XIVWHAT SHELLEY WAS

The solid roarOf thunderous waterfalls and torrents hoarse,Pouring a constant bulk, uncertain where,

which he had not nerves to feel and words so to utter that others should feel as he did.

In making this distinction between poetry of a masculine and that of a feminine order, it must be understood that no sort of disrespect is intended to the latter in saying a good word for that “once important sex” of poetry which the bewitching allurements of Keats and Shelley and their followers have caused, for a season, to be comparatively despised. The femininity of such poets as these is a glorious and immortal gift, such as no mortal lady has ever attained or ever will attain. It has been proved to us how well a mortal lady may become able to read the classics; but, humbled assome of us may feel by her having headed the Tripos, it is still some compensation for those of our sex to remember that we alone can write “classics,” even of the feminine order. Nor let it be thought that we have been insisting upon a modern and fanciful distinction in thus dividing great men into two classes, in one of which the masculine and in the other the feminine predominates. It is a fact the observation of which is as old as the mythology which attributed the parentage of heroes in whom the intellectual powers prevailed to the union of gods with women, while those who distinguished themselves by more external and showy faculties were said to have been born of the commerce of goddesses with men.

Professor Dowdenhas had access to a very large quantity of hitherto unpublished correspondence and other matter, some of which throws much new light upon Shelley’s singular character; and, but for one most important point—his sudden separation from Harriet Westbrook, for which no substantial reason is given—the Professor’s eleven hundred closely printed pages contain all and more than all that any reasonable person can want to know about the subject. Professor Dowden’s arrangement of this mass of material is so lucid that interest seldom flags; and the whole work reads like a first-class sensational novel, of which the only faults are that the characters are unnatural and the incidents improbable. A beautiful youth of almost superhuman genius, sensitiveness, and self-abnegation, is the hero. He is given early to blaspheming whateversociety has hitherto respected; and to cursing the King and his father—an old gentleman whose chief foible seems to have been attachment to the Church of England. His charity is so angelical that he remains on the best of terms with one man who has tried to seduce his wife, and with another—a beautiful young lord with a club-foot, whom he finds wallowing in a society given to vices which cannot be named, and who is also a supreme poet—notwithstanding the fact that this lord has had a child by one of the ladies of his (the hero’s) wife’s family and treats her with the most unmerited contempt and cruelty. He adores three really respectable and attractive young ladies—by name Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Hitchener, and Emilia Viviani—with a passion which eternity cannot exhaust, and praises them in music like that of the spheres (witness “Epipsychidion”); and, anon, Harriet is “a frantic idiot,” Elizabeth a “brown demon,” and Emilia a “centaur.” “It was,” says his biographer, “one of the infirmities of Shelley’s character that, from thinking the best of a friend or acquaintance, he could of a sudden, and with insufficient cause, pass over to the other side and think the worst.” It is, perhaps, fortunate that Providence should afflict supreme sanctities and geniuses with such “infirmities”; otherwise we might take them for something more than meresaints and poets. The hero, as became absolute charity, gave every one credit—at least, when it suited his mood and convenience—for being as charitable as himself: witness his soliciting Harriet Westbrook for money after he had run away with his fresh “wife,” her rival. He was addicted even from his babyhood to the oddest and most “charming” eccentricities. “When Bysshe,” then quite a child, “one day set a fagot-stack on fire, the excuse was a charming one: he did so that he might have ‘a little hell of his own.’”At Eton “in a paroxysm of rage he seized the nearest weapon, a fork, and stuck it into the hand of his tormentor.” On another occasion, when his tutor found him apparently setting fire to himself and the house, and asked him “What on earth are you doing, Shelley?” he replied, “Please, sir, I’m raising the devil.” The pet virtue of the hero was tolerance. “Here I swear,” he writes to Mr. Hogg, “and as I break my oaths, may Infinity, Eternity blast me—here I swear that never will I forgive intolerance! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge ... not one that leaves the wretch at rest, but lasting, long revenge.” His resolutions to be himself tolerant often broke down, and he could not abide “men who pray” and such-like; but what could be expected from such a hero in such aworld! He had all the naïveté as well as the self-reliance of true greatness. He had no sooner become an undergraduate at Oxford than he printed a pamphlet on “The Necessity of Atheism,” and sent copies to the Vice-Chancellor, the heads of houses, and all the bishops, with “a pretty letter in his own handwriting” to each. He was summoned before the University authorities, who “pleaded, implored, and threatened; on the other side, the unabashed and beardless boy maintaining his right to think, and declare his thoughts to others.” Much evil as he believed of such vermin, he does not seem to have dreamed of the intolerance of which they were capable. Hogg—the dear and life-long friend who tried to seduce his wife—writes: “He rushed in; he was terribly agitated. ‘I am expelled,’ he said, as soon as he had recovered himself a little; ‘I am expelled!’... He sat on the sofa, repeating with convulsive vehemence the words ‘Expelled! expelled!’”Professor Dowden thinks “it was natural and perhaps expedient that measures should have been taken to vindicate the authority of the heads of the institution; ... but good feeling” would not have punished so severely what “was more an offence of the intellect than of the heart and will”: for what was it “to fling out a boy’s defiance against the first article of the Creed,” compared with the drinking and disorderly life of some other undergraduates who were yet allowed to remain in the University? The conduct of the authorities was the less excusable that we have Mr. Hogg’s authority for the fact that at this time “the purity and sanctity of his life were most conspicuous,” and that “in no individual, perhaps, was the moral sense ever more completely developed than in Shelley.” Of course, in face of such an authority as Mr. Hogg, the assertion of Thornton Hunt that “he was aware of facts which gave him to understand that Shelley while at college, in tampering with venal passions, had seriously injured his health; and that this was followed by a reaction ‘marked by horror,’”is not to be listened to, and is therefore relegated to a footnote. Professor Dowden rightly thinks that Shelley might have been all the better had he left the University at the usual time, and with his mind weighted with more discipline and knowledge. “His voyage,” says his biographer, “must needs have been fleet and far, and the craft, with fore and flying sails set, must often have run upon her side and drunk the water; all the more reason, therefore, for laying in some ballast below before she raced into the gale.” Every one knows how the craft raced into the gale, with Miss Westbrook on board, as soon as the Oxford hawser was cut.Shelley might have done much worse. She was a good and attractive person. He began by liking her. “There are some hopes,” he says, “of this dear little girl; she would be a divine little scion of infidelity if I could get hold of her.” She seems to have been sincerely devoted to him and he afterwards to her, until circumstances unknown or undivulged made his home insupportable to her, and she became the “frantic idiot” who, though she would give Shelley money when she had it, was apparently not sufficiently “tolerant” upon other points—such as that of his proposition that she should enjoy the scenery of Switzerland in his company and that of her supplanter; and it certainly showed some narrowness of mind to cast herself, upon his final desertion of her, first into some desperation of living and afterwards into the Serpentine, when she might have shared, or at least witnessed, the “eternal rapture” and “divine aspirations” which her husband was enjoying in the arms of another woman. Poor little “idiot” as she was, she constitutes almost the only point in all this bewildering “romance of reality” upon which the mind can rest with any peace or pleasure.

What Shelley was at first he remained to the last: a beautiful, effeminate, arrogant boy—constitutionally indifferent to money, generous byimpulse, self-indulgent by habit, ignorant to the end of all that it most behoves a responsible being to know, and so conceited that his ignorance was incurable; showing at every turn the most infallible sign of a feeble intellect, a belief in human perfectibility; and rushing at once to the conclusion, when he or others met with suffering, that some one, not the sufferer, was doing grievous wrong. If to do what is right in one’s own eyes is the whole of virtue, and to suffer for so doing is to be a martyr, then Shelley was the saint and martyr which a large number of—chiefly young—persons consider him to have been as a man; and if to have the faculty of saying everything in the most brilliant language and imagery, without having anything particular to say beyond sublime commonplaces and ethereal fallacies about love and liberty, is to be a “supreme” poet, then Shelley undoubtedly was such. But, as a man, Shelley was almost wholly devoid of the instincts of the “political animal,” which Aristotle defines a man to be. If he could not see the reasons for any social institution or custom, he could notfeelany; and forthwith set himself to convince the world that they were the invention of priests and tyrants. He was equally deficient in what is commonly understood by natural affection. The ties of relationship were no ties to him: for he could onlyseethem as accidents. “I, like the God of the Jews,” writes Shelley, “set up myself as no respecter of persons; and relationship is regarded by me as bearing that relation to reason which a band of straw does to fire.” As these deficiencies were the cause of all the abnormal phenomena of his life, so they are at the root of, or rather are, the imperfections of his poetry, which is all splendour and sentiment and sensitiveness, and little or no true wisdom or true love. The very texture of his verse suffers from these causes. In his best poems it is firm, fluent, various, and melodious; but the more serious and subtle music of life which he had not in his heart he could not put into his rhythms; which no one who knows what rhythm is will venture to compare with the best of Tennyson’s or Wordsworth’s, far less with the best of our really “supreme” poets. A very great deal of his poetry is much like the soap-bubbles he was so fond of blowing—its superficies beauty, its substance wind; or like many a young lady who looks and moves and modulates her speech like a goddess, and chatters like an ape.

After Shelley, the chief male figure in this romance—which would be altogether incredible were it not real—is that of the guide, philosopher, and friend of the poet’s youth, Godwin. Pecksniff is genteel comedy compared with the grim farceof this repulsive lover of wisdom as embodied in himself. Like the German poet who was entrusted by one friend to be the bearer of a sausage to another, and, bit by bit, ate it all on his way, Godwin “sincerely abhorred all that was sordid and mean; but he liked sausage”; and the way he combined the necessity for nibbling at Shelley’s future fortune by making incessant claims, which the latter could only satisfy by repeated and ruinous post-obits, with the other necessity for keeping up the insulted and injured dignity of a man whom Shelley had wronged past pardon, is funny beyond description. His writing to tell Shelley that he had insulted him by giving him a heavy sum of money in the form of a cheque made payable to his (Godwin’s) own name, thereby making the gift liable to be construed as such by the banker, and threatening solemnly not to receive the gift at all, unless the name was changed to “Hume” or any other the poet might select, is a touch which Shakespeare might have coveted for Ancient Pistol.

It appears that there still exists a good deal of writing by and concerning Shelley which it has not been deemed expedient to publish. A footnote, for instance, assures us that “a poetical epistle to Graham referring to his father in odious terms” is still “in existence”; and various other unprintedletters and poems are alluded to. But it is scarcely to be supposed that any futureLife of Shelleywill supersede Professor Dowden’s—unless, indeed, it should be an abridgment, more suitable in bulk and perhaps in tone than the present publication is, for the use of those who, undazzled, or possibly repelled, by the glamour of Shelley’s personality and revolutionary convictions, admire the meteoric splendour of his genius and allow it its not unimportant place in the permanent literature of England.

Blake’spoetry, with the exception of four or five lovely lyrics and here and there in the other pieces a startling gleam of unquestionable genius, is mere drivel. A sensible person can easily distinguish between that which he cannot understand and that in which there is nothing to be understood. Mr. W. Rossetti, who is an enthusiast for “the much-maligned Paris Commune” and for Blake’s poetry, says of some of the latter, where it is nearly at its worst, “We feel its potent and arcane influence, but cannot dismember this into articulated meanings.” This sentence, if put into less exalted English, expresses tolerably well the aspect of mind with which we regard much of the writing of the Prophets and of the great ancient and modern mystics. Some light of their meaning forces itself through the, in most cases, purposely obscure cloud of their words and imagery; but when, by chance,a glimpse of the disk itself is caught, it is surprisingly strong, bright, and intelligible. Such writers are only spoken of with irreverence by those that would have given their verdict in favour of the famous Irishman who, being confronted with one witness swearing to having seen him take a handkerchief from another gentleman’s pocket, brought four who testified with equal solemnity to not having seen him do any such thing. The obvious rule in regard to such writers is, “When you cannot understand a man’s ignorance, think yourself ignorant of his understanding.” Again, if a man’s sayings are wholly unintelligible to us, he may claim the benefit of a small possibility of a doubt that his meanings may be too great and necessarily “arcane” for our powers of reception. But when a writer’s works consist of a few passages of great beauty and such simplicity that a child may understand them—like Blake’s “Chimney-Sweep,” “Tiger,” “Piping down the valleys wild,” “Why was Cupid a boy?” and “Auguries of Innocence”—and a great deal more that is mere ill-expressed but perfectly intelligible platitude and commonplace mixed with petty spite, and a far larger quantity still which to the ear of the natural understanding is mere gibberish, he has no right to claim, as Blake does, that the latter shall be regarded as plenarily inspired, or, indeed, as beinganything better than the delirious rubbish it obviously is.

Mr. W. Rossetti, though he goes a great way further in his admiration of Blake than reason can be shown for, does the cause of reason a good service in declaring his opinion that the poet was probably mad. “When,” says he, “I find a man pouring forth conceptions and images for which he professes himself not responsible, and which are in themselves in the highest degree remote, nebulous, and intangible, and putting some of these, moreover, into words wherein congruent sequence and significance of expression or analogy are not to be traced, then I cannot resist a strong presumption that that man was in some true sense of the word mad.” As Pope “could not take his tea without a stratagem,” so Blake could not “mix his colours with diluted glue” without declaring that “the process was revealed to him by St. Joseph”; and it was the ghost of his brother who taught him the new, though, had we not been told otherwise, the not supernaturally wonderful device of saving the expense of ordinary typography by etching the words of his verses on the copper plate which bore their illustrations. Blake was morally as well as intellectually mad; proposing on one occasion, for example, that his wife should allow him to introduce a second partner to his bed, anddoing so with abonâ fideunconsciousness of anything amiss in such a suggestion as perfect as that with which Shelley urged his wife to come and share the delights of a tour in Switzerland with him and his mistress Mary Godwin.

That “great wits to madness nearly are allied” is not true; but it is not only true but psychologically explicable that small “geniuses” often are so. Most children are geniuses before the dawn of moral and intellectual responsibilities; and there are some who remain, not children, but moral and intellectual manikins, all their lives. It must be confessed that conscience makes, not only cowards, but more or less dullards, of us all. The child, that

Mighty prophet, seer blest,On whom those truths do restWhich we are toiling all our lives to find,

owes his power of vision to his not being able to see the flaming sword of conscience which turns every way, and hinders all men but a very few from getting a glimpse through the closed gates of Paradise. Yet it is better to be a purblind man with a conscience than a seeing manikin with none. It is better still, and best of all, when the man of developed intellect and fully accepted responsibilities retains a cherished memory of and an innocent sympathy with the knowledge that cameto him in childhood and early youth, and uses his trained powers of expression in order to make the world partakers of those thoughts and feelings which had no tongue when they first arose in him, and leave no memory in the mass of men until the man of true and sane genius touches chords of recollection that would otherwise have slept in them for ever. One of the few really good things ever said by Hazlitt is that “men of genius spend their lives in teaching the world what they themselves learned before they were twenty.”

For the time, however, the manikin type of genius is all the fashion, especially with a class of critics who have it in their power to give notoriety, if they cannot give fame. Craziness alone passes at present for a strong presumption of genius, and where genius is really found in company therewith it is at once pronounced “supreme.” This is partly because most people can see that craziness has something abnormal about it, and are ready, therefore, to identify it with genius, of which most persons only know that it also is “abnormal”; and partly because the manikin mind is always red republican, and ardent in its hatred of kings, priests, “conventions,” the “monopoly” of property and of women, and all other hindrances put in the way of virtue, liberty, and happiness by the wicked “civilizee.”

Blake, as an artist, is a more important figure than Blake the poet; and naturally so, for the smallest good poem involves a consecutiveness and complexity of thought which are only required in paintings of a character which Blake rarely attempted. Yet, even as a painter his reputation has until lately been much exaggerated. The recent exhibition of his collected drawings and paintings was a great blow to the fame which had grown up from a haphazard acquaintance by his admirers with a few sketches or an illustrated poem. Here and there there was a gleam of such pure and simple genius as is often revealed in the speech of a finely natured child amid its ordinary chatter; here and there the expression of a tender or distempered dream, which was not like anything else in the spectator’s experience; now and then an outline that had a look of Michael Angelo, with sometimes hints which might have formed the themes of great works, and which justified the saying of Fuseli that “Blake is damned good to steal from”; but the effect of the whole collection was dejecting and unimpressive, and did little towards confirming its creator’s opinion that Titian, Reynolds, and Gainsborough were bad artists, and Blake, Barry, and Fuseli good ones.

Theclaims of Rossetti as a painter and a poet have obtained a full and generous recognition; and he has acquired a standing in either art which will in all probability abide, though it is far too soon to attempt any estimate of his relative position in the permanent ranks of artists and writers. His thoughtfulness, and the clearness and intensity of his perceptions, do not require to be insisted upon, nor the almost unexampled way in which he has merged—and often, it must be admitted, confounded—the functions of painter and poet. This he has done to the detriment of his perfection in either art; in neither of which can he be truly said to have attained the character of mastery which may be found, more or less, in almost all other workers of equal genius with himself, and sometimes in those whose natural qualifications have been inferior to his. Littleof his drawing and none of his painting can be enjoyed without the drawback of some sense of manifest technical failure; and nearly all his poetry—which is more or less difficult by reason of the quick succession of out-of-the-way thoughts and images, needing the closest attention for their appreciation—is rendered unnecessarily so by language which rarely has the fluency of perfection. In the two or three instances in which his verse becomes fluent and more or less masterly—notably in the “Burden of Nineveh” and “Jenny”—it ceases to be characteristic or subtle. The “Burden of Nineveh” might have been written by Southey, or any other writer of forcible words and thoughts in somewhat commonplace rhythm. This fact, that fluency fails him as soon as he gets upon his own proper ground, renders it extremely difficult to discern and to describe exactly what that ground is. Style, which is the true expression of the poet’s individuality—the mark by which we discover, not what, but how, he thinks and feels—is almost suffocated, in Rossetti’s most characteristic work, by voluntary oddities of manner and by a manifest difficulty in so moving in the bonds of verse as to convert them into graces. If subtle thoughts and vivid imagery were all that went to make a poet, Rossetti would stand very high. But these qualities must havethe running commentary and musical accompaniment of free feeling, which only a correspondingly subtle and vivid versification can express, before they can be allowed to constitute a claim to the highest poetical rank. Rossetti as a versifier was as technically defective as Rossetti as a painter; his best poems and his best paintings are the outcome, not only of very high aims—which are as common as blackberries—but of very high aims deeply and characteristically felt; and his superiority to many far more technically perfect artists results from the fact that his characteristic feeling is strong enough to make itself powerfully, however indistinctly, perceived through the mist and obstructions of his mannerism and defective verse.

Like all men of strong artistic individuality combined with serious artistic faults, Rossetti has had a great influence upon the literature of his day—such an influence as comparatively faultless writers never exert, at least in their time. Many young versifiers and painters fancy they are reproducing Rossetti’s intensity when they are only imitating the most prevailing fault of his art, its tensity. His brother, William Rossetti, in his modest and judicious introduction to these volumes, tells how he and Gabriel used to amuse themselves in makingbouts-rimés. William saysof his brother’s literary toys of this sort: “Some have afaux airof intensity of meaning, as well as of expression; but their real core of significance is small.” It cannot be denied that a careful scrutiny of much of Rossetti’s published work is open to this criticism. It is tense without being intense. This fault is his great attraction to his imitators, whose every sensation is represented as a pang, delicious or otherwise, and whose mental sky is a canopy of iron destiny compared with which the melancholy of Byron, which likewise had so many copyists, was no more than a pleasant shade.

In endeavouring to do justice to Rossetti it must be remembered that, though born and bred in England, he was an Italian by blood and sympathy. His acquaintance with Englishmen and English books was by no means wide. Love, the constant theme of his art, is in some of his most important poems, not the English love whose stream is steady affection and only its occasional eddies passion, and which, when disappointed, does not cease to be love, though it becomes sorrow: but the Italian ardour, in perennial crisis, which stabs its rival and hates its object, if she refuses its satisfaction, as ardently as it worships her so long as there is hope. The limitations, also, which characterise Rossetti’s poetry belongto Italian poetry itself. There is little breadth in it, but much acuteness. Dante is to Shakespeare as the Peak of Teneriffe to the tableland of Tibet; and, as any reader of Rossetti’s translations of the minor Italian poets may see, the same proportion prevails between them and the lesser singers of England. It is therefore quite unfair to try an essentially Italian poet, like Rossetti, by comparing his works with the classical poetry of a nation which, for combined breadth and height, far surpasses the poetry of all other languages present and past, with the doubtful exception of the Greek. The English language itself is not made for Italian thought and passion. It has about four times as many vowel sounds as Italian and a corresponding consonantal power; that is to say, it differs from the Italian about as much as an organ differs from a flute. Rossetti uses little beside the flute-notes of our English organ; and, if he had made himself complete master of those notes, it would have been the most that could have been expected of him. In appearance and manners Rossetti was thoroughly Italian. In his youth especially he had the sweet and easy courtesy peculiar to his nation. His brother says, “There was a certain British bluffness streaking the finely poised Italian suppleness and facility.” This describes, better than perhaps Mr.William Rossetti intended, a characteristic which occasionally, but fortunately not often, appears in his poetry, which is most pleasing when it is least “streaked” with British bluffness: as it is, for example, in “Jenny.”

Rossetti’s power is chiefly shown in his long ballads, such as “Sister Helen,” “The Bride’s Prelude,” “Rose Mary,” and “The King’s Tragedy.” Had these been found in Percy’s “Relics,” they would have constituted the chief ornaments of that collection. As it is, it is impossible not to feel that they are more or less anachronisms, both in spirit and in form. The repetition of a refrain through the fifty stanzas or so of “Sister Helen,” the most forcible of all these lyrical narratives, has no sufficient justification for its interruption of the fiercely flowing history. A refrain which extends to more than three or four stanzas requires and originally assumed a musical accompaniment. The constant high-pressure of passion in these ballads is also an anachronism; and to the cultured modern reader this character is calculated to defeat the poet’s purpose, giving him an impression of cold instead of warmth, as if the fire had a salamander instead of a heart in its centre. A kindred fault, which Rossetti has in common with some of the most famous poets of the century, is that of conferring upon all hisimages an acute and independent clearness which is never found in the natural and truly poetical expression of feeling. It is true, and great poets (especially Shakespeare) have noted it, that in extreme crises of passion there will sometimes be a moment of calm in which the minutiæ of some most trifling object or circumstance will, as it were, photograph themselves upon the mind. But this præternatural calm is only the “eye of the storm”; and to scatter broadcast, over a long poem, imagery with the sharpest outlines is to prove, not only that it has not been written from true passion, but that the poet has not even observed the phenomena of true passion. Such independent force and clearness of imagery can only be justified in poems of the very lowest type of artistic construction, such as Schiller’s “Song of the Bell” and “Childe Harold,” which scarcely profess to have more unity than is to be found in a scrap-book. A fine poem may or may not be full of “fine things”; but, if it does abound in them, their independent value should only appear when they are separated from their context. In Rossetti, as in several other modern poets of great reputation, we are constantly being pulled up, in the professedly fiery course of a tale of passion, to observe the moss on a rock or the note of a chaffinch. High finish has nothing to do withthis quality of extreme definiteness in detail; indeed, it is more often exercised by the perfect poet in blurring outlines than in giving them acuteness. It must be admitted, however, that Rossetti had an unusual temptation to this kind of excess in his extraordinary faculty for seeing objects in such a fierce light of imagination as very few poets have been able to throw upon external things. He can be forgiven for spoiling a tender lyric by a stanza such as this, which seems scratched with an adamantine pen upon a slab of agate—

But the sea stands spreadAs one wall with the flat skies,Where the lean black craft, like flies,Seem wellnigh stagnated,Soon to drop off dead.

Though the foregoing strictures apply to a large portion of Rossetti’s work, there is a really precious residuum which they do not touch. There are several pieces—such as “Love’s Nocturn,” “The Portrait,” “A Little While,” and many sonnets—which are full of natural feeling expressed with simple and subtle art; and in much of his work there is a rich and obscure glow of insight into depths too profound and too sacred for clearspeech, even if they could be spoken: a sort of insight not at all uncommon in the great art of past times, but exceedingly rare in the art of our own.

Ithas probably been a misfortune for Mr. Swinburne’s growth as a poet that no winter of critical neglect preceded the full recognition of his very remarkable talents. His best friends must allow that he is still somewhat younger in judgment than in his years and experience of authorship. It is not, however, much to be wondered at that he should have been tempted to rest content with having apparently attained at a single step a height of reputation to reach which has been with most poets the work of hard climbing during many years. Mr. Swinburne is still in the prime of life and in full possession of his powers, and some of his later work shows that he has that continued power of growth which is one of the greatest privileges of genius. If he will only listen to his own critical conscience, he may yet do work better and much more enduring than any he has yetdone. He cannot, indeed, hope to excel certain single passages of prose and verse in which he has attained a character of breadth and poetic ardour scarcely to be found in any other writer of the time; but he can (and there have of late been signs that he intends to) modify his manner of thinking and writing so that his best—which is very good indeed—may not be discredited by so much of the jejune in thought and composition as is to be found in a great deal of his work heretofore. Hitherto Mr. Swinburne has been too much given to protesting; which is not the poet’s work, even when it is done wisely. In his future writing we shall probably hear more of the whisper of affirmative wisdom than the whirlwind of passionate negation; he will recognise more and more fully that the world is not and never will be made up of Swinburnes and Rossettis, and that it is vain to denounce popular beliefs and institutions, when he has only, to set up in their places, others which are, and for ever will be, unintelligible by the great majority of mankind, and inapplicable to their demands. The people will always insist on having kings and priests; and Mr. Swinburne has, no doubt, had his eyes too well opened by very recent history not to discern that it would be of little use to dethrone King Log in favour of Prime Minister Stork, or to unfrock an Archbishop of Canterburyin order to transfer his authority to a General Booth.

Hitherto it has been impossible not to feel that there has been some disproportion between Mr. Swinburne’s power of saying things and the things he has to say. This defect of the “body of thought,” which Coleridge once complained was wanting in an otherwise good poem, has reacted upon Mr. Swinburne’s language itself, producing sometimes a reiteration of words and imagery surpassing even that which is to be found in the works of Shelley, and which in them arose from the same inadequacy of matter. For example, in a passage of thirteen lines in the present volume we have “flowery forefront of the year,” “foam-flowered strand,” “blossom-fringe,” “flower-soft face,” and “spray-flowers”; and in Mr. Swinburne’s poems generally it must be confessed that flowers, stars, waves, flames and three or four other entities of the natural order, come in so often as to suggest some narrowness of observation and vocabulary. This defect, also, is less manifest than it used to be, though probably the abandonment to the mere joy of words, which is natural and not altogether ungraceful in a writer who can use them so splendidly, will always be a characteristic of Mr. Swinburne’s poetry. It reminds us of the rapture of Tristram in the truly magnificentdescription of the bath he took before breakfast in “Sea and Sunrise,” and the reader is often carried with like joy upon the waves of words without troubling himself as to whether he and the poet are not both out of their depth.

Mr. Swinburne’s mode of dealing with human passions is somewhat of an anachronism. His heroes and heroines, like those of the old English drama and the Scandinavian poems, often become heroic by the sacrifice of humanity, and, thereby, of the reader’s sympathy. The pictures of Mary Queen of Scots and of Iseult in this volume, for instance, though painted with a great brush are not truly great, because they are not greatly true—at all events, to any conditions which the modern world recognises or should desire to recognise. Nor, granting that the characters and situations are poetical, is the execution quite what it ought to be. The effects are obtained by a cumulative rather than a developing process; and, at the end of a long poem or passage full of strong words and images, the idea of strength thence derived is rather that given by a hill than the living hole of a huge tree.

Mr. Swinburne’s metrical practice should be criticised with respect; for he has an unquestionably fine ear, and has ransacked the literature of all times in order to discover and appropriate, ormodify to his own uses, a number of movements which, unlike our familiar English metres, are whirlwinds and blasts of passion in themselves. Such metres, however, should be sparingly used. They almost satisfy the ear without any accompaniment of sound meaning, and evoke, as it were by a trick, a current of emotion that is independent of any human feeling in the poet himself. This is a great temptation, and Mr. Swinburne has not always avoided the traps which he has thus set for himself. Such metres have, moreover, the disadvantage of fixing in too peremptory a manner the key in which the poems written in them must be sustained. They allow none of the endless modulations which are open to the poet who writes in almost any of our native and less emphatic measures. Mr. Swinburne has the less reason for resorting so habitually as he does to this too easy means of obtaining passionate effect, inasmuch as some of his very best and most effective passages are written in our common metres. Witness the almost incomparable apostrophe to Athens, in “Erechtheus” (unfortunately not included in these selections), and “Sea and Sunrise,” and “Herse.”

There is one still easier and far less excusable source of effect which every friend of the poet must rejoice to see that he has of late abandoned.There is nothing in theSelectionswhich a schoolgirl might not be permitted to read and understand, if she could; and there are a number of pieces about children which are so full of pure and tender perceptions as to cause a doubt whether, in some of his earlier writings, the poet was not wantonly flouting the world’s opinion rather than expressing any very real phase of his own feeling.

Cloughworshipped Truth with more than the passion of a lover, and his writings are, for the most part, the tragic records of a life-long devotion to a mistress who steadily refused his embraces; but as it is greatly better to have loved without attaining than to have attained without loving, so Clough’s ardent and unrewarded stumblings in the dark towards his adored though unseen divinity are greatly more attractive and edifying to those who have shared, successfully or not, the same passion, than is that complacent fruition of her smiles which she often accords to those who are contented to be no more than her speaking acquaintances. Regarded from a purely intellectual point of view, Clough’s utterances on religion, duty, etc., are little better than the commonplaces which in these days pass through the mind and more or less affect the feelings ofalmost every intelligent and educated youth before he is twenty years of age; but there are commonplaces which cease to be such, and become indefinitely interesting, in proportion as they are animated by moral ardour and passion. Speech may work good by warming as well as by enlightening; and if Clough’s writings teach no new truth, they may inflame the love of truth, which is perhaps as great a service. Though he professes that he can nowhere see light where light is most necessary and longed for, his mind is utterly opposed to the negative type; and he exactly exemplifies the class of believer whom Richard Hooker endeavours to comfort, in his great sermon on “the perpetuity of faith in the elect,” by the reminder that a longing to believe is implicit faith, and that we cannot sorrow for the lack of that which we interiorly hold to be nonexistent. A question that must suggest itself to most readers is, What is the use and justification of these endless and tautological lamentations over the fact—as Clough conceived it to be—that, for such as him at least, “Christ is not risen”? The reply is, that the responsibility of the publication of so much that is profoundly passionate but far from profoundly intellectual scepticism was not his. With the exception of some not very significant critical essays, his proseconsists of letters, which were of course not meant for the public; and the greater part of his poetry remained to the day of Clough’s death in his desk, and would probably never have left it, with his consent, unless to be put in the fire.

Those who recognise in the “Bothie” Clough’s almost solitary claim to literary eminence must somewhat wonder at the considerable figure he stands for in the estimation of the present generation. The fact is that Clough, like James Spedding, was personally far more impressive than his works; and the singularly strong effect produced among his friends by the extreme simplicity and shy kindliness of his life and manners, and the at once repellent and alluring severity of his truthfulness, gave his character a consequence beyond that of his writings with all who knew him though ever so slightly; and the halo of this sanctity hangs, through the report of his friends, about all that he has done, and renders cold criticism of it almost impossible. No one who knew Clough can so separate his personality from his writings as to be able to criticise them fairly as literature; no one who has not known him can understand their value as the outcome of character.

The impressionable and feminine element, which is manifest in all genius, but which in truly effectivegenius is always subordinate to power of intellect, had in Clough’s mind the preponderance. The masculine power of intellect consists scarcely so much in the ability to see truth, as in the tenacity of spirit which cleaves to and assimilates the truth when it is found, and which steadfastly refuses to be blown about by every wind of doctrine and feeling. The reiterated theme of Clough’s poetry is that the only way of forgetting certain problems now, and of securing their solution hereafter, is to do faithfully our nearest duty. This is no new teaching: it is that of every religion and all philosophy. But Clough had no power of trusting patiently to the promise, “Do my commandments, and you shall know of the doctrine.” This was the ruin of what might otherwise have been a fine poetic faculty. A “Problem” will not sing even in the process of solution, much less while it is only a hopeless and irritating “Pons.” Clough was curiously attracted by Emerson, of whom he spoke as the only great contemporary American. Now Emerson, at his very best, never approached greatness. He was at highest only a brilliant metaphysical epigrammatist. But a religion without a dogma, and with only one commandment, “Thou shalt neither think nor do anything that is customary,” had great attractions for Clough; to whom it never seems to have occurred that thevast mass of mankind, for whose moral and religious welfare he felt so keenly, has not and never can have a religion of speechless aspirations and incommunicable feelings, and that to teach men to despise custom is to cut the immense majority of them adrift from all moral restraint. The promise that we shall all be priests and kings seems scarcely to be for this world. At all events we are as far from its fulfilment now as we were two thousand years ago; and we shall not be brought nearer to it by any such outpourings of sarcastic discontent as go to the making of such poems as the tedious Mephistophelian drama called “Dipsychus,” which Clough had the good sense not to publish, though it is included with many others of equally doubtful value in posthumous editions of his works. This class of his poems possesses, indeed, a lively interest for a great many people of our own time, who are in the painful state of moral and religious ferment which these verses represent; but it is a mere accident of the time that there is any considerable audience for such utterances, and in a generation or two it is probable that most men will feel surprise that there could ever have been a public who found poetry in this sort of matter.

The “Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich” is the only considerable poem of Clough’s in which he seems,for a time, to have got out of his slough of introspection and doubt and to have breathed the healthy air of nature and common humanity. In spite of many artistic shortcomings, this poem is so healthy, human, and original, that it can scarcely fail to survive when a good deal of far more fashionable verse shall have disappeared from men’s memories. The one infallible note of a true poet—the power of expressing himself in rhythmical movements of subtilty and sweetness which baffle analysis—is also distinctly manifest in passages of the “Bothie,” passages the music of which was, we fancy, lingering in the ear of Tennyson when he wrote certain parts of “Maud.” The originality of this idyl is beyond question. It is not in the least like any other poem, and an occasionally ostentatious touch of the manner of “Herman and Dorothea” seems to render this originality all the more conspicuous in the main. Another note of poetical power, scarcely less questionable than is that of sweetness and subtilty of rhythm, is the warm and pure breath of womanhood which is exhaled from the love-passages of this poem. Clough seems to have felt, in the presence of a simple and amiable woman, a mystery of life which acted for a time as the rebuke and speechless solution of all doubts and intellectual distresses. These passages in the“Bothie,” and, in a less degree, some others in the “Amours de Voyage,” stand, in the disturbed course of Clough’s ordinary verse, like the deep, pure, and sky-reflecting pools which occasionally appear in the course of a restless mountain river.

Thelife and writings of Emerson owe their chief claim on our attention to the fact that they represent with singular force a line of thought and belief—if belief it can be called—which an immense number of the young, intelligent, and sincere of the past and present generation have been endeavouring to follow, though as yet without any remarkable or satisfactory results. “Every man is potentially a man of genius,” is the one dogma of Emerson’s religion—though it is nowhere put thus plainly by him; and its one commandment is “Be a man of genius.” Absolute nonconformity with everything, we are taught, is the first condition of personal and social well-being; and we are enjoined to look upon our individual insight as our one infallible guide, though it may bid us go one way to-day and the opposite to-morrow. At the time when Emerson was debating with himself as to whether he should throw up his office as Unitarian preacher he seems to have had some searchings of heart as to the validity of the new doctrine. “How,” he writes, in his Journal, “shall the droning world get on if all itsbeaux espritsrecalcitrate upon its approved forms and accepted constitutions and quit them in order to be single-minded? The double-refiners would produce at the other end the double-damned.” This is perhaps the wisest thing ever said by Emerson; but he nevertheless chose his part definitively with the “double refiners.” “I hate preaching,” he writes in a subsequent page of his Journal. “Preaching is a pledge, and I wish to say what I feel and think to-day, with the proviso that to-morrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.” In the free use of his proviso he accordingly, for the remainder of his life, followed and taught others to follow what he called “intuition,” even though it should not wait for “to-morrow” to contradict itself. For example, in the last page but one of the essay on “Character” we are instructed to reject the doctrine of the divinity of Christ because “the mind requires a victory to the senses, a force of character which will convert judge, jury, soldier, and king and on the following page we are told that, “when that love which is all-suffering,all-abstaining, all-aspiring ... comes into our streets and houses, only the pure and aspiring can know its face.”

Emerson’s life, journals, and letters considerably modify the impression which his published essays and lectures are calculated to leave—namely, that he was a mere stringer-together of lively thoughts, images, and poetical epigrams. He seems to have made the best of his own humanity, and to have always done the right according to his judgment, though the doing of it sometimes involved serious pecuniary inconvenience, and, as in the case of his opposition to the fugitive slave law, violent popular disapprobation. He was kindly and moral in his family and social relationships, and was conscientious even to a fault in avoiding those venial sins of language to which the most of us are perhaps too indifferent. His American admirers sometimes spoke of him as an “angel.” At any rate, he was a sort of sylph. He noted of his compatriots generally that “they have no passions, only appetites.” He seems to have had neither passion nor appetite; and there was an utter absence of “nonsense” about him which made it almost impossible to be intimate with him. Margaret Fuller, his closest friend, and even his wife, whom he loved in his own serene way, seem to have chafed under the impossibility of getting within the adamantine sphere of self-consciousnesswhich surrounded him. He not only could not forget himself, but he could not forget his grammar; and when he talked he seemed rather to be “composing” his thoughts than thinking them. His friend and admirer, Mr. Henry James the elder, complains that for this reason his conversation was without charm. “For nothing ever came but epigrams, sometimes clever, sometimes not.” His manners and discourse were, however, invariably kind and amiable. He never seems to have uttered a personal sarcasm, and only once in his life to have been seriously angry. This was on occasion of the famous fugitive slave law, which he indignantly declared would be disobeyed, if need be, by himself and every honest man.

Dr. W. H. Furness writes of Emerson: “We were babies and schoolfellows together. I don’t think he ever engaged in boys’ plays.... I can as little remember when he was not literary in his pursuits as when I first made his acquaintance.” Indeed, “orating” was in Emerson’s blood. Nearly all his known ancestors and relatives seem to have been “ministers” of some denomination or other. His school-days—though he never became a scholar in any department of learning—began before he was three years old. His father complains of the baby of two years and odd months—“Ralph does not read very well yet”; and duringall the rest of his youth Dr. Furness says that he grew up under “the pressure of I know not how many literary atmospheres.” Add to this the fact that his father and mother and his aunt—who was the chief guide of his nonage—were persons who seemed to think that love could only be manifested by severe duty, and rarely showed him any signs of the weaknesses of “affection,” and we have as bad a bringing-up for a moral, philosophical, and religious teacher as could well have been devised. “The natural first, and afterwards the spiritual.” Where innocent joy and personal affection have not been main factors of early experience the whole life wants the key to Christianity; and a rejection of all faith—except that in “genius,” “over-soul,” “a somewhat which makes for righteousness,” or some other such impotent abstraction—is, in our day, almost inevitable in a mind of constitutional sincerity like Emerson’s, especially when such sincerity is unaccompanied, as it was in him, by a warm and passionate nature and its intellectual correlative, a vigorous conscience. Emerson, though a good man—that is, one who lived up to his lights—had little or no conscience. He admired good, but did not love it; he denounced evil, but did not hate it, and did not even maintain that it was hateful, but only greatly inexpedient.

Though Emerson could not see that a religion of which there is nothing left but an “over-soul” is much the same thing as a man of whom there is nothing left but his hat, the religious bodies to which he was for many years more or less attached were less devoid of humour, and the joke of a faith without a dogma became, in time, too much for their seriousness. Consequently they agreed amicably to part, and Emerson pursued his course; that which had hitherto been called “preaching” becoming thenceforward lecturing and “orating.”

There can be no greater misfortune for a sincere and truthful mind like Emerson’s than to have to get a living by “orating.” This was his predicament, however; and there can be no doubt that his mind and his writings were the worse for this necessity. His philosophy afforded him only a very narrow range of subject. In all his essays and lectures he is but ringing the changes upon three or four ideas—which are really commonplace, though his sprightly wit and imagination give them freshness; and it is impossible to read any single essay, much less several in succession, without feeling that the licence of tautology is used to its extremest limits. In a few essays—for example, “The Poet,” “Character,” and “Love”—the writer’s heart is so much in the matter that these endless variations of one idea have the effect ofmusic which delights us to the end with the reiteration of an exceedingly simple theme; but in many other pieces it is impossible not to detect that weariness of the task of having to coin dollars out of transcendental sentiments to which Emerson’s letters and journals often bear witness. But, whether delighted with or weary of his labour, there is no progress in his thought, which resembles the spinning of a cockchafer on a pin rather than the flight of a bird on its way from one continent to another.

Emerson’s was a sweet and uniformly sunny spirit; but the sunshine was that of the long Polar day, which enlightens but does not fructify. It never even melted the icy barrier which separated his soul from others; and men and women were nothing to him, because he never got near enough to understand them. Hence his journals and letters about his visits to Europe, and especially to England, are curiously superficial in observation. He made many acute and witty remarks, such as, “Every Englishman is a House of Commons, and expects that you will not end your speech without proposing a measure;” but, on the whole, he quite misunderstood the better class of our countrymen, of whom, in his second visit to England, he had the opportunity of seeing a good deal. Although there was much constitutionalreserve, there was no real reticence in him. His ethereal, unimpassioned ideas had, indeed, nothing in them that, for him, commanded reticence; and he concluded that the best sort of Englishmen were without any motives that “transcend” sense, because he did not feel, as all such Englishmen do, that though that which transcends sense may be infinitely dearer than all else, and even because it is so dear, it is better not to talk of things which can scarcely be spoken of without inadequacy and even an approach to nonsense. Many an Englishman would turn aside with a jest from any attempt to lead him into “transcendental” talk, not because he was less, but because he was more “serious” than his interlocutor; and also because the very recognition of certain kinds of knowledge involves the recognition of obligations, to confess directly or indirectly the fulfilment or neglect of which implies either self-praise or self-blame, which, in ordinary circumstances, are alike indecent. In fact, Emerson was totally deficient in the religious sense, which is very strong in the hearts of a vast number of Englishmen who own to no fixed creed, but who would be revolted by the profound and unconscious irreverence with which Emerson was in the habit of speaking and writing of the most sacred things and names. The name of “Jesus” frequently occurs in such sentences as this: “NorJesus, nor Pericles, nor Cæsar, nor Angelo, nor Washington,” etc.

If we put aside Emerson’s unconscious malpractices in this sort, the attitude of his mind with regard to the serious beliefs of the world were too childish for resentment or exposure. It is as if one should be angry with a young lady who should simper, “Oh, my religion is the religion of the Sermon on the Mount!” in answer to an attempt to talk with her about Bossuet or Hooker.

Thefirmament of fame is full of variable stars, and they are nowhere thicker than in that great constellation of poets which marks the end of the last and the commencement of this century. Among the names of Byron, Moore, Rogers, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Burns, Campbell, Crabbe, Cowper, and Scott, there are only two the lustre of whose names has remained perfectly steady and seems likely to remain so. Two or three, which blazed forth at once as luminaries of the first magnitude, have gradually and persistently waned—whether or not ever to recover any part of their lost splendour is very doubtful. The light of one or two others has fluctuated violently, and continues to do so, with a manifest diminution, however, in their total sum of light; one or two others have suffered a distinct degradation from first into second or third class lustres, and atpresent show no sign of further alteration. Two at least have grown astonishingly in conspicuousness, and now glow like the Dog-star and Aldebaran—though there are not wanting sky-critics who declare that they discern conditions of coming change and retrogression; and one at least has almost disappeared from the heaven of public recognition, not, however, without prognostications from some of an assured reassertion of a moderate if not predominating position.

To quit figures of speech, Coleridge and Burns—though poets of very different calibre—are the only two of the thirteen above mentioned whose reputations have been altogether unaffected by the violent changes of literary fashion which have taken place in the course of the century. Each of these two poets has written a good deal which the world will willingly let die; but Coleridge in his great way, and Burns in his comparatively small way, have done a certain moderate amount of work so thoroughly and manifestly well that no sane critic has ever called it into question or ever will. By the leaders of poetic fashion Moore and Rogers have come to be accounted as almost nowhere as poets. Southey and Cowper now depend mainly for their fame upon a few small pieces, which in their own day were not regarded as of much account in comparison with such works asThe TaskandThe Curse of Kehama; Campbell now lives only, but vigorously, in a few lyrics. Who but Mr. Ruskin is there that would not laugh now to hear the name of Scott coupled with those of Keats and Shelley? Byron, who once outblazed all others, is now considered, by many judges not altogether to be disregarded, less as a great fixed star than as a meteor formed from earthly fumes condensed and for a time incandescent in the upper air. Wordsworth’s fame, though all agree that it is assured, has suffered and is likely still to suffer some fluctuations; and, when poetry is talked about in circles of modern experts, no one ever hears of Crabbe, though here and there one comes upon some literary oddity who maintains that he has as good a claim as Shelley to a place in the heavens of abiding fame. As this, to most modern ears astounding, paradox is certainly maintained, in private at least, by several persons whose opinion the most advanced critic would not think of despising, it may be worth while to see what can be said for it.

Things, it is said, are best known by comparison with their opposites; and, if so, surely Crabbe must be best illustrated by Shelley and Shelley by Crabbe. Shelley was an atheist and profoundly immoral; but his irreligion was radiant with pious imagination, and his immorality delicately and strictly conscientious. Crabbe was a most sincereChristian in faith and life; but his religion and morality were intolerant, narrow, and scrupulous, and sadly wanting in all the modern graces. Shelley had no natural feeling or affection and the greatest sensitiveness; Crabbe had the tenderest and strongest affections, but his nerves and æsthetic constitution were of the coarsest. Shelley’s taste often stood him in the stead of morality. He would have starved rather than write begging letters to Thurlow, Burke, and other magnates, as Crabbe did when he wanted to better his condition as an apothecary’s apprentice. Crabbe’s integrity produced some of the best effects of taste, and made him at once an equal in manners with the dukes and statesmen with whom he associated as soon as he had been taken from his beggary by Burke. Through years and years of poverty and almost hopeless trial Crabbe was a devoted and faithful lover, and afterwards as devoted and faithful a husband to his “Myra,” whom he adored in verses that justified some one’s description of his style as “Pope in worsted stockings.” Shelley breathes eternal vows in music of the spheres, to woman after woman, whom he will abandon and speak or write of with hatred and contempt as soon as their persons have ceased to please him. Crabbe knew nothing of the “ideal,” but loved all actualities, especially unpleasant ones, upon which he wouldturn the electric light of his peculiar powers of perception till the sludge and dead dogs of a tidal river shone. Jeffrey described the true position of Crabbe among poets better than any one else has done when he wrote, “He has represented his villagers and humble burghers as altogether as dissipated and more dishonest and discontented than the profligates of higher life.... He may be considered as the satirist of low life—an occupation sufficiently arduous, and in a great degree new and original in our language.” In this his proper vocation Crabbe is so far from being a “Pope in worsted stockings,” that his lines often resemble the strokes of Dryden’s sledge-hammer rather than the stings of his successor’s cane. But, when uninspired by the intensely disagreeable or vicious, Crabbe’s “diction” is to modern ears, for the most part, intolerable. In his cooler moments he poured forth thousands of such couplets as

Back to Index Next