Part 30

“Time and space,” a noble philosopher has observed, “are but hallucinations.” It may be so, and from the point of view of the metaphysician ours may have been merely a “so-called nineteenth century.” Certain it is that to judge literature in blocks of centuries is to make a convenient but illogical cross-division. The early, and perhaps the most important, literary influences of the century were in existence long before 1801. Thus, if we look at whatever is now called _fin de siècle_, at violent antagonism to tradition and convention, at discontent of every sort with everything—with rank, wealth, morality, law, marriage, the family—we find that this passion was as noisy and self-complacent a hundred years ago as it is to-day. The French Revolution was the lurid playground of “New Women,” full of what they supposed to be new ideas. The German drama of 1780–1800, now best remembered by the parody called “The Rovers,” in the _Anti-Jacobin_, was replete with the humorless paradoxes and strained situations of Ibsen. The shortest way to an understanding of the antiquity of our “new ideas” is, in fact, a study of the Poetry of the _Anti-Jacobin_.

Romance, again, as far as romance depends for her effects on desperate deeds, on the rhetoric of noble brigands, on the phantasms of the sheeted dead shivering down dark passages among skeletons, on clanking chains, and on distressed damsels, was as much alive in the end of the eighteenth century as at any age of literary history. Goethe, Schiller, Bürger, Mrs. Radcliffe, all following in the Gothic wake of honest Horace Walpole and his _Castle of Otranto_, were preparing the ground for Scott and Dumas. Once more the old “popular” elements so necessary to literature (which, like Antæus, regains vigor on touching mother-earth) had been wholly absent from the poetry and prose of the last reigning Stuart and of the first two Hanoverian kings of England. But, about 1770–1780, literature had returned to its archaic popular sources. Percy had made _volks-lieder_ fashionable, Fergusson and Burns had revived the rustic muse of Scotland, and Macpherson had given mankind a draught, though an adulterated draught, from the cup of the sorceries of the Celtic enchantress. In opposition to the urban self-restraint and contented complacency of the Augustan age, Rousseau had preached the pleasures of virtue, sentiment, and of a “blessed state of Nature”; young Werther had gotten him a stool to be sad upon, like Master Stephen: weeping was the mode. Rousseau, as Mr. Pater once observed in conversation, was “the grandmother of us all,” and as tearful as Mrs. Gummidge in _David Copperfield_. Meanwhile the “emancipation” born of science had set in; people thought they knew all about everything; the elder Darwin could explain the universe without a God, quite as easily as any modern Darwinian, if not so elaborately. He may not have been always correct in his theories and facts, still, there they were, and they were “emancipating.” Yet, far from being laughed out of court by the gratifying progress of science, a more mystical religion and a life more austere had come in from the preaching of Wesley, who was practically the parent of our neo-Catholicism in its varying forms. The “Oxford Movement,” with all the strange after-symptoms which it has left behind it, is directly descended from Wesley. Thus romance, sentiment, freedom and variety in poetic form, philanthropy, revolt against the past, return to and reverence for the past, scientific doubt, weariness of life, love of nature, wistful belief, relapse on the forms of the Church, and everything else which stamps the literature of the nineteenth century were alive and active in the last half of the eighteenth century. The year 1801 made no sudden break. The nineteenth century merely went on evolving the principles, revolutionary or reactionary, of the last half of the eighteenth century.

Thus Crabbe, the precursor of whoever, Englishman, American, Frenchman, or Slav, has written of the sombre tragedies of the poor, was born in 1754. Blake, whose perfectly un-Augustan rhapsodies and mystic lyrics were made fashionable about 1870, was born in 1757, out of due time, for his best side is Elizabethan in quality. Burns, born in 1759, is as much at home in the nineteenth century as Tolstoï, while Godwin could not be more “advanced,” or Mary Wollstonecraft more of “a New Woman,” if the former belonged to our “Forward Liberals” and the latter perorated at congresses of her sex. The first twenty-five years of Miss Austen belong to the eighteenth century; yet, except for a certain “old-fashioned” primness of style, she is the first, and, beyond all doubt, the greatest of all nineteenth-century “realistic” novelists of domestic life. For, though a “realist,” she is a humorist, and the combination is almost unexampled. Your common realist is a gloomy thing, with no more sense of the comic than M. Zola.

Of the new poets, revolutionary in metre and matter, Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, and Southey were born in 1770–1774; they were mature before the nineteenth century dawned. His northern home, among the hills and lakes, fitted Wordsworth to be the austere and mystical poet of nature and of man in relation to nature. Born a poet, his genius was determined by his environment, while his ardent sympathy with the Revolution at once turned his attention to the unregarded poor, and inspired his not wholly successful attempt to shake off the trammels of Augustan “poetic diction,” the survival of the Latinism of Boileau and Pope. Later, of course, Wordsworth became the Tory, the patriot, the Churchman, and the Stamp Collector. But his poetical creed he never consciously changed, though he often lapsed from it unconsciously. If Scott was to be a poet at all he was fated to be influenced by the New World, not in its emancipated ideas, but in its wistful return to the Old World of reivers, spearmen, claymores, goblin, ghost, and fairy. The Border ballads lulled his cradle and were the joy of his childhood and manhood. All tradition murmured to him her charms of Border and Highland legend; every ruined abbey and castle had its tale for him; to Ettrick and Yarrow he needed not to say, like Lady John Scott, “Have you no message for me?” He never had a touch of the Augustan horror of mountain and torrent, never a touch of the Augustan contempt of “Barbarism.” Walpole’s _Castle of Otranto_ and Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels of terror went to the molding of his genius, as the novels of Miss Edgeworth (born 1767) suggested fiction about the lives and manners of his own people. In his return to the past he came, like Lamb, on the Elizabethan drama, and, unlike Lamb, on the unpublished documents of the Tudor age, the age of desperate resistance to England. But Scott would never have been exactly the poet that he was if he had not heard “Christabel” recited. “Christabel,” the entirely original utterance of a genius which, at first, was a child of the enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The early ideas of Coleridge were the ideas of Rousseau and of Bernardin de Saint Pierre, who was, like Coleridge, but more energetically, a seeker for an ideal land where pantisocracy might flourish and a clown might be the poet’s “brother.”

In poetry, in poetic form, Coleridge was the real and daring innovator, inspired by the eighteenth century reaction against convention, and played on like an æolian harp by every wind of his mystic spirit. His reaction was too violent even for Lamb; his originality too extreme even for Wordsworth. In him, of all our later poets, the “unconscious self” was the strongest and the most free, and of all our poets he had the hardest battle with the dull Augustan survival in such critics as Jeffrey. To them all the ripened fruit of the blossoming time of the late eighteenth century, the poetry of Scott and of Wordsworth, was but dimly intelligible, but Coleridge was the most unintelligible of all. From the Germany of the late eighteenth century came one of Scott’s springs of poetic action; from the _Lenore_ of Bürger (a popular ballad rewritten) and from the _Götz von Berlichingen_ of Goethe. These were the days when Scott longed to possess a skull and cross-bones, and in a love-letter dilated on his choice of a sepulchre. But what came to Coleridge from Germany was the late eighteenth century’s reaction against the truly “common-sense” ideas of Hume, the philosophy of Kant, Schelling, and Fichte. In this field, too, he was unintelligible (and no wonder), but he was but adapting the ideas of 1770–1800, and the neo-Hegelians of Oxford are doing the same thing. A reaction against the materialism of common-sense was inevitable; Mesmer, Swedenborg, and Kant began what survives in the hands of the Master of Balliol and of Professor William James.

In a more recent generation Byron prolonged the Wertherism of Werther, Byron being thus a grandson of Rousseau, while he borrowed his form, and borrowed it very ill, from what Scott borrowed of Coleridge. The genius of Byron is not contested by the sane, but except in satire it seldom found clear and adequate, because it sought hurried, heedless, and tumultuous, expression. Scott had a better ear and was not so reckless an _improvisatore_. Poems that can endure are not written like Byron’s, in the brief leisure of fashionable industry. We admire the native impetus of Byron, his gift of satire, his sensitiveness to elemental force in nature and in man, but we cannot understand the furore which was so much the child of his title, his beauty, his recklessness, and his studiously cultivated air of mystery. Mr. Lenville, as reported by Mr. Folair, said that Nicholas Nickleby was “a regular stick of an actor, and it’s only the mystery about him that has caused him to go down with the people here, though Lenville says he don’t believe there’s anything at all in it.” A later age must partly adopt the same theory of Byron’s original and unparalleled success in Europe as well as in England. He was mysterious Manfred, he was Childe Harold, he was the Corsair; a hero of Mrs. Radcliffe’s, with an Oriental air and a gloomy secret and a heart burning with indignation against the unworthy species of men. What had Byron done? Even Goethe was curious, believing wild anecdotes; now we really do not care what Byron did, recognizing in him, his genius, and his pose, not so much the “Satanic,” as the result of hysteria and madness in his race. Satanism, from of old, has been mainly hysteria. The element of personal _reclame_ in Byron has faded, and with it fades his reputation as an earth-shaking poet. Attempts to revive that fame in our day, attempts to bring us back to “the noble poet,” are respectable, being based on loyalty to the taste of our great-grandfathers and grandmothers in all civilized countries. But the efforts are futile. “Byron,” says Mr. Saintsbury, “seems to me a poet distinctly of the second class, and not even of the best kind of second, inasmuch as his greatness is chiefly derived from a sort of parody, a sort of imitation of the qualities of the first. His verse is to the greatest poetry what melodrama is to tragedy, what plaster is to marble, what pinchbeck is to gold.” Such, however unpopular they may be, are my own candid sentiments, for though from childhood I could and did read all our great poets with pleasure, it was not with the kind of pleasure which Byron in his satire and his declamation could occasionally give me. He is monotonous, he is rhetorical, his versification is often incredibly bad, and he is more obscure, mainly by dint of hurry, bad printing, and bad grammar, than Mr. Browning. Thus Byron leaves us impressed as with a vast, even volcanic, yet dandified force, untrained and often misdirected. Either by nature, or in reaction, he professed sympathy with the Augustan school of Queen Anne’s reign, and sided with Pope in the long quarrel as to whether Pope is a poet.

Even the modern opponents of Byron must recognize in him qualities which won the admiration and affection of Scott and Shelley. In Shelley we had a true child of the revolution, the _Aufklarung_, and the later eighteenth century. His boyhood trifled with chemical science (probably not then popular with the human boy); his adolescence was given to converting school-girls into “dear little atheists.” His social ideas, like those of some advanced moderns, aimed at the absolute destruction of the family; and the moral of _Laon and Cythna_ went far behind the morals of the most backward savages, who make incest a capital offence. Shelley, a boy all his life, was more boyishly devoted to destruction than even the newest writers on the relations of the sexes. In “making all things new” both he and they are, in fact, relapsing on a condition of society which, if it ever existed, is so old that it may be called “pre-human,” and is contrary to nature, as far as we can study human nature in the least developed of tribes. His ideas conducted Shelley to the tragedy and farce of his career: his desertion of one young wife, followed by her suicide, and his marriage with another, in entire opposition to his own opinions. In literature he began at school with a devout following of Mrs. Radcliffe; while, in _Queen Mab_ and _Alastor_, vigorous but vague and misty _Childe Harold_, wandering in No Man’s Land, he first displayed his originality in poetical form. His personal character being noble and generous in the highest degree, his sympathy with the poor and the oppressed being a true passion, Shelley’s errors arose from the fixed idea that almost every human ordinance must, being old, be necessarily bad. He would recognize that there is, after all, something right in the sixth commandment, but did not draw the inference that a gleam of reason might also be found in most of the rest of the Decalogue. The state of society then, as always, provoked revolt, but the state of society was grievous, not because its moral laws were bad, but because its laws were not obeyed. Shelley had no turn for narrative, and, in such poems as _The Revolt of Islam_, it is the splendid meteoric genius, the unexcelled music that captivate. In lyrics he was probably the most original force since the Elizabethan age: his verse is a singing and soaring flame. In _Adonis_ his righteous indignation carries him forward like an angel with a sword of fire; and _The Witch of Atlas_ is a triumph in a new “fairy way of writing.” His is the Muse of clouds and stars, of sea and tempest, of all the aspects, and, in appearance, most capricious forces of the world, yet his is also the Muse of flowers and peaceful woods, of dejection and of delight. What the born rebel, Milton, might have been without the foundation and trammels of Puritanism, that Shelley was, though his wild and tender lyric note was even more exquisite than Milton’s. Neither was, in the full sense, human, for both were without humor, as may be seen in their humorous pieces.

Keats, but three years younger than Shelley (1795), was more a true child of the nineteenth century. His social ideas, though of course liberal, were more in abeyance; he was more exclusively an artist; and his art was more controlled by the revived Elizabethanism of Leigh Hunt (1784). That singular man, who had so much taste, and so much of it bad; so intense a theory of social benevolence, and so keen a belief that it was more blessed to receive than to give, “owed little” (in the way of literature) “to any but the old masters, and many contemporaries owed not a little to him.” Few owed more, for good and bad, than Keats. Virgil he had found out for himself, and had translated when a schoolboy. Spenser, too, he found for himself, and Greece he discovered afresh in Lemprière’s _Dictionary_ and in Chapman’s _Homer_. But this superficial euphuism and elaborate verbal quaintness he partly derived at second hand from Leigh Hunt.

That something in Leigh Hunt which suggested Harold Skimpole to Dickens, and his violent conception of _The Cockney School_ to Lockhart, was not hidden from Keats, and inspired him with some bitter words. It was what he derived from Hunt that gave occasion to Keats’s assailants, who were more of political than of literary partisans. Lockhart, or Wilson, or both, with the _Quarterly_ reviewer, in attacking _Endymion_ were attacking, they thought, a member of an affected, effeminate, and radical coterie. Keats himself, maturing with the suddenness of genius, looked on _Endymion_ as thoroughly immature. But killed, or even discouraged, by his critics he was not, and on a page of a copy of _Lamia_ where his publishers spoke of his discouragment he wrote “This is a lie.” (The copy is in the possession of Canon Ainger.) Keats, like Burns, whom he so intensely admired and so unerringly judged as a man and a poet, was his own best critic. Despite his boyish lusciousness of taste, and the fever of letters written when dying, there was no manlier or more chivalrous soul in England than that of the poet of the odes to the nightingale and to autumn. Keats at his best attained sheer perfection of language, of emotion, and of thought. As he advised Shelley to be, he was not content with less than filling all the rifts with pure gold. “Untaught,” like the minstrel of Odysseus, he combined a Greek clarity and largeness of manner with that romance which Greece does not lack, but which he possessed in a degree more conspicuous, at least to readers who are not Greeks. Though he has not been and cannot be imitated, he has supplied to Tennyson and the best moderns a standard and an ideal. That the Shakespearian copiousness of humanity and humor and dramatic genius would ever have been his nothing indicates, but what writer of the nineteenth century, except Scott, has possessed a large share of these qualities? In poetry, not one, and it was in prose that Scott wore his fragment of the cloak of Shakespeare. For the century has not produced, in England or America, a great dramatic poet. It is to fiction, to Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Stevenson, Meredith, Hawthorne, George Eliot, that we must look for the humor and humanity and passion which, earlier, found their vehicle in the drama.

Ours is a reading rather than a seeing century, though this does not explain the reason which made the great novelists incapable of writing for the stage. Of the other poets of the early century, Campbell, Rogers, Moore, Landor, Hogg, and the ladies, Mrs. Hemans, and L. E. L., and Beddoes, space does not permit us to treat. Landor’s audience has not increased; Rogers has none; Campbell is best remembered for war songs which I fear are overrated; Hogg, despite some exquisite passages in _Kilmeny_, and some admirable songs, suffers from his countrymen’s exclusive devotion to Robbie Burns. When Scott turned to fiction (1814) the current of popular taste at once changed into that channel. Byron had still his vogue; Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge then sang only to the few initiated; Wordsworth was past his prime; and with the general public nothing was really popular but fiction, and that fiction was Scott’s. Miss Austen is probably much more widely appreciated to-day than when she died, little noted by the world, in 1817. A criticism of Scott’s novels, which first made fiction supreme and far above poetry in the estimation of “the reading public,” cannot be attempted in this place. The best estimate of Scott, if far from most favorable, is his own, in the introduction to _The Fortunes of Nigel_. His faults of prolixity, haste, indifference to delicacy of style, and even to grammar; his “big bow-wow” vein (as he calls it); the stilted theatrical language of his Catherine Glovers and Helen Macgregors—all these defects, with his hasty denouéments (as of Shakespeare and Molière), are patent, are confessed, and probably deter many readers from making profit of his humor, his rich knowledge of and sympathy with all human nature, his infrequent but exquisite touches of passion, his tragedy and comedy. None the less, Scott is the main stock of the fiction of the century. Men may now have more minute knowledge, though so wide a knowledge has none; may have more wit, if less humor; may eagerly hunt for all that Scott loathed and avoided in our animal nature; may, indeed must, practise a more careful style, but all the novelists are, willy-nilly, children of Scott and Miss Austen. Dickens, indeed, owed more to Smollett (one of Scott’s chief favorites), Thackeray owed more to Fielding, the “Kailyard School” owed more to Galt (1779—1839). But Scott is “the father of the rest,” above all, of Dumas; and Miss Austen is the mother. Lord Lytton and Mr. Disraeli had, especially at first, a tinge of Byronism, later developing on their own lines: Mr. Disraeli’s political; Lord Lytton’s multifarious, including the line of modern mysticism, now often worked. Scott lived to be interested in Lytton, and might have seen (though probably he did not see them) the little-noted beginnings of Browning and Tennyson, about 1830.

What he did see, and admire, was the performance of Cooper, with whom actual and living American fiction may perhaps be said to take its rise. In England, Cooper was regarded as the Scott of America; and it is to be regretted that Lockhart did not excise a splenetic personal reference to Cooper in Sir Walter’s _Journal_. He was old, tired, and fatigued with the pressure of society in Paris when he wrote. Cooper had the genius to appropriate the unworked fields of American patriotic seafaring life, and of the manners of the Red Man; he is “Cooper of the wood and wave.” Eagerly were his works read by boys, when Thackeray was a boy, and when I was a boy. Never shall his readers forget the “Long Carabine,” to whom Thackeray was devoted, and Uncas, and Chingachgook.

“Still we love the Delaware, And still we hate the Mingos.”