimed for poetry by Shelley is exerted, primarily, by
imagination on the emotions; but there is another influence, exerted
primarily through imagination on the understanding. Poetry is largely an
interpretation of life; and, considering what life is, that must mean a
moral interpretation. This, to have poetic value, must satisfy
imagination; but we value it also because it gives us knowledge, a wider
comprehension, a new insight into ourselves and the world.[7] Now, it
may be held--and this view answers to a very general feeling among
lovers of poetry now--that the most deep and original moral
interpretation is not likely to be that which most shows a moral purpose
or is most governed by reflective beliefs and opinions, and that as a
rule we learn most from those who do not try to teach us, and whose
opinions may even remain unknown to us: so that there is this weighty
objection to the appearance of such purpose and opinions, that it tends
to defeat its own intention. And the reason that I wish to suggest is
this, that always we get most from the _genius_ in a man of genius and
not from the rest of him. Now, although poets often have unusual powers
of reflective thought, the specific genius of a poet does not lie there,
but in imagination. Therefore his deepest and most original
interpretation is likely to come by the way of imagination. And the
specific way of imagination is not to clothe in imagery consciously held
ideas; it is to produce half-consciously a matter from which, when
produced, the reader may, if he chooses, extract ideas. Poetry (I must
exaggerate to be clear), psychologically considered, is not the
_expression_ of ideas or of a view of life; it is their discovery or
creation, or rather both discovery and creation in one. The
interpretation contained in _Hamlet_ or _King Lear_ was not brought
ready-made to the old stories. What was brought to them was the huge
substance of Shakespeare's imagination, in which all his experience and
thought was latent; and this, dwelling and working on the stories with
nothing but a dramatic purpose, and kindling into heat and motion,
gradually discovered or created in them a meaning and a mass of truth
about life, which was brought to birth by the process of composition,
but never preceded it in the shape of ideas, and probably never, even
after it, took that shape to the poet's mind. And _this_ is the
interpretation which we find inexhaustibly instructive, because
Shakespeare's _genius_ is in it. On the other hand, however much from
curiosity and personal feeling towards him we may wish to know his
opinions and beliefs about morals or religion or his own poems or Queen
Elizabeth, we have not really any reason to suppose that their value
would prove extraordinary. And so, to apply this generally, the
opinions, reasonings and beliefs of poets are seldom of the same quality
as their purely imaginative product. Occasionally, as with Goethe, they
are not far off it; but sometimes they are intense without being
profound, and more eccentric than original; and often they are very sane
and sound, but not very different from those of wise men without genius.
And therefore poetry is not the place for them. For we want in poetry a
moral interpretation, but not the interpretation we have already. As a
rule the genuine artist's quarrel with 'morality' in art is not really
with morality, it is with a stereotyped or narrow morality; and when he
refuses in his art to consider things from what he calls the moral point
of view, his reasons are usually wrong, but his instinct is right.

Poetry itself confirms on the whole this contention, though doubtless in
these last centuries a great poet's work will usually reveal more of
conscious reflection than once it did. Homer and Shakespeare show no
moral aim and no system of opinion. Milton was far from justifying the
ways of God to men by the argumentation he put into divine and angelic
lips; his truer moral insight is in the creations of his genius; for
instance, in the character of Satan or the picture of the glorious
humanity of Adam and Eve. Goethe himself could never have told the world
what he was going to express in the First Part of _Faust_: the poem told
_him_, and it is one of the world's greatest. He knew too well what he
was going to express in the Second Part, and with all its wisdom and
beauty it is scarcely a great poem. Wordsworth's original message was
delivered, not when he was a Godwinian semi-atheist, nor when he had
subsided upon orthodoxy, but when his imagination, with a few hints from
Coleridge, was creating a kind of natural religion; and this religion
itself is more profoundly expressed in his descriptions of his
experience than in his attempts to formulate it. The moral virtue of
Tennyson is in poems like _Ulysses_ and parts of _In Memoriam_, where
sorrow and the consciousness of a deathless affection or an unquenchable
desire for experience forced an utterance; but when in the _Idylls_ he
tried to found a great poem on explicit ideas about the soul and the
ravages wrought in it by lawless passion, he succeeded but partially,
because these ideas, however sound, were no product of his genius. And
so the moral virtue of Shelley's poetry lay, not in his doctrines about
the past and future of man, but in an intuition, which was the substance
of his soul, of the unique value of love. In the end, for him, the
truest name of that perfection called Intellectual Beauty, Liberty,
Spirit of Nature, is Love. Whatever in the world has any worth is an
expression of Love. Love sometimes talks. Love talking musically is
Poetry.

1904.

FOOTNOTES:

  [1] Statements equally emphatic on this subject may be found in a
    passage quoted by Mrs. Shelley in a footnote to Shelley's letter to
    John Gisborne, Nov. 16, 1819 (Letter XXX. in Mrs. Shelley's edition).
    Cf. also Letter XXXIII. to Leigh Hunt, Nov. 1819.

  [2] I cannot find the passage or passages to which I referred in
    making this statement, and therefore I do not vouch for its accuracy.
    Cf. from the fragment _Fiordispina_,

      The ardours of a vision which obscure
      The very idol of its portraiture.

  [3] Cf. from the Preface to the _Cenci_: 'I entirely agree with those
    modern critics who assert that, in order to move men to true
    sympathy, we must use the familiar language of men.... But it must be
    the real language of men in general, and not that of any particular
    class to whose society the writer happens to belong.'

  [4] Preface to _Prometheus Unbound_.

  [5] I do not discuss the adequacy of Shelley's position, or assert
    that he held it quite clearly or consistently. In support of my
    interpretation, of it I may refer to the Preface to the _Cenci_.
    There he repudiates the idea of making the dramatic exhibition of the
    story 'subservient to what is vulgarly called a moral purpose,' and,
    as the context shows, he identifies such a treatment of the story
    with the 'enforcement' of a 'dogma.'

    This passage has a further interest. The dogma which Shelley would
    not enforce in his tragedy was that 'no person can truly be
    dishonoured by the act of another, and the fit return to make to the
    most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance, and a resolution
    to convert the injurer from his dark passions by peace and love'; and
    accordingly he held that 'if Beatrice had thought in this manner, she
    would have been wiser and better.' How inexcusable then is the not
    uncommon criticism on the _Cenci_ that he represents Beatrice as a
    perfect character and justifies her murder of 'the injurer.'

    Shelley's position in the _Defence_, it may be added, is in total
    disagreement with his youthful doctrine and practice. In 1811 he
    wrote to Miss Hitchener, 'My opinion is that all poetical beauty
    ought to be subordinate to the inculcated moral,' and a large part of
    _Queen Mab_ is frankly didactic. Even there, however, he reserved
    most of the formal instruction for the Notes, perceiving that 'a poem
    very didactic is ... very stupid.'

  [6] 'I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political
    science,' he says in a letter to Peacock, Jan. 1819.

  [7] And, I may add, the more it does this, so long as it does it
    imaginatively, the more does it satisfy imagination, and the greater
    is its _poetic_ value.

THE LONG POEM IN THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH

THE LONG POEM IN THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH[1]

The poetry of the age of Wordsworth, we are all agreed, is one of the
glories of our literature. It is surpassed, many would add, by the
poetry of no other period except the Elizabethan. But it has obvious
flaws, of which perhaps we are becoming more and more distinctly
conscious now; and, apart from these definite defects, it also leaves
with us, when we review it, a certain feeling of disappointment. It is
great, we say to ourselves, but why is it not greater still? It shows a
wonderful abundance of genius: why does it not show an equal
accomplishment?

  1.

Matthew Arnold, in his essay on _The Function of Criticism at the
Present Time_, gave an answer to this question. 'It has long seemed to
me,' he wrote, 'that the burst of creative activity in our literature,
through the first quarter of this century, had about it, in fact,
something premature.... And this prematureness comes from its having
proceeded without having its proper data, without sufficient materials
to work with. In other words, the English poetry of the first quarter of
this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not
know enough. This makes Byron so empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent,
Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness and
in variety.' The statement that this poetry 'did not know enough' means,
of course, for Arnold, not that it lacked information, reading, ideas of
a kind, but that it lacked 'criticism.' And this means that it did not
live and move freely in an atmosphere of the best available ideas, of
ideas gained by a free, sincere, and continued effort, in theology,
philosophy, history, science, to see things as they are. In such an
atmosphere Goethe lived. There was not indeed in Goethe's Germany, nor
was there in the England of our poets, the 'national glow of life and
thought' that prevailed in the Athens of Pericles or the England of
Elizabeth. That happiest atmosphere for poetry was wanting in both
countries. But there was for Goethe 'a sort of equivalent for it in the
complete culture and unfettered thinking of a large body of Germans,' a
culture produced by a many-sided learning and a long and widely-combined
critical effort. It was this that our poets lacked.

Now, if this want existed, as Arnold affirms, it may not have had all
the importance he ascribes to it, but considerable importance it must
have had. And as to its existence there can hardly be a doubt. One of
the most striking characteristics of Wordsworth's age is the very
unusual superiority of the imaginative literature to the scientific. I
mean by the 'scientific' literature that of philosophy, theology,
history, politics, economics, not only that of the sciences of Nature,
which for our present purpose are perhaps the least important. In this
kind of literature Wordsworth's age has hardly an author to show who
could for a moment be placed on a level with some five of the poets,
with the novelists Scott and Jane Austen, or with the poetic critics
Lamb, Hazlitt, and Coleridge. It has no writers to compare with Bacon,
Newton, Hume, Gibbon, Johnson, or Burke. It is the time of Paley,
Godwin, Stewart, Bentham, Mitford, Lingard, Coleridge the philosopher
and theologian. These are names worthy of all respect, but they
represent a literature quite definitely of the second rank. And this
great disproportion between the two kinds of literature, we must
observe, is a peculiar phenomenon. If we go back as far as the
Elizabethan age we shall find no parallel to it. The one kind was
doubtless superior to the other in Shakespeare's time, possibly even in
Milton's; but Hooker and Bacon and Taylor and Clarendon and Hobbes are
not separated from the best poets of their day by any startling
difference of quality;[2] while in the later periods, right down to the
age of Wordsworth, the scientific literature quite holds its own, to say
no more, with the imaginative. Nor in the Germany of Wordsworth's own
time is there that gap between the two that we find in England. In
respect of genius the philosophers, for example, though none of them was
the equal of Goethe, were as a body not at all inferior to the poets.
The case of England in Wordsworth's age is anomalous.

This peculiarity must be symptomatic, and it must have been influential.
It confirms Arnold's view that the intellectual atmosphere of the time
was not of the best. If we think of the periodical literature--of the
_Quarterly_ and _Edinburgh_ and _Blackwood_--we shall be still more
inclined to assent to that view. And when we turn to the poets
themselves, and especially to their prose writings, letters, and
recorded conversation, and even to the critiques of Hazlitt, of Lamb,
and of Coleridge, we cannot reject it. Assuredly we read with
admiration, and the signs of native genius we meet with in abundance--in
greater abundance, I think, than in the poetry and criticism of Germany,
if Goethe is excepted. But the freedom of spirit, the knowledge, the
superiority to prejudice and caprice and fanaticism, the openness to
ideas, the atmosphere that is all about us when we read Lessing, Goethe,
Schiller, Heine, we do not find. Can we imagine any one of those four
either inspired or imprisoned as Shelley was by the doctrines of Godwin?
Could any of them have seen in the French Revolution no more
significance than Scott appears to have detected? How cramped are the
attitudes, sympathetic or antipathetic, of nearly all our poets towards
the Christian religion! Could anything be more _borné_ than Coleridge's
professed reason for not translating _Faust_?[3] Is it possible that a
German poet with the genius of Byron or Wordsworth could have inhabited
a mental world so small and so tainted with vulgarity as is opened to us
by the brilliant letters of the former, or could have sunk, like the
latter, to suggesting that the cholera was a divine condemnation of
Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill?

But if we accept Arnold's statement as to the intellectual atmosphere of
the poetry of Wordsworth's time, a question will remain. Was he right in
regarding this atmosphere as the sole, or even as the chief, cause of
the fact (if it is one) that the poetry does not fully correspond in
greatness with the genius of the poets? And before we come to this
question we must put another. Is the fact really as it has just been
stated? I do not think so. The disappointment that we feel attends, it
seems to me, mainly our reading of the long poems. Reviewing these in
memory, and asking ourselves how many we can unreservedly call 'great,'
we hesitate. Beyond doubt there is great poetry in some of them, fine
poetry in many; but that does not make a great whole. Which of them is
great as a whole? Not the _Prelude_ or the _Excursion_, still less
_Endymion_ or _The Revolt of Islam_ or _Childe Harold_, which hardly
pretends to unity. _Christabel_, the wonderful fragment, is a fragment;
so is _Hyperion_; _Don Juan_, also unfinished, becomes more discursive
the further it proceeds, and in spirit is nowhere great. All the
principal poets wrote dramas, or at least dramatic pieces; and some
readers think that in _Manfred_, and still more certainly in _Cain_, we
have great poems, while others think this of _Prometheus Unbound_ and
_The Cenci_. But if as to one or more of these we assent, is our
judgment quite confident, and can we say that any of them _satisfy_ us,
like some works of earlier times? We are thus satisfied, it seems to me,
only when we come to poems of smaller dimensions, like _The Ancient
Mariner_, or _The Eve of Saint Agnes_, or _Adonaïs_, or _The Vision of
Judgment_, or when we read the lyrics. To save time I will confine
myself to the latter.

Within this sphere we have no longer that impression of genius which
fails to reach full accomplishment. I would go further. No poet, of
course, of Wordsworth's age is the equal of Shakespeare or of Milton;
and there are certain qualities, too, of lyrical verse in which the
times of Shakespeare and of Milton are superior to that of Wordsworth.
But if we take the better part of the lyrical poetry of these three
periods in the mass, or again in a representative selection, it will not
be the latest period, I think, that need fear the comparison. In the
original edition of the _Golden Treasury_, Book I. (Wyatt to
Shakespeare) occupies forty pages; Book II. (the rest of the seventeenth
century) sixty-five; Book IV., which covers the very much shorter
period from Wordsworth to Hood, close on a hundred and forty. 'Book
I.,' perhaps most of us would say, 'should be longer, and Book IV. a
good deal shorter: some third-rate pieces are included in it, and
Wordsworth is over-represented. And the Elizabethan poems are mostly
quite short, while the Nineteenth Century poets shine equally in the
longer kinds of lyric. And Mr. Palgrave excluded the old ballads, but
admitted poems like Coleridge's _Love_ and Wordsworth's _Ruth_ (seven
whole pages). And in any case we cannot judge by mere quantity.' No; but
still quantity must count for something, and the _Golden Treasury_ is a
volume excellent in selection, arrangement, and taste. It does, I think,
leave the impression that the age of Wordsworth was our greatest period
in lyrical poetry. And if Book I. were swelled to the dimensions of Book
IV., this impression would not be materially altered; it might even be
deepened. For the change would force into notice the comparative
monotony of the themes of the earlier poetry, and the immensely wider
range of the thought and emotion that attain expression in the later. It
might also convince us that, on the whole, this more varied material is
treated with a greater intensity of feeling, though on this point it is
difficult to be sure, since we recognise what may be called the
conventions of an earlier age, and are perhaps a little blind to those
of a time near our own.

Now the eminence of Wordsworth's age in lyrical poetry, even if it is
not also a pre-eminence, is a significant fact. It may mean that the
whole poetic spirit of the time was lyrical in tendency; and this may
indirectly be a cause of that sense of disappointment which mingles with
our admiration of the long poems. I will call attention, therefore, to
two or three allied facts. (1) The longer poems of Campbell are already
dead; he survives only in lyrics. This is also true of Moore. In spite
of fine passages (and the battle in _Marmion_ is in certain qualities
superior to anything else of the time) Scott's longer poems cannot be
classed with the best contemporary poetry; but in some of his ballads
and songs he attains that rank. (2) Again, much of the most famous
narrative poetry is semi-lyrical in form, as a moment's thought of
Scott, Byron, and Coleridge will show. Some of it (for instance, several
of Byron's tales, or Wordsworth's _White Doe of Rylstone_) is strongly
tinged with the lyrical spirit. The centre of interest is inward. It is
an interest in emotion, thought, will, rather than in scenes, events,
actions, which express and re-act on emotions, thoughts, will. It would
hardly be going too far to say that in the most characteristic narrative
poetry the balance of outward and inward is rarely attained.[4] (3) The
same tendencies are visible in much of the dramatic writing. Byron's
regular dramas, for instance, if they ever lived, are almost forgotten;
but _Heaven and Earth_, which is still alive, is largely composed of
lyrics, and the first two acts of _Manfred_ are full of them.
_Prometheus Unbound_ is called 'a lyrical drama.' Though it has some
very fine and some very beautiful blank verse passages (usually
undramatic), its lyrics are its glory; and this is even more the case
with _Hellas_. It would be untrue to say that the comparative failure of
most of the dramas of the time is principally due to the lyrical spirit,
but many of them show it. (4) The strength of this spirit may be
illustrated lastly by a curious fact. The ode is one of the longest and
most ambitious forms of lyric, and some of the most famous poems of
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats are odes. But the greatest of the
lyrists, who wrote the Odes to Liberty and Naples and the West Wind,
found the limits even of the ode too narrow for his 'flight of fire.' If
_Lycidas_ and _L'Allegro_ and Spenser's _Epithalamion_ are lyrical
poems, and if we are not arbitrarily to determine that nothing shall be
called lyrical which exceeds a certain length, _Adonaïs_ will be a
lyrical elegy in fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, and the _Lines written
among the Euganean Hills_ and _Epipsychidion_ will be lyrics consisting
respectively of 370 and 600 lines.

It will however be agreed that in general a lyrical poem may be called
short as compared with a narrative or drama. It is usual, further, to
say that lyrical poetry is 'subjective,' since, instead of telling or
representing a story of people, actions, and events, it expresses the
thoughts and feelings of the poet himself. This statement is ambiguous
and in other ways defective; but it will be admitted to have a basis in
fact. It may be suggested, then, that the excellence of the lyrical
poetry of Wordsworth's time, and the imperfection of the long narratives
and dramas, may have a common origin. Just as it was most natural to
Homer or to Shakespeare to express the imaginative substance of his mind
in the 'objective' shape of a world of persons and actions ostensibly
severed from his own thoughts and feelings, so, perhaps, for some reason
or reasons, it was most natural to the best poets of this later time to
express that substance in the shape of impassioned reflections,
aspirations, prophecies, laments, outcries of joy, murmurings of peace.
The matter of these might, in another sense of the word, be 'objective'
enough, a matter of general human interest, not personal in any
exclusive way; but it appeared in the form of the poet's thought and
feeling. Just because he most easily expressed it thus, he succeeded
less completely when he attempted the more objective form of utterance;
and for the same reason it was especially important that he should be
surrounded and penetrated by an atmosphere of wide, deep, and liberal
'criticism.' For he not only lived among ideas; he expressed ideas, and
expressed them _as_ ideas.

These suggestions seem to be supported by other phenomena of the poetry.
The 'subjective' spirit extends, we saw, into many of the longer poems.
This is obvious when it can plausibly be said, as in Byron's case, that
the poet's one hero is himself. It appears in another way when the poem,
through its story or stories, displays the poet's favourite ideas and
beliefs. The _Excursion_ does this; most of Shelley's longer poems do
it. And the strength of this tendency may be seen in an apparent
contradiction. One of the marks of the Romantic Revival is a disposition
to substitute the more concrete and vivid forms of narrative and drama
for the eighteenth century form of satiric or so-called didactic
reflection. Yet most of the greater poets, especially in their
characteristic beginnings, show a strong tendency to reflective verse;
Coleridge, for example, in _Religious Musings_, Byron in the first two
cantos of _Childe Harold_, Shelley in _Queen Mab_, and Keats in _Sleep
and Poetry_. These are not, like the _Pleasures of Memory_ and
_Pleasures of Hope_, continuations of the traditional style; they are
thoroughly Romantic; and yet they are reflective. Scott, indeed, goes
straight to the objective forms; but then Scott, for good and evil, was
little affected by the spiritual upheaval of his time. Those who were
deeply affected by it, directly or indirectly, had their minds full of
theoretic ideas. They were groping after, or were already inflamed by,
some explicit view of life, and of life seen in relation to an ideal
which it revealed or contradicted. And this view of life, at least at
first, pressed for utterance in a more or less abstract shape, or
became a sort of soul or second meaning within those appearances of
nature, or actions of men, or figures and fantasies of youthful
imagination, which formed the ostensible subject of the poetry.

Considered in this light, the following facts become very significant.
Wordsworth, now about thirty, and the author of many characteristic
lyrics, on returning from Germany and settling at Grasmere, begins to
meditate a long poem. He tells us in the _Prelude_ of the subjects he
thought of. They are good subjects, legendary and historical, stories of
action, not at all theoretical.[5] But it will not do: his mind 'turns
recreant to her task.' He has another hope, a 'favourite aspiration'
towards 'a philosophic song of Truth.' But even this will not do; it is
premature; even Truth (I venture to suggest) is not inward enough. He
must first tell the story of his own mind: the subject of his long poem
must be Poetry itself. He tells this story, to our great gain, in the
_Prelude_; and it is the story of the steps by which he came to see
reality, Nature and Man, as the partial expression of the ideal, of an
all-embracing and perfect spiritual life or Being. Not till this is done
can he proceed to the _Excursion_, which, together with much reflection
and even argumentation, contains pictures of particular men.

'This for our greatest'; but it is not his history alone. The first
longer poem of Shelley which can be called mature was _Alastor_. And
what is its subject? The subject of the _Prelude_; the story of a Poet's
soul, and of the effect on it of the revelation of its ideal. The first
long poem of Keats was _Endymion_. The tendency to the concrete was
strong in Keats; he has been called, I think, an Elizabethan born out of
due time; and _Endymion_, like _Venus and Adonis_, is a mythological
story. But it is by no means that alone. The infection of his time was
in him. The further subject of _Endymion_ is again the subject of the
_Prelude_, the story of a poet's soul smitten by love of its ideal, the
Principle of Beauty, and striving for union with it, for the 'wedding'
of the mind of man 'with this goodly universe in love and holy passion.'
What, again, is the subject of _Epipsychidion_? The same.

  There was a Being whom my spirit oft
  Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft
  In the clear golden prime of my youth's dawn.

The poem is all about the search of the poet's soul for this ideal
Being. And the _Sensitive Plant_ is this soul, and the Lady of the
Garden this Being, And _Prince Athanase_ is the same soul, and if the
poem had been continued the Being would soon have appeared. Is it not an
astonishing proof of Shelley's powers that the _Cenci_ was ever written?
Shelley, when he died, had half escaped--Keats, some time before he
died, had quite escaped--from that bewitching inward world of the poet's
soul and its shadowy adventures. Could that well be the world of what we
call emphatically a 'great poem'?

  2.

Let us review for a moment the course of our discussion. I have been
suggesting that, if our pleasure and glory in the poetry of Wordsworth's
age is tinged with disappointment, this does not extend to the lyrical
poetry; that the lyrical spirit, or, more generally, an inward or
subjective tendency, shows itself in many of the longer works; and that
their imperfection is partly due to it. Now, let me suggest that the
atmosphere of adequate 'criticism' which Arnold misses in the age and
its poetry, while doubtless it would have influenced favourably even the
lyrics, and much more the larger works, could hardly have diminished the
force of that tendency, and that the main difficulty lay _there_. But,
before developing this idea further, I propose to leave for a time the
English poetry of Wordsworth's age, to look beyond it, and to ask
certain questions.

First, granted that in that age the atmosphere of 'criticism' was more
favourable in Germany than in England, how many long poems were produced
in Germany that we can call without hesitation or qualification 'great'?
Were _any_ produced except by Goethe? And, if we admit (as I gladly do)
that he produced several, was not the _main_ reason simply that he was
born with more poetic genius than any of his contemporaries, just as
Dante and Shakespeare and Milton were? And again, with this native
genius and his long laborious life, did he produce anything like as many
great poems as might have been expected? And, if not, why not? I do not
suggest that his general culture, so superior to that of his English
contemporaries, did not help him; but are we sure that it did not also
hinder him? And is it not also significant that, in spite of his love of
new ideas, he felt an instinctive dread of the influence of philosophy,
in the strict sense, as of something dangerous to the poetic modes of
vision and creation?

Secondly, if we look beyond the first quarter of the century to the
second and third, do we find in Europe a large number of those
emphatically great poems, solid coherent structures of concrete
imagination? It seems more than doubtful. To confine ourselves to
English examples, is it not the case that Tennyson is primarily a
lyrical poet, that the best of his longer poems, _Maud_ and _In
Memoriam_, are lyrical, and that the most ambitious, the narrative
_Idylls of the King_, is, as a whole, not great? Is the _Ring and the
Book_, however fine in parts, a great whole, or comparable as a whole
with _Andrea del Sarto_ or _Rabbi ben Ezra_? And is any one of
Browning's dramas a great play? What these questions suggest is that,
while the difficulty about the long poem affects in an extreme degree
the age of Wordsworth, it affects in some degree the time that follows.
Its beginnings, too, are traceable before the nineteenth century. In
fact it is connected with essential characteristics of modern poetry and
art; and these characteristics are connected with the nature of modern
life, and the position of the artist within that life. I wish to touch
on this huge subject before returning to the age of Wordsworth.

Art, we may say, has become free, and, in a sense, universal. The poet
is no longer the minstrel of king or nobles, nor even of a city or
country. Literature, as Goethe foretold, becomes increasingly European,
and more than European; and the poet, however national, is a citizen of
the Republic of Letters. No class of subject, again, has any prerogative
claim on him. Whatever, in any time or place, is human, whatever has
been conceived as divine, whatever belongs even to external nature, he
may choose, as it suits his bent or offers a promising material. The
world is all before him; and it is a world which the increase of
knowledge has made immensely wide and rich. His art, further, has
asserted its independence. Its public exhibition must conform to the
law; but otherwise it neither asks the approval nor submits to the
control of any outward authority; and it is the handmaid of nothing. It
claims a value for itself, as an expression of mind co-ordinate with
other expressions, theoretic and practical; satisfying a need and
serving a purpose that none of them can fulfil; subject only, as they
too are subject, to the unity of human nature and human good. Finally,
in respect of the methods of his art the poet claims and enjoys the same
freedom. The practice of the past, the 'rules' of the past (if they
existed or exist), are without authority for him. It is improbable
beforehand that a violent breach with them will lead him to a real
advance, just as it is improbable that such a breach with the morals or
the science of his day will do so. But there is no certainty beforehand;
and if he fails, he expects blame not because he innovates, but because
he has failed by innovating.

The freedom of modern art, and the universality of its field, are great
things, and the value of the second is easily seen in the extraordinary
variety of subject-matter in the longer poems of the nineteenth century.
But in candid minds most recitals of our modern advantages are followed
by a melancholy sense of our feebleness in using them. And so in some
degree it is here. The unrivalled opportunities fail to produce
unrivalled works. And we can see that the deepest cause of this is not a
want of native genius or of acquired skill or even of conscientious
labour, but the fact that the opportunities themselves bring danger and
difficulty. The poet who knows everything and may write about anything
has, after all, a hard task. Things must have been easier, it seems to
us, for an artist whose choice, if his aim was high, was restricted to a
cycle of ideas and stories, mythological, legendary, or historical, or
all together, concerning beings divine, daemonic, angelic, or heroic.
His matter, as it existed in the general imagination, was already highly
poetical. If not created by imagination, it was shaped or coloured by
it; a world not of bodiless thoughts and emotions, but of scenes,
figures, actions, and events. For the most part he lived in unity with
it; it appealed to his own religious and moral feelings and beliefs,
sometimes to his patriotic feelings; and he wrote, painted, or carved,
for people who shared with him both his material and his attitude
towards it. It belonged usually to the past, but he did not view it over
a great gulf of time with the eye of a scientific historian. If he
wished to robe it in the vesture of the life around him, he was checked
by no scruples as to truth; and the life around him can seldom, we
think, have appeared to him repulsively prosaic. Broad statements like
these require much qualification; but, when it is supplied, they may
still describe periods in which perhaps most of the greatest
architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry has come into being.

How different the position of the artist has now become we see at a
glance, and I confine myself to some points which specially concern the
difficulty of the long poem. If a poem is to be anything like great it
must, in one sense, be concerned with the present. Whatever its
'subject' may be, it must express something living in the mind from
which it comes and the minds to which it goes. Wherever its body is, its
soul must be here and now. What subject, then, in the measureless field
of choice, is the poet to select and fashion into a body? The outward
life around him, as he and his critics so often lament, appears uniform,
ugly, and rationally regulated, a world of trousers, machinery and
policemen. Law--the rule, however imperfect, of the general reasonable
will--is a vast achievement and priceless possession; but it is not
favourable to striking events or individual actions on the grand scale.
Beneath the surface, and breaking through it, there is doubtless an
infinity of poetic matter; but this is inward, or it fails to appear in
impressive forms; and therefore it may suit the lyric or idyll, the
monologue or short story, the prose drama or novel, but hardly the long
poem or high tragedy. Even war, for reasons not hard to find, is no
longer the subject that it was.

But when the poet turns to a subject distant in place or time or both,
new troubles await him. If he aims at complete truth to time and place
the soul of the present will hardly come into his work. Yet he lives in
an age of history and science, and these hamper as well as help him. The
difficulty is not that he is bound to historical or scientific truth,
for in principle, I venture to say, he is free. If he _can_ satisfy
imagination by violating them he is justified. It is no function of his
to attain or propagate them; and a critic who objected, say, to the
First Part of _Faust_ on the ground that it puts a modern spirit into
the legend, would rightly be laughed at. It is its triumph to do so and
yet to succeed. But then success is exceedingly difficult. For the poet
lives in a time when the violation of truth is _prima facie_ felt to be
a fault, something that does require justification by the result.
Further, he has himself to start from a clear consciousness of
difference between the present and the past, the spirit and the story,
and has to produce on this basis a harmony of spirit and story. And
again, living in an age of analytical thought, he is likely--all the
more likely, if he has much greatness of mind--to be keenly interested
in ideas; and so he is exposed to the temptation of using as the spirit
of the old story some highly reflective idea--an idea not only
historically alien to his material, but perhaps not very poetical, or
again not very deep, because it belongs to him rather as philosopher
than poet, while his genius is that of a poet.

The influence of some of these difficulties might readily be shown in
the Second Part of _Faust_ or in _Prometheus Unbound_, especially where
we perceive in a figure or action some symbolical meaning, but find this
meaning deficient in interest or poetic truth, or are vexed by the doubt
how far it ought to be pursued.[6] But the matter is more easily
illustrated by the partial failure of the _Idylls of the King_. We have
no right to condemn beforehand an attempt to modernise the Arthurian
legends. Tennyson's treatment of them, even his outrage on the story of
Tristram, might conceivably have been justified by the result. And,
indeed, in the _Holy Grail_ and the _Passing of Arthur_ his treatment,
to my mind, was more than justified. But, in spite of countless
beauties, the total result of the _Idylls_ was disappointing, not merely
from the defects of this or that poem, but because the old unity of
spirit and story was broken up, and the new was neither equal to the old
nor complete in itself. For the main semi-allegorical idea, having
already the disadvantage of not being poetic in its origin, was, as a
reflective idea, by no means profound, and it led to such inconsistency
in the very centre of the story as the imagination refuses to accept.
Tennyson's Lancelot might have wronged the Arthur who is merely a
blameless king and represents Conscience; but Tennyson's Lancelot would
much rather have killed himself than be systematically treacherous to
the friend and lover-husband who appears in _Guinevere_.[7]

These difficulties belong in some measure to the whole modern time--the
whole time that begins with the Renaissance; but they become so much
clearer and so much more serious with the advance of knowledge and
criticism, that in speaking of them I have been referring specially to
the last century. There are other difficulties not so closely connected
with that advance, and I will venture some very tentative remarks on
one of these, which also has increased with time. It has to do with the
kind of life commonly lived by our poets. Is there not some significance
in the fact that the most famous of our narrative poets were all three,
in their various ways and degrees, public men, or in contact with great
affairs; and that poets in earlier times no less must usually have seen
something at first hand of adventure, political struggles, or war;
whereas poets now, for the most part, live wholly private lives, and,
like the majority of their readers, are acquainted only by report with
anything of the kind? If Chaucer had never been at Court, or seen
service in the French war, or gone on embassies abroad; if Spenser had
not known Sidney and Raleigh and been secretary to Lord Grey in Ireland;
if Milton had spent his whole life at Horton; would it have made no
difference to their poetry? Again, if we turn to the drama and ask why
the numerous tragedies of the nineteenth century poets so rarely
satisfy, what is the answer? There are many reasons, and among them the
poet's ignorance of the stage will doubtless count for much; but must we
not also consider that he scarcely ever saw anything resembling the
things he tried to portray? When we study the history of the time in
which the Elizabethan dramas were composed, when we examine the
portraits of the famous men, or read such a book as the autobiography of
Lord Herbert of Cherbury, we realise that the violent actions and
passions which the dramatist depicted were like the things he saw.
Whatever Shakespeare's own disposition was, he lived among these men,
jested with the fellow-actor who had borne arms abroad and killed his
man in a duel at home, conversed with nobles whose heads perhaps were no
great way from the block. But the poet who strolls about the lanes or
plods the London streets with an umbrella for a sword, and who has
probably never seen a violent deed in his life, or for a moment really
longed to kill so much as a critic, how is he to paint the vengeance of
Hamlet or the frenzy of Macbeth, and not merely to thrill you with the
emotions of his actors but to make them _do_ things that take your
imagination by the throat?

  3.

Assuming, now, that (even if this last idea is doubtful or unimportant)
there is some truth in the suggestion that the difficulties of the long
poem arise largely from the conditions described, and especially from
the nature of the intellectual atmosphere which the modern poet
breathes, let us return to Wordsworth's age in particular. In that age
these difficulties were aggravated in a quite exceptional way by special
causes, causes responsible also in part for the unusual originality and
intensity of the poetry. In it we find conditions removed to the
extremest distance from those of the poet who wrote, in the midst of a
generally accepted social order, for an audience with which he shared
traditional ideas and beliefs and a more or less traditional imaginative
material. It was, in a word, a revolutionary age, in the electric
atmosphere of which the most potent intellectual influences were those
of Rousseau and (for the English poets) of Godwin. Milton's time was not
in the same sense revolutionary, much less Shakespeare's. The forces of
the great movement of mind in Shakespeare's day _we_ may formulate as
'ideas,' but they were not the abstractly conceived ideas of
Wordsworth's day. Such theoretical ideas were potent in Milton's time,
but they were not ideas that made a total breach with the past,
rejecting as worthless, or worse, the institutions, beliefs, and modes
of life in which human nature had endeavoured to realise itself, and
drawing airy pictures of a different human nature on a new earth. Nor
was the poetic mind of those ages enraptured or dejected by the haunting
many-featured contrast of real and ideal. But the poetic mind in
Wordsworth's age breathed this atmosphere of revolution, though it was
not always sensitive to the influence. Nor is it a question of the
acceptance or rejection of the 'ideas of the Revolution.' That influence
is clearly traceable in all the greater writers except Scott and Jane
Austen. It is equally obvious in Wordsworth, who hungered for realities,
recovered from his theoretic malady, sought for good in life's familiar
face, yet remained a preacher; in Byron, who was too shrewd, sceptical,
and selfish to contract that particular malady, but who suffered from
the sickness from which Goethe freed himself by writing _Werther_,[8]
and who punctuates his story in _Don Juan_ with bursts of laughter and
tears; and in Shelley, whose 'rapid spirit' was quickened, and then
clogged, by the abstractions of revolutionary theory.

But doubtless Shelley is, in a sense, the typical example of this
influence and of its effects. From the world of his imagination the
shapes of the old world had disappeared, and their place was taken by a
stream of radiant vapours, incessantly forming, shifting, and dissolving
in the 'clear golden dawn,' and hymning with the voices of seraphs, to
the music of the stars and the 'singing rain,' the sublime ridiculous
formulas of Godwin. In his heart were emotions that responded to the
vision,--an aspiration or ecstasy, a dejection or despair, like those of
spirits rapt into Paradise or mourning over its ruin. And he wrote, not,
like Shakespeare or Pope, for Londoners sitting in a theatre or a
coffee-house, intelligences vivid enough but definitely embodied in a
definite society; he wrote, or rather he sang, to his own soul, to
other spirit-sparks of the fire of Liberty scattered over the dark
earth, to spirits in the air, to the boundless spirit of Nature or
Freedom or Love, his one place of rest and the one source of his vision,
ecstasy, and sorrow. He sang _to_ this, and he sang _of_ it, and of the
emotions it inspired, and of its world-wide contest with such shapes of
darkness as Faith and Custom. And he made immortal music; now in
melodies as exquisite and varied as the songs of Schubert, and now in
symphonies where the crudest of Philosophies of History melted into
golden harmony. But the songs were more perfect than the symphonies; and
they could hardly fail to be so. For a single thought and mood,
expressive of one aspect of things, suffices, with its melody, for a
lyric, but not for a long poem. That requires a substance which
implicitly contains a whole 'criticism' or interpretation of life. And
although there was something always working in Shelley's mind, and
issuing in those radiant vapours, that was far deeper and truer than his
philosophic creed, its expression and even its development were
constantly checked or distorted by the hard and narrow framework of that
creed. And it was one which in effect condemned nine-tenths of the human
nature that has formed the material of the world's great poems.[9]

The second and third quarters of the century were not in the same degree
as the first a revolutionary time, and we feel this change in the
poetry. The fever-heat is gone, the rapture and the dejection moderate,
the culture is wider, the thought more staid and considerate, the
fascination of abstractions less potent, and the formative or plastic
impulse, if not stronger, less impeded. Late in the period, with Morris,
the born teller of tales re-appears. If, as we saw, the lyrical spirit
continues to prevail, no one would deny to Browning the full and robust
sympathy of the dramatist with all the variety of character and passion.
Yet these changes and others are far from obliterating those features of
the earlier generation on which we have dwelt. To describe the
atmosphere of 'criticism' as that of a common faith or view of the world
would be laughable. If not revolutionary, it was agitated, restless, and
distressed by the conflict of theoretic ideas. To Arnold's mind it was
indeed a most unhappy time for poetry, though the poetic impulse
remained as yet, and even later, powerful. The past was dead, but he
could share neither the soaring hope nor the passionate melancholy of
the opening century. He was

  Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
    The other powerless to be born,
  With nowhere yet to rest his head.

And the two greatest poets, as well as he, still offer not only, as
poets always must, an interpretation, but a definite theory of life,
and, more insistently than ever before, of death. Confidence in the
detail, at least, of such theories has diminished, and with the rapid
advance of the critical sciences the poets may prophesy less than their
predecessors; but they probe, and weigh, and deliberate more. And the
strength of the 'inward' tendency, obvious in Tennyson and Arnold, may
be clearly seen even in Browning, and not alone in such works as
_Christmas Eve and Easter Day_ or _La Saisiaz_.

Objective and dramatic as Browning is called and by comparison is, he is
surely most at home, and succeeds most completely, in lyrics, and in
monologues divested of action and merely suggestive of a story or
suggested by one. He too must begin, in _Pauline_, with the picture of a
youthful poet's soul. Dramatic the drama of _Paracelsus_ neither is nor
tries to be: it consists of scenes in the history of souls. Of the
narrative _Sordello_ its author wrote: 'The historical decoration was
purposely of no more importance than a background requires; and my
stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is
worth study.' Even if that is so, great narrative poems are not written
thus. And what Browning says here applies more or less fully to most of
his works. In the end, if we set aside the short lyrics, his best poems
are all 'studies' of souls. 'Well,' it may be answered, 'so are
Shakespeare's tragedies and tragi-comedies.' But the difference is
great. Shakespeare, doubtless, is little concerned with the accuracy of
the historical background,--much less concerned than Browning. But his
subject is not a soul, nor even souls: it is the actions of souls, or
souls coming into action. It is more. It is that clash of souls which
exhibits not them alone, but a whole of spiritual forces, appearing in
them, but spreading beyond them into the visible society to which they
essentially belong, and into invisible regions which enclose it. The
thing shown, therefore, is huge, multiform, ponderous, yet quivering
with an inward agitation which explodes into violent bodily expression
and speaks to the _eye_ of imagination. What specially interests
Browning is not this. It is the soul moving in itself, often in its most
secret windings and recesses; before action or after it, where there is
action at all; and this soul not essentially as in its society (that is
'background' or 'decoration'), but alone, or in relation to another
soul, or to God. He exhibits it best, therefore, in monologue, musing,
explaining, debating, pleading, overflowing into the expression of
feeling or passion, but not acting. The 'men and women' that haunt the
reader's imagination are not so much men of action as lovers, artists,
men of religion. And when they act (as for example in _The Ring and the
Book_, or the dramas) what rivets attention, and is first recalled to
memory by their names, is not the action, but its reflection in the soul
of the doer or spectator. Such, at least, is my experience; and in the
end a critic can only offer to others his considered experience. But
with Homer and Shakespeare and Milton it is otherwise. Even with Dante
it is otherwise. I see not souls alone, but souls in visible attitudes,
in outward movement, often in action. I see Paolo and Francesca drifting
on the wind: I see them sitting and reading: I see them kiss: I _see_
Dante's pity:

  E caddi come corpo morto cade.

  4.

I spoke of Tennyson and Browning in order to point out that, although in
their day the intellectual atmosphere was no longer 'revolutionary,' it
remained an atmosphere of highly reflective ideas representing no common
'faith' or way of envisaging the world, and that the inward tendency
still asserts itself in their poetry. We cannot pursue the history
further, but it does not appear that in the last forty years culture has
advanced much, or at all, towards such a faith or way, or shows the
working of new semi-conscious creative ideas beneath the surface of
warring theories and opinions. Only the younger among us can hope to see
what Arnold descried in the distance,

  One mighty wave of thought and joy
    Lifting mankind again.

And even when, for them or their descendants, that hope is realised, and
with it the hope of a new great poetry, the atmosphere must assuredly
still be one of 'criticism,' and Arnold's insistence on the necessity of
the best criticism will still be as urgently required. It must indeed be
more and more needed as the power of half-educated journalism grows. How
poetry then will overcome the obstacles which, therefore, must in some
measure still beset it, is a question for it, a question answerable not
by the reflections of critics, but by the creative deeds of poets
themselves. Accordingly, while one may safely prophesy that their long
poems will differ from those of any past age, I have no idea of
predicting the nature of this difference, and will refer in conclusion
only to certain views which seem to me delusive.

It must surely be vain for the poet to seek an escape from modern
difficulties by any attempt to withdraw himself from the atmosphere of
free and scientific culture, to maintain by force simplicity of view and
concreteness of imagination, to live in a past century or a sanctuary of
esoteric art, whether secular or religious. Whatever of value such an
attempt may yield--and that it may yield much I do not deny--it will
never yield poems at once long and great.

Such poems, we may allow ourselves to hope, will sometimes deal with
much of the common and painful and ugly stuff of life, and be in that
sense more 'democratic' or universal than any poetry of the past. But it
is vain to imagine that this can be done by a refusal to 'interpret' and
an endeavour to photograph. Even in the most thorough-going prose
'realism' there is selection; and, to go no further, selection itself is
interpretation. And, as for poetry, the mirror which the least
theoretical of great poets holds up to nature is his soul. And that,
whether he likes it or not, is an activity which divides, and sifts,
and recombines into a unity of its own, and by a method of its own, the
crude material which experience thrusts upon it. This must be so; the
only question is of the choice of matter and the method of treatment.
Nor can the end to be achieved be anything but beauty, though the
meaning of that word may be extended and deepened. And beauty in its
essence is something that gives satisfaction, however much of pain,
repulsion, or horror that satisfaction may contain and overcome.

'But, even so,' it may be said, 'why should the poet trouble himself
about figures, events, and actions? That inward tendency in which you
see danger and difficulty is, on the contrary, simply and solely what on
one side you admit it to be, the sign of our advance. What we really
need is to make our long poems _entirely_ interior. We only want to know
how Dante felt; we do not _wish_ to see his pity felling him to the
ground; and much less do we wish to hear Othello say "and smote him
thus," or even to imagine the blow. We are not children or savages.' We
do not want, I agree, attempts to repeat the Elizabethan drama. But
those who speak thus forget, perhaps, in how many kinds of poem this
inward tendency can display its power without any injury or drawback.
They fail to ask themselves, perhaps, whether a _long_ poem so entirely
'interior' can possibly have the clearness, variety, and solidity of
effect that the best long poems have possessed; whether it can produce
the same impression of a massive, building, organising, 'architectonic'
power of imagination; and whether all this and much else is of little
value. They can hardly have realised, one must suspect, how much of life
they wish to leave unrepresented. They fail to consider, too, that
perhaps the business of art is not to ignore, but at once to satisfy and
to purify, the primitive instincts from which it arises; and that, in
the case of poetic art, the love of a story, and of exceptional figures,
scenes, events, and actions, is one of those instincts, and one that in
the immense majority of men shows no sign of decay. And finally, if they
suppose that the desire to see or imagine action, in particular, is a
symptom of mere sensationalism or a relic of semi-barbarism, I am sure
they are woefully mistaken. There is more virtue than their philosophy
dreams of in deeds, in 'the motion of a muscle this way or that.'
Doubtless it is the soul that matters; but the soul that remains
interior is not the whole soul. If I suppose that mere self-scrutiny can
show me that, I deceive myself; and my deeds, good and evil, will
undeceive me.

A last delusion remains. 'There is,' we may be told, 'a simple, final,
and comfortable answer to all these doubts and fears. The long poem is
not merely difficult, it is impossible. It is dead, and should be
publicly buried, and there is not the least occasion to mourn it. It has
become impossible not because we cannot write it, but because we see
that we ought not. And, in truth, it never was written. The thing called
a long poem was really, as any long poem must be, a number of short
ones, linked together by passages of prose. And these passages _could_
be nothing except prose; for poetry is the language of a state of
crisis, and a crisis is brief. The long poem is an offence to art.' I
believe I have stated this theory fairly. It was, unless I mistake, the
invention of Poe, and it is about as true as I conceive his story of the
composition of _The Raven_ to be. It became a gospel with some
representatives of the Symbolist movement in France; and in fact it
would condemn not only the long poem, but the middle-sized one, and
indeed all sizes but the smallest. To reject this theory is to imply no
want of gratitude for the lyrics of some of its adherents; but the
theory itself seems strangely thoughtless. Naturally, in any poem not
quite short, there must be many variations and grades of poetic
intensity; but to represent the differences of these numerous grades as
a simple antithesis between pure poetry and mere prose is like saying
that, because the eyes are the most expressive part of the face, the
rest of the face expresses nothing. To hold, again, that this variation
of intensity is a defect is like holding that a face would be more
beautiful if it were all eyes, a picture better if the illumination were
equally intense all over it, a symphony better if it consisted of one
movement, and if that were all crisis. And to speak as if a small poem
could do all that a long one does, and do it much more completely, is to
speak as though a humming-bird could have the same kind of beauty as an
eagle, the rainbow in a fountain produce the same effect as the rainbow
in the sky, or a moorland stream thunder like Niagara. A long poem, as
we have seen, requires imaginative powers superfluous in a short one;
and it would be easy to show that it admits of strictly poetic effects
of the highest value which the mere brevity of a short one excludes.
That the long poem is doomed is a possible, however groundless, belief;
but it is futile to deny that, if it dies, something of inestimable
worth will perish.[10]

FOOTNOTES:

  [1] The material of these pages belongs in part to the course
    mentioned on p. 99, and in part to a lecture given in November, 1905.
    They have in consequence defects which I have not found it possible
    to remove; and they also open questions too large and difficult for a
    single lecture. This is one reason why I have not referred to the
    prevalence of the novel in the nineteenth century, a prevalence which
    doubtless influenced both the character and the popularity of the
    long poems. I hope the reader will not gain from the lecture the
    false impression that the writer's admiration for those poems is
    lukewarm, or that he has any tendency to reaction against the
    Romantic Revival of Wordsworth's time.

  [2] This, and not the permanent value of the scientific product, is
    the point.

  [3] _Table-talk_, Feb. 16, 1833.

  [4] The narrative poems that satisfy most, because in their way they
    come nearest to perfection, will be found, I believe, to show this
    balance. Such, for instance, are _The Eve of St. Agnes_, _Lamia_,
    _Michael_, _The Vision of Judgment_, some of Crabbe's tales. It does
    not follow, of course, that such poems must contain the greatest
    poetry. Crabbe, for example, was probably the best artist of the day
    in narrative; but he does not represent the full ideal spirit of the
    time.

  [5] See p. 110.

  [6] Demogorgon is an instance of such a figure.

  [7] This incongruity is not the only cause of the discomfort with
    which many lovers of Tennyson read parts of Arthur's speech in that
    Idyll; but it is the main cause, and, unlike other defects, it lies
    in the plan of the story. It may be brought out further thus. So far
    as Arthur is merely the blameless king and representative of
    Conscience, the attitude of a judge which he assumes in the speech is
    appropriate, and, again, Lancelot's treachery to him is intelligible
    and, however wrong, forgivable. But then this Arthur or Conscience
    could never be a satisfactory husband, and ought not to astound or
    shock us by uttering his recollections of past caresses. If, on the
    other hand, these utterances are appropriate, and if all along
    Lancelot and Guinevere have had no reason to regard Arthur as cold
    and wholly absorbed in his public duties, Lancelot has behaved not
    merely wrongly but abominably, and as the Lancelot of the _Idylls_
    could not have behaved. The truth is that Tennyson's design requires
    Arthur to be at once perfectly ideal and completely human. And this
    is not imaginable.

    Having written this criticism, I cannot refrain from adding that I
    think the depreciation of Tennyson's genius now somewhat prevalent a
    mistake. I admire and love his poetry with all my heart, and regard
    him as considerably our greatest poet since the time of Wordsworth.

  [8] It is never to be forgotten, in comparing Goethe with the English
    poets, that he was twenty years older than Wordsworth and Coleridge,
    and forty years older than Byron and Shelley.

  [9] The reader will remember that he must take these paragraphs as an
    exaggerated presentment of a single, though essential, aspect of the
    poetry of the time, and of Shelley's poetry in particular, and must
    supply the corrections and additions for himself. But I may beg him
    to observe that Godwin's formulas are called sublime as well as
    ridiculous. _Political Justice_ would never have fascinated such
    young men as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, unless a great truth
    had been falsified in it; and the inspiration of this truth can be
    felt all through the preposterous logical structure reared on its
    misapprehension.

  [10] The theory criticised in this paragraph arises, I think, from a
    misapplication of the truth that the content of a genuine poem is
    fully expressible only in the words of that poem. It is seen that
    this is so in a lyric, and then it is assumed that it is _not_ so in
    a narrative or drama. But the assumption is false. At first sight we
    may seem able to give a more adequate account of the long poem than
    of the short one; but in reality you can no more convey the whole
    poetic content of the _Divine Comedy_ in a form not its own than you
    can the content of a song.

    The theory is connected in some minds with the view that 'music is
    the true type or measure of perfected art.' That view again rests on
    the idea that 'it is the art of music which most completely realises
    [the] artistic ideal, [the] perfect identification of form and
    matter,' and that accordingly 'the arts may be represented as
    continually struggling after the law or principle of music, to a
    condition which music alone completely realises' (Pater, _The
    Renaissance_, pp. 144, 145). I have by implication expressed dissent
    from this idea (p. 25); but, even if its truth is granted, what
    follows is that poetry should endeavour _in its own way_ to achieve
    that perfect identification; but it does not in the least follow that
    it should endeavour to do so by reducing itself as nearly as possible
    to mere sound. Nor did Pater affirm this, or (so far as I see) imply
    it. But others have.

THE LETTERS OF KEATS

THE LETTERS OF KEATS

There is no lack of good criticism on the poetry of Keats. It has been
discussed by the leading poets of three generations or semi-generations;
by Matthew Arnold, by Mr. Swinburne, and, much more fully, by Mr.
Bridges. Lord Houghton's _Life and Letters_ and Mr. Colvin's biography
both contain excellent criticisms or studies of the poems. And (to go no
further) they have lately been edited by Mr. de Sélincourt in a volume
invaluable to students of Keats, and reflecting honour not only on its
author but on the Oxford School of English, to the strength of which he
has contributed so much. My principal object is to consider Keats's
attitude to poetry and his views about it, in connection with the ideas
set forth in previous lectures on Shelley's views and on the age of
Wordsworth. But I wish to preface my remarks on this subject, and to
prepare for them, by an urgent appeal, addressed to any reader of the
poems who may need it, to study the letters of Keats. If I may judge
from my experience, such readers are still far too numerous; and I am
sure that no one already familiar with the letters will be sorry to
listen to quotations from them.[1]

The best of Keats's poems, of course, can be fully appreciated without
extraneous help; but the letters throw light on all, and they are almost
necessary to the understanding of _Endymion_ and of some of the earlier
or contemporaneous pieces. They clearly reveal those changes in his mind
and temper which appear in his poetry. They dispose for ever of the
fictions once current of a puny Keats who was 'snuffed out by an
article,' a sensual Keats who found his ideal in claret and 'slippery
blisses,' and a mere artist Keats who cared nothing for his country and
his fellow-creatures. Written in his last four years by a man who died
at twenty-five, they contain abundant evidence of his immaturity and his
faults, but they disclose a nature and character which command on the
whole not less respect than affection, and they show not a little of
that general intellectual power which rarely fails to accompany poetic
genius.

Of Keats's character, as the letters manifest it, Arnold has written.
While speaking plainly and decidedly of the weakness visible in those to
Miss Brawne, Arnold brought together the evidence which proves that
Keats 'had flint and iron in him,' 'had virtue in the true and large
sense of the word.' And he selected passages, too, which illustrate the
'admirable wisdom and temper' and the 'strength and clearness of
judgment' shown by Keats, alike in matters of friendship and in his
criticisms of his own productions, of the public, and of the literary
circles,--the 'jabberers about pictures and books,' as Keats in a bitter
mood once called them. We may notice, in addition, two characteristics.
In spite of occasional despondency, and of feelings of awe at the
magnitude of his ambition, Keats, it is tolerably plain from these
letters, had a clear and habitual consciousness of his genius. He never
dreamed of being a minor poet. He knew that he was a poet; sometimes he
hoped to be a great one. I remember no sign that he felt himself the
inferior of any living poet except Wordsworth. How he thought of Byron,
whom in boyhood he had admired, is obvious. When Shelley wrote, hinting
a criticism, but referring to himself as excelled by Keats in genius, he
returned the criticism without the compliment. His few references to
Coleridge are critical, and his amusing description of Coleridge's talk
is not more reverential than Carlyle's. Something, indeed, of the native
pugnacity which his friends ascribe to him seems to show itself in his
allusions to contemporaries, including even Wordsworth. Yet with all
this, and with all his pride and his desire of fame, no letters extant
breathe a more simple and natural modesty than these; and from end to
end they exhibit hardly a trace, if any trace, either of the irritable
vanity attributed to poets or of the sublime egotism of Milton and
Wordsworth. He was of Shakespeare's tribe.

The other trait that I wish to refer to appears in a particular series
of letters--sometimes mere notes--scattered through the collection. They
are addressed to Keats's school-girl sister Fanny, who was eight years
younger than he, and who died in the same year as Browning.[2] Keats, as
we see him in 1817 and 1818, in the first half of Mr. Colvin's
collection, was absorbed by an enthusiasm and ambition which his sister
was too young to understand. During his last two years he was, besides,
passionately and miserably in love, and, latterly, ill and threatened
with death. His soul was full of bitterness. He shrank into himself,
avoided society, and rarely sought even intimate friends. Yet, until he
left England, he never ceased to visit his sister when he could; and,
when he could not, he continued to write letters to her, full of amusing
nonsense, full of brotherly care for her, and of excellent advice
offered as by an equal who happened to be her senior; letters quite free
from thoughts of himself, and from the forced gaiety and the resentment
against fate which in parts of his later correspondence with others
betray his suffering. These letters to his sister are, in one sense, the
least remarkable in the collection, yet it would lose much by their
omission. They tell us next to nothing of his genius, but as we come
upon them the light in our picture of him, if it had grown for a moment
hard or troubled, becomes once more soft and bright.

To turn (with apologies for the distinction) from the character to the
mind of Keats, if the reader has formed a notion of him as a youth with
a genius for poetry and an exclusive interest in poetry, but otherwise
not intellectually remarkable, this error will soon be dispelled by the
letters. With Keats, no doubt, poetry and the hope of success in it were
passions more glowing than we have reason to attribute to his
contemporaries at the same time of life.[3] The letters remind us also
that, compared with them, he was at a disadvantage in intellectual
training and acquisitions, like the young Shakespeare among the
University wits. They show, too--the earlier far more than the later--in
certain literary mannerisms the unwholesome influence of Leigh Hunt and
his circle. But everywhere we feel in them the presence of an
intellectual nature, not merely sensitive and delicate, but open,
daring, rich, and strong; exceedingly poetic and romantic, yet
observant, acute, humorous, and sensible; intense without narrowness,
and quite as various both in its interests and its capacities as the
mind of Wordsworth or of Shelley. Fundamentally, and in spite of
abundant high spirits and a love of nonsense, the mind of Keats was very
serious and thoughtful. It was original, and not more imitative than an
original mind should be in youth; an intelligence which now startles by
flashes of sudden beauty, and now is seen struggling with new and deep
thoughts, which labour into shape, with scanty aid from theories, out of
personal experience. In quality--and I speak of nothing else--the mind
of Shakespeare at three and twenty may not have been very different.

Short extracts can give but little idea of all this; but they may at
least illustrate the variety of Keats's mind, and the passages I am
about to read have been chosen mainly with this intention, and not
because the majority are among the most striking that might be found.
The earliest belong to the September of 1817, and I take them partly for
their local interest. Keats spent most of that month here in Oxford,
staying in the Magdalen Hall of those days with his friend Bailey, a man
whose gentle and disinterested character he warmly admired. 'We lead,'
he writes to his sister, 'very industrious lives--he in general studies,
and I in proceeding at a pretty good pace with a Poem which I hope you
will see early in the next year.' It was _Endymion_: he wrote, it seems,
the whole of the Third Book in Bailey's rooms. Unluckily the hero in
that Book is wandering at the bottom of the sea; but even in those
regions, as Keats imagined them, a diligent student may perhaps find
some traces of Oxford. In the letters we hear of towers and quadrangles,
cloisters and groves; of the deer in Magdalen Park; and how

      The mouldering arch,
      Shaded o'er by a larch,
  Lives next door to Wilson the hosier

(that should be discoverable). But we hear most of the clear
streams--'more clear streams than ever I saw together.' 'I take a walk
by the side of one of them every evening.' 'For these last five or six
days,' he writes to Reynolds, 'we have had regularly a boat on the Isis,
and explored all the streams about, which are more in number than your
eyelashes. We sometimes skim into a bed of rushes, and there become
naturalised river-folks. There is one particularly nice nest, which we
have christened "Reynolds's Cove," in which we have read Wordsworth and
talked as may be.' Of those talks over Wordsworth with the grave
religious Bailey came perhaps the thoughts expressed later in the
best-known of all the letters (it is too well known to quote), thoughts
which take their origin from the _Lines written near Tintern Abbey_.[4]

About a year after this, Keats went with his friend Brown on a
walking-tour to the Highlands; and I will quote two passages from the
letters written during this tour, for the sake of the contrast they
exhibit between the two strains in Keats's mind. The first is the later.
The letter is dated 'Cairn-something July 17th':

  Steam-boats on Loch Lomond, and Barouches on its sides, take a little
  from the pleasure of such romantic chaps as Brown and I. The banks of
  the Clyde are extremely beautiful--the north end of Loch Lomond grand
  in excess--the entrance at the lower end to the narrow part is
  precious good--the evening was beautiful--nothing could surpass our
  fortune in the weather. Yet was I worldly enough to wish for a fleet
  of chivalry Barges with trumpets and banners, just to die away before
  me into that blue place among the mountains.[5]

Keats all over! Yes; but so is this, which was written a fortnight
earlier from Carlisle:

  After Skiddaw, we walked to Ireby, the oldest market town in
  Cumberland, where we were greatly amused by a country dancing-school
  holden at the Tun. It was indeed 'no new cotillion fresh from
  France.' No, they kickit and jumpit with mettle extraordinary, and
  whiskit, and friskit, and toed it and go'd it, and twirl'd it and
  whirl'd it, and stamped it, and sweated it, tattooing the floor like
  mad. The difference between our country dances and these Scottish
  figures is about the same as leisurely stirring a cup o' tea and
  beating up a batter-pudding. I was extremely gratified to think that,
  if I had pleasures they knew nothing of, they had also some into which
  I could not possibly enter. I hope I shall not return without having
  got the Highland fling. There was as fine a row of boys and girls as
  you ever saw; some beautiful faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never
  felt so near the glory of Patriotism, the glory of making by any means
  a country happier. This is what I like better than scenery.[6]

There is little enough here of the young poet who believes himself to
care for nothing but 'Art'; and as little of the theoretic
cosmopolitanism of some of Keats's friends.

Some three months later we find Keats writing from London to his brother
and his sister-in-law in America; and he tells them of a young lady from
India whom he has just met:

  She is not a Cleopatra, but she is at least a Charmian. She has a rich
  Eastern look. When she comes into a room she makes an impression the
  same as the beauty of a leopardess.... You will by this time think I
  am in love with her; so before I go any further I will tell you I am
  not--she kept me awake one night as a tune of Mozart's might do. I
  speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can
  feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very
  'yes' and 'no' of whose lips is to me a banquet.... I believe, though,
  she has faults--the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might have had. Yet
  she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way: for there are two
  distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things,--the worldly,
  theatrical and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual and
  ethereal. In the former, Buonaparte, Lord Byron, and this Charmian,
  hold the first place in our minds; in the latter, John Howard, Bishop
  Hooker rocking his child's cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the
  conquering feelings.[7]

I do not read this passage merely for its biographical interest, but a
word may be ventured on that. The lady was not Miss Brawne; but less
than a month later, on meeting Miss Brawne, he immediately became her
slave. When we observe the fact, and consider how very unlike the words
I have quoted are to anything in Keats's previous letters, we can hardly
help suspecting that he was at this time in a peculiar condition and
ripe for his fate. Then we remember that he had lately returned from his
Scotch tour, which was broken off because the Inverness doctor used the
most menacing language about the state of his throat; and further, that
he was now, in the late autumn, nursing his brother Tom, who died of
consumption before the year was out. And an idea suggests itself which,
if exceedingly prosaic, has yet some comfort in it. How often have
readers of Keats's life cried out that, if only he had never met Miss
Brawne, he might have lived and prospered! Does it not seem at least as
probable that, if Miss Brawne had never existed, what happened would
still have happened, and even that the fever of passion which helped to
destroy him was itself a token of incipient disease?

I turn the leaf and come, in the same letter, to a passage on politics.
The friends of Keats were, for the most part, advanced liberals. His own
sympathies went that way. A number of lines in the poems of his boyhood
show this, and so do many remarks in the letters. And his sympathies
were not mere sentiments. 'I hope sincerely,' he wrote in September,
1819, 'I shall be able to put a mite of help to the liberal side of the
question before I die'; and a few days later, when he tells Brown of his
wish to act instead of dreaming, and to work for his livelihood,
composing deliberate poems only when he can afford to, he says that he
will write as a journalist for whoever will pay him, but he makes it a
condition that he is to write 'on the liberal side of the question.' It
is a mistake to suppose that he had no political interests. But he
cared nothing for the mere quarrels of Whig and Tory; a 'Radical' was
for him the type of an 'obstinate and heady' man; and the perfectibility
theories of friends like Shelley and Dilke slipped from his mind like
water from a duck's back. We have seen the concrete shape his patriotism
took. He always saw ideas embodied, and was 'convinced that small causes
make great alterations.' I could easily find passages more
characteristic than the following; but it is short, it shows that Keats
thought for himself, and it has a curious interest just now (1905):[8]

  Notwithstanding the part which the Liberals take in the cause of
  Napoleon, I cannot but think he has done more harm to the life of
  Liberty than anyone else could have done. Not that the divine right
  gentlemen have done, or intend to do, any good. No, they have taken a
  lesson of him, and will do all the further harm he would have done,
  without any of the good. The worst thing he has done is that he has
  taught them how to organise their monstrous armies. The Emperor
  Alexander, it is said, intends to divide his Empire as did Diocletian,
  creating two Czars beside himself, and continuing the supreme monarch
  of the whole. Should he do this, and they for a series of years keep
  peaceable among themselves, Russia may spread her conquest even to
  China. I think it a very likely thing that China itself may fall;
  Turkey certainly will. Meanwhile European North Russia will hold its
  horns against the rest of Europe, intriguing constantly with France.

Still aiming chiefly to show the variety there is in these letters, I
may take next one or two passages which have an interest also from their
bearing on Keats's poems. Here we have, for example, the unmistakable
origin of the _Ode on Indolence_:

  This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent and supremely careless.
  I long after a stanza or two of Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_. My