A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

by

HENRY A. BEERS

Author of _A Suburban Pastoral_, _The Ways of Yale_, etc. 

New YorkHenry Holt and Company

1918

 ROMANCE

 My love dwelt in a Northern land. A grey tower in a forest green Was hers, and far on either hand The long wash of the waves was seen, And leagues on leagues of yellow sand, The woven forest boughs between. 

 And through the silver Northern light The sunset slowly died away, And herds of strange deer, lily-white, Stole forth among the branches grey; About the coming of the light, They fled like ghosts before the day. 

 I know not if the forest green Still girdles round that castle grey; I know not if the boughs between The white deer vanish ere the day; Above my love the grass is green, My heart is colder than the clay. 

 ANDREW LANG. 

PREFACE. 

The present volume is a sequel to "A History of English Romanticism inthe Eighteenth Century" (New York; Henry Holt & Co. , 1899). Referencesin the footnotes to "Volume I. " are to that work. The difficulties ofthis second part of my undertaking have been of a kind just opposite tothose of the first. As it concerns my subject, the eighteenth centurywas an age of beginnings; and the problem was to discover what latentromanticism existed in the writings of a period whose spirit, upon thewhole, was distinctly unromantic. But the temper of the nineteenthcentury has been, until recent years, prevailingly romantic in the widermeaning of the word. And as to the more restricted sense in which I havechosen to employ it, the mediaevalising literature of the nineteenthcentury is at least twenty times as great as that of the eighteenth, bothin bulk and in value. Accordingly the problem here is one of selection;and of selection not from a list of half-forgotten names, like Warton andHurd, but from authors whose work is still the daily reading of alleducated readers. 

As I had anticipated, objection has been made to the narrowness of mydefinition of _romanticism_. But every writer has a right to make hisown definitions; or, at least, to say what his book shall be about. Ihave not written a history of the "liberal movement in Englishliterature"; nor of the "renaissance of wonder"; nor of the "emancipationof the ego. " Why not have called the book, then, "A History of theMediaeval Revival in England"? Because I have a clear title to the useof _romantic_ in one of its commonest acceptations; and, for myself, Iprefer the simple dictionary definition, "pertaining to the style of theChristian and popular literature of the Middle Ages, " to any of thosemore pretentious explanations which seek to express the true inwardnessof romantic literature by analysing it into its elements, selecting oneof these elements as essential, and rejecting all the rest as accidental. 

M. Brunetière; for instance, identifies romanticism with lyricism. It isthe "emancipation of the ego. " This formula is made to fit Victor Hugo, and it will fit Byron. But M. Brunetière would surely not deny thatWalter Scott's work is objective and dramatic quite as often as it islyrical. Yet what Englishman will be satisfied with a definition of_romantic_ which excludes Scott? Indeed, M. Brunetière himself isrespectful to the traditional meaning of the word. "Numerousdefinitions, " he says, "have been given of Romanticism, and still othersare continually being offered; and all, or almost all of them, contain apart of the truth. Mme. De Staël was right when she asserted in her'Allemagne' that Paganism and Christianity, the North and the South, antiquity and the Middle Ages, having divided between them the history ofliterature, Romanticism in consequence, in contrast to Classicism, was acombination of chivalry, the Middle Ages, the literatures of the North, and Christianity. It should be noted, in this connection, that somethirty years later Heinrich Heine, in the book in which he will rewriteMme. De Staël's, will not give such a very different idea ofRomanticism. " And if, in an analysis of the romantic movement throughoutEurope, any single element in it can lay claim to the leading place, thatelement seems to me to be the return of each country to its nationalpast; in other words, mediaevalism. 

A definition loses its usefulness when it is made to connote too much. Professor Herford says that the "organising conception" of his "Age ofWordsworth" is romanticism. But if Cowper and Wordsworth and Shelley areromantic, then almost all the literature of the years 1798-1830 isromantic. I prefer to think of Cowper as a naturalist, of Shelley as anidealist, and of Wordsworth as a transcendental realist, and to reservethe name romanticist for writers like Scott, Coleridge, and Keats; and Ithink the distinction a serviceable one. Again, I have been censured foromitting Blake from my former volume. The omission was deliberate, notaccidental, and the grounds for it were given in the preface. Blake wasnot discovered until rather late in the nineteenth century. He was not alink in the chain of influence which I was tracing. I am glad to find myjustification in a passage of Mr. Saintsbury's "History of NineteenthCentury Literature" (p. 13): "Blake exercised on the literary _history_of his time no influence, and occupied in it no position. . . . Thepublic had little opportunity of seeing his pictures, and less of readinghis books. . . . He was practically an unread man. "

But I hope that this second volume may make more clear the unity of mydesign and the limits of my subject. It is scarcely necessary to addthat no absolute estimate is attempted of the writers whose works aredescribed in this history. They are looked at exclusively from a singlepoint of view. H. A. B. 

APRIL, 1901. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER

 I. WALTER SCOTT

 II. COLERIDGE, BOWLES, AND THE POPE CONTROVERSY

 III. KEATS, LEIGH HUNT, AND THE DANTE REVIVAL

 IV. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN GERMANY

 V. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN FRANCE

 VI. DIFFUSED ROMANTICISM IN THE LITERATURE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

 VII. THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

 VIII. TENDENCIES AND RESULTS

A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM. 

CHAPTER I. 

Walter Scott. [1]

It was reserved for Walter Scott, "the Ariosto of the North, " "thehistoriographer royal of feudalism, " to accomplish the task which hiseighteenth-century forerunners had essayed in vain. He possessed thetrue enchanter's wand, the historic imagination. With this in his hand, he raised the dead past to life, made it once more conceivable, made iteven actual. Before Scott no genius of the highest order had lent itselfwholly or mainly to retrospection. He is the middle point and theculmination of English romanticism. His name is, all in all, the mostimportant on our list. "Towards him all the lines of the romanticrevival converge. " [2] The popular ballad, the Gothic romance, theOssianic poetry, the new German literature, the Scandinavian discoveries, these and other scattered rays of influence reach a focus in Scott. Itis true that his delineation of feudal society is not final. There weresides of mediaeval life which he did not know, or understand, orsympathize with, and some of these have been painted in by later artists. That his pictures have a coloring of modern sentiment is no arraignmentof him but of the _genre_. All romanticists are resurrectionists; theirart is an elaborate make-believe. It is enough for their purpose if theworld which they re-create has the look of reality, the _verisimile_ ifnot the _verum_. That Scott's genius was _in extenso_ rather than _inintenso_, that his work is largely improvisation, that he was not aminiature, but a distemper painter, splashing large canvasses with acoarse brush and gaudy pigments, all these are commonplaces of criticism. Scott's handling was broad, vigorous, easy, careless, healthy, free. Hewas never subtle, morbid, or fantastic, and had no niceties or secrets. He was, as Coleridge said of Schiller, "master, not of the intense dramaof passion, but the diffused drama of history. " Therefore, because hisqualities were popular and his appeal was made to the people, the generalreader, he won a hearing for his cause, which Coleridge or Keats orTieck, with his closer workmanship, could never have won. He first andhe alone _popularised_ romance. No literature dealing with the feudalpast has ever had the currency and the universal success of Scott's. Atno time has mediaevalism held so large a place in comparison with otherliterary interests as during the years of his greatest vogue, say from1805 to 1830. 

The first point to be noticed about Scott is the thoroughness of hisequipment. While never a scholar in the academic sense, he was, alongcertain chosen lines, a really learned man. He was thirty-four when hepublished "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805), the first of his seriesof metrical romances and the first of his poems to gain popular favour. But for twenty years he had been storing his mind with the history, legends, and ballad poetry of the Scottish border, and was already afinished antiquarian. The bent and limitations of his genius were earlydetermined, and it remained to the end wonderfully constant to itsobject. At the age of twelve he had begun a collection of manuscriptballads. His education in romance dated from the cradle. His lullabieswere Jacobite songs; his grandmother told him tales of moss-troopers, andhis Aunt Janet read him ballads from Ramsay's "Tea-table Miscellany, "upon which his quick and tenacious memory fastened eagerly. The balladof "Hardiknute, " in this collection, he knew by heart before he couldread. "It was the first poem I ever learnt--the last I shall everforget. " Dr. Blacklock introduced the young schoolboy to the poems ofOssian and of Spenser, and he committed to memory "whole duans of the oneand cantos of the other. " "Spenser, " he says, "I could have readforever. Too young to trouble myself about the allegory, I consideredall the knights and ladies and dragons and giants in their outward andexoteric sense, and God only knows how delighted I was to find myself insuch society. " A little later Percy's "Reliques" fell into his hands, with results that have already been described. [3]

As soon as he got access to the circulating library in Edinburgh, hebegan to devour its works of fiction, characteristically rejecting lovestories and domestic tales, but laying hold upon "all that wasadventurous and romantic, " and in particular upon "everything whichtouched on knight-errantry. " For two or three years he used to spend hisholidays with his schoolmate, John Irving, on Arthur's Seat or SalisburyCrags, where they read together books like "The Castle of Otranto" andthe poems of Spenser and Ariosto; or composed and narrated to each other"interminable tales of battles and enchantments" and "legends in whichthe martial and the miraculous always predominated. " The education ofEdward Waverley, as described in the third chapter of Scott's firstnovel, was confessedly the novelist's own education. In the "largeGothic room" which was the library of Waverley Honour, the youngbook-worm pored over "old historical chronicles" and the writings ofPulci, Froissart, Brantome, and De la Noue; and became "well acquaintedwith Spenser, Drayton, and other poets who have exercised themselves onromantic fiction--of all themes the most fascinating to a youthfulimagination. "

Yet even thus early, a certain solidity was apparent in Scott's studies. "To the romances and poetry which I chiefly delighted in, " he writes, "Ihad always added the study of history, especially as connected withmilitary events. " He interested himself, for example, in the art offortification; and when confined to his bed by a childish illness, foundamusement in modelling fortresses and "arranging shells and seeds andpebbles so as to represent encountering armies. . . . I fought my waythus through Vertot's 'Knights of Malta'--a book which, as it hoveredbetween history and romance, was exceedingly dear to me. "

Every genius is self-educated, and we find Scott from the first makinginstinctive selections and rejections among the various kinds ofknowledge offered him. At school he would learn no Greek, and wrote atheme in which he maintained, to the wrath of his teacher, that Ariostowas a better poet than Homer. In later life he declared that he hadforgotten even the letters of the Greek alphabet. Latin would have faredas badly, had not his interest in Matthew Paris and other monkishchroniclers "kept up a kind of familiarity with the language even in itsrudest state. " "To my Gothic ear, the 'Stabat Mater, ' the 'DiesIrae, '[4] and some of the other hymns of the Catholic Church are moresolemn and affecting than the fine classical poetry of Buchanan. " In ourexamination of Scott's early translations from the German, [5] it has beennoticed how exclusively he was attracted by the romantic department ofthat literature, passing over, for instance, Goethe's maturer work, tofix upon his juvenile drama "Götz von Berlichingen. " Similarly helearned Italian just to read in the original the romantic poets Tasso, Ariosto, Boiardo, and Pulci. When he first went to London in 1799, "hisgreat anxiety, " reports Lockhart, "was to examine the antiquities of theTower and Westminster Abbey, and to make some researches among the MSS. Of the British Museum. " From Oxford, which he visited in 1803, hebrought away only "a grand but indistinct picture of towers and chapelsand oriels and vaulted halls", having met there a reception which, as hemodestly acknowledges, "was more than such a truant to the classic pageas myself was entitled to expect at the source of classic learning. "Finally, in his last illness, when sent to Rome to recover from theeffects of a paralytic stroke, his ruling passion was strong in death. He examined with eagerness the remains of the mediaeval city, butappeared quite indifferent to that older Rome which speaks to theclassical student. It will be remembered that just the contrary of thiswas true of Addison, when he was in Italy a century before. [6] Scott wasat no pains to deny or to justify the one-sidedness of his culture. Butwhen Erskine remonstrated with him for rambling on

 "through brake and maze With harpers rude, of barbarous days, "

and urged him to compose a regular epic on classical lines, hegood-naturedly but resolutely put aside the advice. 

 "Nay, Erskine, nay--On the wild hill Let the wild heath-bell[7] flourish still . . . . Though wild as cloud, as stream, as gale, Flow forth, flow unrestrained, my tale!" [8]

Scott's letters to Erskine, Ellis, Leyden, Ritson, Miss Seward, and otherliterary correspondents are filled with discussions of antiquarianquestions and the results of his favourite reading in old books andmanuscripts. He communicates his conclusions on the subject of "Arthurand Merlin" or on the authorship of the old metrical romance of "SirTristram. " [9] He has been copying manuscripts in the Advocates' Libraryat Edinburgh. In 1791 he read papers before the Speculative Society on"The Origin of the Feudal System, " "The Authenticity of Ossian's Poems, ""The Origin of the Scandinavian Mythology. " Lockhart describes twonote-books in Scott's hand-writing, with the date 1792, containingmemoranda of ancient court records about Walter Scott and his wife, DameJanet Beaton, the "Ladye" of Branksome in the "Lay"; extracts from"Guerin de Montglave"; copies of "Vegtam's Kvitha" and the "Death-Song ofRegner Lodbrog, " with Gray's English versions; Cnut's verses on passingEly Cathedral; the ancient English "Cuckoo Song, " and other rubbish ofthe kind. [10] When in 1803 he began to contribute articles to the_Edinburgh Review_, his chosen topics were such as "Amadis of Gaul, "Ellis' "Specimens of Ancient English Poetry, " Godwin's "Chaucer, "Sibbald's "Chronicle of Scottish Poetry, " Evans' "Old Ballads, " Todd's"Spenser, " "The Life and Works of Chatterton, " Southey's translation of"The Cid, " etc. 

Scott's preparation for the work which he had to do was more thanadequate. His reading along chosen lines was probably more extensive andminute than any man's of his generation. The introductions and notes tohis poems and novels are even overburdened with learning. But this, though important, was but the lesser part of his advantage. "Theold-maidenly genius of antiquarianism" could produce a Strutt[11] or evenperhaps a Warton; but it needed the touch of the creative imagination toturn the dead material of knowledge into works of art that have delightedmillions of readers for a hundred years in all civilised lands andtongues. 

The key to Scott's romanticism is his intense local feeling. [12] Thatattachment to place which, in most men, is a sort of animal instinct, waswith him a passion. To set the imagination at work some emotionalstimulus is required. The angry pride of Byron, Shelley's revolt againstauthority, Keats' almost painfully acute sensitiveness to beauty, supplied the nervous irritation which was wanting in Scott's slower, stronger, and heavier temperament. The needed impetus came to him fromhis love of country. Byron and Shelley were torn up by the roots andflung abroad, but Scott had struck his roots deep into native soil. Hisabsorption in the past and reverence for everything that was old, hisconservative prejudices and aristocratic ambitions, all had their sourcein this feeling. Scott's Toryism was of a different spring fromWordsworth's and Coleridge's. It was not a reaction from disappointedradicalism; nor was it the result of reasoned conviction. It was inbornand was nursed into a sentimental Jacobitism by ancestral traditions andby an early prepossession in favour of the Stuarts--a Scottishdynasty--reinforced by encounters with men in the Highlands who had beenout in the '45. It did not interfere with a practical loyalty to thereigning house and with what seems like a somewhat exaggerated deferenceto George IV. Personally the most modest of men, he was proud to tracehis descent from "auld Wat of Harden" [13] and to claim kinship with thebold Buccleuch. He used to make annual pilgrimages to Harden Tower, "the_incunabula_ of his race"; and "in the earlier part of his life, " saysLockhart, "he had nearly availed himself of his kinsman's permission tofit up the dilapidated _peel_ for his summer residence. "

Byron wrote: "I twine my hope of being remembered in my line with myland's language. " But Scott wished to associate his name with the landitself. Abbotsford was more to him than Newstead could ever have been toByron; although Byron was a peer and inherited his domain, while Scottwas a commoner and created his. Too much has been said in condemnationof Scott's weakness in this respect; that his highest ambition was tobecome a _laird_ and found a family; that he was more gratified when theKing made him a baronet than when the public bought his books, that theexpenses of Abbotsford and the hospitalities which he extended to allcomers wasted his time and finally brought about his bankruptcy. LeslieStephen and others have even made merry over Scott's Gothic, [14]comparing his plaster-of-Paris 'scutcheons and ceilings in imitation ofcarved oak with the pinchbeck architecture of Strawberry Hill, andintimating that the feudalism in his romances was only a shade moregenuine than the feudalism of "The Castle of Otranto. " Scott wasimprudent; Abbotsford was his weakness, but it was no ignoble weakness. If the ideal of the life which he proposed to himself there was scarcelya heroic one, neither was it vulgar or selfish. The artist or thephilosopher should perhaps be superior to the ambition of owning land andhaving "a stake in the country, " but the ambition is a very human one andhas its good side. In Scott the desire was more social than personal. It was not that title and territory were feathers in his cap, but thatthey bound him more closely to the dear soil of Scotland and to thenational, historic past. 

The only deep passion in Scott's poetry is patriotism, the passion ofplace. In his metrical romances the rush of the narrative and the vivid, picturesque beauty of the descriptions are indeed exciting to theimagination; but it is only when the chord of national feeling is touchedthat the verse grows lyrical, that the heart is reached, and that tearscome into the reader's eyes, as they must have done into the poet's. Adozen such passages occur at once to the memory; the last stand of theScottish nobles around their king at Flodden; the view ofEdinburgh--"mine own romantic town "--from Blackford Hill;

 "Fitz-Eustace' heart felt closely pent: As if to give his rapture vent, The spur he to his charger lent, And raised his bridle-hand, And, making demi-volte in air, Cried, 'Where's the coward that would not dare To fight for such a land?'"

and the still more familiar opening of the sixth canto in the"Lay"--"Breathes there the man, " etc. :

 "O Caledonia! stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child! Land of brown heath and shaggy wood, Land of the mountain and the flood, Land of my sires! what mortal hand Can e'er untie the filial band That knits me to thy rugged strand?"

In such a mood geography becomes poetry and names are music. [15] Scottsaid to Washington Irving that if he did not see the heather at leastonce a year, he thought he would die. 

Lockhart tells how the sound that he loved best of all sounds was in hisdying ears--the flow of the Tweed over its pebbles. 

Significant, therefore, is Scott's treatment of landscape, and thedifference in this regard between himself and his great contemporaries. His friend, Mr. Morritt of Rokeby, testifies; "He was but half satisfiedwith the most beautiful scenery when he could not connect it with somelocal legend. " Scott had to the full the romantic love of mountain andlake, yet "to me, " he confesses, "the wandering over the field ofBannockburn was the source of more exquisite pleasure than gazing uponthe celebrated landscape from the battlements of Stirling Castle. I donot by any means infer that I was dead to the feeling of picturesquescenery. . . . But show me an old castle or a field of battle and I wasat home at once. " And again: "The love of natural beauty, moreespecially when combined with ancient ruins or remains of our fathers'piety[16] or splendour, became with me an insatiable passion. " It wasnot in this sense that high mountains were a "passion" to Byron, nor yetto Wordsworth. In a letter to Miss Seward, Scott wrote of popularpoetry: "Much of its peculiar charm is indeed, I believe, to beattributed solely to its _locality_. . . . In some verses of thateccentric but admirable poet Coleridge[17] he talks of

 "'An old rude tale that suited well The ruins wild and hoary. '

"I think there are few who have not been in some degree touched with thislocal sympathy. Tell a peasant an ordinary tale of robbery and murder, and perhaps you may fail to interest him; but, to excite his terrors, youassure him it happened on the very heath he usually crosses, or to a manwhose family he has known, and you rarely meet such a mere image ofhumanity as remains entirely unmoved. I suspect it is pretty much thesame with myself. "

Scott liked to feel solid ground of history, or at least of legend, underhis feet. He connected his wildest tales, like "Glenfinlas" and "The Eveof St. John, " with definite names and places. This Antaeus of romancelost strength, as soon as he was lifted above the earth. With Coleridgeit was just the contrary. The moment his moonlit, vapory enchantmentstouched ground, the contact "precipitated the whole solution. " In 1813Scott had printed "The Bridal of Triermain" anonymously, with a prefacedesigned to mislead the public; having contrived, by way of a joke, tofasten the authorship of the piece upon Erskine. This poem is as purefantasy as Tennyson's "Day Dream, " and tells the story of a knight who, in obedience to a vision and the instructions of an ancient sage "sprungfrom Druid sires, " enters an enchanted castle and frees the PrincessGyneth, a natural daughter of King Arthur, from the spell that has boundher for five hundred years. But true to his instinct, the poet lays hisscene not _in vacuo_, but near his own beloved borderland. He found, inBurns' "Antiquities of Westmoreland and Cumberland" mention of a line ofRolands de Vaux, lords of Triermain, a fief of the barony of Gilsland;and this furnished him a name for his hero. He found in Hutchinson's"Excursion to the Lakes" the description of a cluster of rocks in theVale of St. John's, which looked, at a distance, like a Gothic castle, this supplied him with a hint for the whole adventure. MeanwhileColeridge had been living in the Lake Country. The wheels of his"Christabel" had got hopelessly mired, and he now borrowed a horse fromSir Walter and hitched it to his own wagon. He took over Sir Roland deVaux of Triermain and made him the putative father of his mysteriousGeraldine, although, in compliance with Scott's romance, the embassy thatgoes over the mountains to Sir Roland's castle can find no trace of it. In Part I. Sir Leoline's own castle stood nowhere in particular. In PartII. It is transferred to Cumberland, a mistake in art almost as grave asif the Ancient Mariner had brought his ship to port at Liverpool. 

Wordsworth visited the "great Minstrel of the Border" at Abbotsford in1831, shortly before Scott set out for Naples, and the two poets went incompany to the ruins of Newark Castle. It is characteristic that in"Yarrow Revisited, " which commemorates the incident, the Bard of Rydalshould think it necessary to offer an apology for his distinguishedhost's habit of romanticising nature--that nature which Wordsworth, romantic neither in temper nor choice of subject, treated after sodifferent a fashion. 

 "Nor deem that localised Romance Plays false with our affections; Unsanctifies our tears--made sport For fanciful dejections: Ah no! the visions of the past Sustain the heart in feeling Life as she is--our changeful Life, With friends and kindred dealing. "

The apology, after all, is only half-hearted. For while Wordsworthesteemed Scott highly and was careful to speak publicly of his work witha qualified respect, it is well known that, in private, he set littlevalue upon it, and once somewhat petulantly declared that all Scott'spoetry was not worth sixpence. He wrote to Scott, of "Marmion": "I thinkyour end has been attained. That it is not the end which I should wishyou to propose to yourself, you will be aware. " He had visited Scott atLasswade as early as 1803, and in recording his impressions notes that"his conversation was full of anecdote and averse from disquisition. "The minstrel was a _raconteur_ and lived in the past, the bard was amoralist and lived in the present. 

There are several poems of Wordsworth's and Scott's touching upon commonground which serve to contrast their methods sharply and to illustrate ina striking way the precise character of Scott's romanticism. "Helvellyn"and "Fidelity" were written independently and celebrate the sameincident. In 1805 a young man lost his way on the Cumberland mountainsand perished of exposure. Three months afterwards his body was found, his faithful dog still watching beside it. Scott was a lover ofdogs--loved them warmly, individually; so to speak, personally; and alldogs instinctively loved Scott. [18]

Wordsworth had a sort of tepid, theoretical benevolence towards theanimal creation in general. Yet as between the two poets, the advantagein depth of feeling is, as usual, with Wordsworth. Both render, withperhaps equal power, though in characteristically different ways, theimpression of the austere and desolate grandeur of the mountain scenery. But the thought to which Wordsworth leads up is the mysterious divinenessof instinct

 ". . . That strength of feeling, great Above all human estimate:"--

while Scott conducts his story to the reflection that Nature has giventhe dead man a more stately funeral than the Church could have given, acomparison seemingly dragged in for the sake of a stanzaful of hisfavourite Gothic imagery. 

 "When a Prince to the fate of the Peasant has yielded, The tapestry waves dark round the dim-lighted hall; With 'scutcheons of silver the coffin is shielded, And pages stand mute by the canopied pall: Through the courts at deep midnight the torches are gleaming, In the proudly arched chapel the banners are beaming, Far adown the long aisle sacred music is streaming, Lamenting a chief of the people should fall. "

Wordsworth and Landor, who seldom agreed, agreed that Scott's mostimaginative line was the verse in "Helvellyn":

 "When the wind waved his garment how oft didst thou start!"

In several of his poems Wordsworth handled legendary subjects, and it ismost instructive here to notice his avoidance of the romantic note, andto imagine how Scott would have managed the same material. In theprefatory note to "The White Doe of Rylstone, " Wordsworth himself pointedout the difference. "The subject being taken from feudal times has ledto its being compared to some of Sir Walter Scott's poems that belong tothe same age and state of society. The comparison is inconsiderate. SirWalter pursued the customary and very natural course of conducting anaction, presenting various turns of fortune, to some outstanding point onwhich the mind might rest as a termination or catastrophe. The course Iattempted to pursue is entirely different. Everything that is attemptedby the principal personages in 'The White Doe' fails, so far as itsobject is external and substantial. So far as it is moral and spiritualit succeeds. "

This poem is founded upon "The Rising in the North, " a ballad given inthe "Reliques, " which recounts the insurrection of the Earls ofNorthumberland and Westmoreland against Elizabeth in 1569. RichardNorton of Rylstone, with seven stalwart sons, joined in the rising, carrying a banner embroidered with a red cross and the five wounds ofChrist. The story bristled with opportunities for the display of feudalpomp, and it is obvious upon what points in the action Scott would havelaid the emphasis; the muster of the tenantry of the great northernCatholic houses of Percy and Neville; the high mass celebrated by theinsurgents in Durham Cathedral; the march of the Nortons to Brancepeth;the eleven days' siege of Barden Tower; the capture and execution ofMarmaduke and Ambrose; and--by way of episode--the Battle of Neville'sCross in 1346. [19] But in conformity to the principle announced in thepreface to the "Lyrical Ballads"--that the feeling should give importanceto the incidents and situation, not the incidents and situation to thefeeling--Wordsworth treats all this outward action as merely preparatoryto the true purpose of his poem, a study of the discipline of sorrow, ofruin and bereavement patiently endured by the Lady Emily, the onlydaughter and survivor of the Norton house. 

 "Action is transitory--a step, a blow. . . . Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, And has the nature of infinity. Yet through that darkness (infinite though it seem And irremoveable) gracious openings lie. . . . Even to the fountain-head of peace divine. "

With the story of the Nortons the poet connects a local tradition whichhe found in Whitaker's "History of the Deanery of Craven"; of a white doewhich haunted the churchyard of Bolton Priory. Between this gentlecreature and the forlorn Lady of Rylstone he establishes the mysteriousand soothing sympathy which he was always fond of imagining between thesoul of man and the things of nature. [20]

Or take again the "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, " an incident inthe Wars of the Roses. Lord Clifford, who had been hidden away ininfancy from the vengeance of the Yorkists and reared as a shepherd, isrestored to the estates and honours of his ancestors. High in the festalhall the impassioned minstrel strikes his harp and sings the triumph ofLancaster, urging the shepherd lord to emulate the warlike prowess of hisforefathers. 

 "Armour rusting in his halls On the blood of Clifford calls; 'Quell the Scot, ' exclaims the Lance-- Bear me to the heart of France Is the longing of the Shield. "

Thus far the minstrel, and he has Sir Walter with him; for this isevidently the part of the poem that he liked and remembered, when henoted in his journal that "Wordsworth could be popular[21] if hewould--witness the 'Feast at Brougham Castle'--'Song of the Cliffords, ' Ithink, is the name. " But the exultant strain ceases and the poet himselfspeaks, and with the transition in feeling comes a change in the verse;the minstrel's song was in the octosyllabic couplet associated withmetrical romance. But this Clifford was no fighter--none of Scott'sheroes. Nature had educated him. 

 "In him the savage virtue of the Race" was dead. 

 "Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills. "

Once more, consider the pronounced difference in sentiment between thedescription of the chase in "Hartleap Well" and the opening passage of"The Lady of the Lake":

 "The stag at eve had drunk his fill. Where danced the moon on Monan's rill, " etc. [22]

Scott was a keen sportsman, and his sympathy was with the hunter. [23]Wordsworth's, of course, was with the quarry. The knight in hispoem--who bears not unsuggestively the name of "Sir Walter"--hasoutstripped all his companions, like Fitz James, and is the only one inat the death. To commemorate his triumph he frames a basin for thespring whose waters were stirred by his victim's dying breath; he plantsthree stone pillars to mark the creature's hoof-prints in its marvellousleap from the mountain to the springside; and he builds a pleasure houseand an arbour where he comes with his paramour to make merry in thesummer days. But Nature sets her seal of condemnation upon the crueltyand vainglory of man. "The spot is curst"; no flowers or grass will growthere; no beast will drink of the fountain. Part I. Tells the storywithout enthusiasm but without comment. Part II. Draws the lesson

 "Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels. "

The song of Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" derives a pensive sorrow from"old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago. " But to Scott thebattle is not far off, but a vivid and present reality. When he visitedthe Trosachs glen, his thought plainly was, "What a place for a fight!"And when James looks down on Loch Katrine his first reflection is, "Whata scene were here . . . 

 "For princely pomp or churchman's pride! On this bold brow a lordly tower; In that soft vale a lady's bower; On yonder meadow, far away, The turrets of a cloister grey, " etc. 

The most romantic scene was not romantic enough for Scott till hisimagination had peopled it with the life of a vanished age. 

The literary forms which Scott made peculiarly his own, and in which thegreater part of his creative work was done, are three: the popularballad, the metrical romance, and the historical novel in prose. Hispoint of departure was the ballad. [24] The material amassed in hisLiddesdale "raids"--begun in 1792 and continued for seven successiveyears--was given to the world in the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border"(Vols. I. And II. In 1802; Vol. III. In 1803), a collection of balladshistorical, legendary, and romantic, with an abundant apparatus in theway of notes and introductions, illustrating the history, antiquities, manners, traditions, and superstitions of the Borderers. Forty-three ofthe ballads in the "Minstrelsy" had never been printed before; and of theremainder the editor gave superior versions, choosing with sureness oftaste the best among variant readings, and with a more intimate knowledgeof local ways and language than any previous ballad-fancier hadcommanded. He handled his texts more faithfully than Percy, rarelysubstituting lines of his own. "From among a hundred corruptions, " saysLockhart, "he seized, with instinctive tact, the primitive diction andimagery, and produced strains in which the unbroken energy ofhalf-civilised ages, their stern and deep passions, their daringadventures and cruel tragedies, and even their rude wild humour arereflected with almost the brightness of a Homeric mirror. "

In the second volume of the "Minstrelsy" were included what Scott callshis "first serious attempts in verse, " viz. , "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve ofSt. John, " which had been already printed in Lewis' "Tales of Wonder. "Both pieces are purely romantic, with a strong tincture of thesupernatural; but the first--Scott himself draws the distinction--is a"legendary poem, " and the second alone a proper "ballad. ""Glenfinlas, " [25] founded on a Gaelic legend, tells how a Highlandchieftain while hunting in Perthshire, near the scene of "The Lady of theLake, " is lured from his bothie at night and torn to pieces by evilspirits. There is no attempt here to preserve the language of popularpoetry; stanzas abound in a diction of which the following is a fairexample:

 "Long have I sought sweet Mary's heart, And dropp'd the tear and heaved the sigh: But vain the lover's wily art Beneath a sister's watchful eye. "

"The Eve of St. John" employs common ballad stuff, the visit of amurdered lover's ghost to his lady's bedside--

 "At the lone midnight hour, when bad spirits have power"--

but the poet, as usual, anchors his weird nightmares firmly to real namesand times and places, Dryburgh Abbey, the black rood of Melrose, theEildon-tree, the bold Buccleuch, and the Battle of Ancram Moor (1545). The exact scene of the tragedy is Smailholme Tower, the ruined keep onthe crags above his grandfather's farm at Sandynowe, which left such anindelible impression on Scott's childish imagination. [26] "The Eve" isin ballad style and verse:

 "Thou liest, thou liest, thou little foot page, Loud dost thou lie to me! For that knight is cold, and low laid in the mould, All under the Eildon tree. "

In his "Essay on the Imitation of Popular Poetry, " Scott showed that heunderstood the theory of ballad composition. When he took pains, hecould catch the very manner as well as the spirit of ancient minstrelsy;but if his work is examined under the microscope it is easy to detectflaws. The technique of the Pre-Raphaelites and other modern balladists, like Rossetti and Morris, is frequently finer, they reproduce morescrupulously the formal characteristics of popular poetry: the burden, the sing-song repetitions, the quaint turns of phrase, the imperfectrimes, the innocent, childlike air of the mediaeval tale-tellers. Scott's vocabulary is not consistently archaic, and he was not alwayscareful to avoid locutions out of keeping with the style of_Volkspoesie_. [27] He was by no means a rebel against eighteenth-centuryusages. [28] In his prose he is capable of speaking of a lady as an"elegant female. " In his poetry he will begin a ballad thus:

 "The Pope he was saying the high, high mass All on St. Peter's day";

and then a little later fall into this kind of thing:

 "There the rapt poet's step may rove, And yield the muse the day: There Beauty, led by timid Love, May shun the tell-tale ray, " etc. [29]

It is possible to name single pieces like "The Ancient Mariner, " and "LaBelle Dame sans Merci, " and "Rose-Mary, " of a rarer imaginative qualityand a more perfect workmanship than Scott often attains; yet upon thewhole and in the mass, no modern balladry matches the success of his. The Pre-Raphaelites were deliberate artists, consciously reproducing anextinct literary form; but Scott had lived himself back into the socialconditions out of which ballad poetry was born. His best pieces of thisclass do not strike us as imitations but as original, spontaneous, andthoroughly alive. Such are, to particularise but a few, "Jock o'Hazeldean, " "Cadyow Castle, " on the assassination of the Regent Murray;"The Reiver's Wedding, " a fragment preserved in Lockhart's "Life";"Elspeth's Ballad" ("The Red Harlow") in "The Antiquary"; MadgeWildfire's songs in "The Heart of Mid-Lothian, " and David Gellatley's in"Waverley"; besides the other scraps and snatches of minstrelsy toonumerous for mention, sown through the novels and longer poems. For inspite of detraction, Walter Scott remains one of the foremost Britishlyrists. In Mr. Palgrave's "Treasury" he is represented by a largernumber of selections than either Milton, Byron, Burns, Campbell, Keats, or Herrick; making an easy fourth to Wordsworth, Shakspere, and Shelley. And in marked contrast with Shelley especially, it is observable ofScott's contributions to this anthology that they are not the utteranceof the poet's personal emotion; they are coronachs, pibrochs, gatheringsongs, narrative ballads, and the like--objective, dramatic lyricstouched always with the light of history or legend. 

The step from ballad to ballad-epic is an easy one, and it was by anatural evolution that the one passed into the other in Scott's hands. "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805) was begun as a ballad on the localtradition of Gilpin Horner and at the request of the Countess ofDalkeith, who told Scott the story. But his imagination was so full thatthe poem soon overflowed its limits and expanded into a romanceillustrative of the ancient manners of the Border. The pranks of thegoblin page run in and out through the web of the tale, a slender andsomewhat inconsequential thread of _diablerie_. Byron had his laugh atit in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers";[30] and in a footnote on thepassage, he adds: "Never was any plan so incongruous and absurd as thegroundwork of this production. " The criticism was not altogetherundeserved; for the "Lay" is a typical example of romantic, asdistinguished from classic, art both in its strength and in its weakness;brilliant in passages, faulty in architechtonic, and uneven in execution. Its supernatural machinery--Byron said that it had more "gramarye" thangrammar--is not impressive, if due exception be made of the opening ofMichael Scott's tomb in Canto Second. 

When the "Minstrelsy" was published, it was remarked that it "containedthe elements of a hundred historical romances. " It was from suchelements that Scott built up the structure of his poem about the nucleuswhich the Countess of Dalkeith had given him. He was less concerned, ashe acknowledged, to tell a coherent story than to paint a picture of thescenery and the old warlike life of the Border; that _tableau large de lavie_ which the French romanticists afterwards professed to be the aim oftheir novels and dramas. The feud of the Scotts and Carrs furnished himwith a historic background; with this he enwove a love story of the Romeoand Juliet pattern. He rebuilt Melrose Abbey, and showed it bymoonlight; set Lords Dacre and Howard marching on a Warden-raid, androused the border clans to meet them; threw out dramatic charactersketches of "stark moss-riding Scots" like Wat Tinlinn and William ofDeloraine; and finally enclosed the whole in a _cadre_ most happilyinvented, the venerable, pathetic figure of the old minstrel who tellsthe tale to the Duchess of Monmouth at Newark Castle. 

The love story is perhaps the weakest part of the poem. Henry Cranstounand Margaret of Branksome are nothing but lay figures. Scott is always alittle nervous when the lover and the lady are left alone together. Thefair dames in the audience expect a tender scene, but the harper pleadshis age, by way of apology, gets the business over as decently as may be, and hastens on with comic precipitation to the fighting, which hethoroughly enjoys. [31]

The "light-horseman stanza" which Scott employed in his longer poems wascaught from the recitation by Sir John Stoddart of a portion ofColeridge's "Christabel, " then still in manuscript. The norm of theverse was the eight-syllabled riming couplet used in most of the Englishmetrical romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is aform of verse which moves more swiftly than blank verse or the heroiccouplet, and is perhaps better suited for romantic poetry. [32] But it isliable to grow monotonous in a long poem, and Coleridge's unsurpassedskill as a metrist was exerted to give it freedom, richness, and varietyby the introduction of anapaestic lines and alternate rimes and triplets, breaking up the couplets into a series of irregular stanzas. 

With "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" romanticism came of age and enteredon its career of triumph. One wishes that Collins and Tom Warton mighthave lived to hail it as the light, at last, towards which they hadstruggled through the cold obstruction of the eighteenth century. Onefancies Dr. Johnson's disgust over this new Scotch monstrosity, which hadevery quality that he disliked except blank verse; or Gray's delight init, tempered by a critical disapproval of its loose construction andirregularity. Scott's romances in prose and verse are still souniversally known as to make any review of them here individually animpertinence. Their impact on contemporary Europe was instantaneous andwide-spread. There is no record elsewhere in literary history of suchsuccess. Their immense sales, the innumerable editions and translationsand imitations of them, are matters of familiar knowledge. Poem followedpoem, and novel, novel in swift and seemingly exhaustless succession, andeach was awaited by the public with unabated expectancy. Here once morewas a poet who could tell the world a story that it wanted to hear; a poet

 "Such as it had In the ages glad, Long ago. "

The Homeric[33] quality which criticism has attributed or denied to thesepoems is really there. The difference, the inferiority is obvious ofcourse. They are not in the grand style; they are epic on a lower plane, ballad-epic, bastard-epic perhaps, but they are epic. No English versenarrative except Chaucer's ranks, as a whole, above Scott's. Chaucer'sdisciple, William Morris, has an equal flow and continuity, and keeps amore even level of style; but his story-telling is languid compared withScott's. The latter is greater in the dynamic than in the staticdepartment--in scenes of rapid action and keen excitement. His showpassages are such as the fight in the Trosachs, Flodden Field, William ofDeloraine's ride to Melrose, the trial of Constance, the muster on theBorough Moor, Marmion's defiance to Douglas, the combat of James andRoderick Dhu, the summons of the fiery cross, and the kindling of theneed-fires--those romantic equivalents of the lampadephoroi in the"Agamemnon. "

In the series of long poems which followed the "Lay, " Scott deserted theBorder and brought in new subjects of romantic interest, the traditionsof Flodden and Bannockburn, the manners of the Gaelic clansmen, and thewild scenery of the Perthshire Highlands, the life of the WesternIslands, and the rugged coasts of Argyle. Only two of these tales areconcerned with the Middle Ages, strictly speaking: "The Lord of theIsles" (1813), in which the action begins in 1307; and "Harold theDauntless" (1817), in which the period is the time of the Danishsettlements in Northumbria. "Rokeby" (1812) is concerned with the CivilWar. The scene is laid in Yorkshire, "Marmion" (1808), and "The Lady ofthe Lake" (1810), like "The Lay of the Last Minstrel, " had to do with thesixteenth century, but the poet imported mediaeval elements into all ofthese by the frankest anachronisms. He restored St. Hilda's Abbey andthe monastery at Lindisfarne, which had been in ruins for centuries, andpeopled them again with monks and nuns, He revived in De Wilton thefigure of the palmer and the ancient custom of pilgrimage to Palestine. And he transferred "the wondrous wizard, Michael Scott" from thethirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth. But, indeed, the stateof society in Scotland might be described as mediaeval as late as themiddle of the sixteenth century. It was still feudal, and in great partCatholic. Particularly in the turbulent Borderland, a rude spirit ofchivalry and a passion for wild adventure lingered among the Eliots, Armstrongs, Kerrs, Rutherfords, Homes, Johnstons, and other maraudingclans, who acknowledged no law but march law, and held slack allegianceto "the King of Lothian and Fife. " Every owner of a half-ruinous "peel"or border keep had a band of retainers within call, like thenine-and-twenty knights of fame who hung their shields in Branksome Hall;and he could summon them at short notice, for a raid upon the English ora foray against some neighbouring proprietor with whom he was at feud. 

But the literary form under which Scott made the deepest impression uponthe consciousness of his own generation and influenced most permanentlythe future literature of Europe, was prose fiction. As the creator ofthe historical novel and the ancestor of Kingsley, Ainsworth, Bulwer, andG. P. R. James; of Manzoni, Freytag, Hugo, Mérimée, Dumas, AlexisTolstoi, and a host of others, at home and abroad, his example is potentyet. English fiction is directly or indirectly in his debt for "Romola, ""Hypatia, " "Henry Esmond, " and "The Cloister and the Hearth. " In severalcountries the historical novel had been trying for centuries to getitself born, but all its attempts had been abortive. "Waverley" is notonly vastly superior to "Thaddeus of Warsaw" (1803) and "The ScottishChiefs" (1809); it is something quite different in kind. [34] TheWaverley Novels, twenty-nine in number, appeared in the years 1814-31. The earlier numbers of the series, "Waverley, " "Guy Mannering, " "TheAntiquary, " "Old Mortality, " "The Black Dwarf, " "Rob Roy, " "The Heart ofMid-Lothian, " "The Bride of Lammermoor, " and "A Legend of Montrose, " wereScotch romances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In"Ivanhoe" (1819) the author went to England for his scene, and back tothe twelfth century for his period. Thenceforth he ranged over a wideregion in time and space; Elizabethan England ("Kenilworth"), the Franceand Switzerland of Louis XI. And Charles the Bold ("Quentin Durward" and"Anne of Geierstein"), Constantinople and Syria ("Count Robert of Paris, ""The Betrothed, " and "The Talisman") in the age of the Crusades. Thefortunes of the Stuarts, interested him specially and engaged him in"Woodstock, " "The Fortunes of Nigel, " "The Monastery, " and its sequel, "The Abbot. " He seems to have had, in the words of Mr. R. H. Hutton, "something very like personal experience of a few centuries. "

Scott's formula for the construction of a historical romance was originalwith himself, and it has been followed by all his successors. His storyis fictitious, his hero imaginary. Richard I. Is not the hero of"Ivanhoe, " nor Louis XI. Of "Quentin Durward. " Shakspere dramatisedhistory; Scott romanticised it. Still it is history, the private storyis swept into the stream of large public events, the fate of the lover orthe adventurer is involved with battles and diplomacies, with the riseand fall of kings, dynasties, political parties, nations. Stevensonsays, comparing Fielding with Scott, that "in the work of thelatter . . . We become suddenly conscious of the background. . . . Itis curious enough to think that 'Tom Jones' is laid in the year '45, andthat the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop ofsoldiers in his hero's way. " [35] And it is this background which is, after all, the important thing in Scott--the leading impression; thebroad canvas, the swarm of life, the spirit of the age, thereconstitution of an extinct society. This he was able to give withseeming ease and without any appearance of "cram. " Chronicle matter doesnot lie about in lumps on the surface of his romance, but is decentlyburied away in the notes. In his comments on "Queenhoo Hall" he advertsto the danger of a pedantic method, and in his "Journal" (October 18th, 1826) he writes as follows of his own numerous imitators: "They have toread old books and consult antiquarian collections, to get theirknowledge. I write because I have long since read such works andpossess, thanks to a strong memory, the information which they have toseek for. This leads to a dragging in historical details by head andshoulders, so that the interest of the main piece is lost in minutedescription of events which do not affect its progress. "

Of late the recrudescence of the historical novel has revived thediscussion as to the value of the _genre_. It may be readily admittedthat Scott's best work is realistic, and is to be looked for in suchnovels as "The Antiquary, " "Old Mortality, " "The Heart of Mid-Lothian, "and in characters like Andrew Fairservice, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, DandieDinmont, Dugald Dalgetty, Jeanie Deans, Edie Ochiltrie, which broughtinto play his knowledge of men, his humour, observation of life, andinsight into Scotch human nature. Scott knew these people; he had todivine James I. , Louis XI. , and Mary Stuart. The historical novel is a_tour de force_. Exactly how knights-templars, burgomasters, friars, Saracens, and Robin Hood archers talked and acted in the twelfth century, we cannot know. But it is just because they are strange to ourexperience that they are dear to our imagination. The justification ofromance is its unfamiliarity--"strangeness added to beauty"--"thepleasure of surprise" as distinguished from "the pleasure ofrecognition. " Again and again realism returns to the charge and demandsof art that it give us the present and the actual; and again and againthe imagination eludes the demand and makes an ideal world for itself inthe blue distance. 

Two favourite arts, or artifices, of all romantic schools, are "localcolour" and "the picturesque. " "Vers l'an de grâce 1827, " writes ProsperMérimée, "j'étais _romantique_. Nous disions aux _classiques_; vos Grecsne sont pas des Grecs, vos Romains ne sont pas des Romains; vous ne savezpas donner à vos compositions la _couleur locale_. Point de salut sansla _couleur locale_. " [36]

As to the picturesque--a word that connotes, in its critical uses, somequality in the objects of sense which strikes us as at once novel, andcharacteristic in its novelty--while by no means the highest of literaryarts, it is a perfectly legitimate one. [37] Creçy is not, at bottom, amore interesting battle than Gettysburg because it was fought with bowsand arrows, but it is more picturesque to the modern imagination just forthat reason. Why else do the idiots in "MacArthur's Hymn" complain that"steam spoils romance at sea"? Why did Ruskin lament when the littlesquare at the foot of Giotto's Tower in Florence was made a stand forhackney coaches? Why did our countryman Halleck at Alnwick Towers resentthe fact that "the Percy deals in salt and hides, the Douglas sells redherring"? And why does the picturesque tourist, in general, object tothe substitution of naphtha launches for gondolas on the Venetian canals?Perhaps because the more machinery is interposed between man and thething he works on, the more impersonal becomes his relation to nature. 

Carlyle, in his somewhat grudging estimate of Scott, declares that "muchof the interest of these novels results from contrasts of costume. Thephraseology, fashion of arms, of dress, of life belonging to one age isbrought suddenly with singular vividness before the eyes of another. Agreat effect this; yet by the very nature of it an altogether temporaryone. Consider, brethren, shall not we too one day be antiques and growto have as quaint a costume as the rest? . . . Not by slashed breeches, steeple hats, buff belts, or antiquated speech can romance-heroescontinue to interest us; but simply and solely, in the long run, by being_men_. Buff belts and all manner of jerkins and costumes are transitory;man alone is perennial. " [38] Carlyle's dissatisfaction with Scottarises from the fact that he was not a missionary nor a transcendentalphilosopher, but simply a teller of stories. Heine was not troubled inthe same way, but he made the identical criticism, "Like the works ofWalter Scott, so also do Fouqué's romances of chivalry[40] remind us ofthe fantastic tapestries known as Gobelins, whose rich texture andbrilliant colors are more pleasing to our eyes than edifying to oursouls. We behold knightly pageantry, shepherds engaged in festivesports, hand-to-hand combats, and ancient customs, charminglyintermingled. It is all very pretty and picturesque, but shallow;brilliant superficiality. Among the imitators of Fouqué, as among theimitators of Walter Scott, this mannerism of portraying--not the innernature of men and things, but merely the outward garb and appearance--wascarried to still greater extremes. This shallow art and frivolous styleis still [1833] in vogue in Germany as well as in England andFrance. . . . In lieu of a knowledge of mankind, our recent novelistsevince a profound acquaintance with clothes. " [39]

Elsewhere Heine acknowledges a deeper reason for the popularity of theScotch novels. "Their theme . . . Is the mighty sorrow for the loss ofnational peculiarities swallowed up in the universality of the newerculture--a sorrow which is now throbbing in the hearts of all peoples. For national memories lie deeper in the human breast than is generallythought. " But whatever rank may be ultimately assigned to the historicalnovel as an art form, Continental critics are at one with the British increditing its invention to Scott. "It is an error, " says Heine, "not torecognise Walter Scott as the founder of the so-called historicalromance, and to endeavour to trace it to German imitation. " He adds thatScott was a Protestant, a lawyer and a Scotchman, accustomed to actionand debate, in whose works the aristocratic and democratic elements arein wholesome balance; "whereas our German romanticists eliminated thedemocratic element entirely from their novels, and returned to the rutsof those crazy romances of knight-errantry that flourished beforeCervantes. " [41] "Quel est Fouvrage littéraire, " asks Stendhal in1823, [42] "qui a le plus réussi en France depuis dix ans? Les romans deWalter Scott. . . . On s'est moqué à Paris pendant vingt ans du romanhistorique; l'Académie a prouvé doctement le ridicule de ce genre; nous ycroyions tous, lorsque Walter Scott a paru, son Waverley à la main; etBalantyne, son libraire vient de mourir millionaire. " [43]

Lastly the service of the Waverley Novels to history was an importantone. Palgrave says that historical fiction is the mortal enemy ofhistory, and Leslie Stephen adds that it is also the enemy of fiction. In a sense both sayings are true. Scott was not always accurate as tofacts and sinned freely against chronology. But he rescued a wide realmfrom cold oblivion and gave it back to human consciousness and sympathy. It is treating the past more kindly to misrepresent it in someparticulars, than to leave it a blank to the imagination. Theeighteenth-century historians were incurious of life. Their spirit wasgeneral and abstract; they were in search of philosophical formulas. Gibbon covers his subject with a lava-flood of stately rhetoric whichstiffens into a uniform stony coating over the soft surface of life. Scott is primarily responsible for that dramatic, picturesque treatmentof history which we find in Michelet and Carlyle. "These historicalnovels, " testifies Carlyle, "have taught all men this truth, which lookslike a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history andothers, till so taught; that the bygone ages of the world were actuallyfilled by living men, not by protocols, state papers, controversies, andabstractions of men. . . . It is a great service, fertile inconsequences, this that Scott has done; a great truth laid open byhim. " [44] In France, too, historians like Barante and Augustin Thierry, were Scott's professed disciples. The latter confesses, in a well-knownpassage, that "Ivanhoe" was the inspirer of his "Conquête d'Angleterre, "and styles the novelist "le plus grand maître qu'il y ait jamais eu enfait de divination historique. " [45]

Scott apprehended the Middle Ages on their spectacular, and moreparticularly, their military side. He exhibits their large, showyaspects: battles, processions, hunts, feasts in hall, tourneys, [46]sieges, and the like. The motley mediaeval world swarms in his pages, from the king on his throne down to the jester with his cap and bells. But it was the outside of it that he saw; the noise, bustle, colour, stirring action that delighted him. Into its spiritualities he did notpenetrate far; its scholasticisms, strange casuistries, shudderingfaiths, grotesque distortions of soul, its religious mysticisms, asceticisms, agonies; the ecstactic reveries of the cloister, terrors ofhell, and visions of paradise. It was the literature of the knight, notof the monk, that appealed to him. He felt the awfulness and the beautyof Gothic sacred architecture and of Catholic ritual. The externalitiesof the mediaeval church impressed him, whatever was picturesque in itsceremonies or august in its power. He pictured effectively such scenesas the pilgrimage to Melrose in the "Lay"; the immuring of the renegadenun in "Marmion"; the trial of Rebecca for sorcery by the Grand Master ofthe Temple in "Ivanhoe. " Ecclesiastical figures abound in his pages, jolly friars, holy hermits, lordly prelates, grim inquisitors, abbots, priors, and priests of all descriptions, but all somewhat conventionaland viewed _ab extra_. He could not draw a saint. [47] Significant, therefore, is his indifference to Dante, the poet _par excellence_ of theCatholic Middle Age, the epitomizer of mediaeval thought. "The plan" ofthe "Divine Comedy, " "appeared to him unhappy; the personal malignity andstrange mode of revenge presumptuous and uninteresting. " Scott's geniuswas antipathetic to Dante's; and he was as incapable of taking a lastingimprint from his intense, austere, and mystical spirit, as from thenebulous gloom of the Ossianic poetry. Though conservative, he was notreactionary after the fashion of the German "throne-and-altar"romanticists, but remained always a good Church of England man and anobstinate opponent of Catholic emancipation. [48] "Creeds are data in hisnovels, " says Bagehot; "people have different creeds but each keeps hisown. "

Scott's interest in popular superstitions was constant. As a youngman--in his German ballad period--they affected his imagination with a"pleasing horror. " But as he grew older, they engaged him less as a poetthan as a student of _Cultur geschichte_. 

A wistful sense of the beauty of these old beliefs--a rational smile attheir absurdity--such is the tone of his "Letters on Demonology andWitchcraft" (1830), a passage or two from which will give his attitudevery precisely; an attitude, it will be seen, which is after all not sovery different from Addison's, allowing for the distance in time andplace, and for Scott's livelier imagination. [49] Scott had his laugh atMrs. Radcliffe, and in his reviews of Hoffmann's "Tales" and Maturin's"Fatal Revenge" [50] he insists upon the delicacy with which thesupernatural must be treated in an age of disbelief. His own managementof such themes, however, though much superior to Walpole's or Mrs. Radcliffe's, has not the subtle art of Coleridge. The White Lady ofAvenel, _e. G. _, in "The Abbot, " is a notorious failure. There was toomuch daylight in his imagination for spectres to be quite at home. "Theshapes that haunt thought's wildernesses"; the "night side of things";the real shudder are not there, as in Hawthorne or in Poe. WalterPater[51] says that Meinhold's "Amber Witch" has more of the trueromantic spirit than Tieck, who was its professional representative. Onthe contrary, it has less of the romantic spirit, but more of themediaeval fact. It is a literal, realistic handling of the witchsuperstition, as Balzac's "Succube, " in the "Contes Drolatiques" is asatirical version of similar material. But Tieck's "Märchen" are theshadows thrown by mediaeval beliefs across a sensitive, modernimagination, and are in result, therefore, romantic. Scott's dealingwith subjects of the kind is midway between Meinhold and Tieck. He doesnot blink the ugly, childish, stupid, and cruel features of popularsuperstition, but throws the romantic glamour over them, precisely as hedoes over his "Charlie over the water" Jacobites. [52]

Again Scott's apprehension of the spirit of chivalry, though lessimperfect than his apprehension of the spirit of mediaeval Catholicism, was but partial. Of the themes which Ariosto sang--

 "Le donne, i cavalier, l'arme, gli amori, Le cortesie, l'audaci imprese io canto"--

the northern Ariosto sang bravely the _arme_ and the _audaci imprese_;less confidently the _amori_ and the _cortesie_. He could sympathisewith the knight-errant's high sense of honour and his love of boldemprise; not so well with his service of dames. Mediaeval courtship or"love-drurye, " the trembling self-abasement of the lover before his lady, the fantastic refinements and excesses of gallantry, were alien toScott's manly and eminently practical turn of mind. It is hardlypossible to fancy him reading the "Roman de la Rose" with patience--hethought "Troilus and Creseyde" tedious, which Rossetti pronounces thefinest of English love poems; or selecting for treatment the story ofHeloise or Tristram and Iseult, or of "Le Chevalier de la Charette"; orsuch a typical mediaeval life as that of Ulrich von Liechtenstein. [53]These were quite as truly beyond his sphere as a church legend like thelife of Saint Margaret or the quest of the Sangreal. In the "Talisman"he praises in terms only less eloquent than Burke's famous words, "thatwild spirit of chivalry which, amid its most extravagant and fantasticnights, was still pure from all selfish alloy--generous, devoted, andperhaps only thus far censurable, that it proposed objects and courses ofaction inconsistent with the frailties and imperfections of man. " In"Ivanhoe, " too, there is something like a dithyrambic lament over thedecay of knighthood--"The 'scutcheons have long mouldered from thewalls, " etc. ; but even here, enthusiasm is tempered by good sense, andRichard of the Lion Heart is described as an example of the "brilliantbut useless character of a knight of romance. " All this is but to saythat the picture of the Middle Age which Scott painted was not complete. Still it was more nearly complete than has yet been given by any otherhand; and the artist remains, in Stevenson's phrase, "the king of theRomantics. "

APPENDIX A. 

"Jamais homme de génie n'a eu l'honneur et le bonheur d'être imité parplus d'hommes de genié, si tous les grands écrivains de l'époqueromantique depuis Victor Hugo jusqu'à Balzac et depuis Alfred de Vignyjusqu'à Mérimée, lui doivent tous et se sont tous glorifiés de lui devoirquelque chose. . . . Il doit nous suffire pour l'instant d'affirmer quel'influence de Walter Scott est à la racine même des grandes oeuvres quiont donné au nouveau genre tant d'éclat dans notre littérature; que c'estelle qui les a inspirées, suscitées, fait éclore; que sans lui nousn'aurions ni 'Hans d'Islande, ' ni 'Cinq-Mars, ' ni 'Les Chouans, ' ni la'Chronique de Charles IX. , ' ni 'Notre Dame de Paris, ' . . . Ce n'estrien moins que le romantisme lui-même dont elle a hâté l'incubation, facilité l'eclosion, aidé le développement. "--MAIGRON, "Le RomanHistorique, " p. 143. 

"Il nous faut d'abord constater que c'est véritablement de Walter Scott, et de Walter Scott seul, que commence cette fureur des choses du moyenâge, cette manie de couleur locale qui sévit avec tant d'intensitéquelque temps avant et longtemps après 1830, et donc qu'il reste, aumoins pour ce qui est de la description, le principal initiateur de lagénération nouvelle. Sans doute et de toute part, cette résurrection dumoyen âge était des long-temps préparée. Le 'Génie du Christianisme, ' le'Cours de litterature dramatique' de Schlegel, l''Allemagne' de Mme. DeStaël avaient fait des moeurs chrétiennes et chevaleresques le fondementet la condition de renouvellement de l'art français. Et, en effet, dès1802, le moyen âge était découvert, la cathédrale gothique restaurée, l'art chretien remis à la place éminente d'où il aurait fallu ne jamaisle laisser choir. Mais où sont les oeuvres exécutées d'après ce modèleet ces principes? S'il est facile d'apercevoir et de déterminer lacathédrale religieuse de Chateaubriand, est il donc si aisé de distinguersa cathédrale poétique? . . . Un courant vigoureux, que le 'Genie duChristianisme' et les 'Martyrs' ont puissamment contribué à detérminer, fait dériver les imaginations vers les choses gothiques; volontiers, l'esprit français se retourne alors vers le passé comme vers la seulesource de poésie; et voici qu'un étranger vient se faire son guide etfait miroiter, devant tous les yeux éblouis, la fantasmagorie du moyenâge, donjons et créneaux, cuirasses et belles armures, haquenées etpalefrois, chevaliers resplendissants et mignonnes et délicateschatelaines. . . . Sur ses traces, on se précipita avec furie dans lavoie qu'il venait subitement d'élargir. Ce moyen age, jusqu'à lui siconvoité et si infécond, devinait enfin une source inépuisable d'émotionset de productions artistiques. La 'cathédrale' était bien restauréecette fois. Elle le fut même trop, et borda trop obstinement tous lessentiers littéraires. Mais de cet excès, si vite fatigant, c'est WalterScott et non Chateaubriand, quoi qu'il en ait pu dire, qui reste le grandcoupable. Il fit plus que découvrir le moyen âge; il le mit à la modeparmi les Français. "--_Ibid_. , pp. 195 _ff_. 

APPENDIX B. 

"The magical touch and the sense of mystery and all the things that areassociated with the name romance, when that name is applied to 'TheAncient Mariner, ' or 'La Belle Dame sans Merci, ' or 'The Lady ofShalott, ' are generally absent from the most successful romances of thegreat mediaeval romantic age. . . . The true romantic interest is veryunequally distributed over the works of the Middle Ages, and there isleast of it in the authors who are most representative of the 'age ofchivalry. ' There is a disappointment prepared for any one who looks inthe greater romantic authors of the twelfth century for the music of 'TheFaery Queene' or 'La Belle Dame sans Merci. ' . . . The greater authorsof the twelfth century have more affinity to the 'heroic romance' of theschool of the 'Grand Cyrus' than to the dreams of Spenser orColeridge. . . . The magic that is wanting to the clear and elegantnarrative of Benoit and Chrestien will be found elsewhere; it will befound in one form in the mystical prose of the 'Queste del St. Graal'--avery different thing from Chrestien's 'Perceval'--it will be found, againand again, in the prose of Sir Thomas Malory; it will be found in manyballads and ballad burdens, in 'William and Margaret, ' in 'Binnorie, ' inthe 'Wife of Usher's Well, ' in the 'Rime of the Count Arnaldos, ' in the'Königskinder'; it will be found in the most beautiful story of theMiddle Ages, 'Aucassin and Nicolette, ' one of the few perfectly beautifulstories in the world. "--"Epic and Romance, " W. P. Ker, London, 1897, p. 371 _ff_. 

[1] Scott's translations from the German are considered in the author'searlier volume, "A History of English Romanticism in the EighteenthCentury. " Incidental mention of Scott occurs throughout the same volume;and a few of the things there said are repeated, in substance though notin form, in the present chapter. It seemed better to risk somerepetition than to sacrifice fulness of treatment here. 

[2] "The Development of the English Novel, " by Wilbur L. Cross, p. 131. 

[3] Vol. I. , p. 300. 

[4] The sixth canto of the "Lay" closes with a few lines translated fromthe "Dies Irae" and chanted by the monks in Melrose Abbey. 

[5] Vol. I. , pp. 389-404. 

[6] Vol. I. , pp. 48-49. 

[7] "Scott was entirely incapable of entering into the spirit of anyclassical scene. He was strictly a Goth and a Scot, and his sphere ofsensation may be almost exactly limited by the growth ofheather. "--Ruskin, "Modern Painters, " vol. Iii. , p. 317. 

[8] "Marmion": Introduction to Canto third. In the preface to "TheBridal of Triermain, " the poet says: "According to the author's idea ofRomantic Poetry, as distinguished from Epic, the former comprehends afictitious narrative, framed and combined at the pleasure of the writer;beginning and ending as he may judge best; which neither exacts norrefuses the use of supernatural machinery; which is free from thetechnical rules of the _Epée_. . . . In a word, the author is absolutemaster of his country and its inhabitants. "

[9] Scott's ascription of "Sir Tristram" to Thomas the Rhymer, or Thomasof Erceldoune, was doubtless a mistake. His edition of the romance wasprinted in 1804. In 1800 he had begun a prose tale, "Thomas the Rhymer, "a fragment of which is given in the preface to the General Edition of theWaverley Novels (1829). This old legendary poet and prophet, whoflourished _circa_ 1280, and was believed to have been carried off by theQueen of Faerie into Eildon Hill, fascinated Scott's imaginationstrongly. See his version of the "True Thomas'" story in the"Minstrelsy, " as also the editions of this very beautiful romance inChild's "Ballads, " in the publications of the E. E. Text So. ; and byAlois Brandl, Berlin: 1880. 

[10] See vol. I. , p. 390. 

[11] See the General Preface to the Waverley Novels for some remarks on"Queenhoo Hall" which Strutt began and Scott completed. 

[12] _Cf. _ vol. I. , p. 344. 

[13] "I am therefore descended from that ancient chieftain whose name Ihave made to ring in many a ditty, and from his fair dame, the Flower ofYarrow--no bad genealogy for a Border minstrel. "

[14] "He neither cared for painting nor sculpture, and was totallyincapable of forming a judgment about them. He had some confused love ofGothic architecture because it was dark, picturesque, old and likenature; but could not tell the worst from the best, and built for himselfprobably the most incongruous and ugly pile that gentlemanly modernismever devised. "--Ruskin. "Modern Painters, " vol. Iii. , p. 271. 

[15] See vol. I. , p. 200. 

[16] The _Abbey_ of Tintern was irrelevant to Wordsworth. --Herford. "TheAge of Wordsworth, " Int. , p. Xx. 

[17] "Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious, opposites in this:--that every old ruin, hill, river or tree called up inhis mind a host of historical or biographical associations; . . . Whereas, for myself . . . I believe I should walk over the plain ofMarathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain ofsimilar features. "--Coleridge, "Table Talk, " August 4, 1833. 

[18] See the delightful anecdote preserved by Carlyle about the littleBlenheim cocker who hated the "genus acrid-quack" and formed an immediateattachment to Sir Walter. Wordsworth was far from being an acrid quack, or even a solemn prig--another genus hated of dogs--but there wassomething a little unsympathetic in his personality. The dalesmen likedpoor Hartley Coleridge better. 

[19] Scott could scarcely have forborne to introduce the figure of theQueen of Scots, to insure whose marriage with Norfolk was one of theobjects of the rising. 

[20] For a full review of "The White Doe" the reader should consultPrincipal Shairp's "Aspects of Poetry, " 1881. 

[21] Scott averred that Wordsworth offended public taste on system. 

[22] This is incomparable, not only as a masterpiece of romanticnarrative, but for the spirited and natural device by which the hero isconducted to his adventure. R. L. Stevenson and other critics have beenrather hard upon Scott's defects as an artist. He was indeed no stylist:least of all a _precieux_. There are no close-set mosaics in hissomewhat slip-shod prose, and he did not seek for the right word "withmoroseness, " like Landor. But, in his large fashion, he was skilful ininventing impressive effects. Another instance is the solitary trumpetthat breathed its "note of defiance" in the lists of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, which has the genuine melodramatic thrill--like the horn of Hernani orthe bell that tolls in "Venice Preserved. "

[23] See the "Hunting Song" in his continuation of "Queenhoo Hall"--

 "Waken, lords and ladies gay, On the mountain dawns the day. "

[24] See vol. I. , pp. 277 and 390. 

[25] The Glen of the Green Women. 

[26] "And still I thought that shattered tower The mightiest work of human power; And marvelled as the aged hind With some strange tale bewitched my mind, Of foragers who, with headlong force, Down from that strength had spurred their horse, Their Southern rapine to renew, Far in the distant Cheviots blue; And, home returning, filled the hall With revel, wassail-rout and brawl. "--"Marmion. " Introductionto Canto Third. See Lockhart for a description of the view fromSmailholme, _à propos_ of the stanza in "The Eve of St. John":

 "That lady sat in mournful mood; Looked over hill and vale: O'ver Tweed's fair flood, and Mertoun's wood, And all down Teviot dale. "

[27] See vol. I. , pp. 394-395. 

[28] Scott's verse "is touched both with the facile redundance of themediaeval romances in which he was steeped, and with the meretriciousphraseology of the later eighteenth century, which he was too genuine aliterary Tory wholly to put aside. "--"The Age of Wordsworth, " C. H. Herford, London. 1897. 

[29] "The Gray Brother" in vol. Iii. Of the "Minstrelsy. "

[30] "And goblin brats, of Gilpin Horner's brood, Decoy young border-nobles through the wood, And skip at every step, Lord knows how high, And frighten foolish babes, the Lord knows why. "

[31] "Now leave we Margaret and her knight To tell you of the approaching fight. "--Canto Fifth, xiii. 

[32] Landor says oddly of Warton that he "had lost his ear by laying itdown on low swampy places, on ballads and sonnets. "

[33] Does not the quarrel of Richard and Philip in "The Talisman" remindone irresistibly of Achilles and Agamemnon in the "Iliad"?

[34] For a review of English historical fiction before Scott, consultProfessor Cross' "Development of the English Novel, " pp. 110-114. 

[35] "Familiar Studies of Men and Books, " by R. L. Stevenson. Article, "Victor Hugo's Romances. "

[36] "Le Roman Historique à l'Epoque Romantique. " Essai sur l'influencede Walter Scott. Par Louis Maigron. Paris (Hachette). 1898, p. 331, _note_. And _ibid_. , p. 330: "Au lieu que les classiques s'efforçaienttoujours, à travers les modifications que les pays, les temps et lescirconstances peuvent apporter aux sentiments et aux passions des hommes, d'atteindre à ce que ces passions et ces sentiments conservent depermanent, d'immuable et d'éternel, c'est au contraire à l'expression del'accidentel et du relatif que les novateurs devaient les efforts de leurart. Plus simplement, à la place de la vérité humaine, ils devaientmettre la vérité locale. " Professor Herford says that what Scott "has incommon with the Romantic temper is simply the feeling for thepicturesque, for colour, for contrast. " "Age of Wordsworth, " p. 121. 

[37] De Quincey defines _picturesque_ as "the characteristic pushed intoa sensible excess. " The word began to excite discussion in the lastquarter of the eighteenth century. See vol. I. , p. 185, for Gilpin's"Observations on Picturesque Beauty. " See also Uvedale Price, "Essays onthe Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful, " threevols. , 1794-96. Price finds the character of the picturesque to consistin roughness, irregularity, intricacy, and sudden variation. Gothicbuildings are more picturesque than Grecian, and a ruin than an entirebuilding. Hovels, cottages, mills, interiors of old barns arepicturesque. "In mills particularly, such is the extreme intricacy ofthe wheels and the wood work: such is the singular variety of forms andof lights and shadows, of mosses and weather stains from the constantmoisture, of plants springing from the rough joints of the stones--that, even without the addition of water, an old mill has the greatest charmfor a painter" (i. , 55). He mentions, as a striking example ofpicturesque beauty, a hollow lane or by-road with broken banks, thickets, old neglected pollards, fantastic roots bared by the winter torrents, tangled trailers and wild plants, and infinite variety of tints andshades (i. , 23-29). He denounces the improvements of Capability Brown(see "Romanticism, " vol. I. , p. 124): especially the clump, the belt andregular serpentine walks with smooth turf edges, the made water withuniformly sloping banks--all as insipidly formal, in their way, as theold Italian gardens which Brown's landscapes displaced. 

[38] "Essay on Walter Scott. "

[39] Andrew Lang reminds us that, after all, only three of the WaverleyNovels are "chivalry romances. " The following are the only numbers ofthe series that have to do with the Middle Ages: "Count Robert of Paris, "_circa_ 1090 A. D. ; "The Betrothed, " 1187; "The Talisman, " 1193;"Ivanhoe, " 1194; "The Fair Maid of Perth, " 1402; "Quentin Durward, " 1470;"Anne of Geierstein, " 1474-77. 

[40] "The Romantic School in Germany, " p. 187. _Cf. _ Stendhal, "WalterScott et la Princesse de Clèves. " "Mes reflexions seront mal accueilles. Une immense troupe de littérateurs est intéressée à porter aux nues SirWalter Scott et sa maniere. L'habit et le collier de cuivre d'un serf dumoyen âge sont plus facile à décrire que les mouvements du coeurhumain. . . . N'oublions pas un autre avantage de l'école de Sir WalterScott: la description d'un costume et la _pose_ d'un personnage . . . Prennent au moins deux pages. Les mouvements de l'âme fourniraient àpeine quelques lignes. Ouvrez au hazard un cies volumes de la 'Princessede Clèves, ' prenez dix pages au hasard, et ensuite comparez les aux dixpages d'Ivanhoe' ou de 'Quentin Durward': ces derniers ouvrages ont un_mérite historique_. Ils apprennent quelques petites choses surl'histoire aux gens qui l'ignorent ou qui le savent mal. Ce méritehistorique a causé un grand plaisir: je ne le nie pas, mais c'est cemérite historique qui se fanera le premier. . . . Dans 146 ans, SirWalter Scott ne sera pas à la hauteur où Corneille nous apparait 146 ansaprès sa mort. " "To write a modern romance of chivalry. " says Jeffrey, in his review of "Marmion" in the _Edinburgh_, "seems to be much such aphantasy as to build a modern abbey or an English pagoda. . . . [Scott's] genius, seconded by the omnipotence of fashion, has broughtchivalry again into temporary favor. Fine ladies and gentlemen now talk, indeed, of donjons, keeps, tabards, 'scutcheons, tressures, caps ofmaintenance, portcullises, wimples, and we know not what besides; just asthey did, in the days of Dr. Darwin's popularity, of gnomes, sylphs, oxygen, gossamer, polygynia, and polyandria. That fashion, however, passed rapidly away, and Mr. Scott should take care that a different sortof pedantry, " etc. 

[41] For an exhaustive review of Scott's influence on the evolution ofhistorical fiction in France, consult Maigron, "Le Roman Historique, "etc. A longish passage from this work will be found at the end of thepresent chapter. For English imitators and successors of the WaverleyNovels, see Cross, "Development of the English Novel, " pp. 136-48. Seealso De Quincey's "Literary Reminiscences, " vol. Iii. , for an amusingaccount of "Walladmor" (1824), a pretended German translation of anon-existent Waverley novel. 

[42] "Racine et Shakespeare. "

[43] "Don Quixote. "

[44] "Sir Walter Scott. "

[45] "Dix ans d'études historiques": preface. 

[46] Walter Bagehot says that "Ivanhoe" "describes the Middle Ages as weshould have wished them to be, " ignoring their discomforts and harshbarbarism. "Every boy has heard of tournaments and has a firm persuasionthat in an age of tournaments life was thoroughly well understood. Amartial society where men fought hand to hand on good horses with largelances, " etc. ("The Waverley Novels"). 

[47] "Of enthusiasm in religion Scott always spoke very severely. . . . I do not think there is a single study in all his romances of what may befairly called a pre-eminently spiritual character" (R. H. Hutton: "SirWalter Scott, " p. 126). 

[48] "Unopposed, the Catholic superstition may sink to dust, with all itsabsurd ritual and solemnities. Still it is an awful risk. The world isin fact as silly as ever, and a good competence of nonsense will alwaysfind believers. " ("Diary" for 1829). 

[49] See vol. I. , p. 42. "We almost envy the credulity of those who inthe gentle moonlight of a summer night in England, amid the tangledglades of a deep forest, or the turfy swell of her romantic commons, could fancy they saw the fairies tracing their sportive ring. But it isin vain to regret illusions which, however engaging, must of necessityyield their place before the increase of knowledge, like shadows at theadvance of morn. " ("Demonology. " p. 183). "Tales of ghosts anddemonology are out of date at forty years of age and upward. . . . If Iwere to write on the subject at all, it should have been during a periodof life when I could have treated it with more interestingvivacity. . . . Even the present fashion of the world seems to beill-suited for studies of this fantastic nature: and the most ordinarymechanic has learning sufficient to laugh at the figments which in formertimes were believed by persons far advanced in the deepest knowledge ofthe age. " (_Ibid_. , p. 398). 

[50] See vol. I. , pp. 249 and 420. 

[51] "Postscript" to "Appreciations. "

[52] For the rarity of the real romantic note in mediaeval writers seevol. I. , pp. 26-28, and Appendix B to the present chapter. 

[53] See "Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature, " by Edward T. McLaughlin, p. 34. 

CHAPTER II. 

Coleridge, Bowles, and the Pope Controversy. 

While Scott was busy collecting the fragments of Border minstrelsy andtranslating German ballads, [1] two other young poets, far to the south, were preparing their share in the literary revolution. In those sameyears (1795-98) Wordsworth and Coleridge were wandering together over theSomerset downs and along the coast of Devon, catching glimpses of the seatowards Bristol or Linton, and now and then of the skeleton masts andgossamer sails of a ship against the declining sun, like those of thephantom bark in "The Ancient Mariner. " The first fruits of these walksand talks was that epoch-making book, the "Lyrical Ballads"; the firstedition of which was published in 1798, and the second, with anadditional volume and the famous preface by Wordsworth, in 1800. Thegenesis of the work and the allotment of its parts were described byColeridge himself in the "Biographia Literaria" (1817), Chapter XIV. 

"During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours ourconversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, thepower of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence tothe truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty bythe modifying colours of imagination. . . . The thought suggested itselfthat a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, theincidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; . . . For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinarylife. . . . It was agreed that my endeavours should be directed topersons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic. . . . Withthis view I wrote 'The Ancient Mariner, ' and was preparing, among otherpoems, 'The Dark Ladie' and the 'Christabel, ' in which I should have morenearly realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt. "

Coleridge's contributions to romantic poetry are few though precious. Weighed against the imposing array of Scott's romances in prose andverse, [2] they seem like two or three little gold coins put into thescales to balance a handful of silver dollars. He stands for so much inthe history of English thought, he influenced his own and the followinggeneration on so many sides, that his romanticism shows like a mereincident in his intellectual history. His blossoming time was short atthe best, and ended practically with the century. After his return fromGermany in 1799 and his settlement at Keswick in 1800, he produced littleverse of any importance beyond the second part of "Christabel" (writtenin 1800, published in 1816). His creative impulse failed him, and hebecame more and more involved in theology, metaphysics, politicalphilosophy, and literary criticism. 

It appears, therefore, at first sight, a little odd that Coleridge'sGerman biographer, Professor Brandl, should have treated his subjectunder this special aspect, [3] and attributed to him so leading a place inthe romantic movement. Walter Scott, if we consider his life-long andwellnigh exclusive dedication of himself to the work of historicrestoration--Scott, certainly, and not Coleridge was the "high priest ofRomanticism. " [4] Brandl is dissatisfied with the term Lake School, orLakers, commonly given to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, andproposes instead to call them the Romantic School, Romanticists(_Romantiker_), surely something of a misnomer when used of an eclecticversifier like Southey, or a poet of nature, moral reflection, and humblelife like Wordsworth. Southey, in casting about him for a theme, sometimes became for the nonce and so far as subject goes, a romancer; asin "Joan of Arc" (1799), "Madoc" (1805), and "Roderick the Goth" (1814);not to speak of translations like "Amadis of Gaul, " "Palmerin ofEngland, " and "The Chronicle of the Cid. " But these were not due to thecompelling bent of his genius, as in Scott. They were miscellaneousjobs, undertaken in the regular course of his business as a manufacturerof big, irregular epics, Oriental, legendary, mythological, and what not;and as an untiring biographer, editor, and hack writer of alldescriptions. Southey was a mechanical poet, with little originalinspiration, and represents nothing in particular. Wordsworth again, though innovating in practice and theory against eighteenth-centurytradition, is absolutely unromantic in contrast with Scott and Coleridge. 

But it will be fair to let the critic defend his own nomenclature; andthe passage which I shall quote will serve not only as another attempt todefine romanticism, but also to explain why Brandl regards the Lake poetsas our romantic school _par excellence_. "'Lake School' is a name, butno designation. This was felt in England, where many critics haveaccordingly fallen into the opposite extreme, and maintained that themembers of this group of poets had nothing in common beyond theirpersonal and accidental conditions. As if they had only lived together, and not worked together! In truth they were bound together by many astrong tie, and above all by one of a polemical kind, namely, by theaversion for the monotony that had preceded them, and by the struggleagainst merely dogmatic rules. Unbending uniformity is death! Let us bevarious and individual as life itself is. . . . Away with dryRationalism! Let us fight it with all the powers we possess; whether bybold Platonism or simple Bible faith; whether by enthusiastic hymns, ordreamy fairy tales; whether by the fabulous world of distant times andzones, or by the instincts of the children in the next village. Let usabjure the ever-recommended nostrum of imitation of the old masters inpoetry, and rather attach ourselves to homely models, and endeavour, withtheir help, lovingly and organically to develop their inner life. Thesewere the aims of Walter Scott and his Scotch school, only with suchchanges as local differences demanded. Individuality in person, nationality, and subject, and therefore the emphasis of all naturalunlikeness, was the motto on both sides of the Tweed. And, as these men, when confronted by elements peculiar, rare, and marvellous, designatedsuch elements as 'romantic, ' so may they themselves be justly called the'Romantic School. ' But the term is much misused, and requires a littleelucidation. Shakespeare is usually called a romantic poet. He, however, never used the expression, and would have been surprised if anyone had applied it to him. The term presupposes opposition to theclassic style, to rhetorical deduction, and to measured periods, all ofwhich were unknown in the time of the Renaissance, and first imported inthat of the French Revolution. On the other hand, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, and Walter Scott's circle all branched off from theclassical path with a directness and consistency which sharplydistinguish them from their predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. Their predecessors had not broken with the Greek and Latin school, norwith the school of Pope; Chatterton copied Homer; Cowper translated him;Burns in his English verses, and Bowles in his sonnets, adhered to whatis called the 'pig-tail period'! The principal poems composed in thelast decennium of the eighteenth century . . . Adhered still more toclassic tradition. In London the satires of Mathias and Gifford renewedthe style of the 'Dunciad, ' and the moral poems of Rogers that of the'Essay on Man. ' Landor wrote his youthful 'Gebir' in the style ofVirgil, and originally in Latin itself. The amateur in Germanliterature, William Taylor of Norwich, and Dr. Sayers, interestedthemselves especially for those works by Goethe which bear an antiquecharacter--for 'Iphigenia, ' 'Proserpina, ' 'Alexis and Dora. ' Only whenthe war with France drew near was the classical feeling interrupted. Campbell, the Scotchman, and Moore, the Irishman, both well schooled bytranslations from the Greek, recalled to mind the songs of their ownpeople, and rendered them popular with the fashionable world--though onlyby clothing them in classic garb. How different to the 'artificial rust'of 'Christabel'; to the almost exaggerated homeliness of 'We Are Seven';and to the rude 'Lay of the Last Minstrel'! When at last, with the fallof Napoleon, the great stars--Byron, Shelley, Keats, and later the matureLandor--rose in the hemisphere, they had all imbibed from the Romanticschool a warmer form of thought and feeling, and a number of productiveimpulses; though, Euphorion-like, they still regarded the antique astheir parent. They expressed much appreciation of the Romantic school, but their hearts were with Aeschylus and Pindar. They contended fornational character, but only took pleasure in planting it on classicsoil. Byron's enthusiasm for Pope was not only caprice; nor was it merechance that Byron should have died in Greece, and Shelley and Keats inItaly. Compared with what we may call these classical members of theRomantic school, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott . . . May be said tohave taken nothing, whether in the form of translation or imitation, fromclassical literature; while they drew endless inspiration from the MiddleAges. In their eyes Pope was only a lucid, able, and clever journeyman. It is therefore fair to consider them, and them alone, as exponents ofthe Romantic school. " [5]

As to Byron and Shelley this criticism may do; as to Chatterton and Keatsit is misleading. Wordsworth more romantic than Chatterton! Moreromantic than Keats, because the latter often, and Wordsworth seldom, treats subjects from the antique! On the contrary, if "the name isgraven on the workmanship, " "Michael" and "The Brothers" are as classicalas "Hyperion" or "Laodamia" or "The Hamadryad"; "bald as the baremountain-tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur. " Bagehotexpressly singles Wordsworth out as an example of pure or classic art, asdistinguished from the ornate art of such poets as Keats and Tennyson. And Mr. Colvin hesitates to classify him with Landor only because of his"suggestive and adumbrative manner"--not, indeed, he acknowledges, aromantic manner, and yet "quite distinct from the classical"; i. E. , because of the transcendental character of a portion of his poetry. Butwhatever may be true of the other members of the group, Coleridge at hisbest was a romantic poet. "Christabel" and "The Ancient Mariner, "creations so exquisite sprung from the contact of modern imagination withmediaeval beliefs, are enough in themselves to justify the whole romanticmovement. 

Among the literary influences which gave shape to Coleridge's poetry, Percy's ballads and Chatterton's "Rowley Poems" are obvious and havealready been mentioned. In his first volume of verse (1796), there ismanifest a still stronger impulse from the sonnets of the Rev. WilliamLisle Bowles. We have noticed the reappearance of this discarded stanzaform in the work of Gray, Mason, Edwards, Stillingfleet, and ThomasWarton, about the middle of the last century. [6] In 1782 Mrs. CharlotteSmith published a volume of sonnets, treating motives from Milton, Gray, Collins, Pope's "Eloisa" and Goethe's "Werther. " But the writerwho--through his influence upon Wordsworth more especially--contributedmost towards the sonnet revival, was Bowles. In 1789 he had published alittle collection of fourteen sonnets, [7] which reached a second editionwith six pieces additional, in the same year. "His sonnets came intoWordsworth's hands (1793), " says Brandl, "just as he was leaving Londonwith some friends for a morning's excursion; he seated himself in arecess on Westminster Bridge, and was not to be moved from his place tillhe had finished the little book. Southey, again, owned in 1832 that forforty years, he had taken the sweet and artless style of Bowles for amodel. " [8] In the first chapter of his "Biographia Literaria" (1817)Coleridge tells how, when he had just entered on his seventeenth year, "the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number and just then published in aquarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented" to him by hisschool-fellow at Christ's Hospital, Thomas Middleton, afterwards Bishopof Calcutta. "It was a double pleasure to me . . . That I should havereceived, from a friend so revered, the first knowledge of a poet bywhose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted andinspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten theundisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal with which I laboured to makeproselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed, of whatever rank and in whatever place. As my school finances did notpermit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer tothose who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delightdid I receive the three or four following publications of the sameauthor. " To Bowles' poems Coleridge ascribes the credit of havingwithdrawn him from a too exclusive devotion to metaphysics and also astrengthened perception of the essentially unpoetic character of Pope'spoetry. "Among those with whom I conversed there were, of course, verymany who had formed their taste and their notions of poetry from thewritings of Pope and his followers; or, to speak more generally, in thatschool of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by Englishunderstanding, which had predominated from the last century. I was notblind to the merits of this school, yet . . . They gave me littlepleasure. . . . I saw that the excellence of this kind consisted in justand acute observations on men and manners in an artificial state ofsociety, as its matter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyedin smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form. . . . Thematter and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poeticthoughts as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry. "Coleridge goes on to say that, in a paper written during a Cambridgevacation, he compared Darwin's "Botanic Garden" to a Russian ice palace, "glittering, cold, and transitory"; that he expressed a preference forCollins' odes over those of Gray; and that in his defence of the linesrunning into each other, instead of closing at each couplet; and ofnatural language . . . Such as "_I will remember thee_, " instead of

 ". . . Thy image on her wing Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring"

he had continually to appeal to the example of the older English poetsfrom Chaucer to Milton. "The reader, " he concludes, "must make himselfacquainted with the general style of composition that was at that timedeemed poetry, in order to understand and account for the effect producedon me by the sonnets, the 'Monody at Matlock' and the 'Hope' of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar to original genius to become less and lessstriking, in proportion to its success in improving the taste andjudgment of its contemporaries. The poems of West, indeed, had the meritof chaste and manly diction, but they were cold, and, if I may so expressit, only dead-coloured; while in the best of Warton's, there is astiffness which too often gives them the appearance of imitations fromthe Greek. Whatever relation, therefore, of cause or impulse, Percy'scollection of ballads may bear to the most popular poems of the presentday, yet in the more sustained and elevated style of the then livingpoets, Cowper and Bowles were, to the best of my knowledge, the first whocombined natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciledthe heart with the head. " Coleridge adds in a note that he was notfamiliar with Cowper's "Task" till many years after the publication ofBowles' sonnets, though it had been published before them (1785). 

It would be hard to account for the effect of Bowles' sonnets onColeridge, did we not remember that it is not necessarily the greatestliterature that comes home to us most intimately, but that which, forsome reason, touches us where we are peculiarly sensitive. It is afamiliar experience with every reader, that certain books make an appealto him which is personal and individual, an appeal which they make to fewother readers--perhaps to no other reader--and which no other books maketo him. It is something in them apart from their absolute value orcharm, or rather it is something in him, some private experience of hisown, some occult association in depths below consciousness. He has aperfectly just estimate of their small importance in the abstract, theyare not even of the second or third rank. Yet they speak to him; theyseem written to him--are more to him, in a way, than Shakspere and Miltonand all the public library of the world. In the line of light bringerswho pass from hand to hand the torch of intelligential fire, there aremen of most unequal stature, and a giant may stoop to take the preciousflambeau from a dwarf. That Scott should have admired Monk Lewis, andColeridge reverenced Bowles, only proves that Lewis and Bowles hadsomething to give which Scott and Coleridge were peculiarly ready toreceive. 

Bowles' sonnets, though now little read, are not unreadable. They aretender in feeling, musical in verse, and pure in diction. They weremostly suggested by natural scenery, and are uniformly melancholy. Bowles could suck melancholy out of a landscape as a weasel sucks eggs. His sonnets continue the elegiac strain of Shenstone, Gray, Collins, Warton, and the whole "Il Penseroso" school, but with a more personalnote, explained by a recent bereavement of the poet. "Those who knowhim, " says the preface, "know the occasions of them to have been real, tothe public he might only mention the sudden death of a deserving youngwoman with whom

 "Sperabat longos heu! ducere soles, Et fido acclinis consumuisse sinu. . . . 

"This is nothing to the public; but it may serve in some measure toobviate the common remark on melancholy poetry, that it has been veryoften gravely composed, when possibly the heart of the writer had verylittle share in the distress he chose to describe. But there is a greatdifference between _natural_ and _fabricated_ feelings even in poetry. "Accordingly while the Miltonic group of last-century poets went in searchof dark things--grots, caverns, horrid shades, and twilight vales;Bowles' mood bestowed its color upon the most cheerful sights and soundsof nature. The coming of summer or spring; the bells of Oxford andOstend; the distant prospect of the Malvern Hills, or the chalk cliffs ofDover; sunrise on the sea, touching "the lifted oar far off with suddengleam"; these and the like move him to tears equally with the glimmer ofevening, the sequestered woods of Wensbeck, the ruins of Netley Abbey, [9]or the frowning battlements of Bamborough Castle, where

 "Pity, at the dark and stormy hour Of midnight, when the moon is hid on high, Keeps her lone watch upon the topmost tower. "

In "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" Byron calls Bowles "the maudlinprince of mournful sonneteers, " whose

 ". . . Muse most lamentably tells What merry sounds proceed from Oxford bells. " [10]

Bowles' attitude had thus something more modern than that of theeighteenth-century elegiacs, and in unison with Coleridge's doctrine, that

 ". . . We receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live: Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud. " [11]

A number of Bowles' sonnets were addressed to rivers, the Tweed, theCherwell at Oxford, the Wensbeck, and the Itchin near Winton, poems whichstand midway between Thomas Warton's "To the River Lodon" and Coleridge's"To the River Otter, " with Wordsworth's sonnet sequence, "On the RiverDuddon. " A single sonnet of Bowles will be enough to give a taste of hisquality and to show what Coleridge got from him. [12]

Bowles was a disciple in the "School of Warton. " He was "one of JosephWarton's Winchester wonders, " says Peter Cunningham, in a note in thesecond edition of Campbell's "Specimens of the British Poets"; "and thetaste he imbibed there for the romantic school of poetry was strengthenedand confirmed by his removal to Trinity College, Oxford, when Tom Wartonwas master there. " Bowles was always prompt to own that he had learnedhis literary principles from the Wartons; and among his poems is a monodywritten on the death of his old teacher, the master of WinchesterCollege. His verses abound in Gothic imagery quite in the Wartonianmanner; the "castle gleaming on the distant steep"; "the pale moonlightin the midnight aisle"; "some convent's ancient walls, " along the Rhine. Weak winds complain like spirits through the ruined arches of NetleyAbbey:

 "The beam Of evening smiles on the gray battlement, And yon forsaken tower that time has rent. "

His lines on Shakspere recall Collins in their insistence upon the"elvish" things in the plays; "The Tempest, " "Midsummer Night's Dream, "the weird sisters in "Macbeth, " Ophelia's songs, the melancholy Jacques. The lines to Burke on his "Reflections on the Revolution in France, " echohis celebrated dirge over fallen chivalry:

 "Though now no more proud chivalry recalls The tourneys bright and pealing festivals; Though now on high her idle spear is hung, Though time her mouldering harp has half unstrung, " etc. [13]

The "Hymn to Woden" alludes to Gray's "Fatal Sisters. " "St. Michael'sMount" summons up the forms of the ancient Druids, and sings how Fancy, "Sick of the fluttering fancies that engage The vain pursuits of a degenerate age, . . . Would fain the shade of elder days recall, The Gothick battlements, the bannered hall; Or list of elfin harps the fabling rhyme; Or, wrapt in melancholy trance sublime, Pause o'er the working of some wondrous tale, Or bid the spectres of the castle hail!"

Bowles' influence is traceable in Coleridge's earliest volume of verse(1796) in a certain diffused softness and gentle sensibility. Thiselegiac tone appears particularly in effusions like "Happiness, " "TheSigh, " "To a Young Ass, " "To the Autumnal Moon, " "Lines on an AutumnalEvening, " "To the Nightingale"; in "Melancholy: A Fragment" and "Elegy;imitated from Akenside, " both in the "Sibylline Leaves" (1797); and innumerous "lines, " "monodies, " "epitaphs, " "odes, " and "stanzas. " [14]Coleridge soon came to recognise the weakness of his juvenile verses, andparodied himself--and incidentally Bowles--in three sonnets printed atthe end of Chapter I. Of the "Biographia Literaria, " designed toburlesque his own besetting sins, a "doleful egotism, " an affectedsimplicity, and the use of "elaborate and swelling language and imagery. "He never attained much success in the use of the sonnet form. A seriesof twelve sonnets in his first collection opens with one to Bowles:

 "My heart has thanked thee, Bowles! for those soft strains Whose sadness soothes me, like the murmuring Of wild bees in the sunny showers of spring, " etc. 

More important to our inquiries than the poetry of Bowles is the occasionwhich he gave to the revival, under new conditions, of the Popecontroversy. For it was over the body of Pope that the quarrel betweenclassic and romantic was fought out in England, as it was fought out inFrance, a few years later, over the question of the dramatic unities andthe mixture of tragedy and comedy in the _drame_. In 1806, just a halfcentury after Joseph Warton published the first volume of his "Essay onPope, " Bowles' edition of the same poet appeared. In the life of Popewhich was prefixed, the editor made some severe strictures on Pope'sduplicity, jealousy, and other disagreeable traits, though not moresevere than have been made by Pope's latest editor, Mr. Elwin, who hasbacked up his charges with an array of evidence fairly overwhelming. Theedition contained likewise an essay on "The Poetical Character of Pope, "in which Bowles took substantially the same ground that had been taken byhis master, Joseph Warton, fifty years before. He asserted in briefthat, as compared with Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton, Pope was a poet ofthe second order; that in his descriptions of nature he was inferior toThomson and Cowper, and in lyrical poetry to Dryden and Gray; and that, except in his "Eloisa" and one or two other pieces, he was the poet ofartificial manners and of didactic maxims, rather than of passions. Bowles' chief addition to Warton's criticism was the following paragraph, upon which the controversy that ensued chiefly hinged: "All images drawnfrom what is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature are morebeautiful and sublime than any images drawn from art, and they aretherefore _per se_ (abstractedly) more poetical. In like manner thosepassions of the human heart, which belong to nature in general, are _perse_ more adapted to the higher species of poetry than those derived fromincidental and transient manners. "

The admirers of Pope were not slow in joining issue with his critic, notonly upon his general estimate of the poet, but upon the principle herelaid down. Thomas Campbell, in his "Specimens of the British Poets"(1819), defended Pope both as a man and a poet, and maintained that"exquisite descriptions of artificial objects are not less characteristicof genius than the description of simple physical appearances. " Heinstanced Milton's description of Satan's spear and shield, and gave ananimated picture of the launching of a ship of the line as an example ofthe "sublime objects of artificial life. " Bowles replied in a letter toCampbell on "The Invariable Principles of Poetry. " He claimed that itwas the appearances of nature, the sea and the sky, that lent sublimityto the launch of the ship, and asked: "If images derived from art are asbeautiful and sublime as those derived from nature, why was it necessaryto bring your ship off the stocks?" He appealed to his adversary whetherthe description of a game of ombre was as poetical as that of a walk inthe forest, and whether "the sylph of Pope, 'trembling over the fumes ofa chocolate pot, ' be an image as poetical as that of delicate and quaintAriel, who sings 'Where the bee sucks, there lurk (_sic_) I. '" Campbellreplied in the _New Monthly Magazine_, of which he was editor, and thisdrew out another rejoinder from Bowles. Meanwhile Byron had alsoattacked Bowles in two letters to Murray (1821), to which theindefatigable pamphleteer made elaborate replies. The elder Disraeli, Gifford, Octavius Gilchrist, and one Martin M'Dermot also took a hand inthe fight--all against Bowles--and William Roscoe, the author of the"Life of Lorenzo de Medici, " attacked him in an edition of Pope which hebrought out in 1824. The rash detractor of the little Twitnamnightingale soon found himself engaged single-handed against a host; buthe was equal to the occasion, in volubility if not in logic, and pouredout a series of pamphlets, covering in all some thousand pages, andconcluding with "A Final Appeal to the Literary Public" (1825), followedby "more last words of Baxter, " in the shape of "Lessons in Criticism toWilliam Roscoe" (1825). 

The opponents of Bowles maintained, in general, that in poetry thesubject is nothing, but the execution is all; that one class of poetryhas, as such, no superiority over another; and that poets are to beranked by their excellence as artists, and not according to someimaginary scale of dignity in the different orders of poetry, as epic, didactic, satiric, etc. "There is, in fact, " wrote Roscoe, "no poetry inany subject except what is called forth by the genius of the poet. . . . There are no great subjects but such as are made so by the genius of theartist. " Byron said that to the question "whether 'the description of agame of cards be as poetical, supposing the execution of the artistsequal, as a description of a walk in a forest, ' it may be answered thatthe materials are certainly not equal, but that the _artist_ who hasrendered the game of cards poetical is by far the greater of the two. But all this 'ordering' of poets is purely arbitrary on the part of Mr. Bowles. There may or may not be, in fact, different 'orders' of poetry, but the poet is always ranked according to his execution, and notaccording to his branch of the art. " Byron also contended, likeCampbell, that art is just as poetical as nature, and that it was not thewater that gave interest to the ship but the ship to the water. "Whatwas it attracted the thousands to the launch? They might have seen thepoetical 'calm water' at Wapping or in the London lock or in thePaddington Canal or in a horse-pond or in a slop-basin. " Without naturalaccessories--the sun, the sky, the sea, the wind--Bowles had said, theship's properties are only blue bunting, coarse canvas, and tall poles. "So they are, " admits Byron, "and porcelain is clay, and man is dust, andflesh is grass; and yet the two latter at least are the subjects of muchpoesy. . . . Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical, theParthenon or the rock on which it stands. . . . Take away Stonehengefrom Salisbury plain and it is nothing more than Hounslow Heath or anyother unenclosed down. . . . There can be nothing more poetical in itsaspect than the city of Venice; does this depend upon the sea or thecanals? . . . Is it the Canal Grande or the Rialto which arches it, thechurches which tower over it, the palaces which line and the gondolaswhich glide over the waters, that render this city more poetical thanRome itself? . . . Without these the water would be nothing but aclay-coloured ditch. . . . There would be nothing to make the canal ofVenice more poetical than that of Paddington. "

There was something futile about this whole discussion. It was markedwith that fatally superficial and mechanical character whichdistinguished all literary criticism in Europe before the time of Lessingin Germany, and of Wordsworth and Coleridge in England. In particular, the cardinal point on which Pope's rank as a poet was made to turn wasreally beside the question. There is no such essential distinction aswas attempted to be drawn between "natural objects" and "objects ofartificial life, " as material for poetry. In a higher synthesis, man andall his works are but a part of nature, as Shakspere discerned:

 "Nature is made better by no mean But nature makes that mean: so over that art Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature made: the art itself is nature. "

Shakspere, as well as Pope, dealt with artificial life, _i. E. _, with thelife of man in society, but how differently! The reason why Pope'spoetry fails to satisfy the heart and the imagination resides not in hissubjects--so far Campbell and Byron were right--but in his mood; in hisimperfect sense of beauty and his deficiency in the highest qualities ofthe poet's soul. I may illustrate this by an arrow from Byron's ownquiver. To prove how much poetry may be associated with "a simple, household, 'indoor, ' artificial, and ordinary image, " he cites the famousstanza in Cowper's poem to Mrs. Unwin:

 "Thy needles, once a shining store, For my sake restless heretofore. Now rust disused and shine no more, My Mary. "

Let us contrast with this a characteristic passage from "The Rape of theLock, " which also contains an artificial image:

 "On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore Which Jews might kiss and infidels adore. "

What is the difference? It is in the feeling of the poet Pope's coupletis very charming, but it is merely gallantry, a neatly turned compliment, playful, only half sincere, a spice of mockery lurking under the sugaredwords; while in Cowper's lines the humble domestic implement is madesacred by the emotions of pity, sorrow, gratitude, and affection withwhich it is associated. The reason why Pope is not a high poet--orperhaps a poet at all in the best sense of the word--is indicated byColeridge with his usual acuteness and profundity in a sentence alreadyquoted; that Pope's poetry both in matter and diction was "characterisednot so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts _translated_ into thelanguage of poetry. "

Bowles, on the whole, had hold of the right end of the controversy; hisinstinct was correct, but he was a wretched controversialist. As a poetin the minor key, he was tolerable, but as a prose writer, he was a verydull person and a bore. He was rude and clumsy; he tried to be sarcasticand couldn't, he had damnable iteration. Lowell speaks of his"peculiarly helpless way, " and says: "Bowles, in losing his temper, lostalso what little logic he had, and though, in a vague way, aestheticallyright, contrived always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger made worseconfusion in a brain never very clear, and he had neither the scholarshipnor the critical faculty for a vigorous exposition of his own thesis. Never was wilder hitting than his, and he laid himself open to dreadfulpunishment, especially from Byron, whose two letters are masterpieces ofpolemic prose. " Indeed, the most interesting feature of the Popecontroversy is Byron's part in it and the light which it sheds on hisposition in relation to the classic and romantic schools. Before thedefinite outbreak of the controversy, Byron had attacked Bowles for hisdepreciation of Pope, in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" (1809), ina passage in which he wished that Bowles had lived in Pope's time, sothat Pope might have put him into the "Dunciad. "

It seems at first sight hard to reconcile Byron's evidently sincereadmiration for Pope with the ultra-romantic cast of his ownpoetry--romantic, as Pater says, in mood if not in subject. In his earlyfondness for Ossian, his intense passion, his morbid gloom, hisexaltation in wild and solitary places, his love of night and storm, ofthe desert and the ocean, in the careless and irregular outpour of hisverse, in his subjectivity, the continual presence of the man in thework--in all these particulars Byron was romantic and would seem to havehad little in common with Pope. But there was another side to Byron--andWilliam Rossetti thinks his most characteristic side--viz. , his wit andunderstanding; and this side sympathised heartily with Pope. It is wellknown that when Byron came back from the East he had in his trunk besidesthe manuscript of "Childe Harold, " which he thought little of, certain"Hints from Horace" which the world thinks less of, but which he waseager to have published, while Dallas was urging him to print "ChildeHarold. " "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" is a thoroughly Popeiansatire, and "The Vision of Judgment, " though not in couplets but in_ottava rima_, is one of the best personal satires in English. It hasall of Pope's malicious wit, with a sweep and glow, which belonged toByron as a poet rather than as a satirist, and which Pope never had. Lowell thinks, too, that what Byron admired in Pope was "that patience incareful finish which he felt to be wanting in himself and in most of hiscontemporaries. "

With all this there probably mingled something of perversity andexaggeration in Byron's praises of Pope. He hated the Lakers, and hedelighted to use Pope against them as a foil and a rod. He at least waseverything that they were not. Doubtless in the Pope controversy, his"object was mainly mischief, " as Lowell says. Byron loved a fight; hethought the Rev. W. L. Bowles an ass, and he determined to have some funwith him. Besides the two letters to Murray in 1821, an open letter ofByron's to Isaac Disraeli, dated March 15, 1820, and entitled "SomeObservations upon an article in _Blackwood's Magazine_, " [15] contains along passage in vindication of Pope and in denunciation of contemporarypoetry--a passage which is important not only as showing Byron'sopinions, but as testifying to the very general change in taste which hadtaken place since 1756, when Joseph Warton was so discouraged by thepublic hostility to his "Essay on Pope" that he withheld the secondvolume for twenty-six years. "The great cause of the present deplorablestate of English poetry, " writes Byron, "is to be attributed to thatabsurd and systematic depreciation of Pope in which, for the last fewyears, there has been a kind of epidemical concurrence. Men of the mostopposite opinions have united upon this topic. " He then goes on topraise Pope and abuse his own contemporaries, especially the Lake poets, both in the most extravagant terms. Pope he pronounces the most perfectand harmonious of poets. "Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, " he says, "had all of them a very natural antipathy to Pope . . . But they havebeen joined in it by . . . The whole heterogeneous mass of living Englishpoets excepting Crabbe, Rogers, Gifford, and Campbell, who, both byprecept and practice, have proved their adherence; and by me, who haveshamefully deviated in practice, but have ever loved and honoured Pope'spoetry with my whole soul. " There is ten times more poetry, he thinks, in the "Essay on Man" than in the "Excursion"; and if you want passion, where is to be found stronger than in the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard"?To the sneer that Pope is only the "poet of reason" Byron replies that hewill undertake to find more lines teeming with _imagination_ in Pope thanin any two living poets. "In the mean time, " he asks, "what have we gotinstead? . . . The Lake school, " and "a deluge of flimsy andunintelligible romances imitated from Scott and myself. " He prophesiesthat all except the classical poets, Crabbe, Rogers, and Campbell, willsurvive their reputation, acknowledges that his own practice as a poet isnot in harmony with his principles, and says; "I told Moore not very longago, 'We are all wrong except Rogers, Crabbe, and Campbell. '" In thefirst of his two letters to Murray, Byron had taken himself to task inmuch the same way. He compared the romanticists to barbarians who had"raised a mosque by the side of a Grecian temple of the purestarchitecture"; and who were "not contented with their own grotesqueedifice unless they destroy the prior and purely beautiful fabric whichpreceded, and which shames them and theirs for ever and ever. I shall betold that amongst those I _have_ been (or it may be still _am_)conspicuous--true, and I am ashamed of it. I _have_ been amongst thebuilders of this Babel . . . But never among the envious destroyers ofthe classic temple of our predecessor. " "Neither time nor distance norgrief nor age can ever diminish my veneration for him who is the greatmoral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of allstages of existence. The delight of my boyhood, the study of my manhood, perhaps he may be the consolation of my age. His poetry is the Book ofLife. " [16]

Strange language this from the author of "Childe Harold" and "TheCorsair"! But the very extravagance of Byron's claims for Pope makes itplain that he was pleading a lost cause. When Warton issued the firstvolume of his "Essay on Pope, " it was easy for leaders of literaryopinion, like Johnson and Goldsmith, to pooh-pooh the critical canons ofthe new school. But when Byron wrote, the aesthetic revolution wasalready accomplished. The future belonged not to Campbell and Giffordand Rogers and Crabbe, but to Wordsworth and Scott and Coleridge andShelley and Keats; to Byron himself, the romantic poet, but not to Byronthe _laudator temporis acti_. The victory remained with Bowles, notbecause he had won it by argument, but because opinion had changed, andchanged probably once and for all. [17]

Coleridge's four contributions to the "Lyrical Ballads" included hismasterpiece, "The Ancient Mariner. " This is the high-water mark ofromantic poetry; and, familiar as it is, cannot be dismissed here withoutfull examination. As to form, it is a long narrative ballad in seven"fyts" or parts, and descends from that "Bible of the romanticreformation, " Bishop Percy's "Reliques. " The verse is the common balladstanza--eights and sixes--enriched by a generous use of medial rhyme andalliteration:

 "The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free: We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea";

varied and prolonged, moreover, by the introduction of additional lineswith alternate riming, with couplets and sometimes with triplets. Thereare many five-lined and six-lined stanzas, and one--the longest in thepoem--of nine lines. But these metric variations are used withtemperance. The stanza form is never complex; it is built up naturallyfrom the ballad stanza upon which it rests and to which it constantlyreturns as its norm and type. Of the one hundred and forty-two stanzasin the poem, one hundred and six are the ordinary four-lined stanzas ofpopular poetry. The language, too, is not obtrusively archaic as it isin Chatterton and some of the Spenserians; at most an occasional "wist"or "eftsoons"; now and then a light accent, in ballad fashion, on thefinal syllable of a rime-word like mariner or countrie. There is nodefinite burden, which would have been out of place in a poem that isnarrative and not lyrical; but the ballad habits of phrase repetition andquestion and answer are sparingly employed. [18] In reproducing thehomely diction of old popular minstrelsy, Coleridge's art was nicer thanScott's and more perfect at every point. How skilfully studied, _e. G. _is the simplicity of the following:

 "The moving moon went up the sky And nowhere did abide: _Softly she was going up_. "

 "Day after day, day after day _We stuck_. "

"The naive artlessness of the Middle Ages, " says Brandl, "became inthe hands of the Romantic school, an intentional form of art. " Theimpression of antiquity is heightened by the marginal gloss whichthe poet added in later editions, composed in a prose that has aquaint beauty of its own, in its mention of "the creatures of thecalm"; its citation of "the learned Jew Josephus and the PlatonicConstantinopilitan, Michael Psellus, " as authorities on invisiblespirits; and in passages like that Dantesque one which tells how themariner "in his loneliness and fixedness yearneth towards the journeyingmoon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onwards; andeverywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, andtheir native country, and their own natural homes, which they enterunannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is asilent joy at their arrival. "

In "The Ancient Mariner" there are present in the highest degree themystery, indefiniteness, and strangeness which are the marks of romanticart. The period is not strictly mediaeval, for mariners in the MiddleAges did not sail to the south polar regions or lie becalmed in theequatorial seas. But the whole atmosphere of the poem is mediaeval. TheCatholic idea of penance or expiation is the moral theme enwrought withthe story. The hermit who shrives the mariner, and the little vesperbell which biddeth him to prayer are Catholic touches, and so are thenumerous pious oaths and ejaculations;

 "By him who died on cross":

 "Heaven's mother send us grace":

 "The very deep did rot. O Christ That ever this should be!"

The albatross is hung about the mariner's neck instead of the crucifix, and drops off only when he blesses the creatures of the calm and is ableto pray. The sleep which refreshes him is sent by "Mary Queen" fromheaven. The cross-bow with which he shoots the bird is a mediaevalproperty. The loud bassoon and the bride's garden bower and theprocession of merry minstrels who go nodding their heads before her arestraight out of the old land of balladry. One cannot fancy the weddingguest dressed otherwise than in doublet and hose, and perhaps wearingthose marvellous pointed shoes and hanging sleeves which are shown inminiature paintings of the fifteenth century. And it is thus thatillustrators of the poem have depicted him. Place is equally indefinitewith time. What port the ill-fated ship cleared from we do not know orseek to know; only the use of the word _kirk_ implies that it wassomewhere in "the north countree"--the proper home of ballad poetry. 

Coleridge's romances were very differently conceived from Scott's. Hewove them out of "such stuff as dreams are made on. " Industriouscommentators have indeed traced features of "The Ancient Mariner" tovarious sources. Coleridge's friend, Mr. Cruikshank. Had a dream of askeleton ship. Wordsworth told him the incident, which he read inShelvocke's voyages, of a certain Captain Simon Hatley who shot a blackalbatross south of Terra del Fuego, in hopes that its death might bringfair weather. Brandl thinks that the wedding banquet in Monk Lewis'"Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene, " furnished a hint; andsurmises--what seems unlikely--that Coleridge had read a certain epistleby Paulinus, a bishop of the fourth century, describing a vessel whichcame ashore on the coast of Lucania with only one sailor on board, whoreported that the ship had been deserted, as a wreck, by the rest of thecrew, and had since been navigated by spirits. 

But all this is nothing and less than nothing. "The Ancient Mariner" isthe baseless fabric of a vision. We are put under a spell, like thewedding guest, and carried off to the isolation and remoteness ofmid-ocean. Through the chinks of the narrative, the wedding music soundsunreal and far on. What may not happen to a man alone on a wide, widesea? The line between earthly and unearthly vanishes. Did the marinerreally see the spectral bark and hear spirits talking, or was it all butthe phantasmagoria of the calenture, the fever which attacks the sailoron the tropic main, so that he seems to see green meadows and waterbrooks on the level brine? No one can tell; for he is himself the onlywitness, and the ship is sunk at the harbour mouth. One conjectures thatno wreckers or divers will ever bring it to the top again. Nay, was notthe mariner, too, a spectre? Now he is gone, and what was all this thathe told me, thinks the wedding guest, as he rises on the morrow morn. Ordid he tell me, or did I only dream it? A light shadow cast by someinvisible thing swiftly traverses the sunny face of nature and is gone. Did we see it, or imagine it? Even so elusive, so uncertain, so shadowyand phantom-like is the spiriting of this wonderful poem. "Poetry, " saysColeridge, "gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectlyunderstood. It was so by me with Gray's 'Bard' and Collins' odes. 'TheBard' once intoxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure. " [19]There is no danger that his own poem will ever lose its attractiveness inthis way. Something inexplicable will remain to tease us, like the whitePater Noster and St. Peter's sister in Chaucer's night-spell. [20]

Pater subtly connects Coleridge's poetic method with his philosophicalidealism. "The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world, in almostall ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a kind ofcoarseness or crudeness, . . . 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' has theplausibility, the perfect adaptation to reason and life, which belongs tothe marvellous, when actually presented as part of a credible experiencein our dreams. . . . The spectral object, so crude, so impossible, hasbecome plausible, as 'the spot upon the brain that will show itselfwithout, ' and is understood to be but a condition of one's own mind, forwhich--according to the scepticism latent at least in so much of ourmodern philosophy--the so-called real things themselves are but _spectra_after all. It is this finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism, the fruit of his more delicate psychology, which Coleridge infuses intoromantic narrative, itself also then a new or revived thing in Englishliterature; and with a fineness of weird effect in 'The Ancient Mariner'unknown in those old, more simple, romantic legends and ballads. It is aflower of mediaeval, or later German romance, growing up in thepeculiarly compounded atmosphere of modern psychological speculation, andputting forth in it wholly new qualities. "

In "The Ancient Mariner, " as in most purely romantic poetry, the appealis more to the imagination than to the heart or the conscience. Mrs. Barbauld complained that it was improbable and had no moral. Coleridgeadmitted its improbability, but said that it had too much moral; that, artistically speaking, it should have had no more moral than a fairytale. The lesson of course is that of kindness to animals--"He prayethwell who loveth well, " etc. But the punishment of the mariner, and stillmore of the mariner's messmates, is so out of proportion to the gravityof the offence as to be slightly ludicrous when stated by Leslie Stephenthus: "People who approve of the unnecessary killing of an albatross willdie a lingering death by starvation. " The moral, as might be guessed, was foisted upon the poem by Wordsworth, and is identical with that of"Hart-Leap Well. " Wordsworth and Coleridge started to write "The AncientMariner" jointly; and two or three lines in the poem, as it stands, werecontributed by Wordsworth. But he wanted to give the mariner himself"character and profession"; and to have the dead seamen come to life andsail the ship into port; and in other ways laid so heavy a hand uponColeridge's airy creation that it became plain that a partnership onthese terms was out of the question, and Wordsworth withdrew altogether. If we must look for spiritual sustenence in the poem, we shall find itperhaps not so much in any definite warning against cruelty to creatures, as in the sentiment of the blessedness of human companionship and theomnipresence of God's mercy; in the passage, _e. G. _, "O wedding guest! this soul hath been Alone on a wide, wide sea, " etc. --

where the thought is the same as in Cowper's "Soliloquy of AlexanderSelkirk, " even to the detail of the "church-going bell. "

The first part of "Christabel" was written in 1797; the second in 1800;and the poem, in its unfinished state, was given to the press in 1816. Meanwhile it had become widely known in manuscript. Coleridge used toread it to literary circles, and copies of it had got about. We haveseen its influence upon Scott. Byron too admired it greatly, and it wasby his persuasion that Coleridge finally published it as a fragment, finding himself unable to complete it, and feeling doubtless that thepublic regarded him much as the urchins in Keats' poem regarded the crone

 "Who keepeth close a wondrous riddle book, As spectacled she sits in chimney nook. "

"Christabel" is more distinctly mediaeval than "The Ancient Mariner, " andis full of Gothic elements: a moated castle, with its tourney court andits great gate

 . . . "ironed within and without, Where an army in battle array had marched out":

a feudal baron with a retinue of harpers, heralds, and pages; a lady whosteals out at midnight into the moon-lit oak wood, to pray for herbetrothed knight; a sorceress who pretends to have been carried off on awhite palfrey by five armed men, and who puts a spelt upon the maiden. 

If "The Ancient Mariner" is a ballad, "Christabel" is, in form, a _romand'aventures_, or metrical chivalry tale, written in variations of theoctosyllabic couplet. These variations, Coleridge said, were notintroduced wantonly but "in correspondence with some transition, in thenature of the imagery or passion. " A single passage will illustrate this:

 "They passed the hall that echoes still, Pass as lightly as you will. The brands were flat, the brands were dying Amid their own white ashes lying; But when the lady passed, there came A tongue of light, a fit of flame; And Christabel saw the lady's eye, And nothing else saw she thereby, Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall, Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall. O softly tread, said Christabel, My father seldom sleepeth well. "

When, after the hurrying anapaests, the verse returns to the strictiambic measure in the last couplet, the effect is a hush, in harmony withthe meaning of the words. [21]

"Christabel" is not so unique and perfect a thing as "The AncientMariner, " but it has the same haunting charm, and displays the samesubtle art in the use of the supernatural. Coleridge protested that it"pretended to be nothing more than a common fairy tale. " [22] But Lowellasserts that it is "tantalising in the suggestion of deeper meanings thanwere ever there. " There is, in truth, a hint of allegory, like thatwhich baffles and fascinates in Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market"; ahint so elusive that the comparison often made between Geraldine andSpenser's Duessa, is distressing to a reader of sensitive nerves. Thatmystery which is a favourite weapon in the romanticist armoury is usedagain here with consummate skill. What was it that Christabel saw on thelady's bosom? We are left to conjecture. It was "a sight to dream of, not to tell, " [23] and the poet keeps his secret. Lamb, whose taste wasvery fine in these matters, advised Coleridge never to finish the poem. Brandl thinks that the idea was taken from the curtained picture in the"Mysteries of Udolpho"; and he also considers that the generalsituation--the castle, the forest, the old father and his young daughter, and the strange lady--are borrowed from Mrs. Radcliffe's "Romance of theForest"; and that Bürger's "Lenore, " Lewis' "Alonzo, " and some of thePercy ballads contributed a detail here and there. But_Quellenforschungen_ of this kind are very unimportant. It is moreimportant to note the superior art with which the poet excites curiosityand suspends--not simply, like Mrs. Radcliffe, postpones--thegratification of it to the end, and beyond the end, of the poem. WasGeraldine really a witch, or did she only seem so to Christabel? Theangry moan of the mastiff bitch and the tongue of flame that shot up asthe lady passed--were they omens, or accidents which popular superstitioninterprets into omens? Was the malignant influence which Geraldineexerted over the maiden supernatural possession, or the fascination ofterror and repugnance? Did she really utter the words of a charm, or didher sweet bedfellow dream them? And once more, what was that upon herbreast--"that bosom old--that bosom cold"? Was it a wound, or the markof a serpent, or some foul and hideous disfigurement--or was it only theshadows cast by the swinging lamp?

That isolation and remoteness, that preparation of the reader's mind forthe reception of incredible things, which Coleridge secured in "TheAncient Mariner" by cutting off his hero from all human life amid thesolitude of the tropic sea, he here secured--in a less degree, to besure--by the lonely midnight in Sir Leoline's castle. Geraldine and hervictim are the only beings awake except the hooting owls. There is dimmoonlight in the wood, dim firelight in the hall, and in Christabel'schamber "the silver lamp burns dead and dim. "

The second part of the poem was less successful, partly for the reason, as the reviewers pointed out, that it undertakes the hardest of tasks, "witchery by daylight. " But there were other reasons. Three years hadpassed since the poem was begun. Coleridge had been to Germany and hadsettled at Keswick. The poet had been lost in the metaphysician, and hetook up his interrupted task without inspiration, putting force uponhimself. The signs of effort are everywhere visible, and it is painfullymanifest that the poet cannot recover the genial, creative mood in whichhe had set out. In particular it is observable that, while there is nomention of place in the first part, now we have frequent references toWindermere, Borrowdale, Dungeon Ghyll, and other Lake Country localitiesfamiliar enough in Wordsworth's poetry, but strangely out of place in"Christabel. " It was certainly an artistic mistake to transfer SirLeoline's castle from fairyland to Cumberland. [24] There is one noblepassage in the second part, the one which Byron prefixed to his"Farewell" to Lady Byron:

 "Alas! they had been friends in youth, " etc. 

But the stress of personal emotion in these lines is not in harmony withthe romantic context. They are like a patch of cloth of gold let into alace garment and straining the delicate tissue till it tears. 

The example of "The Ancient Mariner, " and in a still greater degree of"Christabel, " was potent upon all subsequent romantic poetry. It is seenin Scott, in Byron, and in Keats, not only in the modelling of theirtales, but in single lines and images. In the first stanza of the "Lay"Scott repeats the line which occurs so often in "Christabel"--"Jesu Mariashield her well!" In the same poem, the passage where the Lady Margaretsteals out of Branksome Tower at dawn to meet her lover in the wood, gliding down the secret stair and passing the bloodhound at the portal, will remind all readers of "Christabel. " The dialogue between the riverand mountain spirits will perhaps remind them of the ghostly antiphonieswhich the "Mariner" hears in his trance. The couplet

 "The seething pitch and molten lead Reeked like a witch's caldron red. "

is, of course, from Coleridge's

 "The water, like a witch's oils, Burned green and blue and white. "

In "The Lord of the Isles" Scott describes the "elvish lustre" and "lividflakes" of the phosphorescence of the sea, and cites, in a note, thedescription, in "The Ancient Mariner, " of the sea snakes from which

 "The elvish light Fell off in hoary flakes. "

The most direct descendant of "Christabel" was "The Eve of St. Agnes. "Madeline's chamber, "hushed, silken, chaste, " recalls inevitably thepassage in the older poem:

 "The moon shines dim in the open air, And not a moonbeam enters here. But they without its light can see The chamber carved so curiously, Carved with figures strange and sweet, All made out of the carver's brain, For a lady's chamber meet: The lamp with twofold silver chain Is fastened to an angel's feet. "

The rest of Coleridge's ballad work is small in quantity and may bedismissed briefly. "Alice du Clos" has good lines, but is unimportant asa whole. The very favourite poem "Love" is a modern story enclosing amediaeval one. In the moonshine by the ruined tower the guilelessGenevieve leans against the statue of an armed man, while her lover singsher a tale of a wandering knight who bore a burning brand upon his shieldand went mad for the love of "The Lady of the Land. " [25]

The fragment entitled "The Dark Ladie" was begun as a "sister tale" to"Love. " The hero is a "knight that wears the griffin for his crest. "There are only fifteen stanzas of it, and it breaks off with a picture ofan imaginary bridal procession, whose "nodding minstrels" recall "TheAncient Mariner, " and incidentally some things of Chatterton's. Lines ofa specifically romantic colouring are of course to be found scatteredabout nearly everywhere in Coleridge; like the musical little song thatfollows the invocation to the soul of Alvar in "Remorse":

 "And at evening evermore, In a chapel on the shore, Shall the chanters sad and saintly-- Yellow tapers burning faintly-- Doleful masses chant for thee, _Miserere Domine_!"

or the wild touch of folk poesy in that marvellous opium dream, "KublaKhan"--the "deep romantic chasm":

 "A savage place, as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover. "

Or the well-known ending of "The Knight's Grave":

 "The knight's bones are dust, And his good sword rust; His soul is with the saints, I trust. "

In taking account of Coleridge's services to the cause of romanticism, his critical writings should not be overlooked. Matthew Arnold declaredthat there was something premature about the burst of creative activityin English literature at the opening of the nineteenth century, andregretted that the way had not been prepared, as in Germany, by acritical movement. It is true that the English romantics put forth nobody of doctrine, no authoritative statement of a theory of literary art. Scott did not pose as the leader of a school, or compose prefaces andlectures like Hugo and Schlegel. [26] As a contributor to the reviews onhis favourite topics, he was no despicable critic; shrewd, good-natured, full of special knowledge, anecdote, and illustration. But his criticismwas never polemic, and he had no quarrel with the classics. He cherishedan unfeigned admiration for Dryden, whose life he wrote and whose workshe edited. Doubtless he would cheerfully have admitted the inferiorityof his own poetry to Dryden's and Pope's. He had no programme toannounce, but just went ahead writing romances; in practice an innovator, but in theory a literary conservative. 

Coleridge, however, was fully aware of the scope of the new movement. Herepresented, theoretically as well as practically, the reaction againsteighteenth-century academicism, the Popean tradition[27] in poetry, andthe maxims of pseudo-classical criticism. In his analysis andvindication of the principles of romantic art, he brought to bear aphilosophic depth and subtlety such as had never before been applied inEngland to a merely belletristic subject. He revolutionised, for onething, the critical view of Shakspere, devoting several lecture coursesto the exposition of the thesis that "Shakspere's judgment wascommensurate with his genius. " These lectures borrowed a number ofpassages from A. W. Von Schlegel's "Vorlesungen über Dramatische Kunstund Litteratur, " delivered at Vienna in 1808, but engrafted with originalmatter of the highest value. Compared with these Shakspere notes, withthe chapters on Wordsworth in the "Biographia Literaria, " and with the_obiter dicta_, sown through Coleridge's prose, all previous Englishcriticism appears crude and superficial, and the contemporary squabbleover Pope like a scolding match in the nursery. 

Coleridge's acute and sympathetic insight into the principles ofShaksperian drama did not save him from producing his abortive "Zapolya"in avowed imitation of the "Winter's Tale. " What curse is on the Englishstage that men who have done work of the highest grade in otherdepartments, as soon as they essay playwriting, become capable offailures like "The Borderers" and "John Woodville" and "Manfred" and"Zapolya"? As for "Remorse, " with its Moorish sea-coasts, wildmountains, chapel interiors with painted windows, torchlight andmoonlight, dripping caverns, dungeons, daggers and poisoned goblets, thebest that can be said of it is that it is less bad than "Zapolya. " Andof both it may be said that they are romantic not after the fashion ofShakspere, but of those very German melodramas which Coleridge ridiculedin his "Critique on Bertram. " [28]

[1] For Coleridge's relations with German romance, see vol. I. , pp. 419-21. For his early interest in Percy, Ossian, and Chatterton, ibid. , pp. 299, 328, 368-70. 

[2] "There is as much difference between Coleridge's brief poem'Christabel' and all the narrative poems of Walter Scott . . . As betweena precious essence and a coarse imitation of it got up for sale. " (LeighHunt's "Autobiography, " p. 197). 

[3] "Samuel Taylor Coleridge und die Englische Romantik, " Alois Brandl, Berlin, 1886. 

[4] It is in view of his critical attitude, not of his poetry, thatSaintsbury applies this title to Coleridge. "The attitude was that of amediaevalism inspired by much later learning, but still more by thatintermediate or decadent Greek philosophy which had so much influence onthe Middle Ages themselves. This is, in other words, the Romanticattitude, and Coleridge was the high priest of Romanticism, which, through Scott and Byron, he taught to Europe, repreaching it even toGermany, from which it had partly come. " ("A Short History of EnglishLiterature, " by George Saintsbury, London, 1898, p. 656). 

[5] "Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School, " by AloisBrandl. Lady Eastlake's translation, London, 1887, pp. 219-23. 

[6] See vol. I. , pp. 160-61. 

[7] "Fourteen Sonnets, written chiefly on Picturesque Spots. " Bath, 1789. 

[8] "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, " p. 37. _Cf. _ Wordsworth's Sonnets "UponWestminster Bridge" (1802) and "Scorn Not the Sonnet. "

[9] _Cf. _ vol. I. , p. 182. 

[10] See Sonnet xvii. , "On Revisiting Oxford. "

See also Sonnet xi. , "At Ostend:"

 "The mournful magic of their mingled chimes First waked my wondrous childhood into tears. "

And _Cf. _ Francis Mahony's "The Bells of Shandon"--

 "Whose sounds so wild would, in the days of childhood, Fling round my cradle their magic spells. "

And Moore's "Those Evening Bells. " The twang of the wind-harp alsoresounds through Bowles' Sonnets. See for the Aeolus' harp, vol. I. , p. 165. And _Cf. _ Coleridge's poem, "The Eolian Harp. "

[11] "Dejection: An Ode" (1802). 

[12] SONNET XX. 

 _November, 1792_. 

 "There is strange music in the stirring wind When lowers the autumnal eve, and all alone To the dark wood's cold covert thou art gone Whose ancient trees, on the rough slope reclined, Rock, and at times scatter their tresses sear. If in such shades, beneath their murmuring, Thou late hast passed the happier hours of spring, With sadness thou wilt mark the fading year; Chiefly if one with whom such sweets at morn Or eve thou'st shared, to distant scenes shall stray. O Spring, return! return, auspicious May! But sad will be thy coming, and forlorn, If she return not with thy cheering ray, Who from these shades is gone, gone far away. "

[13] _Cf. _ Scott's "Harp of the North, that mouldering long hast hung, "etc. "Lady of the Lake, " Canto I. 

[14] "Shall gentle Coleridge pass unnoticed here, To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear?" --"English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. "

[15] No. Xxix. , August, 1819, "Remarks on Don Juan. "

[16] "Time was, ere yet in these degenerate days Ignoble themes obtained mistaken praise. When sense and wit with poesy allied, No fabled graces, nourished side by side. . . . Then, in this happy isle, a Pope's pure strain Sought the rapt soul to charm, nor sought in vain; A polished nation's praise aspired to claim, And raised the people's, as the poet's fame. . . . [But] Milton, Dryden, Pope, alike forgot, Resign their hallowed bays to Walter Scott. " --"English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. "

[17] For the benefit of any reader who may wish to follow up the steps ofthe Pope controversy, I give the titles of Bowles' successive pamphlets. "The Invariable Principles of Poetry: A Letter to Thomas Campbell, Esq. , "1819. "A Reply to an 'Unsentimental Sort of Critic, '" Bath, 1820. [Thiswas in answer to a review of "Spence's Anecdotes" in the _Quarterly_ inOctober, 1820. ] "A Vindication of the Late Editor of Pope's Works, "London, 1821, second edition. [This was also a reply to the _Quarterly_reviewer and to Gilchrist's letters in the _London Magazine_, and wasfirst printed in vol. Xvii. , Nos. 33, 34, and 35 of the _Pamphleteer_. ]"An Answer to Some Observations of Thomas Campbell, Esq. , in hisSpecimens of British Poets" (1822). "An Address to Thomas Campbell, Esq. , Editor of the _New Monthly Magazine_, in Consequence of an Articlein that Publication" (1822). "Letters to Lord Byron on a Question ofPoetical Criticism, " London, 1822. "A Final Appeal to the LiteraryPublic Relative to Pope, in Reply to Certain Observations of Mr. Roscoe, "London, 1823. "Lessons in Criticism to William Roscoe, Esq. , withFurther Lessons in Criticism to a Quarterly Reviewer, " London, 1826. Gilchrist's three letters to Bowles were published in 1820-21. M'Dermot's "Letter to the Rev. W. L. Bowles in Reply to His Letter toThomas Campbell, Esq. , and to His Two Letters to Lord Byron, " was printedat London, in 1822. 

[18] "With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, We could not laugh nor wail, " etc. 

 "With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, Agape they heard me call, " etc. 

 "Are those her sails that glance in the sun Like restless gossamers? Are those her ribs, " etc. 

_Cf. _ "Christabel":

 "Is the night chilly and dark? The night is chilly, but not dark. "

And see vol. I. , p. 271. 

[19] "Anima Poetae, " 1895, p. 5. This recent collection of marginaliahas an equal interest with Coleridge's well-known "Table Talk. " It isthe English equivalent of Hawthorne's "American Note Books, " full ofanalogies, images, and reflections--topics and suggestions for possibledevelopment in future romances and poems. In particular it shows anabiding prepossession with the psychology of dreams, apparitions, andmental illusions of all sorts. 

[20] "Jesu Crist and Seint Benedight Blisse this hous from every wicked wight, Fro the nightes mare, the white Pater Noster; Where wonest thou, Seint Peter's suster. " --"The Miller's Tale. "

[21] _Vide supra_, p. 27. 

[22] "Biographia Literaria, " chap. Xxiv. 

[23] Keats quotes this line in a letter about Edmund Kean. Forman's ed. , vol. Iii. , p. 4. 

[24] _Vide supra_, p. 14. 

[25] Brandl thinks that this furnished Keats with a hint or two for his"Belle Dame sans Merci. " Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" is headed witha stanza from "the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence. "

[26] "The English Romantic critics did not form a school. Likeeverything else in the English Romantic movement, its criticism wasindividual, isolated, sporadic, unsystematised. It had no officialmouthpiece, like Sainte-Beuve and the _Globe_; its members formed nocompact phalanx like that which, towards the close of our period, threwitself upon the 'classiques' of Paris. Nor did they, with the oneexception of Coleridge, approach the Romantic critics of Germany in rangeof ideas, in grasp of the larger significance of their own movement. Itwas only in Germany that the ideas implicit in the great poetic revivalwere explicitly thought out in all their many-sided bearing upon society, history, philosophy, religion; and that the problem of criticism, inparticular, was presented in its full depth and richness ofmeaning. . . . As English Romanticism achieved greater things on itscreative than on its critical side, so its criticism was more remarkableon that side which is akin to creation--in the subtle appreciation ofliterary quality--than in the analysis of the principles on which itsappreciation was founded. " (C. H. Herford: "The Age of Wordsworth, " p. 50). 

[27] See "Biographia Literaria. " chap. I. "From the common opinion thatthe English style attained its greatest perfection in and about QueenAnne's reign, I altogether dissent. " (Lecture "On Style, " March 13, 1818). 

[28] See vol. I. , p. 421 ff. 

CHAPTER III. 

Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the Dante Revival. 

In the interchange of literary wares between England and Germany duringthe last years of the eighteenth century, it is observable that theEnglish romantics went no further back than to their own contemporariesfor their knowledge of the _Deutsche Vergangenheit_. They translated orimitated robber tragedies, chivalry tales, and ghost ballads from themodern restorers of the Teutonic _Mittelalter_; but they made no draughtsupon the original storehouse of German mediaeval poetry. There was nosuch reciprocity as yet between England and the Latin countries. Frenchromanticism dates, at the earliest, from Chateaubriand's "Genie duChristianisme" (1802), and hardly made itself felt as a definite force, even in France, before Victor Hugo's "Cromwell" (1828). But in the firstquarter of the nineteenth century, Italy, Spain, and France began tocontribute material to the English movement in the shape of translationslike Cary's "Divine Comedy" (1814), Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads" (1824);Southey's "Amadis of Gaul" (1803), "Palmerin of England" (1807), and "TheChronicle of the Cid" (1808); and Rose's[1] "Partenopex of Blois" (1807). By far the most influential of these was Cary's "Dante. "

Hitherto the Italian Middle Age had impressed itself upon the Englishimagination not directly but through the richly composite art of theRenaissance schools of painting and poetry; through Raphael and hisfollowers; through the romances of Ariosto and Tasso and their Englishscholar, Spenser. Elizabethan England had been supplied with versions ofthe "Orlando Furioso" [2] and the "Gierusalemme Liberata, " by Harringtonand Fairfax--the latter still a standard translation and a veryaccomplished piece of versification. Warton and Hurd and otherromanticising critics of the eighteenth century were perpetuallyupholding Ariosto and Tasso against French detraction:

 "In face of all his foes, the Cruscan quire, And Boileau, whose rash envy could allow No strain which shamed his country's creaking lyre, That whetstone of the teeth--monotony in wire!" [3]

Scott's eager championship of Ariosto has already been mentioned. [4] Butthe stuff of the old Charlemagne epos is sophisticated in the brilliantpages of Ariosto, who follows Pulci and Boiardo, if not in burlesquingchivalry outright, yet in treating it with a half irony. Tasso isserious, but submits his romantic matter--Godfrey of Boulogne and theFirst Crusade--to the classical epic mould. It was pollen from Italy, but not Italy of the Middle Ages, that fructified English poetry in thesixteenth century. Two indeed of _gli antichi_, "the all Etruscanthree, " communicated an impulse both earlier and later. Lovesonneteering, in emulation of Petrarca, began at Henry VIII. 's court. Chaucer took the substance of "Troilus and Creseyde" and "The KnightesTale" from Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and "Teseide"; and Dryden, who nevermentions Dante, versified three stories from the "Decameron. " ButPetrarch and Boccaccio were not mediaeval minds. They represent theearlier stages of humanism and the new learning. Dante was the genuine_homme du moyen âge_, and Dante was the latest of the great revivals. "Dante, " says Carlyle, "was the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the thoughtthey lived by stands here in everlasting music. "

The difficulty, not to say obscurity, of the "Divine Comedy"; itsallusive, elliptical style; its scholasticism and allegorical method; itsmultitudinous references to local politics and the history ofthirteenth-century Italy, defied approach. Above all, its profound, austere, mystical spirituality was abhorrent to the clear, shallowrationalism of the eighteenth century, as well as to the religiousliberalism of the seventeenth and the joyous sensuality of the sixteenth. Goethe the pagan disliked Dante, no less than Scott the Protestant. [5]In particular, deistic France, _arbiter elegantiarum_, felt with a shiverof repulsion, "How grim the master was of Tuscan song. "

"I estimate highly, " wrote Voltaire to an Italian correspondent, "thecourage with which you have dared to say that Dante was a madman[6] andhis work a monster. . . . There are found among us and in the eighteenthcentury, people who strive to admire imaginations so stupid andbarbarous. " A French translation of the "Divine Comedy" had been printedby the Abbé Grangier[7] at Paris in 1596; but Rivarol, whose "Inferno"was published in 1783, was the first Frenchman, says Lowell, to divineDante's greatness. The earliest German version was Bachenschwanz's prosetranslation of the "Commedia" (Leipsic, 1767-69), [8] but the Germanromantic school were the first to furnish a sympathetic interpretation ofDante to their countrymen. 

Chaucer was well acquainted with the work of "the grete poet ofFlorence, " and drew upon him occasionally, though by no means so freelyas upon Boccaccio. Thus in "The Monkes Tale" he re-tells, in a veryinferior fashion, the tragedy of Ugolino. In "The Parliament of Foules"and "The Hous of Fame" there are distinct imitations of Dante. A passagefrom the "Purgatory" is quoted in the "Wif of Bathes Tale, " etc. Spenserprobably, and Milton certainly, knew their Dante. Milton's sonnet toHenry Lawes mentions Dante's encounter with the musician Casella "in themilder shades of Purgatory. " Here and there a reference to the "DivineComedy" occurs in some seventeenth-century English prose writer like SirThomas Browne or Jeremy Taylor. It is thought that the description ofHell in Sackville's "Mirror for Magistrates" shows an acquaintance withthe "Inferno. " But Dante had few readers in England before thenineteenth century. He was practically unknown there and in all ofEurope outside of Italy. "His reputation, " said Voltaire, "will go onincreasing because scarce anybody reads him. " And half a century laterNapoleon said the same thing in the same words: "His fame is increasingand will continue to increase because no one ever reads him. "

In the third volume of his "History of English Poetry" (1781), ThomasWarton had spoken of the "Divine Comedy" as "this wonderful compound ofclassical and romantic fancy, of pagan and Christian theology, of realand fictitious history, of tragical and comic incidents, of familiar andheroic manners, and of satirical and sublime poetry. But the grossestimproprieties of this poem discover an originality of invention, and itsabsurdities often border on sublimity. We are surprised that a poetshould write one hundred cantos on hell, paradise, and purgatory. Butthis prolixity is partly owing to the want of art and method, and iscommon to all early compositions, in which everything is relatedcircumstantially and without rejection, and not in those general termswhich are used by modern writers. " Warton is shocked at Dante's"disgusting fooleries" and censures his departure from Virgilian grace. Milton "avoided the childish or ludicrous excesses of these boldinventions . . . But rude and early poets describe everything. " ButWarton felt Dante's greatness. "Hell, " he wrote, "grows darker at hisfrown. " He singled out for special mention the Francesca and Ugolinoepisodes. 

If Warton could write thus it is not surprising to discover amongclassical critics either a total silence as to Dante, or else asystematic depreciation. Addison does not mention him in his Italiantravels; and in his "Saturday papers" misses the very obvious chance fora comparison between Dante and Milton such as Macaulay afterwardselaborated in his essay on Milton. Goldsmith, who knew nothing of Danteat first hand, wrote of him with the usual patronising ignorance ofeighteenth-century criticism as to anything outside of the Greek andLatin classics: "He addressed a barbarous people in a method suited totheir apprehension, united purgatory and the river Styx, St. Paul andVirgil, heaven and hell together; and shows a strange mixture of goodsense and absurdity. The truth is, he owes most of his reputation to theobscurity of the times in which he lived. " [1]

In 1782, William Hayley, the biographer of Cowper and author of that verymild poem "The Triumphs of Temper, " published a verse "Essay on EpicPoetry" in five epistles. In his notes to the third epistle, he gave anoutline of Dante's life with a translation of his sonnet to GuidoCavalcanti and of the first three cantos of the "Inferno. " "Voltaire, "he says, has spoken of Dante "with that precipitate vivacity which sofrequently led the lively Frenchman to insult the reputation of thenoblest writers. " He refers to the "judicious and spirited summary" ofthe "Divine Comedy" in Warton, and adds, "We have several versions of thecelebrated story of Ugolino; but I believe no entire canto of Dante hashitherto appeared in our language. . . . The author has been solicitedto execute an entire translation of Dante, but the extreme inequality ofthis poet would render such a work a very laborious undertaking; and itappears very doubtful how far such a version would interest our country. Perhaps the reception of these cantos may discover to the translator thesentiments of the public. " Hayley adopted "triple rhyme, " _i. E. _, the_terza rima_, and said that he did not recollect it had ever been usedbefore in English. His translation is by no means contemptible--muchbetter than Boyd's, --but fails entirely to catch Dante's manner or tokeep the strange precision and picturesqueness of his phrase. Thus herenders

 "Chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco, "

 "Whose voice was like the whisper of a lute";

and the poet is made to address Beatrice--O donna di virtu--as "brightfair, " as if she were one of the belles in "The Rape of the Lock. " Inthis same year a version of the "Inferno" was printed privately andanonymously by Charles Rogers, a book and art collector and a friend ofSir Joshua Reynolds. But the first complete translation of the "Comedy"into English was made by Henry Boyd, a clergyman of the Irish Church; the"Inferno" in 1785 (with a specimen from Ariosto); the whole in 1802. Boyd was a quite obscure person, author among other things of aSpenserian poem entitled "The Woodman's Tale, " and his translationattracted little notice. In his introduction he compares Dante withHomer, and complains that "the venerable old bard . . . Has been longneglected"; perhaps, he suggests, because his poem could not be tried byAristotle's rules or submitted to the usual classical tests. 

"Since the French, the restorers of the art of criticism, cast a dampupon original invention, the character of Dante has been thrown under adeeper shade. That agreeable and volatile nation found in themselves aninsuperable aversion to the gloomy and romantic bard, whose genius, ardent, melancholy, and sublime, was so different from their own. "

Boyd used a six-lined stanza, a singularly ill chosen medium forrendering the _terza rima_; and his diction was as wordy and vague asDante's is concise and sharp of edge. A single passage will illustratehis manner:

 "So full the symphony of grief arose, My heart, responsive to the lovers' woes, With thrilling sympathy convulsed my breast. Too strong at last for life my passion grew, And, sickening at the lamentable view, I fell like one by mortal pangs oppressed. " [10]

The first opportunity which the mere English reader had to form any realnotion of Dante, was afforded by Henry Francis Cary's translation inblank verse (the "Inferno, " with the Italian text in 1805; the entire"Commedia" in 1814, with the title "The Vision of Hell, Purgatory, andParadise"). This was a work of talent, if not of genius; and in spite ofthe numerous versions in prose and verse that have since appeared, itcontinues the most current and standard Dante in England, if not inAmerica, where Longfellow naturally challenges precedence. The publicwas as yet so unprepared to appreciate Dante that Cary's work receivedlittle attention until brought into notice by Coleridge; and thetranslator was deeply chagrined by the indifference, not to sayhostility, with which his labours were acknowledged. In the memoir[11]of Cary by his son there is a letter from Anne Seward--the Swan ofLichfield--which throws a singular light upon the critical taste of the"snug coterie and literary lady" of the period. She writes: "How can youprofess to be charmed with the few faint outlines of landscape paintingin Dante, who are blind to the beautiful, distinct, and profuse sceneryin the pages of Ossian?" She goes on to complain that the poem, in itsEnglish dress, is vulgar and obscure. 

Coleridge devoted to Dante a part of his series of lectures given atLondon in 1818, reading copious selections from Cary's version. Thetranslator had claimed, in his introduction, that the Florentine poet"leaves to Homer and Shakespeare alone the power of challenging thepreeminence or equality. " Coleridge emphasized the "endless, subtlebeauties of Dante"; the vividness, logical connection, strength, andenergy of his style. In this he pronounced him superior to Milton; andin picturesqueness he affirmed that he surpassed all other poets ancientor modern. With characteristic penetration he indicated the preciseposition of Dante in mediaeval literature; his poetry is "the linkbetween religion and philosophy"; it is "christianized, but without thefurther Gothic accession of proper chivalry"; it has that "inwardnesswhich . . . Distinguishes all the classic from all the modern poetry. "It was perhaps in consequence of Coleridge's praise that Cary'stranslation went into its second edition in 1819, the year following thislecture course. A third was published in 1831. Italians used tocomplain that the foreign reader's knowledge of the "Divine Comedy" waslimited to the "Inferno, " and generally to the Ugolino and Francescapassages. Coleridge's quotations are all from the "Inferno, " and Lowellthinks that he had not read beyond it. He testified that the Ugolino andFrancesca stories were already "so well known and admired that it wouldbe pedantry to analyse them. " Sir Joshua Reynolds had made a painting ofthe former subject. In 1800 William Blake produced a series of sevenengravings in illustration of the "Inferno. " In 1817 Flaxman began hisillustrations of the whole "Commedia, " extending to a hundred plates. [12]

In 1819-20 Byron was living at Ravenna, the place of Dante's death andburial[13] and of the last years of his exile. He used to ride for hourstogether through Ravenna's "immemorial wood, " [14] and the associationsof the scene prompted him to put into English (March, 1820) the Francescaepisode, that "thing woven as out of rainbows on a ground of eternalblack. " In the letter to Murray, sent with his translation, he wrote:"Enclosed you will find, line for line, in third rhyme (_terza rima_), ofwhich your British blackguard reader as yet understands nothing, Fanny ofRimini. You know that she was born here, and married and slain, fromCary, Boyd, and such people. " In his diary, Byron commented scornfullyon Frederick Schlegel's assertions that Dante had never been a favouritewith his own countrymen; and that his main defect was a want of gentlefeelings. "_Not_ a favourite! Why they talk Dante--write Dante--andthink and dream Dante at this moment (1821) to an excess which would beridiculous, but that he deserves it. . . . Of gentle feelings!--andFrancesca of Rimini--and the father's feelings in Ugolino--andBeatrice--and 'La Pia'! Why there is a gentleness in Dante beyond allgentleness. " Byron had not the patience to be a good translator. Hisrendering is closer and, of course, more spirited than Hayley's; butwhere long search for the right word was needed, and a delicate shadingof phrase to reproduce without loss the meaning of this most meaning andleast translatable of masters, Byron's work shows haste and imperfection. 

 "Love, who to none beloved to love again Remits. "

is neither an idiomatic nor in any way an adequate englishing of

 "Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona. "

Nor does

 "_Accursed_ was the book and he who wrote, "

fully give the force of the famous

 "Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse. " [15]

The year before Byron had composed "The Prophecy of Dante, " an originalpoem in four cantos, in _terza rima_, ". . . Imitative rhyme, Harsh Runic copy of the Soutb's sublime. " [16]

The poem foretells "the fortunes of Italy in the ensuing centuries, " andis a rheotorical piece, diffuse and declamatory, and therein quite theopposite of Dante. It manifests Byron's self-conscious habit ofsubmitting his theme to himself, instead of losing himself in his theme. _He_ is Dante in exile, and Gemma Donati is Lady Byron--

 "That fatal she, Their mother, the cold partner who hath brought Destruction for a dowry--this to see And feel and know without repair, hath taught A bitter lesson; but it leaves me free: I have not vilely found nor basely sought, They made an exile not a slave of me. "

Dante's bitter and proud defiance found a response in Byron's nature, buthis spirit, as a whole, the English poet was not well fitted tointerpret. In the preface to "The Prophecy, " Byron said that he had notseen the _terza rima_ tried before in English, except by Hayley, whosetranslation he knew only from an extract in the notes to Beckford's"Vathek. "

Shelley's knowledge and appreciation of Dante might be proved fromisolated images and expressions in many parts of his writings. Hetranslated the sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti with greater freedom andelegance than Hayley, and wrote a short copy of verses on the HungerTower at Pisa, the scene of Ugolino's sufferings. In the preface to"Epipsychidion" he cites the "Vita Nuova" as the utterance of anidealised and spiritualised love like that which his own poem records. In the "Defence of Poetry" he pays a glowing tribute to Dante as thesecond of epic poets and "the first awakener of entranced Europe. " Hispoetry is the bridge "which unites the modern and the ancient world. "Contrary to the prevailing critical tradition, Shelley preferred the"Purgatory" and the "Paradise" to the "Hell. " Shelley also employed_terza rima_ in his fragmentary pieces, "Prince Athanase, " "The Triumphof Life, " "The Woodman and the Nightingale, " and in one of his bestlyrics, the "Ode to the West Wind, " [17] written in 1819 "in a wood thatskirts the Arno, near Florence. " This linked measure, so difficult forthe translator and which gives a hampered movement to Byron's andHayley's specimens of the "Inferno, " Shelley may be said to have reallydomesticated in English verse by his splendid handling of it in originalwork:

 "Make me thy lyre even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling, like its own? The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!"

Shelley expressed to Medwin his dissatisfaction with all Englishrenderings from Dante--even with Cary--and announced his intention, ordesire, to translate the whole of the "Divine Comedy" in _terza rima_. Two specimens of this projected version he gave in "Ugolino, " and"Matilda Gathering Flowers" ("Purg. , " xxviii. , 1-51). He also made atranslation of the first canzone of the "Convito. "

After the appearance of Cary's version, critical comprehension of Dantegrew rapidly. In the same year when Coleridge gave his lectures, Hallampublished his "Middle Ages, " which contained a just though somewhatcoldly worded estimate of the great Italian. This was amplified in hislater work, "The Literature of Europe" (1838-39). Hallam said that Dantewas the first name in the literature of the Middle Ages, the creator ofhis nation's poetry, and the most original of all writers, and the mostconcise. But he blamed him for obscurity, forced and unnatural turns ofexpression, and barbarous licenses of idiom. The "Paradise" seemed tohim tedious, as a whole, and much of the "Purgatory" heavy. Hallamrepeated, if he did not originate that nice bit of discernment, that inhis "Paradise" Dante uses only three leading ideas--light, music, andmotion. Then came Macaulay's essay "Milton, " in the _Edinburgh_ for1825, with the celebrated parallel between the "Divine Comedy" and the"Paradise Lost, " and the contrast between Dante's "picturesque" andMilton's "imaginative" method. Macaulay's analysis has been questionedby Ruskin and others; some of his positions were perhaps mistaken, butthey were the most advanced that English Dante criticism had as yet takenup. And finally came Carlyle's vivid piece of portrait painting in "HeroWorship" (1841). The first literal prose translation of any extent fromthe "Commedia" was the "Inferno" by Carlyle's brother John (1849). 

Since the middle of the century Dante study and Dante literature inEnglish-speaking lands have waxed enormously. Dante societies have beenfounded in England and America. Almost every year sees another edition, a new commentary or a fresh translation in prose, in blank verse, in_terza rima_, or in some form of stanza. It is not exaggerating to saythat there is more public mention of Dante now in a single year than inall the years of the eighteenth century together. It would beinteresting, if it were possible, to count the times that Dante's nameoccurs in English writings of the eighteenth and then of the nineteenthcentury; afterwards to do the same with Ariosto and Tasso and compare theresults. It would be found that, while the eighteenth century set novery high value on Ariosto and Tasso, it ignored Dante altogether; andthat the nineteenth has put aside the superficial mediaevalism of theRenaissance romancers and gone back to the great religious romancer ofthe Italian Middle Age. There is no surer plummet than Dante's to soundthe spiritual depth of a time. It is in the nineteenth century firstthat Shakspere and Dante took possession of the European mind. In 1800Shakspere was an English, or at most an English and German poet, andDante exclusively an Italian. In 1900 they had both become world poets. Shakspere's foreign conquests were the earlier and are still the wider, as wide perhaps as the expanse--

 "That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne. "

But the ground that Dante has won he holds with equal secureness. Notthat he will ever be popular, in Shakspere's way; and yet it is far gonewhen the aesthete in a comic opera is described as a "Francesca da Riminiyoung man. "

As a stimulus to creative work the influence of Dante, though notentirely absent, is not conspicuous in the first half of the century. Itis not until the time of the Rossettis in England and of Longfellow andDr. Parsons in America that any poetry of a really Dantesque inspirationand, at the same time, of high original value was added to ourliterature. [18]

The first fruits of the Dante revival in England, in the shape oforiginal production, was Leigh Hunt's "Story of Rimini" (1816)--"Mr. Hunt's smutty story of Rimini, " as the Tory wits of _Blackwood_ were fondof calling it in their onslaughts upon the Cockney school. This was aromaunt in four cantos upon the already familiar episode of Francesca, that "lily in the mouth of Tartarus. " Hunt took Dryden's "Fables" as hismodel in versification, employing the heroic couplet with the frequentvariation of the triplet and the alexandrine. The poem is not at allDantesque in its lax and fluent sweetness, and in that colloquial, familiar manner which is constant in all Hunt's writing, both prose andverse; reminding one, at its best, of Chaucer, who was, indeed, one ofhis favourite masters. Hunt softens the ferocity of the tale as given byBoccaccio, according to whom the husband Giovanni Malatesta was acripple, and killed the lovers _in flagrante delicto_. Hunt makes him apersonable man, though of proud and gloomy temper. He slays his brotherPaolo in chivalrous fashion and in single combat, and Francesca dies of abroken heart. The descriptive portions of the "Story of Rimini" arecharming: the feudal procession with trumpeters, heralds, squires, andknights, sent to escort home the bride, the pine forest outside Ravenna, and the garden at Rimini in which the lovers used to meet--

 "Places of nestling green for poets made. "

Hunt had a quick eye for colour; a fondness, not altogether free fromaffectation, for dainty phrases; and a feminine love of little nicetiesin dress, tapestry, needlework, and furnishings. The poem was writtenmostly in prison where its author spent two years for a libel on thePrince Regent. Byron used to visit him there and bring him books bearingon Francesca's history. Hunt brought into the piece romantic stuff fromvarious sources, including a summary of the book which betrayed thelovers to their fatal passion, the romance of "Lancelot du Lac. " AndGiovanni speaks to his dying brother a paraphrase of the celebratedeulogy pronounced over Lancelot by Sir Ector in the "Morte Darthur":

 "And, Paulo, thou wert the completest knight That ever rode with banner to the fight; And thou wert the most beautiful to see, That ever came in press of chivalry: And of a sinful man thou wert the best That ever for his friend put spear in rest; And thou wert the most meek and cordial That ever among ladies eat in hall; And thou wert still, for all that bosom gored, The kindest man that ever struck with sword. "

Hunt makes the husband discover his wife's infidelity by overhearing hertalking in her sleep. In many other particulars he enfeebles, dandifies, and sentimentalises Dante's fierce, abrupt tragedy; holding the reader bythe button while he prattles in his garrulous way of Paulo's "taste"--

 "The very nose, lightly yet firmly wrought, Showed taste"--

and of

 "The two divinest things in earthly lot, A lovely woman in a rural spot!"

a couplet which irresistibly suggests suburban picnics. 

Yet no one in his generation did more than Leigh Hunt to familiarise theEnglish public with Italian romance. He began the study of Italian whenhe was a schoolboy at Christ Hospital, being attracted to Ariosto by apicture of Angelica and Medoro, in West's studio. Like his friend Keats, on whose "Eve of St. Agnes" he wrote an enthusiastic commentary, [19] Huntwas eclectic in his choice of material, drawing inspiration impartiallyfrom the classics and the romantics; but, like Keats, he became early adeclared rebel against eighteenth-century traditions and asserted impulseagainst rule. "In antiquarian corners, " he says, in writing of theinfluences of his childish days, "Percy's 'Reliques' were preparing anobler age both in poetry and prose. " At school he fell passionately inlove with Collins and Gray, composed a "Winter" in imitation of Thomson, one hundred stanzas of a "Fairy King" in emulation of Spenser, and a longpoem in Latin inspired by Gray's odes and Malet's "Northern Antiquities. "In 1802 [aetate 18] he published a volume of these _juvenilia_--odesafter Collins and Gray, blank verse after Thomson and Akenside, and a"Palace of Pleasure" after Spenser's "Bower of Bliss. " [20] It was inthis same year that on a visit to Oxford, he was introduced to Kett, theprofessor of poetry, who expressed a hope that the youthful bard might beinspired by "the muse of Warton, " whom Hunt had never read. There hadfallen in Hunt's way when he was a young man, Bell's edition of thepoets, which included Chaucer and Spenser. "The omission of these inCooke's edition, " he says, "was as unpoetical a sign of the times as thepresent familiarity with their names is the reverse. It was thought amark of good sense; as if good sense, in matters of literature, did notconsist as much in knowing what was poetical poetry, as brilliant wit. "Of his "Feast of the Poets" (1814) he writes:[21] "I offended all thecritics of the old or French school, by objecting to the monotony ofPope's versification, and all the critics of the new or German school bylaughing at Wordsworth. " In the preface to his collected poems [1832]occurs the following interesting testimony to the recentness of the newcriticism. "So long does fashion succeed in palming its petty instinctsupon the world for those of a nation and of nature, that it is only oflate years that the French have ceased to think some of the mostaffecting passages in Shakespeare ridiculous. . . . Yet the Englishthemselves, no great while since, half blushed at these criticisms, andwere content if the epithet 'bizarre' ('_votre bizarre Shakespeare_') wasallowed to be translated into 'a wild, irregular genius. ' Everything waswild and irregular except rhymesters in toupees. A petty conspiracy ofdecorums took the place of what was becoming to humanity. " In the summerof 1822 Hunt went by sailing vessel through the Mediterranean to Italy. The books which he read chiefly on board ship were "Don Quixote, "Ariosto, and Berni; and his diary records the emotion with which hecoasted the western shores of Spain, the ground of Italian romance, wherethe Paynim chivalry used to land to go against Charlemagne: the scene ofBoiardo's "Orlando Inamorato" and Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso. " "Iconfess I looked at these shores with a human interest, and could nothelp feeling that the keel of our vessel was crossing a real line, overwhich knights and lovers had passed. And so they have, both real andfabulous; the former not less romantic, the latter scarcely lessreal. . . . Fair speed your sails over the lucid waters, ye lovers, on alover-like sea! Fair speed them, yet never land; for where the poet hasleft you, there ought ye, as ye are, to be living forever--forevergliding about a summer sea, touching at its flowery islands and reposingbeneath its moon. "

Hunt's sojourn in Italy, where he lived in close association with Byronand Shelley, enabled him to _préciser_ his knowledge of the Italianlanguage and literature. In 1846 he published a volume of "Stories fromthe Italian Poets, " containing a summary or free paraphrase in prose ofthe "Divine Comedy" and the poems of Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, "with comments throughout, occasional passages versified and criticalnotices of the lives and genius of the authors. " Like our ownromanticist poet Longfellow, who rediscovered Europe for America, LeighHunt was a sympathetic and interpretative rather than a creative genius;and like Longfellow, an admirable translator. Among his collected poemsare a number of elegant and spirited versions from various mediaevalliteratures. "The Gentle Armour" is a playful adaptation of a Frenchfabliau "Les Trois Chevaliers et la Chemise, " which tells of a knightwhose hard-hearted lady set him the task of fighting his two rivals inthe lists, armed only in her smock; and, in contrition for this harshimposure, went to the altar with her faithful champion, wearing only thesame bloody sark as her bridal garment. At least this is the pretty turnwhich Hunt gave to the story. In the original it had a coarser ending. There are also, among these translations from mediaeval sources, theLatin drinking song attributed to Walter Map--

 Mihi est propositum in taberna mori--

and Andrea de Basso's terrible "Ode to a Dead Body, " in fifteenth-centuryItalian; which utters, with extraordinary power, the ascetic thought ofthe Middle Age, dwelling with a kind of gloomy exultation on the foulnessof the human frame in decay. 

In the preface to his "Italian Poets, " Hunt speaks of "how widely Dantehas re-attracted of late the attention of the world. " He pronounces him"the greatest poet for intensity that ever lived, " and complains that hismetrical translators have failed to render his "passionate, practical, and creative style--a style which may be said to write things instead ofwords. " Hunt's introduction is a fine piece of critical work. Hisalert, sparkling, and nimble intellect--somewhat lacking in concentrationand seriousness--but sensitive above all things to the picturesque, waskeenly awake to Dante's poetic greatness. On the other hand, hischeerful philosophy and tolerant, not to say easy-going moral nature, wasshocked by the Florentine's bitter pride, and by what he conceives to behis fanaticism, bigotry, superstition, and personal vindictiveness, when

 "Hell he peoples with his foes, Dark scourge of many a guilty line. "

Hunt was a Universalist, and Dante was a Catholic Calvinist. There wasa determined optimism about Hunt, and a buoyancy as of a cork or otherlight body, sometimes a little exasperating to men of less sanguinetemperament. [22] He ends by protesting that Dante is a semi-barbarianand his "Divine Comedy" too often an infernal tragedy. "Such a vision asthat of his poem (in a theological point of view) seems no better thanthe dream of an hypochondriacal savage. " It was some years before this, in his lecture on "The Hero as Poet, " delivered in 1840, that a friend ofLeigh Hunt, of a temperament quite the opposite of his, had spoken a verydifferent word touching this cruel scorn--this _saeva indignatio_ ofDante's. Carlyle, like Hunt, discovered _intensity_ to be the prevailingcharacter of Dante's genius, emblemed by the pinnacle of the city of Dis;that "red-hot cone of iron glowing through the dim immensity of gloom. "Hunt, the Universalist, said of Dante, "when he is sweet-natured once heis bitter a hundred times. " "Infinite pity, " says Carlyle, theCalvinist, "yet also infinite rigour of law, it is so nature is made; itis so Dante discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that ofhis 'Divine Comedy's' being a poor splenetic, impotent terrestrial libel;putting those into hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth! Isuppose if ever pity tender as a mother's was in the heart of any man, itwas in Dante's. But a man who does not know rigour cannot pity either. His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic--sentimentality, or littlebetter. . . . Morally great above all we must call him; it is thebeginning of all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love;as, indeed, what are they but the _inverse_ or _converse_ of his love?"

It is interesting to note that, antipathetic as Hunt's nature was, inmany ways, not only to the individual Dante but to the theologicalthought of which he was the spokesman, in his view of the sacred art ofthe Italian Middle Age he anticipated the Pre-Raphaelites and the moderninterpreters of Dante. Here is a part of what he says of the paintingsin the Campo Santo at Pisa: "The best idea, perhaps, which I can give anEnglishman of the general character of the painting is by referring himto the engravings of Albert Durer and the serious parts of Chaucer. There is the same want of proper costume--the same intense feeling of thehuman being, both in body and soul--the same bookish, romantic, andretired character--the same evidences, in short, of antiquity andcommencement, weak (where it is weak) for want of a settled art andlanguage, but strong for that very reason in first impulses, and inputting down all that is felt. . . . The manner in which some of thehoary saints in these pictures pore over their books and carry theirdecrepit old age, full of a bent and absorbed feebleness--the set limbsof the warriors on horseback--the sidelong unequivocal looks of some ofthe ladies playing on harps and conscious of their ornaments--the peopleof fashion seated in rows, with Time coming up unawares to destroythem--the other rows of elders and doctors of the Church, forming part ofthe array of heaven--the uplifted hand of Christ denouncing the wicked atthe day of judgment--the daring satires occasionally introduced againstmonks and nuns--the profusion of attitudes, expressions, incidents, broaddraperies, ornaments of all sorts, visions, mountains, ghastly lookingcities, fiends, angels, sibylline old women, dancers, virgin brides, mothers and children, princes, patriarchs, dying saints, it would besimply blind injustice to the superabundance and truth of conception inall this multitude of imagery not to recognize the real inspirers as wellas harbingers of Raphael and Michael Angelo, instead of confining thehonour to the Masaccios and Peruginos, [who] . . . Are no more to becompared with them than the sonneteers of Henry VIII. 's time are to becompared with Chaucer. Even in the very rudest of the pictures, wherethe souls of the dying are going out of their mouths, in the shape oflittle children, there are passages not unworthy of Dante and MichaelAngelo. . . . Giotto, be thou one to me hereafter, of a kindred brevity, solidity, and stateliness with that of thy friend, Dante!" [23]

Among all the writers of his generation, Keats was most purely the poet, the artist of the beautiful. His sensitive imagination thrilled to everytouch of beauty from whatever quarter. That his work is mainlyretrospective and eclectic in subject is because a young poet's mindresponds more readily to books than to life, and this young poet did notoutlive his youth. In the Greek mythology he found a world of lovelyimages ready to his hand, in the poetry of Spenser, Chaucer, and Ariosto, he found another such world. Arcadia and Faeryland--"the realms ofgold"--he rediscovered them both for himself, and he struck into thepaths that wound through their enchanted thickets with the ardour of anexplorer. This was the very mood of the Renaissance--this genial heatwhich fuses together the pagan and the Christian systems--thisindifference of the creative imagination to the mere sources andmaterials of its creations. Indeed, there is in Keats' style a "naturalmagic" which forces us back to Shakspere for comparison, a noticeablelikeness to the diction of the Elizabethans, when the classics were stilla living spring of inspiration, and not a set of copies held _interrorem_ over the head of every new poet. 

Keats' break with the classical tradition was early and decisive. In hisfirst volume (1817) there is a piece entitled "Sleep and Poetry, "composed after a night passed at Leigh Hunt's cottage near Hampstead, which contains his literary declaration of faith. After speaking of thebeauty that fills the universe, and of the office of Imagination to bethe minister and interpreter of this beauty, as in the old days when"here her altar shone, even in this isle, " and "the muses were nighcloyed with honours, " he asks:

 "Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, Made great Apollo blush for this, his land. Men were thought wise who could not understand His glories: with a puling infant's force, They swayed about upon a rocking horse And thought it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-souled! The winds of heaven blew, the ocean rolled Its gathering waves--ye felt it not. The blue Bowed its eternal bosom, and the dew Of summer night collected still, to make The morning precious. Beauty was awake! Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead To things ye knew not of--were closely wed To musty laws, lined out with wretched rule And compass vile: so that ye taught a school Of dolts to smooth, inlay and clip and fit; Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit, Their verses tallied. Easy was the task: A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race! That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face, And did not know it, --no, they went about, Holding a poor decrepit standard out, Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and, in large, The name of one Boileau!"

This complaint, so far as it relates to the _style_ of the rule-riddeneighteenth-century poetry, had been made before: by Cowper, byWordsworth, by Coleridge. But Keats, with his instinct for beauty, pierces to the core of the matter. It was because of Pope's defectivesense of the beautiful that the doubt arose whether he was a poet at all. It was because of its

 ". . . Forgetting the great end Of Poetry, that it should be a friend To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man, "

that the poetry of the classical school was so unsatisfying. This is oneof the very few passages of Keats that are at all doctrinal[24] orpolemic; and as such it has been repeatedly cited by biographers andessayists and literary historians. Lowell quotes it, in his essay onDryden, and adds; "Keats was the first resolute and wilful heretic, thetrue founder of the modern school, which admits no cis-Elizabethanauthority save Milton. " Mr. Gosse quotes it and says, "in these lines hehas admirably summed up the conceptions of the first half of the presentcentury with regard to classical poetry. " [25] The passage was stillfresh when Byron, in the letter to Disraeli already quoted[26] (March15th, 1820), held it up to scorn as the opinion of "a young personlearning to write poetry and beginning by teaching the art. . . . Thewriter of this is a tadpole of the Lakes, a young disciple of the six orseven new schools, in which he has learned to write such lines and suchsentiments as the above. He says 'easy were the task' of imitating Pope, or it may be of equalling him, I presume. I recommend him to try beforehe is so positive on the subject, and then compare what he will have_then_ written, and what he has now written, with the humblest andearliest compositions of Pope, produced in years still more youthful thanthose of Mr. Keats when he invented his new 'Essay on Criticism, 'entitled 'Sleep and Poetry' (an ominous title) from whence the abovecanons are taken. "

In a manuscript note on this passage made after Keats' death, Byronwrote: "My indignation at Mr. Keats' depreciation of Pope has hardlypermitted me to do justice to his own genius. . . . He is a loss to ourliterature, and the more so, as he himself, before his death, is said tohave been persuaded that he had not taken the right line, and wasreforming his style upon the more classical models of the language, "Keats made a study of Dryden's versification before writing "Lamia"; buthad he lived to the age of Methusaleh, he would not have "reformed hisstyle" upon any such classical models as Lord Byron had in mind. Classical he might have become, in the sense in which "Hyperion" isclassical; but in the sense in which Pope was classical--never. Pope'sHomer he deliberately set aside for Chapman's--

 "Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold. " [27]

Keats had read Virgil, but seemingly not much Latin poetry besides, andhe had no knowledge of Greek. He made acquaintance with the Hellenicworld through classical dictionaries and a study of the casts in theBritish Museum. But his intuitive grasp of the antique ideal of beautystood him in as good stead as Landor's scholarship. In such work as"Hyperion" and the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" he mediates between the ancientand the modern spirit, from which Landor's clear-cut marbles stand aloofin chill remoteness. As concerns his equipment, Keats stands related toScott in romance learning much as he does to Landor in classicalscholarship. He was no antiquary, and naturally made mistakes of detail. In his sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, " he makes Cortez, and not Balboa, the discoverer of the Pacific. _À propos_ of a line in"The Eve of St. Agnes"--

 "And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor"--

Leigh Hunt called attention to the fact that rushes and not carpetscovered the floors in the Middle Ages. In the same poem, Porphyro singsto his lute an ancient ditty, "In Provençe called 'La Belle Dame sans Merci. '"

The ditty was by Alain Chartier, who was not a troubadour, but a Normanby birth and a French court poet of the fifteenth century. The title, which Keats found in a note in an edition of Chaucer, pleased his fancyand suggested his ballad, [28] of the same name, which has nothing incommon with Chartier's poem. The latter is a conventional love _estrif_in the artificial taste of the time. But errors of this sort, which anyencyclopaedia can correct, are perfectly unimportant. 

Byron's sneer at Keats, as "a tadpole of the Lakes, " was ridiculouslywide of the mark. He was nearly of the second generation of romantics;he was only three years old when "The Ancient Mariner" was published;"Christabel" and Scott's metrical romances had all been issued before heput forth his first volume. But though he owes much to Coleridge[29] andmore perhaps to Chatterton, he took no imprint from Wordsworth, and carednothing for Scott. Keats, like his friend Hunt, turned instinctivelyaway from northern to southern Gothic; from rough border minstrelsy tothe mythology and romance of the races that dwelt about the midland sea. Keats' sensuous nature longed for "a beaker full of the warm South. " "Ihave tropical blood in my veins, " wrote Hunt, deprecating "the criticismof a Northern climate" as applied to his "Story of Rimini. " Keats' deathmay be said to have come to him from Scotland, not only by reason of thebrutal attacks in _Blackwood's_--to which there is some reason forbelieving that Scott was privy--but because the hardships and exposure ofhis Scotch tour laid the foundation of his fatal malady. He brought backno literary spoils of consequence from the North, and the description ofthe journey in his letters makes it evident that his genius could notfind itself there. This uncomfortable feeling of alienation is expressedin his "Sonnet on Visiting the Tomb of Burns. " The Scotch landscapeseems "cold--strange. "

 "The short-lived paly Summer is but won From Winter's ague. "

And in the letter from Dumfries, enclosing the sonnet he writes: "I knownot how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem anti-Grecian andanti-Charlemagnish. " _Charlemagnish_ is Keats' word for the truemediaeval-romantic. It is noteworthy that Keats avoided Scott'sfavourite verse forms. "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is not in the minstrelballad measure; and when Keats uses the eight-syllabled couplet, he usesit very differently from Scott, without the alternate riming whichprevails in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" and all the rest of the series. 

A spark from Spenser kindled the flame of poetry in Keats. His friend, Cowden Clarke, read him the "Epithalamium" one day in 1812 in an arbourin the old school garden at Enfield, and lent him a copy of "The FaëryQueene" to take home with him. "He romped through the scenes of theromance, " reports Mr. Clarke, "like a young horse turned into a springmeadow. " There is something almost uncanny--like the visits of aspirit--about these recurrent appearances of Spenser in English literaryhistory. It must be confessed that nowadays we do not greatly rompthrough "The Faëry Queene. " There even runs a story that a certainprofessor of literature in an American college, being consulted aboutSpenser by one of his scholars, exclaimed impatiently, "Oh, damnSpenser!" But it is worth while to have him in the literature, if onlyas a starter for young poets. Keats' earliest known verses are an"Imitation of Spenser" in four stanzas. His allusions to him arefrequent, and his fugitive poems include a "Sonnet to Spenser" and anumber of "Spenserian Stanzas. " But his only really important experimentin the measure of "The Faëry Queene" was "The Eve of St. Agnes. " It waswith fine propriety that Shelley chose that measure for his elegy onKeats in "Adonais. " Keats made a careful study of Spenser's verse, the

 "Spenserian vowels that elope with ease"--

and all the rest of it. His own work in this kind is thought to resemblemost closely the "Psyche" of the Irish poetess, Mary Tighe, published in1805[30] on the well-known fable of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius. It isinferred that Keats knew the poem from a mention of the author in one ofhis pieces. He also wrote an "Ode to Psyche, " which seems, however, tohave been inspired by an engraving in Spenser's "Polymetis. " Mrs. Tighewas one of the latest and best of the professed imitators of Spenser. There is beauty of a kind in her languidly melodious verse andover-profuse imagery, but it is not the passionate and quintessentialbeauty of Keats. She is quite incapable of such choice and pregnant wordeffects as abound in every stanza of "St. Agnes":

 "Unclasps her _warmed_ jewels, one by one":

 "_Buttressed_ from moonlight":

 "The music, _yearning_ like a God in pain":

 "The boisterous, _midnight_, festive clarion. "

Keats' intimate association with Leigh Hunt, whose acquaintance he madein 1816, was not without influence on his literary development. Headmired the "Story of Rimini, " [31] and he adopted in his early verseepistles and in "Endymion" (1818), that free ante-Popean treatment of thecouplet with _enjambement_, or overflow, double rimes, etc. , which Hunthad practised in the poem itself and advocated in the preface. Manypassages in "Rimini" and in Keats' couplet poems anticipate, in theireasy flow, the relaxed versification of "The Earthly Paradise. " This wasthe Elizabethan type of heroic couplet, and its extreme instance is seenin William Chamberlayne's "Pharonnida" (1659). There is no proof ofKeats' alleged indebtedness to Chamberlayne, though he is known to havebeen familiar with another specimen of the type, William Browne's"Britannia's Pastorals. " Hunt also confirmed Keats in the love ofSpenser, and introduced him to Ariosto whom he learned to read in theItalian, five or six stanzas at a time. Dante he read in Cary'stranslation, a copy of which was the only book that he took with him onhis Scotch trip. "The fifth canto of Dante, " he wrote (March, 1819), "pleases me more and more; it is that one in which he meets with Pauloand Francesca. " He afterwards dreamed of the story and wrote a sonnetupon his dream, which Rossetti thought "by far the finest of Keats'sonnets" next to that on Chapman's "Homer. " [32] Mr. J. M. Robertsonthinks that the influence of Gary's "Dante" is visible in "Hyperion, "especially in the recast version "Hyperion: A Vision. " [33] And LeighHunt suggests that in the lines in "The Eve of St. Agnes"--

 "The sculptured dead on each side seem to freeze, Emprisoned in black, purgatorial rails: Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries, He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails"--

the germ of the thought is in Dante. [34] Keats wished that Italianmight take the place of French in English schools. To Hunt's examplewas also due, in part, that fondness for neologisms for which thelatter apologises in the preface to "Rimini, " and with which Keats waswont to enrich his diction, as well as with Chattertonian archaisms, Chapmanese compounds, "taffeta phrases, silken terms precise" fromElizabethan English, and coinages like _poesied_, _jollying_, _eye-earnestly_--licenses and affectations which gave dire offence toGifford and the classicals generally. 

In the 1820 volume, which includes Keats' maturest work, there was astory from the "Decameron, " "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, " which tellshow a lady exhumes the body of her murdered lover, cuts off the head andburies it in a pot of sweet basil, which she keeps in her chamber andwaters with her tears. It was perhaps symptomatic of a certain morbidsensibility in Keats to select this subject from so cheerful a writer asBoccaccio. This intensity of love surviving in face of leprosy, torment, decay, and material horrors of all kinds; this passionate clinging ofspirit to body, is a mediaeval note, and is repeated in the neo-romanticschool which derives from Keats; in Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, O'Shaughnessy, Marzials, and Paine. Think of the unshrinking gaze whichDante fixes upon the tortures of the souls in pain; of the wasted body ofChrist upon the cross; of the fasts, flagellations, mortifications ofpenitents; the unwashed friars, the sufferings of martyrs. Keatsapologises for his endeavour "to make old prose in modern rime moresweet, " and for his departure from the even, unexcited narrative of hisoriginal:

 "O eloquent and famed Boccaccio, Of thee we now should ask forgiving boon. . . . For venturing syllables that ill beseem The quiet glooms of such a piteous theme. . . . 

 "Ah! wherefore all this wormy circumstance? Why linger at the yawning tomb so long? O for the gentleness of old Romance, The simple plaining of the minstrel's song. "

But it is just this wormy circumstance that rivets the poet's attention;his imagination lingers over Isabella kissing the dead face, pointingeach eyelash, and washing away the loam that disfigures it with hertears; over the basil tufts growing rankly from the mouldering head, "The thing was vile with green and livid spot, "

but Keats' tenderness pierces the grave. 

It is instructive to compare "Isabella" with Dryden's "Sigismonda andGuiscardo, " also from the "Decameron" and surcharged with the physicallyhorrible. In this tale Tancred sends his daughter her lover's heart in agolden goblet. She kisses the heart, fills the cup with poison, drinks, and dies. The two poems are typical examples of romantic and classicalhandling, though neither is quite a masterpiece in its kind. Thetreatment in Dryden is cool, unimpassioned, objective--like Boccaccio's, in fact. The story is firmly told, with a masculine energy of verse andlanguage. Sigismonda and Tancred are characters, confronted wills, as indrama, and their speeches are like _tirades_ from a tragedy of Racine. But here Dryden's rhetorical habit and his fondness for reasoning in rimerun away with him, and make his art inferior to Boccaccio's. Sigismondaargues her case like counsel for the defendant. She even enjoys her ownargument and carries it out with a gusto into abstractions. 

 "But leaving that: search we the secret springs, And backward trace the principles of things; There shall we find, that when the world began One common mass composed the mould of man, " etc. 

Dryden's grossness of taste mars his narrative at several points. Thesatirist in him will not let him miss the chance for a sneer at priestsand another at William III. 's standing army. He makes his heroine's loveignobly sensual. She is a widow, who having "tasted marriage joys, " isunwilling to live single. Dryden's _bourgeois_ manner is capable even ofludicrous descents. 

 "The sudden bound awaked the sleeping sire, And showed a sight no parent can desire. "

In Keats' poem there are no characters dramatically opposed. Lorenzo andIsabella have no individuality apart from their love; passion hasabsorbed character. The tale is not evolved firmly and continuously, butwith lyrical outbursts, a poignancy of sympathy at the points of highesttragic tensity and a swooning sensibility all through, that sometimesbreaks into weakness. There can be no question, however, which poem isthe more _felt_; no question, either, as to which method is superior--atleast as between these two artists, and as applied to subjects of thisparticular kind. 

"Isabella" is in _ottava rima_, "The Eve of St. Agnes" in the Spenserianstanza. This exquisite creation has all the insignia of romantic art andhas them in a dangerous degree. It is brilliant with colour, richlyornate, tremulous with emotion. Only the fine instinct of the artistsaved it from the overladen decoration and cloying sweetness of"Endymion, " and kept it chaste in its warmth. As it is, the story isalmost too slight for its descriptive mantle "rough with gems and gold. "Such as it is, it is of Keats' invention and of the "Romeo and Juliet"variety of plot. A lover who is at feud with his mistress' clan venturesinto his foemen's castle while a revel is going on, penetrates by the aidof her nurse to his lady's bower, and carries her off while all thehousehold are sunk in drunken sleep. All this in a night of wild weatherand on St. Agnes' Eve, when, according to popular belief, maidens mightsee their future husbands in their dreams, on the performance of certainconditions. The resemblance of this poem to "Christabel" at severalpoints, has already been mentioned, [35] and especially in the descriptionof the heroine's chamber. But the differences are even more apparent. Coleridge's art is temperate and suggestive, spiritual, too, with anunequalled power of haunting the mind with a sense of ghostly presences. In his scene the touches are light and few; all is hurried, mysterious, shadowy. But Keats was a word painter, his treatment more sensuous thanColeridge's, and fuller of imagery. He lingers over the figure of themaiden disrobing, and over the furnishings of her room. The Catholicelegancies of his poem, as Hunt called them, and the architecturaldetails are there for their own sake--as pictures; the sculptured dead inthe chapel, the foot-worn stones, the cobwebbed arches, broad hallpillar, and dusky galleries; the "little moonlight room, pale, _latticed_, chill"; the chain-drooped lamp:

 "The carven angels ever eager-eyed"

that

 "Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests, With hair blown back and wings put crosswise on their breasts. "

Possibly "La Belle Dame sans Merci" borrows a hint from the love-crazedknight in Coleridge's "Love, " who is haunted by a fiend in the likenessof an angel; but here the comparison is to Keats' advantage. Not evenColeridge sang more wildly well than the singer of this weird balladstrain, which has seemed to many critics[36] the masterpiece of thispoet, wherein his "natural magic" reaches its most fascinating subtletyand purity of expression. 

The famous picture of the painted "casement, high and triple-arched" inMadeline's chamber, "a burst of richness, noiseless, coloured, suddenlyenriching the moonlight, as if a door of heaven were opened, " [37] shouldbe compared with Scott's no less famous description of the east oriel ofMelrose Abbey by moonlight, and the comparison will illustrate adistinction similar to that already noted between the romanticism ofColeridge and Scott. The latter is here depicting an actual spot, one ofthe great old border abbeys; national pride and the pathos of historicruins mingle with the description. Madeline's castle stood in thecountry of dream; and it was an "elfin storm from fairyland" that came toaid the lovers' flight, [38] and all the creatures of his tale are but the

 "Shadows haunting fairily The brain new stuffed in youth with triumphs gay Of old Romance. "

In Keats is the romantic escape, the longing to

 "leave the world unseen. And with thee fade away into the forest dim. " [39]

Keats cared no more for history than he did for contemporary politics. Courthope[40] quotes a passage from "Endymion" to illustrate hisindifference to everything but art;

 "Hence, pageant history! Hence, gilded cheat! . . . Many old rotten-timbered boats there be Upon thy vaporous bosom, magnified To goodly vessels, many a sail of pride, And golden-keeled, is left unlaunched and dry. But wherefore this? What care, though owl did fly About the great Athenian admiral's mast? What care though striding Alexander past The Indus with his Macedonian numbers? . . . Juliet leaning Amid her window-flowers, --sighing, --weaning Tenderly her fancy from its maiden snow, Doth more avail than these: the silver flow Of Hero's tears, the swoon of Imogen, Fair Pastorella in the bandit's den, Are things to brood on with more ardency Than the death-day of empires. "

This passage should be set beside the complaint in "Lamia" of thedisenchanting touch of science:

 "There was an awful rainbow once in heaven, " etc. 

Keats is the poet of romantic emotion, as Scott of romantic action. Professor Gates says that Keats' heroes never _do_ anything. [41] Itpuzzles the reader of "The Eve of St. Agnes" to know just why Porphyrosets out the feast of cates on the little table by Madeline's bedsideunless it be to give the poet an opportunity for his luscious descriptionof "the lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon" and other like delicacies. Inthe early fragment "Calidore, " the hero--who gets his name fromSpenser--does nothing in some hundred and fifty lines but assist twoladies to dismount from their palfreys. To revert, as before, toAriosto's programme, it was not the _arme_ and _audaci imprese_ whichKeats sang, but the _donne_, the _amori_, and the _cortesie_. Feudal wararray was no concern of his, but the "argent revelry" of masque anddance, and the "silver-snarling trumpets" in the musicians' gallery. Hewas the poet of the lute and the nightingale, rather than of the shock ofspear in tourney and crusade. His "Specimen of an Induction to a Poem"begins

 "Lo! I must tell a tale of chivalry. "

But he never tells it. The piece evaporates in visions of pureloveliness; "large white plumes"; sweet ladies on the worn tops of oldbattlements; light-footed damsels standing in sixes and sevens about thehall in courtly talk. Meanwhile the lance is resting against the wall. 

 "Ah! shall I ever tell its cruelty, When the fire flashes from a warrior's eye, And his tremendous hand is grasping it?"

"No, " answers the reader, "I don't think you ever will. Leave that sortof thing to Walter Scott, and go on and finish your charming fragment of'The Eve of St. Mark, ' which stops provokingly just where Bertha wasreading the illuminated manuscript, as she sat in her room of an Aprilevening, when

 "'On the western window panes, The chilly sunset faintly told Of unmatured green valleys cold. '" [42]

This quaintly attractive fragment of Keats was written while he wasliving in the old cathedral and college city of Winchester. "Some timesince, " he writes to his brother George, September, 1819, "I began a poemcalled 'The Eve of St. Mark, ' quite in the spirit of town quietude. Ithink it will give you the sensation of walking about an old country townin a coolish evening. " The letter describes the maiden-lady-like air ofthe side streets, with doorsteps fresh from the flannel, the doorsthemselves black, with small brass handles and lion's head or ram's headknockers, seldom disturbed. He speaks of his walks through the cathedralyard and two college-like squares, grassy and shady, dwelling-places ofdeans and prebendaries, out to St. Cross Meadows with their Gothic towerand Alms Square. Mr. Colvin thinks that Keats "in this piece anticipatesin a remarkable degree the feeling and method of the modernpre-Raphaelite schools"; and that it is "perfectly in the spirit ofRossetti (whom we know that the fragment deeply impressed andinterested). " Mr. Forman, indeed, quotes Rossetti's own _dictum_ (worksof John Keats, vol. Ii. , p. 320) that the poem "shows astonishingly realmediaevalism for one not bred as an artist. "

It is in the Pre-Raphaelites that Keats' influence on our later poetry isseen in its most concentrated shape. But it is traceable in Tennyson, inHood, in the Brownings, and in many others, where his name is by no meanswritten in water. "Wordsworth, " says Lowell, "has influenced most theideas of succeeding poets; Keats their forms. "

[1] Scott's friend, William Stewart Rose--to whom the first verse epistlein "Marmion" is addressed. He also translated the "Orlando Furioso"(1823-31). His "Partenopex" was made from a version in modern French. 

[2] A new translation of the "Orlando, " by Hoole, appeared in 1773-83; ofTasso's "Jerusalem" in 1763; and of Metastasio's dramas in 1767. Thesewere in the heroic couplets of Pope. 

[3] "Childe Harold, " Canto iv. , xxxviii. And _Cf. _ vol. I. , pp. 25, 49, 100, 170, 219, 222-26. 

[4] _Vide supra_, p. 5. 

[5] _Vide supra_, p. 40. Goethe pronounced the "Inferno" abominable, the"Purgatorio" doubtful, and the "Paradise" tiresome (Plumptre's "Dante, "London, 1887, vol. Ii. , p. 484). 

[6] See Walpole's opinion, vol. I. , p. 235. 

[7] For early manuscript renderings see "Les Plus Anciennes TraductionsFrançaises de la Divine Comédie, " par C. Morel, Paris, 1897. 

[8] Lowell says Kannegiesser's, 1809. 

[9] "Present State of Polite Learning" (1759). 

[10] "Mentre che l'uno spirto questo disse, L'altro piangeva sì, che di pietade I venni men, così com' io morisse: E cadde come corpo morte cade. " --"Inferno, " Canto v. 

[11] Vol. I. , p. 236. 

[12] Plumptre's "Dante, " vol. Ii. , p. 439. 

[13] "Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar, Like Scipio, buried, by the upbraiding shore. " --"Childe Harold, " iv. , 57. 

[14] See vol. I. , p. 49; and "Purgatorio, " xxviii. , 19-20. 

 "Tal, qual di ramo in ramo si raccoglie Per la pineta in sal lito di Chiassi. "

[15] He did better in free paraphrase than in literal translation. _Cf. _Stanza cviii. , in "Don Juan, " Canto iii. --

 "Soft hour! which wakes the wish and melts the heart"--

with its original in the "Purgatorio, " viii. , 1-6. 

[16] Dedication to La Guiccioli. 

[17] But in this poem each thirteenth and fourteenth line make a couplet, thus breaking up the whole into a series of loose sonnets. 

[18] T. W. Parsons' "Lines on a Bust of Dante" appeared in the Boston_Advertiser_ in 1841. His translation of the first ten cantos of the"Inferno" was published in 1843: later instalments in 1867 and 1893. Longfellow's version of the "Divine Comedy" with the series of sonnets bythe translator came out in 1867-70. For the Dante work of the Rossettis, _vide infra_, pp. 282 ff. 

[19] "The Seer. "

[20] He named a daughter, born while he was in prison, after Spenser'sFlorimel. 

[21] "Autobiography, " p. 200 (ed. Of 1870). 

[22] See Dickens' caricature of him as Harold Skimpole in "Bleak House. "

[23] "When I was last at Haydon's, " wrote Keats to his brother George in1818-19, "I looked over a book of prints taken from the fresco of thechurch at Milan, the name of which I forget. In it were comprisedspecimens of the first and second age of art in Italy. I do not think Iever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare; full of romance and the mosttender feeling; magnificence of drapery beyond everything I ever saw, notexcepting Raphael's--but grotesque to a curious pitch--yet still makingup a fine whole, even finer to me than more accomplished works, as therewas left so much room for imagination. "

[24] Against the hundreds of maxims from Pope, Keats furnishes a singlemotto--the first line of "Endymion"--

 "A thing of beauty is a joy forever. "

[25] "From Shakespeare to Pope. " See also Sidney Colvin's "Keats. " NewYork, 1887, pp. 61-64. 

[26] _Vide supra_, p. 70. 

[27] That he knew Pope's version is evident from a letter to Haydon ofMay, 1817, given in Lord Houghton's "Life. "

[28] He could have known extremely little of mediaeval literature; yetthere is nothing anywhere, even in the far more instructed Pre-Raphaeliteschool which catches up the whole of the true mediaeval romanticspirit--the spirit which animates the best parts of the Arthurian legend, and of the wild stories which float through mediaeval tale-telling, andmake no small figure in mediaeval theology--as does the short piece of'La Belle Dame sans Merci'. (Saintsbury: "A Short History of EnglishLiterature, " p. 673). 

[29] _Vide supra_, p. 85. And for Keats' interest in Chatterton see vol. I. , pp. 370-72. 

[30] The Dict. Nat. Biog. Mentions doubtfully an earlier edition in 1795. 

[31] See "Sonnet on Leigh Hunt's Poem 'The Story of Rimini. '" Forman'sed. , vol. Ii. , p. 229. 

[32] See Forman's ed. , vol. Ii. , p. 334. 

[33] "New Essays toward a Critical Method, " London, 1897, p. 256. 

[34] "Come, per sostentar solaio o tetto, Per mensola talvolta una figura Si vede giunger le ginocchia al petto, La qual fa del non ver vera rancura Nascere in chi la vede. " --"Purgatorio, " Canto x. , 130-34. 

[35] _Vide supra_, p. 85. 

[36] Rossetti, Colvin, Gates, Robertson, Forman, and others. 

[37] Leigh Hunt. It has been objected to this passage that moonlight isnot strong enough to transmit _colored_ rays, like sunshine (see Colvin's"Keats, " p. 160). But the mistake--if it is one--is shared by Scott. 

 "The moonbeam kissed the holy pane And threw on the pavement a bloody stain. " --"Lay of the Last Minstrel, " Canto ii. , xi. 

[38] It is interesting to learn that the line

 "For o'er the Southern moors I have a home for thee"

read in the original draught "Over the bleak Dartmoor, " etc. Dartmoorwas in sight of Teignmouth where Keats once spent two months; but hecancelled the local allusion in obedience to a correct instinct. 

[39] "Ode to a Nightingale, "

[40] "The Liberal Movement in English Literature, " London, 1885, p. 181. 

[41] "Studies and Appreciations. " Lewis G. Gates. New York, 1890, p. 17. 

[42] See vol. I. , p. 371, and for Cumberland's poem, on the samesuperstition, _ibid. _, 177. 

CHAPTER IV. 

The Romantic School in Germany. [1]

Cross-fertilization, at least in these modern eras, is as necessary inthe life of a literature as in that of an animal or a plant. Englishromanticism, though it started independently, did not remain an isolatedphenomenon; it was related to the general literary movement in Europe. Even Italy had its romantic movement; Manzoni began, like Walter Scott, by translating Bürger's "Lenore" and "Wild Huntsman", and afterwards, like Schlegel in Germany and Hugo in France, attacked the classicalentrenchments in his "Discourse of the Three Unities. " It is no part ofour undertaking to write the history of the romantic schools in Germanyand France. But in each of those countries the movement had points oflikeness and unlikeness which shed light upon our own; and an outlinesketch of the German and French schools will help the reader better tounderstand both what English romanticism was, and what it was not. 

In Germany, as in England, during the eighteenth century, the history ofromanticism is a history of arrested development. Romanticism existed insolution, but was not precipitated and crystallised until the closingyears of the period. The current set flowing by Bürger's ballads andGoethe's "Götz, " was met and checked by a counter-current, the newenthusiasm for the antique promoted by Winckelmann's[2] works on classicart, by the neo-paganism of Goethe's later writings, and by the influenceof Lessing's[3] clear, rationalising, and thoroughly Protestant spirit. [4]

We may note, at the outset, the main features in which the Germanromanticism differed from the English. First, then, it was moredefinitely a _movement_. It was organised, self-conscious, and critical. Indeed, it was in criticism and not in creative literature that itshighest successes were won. Coleridge, Scott, and Keats, like theirEnglish forerunners in the eighteenth century, [5] worked independently ofone another. They did not conspire to a common end; had little personalcontact--were hardly acquaintances, and in no sense a "school. " But theGerman romanticists constituted a compact group with coherent aims. Theywere intimate friends and associates; travelled, lived, and workedtogether; edited each other's books and married each other's sisters. [6]They had a theory of art, a programme, and a propaganda, were aggressiveand polemical, attacking their adversaries in reviews, and in satiricaltales, [7] poems, and plays. Their headquarters were at Jena, "thecentral point, " says Heine, "from which the new aesthetic dogma radiated. I advisedly say dogma, for this school began with a criticism of the artproductions of the past, and with recipes for the art works of thefuture. " Their organ was the _Athenaeum_, established by FriedrichSchlegel at Berlin in 1798, the date of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's"Lyrical Ballads, " and the climacteric year of English and Germanromanticism. 

The first number of the _Athenaeum_ contained the manifesto of the newschool, written by Friedrich Schlegel, the seminal mind of the coterie. The terms of this pronunciamento are somewhat rapt and transcendental;but through its mist of verbiage, one discerns that the ideal of romanticart is announced to be: beauty for beauty's sake, the union of poetry andlife, and the absolute freedom of the artist to express himself. "Romantic poetry, " says Schlegel--"and, in a certain sense, all poetryought to be romantic--should, in representing outward objects, alsorepresent itself. " There is nothing here to indicate the precise linewhich German romantic poetry was to take, but there is the same rejectionof authority, the same assertion of the right of original genius to breaka path for itself, which was made, in their various ways, by Wordsworthand Coleridge in the "Lyrical Ballads, " by Keats in "Sleep and Poetry, "and by Victor Hugo in the preface to "Cromwell. "

A second respect in which German romanticism differed from English was inits thoroughgoing character. It is the disposition of the German mind tosynthesise thought and life, to carry out theory into practice. Each ofthose imposing systems of philosophy, Kant's, Fichte's, Schelling's, Hegel's, has its own _aesthetik_ as well as its own _ethik_. It seeks tointerpret all human activities from a central principle; to apply itshighest abstractions to literature, government, religion, the fine arts, and society. The English mind is practical rather than theoretical. Itis sensible, cautious, and willing to compromise; distrusting alike thelogical habit of the French to push out premises into conclusions at allhazards; and the German habit of system-building. The Englishman has nosystem, he has his whim, and is careless of consistency. It is quitepossible for him to have an aesthetic liking for the Middle Ages, withoutwishing to restore them as an actual state of society. It is hard for anEnglishman to understand to what degree a literary man, like Schiller, was influenced in his writings by the critical philosophy of Kant; or howSchelling's transcendental idealism was used to support Catholicism, andHegel made a prop to Protestant orthodoxy and Junkerism. "Tragedies andromances, " wrote Mme. De Staël, "have more importance in Germany than inany other country. They take them seriously there; and to read such andsuch a book, or see such and such a play, has an influence on the destinyand the life. What they admire as art, they wish to introduce into reallife; and poetry, philosophy, the ideal, in short, have often an evengreater empire over the Germans than nature and the passions. " In proofof this, she adduces the number of young Germans who committed suicide inconsequence of reading "Werther"; or took to highway robbery in emulationof "Die Räuber. "

In England, accordingly, romanticism was a merely literary revolution andkept strictly within the domain of art. Scott's political conservatismwas indeed, as we have seen, not unrelated to his antiquarianism and hisfondness for the feudal past; but he remained a Protestant Tory. And asto his Jacobitism, if a Stuart pretender had appeared in Scotland in1815, we may be sure that the canny Scott would not have taken arms inhis behalf against the Hanoverian king. Coleridge's reactionary politicshad nothing to do with his romanticism; though it would perhaps be goingtoo far to deny that his reverence for what was old and tested by time inthe English church and constitution may have had its root in the sametemper of mind which led him to compose archaic ballad-romances like"Christabel" and "The Dark Ladye. " But in Germany "throne and altar"became the shibboleth of the school; half of the romanticists joined theCatholic Church, and the new literature rallied to the side ofaristocracy and privilege. 

A third respect in which the German movement differed from the English ispartly implied in what has been said above. In Germany the romanticrevival was contemporaneous with a great philosophical development whichinfluenced profoundly even the lighter literature of the time. Hence themysticism which is found in the work of many of the romanticists, andparticularly in the writings of Novalis. Novalis was a disciple ofSchelling, and Schelling the continuator of Fichte. Fichte's"Wissenschaftslehre" (1794) is the philosophical corner-stone of theGerman romantic school. The freedom of the fancy from the thraldom ofthe actual world; the right of the Ego to assert itself fully; theprinciple formulated by Friedrich Schlegel, that "the caprice of the poetknows no law"; all these literary doctrines were corollaries of Fichte'sobjective idealism. [8] It is needless to say that, while romantic artusually partakes of the mysterious, there is nothing of thisphilosophical or transcendental mysticism in the English romanticists. If we were to expect it anywhere it would be in Coleridge, who became themediator between German and English thought. But Coleridge's poetry wasmainly written before he visited Germany and made acquaintance with thesystems of Kant and Schelling; and in proportion as his speculativeactivity increased, his creative force declined. There is enough of themarvellous and the unexplained in "Christabel, " and "The AncientMariner"; but the "mystic ruby" and the "blue flower" of the Teutonicsymbolists are not there. 

The German romantic school, in the limited and precise sense of the term, consisted of the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, LudwigTieck, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Johann Dietrich Gries, Tieck'sfriend Wackenroder, and--at a distance--Zacharias Werner, the dramatist;besides a few others, their associates or disciples, whose names need nothere be mentioned. These were, as has been said, personal friends, theybegan to be heard of about 1795; and their quarters were at Jena andBerlin. A later or younger group (_Spätromantiker_) gathered in 1808about the _Zeitung für Einsiedler_, published at Heidelberg. These wereClemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, Ludwig Uhland, Joseph Görres, and thebrothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Arnim, Brentano, and Görres wereresiding at the time at Heidelberg; the others contributed from adistance. Arnim edited the _Einsiedler_; Görres was teaching in theuniversity. There were, of course, many other adherents of the school, working individually at different times and places, scattered indeed allover Germany, and of various degrees of importance or unimportance, ofwhom I need mention only Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, the popularnovelist and author of "Undine. "

The history of German romanticism has been repeatedly told. There areexhaustive treatments of the subject by Julian Schmidt, Koberstein, Hettner ("Die Romantische Schule, " Braunschweig, 1850); Haym ("DieRomantische Schule, " Berlin, 1870); by the Danish critic, Georg Brandes("Den Romantiske Skole i Tydskland"). But the most famous review of thispassage of literary history is the poet Heine's brilliant little book, "Die Romantische Schule, " [9] published at Paris in 1833. This waswritten as a kind of supplement to Mme. De Staël's "L'Allemagne" (1813), and was intended to instruct the French public as to somemisunderstandings in Mme. De Staël's book, and to explain what Germanromanticism really was. Professor Boyesen cautions us to be on our guardagainst the injustice and untrustworthiness of Heine's report. Thewarning is perhaps not needed, for the animus of his book is sufficientlyobvious. Heine had begun as a romantic poet, but he had parted companywith the romanticists because of the reactionary direction which themovement took. He had felt the spell, and he renders it with wonderfulvividness in his history of the school. But, at the same time, theimpatience of the political radical and the religious sceptic--the"valiant soldier in the war for liberty"--and the bitterness of the exilefor opinion's sake, make themselves felt. His sparkling and maliciouswit turns the whole literature of romanticism into sport; and his abuseof his former teacher, A. W. Schlegel, is personal and coarse beyonddescription. Twenty years ago, he said, when he was a lad, whatoverflowing enthusiasm he would have lavished upon Uhland! He used tosit on the ruins of the old castle at Düsseldorf declaiming Uhland's poem

 "A wandering shepherd young and fair Beneath the royal castle strayed. "

"But so much has happened since then! What then seemed to me so grand;all that chivalry and Catholicism; those cavaliers that hack and hew ateach other in knightly tournaments; those gentle squires and virtuousdames of high degree; the Norseland heroes and minnesingers; the monksand nuns; ancestral tombs thrilling with prophetic powers; colourlesspassion, dignified by the high-sounding title of renunciation, and set tothe accompaniment of tolling bells; a ceaseless whining of the'Miserere'; how distasteful all that has become to me since then!"And--of Fouqué's romances--"But our age turns away from all fairypictures, no matter how beautiful. . . . This reactionary tendency, thiscontinual praise of the nobility, this incessant glorification of thefeudal system, this everlasting knight-errantry balderdash . . . Thiseverlasting sing-song of armours, battle-steeds, high-born virgins, honest guild-masters, dwarfs, squires, castles, chapels, minnesingers, faith, and whatever else that rubbish of the Middle Ages may be called, wearied us. "

It is a part of the irony of things that this satirist of romance shouldhave been precisely the one to compose the most popular of all romanticballads; and that the most current of all his songs should have been theone in which he sings of the enchantress of the Rhine, "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten Dass ich so traurig bin. "

The "Loreley" is translated into many tongues, and is sung everywhere. In Germany it is a really national song. And yet the tale on which it isfounded is not an ancient folk legend--"ein Mährchen aus altenZeiten"--but a modern invention of Clemens Brentano, who first publishedit in 1802 in the form of a ballad inserted in one of his novels:

 "Zu Bacharach am Rheine Wohnt' eine Zauberin: Sie war so schön und feine Und riss viel Herzen hin. "

A certain forgotten romanticist, Graf Loeben, made a lyrical tale out ofit in 1821, and Heine composed his ballad in 1824, afterwards set to themournful air in which it is now universally familiar. 

It has been mentioned that Heine's "Romantische Schule" was a sort ofcontinuation and correction of Mme. De Staël's "L'Allemagne. " That verycelebrated book was the result of the distinguished lady's residence inGermany, and of her determination to reveal Germany to France. It hasbeen compared in its purpose to the "Germania" of Tacitus, in which thehistorian held up the primitive virtues of the Teutonic race as a lessonand a warning to corrupt Rome. Mme. De Staël had arranged to publish herbook in 1810, and the first impression of ten thousand copies had alreadybeen printed, when the whole edition was seized and destroyed by thepolice, and the author was ordered to quit France within twenty-fourhours. All this, of course, was at the instance of Napoleon, who was byno means above resenting the hostility of a lady author. But theMinister of Police, General Savary, assumed the responsibility of theaffair; and to Mme. De Staël's remonstrance he wrote in reply: "Itappeared to me that the air of this country did not agree with you, andwe are not yet reduced to seek for models amongst the people you admire[the Germans]. Your last work is not French. " It was not, accordingly, until 1813 that Mme. De Staël's suppressed work on Germany saw the light. 

The only passages in it that need engage our attention are those in whichthe author endeavours to interpret to a classical people the literatureof a Gothic race. In her chapter entitled "Of Classic and RomanticPoetry, " she says: "The word romantic has been lately introduced inGermany to designate that kind of poetry which is derived from the songsof the troubadours; that which owes its birth to the union of chivalryand Christianity. " She mentions the comparison--evidently derived fromSchlegel's lectures which she had attended--of ancient poetry tosculpture and modern to painting; explains that the French inclinetowards classic poetry, and the English--"the most illustrious of theGermanic nations"--towards "that which owes its birth to chivalry andromance. " "The English poets of our times, without entering into concertwith the Germans, have adopted the same system. Didactic poetry hasgiven place to the fictions of the Middle Ages. " She observes thatsimplicity and definiteness, that a certain corporeality andexternality--or what in modern critical dialect we would callobjectivity--are notes of antique art; while variety and shading ofcolour, and a habit of self-reflection developed by Christianity[subjectivity], are the marks of modern art. "Simplicity in the artswould, among the moderns, easily degenerate into coldness andabstraction, while that of the ancients was full of life and animation. Honour and love, valour and pity, were the sentiments which distinguishedthe Christianity of chivalrous ages; and those dispositions of the soulcould only be displayed by dangers, exploits, love, misfortunes--thatromantic interest, in short, by which pictures are incessantly varied. "Mme. De Staël's analysis here does not go very deep, and her expressionis lacking in precision; but her meaning will be obvious to those whohave well considered the various definitions and expositions of thesecontrasted terms with which we set out. Without deciding between thecomparative merits of modern classic and romantic work, Mme. De Staëlpoints out that the former must necessarily be imitative. "Theliterature of the ancients is, among the moderns, a transplantedliterature; that of chivalry and romance is indigenous. . . . Theliterature of romance is alone capable of further improvement, because, being rooted in our own soil, that alone can continue to grow and acquirefresh life; it expresses our religion; it recalls our history. " Henceshe notes the fact that while the Spaniards of all classes know by heartthe verses of Calderon; while Shakspere is a popular and national poetamong the English; and the ballads of Goethe and Bürger are set to musicand sung all over Germany, the French classical poets are quite unknownto the common people, "because the arts in France are not, as elsewhere, natives of the very country in which their beauties are displayed. " Inher review of German poetry she gives a brief description, among otherthings, of the "Nibelungen Lied, " and a long analysis of Bürger's"Leonora" and "Wilde Jäger. " She says that there are four Englishtranslations of "Leonora, " of which William Spenser's is the best. "Theanalogy between the English and German allows a complete transfusion ofthe originality of style and versification of Bürger. . . . It would bedifficult to obtain the same result in French, where nothing strange orodd seems natural. " She points out that terror is "an inexhaustiblesource of poetical effect in Germany. . . . Stories of apparitions andsorcerers are equally well received by the populace and by men of moreenlightened minds. " She notes the fondness of the new school for Gothicarchitecture, and describes the principles of Schlegelian criticism. Shetranscribes A. W. Schlegel's praises of the ages of faith and thegenerous brotherhood of chivalry, and his lament that "the noble energyof ancient times is lost, " and that "our times alas! no longer knoweither faith or love. " The German critics affirm that the best traits ofthe French character were effaced during the reign of Louis XIV. ; that"literature, in ages which are called classical, loses in originalitywhat it gains in correctness"; that the French tragedies are full ofpompous affectation; and that from the middle of the seventeenth century, a constrained and affected manner had prevailed throughout Europe, symbolised by the wig worn by Louis XIV. In pictures and bas-reliefs, where he is portrayed sometimes as Jupiter and sometimes as Hercules cladonly in his lion's skin--but always with the perruque. Heine complainsthat Mme. De Staël fell into the hands of the Schlegels, when in Germany, and that her account of German literature was coloured by theirprejudices; that William Schlegel, in particular, became her escort atall the capitals of Europe and won great _éclat_ thereby

Schlegel's elegiac lament over the decay of chivalry may remind theEnglish reader of the famous passage in Burke[10] about Marie Antoinette. "Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallenupon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and ofcavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from theirscabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But theage of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculatorshas succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, thatproud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of theheart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of anexalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence ofnations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! Itis gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, whichfelt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigatedferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itselflost half its evil by losing all its grossness. " [11]

But Burke's reaction against the levelling spirit of French democracy wasby no means so thoroughgoing as the romanticist protest in Germany. Itwas manifestly impossible to revive the orders of chivalry, as apractical military system; or to recreate the feudal tenures in theirentirety. Nor did even the most romantic of the German romanticistsdream of this. They appealed, however, to the knightly principles ofdevotion to church and king, of honour, of religious faith, and ofpersonal loyalty to the suzerain and the nobility. It was thesepolitical and theological aspects of the movement that disgusted Heine. He says that just as Christianity was a reaction against Romanmaterialism; and the Renaissance a reaction against the extravagances ofChristian spiritualism; and romanticism in turn a reaction against thevapid imitations of antique classic art, "so also do we now behold areaction against the re-introduction of that Catholic, feudal mode ofthought, of that knight-errantry and priestdom, which were beinginculcated through literature and the pictorial arts. . . . For when theartists of the Middle Ages were recommended as models . . . The onlyexplanation of their superiority that could be given was that these menbelieved in that which they depicted. . . . Hence the artists who werehonest in their devotion to art, and who sought to imitate the piousdistortions of those miraculous pictures, the sacred uncouthness of thosemarvel-abounding poems, and the inexplicable mysticisms of those oldenworks . . . Made a pilgrimage to Rome, where the vicegerent of Christ wasto re-invigorate consumptive German art with asses' milk. "

A number of the romanticists were Catholic by birth. There was Josephvon Eichendorff, _e. G. _, who had a strong admiration for the Middle Ages, wrote sacred poetry, and published in 1815 a novel entitled "Ahnung undGegenwart, " the hero of which ends by retiring to a monastery. AndJoseph Görres, who published a work on German _Volksbücher_[12] (1807); afollower of Schelling and editor of _Der Rheinische Merkur_, a violentanti-Gallican journal during the war of liberation. Görres, according toHeine, "threw himself into the arms of the Jesuits, " and became the"chief support of the Catholic propaganda at Munich"; lecturing there onuniversal history to an audience consisting chiefly of pupils from theRomish seminaries. Another _Spätromantiker_, born Catholic, was ClemensBrentano, whom Heine describes in 1833 as having lived at Frankfort forthe last fifteen years in hermit-like seclusion, as a correspondingmember of the propaganda. For six years (1818-24) Brentano wasconstantly at the bedside of the invalid nun, Anna Katharina Emmerich, atDülmen. She was a "stigmatic, " afflicted, _i. E. _, with a mysteriousdisease which impressed upon her body marks thought to be miraculouscounterfeits of the wounds of Christ. She had trances and visions, anduttered revelations which Brentano recorded and afterwards published inseveral volumes, that were translated into French and Italian and widelycirculated among the faithful. 

As adherents of the romantic school who were born and bred Protestants, but became converts to the Catholic faith, Heine enumerates FriedrichSchlegel, Tieck, Novalis, Werner, Schütz, Carové, Adam Müller, and CountStolberg. This list, he says, includes only authors, "the number ofpainters who in swarms simultaneously abjured Protestantism and reasonwas much larger. " But Tieck and Novalis never formally abjuredProtestantism. They detested the Reformation and loved the mediaevalChurch, but looked upon modern Catholicism as a degenerate system. Theirposition here was something like that of the English Tractarians in theearlier stages of the Oxford movement. Novalis composed "Marienlieder. "Tieck complained of the dryness of Protestant ritual and theology, andsaid that in the Middle Ages there was a unity (_Einheit_) which ought tobe again recovered. All Europe was then one fatherland with a singlefaith. The period of the Arthursage was the blossoming time of romance, the vernal season of love, religion, chivalry, and--sorcery! He pleadedfor the creation of a new Christian, Catholic mythology. 

In 1808 Friedrich Schlegel became a Roman Catholic--or, as Heine putsit--"went to Vienna, where he attended mass daily and ate broiled fowl. "His wife, a daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, a Jewess by race, followed herhusband into the Catholic Church. Zacharias Werner, author of a numberof romantic melodramas, the heroes of which are described as monkishascetics, religious mystics, and "spirits who wander on earth in theguise of harp-players"--Zacharias Werner also went to Vienna and joinedthe order of Ligorians. This conversion made a prodigious noise inGermany. It occurred at Rome in 1811, and the convert afterwardswitnessed the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples, thatannual miracle in which Newman expresses so firm a belief. Werner thenspent two years in the study of theology, visited Our Lady's Chapel atLoretto in 1813; was ordained priest at Aschaffenburg in 1814; andpreached at St. Stephen's Church, Vienna, on the vanity of worldlypleasures, with fastings many, with castigations and mortifications ofthe flesh. The younger Voss declared that Werner's religion was nothingbut a poetic coquetting with God, Mary, the wounds of Christ, and theholy carbuncle (_Karfunkelstein_). He had been a man of dissolute lifeand had been divorced from three wives. "His enthusiasm for therestoration of the Middle Ages, " says Heine, "was one-sided; it appliedonly to the hierarchical, Catholic phase of mediaevalism; feudalism didnot so strongly appeal to his fancy. . . . Pater Zacharias died in 1823, after sojourning for fifty-four years in this wicked, wicked world. "Carlyle contributed to the _Foreign Review_ in 1828 an essay on "Werner'sLife and Writings, " with translations of passages from his drama, "TheTemplars in Cyprus. "

But the conversion which caused the greatest scandal was that of CountFriedrich Stolberg, whose apostasy was denounced by his early friendVoss, the translator of Homer, in a booklet entitled "Wie ward FritzStolberg ein Unfreier?" Voss showed, says Heine, that "Stolberg hadsecretly joined an association of the nobility which had for its purposeto counteract the French ideas of liberty; that these nobles entered intoa league with the Jesuits; that they sought, through the re-establishmentof Catholicism, to advance also the interests of the nobility. " [13]

The German literary historians agree that the fresh outbreak ofromanticism in the last decade of the eighteenth century was theresumption of an earlier movement which had been interrupted; that it wasfurthered by the new feeling of German nationality aroused by theBonapartist tyranny; and finally that it was a protest against the flatmediocrity which ruled in the ultra-evangelical circle headed by Nicolai, the Berlin bookseller and editor. Into this mere Philistinism hadnarrowed itself the nobler rationalism of Lessing, with its distrust of_Träumerei_ and _Schwärmerei_--of superstition and fanaticism. "Drylight is best, " says Bacon, but the eye is hungry for colour, that haslooked too steadily on the _lumen siccum_ of the reason; and thenimagination becomes the prism which breaks the invisible sunbeam intobeauty. Hence the somewhat extravagant romantic love of colour, and thedetermination to believe, at all hazards and even in the teeth of reason. Hence the imperfectly successful attempt to force back the modern mindinto a posture of child-like assent to the marvellous. Tieck's"Mährchen" and the Grimm brothers' nursery tales belong to this"renascence of wonder, " like Lewis' "Tales of Terror, " Scott's"Demonology, " and Coleridge's "Christabel" in England. "The tendenciesof 1770 to 1780, " says Scherer, "which had now quite disappeared, asserted themselves with new and increased force. The nations which weregroaning under Napoleon's oppression sought comfort in the contemplationof a fairer and grander past. Patriotism and mediaevalism became for along time the watchwords and the dominating fashion of the day. "

Allowing for the differences mentioned, the romantic movements in Englandand Germany offer, as might be expected, many interesting parallels. Carlyle, writing in 1827, [14] says that the recent change in Germanliterature is only a part of a general change in the whole literature ofEurope. "Among ourselves, for instance, within the last thirty years, who has not lifted up his voice with double vigour in praise ofShakespeare and nature, and vituperation of French taste and Frenchphilosophy? Who has not heard of the glories of old English literature;the wealth of Queen Elizabeth's age; the penury of Queen Anne's; and theinquiry whether Pope was a poet? A similar temper is breaking out inFrance itself, hermetically sealed as that country seemed to be againstall foreign influences; and doubts are beginning to be entertained, andeven expressed, about Corneille and the three unities. It seems to besubstantially the same thing which has occurred in Germany, and beenattributed to Tieck and his associates; only that the revolution which ishere proceeding, and in France commencing, appears in Germany to becompleted. "

In Germany, as in England--in Germany more than in England--other artsbeside literature partook of the new spirit. The brothers Boisseréeagitated for the completion of the "Kölner Dom, " and collected theirfamous picture gallery to illustrate the German, Dutch, and Flemish artof the fifteenth century; just as Gothic came into fashion in Englandlargely in consequence of the writings of Walpole, Scott, and Ruskin. Like our own later Pre-Raphaelite group, German art critics began topraise the naive awkwardness of execution and devout spirituality offeeling in the old Florentine painters, and German artists strove topaint like Fra Angelico. Friedrich Schlegel gave a strong impulse to thestudy of mediaeval art, and Heine scornfully describes him and his friendJoseph Görres, rummaging about "among the ancient Rhine cities for theremains of old German pictures and statuary which were superstitiouslyworshipped as holy relics. " Tieck and his friend Wackenroder broughtback from their pilgrimage to Dresden in 1796 a devotion, a kind ofsentimental Mariolatry, to the celebrated Madonnas of Raphael and Holbeinin the Dresden gallery; and from their explorations in Nürnberg, that_Perle des Mittelalters_, an enthusiasm for Albrecht Dürer. This foundexpression in Wackenroder's "Herzensergiessungen eines KunstliebendenKlosterbruders"; and in Tieck's novel, "Sternbald's Wanderungen, " inwhich he accompanies a pupil of Dürer to Rome. Wackenroder, like Tieck'sother friend, Novalis, was of a consumptive, emotional, and somewhatwomanish constitution of mind and body, and died young. Tieck edited hisremains, including letters on old German art. The standard editions oftheir joint writings are illustrated by engravings after Dürer, one ofwhich in particular, the celebrated "Knight, Death, and the Devil, "symbolizes the mysterious terrors of Tieck's own tales, and of Germanromance in general. The knight is in complete armour, and is ridingthrough a forest. On a hilltop in the distance are the turrets of acastle; a lean hound follows the knight; on the ground between hishorse's hoofs sprawls a lizard-like reptile; a figure on horsebackapproaches from the right, with the face half obliterated or eaten awayto the semblance of a skull, and snakes encircling the temples. Behindcomes on a demon or goblin shape, with a tall curving horn, which is"neither man nor woman, neither beast nor human, " but one of thosegrotesque and obscene monsters which the mediaeval imagination sculpturedupon the cathedrals. This famous copperplate prompted Fouqué's romance, "Sintram and his Companions. " He had received a copy of it for abirthday gift, and brooded for years over its mysterious significance;which finally shaped itself in his imagination into an allegory of thesoul's conflict with the powers of darkness. His whole narrative leadsup to the description of Dürer's picture, which occupies thetwenty-seventh and climacteric chapter. The school of young GermanPre-Raphaelite art students, associated at Rome in 1810 under theleadership of Overbeck and Cornelius, was considerably influenced byWackenroder's "Herzensergiessungen. "

Music, too, and particularly church music, was affected by the new taste. The ancient music of the "Dies Irae" and other Latin hymns was revived;and it would not be far wrong to say that the romantic school sowed theseed of Wagner's great music-dramas, profoundly Teutonic and romantic intheir subject matter and handling and in their application of the unitedarts of poetry, music, and scene-painting to old national legends such as"Parzival, " "Tannhäuser, " [15] "The Knight of the Swan, " and the"Nibelungen Hoard. "

History, too, and Germanic philology took impulse from this freshinterest in the past. Johannes Müller, in his "History of the SwissConfederation" (1780-95), drew the first appreciative picture ofmediaeval life, and caught, in his diction, something of the manner ofthe old chroniclers. As in England ancient stores of folklore andpopular poetry were gathered and put forth by Percy, Ritson, Ellis, Scott, and others, so in Germany the Grimm brothers' universally knowncollections of fairy tales, legends, and mythology began to appear. [16]Tieck published in 1803 his "Minnelieder aus dem Schwabischen Zeitalter. "Karl Simrock made modern versions of Middle High German poetry. Uhland, whose "Walther von der Vogelweide, " says Scherer, "gave the firstcomplete picture of an old German singer, " carried the war into Africa bygoing to Paris in 1810 and making a study of the French Middle Age. Heintroduced the old French epics to the German public, and is regarded, with A. W. Schlegel, as the founder of romance philology in Germany. 

A pupil of Bodmer, [17] the Swiss Christian Heinrich Myller, had issued acomplete edition of the "Nibelungenlied" in 1784-85. The romantic schoolnow took up this old national epic and praised it as a German Iliad, unequalled in sublimity and natural power. Uhland gave a great deal ofstudy to it, and A. W. Schlegel lectured upon it at Berlin in 1801-2. Both Schlegel and Tieck made plans to edit it; and Friedrich von derHagen, inspired by the former's lectures, published four editions of it, and a version in modern German. "For a long time, " testifies Heine, "the'Nibelungenlied' was the sole topic of discussion among us. . . . It isdifficult for a Frenchman to form a conception of this work, or even ofthe language in which it is written. It is a language of stone, and theverses are, as it were, blocks of granite. " By way of giving his Frenchreaders a notion of the gigantic passions and rude, primitive strength ofthe poem, he imagines a battle of all the Gothic cathedrals of Europe onsome vast plain, and adds, "But no! even then you can form no conceptionof the chief characters of the 'Nibelungenlied'; no steeple is so high, no stone so hard as the fierce Hagen, or the revengeful Chrimhilde. "

Another work which corresponds roughly with Percy's "Reliques, " as the"Nibelungenlied" with Macpherson's "Ossian, " was "Des Knaben Wunderhorn"(The Boy's Magic Trumpet), published in 1806-8 by Clemens Brentano andAchim von Arnim, with a dedication to Goethe. This was a three-volumecollection of German songs, and although it came much later than Percy's, and after the imitation of old national balladry in Germany was alreadywell under way, so that its relation to German romanticism is not of aninitial kind, like that of Percy's collection in England; still itsimportance was very great. It influenced all the lyrical poetry of theRomantic school, and especially the ballads of Uhland. "I cannotsufficiently extol this book, " says Heine. "It contains the sweetestflowers of German poesy. . . . On the title page . . . Is the picture ofa lad blowing a horn; and when a German in a foreign land views thispicture, he almost seems to hear the old familiar strains, andhomesickness steals over him. . . . In these ballads one feels thebeating of the German popular heart. Here is revealed all its sombremerriment, all its droll wit. Here German wrath beats furiously thedrum; here German satire stings, here German love kisses. Here we beholdthe sparkling of genuine German wine, and genuine German tears. "

The German romantic school, like the English, but more learnedly andsystematically, sought to reinforce its native stock of materials by_motifs_ drawn from foreign literatures, and particularly from Norsemythology and from Spanish romance. Percy's translation of Malet: Gray'sversions from the Welsh and the Scandinavian: Southey's "Chronicles ofthe Cid" and Lockhart's translations of the Spanish ballads areparalleled in Germany by William Schlegel's, and Uhland's, and others'studies in old Norse mythology and poetry; by Tieck's translation of "DonQuixote" [18] and by Johann Dietrich Gries' of Calderon. Theromanticists, indeed, and especially Tieck and A. W. Schlegel, were mostaccomplished translators. Schlegel's great version of Shakspere isjustly esteemed one of the glories of the German tongue. Heine affirmsthat it was undertaken solely for polemical purposes and at a time (1797)when the enthusiasm for the Middle Ages had not yet reached anextravagant height, "Later, when this did occur, Calderon was translatedand ranked far above Shakespeare. . . . For the works of Calderon bearmost distinctly the impress of the poetry of the Middle Ages, particularly of the two principal epochs, knight-errantry andmonasticism. The pious comedies of the Castilian priest-poet, whosepoetical flowers had been besprinkled with holy water and canonicalperfumes . . . Were now set up as models, and Germany swarmed withfantastically pious, insanely profound poems, over which it was thefashion to work one's self into a mystic ecstasy of admiration, as in'The Devotion to the Cross'; or to fight in honour of the Madonna, as in'The Constant Prince. ' . . . Our poetry, said the Schlegels, issuperannuated. . . . Our emotions are withered; our imagination is driedup. . . . We must seek again the choked-up springs of the naive, simplepoetry of the Middle Ages, where bubbles the elixir of youth. " Heineadds that Tieck, following out this prescription, drank so deeply of themediaeval folk tales and ballads that he actually became a child againand fell to lisping. 

There is a suggestive analogy between the position of the Warton brothersin England and the Schlegel brothers in Germany. The Schlegels, like theWartons, were leaders in the romantic movement of their time and country, and were the inspirers of other men. The two pairs were alike also inthat their best service was done in the field of literary history, criticism, and exposition, while their creative work was imitative and ofcomparatively small value. Friedrich Schlegel's scandalous romance"Lucinde" is of much less importance than his very stimulating lectureson the "History of Literature" and the "Wisdom and Languages ofIndia";[19] and his elder brother, though an accomplished metrist andtranslator, was not successful in original verse. But this resemblancebetween the Wartons and the Schlegels must not be pressed too far. Here, as at many other points, the German movement had greater momentum. TheWartons were men of elegant scholarship after their old-fashioned kind, akind which joined the usual classical culture of the English universitiesto a liberal--and in their century somewhat paradoxical--enthusiasm inantiquarian pursuits. But the Schlegels were men of really wide learningand of depth in criticism. Compared with their scientific method andgrasp of principles, the "Observations" and "Essays" of the Wartons aremere dilettantism. To the influence of the Schlegels is not unfairlyattributed the origin in Germany of the sciences of comparative philologyand comparative mythology, and the works of scholars like Bopp, Diez, andthe brothers Grimm. Herder[20] had already traced the broad cosmopolitanlines which German literary scholarship was to follow, with Germanthoroughness and independence. And Heine acknowledges that "inreproductive criticism, where the beauties of a work of art were to bebrought out clearly; where a delicate perception of individualities wasrequired; and where these were to be made intelligible, the Schlegelswere far superior to Lessing. " The one point at which the Englishmovement outweighed the German was Walter Scott, whose creative vigourand fertility made an impact upon the mind of Europe to which theromantic literature of the Continent affords no counterpart. 

The principles of the Schlegelian criticism were first communicated tothe English public by Coleridge; who, in his lectures on Shakspere andother dramatists, helped himself freely to William Schlegel's"Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur. " [21] Heinedenounces the shallowness of these principles and their failure tocomprehend the modern mind. "When Schlegel seeks to depreciate the poetBürger, he compares his ballads with the old English ballads of the Percycollection, and he shows that the latter are more simple, more naïve, more antique, and consequently more poetical. . . . But death is notmore poetical than life. The old English ballads of the Percy collectionexhale the spirit of their age, and Bürger's ballads breathe the spiritof _our_ time. The latter, Schlegel never understood. . . . Whatincreased Schlegel's reputation still more was the sensation which heexcited in France, where he also attacked the literary authorities of theFrench, . . . Showed the French that their whole classical literature wasworthless, that Molière was a buffoon and no poet, that Racine likewisewas of no account . . . That the French are the most prosaic people ofthe world, and that there is no poetry in France. " It is well known thatColeridge detested the French, as "a light but cruel race", that heundervalued their literature and even affected an ignorance of thelanguage. The narrowness of Schlegelian criticism was only the excess ofTeutonism reacting against the previous excesses of Gallic classicism. 

The deficiency of creative imagination in the Schlegels was supplied bytheir disciple Ludwig Tieck, who made the "Mährchen, " or populartraditionary tale, his peculiar province. It was Wackenroder who firstdrew his attention to "those old, poorly printed _Volksbücher_, withtheir coarse wood-cuts which had for centuries been circulating among thepeasantry, and which may still be picked up at the book-stalls of theLeipzig fairs. " [22] Tieck's volume of "Volksmährchen" (1797) gavereproductions of a number of these old tales, such as the"Haimonskinder, " the "Schöne Magelone, " "Tannhäuser, " and the"Schildbürger. " His "Phantasus" (1812) contained original talesconceived in the same spirit. Scherer says that Tieck uttered themanifesto of German romanticism in the following lines from the overtureof his "Kaiser Octavianus":

 "Mondbeglänzte Zaubernacht, Die den Sinn gefangen hält, Wundervolle Mährchenwelt, Steig auf in der alten Pracht!"

"Forest solitude" [_Waldeinsamkeit_], says Boyesen, [23] "churchyards atmidnight, ruins of convents and baronial castles; in fact, all the thingswhich we are now apt to call romantic, are the favourite haunts ofTieck's muse. . . . Tieck was excessively fond of moonlight andliterally flooded his tales with its soft, dim splendour; thereforemoonlight is now romantic. . . . He never allows a hero to make adeclaration of love without a near or distant accompaniment of a bugle(_Schalmei_ or _Waldhorn_); accordingly the bugle is called a romanticinstrument. "

"The true tone of that ancient time, " says Carlyle, [24] "when man was inhis childhood, when the universe within was divided by no wall of adamantfrom the universe without, and the forms of the Spirit mingled and dweltin trustful sisterhood with the forms of the Sense, was not easy to seizeand adapt with any fitness of application to the feelings of modernminds. It was to penetrate into the inmost shrines of Imagination, wherehuman passion and action are reflected in dim and fitful, but deeplysignificant resemblances, and to copy these with the guileless, humblegraces which alone can become them. . . . The ordinary lovers of witchand fairy matter will remark a deficiency of spectres and enchantments, and complain that the whole is rather dull. Cultivated free-thinkers, again, well knowing that no ghosts or elves exist in this country, willsmile at the crack-brained dreamer, with his spelling-book prose anddoggerel verse, and dismiss him good-naturedly as a German Lake poet. ""In these works, " says Heine, "there reigns a mysterious intenseness, apeculiar sympathy with nature, especially with the vegetable and mineralkingdoms. The reader feels himself transported into an enchanted forest;he hears the melodious gurgling of subterranean waters; at times he seemsto distinguish his own name in the rustling of the trees. Ever and anona nameless dread seizes upon him as the broad-leaved tendrils entwine hisfeet; strange and marvellous wild flowers gaze at him with their bright, languishing eyes; invisible lips mockingly press tender kisses on hischeeks; gigantic mushrooms, which look like golden bells, grow at thefoot of the trees; large silent birds sway to and fro on the branchesoverhead, put on a sapient look and solemnly nod their heads. Everythingseems to hold its breath; all is hushed in awed expectation; suddenly thesoft tones of a hunter's horn are heard, and a lovely female form, withwaving plumes on head and falcon on wrist, rides swiftly by on asnow-white steed. And this beautiful damsel is so exquisitely lovely, sofair; her eyes are of the violet's hue, sparkling with mirth and at thesame time earnest, sincere, and yet ironical; so chaste and yet so fullof tender passion, like the fancy of our excellent Ludwig Tieck. Yes, his fancy is a charming, high-born maiden, who in the forests offairyland gives chase to fabulous wild beasts; perhaps she even hunts therare unicorn, which may only be caught by a spotless virgin. "

In 1827 Carlyle[25] published translations of five of Tieck's "Mährchen, "viz. : "The Fair-Haired Eckbert, " "The Trusty Eckart, " "The Elves, " "TheRunenberg, " and "The Goblet. " He mentioned that another tale had beenalready Englished--"The Pictures" (Die Gemälde). This version was byConnop Thirwall, who had also rendered "The Betrothal" in 1824. In spiteof Carlyle's recommendations, Tieck's stories seem to have made smallimpression in England. Doubtless they came too late, and the romanticmovement, by 1827, had spent its first force in a country already satedwith Scott's poems and novels. Sarah Austin, a daughter of WilliamTaylor of Norwich, went to Germany to study German literature in thissame year 1827. In her "Fragments from German Prose Writers" (1841), shespeaks of the small success of Tieck's stories in England, but testifiesthat A. W. Schlegel's dramatic lectures had been translated early and thetranslation frequently reprinted. Another of the NorwichTaylors--Edgar--was the translator of Grimm's "Haus- undKinder-Mährchen. " Julius Hare, who was at school at Weimar in the winterof 1804-5, rendered three of Tieck's tales, as well as Fouqué's "Sintram"(1820). 

It is interesting to note that Tieck was not unknown to Hawthorne andPoe. The latter mentions his "Journey into the Blue Distance" in his"Fall of the House of Usher", and in an early review of Hawthorne's"Twice-Told Tales" (1842) and "Mosses from an Old Manse" (1846), at atime when their author was still, in his own words, "the obscurest man ofletters in America. " Poe acutely pointed out a resemblance betweenHawthorne and Tieck; "whose manner, " he asserts, "in some of his works, is absolutely identical with that _habitual_ to Hawthorne. " One finds aconfirmation of this _aperçu_--or finds, at least, that Hawthorne wasattracted by Tieck--in passages of the "American Note-Books, " where hespeaks of grubbing out several pages of Tieck at a sitting, by the aid ofa German dictionary. Colonel Higginson ("Short Studies"), _à propos_ ofPoe's sham learning and his habit of mystifying the reader by imaginarycitations, confesses to having hunted in vain for this fascinatinglyentitled "Journey into the Blue Distance"; and to having been laughed atfor his pains by a friend who assured him that Poe could scarcely read aword of German. But Tieck did really write this story, "Das Alte Buch:oder Reise ins Blaue hinein, " which Poe misleadingly refers to under itsalternate title. There is, indeed, a hint of allegory in Tieck's"Mährchen"--which are far from being mere fairy tales--that reminds onefrequently of Hawthorne's shadowy art--of such things as "Ethan Brand, "or "The Minister's Black Veil, " or "The Great Carbuncle of the WhiteMountains. " There is, _e. G. _, "The Elves, " in which a little girl doesbut step across the foot-bridge over the brook that borders her father'sgarden, to find herself in a magic land where she stays, as it seems toher, a few hours, but returns home to learn that she has been absentseven years. Or there is "The Runenberg, " where a youth wandering in themountains, receives from a sorceress, through the casement of a ruinedcastle, a wondrous tablet set with gems in a mystic pattern; and yearsafterward wanders back into the mountains, leaving home and friends tosearch for fairy jewels, only to return again to his village, an old andbroken-down man, bearing a sackful of worthless pebbles which appear tohim the most precious stones. And there is the story of "The Goblet, "where the theme is like that of Hawthorne's "Shaker Bridal, " a pair oflovers whose union is thwarted and postponed until finally, when toolate, they find that only the ghost or the memory of their love is leftto mock their youthful hope. 

But the mystic, _par excellence_, among the German romanticists wasNovalis, of whose writings Carlyle gave a sympathetic account in the_Foreign Review_ for 1829. Novalis' "Hymns to the Night, " written inOssianic prose, were perhaps not without influence on Longfellow ("Voicesof the Night"), but his most significant work was his unfinished romance"Heinrich von Ofterdingen. " The hero was a legendary poet of the time ofthe Crusades, who was victor in a contest of minstrelsy on the Wartburg. But in Novalis' romance there is no firm delineation of mediaevallife--everything is dissolved in a mist of transcendentalism andallegory. The story opens with the words: "I long to see the blueflower; it is continually in my mind, and I can think of nothing else. "Heinrich falls asleep, and has a vision of a wondrous cavern and afountain, beside which grows a tall, light blue flower that bends towardshim, the petals showing "like a blue spreading ruff in which hovered alovely face. " This blue flower, says Carlyle, is poetry, "the realobject, passion, and vocation of young Heinrich. " Boyesen gives asubtler interpretation. "This blue flower, " he says, "is the watchwordand symbol of the school. It is meant to symbolise the deep and namelesslongings of a poet's soul. Romantic poetry invariably deals withlonging; not a definite formulated desire for some attainable object, buta dim mysterious aspiration, a trembling unrest, a vague sense of kinshipwith the infinite, [26] a consequent dissatisfaction with every form ofhappiness which the world has to offer. The object of the romanticlonging, therefore, so far as it has any object, is the ideal. . . . Theblue flower, like the absolute ideal, is never found in this world, poetsmay at times dimly feel its nearness, and perhaps even catch a briefglimpse of it in some lonely forest glade, far from the haunts of men, but it is in vain to try to pluck it. If for a moment its perfume fillsthe air, the senses are intoxicated and the soul swells with poeticrapture. " [27] It would lead us too far afield to follow up the tracesof this mystical symbolism in the writings of our New Englandtranscendentalists. One is often reminded of Novalis' blue flower insuch a poem as Emerson's "Forerunners, " or Lowell's "Footpath, " orWhittier's "Vanishers, " or in Thoreau's little parable about the horse, the hound, and the dove which he had long ago lost and is still seeking. And again one is reminded of Tieck when Thoreau says: "I had seen the redelection birds brought from their recesses on my comrades' strings andfancied that their plumage would assume stranger and more dazzlingcolours in proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness andsolitude of the forest. " Heinrich von Ofterdingen travels to Augsburg tovisit his grandfather, conversing on the way with various shadowypersons, a miner, a hermit, an Eastern maiden named Zulma, who representrespectively, according to Boyesen, the poetry of nature, the poetry ofhistory, and the spirit of the Orient. At Augsburg he meets the poetKlingsohr (the personification, perhaps, of poetry in its fulldevelopment). With his daughter Matilda he falls in love, whose face isthat same which he had beheld in his vision, encircled by the petals ofthe blue flower. Then he has a dream in which he sees Matilda sink anddisappear in the waters of a river. Then he encounters her in a strangeland and asks where the river is. "Seest thou not its blue waves aboveus?" she answers. "He looked up and the blue river was flowing softlyover their heads. " "This image of Death, and of the river being the skyin that other and eternal country" [28]--does it not once more remind usof the well-known line in Channing's "A Poet's Hope"--

 "If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea";

or of Emerson's "Two Rivers":

 "Thy summer voice, Musketaquit, Repeats the music of the rain, But sweeter rivers pulsing flit Through thee, as thou through Concord plain"?

But transcendentalism is one thing and romanticism is another, and we maydismiss Novalis with a reminder of the fact that the _Journal ofSpeculative Philosophy_, once published at Concord, took for its motto asentence from his "Blüthenstaub" (Flower-pollen): "Philosophy can bake nobread, but she can procure for us God, freedom, and immortality. " [29]

Brentano and Von Arnim have had practically no influence in England. Brentano's most popular story was translated by T. W. Appell, under thetitle, "Honour, or the Story of the Brave Casper and the Fair Annerl:With an Introduction and Biographical Notice" (London, 1847). The samestory was rendered into French in the _Correspondant_ for 1859 ("Le BraveKasperl et la Belle Annerl"). Three tales of Arnim were translated byThéophile Gautier, as "Contes Bizarres" (Paris, 1856). Arnim's bestromance is "Die Kronenwächter" (1817). Scherer testifies that this"combined real knowledge of the Reformation period with graphic power";and adds: "It was Walter Scott's great example which, in the seconddecade of this century, first made conscientious faithfulness and studyof details the rule in historical novel-writing. " Longfellow's "GermanPoets and Poetry" (1845) includes nothing from Arnim or Brentano. Nordid Thomas Roscoe's "German Novelists" (four volumes), nor George Soane's"Specimens of German Romance, " both of which appeared in 1826. 

The most popular of the German romanticists was Friedrich Baron de laMotte Fouqué, the descendant of a family exiled from France by theRevocation of the Edict of Nantes, and himself an officer in the Prussianarmy in the war of liberation. Fouqué's numerous romances, in all ofwhich he upholds the ideal of Christian knighthood, have been, many ofthem, translated into English. "Aslauga's Knight" appeared in Carlyle's"Specimens of German Romance" (1827); "Sintram, " "Undine, " and "DerZauberring" had been translated even earlier. "Thiodolf the Icelander"and others have also been current in English circulating libraries. Carlyle acknowledges that Fouqué's notes are few, and that he ispossessed by a single idea. "The chapel and the tilt yard stand in thebackground or the foreground in all the scenes of his universe. He givesus knights, soft-hearted and strong-armed; full of Christian self-denial, patience, meekness, and gay, easy daring; they stand before us in theirmild frankness, with suitable equipment, and accompaniment of squire anddame. . . . Change of scene and person brings little change of subject;even when no chivalry is mentioned, we feel too clearly the influence ofits unseen presence. Nor can it be said that in this solitary departmenthis success is of the very highest sort. To body forth the spirit ofChristian knighthood in existing poetic forms; to wed that old_sentiment_ to modern _thoughts_, was a task which he could not attempt. He has turned rather to the fictions and machinery of former days. "Heine says that Fouqué's Sigurd the Serpent Slayer has the courage of ahundred lions and the sense of two asses. But Fouqué's "Undine" (1811)is in its way a masterpiece and a classic. This story of the lovelywater-sprite, who received a soul when she fell in love with the knight, and with a soul, a knowledge of human sorrow, has a slight resemblance tothe conception of Hawthorne's "Marble Faun. " Coleridge was greatlyfascinated by it. He read the original several times, and once theAmerican translation, printed at Philadelphia. He said that it wasbeyond Scott, and that Undine resembled Shakspere's Caliban in being aliteral _creation_. 

But in general Fouqué's chivalry romances, when compared with Scott's, have much less vigour, variety, and dramatic force, though a higherspirituality and a softer sentiment. The Waverley novels are solid witha right materialistic treatment. It was Scott's endeavour to make theMiddle Ages real. The people are there, as well as chevaliers and theirladies. The history of the times is there. But in Fouqué the MiddleAges become even more unreal, fairy-like, fantastic than they are in ourimaginations. There is nothing but tourneying, love-making, andenchantment. Compare the rumour of the Crusades and Richard the LionHeart in "Der Zauberring" with the stalwart flesh-and-blood figures in"Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman. " A wavering moonshine lies all over theworld of the Fouqué romances, like the magic light which illumines theDruda's castle in "Der Zauberring, " on whose battlements grow tall whiteflowers, and whose courts are filled with unearthly music from theperpetual revolution of golden wheels. "On the romantic side, " wroteRichter, in his review of "L'Allemagne" in the _Heidelberg Jahrbücher_for 1815, "we could not wish the Briton to cast his first glance at us;for the Briton--to whom nothing is so poetical as the commonweal--requires (being used to the weight of gold), even for a golden ageof poetry, the thick golden wing-cases of his epithet-poets; not thetransparent gossamer wings of the Romanticists; no many-colouredbutterfly dust; but, at lowest, flower-dust that will grow to something. "

Another _Spätromantiker_ who has penetrated to the English literaryconsciousness is the Swabian Ludwig Uhland, the sweetest lyric poet ofthe romantic school. Uhland studied the poems of Ossian, the Norsesagas, the "Nibelungenlied" and German hero legends, the Spanishromances, the poetry of the trouveres and the troubadours, and treatedmotives from all these varied sources. His true field, however, was theballad, as Tieck's was the popular tale; and many of Uhland's ballads arefavourites with English readers, through excellent translations. SarahAustin's version of one of them is widely familiar:

 "Many a year is in its grave Since I crossed this restless wave, " etc. 

Longfellow translated three: "The Black Knight, " "The Luck of Edenhall, "and "The Castle by the Sea. " It is to be feared that the last-namedbelongs to what Scherer calls that "trivial kind of romanticism, full ofsadness and renunciation, in which kings and queens with crimson mantlesand golden crowns, kings' daughters and beautiful shepherds, harpers, monks, and nuns play a great part. " But it has a haunting beauty, and adreamy melody like Goethe's "Es war ein König in Thule. " The mockingHeine, who stigmatises Fouqué's knights as combinations of iron andsentimentality, complains that in Uhland's writings too "the naive, rude, powerful tones of the Middle Ages are not reproduced with idealisedfidelity, but rather they are dissolved into a sickly, sentimentalmelancholy. . . . The women in Uhland's poems are only beautifulshadows, embodied moonshine; milk flows in their veins, and sweet tearsin their eyes, _i. E. _, tears which lack salt. If we compare Uhland'sknights with the knights in the old ballads, it seems to us as if theformer were composed of suits of leaden armour, entirely filled withflowers, instead of flesh and bones. Hence Uhland's knights are morepleasing to delicate nostrils than the old stalwarts, who wore heavy irontrousers and were huge eaters and still huger drinkers. "

Upon the whole it must be concluded that this second invasion of Englandby German romance, in the twenties and early thirties of the nineteenthcentury, made a lesser impression than the first irruption in, say, 1795to 1810, in the days of Bürger and "Götz, " and "The Robbers, " and MonkLewis and the youthful Scott. And the reason is not far to seek. Thenewcomers found England in possession of a native romanticism of a veryrobust type, by the side of which the imported article showed like adelicate exotic. Carlyle affirms that Madame de Staël's book was theprecursor of whatever acquaintance with German literature exists inEngland. He himself worked valiantly to extend that acquaintance by hisarticles in the _Edinburgh_ and _Foreign Review_, and by his translationsfrom German romance. But he found among English readers an invincibleprejudice against German mysticism and German sentimentality. Theromantic _chiaroscuro_, which puzzled Southey even in "The AncientMariner, " became dimmest twilight in Tieck's "Mährchen" and midnightdarkness in the visionary Novalis. The _Weichheit_, _Wehmuth_, and_Sehnsucht nach der Unendlichkeit_ of the German romanticists were moodsnot altogether unfamiliar in English poetry. "Now stirs the feelinginfinite, " sings Byron. 

 "Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, "

cries Keats. But when Novalis, in his _Todessehnsucht_, exclaims, "Deathis the romance of life, " the sentiment has an alien sound. There wassomething mutually repellent between the more typical phases of Englishand German romanticism. Tieck and the Schlegels, we know, cared littlefor Scott. We are told that Scott read the _Zeitung für Einsiedler_, butwe are not told what he thought of it. Perhaps romanticism, liketranscendentalism, found a more congenial soil in New than in OldEngland. Longfellow spent the winter of 1835-36 in Heidelberg, callingon A. W. Schlegel at Bonn, on his way thither. "Hyperion" (1839) issaturated with German romance. Its hero, Paul Flemming, knew "Des KnabenWunderhorn" almost by heart. No other German book had ever exercisedsuch "wild and magic influence upon his imagination. "

[1] Besides the authorities quoted or referred to in the text, thematerials used in this chapter are drawn mainly from the standardhistories of German literature; especially from Georg Brandes'"Hauptströmungen in der Litteratur des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts"(1872-76); Julian Schmidt's "Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur"(Berlin, 1890); H. J. T. Hettner's "Litteraturgeschichte" (Braunschweig, 1872); Wilhelm Scherer's "History of German Literature" (Conybeare'stranslation, New York, 1886); Karl Hillebrand's "German Thought" (trans. , New York, 1880); Vogt und Koch's "Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur"(Leipzig and Wien, 1897). My own reading in the German romantics is byno means extensive. I have read, however, a number of Tieck's "Märchen"and of Fouqué's romances; Novalis' "Hymns to the Night" and "Heinrich vonOfterdingen"; A. W. Schlegel's "Lectures on Dramatic Literature" and F. Schlegel's "Lucinde"; all of Uhland's ballads and most of Heine'swritings in verse and prose; a large part of "Des Knaben Wunderhorn, " andthe selections from Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, and Joseph Görrescontained in Koch's "Deutsche National Litteratur, " 146 Band (Stuttgart, 1891). These last include Brentano's "Die Erfindung des Rosenkranzes, ""Kasperl und Annerl, " "Gockel und Hinkerl, " etc. , and Arnim's"Kronenwächter, " a scene from "Die Päpstin Johanna, " etc. I have, ofcourse, read Madame de Staël's "L'Allemagne"; all of Carlyle's papers onGerman literature, with his translations; the Grimm fairy tales and thelike. 

[2] "Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Malereiund Bildhauerkunst, " 1755. "Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, " 1764. 

[3] "Laocoon, " 1766. 

[4] See vol. I. , chap. Xi. ; and particularly pp. 383-87. 

[5] See vol. I. , pp. 422-23. 

[6] Novalis' and Wackenroder's remains were edited by Tieck and F. Schlegel. Arnim married Brentano's sister Bettina--Goethe's Bettina. 

[7] _E. G. _, Tieck's "Der Gestiefelte Kater, " against Nicolai and the_Aufklarung_. 

[8] As to the much-discussed romantic irony, the theory of which played apart in the German movement corresponding somewhat to Hugo's doctrine ofthe grotesque, it seems to have made no impression in England. I candiscover no mention of it in Coleridge. Carlyle, in the first of his twoessays on Richter (1827), expressly distinguishes true humour from irony, which he describes as a faculty of caricature, consisting "chiefly in acertain superficial distortion or reversal of objects"--the method ofSwift or Voltaire. That is, Carlyle uses irony in the common Englishsense; the Socratic irony, the irony of the "Modest Proposal. " Theearliest attempt that I have encountered to interpret to the Englishpublic what Tieck and the Schlegels meant by "irony" is an article in_Blackwood's_ for September, 1835, on "The Modern German School ofIrony"; but its analysis is not very _eingehend_. 

[9] An English translation was published in this country in 1882. Seealso H. H. Boyesen's "Essays on German Literature" (1892) for threepapers on the "Romantic School in Germany. "

[10] Gentz, "The German Burke, " translated the "Reflections on theRevolution in France" into German in 1796. 

[11] See also in the same tract, Burke's tribute to the value ofhereditary nobility, and remember that these were the words of a Whigstatesman. 

[12] Dream books, medicine books, riddle books, almanacs, craftsmen'sproverbs, fabulous travels, prophecies, legends, romances and the like, hawked about at fairs. 

[13] For Stolberg see also vol. I. , pp. 376-77. 

[14] "Ludwig Tieck": Introductions to "German Romance. "

[15] Brentano's fragment "Die Erfindung des Rosenkranzes, " begun in 1803, deals with the Tannhäuser story. 

[16] "Kinder and Hausmährchen" (1812-15). "Deutsche Sagen" (1816). "Deutsche Mythologie" (1835). 

[17] See vol. I. , pp. 375-76. 

[18] "If Cervantes' purpose, " says Heine, "was merely to describe thefools who sought to restore the chivalry of the Middle Ages, . . . Thenit is a peculiarly comic irony of accident that the romantic schoolshould furnish the best translation of a book in which their own folly ismost amusingly ridiculed. "

[19] F. Schlegel's declamations against printing and gun powder in hisVienna lectures of 1810 foretoken Ruskin's philippics against railwaysand factories. 

[20] See vol. I. , pp. 300, 337, 416. 

[21] _Vide supra_, p. 88. A. W. Schlegel was in England in 1823. Tieckmet Coleridge in England in 1818, having made his acquaintance in Italysome ten years before. 

[22] Boyesen: "Aspects of the Romantic School. "

[23] _Ibid_. 

[24] "Ludwig Tieck, " in "German Romance. "

[25] "German Romance, " four vols. , Edinburgh. 

[26] A. W. Schlegel says that romantic poetry is the representation(_Darstellung_) of the infinite through symbols. 

[27] "Novalis and the Blue Flower. "

[28] Carlyle. 

[29] Selections from Novalis in an English translation were published atLondon in 1891. 

CHAPTER V. 

The Romantic Movement in France. [1]

French romanticism had aspects of its own which distinguished it from theEnglish and the German alike. It differed from the former and agreedwith the latter in being organised. In France, as in Germany, there wasa romantic school, whose members were united by common literaryprinciples and by personal association. There were sharply defined andhostile factions of classics and romantics, with party cries, watchwords, and shibboleths; a propaganda carried on and a polemic waged inpamphlets, prefaces, and critical journals. Above all there was aleader. Walter Scott was the great romancer of Europe, but he was neverthe head of a school in his own country in the sense in which Victor Hugowas in France, or even in the sense in which the Schlegels were inGermany. Scott had imitators, but Hugo had disciples. 

One point in which the French movement differed from both the English andthe German was in the suddenness and violence of the outbreak. It wasnot so much a gradual development as a revolution, an explosion. Thereason of this is to be found in the firmer hold which academic traditionhad in France, the fountainhead of eighteenth-century classicism. Romanticism had a special work to do in the land of literary conventionin asserting the freedom of art and the unity of art and life. Everything that is in life, said Hugo, is, or has a right to be in art. The French, in political and social matters the most revolutionary peopleof Europe, were the most conservative in matters of taste. TheRevolution even intensified the reigning classicism by giving it arepublican turn. The Jacobin orators appealed constantly to the examplesof the Greek and Roman democracies. The Goddess of Reason was enthronedin place of God, Sunday was abolished, and the names of the months and ofthe days of the week were changed. Dress under the Directory waspatterned on antique modes--the liberty cap was Phrygian--and childrenborn under the Republic were named after Roman patriots, Brutus, Cassius, etc. The great painter of the Revolution was David, [2] who painted hissubjects in togas, with backgrounds of Greek temples. Voltaire'sclassicism was monarchical and held to the Louis XIV. Tradition; David'swas republican. And yet the recognised formulae of taste and criticismwere the same in 1800 as in 1775, or in 1675. 

A second distinction of the French romanticism was its localconcentration at Paris. The centripetal forces have always been greaterin France than in England and Germany. The earlier group of German_Romantiker_ was, indeed, as we have seen, united for a time at Jena andBerlin; and the _Spätromantiker_ at Heidelberg. But this was dispersionitself as compared with the intense focussing of intellectual rays fromevery quarter of France upon the capital. In England, I hardly needrepeat, there was next to no cohesion at all between the widely scatteredmen of letters whose work exhibited romantic traits. 

In one particular the French movement resembled the English more nearlythan the German. It kept itself almost entirely within the domain ofart, and did not carry out its principles with German thoroughness andconsistency into politics and religion. It made no efforts towards apractical restoration of the Middle Ages. At the beginning, indeed, French romanticism exhibited something analogous to the Toryism of Scott, and the reactionary _Junkerism_ and neo-Catholicism of the Schlegels. Chateaubriand in his "Génie du Christianisme" attempted a sort ofaesthetic revival of Catholic Christianity, which had suffered so heavilyby the deistic teachings of the last century and the atheism of theRevolution. Victor Hugo began in his "Odes et Ballades" (1822) as anenthusiastic adherent of monarchy and the church. "L'histoire deshommes, " he wrote, "ne présente de poésie que jugée du haut des idéesmonarchiques et religieuses. " But he advanced quite rapidly towardsliberalism both in politics and religion. And of the young men whosurrounded him, like Gautier, Labrunie, Sainte-Beuve, Musset, De Vigny, and others, it can only be affirmed that they were legitimist orrepublican, Catholic or agnostic, just as it happened and withoutaffecting their fidelity to the literary canons of the new school. [3]The German romanticism was philosophical; the French was artistic andsocial. The Parisian _ateliers_ as well as the Parisian _salons_ werenuclei of revolt against classical traditions. "This intermixture of artwith poetry, " says Gautier, [4] "was and remains one of the characteristicmarks of the new school, and enables us to understand why its earliestrecruits were found more among artists than among men of letters. Amultitude of objects, images, comparisons, which were believed to beirreducible to words, entered into the language and have stayed there. The sphere of literature was enlarged, and now includes the sphere of artin its measureless circle. " "At that time painting and poetryfraternised. The artists read the poets and the poets visited theartists. Shakspere, Dante, Goethe, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott were tobe found in the studio as in the study. There were as many splotches ofcolour as of ink on the margins of those beautiful volumes that were soincessantly thumbed. Imaginations, already greatly excited bythemselves, were heated to excess by the reading of those foreignwritings of a colouring so rich, of a fancy so free and so strong. Enthusiasm mounted to delirium. It seemed as if we had discoveredpoetry, and that was indeed the truth. Now that this fine flame hascooled and that the positive-minded generation which possesses the worldis preoccupied with other ideas, one cannot imagine what dizziness, what_éblouissement_ was produced in us by such and such a picture or poem, which people nowadays are satisfied to approve by a slight nod of thehead. It was so new, so unexpected, so lively, so glowing!" [5]

The romantic school in France had not only its poets, dramatists, andcritics, but its painters, architects, sculptors, musical composers, andactors. The romantic artist _par excellence_ was Eugène Delacroix, thepainter of "The Crusaders Entering Jerusalem. " "The Greeks and Romanshad been so abused by the decadent school of David that they fell intocomplete disrepute at this time. Delacroix's first manner was purelyromantic, that is to say, he borrowed nothing from the recollections orthe forms of the antique. The subjects that he treated were relativelymodern, taken from the history of the Middle Ages, from Dante, Shakspere, Goethe, Lord Byron, or Walter Scott. " He painted "Hamlet, " "The Boat ofDante, " "Tasso in Bedlam, " "Marino Faliero, " "The Death of Sardanapalus, ""The Combat of the Giaour and the Pasha, " "The Massacre of the Bishop ofLiége, " and similar subjects. Goethe in his conversations with Eckermanexpressed great admiration of Delacroix's interpretations of scenes in"Faust" (the brawl in Auerbach's cellar, and the midnight ride of Faustand Mephistopheles to deliver Margaret from prison). Goethe hoped thatthe French artist would go on and reproduce the whole of "Faust, " andespecially the sorceress' kitchen and the scenes on the Brocken. Otherpainters of the romantic school were Camille Roqueplan, who treatedmotives drawn from "The Antiquary" and other novels of Walter Scott;[6]and Eugène Devéria, whose "Birth of Henry IV. , " executed in 1827, whenthe artist was only twenty-two years of age, was a masterpiece ofcolouring and composition. The house of the Devéria brothers was one ofthe rallying points of the Parisian romanticists. And then there wasLouis Boulanger, who painted "Mazeppa" and "The Witches' Sabbath" ("LaRonde du Sabbat" [7]); and the water-colour painter and engraver, Celestin Nanteuil, who furnished innumerable designs for vignettes, frontispieces, and book illustrations to the writers of the romanticschool. 

"Of all the arts, " says Gautier, "the one that lends itself least to theexpression of the romantic idea is certainly sculpture. It seems to havereceived from antiquity its definitive form. . . . What can the statuaryart do without the gods and heroes of mythology who furnish it withplausible pretexts for the nude, and for such drapery as it needs; thingswhich romanticism prescribes, or did at least prescribe at that time ofits first fervour? Every sculptor is of necessity a classic. " [8]Nevertheless, he says that the romantic school was not quite unprovidedof sculptors. "In our inner circle (_cénacle_), Jehan du Seigneurrepresented this art, austere and rebellious to the fancy. . . . Jehandu Seigneur--let us leave in his name of Jean this mediaeval _h_ whichmade him so happy and made him believe that he wore the apron of Erveinof Steinbach at work on the sculptures of Strasburg minster. " Gautiermentions among the productions of this Gothic-minded statuary an "OrlandoFurioso, " a bust of Victor Hugo, and a group from the latter's romance, "Notre Dame de Paris, " the gipsy girl Esmeralda giving a drink to thehumpback Quasimodo. It was the endeavour of the new school, in the artsof design as well as in literature, to introduce colour, novelty, picturesqueness, character. They studied the great Venetian and Flemishcolourists, neglected under the reign of David, and "in the first momentsof their fury against _le poncif classique_, they seemed to have adoptedthe theory of art of the witches in 'Macbeth'--Fair is foul and foul isfair", [9] _i. E. _, they neglected a traditional beauty in favour of the_characteristic_. "They sought the true, the new, the picturesqueperhaps more than the ideal; but this reaction was certainly permissibleafter so many Ajaxes, Achilleses, and Philocteteses. "

It is not quite so easy to understand what is meant by romanticism inmusic as in literature. But Gautier names a number of composers asadhering to the romantic school, among others, Hippolyte Monpon, who setto music "the leaping metres, the echo-rimes, the Gothic counter-pointsof Hugo's 'Odes et Ballades' and songs like Musset's 'L'Andalouse'--

 "'Avez vous vu dans Barcelone, '

"He believed like us in serenades, alcaldes, mantillas, castinets; in allthat Italy and that Spain, a trifle conventional, which was brought intofashion by the author of 'Don Paëz, ' of 'Portia, ' and of the 'Marchionessof Amalgui, ' . . . 'Gastibelza, the Man with the Carabine, ' and thatguitar, so profoundly Spanish, of Victor Hugo, had inspired Monpon with asavage, plaintive air, of a strange character, which long remainedpopular, and which no romanticist--if any such is left--has forgotten. "A greater name than Monpon was Hector Berlioz, the composer of "Romeo andJuliette" and "The Damnation of Faust. " Gautier says that Berliozrepresented the romantic idea in music, by virtue of his horror of commonformulas, his breaking away from old models, the complex richness of hisorchestration, his fidelity to local colour (whatever that may mean inmusic), his desire to make his art express what it had never expressedbefore, "the tumultuous and Shaksperian depth of the passions, reveriesamorous or melancholy, the longings and demands of the soul, theindefinite and mysterious feelings which words cannot render. " Berliozwas a passionate lover of German music and of the writings of Shakspere, Goethe, and Scott. He composed overtures to "Waverley, " "King Lear, " and"Rob Roy"; a cantata on "Sardanapalus, " and music for the ghost scene in"Hamlet" and for Goethe's ballad, "The Fisher. " He married an Englishactress whom he had seen in the parts of Ophelia, Portia, and Cordelia. Berlioz _en revanche_ was better appreciated in Germany than in France, where he was generally considered mad; where his "Symphonic fantastique"produced an effect analogous to that of the first pieces of RichardWagner; and where "the symphonies of Beethoven were still thoughtbarbarous, and pronounced by the classicists not to be music, any morethan the verses of Victor Hugo were poetry, or the pictures of Delacroixpainting. " And finally there were actors and actresses who came to filltheir roles in the new romantic dramas, of whom I need mention onlyMadame Dorval, who took the part of Hugo's Marion Delorme. What Gautiertells us of her is significant of the art that she interpreted, that heracting was by sympathy, rather than calculation; that it was intenselyemotional; that she owed nothing to tradition; her tradition wasessentially modern, dramatic rather than tragic. [10]

Romanticism in France was, in a more special sense than in Germany andEngland, an effort for freedom, passion, originality, as against rule, authority, convention. "Romanticism, " says Victor Hugo, [11] "so manytimes poorly defined, is nothing else than _liberalism_ inliterature. . . . Literary liberty is the child of politicalliberty. . . . After so many great things which our fathers have doneand which we have witnessed, here we are, issued forth from old forms ofsociety; why should we not issue out of the old forms of poetry? A newpeople, a new art. While admiring the literature of Louis XIV. , so welladapted to his monarchy, France will know how to have its own literature, peculiar, personal, and national--this actual France, this France of thenineteenth century to which Mirabeau has given its freedom and Napoleonits power. " And again:[12] "What I have been pleading for is the libertyof art as against the despotism of systems, codes, and rules. It is myhabit to follow at all hazards what I take for inspiration, and to changethe mould as often as I change the composition. Dogmatism in the arts iswhat I avoid above all things. God forbid that I should aspire to be ofthe number of those, either romantics or classics, who make works_according to their system_; who condemn themselves never to have morethan one form in mind, to always be _proving_ something, to follow anyother laws than those of their organization and of their nature. Theartificial work of such men as those, whatever talents they may possess, does not exist for art. It is a theory, not a poetry. " It is manifestthat a literary reform undertaken in this spirit would not long consentto lend itself to the purposes of political or religious reaction, or tolimit itself to any single influence like mediaevalism, but would strikeout freely in a multitude of directions; would invent new forms and adaptold ones to its material, and would become more and more modern, various, and progressive. And such, in fact, was the history of Victor Hugo'sintellectual development and of the whole literary movement in Francewhich began with him and with De Stendhal (Henri Beyle). This assertionof the freedom of the individual artist was naturally accompanied withcertain extravagances. "To develop freely all the caprices of thought, "says Gautier, [13] "even if they shocked taste, convention, and rule, tohate and repel to the utmost what Horace calls the _profanum vulgus_, andwhat the moustached and hairy _rapins_ call grocers, philistines, orbourgeois; to celebrate love with warmth enough to burn the paper (thatthey wrote on); to set it up as the only end and only means of happiness;to sanctify and deify art, regarded as a second creator; such are the_données_ of the programme which each sought to realise according to hisstrength; the ideal and the secret postulations of the youngromanticists. "

Inasmuch as the French romantic school, even more than the English andthe German, was a breach with tradition and an insurrection againstexisting conditions, it will be well to notice briefly what theparticular situation was which the romanticists in France confronted. "To understand what this movement was and what it did, " saysSaintsbury, [14] "we must point out more precisely what were the faults ofthe older literature, and especially of the literature of the lateeighteenth century. They were, in the first place, an extremelyimpoverished vocabulary, no recourse being had to the older tongue forpicturesque archaisms, and little welcome being given to new phrases, however appropriate and distinct. In the second place, the adoption, especially in poetry, of an exceedingly conventional method of speech, describing everything where possible by an elaborate periphrasis, andavoiding direct and simple terms. Thirdly, in all forms of literature, but especially in poetry and drama, the acceptance for almost every kindof work of cut-and-dried patterns, [15] to which it was bound to conform. We have already pointed out that this had all but killed the tragicdrama, and it was nearly as bad in the various accepted forms of poetry, such as fables, epistles, odes, etc. Each piece was expected to resemblesomething else, and originality was regarded as a mark of bad taste andinsufficient culture. Fourthly, the submission to a very limited andvery arbitrary system of versification, adapted only to the production oftragic alexandrines, and limiting even that form of verse to onemonotonous model. Lastly, the limitation of the subject to be treated toa very few classes and kinds. " If to this description be added aparagraph from Gautier's "Histoire du Romantisme, " we shall have asufficient idea of the condition of French literature and art before theappearance of Victor Hugo's "Odes et Ballades" (1826). "One cannotimagine to what a degree of insignificance and paleness literature hadcome. Painting was not much better. The last pupils of David werespreading their wishywashy colours over the old Graeco-Roman patterns. The classicists found that perfectly beautiful; but in the presence ofthese masterpieces, their admiration could not keep them from puttingtheir hands before their mouths to cover a yawn; a circumstance, however, that failed to make them any more indulgent to the artists of the newschool, whom they called tattooed savages and accused of painting with adrunken broom. " One is reminded by Mr. Saintsbury's summary of manyfeatures which we have observed in the English academicism of theeighteenth century; the impoverished vocabulary, _e. G. _, which makesitself evident in the annotations on the text of Spenser and other oldauthors; the horror of common terms, and the constant abuse of theperiphrasis--the "gelid cistern, " the "stercoraceous heap, " the"spiculated palings, " and the "shining leather that encased the limb. "And the heroic couplet in English usage corresponds very closely to theFrench alexandrine. In their dissatisfaction with the paleness andvagueness of the old poetic diction, and the monotony of the classicalverse, the new school innovated boldly, introducing archaisms, neologisms, and all kinds of exotic words and popular locutions, even_argot_ or Parisian slang; and trying metrical experiments of many sorts. Gautier mentions in particular one Théophile Dondey (who, after thefashion of the school, anagrammatised his name into Philothée O'Neddy) aspresenting this _caractère d'outrance et de tension_. "The word_paroxyste_, employed for the first time by Nestor Roqueplan, seems tohave been invented with an application to Philothée. Everything is_poussé_ in tone, high-coloured, violent, carried to the utmost limits ofexpression, of an aggressive originality, almost dripping with theunheard-of (_ruissilant d'inouïsme_); but back of the double-hornedparadoxes, sophistical maxims, incoherent metaphors, swoln hyperboles, and words six feet long, are the poetic feeling of the time and theharmony of rhythm. " One hears much in the critical writings of thatperiod, of the _mot propre_, the _vers libre_, and the _rime brisé_. Itwas in tragedy especially that the periphrasis reigned most tyrannically, and that the introduction of the _mot propre_, _i. E. _, of terms that wereprecise, concrete, familiar, technical even, if needful, horrified theclassicists. It was beneath the dignity of the muse--the elegant muse ofthe Abbé Delille--Hugo tells us, to speak naturally. "She underlines, "in sign of disapprobation, "the old Corneille for his way of sayingcrudely

 "'Ah, ne me brouillez pas avec la république. '

"She still has heavy on her heart his _Tout beau, monsieur_. And many a_seigneur_ and many a _madame_ was needed to make her forgive ouradmirable Racine his _chiens_ so monosyllabic. . . . History in her eyesis in bad tone and taste. How, for example, can kings and queens whoswear be tolerated? They must be elevated from their royal dignity tothe dignity of tragedy. . . . It is thus that the king of the people(Henri IV. ) polished by M. Legouvé, has seen his _ventre-saint-gris_shamefully driven from his mouth by two sentences, and has been reduced, like the young girl in the story, to let nothing fall from this royalmouth, but pearls, rubies, and sapphires--all of them false, to say thetruth. " It seems incredible to an Englishman, but it is neverthelesstrue that at the first representations of "Hernani" in 1830, the simplequestion and answer

 "Est il minuit?--Minuit bientot"

raised a tempest of hisses and applause, and that the opposing factionsof classics and romantics "fought three days over this hemistich. It wasthought trivial, familiar, out of place; a king asks what time it is likea common citizen, and is answered, as if he were a farmer, _midnight_. Well done! Now if he had only used some fine periphrasis, _e. G. _:

 "----l'heure Atteindra bientot sa dernière demeure. [16]

"If they could not away with definite words in the verse, they enduredvery impatiently, too, epithets, metaphors, comparisons, poeticwords--lyricism, in short; those swift escapes into nature, thosesoarings of the soul above the situation, those openings of poetryathwart drama, so frequent in Shakspere, Calderon, and Goethe, so rare inour great authors of the eighteenth century. " Gautier gives, as onereason for the adherence of so many artists to the romantic school, thecircumstance that, being accustomed to a language freely intermixed withtechnical terms, the _mot propre_ had nothing shocking for them; whiletheir special education as artists having put them into intimate relationwith nature, "they were prepared to feel the imagery and colours of thenew poetry and were not at all repelled by the precise and picturesquedetails so disagreeable to the classicists. . . . You cannot imagine thestorms that broke out in the parterre of the Théâtre Français, when the'Moor of Venice, ' translated by Alfred de Vigny, grinding his teeth, reiterated his demands for that handkerchief (_mouchoir_) prudentlydenominated _bandeau_ (head-band, fillet) in the vague Shakspereimitation of the excellent Ducis. A bell was called 'the soundingbrass'; the sea was 'the humid element, ' or 'the liquid element, ' and soon. The professors of rhetoric were thunderstruck by the audacity ofRacine, who in the 'Dream of Athalie' had spoken of dogs as dogs--molossiwould have been better--and they advised young poets not to imitate thislicense of genius. Accordingly the first poet who wrote bell (_cloche_)committed an enormity; he exposed himself to the risk of being cut by hisfriends and excluded from society. " [17]

As to the alexandrine, the recognised verse of French tragedy, VictorHugo tells us, [18] that many of the reformers, wearied by its monotony, advocated the writing of plays in prose. He makes a plea, however, forthe retention of the alexandrine, giving it greater richness andsuppleness by the displacement of the caesura, and the free use of_enjambement_ or run-over lines; just as Leigh Hunt and Keats broke upthe couplets of Pope into a freer and looser form of verse. "Hernani"opened with an _enjambement_

 "Serait ce déja lui? C'est bien à l'escalier Dérobé. "

This was a signal of fight--a challenge to the classicists--and thebattle began at once, with the very first lines of the play. [19] In hisdramas Hugo used the alexandrine, but in his lyric poems, his wonderfulresources as a metrist were exhibited to the utmost in the invention ofthe most bizarre, eccentric, and original verse forms. An example ofthis is the poem entitled "The Djinns" included in "Les Orientales"(1829). The coming and going of the flying cohort of spirits isindicated by the crescendo effect of the verse, beginning with a stanzain lines of two syllables, rising gradually to the middle stanza of thepoem in lines of ten syllables, and then dying away by exactly gradeddiminutions to the final stanza:

 "On doute La nuit-- J'écoute Tout fuit, Tout passe: L'espace Efface Le bruit. " [20]

But the earlier volume of "Odes et Ballades" (1826) offers many instancesof metrical experiments hardly less ingenious. In "La Chasse duBurgrave" every rime is followed by an echo word, alike in sound butdifferent in sense:

 "Il part, et Madame Isabelle, Belle, Dit gaiement du haut des remparts: 'Pars!' Tous las chasseurs sont dans la plaine, Pleine D'ardents seigneurs, de sénéchaux Chauds. "

The English reader is frequently reminded by Hugo's verses of the queer, abrupt, and _outré_ measures, and fantastic rimes of Robert Browning. Compare with the above, _e. G. _, his "Love among the Ruins. "

 "Where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles Miles and miles On the solitary pastures where our sheep, Half asleep, " etc. 

From the fact, already pointed out, that the romantic movement in Francewas, more emphatically than in England and Germany, a breach with thenative literary tradition, there result several interestingpeculiarities. The first of these is that the new French school, insteadof fighting the classicists with weapons drawn from the old arsenal ofmediaeval France, went abroad for allies; went especially to the modernwriters of England and Germany. This may seem strange when we reflectthat French literature in the Middle Ages was the most influential inEurope; and that, from the old heroic song of Roland in the eleventhcentury down to the very popular court allegory, the "Roman de la Rose", in the fourteenth, and to the poems of Villon in the fifteenth, itafforded a rich treasure-house of romantic material in the shape ofchronicles, _chansons de geste_, _romans d'aventures_, _fabliaux_, _lais_, legends of saints, homilies, miracles, songs, farces, _jeuspartis_, _pastourelles_, _ballades_--of all the literary forms infact which were then cultivated. Nor was this mass of work entirelywithout influence on the romanticists of 1830. Théophile Dondey, wrote apoem on Roland, and Gérard de Nerval (Labrunie) hunted up the old popularsongs and folklore of Touraine and celebrated their naïveté and trulynational character. Attention was directed to the Renaissance group ofpoets who preceded the Louis XIV. Writers--to Ronsard and "The Pleiade. "Later the Old French Text Society was founded for the preservation andpublication of mediaeval remains. But in general the innovating schoolsought their inspiration in foreign literatures. Antony Deschampstranslated the "Inferno"; Alfred de Vigny translated "Othello" as the"Moor of Venice" (1829), and wrote a play on the story of Chatterton, [21]and a novel, "Cinq Mars, " which is the nearest thing in French literatureto the historical romances of Scott. [22] Chateaubriand and Victor Hugowere both powerfully impressed by Macpherson's "Ossian. " Gérard deNerval made, at the age of eighteen, a translation of "Faust" (1828), which Goethe read with admiration, and wrote to the translator, sayingthat he had never before understood his own meaning so well. "It was adifficult task at that time, " says Gautier, "to render into our tongue, which had become excessively timid, the bizarre and mysterious beautiesof this ultra-romantic drama. . . . From his familiarity with Goethe, Uhland, Bürger and L. Tieck, Gérard retained in his turn of mind acertain dreamy tinge which sometimes made his own works seem liketranslations of unknown poets beyond the Rhine. . . . The sympathies andthe studies of Gérard de Nerval drew him naturally towards Germany, whichhe often visited and where he made fruitful sojourns; the shadow of theold Teutonic oak hovered more than once above his brow with confidentialmurmurs; he walked under the lindens with their heart-shaped leaves; onthe margin of fountains he saluted the elf whose white robe trails a hembedewed by the green grass; he saw the ravens circling around themountain of Kyffhausen; the kobolds came out before him from the rockclefts of the Hartz, and the witches of the Brocken danced their grandWalpurgisnight round about the young French poet, whom they took for aJena student. . . . He knows how to blow upon the postillion's horn, [23]the enchanted melodies of Achim von Arnim and Clement Brentano; and if hestops at the threshold of an inn embowered in hop vines, the _Schoppen_becomes in his hands the cup of the King of Thule. " Among the Frenchromanticists of Hugo's circle there was a great enthusiasm for wildGerman ballads like Bürger's "Lenore" and Goethe's "Erl-King. " Thetranslation of A. W. Schlegel's "Vorlesungen über Dramatische Kunst undLitteratur, " by Madame Necker de Saussure, in 1814, was doubtless thefirst fruits of Madame de Staël's "Allemagne, " published the year before. Gautier himself and his friend Augustus Mac-Keat (Auguste Maguet)collaborated in a drama founded on Byron's "Parisina. " "Walter Scott wasthen in the full flower of his success. People were being initiated intothe mysteries of Goethe's 'Faust, ' . . . And discovering Shakspere underthe translation, a little dressed up, of Letourneur; and the poems ofLord Byron, 'The Corsair, ' 'Lara, ' 'The Giaour, ' 'Manfred, ' 'Beppo, ' 'DonJuan, ' were coming to us from the Orient, which had not yet growncommonplace. " Gautier said that in _le petit cénacle_--the inner circleof the initiated--if you admired Racine more than Shakspere and Calderon, it was an opinion that you would do well to keep to yourself. "Toleration is not the virtue of neophytes. " As for himself, who had setout as a painter--and only later deviated into letters--he was all forthe Middle Ages: "An old iron baron, feudal, ready to take refuge fromthe encroachments of the time, in the castle of Goetz von Berlichingen. "Of Bouchardy, the extraordinary author of "Le Sonneur de Saint Paul, " who"was to Hugo what Marlowe was to Shakspere"--and who was playfullyaccused of making wooden models of the plots of his melodramas--Gautiersays that he "planned his singular edifice in advance, like a castle ofAnne Radcliffe, with donjon, turrets, underground chambers, secretpassages, corkscrew stairs, vaulted halls, mysterious closets, hidingplaces in the thickness of the walls, oubliettes, charnel-houses, cryptswhere his heroes and heroines were to meet later on, to love, hate, fight, set ambushes, assassinate, or marry. . . . He cut masked doors inthe walls for his expected personage to appear through, and trap doors inthe floor for him to disappear through. "

The reasons for this resort to foreign rather than native sources ofinspiration are not far to seek. The romantic movement in France wasbelated; it was twenty or thirty years behind the similar movements inEngland and Germany. It was easier and more natural for Stendhal or Hugoto appeal to the example of living masters like Goethe and Scott, whoseworks went everywhere in translation and who held the ear of Europe, thanto revive an interest all at once in Villon or Guillaume de Lorris orChrestien de Troyes. Again, in no country had the divorce betweenfashionable and popular literature been so complete as in France; in nonehad so thick and hard a crust of classicism overlain the indigenousproduct of the national genius. It was not altogether easy for BishopPercy in 1765 to win immediate recognition from the educated class forOld English minstrelsy; nor for Herder and Bürger in 1770 to do the samething for the German ballads. In France it would have been impossiblebefore the Bourbon restoration of 1815. In England and in Germany, moreover, the higher literature had always remained more closely in touchwith the people. In both of those countries the stock of ballad poetryand folklore was much more extensive and important than in France, andthe habit of composing ballads lasted later. The only French writers ofthe classical period who produced anything at all analogous to the German"Mährchen" were Charles Perrault, who published between 1691-97 hisfamous fairy tales, including "Blue Beard, " "The Sleeping Beauty, ""Little Red Riding-Hood, " "Cinderella, " and "Puss in Boots"; and theCountess d'Aulnoy (died 1720), whose "Yellow Dwarf" and "White Cat"belong to the same department of nursery tales. [24]

A curious feature of French romanticism was the way in which thenew-found liberty of art asserted itself in manners, costume, andpersonal habits. Victor Hugo himself was scrupulously correct andsubdued in dress, but his young disciples affected bright colours andrich stuffs. They wore Spanish mantillas, coats with large velvetlapels, pointed doublets or jerkins of satin or damask velvet in place ofthe usual waistcoat, long hair after the Merovingian fashion, and pointedbeards. We have seen that Shenstone was regarded as an eccentric, andperhaps somewhat dangerous, person when at the university, because hewore his own hair instead of a wig. In France, half a century later, notonly the _perruque_, but the _menton glabre_ was regarded as symptomaticof the classicist and the academician; while the beard became a badge ofromanticism. At the beginning of the movement, Gautier informs us, "there were only two full beards in France, the beard of Eugène Devériaand the beard of Petrus Borel. To wear them required a courage, acoolness, and a contempt for the crowd truly heroic. . . . It was thefashion then is the romantic school to be pale, livid, greenish, a triflecadaverous, if possible. It gave one an air of doom, Byronic, _giaourish_, devoured by passion and remorse. " It will be rememberedthat the rolling Byronic collar, open at the throat, was much affected atone time by young persons of romantic temperament in England; and thatthe conservative classes, who adhered to the old-fashioned stock and highcollar, looked askance upon these youthful innovators as certainlyatheists and libertines, and probably enemies to society--would-becorsairs or banditti. It is interesting, therefore, to discover that inFrance, too, the final touch of elegance among the romantics was not tohave any white linen in evidence; the shirt collar, in particular, being"considered as a mark of the grocer, the bourgeois, the philistine. " Acertain _gilet rouge_ which Gautier wore when he led the _claque_ at thefirst performance of "Hernani" has become historic. This flamboyantgarment--a defiance and a challenge to the academicians who had come tohiss Hugo's play--was, in fact, a _pourpoint_ or jerkin ofcherry-coloured satin, cut in the shape of a Milanese cuirass, pointed, busked, and arched in front, and fastened behind the back with hooks andeyes. From the imperturbable disdain with which the wearer faced theopera-glasses and laughter of the assembly it was evident that it wouldnot have taken much urging to induce him to come to the second night'sperformance decked in a daffodil waistcoat. [25] The young enthusiasts of_le petit cénacle_ carried their Byronism so far that, in imitation ofthe celebrated revels at Newstead, they used to drink from a human skullin their feasts at _le Petit Moulin Rouge_. It had belonged to adrum-major, and Gérard de Nerval got it from his father, who had been anarmy surgeon. One of the neophytes, in his excitement, even demandedthat it be filled with sea water instead of wine, in emulation of thehero of Victor Hugo's novel, "Han d'Islande, " who "drank the water of theseas in the skull of the dead. " Another _caput mortuum_ stood on Hugo'smantelpiece in place of a clock. [26] "If it did not tell the hour, atleast it made us think of the irreparable flight of time. It was theverse of Horace translated into romantic symbolism. " There was a decidedflavour of Bohemianism about the French romantic school, and the spiritof the lives which many of them led may best be studied in Merger'sclassic, "La Vie de Boheme. " [27]

As another special feature of French romanticism, we may note theimportant part taken by the theatre in the history of the movement. Thestage was the citadel of classical prejudice, and it was about it thatthe fiercest battles were fought. The climacteric year was 1830, inwhich year Victor Hugo's tragedy, "Hernani, or Castilian Honour, " was puton at the Theatre Français on February 25th, and ran for thirty nights. The representation was a fight between the classics and the romantics, and there was almost a mob in the theatre. The dramatic censorship underCharles X. , though strict, was used in the interest of political ratherthan aesthetic orthodoxy. But it is said that some of the olderAcademicians actually applied to the king to forbid the acting of"Hernani. " Gautier has given a mock-heroic description of this famousliterary battle _quorum pars magna fuit_. He had received from hiscollege friend, Gérard de Nerval--who had been charged with the duty ofdrumming up recruits for the Hugonic _claque_--six tickets to bedistributed only to tried friends of the cause--sure men and true. Thetickets themselves were little squares of red paper, stamped in thecorner with a mysterious countersign--the Spanish word _hierro_, iron, not only symbolizing the hero of the drama, but hinting that theticket-holder was to bear himself in the approaching fray frankly, bravely, and faithfully like the sword. The proud recipient of thesetokens of confidence gave two of them to a couple of artists--ferociousromantics, who would gladly have eaten an Academician, if necessary; twohe gave to a brace of young poets who secretly practised _la rime riche_, _le mot propre_, and _la metaphore exacte_: the other two he reserved forhis cousin and himself. The general attitude of the audience on thefirst nights was hostile, "two systems, two parties, two armies, twocivilizations even--it is not saying too much--confronted oneanother, . . . And it was not hard to see that yonder young man with longhair found the smoothly shaved gentleman opposite a disastrous idiot; andthat he would not long be at pains to conceal his opinion of him. " Theclassical part of the audience resented the touches of Spanish localcolour in the play, the mixture of pleasantries and familiar speecheswith the tragic dialogue, and of heroism and savagery in the character ofHernani, and they made all manner of fun of the species of pun--_de tasuite, j'en suis_--which terminated the first act. "Certain lines werecaptured and recaptured, like disputed redoubts, by each army with equalobstinacy. On one day the romantics would carry a passage, which theenemy would retake the next day, and from which it became necessary todislodge them. What uproar, what cries, cat-calls, hisses, hurricanes ofbravos, thunders of applause! The heads of parties blackguarded eachother like Homer's heroes before they came to blows. . . . For thisgeneration 'Hernani' was what the 'Cid' was for the contemporaries ofCorneille. All that was young, brave, amorous, poetic, caught theinspiration of it. Those fine exaggerations, heroic, Castilian, thatsuperb Spanish emphasis; that language so proud and high even in itsfamiliarity, those images of a dazzling strangeness, threw us into anecstasy and intoxicated us with their heady poetry. " The victory in theend was with the new school. Musset, writing in 1838, says that thetragedies of Corneille and Racine had disappeared from the French stagefor ten years. 

Another triumphant battlefield--a veritable _fête romantique_--was thefirst representation in 1831 of Alexandre Dumas' "Anthony. " "It was anagitation, a tumult, an effervescence. . . . The house was actuallydelirious; it applauded, sobbed, wept, shouted. A certain famous greencoat was torn from the author's back and rent into shreds by his tooardent admirers, who wanted pieces of it for memorabilia. " [28]

The English reader who hears of the stubborn resistance offered to theperformance of 'Hernani' will naturally suppose that there must have beensomething about it contrary to public policy--some immorality, or somepolitical references, at least, offensive to the government; and he willhave a difficulty in understanding that the trouble was all about affairspurely literary. "Hernani" was fought because it violated the unities ofplace and time; because its hero was a Spanish bandit; because in thedialogue a spade was called a spade, and in the verse the lines overlap. The French are often charged with frivolity in matters of conduct, but tothe discussion of matters of art they bring a most serious conscience. The scene in "Hernani" shifts from Saragossa to the castle of Don RuyGomez de Silva in the mountains of Arragon, and to the tomb ofCharlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle. The time of the action, though notprecisely indicated, covers at least a number of months. The dialogueis, in many parts, nervous, simple, direct, abrupt; in others runninginto long _tirades_ and soliloquies, rich with all the poetic resourcesof the greatest poet who has ever used the French tongue. The spirit ofthe drama, as well as its form, is romantic. The point of honour ispushed to a fantastic excess; all the characters display the mostdelicate chivalry, the noblest magnanimity, the loftiest Castilian pride. Don Ruy Gomez allows the King to carry off his bride, rather than yieldup the outlaw who has taken refuge in his castle; and that although hehas just caught this same outlaw paying court to this same bride, whoseaccepted lover he is. Hernani, not to be outdone in generosity, offershis life to his enemy and preserver, giving him his horn and promising tocome to meet his death at its summons. There is the same fault herewhich is felt in Hugo's novels. Motives are exaggerated, the _dramatispersonae_ strut. They are rather over-dramatic in theirposes---melodramatic, in fact--and do unlikely things. But this fault isthe fault of a great nature, grandeur exalted into grandiosity, till theheroes of these plays, "Hernani, " "Marion Delorme, " "Le Roi d'Amuse, "loom and stalk across the scene like epic demigods of more than mortalstature and mortal passions. But Hugo was not only a great dramatist anda great poet, but a most clever playwright. "Hernani" is full ofeffective stage devices, crises in the action which make an audience holdits breath or shudder; moments of intense suspense like that in the thirdact, where the old hidalgo pauses before his own portrait, behind whichthe outlaw is hidden; or that in the fifth, where Hernani hears at first, faint and far away, the blast of the fatal horn that summons him to leavehis bride at the altar and go to his death. The young romantics of theday all got "Hernani" by heart and used to rehearse it at theirassemblies, each taking a part; and the famous trumpet, the _cord'Hernani_, became a symbol and a rallying call. 

No such scene would have been possible in an English playhouse as thatwhich attended the first representation of "Hernani" at the ThéâtreFrançais. For not only is an English audience comparatively indifferentto rules of art and canons of taste, but the unities had never prevailedin practice in England, though constantly recommended in theory. TheFrench had no Shakspere, and the English no Academy. We may construct animaginary parallel to such a scene if we will suppose that all reputableEnglish tragedies from 1600 down to 1830 had been something upon themodel of Addison's "Cato" and Johnson's "Irene", or better still upon themodel of Dryden's heroic plays in rimed couplets; and that then a dramalike "Romeo and Juliet" had been produced upon the boards of Drury Lane, and a warm spurt of romantic poetry suddenly injected into the icycurrent of classic declamation. 

Having considered the chief points in which the French romantic movementdiffered from the similar movements in England and Germany, let us nowglance at the history of its beginnings, and at the work of a few of itstypical figures. The presentation of "Hernani" in 1830 was by no meansthe first overt act of the new school. Discussion had been going on foryears in the press. De Stendhal says that the classicists had on theirside two-thirds of the Académie Française, and all of the Frenchjournalists; that their leading organ, however, was the very influential_Journal des Débats_ and its editor, M. Dussant, the general-in-chief ofthe classical party. The romanticists, however, were not without organsof their own; among which are especially mentioned _Le ConservateurLittéraire_, begun in 1819, _Le Globe_ in 1824, and the _AnnalesRomantiques_ in 1823, the last being "practically a kind of annual of theMuse Française (1823-24), which had pretty nearly the same contributors. "All of these journals were Bourboniste, except _Le Globe_, which wasliberal in politics. [29] The Academy denounced the new literary doctrineas a heresy and its followers as a sect, but it made head so rapidly thatas early as 1829, a year before "Hernani" was acted, a "Histoire duRomantisme en France" appeared, written by a certain M. De Toreinx. [30]It agrees with other authorities in dating the beginning of the movementfrom Chateaubriand's "Le Génie du Christianisme" (1802). "Chateaubriand, " says Gautier, "may be regarded as the grandfather, or, if you prefer it, the sachem of romanticism in France. In the 'Genius ofChristianity' he restored the Gothic cathedral, in the 'Natchez' hereopened the sublimity of nature, which had been closed, in 'René' heinvented melancholy and modern passion. "

Sprung from an ancient Breton family, Chateaubriand came to America in1790 with the somewhat singular and very French idea of travellingoverland to the northwest passage. He was diverted from this enterprise, however, fell in with an Indian tribe and wandered about with them in thewilderness. He did not discover the north-west passage, but, accordingto Lowell, he invented the forest primeval. Chateaubriand gave the firstfull utterance to that romantic note which sounds so loudly in Byron'sverse; the restless dissatisfaction with life as it is, the longing forsomething undefined and unattainable, the love for solitude and thedesert, the "passion incapable of being converted into action"--in short, the _maladie du siécle_--since become familiar in "Childe Harold" and inSénancour's "Obermann. " In one of the chapters[31] of "Le Génie duChristianisme" he gives an analysis of this modern melancholy, thisByronic satiety and discontent, which he says was unknown to theancients. "The farther nations advance in civilization, the more thisunsettled state of the passions predominates, for then our imagination isrich, abundant, and full of wonders; but our existence is poor, insipid, and destitute of charms. With a full heart we dwell in an empty world. ""Penetrate into those forests of America coeval with the world; whatprofound silence pervades these retreats when the winds are husht! Whatunknown voices when they begin to rise! Stand still and everything ismute; take but a step and all nature sighs. Night approaches, the shadesthicken; you hear herds of wild beasts passing in the dark; the groundmurmurs under your feet; the pealing thunder rebellows in the deserts;the forest bows, the trees fall, an unknown river rolls before you. Themoon at length bursts forth in the east; as you proceed at the foot ofthe trees, she seems to move before you on their tops and solemnly toaccompany your steps. The wanderer seats himself on the trunk of an oakto await the return of day; he looks alternately at the nocturnalluminary, the darkness, and the river; he feels restless, agitated, andin expectation of something extraordinary; a pleasure never felt before, an unusual fear, cause his heart to throb, as if he were about to beadmitted to some secret of the Divinity; he is alone in the depth of theforests, but the mind of man is equal to the expanse of nature, and allthe solitudes of the earth are not too vast for the contemplations of hisheart. There is in man an instinctive melancholy, which makes himharmonise with the scenery of nature. Who has not spent whole hoursseated on the bank of a river, contemplating its passing waves? Who hasnot found pleasure on the seashore in viewing the distant rock whitenedby the billows? How much are the ancients to be pitied, who discoveredin the ocean naught but the palace of Neptune and the cavern of Proteus;it was hard that they should perceive only the adventures of the Tritonsand the Nereids in the immensity of the seas, which seems to give anindistinct measure of the greatness of our souls, and which excites avague desire to quit this life, that we may embrace all nature and tastethe fulness of joy in the presence of its Author. " [32]

The outbreak of the Revolution recalled Chateaubriand to France. Hejoined the army of the _emigrées_ at Coblentz, was wounded at the siegeof Thionville, and escaped into England where he lived (1793-1800) untilthe time of the Consulate, when he made his peace with Napoleon andreturned to France. He had been a free-thinker, but was converted toChristianity by a dying message from his mother who was thrown intoprison by the revolutionists. "I wept, " said Chateaubriand, "and Ibelieved. " "Le Génie du Christianisme" was an expression of thatreactionary feeling which drove numbers of Frenchmen back into theChurch, after the blasphemies and horrors of the Revolution. It came outjust when Napoleon was negotiating his _Concordat_ with the Pope, and wastrying to enlist the religious and conservative classes in support of hisgovernment; and it reinforced his purposes so powerfully that heappointed the author, in spite of his legitimism, to several diplomaticposts. "Le Génie du Christianisme" is indeed a plea for Christianity onaesthetic grounds--an attempt, as has been sneeringly said, to recommendChristianity by making it look pretty. Chateaubriand was not a closereasoner; his knowledge was superficial and inaccurate; his character wasweakened by vanity and shallowness. He was a sentimentalist and arhetorician, but one of the most brilliant of rhetoricians; while hissentiment, though not always deep or lasting, was for the noncesufficiently sincere. He had in particular a remarkable talent forpictorial description; and his book, translated into many tongues, enjoyed an extraordinary vogue. The English version, made in 1815, wasentitled "The Beauties of Christianity. " For Chateaubriand undertook toshow that the Christian religion had influenced favorably literature andthe fine arts; that it was more poetical than any other system of beliefand worship. He compared Homer and Vergil with Dante, Tasso, Milton, andother modern poets, and awarded the palm to the latter in the treatmentof the elementary relations and stock characters, such as husband andwife, father and child, the priest, the soldier, the lover, etc. ;preferring Pope's Eloisa, _e. G. _, to Vergil's Dido, and "Paul andVirginia" to the idyls of Theocritus. He pronounced the Christianmythology--angels, devils, saints, miracles--superior to the pagan; andDante's Hell much more impressive to the imagination than Tartarus. Hedwelt eloquently upon the beauty and affecting significance of Gothicchurch architecture, of Catholic ritual and symbolism, the dress of theclergy, the crucifix, the organ, the church bell, the observances ofChristian festivals, the monastic life, the orders of chivalry, thecountry churchyards where the dead were buried, and even upon thesuperstitions which the last century had laughed to scorn; such as thebelief in ghosts, the adoration of relics, vows to saints and pilgrimagesto holy places. In his chapter on "The Influence of Christianity uponMusic, " he says that the "Christian religion is essentially melodious forthis single reason, that she delights in solitude"; the forests are herancient abode, and her musician "ought to be acquainted with themelancholy notes of the waters and the trees; he ought to have studiedthe sound of the winds in cloisters, and those murmurs that pervade theGothic temple, the grass of the cemetery, and the vaults of death. " Herepeats the ancient fable that the designers of the cathedrals wereapplying forest scenery to architecture; "Those ceilings sculptured intofoliage of different kinds, those buttresses which prop the walls andterminate abruptly like the broken trunks of trees, the coolness of thevaults, the darkness of the sanctuary, the dim twilight of the aisles, the chapels resembling grottoes, the secret passages, the low doorways, in a word everything in a Gothic church reminds you of the labyrinths ofa wood, everything excites a feeling of religious awe, of mystery, and ofthe Divinity. " The birds perch upon the steeples and towers as if theywere trees, and "the Christian architect, not content with buildingforests, has been desirous to retain their murmurs, and by means of theorgan and of bells, he has attached to the Gothic temple the very windsand the thunders that roll in the recesses of the woods. Past ages, conjured up by these religious sounds, raise their venerable voices fromthe bosom of the stones and sigh in every corner of the vast cathedral. The sanctuary re-echoes like the cavern of the ancient Sibyl;loud-tongued bells swing over your head; while the vaults of death underyour feet are profoundly silent. " He praises the ideals of chivalry;gives a sympathetic picture of the training and career of aknight-errant, and asks: "Is there then nothing worthy of admiration inthe times of a Roland, a Godfrey, a Coucey, and a Joinville; in the timesof the Moors and the Saracens; . . . When the strains of the Troubadourswere mingled with the clash of arms, dances with religious ceremonies, and banquets and tournaments with sieges and battles?" Chateaubriandsays that the finest Gothic ruins are to be found in the English lakecountry, on the Scotch mountains, and in the Orkney Islands; and thatthey are more impressive than classic ruins because in the latter thearches are parallel with the curves of the sky, while in the Gothic orpointed architecture the arches "form a contrast with the circular archesof the sky and the curvatures of the horizon. The Gothic being, moreover, entirely composed of _voids_, the more readily admits of thedecoration of herbage and flowers than the fulness of the Grecian orders. The clustered columns, the domes carved into foliage, or scooped out inthe form of a fruit-basket, offered so many receptacles into which thewinds carry, with the dust, the seeds of vegetables. The house-leekfixes itself in the mortar, the mosses cover rugged masses with theirelastic coating; the thistle projects its brown burrs from the embrasureof a window; and the ivy creeping along the northern cloisters falls infestoons over the arches. "

All this is romantic enough; we have the note of Catholic mediaevalismand the note of Ossianic melancholy combined; and this some years before"The Lay of the Last Minstrel, " and when Byron was a boy of fourteen andstill reading his Ossian. [33] But we are precluded from classifyingChateaubriand among full-fledged romanticists. His literary taste was byno means emancipated from eighteenth-century standards. In speaking ofMilton, _e. G. _, he says that if he had only been born in France in thereign of Louis XIV. , and had "combined with the native grandeur of hisgenius the taste of Racine and Boileau, " the "Paradise Lost" might haveequalled the "Iliad. "

Chateaubriand never called himself a romantic. It is agreed upon allhands that the expressions _romantisme_ and _littérature romantique_ werefirst invented or imported by Madame de Staël in her "L'Allemagne"(1813), "pour exprimer l'affranchissement des vieilles formeslittéraires. " [34] Some ten years later, or by 1823, when Stendhalpublished his "Racine et Shakspere, " the issue between the schools hadbeen joined and the question quite thoroughly agitated in the Parisianjournals. Stendhal announced himself as an adherent of the new, but histemper was decidedly cool and unromantic. I have quoted his epigrammaticdefinition of romanticism. [35]

In this _brochure_ Stendhal announces that France is on the eve of aliterary revolution and that the last hour of classicism has struck, although as yet the classicists are in possession of the theatres, and ofall the salaried literary positions under government; and all thenewspapers of all shades of political opinion are shut to theromanticists. A company of English actors who attempted to give some ofShakspere's plays at the Porte-Saint-Martin in 1822 were mobbed. "Thehisses and cat-calls began before the performance, of which it wasimpossible to hear a single word. As soon as the actors appeared theywere pelted with apples and eggs, and from time to time the audiencecalled out to them to talk French, and shouted, '_À bas Shakspere! c'estun aide de camp du duc de Wellington_. '" It will be remembered that inour own day the first representations of Wagner's operas at Paris wereinterrupted with similar cries: "_Pas de Wagner_!, " "_À bas lesAllemands_!, " etc. 

In 1827 Kemble's company visited Paris and gave, in English, "Hamlet, ""Romeo and Juliet, " "Othello, " and "The Merchant of Venice. " Dumas wentto see them and described the impression made upon him by Shakspere, inlanguage identical with that which Goethe used about himself. [36] He waslike a man born blind and suddenly restored to sight. Dumas' "HenryIII. " (1829), a _drame_ in the manner of Shakspere's historical plays, though in prose, was the immediate result of this new vision. Englishactors were in Paris again in 1828 and 1829; and in 1835 Macreadypresented "Hamlet, " "Othello, " and "Henry IV. " with great success. Previous to these performances, the only opportunities that the Frenchpublic had to judge of Shakspere's dramas as acting plays were affordedby the wretched adaptations of Ducis and other stage carpenters. Ducishad read Shakspere only in Letourneur's very inadequate translation(revised by Guizot in 1821). His "Hamlet" was played in 1769; "Macbeth, "1784, "King John, " 1791; "Othello" (turned into a comedy), 1792. Mercier's "Timon" was given in 1794; and Dejaure's "Imogènes"--an"arrangement" of "Cymbeline"--in 1796. The romanticists labored to puttheir countrymen in possession of better versions of Shakspere. Alfredde Vigny rendered "Othello" (1827), and Emile Deschamps, "Romeo andJuliet" and "Macbeth. "

Stendhal interviewed a director of one of the French theatres and triedto persuade him that there would be money in it for any house which wouldhave the courage to give a season of romantic tragedy. But the director, who seemed to be a liberal-minded man, assured him that until some stagemanager could be found rich enough to buy up the dramatic criticism ofthe _Constitutionnel_ and two or three other newspapers, the law studentsand medical students, who were under the influence of those journals, would never suffer the play to get as far as the third act. "If it wereotherwise, " he said, "don't you suppose that we would have triedSchiller's 'William Tell'? The police would have cut out a quarter ofit; one of our adapters another quarter; and what was left would reach ahundred representations, _provided it could once secure three_. "

To this the author replied that the immense majority of young societypeople had been converted to romanticism by the eloquence of M. Cousin. 

"Sir, " said the director, "your young society people don't go into theparterre to engage in fisticuffs [_faire le coup de poing_], and at thetheatre, as in politics, we despise philosophers who don't fight. "Stendhal adds that the editors of influential journals found theirinterest in this state of things, since many of them had pieces of theirown on the stage, written of course in alexandrine verse and on theclassic model; and what would become of these masterpieces if Talmashould ever get permission to play in a prose translation of "Macbeth, "abridged, say, one-third? "I said one day to one of these gentlemen, 28, 000, 000 men, _i. E. _, 18, 000, 000 in England and 10, 000, 000 in America, admire 'Macbeth' and applaud it a hundred times a year. 'The English, 'he answered me with great coolness, 'cannot have real eloquence or poetrytruly admirable; the nature of their language, which is not derived fromthe Latin, makes it quite impossible. '" A great part of "Racine etShakspere" is occupied with a refutation of the doctrine of the unitiesof time and place, and with a discussion of the real nature of dramaticillusion, on which their necessity was supposed to rest. Stendhalmaintains that the illusion is really stronger in Shakspere's tragediesthan in Racine's. It is not essential here to reproduce his argument, which is the same that is familiar to us in Lessing and in Coleridge, though he was an able controversialist, and his logic and irony give afreshness to the treatment of this hackneyed theme which makes his littletreatise well worth the reading. To illustrate the nature of _real_stage illusion, he says that last year (August, 1822) a soldier in aBaltimore theatre, seeing Othello about to kill Desdemona, cried out, "Itshall never be said that a damned nigger killed a white woman in mypresence, " and at the same moment fired his gun and broke an arm of theactor who was playing Othello. "_Eh bien_, this soldier had illusion: hebelieved that the action which was passing on the stage was true. "

Stendhal proposes the following as a definition of romantic tragedy: "Itis written in prose; the succession of events which it presents to theeyes of the spectators lasts several months, and they happen in differentplaces. " He complains that the French comedies are not funny, do notmake any one laugh; and that the French tragic dialogue is epic ratherthan dramatic. He advises his readers to go and see Kean in "Richard"and "Othello"; and says that since reading Schlegel and Dennis (!) he hasa great contempt for the French critics. He appeals to the usages of theGerman and English stage in disregarding the rules of Aristotle, andcites the great popularity of Walter Scott's romances, which, he says, are nothing more than romantic tragedies with long descriptionsinterspersed, to support his plea for a new kind of French prose-tragedy;for which he recommends subjects taken from national history, andespecially from the mediaeval chroniclers like Froissart. Nevertheless, he does not advise the direct imitation of Shakspere. He blames Schillerfor copying Shakspere, and eulogizes Werner's "Luther" as nearer to themasterpieces of Shakspere than Schiller's tragedies are. He wants thenew French drama to resemble Shakspere only in dealing freely with modernconditions, as the latter did with the conditions of his time, withouthaving the fear of Racine or any other authority before its eyes. 

In 1824 the Academy, which was slowly constructing its famous dictionaryof the French language, happened to arrive at the new word _romanticism_which needed defining. This was the signal for a heated debate in thatvenerable body, and the director, M. Auger, was commissioned to prepare amanifesto against the new literary sect, to be read at the meeting of theInstitute on the 24th of April next. It was in response to thismanifesto that Stendhal wrote the second part of his "Racine etShakspere" (1825), attached to which is a short essay entitled "Qu'est ceque le Romanticisme?" [37] addressed to the Italian public, and intendedto explain to them the literary situation in France, and to enlist theirsympathies on the romantic side. "Shakspere, " he says, "the hero ofromantic poetry, as opposed to Racine, the god of the classicists, wrotefor strong souls; for English hearts which were what Italian hearts wereabout 1500, emerging from that sublime Middle Age _questi tempi dellavirtu sconosciutta_. " Racine, on the contrary, wrote for a slavish andeffeminate court. The author disclaims any wish to impose Shakspere onthe Italians. The day will come, he hopes, when they will have anational tragedy of their own; but to have that, they will do better tofollow in the footprints of Shakspere than, like Alfieri, in thefootprints of Racine. In spite of the pedants, he predicts that Germanyand England will carry it over France; Shakspere, Schiller, and LordByron will carry it over Racine and Boileau. He says that English poetrysince the French Revolution has become more enthusiastic, more serious, more passionate. It needed other subjects than those required by thewitty and frivolous eighteenth century, and sought its heroes in therude, primitive, inventive ages, or even among savages and barbarians. It had to have recourse to time or countries when it was permitted to thehigher classes of society to have passions. The Greek and Latin classicscould give no help; since most of them belonged to an epoch asartificial, and as far removed from the naïve presentation of thepassions, as the eighteenth century itself. The court of Augustus was nomore natural than that of Louis XIV. Accordingly the most successfulpoets in England, during the past twenty years, have not only soughtdeeper emotions than those of the eighteenth century, but have treatedsubjects which would have been scornfully rejected by the age of _belesprit_. The anti-romantics can't cheat us much longer. "Where, amongthe works of our Italian pedants, are the books that go through seveneditions in two months, like the romantic poems that are coming out inLondon at the present moment? Compare, _e. G. _, the success of Moore's'Lalla Rookh, ' which appeared in June, 1817, and the eleventh edition ofwhich I have before me, with the success of the 'Camille' of the highlyclassical Mr. Botta!'"

In 1822, a year before the appearance of Stendhal's "Racine etShakspere, " Victor Hugo had published his "Odes et Poésies Diverses, " anda second collection followed in 1824. In the prefaces to these twovolumes he protests against the use of the terms classic and romantic, as_mots de guerre_ and vague words which every one defines in accordancewith his own prejudices. If romanticism means anything, he says, itmeans the literature of the nineteenth century, and all the anathemaslaunched at the heads of contemporary writers reduce themselves to thefollowing method of argument. "We condemn the literature of thenineteenth century because it is romantic. And why is it romantic?Because it is the literature of the nineteenth century. " As to the falsetaste which disfigured the eighteenth-century imitations of Racine andBoileau, he would prefer to distinguish that by the name _scholastic_, astyle which is to the truly classic what superstition and fanaticism areto religion. The intention of these youthful poems of Hugo was partlyliterary and partly political and religious: "The history of mankindaffords no poetry, " he says, "except when judged from the vantage-groundof monarchical ideas and religious beliefs. . . . He has thoughtthat . . . In substituting for the outworn and false colours of paganmythology the new and truthful colours of the Christian theogony, onecould inject into the ode something of the interest of the drama, andcould make it speak, besides, that austere, consoling, and religiouslanguage which is needed by an old society that issues still tremblingfrom the saturnalia of atheism and anarchy. . . . The literature of thepresent, the actual literature, is the expression, by way ofanticipation, of that religious and monarchical society which will issue, doubtless, from the midst of so many ancient debris, of so many recentruins. . . . If the literature of the great age of Louis XIV. Hadinvoked Christianity in place of worshipping heathen gods . . . Thetriumph of the sophistical doctrines of the last century would have beenmuch more difficult, perhaps even impossible. . . . But France had notthat good fortune; its national poets were almost all pagan poets, andour literature was rather the expression of an idolatrous and democratic, than of a monarchical and Christian society. " The prevailing note, accordingly, in these early odes is that of the Bourbon Restoration of1815-30, and of the Catholic reaction against the scepticalÉclaircissement of the eighteenth century. The subjects are such asthese: "The Poet in the Times of Revolution"; "La Vendée"; "The Maidensof Verdun, " which chants the martyrdom of three young royalist sisterswho were put to death for sending money and supplies to the _emigres_;"Quibiron, " where a royalist detachment which had capitulated underpromise of being treated like prisoners of war, were shot down in squadsby the Convention soldiery; "Louis XVII. "; "The Replacement of the Statueof Henry IV. "; "The Death of the Duke of Berry"; "The Birth of the Dukeof Bourdeaux" and his "Baptism"; "The Funeral of Louis XVIII. "; "TheConsecration of Charles X. "; "The Death of Mlle. De Sombreuil, " theroyalist heroine who saved her father's life by drinking a cupful ofhuman blood in the days of the Terror; and "La Bande Noire, " whichdenounces with great bitterness the violation of the tombs of the kingsof France by the regicides, and pleads for the preservation of the ruinsof feudal times:

 "O murs! ô créneaux! ô tourelle! Remparts, fossés aux ponts mouvants! Lourds faisceaux de colonnes frêles! Fiers chateaux! modestes couvents! Cloîtres poudreux, salles antiques, Où gémissaient les saints cantiques, Où riaient les banquets joyeux! Lieux où le coeur met ses chimères! Églises où priaient nos mères Tours où combattaient nos aïeux!"

In these two ode collections, though the Catholic and legitimistinspiration is everywhere apparent, there is nothing revolutionary in thelanguage or verse forms. But in the "Odes et Ballades" of 1826, "theromantic challenge, " says Saintsbury, "is definitely thrown down. Thesubjects are taken by preference from times and countries which theclassical tradition had regarded as barbarous. The metres and rhythm arestudiously broken, varied, and irregular; the language has the utmostpossible glow of colour, as opposed to the cold correctness of classicalpoetry, the completest disdain of conventional periphrasis, the boldestreliance on exotic terms and daring neologisms. " This descriptionapplies more particularly to the Ballades, many of which, such as "LaRonde du Sabbat, " "La Légende de la Nonne, " "La Chasse du Burgrave, " and"Le Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean" are mediaeval studies in which the lawless_grotesquerie_ of Gothic art runs riot. "The author, in composing them, "says the preface, "has tried to give some idea of what the poems of thefirst troubadours of the Middle Ages might have been; those Christianrhapsodists who had nothing in the world but their swords and theirguitars, and went from castle to castle paying for their entertainmentwith their songs. " To show that liberty in art does not mean disorder, the author draws an elaborate contrast between the garden of Versaillesand a primitive forest, in a passage which will remind the reader ofsimilar comparisons in the writings of Shenstone, Walpole, and otherEnglish romanticists of the eighteenth century. There is as much order, he asserts, in the forest as in the garden, but it is a live order, not adead regularity. "Choose then, " he exclaims, "between the masterpiece ofgardening and the work of nature; between that which is beautiful byconvention and that which is beautiful without rule; between anartificial literature and an original poetry. . . . In two words--and weshall not object to have judgment passed in accordance with thisobservation on the two kinds of literature that are called _classic_ and_romantic_, --regularity is the taste of mediocrity, order is the taste ofgenius. . . . It will be objected to us that the virgin forest hides inits magnificent solitudes a thousand dangerous animals, while the marshybasins of the French garden conceal at most a few harmless creatures. That is doubtless a misfortune; but, taking it all in all, we like acrocodile better than a frog; we prefer a barbarism of Shakspere to aninsipidity of Campistron. " But above all things--such is the doctrine ofthis preface--do not imitate anybody--not Shakspere any more than Racine. "He who imitates a _romantic_ poet becomes thereby a _classic_, and justbecause he imitates. " In 1823 Hugo had published anonymously his firstprose romance, "Han d'Islande, " the story of a Norwegian bandit. He gotup the local colour for this by a careful study of the Edda and theSagas, that "poésie sauvage" which was the admiration of the new schooland the horror of the old. But it was in the preface to "Cromwell, "published in 1827, that Hugo issued the full and, as it were, officialmanifesto of romanticism. The play itself is hardly actable. It ismodelled, in a sense, upon the historical plays of Shakspere, but itsCromwell is a very melodramatic person, and its Puritans and Cavaliersstrike the English reader with the same sense of absurdity produced bythe pictures of English society in "L'Homme qui Rit. " But of the famouspreface Gautier says: "The Bible among Protestants, the Koran amongMahometans are not the object of a deeper veneration. It was, indeed, for us the book of books, the book which contained the pure doctrine. "It consisted in great part of a triumphant attack upon the unities, andupon the verse and style which classic usage had consecrated to Frenchtragedy. I need not repeat the argument here. It is already familiar, and some sentences[38] from this portion of the essay I have quotedelsewhere. 

The preface also contained a plea for another peculiarity of the romanticdrama, its mixture, viz. , of tragedy and comedy. According to Hugo, thisis the characteristic trait, the fundamental difference, which separatesmodern from ancient art, romantic from classical literature. Antiqueart, he says, rejected everything which was not purely beautiful, but theChristian and modern spirit feels that there are many things in creationbesides that which is, humanly speaking, beautiful; and that everythingwhich is in nature is--or has the right to be--in art. It includes inits picture of life the ugly, the misshapen, the monstrous. Henceresults a new type, the grotesque, and a new literary form, romanticcomedy. He proceeds to illustrate this thesis with his usual wealth ofimaginative detail and pictorial language. The Middle Ages, more thanany other period, are rich in instances of that intimate blending of thecomic and the horrible which we call the grotesque; the witches' Sabbath, the hoofed and horned devil, the hideous figures of Dante's hell; theScaramouches, Crispins, Harlequins of Italian farce; "grimacingsilhouettes of man, quite unknown to grave antiquity"; and "all thoselocal dragons of our legends, the gargoyle of Rouen, the Taras ofTarascon, etc. . . . The contact of deformity has given to the modernsublime something purer, grander, more sublime, in short, than theantique beauty. . . . Is it not because the modern imagination knows howto set prowling hideously about our churchyards, the vampires, the ogres, the erl-kings, the _psylles_, the ghouls, the _brucolaques_, the_aspioles_, that it is able to give its fays that bodiless form, thatpurity of essence which the pagan nymphs approach so little? The antiqueVenus is beautiful, admirable, no doubt; but what has spread over thefigures of Jean Goujon that graceful, strange, airy elegance? What hasgiven them that unfamiliar character of life and grandeur, unless it bethe neighbourhood of the rude and strong carvings of the MiddleAges? . . . The grotesque imprints its character especially upon thatwonderful architecture which in the Middle Ages takes the place of allthe arts. It attaches its marks to the fronts of the cathedrals;enframes its hells and purgatories under the portal arches, and sets themaflame upon the windows; unrolls its monsters, dogs, demons around thecapitals, along the friezes, on the eaves. " We find this same bizarrenote in the mediaeval laws, social usages, church institutions, andpopular legends, in the court fools, in the heraldic emblems, thereligious processions, the story of "Beauty and the Beast. " It explainsthe origin of the Shaksperian drama, the high-water mark of modern art. 

Shakspere does not seem to me an artist of the grotesque. He is by turnsthe greatest of tragic and the greatest of comic artists, and his tragedyand comedy lie close together, as in life, but without that union of theterrible and the ludicrous in the same figure, and that element ofdeformity which is the essence of the proper grotesque. He has created, however, one specimen of true grotesque, the monster Caliban. Caliban isa comic figure, but not purely comic; there is something savage, uncouth, and frightful about him. He has the dignity and the poetry which allrude, primitive beings have: which the things of nature, rocks and treesand wild beasts have. It is significant, therefore, that Robert Browningshould have been attracted to Caliban. Browning had little comic power, little real humour; in him the grotesque is an imperfect form of thecomic. The same criticism applies to Hugo. He gave a capital example ofthe grotesque in the four fools in the third act of "Cromwell" and inTriboulet, the Shaksperian jester of "Le Roi s'Amuse. " Their songs anddialogues are bizarre and fantastic in the highest degree, but they arenot funny; they do not make us laugh like the clowns of Shakspere--theyare not comic, but merely queer. Hugo's defective sense of humour isshown in the way in which he frequently takes that one step which, Napoleon said, separates the sublime from the ridiculous--exaggeratingcharacter and motive till the heroic passes into melodrama and melodramainto absurdity. This fault is felt in his great prose romance"Notre-Dame de Paris" (1831), a picture of mediaeval Paris, in which thehumpback Quasimodo affords an exact illustration of what the author meantby the grotesque; another of the same kind is furnished by the hero ofhis later romance "L'Homme qui Rit. "

Gautier has left a number of sketches, written in a vein lovinglyhumorous, of some of the eccentrics--the _curiosités romantiques_--whoseoddities are perhaps even more instructive as to the many directionswhich the movement took, than the more ordered enthusiasm of the lessextreme votaries. There was the architect Jule Vabre, _e. G. _, whosespecialty was Shakspere. Shakspere "was his god, his idol, his passion, a wonder to which he could never grow accustomed. " Vabre's life-projectwas a French translation of his idol, which should be absolutely true tothe text, reproducing the exact turn and movement of the phrase, following the alternations of prose, rime, and blank verse in theoriginal, and shunning neither its euphemistic subtleties nor itsbarbaric roughnesses. To fit himself for this task, he went to Londonand lived there, striving to submit himself to the atmosphere and the_milieu_, and learning to think in English; and there Gautier encounteredhim about 1843, in a tavern at High-Holborn, drinking stout and eating_rosbif_ and speaking French with an English accent. Gautier told himthat all he had to do now, to translate Shakspere, was to learn French. "I am going to work at it, " he answered, more struck with the wisdom thanthe wit of the suggestion. A few years later Vabre turned up in Francewith a project for a sort of international seminary. "He wanted toexplain 'Hernani' to the English and 'Macbeth' to the French. It madehim tired to see the English learning French in 'Telemaque, ' and theFrench learning English in the 'Vicar of Wakefield. '" Poor Vabre's greatShakspere translation never materialised; but François-Victor Hugo, thesecond son of the great romancer, carried out many of Vabre's principlesof translation in his version of Shakspere. 

Another curious figure was the water-colour painter, Célestin Nanteuil, who suggested to Gautier the hero of an early piece of his own, writtento accompany an engraving in an English keepsake, representing the Squareof St. Sebald at Nuremberg. This hero, Elias Wildman-stadius, or l'HommeMoyen-âge, was "in a sort, the Gothic genius of that Gothic town"--a_retardataire_ or man born out of his own time--who should have been bornin 1460, in the days of Albrecht Dürer. Célestin Nanteuil "had the airof one of those tall angels carrying a censer or playing on the_sambucque_, who inhabit the gable ends of cathedrals; and he seemed tohave come down into the city among the busy townsfolk, still wearing hisnimbus plate behind his head in place of a hat, and without having theleast suspicion that it is not perfectly natural to wear one's aureole inthe street. " He is described as resembling in figure "the spindlingcolumns of the church naves of the fifteenth century. . . . The azure ofthe frescoes of Fiesole had furnished the blue of his eyes; his hairs, ofthe blond of an aureole, seemed painted one by one, with the gold of theilluminators of the Middle Ages. . . . One would have said, that fromthe height of his Gothic pinnacle Célestin Nanteuil overlooked the actualtown, hovering above the sea of roofs, regarding the eddying blue smoke, perceiving the city squares like a checkerboard, the streets like thenotches of a saw in a stone bench, the passers-by like mice; but all thatconfusedly athwart the haze, while from his airy observatory he saw, close at hand and in all their detail, the rose windows, the bell towersbristling with crosses, the kings, patriarchs, prophets, saints, angelsof all the orders, the whole monstrous army of demons or chimeras, nailed, scaled, tushed, hideously winged; _guivres_, taresques, gargoyles, asses' heads, apes' muzzles, all the strange bestiary of theMiddle Age. " Nanteuil furnished illustrations for the books of theFrench romanticists. "Hugo's' Notre-Dame de Paris' was the object of hismost fervent admiration, and he drew from it subjects for a large numberof designs and aquarelles. " Gautier mentions, as among his rarestvignettes, the frontispiece of "Albertus, " recalling Rembrandt's manner;and his view of the Palazzo of San Marc in Royer's "Venezia la bella. "Gautier says that one might apply to Nanteuil's aquarelles what JosephDelorme[39] said of Hugo's ballads, that they were Gothic windowpaintings. "The essential thing in these short fantasies is thecarriage, the shape, the clerical, monastic, royal, seignorial_awkwardness_ of the figures and their high colouring. . . . Célestinhad made his own the angular anatomy of coats-of-arms, the extravagantcontours of the mantles, the chimerical or monstrous figures of heraldry, the branchings of the emblazoned skirts, the lofty attitude of the feudalbaron, the modest air of the chatelaine, the sanctimonious physiognomy ofthe big Carthusian Carmelite, the furtive mien of the young page withparti-coloured pantaloons. . . . He excelled also in setting the personsof poem, drama, or romance in ornamented frames like the Gothic shrineswith triple colonettes, arches, canopied and bracketed niches, withstatuettes, figurines, emblematic animals, male and female saints on abackground of gold. He entered so deeply into the sentiment of the oldGothic imagery that he could make a Lady of the Pillar in a brocadedalmatica, a Mater Dolorosa with the seven swords in her breast, a St. Christopher with the child Jesus on his shoulder and leaning on a palmtree, worthy to serve as types to the Byzantine painters of Epinal. . . . Nothing resembled less the clock face and troubadour Middle Age whichflourished about 1825. It is one of the main services of the romanticschool to have thoroughly disembarrassed art from this. " Gautierdescribes also a manuscript piece of Nerval, for which he furnished aprologue, and which was an imitation of one of the _Diableries_, orpopular farces of the Middle Ages, in which the devil was introduced. Itcontained a piece within the piece, in the fashion of an old mysteryplay, with scenery consisting of the mouth of hell, painted red andsurmounted by a blue paradise starred with gold. An angel came down toplay at dice with the devil for souls. In his excess of zeal, the angelcheated and the devil grew angry and called him a "big booby, a celestialfowl, " and threatened to pull his feathers out ("Le Prince des Sots"). 

In France, as in England and Germany, the romantic revival promoted andaccompanied works of erudition like Raynouard's researches in Provençaland old French philology and the poetry of the troubadours (1816); Creuzéde Lesser's "Chevaliers de la Table Ronde"; Marchangy's "La GaulePoétique. " History took new impulse from that _sens du passé_ whichromanticism did so much to awaken. Augustin Thierry's obligations toScott have already been noticed. It was the war chant of the Prankishwarriors in Chateaubriand's "Les Martyrs"--

 "Pharamond! Pharamond! nous avons combattu avec l'épée"--

which first excited his historical imagination and started him upon thestudies which issued in the "Récits Mérovingiens" and the "Conquéted'Angleterre. " Barante's "Ducs de Bourgogne" (1814-28) confessedly owesmuch of its inception to Scott. Michaud's "History of the Crusades"(1811-22) and the "History of France" (1833-67) by that most romantic ofhistorians, Michelet, may also be credited to the romantic movement. Theend of the movement, as a definite period in the history of Frenchliterature, is commonly dated from the failure upon the stage of VictorHugo's "Les Burgraves" in 1843. The immediate influence of the Frenchromantic school upon English poetry or prose was slight. Like the Germanschool, it came too late. The first generation of English romantics wasdrawing to its close. Scott died two years after "Hernani" stormed theFrench theatre. Two years later still died Coleridge, long since fallensilent--as a poet--and always deaf to Gallic charming. We shall find thefirst impress of French romance among younger men and in the latter halfcentury. 

In France itself the movement passed on into other phases. Many earlyadherents of Hugo's _cénacle_ and _entourage_ fell away from theirallegiance and, like Sainte-Beuve and Musset, took up a critical or evenantagonistic attitude. Musset's "Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet" [40]turns the whole romantic contention into mockery. Yet no work morefantastically and gracefully romantic, more Shaksperian in quality, wasproduced by any member of the school than Musset produced in such dramasas "Fantasio" and "Lorenzaccio. "

[1] It is scarcely necessary to say that no full-length picture of theFrench romantic movement is attempted in this chapter, but only such asketch as should serve to illustrate its relation to English romanticism. For the history of the movement, besides the authorities quoted orreferred to in the text, I have relied principally upon the following:Petit de Julleville: "Histoire de la Littérature Française, " Tome vii. , Paris, 1899. Brunetière: "Manual of the History of French Literature"(authorized translation), New York, 1898. L. Bertrand; "La Fin duClassicisme, " Paris, 1897. Adolphe Jullien: "Le Romantisme et L'EditeurRenduel, " Paris, 1897. I have also read somewhat widely, though notexhaustively, in the writings of the French romantics themselves, including Hugo's early poems and most of his dramas and romances;Nodier's "Contes en prose et en verse "; nearly all of Musset's works inprose and verse; ditto of Théophile Gautier's; Stendhal's "La Chartreusede Parme, " "Le Rouge et le Noir, " "Racine et Shakespeare, " "Lord Byron enItalie, " etc. ; Vigny's "Chatterton, " "Cinq-Mars, " and many of hisScriptural poems; Balzac's "Les Chouans"; Mérimée's "Chronique de CharlesIX. , " and most of his "Nouvelles "; Chateaubriand's "Le Genie duChristianisme"; some of Lamartine's "Meditations"; most of George Sand'snovels, and a number of Dumas'; many of Sainte-Beuve's critical writings;and the miscellanies of Gérard de Nerval (Labrunie). Of many of these, of course, no direct use or mention is made in the present chapter. 

[2] "Il a pour l'art du moyen âge, un mepris voisin de la demence et dela frénésie. . . . Voir le discours où il propose de mutiler les statuesdes rois de la facade de Notre-Dame, pour en former un piédestal à lastatue du peuple français. " Bertrand: "La Fin du Classicisme, " pp. 302-3and _note_. 

[3] But see, for the Catholic reaction in France, the writings of Josephde Maistre, especially "Du Pape" (1819). 

[4] "Histoire du Romantisme" (1874). 

[5] _ibid. _, 210. 

[6] Heine counted, in the Salon of 1831, more than thirty picturesinspired by Scott. 

[7] Also "Le Roi Lear" (Salon of 1836) and "La Procession du Pape desFous" (aquarelle) for Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris. "

[8] Recall Schlegel's saying that the genius of the classic drama wasplastic and that of the romantic picturesque. 

[9] Gautier, 192. 

[10] This is a distinction more French than English: _la tragédie_ vs. _le drame_. 

[11] Preface to "Hernani. "

[12] Preface to "Cromwell. "

[13] "Histoire du Romantisme, " p. 64. 

[14] "Primer of French Literature, " p. 115. 

[15] One of the principles of the romanticists was the _mélange desgenres_, whereby the old lines between tragedy and comedy, _e. G. _, werebroken down, lyricism admitted into the drama, etc. 

[16] Stendhal, writing in 1823 ("Racine et Shakspere"), complains that"it will soon be thought bad form to say, on the French stage, 'Fermezcette fenêtre' [window]: we shall have to say, 'Fermez cette croisée'[casement]. Two-thirds of the words used in the parlours of the bestpeople (_du meilleur ton_) cannot be reproduced in the theatre. M. Legouvé, in his tragedy 'Henri IV. , ' could not make use of the patriotking's finest saying, 'I could wish that the poorest peasant in mykingdom might, at the least, have a chicken in his pot of a Sunday. 'English and Italian verse allows the poet to say everything; and thisgood French word _pot_ would have furnished a touching scene toShakspere's humblest pupil. But _la tragédie racinienne_, with its_style noble_ and its artificial dignity, has to put it thus, --in fouralexandrines:

 "'Je veux enfin qu'au jour marqué pour le repos, L'hôte laborieux des modestes hameaux, Sur sa table moins humble, ait, par ma bienfaisance, Quelques-uns de ces mets réservés à l'aisance. '"

It was Stendhal (whose real name was Henri Beyle) who said that Parisneeded a chain of mountains on its horizon. 

[17] Gautier, 188. 

[18] "Cromwell, " 1827, [19] Gautier, 107. 

[20] Musset's fantastic "Ballade à la Lune, " exaggerates the romantic sodecidedly as to seem ironical. It is hard to say whether it is hyperboleor parody. See Petit de Julleville, vol. Vii. , p. 652. 

[21] See vol. I. , pp. 372-73. 

[22] Gautier, 163. 

[23] "Des Knaben Wunderhorn. "

[24] Charles Nodier vindicated the literary claims of Perrault. 

[25] Gautier, 93. 

[26] Rue Jean-Gougon, where the _cénacle_ met often. 

[27] Nerval hanged himself at Paris, in January, 1855, in the rue de laVielle Lanterne. 

[28] Gautier, 167. 

[29] The romanticism of the _Globe_ was of a more conservative stripethan that of the Muse Française, which was the organ of the group ofyoung poets who surrounded Hugo. The motto of the latter was _Jam novaprogenies coelo demittitur alto_. The _Globe_ defined romanticism asProtestantism in letters. The critical battle was on as early as 1824. On April 24, in that year, Auger, director of the Academy, read at theannual session of the Institute a discourse on romanticism, which hedenounced as a literary schism. The prospectus of the _Globe_, animportant document on the romantic side, dates from the same year. The_Constitutionnel_, the most narrowly classical of the opposing journals, described romanticism as an epidemic malady. To the year 1825, when the_Cénacle_ had its headquarters at Victor Hugo's house, belong, amongothers, the following manifestoes on both sides of the controversy; "LesClassiques Vengés, " De la Touche; "Le Temple du Romantisme, " Morel; "LeClassique et le Romantique" (a satirical comedy in the classicalinterest), Baour-Lormian. Cyprien Desmarais' "Essais sur les classiqueset les romantiques" had appeared at Paris in 1823. At Rouen was printedin 1826 "Du Classique et du Romantique, " a collection of papers read atthe Rouen Academy during the year, rather favorable, on the whole, to thenew movement. 

[30] This is now a somewhat rare book; I have never seen a copy of it;but it was reviewed in The Saturday Review (vol. Lxv. , p. 369). 

[31] Part ii. , Book iii. , chap ix. 

[32]Part ii. , Book iv. , chap. I. 

[33] For Chateaubriand and Ossian see vol. I. , pp. 332-33. He madetranslations from Ossian, Gray, and Milton. 

[34] "Victor Hugo, " par Paul Boudois, p. 32. 

[35] Vol. I. , p. 10. 

[36] See vol. I. , p. 379. 

[37] The use of this form instead of _romantisme_ is perhaps worthnoticing. 

[38] See vol. I. , pp. 19-20. 

[39] Sainte-Beuve's "Confessions de Joseph Delorme, " 1829. 

[40] See vol. I. , pp. 18-23. 

CHAPTER VI. 

Diffused Romanticism in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century. 

Most of the poetry of the century that has just closed has been romanticin the wider or looser acceptation of the term. Emotional stress, sensitiveness to the picturesque, love of natural scenery, interest indistant times and places, curiosity of the wonderful and mysterious, subjectivity, lyricism, intrusion of the ego, impatience of the limits ofthe _genres_, eager experiment with new forms of art--these and the likemarks of the romantic spirit are as common in the verse literature of thenineteenth century as they are rare in that of the eighteenth. The sameis true of imaginative prose, particularly during the first half of thecentury, the late Georgian and early Victorian period. In contrast withAddison, Swift, and Goldsmith, De Quincey, Carlyle, and Ruskin areromanticists. In contrast with Hume, Macaulay is romantic, concrete, pictorial. The critical work of Hazlitt and Lamb was in line withColeridge's. They praised the pre-Augustan writers, the Elizabethandramatists, the seventeenth-century humorists and moralists, the Sidneianamourists and fanciful sonneteers, at the expense of their classicalsuccessors. 

But in the narrower sense of the word--the sense which controls in theseinquiries--the great romantic generation ended virtually with the deathof Scott in 1832. Coleridge followed in 1834, Wordsworth in 1850. Bothhad long since ceased to contribute anything of value to imaginativeliterature. Byron, Shelley, and Keats had died some years beforeColeridge; Leigh Hunt survived until 1859. The mediaevalism ofColeridge, Scott, and Keats lived on in dispersed fashion till itcondensed itself a second time, and with redoubled intensity, in the workof the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which belongs to the last half of thecentury. The direct line of descent was from Keats to Rossetti; and thePre-Raphaelites bear very much such a relation to the elder group, as theromantic school proper in Germany bears to Bürger and Herder, and toGoethe and Schiller in their younger days. That is to say, theirmediaevalism was more concentrated, more exclusive, and more final. 

We have come to a point in the chronology of our subject where thematerial is so abundant that we must narrow the field of study tocreative work, and to work which is romantic in the strictest meaning. Henceforth we may leave out of account all works of mere erudition assuch; all those helps which the scholarship of the century has furnishedto a knowledge of the Middle Ages; histories, collections, translations, reprints of old texts, critical editions. Middle English lexicons andgrammars, studies of special subjects, such as popular myths or miracleplays or the Arthurian legends, and the like. Numerous and valuable asthese publications have been, they concern us only indirectly. They haveswelled the material available for the student; they have not necessarilystimulated the imagination of the poet; which sometimes--as in the caseof Chatterton and of Keats--goes off at a touch and carries but a lightcharge of learning. In literary history it is the beginnings that count. Child's great ballad collection is, beyond comparison, more importantfrom the scholar's point of view than Percy's "Reliques. " But in thehistory of romanticism it is of less importance, because it came acentury later. Mallet's "Histoire de Dannemarc" has been long sincesuperseded, and the means now accessible in English for a study of Norsemythology are infinitely greater than when Gray read and Percy translatedthe "Northern Antiquities. " But it is not the history of the revival ofthe _knowledge_ of mediaeval life that we are following here; it israther the history of that part of our modern creative literature whichhas been kindled by contact--perhaps a very slight and casualcontact--with the transmitted _image_ of mediaeval life. 

Nor need we concern ourselves further with literary criticism or thehistory of opinion. This was worth considering in the infancy of themovement, when Warton began to question the supremacy of Pope; when Hurdasserted the fitness for the poet's uses of the Gothic fictions and theinstitution of chivalry; and when Percy ventured to hope that cultivatedreaders would find something deserving attention in old Englishminstrelsy. It was still worth considering a half-century later, whenColeridge explained away the dramatic unities, and Byron once more tookup the lost cause of Pope. But by 1832 the literary revolution wascomplete. Romance was in no further need of vindication, when allScott's library of prose and verse stood back of her, and

 "High-piled books in charactery Held, like rich garners, the full-ripened grain. "

As to Scott's best invention, the historical romance, I shall not pursueits fortunes to the end. The formula once constituted, its applicationwas easy, whether the period chosen was the Middle Ages or any old periodB. C. Or A. D. Here and there an individual stands forth from the class, either for its excellent conformity with the Waverley type or for itsoriginality in deviation. Of the former kind is Charles Reade's "TheCloister and the Hearth" (1861); and of the latter Mr. Maurice Hewlett's"The Forest Lovers" (1898). The title page of Reade's novel describesthe book as "a matter-of-fact romance. " It is as well documented as anyof Scott's, and reposes especially upon the "Colloquies" of Erasmus, thebetrothal of whose parents, with their subsequent separation by themonastic vow of celibacy, is the subject of the story. This is somewhatromanticised, but keeps a firm grip upon historical realities. Theperiod of the action is the fifteenth century, yet the work is as far aspossible from being a chivalry tale, like the diaphanous fictions ofFouqué. "In that rude age, " writes the novelist, "body prevailing overmind, all sentiments took material forms. Man repented with scourges, prayed by bead, bribed the saints with wax tapers, put fish into the bodyto sanctify the soul, sojourned in cold water for empire over theemotions, and thanked God for returning health in 1 cwt, 2 stone, 7 lbs. , 3 oz. , 1 dwt. Of bread and cheese. " There is no lack in "The Cloisterand the Hearth" of stirring incident and bold adventure; encounters withbears and with bandits, sieges, witch trials, gallows hung with thieves, archery with long bow and arbalest--everywhere fighting enough, as inScott; and, also as in Scott, behind the private drama of true love, intrigue, persecution, the broad picture of society. It is no idealisedversion of the Middle Ages. The ugly, sordid side of mediaeval life isturned outwards; its dirt, discomfort, ignorance, absurdity, brutality, unreason and insecurity are rendered with crass realism. The burgher ismore in evidence than the chevalier. Less after the manner of theWaverley novels, and more after that of "Hypatia, " "Romola, " and "Fathersand Sons, " it depicts the intellectual unrest of the time, theconflicting ideals of the old and new generations. The printing-press isbeing set up, and the hero finds his art of calligraphy, learned in thescriptorium, no longer in request. The Pope and many of the higherclergy are infected with the religious scepticism and humanitarianenthusiasm of the Renaissance. The child Erasmus is the new birth ofreason, destined to make war on monkery and superstition and therebyavenge his parents' wrongs. Of quite another fashion of mediaevalism isMr. Hewlett's story--sheer romance. The wonderful wood of Morgraunt, with its charcoal burners and wayside shrines, black meres frowned overby skeleton castles, and gentle hinds milked by the heroine to get foodfor her wounded lover, is of no time or country, but almost as unreal asSpenser's fairy forest. Through its wild ways Isoult la Desirous andProsper le Gai go adventuring like Una and her Red Cross knight, or Enidand Geraint. Or, again, Isoult in her page's dress, and forsaken by herwedded lord, is like Viola or Imogen or Rosalind, or Constance in"Marmion, " or any lady of old romance. Or sometimes again she is like awood spirit, or an elemental creature such as was Undine. The inventedplace names, High March, Wanmeeting, Market Basing, etc. , with theirtransparent air of actuality, sound an echo from William Morris' proseromances, like "The House of the Wolfings" and "The Sundering Flood. " Asin the last named, and in Thomas Hardy's "Return of the Native, " thereader's imagination is assisted by a map of the Morgraunt forest and theriver Wan. Mr. Hewlett has evidently profited, too, by recent romancesof various schools: by "Prince Otto, " _e. G. _, and "The Prisoner ofZenda, " and possibly by others. His Middle Ages are not the Middle Agesof history, but of poetic convention; a world where anything may happenand where the facts of any precise social state are attenuated into"atmosphere" for the use of the imagination. "The Forest Lovers" isnearer to "Christabel" or "La Belle Dame sans Merci" than to "Ivanhoe":is, indeed, a prose poem, though not quite an allegory like "Sintram andhis Companions. "

Among Scott's contemporaries, Byron and Shelley, profoundly romantic intemper, were not retrospective in their habit of mind; and the MiddleAges, in particular, had little to say to them. Scott stood for thepast; Byron--a man of his time, a modern man--for the present; Shelley--avisionary, with a system of philosophical perfectionism--for the future. Memory, Mnemosyne, mother of the muses, was the nurse of Scott's genius. Byron lived intensely in the world which he affected to despise. Shelleyprophesied, with eyes fixed upon the coming age. We have found, inByron's contributions to the Pope controversy, one expression of hisinstinctive sympathy with the classical and contempt for the Gothic. Shelley, too, was a Hellenist; and to both, in their angry break withauthority and their worship of liberty, the naked freedom, the clearlight, the noble and harmonious forms of the antique were as attractiveas the twilight of the "ages of faith, " with their mysticism, asceticism, and grotesque superstitions, were repulsive. Remote as their ownfeverish and exuberant poetry was from the unexcited manner of classicalwork, the latter was the ideal towards which they more and more inclined. The points at which these two poets touch our history, then, are few. Byron, to be sure, cast "Childe Harold" into Spenserian verse, and gaveit a ballad title. [1] In the first canto there are a few archaisms;words like _fere_, _shent_, and _losel_ occur, together with Gothicproperties, such as the "eremite's sad cell" and "Paynim shores" andNewstead's "monastic dome. " The ballad "Adieu, adieu my native shore, "was suggested by "Lord Maxwell's Good-Night" in the "Border Minstrelsy, "and introduces some romantic appurtenances: the harp, the falcon, and thelittle foot-page. But this kind of falsetto, in the tradition of thelast-century Spenserians, evidently hampered the poet; so he shookhimself free from imitation after the opening stanzas, and spoke in hisnatural voice. [2] "Lara" is a tale of feudal days, with a due proportionof knights, dames, vassals, and pages; and an ancestral hall with gloomyvaults and portrait galleries, where

 "--the moonbeam shone Through the dim lattice o'er the floor of stone, And the high fretted roof and saints that there O'er Gothic windows knelt in pictured prayer. . . . The waving banner and the clapping door, The rustling tapestry and the echoing floor; The long dim shadows of surrounding trees, The flapping bats, the night-song of the breeze, Aught they behold or hear their thought appalls, As evening saddens o'er the dark grey walls. "

But these things are unimportant in Byron--mere commonplaces ofdescription inherited from Scott and Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe. Neitheris it of importance that "Parisina" is a tale of the year 1405, and hasan echo in it of convent bells and the death chant of friars; nor thatthe first scene of "Manfred" passes in a "Gothic gallery, " and includesan incantation of spirits upon the model of "Faust"; nor that "MarinoFaliero" and "The Two Foscari" are founded on incidents of Venetianhistory which happened in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuriesrespectively; nor yet that Byron translated the Spanish ballad "Woe is meAlhama" and a passage from Pulci's "Morgante Maggiore. " [3] SimilarlyShelley's experimental versions of the "Prolog im Himmel, " and"Walpurgisnacht" in "Faust, " and of scenes from Calderon's "MagicoProdigioso" are felt to be without special significance in comparisonwith the body of his writings. "Faust" impressed him, as it did Byron, and he urged Coleridge to translate it, speaking of the current Englishversions as wretched misrepresentations of the original. But in all ofShelley's poetry the scenery, architecture, and imagery in general aresometimes Italian, sometimes Asiatic, often wholly fantastic, but nevermediaeval. Their splendour is a classic splendour, and not what Miltoncontemptuously calls "a Hunnish and Norwegian stateliness. " Hisfavourite names are Greek: Cythna, Ianthe, and the like. The ruinedcathedral in "Queen Mab"--a poem only in its title romantic--is coupledwith the ruined dungeon, in whose courts the children play; both alike"works of faith and slavery, " symbols of the priestcraft and kingcraftwhich Shelley hated, now made harmless by the reign of Reason and Love ina regenerated universe. How different is the feeling which the emptycathedral inspires in Lowell; once thronged with worshippers, nowpathetically lonely--a cliff, far inland, from which the sea of faith hasforever withdrawn! At the time when "Queen Mab" was written, Coleridge, Southey, and Landor's "Gebir" were Shelley's favourite reading. "He wasa lover of the wonderful and wild in literature, " says Mrs. Shelley, inher notes on the poem; "but had not fostered these tastes at theirgenuine sources--the romances and chivalry of the Middle Ages--but in theperusal of such German works as were current in those days. [4] . . . Ourearlier English poetry was almost unknown to him. "

"Queen Mab" begins with a close imitation of the opening lines ofSouthey's "Thalaba the Destroyer. " The third member of the Lake Schoolis a standing illustration of Mr. Colvin's contention that thedistinction between classic and romantic is less in subject than intreatment. Southey regarded himself as, equally with Wordsworth andColeridge, an innovator and a rebel against poetic conventions. His bigOriental epics, "Thalaba" and "The Curse of Kehama, " are written in versepurposely irregular, but so inferior in effect to the irregular verse ofColeridge and Scott as to prove that irregularity, as such, is onlytolerable when controlled by the subtly varying lyric impulse--not whenit is adopted as a literary method. Southey's worth as a man, hisindefatigable industry, his scholarship, and his excellent work in prosemake him an imposing figure in our literature. But his poeticalreputation has faded more rapidly than that of his greatercontemporaries. He ranged widely in search of subjects and experimentedboldly in forms of verse; but his poems are seldom inspired; they aremanufactures rather than creations, and to-day Southey, the poet, represents nothing in particular. 

But, like Taylor of Norwich, Southey, by his studies in foreignliterature, added much to the romantic material constantly accumulatingin the English tongue. In his two visits to the Peninsula he madeacquaintance with Spanish and Portuguese; and afterwards by histranslations and otherwise, helped his countrymen to a knowledge of theold legendary poetry of Spain, the country above all others of chivalryand romance. Mention has already been made of his versions of "Amadis ofGaul, " "Palmerin of England, " and the "Chronicle of the Cid. " The lastnamed was not a translation from any single source, but was put togetherfrom the "Poem of the Cid, " which the translator considered to be"unquestionably the oldest poem in the language" and probably by a writercontemporary with the great Campeador himself; from the prose "Chronicle"assigned to the thirteenth century; and from the ballads, which Southeythought mainly worthless, _i. E. _, from the historical point of view. 

Southey's long blank verse poems on mediaeval subjects, partlyhistorical, partly legendary, "Joan of Arc" (1795), "Madoc" (1805), and"Roderick, the Last of the Goths" (1814), like his friend Landor's"Gebir, " are examples of romantic themes with classical or, at least, unromantic handling. The last of them was the same in subject, indeed, with Landor's drama, "Count Julian. " I have spoken of "Thalaba" and "TheCurse of Kehama" as epics; but Southey rejected "the degraded title ofepic" and scouted the rules of Aristotle. Nevertheless, the bestqualities of these blank verse narratives are of the classic-epic kind. The story is not badly told; the measure is correct if not distinguished;and the style is simple, clear, and in pure taste. But the spell ofromance, the witchery of Coleridge and Keats is absent; and so are theglow and movement of Scott. 

Southey got up his history and local colour conscientiously, and hisnotes present a formidable array of authorities. While engaged upon"Madoc, " he went to Wales to verify the scenery and even came near toleasing a cottage and taking up his residence there. "The manners of thepoem, " he asserted, "will be found historically true. " The hero of"Madoc" was a legendary Welsh prince of the twelfth century who led acolony to America. The _motif_ of the poem is therefore nearly the sameas in William Morris's "Earthly Paradise, " and it is curious to comparethe two. In Southey's hands the blank verse, which in the last centuryhad been almost an ear-mark of the romanticising schools, is far moreclassical than the heroic couplet which Morris writes. In the Welshportion of "Madoc" the historical background is carefully studied fromGiraldus Cambrensis, Evans' "Specimens, " the "Triads of Bardism, " the"Cambrian Biography, " and similar sources, and in the Aztec portion, fromold Spanish chronicles of the conquest of Mexico and the journals ofmodern travellers in America. In "The Earthly Paradise" nothing ishistorical except the encounter with Edward III. 's fleet in the channel. Over all, the dreamlike vagueness and strangeness of romance. Yet theimaginative impression is more distinct, not an impression of reality, but as of a soft, bright miniature painting in an old manuscript. 

In common with his literary associates, Southey was prompted by Percy's"Reliques" to try his hand at the legendary ballad and at longer metricaltales like "All for Love" and "The Pilgrim to Compostella. " Most ofthese pieces date from the last years of the century. One of them, "St. Patrick's Purgatory, " was inserted by Lewis in his "Tales of Wonder. "Another of the most popular, and a capital specimen of grotesque, "TheOld Woman of Berkeley, " was upon a theme which was also undertaken byTaylor of Norwich and Dr. Sayers of the same city, when Southey was on avisit to the former in 1798. The story, told by Olaus Magnus as well asby William of Malmesbury, was of a witch whose body was carried off bythe devil, though her coffin had been sprinkled with holy water and boundwith a triple chain. For material Southey drew upon Spanish chronicles, French _fabliaux_, the "Acta Sanctorum, " Matthew of Westminster, and manyother sources. His ballads do not compare well with those of Scott andColeridge. They abound in the supernatural--miracles of saints, sorceries, and apparitions; but the matter-of-fact narrative, common-place diction, and jog-trot verse are singularly out of keepingwith the subject matter. The most wildly romantic situations becometamely unromantic under Southey's handling. Though in better taste thanLewis' grisly compositions, yet, as in Lewis, the want of "highseriousness" or any finer imagination in these legendary tales makes themturn constantly towards the comic; so that Southey was scandalised tolearn that Mr. Payne Collier had taken his "Old Woman of Berkeley" for a"mock ballad" or parody. He affected especially a stanza which hecredited to Lewis' invention:

 "Behind a wide column, half breathless with fear She crept to conceal herself there; That instant the moon o'er a dark cloud shone clear, And she saw in the moonlight two ruffians appear, And between them a corpse did they bear. " [5]

Southey employs no archaisms, no refrains, nor any of the stylistic marksof ancient minstrelsy. His ballads have the metrical roughness and plainspeech of the old popular ballads, but none of their frequent, peculiarbeauties of thought and phrase, Spain, no less than Germany and Italy, was laid under contribution by theEnglish romantics. Southey's work in this direction was followed by suchthings as Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads" (1824), Irving's "Alhambra, " andBryant's and Longfellow's translations from Spanish lyrical poetry. Butthese exotics did not stimulate original creative activity in England inequal degree with the German and Italian transplantings. They wereimported, not appropriated. Of all European countries Spain had remainedthe most Catholic and mediaeval. Her eight centuries of struggle againstthe Moors had given her a rich treasure of legendary song and story. Shehad a body of popular ballad poetry larger than either England's orGermany's. [6] But Spain had no modern literature to mediate between theold and new; nothing at all corresponding with the schools of romance inGermany, from Herder to Schlegel, which effected a revival of theTeutonic Middle Age and impressed it upon contemporary England andFrance. Neither could the Spanish Middle Age itself show any suchsupreme master as Dante, whose direct influence on English poetry haswaxed with the century. There was a time when, for the greater part of acentury, England and Spain were in rather close contact, but it wasmainly a hostile contact, and its tangential points were the ill-starredmarriage of Philip and Mary, the Great Armada of 1588, and the abortive"Spanish Marriage" negotiations of James I. 's reign. Readers of ourElizabethan literature, however, cannot fail to remark a knowledge of, and interest in, Spanish affairs now quite strange to English writers. The dialogue of the old drama is full of Spanish phrases of conveniencelike _bezo los manos_, _paucas palabras_, etc. , which were evidentlyquite as well understood by the audience as was later the colloquialFrench--_savoir faire_, _coup de grâce_, etc. --which began to come inwith Dryden, and has been coming ever since. The comedy Spaniard, likeDon Armado in "Love's Labour's Lost, " was a familiar figure on theEnglish boards. Middleton took the double plot of his "Spanish Gipsy"from two novels of Cervantes; and his "Game of Chess, " a politicalallegorical play, aimed against Spanish intrigues, made a popular hit andwas stopped, after a then unexampled run, in consequence of theremonstrances of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador. Somewhat later theRestoration stage borrowed situations from the Spanish love-intriguecomedy, not so much directly as by way of Molière, Thomas Corneille, andother French playwrights; and the duenna and the _gracioso_ became stockfigures in English performances. The direct influence of Calderon andLope de Vega upon our native theatre was infinitesimal. The Spanishnational drama, like the English, was self-developed and unaffected byclassical rules. Like the English, it was romantic in spirit, but wasmore religious in subject and more lyrical in form. The land of romanceproduced likewise the greatest of all satires upon romance. "DonQuixote, " of course, was early translated and imitated in England; andthe _picaro_ romances had an important influence upon the evolution ofEnglish fiction in De Foe and Smollett; not only directly through bookslike "The Spanish Rogue, " but by way of Le Sage. [7] But upon the whole, the relation between English and Spanish literature had been one ofdistant respect rather than of intimacy. There was never any such inrushof foreign domination from this quarter as from Italy in the sixteenthcentury, or from France in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and latter half ofthe seventeenth. 

The unequalled wealth of Spanish literature in popular ballads ispartially explained by the facility with which such things were composed. The Spanish ballad, or _romance_, was a stanza (_redondilla_, roundel) offour eight-syllable lines with a prevailing trachaic movement--just themetre, in short, of "Locksley Hall. " Only the second and fourth linesrimed, and the rime was merely assonant or vowel rime. Given the subjectand the lyrical impulse, and verses of this sort could be produced toorder and in infinite number by poets of the humblest capacity. Thesubjects were furnished mainly by Spanish history and legend, theexploits of national heroes like the Cid (Ruy Diaz de Bivar), the sevenPrinces of Lara, Don Fernán Gonzalez, and Bernaldo del Carpio, the leaderin the Spanish versions of the great fight by Fontarabbia

 "When Rowland brave and Olivier, And every paladin and peer On Roncesvalles died. "

Southey thought the Spanish ballads much inferior to the English andScotch, a judgment to which students of Spanish poetry will perhapshardly agree. [8] The Spanish ballads, like the British, are partlyhistorical and legendary, partly entirely romantic or fictitious. Theyrecord not only the age-long wars against the Saracen, the common enemy, but the internecine feuds of the Spanish Christian kingdoms, the quarrelsbetween the kings and their vassals, and many a dark tale of domestictreachery or violence. In these respects their resemblance to theEnglish and Scotch border ballads is obvious; and it has been pointed outthat they sprang from similar conditions, a frontier war for nationalindependence, maintained for centuries against a stubborn foe. Thetraditions concerning Wallace and the Bruce have some analogy with thechronicles of the Cid; but as to the border fights celebrated in Scott's"Minstrelsy, " they were between peoples of the same race, tongue, andfaith; and were but petty squabbles in comparison with that epic crusadein which the remnants of the old Gothic conquerors slowly made headagainst, and finally overthrew and expelled, an Oriental religion, aforeign blood, and a civilisation in many respects more brilliant thananything which Europe could show. The contrast between Castile andGranada is more picturesque than the difference between Lothian andNorthumberland. The Spanish ballads have the advantage, then, of beingconnected with imposing passages of history. In spirit they areintensely national. Three motives animate them all: loyalty to the king, devotion to the cross, and the _pundonor_: that sensitive personalhonour--the "Castilian pride" of "Hernani, "--which sometimes ran intofantastic excess. A rude chivalry occasionally softens the ferocity offeudal manners in Northern ballad-poetry, as in the speech of Percy overthe dead Douglas in "Chevy Chase. " But in the Spanish _romances_ theknightly feeling is all-pervading. The warriors are _hidalgos_, gentlemen of a lofty courtesy; the Moorish chieftains are not "heathenhounds, " but chivalrous adversaries, to be treated, in defeat, with acertain generosity. This refinement and magnanimity are akin to thatideality of temper which makes Don Quixote at once so noble and soridiculous, and which is quite remote from the sincere realism of theBritish minstrelsy. In style the Spanish ballads are simple, forcible, and direct, but somewhat monotonous in their facility. The English andScotch have a wider range of subject; the best of them have a condensedenergy of expression and a depth of tragic feeling which is more potentthan the melancholy grace of the Spanish. Women take a more active partin the former, the Christians of the Peninsula having caught from theirSaracen foes a prejudice in favour of womanly seclusion and retirement. There is also a wilder imagination in Northern balladry; a much largerelement of the mythological and supernatural. Ghosts, demons, fairies, enchanters are rare in the Spanish poems. Where the marvellous entersinto them at all, it is mostly in the shape of saintly miracles. St. James of Compostella appears on horseback among the Christian hostsbattling with the Moors, or even in the army of the Conquistadores inMexico--an incident which Macaulay likens to the apparition of the "greattwin Brethren" in the Roman battle of Lake Regillus. The mediaevalSpaniards were possibly to the full as superstitious as their Scottishcontemporaries, but their superstitions were the legends of the CatholicChurch, not the inherited folklore of Gothic and Celtic heathendom. Iwill venture to suggest, as one reason of this difference, the absence offorests in Spain. The shadowy recesses of northern Europe were thenatural haunts of mystery and unearthly terrors. The old Teutonicforest, the Schwarzwald and the Hartz, were peopled by the popularimagination with were-wolves, spectre huntsmen, wood spirits, and allthose nameless creatures which Tieck has revived in his "Mährchen" andHauptmann in the Rautendelein of his "Versunkene Glocke. " The treelessplateaus of Spain, and her stony, denuded sierras, all bare and brightunder the hot southern sky, offered no more shelter to such beings of themind than they did to the genial life of Robin Hood and his merry men"all under the greenwood tree. " And this mention of the bold archer ofSherwood recalls one other difference--the last that need here be touchedupon--between the ballads of Spain and of England. Both constitute abody of popular poetry, _i. E. _, of folk poetry. They recount the doingsof the upper classes, princes, nobles, knights, and ladies, as seen fromthe angle of observation of humble minstrels of low degree. But thepeople count for much more in the English poems. The Spanish are morearistocratic, more public, less domestic, and many of them composed, itis thought, by lordly makers. This is perhaps, in part, a difference innational character; and, in part, a difference in the conditions underwhich the social institutions of the two countries were evolved. 

Spain collected her ballads early in numerous songbooks--_cancioneros_, _romanceros_--the first of which, the "Cancionero" of 1510, is "theoldest collection of popular poetry, properly so-called, that is to befound in any European literature. " [9] But modern Spain had gone throughher classic period, like England and Germany. She had submitted to thecritical canons of Boileau, and was in leading-strings to France till theend of the eighteenth century. Spain, too, had her romantic movement, and incidentally her ballad revival, but it came later than in Englandand Germany, later even than in France. Historians of Spanish literatureinform us that the earliest entry of French romanticism into Spain tookplace in Martinez de la Rosa's two dramas, "The Conspiracy of Venice"(1834) and "Aben-Humeya, " first written in French and played at Paris in1830; and that the representation of Duke de Rivas' play, "Don Alvaro"(1835), was "an event in the history of the modern Spanish dramacorresponding to the production of 'Hernani' at the Theatre Francais" in1830. [10] Both of these authors had lived in France and had there madeacquaintance with the works of Chateaubriand, Byron, and Walter Scott. Spain came in time to have her own Byron and her own Scott, the former inJosé de Espronceda, author of "The Student of Salamanca, " who resided fora time in London; the latter in José Zorrilla, whose "Granada, " "Legendsof the Cid, " etc. , "were popular for the same reason that 'Marmion' and'The Lady of the Lake' were popular; for their revival of nationallegends in a form both simple and picturesque. " [11] Scott himself isreported to have said that if he had come across in his younger daysPerez de Hita's old historical romance, "The Civil Wars of Granada"(1595), "he would have chosen Spain as the scene of a Waverleynovel. " [12]

But when Lockhart, in 1824, set himself to

 "--relate In high-born words the worth of many a knight From tawny Spain, lost in the world's debate"--

her ballad poetry had fallen into disfavour at home, and "no SpanishPercy, or Ellis, or Ritson, " he complains, "has arisen to perform what noone but a Spaniard can entertain the smallest hope of achieving. " [13]Meanwhile, however, the German romantic school had laid eager hands uponthe old romantic literature of Spain. A. W. Schlegel (1803) and Grieshad made translations from Calderon in assonant verse; and FriedrichSchlegel--who exalted the Spanish dramatist above Shakspere, much toHeine's disgust--had written, also in _asonante_, his dramatic poem"Conde Alarcos" (1802), founded on the well-known ballad. Brentano andothers of the romantics went so far as to practise assonance in theiroriginal as well as translated work. Jacob Grimm (1815) and Depping(1817) edited selections from the "Romancero" which Lockhart made use ofin his "Ancient Spanish Ballads. " With equal delight the Frenchromanticists--Hugo and Musset in particular--seized upon the treasures ofthe "Romancero"; but this was somewhat later. 

Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads, " which were bold and spirited paraphrasesrather than close versions of the originals, enjoyed a great success, andhave been repeatedly reprinted. Ticknor pronounced them undoubtedly awork of genius, as much so as any book of the sort in any literature withwhich he was acquainted. [14] In the very same year Sir John Bowringpublished his "Ancient Poetry and Romance of Spain. " Hookham Frere, thatmost accomplished of translators, also gave specimens from the"Romancero. " Of late years versions in increasing numbers of Spanishpoetry of all kinds, ancient and modern, by Ormsby, Gibson, and otherstoo numerous to name, have made the literature of the country largelyaccessible to English readers. But to Lockhart belongs the credit ofhaving established for the English public the convention of romanticSpain--the Spain of lattice and guitar, of mantilla and castanet, articles now long at home in the property room of romance, along with thegondola of Venice, the "clock-face" troubadour, and the castle on theRhine. The Spanish brand of mediaevalism would seem, for a number ofyears, to have substituted itself in England for the German, anddoubtless a search through the annuals and gift books and fashionablefiction and minor poetry generally, of the years from 1825 to 1840, woulddisclose a decided Castilian colouring. To such effect, at least, is thetestimony of the Edinburgh reviewer--from whom I have several timesquoted--reviewing in January, 1841, the new and sumptuously illustratededition of "Ancient Spanish Ballads. " "Mr. Lockhart's success, " hewrites, "rendered the subject fashionable; we have, however, no space tobestow on the minor fry who dabbled in these . . . Fountains. Those whoremember their number may possibly deprecate our re-opening thefloodgates of the happily subsided inundation. "

The popular ballad, indeed, is, next after the historical romance, theliterary form to which the romantic movement has given, in the highestdegree, a renewal of prosperous life. Every one has written ballads, andthe "burden" has become a burden even as the grasshopper is such. Thevery parodists have taken the matter in hand. The only Calverley madeexcellent sport of the particular variety cultivated by Jean Ingelow. And Sir Frederick Pollock, as though actuated by Lowell's hint, about "adeclaration of love under the forms of a declaration in trover, " cast thelaw reports into ballad phrase in his "Leading Cases Done into English(1876):

 "It was Thomas Newman and five his feres (Three more would have made them nine), And they entered into John Vaux's house, That had the Queen's Head to sign. The birds on the bough sing loud and sing low, What trespass shall be _ab initio_. "

Of course the great majority of these poems in the ballad form, whetherlyric or narrative, or a mixture of both, are in no sense romantic. Theyare like Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads, " idyllic; songs of theaffections, of nature, sentiment, of war, the sea, the hunting field, rustic life, and a hundred other moods and topics. Neither are thehistorical or legendary ballads, deriving from Percy and reinforced byScott, prevailingly romantic in the sense of being mediaeval. They aresuch as Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome, " in which--with ampleacknowledgment in his introduction both to Scott and to the"Reliques"--he applies the form of the English minstrel ballad to animaginative re-creation of the lost popular poetry of early Rome. Orthey continue Scott's Jacobite tradition, like "Aytoun's Lays of theScottish Cavaliers, " Browning's "Cavalier Tunes, " Thornbury's "Songs ofthe Cavaliers and Roundheads" (1857), and a few of Motherwell's ditties. These last named, except Browning, were all Scotchmen and staunch Tories;as were likewise Lockhart and Hogg; and, for obvious reasons, it is inScotland that the simpler fashion of ballad writing, whether in dialector standard English, and more especially as employed upon martialsubjects, has flourished longest. Artifice and ballad preciosity havebeen cultivated more sedulously in the south, with a learned use of therepetend, archaism of style, and imitation of the quaint mediaeval habitof mind. 

Of the group most immediately connected with Scott and who assisted him, more or less, in his "Minstrelsy" collection, may be mentioned theeccentric John Leyden, immensely learned in Border antiquities andpoetry, and James Hogg, the "Ettrick Shepherd. " The latter was a peasantbard, an actual shepherd and afterward a sheep farmer, a self-taught manwith little schooling, who aspired to become a second Burns, and composedmuch of his poetry while lying out on the hills, wrapped in his plaid andtending his flocks like any Corydon or Thyrsis. He was a singularmixture of genius and vanity, at once the admiration and the butt of the_Blackwood's_ wits, who made him the mouthpiece of humour and eloquencewhich were not his, but Christopher North's. The puzzled shepherd hardlyknew how to take it; he was a little gratified and a good deal nettled. But the flamboyant figure of him in the _Noctes_ will probably do as muchas his own verses to keep his memory alive with posterity. Nevertheless, Hogg is one of the best of modern Scotch ballad poets. Having read thefirst two volumes of the "Border Minstrelsy, " he was dissatisfied withsome of the modern ballad imitations therein and sent his criticisms toScott. They were sound criticisms, for Hogg had an intimate knowledge ofpopular poetry and a quick perception of what was genuine and what wasspurious in such compositions. Sir Walter called him in aid of his thirdvolume and found his services of value. 

As a Border minstrel, Hogg ranks next to Scott--is, in fact, a sort ofinferior Scott. His range was narrower, but he was just as thoroughlysaturated with the legendary lore of the countryside, and in somerespects he stood closer to the spirit of that peasant life in whichpopular poetry has its source. As a ballad poet, indeed, he is notalways Scott's inferior, though even his ballads are apt to be too longand without the finish and the instinct for selection which marks thetrue artist. When he essayed metrical romances in numerous cantos, hisdeficiencies in art became too fatally evident. Scott, in his longerpoems, is often profuse and unequal, but always on a much higher levelthan Hogg. The latter had no skill in conducting to the end a fable ofsome complexity, involving a number of varied characters and a reallydramatic action. "Mador of the Moor, " _e. G. _, is a manifest and not verysuccessful imitation of "The Lady of the Lake"; and it requires a strongappetite for the romantic to sustain a reader through the six parts of"Queen Hynde" and the four parts of "The Pilgrims of the Sun. " Bygeneral consent, the best of Hogg's more ambitious poems is "The Queen'sWake, " and the best thing in it is "Kilmeny. " "The Queen's Wake" (1813)combines, in its narrative plan, the framework of "The Lay of the LastMinstrel" with the song competition in its sixth canto. Mary Stuart, onlanding in Scotland, holds a Christmas wake at Holyrood, where seventeenbards contend before her for the prize of song. The lays are in manydifferent moods and measures, but all enclosed in a setting ofoctosyllabic couplets, closely modelled upon Scott, and the whole endswith a tribute to the great minstrel who had waked once more the longsilent Harp of the North. The thirteenth bard's song--"Kilmeny"--is ofthe type of traditionary tale familiar in "Tarn Lin" and "Thomas ofErcildoune, " and tells how a maiden was spirited away to fairyland, whereshe saw a prophetic vision of her country's future (including theNapoleonic wars) and returned after a seven years' absence. 

 "Late, late in a gloamin' when all was still, When the fringe was red on the westlin hill, The wood was sere, the moon i' the wane, The reek o' the cot hung o'er the plain, Like a little wee cloud in the world its lane; When the ingle lowed wi' an eiry leme, Late, late in the gloamin' Kilmeny came hame. "

The Ettrick Shepherd's peculiar province was not so much the romance ofnational history as the field of Scottish fairy lore and popularsuperstition. It was he, rather than Walter Scott, who carried out thesuggestions long since made to his countryman, John Home, in Collins'"Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands. " His poems are full ofbogles, kelpies, brownies, warlocks, and all manner of "grammarie. " "TheWitch of Fife" in "The Queen's Wake, " a spirited bit of grotesque, isrepeatedly quoted as authority upon the ways of Scotch witches in thenotes to Croker's "Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland. "Similar themes engaged the poet in his prose tales. Some of these weremere modern ghost stories, or stories of murder, robbery, death warnings, etc. Others, like "The Heart of Eildon, " dealt with ancient legends ofthe supernatural. Still others, like "The Brownie of Bodsbeck: a Tale ofthe Covenanters, " were historical novels of the Stuart times. Here Hoggwas on Scott's own ground and did not shine by comparison. Hecomplained, indeed, that in the last-mentioned tale, he had been accusedof copying "Old Mortality", but asserted that he had written his book thefirst and had been compelled by the appearance of Sir Walter's, to goover his own manuscript and substitute another name for Balfour ofBurley, his original hero. Nanny's songs, in "The Brownie of Bodsbeck, "are among Hogg's best ballads. Others are scattered through his variouscollections--"The Mountain Bard, " "The Forest Minstrel, " "Poetical Talesand Ballads, " etc. 

Another Scotch balladist was William Motherwell, one of the mostcompetent of ballad scholars and editors, whose "Minstrelsy: Ancient andModern, " was issued at Glasgow in 1827, and led to a correspondencebetween the collector and Sir Walter Scott. [15] In 1836 Motherwell wasassociated with Hogg in editing Burns' works. His original ballads arefew in number, and their faults and merits are of quite an oppositenature from his collaborator's. The shepherd was a man of the people, and lived, so far as any modern can, among the very conditions whichproduced the minstrel songs. He inherited the popular beliefs. Hisgreat-grandmother on one side was a notorious witch; his grandfather onthe other side had "spoken with the fairies. " His poetry, such as it is, is fluent and spontaneous. Motherwell's, on the contrary, is the work ofa ballad fancier, a student learned in lyric, reproducing old modes withconscientious art. His balladry is more condensed and skilful thanHogg's, but seems to come hard to him. It is literary poetry trying tobe _Volkspoesie_, and not quite succeeding. Many of the pieces in thesouthern English, such as "Halbert the Grim, " "The Troubadour's Lament, ""The Crusader's Farewell, " "The Warthman's Wail, " "The Demon Lady, " "TheWitches' Joys, " and "Lady Margaret, " have an echo of Elizabethan music, or the songs of Lovelace, or, now and then, the verse of Coleridge orByron. "True Love's Dirge, " _e. G. _, borrows a burden fromShakspere--"Heigho! the Wind and Rain. " Others, like "Lord Archibald: ABallad, " and "Elfinland Wud: An Imitation of the Ancient ScottishRomantic Ballad, " are in archaic Scotch dialect with careful balladphrasing. Hogg employs the broad Scotch, but it is mostly the vernacularof his own time. A short passage from "The Witch of Fife" and one from"Elfin Wud" will illustrate two very different types of ballad manner:

 "He set ane reid-pipe till his muthe And he playit se bonnileye, Till the gray curlew and the black-cock flew To listen his melodye. 

 "It rang se sweit through the grim Lommond, That the nycht-winde lowner blew: And it soupit alang the Loch Leven, And wakenit the white sea-mew. 

 "It rang se sweit through the grim Lommond, Se sweitly but and se shill, That the wezilis laup out of their mouldy holis, And dancit on the mydnycht hill. "

 "Around her slepis the quhyte muneschyne, (Meik is mayden undir kell), Hir lips bin lyke the blude reid wyne; (The rois of flouris hes sweitest smell). 

 "It was al bricht quhare that ladie stude, (Far my luve fure ower the sea). Bot dern is the lave of Elfinland wud, (The Knicht pruvit false that ance luvit me). 

 "The ladie's handis were quhyte als milk, (Ringis my luve wore mair nor ane). Hir skin was safter nor the silk; (Lilly bricht schinis my luve's halse bane). "

Upon the whole, the most noteworthy of Motherwell's original additions tothe stores of romantic verse were his poems on subjects from Norse legendand mythology, and particularly the three spirited pieces that standfirst in his collection (1832)--"The Battle-Flag of Sigurd, " "The WooingSong of Jarl Egill Skallagrim, " and "The Sword Chant of Thorstein Randi. "These stand midway between Gray's "Descent of Odin" and the later work ofLongfellow, William Morris and others. Since Gray, little or nothing ofthe kind had been attempted; and Motherwell gave perhaps the firstexpression in English song of the Berserkir rage and the Viking passionfor battle and sea roving. 

During the nineteenth century English romance received new increments ofheroic legend and fairy lore from the Gaelic of Ireland. It was notuntil 1867 that Matthew Arnold, in his essay "On the Study of CelticLiterature, " pleading for a chair of Celtic at Oxford, bespoke theattention of the English public to those elements in the nationalliterature which come from the Celtic strain in its blood. Arnold knewvery little Celtic, and his essay abounds in those airy generalisationswhich are so irritating to more plodding critics. His theory, e. G. , thatEnglish poetry owes its sense for colour to the Celts, when taken up andstated nakedly by following writers, seems too absolute in its ascriptionof colour-blindness to the Teutonic races. Still, Arnold probablydefined fairly enough the distinctive traits of the Celtic genius. Heattributes to a Celtic source much of the turn of English poetry forstyle, much of its turn for melancholy, and nearly all its turn for"natural magic. " "The forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the wildflowers, are everywhere in romance. They have a mysterious life andgrace there; they are Nature's own children, and utter her secret in away which makes them something quite different from the woods, waters, and plants of Greek and Latin poetry. Now, of this delicate magic, Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a mistress that it seems impossible tobelieve the power did not come into romance from the Celts. "

In 1825 T. Crofton Croker published the first volume of his delightful"Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland. " It wasimmediately translated into German by the Grimm brothers, and wasreceived with enthusiasm by Walter Scott, who was introduced to theauthor in London in 1826, and a complimentary letter from whom wasprinted in the preface to the second edition. 

Croker's book opened a new world of romance, and introduced the Englishreader to novel varieties of elf creatures, with outlandish Gaelic names;the Shefro; the Boggart; the Phooka, or horse-fiend; the Banshee, afamiliar spirit which moans outside the door when a death impends; theCluricaune, [16] or cellar goblin; the Fir Darrig (Red Man); the Dullahan, or Headless Horseman. There are stories of changelings, haunted castles, buried treasure, the "death coach, " the fairy piper, enchanted lakeswhich cover sunken cities, and similar matters not unfamiliar in thefolk-lore of other lands, but all with an odd twist to them and setagainst a background of the manners and customs of modern Irishpeasantry. The Celtic melancholy is not much in evidence in thiscollection. The wild Celtic fancy is present, but in combination withIrish gaiety and light-heartedness. It was the day of the comedyIrishman--Lover's and Lever's Irishman--Handy Andy, Rory O'More, WidowMachree and the like. It took the famine of '49 and the strenuous workof the Young Ireland Party which gathered about the _Nation_ in 1848, todisplace this traditional figure in favour of a more earnest and tragicalnational type. But a single quotation will illustrate the natural magicof which Arnold speaks: "The Merrow (mermaid) put the comb in her pocket, and then bent down her head and whispered some words to the water thatwas close to the foot of the rock. Dick saw the murmur of the words uponthe top of the sea, going out towards the wide ocean, just like a breathof wind rippling along, and, says he, in the greatest wonder, 'Is itspeaking you are, my darling, to the salt water?'

"'It's nothing else, ' says she, quite carelessly; 'I'm just sending wordhome to my father not to be waiting breakfast for me. '" Except for itslack of "high seriousness, " this is the imagination that makes myths. 

Catholic Ireland still cherishes popular beliefs which in England, andeven in Scotland, have long been merely antiquarian curiosities. In herpoetry the fairies are never very far away. 

 "Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen We daren't go a-hunting For fear of little men. " [17]

Irish critics, to be sure, tell us that Allingham's fairies are Englishfairies, and that he had no Gaelic, though he knew and loved his Irishcountryside. He was a Protestant and a loyalist, and lived in closeassociation with the English Pre-Raphaelites--with Rossetti especially, who made the illustration for "The Maids of Elfin-Mere" in Allingham'svolume "The Music Master" (1855). The Irish fairies, it is said, arebeings of a darker and more malignant breed than Shakspere's elves. Yetin Allingham's poem they stole little Bridget and kept her seven years, till she died of sorrow and lies asleep on the lake bottom; even as inFerguson's weird ballad, "The Fairy Thorn, " the good people carry offfair Anna Grace from the midst of her three companions, who "pined awayand died within the year and day. "

To the latter half of the century belongs the so-called Celtic revival, which connects itself with the Nationalist movement in politics and ispartly literary and partly patriotic. It may be doubted whether, forpractical purposes, the Gaelic will ever come again into general use. But the concerted endeavour by a whole nation to win back its ancient, wellnigh forgotten speech is a most interesting social phenomenon. Atall events, both by direct translations of the Gaelic hero epics and byoriginal work in which the Gaelic spirit is transfused through Englishballad and other verse forms, a lost kingdom of romance has beenrecovered and a bright green thread of Celtic poetry runs through theBritish anthology of the century. The names of the pioneers and leadingcontributors to this movement are significant of the varied strains ofblood which compose Irish nationality. James Clarence Mangan was a Celtof the Celts; Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Aubrey de Vere were ofNorman-Irish stock, and the former was the son of a dean of theEstablished Church, and himself the editor of a Tory newspaper; SirSamuel Ferguson was an Ulster Protestant of Scotch descent; Dr. GeorgeSigerson is of Norse blood; Whitley Stokes, the eminent Celtic scholar, and Dr. John Todhunter, author of "Three Bardic Tales" (1896), bearAnglo-Saxon surnames; the latter is the son of Quaker parents and waseducated at English Quaker schools. 

Mangan's paraphrases from the Gaelic, "Poets and Poetry of Munster, "appeared posthumously in 1850. They include a number of lyrics, wildlyand mournfully beautiful, inspired by the sorrows of Ireland: "DarkRosaleen, " "Lament for the Princes of Tir-Owen and Tir-Connell, ""O'Hussey's Ode to the Maguire, " etc. The ballad form was not practisedby the ancient Gaelic epic poets. In choosing it as the vehicle fortheir renderings from vernacular narrative poetry, the modern Irish poetshave departed widely from the English and Scottish model, employing avariety of metres and not seeking to conform their diction to the mannerof the ballads in the "Reliques" or the "Border Minstrelsy. " Ferguson's"Lays of the Western Gael" (1865) is a series of historical ballads, original in effect, though based upon old Gaelic chronicles. "Congal"(1872) is an epic, founded on an ancient bardic tale, and written inChapman's "fourteener" and reminding the reader frequently of Chapman'slarge, vigorous manner, his compound epithets and spacious Homericsimiles. The same epic breadth of manner was applied to the treatment ofother hero legends, "Conary, " "Deirdré, " etc. , in a subsequent volume(1880). "Deirdré, " the finest of all the old Irish stories, was alsohandled independently by the late Dr. R. D. Joyce in the verse and mannerof William Morris' "Earthly Paradise. " [18] Among other recent workersin this field are Aubrey de Vere, a volume of selections from whosepoetry appeared at New York in 1894, edited by Prof. G. E. Woodberry;George Sigerson, whose "Bards of the Gael and the Gall, " a volume oftranslations from the Irish in the original metres, was issued in 1897;Whitley Stokes, an accomplished translator, and the joint editor (withWindisch) of the "Irische Texte "; John Todhunter, author of "The Bansheeand Other Poems" (1888) and "Three Bardic Tales" (1896); Alfred PercevalGraves, author of "Irish Folk Songs" (1897), and many other volumes ofnational lyrics; and William Larminie--"West Irish Folk Tales andRomances" (1893), etc. 

The Celtism of this Gaelic renascence is of a much purer and more genuinecharacter than the Celtism of Macpherson's "Ossian. " Yet with all itssuperiority in artistic results, it is improbable that it will make anysuch impression on Europe or England as Macpherson made. "Ossian" wasthe first revelation to the world of the Celtic spirit: sophisticated, rhetorical, yet still the first; and it is not likely that its successwill be repeated. In the very latest school of Irish verse, representedby such names as Lionel Johnson, J. B. Yeats, George W. Russell, NoraHopper, the mystical spirit which inhabits the "Celtic twilight" turnsinto modern symbolism, so that some of their poems on legendary subjectsbear a curious resemblance to the contemporary work of Maeterlinck: tosuch things as "Aglivaine et Salysette" or "Les Sept Princesses. " [19]

The narrative ballad is hardly one of the forms of high art, like theepic, the tragedy, the Pindaric ode. It is simple and not complex likethe sonnet: not of the aristocracy of verse, but popular--not to sayplebeian--in its associations. It is easy to write and, in its commonestmetrical shape of eights and sixes, apt to run into sing-song. Itslimitations, even in the hands of an artist like Coleridge or Rossetti, are obvious. It belongs to "minor poetry. " The ballad revival has notbeen an unmixed blessing and is responsible for much slip-shod work. IfDr. Johnson could come back from the shades and look over our recentverse, one of his first comments would probably be: "Sir, you have toomany ballads. " Be it understood that the romantic ballad only is here inquestion, in which the poet of a literary age seeks to catch andreproduce the tone of a childlike, unself-conscious time, so that his arthas almost inevitably something artificial or imitative. Here and thereone stands out from the mass by its skill or luck in overcoming thedifficulty. There is Hawker's "Song of the Western Men, " which Macaulayand others quoted as historical, though only the refrain was old:

 "And shall Trelawney die? Here's twenty thousand Cornish men Will know the reason why!" [20]

There is Sydney Dobell's "Keith of Ravelston, " [21] which haunts thememory with the insistent iteration of its refrain:--

 "The murmur of the mourning ghost That keeps the shadowy kine; Oh, Keith of Ravelston, The sorrows of thy line!"

And again there is Robert Buchanan's "Ballad of Judas Iscariot" which Mr. Stedman compares for "weird impressiveness and power" with "The AncientMariner. " The mediaeval feeling is most successfully captured in thispoem. It recalls the old "Debate between the Body and Soul, " and stillmore the touches of divine compassion which soften the rigours ofCatholic theology in the legends of the saints. It strikes the keynote, too, of that most modern ballad mode which employs the narrative only toemphasize some thought of universal application. There is salvation forall, is the thought, even for the blackest soul of the world, the soulthat betrayed its Maker. [22] Such, though after a fashion more subtlyintellectual, is the doctrinal use to which this popular form is put byone of the latest English ballad makers, Mr. John Davidson. Read, e. G. , his "Ballad of a Nun, " [23] the story of which was told in several shapesby the Spanish poet Alfonso the Learned (1226-84). A runaway nun returnsin penitence to her convent, and is met at the gate by the Virgin Mary, who has taken her likeness and kept her place for her during the years ofher absence. Or read "A New Ballad of Tannhäuser, " [24] whichcontradicts "the idea of the inherent impurity of nature" by aninterpretation of the legend in a sense quite the reverse of Wagner's. Tannhäuser's dead staff blossoms not as a sign of forgiveness, but toshow him that "there was no need to be forgiven. " The modern balladistattacks the ascetic Middle Age with a shaft from its own quiver. 

But it is time to turn from minor poets to acknowledged masters; andabove all to the greatest of modern English artists in verse, therepresentative poet of the Victorian era. Is Tennyson to be classed withthe romantics? His workmanship, when most truly characteristic, isromantic in the sense of being pictorial and ornate, rather thanclassically simple or severe. He assimilated the rich manner of Keats, whose influence is perceptible in his early poems. His art, like Keats', is eclectic and reminiscent, choosing for its exercise with equalimpartiality whatever was most beautiful in the world of Grecian fable orthe world of mediaeval legend. But unlike Keats, he lived to add newstrings to his lyre; he went on to sing of modern life and thought, ofpresent-day problems in science and philosophy, of contemporary politics, the doubt, unrest, passion, and faith of his own century. To find workof Tennyson's that is romantic throughout, in subject, form, and spiritalike, we must look among his earlier collections (1830, 1832, 1842). For this was a phase which he passed beyond, as Millais outgrew hisyouthful Pre-Raphaelitism, or as Goethe left behind him his "Götz" and"Werther" period and widened out into larger utterance. Mr. Stedmanspeaks of the "Gothic feeling" in "The Lady of Shalott, " and in balladslike "Oriana" and "The Sisters, " describing them as "work that in itskind is fully up to the best of those Pre-Raphaelites who, by some arrestof development, stop precisely where Tennyson made his second stepforward, and censure him for having gone beyond them. " [25] Thisestimate may be accepted so far as it concerns "The Lady of Shalott, "which is known to have worked strongly upon Rossetti's imagination; butsurely "The Sisters" and "Oriana" do not rank with the bestPre-Raphaelite work. The former is little better than a failure; and thelatter, which provokes a comparison, not to Tennyson's advantage, withthe fine old ballad, "Helen of Kirkconnell, " is a weak thing. The nameOriana has romantic associations--it is that of the heroine of "Amadis deGaul"--but the damnable iteration of it as a ballad burden is irritating. Mediaeval _motifs_ are rather slightly handled in "The Golden Supper"(from the "Decameron, " 4th novel, 10th day); "The Beggar Maid" (from theballad of "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid" in the "Reliques"); andmore adequately in "Godiva, " a blank-verse rendering of the local legendof Coventry, in which an attempt is made to preserve something of theantique roughness under the smooth Vergilian elegance of Tennyson'sdiction. "The Day Dream" was a recasting of one of Perrault's fairytales, "The Sleeping Beauty, " under which title a portion of it hadappeared in the "Poems Chiefly Lyrical" of 1830. Tennyson has writtenmany greater poems than this, but few in which the special string ofromance vibrates more purely. The tableau of the spellbound palace, withall its activities suspended, gave opportunity for the display of hisunexampled pictorial power in scenes of still life; and the legend itselfsupplied that charmed isolation from the sphere of reality which wenoticed as so important a part of the romantic poet's stock-in-trade in"Christabel" and "The Eve of St. Agnes"--

 "The hall-door shuts again and all is still. "

Poems like "The Day Dream" and "The Princess" make it evident that Scottand Coleridge and Keats had so given back the Middle Ages to theimagination that any future poet, seeking free play in a realm unhamperedby actual conditions--"apart from place, withholding time"--was apt toturn naturally, if not inevitably, to the feudal times. The action of"The Day Dream" proceeds no-where and no-when. The garden--if wecross-examine it--is a Renaissance garden:

 "Soft lustre bathes the range of urns On every slanting terrace-lawn: The fountain to its place returns, Deep in the garden lake withdrawn. "

The furnishings of the palace are a mixture of mediaeval and LouisQuatorze--clocks, peacocks, parrots, golden mantle pegs:--

 "Till all the hundred summers pass, The beams that through the oriel shine Make prisms in every carven glass And beaker brimm'd with noble wine. "

But the impression, as a whole, is of the Middle Age of poeticconvention, if not of history; the enchanted dateless era of romance andfairy legend. 

"St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad, " its masculine counterpart, sound the oldCatholic notes of saintly virginity and mystical, religious rapture, the_Gottesminne_ of mediaeval hymnody. Not since Southwell's "Burning Babe"and Crashaw's "Saint Theresa" had any English poet given such expressionto those fervid devotional moods which Sir Thomas Browne describes as"Christian annihilation, ecstasies, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of God and ingressioninto the divine shadow. " This vein, we have noticed, is wanting inScott. On the other hand, it may be noticed in passing, Tennyson'sattitude towards nature is less exclusively romantic--in the narrowsense--than Scott's. He, too, is conscious of the historic associationsof place. In Tennyson, as in Scott, --

 "The splendour falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story"--[26]

but, in general, his treatment of landscape, in its human relations, issubtler and more intimate. 

"St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad" are monologues, but lyric and not dramaticin Browning's manner. There is a dramatic falsity, indeed, in making SirGalahad say of himself--

 "My strength is as the strength of ten Because my heart is pure, "

and the poem would be better in the third person. "St. Simeon Stylites"is a dramatic monologue more upon Browning's model, _i. E. _, a piece ofapologetics and self-analysis. But in this province Tennyson is greatlyBrowning's inferior. 

"The Princess" (1847) is representative of that "splendid composite ofimagery, " and that application of modern ideas to legendary material, orto invented material arbitrarily placed in an archaic setting, which arecharacteristic of this artist. The poem's sub-title is "A Medley, "because it is

 "--made to suit with time and place, A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house, A talk of college and of ladies' rights, A feudal knight in silken masquerade, And, yonder, shrieks and strange experiments. "

The problem is a modern one--the New Woman. No precise historic periodis indicated. The female university is full of classic lore and art, butwithal there are courts of feudal kings, with barons, knights, andsquires, and shock of armoured champions in the lists. 

But the special service of Tennyson to romantic poetry lay in his beingthe first to give a worthy form to the great Arthurian saga; and themodern masterpiece of that poetry, all things considered, is his "Idyllsof the King. " Not so perfect and unique a thing as "The AncientMariner"; less freshly spontaneous, less stirringly alive than "The Layof the Last Minstrel, " Tennyson's Arthuriad has so much wider a rangethan Coleridge's ballad, and is sustained at so much higher a level thanScott's romance, that it outweighs them both in importance. TheArthurian cycle of legends, emerging from Welsh and Breton mythology;seized upon by French romancers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who made of Arthur the pattern king, of Lancelot the pattern knight, andof the Table Round the ideal institute of chivalry; gathering aboutitself accretions like the Grail Quest and the Tristram story; passing bytranslation into many tongues, but retaining always its scene in Great orLesser Britain, the lands of its origin, furnished the modern Englishromancer with a groundwork of national, though not Anglo-Saxon epicstuff, which corresponds more nearly with the Charlemagne epos in France, and the Nibelung hero Saga in Germany, than anything else which ourliterature possesses. And a national possession, in a sense, it hadalways remained. The story in outline and in some of its main episodeswas familiar. Arthur, Lancelot, Guinivere, Merlin, Modred, Iseult, Gawaine, were well-known figures, like Robin Hood or Guy of Warwick, inShakspere's time as in Chaucer's. But the epos, as a whole, had neverfound its poet. Spenser had evaporated Arthur into allegory. Milton haddallied with the theme and put it by. [27] The Elizabethan drama, whichwent so far afield in search of the moving accident, had strangely missedits chance here, bringing the Round Table heroes upon its stage only inmasque and pageant (Justice Shallow "was Sir Dagonet in Arthur's show"), or in some such performance as the rude old Seneca tragedy of "TheMisfortunes of Arthur. " In 1695 Sir Richard Blackmore published his"Prince Arthur, " an epic in ten books and in rimed couplets, enlarged in1697 into "King Arthur" in twelve books. Blackmore professed to takeVergil as his model. A single passage from his poem will show how muchchance the old chivalry tale had in the hands of a minor poet of KingWilliam's reign. Arthur and his company have landed on the shores ofAlbion, where

 "Rich wine of Burgundy and choice champagne Relieve the toil they suffered on the main; But what more cheered them than their meats and wine, Was wise instruction and discourse divine From Godlike Arthur's mouth. "

There is no need, in taking a summary view of Tennyson's "Idylls, " to gointo the question of sources, or to inquire whether Arthur was ahistorical chief of North Wales, or whether he signified the Great Bear(Arcturus) in Celtic mythology, and his Round Table the circle describedby that constellation about the pole star. [28] Tennyson went no fartherback for his authority than Sir Thomas Malory's "Morte Darthur, " printedby Caxton in 1485, a compilation principally from old French Round Tableromances. This was the final mediaeval shape of the story in English. It is somewhat wandering and prolix as to method, but written indelightful prose. The story of "Enid, " however (under its various titlesand arrangements in successive editions), he took from Lady CharlotteGuest's translation of the Welsh "Mabinogion" (1838-49). 

Before deciding upon the heroic blank verse and a loosely epic form, asmost fitting for his purpose, Tennyson had retold passages of Arthurianromance in the ballad manner and in various shapes of riming stanza. Thefirst of these was "The Lady of Shalott" (1832), identical in subjectwith the later idyll of "Lancelot and Elaine, " but fanciful and evenallegorical in treatment. Shalott is from Ascalot, a variant of Astolat, in the old _metrical_ romance--not Malory's--of the "Morte Arthur. " Thefairy lady, who sees all passing sights in her mirror and weaves theminto her magic web, has been interpreted as a symbol of art, which has todo properly only with the reflection of life. When the figure ofLancelot is cast upon the glass, a personal emotion is brought into herlife which is fatal to her art. She is "sick of shadows, " and looksthrough her window at the substance. Then her mirror cracks from side toside and the curse is come upon her. Other experiments of the same kindwere "Sir Galahad" and "Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinivere" (both in 1842). The beauty of all these ballad beginnings is such that one is hardlyreconciled to the loss of so much romantic music, even by the noble blankverse and the ampler narrative method which the poet finally adopted. They stand related to the "Idylls" very much as Morris' "Defence ofGuenevere" stands to his "Earthly Paradise. "

Thoroughly romantic in content, the "Idylls of the King" are classical inform. They may be compared to Tasso's "Gierusalemme Liberata, " in whichthe imperfectly classical manner of the Renaissance is applied to aGothic subject, the history of the Crusades. The first specimen givenwas the "Morte d'Arthur" of 1842, set in a framework entitled "The Epic, "in which "the poet, Everard Hall, " reads to his friends a fragment fromhis epic, "King Arthur, " in twelve books. All the rest he has burned. For--

 "Why take the style of those heroic times? For nature brings not back the Mastodon, Nor we those times; and why should any man Remodel models? these twelve books of mine Were faint Homeric echoes. "

The "fragment" is thus put forward tentatively and withapologies--apologies which were little needed; for the "Morte d'Arthur, "afterwards embedded in "The Passing of Arthur, " remains probably thebest, and certainly the most Homeric passage in the "Idylls. " Tennyson'sown quality was more Vergilian than Homeric, but the models which he hereremodels were the Homeric epics. He chose for his measure not theSpenserian stanza, nor the _ottava rima_ of Tasso, nor the octosyllablesof Scott and the chivalry romances, but the heroic blank verse whichMilton had fixed as the vehicle of English classical epic. He adoptsHomer's narrative practices: the formulated repetitions of phrase, thepictorial comparisons, the conventional epithets (in moderation), and hisgnomic habit--

 "O purblind race of miserable men, " etc. 

The original four idylls were published in 1859. [29] Thenceforth theseries grew by successive additions and rearrangements up to thecompleted "Idylls" of 1888, twelve in number--besides prologue andepilogue--according to the plan foreshadowed in "The Epic. " The story ofArthur had thus occupied Tennyson for over a half century. Thoughmodestly entitled "Idylls, " by reason of the episodic treatment, the poemwhen finished was, in fact, an epic; but an epic that lacked the formalunity of the "Aeneid" and the "Paradise Lost, " or even of the "Iliad. " Itresembled the Homeric heroic poems more than the literary epics of Vergiland Milton, in being not the result of a single act of construction, buta growth from the gradual fitting together of materials selected from avast body of legend. This legendary matter he reduced to an epic unity. The adventures in Malory's romance are of very uneven value, and itabounds in inconsistencies and repetitions. He also redistributed theethical balance. Lancelot is the real hero of the old "Morte Darthur, "and Guinivere--the Helen of romance--goes almost uncensured. Malory'sArthur is by no means "the blameless king" of Tennyson, who makes of hima nineteenth-century ideal of royal knighthood, and finally anallegorical type of Soul at war with Sense. The downfall of the RoundTable, that order of spiritual knight-errantry through which the kinghopes to regenerate society, happens through the failure of his knightsto rise to his own high level of character; in a degree, also, becausethe emprise is diverted from attainable practical aims to the fantasticquest of the Holy Grail. The sin of Lancelot and the Queen, drawingafter it the treachery of Modred, brings on the tragic catastrophe. Thisconception is latent in Malory, but it is central in Tennyson; andeverywhere he subtilises, refines, elevates, and, in short, modernisesthe _Motivirung_ in the old story. Does he thereby also weaken it?Censure and praise have been freely bestowed upon Tennyson's dealingswith Malory. Thus it is complained that his Arthur is a prig, a curate, who preaches to his queen and lectures his court, and whose virtue is tooconscious; that the harlot Vivien is a poor substitute for the damsel ofthe lake who puts Merlin to sleep under a great rock in the land ofBenwick; that the gracious figure of Gawain suffers degradation from theapplication of an effeminate moral standard to his shining exploits inlove and war, that modern _convenances_ are imposed upon a society inwhich they do not belong and whose joyous, robust _naïveté_ is hurt bythem. [30]

The allegorical method tried in "The Lady of Shalott, " but abandoned inthe earlier "Idylls, " creeps in again in the later; particularly in"Gareth and Lynette" (1872), in the elaborate symbolism of the gates ofCamelot, and in the guardians of the river passes, whom Garethsuccessively overcomes, and who seem to represent the temptationsincident to the different ages of man. The whole poem, indeed, has beeninterpreted in a parabolic sense, Merlin standing for the intellect, theLady of the Lake for religion, etc. Allegory was a favourite mediaevalmode, and the Grail legend contains an element of mysticism which invitesan emblematic treatment. But the attraction of this fashion for minds ofa Platonic cast is dangerous to art: the temptation to find a meaning inhuman life more esoteric than any afforded by the literal life itself. Adelicate balance must be kept between that presentation of the concretewhich makes it significant by making it representative and typical, andthat other presentation which dissolves the individual into the general, by making it a mere abstraction. Were it not for Dante and Hawthorne andthe second part of "Faust, " one would incline to say that no creativegenius of the first order indulges in allegory. Homer is neverallegorical except in the episode of Circe; Shakspere never, with thedoubtful exception of "The Tempest. " The allegory in the "Idylls of theKing" is not of the obvious kind employed in the "Faëry Queene"; butTennyson, no less than Spenser, appeared to feel that the simpleretelling of an old chivalry tale, without imparting to it some deepermeaning, was no work for a modern poet. 

Tennyson has made the Arthur Saga, as a whole, peculiarly his own. Butothers of the Victorian poets have handled detached portions of it. William Morris' "Defence of Guenevere" (1858) anticipated the first groupof "Idylls. " Swinburne's "Tristram of Lyonesse" (1882) dealt at fulllength, and in a very different spirit, with an epicyclic legend whichTennyson touched incidentally in "The Last Tournament. " Matthew Arnold's"Tristram and Iseult" was a third manipulation of the legend, partly indramatic, partly in narrative form, and in changing metres. It followsanother version of Tristram's death, and the story of Vivian and Merlinwhich Iseult of Brittany tells her children is quite distinct from theone in the "Idylls. " Iseult of Brittany--not Iseult of Cornwall--is theheroine of Arnold's poem. Thomas Westwood's "Quest of the Sancgreall" isstill one more contribution to Arthurian poetry of which a mere mentionmust here suffice. 

For our review threatens to become a catalogue. To such a degree hadmediaevalism become the fashion, that nearly every Georgian and Victorianpoet of any pretensions tried his hand at it. Robert Browning was notromantic in Scott's way, nor in Tennyson's. His business was with thesoul. The picturesqueness of the external conditions in which soul wasplaced was a matter of indifference. To-day was as good as yesterday. Now and then occurs a title with romantic implications--"Childe Roland tothe Dark Tower Came, " _e. G. _, borrowed from a ballad snatch sung by theFool in "Lear" (Roland is Roland of the "Chanson"). But the poem provesto be a weird study in landscape symbolism and the history of some darkemprise, the real nature of which is altogether undiscoverable. "CountGismond, " again, is the story of a combat in the lists at Aix inProvence, in which a knight vindicates a lady's honour with his lance, and slays her traducer at her feet. But this is a dramatic monologuelike any other, and only accidentally mediaeval. "The Heretic's Tragedy:A Middle Age Interlude, " is mediaeval without being romantic. Itrecounts the burning, at Paris, A. D. 1314, of Jacques du Bourg-Molay, Grand Master of the Templars; and purports to be a sort of canticle, withsolo and chorus, composed two centuries after the event by a Flemishcanon of Ypres, to be sung at hocktide and festivals. The childishnessand devout buffoonery of an old miracle play are imitated here, as inSwinburne's "Masque of Queen Bersabe. " This piece and "Holy Cross Day"are dramatic, or monodramatic, grotesques; and in their apprehension ofthis trait of the mediaeval mind are on a par with Hugo's "Pas d'armes duRoi Jean" and "La Chasse du Burgrave. " But Browning's mousings in theMiddle Ages after queer freaks of conscience or passion were occasional. If any historical period, more than another, had special interest forhim, it was the period of the Italian Renaissance. Yet Ruskin said:"Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the MiddleAges. "

Among Mrs. Browning's poems, which, it needs hardly be said, are notprevailingly "Gothic, " there are three interesting experiments in balladromance: "The Romaunt of the Page, " "The Lay of the Brown Rosary, " and"The Rime of the Duchess May. " In all of these she avails herself of themediaeval atmosphere, simply to play variations on her favourite theme, the devotedness of woman's love. The motive is the same as in poems ofmodern life like "Bertha in the Lane" and "Aurora Leigh. " The vehemenceof this nobly gifted woman, her nervous and sometimes almost hystericalemotionalism, are not without a disagreeable quality. With greater rangeand fervour, she had not the artistic poise of the Pre-Raphaelitepoetess, Christina Rossetti. In these romances, as elsewhere, she issometimes shrill and often mannerised. "The Romaunt of the Page" is thetale of a lady who attends her knight to the Holy Land, disguised as apage, and without his knowledge. She saves his life several times, andfinally at the cost of her own. A prophetic accompaniment or burdencomes in ever and anon in the distant chant of nuns over the dead abbess. 

 "Beati! beati mortui. "

"The Lay of the Brown Rosary" is a charming but uneven piece, in fourparts and a variety of measures, about a girl who, while awaiting herlover's return from the war, learns in a dream that she must die, andpurchases seven years of life from the ghost of a wicked nun whose bodyhas been immured in an old convent wall. The spirit gives the bride abrown rosary which she wears under her dress, but her kiss kills thebridegroom at the altar. The most spirited and well-sustained of theseballad poems is "The Rime of the Duchess May, " in which the heroine ridesoff the battlements with her husband. "Toll slowly, " runs the refrain. Mrs. Browning employs some archaisms, such as _chapélle_, _chambére_, _ladié_. The stories are seemingly of her own invention, and have notquite the genuine accent of folk-song. 

Even Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hood, representatives in their separatespheres of anti-romantic tendencies, made occasional forays into theMiddle Ages. But who thinks of such things as "The Plea of the MidsummerFairies" or "The Two Peacocks of Bedfont" when Hood is mentioned; and notrather of "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Shirt"? Or who, inspite of "Balder Dead" and "Tristram and Iseult, " would classify Arnold'sclean-cut, reserved, delicately intellectual work as romantic? Hood wasan artist of the terrible as well as of the comic; witness his "LastMan, " "Haunted House, " and "Dream of Eugene Aram. " If he could havewelded the two moods into a more intimate union, and applied them tolegendary material, he might have been a great artist in mediaevalgrotesque--a species of Gothic Hoffman perhaps. As it is, his oneromantic success is the charming lyric "Fair Ines. " His longer poems inthis kind, in modifications of _ottava rima_ or Spenserian stanza, showKeats' influence very clearly. The imagery is profuse, but too distinctand without the romantic _chiaroscuro_. "The Water Lady" is a manifestimitation of "La Belle Dame sans Merci, " and employs the same somewhatunusual stanza form. Hood--incorrigible punster--who had his jest ateverything, jested at romance. He wrote ballad parodies--"The Knight andthe Dragon, " etc. --and an ironical "Lament for the Decline of Chivalry":

 "Well hast thou cried, departed Burke, All chivalrous romantic work Is ended now and past! That iron age--which some have thought Of mettle rather overwrought-- Is now all overcast. "

And finally, "The Saint's Tragedy" (1848) of Charles Kingsley affords acase in which mediaeval biography is made the pretext for an assault uponmediaeval ideas. It is a _tendenz_ drama in five acts, founded upon the"Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, " as narrated by her contemporary, Dietrich the Thuringian. Its militant Protestantism is such as might bepredicted from Kingsley's well-known resentment of the Romanist attitudetowards marriage and celibacy; from his regard for freedom of thought;and from that distrust and contempt of Popish priestcraft which involvedhim in his controversy with Newman. "The Middle Age, " says theIntroduction, "was, in the gross, a coarse, barbarous, and profligateage. . . . It was, in fact, the very ferocity and foulness of the timewhich, by a natural revulsion, called forth at the same time theApostolic holiness and the Manichean asceticism of the mediaevalsaints. . . . So rough and common a life-picture of the Middle Age will, I am afraid, whether faithful or not, be far from acceptable to those whotake their notions of that period principally from such exquisite dreamsas the fictions of Fouqué, and of certain moderns whose gracefulminds . . . Are, on account of their very sweetness and simplicity, singularly unfitted to convey any true likeness of the coarse and stormyMiddle Age. . . . But really, time enough has been lost in ignorantabuse of that period, and time enough also, lately, in blind adoration ofit. When shall we learn to see it as it was?"

Polemic in its purpose and anti-Catholic in temper, "The Saint's Tragedy"then seeks to dispel the glamour which romance had thrown over mediaevallife. Kingsley's Middle Age is not the holy Middle Age of the German"throne-and-altar" men; nor yet the picturesque Middle Age of WalterScott. It is the cruel, ignorant, fanatical Middle Age of "The AmberWitch" and "The Succube. " But Kingsley was too much of a poet not tofeel those "last enchantments" which whispered to Arnold from Oxfordtowers, maugre his "strong sense of the irrationality of that period. "The saintly, as well as the human side, of Elizabeth's character isportrayed with sympathy, though poetically the best thing in the dramaare the songs of the Crusaders. 

Kingsley, in effect, was always good at a ballad. His finest work inthis kind is modern, "The Last Buccaneer, " "The Sands of Dee, " "The ThreeFishers, " and the like. But there are the same fire and swing in many ofhis romantic ballads on historical or legendary subjects, such as "TheSwan-Neck, " "The Red King, " "Ballad of Earl Haldan's Daughter, " "The Songof the Little Baltung, " and a dozen more. Without the imaginativewitchery of Coleridge, Keats, and Rossetti, in the ballad of actionKingsley ranks very close to Scott. The same manly delight in outdoorlife and bold adventure, love of the old Teutonic freedom and strongfeeling of English nationality inspire his historical romances, only oneof which, however, "Hereward the Wake" (1866), has to do with the periodof the Middle Ages. 

[1] "It is almost superfluous to mention that the appellation 'Childe, 'as 'Childe Waters, ' 'Childe Childers, ' etc. , is used as more consonantwith the old structure of versification which I have adopted. "--Prefaceto "Childe Harold. " Byron appeals to a letter of Beattie relating to"The Minstrel, " to justify his choice of the stanza. 

[2] See vol. I. , p. 98. 

[3] For Byron's and Shelley's dealings with Dante, _vide supra_, pp. 99-102. 

[4] For the type of prose romance essayed by Shelley, see Vol. I. , p. 403. 

[5] "Mary, the Maid of the Inn. "

[6] Duran's great collection, begun in 1828, embraces nearly two thousandpieces. 

[7] It is hardly necessary to mention early English translations of"Palmerin of England" (1616) and "Amadis de Gaul" (1580), or to point outthe influence of Montemayor's "Diana Enamorada" upon Sidney, Shakspere, and English pastoral romance in general. 

[8] "The English and Scotch ballads, with which they may most naturallybe compared, belong to a ruder state of society, where a personalviolence and coarseness prevailed which did not, indeed, prevent thepoetry it produced from being full of energy, and sometimes oftenderness; but which necessarily had less dignity and elevation thanbelong to the character, if not the condition, of a people who, like theSpanish, were for centuries engaged in a contest ennobled by a sense ofreligion and loyalty--a contest which could not fail sometimes to raisethe minds and thoughts of those engaged in it far above such anatmosphere as settled round the bloody feuds of rival barons or the grossmaraudings of a border warfare. The truth of this will at once be felt, if we compare the striking series of ballads on Robin Hood with those onthe Cid and Bernardo de Carpio; or if we compare the deep tragedy of EdomO'Gordon with that of the Conde Alarcos; or, what would be better thaneither, if we should sit down to the 'Romancero General, ' with itspoetical confusion of Moorish splendours and Christian loyalty, just whenwe have come fresh from Percy's 'Reliques' or Scott's 'Minstrelsy'. "("History of Spanish Literature, " George Ticknor, vol. I. , p. 141, thirdAmerican ed. , 1866). The "Romancero General" was the great collection ofsome thousand ballads and lyrics published in 1602-14. 

[9] "The Ancient Ballads of Spain. " R. Ford, in Edinburgh Review, No. 146. 

[10] "A History of Spanish Literature. " By James Fitz-Maurice Kelly, NewYork, 1898, pp. 366-67. 

[11] _Ibid. _, pp. 368-73. 

[12] Kelly, p. 270. 

[13] The collection of Sanchez (1779) is described as an imitation of the"Reliques" (Edinburgh Review, No. 146). 

[14] He preferred, however, Sir Edmund Head's rendering of the ballad"Lady Alda's Dream" to Lockhart's version. 

[15] Scott and Motherwell never met in person. 

[16] Mr. Churton Collins thinks that the lines in "Guinevere"--

 "Down in the cellars merry bloated things Shouldered the spigot, straddling on the butts While the wine ran"--

was suggested by Croker's description of the Cluricaune. ("Illustrationsof Tennyson" (1891), p. 152. )

[17] "The Fairies. " William Allingham. 

[18] See vol. I. , p. 314. Dr. Joyce was for some years a resident ofBoston, where his "Ballads of Irish Chivalry" were published in 1872. His "Deirdré" received high praise from J. R. Lowell. Tennyson's "Voyageof Maeldune" (1880) probably had its source in Dr. P. W. Joyce's "OldCeltic Romances" (1879) (Collins' "Illustrations of Tennyson, " p. 163). Swinburne pronounced Ferguson's "Welshmen of Tirawley" one of the best ofmodern ballads. 

[19] For a survey of this department of romantic literature the reader isreferred to "A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue. " Editedby Stopford A. Brooke and T. W. Rolleston (New York, 1900). There are aquite astonishing beauty and force in many of the pieces in thiscollection, though some of the editors' claims seem excessive; as, _e. G. _, that Mr. Yeats is "the first of living writers in the Englishlanguage. "

[20] Robert Stephen Hawker was vicar of Morwenstow, near "wild Tintagilby the Cornish Sea, " where Tennyson visited him in 1848. Hawker himselfmade contributions to Arthurian poetry, "Queen Gwynnevar's Round" and"The Quest of the Sangreal" (1864). He was converted to the RomanCatholic faith on his death-bed. 

[21] Given in Palgrave's "Golden Treasury, " second series. Rossettiwrote of Dobell's ballad in 1868: "I have always regarded that poem asbeing one of the finest, of its length, in any modern poet; ranking withKeats' 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' and the other masterpieces of thecondensed and hinted order so dear to imaginative minds. " The use of thefamily name Keith in Rossetti's "Rose Mary" was a coincidence. His poemwas published (1854) some years before Dobell's. He thought ofsubstituting some other name for Keith, but could find none to suit him, and so retained it. 

[22] _Cf. _ Matthew Arnold's "St. Brandan, " suggested by a passage in theold Irish "Voyage of Bran. " The traitor Judas is allowed to come up fromhell and cool himself on an iceberg every Christmas night because he hadonce given his cloak to a leper in the streets of Joppa. 

[23] "Ballads and Songs, " London, 1895. 

[24] "New Ballads, " London, 1897. 

[25] "Victorian Poets. " By E. C. Stedman. New York, 1886 (tenth ed. ), p. 155. 

[26] This famous lyric, one of the "inserted" songs in "The Princess, "was inspired by the note of a bugle on the Lakes of Killarney. 

[27] See vol. I. , pp. 146-47. Dryden, like Milton, had designs uponArthur. See introduction to the first canto of "Marmion":

 "--Dryden, in immortal strain, Had raised the Table Round again, But that a ribald king and court Bade him toil on, to make them sport. "

[28] For a discussion of these and similar matters and a bibliography ofArthurian literature, the reader should consult Dr. H. Oskar Sommer'sscholarly reprint and critical edition of "Le Morte Darthur. By SyrThomas Malory, " three vols. , London, 1889-91. 

[29] Two of them, however, had been printed privately in 1857 under thetitle of "Enid and Nimuë": the true and the false. "Nimuë" was the firstform of Vivien. 

[30] Matthew Arnold writes in one of his letters; "I have a strong senseof the irrationality of that period [the Middle Ages] and of the utterfolly of those who take it seriously and play at restoring it; still ithas poetically the greatest charm and refreshment possible for me. Thefault I find with Tennyson, in his 'Idylls of the King, ' is that thepeculiar charm of the Middle Age he does not give in them. There issomething magical about it, and I will do something with it before I havedone. "

CHAPTER VII. 

The Pre-Raphaelites. 

In the latter half of the century the Italian Middle Age and Dante, itsgreat exemplar, found new interpreters in the Rossetti family; a familywell fitted by its mixture of bloods and its hereditary aptitudes, literary and artistic, to mediate between the English genius and whateverseemed to it alien or repellant in Dante's system of thought. Thefather, Gabriele Rossetti, was a political refugee, who held theprofessorship of Italian in King's College, London, from 1831 to 1845, and was the author of a commentary on Dante which carried thepolitico-allegorical theory of the "Divine Comedy" to somewhat fantasticlengths. The mother was half English and half Italian, a sister ofByron's travelling companion, Dr. Polidori. Of the four children of themarriage, Dante Gabriel and Christina became poets of distinction. Theeldest sister, Maria Francesca, a religious devotee who spent her lastyears as a member of a Protestant sisterhood, was the author of thatunpretentious but helpful piece of Dante literature, "A Shadow of Dante. "The younger brother, William Michael, is well known as a biographer, _littérateur_, and art critic, as an editor of Shelley and of the worksof Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 

Other arts besides the literary art had partaken in the romanticmovement. The eighteenth century had seen the introduction of the new, or English, school of landscape gardening; and the premature beginningsof the Gothic revival in architecture, which reached a successful issuesome century later. [1] Painting in France had been romanticised in thethirties _pari passu_ with poetry and drama; and in Germany, Overbeck andCornelius had founded a school of sacred art which corresponds, in itsmediaeval spirit, to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In England paintingwas the last of the arts to catch the new inspiration. When the changecame, it evinced that same blending of naturalism and Gothicism whichdefined the incipient romantic movement of the previous century. Painting, like landscape gardening, returned to nature; likearchitecture, it went back to the past. Like these, and like literatureitself, it broke away from a tradition which was academic, if notprecisely classic in the way in which David was classic. 

In 1848 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established by three youngpainters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and WilliamHolman Hunt. The name expresses their admiration of the earlyItalian--and notably the early Florentine--religious painters, likeGiotto, Ghiberti, Bellini, and Fra Angelica. In the work of these menthey found a sweetness, depth, and sincerity of devotional feeling, aself-forgetfulness and humble adherence to truth, which were absent fromthe sophisticated art of Raphael and his successors. Even the imperfectcommand of technique in these "primitives" had a charm. The stiffnessand awkwardness of their figure painting, their defects of drawing, perspective, and light and shade, their lack of anatomical science werelike the lispings of childhood or the artlessness of an old ballad. Theimmediate occasion of the founding of the Brotherhood was a book ofengravings which Hunt and Rossetti saw at Millais' house, from thefrescoes by Gozzoli, Orcagna, and others in the Campo Santo, at Pisa; thesame frescoes, it will be remembered, which so strongly impressed LeighHunt and Keats. Holman Hunt--though apparently not his associates--hadalso read with eager approval the first volume of Ruskin's "ModernPainters, " in which the young artists of England are advised to "go tonature in all singleness of heart . . . Rejecting nothing, selectingnothing. " Pre-Raphaelitism was a practical, as "Modern Painters" was atheoretical, protest against the academic traditions which kept youngartists making school copies of Raphael, instructed them that a third ofthe canvas should be occupied with a principal shadow, and that no twopeople's heads in the picture should be turned the same way, and asked, "Where are you going to put your brown tree?"

The three original members of the group associated with themselves fourothers: Thomas Woolner, the sculptor; James Collinson, a painter; F. G. Stephens, who began as an artist and ended as an art critic; andRossetti's brother William, who was the literary man of the movement. Woolner was likewise a poet, and contributed to _The Germ_[2] his twostriking pieces, "My Beautiful Lady" and "Of My Lady in Death. " Amongother artists not formally enrolled in the Brotherhood, but who workedmore or less in the spirit and principles of Pre-Raphaelitism, were FordMadox Brown, an older man, in whose studio Rossetti had, at his ownrequest, been admitted as a student; Walter Deverell, who tookCollinson's place when the latter resigned his membership in order tostudy for the Roman Catholic priesthood; and Arthur Hughes. [3]

But the main importance of the Pre-Raphaelite movement to romanticliterature resides in the poetry of Rossetti, and in the inspirationwhich this communicated to younger men, like Morris and Swinburne, andthrough them to other and still younger followers. The history ofEnglish painting is no part of our subject, but Rossetti's painting andhis poetry so exactly reflect each other, that some definition or briefdescription of Pre-Raphaelitism seems here to be called for, illqualified as I feel myself to give any authoritative account of thematter. [4]

And first as to methods: the Pre-Raphaelites rejected the academic systemwhereby the canvas was prepared by rubbing in bitumen, and the colourswere laid upon a background of brown, grey, or neutral tints. Instead ofthis, they spread their colours directly upon the white, unpreparedcanvas, securing transparency by juxtaposition rather than by overlaying. They painted their pictures bit by bit, as in frescoes or mosaic work, finishing each portion as they went along, until no part of the canvaswas left blank. The Pre-Raphaelite theory was sternly realistic. Theywere not to copy from the antique, but from nature. For landscapebackground, they were to take their easels out of doors. In figurepainting they were to work, if possible, from a living model and not froma lay figure. A model once selected, it was to be painted as it was ineach particular, and without imaginative deviation. "EveryPre-Raphaelite landscape background, " wrote Ruskin, "is painted, to thelast touch, in the open air from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelitefigure, however studied in expression, is a true portrait of some livingperson. Every minute accessory is painted in the same manner. " [5] Inthis fashion their earliest works were executed. In Rossetti's "Girlhoodof Mary Virgin, " exhibited in 1849, the figure of St. Anne is a portraitof the artist's mother; the Virgin, of his sister Christina; and Joseph, of a man-of-all-work employed in the family. In Millais' "Lorenzo andIsabella"--a subject from Keats--Isabella's brother, her lover, and oneof the guests, are portraits of Deverell, Stephens, and the twoRossettis. But this severity of realism was not long maintained. It wasa discipline, not a final method. Even in Rossetti's second painting, "Ecce Ancilla Domini, " the faces of the Virgin and the angel Gabriel areblendings of several models; although, in its freedom from convention, its austere simplicity, and endeavour to see the fact as it happened, thepiece is in the purest Pre-Raphaelite spirit. Ruskin insisted that, while composition was necessarily an affair of the imagination, thefigures and accessories of a picture should be copies from the life. Inthe early days of the Brotherhood there was an ostentatiousconscientiousness in observing this rule. We hear a great deal inRossetti's correspondence about the brick wall at Chiswick which hecopied into his picture "Found, " and about his anxious search for a whitecalf for the countryman's cart in the same composition. But all thePre-Raphaelites painted from the lay figure as well as from the livingmodel, and Rossetti, in particular, relied quite as much on memory andimagination as upon the object before him. W. B. Scott thinks that hismost charming works were the small water-colours on Arthurian subjects;"done entirely without nature and a good deal in the spirit ofilluminated manuscripts, with very indifferent drawing and perspectivenowhere. " As for Millais, he soon departed from rigidly Pre-Raphaeliteprinciples, and became the most successful and popular of British artistsin genre. In natural talent and cleverness of execution he was the mostbrilliant of the three; in imaginative intensity and originality he wasRossetti's inferior--as in patience and religious earnestness he wasinferior to Hunt. It was Hunt who stuck most faithfully to the programmeof Pre-Raphaelitism. He spent laborious years in the East in order tosecure the exactest local truth of scenery and costume for his Biblicalpieces: "Christ in the Shadow of Death, " "Christ in the Temple, " and "TheScapegoat. " While executing the last-named, he pitched his tent on theshores of the Dead Sea and painted the desert landscape and the actualgoat from a model tied down on the edge of the sea. Hunt's "Light of theWorld" was one of the masterpieces of the school, and as it is typical inmany ways, may repay description. Ruskin pronounced it "the most perfectinstance of expressional purpose with technical power which the world hasyet produced. "

In this tall, narrow canvas the figure of Christ occupies nearly half thespace. He holds a lantern in his hand and knocks at a cottage door. Theface--said to be a portrait of Venables, curate of St. Paul's, Oxford--isquite unlike the type which Raphael has made traditional. It ismasculine--even rugged--seamed with lines of care, and filled with anexpression of yearning. There is anxiety and almost timidity in his poseas he listens for an answer to his knock. The nails and bolts of thedoor are rusted; it is overgrown with ivy and the tall stalks and flatumbels of fennel. The sill is choked with nettles and other weeds, emblems all of the long sleep of the world which Christ comes to break. The full moon makes a halo behind his head and shines through the lowboughs of an orchard, whose apples strew the dark grass in theforeground, sown with spots of light from the star-shaped perforations inthe lantern-cover. They are the apples of Eden, emblems of the Fall. Everything, in fact, is symbolical. Christ's seamless white robe, withits single heavy fold, typifies the Church catholic; the jewelled claspsof the priestly mantle, one square and one oval, are the Old and NewTestaments. The golden crown is enwoven with one of thorns, from whichnew leaves are sprouting. The richly embroidered mantle hem has itsmeaning, and so have the figures on the lantern. To get the light inthis picture right, Hunt painted out of doors in an orchard everymoonlight night for three months from nine o'clock till five. Whileworking in his studio, he darkened one end of the room, put a lantern inthe hand of his lay-figure and painted this interior through the hole ina curtain. On moonlight nights he let the moon shine in through thewindow to mix with the lantern light. It was a principle with theBrotherhood that detail, though not introduced for its own sake, shouldbe painted with truth to nature. Hunt, especially, took infinite painsto secure minute exactness in his detail. Ruskin wrote in enthusiasticpraise of the colours of the gems on the mantle clasp in "The Light ofthe World, " and said that all the Academy critics and painters togethercould not have executed one of the nettle leaves at the bottom of thepicture. The lizards in the foreground of Millais' "Ferdinand Lured byAriel" (exhibited in 1850) were studied from life, and Scott makes merryover the shavings on the floor of the carpenter shop in the same artist's"Christ in the House of his Parents, " a composition which was ferociouslyridiculed by Dickens in "Household Words. "

The symbolism which is so pronounced a feature in "The Light of theWorld" is common to all the Pre-Raphaelite art. It is a mediaeval note, and Rossetti learned it from Dante. Symbolism runs through the "DivineComedy" in such touches as the rush, emblem of humility, with whichVergil girds Dante for his journey through Purgatory; the constellationof four stars--

 "Non viste mai fuor ch' alla prima gente"--

typifying the cardinal virtues; the three different coloured steps to thedoor of Purgatory;[6] and thickening into the elaborate apocalypticallegory of the griffin and the car of the church, the eagle and themystic tree in the last cantos of the "Purgatorio. " In Hunt's "Christ inthe Shadow of Death, " the young carpenter's son is stretching his armsafter work, and his shadow, thrown upon the wall, is a prophecy of thecrucifixion. In Millais' "Christ in the House of his Parents, " the boyhas wounded the palm of his hand upon a nail, another foretokening of thecrucifixion. In Rossetti's "Girlhood of Mary Virgin, " Joseph is traininga vine along a piece of trellis in the shape of the cross; Mary iscopying in embroidery a three-flowered white lily plant, growing in aflower-pot which stands upon a pile of books lettered with the names ofthe cardinal virtues. The quaint little child angel who tends the plantis a portrait of a young sister of Thomas Woolner. Similarly, in "EcceAncilla Domini, " the lily of the annunciation which Gabriel holds isrepeated in the piece of needlework stretched upon the 'broidery frame atthe foot of Mary's bed. In "Beata Beatrix" the white poppy brought bythe dove is the symbol at once of chastity and of death; and the shadowupon the sun-dial marks the hour of Beatrice's beatification. Again, in"Dante's Dream, " poppies strew the floor, emblems of sleep and death; anexpiring lamp symbolises the extinction of life; and a white cloud borneaway by angels is Beatrice's departing soul. Love stands by the couch inflame-coloured robes, fastened at the shoulder with the scallop shellwhich is the badge of pilgrimage. In Millais' "Lorenzo and Isabella" thesalt-box is overturned upon the table, signifying that peace is brokenbetween Isabella's brothers and their table companion. Doves areeverywhere in Rossetti's pictures, embodiments of the Holy Ghost and theministries of the spirit, Rossetti labelled his early manuscript poems"Poems of the Art Catholic"; and the Pre-Raphaelite heresy was connectedby unfriendly critics with the Anglo-Catholic or Tractarian movement atOxford. William Sharp, in speaking of "that splendid outburst ofRomanticism in which Coleridge was the first and most potentparticipant, " and of the lapse or ebb that followed the death ofColeridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, resumes: "At last a time came whena thrill of expectation, of new desire, of hope, passed through thehigher lives of the nation; and what followed thereafter were the Oxfordmovement in the Church of England, the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art, and the far-reaching Gothic revival. Different as these movements werein their primary aims, and still more differing in the individualrepresentations of interpreters, they were in reality closely interwoven, one being the outcome of the other. The study of mediaeval art, whichwas fraught with such important results, was the outcome of thewidespread ecclesiastical revival, which in its turn was the outcome ofthe Tractarian movement in Oxford. The influence of Pugin was potent instrengthening the new impulse, and to him succeeded Ruskin with 'ModernPainters' and Newman with the 'Tracts for the Times. ' Primarily thePre-Raphaelite movement had its impulse in the Oxford religious revival;and however strange it may seem to say that such men as Holman Hunt andRossetti . . . Followed directly in the footsteps of Newman and Pusey andKeble, it is indubitably so. " [7] Ruskin, too, cautioned his youngfriends that "if their sympathies with the early artists lead them intomediaevalism or Romanism, they will of course come to nothing. But Ibelieve there is no danger of this, at least for the strongest amongthem. There may be some weak ones whom the Tractarian heresies maytouch; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branches from a strongstem. " [8] One of these weak ones who dropped off was James Collinson, aman of an ascetic and mystical piety--like Werner or Brentano. Hepainted, among other things, "The Renunciation of St. Elizabeth" fromKingsley's "Saint's Tragedy. " "The picture, " writes Scott, "resembledthe feckless dilettanteism of the converts who were then dropping out oftheir places in Oxford and Cambridge into Mariolatry and Jesuitism. Infact, this James Collinson actually did become Romanist, wanted to be apriest, painted no more, but entered a seminary, where they set him toclean the boots as an apprenticeship in humility and obedience. They didnot want him as a priest; they were already getting tired of that speciesof convert; so he left, turned to painting again, and disappeared. " [9]

M. De la Sizeranne is rather scornful of these metaphysical definitionsof Pre-Raphaelitism; "for to characterise a Pre-Raphaelite picture bysaying that it was inspired by the Oxford movement, is like attempting toexplain the mechanism of a lock by describing the political opinions ofthe locksmith. " [10] He himself proposes, as the distinguishingcharacteristics of Pre-Raphaelite art, originality of gesture andvividness of colouring. This is the professional point of view; but thestudent of literature is less concerned with such technical aspects ofthe subject than with those spiritual aspects which connect the work ofthe Pre-Raphaelites with the great mediaeval or romantic revival. 

When Ruskin came to the rescue of the P. -R. B. In 1851, in those lettersto the _Times_, afterwards reprinted in pamphlet form under the title"Pre-Raphaelitism, " he recognised the propriety of the name, and the realaffinity between the new school and the early Italian schools of sacredart. Mediaeval art, he asserted, [11] was religious and truthful, modernart is profane and insincere. "In mediaeval art, thought is the firstthing, execution is the second; in modern art, execution is the firstthing and thought is the second. And again, in mediaeval art, truth isfirst, beauty second; in modern art, beauty is first, truth second. "Ruskin denied that the Pre-Raphaelites were unimaginative, though heallowed that they had a disgust for popular forms of grace andprettiness. And he pointed out a danger in the fact that theirprinciples confined them to foreground work, and called for laboriousfinish on a small scale. In "Modern Painters" he complained that thePre-Raphaelites should waste a whole summer in painting a bit of oakhedge or a bed of weeds by a duck pond, which caught their fancy perhapsby reminding them of a stanza in Tennyson. Nettles and mushrooms, hesaid, were good to make nettle soup and fish sauce; but it was too badthat the nobler aspects of nature, such as the banks of the castledRhine, should be left to the frontispieces in the Annuals. Ruskin, furthermore, denied that the drawing of the Pre-Raphaelites was bad ortheir perspective false; or that they imitated the _errors_ of the earlyFlorentine painters, whom they greatly excelled in technicalaccomplishment. Meanwhile be it remarked that the originality of gesturein Pre-Raphaelite figure painting, which M. De la Sizeranne notices, wasonly one more manifestation of the romantic desire for individuality andconcreteness as against the generalising academicism of the eighteenthcentury. [12]

As poets, the Pre-Raphaelites derive from Keats rather than from Scott, in their exclusive devotion to beauty, to art for art's sake; in theirsingle absorption in the passion of love; and in their attraction towardsthe more esoteric side of mediaeval life, rather than towards its broad, public, and military aspects. [13]

Rossetti's position in the romantic literature of the last half of theninetenth century is something like Coleridge's in the first half. Unlike Coleridge, he was the leader of a school, the master of a definitegroup of artists and poets. His actual performance, too, far exceedsColeridge's in amount, if not in value. But like Coleridge, he was aseminal mind, a mind rich in original suggestions, which inspired andinfluenced younger men to carry out its ideas, often with a fluency ofutterance and a technical dexterity both in art and letters which themaster himself did not possess. Holman Hunt, Millais, and Burne-Jonesamong painters, Morris and Swinburne among poets, were disciples ofRossetti who in some ways outdid him in execution. His pictures wererarely exhibited, and no collection of his poems was published till 1870. Meanwhile, however, many of these had circulated in manuscript, and"secured a celebrity akin in kind and almost equal in extent to thatenjoyed by Coleridge's 'Christabel' during the many years preceding 1816in which it lay in manuscript. Like Coleridge's poem in anotherimportant particular, certain of Rossetti's ballads, while still unknownto the public, so far influenced contemporary poetry that when they didat length appear, they had all the seeming to the uninitiated of workimitated from contemporary models, instead of being, as in fact theywere, the primary source of inspiration for writers whose names wereearlier established. " [14] William Morris, _e. G. _, had printed fourvolumes of verse in advance of Rossetti, and the earliest of these, "TheDefence of Guenevere, " which contains his most intensely Pre-Raphaelitework and that most evidently done in the spirit of Rossetti's teachings, saw the light (1858) twelve years before Rossetti's own. Swinburne, too, had published three volumes of poetry before 1870, including the "Poemsand Ballads" of 1866, in which Rossetti's influence is plainly manifest;and he had already secured a wide fame at a time when the elder poet'sreputation was still esoteric and mainly confined to the _cénacle_. William M. Rossetti, in describing the literary influences which mouldedhis brother's tastes, tells us that "in the long run he perhaps enjoyedand revered Coleridge beyond any other modern poet whatsoever. " [15]

It is worth while to trace these literary influences with some detail, since they serve to link the neo-romantic poetry of our own time to theproduct of that older generation which had passed away before Rossetticame of age. It is interesting to find then, that at the age of fifteen(1843) he taught himself enough German to enable him to translateBürger's "Lenore, " as Walter Scott had done a half-century before. Thisdevil of a poem so haunts our history that it has become as familiar aspirit as Mrs. Radcliffe's bugaboo apparitions, and our flesh refuses anylonger to creep at it. It is quite one of the family. It would seem, indeed, as if Bürger's ballad was set as a school copy for every youngromanticist in turn to try his 'prentice hand upon. Fortunately, Rossetti's translation has perished, as has also his version--somehundred lines--of the earlier portion of the "Nibelungenlied. " But atranslation which he made about the same time of the old Swabian poet, Hartmann von Aue's "Der Arme Heinrich" (Henry the Leper) is preserved, and was first published in 1886. This poem, it will be remembered, wasthe basis of Longfellow's "Golden Legend" (1851). Rossetti did not keepup his German, and in later years he never had much liking forScandinavian or Teutonic literature. He was a Latin, and he made it hisspecial task to interpret to modern Protestant England whatever struckhim as most spiritually intense and characteristic in the Latin CatholicMiddle Age. The only Italian poet whom he "earnestly loved" was Dante. He did not greatly care for Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Tasso--theRenaissance poets--though in boyhood he had taken delight in Ariosto, just as he had in Scott and Byron. But that was a stage through which hepassed; none of these had any ultimate share in Rossetti's culture. Atfifteen he wrote a ballad entitled "Sir Hugh the Heron, " founded on atale of Allan Cunningham, but taking its name and motto from the lines in"Marmion"--

 "Sir Hugh the Heron bold, Baron of Twisell and of Ford, And Captain of the Hold. "

A few copies of this were printed for family circulation by his fondgrandfather, G. Polidori. Among French writers he had no modernfavourites beyond Hugo, Musset, and Dumas. But like all theneo-romanticists, he was strongly attracted by François Villon, thatstrange Parisian poet, thief, and murderer of the fifteenth century. Hemade three translations from Villon, the best known of which is thefamous "Ballad of Dead Ladies" with its felicitous rendering of therefrain--

 "But where are the snows of yester year?" (Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?)

There are at least three good English verse renderings of this ballad ofVillon; one by Andrew Lang; one by John Payne, and doubtless innumerableothers, unknown to me or forgotten. In fact, every one translates itnowadays, as every one used to translate Bürger's ballad. It is the"Lenore" of the neo-romanticists. Rossetti was a most accomplishedtranslator, and his version of Dante's "Vita Nuova" and of the "EarlyItalian Poets" (1861)--reissued as "Dante and His Circle" (1874)--is anotable example of his skill. There are two other specimens of oldFrench minstrelsy, and two songs from Victor Hugo's "Burgraves" among hismiscellaneous translations; and William Sharp testifies that Rossetti atone time thought of doing for the early poetry of France what he hadalready done for that of Italy, but never found the leisure for it. [16]Rossetti had no knowledge of Greek, and "the only classical poet, " sayshis brother, "whom he took to in any degree worth speaking of was Homer, the 'Odyssey' considerably more than the 'Iliad. '" This, I presume, heknew only in translation, but the preference is significant, since, as wehave seen, the "Odyssey" is the most romantic of epics. Among Englishpoets, he preferred Keats to Shelley, as might have been expected. Shelley was a visionary and Keats was an artist; Shelley often abstract, Keats always concrete. Shelley had a philosophy, or thought he had;Keats had none, neither had Rossetti. It is quite comprehensible thatthe sensuous element in Keats would attract a born colourist likeRossetti beyond anything in the English poetry of that generation; and Ineed not repeat that the latest Gothic or romantic schools have all beentaking Keats' direction rather than Scott's, or even than Coleridge's. Rossetti's work, I should say, _e. G. _, in such a piece as "The Bride'sPrelude, " is a good deal more like "Isabella" and "The Eve of St. Agnes"than it is like "The Ancient Mariner" or "Christabel" or "The Lay of theLast Minstrel. " Rossetti got little from Milton and Dryden, or even fromChaucer and Spenser. Wordsworth he valued hardly at all. In the lasttwo or three years of his life he came to have an exaggerated admirationfor Chatterton. Rossetti's taste, like his temperament, was tincturedwith morbidness. He sought the intense, the individual, the symbolic, the mystical. These qualities he found in a supreme degree in Dante. Probably it was only his austere artistic conscience which saved him fromthe fantastic--the merely peculiar or odd--and kept him from going astrayafter false gods like Poe and Baudelaire. Chaucer was a mediaeval poetand Spenser certainly a romantic one, but their work was too broad, toogeneral in its appeal, too healthy, one might almost say, to come home toRossetti. [17] William Rossetti testifies that "any writing about devils, spectres, or the supernatural generally . . . Had always a fascinationfor him. " Sharp remarks that work more opposite than Rossetti's to theGreek spirit can hardly be imagined. "The former [the Greek spirit]looked to light, clearness, form in painting, sculpture, architecture; tointellectual conciseness and definiteness in poetry; the latter[Rossetti] looked mainly to diffused colour, gradated to almostindefinite shades in his art, finding the harmonies thereof more akinthan severity of outline and clearness of form; while in his poetry theGothic love of the supernatural, the Gothic delight in sensuous images, the Gothic instinct of indefiniteness and elaboration, carried to anextreme, prevailed. . . . He would take more pleasure in a designby . . . William Blake . . . Than in the more strictly artistic drawingof some revered classicist; more enjoyment in the weird or dramaticScottish ballad than in Pindaric or Horatian ode; and he would certainlyrather have had Shakspere than Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides puttogether. "

Rossetti's office in the later and further development of romantic artwas threefold: First, to revive and express, both in painting and poetry, the religious spirit of the early Florentine schools; secondly, to give amore intimate interpretation of Dante to the English public, andespecially of Dante's life and personality and of his minor poetry, likethe "Vita Nuova, " which had not yet been translated; thirdly, to affordnew illustrations of mediaeval life and thought, partly by treatinglegendary matter in the popular ballad form, and partly by treatingromantic matter of his own invention with the rich colour and sensuousimagery which belonged to his pictorial art. 

"Perhaps, " writes Mr. Caine, [18] "Catholicism is itself essentiallymediaeval, and perhaps a man cannot possibly be a 'mediaeval artist, heart and soul, ' without partaking of a strong religious feeling that isprimarily Catholic--so much were the religion and art of the Middle Agesknit each to each. . . . Rossetti's attitude towards spiritual thingswas exactly the reverse of what we call Protestant. . . . He constantlyimpressed me during the last days of his life with the conviction that hewas by religious bias of nature a monk of the Middle Ages. " All this istrue in a way, yet Rossetti strikes one as being Catholic, without beingreligious; as mediaeval rather than Christian. He was agnostic in hisbelief and not devout in his practice; so that the wish that he suddenlyexpressed in his last illness, to confess himself to a priest, affectedhis friends as a singular caprice. It was the romantic quality in theItalian sacred art of the Middle Ages that attracted him; and itattracted him as a poet and painter, not as a devotee. There was littlein Rossetti of the mystical and ascetic piety of Novalis or ZachariasWerner; nor of the steady religious devotion of his friend Holman Hunt, or his own sister Christina. 

Rossetti, by the way, was never in Italy, though he made several visitsto France and Belgium. A glance at the list of his designs--extending tosome four hundred titles--in oil, water-colour, crayon, pen and ink, etc. , will show how impartially his interest was distributed over thethreefold province mentioned above. There are sacred pieces like "MaryMagdalen at the Door of Simon the Pharisee, " "St. Cecily, " a "Head ofChrist, " a "Triptych for Llandaff Cathedral"; Dante subjects such as"Paolo and Francesca, " "Beata Beatrix, " "La Donna della Finestra, ""Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante"; and, in greater number, compositions of a purely romantic nature--"Fair Rosamond, " "La Belle Damesans Merci, " "The Chapel before the Lists, " "Michael Scott's Wooing, ""Meeting of Sir Tristram and Yseult, " "Lady Lilith, " "The Damozel of theSanct Grail, " "Death of Breuse sans Pitié, " and the like. 

It will be noticed that some of these subjects are taken from the RoundTable romances. Tennyson was partly responsible for the newly awakenedinterest in the Arthurian legend, but the purely romantic manner which hehad abandoned in advancing from "Sir Galahad" and "The Lady of Shalott"to the "Morte d'Arthur" of 1842 and the first "Idylls" of 1859, continuedto characterise the work of the Pre-Raphaelites both in poetry and inpainting. Malory's "Morte Darthur" was one of Rossetti's favouritebooks, and he preferred it to Tennyson, as containing "the _weird_element in its perfection. . . . Tennyson _has_ it certainly here andthere in imagery, but there is no great success in the part it playsthrough his 'Idylls. '" [19] The five wood-engravings from designsfurnished by Rossetti for the Moxon Tennyson quarto of 1857 include threeArthurian subjects: "The Lady of Shalott, " "King Arthur Sleeping inAvalon, " and "Sir Galahad Praying in the Wood-Chapel. " "Interwoven aswere the Romantic revival and the aesthetic movement, " writes Mr. Sharp, "it could hardly have been otherwise but that the young painter-poetshould be strongly attracted to that Arthurian epoch, the legendaryglamour of which has since made itself so widely felt in the Arthurianidyls of the laureate. . . . Mr. Ruskin speaks, in his lecture on 'TheRelation of Art to Religion' delivered in Oxford, of our indebtedness toRossetti as the painter to whose genius we owe the revival of interest inthe cycle of early English legend. "

It was in 1857 that Rossetti, whose acquaintance had been recently soughtby three young Oxford scholars, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, andAlgernon Charles Swinburne, volunteered to surround the gallery of thenew Union Club House at Oxford with life-size frescoes from the "MorteDarthur. " [20] He was assisted in this work by a number of enthusiasticdisciples. Burne-Jones had already done some cartoons in colour forstained glass, and Morris had painted a subject from the "Morte Darthur, "to wit: "Sir Tristram after his Illness, in the Garden of King Mark'sPalace, recognised by the Dog he had given to Iseult. " Rossetti'scontribution to the Oxford decorations was "Sir Lancelot before theShrine of the Sangreal. " Morris' was "Sir Palomides' Jealousy of SirTristram and Iseult, " an incident which he also treated in his poetry. Burne-Jones, Valentine Prinsep, J. H. Pollen, and Arthur Hughes likewisecontributed. Scott says that these paintings were interesting asdesigns; that they were "poems more than pictures, being largeilluminations and treated in a mediaeval manner. " But he adds that notone of the band knew anything about wall painting. They laid theirwater-colours, not on a plastered surface, but on a rough brick wall, merely whitewashed. They used no adhesive medium, and in a few monthsthe colours peeled off and the whole series became invisible. 

A co-partnership in subjects, a duplication of treatment, orinterchange between the arts of poetry and painting characterisePre-Raphaelite work. For example, Morris' poems, "The Blue Closet"and "The Tune of Seven Towers" were inspired by the similarly entitleddesigns of Rossetti. They are interpretations in language of pictorialsuggestions--"word-paintings" in a truer meaning than that much-abusedpiece of critical slang commonly bears. In one of these compositions--awater-colour, a study in colour and music symbolism--four damozels inblack and purple, white and green, scarlet and white, and crimson, aresinging or playing on a lute and clavichord in a blue-tiled room; whilein front of them a red lily grows up through the floor. To this interiorMorris' "stunning picture"--as his friend called it--adds an obscurelyhinted love story: the burden of a bell booming a death-knell in thetower overhead; the sound of wind and sea; and the Christmas snowsoutside. Conversely Rossetti's painting, "Arthur's Tomb, " was suggestedby Morris' so-named poem in his 1858 volume. 

Or, again, compare Morris' poem, "Sir Galahad: A Christmas Mystery, " withthe following description of Rossetti's aquarelle, "How Sir Galahad, SirBors, and Sir Percival were fed with the Sanc Grael; but Sir Percival'ssister died by the way": "On the right is painted the altar, and in frontof it the damsel of the Sanc Grael giving the cup to Sir Galahad, whostoops forward to take it over the dead body of Sir Percival's sister, who lies calm and rigid in her green robe and red mantle, and near whosefeet grows from the ground an aureoled lily, while, with his left hand, the saintly knight leads forward his two companions, him who has lost hissister, and the good Sir Bors. Behind the white-robed damsel at thealtar, a dove, bearing the sacred casket, poises on outspread pinions;and immediately beyond the fence enclosing the sacred space, stands a rowof nimbused angels, clothed in white and with crossed scarlet orflame-coloured wings. " [21]

Rossetti's powerful ballad, "The King's Tragedy, " was suggested by themural paintings (encaustic) with which William Bell Scott decorated thecircular staircase of Penkill Castle in 1865-68. These were a series ofscenes from "The Kinges Quair" once attributed to James I. Of Scotland. The photogravure reproduction, from a painting by Arthur Hughes of asection of the Penkill Castle staircase, represents the king looking fromthe window of his prison in Windsor Castle at Lady Jane Beaufort walkingwith her handmaidens in a very Pre-Raphaelite garden. At the left of thepicture, Cupid aims an arrow at the royal lover. Rossetti, Hunt, andMillais were all great lovers of Keats. Hunt says that his "Escape ofMadeline and Prospero" was the first subject from Keats ever painted, andwas highly acclaimed by Rossetti. At the formation of the P. -R B. In1848, it was agreed that the first work of the Brotherhood should be inillustration of "Isabella, " and a series of eight subjects was selectedfrom the poem. Millais executed at once his "Lorenzo and Isabella, " butHunt's "Isabella and the Pot of Basil" was not finished till 1867, andRossetti's part of the programme was never carried out. Rossetti's "LaBelle Dame sans Merci, " Mr. J. M. Strudwick's "Madness of Isabella, "Arthur Hughes' triptych of "The Eve of St. Agnes, " and Millais' greatpainting, "St. Agnes' Eve, " were other tributes of Pre-Raphaelite art tothe young master of romantic verse. 

Whether this interpenetration of poetry and painting is of advantage toeither, may admit of question. Emerson said to Scott: "We [Americans]scarcely take to the Rossetti poetry; it does not come home to us; it isexotic. " The sonnets of "The House of Life" have appeared to manyreaders obscure and artificial, the working out in language ofconceptions more easily expressible by some other art; expressed here, atall events, through imagery drawn from a special and even technical rangeof associations. Such readers are apt to imagine that Rossetti suffersfrom a hesitation between poetry and painting; as Sidney Lanier isthought by some to have been injured artistically by halting midwaybetween music and verse. The method proper to one art intrudes into theother; everything that the artist does has the air of an experiment; hepaints poems and writes pictures. 

A department of Rossetti's verse consists of sonnets written forpictures, pictures by Botticelli, Mantegna, Giorgione, Burne-Jones, andothers, and in many cases by himself, and giving thus a double renderingof the same invention. But even when not so occasioned, his poems nearlyalways suggest pictures. Their figures seem to have stepped down fromsome fifteenth-century altar piece bringing their aureoles and goldenbackgrounds with them. This is to be pictorial in a very different sensefrom that in which Tennyson is said to be a pictorial poet. Hall Caineinforms us that Rossetti "was no great lover of landscape beauty. " Hisscenery does not, like Wordsworth's or Tennyson's, carry an impression oflife, of the real outdoors. Nature with Rossetti has been passed throughthe medium of another art before it comes into his poetry; it is a doublydistilled nature. It is nature as we have it in the "Roman de la Rose, "or the backgrounds of old Florentine painters: flowery pleasances andorchard closes, gardens with trellises and singing conduits, where ladiesare playing at the palm play. In his most popular poem, "The BlessedDamosel"--a theme which he both painted and sang--the feeling isexquisitely and voraciously human. The maiden is "homesick in heaven, "and yearns back towards the earth and her lover left behind. Even so, with her symbolic stars and lilies, she is so like the stiff, sweetangels of Fra Angelico or Perugino, that one almost doubts when the poetsays

 "--her bosom must have made The bar she leaned on warm. "

The imagery of the poem is right out of the picture world;

 "The clear ranged, unnumbered heads Bowed with their aureoles. "

The imaginations are Dantesque:

 "And the souls, mounting up to God, Went by her like thin flames. "

 "The light thrilled towards her, filled With angels in strong, level flight. "

Even in "Jenny, " one of the few poems of Rossetti that deal with modernlife, mediaeval art will creep in. 

 "Fair shines the gilded aureole In which our highest painters place Some living woman's simple face. And the stilled features thus descried, As Jenny's long throat droops aside-- The shadows where the cheeks are thin And pure wide curve from ear to chin-- With Raffael's, Leonardo's hand To show them to men's souls might stand. "

The type of womanly beauty here described is characteristic; it is thetype familiar to all in "Pandora, " "Proserpine, " "La Ghirlandata, " "TheDay Dream, " "Our Lady of Pity, " and the other life-size, half-lengthfigure paintings in oil which were the masterpieces of his maturer style. The languid pose, the tragic eyes with their mystic, brooding intensityin contrast with the full curves of the lips and throat, give that unionof sensuousness and spirituality which is a constant trait of Rossetti'spoetry. The Pre-Raphaelites were accused of exaggerating the height oftheir figures. In Burne-Jones, whose figures are eight and a half headshigh, the exaggeration is deliberate. In Morris' and Swinburne's earlypoems all the lines of the female face and figure are long--the hand, thefoot, the throat, the "curve from chin to ear, " and above all, thehair. [22] The hair in these paintings of Rossetti seems a romanticexaggeration, too; immense, crinkly waves of it spreading off to left andright. William Morris' beautiful wife is said to have been his model inthe pieces above named. 

The first collection of original poems by Rossetti was published in 1870. The manuscripts had been buried with his wife in 1862. When he finallyconsented to their publication, the coffin had to be exhumed and themanuscripts removed. In 1881 a new edition was issued with changes andadditions; and in the same year the volume of "Ballads and Sonnets" waspublished, including the sonnet sequence of "The House of Life. " Of thepoems in these two collections which treat directly of Dante the mostimportant is "Dante at Verona, " a noble and sustained piece ineighty-five stanzas, slightly pragmatic in manner, in which are enwoventhe legendary and historical incidents of Dante's exile related by theearly biographers, together with many personal allusions from the "DivineComedy. " But Dante is nowhere very far off either in Rossetti's paintingor in his poetry. In particular, the history of Dante's passion forBeatrice, as told in the "Vita Nuova, " in which the figure of the girl isgradually transfigured and idealised by death into the type of heavenlylove, made an enduring impression upon Rossetti's imagination. Shelley, in his "Epipsychidion, " had appealed to this great love story, socharacteristic at once of the mediaeval mysticism and of the Platonicspirit of the early Renaissance. But Rossetti was the first to give athoroughly sympathetic interpretation of it to English readers. Itbecame associated most intimately with his own love and loss. We see itin a picture like "Beata Beatrix, " and a poem like "The Portrait, "written many years before his wife's death, but subsequently retouched. Who can read the following stanza without thinking of Beatrice and the"Paradiso"?

 "Even so, where Heaven holds breath and hears The beating heart of Love's own breast, -- Where round the secret of all spheres All angels lay their wings to rest, -- How shall my soul stand rapt and awed, When, by the new birth borne abroad Throughout the music of the suns, It enters in her soul at once And knows the silence there for God!"

Rossetti's ballads and ballad-romances, all intensely mediaeval inspirit, fall, as regards their manner, into two very different classes. Pieces like "The Blessed Damozel, " "The Bride's Prelude, " "Rose Mary, "and "The Staff and Scrip" (from a story in the "Gesta Romanorum") are artpoems, rich, condensed, laden with ornament, pictorial. Every attitudeof every figure is a pose; landscapes and interiors are painted withminute Pre-Raphaelite finish. "The Bride's Prelude"--a fragment--openswith the bride's confession to her sister, in the 'tiring-room sumptuouswith gold and jewels and brocade, where the air is heavy with musk andmyrrh, and sultry with the noon. In the pauses of her tale stray lutenotes creep in at the casement, with noises from the tennis court and thesplash of a hound swimming in the moat. In "Rose Mary, " which employsthe superstition in the old lapidaries as to the prophetic powers of theberyl-stone, the colouring and imagery are equally opulent, and, inpassages, Oriental. 

On the other hand, "Stratton Water, " "Sister Helen, " "The White Ship, "and "The King's Tragedy" are imitations of popular poetry, done with asimulated roughness and simplicity. The first of these adopts a commonballad motive, a lover's desertion of his sweetheart through thecontrivances of his wicked kinsfolk:

 "And many's the good gift, Lord Sands, You've promised oft to me; But the gift of yours I keep to-day Is the babe in my body. " . . . 

 "Look down, look down, my false mother, That bade me not to grieve: You'll look up when our marriage fires Are lit to-morrow eve. "

"Sister Helen" is a ballad in dialogue with a subtly varying repetend, and introduces the popular belief that a witch could kill a man slowly bymelting a wax figure. Twice Rossetti essayed the historical ballad. "The White Ship" tells of the drowning of the son and daughter of HenryI. With their whole ship's company, except one survivor, Berold, thebutcher of Rouen, who relates the catastrophe. The subject of "TheKing's Tragedy" is the murder of James I. By Robert Graeme and his men inthe Charterhouse of Perth. The teller of the tale is Catherine Douglas, known in Scottish tradition as Kate Barlass, who had thrust her armthrough the staple, in place of a bar, to hold the door against theassassins. A few stanzas of "The Kinges Quair" are fitted into the poemby shortening the lines two syllables each, to accommodate them to theballad metre. It is generally agreed that this was a mistake, as wasalso the introduction of the "Beryl Songs" between the narrative parts of"Rose Mary. " These ballads of Rossetti compare well with other modernimitations of popular poetry. "Sister Helen, " _e. G. _, has much greaterdramatic force than Tennyson's "Oriana" or "The Sisters. " Yet theyimpress one, upon the whole, as less characteristic than the poet'sItalianate pieces; as _tours de force_ carefully pitched in the key ofminstrel song, but falsetto in effect. Compared with such things as"Cadyow Castle" or "Jack o' Hazeldean, " they are felt to be the work ofan art poet, resolute to divest himself of fine language and scrupulouslyobservant of ballad convention in phrase and accent--details of whichScott was often heedless--but devoid of that hearty, natural sympathywith the conditions of life from which popular poetry sprang, and wantingthe lyrical pulse that beats in the ballad verse of Scott, Kingsley, andHogg. In "The King's Tragedy" Rossetti was poaching on Scott's ownpreserves, the territory of national history and legend. If we can guesshow Scott would have handled the same story, we shall have an objectlesson in two contrasted kinds of romanticism. Scott could not havebettered the grim ferocity of the murder scene, nor have equalled, perhaps, the tragic shadow of doom which is thrown over Rossetti's poemby the triple warning of the weird woman. But the sense of the historicenvironment, the sense of the actual in places and persons, would havebeen stronger in his version. Graeme's retreat would have been thePerthshire Highlands, and not vaguely "the land of the wild Scots. " Andif scenery had been used, it would not have been such as this--aPre-Raphaelite background:

 "That eve was clenched for a boding storm, 'Neath a toilsome moon half seen; The cloud stooped low and the surf rose high; And where there was a line of the sky, Wild wings loomed dark between. "

The historical sense was weak in Rossetti. It is not easy to imagine himcomposing a Waverley novel. The life of the community, as distinct fromthe life of the individual, had little interest for him. The mellifluousnames of his heroines, Aloyse, Rose Mary, Blanchelys, are pure romance. In his intense concentration upon the aesthetic aspects of every subject, Rossetti seemed, to those who came in contact with him, singularly_borné_. He was indifferent to politics, society, speculative thought, and the discoveries of modern science--to contemporary matters ingeneral. [23] It is to this narrow aestheticism that Mr. Courthope referswhen, in comparing Coleridge and Keats with Rossetti and Swinburne, hefinds in the latter an "extraordinary skill in the imitation of antiqueforms, " but "less liberty of imagination. " [24] The contrast is moststriking in the case of Coleridge, whose intellectual interests had sowide a range. Rossetti cared only for Coleridge's verse; William Morrisspoke with contempt of everything that he had written except two or threeof his poems;[25] and Swinburne regretted that he had lost himself in themazes of theology and philosophy, instead of devoting himself wholly tocreative work. Keats, it is true, was exclusively preoccupied with thebeautiful; but he was more eclectic than Rossetti--perhaps also thanMorris, though hardly than Swinburne. The world of classic fable, theworld of outward nature were as dear to his imagination as the country ofromance. Rossetti was not university bred, and, as we have seen, forgothis Greek early. Morris, like Swinburne, was an Oxford man; yet we hearhim saying that he "loathes all classical art and literature. " [26] In"The Life and Death of Jason" and "The Earthly Paradise" he treatsclassical and mediaeval subjects impartially, but treats them both alikein mediaeval fashion; as Chaucer does, in "The Knightes Tale. " [27] Asfor Rossetti, he is never classical. He makes Pre-Raphaelite ballads outof the tale of Troy divine and the Rabbinical legends of Adam's firstwife, Lilith; ballads with quaint burdens--

 "(O Troy's down, Tall Troy's on fire)";

 "(Sing Eden Bower! Alas the hour!)"

and whose very titles have an Old English familiarity--"Eden Bower, ""Troy Town, " as who says "London Bridge, " "Edinboro' Town, " etc. Swinburne has given the _rationale_ of this type of art in hisdescription of a Bacchus and Ariadne by Lippino Lippi ("Old Masters atFlorence"), "an older legend translated and transformed into mediaevalshape. More than any others, these painters of the early Florentineschool reproduce in their own art the style of thought and work familiarto a student of Chaucer and his fellows or pupils. Nymphs have fadedinto fairies, and gods subsided into men. A curious realism has grown upout of that very ignorance and perversion which seemed as if it could notbut falsify whatever thing it touched upon. This study of Fillippino'shas all the singular charm of the romantic school. . . . The clear formhas gone, the old beauty dropped out of sight . . . But the mediaeval orromantic form has an incommunicable charm of its own. . . . BeforeChaucer could give us a Pandarus or a Cressida, all knowledge and memoryof the son of Lycaon and the daughter of Chryses must have died out, thewhole poem collapsed into romance; but far as these may be removed fromthe true tale and the true city of Troy, they are not phantoms. "

But of all this group, the one most thoroughly steeped inmediaevalism--to repeat his own description of himself--was WilliamMorris. He was the English equivalent of Gautier's _homme moyen âge_;and it was his endeavour, in letters and art, to pick up and continue themediaeval tradition, interrupted by four hundred years of moderncivilisation. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not attracthim; and as for the eighteenth, it simply did not exist for him. [28] Theugliness of modern life, with its factories and railroads, itsunpicturesque poverty and selfish commercialism, was hateful to him as itwas to Ruskin--his teacher. He loved to imagine the face of England asit was in the time of Chaucer--his master; to

 "Forget six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting steam and piston smoke, . . . And dream of London, small and white and clean, The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green. "

The socialistic Utopia depicted in his "News from Nowhere" (1890) is aregenerated Middle Age, without feudalism, monarchy, and the mediaevalChurch, but also without densely populated cities, with handicraftssubstituted for manufactures, and with mediaeval architecture, house, decoration, and costume. None of Morris' books deals with modern life, but all of them with an imaginary future or an almost equally imaginarypast. This same "News from Nowhere" contains a passage of dialogue injustification of retrospective romance. "'How is it that though we areso interested with our life for the most part, yet when people take towriting poems or painting pictures they seldom deal with our modern life, or if they do, take good care to make their poems or pictures unlike thatlife? Are we not good enough to paint ourselves?' . . . 'It always wasso, and I suppose always will be, ' said he, 'however, it may beexplained. It is true that in the nineteenth century, when there was solittle art and so much talk about it, there was a theory that art andimaginative literature ought to deal with contemporary life; but theynever did so; for, if there was any pretence of it, the author alwaystook care . . . To disguise, or exaggerate, or idealise, and in some wayor another make it strange; so that, for all the verisimilitude therewas, he might just as well have dealt with the times of thePharaohs. '" [29]

The difference between the mediaevalism of Rossetti and of Morrisillustrates, in an interesting way, the varied results produced by theoperation of similar influences on contrasted temperaments. Thecomparison which Morris' biographer makes between him and Burne-Jonesholds true as between Morris and Rossetti: "They received orre-incarnated the Middle Ages through the eyes and brain, in the one caseof a Norman, in the other of a Florentine. " Morris was twice a Norman, in his love for the romancers and Gothic builders of northern France; andin his enthusiasm for the Icelandic sagas. His visits to Italy left himcold, and he confessed to a strong preference for the art of the North. "With the later work of Southern Europe I am quite out of sympathy. Inspite of its magnificent power and energy, I feel it as an enemy, andthis much more in Italy, where there is such a mass of it, thanelsewhere. Yes, and even in these magnificent and wonderful towns I longrather for the heap of gray stones with a gray roof that we call a housenorth-away. " Rossetti's Italian subtlety and mysticism are replaced inMorris by an English homeliness--a materialism which is Teutonic and notLatin or Celtic, and one surface indication of which is the scrupulouslySaxon vocabulary of his poems and prose romances. "His earliestenthusiasms, " said Burne-Jones, "were his latest. The thirteenth centurywas his ideal period always"--the century which produced the lovelyFrench romances which he translated and the great French cathedrals whichhe admired above all other architecture on earth. But this admirationwas aesthetic rather than religious. The Catholic note, so resonant inRossetti's poetry, is hardly audible in Morris, at least after his earlyOxford days. The influence of Newman still lingered at Oxford in thefifties, though the Tractarian movement had spent its force and areaction had set in. Morris came up to the university an Anglo-Catholic, and like his fellow-student and life-long friend, Burne-Jones, had beendestined to holy orders. We find them both, as undergraduates, eagerlyreading the "Acta Sanctorum, " the "Tracts for the Times, " and KenelmDigby's "Mores Catholici, " and projecting a kind of monastic community, where celibacy should be practised and sacred art cultivated. But laterimpressions soon crowded out this early religious fervour. Churchlyasceticism and the mediaeval "praise of virginity" made no part ofMorris' social ideal. The body counted for much with him. In "News fromNowhere, " marriage even is so far from being a sacrament, that it ismerely a free arrangement terminable at the will of either party. Morrishad a passionate love of earth and a regard for the natural instincts. He complains that Swinburne's poetry is "founded on literature, not onnature. " His religion is a reversion to the old Teutonic paganearth-worship, and he had the pagan dread of "quick-coming death. " Hisparadise is an "Earthly Paradise"; it is in search of earthly immortalitythat his voyagers set sail. "Of heaven or hell, " says his prelude, "Ihave no power to sing"; and the great mediaeval singer of heaven and hellwho meant so much to Rossetti, appealed hardly more to Morris than toWalter Scott. 

Moreover, Morris' work in verse was the precise equivalent of his work asa decorative artist, who cared little for easel pictures, and regardedpainting as one method out of many for covering wall spaces or othersurfaces. [30] His poetry is mainly narrative, but whether epical orlyrical in form, is always less lyric in essence than Rossetti's. In itsobjective spirit and even distribution of emphasis, it contrasts withRossetti's expressional intensity very much as Morris' wall-paper andtapestry designs contrast with paintings like "Beata Beatrix" and"Proserpina. " Morris--as an artist--cared more for places and thingsthan for people; and his interest was in the work of art itself, not inthe personality of the artist. 

Quite unlike as was Morris to Scott in temper and mental endowment, hisposition in the romantic literature of the second half-century answersvery closely to Scott's in the first. His work resembled Scott's involume, and in its easiness for the general reader. For the second timehe made the Middle Ages _popular_. There was nothing esoteric in hisart, as in Rossetti's. It was English and came home to Englishmen. Hispoetry, like his decorative work, was meant for the people, and"understanded of the people. " Moreover, like Scott, he was anaccomplished _raconteur_, and a story well told is always sure of anaudience. His first volume, "The Defence of Guenevere" (1858), dedicatedto Rossetti and inspired by him, had little popular success. But when, like Millais, he abandoned the narrowly Pre-Raphaelite manner andbroadened out, in "The Life and Death of Jason" (1867) and "The EarthlyParadise" (1868-70), into a fashion of narrative less caviare to thegeneral, the public response was such as met Millais. 

Morris' share in the Pre-Raphaelite movement was in the special field ofdecorative art. His enthusiasm for Gothic architecture had been arousedat Oxford by a reading of Ruskin's chapter on "The Nature of Gothic" in"The Stones of Venice. " In 1856, acting upon this impulse, he articledhimself to the Oxford architect G. E. Street, and began work in hisoffice. He did not persevere in the practice of the profession, andnever built a house. But he became and remained a _connoisseur_ ofGothic architecture and an active member of the Society for theProtection of Ancient Buildings. His numerous visits to Amiens, Chartres, Reims, Soissons, and Rouen were so many pilgrimages to theshrines of mediaeval art. Indeed, he always regarded the variousbranches of house decoration as contributory to the master art, architecture. 

A little later, under the dominating and somewhat overbearing persuasionsof Rossetti, he tried his hand at painting, but never succeeded well indrawing the human face and figure. The figure designs for his stainedglass, tapestries, etc. , were usually made by Burne-Jones, Morrisfurnishing floriated patterns and the like. In 1861 was formed the firmof Morris & Company, which revolutionised English household decoration. Rossetti and Burne-Jones were among the partners in this concern, whichundertook to supply the public with high art work in wall painting, paperhangings, embroidery, carpets, tapestries, printed cottons, stampedleather, carved furniture, tiles, metals, jewelry, etc. In particular, Morris revived the mediaeval arts of glass-staining, illumination, orminiature painting, and tapestry-weaving with the high-warp loom. Thoughhe chose to describe himself as a "dreamer of dreams born out of my duetime, " and "the idle singer of an empty day, " he was a tireless practicalworkman of astonishing cleverness and versatility. He taught himself todye and weave. When, in the last decade of the century, he set up thefamous Kelmscott Press, devoted to artistic printing and book-making, hestudied the processes of type-casting and paper manufacture, and actuallymade a number of sheets of paper with his own hands. It was hisfavourite idea that the division of labour in modern manufactures haddegraded the workman by making him a mere machine; that the divorcebetween the art of the designer and the art of the handicraftsman wasfatal to both. To him the Middle Ages meant, not the ages of faith, orof chivalry, or of bold and free adventure, but of popular art--of "TheLesser Arts"; when every artisan was an artist of the beautiful and tookpleasure in the thing which his hand shaped; when not only the cathedraland the castle, but the townsman's dwelling-house and the labourer'scottage was a thing of beauty. He believed that in those times therewas, as there should be again, an art by the people and for the people. It was the democratic and not the aristocratic elements of mediaeval lifethat he praised. "From the first dawn of history till quite moderntimes, art, which nature meant to solace all, fulfilled its purpose; allmen shared in it; that was what made life romantic, as people call it, inthose days; that and not robber-barons and inaccessible kings with theirhierarchy of serving-nobles and other such rubbish. " [31] One morepassage will serve to set in sharp contrast the romanticism of Scott andthe romanticism of Ruskin and Morris. "With that literature in whichromance, that is to say humanity, was re-born, there sprang up also afeeling for the romance of external nature, which is surely strong in usnow, joined with a longing to know something real of the lives of thosewho have gone before us; of these feelings united you will find thebroadest expression in the pages of Walter Scott; it is curious, asshowing how sometimes one art will lag behind another in a revival, thatthe man who wrote the exquisite and wholly unfettered naturalism of 'TheHeart of Midlothian, ' for instance, thought himself continually bound toseem to feel ashamed of, and to excuse himself for, his love of Gothicarchitecture; he felt that it was romantic, and he knew that it gave himpleasure, but somehow he had not found out that it was art, having beentaught in many ways that nothing could be art that was not done by anamed man under academical rules. " [32]

It is worth while to glance at Morris' culture-history and note theorganic filaments which connect the later with the earlier romanticism. He had read the Waverley novels as a child, and had even snatched afearful joy from Clara Reeve's "Old English Baron. " [33] He knew hisTennyson before he went up to Oxford, but reserved an unqualifiedadmiration only for such things as "Oriana" and "The Lady of Shalott. "He was greatly excited by the woodcut engraving of Dürer's "Knight, Deathand the Devil" in an English translation of Fouqué's "Sintram. " [34]Rossetti was first made known to him by Ruskin's Edinburgh lectures of1854 and by the illustration to Allingham's "Maids of Elfin Mere, " overwhich Morris and Burne-Jones "pored continually. " Morris devouredgreedily all manner of mediaeval chronicles and romances, French andEnglish; but he read little in Elizabethan and later authors. Hedisliked Milton and Wordsworth, and held Keats to be the foremost ofmodern English poets. He took no interest in mythology, or Welsh poetryor Celtic literature generally, with the exception of the "MorteDarthur, " which, Rossetti assured him, was second only to the Bible. TheBorder ballads had been his delight since childhood. An edition ofthese; a selection of English mediaeval lyrics; and a "Morte Darthur, "with a hundred illustrations from designs by Burne-Jones, were among theunfulfilled purposes of the Kelmscott Press. 

Morris' first volume, "The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems, " was putforth in 1858 (reprint in 1875); "a book, " says Saintsbury, "almost asmuch the herald of the second school of Victorian poetry as Tennyson'searly work was of the first. " [35] "Many of the poems, " wrote WilliamBell Scott, "represent the mediaeval spirit in a new way, not by asentimental, nineteenth-century-revival mediaevalism, but they give apoetical sense of a barbaric age strongly and sharply real. " [36] Theselast words point at Tennyson. The first four pieces in the volume are onArthurian subjects, but are wholly different in style and conception evenfrom such poems as "The Lady of Shalott" and "Sir Lancelot and QueenGuinevere. " They are more mannerised, more in the spirit ofPre-Raphaelite art, than anything in Morris' later work. If thename-poem is put beside Tennyson's idyl "Guinevere"; or "Sir Galahad, aChristmas Mystery, " beside Tennyson's "Sir Galahad, " the difference isstriking. In place of the refined ethics and sentiment, and purelymodern spiritual ideals which find a somewhat rhetorical expression inTennyson, Morris endeavours to render the genuine Catholic mediaevalmaterialistic religious temper as it appears in Malory; whereunquestioning belief, devotion, childish superstition, and the fear ofhell coexist with fleshly love and hate--a passion of sin and a passionof repentance. Guenevere's "defence" is, at bottom, the same as Phryne's:

 "See through my long throat how the words go up In ripples to my mouth: how in my hand The shadow lies like wine within a cup Of marvellously colour'd gold. "

 "Dost thou reck That I am beautiful, Lord, even as you And your dear mother?" [37]

Morris criticised Tennyson's Galahad, as "rather a mild youth. " His ownGalahad is not the rapt seer of the vision beatific, but a moreflesh-and-blood character, who sometimes has cold fits in which he doubtswhether the quest is not a fool's errand; and whether even Sir Palomydesin his unrequited love, and Sir Lancelot in his guilty love, do not takegreater comfort than he. 

Other poems in the book were inspired by Froissart's "Chronicle" or otherhistories of the English wars in France: "Sir Peter Harpdon's End, ""Concerning Geffray Teste Noire, " "The Eve of Crecy, " etc. [38] Stillothers, and these not the least fascinating, were things of pureinvention, lays of "a country lit with lunar rainbows and ringing withfairy song. " [39] These have been thought to owe something to Edgar Poe, but they much more nearly resemble the work of the latest symbolisticschools. When reading such poems as "Rapunzel, " "Golden Wings, " and "TheTune of Seven Towers, " one is frequently reminded of "Serres Chaudes" or"Pelléas et Mélisande"; and is at no loss to understand why Morrisexcepted Maeterlinck from his general indifference to contemporarywriters--Maeterlinck, like himself, a student of Rossetti. There is noother collection of English poems so saturated with Pre-Raphaelitism. The flowers are all orchids, strange in shape, violent in colouring. Rapunzel, _e. G. _, is like one of Maeterlinck's spellbound princesses. She stands at the top of her tower, letting down her hair to the ground, and her lover climbs up to her by it as by a golden stair. Here is againthe singular Pre-Raphaelite and symbolistic scenery, with its images fromart and not from nature. Tall damozels in white and scarlet walk ingarths of lily and sunflower, or under apple boughs, and feed the swansin the moat. 

 "Moreover, she held scarlet lilies, such As Maiden Margaret bears upon the light Of the great church walls. " [40]

 "Lord, give Mary a dear kiss, And let gold Michael, who look'd down, When I was there, on Rouen town, From the spire, bring me that kiss On a lily!" [41]

The language is as artfully quaint as the imaginations are fantastic:

 "Between the trees a large moon, the wind lows Not loud, but as a cow begins to low. " [42]

 "Pale in the green sky were the stars, I ween, Because the moon shone like a star she shed When she dwelt up in heaven a while ago, And ruled all things but God. " [43]

 "Quiet groans That swell out the little bones Of my bosom. " [44]

 "I sit on a purple bed, Outside, the wall is red, Thereby the apple hangs, And the wasp, caught by the fangs, Dies in the autumn night. And the bat flits till light, And the love-crazed knight Kisses the long, wet grass. " [45]

A number of these pieces are dramatic in form, monologues or dialogues, sometimes in the manner of the mediaeval mystery plays. [46] Others areballads, not of the popular variety, but after Rossetti's fashion, employing burdens, English or French:

 "Two red roses across the moon";

 "Hah! hah! la belle jaune giroflée";

 "Ah! qu'elle est belle La Marguerite"; etc. 

The only poem in the collection which imitates the style of the oldminstrel ballad is "Welland Water. " The name-poem is in _terza rima_;the longest, "Sir Peter Harpdon's End, " in blank verse; "Golden Wings, "in the "In Memoriaro" stanza. 

When Morris again came before the public as a poet, his style hadundergone a change akin to that which transformed the Pre-Raphaelitepainter into the decorative artist. The skeins of vivid romantic colourhad run out into large-pattern tapestries. There was nothing eccentricor knotty about "The Life and Death of Jason" and "The Earthly Paradise. "On the contrary, nothing so facile, pellucid, pleasant to read hadappeared in modern literature--a poetic lubberland, a "clear, unwrinkledsong. " The reader was carried along with no effort and little thought onthe long swell of the verse, his ear lulled by the musical lapse of therime, his eye soothed--not excited--by ever-unrolling panoramas of anenchanted country "east of the sun and west of the moon. " Morris wrotewith incredible ease and rapidity. It was a maxim with him, as withRuskin, that all good work is done easily and with pleasure to theworkman; and certainly that seems true of him which Lowell said ofChaucer--that he never "puckered his brow over an unmanageable verse. "Chaucer was his avowed master, [47] and perhaps no English narrative poethas come so near to Chaucer. Like Chaucer, and unlike Scott, he did notinvent stories, but told the old stories over again with a new charm. His poetry, as such, is commonly better than Scott's; lacking the fireand nervous energy of Scott in his great passages, but sustained at ahigher artistic level. He had the copious vein of the mediaevalchroniclers and romancers, without their tiresome prolixity and withfiner resources of invention. He had none of Chaucer's humour, realism, or skill in character sketching. In its final impression his poetryresembles Spenser's more than Chaucer's. Like Spenser's, it growsmonotonous--without quite growing languid--from the steady flow of themetre and the exhaustless profusion of the imagery. The reader becomes, somewhat ungratefully, surfeited with beauty, and seeks relief in poetrymore passionate or intellectual. Chaucer and, in a degree, Walter Scott, have a way of making old things seem near to us. In Spenser and Morris, though bright and clear in all imagined details, they stand at aninfinite remove, in a world apart--

 "--a little isle of bliss Midmost the beating of the steely sea"

which typifies the weary problems and turmoil of contemporary life. 

"Jason" was a poem of epic dimensions, on the winning of the GoldenFleece; "The Earthly Paradise, " a series of twenty-four narrative poemsset in a framework of the poet's own. Certain gentlemen of Norway, inthe reign of Edward III. Of England, set out--like St. Brandan--on avoyage in search of a land that is free from death. They cross theWestern ocean, and after long years of wandering, come, disappointed oftheir hope, to a city founded centuries since by exiles from ancientGreece. There being hospitably received, hosts and guests interchangetales in every month of the year; a classical story alternating with amediaeval one, till the double sum of twelve is complete. Among thewanderers are a Breton and a Suabian, so that the mediaeval tales have awide range. There are Norse stories like "The Lovers of Gudrun"; FrenchCharlemagne romances, like "Ogier the Dane"; and late German legends ofthe fourteenth century, like "The Hill of Venus, " besides miscellaneoustravelled fictions of the Middle Age. [48] But the Hellenic legends arereduced to a common term with the romance material, so that the reader isnot very sensible of a difference. Many of them are selected for theirmarvellous character, and abound in dragons, monsters, transformations, and enchantments: "The Golden Apples, " "Bellerophon, " "Cupid and Psyche, ""The Story of Perseus, " etc. Even "Jason" is treated as a romance. Ofits seventeen books, all but the last are devoted to the exploits andwanderings of the Argonauts. Medea is not the wronged, vengeful queen ofthe Greek tragic poets, so much as she is the Colchian sorceress whoeffects her lover's victory and escape. Her romantic, outweighs herdramatic character. Sea voyages, emprizes, and wild adventures, likethose of his own wanderers in "The Earthly Paradise, " were dearer toMorris' imagination than conflicts of the will; the _vostos_ orhome-coming of Ulysses, _e. G. _ He preferred the "Odyssey" to the"Iliad, " and translated it in 1887 into the thirteen-syllabled line ofthe "Nibelungenlied. " [49] Of the Greek tales in "The Earthly Paradise, ""The Love of Alcestis" has, perhaps, the most dramatic quality. 

Like Chaucer and like Rossetti, [50] Morris mediaevalised classic fable. "Troy, " says his biographer, "is to his imagination a town exactly likeBruges or Chartres, spired and gabled, red-roofed, filled (like the cityof King Aeetes in 'The Life and Death of Jason') with towers and swingingbells. The Trojan princes go out, like knights in Froissart, to tilt atthe barriers. " [51] The distinction between classical and romantictreatment is well illustrated by a comparison of Theocritus' idyl"Hylas, " with the same episode in "Jason. " "Soon was he 'ware of aspring, " says the Syracusan poet, "in a hollow land, and the rushes grewthickly round it, and dark swallow-wort, and green maiden-hair, andblooming parsley and deer-grass spreading through the marshy land. Inthe midst of the water the nymphs were arraying their dances, thesleepless nymphs, dread goddesses of the country people, Eunice, andMalis, and Nycheia, with her April eyes. And now the boy was holding outthe wide-mouthed pitcher to the water, intent on dipping it; but thenymphs all clung to his hand, for love of the Argive lad had flutteredthe soft hearts of all of them. Then down he sank into the blackwater. " [52] In "Jason, " where the episode occupies some two hundred andseventy lines, one of the nymphs meets the boy in the wood, disguised infurs like a northern princess, and lulls him to sleep by the stream sidewith a Pre-Raphaelite song:

 "I know a little garden close Set thick with lily and red rose";

the loveliest of all the lyrical passages in Morris' narrative poemsexcept possibly the favourite two-part song in "Ogier the Dane";

 "In the white-flower'd hawthorne brake, Love, be merry for my sake: Twine the blossoms in my hair. Kiss me where I am most fair-- Kiss me, love! for who knoweth What thing cometh after death?"

This is the strain which recurs in all Morris' poetry with the insistenceof a burden, and lends its melancholy to every season of "the rich yearslipping by. "

Three kinds of verse are employed in "The Earthly Paradise": theoctosyllabic couplet; the rime royal, which was so much a favourite withChaucer; and the heroic couplet, handled in the free, "enjambed" fashionof Hunt and Keats. 

"Love is Enough, " in the form of a fifteenth-century morality play, andtreating a subject from the "Mabinogion, " appeared in 1873, Mackailpraises its delicate mechanism in the use of "receding planes of action"(Love is prologue and chorus, and there is a musical accompaniment); butthe dramatic form only emphasises the essentially undramatic quality ofthe author's genius. What is the matter with Morris' poetry? Forsomething is the matter with it. Beauty is there in abundance, a richprofusion of imagery. The narrative moves without a hitch. Passion isnot absent, passionate love and regret; but it speaks a sleepy language, and the final impression is dream-like. I believe that the singular lackwhich one feels in reading these poems comes from Morris' dislike ofrhetoric and moralising, the two main nerves of eighteenth-century verse. Left to themselves, these make sad work of poetry; yet poetry includeseloquence, and life includes morality. The poetry of Morris is sensuous, as upon the whole poetry should be; but in his resolute abstention fromthe generalizing habit of the previous century, the balance is lostbetween the general and the concrete, which all really great poetrypreserves. Byron declaims and Wordsworth moralises, both of them perhapstoo much; yet in the end to the advantage of their poetry, which is fullof truths, or of thoughts conceived as true, surcharged with emotion anduttered with passionate conviction. One looks in vain in Morris' pagesfor such things as

 "There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away";

or

 "--the good die first, ----And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust, Burn to the socket. "

Such coin of universal currency is rare in Morris, as has once beforebeen said. Not that quotability is an absolute test of poetic value, forthen Pope would rank higher than Spenser or Shelley. But its absence inMorris is significant in more than one way. 

While "The Earthly Paradise" was in course of composition, a newintellectual influence came into Morris' life, the influence of theIcelandic sagas. Much had been done to make Old Norse literatureaccessible to English readers since the days when Gray put forth hisRunic scraps and Percy translated Mallet. [53] Walter Scott, e. G. , hadgiven an abstract of the "Eyrbyggja Saga. " Amos Cottle had published atBristol in 1797 a metrical version of the mythological portion of the"Elder Edda" ("Icelandic Poetry, or the Edda of Saemund"), with anintroductory verse epistle by Southey. Sir George Dasent's translationof the "Younger Edda" appeared in 1842; Laing's "Heimskringla" in 1844;Dasent's "Burnt Nial" in 1861; his "Gisli the Outlaw, " and Head's "Sagaof Viga-Glum" in 1866. William and Mary Howitt's "Literature and Romanceof Northern Europe" appeared in 1852. Morris had made the acquaintanceof Thorpe's "Northern Mythology" (1851) and "Yuletide Stories" (1853) atOxford; two of the tales in "The Earthly Paradise" were suggested bythem: "The Land East of the Sun" and "The Fostering of Aslaug. " These, however, he had dealt with independently and in an ultra-romantic spirit. But in 1869 he took up the study of Icelandic under the tuition of Mr. Erick Magnusson; in collaboration with whom he issued a number oftranslations. [54] "The Lovers of Gudrun" in "The Earthly Paradise" wastaken from the "Laxdaela Saga, " and is in marked contrast with the otherpoems in the collection. There is no romantic glamour about it. It is agrim, domestic tragedy, moving among the homeliest surroundings. Savefor the lawlessness of a primitive state of society which gave free playto the workings of the passions, the story might have passed in Yorkshireor New England. A book like "Wuthering Heights, " or "Pembroke, "occasionally exhibits the same obstinate Berserkir rage of the tough oldTeutonic stock, operating under modern conditions. For the men and womenof the sagas are hard as iron; their pride is ferocious, their courageand sense of duty inflexible, their hatred is as enduring as their love. The memory of a slight or an injury is nursed for a lifetime, and whenthe hour of vengeance strikes, no compunction, not even the commonesthuman instincts--such as mother love--can avert the blow. Signy in the"Völsunga Saga" is implacable as fate. To avenge the slaughter of theVolsungs is with her an obsession, a fixed idea. When incest seems theonly pathway to her purpose, she takes that path without a moment'shesitation. The contemptuous indifference with which she hands over herown little innocent children to death is more terrible than the readinessof the fierce Medea to sacrifice her young brothers to Jason's safety;more terrible by far than the matricide of Orestes. 

The colossal mythology of the North had impressed Gray's imagination acentury before, Carlyle in his "Hero Worship" (1840) had given it thepreference over the Greek, as an expression of race character andimagination. In the preface to his translation of the "Völsunga Saga, "Morris declared his surprise that no version of the story yet existed inEnglish. He said that it was one of the great stories of the world, andthat to all men of Germanic blood it ought to be what the tale of Troyhad been to the whole Hellenic race. In 1876 he cast it into a poem, "Sigurd the Volsung, " in four books in riming lines of six iambic oranapaestic feet. "The Lovers of Gudrun" drew its material from one ofthat class of sagas which rest upon historical facts. The familyvendetta which it narrates, in the Iceland of the eleventh century, ishardly more fabulous--hardly less realistic--than any modern blood feudin the Tennessee mountains. The passions and dramatic situations aremuch the same in both. The "Völsunga Saga" belongs not to romanticliterature, strictly speaking, but to the old cycle of hero epics, tothat earlier Middle Age which preceded Christian chivalry. It is theScandinavian version of the story of the Niblungs, which Wagner'smusic-dramas have rendered in another art. But in common with romance, it abounds in superhuman wonders. It is full of Eddaic poetry andmythology. Sigmund and Sinfiotli change themselves into were wolves, like the people in "William of Palermo": Sigurd slays Fafnir, the dragonwho guards the hoard, and his brother Regni, the last of the Dwarf-kin;Grimhild bewitches Sigurd with a cup of evil drink; Sigmund draws fromthe hall pillar the miraculous sword of Odin, and its shards areafterwards smithed by Regni for the killing of the monster. 

Morris was so powerfully drawn to the Old Norse literature that he madetwo visits to Iceland, to verify the local references in the sagas and toacquaint himself with the strange Icelandic landscapes whose savagesublimity is reflected in the Icelandic writings. "Sigurd the Volsung"is probably the most important contribution of Norse literature toEnglish poetry; but it met with no such general acceptance as "TheEarthly Paradise. " The spirit which created the Northern mythology andcomposed the sagas is not extinct in the English descendants of Frisiansand Danes. There is something of it in the minstrel ballads; but it hasbeen so softened by modern life and tempered with foreign cultureelements, that these old tales in their aboriginal, barbaric sternnessrepel. It is hard for any blossom of modern poetry to root itself in thescoriae of Hecla. 

An indirect result of Morris' Icelandic studies was his translation ofBeowulf (1897), not a success; another was the remarkable series of prosepoems or romances, which he put forth in the last ten years of hislife. [55] There is nothing else quite like these. They are written in apeculiar archaic English which the author shaped for himself out offifteenth- and early sixteenth-century models, like the "Morte Darthur"and the English translation of the "Gesta Roroanorum, " but with ananxious preference for the Saxon and Danish elements of the vocabulary. It is a dialect in which a market town is called a "cheaping-stead, " apopular assembly a "folk-mote, " foresters are "wood-abiders, " sailors are"ship-carles, " a family is a "kindred, " poetry is "song-craft, " [56] andany kind of enclosure is a "garth. " The prose is frequently interchangedwith verse, not by way of lyrical outbursts, but as a variation in thenarrative method, after the manner of the Old French _cantefables_, suchas "Aucassin et Nicolete"; but more exactly after the manner of thesagas, in which the azoic rock of Eddaic poetry crops out ever and anonunder the prose strata. This Saxonism of style is in marked contrastwith Scott, who employs without question the highly latinised Englishwhich his age had inherited from the last. Nor are Morris' romanceshistorical in the manner of the Waverley novels. The first two of theseries, however, are historical in the sense that they endeavour toreproduce in exact detail the picture of an extinct society. Time andplace are not precisely indicated, but the scene is somewhere in the oldGerman forest, and the period is early in the Christian era, during theobscure wanderings and settlements of the Gothic tribes. "The House ofthe Wolfings" concerns the life of such a community, which has made aseries of clearings in "Mirkwood" on a stream tributary to the Rhine. The folk of Midmark live very much as Tacitus describes the ancientGermans as living. Each kindred dwells in a great common hall, like thehall of the Niblungs or the Volsungs, or of King Hrothgar in "Beowulf. "Their herding and agriculture are described, their implements andcostumes, feasts in hall, songs, rites of worship, public meetings, andfinally their warfare when they go forth against the invading Romans. In"The Roots of the Mountains" the tribe of the Wolf has been driven intothe woods and mountains by the vanguard of the Hunnish migrations. Intime they make head against these, drive them back, and retake theirfertile valley. In each case there is a love story and, as in Scott, theprivate fortunes of the hero and heroine are enwoven with the ongoings ofpublic events. But it is the general life of the tribe that is ofimportance, and there is little individual characterisation. There is aclass of thralls in "The House of the Wolfings, " but no single member ofthe class is particularised, like Garth, the thrall of Cedric, in"Ivanhoe. "

The later numbers of the series have no semblance of actuality. The lastof all, indeed, "The Sundering Flood, " is a war story which attains anair of geographical precision by means of a map--like the plan of EgdonHeath in "The Return of the Native"--but the region and its inhabitantsare alike fabulous. Romances such as "The Water of the Wondrous Isles"and "The Wood beyond the World" (the names are not the least imaginativefeature of these curious books) are simply a new kind of fairy tales. Unsubstantial as Duessa or Armida or Circe or Morgan le Fay are thewitch-queen of the Wood beyond the World and the sorceress of theenchanted Isle of Increase Unsought. The white Castle of the Quest, withits three champions and their ladies, Aurea, Atra, and Viridis; theyellow dwarfs, the magic boat, the wicked Red Knight, and his den, theRed Hold; the rings and spells and charms and garments of invisibilityare like the wilder parts of Malory or the Arabian Nights. 

Algernon Charles Swinburne was an early adherent of the Pre-Raphaeliteschool, although such of his work as is specifically Gothic is to befound mainly in the first series of "Poems and Ballads" (1866);[57] avolume which corresponds to Morris' first fruits, "The Defence ofGuenevere. " If Morris is prevailingly a Goth--a heathen Norseman orSaxon--Swinburne is, upon the whole, a Greek pagan. Rossetti and Morrisinherit from Keats, but Swinburne much more from Shelley, whom heresembles in his Hellenic spirit; as well as in his lyric fervour, hisshrill radicalism--political and religious--and his unchastenedimagination. Probably the cunningest of English metrical artists, hisart is more closely affiliated with music than with painting. Not thatthere is any paucity of imagery in his poetry; the imagery issuperabundant, crowded, but it is blurred by an iridescent spray ofmelodious verbiage. The confusion of mind which his work often producesdoes not arise from romantic vagueness, from the dreamlike and mysteriousimpression left by a ballad of Coleridge's or a story of Tieck's, butrather, as in Shelley's case, from the dizzy splendour and excitement ofthe diction. His verse, like Shelley's, is full of foam and flame, andthe result upon the reader is to bewilder and exhaust. He does notdescribe in pictures, like Rossetti and Morris, but by metaphors, comparisons, and hyperboles. Take the following very typicalpassage--the portrait of Iseult in "Tristram of Lyonesse" (1882);

 "The very veil of her bright flesh was made As of light woven and moonbeam-colored shade More fine than moonbeams; white her eyelids shone As snow sun-stricken that endures the sun, And through their curled and coloured clouds of deep, Luminous lashes, thick as dreams in sleep, Shone, as the sea's depth swallowing up the sky's, The springs of unimaginable eyes. As the wave's subtler emerald is pierced through With the utmost heaven's inextricable blue, And both are woven and molten in one sleight Of amorous colour and implicated light Under the golden guard and gaze of noon, So glowed their aweless amorous plenilune, Azure and gold and ardent grey, made strange With fiery difference and deep interchange Inexplicable of glories multiform; Now, as the sullen sapphire swells towards storm Foamless, their bitter beauty grew acold, And now afire with ardour of fine gold. Her flower-soft lips were meek and passionate, For love upon them like a shadow sate Patient, a foreseen vision of sweet things, A dream with eyes fast shut and plumeless wings That knew not what man's love or life should be, Nor had it sight nor heart to hope or see What thing should come; but, childlike satisfied, Watched out its virgin vigil in soft pride And unkissed expectation; and the glad Clear cheeks and throat and tender temples had Such maiden heat as if a rose's blood Beat in the live heart of a lily-bud. "

What distinct image of the woman portrayed does one carry away from allthis squandered wealth of words and tropes? Compare the entire poem withone of Tennyson's Arthurian "Idyls, " or even with Matthew Arnold's notover-prosperous "Tristram and Iseult, " or with any of the stories in "TheEarthly Paradise, " and it will be seen how far short it falls of beinggood verse narrative--with its excesses of language and retardedmovement. Wordsworth said finely of Shakspere that he could not havewritten an epic: "he would have perished from a plethora of thought. " Itis not so much plethora of thought as lavishness of style which clogs thewheels in Swinburne. Too often his tale is

 "Like a tale of the little meaning, Though the words are strong. "

But his narrative method has analogies, not only with things likeShelley's "Laon and Cythna, " but with Elizabethan poems such as Marloweand Chapman's "Hero and Leander. " If not so conceited as these, it isequally encumbered with sticky sweets which keep the story from gettingforward. 

The symbolism which characterises a great deal of Pre-Raphaelite art isnot conspicuous in Swinburne, whose spirit is not mystical. But twomarks of the Pre-Raphaelite--and, indeed, of the romantic mannergenerally--are obtrusively present in his early work. One of these isthe fondness for microscopic detail at the expense of the obvious, natural outlines of the subject. Thus of Proserpine at Enna, in thepiece entitled "At Eleusis, "

 "--she lying down, red flowers Made their sharp little shadows on her sides. "

"Endymion" is, perhaps, partly responsible for this exaggeration of thepicturesque, and in Swinburne, as in Keats, the habit is due to anexcessive impressibility by all forms of sensuous beauty. It is a signof riches, but of riches which smother their possessor. It is impossibleto fancy Chaucer or Goethe, or any large, healthy mind dealing thus byits theme. Or, indeed, contrast the whole passage from "At Eleusis" withthe mention of the rape of Proserpine in the "Winter's Tale" and in"Paradise Lost. "

Another Pre-Raphaelite trait is that over-intensify of spirit and sensewhich was not quite wholesome in Rossetti, but which manifested itself inSwinburne in a morbid eroticism. The first series of "Poems and Ballads"was reprinted in America as "Laus Veneris. " The name-poem was a versionof the Tannhäuser legend, a powerful but sultry study of animal passion, and it set the key of the whole volume. It is hardly necessary to say ofthe singer of the wonderful choruses in "Atalanta" and the equallywonderful hexameters of "Hesperia, " that his imagination has turned mostpersistently to the antique, and that a very small share of his work isto be brought under any narrowly romantic formula. But there are a fewnoteworthy experiments in mediaevalism included among these early lyrics. "A Christmas Carol" is a ballad of burdens, suggested by a drawing ofRossetti's, and full of the Pre-Raphaelite colour. The inevitabledamsels, or bower maidens, are combing out the queen's hair with goldencombs, while she sings a song of God's mother; how she, too, had threewomen for her bed-chamber--

 "The first two were the two Maries, The third was Magdalen, " [58]

who "was the likest God"; and how Joseph, who, likewise had threeworkmen, Peter, Paul, and John, said to the Virgin in regular balladstyle:

 "If your child be none other man's, But if it be very mine, The bedstead shall be gold two spans, The bedfoot silver fine. "

"The Masque of Queen Bersabe" is a miracle play, and imitates the rough_naïveté_ of the old Scriptural drama, with its grotesque stagedirections and innocent anachronisms. Nathan recommends King David tohear a mass. All the _dramatis personae_ swear by Godis rood, by Paulishead, and Peter's soul, except "Secundus Miles" (_Paganus quidam_), a badman--a species of Vice--who swears by Satan and Mahound, and is finallycarried off by the comic devil:

 "_S. M. _ I rede you in the devil's name, Ye come not here to make men game; By Termagaunt that maketh grame, I shall to-bete thine head. _Hic Diabolus capiat eum_. " [59]

Similarly "St. Dorothy" reproduces the childlike faith and simplicity ofthe old martyrologies. [60] Theophilus addresses the Emperor Gabalus with"Beau Sire, Dieu vous aide. " The wicked Gabalus himself, though aheathen, curses by St. Luke and by God's blood and bones, and quotesScripture. Theophilus first catches sight of Dorothy through a latticedwindow, holding a green and red psalter among a troop of maidens who playupon short-stringed lutes. The temple of Venus where he does hisdevotions is a "church" with stained-glass windows. Heaven is a walledpleasance, like the Garden of Delight in the "Roman de la Rose, "

 "Thick with companies Of fair-clothed men that play on shawms and lutes. "

Swinburne has also essayed the minstrel ballad in various forms. Therewere some half-dozen pieces of the sort in the "Laus Veneris" volume, ofwhich several, like "The King's Daughter" and "The Sea-Swallows, " wereimitations of Rossetti's and Morris' imitations, artistically overwroughtwith elaborate Pre-Raphaelite refrains; others, like "May Janet" and "TheBloody Son, " are closer to popular models. The third series of "Poemsand Ballads" (1889) contains nine of these in the Scotch dialect, two ofthem Jacobite songs. That Swinburne has a fine instinct in such mattersand holds the true theory of ballad imitation is evident from his reviewof Rossetti's and Morris' work in the same kind. [61] "The highest formof ballad requires, from a poet, " he writes, "at once narrative power, lyrical and dramatic. . . . It must condense the large, loose fluency ofromantic tale-telling into tight and intense brevity. . . . There can beno pause in a ballad, and no excess; nothing that flags, nothing thatoverflows. " He pronounces "Sister Helen" the greatest ballad in modernEnglish; but he thinks that "Stratton Water, " which is less independentin composition, and copies the formal as well as the essentialcharacteristics of popular poetry, is "a study after the old manner tooclose to be no closer. It is not meant for a perfect and absolute pieceof work in the old Border fashion, . . . And yet it is so far a copy thatit seems hardly well to have gone so far and no farther. On this groundMr. Morris has a firmer tread than the great artist by the light of whosegenius and kindly guidance he put forth the first fruits of his work, asI did afterwards. In his first book, the ballad of 'Welland River, ' theChristmas carol in 'The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 'etc. , . . . Are examples of flawless work in the pure early manner. Anyless absolute and decisive revival of mediaeval form . . . Rouses somesense of failure by excess or default of resemblance. "

Swinburne's own ballads are clever and learned experiments, but he doesnot practise the brevity which he recommends; some of them, such as "TheBloody Son, " "The Weary Wedding, " and "The Bride's Tragedy, " otherwisemost impressive, would be more so if they were shorter or less wordy. Though his genius is more lyrical than dramatic, the fascination whichthe dramatic method has had for him from the first is as evident in hisballads as in his series of verse dramas, which begins with "The QueenMother, " and includes the enormous "Mary Stuart" trilogy. Several ofthese are mediaeval in subject; the "Rosamond" of his earliestvolume--Fair Rosamond of the Woodstock Maze--the other "Rosamund, Queenof the Goths" (1899) in which the period of the action is 573 A. D. ; and"Locrine" (1888), the hero of which is that mythic king of Britain whosestory had been once before dramatised for the Elizabethan stage; andwhose daughter, "Sabrina fair, " goddess of the Severn, figures in"Comus. " But these are no otherwise romantic than "Chastelard" or "TheQueen Mother. " The dramatic diction is fashioned after the Elizabethans, of whom Swinburne has been an enthusiastic student and expositor, findingan attraction even in the morbid horrors of Webster, Ford, andTourneur. [62]

Once more the poet touched the Round-Table romances in "The Tale ofBalen" (1896), written in the stanza of "The Lady of Shalott, " and in astyle simpler and more direct than "Tristram of Lyonesse. " The story isthe same as Tennyson's "Balin and Balan, " published with "Tiresias andOther Poems" in 1885, as an introduction to "Merlin and Vivien. " Herethe advantage is in every point with the younger poet. Tennyson'sversion is one of the weakest spots in the "Idylls. " His hero is a roughNorthumberland warrior who looks with admiration upon the courtly gracesof Lancelot, and borrows a cognisance from Guinevere to wear upon hisshield, in hope that it may help him to keep his temper. But having oncemore lost control of this, he throws himself upon the ground

 "Moaning 'My violences, my violences!'"--

a bathetic descent not unexampled elsewhere in Tennyson. 

This episode of the old "Morte Darthur" has fine tragic possibilities. It is the tale of two brothers who meet in single combat, with visorsdown, and slay each other unrecognised. It has some resemblance, therefore, to the plan of "Sohrab and Rustum, " but it cannot be said thateither poet avails himself of the opportunity for a truly dramaticpresentation of his theme. Tennyson, as we have seen, aimed to give epicunity to the wandering and repetitious narrative of Malory, by selectingand arranging his material with reference to one leading conception; theeffort of the king to establish a higher social state through an order ofChristian knighthood, and his failure through the gradual corruption ofthe Round Table. He subdues the history of Balin to this purpose, justas he does the history of Tristram which he relates incidentally only, and not for its own sake, in "The Last Tournament. " Balin's simple faithin the ideal chivalry of Arthur's court is rudely dispelled when he hearsfrom Vivien, and sees for himself, that the two chief objects of hisreverence, Lancelot and the queen, are guilty lovers and false to theirlord; and in his bitter disappointment, he casts his life away in thefirst adventure that offers. Moreover, in consonance with his maindesign, Tennyson seeks, so far as may be, to discard whatever in Maloryis merely accidental or irrational; whatever is stuff of romance ratherthan of epic or drama--whose theatre is the human will. To such elementsof the wonderful as he is obliged to retain he gives, where possible, anallegorical or spiritual significance. There are very strange things inthe story of Balin, such as the invisible knight Garlon, a "darklingmanslayer"; and the chamber in the castle of King Pellam, where the bodyof Joseph of Arimathea lies in state, and where there are a portion ofthe blood of Christ and the spear with which his heart was pierced, withwhich spear Sir Balin smites King Pellam, whereupon the castle falls andthe two adversaries lie among its ruins three days in a deathlike trance. All this wild magic--which Tennyson touches lightly--Swinburne gives atfull length; following Malory closely through his digressions and theroving adventures--most of which Tennyson suppresses entirely--by whichhe conducts his hero his end. This is the true romantic method. 

As Rossetti for the Italian and Morris for the Scandinavian, Swinburnestands for the spirit of French romanticism. At the beginning of thenineteenth century France, the inventor of "Gothic" architecture andchivalry romance, whose literature was the most influential of mediaevalEurope, still represented everything that is most anti-mediaeval andanti-romantic. Gérard de Nerval thought that the native genius of Francehad been buried under two ages of imported classicism; and that Perrault, who wrote the fairy tales, was the only really original mind in theFrench literature of the eighteenth century. M. Brunetière, on thecontrary, holds that the true expression of the national genius is to befound in the writers of Louis XIV. 's time--that France is instinctivelyand naturally classical. However this may be, in the history of themodern return to the past, French romanticism was the latest to awake. Somewhat of the chronicles, fabliaux, and romances of old France haddribbled into England in translations;[63] but Swinburne was perhaps thefirst thoroughpaced disciple of the French romantic school. Victor Hugois the god of his idolatry, and he has chanted his praise in prose andverse, in "ode and elegy and sonnet. " [64] Gautier and Baudelaire havealso shared his devotion. [65] The French songs in "Rosamond" and"Chastelard" are full of romantic spirit. "Laus Veneris" follows aversion of the tale given in Maistre Antoine Gaget's "Livre des grandesmerveilles d'amour" (1530), in which the Venusberg is called "le montHorsel"; and "The Leper, " a very characteristic piece in the samecollection, is founded on a passage in the "Grandes Chroniques de France"(1505). Swinburne introduced or revived in English verse a number of oldFrench stanza forms, such as the ballade, the sestina, the rondel, whichhave since grown familiar in the hands of Dobson, Lang, Gosse, andothers. In the second series of "Poems and Ballads" (1878) he gavetranslations of ten of the ballads of that musical old blackguard

 "Villon, our sad, bad, glad, mad brother's name. " [66]

The range of Swinburne's intellectual interests has been wider than thatof Rossetti and Morris. He is a classical scholar, who writes easily inLatin and Greek. Ancient mythology and modern politics divide hisattention with the romantic literatures of many times and countries. Rossetti made but one or two essays in prose criticism, and Morris viewedthe reviewer's art with contempt. But Swinburne has contributed freelyto critical literature, an advocate of the principles of romantic art inthe last quarter of the nineteenth century, as Coleridge, Lamb, andHazlitt had been in the first. The manner of his criticism is not at alljudicial. His prose is as lyrical as his verse, and his praise and blameboth in excess--dithyrambic laudation or affluent billingsgate. Inparticular, he works the adjective "divine" so hard that it losesmeaning. Yet stripped of its excited superlatives, and reduced to thecool temperature of ordinary speech, his critical work is found to befull of insight, and his judgment in matters of poetical technique almostalways right. I may close this chapter with a few sentences of hisdefence of retrospective literature. [67] "It is but waste of breath forthe champions of the other party to bid us break the yoke and cast offthe bondage of that past, leave the dead to bury their dead, and turnfrom the dust and rottenness of old-world themes, epic or romantic, classical or feudal, to face the age wherein we live. . . . In vain, forinstance, do the first poetess of England and the first poet of Americaagree to urge upon their fellows or their followers the duty ofconfronting and expressing the spirit and the secret of their own time, its meaning, and its need. . . . If a poem cast in the mould of classicor feudal times, of Greek drama or mediaeval romance, be lifeless andworthless, it is not because the subject or the form was ancient, butbecause the poet was inadequate. . . . For neither epic nor romance ofchivalrous quest or classic war is obsolete yet, or ever can be; there isnothing in the past extinct . . . [Life] is omnipresent and eternal, andforsakes neither Athens nor Jerusalem, Camelot nor Troy, Argonaut norCrusader, to dwell, as she does with equal good will, among modernappliances in London and New York. "

[1] See vol. I. , chaps. Iv. And vii. , "The Landscape Poets" and "TheGothic Revival. "

[2] This was the organ of the Pre-Raphaelites, started in 1850. Onlyfour numbers were issued (January, February, March, April), and in thethird and fourth the title was changed to _Art and Poetry_. The contentsincluded, among other things, poems by Dante Gabriel and ChristinaRossetti. One of the former's twelve contributions was "The BlessedDamozel. " The _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, which ran through theyear 1856 and was edited by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, wasalso a Pre-Raphaelite journal and received many contributions fromRossetti. 

[3] The foreign strain in the English Pre-Raphaelites and in the paintersand poets who descend from them is worth noting. Rossetti wasthree-fourths Italian. Millais' parents were Channel Islanders--fromJersey--and he had two mother tongues, English and French. Burne-Jonesis of Welsh blood, and Alma Tadema of Frisian birth. AmongNeo-Pre-Raphaelite poets, the names of Theophile Marzials and ArthurO'Shaughnessy speak for themselves. 

[4] Let the reader consult the large and rapidly increasing literature onthe English Pre-Raphaelites. I do not profess to be a very competentguide here, but I have found the following works all in some degreeenlightening. "Autobiographical Notes of William Bell Scott, " two vols. , New York, 1892. "English Contemporary Art. " Translated from the Frenchof R. De la Sizeranne, Westminster, 1898. "D. G. Rossetti as Designerand Writer. " W. M. Rossetti, London, 1889. "The Rossettis. " E. L. Cary, New York, 1900. "Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. "Esther Wood, New York, 1894. "Pre-Raphaelitism. " J. Ruskin, New York, 1860. "The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. " Holman Hunt in _ContemporaryReview_, vol. Xlix. (three articles). "Encyclopaedia Britannica, "article "Rossetti. " by Theodore Watts. Of course the standard lives andmemoirs by William Rossetti, Hall Caine, William Sharp, and JosephKnight, as well as Rossetti's "Family Letters, " "Letters to WilliamAllingham, " etc. , afford criticisms of the movement from various pointsof view. Lists of Rossetti's paintings and drawings are given by severalof these authorities, with photographs or engravings of his most famousmasterpieces. 

[5] "Lectures on Architecture and Painting. " Delivered at Edinburgh in1853. Lecture iv. , "Pre Raphaelitism. "

[6] _Cf. _ Milton: "Each stair mysteriously was meant" ("P. L. "). 

[7] "Dante Gabriel Rossetti: a record and a study, " London, 1882, pp. 40-41. 

[8] "Pre-Raphaelitism, " p. 23, _note_. 

[9] "Autobiographical Notes of William Bell Scott, " vol. I. , p. 281. 

[10] "English Contemporary Art, " p. 58. 

[11] "Lectures on Architecture and Painting, " 1853. 

[12] See vol. I. , p. 44. 

[13] "The return of this school was to a mediaevalism different from thetentative and scrappy mediaevalism of Percy, from the genial but slightlysuperficial mediaevalism of Scott, and even from the more exact butnarrow and distinctly conventional mediaevalism of Tennyson. . . . Moreover, though it may seem whimsical or extravagant to say so, thesepoets added to the very charm of mediaeval literature, which they thusrevived, a subtle something which differentiates it from--which, to ourperhaps blind sight, seems to be wanting in--mediaeval literature itself. It is constantly complained (and some of those who cannot go all the waywith the complainants can see what they mean) that the graceful andlabyrinthine stories, the sweet snatches of song, the quaint drama andlegend of the Middle Ages lack--to us--life; that they are shadowy, unreal, tapestry on the wall, not alive even as living pageants are. Bythe strong touch of modernness which these poets and the best of theirfollowers introduced into their work, they have given the vivificationrequired" (Saintsbury, "Literature of the Nineteenth Century, " p. 439). Pre-Raphaelitism "is a direct and legitimate development of the greatromantic revival in England. . . . Even Tennyson, much more Scott andColeridge and their generation, had entered only very partially into thetreasures of mediaeval literature, and were hardly at all acquainted withthose of mediaeval art. Conybeare, Kemble, Thorpe, Madden were only inTennyson's own time reviving the study of Old and Middle English. EarlyFrench and Early Italian were but just being opened up. Above all, theOxford Movement directed attention to mediaeval architecture, literature, thought, as had never been the case before in England, and as has neverbeen the case at all in any other country" ("A Short History of EnglishLiterature, " by G. Saintsbury, London, 1898, p. 779). 

[14] "Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, " by T. Hall Caine, London, 1883, p. 41. 

[15] "The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. " Edited by W. M. Rossetti, two vols. , London, 1886. 

[16] "Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A Record and a Study, " p. 305. 

[17] He wrote to Allingham in 1855, apropos of the latter's poem "TheMusic Master": "I'm not sure that it is not too noble or too resolutelyhealthy. . . . I must confess to a need in narrative dramaticpoetry . . . Of something rather 'exciting, ' and indeed, I believe, something of the 'romantic' element, to rouse my mind to anything likethe moods produced by personal emotion in my own life. That sentence isshockingly ill worded, but Keats' narratives would be of the kind Imean. " Theodore Watts ("Encyclopaedia Britannica, " article "Rossetti")says that "the purely romantic temper was with Rossetti a more permanentand even a more natural temper than with any other nineteenth-centurypoet, even including the author of 'Christabel' himself. " He thinks thatall the French romanticists together do not equal the romantic feeling ina single picture of Rossetti's; and he somewhat capriciously defines theidea at the core of romanticism as that of the evil forces of natureassailing man through his sense of beauty. Analysis run mad! As to Poe, Rossetti certainly preferred him to Wordsworth. Hall Caine testifiesthat he used to repeat "Ulalume" and "The Raven" from memory; and thatthe latter suggested his "Blessed Damozel. " "I saw that Poe had done theutmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and soI determined to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to theyearning of the loved one in heaven" ("Recollections, " p. 384). 

[18] "Recollections, " p. 140. 

[19] Caine's "Recollections, " p. 266. 

[20] Burne-Jones had been attracted by Rossetti's illustration ofAllingham's poem, "The Maids of Elfinmere, " and had obtained anintroduction to him at London in 1856. It was by Rossetti's persuasionthat he gave up the church for the career of an artist. Rossetti andSwinburne some years later (1862) became housemates for a time atChelsea; and Rossetti and Morris for a number of years, off and on, atKelmscott. 

[21] Sharp's "Dante Gabriel Rossetti, " p. 190. 

[22] See especially Morris' poem "Rapunzel" in "The Defence of Guenevere. "

[23] "I can't say, " wrote William Morris, "how it was that Rossetti tookno interest in politics; but so it was: of course he was quite Italian inhis general turn of thought; though I think he took less interest inItalian politics than in English. . . . The truth is, he cared fornothing but individual and personal matters; chiefly of course inrelation to art and literature. "

[24] "The Liberal Movement in English Literature, " by W. J. Courthope, London, 1885, p. 230. 

[25] "Keats was a great poet who sometimes nodded. . . . Coleridge was amuddle-brained metaphysician who, by some strange freak of fortune, turned out a few real poems amongst the dreary flood of inanity which washis wont. . . . I have been through the poems, and find that the onlyones which have any interest for me are: (1) 'Ancient Mariner'; (2)'Christabel'; (3) 'Kubla Khan'; and (4) the poem called 'Love'"(Mackail's "Life of Morris, " vol. Ii. , p. 310). 

[26] "The Life of William Morris, " by W. J. Mackail, London, 1899, vol. Ii. , p. 171. 

[27] For the Chaucerian manipulation of classical subjects byPre-Raphaelite artists see "Edward Burne-Jones, " by Malcolm Bell, London, 1899. 

[28] "The slough of despond which we call the eighteenth century" ("Hopesand Fears for Art, " p. 211). "The English language, which under thehands of sycophantic verse-makers had been reduced to a miserablejargon . . . Flowed clear, pure, and simple along with the music of Blakeand Coleridge. Take those names, the earliest in date among ourselves, as a type of the change that has happened in literature since the time ofGeorge II. " (_ibid. _, p. 82). 

[29] Page 113. 

[30] "Sir Edward Burne-Jones told me that Morris would have liked thefaces in his pictures less highly finished, and less charged with theconcentrated meaning or emotion of the painting . . . And he thought thatthe dramatic and emotional interest of a picture ought to be diffusedthroughout it as equally as possible. Such, too, was his own practice inthe cognate art of poetry; and this is one reason why his poetry affordsso few memorable single lines, and lends itself so little to quotation"(Mackail's "Life of William Morris, " vol. Ii. , p. 272). 

[31] "Hopes and Fears for Art, " p. 79. 

[32] _Ibid. _, p. 83. 

[33] See vol. I. , pp. 241-43. 

[34] _Vide supra_, p. 153. 

[35] "A Short History of English Literature, " p. 783. 

[36] "Recollections of Rossetti, " vol. Ii. , p. 42. 

[37] "King Arthur's Tomb. "

[38] 0ne of these, "The Haystack in the Floods, " has a tragic powerunexcelled by any later work of Morris. 

[39] Saintsbury, p. 785. 

[40] "King Arthur's Tomb. "

[41] "Rapunzel. "

[42] "King Arthur's Tomb. "

[43] _Ibid_. 

[44] "Rapunzel. "

[45] "Golden Wings. "

[46] See "Sir Galahad, " "The Chapel in Lyoness, " "A Good Knight inPrison. "

[47] See "Jason, " Book xvii. , 5-24, and the _Envoi_ to "The EarthlyParadise. "

[48] Some of Morris' sources were William of Malmesbury, "Mandeville'sTravels, " the "Gesta Romanorum, " and the "Golden Legend. " "The Man Bornto be King" was derived from "The Tale of King Constans, the Emperor" ina volume of French romances ("Nouvelles françaises en prose du xiii. IèmeSiècle, " Paris, 1856) of which he afterwards (1896) made a prosetranslation. The collection included also "The friendship of Amis andAmile"; "King Florus and the Fair Jehane"; and "The History of Over Sea";besides "Aucassin and Nicolete, " which Morris left out because it hadbeen already rendered into English by Andrew Lang. 

[49] His Vergil's "Aeneid, " in the old fourteener of Chapman, waspublished in 1876. 

[50] _Vide supra_, p. 315. 

[51] Mackail, i. , p. 168. 

[52] Lang's translation. 

[53] See vol. I. , pp. 190-92. 

[54] The "Grettis Saga" (1869); the "Völsunga Saga" (1870); "ThreeNorthern Love Stories" (1875). 

[55] These, in order of publication, were "The House of the Wolfings"(1889); "The Roots of the Mountains" (1890); "The Story of the GlitteringPlain" (1891); "The Wood Beyond the World" (1894); "The Well at theWorld's End" (1896); "The Water of the Wondrous Isles" (1897); and "TheSundering Flood" (1898). 

[56] Morris became so intolerant of French vocables that he detested andwould "fain" have eschewed the very word literature. 

[57] This collection is made up of Swinburne's earliest work but isantedated in point of publication by "The Queen Mother, and Rosamond"(1861) dedicated to Rossetti; and "Atalanta in Calydon" (1865). "Poemsand Ballads" was inscribed to Burne-Jones. 

[58] "Where the lady Mary is, With her five handmaidens whose names Are five sweet symphonies, Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen, Margaret and Rosalys. " --"The Blessed Damozel. "

[59] _Cf. _ Browning's "The Heretic's Tragedy, " _supra_, p. 276. 

[60] This was the subject of Massinger's "Virgin Martyr. "

[61] "Essays and Studies, " pp. 85-88. 

[62] See "A Study of Ben Jonson"; "John Ford" (in "Essays and Studies");and the introductions to "Chapman" and "Middleton" in the Mermaid Series. 

[63] _Vide supra_, pp. 90, 109, 330, and vol. I. , pp. 221-22, 301. 

[64] See especially "A Study of Victor Hugo" (1886); the articles on"L'Homme qui Rit" and "L'Année Terrible" in "Essays and Studies" (1875);and on Hugo's posthumous writings in "Studies in Prose and Poetry"(1886); "To Victor Hugo" in "Poems and Ballads" (first series); _Ibid_. (second series); "Victor Hugo in 1877, " _Ibid_. 

[65] See "Ave atque Vale" and the memorial verses in English, French, andLatin on Gautier's death in "Poems and Ballads" (second series). 

[66] "A Ballad of François Villon. " _Vide supra_, pp. 298-99. 

[67] "Essays and Studies, " pp. 45-49. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

Tendencies and Results. 

It has been mentioned that romanticism was not purely a matter ofaesthetics, without relation to the movement of religious and politicalthought. [1] But it has also been pointed out that, as compared with whathappened in Germany, English romanticism was almost entirely a literaryor artistic, and hardly at all a practical force, that there was no such_Zusammenhang_ between poetry and life as was asserted by the Germanromantic school to be one of their leading principles. Walter Scott, _e. G. _, liked the Middle Ages because they were picturesque; becausetheir social structure rested on a military basis, permitted greatindividual freedom of action and even lawlessness, and thus gave chancesfor bold adventure; and because classes and callings were so sharplydifferentiated--each with its own characteristic manners, dialect, dress--that the surface of society presented a rich variety of colour, incontrast with the drab uniformity of modern life. Perhaps to Scott theideal life was that of a feudal baron, dwelling in a Gothic mansion, surrounded by retainers and guests, keeping open house, and goinga-hunting; and he tried to realise this ideal--so far as it was possibleunder modern conditions--at Abbotsford. He respected rank and pedigree, and liked to own land. He was a Tory and, in Presbyterian Scotland, hewas an Episcopalian. But his mediaeval enthusiasms were checked by allkinds of good sense. He had no wish to restore mediaeval institutions inpractice. In spite of the glamour which he threw over feudal life, heknew very well what that life must have been in reality: its insecurityfrom violence and oppression, its barbarous discomfort; the life ofnobles in unplumbed stone castles; the life of burghers in walled towns, without lighting, drainage, or police; the life of countrymen who tooktheir goods to market over miry roads impassable half the year for anywheeled vehicle. As to the English poets whom we have passed in review, from Coleridge to Swinburne, not one of them joined the Catholic Church;and most of them found romantic literary tastes quite consistent withvarying shades of political liberalism and theological heterodoxy. 

THE ANGLO-CATHOLIC MOVEMENT. --Still even in England, the mediaevalrevival in art and letters was not altogether without influence onpractice and belief in other spheres of thought. Thus the OxfordTractarians of 1833 correspond somewhat to the throne-and-altar party inGermany. At Newcastle in 1845, William Bell Scott visited apainted-glass manufactory where he found his friend, FrancisOliphant--afterwards husband of Margaret Oliphant, the novelist--engagedas a designer. He describes Oliphant as no artist by nature, but a manof pietistic feelings who had "thrown himself into the Gothic revivalwhich was, under the Oxford movement, threatening to become a seriousantagonist to our present freedom from clerical domination. " Scott addsthat the master of this glass-making establishment was an uncultivatedtradesman, who yet had the business shrewdness to take advantage of "theclerical and architectural proclivities of the day, " and had visited andstudied the French cathedrals. "These workshops were a surprise to me. Here was the Scotch Presbyterian working-artist, with a short pipe in hismouth, cursing his fate in having to elaborate continual repetitions ofsaints and virgins--Peter with a key as large as a spade, and a yellowplate behind his head--yet by constant drill in the groove realising thesentiment of Christian art, and at last able to express the abnegation ofself, the limitless sadness and even tenderness, in every line of draperyand every twist of the lay figure. "

Here is one among many testimonies to the influence of the Oxfordmovement on the fine arts. It would be easy to call witnesses to provethe reverse--the influence of romance upon the Oxford movement. Newman[2] quotes an article contributed by him to the _British Critic_for April, 1839, in which he had spoken of Tractarianism "as a reactionfrom the dry and superficial character of the religious teaching and theliterature of the last generation, or century. . . . First, I mentionedthe literary influence of Walter Scott, who turned men's minds to thedirection of the Middle Ages. 'The general need, ' I said, 'of somethingdeeper and more attractive than what had offered itself elsewhere may beconsidered to have led to his popularity; and by means of his popularityhe reacted on his readers, stimulating their mental thirst, feeding theirhopes, setting before them visions which, when once seen, are not easilyforgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, whichmight afterwards be appealed to as first principles. '" Of Coleridge hespoke, in the same paper, as having laid a philosophical basis for churchfeelings and opinions, and of Southey and Wordsworth as "two livingpoets, one of whom in the department of fantastic fiction, the other inthat of philosophical meditation, have addressed themselves to the samehigh principles and feelings, and carried forward their readers in thesame direction. " Newman, like Ruskin, was fond of Scott's verse as wellas of his prose. [3]

Professor Gates has well recognised that element in romantic art whichaffiliates with Catholic tendencies. "Mediaevalism . . . Was adistinctive note of the Romantic spirit, and, certainly, Newman wasintensely alive to the beauty and the poetic charm of the life of theMiddle Ages. One is sometimes tempted to describe him as a greatmediaeval ecclesiastic astray in the nineteenth century and heroicallystriving to remodel modern life in harmony with his temperamental needs. His imagination was possessed with the romantic vision of the greatnessof the Mediaeval Church--of its splendour and pomp and dignity, and ofits power over the hearts and lives of its members; and the Oxfordmovement was in its essence an attempt to reconstruct the English Churchin harmony with this romantic ideal. . . . As Scott's imagination wasfascinated with the picturesque paraphernalia of feudalism--with itsjousts, and courts of love, and its coats of mail and buff-jerkins--soNewman's imagination was captivated by the gorgeous ritual andceremonial, the art and architecture of mediaeval Christianity. . . . Newman sought to revive in the Church a mediaeval faith in its own divinemission and the intense spiritual consciousness of the Middle Ages; heaimed to restore to religion its mystical character, to exalt thesacramental system as the divinely appointed means for the salvation ofsouls, and to impose once more on men's imaginations the mighty spell ofa hierarchical organisation, the direct representative of God in theworld's affairs. . . . Both he and Scott substantially ruined themselvesthrough their mediaevalism. Scott's luckless attempt was to place hisprivate and family life upon a feudal basis and to give it mediaevalcolour and beauty; Newman undertook a much nobler and more heroic butmore intrinsically hopeless task--that of re-creating the whole EnglishChurch in harmony with mediaeval conceptions. " [4]

All this is most true, and yet it is easy to exaggerate the share whichromantic feeling had in the Oxford movement. In his famous apostrophe toOxford, Matthew Arnold personifies the university as a "queen ofromance, " an "adorable dreamer whose heart has been so romantic, ""spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towersthe last enchantments of the Middle Age, " and "ever calling us nearerto . . . Beauty. " Newman himself was a poet, as well as one of themasters of English prose. The movement left an impress upon generalliterature in books like Keble's "Christian Year" (1827) and "LyraInnocentium" (1847); in Newman's two novels, "Callista" and "Loss andGain" (1848), and his "Verses on Various Occasions" (1867); and evenfound an echo in popular fiction. Grey in Hughes' "Tom Brown at Oxford"represents the Puseyite set. Miss Yonge's "Heir of Redcliffe" andShorthouse's "John Inglesant" are surcharged with High-Church sentiment. Newman said that Keble made the Church of England poetical. "The authorof 'The Christian Year' found the Anglican system all but destitute ofthis divine element [poetry]; . . . Vestments chucked off, lightsquenched, jewels stolen, the pomp and circumstances of worshipannihilated; . . . The royal arms for the crucifix; huge ugly boxes ofwood, sacred to preachers, frowning on the congregation in place of themysterious altar; and long cathedral aisles unused, railed off, like thetombs (as they were) of what had been and was not. " [5] Newman praisesin "The Christian Year" what he calls its "sacramental system"; and tothe unsympathetic reader it seems as though Keble saw all outdoorsthrough a stained-glass window. The movement had its aesthetic side, andcoincided with the revival of church Gothic and with the effort to makechurch music and ritual richer and more impressive. But, upon the whole, it was more intellectual than aesthetic, an affair of doctrine and churchpolity rather than of ecclesiology; while the later phase of ritualisminto which it has tapered down appears to the profane to be largely amatter of upholstery, given over to people who concern themselves withthe carving of lecterns and the embroidery of chasubles and altar cloths;with Lent lilies, antiphonal choirs, and what Carlyle calls the "singularold rubrics" of the English Church and the "three surplices atAll-Hallowmas. "

Newman was, above all things, a theologian; a subtle reasoner whoserelentless logic led him at last to Rome. "From the age of fifteen, " hewrote, "dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion; I knowno other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort ofreligion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery. "Discussions concerning church ceremonies, liturgy, ritual, he put asidewith some impatience. His own tastes were simple to asceticism. Mozleysays that Newman and Hurrell Froude induced several of the Oriel fellowsto discontinue the use of wine in the common room. "When I came up atEaster, 1825, one of the first standing jokes against the college allover the university was the Oriel tea-pot. " [6] Dean Church testifies tothe plainness of the services at St. Mary's. [7] Aubrey de Vere reportshis urging Newman to make an expedition with him among the WicklowMountains, and the latter's "answering with a smile that life was full ofwork more important than the enjoyment of mountains and lakes. . . . Theecclesiastical imagination and the mountain-worshipping imagination aretwo very different things. Wordsworth's famous 'Tintern Abbey' describesthe river Wye, etc. . . . The one thing which it did not see was thegreat monastic ruin; . . . And now here is this great theologian, who, when within a few miles of Glendalough Lake, will not visit it. " [8]

There is much gentle satire in "Loss and Gain" at the expense of theRitualistic set in the university who were attracted principally by theexternal beauty of the Roman Catholic worship. One of these is Bateman, a solemn bore, who takes great interest in "candlesticks, ciboriums, faldstools, lecterns, ante-pend turns, piscinas, roodlofts, and sedilia":wears a long cassock which shows absurdly under the tails of his coat;and would tolerate no architecture but Gothic in English churches, and nomusic but the Gregorian. Bateman is having a chapel restored in purefourteenth-century style and dedicated to the Royal Martyr. He is goingto convert the chapel into a chantry, and has bought land about it for acemetery, which is to be decorated with mediaeval monuments in sculptureand painting copied from the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa, ofwhich he has a portfolio full of drawings. "It will be quite sweet, " hesays, "to hear the vesper-bell tolling over the sullen moor everyevening. " Then there is White, a weak young aesthete who shocks thecompany by declaring: "We have no life or poetry in the Church ofEngland; the Catholic Church alone is beautiful. You would see what Imean if you went into a foreign cathedral, or even into one of theCatholic churches in our large towns. The celebrant, deacon andsub-deacon, acolytes with lights, the incense and the chanting allcombine to one end, one act of worship. " White is much exercised by thequestion whether a sacristan should wear the short or the long cotta. But he finally marries and settles down into a fat preferment. 

Newman's sensitiveness to the beauty of Catholic religion is acute. "Hervery being is poetry, " he writes. But equally acute is his sense of thedanger under which religion lies from the ministration of the arts, lestthey cease to be handmaids, and "give the law to Religion. " Hence hepraises, from an ecclesiastical point of view, the service of the arts intheir rudimental state--the rude Gothic sculpture, the simple Gregorianchant. [9] A similar indifference to the merely aesthetic aspects ofCatholicism is recorded of many of Newman's associates; of HurrellFroude, _e. G. _, and of Ward. When Pugin came to Oxford in 1840 tosuperintend some building at Balliol, he saw folio copies of St. Buenaventura and Aquinas' "Summa Theologiae" lying on Ward's table, andexclaimed, "What an extraordinary thing that so glorious a man as Wardshould be living in a room without mullions to the windows!" This beingreported to Ward, he asked, "What are mullions? I never heard of them. "Ward cared nothing about rood-screens and lancet windows; Newman andFaber preferred the Palladian architecture to the Gothic. [10] Pugin, onthe other hand, who had been actually converted to the Roman Churchthrough his enthusiasm for pointed architecture; and who, when asked todinner, stipulated for Gothic puddings, for which he enclosed designs, was greatly distressed at the carelessness about such matters which hefound at Oxford. A certain Dr. Cox was going to pray for the conversionof England, in an old French cope. "What is the use, " asked Pugin, "ofpraying for the Church of England in that cope?" [11]

Of the three or four hundred Anglican clergymen who went over with Newmanin 1845, or some years later with Manning, on the decision in the Gorhamcontroversy, few were influenced in any assignable degree by poeticmotives. "As regards my friend's theory about my imaginative sympathieshaving led me astray, " writes Aubrey de Vere, "I may remark that they hadbeen repelled, not attracted, by what I thought an excess of ceremonialin the churches and elsewhere when in Italy. . . . It seemed to me toosensuous. " [12] Indeed, at the outset of the movement it was not themediaeval Church, but the primitive Church, the Church of patristicdiscipline and doctrine, that appealed to the Tractarians. It was theAnglican Church of the seventeenth century, the Church of Andrewes andHerbert and Ken, to which Keble sought to restore the "beauty ofholiness"; and those of the Oxford party who remained within theestablishment continued true to this ideal. "The Christian Year" is thegenuine descendant of George Herbert's "Temple" (1632). What impressedNewman's imagination in the Roman Catholic Church was not so much theromantic beauty of its rites and observances as its imposing unity andauthority. He wanted an authoritative standard in matters of belief, afaith which had been held _semper et ubique et ab omnibus_. The EnglishChurch was an Elizabethan compromise. It was Erastian, a creature of thestate, threatened by the Reform Bill of 1832, threatened by every liberalwind of opinion. The Thirty-nine Articles meant this to one man and thatto another, and there was no court of final appeal to say what theymeant. Newman was a convert not of his imagination, but of his longingfor consistency and his desire to believe. 

There is nothing romantic in either temper or style about Newman's poems, all of which are devotional in subject, and one of which--"The Pillar ofthe Cloud" ("Lead, Kindly Light") (1833)--is a favourite hymn in mostProtestant communions. The most ambitious of these is "The Dream ofGerontius, " a sort of mystery play which Sir Henry Taylor used to comparewith the "Divine Comedy. " Indeed, none but Dante has more poignantlyexpressed the purgatorial passion, the desire for pain, which makes thespirits in the flames of purification unwilling to intermit theirtorments even for a moment. The "happy, suffering soul" of Gerontiuslies before the throne of the Crucified and sings:

 "Take me away, and in the lowest deep There let me be, And there in hope the lone night-watches keep Told out for me. " [13]

Some dozen years before the "Tracts for the Times" began to appear atOxford, a sporadic case of conversion at the sister university offers acloser analogy with the catholicising process among the German romantics. Kenelm Henry Digby, who took his degree at Trinity College in 1819, anddevoted himself to the study of mediaeval antiquities and scholasticphilosophy, was actually led into the Catholic fold by his enthusiasm forthe chivalry romances, as Pugin was by his love of Gothic architecture. His singular book, "The Broad Stone of Honour, " was first published in1822, and repeatedly afterwards in greatly enlarged form. In its finaledition it consists of four books entitled respectively "Godefridus, ""Tancredus, " "Morus" (Sir Thomas More), and "Orlandus, " after fourrepresentative paladins of Christian chivalry. The title of the wholework was suggested by the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, the "Gibraltar ofthe Rhine. " Like Fouqué, Digby was inspired by the ideal of knighthood, but he emphasises not so much the gallantry of the knight-errant as hisreligious character as the champion of Holy Church. The book is, looselyspeaking, an English "Genié du Christianisme, " less brilliantlyrhetorical than Chateaubriand, but more sincerely devout. It is poeticand descriptive rather than polemical, though the author constantlyexpresses his dislike of modern civilisation, and complains with Burkethat this is an age of sophists, calculators, and economists. He quotesprofusely from German and French reactionaries, like Busching, [14] FritzStolberg, Görres, Friedrich Schlegel, Lamennais, and Joseph de Maistre, and illustrates his topic at every turn from mediaeval chronicles, legendaries, romances, and manuals of chivalry; from the lives ofCharlemagne, St. Louis, Godfrey of Bouillon, the Chevalier Bayard, St. Anselm, King Rene, etc. , and above all, from the "Morte Darthur. " Hedefends the Crusades, the Templars, and the monastic orders against suchhistorians as Muller, Sismondi, and Hume; is very contemptuous of theProtestant concessions of Bishop Hurd's "Letters on Chivalry andRomance";[15] and, in short, fights a brave battle against the artilleryof "the moderns" with weapons borrowed from "the armoury of theinvincible knights of old. " The book is learned, though unsystematic anddiscursive, but its most interesting feature is its curiously personalnote, its pure spirit of honour and Catholic piety. The enthusiasm ofthe author extends itself from the institutes of chivalry and the Churchto the social and political constitution of the Middle Ages. He isanti-democratic as well as anti-Protestant; upholds monarchy, nobility, the interference of the popes in the affairs of kingdoms, and praises thetimes when the doctrines of legislation and government all over Europerested on the foundations of the Church. 

A few paragraphs from "The Broad Stone of Honour" will illustrate theauthor's entrance into the Church through the door of beauty, and hisidentification of romantic art with "the art Catholic. " "It is much tobe lamented, " he writes, "that the acquaintance of the English readerwith the characters and events of the Middle Ages should, for the mostpart, be derived from the writings of men who were either infidels, orwho wrote on every subject connected with religion, with the feelings andopinions of Scotch Presbyterian preachers of the last century. " [16] "Adistinguishing characteristic of everything belonging to the early andMiddle Ages of Christianity is the picturesque. Those who now struggleto cultivate the fine arts are obliged to have recourse to the despised, and almost forgotten, houses, towns, and dresses of this period. As soonas men renounced the philosophy of the Church, it was inevitable thattheir taste, that the form of objects under their control, should changewith their religion; for architects had no longer to provide for the loveof solitude, of meditation between sombre pillars, of modesty inapartments with the lancet-casement. They were not to study duration andsolidity in an age when men were taught to regard the present as theironly concern. When nothing but exact knowledge was sought, the undefinedsombre arches were to be removed to make way for lines which wouldproclaim their brevity, and for a blaze of light which might correspondwith the mind of those who rejected every proposition that led beyond thereach of the senses. . . . So completely is it beyond the skill of thepainter or the poet to render bearable the productions of themoderns, . . . And so fast are the poor neglected works of Christianantiquity falling to ruin, that it is hard to conceive how the fine artscan be cultivated after another century has elapsed; for when childrenare taught in infant schools to love accounts from their cradle, and tostudy political economy before they have heard of the Red Cross Knight orthe Wild Hunter, the manner and taste of such an age will smother thesparks of nature. " [17] The Church summoned all natural beauty to theministry of religion. "Flowers bloomed on the altars; men could beholdthe blue heaven through those tall, narrow-pointed eastern windows of theGothic choir as they sat at vespers. . . . The cloud of incense breatheda sweet perfume; the voice of youth was tuned to angelic hymns; and thegolden sun of the morning, shining through the coloured pane, cast itspurple or its verdant beam on the embroidered vestments and marblepavement. " [18] Or read the extended rhapsody which closes the firstvolume, where, to counteract the attractions of classic lands, the authorpasses in long review the sites and monuments of romance in England, Germany, Spain, Italy, and France. Aubrey de Vere says that nothing hadbeen so "impressive, suggestive, and spiritually helpful" to him asNewman's "Lectures on Anglican Difficulties" (1850), "with the exceptionof the 'Divina Commedia' and Kenelm Digby's wholly uncontroversial 'MoresCatholici'" (1831-40). 

THE STUDY OF MEDIAEVAL ART. --The correlation of romantic poetry, Catholicworship, and mediaeval art has been indicated in the chapter upon thePre-Raphaelites, as well as in the foregoing section of the presentchapter. But the three departments have other tangential points whichshould not pass without some further mention. The revival of Gothicarchitecture which began with Horace Walpole[19] went on in anunintelligent way through the eighteenth century. One of the queerestmonuments of this new taste--a successor on a larger scale to StrawberryHill--was Fonthill Abbey, near Salisbury, that prodigious folly to whichBeckford, the eccentric author of "Vathek, " devoted a great share of hisalmost fabulous wealth. It was begun in 1796, took nearly thirty yearsin building, employed at one time four hundred and sixty men, and costover 273, 000 pounds. Its most conspicuous feature was an octagonal tower278 feet high, so ill constructed that it shortly tumbled down into aheap of ruins. [20]

The growing taste for mediaeval architecture was powerfully reinforced bythe popularity of Walter Scott's writings. But Abbotsford is evidenceenough of the superficiality of his own knowledge of the art; and duringthe first half of the nineteenth century, Gothic design was applied notto churches, but to the more ambitious classes of domestic architecture. The country houses of the nobility and landed gentry were largely builtor rebuilt in what was known as the castellated style. [21] Meanwhile atruer understanding of the principles of pointed architecture was beinghelped by the publication of archaeological works like Britton's"Cathedral Antiquities" (1814-35), Milner's "Treatise on EcclesiasticalArchitecture" (1811), and Rickman's "Ancient Examples of GothicArchitecture" (1819). The parts of individual buildings, such asWestminster Abbey and Lincoln Cathedral, were carefully studied andillustrated with plans and sections drawn to scale, and measurement wassubstituted for guesswork. But the real restorer of ecclesiasticalGothic in England was Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, an enthusiast, nay, a fanatic, in the cause; whose "Contrasts" (1836) is not only a landmarkin the history of the revival of mediaeval art, but a most instructiveillustration of the manner in which an aesthetic admiration of the MiddleAges has sometimes involved an acceptance of their religious beliefs andsocial principles. Three generations of this family are associated withthe rise of modern Gothic. The elder Pugin (Augustus Charles) was aFrench _emigré_ who came to England during the Revolution, and gainedmuch reputation as an architectural draughtsman, publishing, among otherthings, "Specimens of Gothic Architecture, " in 1821. The son of A. W. N. Pugin, Edward Welby (1834-73), also carried on his father's work as apractical architect and a writer. 

Pugin joined the Roman Catholic Church just about the time when the"Tracts for the Times" began to be issued. His "Contrasts: or a Parallelbetween the Architecture of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" isfiercely polemical, and displays all the zeal of a fresh convert. In thepreface to the second edition he says that "when this work was firstbrought out [1836], the very name of Christian art was almost unknown";and he affirms, in a footnote, that in the whole of the national museum, "there is not even one room, one _shelf_, devoted to the exquisiteproductions of the Middle Ages. " The book is a jeremiad over thecondition to which the cathedrals and other remains of Englishecclesiastical architecture had been reduced by the successivespoliations and mutilations in the times of Henry VIII. , Edward VI. , andCromwell, and by the "vile" restorations of later days. It maintains thethesis that pointed architecture is not only vastly superiorartistically, but that it is the only style appropriate to Christianchurches; "in it alone we find the faith of Christianity embodied and itspractices illustrated. " Pugin denounces alike the Renaissance and theReformation, "those two monsters, revived Paganism and Protestantism. "There is no chance, he thinks, for a successful revival of Gothic exceptin a return to Catholic faith. "The mechanical part of Gothicarchitecture is pretty well understood, but it is the principles whichinfluenced ancient compositions, and the soul which appears in all theformer works, which is so lamentably deficient. . . . 'Tis they alonethat can restore pointed architecture to its former glorious state;without it all that is done will be a tame and heartless copy. " Hepoints out the want of sympathy between "these vast edifices" and theProtestant worship, which might as well be carried on in a barn orconventicle or square meeting-house. Hence, the nave has been blocked upwith pews, the choir or transept partitioned off to serve as a parishchurch, roodloft and chancel screen removed, the altar displaced by atable, and the sedilia scattered about in odd corners. The contrastbetween old and new is strikingly presented, by way of object lessons, ina series of plates, arranged side by side, and devised with a great dealof satirical humour. There is, _e. G. _, a Catholic town in 1440, richwith its ancient stone bridge, its battlemented wall and city gate, andthe spires and towers of St. Marie's Abbey, the Guild Hall, Queen'sCross, St. Cuthbert's Church, and the half-timbered, steep-roofed, gabledhouses of the burgesses. Over against it is the picture of the same townin 1840, hideous with the New Jail, Gas Works, Lunatic Asylum, WesleyanChapel, New Town Hall, Iron Works, Quaker Meeting-house, Socialist Hallof Science, and other abominations of a prosperous modern industrialcommunity. Or there is the beautiful old western doorway of St. MaryOveries, destroyed in 1838. The door stands invitingly open, showing thenoble interior with kneeling worshippers scattered here and there overthe unobstructed pavement. Opposite is the new door, grimly closed, witha printed notice nailed upon it: "Divine Service on Sundays. Eveninglecture. " A separate plate exhibits a single compartment of the old doorcuriously carved in oak; and beside it a compartment of the new door inpainted deal and plain as a pike-staff. 

But the author is forced to confess that the case is not much better inCatholic countries, where stained windows have been displaced by whitepanes, frescoed ceilings covered with a yellow wash, and the "bastardpagan style" introduced among the venerable sanctities of old religion. English travellers return from the Continent disgusted with the tinselornament and theatrical trumperies that they have seen in foreignchurches. "I do not think, " he concludes, "the architecture of ourEnglish churches would have fared much better under a Catholichierarchy. . . . It is a most melancholy truth that there does not existmuch sympathy of idea between a great portion of the present Catholicbody in England and their glorious ancestors. . . . Indeed, such is thetotal absence of solemnity in a great portion of modern Catholicbuildings in England, that I do not hesitate to say that a few crumblingwalls and prostrate arches of a religious edifice raised during the daysof faith will convey a far stronger religious impression to the mind thanthe actual service of half the chapels in England. "

In short, Pugin's Catholicism, though doubtless sincere, was prompted byhis professional feelings. His reverence was given to the mediaevalChurch, not to her--aesthetically--degenerate daughter; and it extendedto the whole system of life and thought peculiar to the Middle Ages. "Men must learn, " he wrote, "that the period hitherto called dark andignorant far excelled our age in wisdom, that art ceased when it is saidto have been revived, that superstition was piety, and bigotry faith. "In many of his views Pugin anticipates Ruskin. He did not like St. Peter's at Rome, and said: "If those students who journey to Italy tostudy art would follow the steps of the great Overbeck, [22] . . . Theywould indeed derive inestimable benefit. Italian art of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries is the beau ideal of Christianpurity, and its imitation cannot be too strongly inculcated; but when itforsook its pure, mystical, and ancient types, to follow those of sensualPaganism, it sunk to a fearful state of degradation. "

As a practising architect Pugin naturally received and executed manycommissions for Catholic churches. But the Catholic Church in Englanddid much less, even in proportion to its resources, than the Anglicanestablishment towards promoting the Gothic revival. Eastlake says thatPugin's "strength as an artist lay in the design of ornamental detail";and that he helped importantly in the revival of the mediaeval taste instained glass, metal work, furniture, carpets, and paper-hangings. Several of his works have to do with various departments of ecclesiology;chancel-screens, roodlofts, church ornaments, symbols and costumes, andthe like. But the only one that need here be mentioned is the once veryinfluential "True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture"(1841). This revival of ecclesiastical Gothic fell in with the reform ofAnglican ritual, which was one of the features or sequences of the Oxfordmovement, and the two tendencies afforded each other mutual support. 

Evidence of a newly awakened interest in mediaeval art is furnished by anumber of works of a more systematic character which appeared about themiddle of the century, dealing not only with architecture, but with theearly schools of sculpture and painting. One of these was "Sketches ofthe History of Christian Art" (3 vols. , 1847) by Alexander WilliamCrawford Lindsay, twenty-fifth Earl of Crawford. In the preface to thereprint of this book in 1885, Lady Crawford speaks of it as a pioneer inan "early time of unawakened interest. " Ruskin refers to itrepeatedly--always with respect--and acknowledges in "Praeterita" thatLord Lindsay knew a great deal more about Italian art than he himselfdid. The book reviews in detail the works of Christian builders, sculptors and painters, both in Italy and north of the Alps, from thetime of the Roman catacombs and basilicas down to the Renaissance. Itgives likewise a history of Christian mythology, iconography andsymbolism; all that great body of popular beliefs about angels, devils, saints, martyrs, anchorites, miracles, etc. , which Protestant iconoclasmand the pagan spirit of the _cinque-cento_ had long ago swept into thedust-bin as sheer idolatry and superstition. Lord Lindsay's treatment ofthese matters is reverential, though his own Protestantism is proofagainst their charm. His tone is moderate; he has no quarrel with theRenaissance, and professes respect for classical art, which seems to him, however, on a lower spiritual plane than the Christian. He remarks thatall mediaeval art was religious; the only concession to the secular beingfound in the illuminations of some of the chivalry romances. Gothicarchitecture was the expression of Teutonic genius, which is realisticand stands for the reason, while Italian sacred painting was idealisticand stands for the imagination. In the most perfect art, as in thehighest type of religion, reason and imagination are in balance. Hence, the influence of Van Eyck, Memling, and Dürer on Italian painters waswholesome; and the Reformation, the work of the reasoning Teutonic mind, is not to be condemned. Reason is to blame only when it goes too far andextinguishes imagination. [23]

"The sympathies of the North, or of the Teutonic race, are with Death, asthose of the Southern, or classic, are with Life. . . . The exquisitelybeautiful allegorical tale of 'Sintram and His Companions' by La MotteFouqué, was founded on the 'Knight and Death' of Albert Dürer, and Icannot but think that Milton had the 'Melancholy' in his remembrancewhile writing 'Il Penseroso. '" [24] The author thinks that, whatever maybe true of Gothic architecture--an art less national thanecclesiastical--"sculpture and painting, on the one hand, and the spiritof chivalry on the other, have usually flourished in an inverse ratio oneto the other, and it is not therefore in England, France, or Spain, butamong the free cities of Italy and Germany that we must look for theirrise. " [25] I give these conclusions--so opposite to those of Catholicmediaevalists like Digby and Pugin--because they illustrate the temper ofLindsay's book. One more quotation I will venture to add for itsagreement with Uvedale Price's definition of the picturesque:[26] "Thepicturesque in art answers to the romantic in poetry; both stand opposedto the classic or formal school--both may be defined as the triumph ofnature over art, luxuriating in the decay, not of her elemental andever-lasting beauty, but of the bonds by which she had been enthralled byman. It is only in ruin that a building of pure architecture, whetherGreek or Gothic, becomes picturesque. " [27]

Lord Lindsay's "Sketches" contained no illustrations. Mrs. Jameson'svery popular series on "Sacred and Legendary Art" was profuselyembellished with wood-cuts and etchings. The first number of the series, "Legends of the Saints and Martyrs, " was begun in 1842, but issued onlyin 1848. "Legends of the Monastic Orders" followed in 1850; "Legends ofthe Madonna" in 1852; and the "History of Our Lord" (completed by LadyEastlake) in 1860. Mrs. Jameson had an imperfect knowledge of technique, and her work was descriptive rather than critical. But it probably didmore to enlist the interest of the general reader in Christian art thanLord Lindsay's more learned volumes; or possibly even than the brilliantbut puzzling rhetoric of Ruskin. 

With Pugin's "Contrasts" began the "Battle of the Styles. " This was soondecided in Pugin's favour, so far as ecclesiastical buildings wereconcerned. Fergusson, who is hostile to Gothic, admits that whereverclerical influence extended, the style came into fashion. The CambridgeCamden Society was founded in 1839 for the study of church architectureand ritual, and issued the first number of its magazine, _TheEcclesiologist_, in 1841. But the first national triumph for secularGothic was won when Barry's design for the new houses of Parliament wasselected from among ninety-seven competing plans. The corner-stone waslaid at Westminster in 1840, and much of the detail, as the work went on, was furnished by Pugin. 

It was not long before the Gothic revival found an ally in the same greatwriter who had already come forward as the champion of Pre-Raphaelitepainting. The masterly analysis of "The Nature of Gothic" in "The Stonesof Venice" (vol. I. , 1851; vols. Ii. And iii. , 1853), and the eloquenceand beauty of a hundred passages throughout the three volumes, fascinateda public which cared little about art, but knew good literature when theysaw it. Eastlake testifies that Ruskin had some practical influence onEnglish building. Young artists went to Venice to study the remains ofItalian Gothic, and the results of their studies were seen in the surfacetreatment of many London facades, especially in the cusped window arches, and in the stripes of coloured bricks which give a zebra-like appearanceto the architecture of the period. But, in general, working architectswere rather contemptuous of Ruskin's fine-spun theories, which theyridiculed as fantastic, self-contradictory, and super-subtle; rhetoric ormetaphysics, in short, and not helpful art criticism. 

Ruskin's adhesion to Gothic was without compromise. It was "not only thebest, but the _only rational_ architecture. " "I plead for theintroduction of the Gothic form into our domestic architecture, notmerely because it is lovely, but because it is the only form of faithful, strong, enduring, and honourable building, in such materials as comedaily to our hands. " [28] On the other hand, Roman architecture isessentially base; the study of classical literature is "pestilent"; andmost modern building is the fruit of "the Renaissance poison tree. ""If . . . Any of my readers should determine . . . To set themselves tothe revival of a healthy school of architecture in England, and wish toknow in few words how this may be done, the answer is clear and simple. First, let us cast out utterly whatever is connected with the Greek, Roman, or Renaissance architecture, in principle or in form. . . . Thewhole mass of the architecture, founded on Greek and Roman models, whichwe have been in the habit of building for the last three centuries, isutterly devoid of all life, virtue, honourableness, or power of doinggood. It is base, unnatural, unfruitful, unenjoyable, and impious. Pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralysed in itsold age. " [29]

Ruskin loved the religious spirit of the mediaeval builders, Byzantine, Lombard, or Gothic; and the pure and holy faith of the early sacredpainters like Fra Angelico, Orcagna, and Perugino. He thought thatwhatever was greatest even in Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo camefrom their training in the old religious school, not from the new scienceof the Renaissance. "Raphael painted best when he knew least. " Hedeplored the harm to Catholic and Protestant alike of the bitterdissensions of the Reformation. But he sorrowfully acknowledged thecorruption of the ancient Church, and had no respect for modern Romanism. Against the opinion that Gothic architecture was fitted exclusively forecclesiastical uses, he strongly protested. On the contrary, he advisedits reintroduction, especially in domestic building. "Most readers . . . Abandon themselves drowsily to the impression that Gothic is a peculiarlyecclesiastical style. . . . The High Church and Romanist parties . . . Have willingly promulgated the theory that, because all the goodarchitecture that is now left is expressive of High Church or Romanistdoctrines, all good architecture ever has been and must be so--a piece ofabsurdity. . . . Wherever Christian Church architecture has been goodand lovely, it has been merely the perfect development of the commondwelling-house architecture of the period. . . . The churches were notseparated by any change of style from the buildings round them, as theyare now, but were merely more finished and full examples of a universalstyle. . . . Because the Gothic and Byzantine styles are fit forchurches, they are not therefore less fit for dwellings. They are in thehighest sense fit and good for both, nor were they ever brought toperfection except when they were used for both. " [30]

The influence of Walter Scott upon Ruskin is noteworthy. As a child heread the Bible on Sundays and the Waverley Novels on week-days, and hecould not recall the time when either had been unknown to him. Thefreshness of his pleasure in the first sight of the frescoes of the CampoSanto he describes by saying that it was like having three new Scottnovels. [31] Ruskin called himself a "king's man, " a "violent illiberal, "and a "Tory of the old-fashioned school, the school of Walter Scott. "Like Scott, he was proof against the religious temptations ofmediaevalism. "Although twelfth-century psalters are lovely and right, "he was not converted to Catholic teachings by his admiration for the artof the great ages; and writes, with a touch of contempt, of those who are"piped into a new creed by the squeak of an organ pipe. " If Scott wasunclassical, Ruskin was anti-classical. The former would learn no Greek;and the latter complained that Oxford taught him all the Latin and Greekthat he would learn, but did not teach him that fritillaries grew inIffley meadow. [32] Even that fondness for costume which has been made areproach against Scott finds justification with Ruskin. "The essence ofmodern romance is simply the return of the heart and fancy to the thingsin which they naturally take pleasure; and half the influence of the bestromances, of 'Ivanhoe, ' or 'Marmion, ' or 'The Crusaders, ' or 'The Lady ofthe Lake, ' is completely dependent upon the accessories of armour andcostume. " [33] Still Ruskin had the critical good sense to rate such asthey below the genuine Scotch novels, like "Old Mortality" and "The Heartof Mid-Lothian"; and he is quite stern towards the melodramatic Byronicideal of Venice. "The impotent feelings of romance, so singularlycharacteristic of this century, may indeed gild, but never save theremains of those mightier ages to which they are attached like climbingflowers, and they must be torn away from the magnificent fragments, if wewould see them as they stood in their own strength. . . . The Venice ofmodern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence ofdecay, a stage dream. " [34] For it cannot be too often repeated that theromance is not in the Middle Ages themselves, but in their strangeness toour imagination. The closer one gets to them, the less romantic theyappear. 

MEDIEVAL SOCIAL IDEALS. --It is obvious how a fondness for the MiddleAges, in a man of Scott's conservative temper, might confirm him in hisattachment to high Tory principles and to an aristocratic-feudal ideal ofsociety; or how, in an enthusiastic artist like Pugin, and a gentleman ofhigh-strung chivalric spirit like Sir Kenelm Digby, it might even lead toan adoption of the whole mediaeval religious system. But it is not soeasy, at first sight, to understand why the same thing should haveconducted Ruskin and William Morris to opinions that were more "advanced"than those of the most advanced Liberal. Orthodox economists looked uponthe theories put forward in Ruskin's "Unto this Last" (1860), "MuneraPulveris" (1862-63), and "Fors Clavigera" (1871-84), as theeccentricities of a distinguished art critic, disporting himself inunfamiliar fields of thought. And when in 1883 the poet of "The EarthlyParadise" joined the Democratic Federation, and subsequently theSocialist League, and was arrested and fined one shilling and costs foraddressing open-air meetings, obstructing public highways, and strikingpolicemen, amusement was mingled with disapproval. What does thisdreamer of dreams and charming decorative artist in a London police court?

But Socialism, though appearing on the face of it the most modern ofdoctrines, is in a sense reactionary, like Catholicism, orknight-errantry, or Gothic architecture. That is, those who protestagainst the individualism of the existing social order are wont tocontrast it unfavourably with the principle of association which is foundeverywhere in the Middle Ages. No mediaeval man was free or independent;all men were members one of another. The feudal system itself was anelaborate network of interdependent rights and obligations, in whichservice was given in return for protection. The vassal did homage to hislord--became his _homme_ or man--and his lord was bound to take care ofhim. In theory, at least, every serf was entitled to a living. Intheory, too, the Church embraced all Christendom. None save Jews wereoutside it or could get outside it, except by excommunication; which wasthe most terrible of penalties, because it cut a man off from allspiritual human fellowship. The same principle of co-operation prevailedin mediaeval industry and commerce, organised into guilds of craftsmenand trading corporations, which fixed the prices and quality of goods, the number of apprentices allowed, etc. The manufacturer was not acapitalist, but simply a master workman. Government was paternal andinterfered continually with the freedom of contract and the rights of theindividual. Here was where Carlyle took issue with modern Liberalism, which proclaims that the best government is that which governs least. According to the _laissez-faire_ doctrine, he said, the work of agovernment is not that of a father, but of an active parish constable. The duty of a government is to govern, but this theory makes it its dutyto refrain from governing. Not liberty is good for men, but obedienceand stern discipline under wise rulers, heroes, and heaven-sent kings. Carlyle took no romantic view of the Middle Ages. He is rathercontemptuous of Scott's mediaeval-picturesque, [35] and his ScotchCalvinism burns fiercely against the would-be restorers of mediaevalreligious formularies and the mummeries of "the old Pope of Rome"--aghastly survival of a dead creed. [36] He said that Newman had the brainof a good-sized rabbit. But in this matter of collectivism versusindividualism, Carlyle was with the Middle Ages. "For those were rugged, stalwart ages. . . . Gurth, born thrall of Cedric, it is like, got cuffsas often as pork-parings; but Gurth did belong to Cedric; no humancreature then went about connected with nobody; left to go his way intoBastilles or worse, under _Laissez-faire_. . . . That FeudalAristocracy, I say, was no imaginary one. . . . It was a LandAristocracy; it managed the Governing of this English People, and had thereaping of the Soil of England in return. . . . Soldiering, Police andJudging, Church-Extension, nay, real Government and Guidance, all thiswas actually _done_ by the Holders of Land in return for their Land. Howmuch of it is now done by them; done by anybody? Good Heavens!'_Laissez faire_, Do ye nothing, eat your wages and sleep, ' is everywherethe passionate half-wise cry of this time. " [37]

From 1850 onwards, in which year Ruskin made Carlyle's acquaintance, theformer fell under the dominion of these ideas, and began to preach aspecies of Aristocratic Socialism. [38] He denounced competition andprofit-seeking in commerce; the factory system; the capitalisticorganisation of industry. His scheme of a regenerated society, however, was by no means so democratic as that imagined by Morris in "News fromNowhere. " It was a "new feudalism" with a king at the head of it and arural nobility of "the great old families, " whose relations to theirtenantry are not very clearly defined. [39] Ruskin took some stepstowards putting into practice his plans for a reorganisation of labourunder improved conditions. "Fors Clavigera" consisted of a series ofletters to workingmen, inviting them to join him in establishing a fundfor rescuing English country life from the tyranny and defilement ofmachinery. In pursuance of this project, the St. George's Guild wasformed, about 1870, Ruskin devoting to it 7, 000 pounds of his own money. Trustees were chosen to administer the fund; a building was bought atWalkley, in the suburbs of Sheffield, for use as a museum; and the moneysubscribed was employed in promoting co-operative experiments inagriculture, manufacturing, and education. 

In 1848 the widespread misery among the English working class, bothagricultural labourers and the operatives in cities, broke out in astartling way in the Chartist movement. Sympathy with some of the aimsof this movement found literary expression in Charles Kingsley's novels, "Yeast" and "Alton Locke", in his widely circulated tract, "Cheap Clothesand Nasty"; in his letters in _Politics for the People_ over thesignature "Parson Lot"; in some of his ballads like "The Three Fishers";and in the writings of his friends, F. D. Maurice and Thomas Hughes. Butthe Christian Socialism of these Broad Churchmen was by no means of themediaeval type. Kingsley was an exponent of "Muscular Christianity. " Hehated the asceticism and sacerdotalism of the Oxford set, and challengedthe Tractarian movement with all his might. [40] Neither was thisChristian Socialism of a radical nature, like Morris'. It limited itselfto an endeavour to alleviate distress by an appeal to the good feeling ofthe upper classes; and by setting on foot trade-unions, co-operativesocieties, and workingmen's colleges. Kingsley himself, like Ruskin, believed in a landed gentry; and like both Ruskin and Carlyle, hedefended Governor Eyre of Jamaica against the attacks of the radicalpress. [41]

Ruskin and Morris travelled to Socialism by the pathway of art. Carlylehad early begun his complaints against the mechanical spirit of the age, and its too great reliance on machinery in all departments of thought andlife. [42] But Ruskin made war on machinery for different reasons. As alover of the beautiful, he hated its ugly processes and products. As astudent of art, he mourned over the reduction of the handicraftsman to aslave of the machine. Factories had poisoned the English sky with theirsmoke, and blackened English soil and polluted English rivers with theirrefuse. The railroad had spoiled Venice and vulgarised Switzerland. Hewould like to tear up all the railroads in Wales and most of those inEngland, and pull down the city of New York. He could not live inAmerica two months--a country without castles. Modern architecture, modern dress, modern manufactures, modern civilisation, were all utterlyhideous. Worst of all was the effect on the workman, condemned bycompetitive commercialism to turn out cheap goods, condemned by divisionof labour to spend his life in making the eighteenth part of a pin. Workwithout art, said Ruskin, is brutalising. To take pleasure in his work, said Morris, is the workman's best inducement to labour and his truestreward. In the Middle Ages every artisan was an artist; the art of theMiddle Ages was popular art. Now that the designer and thehandicraftsman are separate persons, the work of the former is unreal, and of the latter merely mechanical. 

This point of view is eloquently stated in that chapter on "The Nature ofGothic" in "The Stones of Venice, " which made so deep an impression onMorris when he was in residence at Oxford. [43] "It is verily thisdegradation of the operative into a machine which, more than any otherevil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere intovain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which theycannot explain the nature to themselves. Their universal outcry againstwealth and against nobility is not forced from them either by thepressure of famine or the sting of mortified pride. These do much, andhave done much in all ages; but the foundations of society were never yetshaken as they are at this day. It is not that men are ill-fed, but thatthey have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, andtherefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not thatmen are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot enduretheir own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they arecondemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. . . . We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilisedinvention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It isnot, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men--dividedinto mere segments of men--broken into small fragments and crumbs oflife, so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a manis not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making thepoint of a pin, or the head of a nail. . . . And the great cry thatrises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all, in very deed, for this--that we manufacture everything thereexcept men. . . . And all the evil to which that cry is urging ourmyriads can be met only . . . By a right understanding, on the part ofall classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, andmaking them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, orbeauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of theworkman. " [44]

Morris' contributions to the literature of Socialism include, besides hisromance, "News from Nowhere, " two volumes of verse, "Poems by the Way"(1891)and "The Dream of John Ball"; together with "Socialism: Its Growthand Outcome" (1893), an historical sketch of the subject written incollaboration with Mr. E. Belfort Bax. Mackail also describes asatirical interlude, entitled "The Tables Turned, or Nupkins Awakened, "which was acted thrice at Farringden Road in the autumn of 1887--aSocialistic farce in the form of a mediaeval miracle play--a conjunctionquite typical of the playwright's political principles and literarypreferences. Morris' ideal society, unlike Ruskin's, included no feudalelements; there was no room in it for kings, or nobles, or great cities, or a centralised government. It was primitive Teutonic rather thanmediaeval; resembling the communal type described in "The House of theWolfings. " There were to be no more classes--no rich or poor. Toordinary Socialists the reform means a fairer distribution of the jointproduct of capital and labour; higher wages for the workingman, shorterhours, better food and more of it, better clothes, better houses, moreamusements--in short, "beer and skittles" in reasonable amount. TheSocialism of Ruskin and Morris was an outcome of their aesthetic feeling. They liked to imagine the work people of the future as an intelligent andartistic body of handicraftsmen, living in pretty Gothic cottages amonggardens of their own, scattered all over England in small rural towns orvillages, and joyfully engaged in making sound and beautiful objects ofuse, tools, furniture, woven goods, etc. To the followers of Mr. Hyndmanthese motives, if not these aims, must have seemed somewhat unpractical. And in reading "Fors Clavigera, " one sometimes has a difficulty inunderstanding just what sort of person Ruskin imagined the Britishworkman to be. 

THE NEO-ROMANTICISTS. --The literature of each new generation is apt to bepartly an imitation of the last, and partly a reaction against it. Theimpulse first given by Rossetti was communicated, through Morris andSwinburne, to a group of younger poets whom Mr. Stedman distinguishes as"Neo-Romanticists. " [45] The most noteworthy among these are probablyArthur O'Shaughnessy, [46] John Payne, [47] and Théophile Marzials;[48]though mention (want of space forbids more) should also be made of GeorgeAugustus Simcox, whose "Poems and Romances" (1869) are in thePre-Raphaelite tradition. The work of each of these has pronouncedindividuality; yet, as a whole, it reminds one continually now ofRossetti, now of Morris, and again of Swinburne; not infrequently, too, of Keats or Leigh Hunt, but never of the older romanticism, never ofScott nor even of Coleridge or Tennyson. The reminder comes sometimesthrough a turn of phrase or the trick of the verse; but more insistentlyin the choice of subject and the entire attitude of the poet towards artand life, an attitude that may be vaguely described as "aesthetic. " Evenmore distinctly than in Swinburne, English romanticism in these latestrepresentatives is seen to be taking a French direction. They show theinfluence not only of Hugo and Gautier, but of those more recent schoolsof "decadents" which exhibit French romanticism in its deliquescentstage; writers like Theodore de Banville and Charles Baudelaire; bookslike Aloysius Bertrand's "Gaspard de la Nuit. " Morbid states of passion, the hectic bloom of fever, heady perfumes of the Orient and the tropics;the bitter-sweet blossom of love; forced fruits of the hot-house (_serreschaudes_); the iridescence of standing pools; the fungoidal growths ofdecay; such are some of the hackneyed metaphors which render theimpression of this neo-romantic poetry. 

Marzials was born at, Brussels, of French parents. His "Gallery ofPigeons" is inscribed to the modern Provençal poet Aubanel, andintroduced by a French sonnet. O'Shaughnessy "was half a Frenchman inhis love for, and mastery of, the French language";[49] and on hisfrequent visits to Paris, made close acquaintance with Victor Hugo andthe younger school of French poets. O'Shaughnessy and Payne wereintimate friends, and dedicated their first books to each other. In1870-72 they were members of the literary circle that assembled at thehouse of Ford Madox Brown, and there they met the Rossettis, Morris, Swinburne, and William Bell Scott. O'Shaughnessy emerges most distinctlyfrom the group by reason of his very original and exquisite lyricalgift--a gift not fully recognised till Mr. Palgrave accorded him, in thesecond series of his "Golden Treasury" (1897), a greater number ofselections than any Victorian poet but Tennyson: a larger space than hegave either to Browning or Rossetti or Matthew Arnold. [50] Comparativelylittle of O'Shaughnessy's work belongs to the department ofmediaeval-romantic. His "Lays of France, " five in number, are foundedupon the _lais_ of Marie de France, the Norman poetess of the thirteenthcentury whose little fable, "Du coq et du werpil, " Chaucer expanded intohis "Nonne Prestes Tale. " O'Shaughnessy's versions are not so muchparaphrases as independent poems, following Marie's stories merely inoutline. 

The verse is the eight-syllabled couplet with variations and alternateriming, the style follows the graceful, fluent simplicity of the OldFrench; and in its softly articulated, bright-coloured prolixity, thenarrative frequently suggests "The Earthly Paradise" or "The Story ofRimini. " The most remarkable of these pieces is "Chaitivel, " in whichthe body of a bride is carried away by a dead lover, while another deadlover comes back from his grave in Palestine and fights with thebridegroom for possession of her soul. The song which the lady sings tothe buried man is true to that strange mediaeval materialism, thecleaving of "soul's love" to "body's love, " the tenderness intense thatpierces the "wormy circumstance" of the tomb, and refuses to let the deadbe dead, which was noted in Keats' "Isabella":

 "Hath any loved you well, down there, Summer or winter through? Down there, have you found any fair Laid in the grave with you? Is death's long kiss a richer kiss Than mine was wont to be-- Or have you gone to some far bliss And quite forgotten me?"

Of similar inspiration, but more pictorially and externally Gothic, aresuch tales as "The Building of the Dream" and "Sir Floris" in Payne'svolume, "The Masque of Shadows. " The former of these, introduced by aquotation from Jehan du Mestre, is the history of a certain squire ofPoitou, who devotes himself to necromancy and discovers a spell in an oldGreek manuscript, whereby, having shod his horse with gold and riddenseven days into the west, he comes to the enchanted land of Dame Venusand dwells with her a season. But the bliss is insupportable by amortal, and he returns to his home and dies. The poem has analogies with"The Earthly Paradise" and the Tannhäuser legend. The ancient city ofPoitou, where the action begins, is elaborately described, with its "lazygrace of old romance";

 "Fair was the place and old Beyond the memory of man, with roofs Tall-peak'd and hung with woofs Of dainty stone-work, jewell'd with the grace Of casements, in the face Of the white gables inlaid, in all hues Of lovely reds and blues. At every corner of the winding ways A carven saint did gaze, With mild sweet eyes, upon the quiet town, From niche and shrine of brown; And many an angel, graven for a charm To save the folk from harm Of evil sprites, stood sentinel above High pinnacle and roof. "

"Sir Floris" is an allegorical romaunt founded on a passage in "LeViolier des Histoires Provenciaux. " The dedication, to the author of"Lohengrin, " praises Wolfram von Eschenbach, the poet of "Parzival, " as"the sweetest of all bards. " Sir Floris, obeying a voice heard in sleep, followed a white dove to an enchanted garden, where he slew sevenmonsters, symbolic of the seven deadly sins; from whose blood sprang upthe lily of chastity, the rose of love, the violet of humility, theclematis of content, the marigold of largesse, the mystic marguerite, andthe holy vervain "that purgeth earth's desire. " Sir Galahad then carrieshim in a magic boat to the Orient city of Sarras, where the Grail isenshrined and guarded by a company of virgin knights, Percival, Lohengrin, Titurel, and Bors. Sir Floris sees the sacred chalice--asingle emerald--lays his nosegay upon the altar, witnesses the mystery ofthe eucharist, and is kissed upon the mouth by Christ. This poet is fondof introducing old French words "to make his English sweet upon histongue"; _accueillade_, _valiantise_, _faineant_, _allegresse_, _gentilesse_, _forte et dure_, and occasionally a phrase like _dieu vousdoint felicité_. Payne's ballads are less characteristic. [51] Perhapsthe most successful of them is "The Rime of Redemption"--in "The Masqueof Shadows" volume. Sir Loibich's love has died in her sins, and he sitsby the fire in bitter repentance. He hears the voice of her spiritoutside in the moonlight, and together they ride through the night on ablack steed, first to Fairyland, then to Purgatory, and then to the gateof Heaven. Each of these in turn is offered him, but he rejects themall--

 "With thee in hell, I choose to dwell"--

and thereby works her redemption. The wild night ride has an obviousresemblance to "Lenore":

 "The wind screams past; they ride so fast, Like troops of souls in pain The snowdrifts spin, but none may win To rest upon the twain. "

Very different from these, and indeed with no pretensions to the formalpeculiarities of popular minstrelsy, is O'Shaughnessy's weird ballad"Bisclaveret, " [52] suggested by the superstition concerning were-wolves:

 "The splendid fearful herds that stray By midnight"-- "The multitudinous campaign Of hosts not yet made fast in Hell. "

_Bisclaveret_ is the Breton word for _loup garou_; and the poem is headedwith a caption to this effect from the "Lais" of Marie. The wild, mystical beauty of which the Celtic imagination holds the secret isvisible in this lyrist; but it would perhaps be going too far toattribute his interest in the work of Marie de France to a nativesympathy with the song spirit of that other great branch of the Celticrace, the ancient Cymry. 

Payne's volume of sonnets, "Intaglios" (a title perhaps prompted by thechiselled workmanship of Gautier's "Emaux et Camées") bears the clearestmarks of Rossetti's influence--or of the influence of Dante throughRossetti. The inscription poem is to Dante, and the series named"Madonna dei Sogni" is particularly full of the imagery and sentiment ofthe "Purgatorio" and the "Vita Nuova. " Several of the sonnets in thecollection are written for pictures, like Rossetti's. Two are onSpenserian subjects, "Belphoebe" and "The Garden of Adonis", and one, "Bride-Night" is suggested by Wagner's "Tristram und Isolde. " Payne'swork as a translator is of importance, and includes versions of the"Decameron, " "The Thousand and One Nights, " and the poems of FrançoisVillon, all made for the Villon Society. 

Jewels and flowers are set thickly enough in the pages of all thisschool; but it is in Théophile Marzials' singular, yet very attractive, verses that the luxurious colour in which romance delights, and thedecorative features of Pre-Raphaelite art run into the most _bizarre_excesses. He wantons in dainty affectations of speech and eccentricitiesof phantasy. Here we find again the orchard closes, the pleachedpleasances, and all those queer picture paradises, peopled with talllilied maidens, angels with peacock wings and thin gold hoops above theirheads, and court minstrels thrumming lutes, rebecks, and mandolins--

 "I dreamed I was a virginal-- The gilt one of Saint Cecily's. "

The book abounds in nocturnes, arabesques, masquerades, bagatelles, rococo pastorals. The lady in "The Gallery of Pigeons" sits at herbroidery frame and works tapestries for her walls. At night she sleepsin the northern tower where

 "Above all tracery, carven flower, And grim gurgoil is her bower-window";

and higher up a griffin clings against a cornice, "And gnashes and grins in the green moonlight, "

and higher still, the banderolle flutters

 "At the top of the thinnest pinnacle peak. "

In a Pre-Raphaelite heaven the maidens sit in the blessed mother'schamber and spin garments for the souls in Limbo, or press sweet wine forthe sacrament, or illuminate missals with quaint phantasies. Mr. Stedmanquotes a few lines which he says have the air of parody:

 "They chase them each, below, above, -- Half madden'd by their minstrelsy, -- Thro' garths of crimson gladioles; And, shimmering soft like damoisels, The angels swarm in glimmering shoals, And pin them to their aureoles, And mimick back their ritournels. "

This reads, indeed, hardly less like a travesty than the well-knownverses in _Punch_:

 "Glad lady mine, that glitterest In shimmer of summer athwart the lawn; Canst tell me whether is bitterest, The glamour of eve, or the glimmer of dawn?"

This stained-glass imagery was so easy to copy that, before long, citolesand damoisels and aureoles and garths and glamours and all the rest ofthe picturesque furniture grew to be a burden. The artistic movement hadinvaded dress and upholstery, and Pre-Raphaelitism tapered down intoaestheticism, domestic art, and the wearing of sunflowers. Du Maurierbecame its satirist; Bunthorn and Postlethwaite presented it to thephilistine understanding in a grotesque mixture of caricature andquackery. 

THE REACTION. --Literary epochs overlap at the edges, and contrastingliterary modes coexist. There was some romantic poetry written in Pope'stime; and in the very heat and fury of romantic predominance, Landor kepta cool chamber apart, where incense was burned to the ancient gods. [53]But it is the master current which gives tinge and direction to lesserconfluents; and romanticism may be said to have had everything its ownway down to the middle of the century. Then reaction set in and thestream of romantic tendency ceased to spread itself over the wholeliterary territory, but flowed on in the narrower and deeper channels ofPre-Raphaelitism and its allied movements. This reaction expresseditself in different ways, of which it will be sufficient here to mentionthree: realistic fiction, classical criticism, and the Queen Anne revival. 

The leading literary form of the past fifty years has been the novel ofreal life. The failure of "Les Burgraves" in 1843 not more surelysignalised the end of French romanticism, than the appearance of "VanityFair" in 1848 announced that in England, too, the reign of romance wasover. Classicism had given way before romanticism, and now romanticismin turn was yielding to realism. Realism sets itself against that desireof escape from actual conditions into an ideal world, which is a note ofthe romantic spirit in general; and consequently it refuses to find thepast any more interesting than the present, and has no use for the MiddleAges. The temperature, too, had cooled; not quite down to the Augustangrade, yet to a point considerably below the fever heat registered by theemotional thermometer of the late Georgian era. Byron's contemporarieswere shocked by his wickedness and dazzled by his genius. Theyremonstrated admiringly with him; young ladies wept over his poetry andprayed for the poet's conversion. But young university men ofThackeray's time discovered that Byron was a _poseur_; Thackeray himselfdescribes him as "a big, sulky dandy. " "The Sorrows of Werther, " whichmade people cry in the eighteenth century, made Thackeray laugh; and hesummed it up in a doggerel ballad:

 "Charlotte was a married woman And a moral man was Werther, And for nothing in creation Would do anything to hurt her. "

 * * * * *

 "Charlotte, having seen his body Borne before her on a shutter, Like a well-conducted woman, Went on cutting bread and butter. "

Mr. Howells in Venice sneers at Byron's theatrical habit of ridinghorseback on the Lido in "conspicuous solitude, " as recorded in "Julianand Maddalo. " He notices the local traditions about Byron--a window fromwhich one of his mistresses was said to have thrown herself into thecanal, etc. --and confesses that these matters interest him very little. 

As to the Walter Scott kind of romance, we know what Mr. Howells thinksof it; and have read "Rebecca and Rowena, " Thackeray's travesty of"Ivanhoe. " Thackeray took no print from the romantic generation; hepassed it over, and went back to Addison, Fielding, Goldsmith, Swift. His masters were the English humourists of the eighteenth century. Heplanned a literary history of that century, a design which was carriedout on other lines by his son-in-law, Leslie Stephen. If he wrotehistorical novels, their period was that of the Georges, and not ofRichard the Lion Heart. It will not do, of course, to lay too muchstress on Thackeray, whose profession was satire and whose temper purelyanti-romantic. But if we turn to the leaders of the modern schools offiction, we shall find that some of them, like George Eliot and AnthonyTrollope, are even more closely realistic than Thackeray--who, says Mr. Howells, is a caricaturist, not a true realist--and of others such asDickens and Meredith, we shall find that, in whatever way they deviatefrom realism as strictly understood, it is not in the direction ofromance. 

In Matthew Arnold's critical essays we meet with a restatement ofclassical principles and an application of them to the literature of thelast generation. There was something premature, he thinks, about theburst of creative activity in the first quarter of the nineteenthcentury. Byron was empty of matter, Shelley incoherent, Wordsworthwanting in completeness and variety. He finds much to commend in theinfluence of a literary tribunal like the French Academy, which embodiesthat ideal of authority so dear to the classical heart. Such aninstitution acts as a salutary check on the lawlessness, eccentricity, self-will, and fantasticality which are the besetting intellectual sinsof Englishmen. It sets the standard and gives the law. "Work done aftermen have reached this platform is _classical_; and that is the only workwhich, in the long run, can stand. " For want of some such organ ofeducated opinion, to take care of the qualities of order, balance, measure, propriety, correctness, English men of genius like Ruskin andCarlyle, in their national impatience of prescription and routine, run oninto all manner of violence, freak, and extravagance. 

Again, in the preface of the 1853 edition of his poems, Arnold assertsthe superiority of the Greek theory of poetry to the modern. "Theyregarded the whole; we regard the parts. With them the actionpredominated over the expression of it; with us the expressionpredominates over the action. . . . We have poems which seem to existmerely for the sake of single lines and passages; not for the sake ofproducing any total impression. "

"Faust" itself, judged as a whole, is defective. Failing a sure guide, in the confusion of the present times, the wisest course for the youngwriter is to fix his attention upon the best models. But Shakspere isnot so safe a model as the ancients. He has not their purity of method, and his gift of expression sometimes leads him astray. "Mr. Hallam, thanwhom it is impossible to find a saner and more judicious critic, has hadthe courage (for at the present day it needs courage) to remark, howextremely and faultily difficult Shakspere's language often is. " Half acentury earlier it would have needed courage to question Hallam's remark;but the citation shows how thoroughly Coleridge and Hazlitt and Lamb hadshifted the centre of orthodoxy in matters of Shaksperian criticism. _Now_ the presumption was against any one who ventured a doubt ofShakspere's impeccability. The romantic victory was complete. "But, Isay, " pursues the essayist, "that in the sincere endeavour to learn andpractise . . . What is sound and true in poetical art, I seemed to myselfto find the only sure guidance, the only solid footing, among theancients. " All this has a familiar look to one at all read ineighteenth-century criticism; but in 1853 it sounds very much like heresy. 

As an instance of the inferiority of romantic to classical method innarrative poetry, Arnold refers to Keats' "Isabella. " [54] "This oneshort poem contains, perhaps, a greater number of happy singleexpressions which one could quote than all the extant tragedies ofSophocles. But the action, the story? The action in itself is anexcellent one; but so feebly is it conceived by the poet, so looselyconstructed, that the effect produced by it, in and for itself, isabsolutely null. Let the reader, after he has finished the poem ofKeats, turn to the same story in the 'Decameron'; he will then feel howpregnant and interesting the same action has become in the hands of agreat artist who, above all things, delineates his object; whosubordinates expression to that which it is designed to express. "

A sentence or two from Arnold's essay on Heinrich Heine, and we may leavethis part of our subject. "Mr. Carlyle attaches, it seems to me, far toomuch importance to the romantic school of Germany--Tieck, Novalis, JeanPaul Richter. . . . The mystic and romantic school of Germany lostitself in the Middle Ages, was overpowered by their influence, came toruin by its vain dreams of renewing them. Heine, with a far profoundersense of the mystic and romantic charm of the Middle Age than Görres, orBrentano, or Arnim; Heine, the chief romantic poet of Germany, is yetalso much more than a romantic poet; he is a great modern poet, he is notconquered by the Middle Age, he has a talisman by which he can feel, along with but above the power of the fascinating Middle Age itself, thepower of modern ideas. "

And, finally, the oscillation of the pendulum has brought us back againfor a moment to the age of gayety, and to that very Queen Anne spiritagainst which the serious and sentimental Thomson began the revolt. There is not only at present a renewed appreciation of what was admirablein the verse of Pope and the prose of Swift, but we discover a quaintattractiveness in the artificiality of Augustan manners, dress, andspeech. Lace and brocade, powder and patch, Dutch gardens, Reynolds'portraits, Watteau fans, Dresden china, the sedan chair, the spinet, thehoop-skirt, the _talon rouge_--all these have receded so far into theperspective as to acquire picturesqueness. To Scott's generation theyseemed eminently modern and prosaic, while buff jerkins and coats of mailwere poetically remote. But so the whirligig of time brings in itsrevenges, and the old-fashioned, as distinguished from the antique, begins to have a romanticness of its own. It is now some quarter centurysince people took to building Queen Anne cottages, and gentlemen atcostume parties to treading minuets in small clothes and perukes, withladies in high-cushioned hair and farthingales. Girl babies in largenumbers were baptised Dorothy and Belinda. Book illustrators like KateGreenaway, Edwin Abbey, and Hugh Thomson carried the mode into art. Thedate of the Queen Anne revival in literature and the beginnings of the_bric-à-brac_ school of verse are marked with sufficient precision by thepublication of Austin Dobson's "Vignettes in Rhyme" (1873), "Proverbs inPorcelain" (1877), and the other delightful volumes of the same kind thathave followed. Mr. Dobson has also published, in prose, lives of Steele, Fielding, Hogarth, and Goldsmith; "Eighteenth-Century Vignettes, " and thelike. But his particular ancestor among the Queen Anne wits was MatthewPrior, of whose metrical tales, epigrams, and _vers de société_ he hasmade a little book of selections, and whose gallantry, lightness, andtone of persiflage, just dashed with sentiment, he has reproduced withadmirable spirit in his own original work. 

It was upon the question of Pope that romantics and classics first joinedissue in the time of Warton, and that the critical battle was fought inthe time of Bowles and Byron; the question of his real place inliterature, and of his title to the name of poet. Mr. Dobson has a wordto say for Pope, and with this our enquiries may fittingly end:

 "Suppose you say your Worst of POPE, declare His Jewels Paste, his Nature a Parterre, His Art but Artifice--I ask once more Where have you seen such artifice before? Where have you seen a Parterre better grac'd, Or gems that glitter like his Gems of Paste? Where can you show, among your Names of Note, So much to copy and so much to quote? And where, in Fine, in all our English Verse, A Style more trenchant and a Sense more terse?"

 "So I, that love the old Augustan Days Of formal courtesies and formal Phrase; That like along the finish'd Line to feel The Ruffle's Flutter and the Flash of Steel; That like my Couplet as Compact as Clear; That like my Satire sparkling tho' severe, Unmix'd with Bathos and unmarr'd by trope, I fling my Cap for Polish--and for POPE!" [55]

But ground once gained in a literary movement is never wholly lost; and areversion to an earlier type is never complete. The classicism ofMatthew Arnold is not at all the classicism of the eighteenth century;Thackeray's realism is not the realism of Fielding. It is what it is, partly just because Walter Scott had written his Waverley Novels in themean while. Apart from the works for which it is directly responsible, the romantic movement had enriched the blood of the literature, and itsresults are seen even in writings hostile to the romantic principles. Asto the absolute value of the great romantic output of the nineteenthcentury, it may be at once acknowledged that, as "human documents, " bookswhich reflect contemporary life have a superior importance to thecreations of the modern imagination, playing freely over times and placesdistant, and attractive through their distance; over ancient Greece orthe Orient or the Middle Age. But that a very beautiful and quitelegitimate product of literary art may spring from this contact of thepresent with the past, it is hoped that our history may have shown. 

[1] See vol. I. , pp. 31-32. 

[2] "Apologia pro Vita Sua, " p. 139. 

[3] "It would require the . . . Magic pen of Sir Walter to catalogue andto picture . . . That most miserable procession" ("Callista: a Sketch ofthe Third Century, " 1855; chapter, "Christianos ad Leones"). It iscurious to compare this tale of the early martyrs, Newman's solitaryessay in historical romance, with "Hypatia. " It has the intellectualrefinement of everything that came from its author's pen; and it hasstrong passages like the one describing the invasion of the locusts. But, upon the whole, Newman was as inferior to Kingsley as a novelist ashe was superior to him in the dialectics of controversy. 

[4] See the entire section "Selections from Newman, " by Lewis G. Gates, New York, 1895. Introduction, pp. Xlvi-lix. 

[5] "Essays Critical and Historical" (1846). 

[6] "Reminiscences, " Thomas Mozley, Boston, 1882. 

[7] "Life and Letters of Dean Church, " London, 1894. 

[8] "Recollections of Aubrey de Vere, " London, 1897. 

[9] "Idea of a University" (1853). See also in "Parochial and PlainSermons" the discourse on "The Danger of Accomplishments, " and that on"The Gospel Palaces. " In the latter he writes, speaking of thecathedrals: "Unhappy they who, while they have eyes to admire, admirethem only for their beauty's sake; . . . Who regard them as works of art, not fruits of grace. "

[10] Cardinal Wiseman had a decided preference for Renaissance overGothic, and the churches built under his authority were mostly in Italianstyles. 

[11] "William George Ward and the Oxford Movement, " London, 1889, pp. 153-55. 

[12] "Recollections, " p. 309. 

[13] Frederick William Faber, one of the Oxford men who went over withNewman in 1845, and became Superior of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, was a religious poet of some distinction. A collection of his hymns waspublished in 1862. 

[14] "Ritterzeit und Ritterwesen. "

[15] See vol. I. , pp. 221-26. 

[16] Vol. I. , p. 44 (ed. 1846). 

[17] _Ibid. _, pp. 315-16. 

[18] _Ibid. _, p. 350. 

[19] See vol. I. , chap. Vii. , "The Gothic Revival. "

[20] A view of Fonthill Abbey, as it appeared in 1822, is given inFergusson's "History of Modern Architecture, " vol. Ii. , p. 98 (third ed. ). 

[21] For Scott's influence on Gothic see Eastlake's "Gothic Revival, " pp. 112-16. A typical instance of this castellated style in America was theold New York University in Washington Square, built in the thirties. This is the "Chrysalis College" which Theodore Winthrop ridicules in"Cecil Dreeme" for its "mock-Gothic" pepper-box turrets, and "deciduousplaster. " Fan traceries in plaster and window traceries in cast ironwere abominations of this period. 

[22] _Vide supra_, p. 153. 

[23] "A blast from the icy jaws of Reason, the wolf Fenris of theTeutonic mind, swept one and all into the Limbo of oblivion--that soleante-chamber spared by Protestantism in spoiling Purgatory. Perhaps thiswas necessary and inevitable. If we would repair the column, we must cutaway the ivy that clings around the shaft, the flowers and brushwood thatconceal the base; but it does not follow that, when the repairs arecompleted, we should isolate it in a desert, --that the flowers andbrushwood should not be allowed to grow up and caress it as before" (vol. Ii. , p. 380, second ed. ). 

[24] Vol. Ii. , p. 364, _note_; and _vide supra_, p. 152. 

[25] _Ibid. _, p. 289. 

[26] _Vide supra_, p. 34. 

[27] _Ibid. _, p. 286, _note_. 

[28] "Stones of Venice, " vol. Ii. , p. 295 (American ed. 1860). 

[29] _Ibid. _, vol. Iii. , p. 213. 

[30] _Ibid. _, vol. Ii. , pp. 109-14. 

[31] See the final instalment of "Praeterita" for an extended eulogy ofScott's verse and prose. 

[32] "I know what white, what purple fritillaries The grassy harvest of the river-fields Above by Ensham, down by Sandford, yields. " --Matthew Arnold, "Thyrsis. "

[33] "Stones of Venice, " vol. Iii. , p. 211. 

[34] _Ibid. _, vol. Ii. , p. 4. 

[35] _Vide supra_, p. 35. 

[36] "I reckon him the remarkablest Pontiff that has darkened God'sdaylight. . . . Here is a Supreme Priest who believes God to be--what, in the name of God, _does_ he believe God to be?--and discerns that allworship of God is a scenic phantasmagory of wax-candles, organ-blasts, Gregorian chants, mass-brayings, purple monsignori, etc. " ("Past andPresent, " Book iii. , chap. I. ). 

[37] Ibid. , Book iv. , chap. I. 

[38] With Morris, too, when an Oxford undergraduate, "Carlyle's 'Past andPresent, '" says his biographer, "stood alongside of 'Modern Painters' asinspired and absolute truth. "

[39] For a systematic exposition of Ruskin's social and politicalphilosophy, the reader should consult "John Ruskin, Social Reformer, " byJ. A. Hobson, London, 1898. 

[40] _Vide supra_, pp. 279, 280. 

[41] For a number of years, beginning with 1854, Ruskin taught drawingclasses in Maurice's Working Man's College. 

[42] See "Characteristics" and "Signs of the Times. "

[43] _Vide supra_, p. 321. 

[44] Vol. Ii. , chap. Vi. , section xv. , xvi. Morris reprinted the wholechapter on the Kelmscott Press. 

[45] "Victorian Poets, " chap. Vii. , section vi. 

[46] "An Epic of Women" (1870); "Lays of France" (1872); "Music andMoonlight" (1874); "Songs of a Worker" (1881). 

[47] "A Masque of Shadows" (1870): "Intaglios" (1871); "Songs of Life andDeath" (1872); "Lautrec" (1878); "New Poems" (1880). 

[48] "A Gallery of Pigeons" (1873). 

[49] "Arthur O'Shaughnessy. " By Louise Chandler-Moulton, Cambridge andChicago, 1894. 

[50] Swinburne, as a living author, is not represented in the "Treasury. "O'Shaughnessy's metrical originality is undoubted. But one of his finestlyrics, "The Fountain of Tears, " has an echo of Baudelaire's Americanmaster, Edgar Poe, as well as of Swinburne;

 "Very peaceful the place is, and solely For piteous lamenting and sighing, And those who come living or dying Alike from their hopes and their fears: Full of cypress-like shadows the place is, And statues that cover their faces; But out of the gloom springs the holy And beautiful Fountain of Tears. "

[51] See especially "Sir Erwin's Questing, " "The Ballad of May Margaret, ""The Westward Sailing, " and "The Ballad of the King's Daughter" in "Songsof Life and Death. "

[52] In "An Epic of Women. "

[53] "From time to time bright spirits, intolerant of the traditional, try to alter the bournes of time and space in these respects, and to makeout that the classical, whatever the failings on its part, was always inits heart rather Romantic, and that the Romantic has always, at its best, been just a little classical. . . . But such observations are only ofuse as guards against a too wooden and matter-of-fact classification; thegreat general differences of the periods remain, and can never be removedin imagination without loss and confusion" ("A Short History of EnglishLiterature, " Saintsbury, p. 724). 

[54] _Vide supra_, pp. 123-25. 

[55] "A Dialogue to the Memory of Mr. Alexander Pope. "

THE END. 

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 INDEX. 

 Abbot, The, 42 Aben-Humeya, 246 Addison, Jos. , 95 Adonais, 120 Age of Wordsworth, The, 12, 24, 34, 87, 88 Ahnung und Gegenwart, 147 Alhambra, The, 239 Allemagne, L', 139, 141-45, 192, 208 Allingham, Wm. , 258, 300, 304, 324 Alonzo the Brave, 77, 83 Alton Locke, 383 Amadis of Gaul, 236, 241 Amber Witch, The, 42, 280 Ancient Mariner, The, 48, 49, 54, 74-80 Ancient Poetry and Romance of Spain, 248 Ancient Spanish Ballads, 239, 247-49 Anima Poetae, 78 Annales Romantiques, 201 Anthony, 198 Antiquary, The, 31, 33, 178 Appreciations, 42 Ariosto, Lodovico, 91, 104, 107, 109, 122 Arme Heinrich, Der, 297 Arnim, Achim von, 134, 138, 155, 167, 192, 400 Arnold, Matthew, 255, 256, 263, 274-76, 278, 280, 356, 378, 398-400, 402 Arthur's Tomb, 305 Aslauga's Knight, 168 Aspects of Poetry, 18 At Eleusis, 342 Athenaeum, The, 134 Aucassin et Nicolete, 330 Aue, Hartmann von, 297 Aulnoy, Comtesse d', 194 Austin, Sarah, 162, 170 Ave atque Vale, 349

 Bagehot, Walter, 39 Balin and Balan, 347, 348 Ballad of a Nun, 263, 264 Ballad of Dead Ladies, 298 Ballad of Judas Iscariot, 263 Ballade à la Lune, 189 Ballads and Sonnets (Rossetti), 310 Ballads of Irish Chivalry, 260 Balzac, Honoré de, 42 Bande Noire, La, 216 Banshee and Other Poems, The, 261 Banville, Théodore F. De, 388 Barante, P. A. P. B. , 226 Bards of the Gael and the Gall, 260 Basso, Andrea de, 110 Baudelaire, Chas. , 388, 389 Bax, E. B. , 386 Beata Beatrix, 291, 303, 310 Beckford, Wm. , 367 Belle Dame sans Merci, La, 86, 118, 119, 127, 262, 279, 303, 307 Berlioz, Hector, l80, 181 Bertrand, A. , 175, 388 Beyle, Henri. See Stendhal. Biographia Literaria, 48, 55, 63, 88, 89 Bisclaveret, 393 Blackmore, Sir Richard, 269, 270 Blake, Wm. , 99 Blessed Damozel, The, 285, 301, 308, 311, 343 Blue Closet, The, 305 Blüthenstaub, 167 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 92, 123, 124 Bowles, W. L. , 55-73 Bowring, Sir Jno. , 248 Boyd, Henry, 96, 97 Boyesen, H. H. , 139, 159, 160, 165 Brandl, Alois, 50-55, 75, 77, 82, 86 Brentano, Clemens, 134, 138, 141, 147, 153, 155, 167, 192, 247, 400 Bridal of Triermain, The, 6, 13, 14 Bride's Prelude, The, 300, 311 Broad Stone of Honour, The, 363-66 Brooke, Stopford A. , 261 Brown, F. M. , 389 Brownie of Bodsbeck, The, 253 Browning, Elizabeth B. , 277, 278 Browning, Robert, 190, 221, 276, 277 Buchanan, Robert, 263 Building of the Dream, The, 390, 391 Bürger, G. A. , 83, 133, 144, 159, 192, 297 Burgraves, Les, 226, 299, 396 Burke, Edmund, 145 Burne-Jones, Edward, 285, 304, 305, 309, 318-20, 322, 324, 340 Byron, Geo. Gordon, Lord, 8, 9, 26, 53, 60, 65-73, 81, 84, 99-101, 106, 116-18, 171, 192, 195, 196, 203, 232-34, 246, 333, 396-98

 Caine, T. Hall, 279, 296, 301, 302, 308 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 156, 192, 234, 247 Calidore, 129 Callista, 355, 357 Calverley, C. S. , 249 Campbell, Thomas, 64-67, 71, 72 Cancionero, The, 246 Carlyle, Thos. , 15, 35, 39, 92, 103, 110, 137, 149, 151, 160, 162, 164, 168, 171, 335, 381, 382, 384, 398, 400 Cary, Henry F. , 97-99, 102 Castle by the Sea, The 170 Castle of Otranto, The, 4, 10 Cecil Dreeme, 367 Chaitivel, 390 Chartier, Alain, 118 Chasse du Burgrave, La, 189, 277 Chateaubriand, F. A. De, 90, 176, 191, 202-08, 225, 246, 363 Chatterton, Thos. , 52, 54, 86, 119, 191, 300 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 93, 315-17, 328, 329 Cheap Clothes and Nasty, 383 Chevaliers de la Table Ronde, Les, 225 Childe Harold, 70, 73, 91, 99, 233 Childe Roland, 276 Christabel, 14, 27, 49, 53, 54, 75, 80-85, 126, 296 Christian Year, The, 357, 361 Christmas Carol, A, 343 Chronicle of the Cid, 236 Cinq Mars, 191 Civil Wars of Granada, The, 247 Cloister and the Hearth, The, 230, 231 Coleridge, S. T. , 9, 12-14, 27, 48-63, 74-89, 97-99, 119, 126, 127, 136-38, 158, l59, 168, 291, 295-97, 314, 355 Collins, J. Churton, 257, 260 Collinson, Jas. , 284, 292, 293 Colvin, Sidney, 116, 127 Conde Alarcos, 247 Congal, 260 Conquête d'Angleterre, La, 39, 226 Conservateur Littéraire, Le, 201 Conspiracy of Venice, The, 246 Contes Bizarres, 167 Contes Drolatiques, 42 Contrasts, 368-71, 375 Count Gismond, 276 Courthope, W. J. , 314 Cowper, Wm. , 57, 58, 68 Croker, T. C. , 253, 256, 258 Cromwell, 90, 218, 221 Cross, W. L. , 1, 31, 38

 Dante, Alighieri, 40, 90-113, 122, 282, 290, 298-301, 310, 311, 362, 393 Dante and his Circle, 299, 303 Dante at Verona, 310 Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Sharp), 291, 292, 306 Dante's Dream, 291 Dark Ladie, The, 49, 86 Dark Rosaleen, 259 Dasent, Sir Geo. , 334 Davidson, Jno. , 263, 264 Day Dream, The, 265-67 Death of Mlle. De Sombreuil, The, 216 Decameron, The, 123, 124, 393, 400 Defence of Guenevere, The, 275, 296, 309, 321, 324-28 Defence of Poetry (Shelley), 101 Deirdrè, 260 Dejection: an Ode, 60, 86 Delacroix, Eugène, 177, 178 De Quincey, Thos. , 38 Development of the English Novel, The, 1, 31, 38 Devéria, Eugène, 178, 195 Dialogue to the Memory of Mr. Alexander Pope, 402 Dies Irae, 5, 153 Digby, Kenelm H. , 319, 363-66, 379 Discourse of the Three Unities, 133 Divine Comedy, The, 92-99, 102, 103, 105, 109, 111, 282, 290, 310, 362, 366 Djinns, The, 189 Dobell, Sydney, 262, 263 Dobson, Austin, 401, 402 Don Alvaro, 246 Dondey, Théophile, 185, 190 Don Quixote, 156, 241 Dream of Gerontius, The, 362 Dream of John Ball, The, 386 Dryden, Jno. , 117, 124, 125, 269 Ducs de Bourgogne, Les, 226 Dumas, Alexandre, 198, 209 Dürer, Albrecht, 152, 153, 324, 373, 374

 Earthly Paradise, The, 237, 238, 315, 321, 328-32, 334, 380, 390, 391 Ecclesiologist, The, 375 Edda, The, 334 Eden Bower, 315 Eichendorff, Joseph von, 146 Eighteenth Century Vignettes, 401 Elfinland Wud, 254, 255 Elves, The, 163 Emerson, R. W. , 165, 166, 307 Endymion, 121, 126, 128, 342 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 26, 60, 63, 69, 70, 72 English Contemporary Art, 293 Enid, 270, 272 Epic and Romance, 46, 47 Epic of Women, An, 393 Epipsychidion, 101, 310 Erfindung des Rosenkranzes, Die, 153 Erl King, The, 192 Erskine, Wm. , 6, 7, 13 Espronceda, José de, 246 Essay on Epic Poetry (Hayley), 95 Essays and Studies (Swinburne), 349, 351 Essays on German Literature (Boyesen), 139, 159, 160, 165 Essays on the Picturesque (Price), 34 Eve of St. Agnes, The, 85, 107, 120-22, 125-29, 307 Eve of St. John, The, 13, 22, 23 Eve of St. Mark, The, 130, 131

 Faber, F. W. , 360, 362 Faërie Queene, The, 120, 275 Fairies, The, 258 Fair Inez, 279 Fairy Legends of the South of Ireland, 253, 256, 258 Fairy Thorn, The, 258 Familiar Studies of Men and Books, 32 Fantasio, 226 Faust, 178, 191, 192, 238 Feast of the Poets, The, 108 Ferguson, Sir Samuel, 258-60 Fichte, J. G. , 137 Fin du Classicisme, La, 175 Ford, R. , 246, 248 Forest Lovers, The, 230-32 Fors Clavigera, 380, 383, 387 Fountain of Tears, The, 389 Fouqué, F. De la M. , 36, 139, 140, 153, 162, 167-69, 324, 363, 373 Fourteen Sonnets (Bowles), 55, 58-61 Fragments from German Prose Writers, 162 Frere, Jno. H. , 248 From Shakspere to Pope, 116

 Gallery of Pigeons, The, 388, 394, 395 Gareth and Lynette, 274 Gaspard de la Nuit, 388 Gates, L. E. , 129, 355, 356 Gaule Poétique, La, 225 Gautier, Théophile, 167, 176-81, 183-85, 187, 188, 191-93, 195-98, 202, 219, 221-25, 349, 388, 393 Gebir, 235, 237 Génie du Christianisme, Le, 90, 176, 202, 203, 205-08, 363 Gentle Armour, The, 109, 110 Germ, The, 284 German Novelists (Roscoe), 167 German Poets and Poetry (Longfellow), 167 German Romance (Carlyle), 162 Gierusalemme Liberata, 91 Girlhood of Mary Virgin, The, 287, 290, 291 Glenfinlas, 13, 22 Globe, Le, 201, 202 Goblet, The, 164 Goblin Market, The, 82 Godiva, 265 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 5, 92, 133, 178, 191, 192 Golden Legend, The, 297 Golden Treasury, The, 25, 389 Golden Wings, 326-28 Goldsmith, Oliver, 95 Görres, Joseph, 138, 147, 152, 363, 400 Gosse, Edmund, 116 Götz von Berlichingen, 5, 133, 193 Gries, J. D. , 156, 247 Grimm, Jakob and Wm. , 154, 162, 247, 256 Guest, Lady Charlotte, 270

 Hallam, Henry, 103, 399 Han d'Islande, 196, 218 Hardiknute, 3 Harold the Dauntless, 29 Hartleap Well, 19-21, 80 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 245 Hawker, R. S. , 262, 263 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 162-64 Hayley, Wm. , 95, 96 Haystack in the Floods, The, 326 Heart of Midlothian, The, 31, 33, 379 Heine, Heinrich, 35-38, 139-41, 144, 146-49, 152, 154-59, l6l, 170, 400 Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 164-66 Heir of Redcliffe, The, 357 Helvellyn, 15, l6 Henri III. , 209 Heretic's Tragedy, The, 276 Hereward the Wake, 281 Herford, C. H. , 12, 24, 34, 87, 88 Hernani, 186, 188, 195-200 Hero Worship, 103, 111, 335 Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders, 152, 153 Hewlett, Maurice, 230-32 Higginson, T. W. , 163 Histoire du Romantisme (Gautier), 176-81, 183-85, 187, 188, 191-93, 195-98, 22l-25 Histoire du Romantisme en France (Toreinx), 202 History of France (Michelet), 226 History of Literature (Schlegel), 157 History of Spanish Literature, A (Kelly), 246, 247 History of Spanish Literature, A (Ticknor), 242, 243, 248 History of the Crusades, 226 History of the Swiss Confederation, 153 Hita, Perez de, 247 Hogg, Jas. , 250-55 Holy Cross Day, 277 Homme qui Rit, L', 219, 22l Hood, Thos. , 278, 279 House of Life, The, 307, 310 House of the Wolfings, The, 232, 337-39, 387 Howells, W. D. , 397, 398 Howitt, Chas. And Mary, 334 Hughes, Arthur, 305-07 Hughes, Thomas. , 357, 383 Hugo, François V. , 222 Hugo, Victor Marie, 90, 137, 173, 176, 178-82, 188, 189, 194-96, 200, 214-21, 224, 226, 247, 277, 298, 299, 349, 388, 389 Hunt, Jas. Leigh, 49, 105-13, 118, 119, 121-23, 127, 388 Hunt, Wm. H. , 283, 284, 288-90, 292, 302, 306, 307 Hurd, Richard, 364 Hutton, R. H. , 40 Hylas, 331 Hymns to the Night, 164 Hypatia, 355 Hyperion (Keats), 117, 122 Hyperion (Longfellow), 172

 Idylls of the King, 268-75, 303, 347 Illustrations of Tennyson, 257, 260 Il Penseroso, 374 Imitation of Spenser (Keats), 120 Inferno, 96, 99, 103, 191 Intaglios, 393 Irving, Washington, 239 Isabella, 123-25, 307, 390, 400 Ivanhoe, 31, 36, 39, 40, 43, 379, 397 Jameson, Anna, 374, 375 Jeffrey, Francis, Lord, 37 Jenny, 309 John Inglesant, 357 Journal des Débats, 201 Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The, 166 Journey into the Blue Distance, 162, 163 Joyce, P. W. , 260 Joyce, R. D. , 260

 Keats (Colvin), 116, 127 Keats, Jno. , 53, 54, 82, 85, 86, 107, 113-31, 172, 228, 262, 264, 279, 287, 294, 299, 300, 306, 307, 314, 315, 342, 388, 390, 400 Kebie, Jno. , 292, 357, 361 Keith of Ravelston, 262, 263 Kelly, J. F. , 246, 247 Ker, W. P. , 46, 47 Kilmeny, 252 Kinder und Hausmärchen, 154, 162 King Arthur's Tomb, 327 Kinges Quair, The, 306, 312 Kingsley, Chas. , 279-81, 292, 355, 383, 384 King's Tragedy, The, 306, 311-13 Knaben Wunderhorn, Des, 155, 172 Knight, Death, and the Devil, The, 152, 153, 324, 373 Knight's Grave, The, 87 Kronenwächter, Die, 167 Kubia Khan, 87

 Lady of Shalott, The, 365, 271, 303, 304, 324 Lady of the Lake, The, 19, 29, 251, 379 Lament for the Decline of Chivalry, 279 Lamia, 117, 129 Landor, W. S. , 16, 20, 27, 53, 54, 117, 235, 237, 395 Lang, Andrew, 330 Lara, 233 Laus Veneris, 343, 349 Lay of the Brown Rosary, The, 277, 278 Lay of the Last Minstrel, The, 3, 5, 11, 25-28, 40, 53, 85, 252 Lays of Ancient Rome, 249 Lays of France, 389, 390 Lays of the Western Gael, 260 Leading Cases done into Equity, 249 Legends of the Cid, 246 Lenore, 83, 133, 144, 192, 297, 392 Leper, The, 349 Lesser, Creuzé de, 225 Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 364 Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, 41 Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet, 226 Lewis, M. G. , 77, 83, 238, 239 Liberal Movement in English Literature, The, 314 Life and Death of Jason, The, 315, 321, 328-33 Life and Letters of Dean Church, The, 358 Life of William Morris, The (Mackail), 315, 320, 331, 333, 382 Light of the World, The, 288-90 Lindsay, A. W. C. , 372-74 Lines on a Bust of Dante, 105 Literary Reminiscences (De Quincey), 38 Literature and Romance of Northern Europe, 334 Literature of Europe, The (Hallam), 103 Lockhart, J. G. , 5, 7, 9, 11, 22, 23, 239, 247, 248 Locrine, 346 Longfellow, H. W. , 105, 109, 164, 167, 170, 172, 239, 297 Lord of the Isles, The, 29, 85 Lorenzaccio, 226 Lorenzo and Isabella, 287, 291 Loss and Gain, 357, 359 Love, 86, 127 Love is Enough, 332, 333 Lovers of Gudrun, The, 330, 334-36 Lowell, J. R. , 70, 82, 93, 116, 131, 165, 203, 260 Lucinde, 157 Luck of Edenhall, The, 170 Lürlei, Die, 141 Lyra Innocentium, 357 Lyrical Ballads, 18, 48, 74

 Mabinogion, The, 270, 332 Macaulay, T. B. , 103, 249 Mackail, W. J. , 315, 320, 331, 333, 382 McLaughlin, E. T. , 43 Madoc, 237 Mador of the Moor, 251 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 326 Maidens of Verdun, The, 216 Maids of Elfin-Mere, The, 258, 304, 324 Maigron, L. , 33, 34, 44-46 Mallet, P. H. , 107, 229 Malory, Sir Thos. , 270, 272, 303, 347, 348 Manfred, 234 Mangan, J. C. , 259, 260 Manzoni, Alessandro, 133 Märchen (Tieck), 162 Marie de France, 390, 393 Marienlieder, 148 Marino Faliero, 234 Marion Delorme, 200 Marmion, 6, 15, 23, 29, 40, 90, 379 Martyrs, Les, 225 Marzials, Théophile, 285, 387, 388, 394, 395 Masque of Queen Bersabe, The, 277, 344 Masque of Shadows, The, 390, 392 Meinhold, J. W. , 42, 280 Mérimée, Prosper, 30, 33 Michaud, J. F. , 226 Michelet, Jules, 226 Middle Ages, The (Hallam), 103 Millais, J. E. , 283-85, 287, 288, 290, 291, 307 Milton, Jno. , 93, 103, 269, 374 Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern (Motherwell), 253 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 21, 22, 24, 26, 243, 250, 251 Modern Painters, 6, 10, 284, 292, 294 Mores Catholici, 319, 366 Morgante Maggiore, 234 Morris, Wm. , 29, 232, 237, 275, 285, 296, 304-06, 309, 314-40, 345, 350, 380, 382, 384-89 Morte Darthur (Malory), 106, 270, 273, 303, 304, 324, 347, 364 Morte d'Arthur (Tennyson), 271, 272 Motherwell, Wm. , 250, 253-55 Mozley, T. , 358 Müller, Johannes, 153 Munera Pulveris, 380 Muse Française, La, 201 Music Master, The, 258, 300 Musset, Alfred de, 180, 189, 198, 226, 247 Myller, H. , 154 Mysteries of Udolpho, 83

 Nanteuil, Célestin, 178, 223-25 Nature of Gothic, The, 321, 375, 385, 386 Nerval, Gérard de, 190-92, 196, 197, 225, 349 New Essays toward a Critical Method, 122 Newman, J. H. , 292, 319, 354-62, 366, 381 News from Nowhere, 317, 319, 382, 386 Nibelungenlied, The, 154, 155, 297 Nodier, Chas. , 194 Northern Antiquities, 107, 229 Northern Mythology. 334 Notre Dame de Paris, 178, 179, 221, 224 Novalis, 134, 137, 148, 152, 164-67, 172, 302, 400

 Ode to a Dead Body, 110 Ode to a Grecian Urn, 117 Ode to the West Wind, 102 Odes et Ballades (Hugo), 176, 180, 189, 217 Odes et Poésies Diverses (Hugo), 214 Odyssey, The, 331 Ogier the Dane, 330, 332 Old Celtic Romances, 260 Old Masters at Florence, 316 Old Mortality, 31, 33, 253, 379 Old Woman of Berkeley, The, 238, 239 Oliphant, F. , 353 On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, 117, 122 Oriana, 265, 313, 324 Orientales, Les, 189 Orlando Furioso, 90, 91, 109 O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 387-90, 393 Ossian, 208, 261

 Palgrave, F. T. , 25, 389 Palmerin of England, 236, 241 Paradise, 311 Parochial and Plain Sermons, 360 Parsons, T. W. , 105 Partenopex of Blois, 90 Past and Present, 381, 382 Pater, Walter, 42, 79 Payne, Jno. , 387-93 Perrault, Chas. , 194, 265, 349 Percy, Thos. , 3, 54, 57, 74, 159, 238, 295 Petrarca, Francesco, 92 Phantasus, 160 Pillar of the Cloud, The, 362 Poe, Edgar A. , 162, 163, 300, 301, 389 Poems and Ballads (Swinburne), 296, 339, 343, 345, 349, 350 Poems and Romances (Simcox), 388 Poems by the Way, 386 Poets and Poetry of Munster, 259 Politics for the People, 383 Pollock, Sir Frederick, 249 Pope, Alexander, 52-54, 56, 63-73, 115-17, 402 Portrait, The, 311 Praeterita, 372, 378 Preface to Cromwell, 182, 188, 218-20 Pre-Raphaelitism (Ruskin), 293 Price, Sir Uvedale, 34, 374 Primer of French Literature, A, 183, 184 Prince Arthur (Blackmore), 270 Prince des Sots, Le, 225 Princess, The, 267, 268 Prior, Matthew, 401 Prophecy of Dante, The, 100, 101 Proverbs in Porcelain, 401 Psyche, 121 Pugin, A. C. , 368 Pugin, A. W. N. , 360, 361, 368-72, 375, 379 Pugin, E. W. , 368 Purgatorio, 362

 Queen Gwynnevar's Round, 262 Queenhoo Hall, 8, 20, 32 Queen Mab, 235 Queen's Wake, The, 252, 253 Quentin Durward, 31, 36 Quest of the Sancgreall, The (Westwood), 276 Quest of the Sangreal, The (Hawker), 262 Quiberon, 216

 Racine et Shakspere, 38, 186, 208, 211, 213 Radcliffe, Anne, 41, 42, 82, 193 Rapunzel, 309, 326, 327 Raven, The, 301 Reade, Chas. , 230 Rebecca and Rowena, 397 Récits Mérovingiens, 226 Recollections of D. G. Rossetti (Caine), 296, 297, 301, 302, 308 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3, 17, 74, 107, 229, 238, 243, 247 Reminiscences (Mozley), 358 Remorse, 86, 89 Richter, J. P. F. , 169 Rime of Redemption, The, 392 Rime of the Duchess May, The, 277, 278 Rivas, Duke de, 246 Robertson, J. M. , 122 Rogers, Chas. , 96 Roi s'Amuse, Le, 200, 201 Rokeby, 29 Romancero General, The, 243, 247 Roman Historique, Le, 33, 34, 44-46 Romantische Schule, Die (Heine), 36, 139-41 Romaunt of the Page, The, 277 Roots of the Mountains, The, 337, 338 Rosa, Martinez de la, 246 Rosamond, 346, 347 Rosamund, Queen of the Goths, 346 Roscoe, Wm. , 65, 66 Rose, W. S. , 90 Rose Mary, 263, 311, 312 Rossetti, Christina, 82, 282, 284, 302 Rossetti, D. G. , 131, 228, 258, 262, 263, 265, 282-88, 290-92, 295-315, 318-21, 323, 324, 340, 343, 345, 350, 387-89, 393 Rossetti, Gabriele, 282 Rossetti, Maria F. , 282 Rossetti, W. M. , 282, 284 Runenberg, The, 163 Ruskin, Jno. , 6, 10, 284, 286-89, 292-94, 304, 317, 321, 324, 371, 372, 375-80, 382-87, 398

 Sacred and Legendary Art, 374, 375 Saint Agnes, 267 Saint Brandan, 263 Saint Dorothy, 344 Saint Patrick's Purgatory, 238 Saintsbury, George, 50, 118, 183, l84, 295, 324, 326, 395, 396 Saints' Tragedy, The, 279, 280, 292 Samuel Taylor Coleridge und die Englische Romantik, 50-55, 75, 77, 82, 86 Scherer, Wm. , 167, 170 Schiller, J. C. F. , 210, 212 Schlegel, A. W. , 88, 140, 144, 145, 154, 156-59, 162, 165, 172, 192, 247 Schlegel, F. , 99, 134, 135, 137, 148, 151, 157-59, 172, 247, 363 Scott, Sir Walter, 1-47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 71, 75, 77, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 119, 120, 127, 129, 136, 158, 167, 169, 172, 173, 178, 180, 192, 212, 226, 232, 243, 246, 247, 249-53, 256, 267, 295, 313, 320, 321, 323, 329, 352-56, 367, 378, 379, 397, 402 Scott, W. B. , 292, 293, 305-07, 353, 389 Selections from Newman, 355, 356 Seward, Anne, 98 Shairp, J. C. , 18 Shaker Bridal, The, 164 Shakspere, Wm. , 210, 222, 399 Sharp, Wm. , 291, 292, 306 Shelley, P. B. , 8, 25, 101, 102, 120, 232-35, 299, 310, 340, 398 Short History of English Literature, A, 50, 118, 295, 324, 326, 395, 396 Shorthouse, J. H. , 357 Short Studies (Higginson), 163 Sigerson, Jno. , 259, 261 Sigismonda and Guiscardo, 124, 125 Sigurd the Volsung, 336 Simcox, G. A. , 388 Sintram and his Companions, 153, 162, 168, 324, 373 Sir Floris, 390-92 Sir Galahad (Morris), 306, 325, 328 Sir Galahad (Tennyson), 267, 271, 325 Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinivere, 271, 325 Sir Tristram, 7 Sister Helen, 311, 312, 345 Sisters, The, 265, 313 Sizeranne, R. De la, 293 Sketches of Christian Art, 372-74 Sleep and Poetry, 114-16 Sleeping Beauty, The, 265 Smith, Charlotte, 55 Socialism, 386 Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, 18, 19 Song of the Western Men, 262 Sonneur de Saint Paul, Le, 193 Sorrows of Werther, The, 397 Southey, Robert, 50, 51, 55, 71, 235-39, 355 Specimen of an Induction to a Poem, 129 Specimens of German Romance, 167 Specimens of Gothic Architecture, 368 Spenser, Edmund, 3, 4, 93, 107, 120-22, 269, 275, 329 Staël, Mme. De, 134, 139, 141-45, l71, 192, 208 Staff and Scrip, 311 Stedman, E. C. , 265, 387 Stendhal, De, 36-38, 186, 187, 201, 208-14 Stephen, Leslie, 10, 38, 80 Sternbald's Wanderungen, 152 Stevenson, R. L. , 32 Stokes, Whitley, 259, 261 Stolberg, F. L. , Count, 149, 363 Stones of Venice, 321, 375-79, 385, 386 Stories from the Italian Poets, 109-11 Story of Rimini, The, 105-07, 119, 121, 122, 390 Story of the Brave Casper and the Fair Annerl, The, 167 Student of Salamanca, The, 246 Studies and Appreciations, 129 Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature, 43 Study of Celtic Literature, On the, 256 Succube, La, 43 Sundering Flood, The, 232, 337, 339 Swinburne, A. C. , 275, 276, 296, 304, 309, 314, 315, 319, 339-51, 387-89

 Table Talk (Coleridge), 12 Tables Turned, The, 386 Tale of Balen, The, 347, 348 Tale of King Constans, The, 330 Tales of Wonder, 238 Talisman, The, 28, 36, 43 Tannhäuser, 153, 160, 264, 343, 391 Task, The, 58 Tasso, Torquato, 91, 104, 109 Taylor, Edgar, 162 Taylor, Wm. , 53, 162, 238 Templars in Cyprus, The, 149 Tennyson, Alfred, 257, 260, 262, 264-75, 295, 303, 324, 325, 347, 348 Thackeray, W. M. , 397, 398, 402 Thalaba the Destroyer, 235 Theocritus, 331 Thierry, Augustin, 39, 225, 226 Thomas the Rhymer, 7 Thoreau, H. D. , 165 Thorpe, Benjamin, 334 Thousand and One Nights, The, 393 Three Bardic Tales, 259 Three Fishers, The, 383 Thyrsis, 378 Ticknor, Geo. , 242, 243, 248 Tieck, Ludwig, 42, 134, 137, 148, 150, 152, 154, 156-65, 172, 245, 400 Tighe, Mary, 121 Tintern Abbey, 358 Todhunter, Jno. , 259, 261 Tom Brown at Oxford, 357 Tracts for the Times, 292, 319, 363, 368 Treasury of Irish Poetry, A, 261 Tristram and Iseult (Arnold), 275, 278, 341 Tristram of Lyonesse (Swinburne), 275, 340 Tristram und Isolde (Wagner), 393 Troy Town, 315 True Principles of Pointed Architecture, The, 372 Tune of Seven Towers, The, 305, 326 Two Foscari, The, 234

 Uhland, Ludwig, 140, 154-56, 170, 171 Ulalume, 301 Undine, 168 Unto this Last, 380

 Vabre, Jule, 222 Vanity Fair, 396 Vathek, 367 Vere, Aubrey de, 259, 260, 358, 361, 366 Verses on Various Occasions (Newman), 357 Versunkene Glocke, Die, 245 Victorian Poets, 265, 387 Vignettes in Rhyme, 401 Vigny, A. V. , Comte de, 188, 191, 210 Villon, François, 298, 299, 350, 393 Vision of Judgment, The, 70 Vita Nuova, La, 101, 299, 302, 310, 393 Volksmärchen (Tieck), 160 Völsunga Saga, The, 334, 335 Voltaire, F. M. A. De, 92, 94, 95 Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur (Schlegel), 88, 158, 162, 192 Voss, J. H. , 149 Voyage of Maeldune, The, 260 Wackenroder, W. H. , 134, 152, 153, 159 Wagner, Richard, 153, 264, 391, 393 Walladmor, 38 Walter Scott et la Princesse de Clèves, 36 Ward, W. G. , 360 Warton, Joseph, 61, 63, 64, 71, 73, 157, 158 Warton, Thos. , 27, 57, 60, 61, 94, 157, 158 Water Lady, The, 279 Water of the Wondrous Isles, The, 337, 339 Watts, Theodore, 300 Waverley Novels, The, 30-39, 324, 378, 379, 403 Welland River, 328, 345 Welshmen of Tirawley, The, 260 Werner, Zacharias, 148, 149, 212, 302 Westwood, Thos. , 276 White Doe of Rylstone, The, 16-18 White Ship, The, 311, 312 William George Ward and the Oxford Movement, 361 Winthrop, Theodore, 367 Wisdom and Languages of India, The, 157 Wissenschaftslehre (Fichte), 137 Witch of Fife, The, 252 Wood beyond the World, The, 337, 339 Woolner, Thos. , 284 Wordsworth, Wm. , 9, 12, 14-20, 48, 50-55, 71, 77, 80, 89, 119, 300, 333, 355, 358, 398

 Yarrow Revisited, 14 Yeast, 383 Yeats, J. B. , 261 Yonge, Charlotte M. , 357 Yuletide Stories, 334

 Zapolya, 89 Zauberring, Der, 168 Zeitung für Einsiedler, 138, 172 Zorrilla, José de, 246