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This theory, founded on Wordsworth's disgust at eighteenth century poetic
artificiality, contains a very important but greatly exaggerated element of
truth. That the experiences of simple and common people, including
children, may adequately illustrate the main spiritual aspects of life
Wordsworth unquestionably demonstrated in such poems as 'The Reverie of
Poor Susan,' 'Lucy Gray,' and 'Michael.' But to restrict poetry largely to
such characters and subjects would be to eliminate not only most of the
external interest of life, which certainly is often necessary in giving
legitimate body to the spiritual meanings, but also a great range of
significant experiences which by the nature of things can never come to
lowly and simple persons. That the characters of simple country people are
on the average inevitably finer and more genuine than those of others is a
romantic theory rather than a fact, as Wordsworth would have discovered if
his meditative nature had, allowed him to get into really direct and
personal contact with the peasants about him. As to the proper language of
poetry, no one to-day (thanks partly to Wordsworth) defends artificiality,
but most of Wordsworth's own best work, as well as that of all other poets,
proves clearly that there _is_ an essential difference between the
language of prose and that of poetry, that much of the meaning of poetry
results from the use of unusual, suggestive, words and picturesque
expressions, which create the essential poetic atmosphere and stir the
imagination in ways distinctly different from those of prose. Wordsworth's
obstinate adherence to his theory in its full extent, indeed, produced such
trivial and absurd results as 'Goody Blake and Harry Gill,' 'The Idiot
Boy,' and 'Peter Bell,' and great masses of hopeless prosiness in his long
blank-verse narratives.

This obstinacy and these poems are only the most conspicuous result of
Wordsworth's chief temperamental defect, which was an almost total lack of
the sense of humor. Regarding himself as the prophet of a supremely
important new gospel, he never admitted the possibility of error in his own
point of view and was never able to stand aside from his poetry and
criticise it dispassionately. This somewhat irritating egotism, however,
was perhaps a necessary element in his success; without it he might not
have been able to live serenely through the years of misunderstanding and
ridicule which would have silenced or embittered a more diffident spirit.

The variety of Wordsworth's poetry deserves special mention; in addition to
his short lyric and narrative poems of Nature and the spiritual life
several kinds stand out distinctly. A very few poems, the noble 'Ode to
Duty,' 'Laodamia,' and 'Dion,' are classical in inspiration and show the
finely severe repression and finish of classic style. Among his many
hundreds of sonnets is a very notable group inspired by the struggle of
England against Napoleon. Wordsworth was the first English poet after
Milton who used the sonnet powerfully and he proves himself a worthy
successor of Milton. The great bulk of his work, finally, is made up of his
long poems in blank-verse. 'The Prelude,' written during the years
1799-1805, though not published until after his death, is the record of the
development of his poet's mind, not an outwardly stirring poem, but a
unique and invaluable piece of spiritual autobiography. Wordsworth intended
to make this only an introduction to another work of enormous length which
was to have presented his views of Man, Nature, and Society. Of this plan
he completed two detached parts, namely the fragmentary 'Recluse' and 'The
Excursion,' which latter contains some fine passages, but for the most part
is uninspired.

Wordsworth, more than any other great English poet, is a poet for mature
and thoughtful appreciation; except for a very small part of his work many
readers must gradually acquire the taste for him. But of his position among
the half dozen English poets who have made the largest contribution to
thought and life there can be no question; so that some acquaintance with
him is a necessary part of any real education.

ROBERT SOUTHEY. Robert Southey (1774-1843), a voluminous writer of verse
and prose who from his friendship with Wordsworth and Coleridge has been
associated with them as third in what has been inaptly called 'The Lake
School' of poets, was thought in his own day to be their equal; but time
has relegated him to comparative obscurity. An insatiate reader and
admirable man, he wrote partly from irrepressible instinct and partly to
support his own family and at times, as we have seen, that of Coleridge. An
ardent liberal in youth, he, more quickly than Wordsworth, lapsed into
conservatism, whence resulted his appointment as Poet Laureate in 1813 and
the unremitting hostility of Lord Byron. His rather fantastic epics,
composed with great facility and much real spirit, are almost forgotten; he
is remembered chiefly by three or four short poems--'The Battle of
Blenheim,' 'My days among the dead are past,' 'The Old Man's Comforts' (You
are old, Father William,' wittily parodied by 'Lewis Carroll' in 'Alice in
Wonderland')--and by his excellent short prose 'Life of Nelson.'

WALTER SCOTT. In the eighteenth century Scotland had contributed Thomson
and Burns to the Romantic movement; now, early in the nineteenth, she
supplied a writer of unexcelled and marvelous creative energy, who
confirmed the triumph of the movement with work of the first importance in
both verse and prose, namely Walter Scott. Scott, further, is personally
one of the most delightful figures in English literature, and he is
probably the most famous of all the Scotsmen who have ever lived.

He was descended from an ancient Border fighting clan, some of whose
pillaging heroes he was to celebrate in his poetry, but he himself was
born, in 1771, in Edinburgh, the son of an attorney of a privileged, though
not the highest, class. In spite of some serious sicknesses, one of which
left him permanently lame, he was always a very active boy, more
distinguished at school for play and fighting than for devotion to study.
But his unconscious training for literature began very early; in his
childhood his love of poetry was stimulated by his mother, and he always
spent much time in roaming about the country and picking up old ballads and
traditional lore. Loyalty to his father led him to devote six years of hard
work to the uncongenial study of the law, and at twenty he was admitted to
the Edinburgh bar as an advocate. Though his geniality and high-spirited
brilliancy made him a social favorite he never secured much professional
practice; but after a few years he was appointed permanent Sheriff of
Selkirk, a county a little to the south of Edinburgh, near the English
Border. Later, in 1806, he was also made one of the Principal Clerks of
Session, a subordinate but responsible office with a handsome salary which
entailed steady attendance and work at the metropolitan law court in
Edinburgh during half of each year.

His instinct for literary production was first stimulated by the German
Romantic poets. In 1796 he translated Burger's fiery and melodramatic
ballad 'Lenore,' and a little later wrote some vigorous though hasty
ballads of his own. In 1802-1803 he published 'Minstrelsy of the Scottish
Border,' a collection of Scottish ballads and songs, which he carefully
annotated. He went on in 1805, when he was thirty-four, to his first
original verse-romance, 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel.' Carelessly
constructed and written, this poem was nevertheless the most spirited
reproduction of the life of feudal chivalry which the Romantic Movement had
yet brought forth, and its popularity was immediate and enormous. Always
writing with the greatest facility, though in brief hours snatched from his
other occupations, Scott followed up 'The Lay' during the next ten years
with the much superior 'Marmion,' 'The Lady of the Lake,' and other
verse-romances, most of which greatly increased both his reputation and his
income. In 1813 he declined the offer of the Poet Laureateship, then
considered a position of no great dignity for a successful man, but secured
the appointment of Southey, who was his friend. In 1811 he moved from the
comparatively modest country house which he had been occupying to the
estate of Abbotsford, where he proceeded to fulfill his ambition of
building a great mansion and making himself a sort of feudal chieftain. To
this project he devoted for years a large part of the previously
unprecedented profits from his writings. For a dozen years before, it
should be added, his inexhaustible energy had found further occupation in
connection with a troop of horse which he had helped to organize on the
threat of a French invasion and of which he acted as quartermaster,
training in barracks, and at times drilling for hours before breakfast.

The amount and variety of his literary work was much greater than is
understood by most of his admirers today. He contributed largely, in
succession, to the 'Edinburgh' and 'Quarterly' reviews, and having become a
secret partner in the printing firm of the Ballantyne brothers, two of his
school friends, exerted himself not only in the affairs of the company but
in vast editorial labors of his own, which included among other things
voluminously annotated editions of Dryden and Swift. His productivity is
the more astonishing because after his removal to Abbotsford he gave a
great part of his time not only to his family but also to the entertainment
of the throngs of visitors who pressed upon him in almost continuous
crowds. The explanation is to be found partly in his phenomenally vigorous
constitution, which enabled him to live and work with little sleep; though
in the end he paid heavily for this indiscretion.

The circumstances which led him to turn from poetry to prose fiction are
well known. His poetical vein was really exhausted when in 1812 and 1813
Byron's 'Childe Harold' and flashy Eastern tales captured the public fancy.
Just about as Scott was goodnaturedly confessing to himself that it was
useless to dispute Byron's supremacy he accidentally came across the first
chapters of 'Waverley,' which he had written some years before and had
thrown aside in unwillingness to risk his fame by a venture in a new field.
Taking it up with renewed interest, in the evenings of three weeks he wrote
the remaining two-thirds of it; and he published it with an ultimate
success even greater than that of his poetry. For a long time, however,
Scott did not acknowledge the authorship of 'Waverley' and the novels which
followed it (which, however, was obvious to every one), chiefly because he
feared that the writing of prose fiction would seem undignified in a Clerk
of Session. The rapidity of the appearance of his novels testified to the
almost unlimited accumulation of traditions and incidents with which his
astonishing memory was stored; in seventeen years he published nearly
thirty 'Waverley' novels, equipping most of them, besides, with long
fictitious introductions, which the present-day reader almost universally
skips. The profits of Scott's works, long amounting apparently to from ten
to twenty thousand pounds a year, were beyond the wildest dream of any
previous author, and even exceeded those of most popular authors of the
twentieth century, though partly because the works were published in
unreasonably expensive form, each novel in several volumes. Still more
gratifying were the great personal popularity which Scott attained and his
recognition as the most eminent of living Scotsmen, of which a symbol was
his elevation to a baronetcy in 1820.

But the brightness of all this glory was to be pathetically dimmed. In 1825
a general financial panic, revealing the laxity of Scott's business
partners, caused his firm to fail with liabilities of nearly a hundred and
twenty thousand pounds. Always magnanimous and the soul of honor, Scott
refused to take advantage of the bankruptcy laws, himself assumed the
burden of the entire debt, and set himself the stupendous task of paying it
with his pen. Amid increasing personal sorrows he labored on for six years
and so nearly attained his object that the debt was actually extinguished
some years after his death. But in the effort he completed the exhaustion
of his long-overtaxed strength, and, a trip to Italy proving unavailing,
returned to Abbotsford, and died, a few weeks after Goethe, in 1832.

As a man Scott was first of all a true and thorough gentleman, manly, open
hearted, friendly and lovable in the highest degree. Truthfulness and
courage were to him the essential virtues, and his religious faith was deep
though simple and unobtrusive. Like other forceful men, he understood his
own capacity, but his modesty was extreme; he always insisted with all
sincerity that the ability to compose fiction was not for a moment to be
compared with the ability to act effectively in practical activities; and
he was really displeased at the suggestion that he belonged among the
greatest men of the age. In spite of his Romantic tendencies and his
absolute simplicity of character, he clung strongly to the conservatism of
the feudal aristocracy with which he had labored so hard to connect
himself; he was vigorously hostile to the democratic spirit, and, in his
later years, to the Reform Bill; and he felt and expressed almost childish
delight in the friendship of the contemptible George IV, because George IV
was his king. The conservatism was closely connected, in fact, with his
Romantic interest in the past, and in politics it took the form,
theoretically, of Jacobitism, loyalty to the worthless Stuart race whose
memory his novels have done so much to keep alive. All these traits are
made abundantly clear in the extended life of Scott written by his
son-in-law, J. G. Lockhart, which is one of the two or three greatest
English biographies.

Scott's long poems, the best of them, are the chief examples in English of
dashing verse romances of adventure and love. They are hastily done, as we
have said, and there is no attempt at subtilty of characterization or at
any moral or philosophical meaning; nevertheless the reader's interest in
the vigorous and picturesque action is maintained throughout at the highest
pitch. Furthermore, they contain much finely sympathetic description of
Scottish scenery, impressionistic, but poured out with enthusiasm. Scott's
numerous lyrics are similarly stirring or moving expressions of the primal
emotions, and some of them are charmingly musical.

The qualities of the novels, which represent the culmination of Romantic
historical fiction, are much the same. Through his bold and active
historical imagination Scott vivifies the past magnificently; without
doubt, the great majority of English readers know English history chiefly
through his works. His dramatic power, also, at its best, is superb; in his
great scenes and crises he is masterly as narrator and describer. In the
presentation of the characters there is often much of the same
superficiality as in the poems, but there is much also of the highest
skill. The novels may be roughly divided into three classes: first those,
like 'Ivanhoe,' whose scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century;
second those, like 'Kenilworth,' which are located in the fifteenth or
sixteenth; and third, those belonging to England and Scotland of the
seventeenth and eighteenth. In the earlier ones sheer romance predominates
and the hero and heroine are likely to be more or less conventional
paragons, respectively, of courage and tender charm; but in the later ones
Scott largely portrays the life and people which he himself knew; and he
knew them through and through. His Scottish characters in particular, often
especially the secondary ones, are delightfully realistic portraits of a
great variety of types. Mary Queen of Scots in 'The Abbot' and Caleb
Balderstone in 'The Bride of Lammermoor' are equally convincing in their
essential but very personal humanity. Descriptions of scenery are
correspondingly fuller in the novels than in the poems and are equally
useful for atmosphere and background.

In minor matters, in the novels also, there is much carelessness. The
style, more formal than that of the present day, is prevailingly wordy and
not infrequently slipshod, though its vitality is a much more noticeable
characteristic. The structure of the stories is far from compact. Scott
generally began without any idea how he was to continue or end and sent off
each day's instalment of his manuscript in the first draft as soon as it
was written; hence the action often wanders, or even, from the structural
point of view, drags. But interest seldom greatly slackens until the end,
which, it must be further confessed, is often suddenly brought about in a
very inartistic fashion. It is of less consequence that in the details of
fact Scott often commits errors, not only, like all historical novelists,
deliberately manipulating the order and details of the actual events to
suit his purposes, but also making frequent sheer mistakes. In 'Ivanhoe,'
for example, the picture of life in the twelfth century is altogether
incorrect and misleading. In all these matters scores of more
self-conscious later writers are superior to Scott, but mere correctness
counts for far less than genius.

When all is said, Scott remains the greatest historical novelist, and one
of the greatest creative forces, in world literature.

THE LAST GROUP OF ROMANTIC POETS. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, and Scott
had mostly ceased to produce poetry by 1815. The group of younger men, the
last out-and-out Romanticists, who succeeded them, writing chiefly from
about 1810 to 1825, in some respects contrast strongly with them. Byron and
Shelley were far more radically revolutionary; and Keats, in his poetry,
was devoted wholly to the pursuit and worship of beauty with no concern
either for a moral philosophy of life or for vigorous external adventure.
It is a striking fact also that these later men were all very short-lived;
they died at ages ranging only from twenty-six to thirty-six.

Lord Byron, 1788-1824. Byron (George Gordon Byron) expresses mainly the
spirit of individual revolt, revolt against all existing institutions and
standards. This was largely a matter of his own personal temperament, but
the influence of the time also had a share in it, the time when the
apparent failure of the French Revolution had thrown the pronounced
liberals back upon their own resources in bitter dissatisfaction with the
existing state of society. Byron was born in 1788. His father, the violent
and worthless descendant of a line of violent and worthless nobles, was
just then using up the money which the poet's mother had brought him, and
soon abandoned her. She in turn was wildly passionate and uncontrolled, and
in bringing up her son indulged alternately in fits of genuine tenderness
and capricious outbursts of mad rage and unkindness. Byron suffered also
from another serious handicap; he was born with deformed feet, so that
throughout life he walked clumsily--a galling irritation to his sensitive
pride. In childhood his poetic instincts were stimulated by summers spent
among the scenery of his mother's native Scottish Highlands. At the age of
ten, on the death of his great-uncle, he succeeded to the peerage as Lord
Byron, but for many years he continued to be heavily in debt, partly
because of lavish extravagance, which was one expression of his inherited
reckless wilfulness. Throughout his life he was obliged to make the most
heroic efforts to keep in check another inherited tendency, to corpulence;
he generally restricted his diet almost entirely to such meager fare as
potatoes and soda-water, though he often broke out also into periods of
unlimited self-indulgence.

From Harrow School he passed to Trinity College, Cambridge, where Macaulay
and Tennyson were to be among his successors. Aspiring to be an athlete, he
made himself respected as a fighter, despite his deformity, by his strength
of arm, and he was always a powerful swimmer. Deliberately aiming also at
the reputation of a debauchee, he lived wildly, though now as later
probably not altogether so wickedly as he represented. After three years of
irregular attendance at the University his rank secured him the degree of
M. A., in 1808. He had already begun to publish verse, and when 'The
Edinburgh Review' ridiculed his very juvenile 'Hours of Idleness' he added
an attack on Jeffrey to a slashing criticism of contemporary poets which he
had already written in rimed couplets (he always professed the highest
admiration for Pope's poetry), and published the piece as 'English Bards
and Scotch Reviewers.'

He was now settled at his inherited estate of Newstead Abbey (one of the
religious foundations given to members of the nobility by Henry VIII when
he confiscated them from the Church), and had made his appearance in his
hereditary place in the House of Lords; but following his instinct for
excitement and for doing the expensively conspicuous thing he next spent
two years on a European tour, through Spain, Greece, and Turkey. In Greece
he traveled, as was necessary, with a large native guard, and he allowed
reports to become current that he passed through a succession of romantic
and reckless adventures. The first literary result of his journey was the
publication in 1812 of the first two cantos of 'Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage.' This began as the record of the wanderings of Childe Harold, a
dissipated young noble who was clearly intended to represent the author
himself; but Byron soon dropped this figure as a useless impediment in the
series of descriptions of Spain and Greece of which the first two cantos
consist. He soon abandoned also the attempt to secure an archaic effect by
the occasional use of Spenserian words, but he wrote throughout in
Spenser's stanza, which he used with much power. The public received the
poem with the greatest enthusiasm; Byron summed up the case in his
well-known comment: 'I awoke one morning and found myself famous.' In fact,
'Childe Harold' is the best of all Byron's works, though the third and
fourth cantos, published some years later, and dealing with Belgium, the
battle of Waterloo, and central Europe, are superior to the first two. Its
excellence consists chiefly in the fact that while it is primarily a
descriptive poem, its pictures, dramatically and finely vivid in
themselves, are permeated with intense emotion and often serve only as
introductions to passionate rhapsodies, so that the effect is largely
lyrical.

Though Byron always remained awkward in company he now became the idol of
the world of fashion. He followed up his first literary success by
publishing during the next four years his brief and vigorous metrical
romances, most of them Eastern in setting, 'The Giaour' (pronounced by
Byron 'Jower'), 'The Bride of Abydos,' 'The Corsair,' 'Lara,' 'The Siege of
Corinth,' and 'Parisina.' These were composed not only with remarkable
facility but in the utmost haste, sometimes a whole poem in only a few days
and sometimes in odds and ends of time snatched from social diversions. The
results are only too clearly apparent; the meter is often slovenly, the
narrative structure highly defective, and the characterization superficial
or flatly inconsistent. In other respects the poems are thoroughly
characteristic of their author. In each of them stands out one dominating
figure, the hero, a desperate and terrible adventurer, characterized by
Byron himself as possessing 'one virtue and a thousand crimes,' merciless
and vindictive to his enemies, tremblingly obeyed by his followers,
manifesting human tenderness only toward his mistress (a delicate romantic
creature to whom he is utterly devoted in the approved romantic-sentimental
fashion), and above all inscrutably enveloped in a cloud of pretentious
romantic melancholy and mystery. Like Childe Harold, this impossible and
grandiose figure of many incarnations was well understood by every one to
be meant for a picture of Byron himself, who thus posed for and received in
full measure the horrified admiration of the public. But in spite of all
this melodramatic clap-trap the romances, like 'Childe Harold,' are filled
with the tremendous Byronic passion, which, as in 'Childe Harold,' lends
great power alike to their narrative and their description.

Byron now made a strangely ill-judged marriage with a Miss Milbanke, a
woman of the fashionable world but of strict and perhaps even prudish moral
principles. After a year she left him, and 'society,' with characteristic
inconsistency, turned on him in a frenzy of superficial indignation. He
shortly (1816) fled from England, never to return, both his colossal vanity
and his truer sensitive self stung by the injustice to fury against the
hypocrisy and conventionalities of English life, which, in fact, he had
always despised. He spent the following seven years as a wanderer over
Italy and central Europe. He often lived scandalously; sometimes he was
with the far more fine-spirited Shelley; and he sometimes furnished money
to the Italians who were conducting the agitation against their tyrannical
foreign governments. All the while he was producing a great quantity of
poetry. In his half dozen or more poetic dramas he entered a new field. In
the most important of them, 'Manfred,' a treatment of the theme which
Marlowe and Goethe had used in 'Faust,' his real power is largely thwarted
by the customary Byronic mystery and swagger. 'Cain' and 'Heaven and
Earth,' though wretchedly written, have also a vaguely vast imaginative
impressiveness. Their defiant handling of Old Testament material and
therefore of Christian theology was shocking to most respectable Englishmen
and led Southey to characterize Byron as the founder of the 'Satanic
School' of English poetry. More significant is the longest and chief of his
satires, 'Don Juan,' [Footnote: Byron entirely anglicized the second word
and pronounced it in two syllables--Ju-an.] on which he wrote
intermittently for years as the mood took him. It is ostensibly the
narrative of the adventures of a young Spaniard, but as a story it rambles
on formlessly without approaching an end, and its real purpose is to serve
as an utterly cynical indictment of mankind, the institutions of society,
and accepted moral principles. Byron often points the cynicism by lapsing
into brilliant doggerel, but his double nature appears in the occasional
intermingling of tender and beautiful passages.

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