Book: A History of English Literature

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Byron's fiery spirit was rapidly burning itself out. In his uncontrolled
zest for new sensations he finally tired of poetry, and in 1823 he accepted
the invitation of the European committee in charge to become a leader of
the Greek revolt against Turkish oppression. He sailed to the Greek camp at
the malarial town of Missolonghi, where he showed qualities of leadership
but died of fever after a few months, in 1824, before he had time to
accomplish anything.

It is hard to form a consistent judgment of so inconsistent a being as
Byron. At the core of his nature there was certainly much genuine
goodness--generosity, sympathy, and true feeling. However much we may
discount his sacrifice of his life in the cause of a foreign people, his
love of political freedom and his hatred of tyranny were thoroughly and
passionately sincere, as is repeatedly evident in such poems as the sonnet
on 'Chillon,' 'The Prisoner of Chillon,' and the 'Ode on Venice.' On the
other hand his violent contempt for social and religious hypocrisy had as
much of personal bitterness as of disinterested principle; and his
persistent quest of notoriety, the absence of moderation in his attacks on
religious and moral standards, his lack of self-control, and his indulgence
in all the vices of the worser part of the titled and wealthy class require
no comment. Whatever allowances charity may demand on the score of tainted
heredity, his character was far too violent and too shallow to approach to
greatness.

As a poet he continues to occupy a conspicuous place (especially in the
judgment of non-English-speaking nations) through the power of his volcanic
emotion. It was this quality of emotion, perhaps the first essential in
poetry, which enrolled among his admirers a clear spirit in most respects
the antithesis of his own, that of Matthew Arnold. In 'Memorial Verses'
Arnold says of him:


He taught us little, but our soul
Had felt him like the thunder's roll.
With shivering heart the strife we saw
Of passion with eternal law.

His poetry has also an elemental sweep and grandeur. The majesty of Nature,
especially of the mountains and the ocean, stirs him to feeling which often
results in superb stanzas, like the well-known ones at the end of 'Childe
Harold' beginning 'Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean, roll'! Too
often, however, Byron's passion and facility of expression issue in bombast
and crude rhetoric. Moreover, his poetry is for the most part lacking in
delicacy and fine shading; scarcely a score of his lyrics are of the
highest order. He gives us often the blaring music of a military band or
the loud, swelling volume of an organ, but very seldom the softer tones of
a violin or symphony.

To his creative genius and power the variety as well as the amount of his
poetry offers forceful testimony.

In moods of moral and literary severity, to summarize, a critic can
scarcely refrain from dismissing Byron with impatient contempt;
nevertheless his genius and his in part splendid achievement are
substantial facts. He stands as the extreme but significant exponent of
violent Romantic individualism in a period when Romantic aspiration was
largely disappointed and disillusioned, but was indignantly gathering its
strength for new efforts.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, 1792-1832. Shelley resembles Byron in his
thorough-going revolt against society, but he is totally unlike Byron in
several important respects. His first impulse was an unselfish love for his
fellow-men, with an aggressive eagerness for martyrdom in their behalf; his
nature was unusually, even abnormally, fine and sensitive; and his poetic
quality was a delicate and ethereal lyricism unsurpassed in the literature
of the world. In both his life and his poetry his visionary reforming zeal
and his superb lyric instinct are inextricably intertwined.

Shelley, born in 1792, belonged to a family of Sussex country gentry; a
baronetcy bestowed on his grandfather during the poet's youth passed from
his father after his own death to his descendants. Matthew Arnold has
remarked that while most of the members of any aristocracy are naturally
conservative, confirmed advocates of the system under which they enjoy
great privileges, any one of them who happens to be endowed with radical
ideas is likely to carry these to an extreme. In Shelley's case this
general tendency was strengthened by reaction against the benighted Toryism
of his father and by most of the experiences of his life from the very
outset. At Eton his hatred of tyranny was fiercely aroused by the fagging
system and the other brutalities of an English school; he broke into open
revolt and became known as 'mad Shelley,' and his schoolfellows delighted
in driving him into paroxysms of rage. Already at Eton he read and accepted
the doctrines of the French pre-Revolutionary philosophers and their
English interpreter William Godwin. He came to believe not only that human
nature is essentially good, but that if left to itself it can be implicitly
trusted; that sin and misery are merely the results of the injustice
springing from the institutions of society, chief of which are organized
government, formal religion, law, and formal marriage; and that the one
essential thing is to bring about a condition where these institutions can
be abolished and where all men may be allowed to follow their own
inclinations. The great advance which has been made since Shelley's time in
the knowledge of history and the social sciences throws a pitiless light on
the absurdity of this theory, showing that social institutions, terribly
imperfect as they are, are by no means chiefly bad but rather represent the
slow gains of thousands of years of painful progress; none the less the
theory was bound to appeal irresistibly to such an impulsive and
inexperienced idealism as that of Shelley. It was really, of course, not so
much against social institutions themselves that Shelley revolted as
against their abuses, which were still more flagrantly apparent in his time
than in ours. When he repudiated Christianity and declared himself an
atheist, what he actually had in mind was the perverted parody of religion
mainly offered by the Church of his time; and, as some one has observed,
when he pronounced for love without marriage it was because of the
tragedies that he had seen in marriages without love. Much must be ascribed
also to his sheer radicalism--the instinct to fly violently against
whatever was conventionally accepted and violently to flaunt his adherence
to whatever was banned.

In 1810 Shelley entered Oxford, especially exasperated by parental
interference with his first boyish love, and already the author of some
crude prose-romances and poetry. In the university he devoted his time
chiefly to investigating subjects not included or permitted in the
curriculum, especially chemistry; and after a few months, having written a
pamphlet on 'The Necessity of Atheism' and sent it with conscientious zeal
to the heads of the colleges, he was expelled. Still a few months later,
being then nineteen years old, he allowed himself to be led, admittedly
only through pity, into a marriage with a certain Harriet Westbrook, a
frivolous and commonplace schoolgirl of sixteen. For the remaining ten
years of his short life he, like Byron, was a wanderer, sometimes in
straits for money, though always supported, after some time generously
enough, by his father. At first he tried the career of a professional
agitator; going to Ireland he attempted to arouse the people against
English tyranny by such devices as scattering copies of addresses from his
window in Dublin or launching them in bottles in the Bristol Channel; but
he was soon obliged to flee the country. It is hard, of course, to take
such conduct seriously; yet in the midst of much that was wild, his
pamphlets contained also much of solid wisdom, no small part of which has
since been enacted into law.

Unselfish as he was in the abstract, Shelley's enthusiast's egotism and the
unrestraint of his emotions rendered him fitful, capricious, unable to
appreciate any point of view but his own, and therefore when irritated or
excited capable of downright cruelty in concrete cases. The most painful
illustration is afforded by his treatment of his first wife. Three years
after his marriage he informed her that he considered the connection at an
end and abandoned her to what proved a few years of a wretched existence.
Shelley himself formed a union with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the
daughter of his revolutionary teacher. Her sympathetic though extravagant
admiration for his genius, now beginning to express itself in really great
poetry, was of the highest value to him, the more so that from this time on
he was viewed by most respectable Englishman with the same abhorrence which
they felt for Byron. In 1818 the Shelleys also abandoned England
(permanently, as it proved) for Italy, where they moved from place to
place, living sometimes, as we have said, with Byron, for whose genius, in
spite of its coarseness, Shelley had a warm admiration. Shelley's death
came when he was only thirty, in 1822, by a sudden accident--he was
drowned by the upsetting of his sailboat in the Gulf of Spezia, between
Genoa and Pisa. His body, cast on the shore, was burned in the presence of
Byron and another radical, Leigh Hunt, and the ashes were buried in the
Protestant cemetery just outside the wall of Rome, where Keats had been
interred only a year earlier.

Some of Shelley's shorter poems are purely poetic expressions of poetic
emotion, but by far the greater part are documents (generally beautiful
also as poetry) in his attack on existing customs and cruelties. Matthew
Arnold, paraphrasing Joubert's description of Plato, has characterized him
as 'a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous
wings in vain.' This is largely true, but it overlooks the sound general
basis and the definite actual results which belong to his work, as to that
of every great idealist.

On the artistic side the most conspicuous thing in his poetry is the
ecstatic aspiration for Beauty and the magnificent embodiment of it.
Shelley is the poetic disciple, but a thoroughly original disciple, of
Coleridge. His esthetic passion is partly sensuous, and he often abandons
himself to it with romantic unrestraint. His 'lyrical cry,' of which
Matthew Arnold has spoken, is the demand, which will not be denied, for
beauty that will satisfy his whole being. Sensations, indeed, he must
always have, agreeable ones if possible, or in default of them, painful
ones; this explains his occasional touches of repulsive morbidness. But the
repulsive strain is exceptional. No other poetry is crowded in the same way
as his with pictures glorious and delicate in form, light, and color, or is
more musically palpitating with the delight which they create. To Shelley
as a follower of Plato, however, the beauty of the senses is only a
manifestation of ideal Beauty, the spiritual force which appears in other
forms as Intellect and Love; and Intellect and Love as well are equal
objects of his unbounded devotion. Hence his sensuousness is touched with a
real spiritual quality. In his poetic emotion, as in his social ambitions,
Shelley is constantly yearning for the unattainable. One of our best
critics [Footnote: Mr. R. H. Hutton.] has observed: 'He never shows his
full power in dealing separately with intellectual or moral or physical
beauty. His appropriate sphere is swift sensibility, the intersecting line
between the sensuous and the intellectual or moral. Mere sensation is too
literal for him, mere feeling too blind and dumb, mere thought too cold....
Wordsworth is always exulting in the fulness of Nature, Shelley is always
chasing its falling stars.'

The contrast, here hinted at, between Shelley's view of Nature and that of
Wordsworth, is extreme and entirely characteristic; the same is true, also,
when we compare Shelley and Byron. Shelley's excitable sensuousness
produces in him in the presence of Nature a very different attitude from
that of Wordsworth's philosophic Christian-mysticism. For the sensuousness
of Shelley gets the upper hand of his somewhat shadowy Platonism, and he
creates out of Nature mainly an ethereal world of delicate and rapidly
shifting sights and sounds and sensations. And while he is not unresponsive
to the majestic greatness of Nature in her vast forms and vistas, he is
never impelled, like Byron, to claim with them the kinship of a haughty
elemental spirit.

A rather long passage of appreciative criticism [Footnote: Professor A.C.
Bradley, 'Oxford Lectures on Poetry' (Macmillan), p.196.] is sufficiently
suggestive for quotation:

"From the world of [Shelley's] imagination the shapes of the old world had
disappeared, and their place was taken by a stream of radiant vapors,
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 theories 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 Shakspere or Pope, for Londoners
sitting in a theatre or a coffee-house, intelligence's vivid enough but
definitely embodied in a definite society, able to fly, but also able to
sit; 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. For although there was
something always working in Shelley's mind and issuing in those radiant
vapors, he 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 his 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." [Footnote: Perhaps the finest piece of
rhapsodical appreciative criticism written in later years is the essay on
Shelley (especially the last half) by Francis Thompson (Scribner).]

The finest of Shelley's poems, are his lyrics. 'The Skylark' and 'The
Cloud' are among the most dazzling and unique of all outbursts of poetic
genius. Of the 'Ode to the West Wind,' a succession of surging emotions and
visions of beauty swept, as if by the wind itself, through the vast spaces
of the world, Swinburne exclaims: 'It is beyond and outside and above all
criticism, all praise, and all thanksgiving.' The 'Lines Written among the
Euganean Hills,' 'The Indian Serenade,' 'The Sensitive Plant' (a brief
narrative), and not a few others are also of the highest quality. In
'Adonais,' an elegy on Keats and an invective against the reviewer whose
brutal criticism, as Shelley wrongly supposed, had helped to kill him,
splendid poetic power, at least, must be admitted. Much less satisfactory
but still fascinating are the longer poems, narrative or philosophical,
such as the early 'Alastor,' a vague allegory of a poet's quest for the
beautiful through a gorgeous and incoherent succession of romantic
wildernesses; the 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty'; 'Julian and Maddalo,' in
which Shelley and Byron (Maddalo) are portrayed; and 'Epipsychidion,' an
ecstatic poem on the love which is spiritual sympathy. Shelley's satires
may be disregarded. To the dramatic form belong his two most important long
poems. 'Prometheus Unbound' partly follows AEschylus in treating the
torture of the Titan who is the champion or personification of Mankind, by
Zeus, whom Shelley makes the incarnation of tyranny and on whose overthrow
the Golden Age of Shelleyan anarchy succeeds. The poem is a lyrical drama,
more on the Greek than on the English model. There is almost no action, and
the significance lies first in the lyrical beauty of the profuse choruses
and second in the complete embodiment of Shelley's passionate hatred of
tyranny. 'The Cenci' is more dramatic in form, though the excess of speech
over action makes of it also only a 'literary drama.' The story, taken
from family history of the Italian Renaissance, is one of the most horrible
imaginable, but the play is one of the most powerful produced in English
since the Elizabethan period. That the quality of Shelley's genius is
unique is obvious on the slightest acquaintance with him, and it is equally
certain that in spite of his premature death and all his limitations he
occupies an assured place among the very great poets. On the other hand,
the vagueness of his imagination and expression has recently provoked
severe criticism. It has even been declared that the same mind cannot
honestly enjoy both the carefully wrought classical beauty of Milton's
'Lycidas' and Shelley's mistily shimmering 'Adonais.' The question goes
deep and should receive careful consideration.

JOHN KEATS, 1795-1821. No less individual and unique than the poetry of
Byron and Shelley is that of the third member of this group, John Keats,
who is, in a wholesome way, the most conspicuous great representative in
English poetry since Chaucer of the spirit of 'Art for Art's sake.' Keats
was born in London in 1795, the first son of a livery-stable keeper.
Romantic emotion and passionateness were among his chief traits from the
start; but he was equally distinguished by a generous spirit, physical
vigor (though he was very short in build), and courage. His younger
brothers he loved intensely and fought fiercely. At boarding-school,
however, he turned from headstrong play to enthusiastic reading of Spenser
and other great English and Latin poets and of dictionaries of Greek and
Roman mythology and life. An orphan at fourteen, the mismanagement of his
guardians kept him always in financial difficulties, and he was taken from
school and apprenticed to a suburban surgeon. After five years of study and
hospital practice the call of poetry proved too strong, and he abandoned
his profession to revel in Spenser, Shakspere, and the Italian epic
authors. He now became an enthusiastic disciple of the literary and
political radical, Leigh Hunt, in whose home at Hampstead he spent much
time. Hunt was a great poetic stimulus to Keats, but he is largely
responsible for the flippant jauntiness and formlessness of Keats' earlier
poetry, and the connection brought on Keats from the outset the relentless
hostility of the literacy critics, who had dubbed Hunt and his friends 'The
Cockney [i.e., Vulgar] School of Poetry.'

Keats' first little volume of verse, published in 1817, when he was
twenty-one,-contained some delightful poems and clearly displayed most of
his chief tendencies. It was followed the next year by his longest poem,
'Endymion,' where he uses, one of the vaguely beautiful Greek myths as the
basis for the expression of his own delight in the glory of the world and
of youthful sensations. As a narrative the poem is wandering, almost
chaotic; that it is immature Keats himself frankly admitted in his preface;
but in luxuriant loveliness of sensuous imagination it is unsurpassed. Its
theme, and indeed the theme of all Keats' poetry, may be said to be found
in its famous first line--'A thing of beauty is a joy forever.' The
remaining three years of Keats' life were mostly tragic. 'Endymion' and its
author were brutally attacked in 'The Quarterly Review' and 'Blackwood's
Magazine.' The sickness and death, from consumption, of one of Keats'
dearly-loved brothers was followed by his infatuation with a certain Fanny
Brawne, a commonplace girl seven years younger than himself. This
infatuation thenceforth divided his life with poetry and helped to create
in him a restless impatience that led him, among other things, to an
unhappy effort to force his genius, in the hope of gain, into the very
unsuitable channel of play-writing. But restlessness did not weaken his
genuine and maturing poetic power; his third and last volume, published in
1820, and including 'The Eve of St. Agnes,' 'Isabella,' 'Lamia,' the
fragmentary 'Hyperion,' and his half dozen great odes, probably contains
more poetry of the highest order than any other book of original verse, of
so small a size, ever sent from the press. By this time, however, Keats
himself was stricken with consumption, and in the effort to save his life a
warmer climate was the last resource. Lack of sympathy with Shelley and his
poetry led him to reject Shelley's generous offer of entertainment at Pisa,
and he sailed with his devoted friend the painter Joseph Severn to southern
Italy. A few months later, in 1821, he died at Rome, at the age of
twenty-five. His tombstone, in a neglected corner of the Protestant
cemetery just outside the city wall, bears among other words those which in
bitterness of spirit he himself had dictated: 'Here lies one whose name was
writ in water.' But, in fact, not only had he created more great poetry
than was ever achieved by any other man at so early an age, but probably no
other influence was to prove so great as his on the poets of the next
generation.

The most important qualities of his poetry stand out clearly:

1. He is, as we have implied, the great apostle of full though not
unhealthy enjoyment of external Beauty, the beauty of the senses. He once
said: 'I feel sure I should write, from the mere yearning and tenderness I
have for the beautiful, even if my night's labors should be burnt every
morning and no eye ever rest upon them.' His use of beauty in his poetry is
marked at first by passionate Romantic abandonment and always by lavish
Romantic richness. This passion was partly stimulated in him by other
poets, largely by the Italians, and especially by Spenser, from one of
whose minor poems Keats chose the motto for his first volume: 'What more
felicity can fall to creature than to enjoy delight with liberty?'
Shelley's enthusiasm for Beauty, as we have seen, is somewhat similar to
that of Keats. But for both Spenser and Shelley, in different fashions,
external Beauty is only the outer garment of the Platonic spiritual Beauty,
while to Keats in his poetry it is, in appearance at least, almost
everything. He once exclaimed, even, 'Oh for a life of sensations rather
than of thoughts!' Notable in his poetry is the absence of any moral
purpose and of any interest in present-day life and character, particularly
the absence of the democratic feeling which had figured so largely in most
of his Romantic predecessors. These facts must not be over-emphasized,
however. His famous final phrasing of the great poetic idea--'Beauty is
truth, truth beauty'--itself shows consciousness of realities below the
surface, and the inference which is sometimes hastily drawn that he was
personally a fiberless dreamer is as far as possible from the truth. In
fact he was always vigorous and normal, as well as sensitive; he was always
devoted to outdoor life; and his very attractive letters, from which his
nature can best be judged, are not only overflowing with unpretentious and
cordial human feeling but testify that he was not really unaware of
specific social and moral issues. Indeed, occasional passages in his poems
indicate that he intended to deal with these issues in other poems when he
should feel his powers adequately matured. Whether, had he lived, he would
have proved capable of handling them significantly is one of the questions
which must be left to conjecture, like the other question whether his power
of style would have further developed.

Almost all of Keats' poems are exquisite and luxuriant in their embodiment
of sensuous beauty, but 'The Eve of St. Agnes,' in Spenser's richly
lingering stanza, must be especially mentioned.

2. Keats is one of the supreme masters of poetic expression, expression the
most beautiful, apt, vivid, condensed, and imaginatively suggestive. His
poems are noble storehouses of such lines as these:


The music, yearning like a God in pain.

Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odour with the violet.

magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

It is primarily in this respect that he has been the teacher of later
poets.

3. Keats never attained dramatic or narrative power or skill in the
presentation of individual character. In place of these elements he has the
lyric gift of rendering moods. Aside from ecstatic delight, these are
mostly moods of pensiveness, languor, or romantic sadness, like the one so
magically suggested in the 'Ode to a Nightingale,' of Ruth standing lonely
and 'in tears amid the alien corn.'

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