An Era of Rapid Social Change. The last decade of the 18th century and the opening decades of the 19th constitute an era of revolutionary social changes, economic, political, religious and literary. Says Edgell Rickword, "The social developments in the last decades of the eighteenth century decisively ensured the emergence of Britain as the first nation state of a new type, that form of industrial capitalist democracy which reached maturity about the end of the nineteenth century. The transition from our older economy of agriculture and domestic handicrafts was quite spontaneous, not directed from above or regulated in any way except by the laws inherent in the new system of production. In no long time, the cumulative effect of the introduction of mechanical improvements provoked an upheaval affecting the community at all levels. From the eighties onwards, the scale and tempo of change were visibly increasing, and in a single generation the mode and manner of living which had fostered the brief splendour of a native classicism had become incompatible with social reality."
Its Causes. This rapid social change which took place between 1776 and 1832 resulted from a variety of causes. It arose from the writings of the French intellectuals, writings which circulated freely in England, from the spread of interest in scientific discoveries and their possible practical applications, from the American example in setting up a constitution without hereditary legislato?s, from the philosophical speculations as to the perfectibility of man. "Stability and contentment had inspired the glow in the Augustan bosom: iridescent perspective of unlimited human progress awoke the enthusiasm of the Romantic generation." The progress of social change was accelerated by the French Revolution (1789-1799) and the war with France (1793) which followed, and which lasted till 1815, the year of The Battle of Waterloo. The forces generated by the Revolution shook the very fabric of European society including English society.
The Industrial Revolution and Social Misery. The period from 1789 to 1832 in English social history is a period of revolutionary social change which was destined to transform the entire economy and social structure of the country. A series of scientific inventions rapidly gave England a new and vastly revolutionary industry—the making of cheap cloth by mass production methods. By 1789, the Industrial Revolution was establishing new centres of population around the factories and the coal and iron deposits, where new methods of mining and smelting were increasing production by leaps and bound. The result was that a new and wealthy industrial class soon sprang up and acquired power and prestige. In agriculture new scientific methods of farming led to an increase in the number of large holdings and a rapid decrease in the number of small farms. The small farmer soon lost the independence he had gained with the end of feudalism. He was forced to a bare subsistence or he moved to the industrial centres and allowed his land to be added to swell large estates. The resulting social conditions, both rural and urban, were appalling; England was soon sharply divided between capital and labour, and the masses of workers had little protection from exploitation by the wealthy mill owners.
Social Reform. The result of this social misery was that a wave of protest and minor revolts took place in the early years of the 19th century. Other forces from abroad were also strring the masses to demand social and political reform. The French revolution (1789-1793) had driven the aristocracy from power in France. Cries of liberty, equality, and individual freedom came from all parts of the world, and this could not but have its impact on English society. A whole literature of democracy soon came into being and it was eagerly read everywhere: It was an age of disillusionment for liberal minds as well as a period of increasing greed on the part of the newly rich masters of industry. The complacency of the earlier Augustan Age when George I and George II ruled England was no longer trusted to bring well being to England. Social reform was demanded on all sides. Added to this, was the misery and hardship caused by twenty or more years of war with the armies of the French Republic and the forces of Napoleon, a war which ended in 1815. The resulting collapse of war industry, the returning soldiers and their demoralisation, and the huge national debt, but added impetus to cries for, reform. A series of reform bills were introduced in parliament to rectify some of the inequalities and miseries caused by the political and social upheavals.
Peace and Stability. As a result of the various measures of social reform, a new and numerous middle class steadily gained political power and "poor laws" and "peoples' charters" slowly raised the standards and increased the civil rights of the masses of Englishmen. The individual felt a little more free and he lived better. By 1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, England was settling down to a long period of expansion and scientific progress. She had now a middle-class economy. Art and literature, which had fled from reality during the turbulent years, were to compromise with this reality and the new middle-class society by mid-century.
The French Revolution: the Reaction. The century opened in the midst of widespread disturbance caused by the French Revolution and the events which had followed. The enthusiasm with which the "glorious outburst" of 1789 had been welcomed by many in this country, especially among the ardent spirits of the younger generation, had already waned, and the excesses of the Reign of Terror and the military ambitions of the. Republic had brought about a sweeping change in English thought. This change was completed by the long struggle with Napoleon. The battle of Waterloo delivered Europe from the despotism of the Great Adventurer, but at the same time it marked the triumph of the forces of reaction : and though the democratic ideas generated by the Revolution were by no means destroyed, progress all over Europe was definitely checked. In England, men's minds were still haunted by the spectre of anarchy; and for some years there was no further talk of constitutional reform.
The Reform Acts : March of Democracy. Meanwhile, however, vast new economic forces had come into play. England was being rapidly transformed from an, agricultural and mercantile nation into an industrial one. The far-reaching social changes caused by this transformation made political reorganization an imperative necessity, and at length the first step was taken in the Reform Act of 1832, by which the political monopoly of the old landed aristocracy was broken and a large share of their power was gradually transferred to the middle classes, the representatives of commerce and capital. But the working classes in turn began to clamour for recognition and the agitation for the further extension of the franchise that ensued was powerfully reinforced by industrial depression. Hence the Chartist movement of 1837-49 with its demand for manhood suffrage and other radical reforms. Chartism died out under the influence of improved industrial conditions; but the extension of the franchise, though delayed, came in time, and the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884-85 register the steady ownward sweep of English democracy.
Humanitarianism and Liberalism. The purely political aspects of the democratic movement are, however, of less moment to us here than its indirect effects on the fabric and temper of society. The social consciousness was deeply stirred; the old sharp dividing lines between class and class began to be obliterated; increasing attention was given to the claims of the masses as against those of the privileged few; humanitarianism spread, and the sphere of legislation was enlarged to include the amelioration of the conditions of labour and of the poor. Some advance was made towards the breaking up of social conventions and the increase of freedom of thought and action and, more important still, a movement began for the emancipation of women. Much of the literature of the Victorian age is the direct expression of these new social enthusiasms and ideals.
The Spread of Education. The development of popular education, though very slow, was yet another significant accompaniment, partly cause and partly effect, of democratic progress. So, too, was the diffusion of knowledge through the newspapers (the number and circulation of which increased enormously after the abolition of The Stamp Duty in 1855 and The Paper Duty in 1861), magazines, and cheap books. Even the humblest were thus made partakers in the larger intellectual life of their time, and ideas and speculations which would otherwise have been limited to the aristocracy of culture became the common property of the common man. An ever-widening public for literature was thus opened up, with results to literature itself too numerous and complex to be considered in the brief space at our disposal.
Science and Technology. Not less important than the advance of democracy during the 19th century was the corresponding advance of science to which nothing in previous history affords a parallel. "Decade by decade men penetrated more deeply into the secrets of the universe, adding fact to fact and generalization to generalization; decade by decade they gained more and more control over the forces of nature". On the practical side — in the application of science to life, in the factory, the railway, the steamship, and in the .multitudinous uses of electricity—the result was a complete transformation of the world. No less complete was the revolution effected in the domain of thought. In matter and spirit alike literature was profoundly effected by this "march of mind" and the new ideas which it brought in its train. Directly, it showed the influence of science in the realistic tendency which for a time was dominant. Fiction and history alike became scientific. The poets and other man of letters were continuously engaged in reconciling the revelations of science with religion and human idealism.
Religious Scepticism. While not wholly responsible for it (for powerful disintegrating forces were at work within the edifice of faith itself), the scientific movement was in large measure the cause of the great religious upheaval of the age. New Knowledge and old dogmas came into fierce conflict; the ancient system of thought was shaken of its foundations; traditional landmarks were swept away; intelligent men of all sects and classes were deeply stirred by the spirit of speculation and unrest. Hence the scepticism, the continual heart-searchings, the widespread melancholy which are among the persistent features of the literature of the period, and the strenuous moral spirit which makes it so different as a whole from the literature of the age of Elizabeth or of the first half of the 18thcentury. Hence, too, the strong reaction against the domination of science in many quarters, the religious revivals initiated in the High Church movement: and outside the Church itself, the unceasing protest of some of the greatest poets and prose- writers against the materialism to which science seemed to lead. That protest had two sides. On the one hand, it was inspired by hostility to the mechanical and godless view of the world which appeared to be sapping the bases of all religious faith. On the other hand, it was directed against the hardness and ugliness which had come to characterize life in a commercial, utilitarian, and comfortable age. The real sense of art and a fresh, outburst of romanticism were the most conspicuous expressions of this newly awakened sense of beauty.' The fact that both aestheticism and romanticism soon became intimately connected with social reform attests the ever growing influence of social ideas during the period with which we are concerned.
Rovolt Against the Augustan Tradition. The revolt against eighteenth century realism and "common sense" found expression in the wild phantasmagories of Blake, and in the strange dream world of Coleridge. The reaction from the rigid social aristocracy of the eighteenth century, and from its supercillious distaste for lowly human life led, through the harsh realism of Crabbe, to Burn's passionate vindication of the primary instincts, and to Wordsworth's solemn revelation of the majesty of simple lives. The protest against eighteenth century "urbanity" and absorption in the life of the town lied, through Cowper's mild delight in rural thing, to the piercing tenderness of Burn's Mountain Daisy; and to the mystical insight of Wordsworth's Tinter: Abbey. The revulsion from the Augustan indifference to the Middle Ages led, through the forgeries of Chatterton and the epic chants of the pseudo-Ossian, to Scott, for whom it was reserved to create the life of the past on a vast scale, and with an unparalleled illusion of truth".
The Beginning of Romanticism. The romantic movement cannot be given a precise date; it developed slowly till it came to a head in the year 1798, and the event that gave a definite shape and direction to the movement was the publication of the Lyrical Ballads. The beginning of romanticism may be traced back to the early part of the eighteenth century. Wordsworth and Coleridge did not create or initiate it, but they gave a definite shape to romanticism, which had manifested itself long before in the works of the eighteenth century poets. Thompson, Gray and Collins, as we have discussed in the previous chapter, may be called the precursors of the new movement, there is the first glimmering of romanticism in their poetry. They were living in an age dominated by classical ideals, but both in form and sentiment their works show a new trend. The heroic couplet was replaced by the Spenserian stanza and Miltonic blank verse; and love of nature, humanism, lyric and elegiac note, and a new interest in the medieval past reappeared in English poetry.
Revival of Elizabethan Romanticism. The term, "Romantic Revival" is applied to the splendid outburst of literature in the age of Wordsworth. The word "revival" indicates a return to literature of those romantic qualities which had characterised the literature of the Elizabethan Age. The romanticism of Elizabethan Age was the expression of that imaginative life which had been stimulated by the Renaissance. Unbridled imagination, the glow of passion and emotion, the joy of new found freedom and power of mind are the main characteristics of the Elizabethan literature. It in the poetry of Spenser, in the plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare, and in the prose of Bacon that these qualities found their supreme expression. Milton's early poetry shows a continuity, with a slight difference, of the Elizabethan trends, the difference being a certain measure of discipline and moral purity.
The unrestrained freedom and exuberance of the Elizabethans was subjected to scrutiny and criticism in Augustan Age. "The new spirit involved the substitution of the critical for the imaginative spirit." It brought intellect into play rather than poetic imagination. The leading writers of the age eschewed extravagance and emotionalism. The Augustans laid stress on the cultivation of simplicity, clarity, propriety, decorum, moderation, perfect finish, good sense and reason. Elizabethan picturesqueness, suggestiveness and sensuousness, liberalism and sensibility had no place. The poetry of this time was confined to high society and to "my lords and ladies gay." It has nothing to do with the countryside or nature, and with the life of remote times and places. The result was that the fundamental qualities of great poetry were altogether suppressed and the form of verse that developed in the age was satire. The age is called the classical age in literature. The Elizabethans had also been inspired by the study of Greek and Roman classics; but their inspiration came from the substance of classics; they did not care for the form and were prone to extravagance. Ben Jonson had sounded a note of caution and tried to check extravagance. When the imaginative exhilaration of Elizabethan Age wore off, and was succeeded by the critical and analytical spirit, people began to look towards the methods of the ancient writers. Thus, both the Elizabethan and Augustan writers were inspired by the classical ideal — the former by the substance, and the latter by the methods of the ancient literature of Greece and Rome. The merits of the literature of the eighteenth century are intellectual force and clarity and are found in its prose, while its deficiencies lie in its lack of imagination and in its treatment of superficial things of life rather than its deeper issues; and these deficiencies are manifested in the verse of the age.
There was a natural revolt against the classical spirit of the eighteenth century which had given rise to artificiality in poetry, both in regard to subject-matter and style. This spirit of revolt was accentuated by the French Revolution, with its cry of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. What the Renaissance had done to the release of the human mind from the bondage of church and medieval scholasticism, the French Revolution dir' in a large measure in the social and political spheres. The ideals of French Revolution inspired men's minds and inflamed their souls. The same unbridled imagination, the same glow of passion that had characterised Elizabethan literature were revived in the literature of the age of Wordsworth. Hence the literary movement, known as the Romantic Revival, was on the one hand a revolt against the classical creed of the eighteenth century, and on the other a revival of the Romantic spirit of the Elizabethan age.
Since the spirit of Romantic poetry was akin to that of the Elizabethan age, the Elizabethan literary forms and subjects were revived again—the sonnet, the lyric, the pastoral, the blank verse drama, the Spenserian stanza, the ballad. The same fullness of imagination, richness of language, vastness of conception, lyricism and picturesqueness, suggestiveness and sensuousness, which permeated the great Elizabethan works, are found again in the literature, especially poetry, in the age of Wordsworth.
"The essence of Romanticism was," says W. J. Long, "that literature must reflect all that is spontaneous and unaffected in nature and in man, and be free to follow its own fancy in its own way."
Some Definitions of Romanticism. The term 'Romanticism' has been variously defined by various critics. Heine calls it "the reawakening of Middle Ages ..... a passion flower blooming from the blood of Christ." Victor Hugo defines it as "liberalism in literature." Goethe, the German poet-critic contrasts romanticism with classicism, and says: "Romanticism is disease, classicism is health." George Sand calls it "emotion against reason". To Herford romanticism stands for "liberty of imagination." Herbert Grierson remarks that "the essence of the Romantic art is that in it spirit counts far more than the form, or rather gives to the form its peculiar indefinite charm, its tendency to be rhapsodical and lyrical." C. M. Bowra contradicts those critics who regard it as an expression of insubstantial dreams. He says: "The romantics were not content to dream, to fashion illusions. They insisted, their creations must be real." Commenting on the difference between classicism and romanticism Stoddard remarks: "Classicism is born of law; it is nourished by authority, its ideals are known The cardinal notion of romanticism is not acceptance but rejection. Romanticism rejects the literal and seeks the allegorical, it leaves the seen and searches the unseen, it casts aside the evident and seeks a symbol of deeper thought." To Wats Dunton, it is "the renaissance of wonder". Pater calls it the "addition of strangeness to beauty". Abercrombie stresses the subjective element of romanticism. He writes: "Romanticism is a withdrawal from outer experience to concentrate on inner experience." Summing up the main traits of romanticism F. L. Lucas says: "Remoteness, the sad delight of desolation, silence and the supernatural, winter and dreariness, vampiric love and stolen trysts, the flowering of passion and the death of beauty, Radcliffe horrors and sadistic cruelty, disillusion, death and madness; the Holy Grail, the battles on the Border, the love of the impossible" are the main characteristics of romanticism. Legious and Cazamian emphasize both the emotional and imaginative aspects of romanticism and call it "an accentuated predominance of emotional life, provoked and directed by the imaginative vision". To Rickett, "Romanticism, generally speaking, is the expression in term of art of sharpened sensibilities, heightened imaginative feeling ...... "
To conclude, romanticism, is Proteus like in its conception; sometimes it is used for the mysterious and unexplored beauty of the middle ages; sometimes for the "unheard" melodies expressed in the poetry of Shelley and Keats; for the expression of the novelty and mystery in commonplace objects of man, nature and human life as in the poetry of Wordsworth; for the majestic revelation of earthly touch in things mysterious and uncommon as in the supernatural poetry of Coleridge; for the fiercely passionate and rebellious poetry of Byron; for the historical novels of Scott; for the desire of creating an ideal world, the `ivory tower' as a citadel of relief from the maddening strife of the crowd.
Characteristics of Romanticism. An analysis of the definitions of Romanticism reveals the following characteristics:
(i) Mystery: "The subtle sense of mystery," says Rickett, "is found on analysis to be a complex emotion compounded of awe in the presence of the unknown, wonder in the presence of the known and an exquisite response to manifestations of beauty wherever they may be found that we may call for want of a better word— Rapture." The romantic spirit seeks the strange and the mysterious and reveals the wonder of things removed from real life. According to the romantics, there are more things in heaven and earth than are perceived in the ordinary course of life, and it is this feeling that arouses their curiosity in the unearthly and the supernatural. Coleridge described the feeling of wonder and mystery in the supernatural and Wordsworth revealed the inherent mystery in the common objects of nature and human life. Shelley spiritualised nature.
(ii) Interest in the Past: The romantics sought to get away from the pressure of present reality and to find "modes of deliverance from the dead weight of routine." So they looked to the past, for the past was remote from present reality, and it is remoteness and distance that lends a wonder and enchantment to the panorama of life. The Romantics went back especially to the Middle Ages, for according to Pater, it is in the Middle Ages that there are "unworked sources of romantic effect of a strange beauty to be won by strong imagination out of things unlike or remote." Rickett says: "It was the element of mysticism ha medieval life that appealed, heightened by the passage of time and the unlikeness of life then to life under modern conditions." History embraced by romanticism gave birth to historical novel, which fascinated Scott. Coleridge, Scott and Keats dealt with the past and the Middle Ages. Byron presented the romance and enchantment of the East.
(iii) Love of Nature: The Romantics discovered a new beauty and wonder in the world of nature. The Romantic poets were all lovers of nature; they minutely observed nature in all her aspects, and expressed in poetry their emotional reactions to her beauty and magic. Wordsworth was the first of the Romantics to discover a new wonder in nature. Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats—all loved nature and represented her beauty and grandeur from different points of view. "Wordsworth found brooding and tranquillising thought at the heart of Nature; Shelley an ardent and persuasive love. In other words, they spiritualised nature." Keats was content to paint the sensuous beauty of nature.
(iv) Interest in Inhumanity: The Romantics took great interest in humanity and dealt with the lives of common men and women. It was the essential character of man as man that interested them. Their hearts overflow with sympathy for the poor and the downtrodden. They glorify the innocence and simplicity of the common man. They find the divine in man, plead for his emancipation from all bondage, and claim equal rights and liberties for the humblest. The humanitarian philosophy of Rousseau and the ideal of French Revolution spearheaded the democratic movement. The doctrines of "freedom, equality and brotherhood inspired the poets of this age. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Byron were humanists.
(v) Love for the Elemental Simplicities of Life: Romanticism is characterised by "an instinct for the elemental simplicities of life." Rousseau's call "return to nature" was part of a larger naturalism that sought to bring people back to the bosom of nature, and reclaim us from superfluous conventions. As a result of this we got the idealising of childhood by Blake and Wordsworth, and of simple unsophisticated natures by Burns, Wordsworth and Coleridge. The great romantic poets found inspiration "in the simplicities of everyday life; an ordinary sunset, a walk over the hills, a cluster of spring flowers, the rain wearing west wind, the song of the nightingale, a cottage girl, a simple old salesman—such are few of the subjects that inspired to supreme achievement: a Wordsworth, a Coleridge, a Shelley, a Keats."
(vi) Freedom of Imagination: Imagination is the cardinal characteristic of romanticism. It is the "freeing or unfettering of passions or emotions in art and letters." The artist is not bound down by any law apart from the law prescribed by the law of his own artistic genius. It is a revolt against the stereotyped conventions of art, and gives a free play to imagination. According to Rickett, "Romanticism, generally speaking, is the expression, in terms of art, of sharpened sensibilities, and heightened imaginative feeling."
(vii) Subjectivity and Spontaneity: The Romantics were concerned not so much with the external facts of life as with their own feelings and emotions. Poetry to them was the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. It is the poet's own emotions that finds expression in his poetry.
(viii) Speculative and Inquisitive Tendency: According to Rickett, Romanticism induces a speculative and inquisitive turn of mind. Besides the expression of the heightened sensibility of the imagination, a strong undercurrent of the speculative, intellectual power underlies the best works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. Wordsworth's theory of poetry and poetic diction, Shelley's transcendentalism and Coleridge's critical theories are permeated with inquisitiveness and sharp intellectual quality. Even the charge of vagueness against Shelley's poetry is not acceptable. Shelley's philosophy of nature is "perfectly clear and consistent, and in his finest lyrics, such as The Cloud and The West Wind, ,here is a logical power of development and, when the poet is so disposed, a scientific accuracy, that is so often overlooked by the slovenly reader.
(ix) Regeneration of Poetic Style: Poetic style acquired a rich variety in the hands of the Romantics. Rickett writes: "Nowhere is the intellectual curiosity of Romantics better shown than in the regeneration of English poetic style." Their interest in the past led them to experiment with old metres and poetic forms. The heroic couplet of the eighteenth century gave place to various stanza forms. The Spenserian stanza, the ballad, the blank verse, the lyric, the ode and the sonnet were all revived. The metrical peculiarities of the old ballad gave fresh inspiration to great poets like Coleridge and Keats. A richness in language and a variety in metrical forms created a new melody in English poetry. Wordsworth with his simple and natural style, Coleridge with his wonderful music, Byron with his vigorous and oratorical style, Shelley with his rich harmonies, and Keats with his picturesque word painting— gave to English poetry a style, which is unique in its range and sweep as well as in its grace and movement.
The Influence of French Revolution on Romanticism
The French Revolution of 1789 sent a thrill of fresh life through the whole civilised world. It ushered in an era of democratic ideals—of liberty, brotherhood and the rights of man. It kindled new hopes of progress and perfection in young ardent souls. In later eighteenth century England a steady growth of many principles of democratic and humanitarian ideals was manifest. The people of England saw in the French Revolution the promise of the translation of abstract humanitarian ideals into living facts.
The background to English Romantic Movement was furnished by the French Revolution as a historical event and by the revolutionary philosophy as an ideology. The first phase of the Revolution was ideological or doctrinaire. Rousseau exposed the hollowness of social system and pointed out their evil and restraining influence on human personality. He gave the call "return to nature" and stressed the importance of the "noble savage" and the democratic ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. He pointed out the importance of the unhindered development of human personality. He said: "Man is born free but is everywhere in chains." Commenting on his influence on Romantic poets, Rickett writes: "Rousseau's sentimental influence touched Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge, his intellectual influence Godwin and through Godwin Shelley."
Danton said, "The Republic was in men's minds twenty years before it was established. Long before the fateful event of 1789 the philosophers— Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesque had exposed the hollowness of the "Ancien Regime", the injustice of the privileged, the miseries and inequalities inflicted on the poor by the nobles. Voltaire ridiculed sham religion, the hypocritical faith and the meaningless existence of the Church in France. Rousseau stood for the destruction of the social structure raised by man during centuries of human history, and start afresh. He condemned the political and social institutions which existed merely to enable the rich man to rob the poor, the tyrant to oppress the weak. There is no compulsion with anything but love. There is no way of erecting a new social order save by the light of pure reason. The intellectual and doctrinaire phase of the Revolution inspired Blake, Godwin and Shelley.
The second phase of the Revolutionary movement began in 1789 with the fall of the old fortress of Bastille, long used by French Kings as prison. It had become a symbol of tyranny and oppression to revolutionaries, who pulled it down. This was the end of the old order of suppression and tyranny and the beginning of the new order based on the democratic ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. The Revolution proclaimed the natural rights of man and the abolition of class distinctions. Patriotic clubs and societies multiplied in England, all asserting the doctrine of liberty, equality and fraternity, the watchwords of Revolution. Adam Smith in his famous book, The Wealth of Nations upheld the doctrine that labour is the only source of a nation's wealth and to impose unnatural checks on it is unjust and destructive. Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, published in London in 1791, was a powerful outcry against institutions which oppressed humanity. The second phase of the Revolution stirred the imagination of English poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. Wordsworth exclaimed:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.
Coleridge greeted the fall of Bastille as a promise of the time when
Liberty, the Soul of Life, shall reign,
Shall throb in every pulse, shall flow thro' every
vein.
The third phase of Revolution is known as the military phase or the Age of Napoleon. The glorious promises of 1789 were destined to remain unfulfilled. The sensational rise of Napoleon let loose a reign of terror and the establishment of military despotism. The long strain of Napoleonic wars proved oppressive, The democratic ideals of the Revolution were ruthlessly suppressed. The long continental war came to an end with Napoleon's overthrow at Waterloo in 1815. The crowned heads of Europe were determined to destroy democracy and popular government. All these things were naturally productive of vast disturbances in thought and feeling. The principles of Revolution were discredited, and the failure of the great effort that France had made to initiate a new and better order of things resulted in a general collapse of faith and hope. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge were horrified by the extinction of the great revolutionary ideals. Only Lord Byron was fascinated by the last phase of the Revolution. Rickett points out: "Byron is scarcely touched by the intellectual side of the Revolution, and from the historical side he certainly stood aloof, at once fascinated and repelled. What does emerge in Byron's poetry is the last phase of the movement, with Napoleon as a great figure. Byron's own intensely egotistic nature seized upon that aspect of the Revolution which sees in it the conflict of personalities. The tremendous force of the greater personalities, especially Napoleon, intoxicates him, and runs through his poetry."
POETRY
The era of Romantic revival is emphatically an age of poetry, as the previous century, with its practical outlook on life, was largely one of prose. The glory of the age is in the poetry of Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Moore and Southey. The Romantic poets are generally classified into two generations—the older poets consisting of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, grouped together as Lake. Poets, and Sir Walter Scott. The Lake Poets accepted the revolutionary ideals at first with joy, but receded from them when they ended in the violence of the Reign of Terror, and in the Imperialism of Napoleon. Scott turned from them with pain to write of the romantic past which they destroyed. The poets of the later Romantic Age, especially Byron and Shelley, were inspired by the revolution as an ideal and not as a political event. Byron expressed the whole of the revolutionary spirit in its action against only social opinions. Shelley took them up after the reaction against them had begun to die away, and in half his poetry re-expressed them. Keats and Rogers were wholly untouched by the revolutionary ideals. Commenting on the difference between the two generations of romantic poets Legouis and Cazamian write: "The romanticism of Lake Poets is a kind of purification and deepening of normal existence; it fronts society as an example and permanent solicitation. The second generation, on the contrary, sets up a. decided opposition between the artist and his surroundings. Romanticism becomes a literature of social conflict." "Sensationalism, satanism, sadism," says F. L. Lucas, "these were the three maladies of later romanticism."
I
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)
His Life and Works. Wordsworth, who in Tennyson's words, "uttered nothing base", was born in 1770 at Cockermouth, Cumberland, where the Derwent "fairest of all rivers, loved to blend his murmurs with my nurse's song." He was educated on the banks of Esthwaite, he loved the scenery of the Lakes as a boy. He graduated from Cambridge in 1791. After spending a few years in London he went to France where he stayed at Orleans and Blois for nearly a year. The democratic ideals inspired him. He fell in love with Annette Vallon, a French girl, and a daughter, Caroline, was born to them in 1792. He returned to Paris the same year. The September massacre horrified him and shook his faith in the revolutionary doctrine.
Wordsworth returned to England in 1793 before the execution of Louis XVI. The failure of his hopes and plans, personal and political, induced in him a profound despondency, from which he was rescued by his sister Dorothy. Her influence kept alive the poet in him, by directing his mind toward the sources of permanent strength and joy which lie in nature and human sympathy. He published his Descriptive Sketches and the Evening Walk.
With his sister Dorothy he settled in Dorset, and, then, shifted to Alfoxden in Somerset, where he and S. T. Coleridge planned and published in 1798 the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads. It is a landmark in English poetry, as it heralded a new era. In their partnership Coleridge was to take up the "supernatural, or at least romantic", while Wordsworth was "to give the charm of novelty to things of every day ....: . by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us." The whole spirit of their work is reflected in two poems of this memorable little volume, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which is Coleridge's masterpiece, and Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintem Abbey, which expresses Wordsworth's poetical creed, and which is one of the noblest and most significant poems. Besides, it comprised Wordsworth's The Idiot Boy, The Thorn, Simon Lee, The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman, Expostulation and Reply and Lines Written in Early Spring. The Lyrical Ballads is a landmark in the history of English poetry.
After a winter in Germany in 1798-99 Wordsworth settled in the Lake District. In 1802 he married Mary Hutchinson. During these years he composed some of his finest poems—Michael, The Old Cumberland Beggar, She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways, Strange Fits of Passion and Nutting. The firsebook of The Recluse tells of his settlement in the Lake district. He finished his long autobiographical poem, The Prelude in 1805-6 but it was posthumously published in 1850. It records his development as a poet. In 1807 two volumes of his poetry were published. Some of the finest poems of these volumes are The Solitary Reaper, The Green Linnet, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, Resolution and Independence, Ode to Duty and some sonnets.
After the publication of The Excursion in 1814 Wordsworth's poetical power was on the wane. His later poems—The White Doe of Rylstone (1815), The Waggoner (1819), Peter Bell (1819) and Yarrow Revisited (1835) — mark the decline in an increasing degree. He was made Poet Laureate in 1843 after Southey's death. He died in 1850.
Four Stages in Wordsworth's Poetic Development
Wordsworth's poetic career consists of four periods. He gives an account of the growth of his mind in The Prelude or Growth of a Poet's Mind and Tintern Abbey. These poems show a definite development in Wordswortn's conception of nature and human life.
(i) First Period: Wordsworth's early years were spent in solitude among the hills. The "ceaseless music" of Derwent filled his soul and gave him an unconscious foretaste of the calm —"That Nature breathes among the hills and groves." In the Book I of The Prelude Wordsworth describes his feelings and impressions of his childhood. He begins the Second Book of The Prelude with a description of the tumultuous joy and eagerness of boyhood in its sports among a rich and varied scenery. During this boyish stage Nature was,
But secondary to my own pursuits
And animal activities, and all
Their trivial pleasures.
His early intercourse with natural objects developed in him a calmness and tranquillity of soul, which was to be a characteristic feature in later years:
The visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind,
With all its solemn imagery.
(ii) Second Period: Then followed the period of senses, when the young poet drank in the beauty of nature with the passion of a lover:
The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain and the deep gloomy wood,
Their colours and forms, were then to me
An appetite, a feeling and a love
That had no need of a remoter charm
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.
During this period "nature was loved with an unreflecting passion altogether untouched by intellectual interests or associations—the kind of interest that found such full expression in the poetry of Keats."
(iii) Third Period: This stage of "dizzy joys" and "aching raptures" came to an end with his experience of human sorrow and suffering in France. He had kept watch over "human mortality" and in his eyes nature now took on a "sober colouring". He heard "the still, sad music of humanity," and his love of nature became linked with the love of man. He found strength and force and beauty in the character of humble people. He saw into the depths of human souls:
Souls that appear to have no depth at all
To careless eyes.
He bent in reverence
To Nature and the power of human minds,
To men as they are men within themselves.
(iv) Fourth Period: The final stage was the period of the soul, when the poet's Love of nature became reflective, mystical and spiritual. He felt in Nature "a presence" that disturbed him with "the joy of elevated thoughts,"
a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of men.
Wordsworth now felt that there is one soul immanent through the universe, but it objectifies itself into various forms and phenomena perceived by the senses. This was the greatest period of Wordsworth's poetic life. His poetic powers gradually declined after 1808 and his later poetry became didactic and even prosaic.
The Influence of French Revolution on Wordsworth's Poetry
The dawn of the French Revolution inspired young Wordsworth with a feeling of democratic idealism and passion for liberty. He cried out in a rapturous ecstasy:
Bliss was in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.
It was a movement of great expectancy among the nations for the Revolution brought the promise of a new and glorious era in the life of man:
Europe at that time was thrilled with joy,
France Standing on the path of golden hours,
And human nature seeming born again.
Raleigh remarks, "The Revolution, in its earlier phases, involved no revolution in Wordsworth's mental life." He had lived all along in a society, which was democratic in its basis. He observed absolute equality among the rural people of Cumberland. At Cambridge again democratic principles prevailed:
We were brothers all
In honour as in one community,
Scholars and gentlemen.
Hence the Revolution presented itself to Wordsworth's thinking and feeling as the most natural thing in the world. The events of the Revolution, as he saw them developing in France:
Seemed nothing out of nature's course,
A gift that was come rather late than soon.
Naturally Wordsworth joyfully greeted the Revolution.
When he first visited France in July 1790 he saw evidences of wonderful enthusiasm which the Revolution inspired in the people everywhere. When he proceeded to France for the second time in November 1791, he witnessed actual human suffering; the miseries of the old order were brought home to him. He hated the absolute rule and developed a deep love and pity for the downtrodden masses.
On his return to England Wordsworth remained firm in his revolutionary faith. But certain events which happened gradually destroyed all his hopes. First came England's declaration of war against France; it was a terrible shock to him. Then came the Reign of Terror, which overwhelmed him with despair. The final blow to his revolutionary faiths came when the Republic of France embarked upon a policy of military aggression; the war for liberty was changed into a war for conquest and the French appeared as the oppressors of humble peoples. This meant for Wordsworth a wreck of his concrete hopes; for a time, even though France failed him, he clung to the abstract political theories behind the revolutionary movement.
The revolutionary ideal effected a transformation on his poetry. "It built him into a Man; it added the enthusiasm of Man to the enthusiasm of Nature; it took him away from the contemplation of his own soul to live in the hopes, to proclaim the faith, to seek the love of mankind ..... It made him the singer of simple life, of honest manners, of poverty and its sorrow and of the honour of humanity in all its ranks." Thus the French Revolution made of Wordsworth a poet of Man.
Wordsworth's Theory of Poetry and Poetic Diction
Wordsworth expounded his theory of poetry and poetic diction in the Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800). The essence of his poetic creed lies in his conception of the origin, nature and purpose of poetry. He- says: "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Poetry is spontaneous and cannot be made to order. It cannot be made to flow through artificially laid pipes. Secondly, poetry is born not in the mind, but in the heart overflowing with feeling. The emotion, deep and powerful, is the fundamental condition of poetry.
Wordsworth further says that "poetry takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity." It implies that the poet does not discharge his emotion at once; he allows it to sink into his mind, along with the object or incident that had excited it; and there it remains till its unessential or accidental ingredients are eliminated, and what remains is its essential or ideal truth. When later, the poet recalls the object or the incident, the emotion, purified and idealised, revives with it. The excitement of his original experience is gone and he lives in his imagination through the whole experience again in a calm and tranquil manner. Wordsworth himself explains the process of poetic creation: "The emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and emotion kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on: but the emotion, of whatever kind, and in whatever degree, from various causes, is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any positions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will upon the whole, be in a state of enjoyment."
The aim of poetry is ultimately to do good to the world by extending the domain of sensibility for the delight, honour and benefit of human nature. Poetry, according to Wordsworth, "is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge, the impassioned expression that is in the countenance of all science." It is the poet's office to do good to the world by extending the range of human sensibility. Wordsworth writes: "The poet is a man speaking to man; a man it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature and a more comprehensive soul than are supposed to be common among mankind The poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time."
Regarding the subject-matter of poetry and the mode of expression Wordsworth writes: "The principal object, then, proposed in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, or to relate or describe them throughout in a selection of the language really used by men, and at the same time to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect", and he goes on to say that "humble and rustic life was generally chosen because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language."
In this declaration the following points call for comment:
(i) In search of themes Wordsworth goes straight to common life.
(ii) Secondly, in the treatment of such themes, he sets out to employ the language "really used by man"; but it should be a selection of such language. He avoids "the gaudiness and inane phraseology" of eighteenth century poets.
(iii) Thirdly, it should be the language of men in a state of vivid sensation.
(iv) Fourthly, it should have a certain colouring of imagination.
(v) Lastly, Wordsworth emphatically declares: "There neither is, nor can be any essential distinction between the language of prose and metrical composition."
Wordsworth's theory of poetry and poetic diction represents his aim to bring the language of poetry to naturalness and simplicity. When he declared that his chosen theme was no other than the very heart of man, that the language of poetry should be the language really used by men, even peasants, he stood out as the champion and interpreter of new democratic faith.
Wordsworth followed his own theory in some of his poems like Lucy Gray, Susan, The Leech Gatherer, Michael etc. But in some of his poems like Tintern Abbey and Ode on the Intimations of Immortality he is stately. Herbert Reade rightly remarks: "As the theory of poetic diction, I do not think that any subsequent criticisms, including that of Coleridge, have succeeded in refuting it. There are a score of poems and these are among his best poems like Lucy Gray, The Solitary Reaper and Michael, which triumphantly vindicate it. But it is equally true that there are as many poems which contradict the theory as an all-inclusive generalisation. The mistake is to imagine that any theory of poetry, which descends to accidentals of diction and metre, can be universal in its scope."
Characteristics of Wordsworth's Poetry
Wordsworth was one of the protagonists of the Romantic Movement. Wordsworth and Colerdige, the two stalwarts of Romantic poetry, aroused the feeling of wonder, the cardinal characteristic of romanticism, in their poetry in two different ways. Coleridge indicates in The Biographia Literaria: "It was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters, supernatural or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer our inward nature or human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us, an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not and hearts that neither feel nor understand." This statement brings to light the following characteristics of Romanticism in Wordsworth's poetry:
(i) Imagination: Imagination, which is the soul of Romanticism, is employed in Wordsworth's poetry,for the revelation of a sense of mystery and uncommonness in the ordinary objects of nature and human life. He threw a colouring of imagination upon the common things of life and nature so as to make them appear to be uncommon — to make the natural appear like the supernatural by the iridescent colour of imagination. The ordinary objects are so heightened and glorified by the poet's imagination that they seem completely transmuted and transfigured:
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and freshness of a dream.
Wordsworth adds from his imagination a new light to what he sees and hears:
the gleam
The light that never was on sea or land;
The consecration and the poet's dream.
The ordinary things of life and nature thus assume new appearance and acquire a new charm under the imaginative treatment of the poet. In fact, the whole of Wordsworth's poetry is an integrated vision of nature and man revealed through his imagination:
Which is truth
Is but another name for absolute power
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind
And Reason in her most exalted mood.
(ii) Nature: All the poets of the Romantic school, Wordsworth being the most prominent among them, were lovers of nature, and represented the various aspects of beauty and truth embodied in nature. Wordsworth is, indeed, one of the world's most loving, penetrative and thoughtful poets of nature. His vision of nature is comprehensive and all embracing. There is hardly a sight or a sound, from a violet to a mountain and from a bird note to the thunder of a cataract that is not reflected in some beautiful way in Wordsworth's poetry.
Wordsworth's nature poetry is characterised by accuracy of observation and truthfulness of representation. He is content to describe the bird and the flower, the wind and the tree, the river and the mountain, just as they are, and is content to let them speak their own message. He can actualise a scene faithfully, and give a subtle expression to the sensuous delight of the world of nature; for example, he can describe the joy of the daffodils:
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of the bay:
………………………………
The waves beside them danced, but they
outdid the sparkling waves in glee.
Rickett writes: "Wordsworth is the poet of the ear just as Shelley is the poet of the eye, and never more felicitous than in conveying some phase of silence, tone of sound."
Shelley said that Wordsworth has awakened "a kind of thought in sense." W. J. Long writes: "He had not only sight, but insight, that is, he not only sees clearly and describes accurately, but penetrates to the heart of things and always finds some exquisite meaning that is not written on the surface Nothing is ugly or commonplace in his world; on the contrary, there is hardly one natural phenomenon which he has not glorified by pointing out some beauty that was hidden from our eyes."
According to Wordsworth Nature is a moral teacher and guide to man. She is both law and impulse, and kindles and restrains. She is a comforter and consoler of man. She is the guardian and guide of man's heart, the giver of purest thoughts:
One impulse from the vernal wood
May teach you more of man
Of moral evil and of good
Than all the sages can.
Nature is vibrant with joy. The hare runs races in her mirth, the flowers enjoy the air they breathe, the waves dance beside the daffodils.
The moon doth with delight
Look around her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair.
There is peace everywhere in the domain of Nature. Wordsworth sees in Nature
Central peace subsisting at the heart
of endless agitation.
Wordsworth recognises life in Nature. She is not only alive but has a personality. It is she who gives to every thing—to the flower, the valley or the hill—its special life, its separate soul. The poem "Three years she grew in sun and shower" shows how nature has a distinct personality, and how she makes her whole world unite to educate Lucy. She is the poetic impersonation of an actual being, the form which the poet gives to the living spirit of God in the outward world:
Wisdom and spirit of the universe:
Thou soul that art the Eternity of Thought:
And gives to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion.
This is God, living, moving and rejoicing in all his works. His dwelling is:
the light of setting suns
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky and in the mind of man.
The whole of the universe is thus permeated with one life, one soul. Nature' is the reflection of the living God. S. A. Brooke writes: "Wordsworth conceived as poet that Nature was alive. It had, he imagined one living soul which, entering into flower, stream or mountain, gave them each a soul of their own. Between the spirit in nature'and the mind of man there was a prearranged harmony which enabled nature to communicate its own thoughts to man, and man to reflect upon them, until an absolute union between them was established."
(iii) Human Life: Wordsworth's poetry of man is marked by lofty idealism and undaunted optimism. He relates in the Prelude how he had been led through his love of Nature to honour man. Man, apart from Nature, has no existence, but he is the very "life of her life".
Wordsworth views the whole of human life from childhood to manhood. In childhood man is nearest to Nature; he is an epitome of the grandness and beauty of the world. Wordsworth glorifies childhood. Child is glad and sensitive to nature because he comes straight from the creator of nature:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
This kinship with God and with Nature, which glorifies childhood, ought to extend throughout a man's whole life and ennoble it. He says: "Child is the father of the man." Wordsworth sums up his philosophy of childhood in Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood and Tintern Abbey.
According to Wordsworth man is found at his best when he lives close to the heart of Nature. He emphasises the value of simplicity and intimate contact with nature. Man can elevate himself morally and spiritually, if he lives a life of primal simplicity in constant communion with nature, for nature is the best teacher. According to Wordsworth, society, materialism and the crowded unnatural life of cities tend to weaken and pervert humanity, and a return to natural and simple living is the only remedy for human wretchedness. This is what the poet points out in the sonnet The world is too much with us. He denounces the materialism of his age in the following lines:
Plain living and high thinking are no more:
The homely beauty of the good old cause
Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence
And pure religion breathing household laws.
Wordsworth does not write about kings and princes in his poetry he shows the greatness and dignity of human life in the character of the shepherds of the Lake hills, the dalesmen, the beggars whom he had seen as part of the wild scenery in which he lived, and he mixed up their life with the grandeur of nature and came to honour them as part of her being. Wordsworth poetises the qualities of strength, hope, endurance, simplicity, courage and determination which he finds in ordinary humanity. He treats Nature and Humanity in the same way:
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 lively hills.
Michael, the old shepherd, stands for strength and fortitude. The old Cumberland Beggar taught Wordsworth that the meanest individual is not useless:
a spirit and pulse of good,
A life and soul, to every mode of being
Inseparably linked.
The leechgatherer in Resolution and Independence is a lonely figure dwarfed in body but magnified in spirit. He taught the poet lessons of fortitude and independence of character.
The democratic ideals of "liberty, equality and fraternity, as we have seen, influenced his poetry of human life. Wordsworth was the first great Romantic poet who realised that "a spirit of independence and stern liberty is the birthright and the passion of the poorest shepherd as well as of the patriot who fill the pages of history."
Wordsworth is the poet of human life in the lowest terms, of that joy and sorrow which is in "the widest communality spread." To him "the still sad music of humanity" is neither harsh nor grating but has "ample power to chasten and subdue."
(iv) Mysticism: To this natural philosophy of man Wordsworth adds a mystic element, the result of his own belief that in every natural object there is a reflection of the living God. The commonest things in nature and human life are not common and trivial—they are symbols of Eternity. To discover behind the diverse forms and phenomena of nature the One Inseparable and Changeless—this was the mystic note in Wordsworth. Both nature and man must be "spiritually discovered". In Tintern Abbey the spiritual appeal of nature is expressed in almost every line. In it he tells us he is inspired by:
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of the setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky and in the mind of man.
The central faith — that an unbroken chain binds all things in the outward world, and that the spirit of man can commune with God through Nature — informs all his poetry. Therefore his heart can as well dance with daffodils as leap with delight when he beholds a rainbow in the sky. Tintern Abbey is the finest expression of Wordsworth's spiritualism. The metaphysical aspect of his poetry is revealed in the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality. In the words of Moody and Lovett: "The Ode: Intimations of Immortality is the poem in which the speculation is the boldest. In this ode, which Emerson called "the high watermark of poetry in the nineteenth century", the poet looks back with passionate regret to the lost radiance of his childhood, and tries to connect childhood reassuringly not only with manhood and old age, but also with a previous existence, whence it brings its aura of innocence and joy. The poem is a product of that majestic kind of metaphysical imagination which transcends space and time and makes
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence."
(v) Poetic Art: As a poetic artist Wordsworth was a bold experimenter, and he had his resounding failure as well as supreme successes. The forms he adopts are the lyric, the ballad, the sonnet and the narrative. He composed beautiful lyrics on themes of rural life. The dainty and delicate grace of poems like Three Years She Grew, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, My Heart Leaps Up, The Solitary Reaper, To the Cuckoo etc. have no superior of their kind in English poetry. There is a perfect harmony of thought and emotion and music in his lyrics. Rickett writes: "To the lyric Wordsworth brought a freshness and pensive sweetness that give them quite an original place in lyric literature."
Wordsworth's ballads have not the fire and lilt of Scott, but they exhibit often a simple force and chaste tenderness unmatched by his contemporaries. Lucy Gray, We are Seven, Simon Lee and Ruth are some of his finest poems in the ballad metre. Wordsworth has written a few odes. Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, Tintem Abbey and Ode to Duty are memorable for fine artistic quality. The first is, says Elton, "Wordsworth's single but supreme triumph in the highest kind of lyrical architecture."
The sonnet provided a fit instrument for the expression of Wordsworth's genius. He acquired a mastery of this form and wrote some of the finest sonnets Milton, The World is too much with us, Westminster Bridge etc.
Apart from the poems of the lyric class, Wordsworth wrote several narratives in verse, some of them in blank verse like Michael and The Brothers. His narrative powers are considerable. His narrative skill is sometimes marred by his prolixity; still these verse stories, with their truth of narration and idealising touch, are an original contribution to English poetry.
Laodamia belongs to a class apart. Here Wordsworth shows classical restraint. His only drama The Borderers is a grotesque melodrama. Wordsworth conceived a huge plan in the form of an epic; but the plan was never executed. Only The Prelude and Excursion, which were meant to form parts of that long poem, were finished. The Prelude is an autobiography in a poetic form; and though it is didactic in many places, it is a great achievement "on the strength of its style, of its intellectual unity and of its spiritual energy." Its blank verse, in spite of its dull stretches, has a dignity of its own and rises "with a natural ease from simple personal narration to exalted meditation."
Wordsworth's poetic style is marked above all by simplicity and naturalness. His simplicity is golden simplicity, for his simple style expresses profound thought. Arnold said: "Nature herself seems to take the pen out of his hand and write with her bare, sheer penetrating power:" At his best Wordsworth could unite simplicity with sublimity as in some of his finest lyrics. Edward Albert says: "He has a kind of middle style; at its best it has grace and dignity, a heart-searching simplicity, and a certain magical enlightenment of his phrase that is all his own." Wordsworth wrote two styles, one inspired as a Tintern Abbey and the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality; and the other pedestrian, which describes his ordinary moods and matter-of-fact themes.
Limitations in Wordsworth's Poetry
(i) Inequality: In spite of Wordsworth's obvious greatness as a poet, we find many poems written by him as distinctly inferior in quality. Sometimes he rises to highest poetic raptures, and at other times his work is dull and flat. In Wordsworth alone among the great poets, we find a curious mixture of the highest poetry with the baldest prose. This was perhaps Wordsworth's insistence on his role as a teacher. His teachings in uninspired moments were dull and flat. It was for this reason that Matthew Arnold wanted that Wordsworth should be relieved of much of the poetic baggage which encumbered him. Besides being prolix, he is often cumbrous. He "has often no flight, is not liquid, is not musical." He wrote too much poetry, and his poetry, when not of the best, is curiously tedious. Indeed, Wordsworth's poetic powers declined after 1808, even before the completion of The Excursion. Edward Albert remarks: "This poem (The Excursion) is long, meditative, and often prosaic, and these tendencies become more marked as the years passed. Before the year 1808 he had produced poems as intensely and artistically beautiful as any in the langauge He had little sense of humour, a scanty dramatic power, and only a meagre narrative gift, but he strove to exploit all these qualities in his work."
(ii) Limited Range of His Poetry: Wordsworth's poetry is narrow in its range. His subject was, indeed, Man and Nature, but the life of Man and aspects of Nature with which he was familiar, were those of the Lake District. He cares only for those men who live simple lives in rural surroundings. His ideal man was the simple dalesman of the hills with his austere character and quiet life. The great human passions were beyond his range. He possessed no dramatic power, no imagination to enter into another's personality.
As a poet of Nature, as Huxley points out, Wordsworth was acquainted only with the "trim" and peaceful aspects of nature which he saw in the Lake District. He had no eye for Nature "red in tooth and claw."
(iii) Excessive Egoism: Wordsworth is too conscious of himself and makes himself the subject of his poetry. His poetry lacks in that spirit of detachment and self-forgetfulness,—that negative capability—which distinguishes the highest type of poetry. "Domestic circumstances— the adoration of his wife and sister and the cloistral seclusion of the life he led — confirmed him in the habit of taking himself too seriously. The best of his shorter poems deal with his own experiences; and his longest works, The Prelude and The Excursion, describe his spiritual development in the most minute detail." (Edward Albert)
(iv) Deficiency in Poetic Style: Wordsworth's deficiency in respect of poetic style and music is also responsible for much that is flat and dull in his poetical work. Of course when Wordsworth is inspired, his writings show wonders of style and even of a certain measure of music, as in Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, Tintern Abbey, The Solitary Reaper and some other lyrics. When Arnold says that Wordsworth has no poetic style, he means that his style lacks that subtle heightening effect, which characterises the style of great poets. In fact, Wordsworth is not sure of his style, and consequently there is sometimes a curious intermingling of the sublime and the ridiculous.
Despite these limitations, Wordsworth's poetry is truly great. There is something in it that cannot die. His poetry will always be read with interest, whatever change there may be in taste or fashion.
Moral Value of Wordsworth's Poetry
Wordsworth once said "Every great poet is a teacher; I wish to be considered as a teacher or as nothing." It does not mean that Wordsworth is a moral teacher. Though his aim was to teach, he was pre-eminently a poet. He combines as every great poet does, the functions of a poet and a teacher. Like all great poets Wordsworth teaches by presenting before the world a new vision of life. This new vision that Wordsworth discloses is not only beautiful and glorious, but provides to us a new angle from which to look at life. He does not teach like a school teacher. He moves the springs of feeling and emotion and thus raises the moral and spiritual level of mankind. When Wordsworth consciously and deliberately teaches, his poetry nods and becomes dull and prosaic, when he presents his vision of life, his teaching is merged in his poetry, which thrills and inspires.
Wordsworth was more than a poet. Like every great poet he is a seer. He has taught mankind to look at the world from a different angle, viz., spiritual angle. He teaches that man must rise above his merely material interests and endeavour to feel the spiritual presences that lie all round him. The special aim of Wordsworth as a poet was, in the words of Bailey, "to show that in the commonest sight, in the simplest nature, in the Daffodil, in Poor Susan, in a beggar or in a cloud, there is something of interest, of stimulus, of emotional inspiration, if one will but learn to look for it." It is in the poetry of Wordsworth that we first notice "the consecration of the commonplace." He has taught for the first time that the meanest flower gives thoughts too deep for tears. Wordsworth's poetry has a great value, for it exalts and widens the spiritual vision with the aim of leading us towards firm and austere self-control. He does not possess Shakespeare's richness and vast compass nor Milton's sublime and unflagging strength but "he has the skill to lead us," says Morley, "by his secret of bringing the infinite into commonplace, into inner moods of settled peace, to give us quietness, strength, steadfastness and purpose, whether to do or to endure." Wordsworth himself said that his aim was "to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier, to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous."
The fundamental teaching of Wordsworth is that man can ennoble himself by living in harmony with natures and that whenever this harmony is disturbed, he not only degrades himself but introduces all sorts of discords into the peaceful life of the universe. We should learn the lessons of peace, harmony and joy from nature.
Herford says: "Two convictions penetrate Wordsworth's work: the dignity of man in himself, and the moral and intellectual strength which comes to him in communion with nature." Wordsworth gives us glimpses of "truths that wake to perish never" and this revelation constitutes the teaching of his poetry.
Wordsworth's Influence
It has been truly said that the poets of the nineteenth century are directly or indirectly heirs of Wordsworth. Not of nineteenth century, but the poets of the present century are also deeply indebted to Wordsworth. In respect of the growth and development of English poetry, Wordsworth's contribution was twofold. He emancipated both matter and style of poetry from the fetters of artificiality. All the poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have followed Wordsworth's creed of "back to nature". They may not have accepted his view of nature but the fact remains that nature has been one of the most important sources of poetic inspiration since Wordsworth. Byron, Shelley and Keats were lovers of nature. "Shelley is consciously Wordsworth's debtor. The poet of Tintern Abbey left his stamp upon Alastor; and Shelley's special kind of pantheism flows partly from the same source." Keats was "educated in the Wordsworthian school of nature—worship", and stopped at the sensuous stage of the Lake poet. Victorian poets had their schooling in the nature-poetry of Wordsworth. Tennyson's truthful delineation of nature, Arnold's deep feeling for nature—all have their source in the naturalism of Wordsworth.
Tennyson admitted his indebtedness to Wordsworth and paid a tribute to him in his verse. He tells stories of humble folk, and in Dora uses "the real language of men". Arnold, like Wordsworth, had an ideal of sober and pure simplicity, and with it combined a serious note of deep reflection; in fact he chose Wordsworth, as Cazamian notes, as his guide who "built up and willed his moral life." Hardys interest in rural life and his revelation of beauty and grandeur in the lives of simple folk—can be easily traced back to Wordsworth.
It was Wordsworth who again pleaded for use in poetry of the language spoken by men. The modern poets like Stephen Spender follow Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction.
Thus, the influence of Wordsworth persists even today both in regard to subject-matter and language of poetry.
2
S. T. COLERIDGE (1772-1834)
His Life and Works. S. T. Coleridge was born in 1772 in Devonshire. He was the youngest of the thirteen children of the Vicar of Ottery St. Mary. When he was nine years old his father died. He obtained a place in Christ's Hospital. He was a precocious child. He says, "I never thought as a child, never had the language of a child." The French Revolution appealed to him and he welcomed it in some of his early poems. He went to Cambridge in 1791, where he met Robert Southey, with whom he planned the founding of an ideal republic in America. This Utopian plan, which was influenced by the revolutionary ardour came to nothing. Coleridge expressed his political aspirations in Religious Musings, The Destiny of Nations and Ode to the Departing Year (1776). France: An Ode (1778) reveals the change in his thoughts.
In 1797 Coleridge met Wordsworth and planned the joint publication of the Lyrical Ballads. The subsequent story of his life is a story of aimless wanderings, of plans made and abandoned, of failure and of bitter sense of failure. Hudson writes: "A man of gigantic genius, he was absolutely wanting in will power and his slavery to opium, which lasted many years, helped him still further to paralyse his energies. So the divinely gifted Coleridge stumbled through life, dreaming great dreams and projecting great books; but the dreams were never realised, and the books were never written." He died in 1834, and was buried in Highgate Church.
Coleridge's poetic output is slender. His best poetry was composed between two years 1797-98. Of his poetry Stopford A. Brooke says: "All that he did excellently might be found up in twenty pages, but it should be bound up in pure gold." His first book was Poems on Various Subjects (17%). The poems in the volume are of a moderate quality. Then, in collaboration with Wordsworth he produced The Lyrical Ballads (1798). This memorable volume contains nineteen poems by Wordsworth and four by Coleridge. The most noteworthy of Coleridge's poems is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Coleridge wrote the first part of Christabel in 1797 and a second part was added to it in 1800. But the poem remained fragmentary and lay unpublished till 1816. Kubla Khan, written in 1798 is a fragment painting a gorgeous oriental dream picture. His other memorable poems composed during 1798 are Frost at Midnight and France: An Ode. In 1802 he wrote his famous ode Dejection in which he bewails the loss of his "shaping spirit of Imagination."
Influence of French Revolution on Coleridge
Coleridge too was influenced by the ideology of French Revolution. He welcomed the fall of the Bastille as a promise of the time when
Liberty, the soul of Life, shall reign,
Shall throb in every pulse, shall flow
thro' every vein.
In his youthful revolutionary zeal he challenged established beliefs and even conceived wild projects to serve the cause of Freedom. His mind was filled with Utopian dreams; with Southey and some others he planned the scheme of Pantisocracy— a sort of communistic society on the banks of Susquehanna in America, where he hoped to realise his dreams of equality. It was a fantastic plan and of course nothing came of it. S. A. Brooke remarks: "It was an enthusiasm which, taking fire from the fire of the world, made him think, in the hope and joy which filled his heart, that all things were possible to faith so strong, and aspiration so intense."
Soon afterwards his revolutionary enthusiasm cooled. The aggressive designs of Prance in her attack on Switzerland totally destroyed his belief that she was the champion of liberty. His feelings about Revolution —his earlier enthusiasm and his later disillusionment—are expressed in two odes— Ode on the Departing Year (1796) and France: An Ode (1798); "they form the transition between the first wild hopes and his later conservative despair."
With the passing of his revolutionary enthusiasm, his will and poetic energy passed away. S. A. Brooke writes: "Almost all his work is coincident with the Revolution; afterwards everything is incomplete. The weakness of will was doubled by disease, and trebled by opium, and his poetic life, even his philosophic work was a splendid failure."
Coleridge as a Romantic Poet or
Characteristic Features of Coleridge's Poetry
Coleridge is one of the chief protagonists of Romantic poetry. Rickett writes: "The quality of Coleridge's poetic genius does not suggest long life; it is like a superb sunrise that is bound by the laws of its being to fade into the light of common day; for it draws its sustenance from the mysterious half lights, the meeting of night and morning, and with the dissipation of nocturnal mysteries its magic is weakened and dissipated." The main characteristics of Coleridge's poetry are given below:
(i) Mystery and Supernaturalism: The most conspicuous feature of the poems of Coleridge is their intense imaginative power. It exploits the weird, the supernatural and the obscure. The very centre of Coleridge's imagination lies in his faculty of evoking the mystery of things. Coleridge wrote in Biographia Literaria: "It was agreed that my endeavours should he directed to persons and characters, supernatural or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human nature and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith." It was with this idea in mind that he composed The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a poem founded entirely on supernaturalism. Christabel and Kubla Khan, the two poetic fragments, deal with supernatural element.
Coleridge gave an inwardness to his conception of supernaturalism; he brought it into intimate relation with individual experience and gave a new psychological interest to it. Coleridge himself wrote about supernatural poetry: " ..... the incidents and agents were to be in part at least supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such emotioas, supposing them real." Thus, Coleridge, even before he wrote The Ancient Mariner laid stress upon three essential features of the poems of the supernatural class: (i) psychological interest, (ii) dramatic truth, and (iii) reality of the supernatural.
Supernaturalism in Coleridge's poetry is neither a presentation of horror by external devices, nor a mere exhibition of the effects of the supernatural on human conduct and behaviour, but it is an exploration of what Pater calls "soul-lore", the deepest emotions of the soul are explored by the experience of the supernatural. Secondly, the incidents and emotions arising from them are so full of human interest that they acquire a dramatic truth and produce "a suspension of disbelief which constitutes poetic faith." Thirdly, the supernatural in Coleridge appears to be psychologically real.
Coleridge's three great poems — The Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan — are the finest examples of his use of the supernatural. He does not employ any crude device to prodiee the sense of the supernatural. "It is delicacy," says Pater, "the dreamy grace in the presentation of the marvellous which makes Coleridge's work so remarkable. The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world in almost all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a kind of coarseness or crudeness. Coleridge's power is in the very fineness with which, as with some really ghostly finger, he brings home to our innermost sense his inventions, daring as they are." The secret of Coleridge's unique success works on the mind and not merely on the external objects. He knew with his psychological insight that the mysterious world of the supernatural must remain a mystery, and that subtle suggestion only can produce this sense of mystery, not crude description. It is with delicate touches of suggestions combined with psychological insight, that he brings out all the shadowy mysteries of the unseen world. It is the human note in his supernatural poetry that helps to create this sense of reality. When the Mariner recovers from the spell and returns to his normal self, a natural human interest emerges in the weary words of the Mariner:
O sweeter than the marriage-feast
'T is sweeter far to me,
To walk together to the kiosk
With a goodly company.
And in this chastened and humanised mood, he derives the simple moral:
He prayeth well who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
Coleridge aroused the sense of supernatural mystery by taking the imagination to some distant unknown place, especially the Middle Ages, as in The Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan. Rickett writes: "Coleridge does not use the spells of medievalism as so many stage properties, he absorbs them into himself, and they reappear rarely distilled and inextricably blended with the poet's exquisite perception of the mysteries that surround the commonplace things of everyday life." Rickett further writes that the Ancient Mariner "is wrought with the colour and glamour of the Middle Ages. From the quaint embroideries of the "merry minstrelsy" to the central pattern of the catholic idea of penance, everywhere we see the mediaval touch—the fateful crossbow; the vesper-bell, the shriving hermit, the innovation to "Mary Queen." ....... The supernaturalism of the poem is no matter of stage-lighting as with "Monk" Lewis; of hysterical declamation as with Mrs. Radcliffe; of scenic accessories as with Scott; it is an atmosphere that suffuses the entire tale; the outcome of a delicate hundred touches and subtle hints, made convincing to the reader by the profound psychological insight of the poet." In Christabel he again creates medieval atmosphere; there is the old moated castle with its feudal accompaniments of heralds and pages, with its massive gate "ironed within and without," we have the witch woman with the evil spell and the innocent victim; hints of the tourney. This poem is a fantasia on the elemental theme of good and evil, light and darkness, set in the appropriate key of moonlight and nocturnal mystery." Coleridge was attracted by the magic and mystery of the Middle Ages. His greatness lies in correlating the magic and enchantment of medievalism with human psychology and experience. Coleridge, thus, creates what is called "dramatic probability" and produces "that willing suspension of disbelief which constitutes poetic faith."
As a romantic poet, Coleridge undertook to awaken the feeling of wonder by depicting the supernatural and the mysterious. The pervading sense of mystery is the key to Coleridge's supernaturalism; it is that species of supernaturalism whose essence is psychological. Pater says "It is this finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism, fruit of his more delicate psychology, that Coleridge infuses into romantic adventure, which itself was then a new or revived thing in English language."
(ii) Love of Nature: Like all romantic poets Coleridge loved nature. He loved nature for her own sake, and his love took almost the form of a reverent worship, for he saw behind all the phenomena of nature the veiled presence of God:
Father of Earth and Heaven
All conscious presence of the Universe,
Nature's vast ever-acting energy
In will, in Deed, impulse of all in all.
Coleridge's attitude towards nature passed through two phases: (i) In his youth he conceived that there were multitudes of spirits, by whose operation nature grew, and who informed all the organic and inorganic forms of nature. They were all in the service of God, and it was God, the all-conscious spirit, who informed all forms of nature. The whole universe thus resided in God. Nature was alive in God, and each of her forms, — the flower or the river or the mountain — informed by a distinct spirit, had a distinct life of its own. This idea forms the basis of The Ancient Mariner, where the guilty man is first punished by the avenging spirits, and then redeemed by the "seraph band". (ii) The poet passes to the second phase of his conception of nature when he conceives that it is our own thought that makes Nature to us. It is in our thought that we give forms to external objects, and thinking these we build up the world of nature ourselves. This idea is beautifully expressed in The Aeolian Harp and in The Ode to Dejection. In the former he writes:
And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic harps diversely framed.
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps,
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze
At once the soul of each and God of all
In Ode to Dejection he says:
O Lady ! we receive what we give
And in our life does nature live.
Coleridge had the eye of the artist, and his sensuous perception was hardly less keen than that of Keats. But his poetry, showing evidence of his keenness of perception, is not purely sensuous, for nature is always seen by him through human atmosphere. "The shaping spirit of imagination works upon the outward forms, and everything is seen in "a fair luminous mist"; it is then when we have the highest poetry of Coleridge. But when the shaping power of imagination declines, he cries in despair:
I see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!
Coleridge was endowed with the faculty of minute and subtle observation, and painted the outward forms of nature with "a degree of delicacy to which neither Wordsworth himself nor perhaps any other worshipper of nature, Keats excepted, ever quite attained." Pater says: "It is a highly sensitive apprehension of the external aspects of nature that Coleridge identifies himself most closely with one of the Lake School, a tendency, instinctive, and no mere matter of theory in him as in Wordsworth
green light
Which lingers in the West
and again of
the western sky
And its peculiar tint of yellow green.
...... is a characteristic example of a singular watchfulness of the minute effect and expression of natural scenery pervading all he writes." Coleridge had a sense of colour, comparable to that of Keats in poetry and of Turner in painting:
(i) The thin grey cloud is spread on high
(ii) The one red leaf, the last of its clan
(iii) The level sunshine glimmers with green light.
Symons writes: "With him colour is melted in atmosphere which shines through like fire through a crystal. It is liquid colour, the dew on flowers or a mist of rain in bright sunshine."
(iii) Dreaminess: Coleridge's imaginative faculty was at its height when he escaped from reality into a mystic world of dreams; and it was out of such dreams that he conceived his Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan. The quality that gives them their poetic distinction is their twilight vagueness, in which everything is seen through a haze as a sort of projection from a dream-land. Kubla Khan is all a wonder and melody, and it was out of the stuff of dreams that this wonderful poem was conceived and wrought. The following lines from Kubla Khan represent the very summit of romantic poetry, condensing within themselves the whole world of romantic imagination:
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By a woman wailing for her demon-lover.
(iv) Coleridge's Metrical Art: As a gifted metrical artist Coleridge is most musical. No poet has ever excelled him in the witchery of music. According to Symons he is always a singer and shows a greater sensitiveness to music than any English poet, except Milton. Swinburne, a master of verse-music himself, felt the enchantment of Coleridge's. lyrics, and it was the same feeling that made Shelley describe France as "the finest ode in English language".
Music comes spontaneously and naturally to Coleridge. The following lines from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner show how the poet produces lyric music effortlessly by the simplest of means:
"O shrive me, shrive me, holy man"
The Hermit crossed his brow,
"Say quick," quoth he, "I bid thee say
What manner of man art thou?"
The music of Coleridge's poetry defies analysis, still we can discover a few devices by which he produces music. First, the poet with his sensitive ear creates music by the skilful manipulation of vowel-sounds, for example:
(i) The thin grey cloud is spread on high
It covers but not hides the sky. (Christabel)
(ii) The night is chill; the forest bare
Is it the wind that moaneth bleak? (Christabel)
(iii) The sun's rim drops, the stars rush out
At one stride comes the dark. (Ancient Mariner)
Secondly, words and phrases, instinctively selected for their sound value are so placed that they not only create music in the lines where they occur, but contribute to the entire symphony of the preceding and succeeding lines. Thirdly, he dexterously handles the metres.
The metrical art of Coleridge is best revealed in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan. He employed the old ballad metre with great artistic skill and imparted to it a lyric intensity and dramatic momentum. Coleridge reproduces the homely diction of mediaeval balladry with a skill greater than that of Scott:
Day after day, day after day
We stuck ………
Alone, alone, all, all, alone,
Alone on a wide, wide sea.
Mark the effective use of alliteration:
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free......
Coleridge deftly uses the ballad habit of repetition:
"With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could not laugh nor wail."
"With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
Agape they heard me call."
Coleridge also uses archaic words in order to preserve the medieval atmosphere:
"Eftsoons his hand dropt he."
"And, by the holy rood."
"A certain shape I wilt."
Rickett writes: "Thus the simple beauty of old ballad is imparted with none of its extravagances; while with the medievalism he blends the modern spirit, so as to convey a more moving magic to the reader today."
In Christabel Coleridge "goes to the metrical romance", and employs variations of the octosyllabic couplet. The magic of the poetry of Christabel is largely due to its wonderful music:
The night is chill; the forest bare,
Is it the wind that moaneth bleak?
There is not wind enough in the air
To move away the ringlet curl
From the lovely lady's cheek
In Kubla Khan the dream structure of the poem is held up by its music. Nothing in English poetry can match "its wonderful cadence —changes"
For he on honey dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
and the splendid crash of the "ancestral voices prophesying war."
As a metrical artist Coleridge is unsurpassable. His poetry has a singing quality.
Limitations of Coleridge's Poetry. The poetic output of Coleridge is meagre and his poetry is, even more than Wordsworth's, unequal. There are large tracts of dreariness and flatness in his poetry. Coleridge's poetry suffers from two shortcomings:
(i) Lack of Actuality: Coleridge's poetry suffers from inadequacy of the treatment of the actualities of life. He has created wonderful dreamland in his poetry. He has opened before us as no poet has done, the world of the unseen and supernatural forces. But we miss in his poetry the firm grasp of the realities of life, which produces a satisfying sense in the reader. Poems like The Ancient Mariner or Christabel cannot always satisfy us, we need something, we need something that tells us of human passion, action, sensations and thought. Coleridge's poetry, in spite of its beauty and power, does not give a satisfying sense of actuality.
(ii) Smallness and Incompleteness of Poetic Work: Coleridge left but little poetry. Much of this is scrappy and unfinished. The Ancient Mariner is the only completed thing of the highest quality in the whole of his work. Christabel is a splendid fragment. Kubla Khan remained unfinished because the call of a friend broke the reverie. A critic writes: "We should rather attribute the smallness and incompleteness of his work to some defect of character or purpose, some outside limitation which clogged the exercise of a great gift, than regard it as the result of any flaw in the quality of the gift itself. When Coleridge's genius works freely and under favourable conditions, we are captivated by a music that places him with the lyrical masters of literature, and are impressed by the sense of his absolute originality of tone.
3
SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832)
Sir Walter Scott, the father of the historical novel in English literature, represents the romantic love for the revival of the past, especially that of the Middle Ages, in English poetry. In his early life he developed a passion for the ballad poetry of his land; and he spent many days of his youth roaming over the country, gathering ballads and scraps of ballads from the lips of peasants. He became interested in German Romantic literature and translated some of the German ballads. He was also influenced by Percy's Reliques. His first collection was published as Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1802-03. In some respect the work is a compilation of old material. He also contributed some poems of his own, which were done in the ancient manner.
In The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) there is much more originality. In it a thread of Gothic supernaturalism is woven into a tale of Scottish Border life in the Middle Ages. It was a great and instant success, and was quickly followed up with Manion (1808). Marmion "exhibited in much great measure the brilliant descriptive colour, the swift and powerful narrative movement, and the ringing, energetic music, which had made the Lay instantly popular; and it showed a great advance over the earlier poem in lifelikeness and breadth." Next came The Lady of the Lake (1810) which is remarkable for picturesqueness and the effective use of the wild scenery of the Trossachs. In it Scott effectively deals with medieval Scottish life which he afterwards reproduced in his prose romances. In Rolceby (1813) the scene shifts to the North of England. The Bridal of Triennain (1813) and The Lord of Isles (1814) mark a decline in quality.
Commenting on the qualities of Scott's poetry, Hudson writes: "He rejected altogether the classic epic as his model, and his "romantic tales in verse", as he called them, represent a natural development of the old ballad and medieval romance. In style, he is vigorous, free and rapid, but often careless, diffuse, and commonplace. He can tell a story admirably, and is particularly successful with scenes of stirring action and, above all, with his battle pieces. But he wrote too fast, and his wonderful facility was often fatal. He has nothing of the mystical quality and the spiritual power of Wordsworth and Coleridge, he rarely takes us beneath the surface of things; he carries no weight of thought; and, while his tone is eminently healthy, his moralising is of the tritest."
4
GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON (1788-1824)
His Life and Works. Born in 1788, Lord Byron inherited from his parents that irritable and volcanic character which repeatedly brought him into conflict with men and things. He succeeded to the family title at the age of ten. He was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained M. A. degree. He published his first collection of poems, Hours of Idleness in 1807, which was ferociously attacked by the Edinburgh Review, The poems in this volume contained nothing important. Byron replied to this attack in a vigorous satire, English Bards and Scottish Poets. It is modelled upon Pope but it lacks the polish and refinement of Pope's satires. He widely toured the continent in 1809-11 and visited Portugal, Spain, Gibraltar, Malta, Greece and Asia Minor. This tour inspired the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which were published in 1812. In it he combines vivid descriptions of the places he had visited with historic memories and much melancholy meditation on the instability and transience of human grandeur and power. These two cantos were immensely popular. Byron said: "I woke up one morning and found myself famous." He now began to write romances, which were inspired by Scott's poems, with great rapidity. These poems are The Curse of Minerva (1812), The Waltz (1813), The Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813), The Corsair (1814), Lara (1814), Hebrew Melodies (1814), and Parisina.
Byron married in 1815, but a year after he and his wife separated. This caused so much scandal that he was denounced as a monster of iniquity. He left England as an embittered man. During the self-imposed exile he visited France, Waterloo, Brussels, Switzerland, Italy and Venice. In Venice he completed the third canto of Childe Harold in 1816. He spent the remainder of his life on the continent and it was during these years of exile that he produced his greatest work — Manfred, Cain and the unfinished Don Juan.
In the end Byron was weary of everything — of fame, of poetry and even of himself. He dedicated himself to the cause of Greece then struggling for freedom against the Turks, took the field and died in 1824 of a fever at Missolonghi, before he had completed his thirty-seventh year.
Characteristics of Byron's Poetry
"The position of Byron," says Stopford A. Brooke, "is a curious one. He is partly of the past and partly of the present. Something of the school of Pope clings to him, yet no one so completely broke away from old measures and old manners to make his poetry individual, not imitative." The main characteristics of his poetry are given below:
(i) His Strong Individuality: Of all the great poets of England, Byron is the most subjective. In everything that he writes, it is his own self that he tries to express itself and the different personages of his poems are but the various aspects of the poet's own personality. "His energy, passion and power of vivid and richly coloured description, together with the interest attaching to his wayward and unhappy career, must always make him loom large in-the assembly of English poets." The hero, Childe Harold, is a romantic youth, and is very clearly Byron himself. He is very grand and terrible, and sinister with the stain of a dark and awful past. His tales —The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, The Siege of Comith and Parisina — which deal with the romantic scenes of the East, "almost uniformly reproduce the young Byronic hero of Childe Harold". Byron chronicled his wanderings in the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The hero in Don Juan also reflects the personality of the poet. Rickett writes: "But such as he was with all his contradictions, his sensuality, his sublimity, his wit, his spleen, his moody restlessness, his individuality is so strong that it breaks through all his poems. There is no poet less objective than he. His heroes and villains....are coloured stage editions of himself. Manfred, Childe Harold, Lara, Don Juan; we can see the insolent dandy, the daring adventurer, the intrepid fighter, the amorist in each."
(ii) His Wit and Satire: Edward Albert writes: "His satirical power is gigantic. In the expression of his scorn, a kind of sublime and reckless arrogance, he has the touch of the master." Don Juan is Byron's comprehensive satire upon modern society. In it "Byron expresses the wrath that consumes them, and all the human race comes under the lash. The strength and flexibility of the satire are beyond question, and are freely revealed in bitter mockery, in caustic comment, and in burning rage." Byron's satire suffers from many drawbacks. His motive is to a very large extent personal, and so his satire becomes one-sided, but he hardly ever becomes mean and spiteful. Byron lacks the powerful satirical vision of the great artist, like Cervantes, who behind the shadows of the crimes and follies of men can see the pity of it all. He also took pleasure in deliberately outraging and shocking a certain class of people whom he disliked.
Byron's satire, especially Beffo and Don Juan "scintillate with humour. There is no delicacy, no subtlety about it; but it has a daring and liveliness that reminds one of the Restoration wits rather than of any contemporary models." (Rickett)
(iii) His Love of Nature: Rickett writes: "Lacking the intensity of Wordsworth, the subtlety of Coleridge, the receptivity of Keats, the aerial fire of Shelley, Byron possessed a breadth and vigour of imagination beyond that of any contemporary. Nowhere is this more agreeably illustrated than in his love of nature. In this love he is at one with all the Romantic poets, and he expresses it quite in his own particular way; there is no meditative musing, little sense of mystery, but a very live sense of wonder and delight in the energising glories of Nature." Nature for him is a splendid background against which human activities depict themselves.
Byron is at his best in his descriptions of nature. Without forgetting himself, he paints admirable pictures of the elements, in their calm and above all in their fury. He was keenly alive to a very live sense of wonder and delight in the energising glories of Nature; for example:
The morn is up again, the dewy morn
With breath all incense and with cheek all bloom,
Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn,
And living as if earth contained no tomb
And glowing into day, we may resume
The march of an existence.
(iv) His Interest in the Present: Byron is a romantic poet with a difference. Like Scott, Coleridge and Keats he is not a poet of the past but of the present. His poetry is characterised by a strong practicality and a vivid sense of the present. Rickett writes: "Of all the great poets of the time, Byron presents the curious and piquant combination of an ardent romantic imagination, and an intellect and outlook essentially worldly and matter-of-fact. With Keats it was the past, with Shelley the future, with Byron it is the present that really interests and grips him. His ardent fancy dallied with the past on occasion, but he is most at home with the England of his day, the Europe of his day, its social hypocrisies, its literary conventions and affectations."
(v) Passion for Liberty and Rebellious Spirit: Byron is a superb poet of liberty and revolution. "As a revolutionary poet he represents the destructive side of the revolutionary movement only. Of its Utopianism and social aspirations he knows nothing. He had no faith in the older order, and in many places he forces merciless ridicule, as in the brilliant Vision of Judgment he pours merciless ridicule upon the spent forces of the ancient feudalism and monarchy. But he had no new faith to offer the world in place of the old, and his philosophy ends in blank negation."
Byron had a real passion for liberty, but to him it was synonymous with pure individualism. The heroes of his romances are pirates, corsairs, outlaws, Ishmaels. In Childe Harold, Manfred, Cain, Don Juan he idealises all those who rise in rebellion against society. Byron is a rebel against the very conditions of human life—against what men have called the ways of providence and moral order. In Don Juan he exposes the conventions and hypocrisies of society. In Cain Byron produces a terrific indictment of God's dealings with men as interpreted by the current theology of the time. He became a source of strength and inspiration to the people of Europe because of his passionate devotion to liberty. He prophetically says: "blood will be shed like water and tears like mist, but people will conquer in the end."
(vi) His Lyricism: Byron's lyrical gift is disappointingly meagre. Some of his lyrics are merely sentimental. "Of his lyrics it may be said that while lacking the elusive delicacy of Shelley, and the noble distinction of Wordsworth, they have nonetheless a tilting charm and gracious music of their own." To Thyrza and She Walks in Beauty are his tuneful and readable lyrics. The former lyric is one of the finest lyrics in English. It is characterised by sonority, music, felicity of expression, aptness of diction, picturesqueness and superb flight of imagination:
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies.
(vii) His Style: Byron's poetic style has a unique distinction of its own An ardent admirer of Pope, he was greatly influenced by the poetic diction, personification and conventional epithets of the eighteenth century. He imparted vehemence, passion and vigour to poetic style; for example:
What from this barren being do we reap?
Our senses narrow and our reason frail,
Life short, and truth a gem which loves the deep
And all things weighed in custom's falsest scale;
In his best satires Byron's style is noticeable for conversational ease and naturalness of expression. He displays an epigrammatic wit and great vivacity.
As a poetic craftsman he had some glaring limitations. Byron "had frequent lapses of taste, his dramatic blank verse was often rhetorical and declamatory in tone and, especially when writing of himself, be was often guilty of repetition and over-emphasis." (Edward Albert)
(viii) Byron's Place in Literature: Byron was one of the greatest romantic poets. He was indisputably "one of the chief forces, who made a breach for romanticism in the fortress walls of custom and prejudice."
Byron's greatest and most important contribution to English romantic poetry was the addition of passion. Wordsworth brought poetry back to nature, Coleridge introduced into it the supernatural as a psychic phenomenon, Byron imparted to it "tones of passionate feeling". Indeed, "the note of passion is Byron's most essential contribution to the reawakening of English poetry."
W. H. Hudson writes about Byron's contribution: "But with all his carelessness and his many faults, he has amazing vitality and power, and in his most impassioned moods his verse rushes on like a torrent. He is at his best in description, especially when he blends description with meditation. As a poet of nature he is most at home with nature's wilder aspects; he loves mountains and storms, and he glories in the sea, because of its utter indifference to man. It must be added that as a satirist (as in the Vision of Judgment and Don Juan) he is incomparably the greatest of modern English poets.
"His place in the literature of his age has already been indicated. It is suggested by the very word Byronism, which we still use to denote the spirit of gloom, satiety, and unrest which is characteristic of most of his writings."
Rickett says: "If not one of our greatest poets, there are few literary personalities more interesting than he, and he was undoubtedly a powerful force in English letters."
5
P. B. SHELLEY (1792-1822)
His Life and Works. P. B. Shelley, the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, was born at Field Place in Sussex on August 4, 1792. In 1804, at the age of twelve, he was sent to Eton Public School. He was an uncommon boy, violent in his likes and dislikes. He was gentle and courteous. He was physically fragile, but he could flare up with fury at the sight of tyranny. He frequented graveyards, studied alchemy, and read books of dreadful import. From Eton he went up to Oxford in 1810. He was now revolutionary in spirit and was bitterly opposed to the existing state of society. He wrote a pamphlet, entitled The Necessity of Atheism which caused considerable friction with the authorities of the university. It caused him to be expelled from the university. He left Oxford for London "with the impression that the world was against him and a determination from henceforth to be against the world."
At this time Shelley fell in love with Harriet Westbrook, eloped with her to Edinburgh and married her. This led to an open rupture with the family, and Shelley found himself adrift. His marriage with Harriet proved a failure, and they agreed to separate. Harriet went to her father, and Shelley quite openly left London for Switzerland with Mary Godwin, daughter of William Godwin. In 1816, Shelley married Mary Godwin, after his first wife Harriet had committed suicide by drowning. During these years he wrote Queen Mab (1813) and Alastor (1815). Shelley spent the last four years (1818-1822) mostly in Italy, and this period was most prolific in his career. In 1819 he composed the great lyric drama, Prometheus Unbound, and some of his finest lyrics including the Ode to the West Wind, To The Skylark and The Cloud. The noble elegy, Adonais, and Epipsychidion, appeared in 1821. On July 8, 1822 he was drowned in the sea.
Poetical Works of Shelley. Queen Mab, the first poetical work of Shelley (1813), is full of the poet's youthful idealism. It is "an outcry against the spiritual forces that weigh down mankind." Though crude in expression, it shows the promise of the poet's future greatness. Alastor (1815) bears the authentic stamp of Shelley's poetic genius. It depicts the tragedy of a young idealist who seeks his ideal of beauty in real life. It is "bathed in an atmosphere of luminous beauty and ethereal music so peculiarly Shelleyan." It was followed by the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty which expresses that the spirit of absolute beauty cannot be found in the concrete world.
The Revolt of Islam (1818) is a passionate plea for freedom. It abounds "in fine imagery and musical cadences, but is marred by incoherence, and charms the fancy rather than holds the imagination." Julian and Meddalo (1818) records Shelley's impressions of Venice and the great poet, Byron. It is an interesting poem, written in heroic couplet. As a poem it is weak and formless. Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills presents the discords of life and the passionate idealism of the poet, hoping against hope, with supple grace and power.
Prometheus Unbound (1818-19), a superb lyrical drama, expresses Shelley's thirst for freedom in noble verse. The poet eloquently sings in it of "the hopes of man, the glory of love, and the beauty of nature in verses of exquisite melody." The Cenci (1819) is a verse drama which is remarkable for its concentration and tragic power. The lyrical note is subdued. The Cenci, says Rickett, "with its austere atmosphere and undeviating thread of tragedy, has more points in common with the Greek than the romantic drama."
The Witch of Atlas (1820) is the lightest and most delicate of Shelley's fantasies. It is rich in music and imagery. The witch is a beautiful goddess, who watches human destiny and is free from all human passion. She visits mortal beings and gives them dreams of beauty. The Sensitive Plan (1819) is less satisfying as a fantasy than the Witch of Atlas, but it has a delicate exotic grace and many haunting lines.
Shelley's poetic genius exults in the lyrical pieces The Skylark (1820), The Cloud (1820), Ode to the West Wind (1819), Aretheusa (1820), Hymn of Apollo (1820), Ode to Liberty, Ode to Naples. Epipsychidion is a poem of ideal love. Adonais (1821) is one of the finest elegies in English poetry.
Hellas, a verse drama, which was inspired by the Greek Revolution, appeared in (1822). The dramatic element is feeble but it contains beautiful songs, which display the superb lyricism of the poet and his passionate humanitarianism. The Triumph of Life, a beautiful fragment, was left incomplete by the poet's death.
Characteristics of Shelley as a Romantic Poet
"Pursuit of the unknown, the invisible and the infinite, impels all the romantic poetry of the world. It is out of the hunger for the unknown," says S. A. Brooke, "out of the desire, not for the limited happiness but for the illimitable in joy and in loveliness, that Romanticism sprang into being." It is the pursuit of the illimitable and the infinite that makes Shelley the most romantic of the romantic poets. Shelley's finest poetry is an expression of his unquenchable desire for "what is not", for the unreliable and the unknown. The following traits distinguish Shelley's poetry:
(i) Revolutionary Idealism: Symonds writes: "As a poet, Shelley contributed a new quality to English literature— a quality of ideality, freedom and spiritual audacity." The French Revolution, which was a spent up force in Shelley's boyhood, influenced him by its great ideas. He was attracted by the abstract creed of Revolution — viz., the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity, and he completely ignored the concrete aspects — (viz., the horrors) of the Revolution.
"The Revolution to Shelley was much more than a political upheaval; it was a spiritual awakening, the beginning of a new life." Slavery, according to Shelley, is the main cause of various manifestations of evil. Free and natural development of man was the true, the only development of man. He could develop rightly and truly when he enjoyed liberty, which meant to him freedom from external restraints. The French Revolution preached freedom; Shelley also felt the necessity of abolishing external force or authority which obstructed the growth of human personality. Love would take the place of force. When love reigns supreme, no force, no external authority will be necessary for society. All men shall enjoy liberty, and liberty will work efficiently in an atmosphere of Love. "Love is, with Shelley, a transcendental force, kindling all things into beauty." Thus, the Revolution kindled the imaginative life of Shelley, as it did Wordsworth's, but the fire in Wordsworth soon died out, but in Shelley, it kept burning all through his brief career and permeated all his poetic work. Cazamian writes: "Shelley belongs to that rare species of mankind whom reason and feeling convert into revolutionaries in the flush of youth, and who remain so for the rest of their lives."
Shelley's first two long poems—Queen Mab and The Revolt of Islam—are allegories respectively of the emancipation of mankind and of the heroic struggle with violence. In the Queen Mab he condemns and attacks kings and priests as they are sources of evil. In The Revolt of Islam, Shelley's aim was, as he tells in the Preface, "to kindle in the bosom of the readers a virtuous enthusiasm for the doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither violence nor misrepresentation nor prejudice, can ever wholly extinguish among mankind" and "to illustrate the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind." Prometheus Unbound is a grand orchestral song of the liberation of mankind. In Hellas Shelley sings of the triumph of freedom. As freedom dawns, the poet sings with rapture:
The world's age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn;
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving stream.
Shelley's idealism leads him to live in a region of visionary dream and fancy, more than in the realm of reality. As an idealist he hates the present because of its evils, and fixes his gaze upon the future which will bring to an end all future evils and usher in the reign of love and peace. His idealism shines through all his poetry and is not damped in the least hope the darkness of the present. He sings with undaunted courage and by: "If winter comes, can spring be far behind?" Commenting on Shelley's idealism, Rickett writes: "Liberty for the downtrodden, hope for the oppressed, peace for the storm tossed, these are things that fire his songs and stir his imagination to its depths."
(ii) Transcendentalism: Shelley was a transcendalist who was steeply influenced by Plato. Platonic ideal of love and beauty is beautifully expressed in his finest poetry. To Shelley, Beauty and Love are identical. The essential basis of Shelley's creed is that the universe is penetrated, vitalised and made real by a spirit, which he conceived as Love or Beauty. To Shelley as to Plato, Love is the perfection of all that is good and noble in life. He writes in Adonais:
That Light whose smile kindles the universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move
That Benediction, which the eclipsing curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love,
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth be and air and sea
This spirit of Love or Beauty appears everywhere in Shelley's poetry—in Prometheus Unbound, in the vision of Alastor, in the image of "awful loveliness" in the Hymns to Intellectual Beauty, which he apostrophises as:
Spirit of Beauty that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form.
To Shelley as to Plato, the impressions of the world of sense are dim shadows of things in a higher world, where the archetypes of all that we see in this world exist in splendour and perfection. To Shelley life is a dream, and we awake from the dream of life with death. It is the "eclipsing curse of birth' that shuts us out of heavenly light and admits us to eternal light and truth:
Dust to the dust ! but the pure spirit shall flow
Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
A portion of the Eternal, which must glow
Through time and change, unquenchably the same.
The Spirit of Beauty consecrates all that it shines upon of human thought or form. It is immanent. It is not subject to change. The phenomenal world, with its many shapes and forms, changes, but the spirit behind it is eternal: "The One remains, the many change and pass" Cazamian writes: "The tone of Shelley's poetry is that of a keen aspiration, in which mystical desire, with its anguished pangs and spiritual raptures, transcends the joys and sufferings of ordinary mankind.
Shelley, says Symonds, had faith "in the divine beauty of nature, faith in a love that rules the universe, faith in the omnipresent soul whereof our souls are atoms." He felt himself surrounded by God, as universal soul, everywhere, and therefore did not mention God in his poetry.
(iii) Shelley, the Poet of the Future or Shelley, the Poet of Visions or The Prophetic Note in Shelley's Poetry: Shelley's poetry has been called "the fabric of visions" — the vision of ideal Beauty and Love, or the vision of a regenerated world free from cruelty and hatred and oppression, or the transcendental vision of the universal spirit, of the one that remains. "Shelley attempted," says Baker, "to be the hierophant or philosophical interpreter of the great vision of supernatural beauty and love — a vision, which he knew to be unapprehended by the majority of men, and only apprehended in perception by the poet himself, yet a vision necessary for the moral progress and mental well being of the benighted race of men."
Shelley's visions have a forward looking quality. He is a poet of future. He ardently looked forward to a new world order, based on the solid foundations of love, freedom and brotherhood. He was sick of the ugly realities of life. The sorrows and sufferings of man saddened his heart, and the falsehood, hypocrisy and oppression, which he saw around him, filled him with indignation. He felt that power and authority encouraged slavery and bondage, and exercised a corrupting influence. Shelley passionately opposed power and authority and sang of the glory of love and freedom so that this earth might become a heaven. In his imagination Shelley leaped over centuries—his eyes is undauntedly fixed upon the future when love will rule the world and mankind will be free and happy. He like a prophet holds the light before the world, and a time shall come when the world will be wrought to sympathy with the hopes and aspirations it does not heed today. In Prometheus Unbound, ,Shelley sings of man's ultimate victory over evil, achieved through endurance and suffering. He eloquently and prophetically sings Ode to the West Wind:
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth.
Shelley is optimistic about the dawn of a happier and brighter future. The darkness will clear away, and the light of freedom and love will burst upon the world:
If winter comes, can Spring be far behind? The hope of the regeneration of mankind through suffering, the prophecy of the inevitable coming of the millennium glow brightly through Shelley's poetry. Rickett rightly remarks: "He is a reformer as well as a poet. Little interested in the past, mindful only of the present when it jarred on his social idealism, his eyes are fixed intently on the future. To renovate the world, to bring about Utopia, that is his constant aim, and for this reason we may regard Shelley as emphatically the poet of eager, sensitive youth, not the animal youth of Byron, but the spiritual youth of the visionary and reformer."
(iv) Shelley—an Effectual Angel: A question arises about the vagueness and unreality of Shelley's visions. Some critics say that his visions are not related to reality; they are vague, impalpable, and are lost in obscurity. Matthew Arnold's view that "Shelley is a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain" is largely based on the unreal and insubstantial character of his vision and imagery. Arnold was no doubt very right when he called Shelley a beautiful angel, but he was very wrong when he called him ineffectual. Ideas are more real to Shelley than realities. But his ideas are founded on reality. "He has been called a visionary, but he was not one of those visionaries who shut themselves up with their own ideal away from reality. He was always in fierce conflict with a great part of reality, and out of that conflict came the experience and emotion which he expressed in Prometheus."
Indeed, Shelley lived with ideas. He apprehended with prophetic insight those great forces which were altering the face of the world during the nineteenth century —the forces of science and democracy. But he apprehended these forces not from the material but from the spiritual point of view. Shelley, therefore, does not beat his wings "in the void" but amid the prime forces of the modern world. Dowden says: "If love, justice, hope, freedom, fraternity be real, then so is the wiser part of the inspiration of Shelley's song." Dowden adds that the tendency of Shelley's poetry is "to quicken our sense to an exalted wisdom, and to stimulate us to its pursuit", and this wisdom consists in "devotion at all hazards to an ideal —to the ideal of highest truth, sacred justice and purest love." Shelley has widened the scope of our imagination and enriched human life. His poetry leads us to conceive nobly of Nature and of man. Dixon writes: "In so far as Shelley was the prophet of a new faith, the gospel of the universal brotherhood of man, of universal reign of love, and insofar as he was successful in impressing the beauty and nobility of that idea, he was and is an undeniable force." Shelley has not only enlarged our conception of human nature, he has extended the circuit of our spiritual adventure."
Elton has justly observed: "Arnold is wrong about Shelley, wrong without recovery and without qualification." Quiller Couch emphatically declares that "ineffectual is the falsest world that has been applied to him." Arnold's observation may be altered and read as follows: "Shelley was a poetic angel flying with luminous beings to lofty spiritual heights."
(v) Shelley, the Poet of Nature: Shelley, like all great romantic poets, was an ardent lover of nature. The external beauty of nature appealed to him. The description of various flowers in The Sensitive Plant shows how Shelley's senses reacted to their beauties, their colours and their odours:
The sundrop and then the violet,
Arose from the ground with warm rain wet,
And their breath was mixed with fresh
colour, sent
from the turf like the voice and the instrument.
……………………………………………..
……………………………………………..
And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tube
rose,
The sweetest flower for scent that flows;
And all rare blossoms from every clime
Grew in that garden in perfect prime.
But Shelley was not content with the sensuous presentation of nature. He went beyond the external beauty of nature, and strove to realise the idea of beauty, of which Nature is the visible embodiment. Like Wordsworth he conceives nature as one spirit working through all things:
the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world.
To Wordsworth, this spirit is the Spirit of Wisdom and Thought. To Shelley the spirit is the Spirit of Love. Love binds together the various objects of nature. The lovely lyric, Love's Philosophy expresses in a simple manner how Love binds together the various aspects of nature. In The Sensitive Plant, the poet expresses that the flowers and the grass have each of them a soul of love which knits them together. Each one of the flowers "shared joy in the light of the gentle sun" and each one was interpenetrated
With the light and the odour its neighbour shed,
Like young lovers whom youth and love make dear,
Wrapped and filled by their mutual atmosphere.
According to Shelley each object of nature has a separate and individual life, and each one again is linked with that one spirit working through all things— the one spirit, whose plastic stress sweeps through all things. The cloud lives its own life, so do the West Wind and the Skylark. Shelley's mythopoeic imagination enables him to conceive the separate things of nature with distinct individuality, and to describe them in human terms. Shelley saw beyond the external phenomenon, and makes a myth of the West Wind. He shows how it is a destroyer and preserver:
Wild spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver: hear 0 hear.
Rickett writes: "As the wind purifies the woods, so does the wind sweeten the sky, clarify the ocean, and make stronger and sounder the heart of man." The Cloud is also a myth of flawless beauty. The cloud is also described in human terms. She is the daughter of earth and water.
Shelley often identifies himself with the objects of Nature. The Skylark, the West Wind, the sensitive plant and the cloud represent different aspects of his own personality.
(vi) Shelley, the Poet of Love: Shelley is a great poet of Love. Love, according to him, is "the bond and sanction which connects not only man with man, but with everything which exists." Love is "an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person, not our own." Shelley's conception of ideal love, is platonic. Love is the soul of the universe. His creed is that "the universe is penetrated by a spirit which is sometimes called the spirit of Nature, but which is always conceived as Love and Beauty. Love is the universal spirit uniting all objects of the universe:
that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fue for which all thirst.
Thus love is the power which interpenetrates all things, circling them like the breath of life, and without which the glorious world were a blind and formless chaos. This is the basis of Shelley's idealistic pantheism.
Shelley finds Love in the widest commonalty spread in the realm of Nature. He writes in The Sensitive Plant:
And the Spring arose on the garden fair,
Like the spirit of Love felt everywhere
And each flower and herb on earth's dark breast
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.
In Love's Philosophy he again sings of Love in Nature.
Shelley's love for the beloved is devoid of sexual emotion, which has evoked the finest feelings in the love poetry of the Elizabethans, Robert Burns, Caroline singers and even Tennyson. Rickett writes: "But, whether directly or indirectly, the call of sex has evoked their finest songs. This is not the case with Shelley." To him the ideal woman is:
………a mortal shape indued
With love and life and light and deity,
And motion which may change and cannot die;
An image of some bright Eternity
Shelley knows that the ideal love for which his soul hungers is unattainable— hence there is a note of desire as well as a note of despair in his love poetry. Love is worship. The famous lyric One Word Is Too Often Profaned expresses the characteristic Shelleyan note:
I can give not what men call love,
But will thou accept not
The devotion the heart lifts above
And the heavens reject not.
(vii) Shelley's Lyricism: As a lyric poet, Shelley is unsurpassable. Swinburne writes: "He was alone the perfect singing god; his thoughts, words and deeds all sang together .... The master singer of our modern race and age, the poet beloved above all other poets—in one word and the only proper word— divine."
Shelley's lyrics are matchless for their emotional intensity, poetic energy, subjectivity and enchanting music.
Stopford A. Brooke says: "The lyric proper is the product of a swift, momentary and passionate impulse coming from without for the most part, suddenly awaking the poet into a vivid life, seizing upon him and setting him on fire." Shelley is superb master of the lyric form. He was swiftly led away by impulse —impulse either from within or from without. He was impelled from within by his own thoughts, and these thoughts immediately swept him away into emotions, which formed themselves into lovely lyrics. The longing for a new world order translated itself into matchless lyric outburst:
The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return.
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and emperors gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
Shelley was also "impelled from without by impressions made on him by the loveliness of nature, or by the good or evil of man," and these impressions, charged with the heat of passion, generate wonderful lyrical poetry. The swift march of the West Wind made Shelley cry out,
O wild West Wind, thou breath of
Autumn's being.
Shelley merges his personality in the West Wind:
Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit ! Be thou me, impetuous one !
Shelley's lyrics are unequalled for their music. A critic writes: "Shelley outsang all poets on record but some two or three throughout all time; his depths and heights of inner and outer music are as diverse as nature's, and not sooner exhaustible. He was at once the perfect singing god; his thoughts, words and deeds all sang together." He deftly employed various musical cadences in his lyrics. They are swift and impetuous, grave and solemn, galloping and joyous, according to the nature of emotions expressed. The rolling music of the "West Wind" is in harmony with the march of the Wind. The music of To the Skylark reproduces the upward flight and song of the bird:
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest;
Like a cloud of fire
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever
singest.
The hurried movement of the clouds is projected on the reader's mind by the musical cadence of The Cloud:
I bring showers for the thirsting flowers
From the seas and the streams,
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In the noon-day dreams.
Thus, every lyric of Shelley brings its own music.
Shelley's lyrics show a unique rush of poetic imagery. He heaps image on image suggested by the original thought. The imagery in his finest lyrics¾Ode to the West Wind, To the Skylark and The Cloud is not e product of laborious thought but a spontaneous growth of poetic impulse.
There is logical arrangement in the best lyrics of Shelley—logic of emotion and logic of thought, and it is unconscious, for it produces itself without any set scheme.
Rickett remarks: "Shelley exhaled verse as a flower exhales fragrance, and just as the fragrance of a blossom varies in quality and power, so did Shelley's verse vary in poetic merit. The essential point is that there was no effort of laborious artistry about it at any time."
(viii) Shelley's Poetic Style and Music: Shelley's poetic style is romantic throughout. It is reflective of his nature and is full of uncontrollable passion and energy. He is never unpoetic, as most poets sometimes are. His style glows with passion and music, soars up as soon as his imagination catches fire, and image after image comes forth, to clothe his ideas in poetry. The series of gorgeous similes in To the Skylark show the romantic exuberance of Shelley's poetic style. Shelley has contributed to English poetry the largest variety of lyric measures; and his lyrics, with their rush and music, are unique specimens of romantic poetry.
Shelley's poetry is also characterised by the abundance of imagery. Images after images are piled up in quick succession, so much so that the readers are unable to keep pace with the flight of his fancy. Shelley's poetry is also characterised by his myth making faculty. He is one of the greatest myth makers in modern times, and his myths have the freshness and sureness of touch of the ancient Greek myths.
Commenting on Shelley's mastery over verse music, Saintsbury writes: "Without apparent study or preparation he passes from the most ordinary, or nearly most ordinary verse making to the extraordinary blank verse of Alastor, and thenceforward anything that he chooses to write—tercet, and quatrain and Spenserian, mixed lyric metres on the great and small scale, couplets, octo-syllabics— is all the same to him ......He is one of the very greatest of all practical prosodists."
6
JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)
His Life. John Keats was born in 1795 in London. His father, an ostler, who had married his master's daughter and had settled as a businessman, died in 1804, when Keats was only nine years old. He was sent to school where he learned some Latin. He was apprenticed at fifteen to a surgeon, but he was deeply interested in poetry. His friend Cowden Clarke gave him a 'copy of Spenser's Faerie Queene which greatly influenced him. The rhythmic beauties and sensuous charms of Spenser's poetry appealed to him. In 1816 he was appointed dresser at a hospital, assisting the surgeons and dreaming of fairyland all the time. Keats read Chapman's translation of Homer with great interest. The Iliad revealed to him a new world of beauty, which he expressed in the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. In 1816 Keats came in contact with Leigh Hunt, who exercised a wholesome influence in giving a shape to his growing poetic powers. In 1817 the first volume of his poems appeared, which almost passed unnoticed. In 1818 he published Endymion which was severely criticised in The Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Magazine. In 1818 his brother Tom died of consumption, and Keats himself fell ill, and never recovered from the fever. Yet in this year and next year, he wrote some of his greatest poems—the Odes; for while his body was wasting away, his imagination was becoming more vital. The deep and agonising love affair with Fanny Browne strained his nerves almost to a breaking point. In 1820, Lamia, Isabella and The Eve of St. Agnes came out. He was now in the grip of consumption. He sailed for Naples in 1820; from Naples he went to Rome where he passed away in February 1821. On his tomb are carved, according to his own request, the words: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." In a hopefuller time and in a mood of noble simplicity he had said: "I think I shall be among the English poets after my death."
His Works. Keats' earliest attempt at verse was Imitation of Spenser (1813), which consists of a few Spenserian stanzas. This and some other short pieces were published together in his Poems (1817). His two poems I Stood Tip Toe Upon A Hill and Sleep and Beauty— show the influence of Spenser and Leigh Hunt. At this time he got a copy of Chapman's Translation of Homer which revealed to him a new world, the world of Hellenic beauty. His famous sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer reveals his wonder and delight at the discovery of the new found world of Hellenism. This sonnet was the first indication of his poetic genius.
Keats' first ambitious work Endymion appeared in 1818. It is probably based on Drayton's The Man in the Moon and Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess. It tells the story of Endymion, the shepherd prince of Mount Latmos, with whom Cynthia, the moon-goddess falls in love. The poem is an allegory which represents the poet's search for ideal beauty. It is an immature work but it shows "the tender budding of the Keatsian style— a rich and suggestive beauty obtained by a rich ornamented diction." The first line of the poem contains the theory that Keats followed all through his life: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever."
Some of the finest poems and greatest odes of Keats were published during 1819-20. Isabella or The Pot of Basil (1818) is based on Boccaccio's Decameron and tells a tragic story of love. It is written in Ottava Rima and marks a decided advance in the poet's work. Lamia is the story of the serpent woman, and is the most constructed of Keats' narratives. The Eve of St. Agnes (1819), Keats' finest narrative poem, is a tale of the elopement 9f two lovers. It is a piece of richly decorative verse, and shows the influence of Spenser. The style is Keats' own, and the poem is full of beauties of description, imagery and colour. The poet left two unfinished poems-The Eve of St. Mark and Hyperion. The Eve of St. Mark, though Incomplete, shows balance, simplicity and restraint, and "with rare economy of words, the poet arrests the reader and makes him feel the Impending tragedy." Hyperion, an unfinished epic, is marked by an austere Miltonic beauty. The story of Lamia is taken from Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy and tells of a beautiful enchantress. The poet has skilfully used theheroic couplet. It is remarkable for sensuousness and Pictorial quality.
Keats' great odes ¾ To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn, To Psyche, On Melancholy, To Autumn —were nearly all written in 1819. His odes form a class apart and are the monumental contribution to Romantic poetry.
As a sonneteer Keats ranks with the greatest English poets. Edward Albert remarks: "Of the sixty-one sonnets some ten, including On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, When I have fears, and Bright Star are worthy to be ranked with those of Shakespeare."
Keats as A Romantic Poet
It has been said that "English Romanticism attains in Keats the final stage of progress." Romanticism with Keats "was no conscious revolt, no adoption of a creed, but a subtle, permeating essence of the-soul." All the romantic poets save Keats made poetry serve other interests than those that belong strictly to poetry. Wordsworth and Coleridge were often diverted from the true distinction of poetry—the former by his zeal as a moral teacher, and the latter by his metaphysics. Byron was self-centred and always talked of himself, and Shelley was a revolutionary idealist, singing of freedom or dreaming of the millennium. Keats was the pure poet, with an inexhaustible capacity for joy and for creating beauty for its own sake. In the poetry of Keats are united all the different elements of Romanticism-love of nature, sensuousness and pictorial quality, supernaturalism and medievalism, Hellenism and a mystic worship of Beauty. Wordsworth passed through sensuousness to spiritualism and mysticism, but he was never inspired by supernaturalism and medievalism. Coleridge, though most richly gifted among the Romantics, was not affected by Hellenism. Byron, with all his passion and force, lacked delicate sense of beauty. Shelley's poetry, with all its romantic idealism, lacked concreteness. Keats may, therefore, be called the finest flower of the Romantic movement. He is the most artistic and purest of the Romantic poets. The following characteristics, which distinguish his poetry, make him the superb romantic poet.
(i) Sensuousness and Concreteness: Arnold said: "Keats as a poet is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous." Keats is called a poet of senses (i) because in his poetry the sensuous appeal is most intense and all-pervading, (ii) because his emotions are immediately excited by his senses, and (iii) because his poetry is full of sensuous imagery. The sensuousness of Keats is not confined to the eye and ear, but embraces all the five senses. Just as the beauties of nature appealed to his eye and sweet sound to his ear, so did sweet odour and delicious taste and soft touch appeal to his other senses. All his senses were keen and responded quickly to the outer world, and his sensitive soul vibrated to every kind of sense impression.
Keats is preeminently a poet of sensations, whose very thought is clothed in sensuous and concrete images. The epithets he uses are rich in sensuous quality—watery watery clearness, delicious face, melodious plot, sunburnt mirth, embalmed darkness etc. Keats was also endowed with the rare gift of communicating these perceptions by concrete and sensuous imagery; for example:
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim.
Sense perceptions quicken the activity of his imagination. His poetry is not a mere record of sense impressions. It is a spontaneous overflow of his imagination kindled by the senses. He sees the sensuous beauty of the Grecian urn and, of the figures carved upon it. Keats' imagination is kindled and he hears in his imagination the music of the piper:
Heard melodies are sweet, those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes play on
Not to the sensual ear, but more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit, ditties of no tone.
Keats' early poetry is blatantly sensuous, but the poetry of his maturity is penetrated with sentiment and intellectualism. It was his sense impressions that kindled his imagination which made him realise the great principle that "Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty."
Rickett writes that Keats deals with "sensations rather than ideas, with concrete life than with abstract imaginings, — sight and hearing respond to ideas, touch to sensations. The metaphysical power that charges with intellectual fire the visions of Shelley, is outside his scope. Not that he eschews ideas, the odes eloquently refute such a suggestion, but when he elects to deal with ideas, he chooses such human things as love, sorrow, life and beauty, and presents them in concrete shape:
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.
Thus do his ideas, like his memory, become incarnate with the shaping splendour of the consummate Artist, and thus does he help us to realise, as no other poet has done since Shakespeare, the oneness of Truth and Beauty."
(ii) Hellenism: Shelley once said: "Keats was a Greek." He did not read Greek language and literature, but the Greek influence came to him through his reading of translation of Greek classics, Lempriere's Classical Dictionary and through Greek sculpture. Above all, Keats had a temperamental affinity with the ancient Greek writers and thinkers. Chapman's translation of Homer revealed to him the new world of wonder and delight. He felt as if he had discovered a new world:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
When a new planet swims into his ken.
His study of Lemprier's Classical Dictionary fully acquainted him with the Greek mythology; and he loved every bit of it. He freely used it in his poetry. The stories of Endymion, Lamia and Hyperion are based upon Greek legends. In his famous odes To Psyche and On a Grecian Urn the subjects are Greek. The sculptured "wonders" of ancient Greece fascinated Keats' imagination. He felt in them the calm grandeur of Greek art, its symmetry and simplicity, and lastly, its sense of proportion, its subordination of parts to the whole. The pieces of Greek sculpture were in his mind when he was writing the Ode on Indolence and the Ode on a Grecian Urn.
Keats is a Greek in his manner of personifying the powers of nature. What the Greeks felt, Keats also felt. The rising sun for Keats is not a ball of fire, but Apollo riding his chariot. He sees the moon as the goddess with a silver bow coming down to kiss Endymion. In fact, the world of Greek paganism lives again in the poetry of Keats, with all its sensuousness and joy of life, and with all the wonder and mysticism of the natural world. Like the Greeks he attributed human qualities of various objects of Nature. Autumn sometimes appears as a thresher:
Sitting careless on granary floor,
Thy hair soft lifted by the winnowing wind.
Sometimes as a reaper, sound asleep on a half-reaped furrow, or as a gleaner, steadying the laden head across a brook.
The Greeks were lovers of beauty, so is Keats. It was the perfection of loveliness in Greek art that fascinated Keats. It was the beauty and shapeliness of the figures on the Grecian urn that started the imaginative impulse which created the great Ode. Keats' passionate pursuit of beauty shows the instinctive greatness of his mind. To him "a thing of beauty is a joy forever" and "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty". Thus, "there was in Keats the keenest sense and enjoyment of beauty, and this gave him a fellow-feeling with the Greek masters." W. J. Long remarks that Keats "had a marvellous faculty of discerning the real spirit of the classics — a faculty denied to many great scholars, and to most of the classical writers of the preceding century, — and so he set himself to the task of reflecting in modern English the spirit of the old Greeks."
(iii) Medievalism: The romantic imagination of Keats revels in the past—in the Middle Ages and in ancient Greece. Keats recaptured the romantic spirit and atmosphere of the Middle Ages. Medievalism with all its paraphernalia of romance and legend, love and adventure, is most prominent in The Eve of St. Agnes and La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The following lines from Ode to a Nightingale condense within themselves the whole world of medieval romance:
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.
Keats deals with supernaturalism in La Belle Dame Sans Merci. It is in the simple style of a ballad, and tells a supernatural story with a medieval atmospehre.
(iv) Keats' Nature Poetry: Keats loved nature for her own sake, and not for the sake of any idea that the human mind can read into her with its own workings and aspirations. Downer remarks: "Keats seeks to know Nature perfectly and to enjoy her fully, with no ulterior thought than to give her complete expression. With him no considerations of theology, humanity or metaphysics mingle with nature." He looked with wondering eyes upon the face of nature with the rapture of a lover gazing on the face of his beloved.
Keats was enchanted by the sensuous beauty of Nature. Each object of nature brings delight to the poet, and he paints beautiful pictures. As a landscape painter in colourful words Keats is unsurpassable in the entire range of romantic poetry. Nature is to him a store of delight, but there is no spiritual union between his soul and the soul of nature. The poet is enraptured by the beauties of Nature, which have gratified and thrilled his senses.
Rickett writes: "Where Wordsworth spiritualizes and Shelley intellectualises Nature, Keats is content to express her through the senses: the colour, the scent, the touch, the pulsing music; these are the things that stir him to his depths; there is not a mood of Earth he does not love, not a season that will not cheer and inspire him."
(v) Keats, a Poet of Beauty: To Keats the passion for beauty was the one dominant passion of his soul. He said: "With a great poet, the sense of beauty overcame every other consideration." Beauty was for him the moving principle of life. In fact, beauty was his religion. He loved beauty in all its forms and shapes—in the flower and in the cloud, in the song of a bird and in the face of a woman, in the work of art and in tales of romance and mythology. All his poetry from Endymion to Hyperion has one dominant theme — Beauty.
Keats' senses, which were very sharp, reacted quickly to the beauties of the external world, and these sense impressions are transmitted into poetry by his imagination. The first line of Endymion strikes the keynote of his poetry— thing of beauty is a joy forever"— a joy even in the midst of disease, sufferings and disappointments of life. This joy of beauty came to him through the senses. He drank in the beauty of the external world with all his senses, and his whole being was excited by it, and he sang out with wonder and delight. Ode to Autumn reveals the sensuous beauty of the sea soil.
But Keats went beyond mere sensuousness, though he never lost the intense appeal of the sensuous beauty. At first, he loved and rejoiced in the concrete manifestation of beauty that appealed to the senses, then he worshipped "the mighty abstract idea of beauty, that appealed to the mind and the imagination". What is it that he sings in his Ode to a Nightingale? Is it merely the song of the nightingale, that delighted his ears on a Particular evening? It would be that, if he had written it early in his career, but he had passed beyond that stage. The song of the particular nightingale, which he heard, is merely a symbol; it is the symbol of universal beauty which is external: "Thou was not born for death, immortal bird." Keats would die, that particular nightingale would die, but the song of the nightingale (the beauty that the song represents) would never die. The poet, in a sudden sweep of his imagination has passed from the world of senses to the world of eternity, where the nightingale would sing for ever. Beauty transcends time and space.
Keats found beauty in life with all its sufferings and tears. In Ode to Melancholy he reveals how melancholy dwells with Beauty— "Beauty that must die." Middleton Murray remarks: "It involves a profound acceptance of life as it a passing beyond all rebellion, not into the apathy of stoic resignation, but into a condition of soul, to which the sum of things— foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor — is revealed as necessary and true and beautiful." Keats accepts life as it is-- and still can affirm that though forms of beauty are fleeting, the principle of beauty that is behind the universe is eternal.
The beauty revealed through the senses is fleeting but Keats' imagination revealed to him the essential truth about beauty. His imagination reveals to Keats the beauty which is beyond the senses
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter, therefore ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.
So, imagination reveals a new aspect of beauty, which is sweeter than beauty which is perceptible to the senses. The senses perceive only the external aspect of beauty, but imagination apprehends its essence, and "what the imagination seizes as beauty is truth". Hence, he emphatically writes:
Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
In this instance, writes Moody and Lovett, Keats "attempts to rationalize his instinctive devotion; but it is an overmastering instinct, not philosophic conception, that we find the worship of beauty everywhere operative in his work."
(vi) His Humanity: Keats was neither an escapist nor unconcerned with human affairs. Moody and Lovett write: "Although the body of Keats' work is unconcerned with prosaic human interests, it is a serious mistake to think of him as indifferent to human affairs. His wonderful letters, with their spirited humour, their quick human sympathy and solicitude, their eager ponderings of life and clear insight into many of its dark places, show a nature vitalized at every point, and keenly alert to reality. In many of his later poems, especially the great odes, the poignant human undertone suggests that if he had lived he might have turned more and more to themes of common human experience." Keats submitted himself, says Middleton Murray, "steadily, persistently, unflinchingly to life" and had "the capacity to see and to feel what life is."
(vii) Keats' Poetic Art: Keats was a conscious artist and his poetry is marked by its artistic workmanship. He felt that poetic composition needed application, study and thought, and with regard to many passages of his works he took considerable pains to shape his verse. Keats' "sureness of touch in the correction of his verse reveals a rare sense of the consummate artist."
Keats' poetic art developed quickly from the immaturity of Endymion to the finished excellence of the odes; this speedy development was guided by his sure poetic and artistic instinct. The outstanding quality of his poetic art is the power to paint vivid word pictures. His poems may be said to have been painted with words. The abstract ideas in his poetry assume a concrete, corporeal form; for instance, he gives a concrete living image to express the idea of joy which is evanescent:
Joy whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu.
Keats hardly expresses a thought or feeling in abstract terms; his thought leaps up into visual forms. His poetry abounds with words and epithets which call up vivid pictures to the mind: "beaded bubbles winking at the brim," "full throated ease", "hushed, cool rooted flowers fragrant eyed."
Keats had the gift of making what Bridges calls "imginative phrases". It is for the possession of this power that Keats has been likened to Shakespeare. In Keats we find "imaginative phrases, which have the power to delight the aesthetic sense and also surprise the intellect by their aptness."
Keats consciously used language employing all its resources to make it musical. He frequently uses alliteration, but it is used with the sure tact of an artist, so that it contributes to the music of his verse: "the marble men and maidens", "the winnowing winds", "fast fading violets covered up in leaves" etc. Vowels are artistically used to bear the burden of melody. Sound echoes the sense; for example:
"the murmurous haunt of flies summer eves"
and
"Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours."
"Keats", says Hewlett, "not only recovered in poetry the almost forgotten splendour of colour, but used it as a master craftsman."
The peculiar excellence of his poetic art consists in his unfailing sense of proportion and balance. There is perfect harmony and balance in his poetry.
Keats employed various kinds of metres and stanza forms in his poetry. Edward Albert writes: "The most striking feature of his work is the speed with which he learned his craft, and evolved from the imitator of Leigh Hunt, Spenser, Shakespeare or Milton to the artist with a style of his own."
(vii) Negative Capability: Negative capability is one of the main characteristics of Keats'. poetry. A poet, he says, has no identity. "Of the poetic character," Keats says, "it has no self, it is everything and nothing. It enjoys light and shade, it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It 'has as much delight in conceiving an lago or Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the Chameleon poet." For Keats, the necessary quality of poetry is a submission to things as they are, without any effort to intellectualise them his something else. Keats and the nightingale are merged into one—it is his soul that sings in the bird. He was wholly in the place and in the time and with the things of which he wrote. He is fully thrilled by the beauty of autumn. This joy in the present, this absorption in the beauty of the hour—is one of the chief marks of his genius as a poet.
Odes of Keats. The odes of Keats are the ripest fruits of his poetic genius, and in them he gives most of his inmost self. They are, according to Middleton Murray, "comparable to nothing in English literature, save the work of Shakespeare's maturity." Selincourt says: "On the Odes, Keats has no master, and their indefinable beauty is so direct and its distinctive an effluence of his soul that he has no disciple."
The odes are most expressive of Keats' mind and genius. They reveal his deepest thoughts and emotions, his deepest enjoyment of beauty in all its forms—in nature, art and literature. There is an undercurrent of melancholy in his odes, the melancholy arising out of the poet's sense of mutability of life and the transience of beauty and joy. In the odes we find sadness in joy and joy in sadness. This fusion of joy and sadness imparts a rare beauty to his odes.
Keats is the greatest writer of odes in English poetry. They are masterpieces of poetic craftsmanship and conscious artistry. The unmatched witchery of words, phrases, and the wonderful felicity and daring with which Keats turns abstract ideas into concrete pictures, gave to the odes a unique place in English poetry.
Not all the odes of Keats are on the same level of poetic excellence The Ode to Indolence, faithfully portraying, as it does, a transient mood, shows the poet as a relaxed and sensuous man and has no very high beauty to recommend it; the Ode to Psyche, a piece of lovely decorative mythology, shows too clearly the marks of craftsmanship. But the Ode to Nightingale, the Ode on a Grecian Urn, the Ode on Melancholy and the Ode to Autumn are among the great achievements in English poetry.
Keats' Place and Influence. Lowell says: "Wordsworth has influenced most of the ideas of the succeeding poets; Keats its form.' Tennyson assimilated the rich manner of Keats. His pictorial art, his suggestive phrases, his delight in lovely words—all show the influence of Keats. Browning's word pictures also owe much to Keats. The pre-Raphaelite poets are direct poetic descendants of Keats. Rossetti` sensuousness and love of colour evince Keats' influence. Like Keats both Rossetti and Morris looked back to the Middle Ages for their poetic inspiration. Moody and Lovett write about his influence: "From the youthful work of Tennyson and Browning down to the present day, the poetry of the Victorian Age has been deeply affected in form and colour! by Keats' fascinating example. His importance in the romantic development which we have been tracing is twofold. In the first place, he one in the line of his predecessors had been endowed as was he to taste of all earthly delights, to "burst joy's grapes against his palate fine", to convey in verse the wealth of his sensations. By describing life as it impinged upon his temperament, a temperament most rich and delicate yet most robust, he greatly widened the sensuous realm of poetry. In Ode second place, he greatly enriched the texture of verse— its diction and melody— by importing into it new elements from Italian and Elizabethan poetry. In reclaiming the lost secrets of Renaissance verse, he did consummately what Thomson, Collins, Gray and Blake had done falteringly." Long calls him "like Spenser, a poet's poet; his work profoundly influenced Tennyson and, indeed, most of the poets of the present era."
OTHER POETS
This was a period of great poetical activity and only some of the minor poets can be discussed here. Robert Southey (1774-1843) is remembered for Joan of Arc (1798), Thalba the Destroyer (1801), The and Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814). All Curse of Kehama (1810), these poems are romantic in theme, straightforward and unaffected in style. His prose works include The History of Brazil, The History of Peninsular War (1823-32) and The Life of Nelson. Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) exercised great influence on Keats. He contributed to The Examiner and The Indicator. His memorable work is the Story of Rimini (1816) in which he employed free verse. Hunt is seen at his best in the shorter pieces, The Nile and Abou Ben Adhem. He develops the story properly. "In his love of good story free from didacticism, and in his unrestrained revelling in beauty and the riches of imagination, he is a definite contributory force in the march away from the eighteenth century and toward the age of romance. Hunt's prose works include Men, Women and Books, Autobiography, Tom Town and much journalistic work.
Thomas Moore (1779-1852), is an Irish poet, who is best remembered for his Lalla Rookh (1817), an oriental romance, written in the Scott-Byron manner. His Irish Melodies is set to the traditional musical airs of Ireland. Moore's political satires — The Twopenny Postbag (1813), The Fudge Family in Paris (1818) and Fables for the Holy Alliance (1823) reveal the liveliness and sharpness of his Irish wit.
Thoma Campbell (1717-14) edited The New Magazine from 1820 to 1830. He wrote many a larger poems. His Pleasures of Hope contains many beautiful descriptions of nature. It is written in the heroic couplet which reminds us of Goldsmith. His other poems are Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), The Pilgrim of Glencoe (1842), Ye Mariners of England and The Battle of Baltic. Thomas Hood (1799-1845) is mainly remembered for his humorous poems which show his mastery over verbal Wit and funning. He wrote varied type of poetry. The Dream of Eugene Aram, The Song of the Shirt, The Bridge of Sighs, Fair Inez, Ode To and his sonnet Silence are some of his finest poems in romantic poetry. Plea for the Midsummer Night Fairies and The Haunted House are remarkable for sustained imaginative power.
Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) wrote The Pleasures of Memory (1792) in the eighteenth century poetic manner. His Columbus (1812) and Jacqueline (1842) are in the Byronic manner.
Other poets who deserve mention are T. L. Beddoes, John Clare, James Hogy and Ebenezer Elliott.
PROSE
General Characteristics. The most important feature of the histo of prose literature during the age of Wordsworth was the rise of mode review and magazine. The Edinburgh Review, established in 1802, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith and other prominent men of letters of the Whig Party, was concerned with literature and politics. The Quarterly was started as the mouthpiece of Tory Party. William Gifford and Lockhart edited it with distinction. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was launched in 1817 by Wilson, Lockhart and Hoggy. It was followed by the distinguished London Magazine to which Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Allan Cunningham and Carlyle contributed. Another famous periodical of the same type, Fraser's, was founded in 1830.
Nearly all men of letters regularly contributed to these periodicals. The periodical literature exerted great influence on prose literature in general. First, it gave encouragement to essay writing. Most of the prose writers of the time were essayists. Secondly, it offered a fresh field for criticism and especially for the criticism of contemporary literature.
The prose of the eighteenth century was marked by lucidity, grace and charm but it was wanting in variety, warmth and colour. It was not a befitting medium for the expression of deep feelings or strong passion. Hudson writes: "Now the romantic movement brought with it strong passion and deep feeling, and a love of variety, warmth and colour This new movement in prose, like the corresponding movement in verse, was in part connected with the revival of interest in our pre-Augustan authors."
THE ESSAYISTS
"We have seen," writes Rickett, "that The Spectator and The Tatler fostered the essay and inaugurated its more intimate and familiar appeal; and while the essay was reared under the protecting wing of journalism, it still retained its connection with the periodical during the next couple of decades." All great essayists of this period were contributors to magazines.
1
CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834)
His Life. "Of all our English essayists," says W. J. Long, "he (Lamb) is the most lovable, partly because of his delicate, old-fashioned style and humour, but more because of that cheery and heroic struggle against misfortune which shines like a subdued light in all his wirtings." Lamb was born in 1775 in London. He was educated at Christ's Hospital, where he was a fellow pupil of S. T. Coleridge. Lamb, the son of a barrister's clerk, became a clerk in the South Sea House, then in the India House, where the remainder of his working life was spent. In 1796 occurred the terrible family tragedy which moulded the whole of his life. There was a strain of madness in the family which did not leave him untouched. In case of his sister Mary Lamb, the curse was a deadly one. In September 1796 she murdered her mother in a sudden fit of madness, and thereafter she had intermittent attacks of madness. Lamb devoted his whole life to the welfare of his sister who often appears in his essays as Bridget Elia. After thirty years' service he retired in 1825. He passed away in 1834.
His Works. Lamb wrote some poems of a charming nature. In 1807 he and his sister co-authored Tales From Shakespeare. His reputation as a critic rests on Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare (1808). Rosamund Gray is Lamb's mild excursion into fiction. Lamb'sAdventures of Ulysses is an Elizabethan version of the Homeric story. Mrs. Leicester's. School was written cojointly with his sister. Lamb's dramatic experiments include John Woodvil (1802). On it he skilfully reproduces the Elizabethan diction. Lamb's dramatic verse has power and beauty, but there is little dramatic imagination in telling the story. Lamb’s first essay appeared in The London Magazine in 1820 under the name of Elia. The first volume of essays was published as Essays of Elia in 1823, and the second under the title The Last Essays of Elia in 1833. Lamb's essays are the finest in English prose.
Lamb as an Essayist. Charles Lamb, the prince among English essayists, is a romanticist who brought to prose the finest qualities of romanticism. No other essayist can stand a match to him. "I here are essayists, like Bacon," writes Hugh Walker, "of more massive greatness, and others like Sir Thomas Browne, who can attain loftier heights of eloquence, but there is no other who has in an equal degree the power to charm. If an attempt be made to discover the secret of this power, it will be found that first and chief among the factors contributory to it is the incomparable sweetness of disposition which Lamb not only possessed but had a unique gift of communicating to his writings." His wisdom, his humanity, his intimate personal revelations, his love of the past, his reminiscences, his genial humour, his profound pathos and his style have endeared Lamb as an essayist to the readers.
(i) Autobiographal Element in the Essays of Elia: Lamb is the most autobiographical of English essayists and his essays at every step reflect his nobility of soul, his good nature, his charity, his simplicity, his geniality and his boundless kindliness. Lamb is friendly and intimate with the reader, takes them into his confidence on all private affairs, jokes with him, and mystifies him, exactly in the same way as he treated his actual friends.
Lamb is a romantic writer whose essays are practically autobiographical fragments, from which we may reconstruct with little difficulty the inter life and no little of the outer life of Lamb. A large position of Lamb's life is expressed in the Essays of Elia, and with the addition of a few names and dates, a complete autobiography might be constructed from them alone. He frankly tells us of his childish thoughts and feelings, of his school days, his home in the Temple, the Hertfordshire village, where he passed his holidays as a boy, and the university towns where he spent his manhood. In some of his essays he speaks of his early poverty, his first literary beginnings, his holiday trips to the seaside with his sister Mary, his recovery from serious illness, the drudgery of his office work, and his relief when he finally retires from office work.
Of his relations Lamb gives us full and vivid pictures— his brother John is the James Elia of My Relations, his sister Mary Lamb is present in many essays as Bridget Elia; his father is the Lovel of Old Benchers; his aunt appears in My Relations and his maternal grandmother is portrayed in Dream Children. We may learn about the boyish Charles in Night Fears and in Christ's Hospital. We read about his youthful experiences in Mockery End in Hertfordshire, get a vivid glimpse of his long intimacy with sister in Mrs. Battle's Opinions; of his official work in the South Sea House; of his sentimental memories in Dream Children; of his prejudices and temptations in Imperfect Sympathies and the Confessions of a Drunkard, of his relations in My Relations and The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple. "There is no touch of vulgarity in these intimacies; for in their frank unreserve," writes Rickett, "we fed the delicate refinement of the man's spiritual nature...... Lamb omits no essential, he does not sentimentalise, and he does not brutalise his memories. He poetises them, preserving them for us in an art that can differentiate between genuine reality and crude realism."
The autobiographical element in the Essays of Elia is a strange blend of fact, fiction and mystification. Hugh Walker writes: "He had a turn for mystifications, he delighted in weaving threads of fiction 'in a web of truth." At one place Lamb writes: "Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this while—peradventure the very names which I have summoned up before thee are fantastic ..... " Again he writes; "Reader ! if you wrest my words beyond their fair construction it is you, not I, that are the April Fool." Such lines deepen mystification. In fact, Lamb employs autobiography in keeping with the canons of art. The Essays of Elia are a work of art and in them imagination plays an important role. "Autobiographical detail is not its purpose, but is merely incident to it and the writer is at liberty to keep to the strict truth or draw upon his imagination at his will." This free blending of fact and fiction is seen at its best in those essays in which Lamb groups together a number of portraits of his early friends and acquaintances. The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple, South Sea House, and the Grecians in Christ's, Hospital are drawn with a power of accurate reminiscence always tempered with a consciousness of the licence necessary to artistic portraiture. Slight exaggerations, judicious omissions only make the licence more effective. The names and traits of real persons have been altered. Lamb always colours the truth with some degree of imagination. It matters little that the name of Mrs. Battle was Burney, or that the cousin Bridget was really a sister, or that when he says: "Brother or sister, I never had any to know them" his statement will not square with facts. Such deviations from precise truth, the disguises usually transparent, which he chose to assume, do not alter the essential fact that throughout, to a degree almost unexampled in English, Lamb is personal and autobiographical. His mystifications are of no avail, the truth is always transparent behind the disguise.
(ii) Lamb's Nobility of Nature: The essays of Elia reveal the nobility of his nature. His greatness of heart is imprinted deep upon his essays. He thinks of a kindly face with kindly feelings. When a kindly face, he says, greets us, though but passing by, and never knows us again, nor we it, we should feel it an obligation. There are essays illumined by Lamb's delicate sympathy, essays like Grace Before Meat, The Praise of Chimney Sweepers, Captain Jackson etc. Lamb, like Dickens, was a champion of the poor, and even in the essay Poor Relations, which is written from the viewpoint of a rich relation, we never cease to sympathise with the poor.
(iii) Lamb's Humour and Pathos: As a humorist Lamb is unsurpassable in English prose. It has been rightly remarked: "There is no humorist more original than Lamb." There is an element of exaggeration and grotesqueness in his humour. Many examples of humorous exaggerations can easily be cited from his essays—Poor Relations, Christ's Hospital, The Convalescent etc. The following quote from A Chapter on Ears reveals exaggeration: "Scientifically, I could never be made to understand (yet I have taken some pains) what a note of music is: or how one note should differ from another. Much less in voices can I distinguish a soprano from a tenor."
The note of grotesqueness is illustrated by the description of Bores wigs in Christ's Hospital: "He had two wigs, both pedantic, but of differing omen. The one serene, smiling, fresh, powdered, betokening a mild day. The other an old, discoloured, unkempt, angry caxon, denoting frequent and bloody execution."
There is something of the poetic too in the humour of Elia. The whole of Dream Children is poetic, and much of A Quakers' Meeting. Frequently, the poetic element is brought in under the shape of literary allusion or quotation which no one could manage more skilfully than Lamb.
Another factor in Lamb's humour is iteration, which Hugh Walker calls "anything but damnable". It can be illustrated from The Praise of Chimney Sweepers, Two Races of Men, Poor Relations, and The Convalescent. Constant repetitions arouse humour in the essays of Elia.
The most outstanding characteristic of Lamb's humour is a Powerful undercurrent of pathos. He was a highly sensitive person and his heart was touched to the quick by the sight of suffering. He had himself suffered in life, so he could feel deeply for the sufferings of others. "Lamb's humour," write Hallward and Hill, "was largely the effect of a sane and healthy protest against the overwhelming melancholy induced by the morbid taint in his mind. He laughed to save himself from Weeping ...... , he could not prevent his mind from passing at times to the sadder aspects of life." Rickett remarks: "Humour with him is never far from tragedy, through his tears you may see the rainbow in the sky, for his humour and pathos are really inseparable from one another; they are two different facets of the same gem; or to change the simile, one may say that Lamb's moods, whether grave or gay, are equally the natural effervescence of an exquisitely mobile imagination. Whether you call it humour or pathos depends entirely upon where the light may strike the bubbles.”
The close of the Dream Children is remarkable for its blend of humour and pathos. The same commingling of humour and pathos is found in Old China, Poor Relations, A Dissertation on Roast Pig and in many other essays. Pater writes: "Below his quiet, his quaintness,. His humour...... there lies a genuine tragic element."
(iv) Lamb's Humanity: Lamb's subject is humanity at large but in himself he sees its microcosm. Using his own impressions and recollections as a text for his work, he wrote without a trace of egotism or self-assertion. He has no mission to teach. In his essays he presents himself as one of a crowd, sympathising with its most ordinary sorrow and pleasures. He dedicates himself to the common duties of human life. The essays of Elia are remarkable for the quality of self-effacement. A H. Thompson remarks: "Subjective though his essays are in the sense. that they deal largely with himself and his doings, his personality did II( project itself so as to bend everything within its reach into, the shape its idiosyncrasies: it was a receptive surface which reflected the ordinal life of the world, with added light and colour."
(v) The Reminiscent Charm of The Essays of Elia: As a romanticist, Lamb evades the present and mocks the future. His affections revert to, and setttle on the past. He has a distaste to new faces, to new books, to new buildings and to new customs. Lamb vividly recaptures the manners of a bygone age. His essays abound in graphic and picturesque descriptions of old places and old persons living in the essayst's rich and colourful memory. The charm of the essays of Elia is a reminiscent one. He admirably sketches the former inmates of the South-sea House and the Grecians in Christ's Hospital, his relations in My Relations and Dream Children. Lamb possessed the wonderful power of visualising memories and took delight in picturing the past. He sees more clearly the shadow of bygone times rather than the present actuality. A familiar face from real life or from books, a recollected gesture, a guest at his father's table, a school or a university friend, a smile or an expression of suffering that has vanished, "the seven of my goldenest years when I was a thrall to the fair hair, and fairer eyes of Alice Winterton" — these are the stuff of which his essays are made. Hazlitt writes: "The streets of London are his fairyland, teeming with wonder, with life and interest to his retrospective glance, as it did to the eager eye of childhood; he has contrived to weave its tritest traditions into a bright and endless romance."
(vi) Lamb's Style: Lamb's style is the expression of his personality. As a stylist he absorbed the tricks and mannerisms of bygone writers, but he made them all his own by the transforming power of his imagination. Rickett writes: "His style is a mixture certainly of many styles, but a chemical, not a mechanical mixture."
Lamb was influenced by Milton, Browne, Fuller, Burton Walton. There are many points in which he imitates the Elizab, writers — in his love for word coining, his fondness for alliteration, his use of compound words, his formation of adjectives from proper nouns and his frequent use of Latinisms. He had a temperamental affinity with the ancient prose writers. Their thoughts were largely his, their quaintness and conceits fitted in with his humour, their antique flavour pleased his critical palate. Lamb's style, though influenced by the ancients, is coloured by his own imagination. It is a personal style. Lamb is so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of his authors that the idea of imitation is almost done away with.
Lamb's style is noticeable for its immense variety. Ainger points out that Lamb's mind was so saturated with ancient writers that "the occurrence of a particular theme sends him back to those early masters who had specially made that theme their own. That is why he writes so differently on different themes. When he is reflective and fanciful as in New Year's Eve and Popular Fallacies, his style resembles that of S. T. Browne; when fantastic as in The Chapter on Ears that of Burton; when witty as in Poor Relations that of Fuller. When he is grave and didactic he can write with the sententiousness of Bacon, as in Imperfect Sympathies. In elevated and imaginative moods he could be lofty like Milton or Taylor. He can be witty and playful like Fuller as in A Chapter on Ears. He can be lyrical and poetical as in Dream Children. In dealing with matters purely modern, as in Newspapers Thirty Five Years Ago his style is purely modern. In rural descriptions his tone is Wordsworthian. When he writes on homely themes, he writes like "a man of this world" and of his own century. He can recapture the refined style of the nineteenth century prose writers as in The Modern Gallantry.
"Lamb's style," says Hugh Walker, "is inseparable from his humour, of which it is the expression. His 'whim-whams', as he called them, found their best expression in the quaint words and antique phrases and multiplied and sometimes far-fetched, yet never forced comparisons in which he abounds. Strip Elia of these and he is nothing. Neither the brilliancy of Hazlitt, nor the eloquence of Ruskin, nor the harmony of De Quincey, nor the vigour of Macaulay, nor the purity of Goldsmith could for a moment be thought capable of expressing the meaning of Lamb ...... of no one else is the saying that style is the man more true than of Lamb. In the deepest sense therefore his style is natural and all his own."
In Lamb's style we find the abundance of allusions and quotations.
Lamb's style is delightful and inimitable. It defines analysis. J. C. Powys writes: "Elia's style is the only thing in 'English prose that can be called absolutely perfect."
(vii) Lamb's Art of Essay Writing: Lamb is the finest and most charming of all English essayists. He brought perfection to the art of essay writing. In an essay the subject should be treated lightly, in a chatty, gossipy manner. The subject should be pictured, not reasoned. An essay a lyric in prose. So it must have the qualities of lyric. It must be personal is land confidential. It must appeal, like a poem, to the emotions and heart fascinating than to the intellect. An essay must be written in a charming and fascinating style. It must have qualities of wit, humour and pathos. Lamb combines all these essential elements of essay writing in his esays with great artistic excellence.
As a great and gifted essayist Lamb is concerned with the pageant of human life as it weaves itself with a moving tapestry of scenes and figures, rather than with the aims and purposes of life. He is preoccupied with things as they appear, rather than with their significance or ethical example. C. H. Herford writes that Lamb "does not deal in problems but in memories of simple things and simple people, often with pathos of death or oblivion clinging about them; the sights of common London, and what else is a great city but a collection of sights—the chimney sweepers and beggars..... so, it is the accidents and essentials of life and death with which he deals, and therein lies the human interest of his essays."
Lamb ignored all the conventional approaches of Essay. "Never was," writes Rickett, "any man more intimate in print than he. He has made of chatter a fine art, for he is enchantingly easy with no suspicion , of vulgarity, simple in his choice of subjects, never trite in treatment, and he can trifle delicately without being trivial."
"When compared with Bacon, Addison, Steele, Goldsmith, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt or Macaulay, his greatest companions in the Essay, it is Lamb's richness that surprises us, his abundance, and above all, his interest. Each of the writers named could do this or that better than Lamb, but Lamb as a whole is a better company than all." — [E. V. Lucas]
2
WILLIAM HAZLITT (1778-1830)
His Life and Works. Hazlitt was the son of a unitarian minister and he spent most of his time in Shropshire. His meeting with Coleridge in 1798 was very significant. Under Coleridge's influence, he became a great literary critic. He abandoned his ambition to become a painter in favour of a literary career. From 1814 until his death he contributed to The Edinburgh Review, The Examiner, The Times and The London Magazine.
Hazlitt's earliest writings consisted of miscellaneous philosophical and political works, which are of little interest today. His reputation rests on lectures and essays on literary and general subjects, all published between 1817 and 1825. Between 1828 and 1830 Hazlitt published an unsuccessful biography of Napoleon.
Hazlitt's Critical Prose. As a literary critic Hazlitt is remembered for his lectures on Characters in Shakespeare's Plays (1817), The English Poets (1818), The English Comic Writers (1819), and The Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. Coleridge exercised powerful influence on his critical works. It was Coleridge who first recognised the importance of imagination in critical works. Hazlitt was his lineal successor in criticism. He does not have the penetrating insight of the master but he surpasses Coleridge in lucidity and incisive vigour. "He has," says Hudson, "been called 'the critic's critic', and his insight, discrimination, and sureness of taste and touch, go far to justify the title."
Hazlitt as an Essayist. Hazlitt's best essays were collected in The Round Table (1817), Table Talk or Original Essays on Men and Manners (1821-22) and The Spirit of the Age or Contemporary Portraits (1825). As an essayist he is inferior to Charles Lamb. He lacks the gentleheartedness and uniformity, geniality and good humour of Elia. However his essays are remarkable for the following characteristics:
(i) Wide Range and Variety: His essays reveal the wide range and variety of his interests, which is illustrated compendiously in Merry England. He writes essays an books of all sorts, on nature, on politics, on sports and games, on prize fighting, on pictures and the stage, on the Indian jugglers and on the ignorance of the learned. He writes on them with equal wit and wisdom. The views he expresses are his own. He never expresses an opinion which he does not sincerely hold, and when he holds it he expresses it boldly and vigorously. Hazlitt's variety of interests, his sincerity and independence impart to his essays a rare charm.
(ii) Autobiographical Element: Hazlitt knew well the charm of the snatches of autobiography and he has given many. He belongs to the group of personal essayists. He takes the readers into his confidence and tells them about numerous aspects of his rich, varied personality. My First Acquaintance with Poets, Winterslow, On Living to One's Self On a Sun Dial, Farewell to Essay Writing, On Going to a Journey and many others are personal and autobiographical. Hazlitt's stubbornness and tenacity of view appear in On Consistency of Opinion. He frankly tells his readers about his tastes, his likes and dislikes, his personal experiences and his experiences and prejudices without any effort at concealment. His habit of introducing personal matter into his essays gives a pleasant intimate flavour to his writing. We take interest in his essays because of the interesting glimpses afforded of the writer's personality. "Every essay," writes Rickett, "is a fragment of autobiography and every sentence is confession. There is something of Rousseau's sentimental garrulousness about Hazlitt, and this increases the human interest of his writings."
(iii) Gusto and Joy: Hazlitt's essays reveal the zest of his enjoyment of life and nature. He may be writing on books, on life or nature, on men or manners, on painting or pictures, he ever expresses his thoughts and feelings with the same zest and relish. " ..... there was a fine quality of joy about Hazlitt. It is this quality of joy," says Rickett, "that gives the sparkle and relish to his essays. He took the same joy in his books as in his walks, and he communicates this joy to the reader."
(iv) Hazlitt's Style: Hazlitt was a great prose writer and stylist. He cultivated a personal style which is characterized by clarity, vigour and force. He had a rare command over words, understood their full significance and could define them accurately and precisely. Howe remarks that Hazlitt "knew the meaning of words and strove increasingly to get the proper word for the proper place."
Hazlitt is one of the masters of aphorism. His essays are remarkable for pregnancy of expression, where a single sentence would bear expansion into an essay, as in the saying: "Common sense is tacit reason." Hazlitt could "also be copious, though never verbose."
Edward Albert remarks about his style: “His brief, abrupt sentences have the vigour and directness which his views demand. His lectures have a manly simplicity, and something of the looseness of organisation which is typical of good conversation. Essays and lectures alike show a fondness for the apt and skilfully blended quotation, and for the balanced sentence, often embodying a contrast. Always his diction is pure and his expression concise."
3
THOMAS DE QUINCEY (1785-1859)
De Quincey is a voluminous writer of great versatility. He was capable of turning out an article on almost any subject. His literary career started in 1821, with the first version of The Confessions of an Opium Eater. In this work he utilises his early experiences and exhibits his fantastic imagination. In The Dialogue of Three Templars he displays that passion for logical analysis which is as distinctive of his genius as his fantasy. His descriptive and visualising power finds expression in Suspiria de Profundis.
(i) De Quincey's Critical Works: The most illuminating of De Quincey's literary works is Literary Reminiscences, which contains brilliant appreciations of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Shelley, Keats, Hazlitt and Landor, as well as some interesting studies of the literary figures of preceding age. His brilliant critical essay On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth (1823) reveals his critical genius at its best. Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827) reveals his grotesque humour. His other critical works are Letters to a Young Man (1823), Joan of Arc (1827), The Revolt of the Tartars (1840) and The English Mail Coach (1849).
De Quincey's critical work shows great penetration and subtlety. His critical essays appeal purely to the understanding. His admirable distinction between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power has been widely accepted.
(ii) De Quincey's Autobiographical Sketches: Of his autobiographical sketches the best known is his Confessions of An English Opium Eater (1821). It is partly a record of opium dreams; and its chief interest lies in glimpses it gives us of De Quincey's own life and wanderings. Suspiria de Profundis (1845) is chiefly a record of gloomy and terrible dreams produced by opiates. TheAutobiographic Sketches (1853), a series of nearly thirty articles, completes the revelation of the author's own life.
(iii) De Quincey's Style: De Quincey skilfully recreated the poetic prose of the seventeenth century. He successfully attempted to create a new style which combines the best elements of prose and poetry. Consequently, his prose works are often, like those of Milton, more imaginative and melodious than much of our poetry.
De Quincey was a purist in style and he took great pains to select right words for the right place. But he cared more for the sounds of words than for their sense. Words chosen for their sounds are put together into harmonious, sonorous, swinging sentences. He is a master of cadenced, rhythmical prose. His language is highly figurative.
"Of his subject matter", writes W. J. Long, "his facts, his ideas, and criticisms, we are generally suspicious; but of his style, sometimes stately and sometimes headlong, now gorgeous as an oriental dream, now musical as Keats' Endymion, and always, even in the most violent contrasts, showing a harmony between the idea and the expression such as no other English writer, with the possible exception of Newman, has ever rivalled, — say what you will of the marvellous brilliancy of De Quincey's style, you have still only half expressed the truth. It is the style alone which makes these essays immortal."
(iv) Other Essayists: Leigh Hunt contributed his papers to The Examiner and The Indicator. He expressed his experiences and impressions of the journey to Italy in Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla (1848). His varied knowledge of London life is exhibited in The Town. His Autobiography is the fullest expression of his own life. In it Hunt frankly reveals his innate sweetness and beauty of character and his little weaknesses and prejudices. "In his literary methods as essayist," writes Rickett, "he is akin to Lamb, with something of the same sprightliness, intimate ease and whimsical charm. What he lacks is the deep tenderness and the high flashes of imagination that mark Lamb's best work."
Robert Southey (1774-1843) contributed to the Quarterly Review. His essays, which are scattered in the pages of periodicals, deal partly with literary and partly with social and political subjects. Southey's essays are remarkable for their style. They are written in clear, graceful and easy prose. There are no purple patches. Southey's Life of Nelson is a great contribution to biography writing.
Miscellaneous Prose Writers
W. S. Landor (1775-1864) was more of a prose writer than a poet. His Poems (1795) is a collection of poems which show the influence of Miltonic style. His famous work Imaginary Conversations (1824-1846) deals with a wide variety of topics from literary criticism to politics. It is a fine specimen of poetic prose. It is full of rich imagery and ornate diction.
Lockhart's fame mainly rests on Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837-38). As a writer of critical prose Coleridge is unsurpassable. His Biographia Literaria renunciates the romantic principles of criticism.
During this period many writers did excellent work in history and Philosophy but it is not proper to discuss them here as their contribution to the literature of their special subjects.
NOVEL
The novel showed the most marked development during this period. This was largely due to the work of Scott and Jane Austen, who respectively established the historical and domestic types of novel.
1
SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832)
Scott's Novels. Scott wrote historical novels with great haste and apidity. His novels, known as the Waverley Novels, consist of twenty seven novels and five tales. Arranged in historical order they are as follows: Eleventh century, Count Robert of Paris; Twelfth century, The Bethrothed, The Talisman, Ivanhoe; Fourteenth century, Castle Dangerous; Fifteenth century, The Fair Maid of Perth, Quentin Durward, Annie of Geierstein; Sixteenth century, The Monastery, The Abbot, Kenilworth, Death of the Laird's Jock; Seventeenth century, The Fortunes of Nigel, A Legend of Montrose, Woodstock, Peveril of the Peak Old Mortality, The Bride of Lammermoor, The Pirate; the Eighteenth century, My Aunt Margaret's Mirror, The Black Dwarf Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, Waverly, Redgauntlet, Guy Mannering, The Highland Widow, The Surgeon's Daughter, The Tapasteried Chamber, The Two Drovers, The Antiquary; Nineteenth century, St. Ronan's Well. Most of Scott's novels are historical in the sense that they include historical events and characters, though some like Guy Mannering, The Antiquary and The Bride of Lammermoor are private stories with historical background.
Scott had always been a story teller rather than a lyric poet. He now became a story teller in prose, using the same fount of inspiration. The new medium suited him more than the old. It gave him an opportunity for exhibiting his rich sense of broad imagery, that had found little scope in verse. His novels appealed to a wide circle and entirely captured the fancy of the day.
Scott and the Historical Novel: Sir Walter Scott, "the prophesier of things past," brought to the contemporary age interest in the past and with his own splendid gift of imagination he developed an almost a new genre, the historical novel. "To the historical novel," writes Edward Albert, "he brought a knowledge that was not pedantically exact, but manageable, wide and bountiful. To the sum of this knowledge he added a life giving force, a vitalizing energy, an insight, and a genial dexterity ' that made the historical novel an entirely new species.......lt should also He noted that he did much to develop the domestic novel, which had several representatives in the Waverley series, such as Guy Mannering and The Antiquary." The notable points of Scott's contribution to the creation of the historical novel are given below:
(i) Historical Realism: Few novelists before Scott had attempted to write historical fiction. Horace, Walpole, Clara Reeve and Mrs. Radcliffe were concerned in their historical romances with periods sufficiently remote to be invested with romantic charm and to offer scope for the imaginative treatment of history. None of these writers possessed any feeling for historical realism and they made no attempt to induce in the reader "a willing suspension of disbelief'. Scott defined the novel as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse because the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events, and the modern state of society. Scott combined the elements of real life with elements of wonder from old romance, and created a new synthesis of historical prose romance. What Richardson, Fielding and Smollett had done in holding a mirror up to the eighteenth century way of life Scott did for the remote, centuries of which his contemporaries knew nothing. His very first novel Waverley is "a slight attempt at a sketch of ancient Scottish manners". Scott had a comprehensive knowledge of the Scottish past. Guy Mannering and The Antiquary truthfully picture the manners and a state of society that could breed such characters as Meg Merrilies, Dandie Dinmont, and Counsellor Pleydell. The Antiquary is also important for its peasant humours, which makes it a true picture of the manners of Scotland. Old Mortality takes us to the troubled times of Charles II and the rising of Covenanters in 1685. It is a historical monument of the finest pictures of the past, its men, its ideas and manners. In Ivanhoe Scott took up England as his scene, and reconstructed not the eighteenth century he knew, but the Middle Ages.
Endowed with the creative energy of imagination, Scott made the reader feel the glamour of the places and the actuality of the past. "Thus he welded together the past and present in a homogeneous whole, and shows us the spiritual continuity of history. Thus he makes manifest how the national type of character is the vital embodiment of centuries, and is evolved from countless customs and traditions." [Rickett]
Carlyle said of his work: "These historical novels have taught all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history, and others till so taught; that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state papers, controversies, and obstruction of men. ..... It is a great service, fertile in consequence, this that Scott has done, a great truth laid open by him."
Scott's treatment of history is not entirely accurate. He often takes liberties with facts and alters them. His anachronisms are numerous. For example, Ivanhoe, though a brilliant romance, is totally untrustworthy as a picture of life of the middle ages. "But in general," writes Hudson, "he was marvelously successful in reproducing at least the externals of the periods which he describes, in giving us a vivid sense of their men and manners, and in breathing life into the dry bones of history."
(ii) Gothic Element: Despite his love for historical realism, Scott never freed himself from the influence of the marvellous. From Waverley, Guy Mannering and The Antiquity to Castle Dangerous there is not a single novel which is free from some ghost or hallucination, legend, omen, some vision prophesying disaster, some mystic sign, wonder, dream or obscure allusion to future events. The historical novel had its origin in the Gothic Romance, and in giving it a new orientation Scott did not remove its original traits
(iii) Wide Range of Action: Scott's novels are on a vast scale, covering a wide range of action. They are concerned with public rather than with private interests. So, with the singular exception of The Bride of Lammermoor, the element of love in his novels is generally pale and feeble. He magnificently portrayed the strife and passions of big parties. The heroic side of history for over six hundred years finds expression in Scott's novels. All the parties of the six centuries — Crusaders, Covenanters, Cavaliers, Roundheads, Papists, Jews, Gypsies, Rebels—start into life again, and fight, or give reason for the faith that is in them. "No other novelist in England," says W. J. Long, "and only Balzac in France, approaches Scott in the scope of his narrative."
(iv) Scenic Beauty and Atmosphere: In Scott's novels scene is an essential element in the action. He knew Scotland and loved it. He vividly creates the very atmosphere of the place and makes the readers feel the presence of its moors and mountains. The place is so well chosen and described that the action seems almost to be the result of natural environment. The finest examples of this harmony between scene and action are found in Old Mortality, The Talisman, Ivanhoe and many others.
The scene in Old Mortality when Claverhouse saves Morton from the fanatics who are attending his midnight doom is one of the supremely beautiful things in the novel. Scenes of action are more to his taste than scenes of calm life. Scott's imagination was stirred by scenes of adventure and warfare; wild, curious and improbable dangers by blood and field. Beautiful scenes always fascinated him, but "when to this beauty was superadded some historical association, then the liking became a passion." Scott once remarked: "Show me an old castle and a field of battle, and I was at home at once." "Given some historical association," writes Rickett, "Scott will revitalise the entire scene, using his power of scenic description to visualise more clearly the drama he is presenting."
(v) Characterisation: Scott was the first novelist to recreate the past. He made history not a record of dry facts, but a stage on which living men and women played their parts. He could successfully recreate his men and women drawn directly from Scottish life which he knew thoroughly. His lawyers, soldiers, pirates, farmers, old-fashioned serving men, lords and ladies, preachers, schoolmasters, bailiffs and low comedy figures are living, breathing characters. His characters are both types and individuals. Scott's humour is racy, full-blooded, and always genial and wholesome. He possessed the secret of making his characters vital and human. His James I, Louis XI, Elizabeth, and the Young Pretender are fine pieces of imaginative recreation. "It is astonishing," remarks W. J. Long, "with his large number of characters, that Scott never repeats himself. Naturally he is most at home in Scotland, and with humble-people. Scott's own interest in feudalism caused to make his lords altogether too lordly; his aristocratic maidens are usually bloodless, conventional, exasperating creatures, who talk like books and pose like figures in old tapestry. But when he describes characters like Jeanie Deans, in The Heart of Midlothian, and the old clansman, Even Dhu, in Waverley, we know the very soul of Scotch womanhood and manhood."
Scott could not portray complex characters. He could not depict the complex mental conditions or strong passions of his characters. Like Shakespeare he was neither endowed with psychological insight nor with philosophic vision. He was content to portray his characters in broad, bold outlines and with a big brush. Carlyle truly remarks: "Your Shakespeare fashions.his characters from the heart outwards; your Scott fashions them from the skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them.
(vi) Scott's Style: In order to create historical realism Scott employed a language approximating to common speech, but heightened with poetry and with just enough of archaisms to create an illusion of the past. In his use of the Scottish vernacular Scott is exceedingly natural and vivavious. His characters who employ Scottish dialect owe much of their freshness and attraction to his happy use of their native tongue.
(vii) Scott's Influence: Scott created the historical novel, and all novelists who draw upon history for their characters and events are his followers and acknowledge his mastery. Scott's novels were translated into French and they influenced Balzac, Dumas and Victor Hugo. In England Scott's influence reigned supreme throughout the nineteenth century. Tennyson was influenced by Scott. Newman said that "Scott's influence lay behind the Neo-Catholic movement in England in the nineteenth century."
2
JANE AUSTEN (1775-1813)
Her Life and Works: Jane Austen, the daughter of a Hampshire clergyman, was born in 1775 at Steventon. She was educated on sound lines at home. Her life was unexciting and unadventurous. She passed her life very quietly, cheerfully, in the doing of small domestic duties. With the exception of an occasional visit to the watering place of Bath, her whole life was spent in small country parishes, whose simple country people became the characters of her novels. Austen's brothers were in the navy, and so navel officers furnish the only exciting elements in her stories. On her father's death the family shifted to the neighbourhood of Southampton, where the majority of her novels were written.
Jan Austen's first novel, Pride and Prejudice (written in 1796-97 and published in 1813) deals with men and manners, and it is a fine example of domestic comedy. Sense and Sensibility (1797-98, published in 1811) is another fine example of the domestic comedy. Northanger Abbey (1798, published in 1818) is a burlesque of the Radcliffian horror novel. Her three novels Mansfield Park (1811-13, published in 1814), Emma (1815, published in 1816); and Persuasion (1815-16, published in 1818) appeared in quick succession. Her novels are all much the same, yet subtly and artistically different.
Austen died in 1817 in middle age.
Characteristics of Jane Austen's Novels
Jane Austen has been called "the pure novelist" who presents an authentic criticism of the country society she knew so well within the limits of art. She did for the English novel what the Lake poets did for the English poetry—she simplified and refined it making it a true reflection of English life. As Wordsworth began with the deliberate purpose of making poetry natural and truthful, so Jane Austen appears to have begun writing with the idea of presenting the life of English country society exactly as it was in opposition to the romantic extravagance of Mrs. Radcliffe and her school. Jane Austen's novels are remarkable for the following characteristics:
(i) Her Limited Range: Jane Austen represents in her novels the world that she knew and the influences that she saw at work. Her acquaintances included country families, clergymen and naval officers. The chief business of these people, as Austen saw them, was attention to social duties. Their chief interest was matrimony. She represents this world in her novels. She never steps outside of it. "And even in this petty world she takes account chiefly of its pettiness." Great human passions and purposes of life were beyond her range. Themes of personal relationships fascinated her. There is scarcely any feeling for external nature in her novels, except in Persuasion. There is little passion; the language of emotion is unknown to her. She says in Sense and Sensibility: "Sense is the foundation on which everything good may be based." Rickett writes: "The secret of her power lies in the complete mastery she has as an artist over her material. She was finely alive to her limitations, never touched a character or scene she did not thoroughly know, and never invented a story or personage which she did not subject to such minutely intimate treatment that the reader feels as if it were all a fragment of autobiography."
(ii) Her Sense of Comedy: Jane Austen's novels are domestic comedies of a high order. "For aesthetic reasons she limits herself to the mood of comedy," writes David Cecil, "and the world of small gentry in England. But comedy can deal ..... with themes as important and significant as those of tragedy,……., it can no more avoid the social problems that face mankind during its sojourn on this planet. The visible structure of Jane Austen's novels may be flimsy enough, but their foundations drive deep down into the basic principles of human conduct. On her bit of ivory she has engraved a criticism of life as serious and as considered as Hardy's."
To use Scott's expression, Jane Austen confined herself "chiefly to the middling classes of society. She was neither a social philosopher, nor a romancer. She was mainly interested in the comedy of human nature. Her comedy, in the first place, was confined to human beings in their personal relations. All her stories turn on personal relationships, between friend and friend, between parents and children, between men and women in love, and they turn on nothing else. In Pride and Prejudice she deals with the family of Bennet. In all her novels she adroitly paints pictures of domestic life in country villages. She chose a village, or a country house, because that was what she knew and loved best. Jan Austen's novels might be called novels of manners because they depict like the comedies of Congreve the manners, customs and follies of her limited social circle. Her novels are pictures of everyday existence. Life in her novels is governed by easy decorum, and moments of fierce passion, or moments of deep emotion never occur.
(iii) Humour and Satire: Jane Austen is a gentle humorist. She had a keen sense of the absurdities of men and women, but she was never harsh or unkind. She was not a satirist because she did not possess the savage and stinging characteristic of Swift. Austen is seldom satirical but her satire is always gentle, seldom severe and never savage. She brilliantly uses irony in social comedies. Her gentle strokes of irony are charming, for example: "Her father was a clergyman without being neglected or poor, and a very respectable man though his name was Richard and he had never been handsome."
Jane Austen "is quiet, delicate, and ironical. She is not a satirist, for satire connotes moral purpose. Jane Austen never lashed our follies, she faintly arched her eyebrows and passed on. There is scarcely any scene she did not see and did not touch on the humorous side, whether the fear of ghosts (Northanger Abbey), private theatricals (Mansfield Park), a picnic (Emma), a proposal (persuasion). But she never exaggerates the fun."
As a humorist, Austen has no moral purpose. It was her habit to leave didacticism, the practice of edification, to certain chosen characters. It was one of their idiosyncrasies, sometimes a virtue, more often and a vice that attracted Jane Austen's attention. One of the ironies in Pride and Prejudice is that persons most given to moral instructions of their fellow beings are the most absurd. They are Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Borough. Austen's sphere was humbler the niceties of decorum, grace, tolerance, sympathy, self-respect with their opposites, ill breeding, self-deceit, egotism, affectation: these were the things upon which she concentrated. Her code of morality was higher and finer than the accepted one; it was based on a high conception of the intrinsic worth of personality. In her novels she also presents a saner and healthier view of love. "Business is business" and love is the business of Austen's heroines. She recognises the claims both of the body and the soul; it is a civilised philosophy for civilised people. She wrote primarily to entertain, but her comic view of life was so fundamental to her that all her novels are soaked in it.
(iv) Love and Marriage in Jane Austen's Novels: Love and marriage form an important element in Jane Austen's novels. Hers was a practical idealism. She was preoccupied with the subject of love and marriage. But her conception of a genuine union was higher than that of her fellow romantic novelists or sentimental enthusiasts. They either romanticised love or like Fanny Burney coolly settled marriage with the goal of a handsome husband, financial settlement and happy home. Jane Austen made marriage a serious vocation for women. She realized that husband and wife should be spiritual counterparts of each other. A perfect marriage is fundamentally a perfect friendship.
(v) Characterisation: Jane Austen's art of characterisation has not been excelled by any writer. Her special charm as a novelist lies, not in any greater insight into character, but in the impracticality with which she individualizes and differentiates them. Her minute observation of men and women whom she knew imparted life likeness to her characters. She deftly reproduced those men and women whom she found crowding about her tea parties, her church gatherings, her balls and she reproduced them for us with an unemotional fidelity, sometimes a little cruel, but never unfair. All her characters are living, breathing realities. She shows them compounded with faults and virtues like real human beings. Austen's characters expose themselves in their own words, so that we can know them through and through. Her female characters are more adroitly drawn than her male characters. Her presentation of the masculine mind is confined to the picturing of men as they appear to women, and not as they appear to men. In her novels, therefore, we find ourselves in an intensely feminine atmosphere. Her chief theme is love in the life of woman. Her female characters are almost unexceptionable in perfection of finish.
Jane Austen has created many memorable characters, like the servile Mr. Collins, and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, the garrulous Miss Bates is Emma, and the selfish and vulgar John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey. She is fond of introducing clergymen, though each has his individual characteristics.
The words of Scott about her characterisation are worth quoting: "That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements, feelings, and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful which I have ever met with. The big bowwow I can do myself like anyone going, but the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied me."
(vi) Plot Construction: Jane Austen's novels have an exactness of structure and a symmetry of form. In Pride and Prejudice the plot is the chief interest, simple but pervasive; controlling every incident, but itself depending for its outcome upon the development or revelation of the principal characters. Austen's later novels, Mansfield Park and Emma, are longer and slightly more elaborate than Pride and Prejudice, but in them the essentials of her art are still the same; a well-defined story, growing naturally out of the influence of character on character, and developed in the midst of a society full of the mild humours of provincial life. All her stories are faultlessly constructed, every character and every incident is necessary for the development of plot. The incidents happen so naturally, the characters have so independent a reality, that we do not feel that they are parts of a design or scheme.
(vii) Style: Jane Austen's style is natural and unaffected, clear and careful. It fits the subject as a glove fits the hand, and it is the very substance of her art. Austen once remarked: "Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style." Her style is true to this definition. She never misuses words. The structure and movement of sentences is neat and brisk.
Jane Austen had complete mastery over dialogue. Chapman says "She is one of the greatest because one of the most accurate writers of dialogue of her own or any age." Language and dialogue reveal character.
(viii) Conclusion: Jane Austen occupies a high place in English novel. She imparted realism to English novel in an age of Romanticism. She pioneered the comedy of manners successfully and introduced dramatic element. Like Moliere her comedy is the comedy of manners in which commonsense shatters the absurdities and pretensions, shams and affectations of the comic personages.
Jane Austen writes, as we have seen, from the feminine point of view. She, thus, feminised the English novel. We admire Jane Austen "for her influence in bringing our novels back to their true place as an expression of human life." Jane Austen has won her way to a foremost place, and she will surely keep it.
Other Novelists
Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) confined herself to the limited domestic circle like Jane Austen. She also writes in simple and unaffected style. She wrote stories for children which show a fine understanding of, and sympathy with, the outlook of children. Her children stories were collected in two volumes The Parent's Assistant and Early Lessons. Her Irish tales, which include her best work are Castle Rackrent (1800), The Absentee (1809), and Ormond (1817). Walter Scott declared that her tales of Irish life inspired his attempt to do something similar for Scotland. Her full-length novels —Belinda (1801), Leonora (1806), Patronage (1814) and Harrington (1817) are marred by her overmastering didactic urge.
John Galt (1779-1839) wrote The Ayrshire Legatees; or The Pringle Family (1821) in the form of letter series, The Annals of the Parish (1821), The Provost and The Entail. As a painter of Scottish manners in a terse and vigorous style, John Galt is endowed with plenty of humour and sympathetic observation.
W. H. Ainsworth (1805-82) was an imitator of Sir Walter Scott in his early novels—Sir John Chiverton (1826), and Rookwood (1834). His other novels with historical themes are The Tower of London, Old St. Paul, Windsor Castle, The Star Chamber, The Constable of the Tower, and The Insurrection. His method of handling historical material is crude.
George P. R. James (1801-60) was another follower of Scott. He wrote about a hundred and eighty volumes. His famous works are Richelieu, A Tale of France, Darnley, or the Field of the Cloth of Gold and The Gipsey. He has little power in dealing with his characters, and no imaginative grasp of history. His style is pompous and monotonous.
Charles Lever (1806-72), an Irish novelist, wrote many novels. His first novel The Confessions of Harry Lonequer is of the picaresque type. The Donoghue and The Knight of Gyynne are historical novels.
Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) was both a poet and novelist. His poems which were collected in Palmyra, and Other Poems, The genius of the Thames and the Philosophy of Melancholy lack finish and polish. The Thessalian Spell shows some felicity and smoothness. Peacock wrote seven novels, Headlong Hill (1816), Melincourt (1817), Nightmare Abbey (1818), Maid Marian (1822), The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), Crotchet Castle (1831) and Gryll Grange (1860). In his novels he criticized romanticists. Peacock was clear and straightforward in treatment of his subject. He was an artist in irony, who loved to depict human weaknesses from sheer high spirits. Peacock's style is lucid, harmonious and vigorous.
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