tions deserve to be exhibited, because they recapitulate our whole existence; but not the little effects of the little agitations which pass through us, and the imperceptible oscillations of our every-day condition. Else I might end by explaining in rhyme that yesterday my dog broke his leg, and that this morning my wife put on her stockings inside out. The specialty of the artist is to cast great ideas in moulds as great; Wordsworth's moulds are of bad common clay, cracked, unable to hold the noble metal which they ought to contain. I for reflection; we begin to feel respect, we we feel ourselves impressed as by a dis course of Théodore Jouffroy. After all, Wordsworth is convinced; he has spent his life meditating on these kinds of ideas, they are the poetry of his relig. ion, race, climate; he is imbued with them; his pictures, stories, interpretations of visible nature and human life tend only to put the mind in a grave disposition which is proper to the inner man. I enter here as in the valley of Port Royal: a solitary nook, stagnant waters, gloomy woods, ruins, grave. stones, and above all the idea of responsible man, and the obscure beyond, But the metal is really noble; and to which we involuntarily move besides several very beautiful sonnets, get the careless French fashions, the there is now and then a work, amongst custom of not disturbing the even tenor others his largest, The Excursion, in of life. There is an imposing seriouswhich we forget the poverty of the get-ness, an austere beauty in this sincere ting up to admire the purity and elevation of the thought. In truth, the author hardly puts himself to the trouble of imagining; he walks along and converses with a pious Scotch pedler: this is the whole of the story. The poets of this school always walk, look at nature and think of human destiny; it is their permanent attitude. He converses, then, with the pedler, a meditative character, who has been educated by a long experience of men and things, who speaks very well (too well!) of the soul and of God, and relates to him the history of a good woman who died of grief in her cottage; then he meets a solitary, a sort of skeptical Hamletmorose, made gloomy by the death of his family, and the disappointments suffered during his long journeyings; then a clergyman, who took them to the village churchyard, and described to them the life of several interesting people who are buried there. Observe that, just in proportion as reflections and moral discussions arise, and as Scenery and moral descriptions spread before us in hundreds, so also dissertations entwine their long thorny hedgerows, and metaphysical thistles multiply in every corner. In short, the poem is as grave and dull as a sermon. And yet, in spite of this ecclesiastical air and Or elvates the Mind, intent to weigh come, Whether from breath of outward circum- Or from the Soul-an impulse to herself,- And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith ; This intelligence, the only holy part of penetrates moral life; for this life fails | in the eventide, at the close of the ser nowhere: "To every Form of being is assigned... Reject, then, with disdain this arid "Where Knowledge, ill begun in cold remarks On outward things, with formal inference ends; Or, if the mind turn inward, she recoils, Viewing all objects unremittingly Beyond the vanities of science and the pride of the world, there is the soul, whereby all are equal, and the broad and inner Christian life opens at once its gates to all who would enter: So, at the end of all agitation and all search appears the great truth, which is the abstract of the rest: "Life, i repeat, is energy of love Divine or human; exercised in pain, The verses sustain these serious thoughts by their grave harmony, as a motet accompanies meditation or prayer. They resemble the grand and monotonous music of the organ, which * Wordsworth's Works, 7 vols. 1849, vii. book 9; Discourse of the Wanderer, opening verses, 315. ↑ Ibid. vii.; The Excursion, book 4; Despondency Corrected, 137. Ibid. 149. Ibid. last lines of book 5, The Pastor, 20. vice, rolls slowly in the twilight of arches and pillars. When a certain phase of human in. telligence comes to light, it does so from all sides; there is no part where it does not appear, no instincts which It enters simulit does not renew. taneously the two opposite camps, and seems to undo with one hand what it has made with the other. If it is, as it was formerly, the oratorical style, we find it at the same time in the service of cynical misanthropy, and in that of decorous humanity, in Swift and in Addison. If it is, as now, the philosophical spirit, it produces at once conservative harangues and socialistic utopias, Wordsworth and Shelley.* The latter, one of the greatest poets of the age, son of a rich baronet, beautiful as an angel, of extraordinary precocity, gentle, generous, tender, overflowing with all the gifts of heart, mind, birth, and fortune, marred his life, as it were, wantonly, by allowing his conduct to be guided by an enthusiastic imagination which he should have kept for his verses. From his birth he had "the vision of sublime beauty and happiness; and the contemplation of an ideal world set him in arms against the real. Having refused at Eton to be a fag of the big boys, he was treated by boys and masters with a revolting cruelty; suffered himself to be made a martyr, refused to obey, and, falling back into forbidden studies, began to form the most immoderate and most poetical dreams. He judged society by the oppression which he underwent, and man by the generosity which he felt in himself; thought that man was good, and society bad, and that it was only necessary to suppress established institutions to make earth "a paradise." He became a republican, a communist, preached fraternity, love, even abstinence from flesh, and is a means the abolition of kings, priests, and God.* We can fancy the indignation which such ideas roused in a society so obstinately attached to established orderso intolerant, in whic! above the con*See also the novels of Godwin, Caled Williams, and others. + Queen Mab, and notes issued a kind of thesis, Necessity of Atheism." At Oxford Shelley calling it "On the servative and religious instincts, Cant | ordinary eyes seem dull and insens ble, spoke like a master. Shelley was ex-are, to a wide sympathy, living and peiled from the university; his father divine existences, which are an agree refused to see him; the Lord Chan-able change from men. No virgin cellor, by a decree, took from him, as being unworthy, the custody of his two children; finally, he was obliged to quit England. I forgot to say that at eighteen he married a young girl of inferior rank, that they separated, that she committed suicide, that he undermined his health by his excitement and suffering,* and that to the end of his life he was nervous or ill. Is not this the life of a genuine poet? Eyes fixed on the splendid apparitions with which he peopled space, he went through the world not seeing the high road, stumbling over the stones of the roadside. He possessed not that knowledge of life which most poets share in common with novelists. Seldom has a mind been seen in which thought soared in loftier regions, and more removed from actual things. When he tried to create characters and events-in Queen Mab, in Alastor, in The Revolt of Islam, in Prometheus he only produced unsubstantial phantoms. Once only, in the Cenci, did he inspire a living figure (Beatrice) worthy of Webster or old Ford; but in some sort this was in spite of himself, and because in it the sentiments were so unheard of and so strained that they suited superhuman conceptions. Elsewhere his world is throughout beyond our own. The laws of life are suspended or transformed. We move in Shelley's world between heaven and earth, in abstraction, dreamland, symbolism: the beings float in it like those fantastic figures which we see in the clouds, and which alternately undulate and change form capriciously, in their robes of snow and gold. For souls thus constituted, the great consolation is nature. They are too finely sensitive to find amusement in the spectacle and picture of human passions. Shelley instinctively avoided that spectacle; the sight re-opened his own wounds. He was happier in the woods, at the sea-side, in contemplation of grand landscapes. The rocks, clouds, and meadows, which to Some time before his death, when he was twenty-nine, he said, "If I die now, I shall have lived as long as my father." smile is so charming as that of the dawn, nor any joy more triumphant than that of the ocean when its waves swell and shimmer, as far as the eye can reach, under the lavish splendor of heaven. At this sight the heart rise! unwittingly to the sentiment of ancient legends, and the poet perceives in the inexhaustible bloom of things the peace ful soul of the great mother by whom every thing grows and is supported. Shelley spent most of his life in the open air, especially in his boat; first on the Thames, then on the Lake of Geneva, then on the Arno, and in the Italian waters. He loved desert and solitary places, where man enjoys the pleasure of believing infinite what he sees, infinite as his soul. And such was this wide ocean, and this shore more barren than its waves. This love was a deep Teutonic instinct, which, allied to pagan emotions, produced his poetry, pantheistic and yet full of thought, almost Greek and yet English, in which fancy plays like a foolish, dreamy child, with the splendid skein of forms and colors. A cloud, a plant, a sunrise,-these are his characters: they were those of the primitive poets, when they took the lightning for a bird of fire, and the clouds for the flocks of heaven. But what a secret ardor beyond these splendid images, and how we feel the heat of the furnace beyond the colored phantoms, which it sets afloat over the horizon!* Has any one since Shak speare and Spenser lighted on such tender and such grand ecstasies? Has any one painted so magnificently the cloud which watches by: 'ght in the sky, enveloping in its net the swarm of golden bees, the stars: "The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes, See in Shelley's Works, 1853, The Witch of Atlas, The Cloud, To a Sky-lark, the end of The Revolt of Íslam, Alastor, and the whole of Prometheus. t The Cloud, c. iii. 3oa. Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor, By the midnight breezes strewn.” * Read again those verses on the garden, in which the sensitive plant dreams. Alas! they are the dreams of the poet, and the happy visions which floated in his virgin heart up to the moment when it opened out and withered. I will pause in time; I will not proceed, as he did, beyond the recollections of his -ring-time: The snowdrop, and then the violet, Arose from the ground with warm rain wet, And their breath was mixed with fresh odour, drest, Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast, Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air And the wand-like lily, which lifted up, And on the stream whose inconstant bosom Was prankt, under boughs of embowering blossom, With golden and green light, slanting through Broad water-lilies lay tremulously, and lance As fair as the fabulous aspl adels, too, Fell into pavilions, white, purple, and blue, To roof the glow-worm from the evening dew."* Every thing lives here, every thing breathes and yearns for something. This poem, the story of a plant, is also the story of a soul-Shelley's soul, the sensitive. Is it not natural to confound them? Is there not a community of nature amongst all the dwellers in this world? Verily there is a soul in every thing; in the universe is a soul; be the existence what it will, uncultured or rational, defined or vague, ever be yond its sensible form shines a secret essence and something divine, which we catch sight of by sublime illuminations, never reaching or penetrating it. It is this presentiment and yearning which sustains all modern poetry,now in Christian meditations, as with Campbell and Wordsworth, now in pagan visions, as with Keats and Shelley. They hear the great heart of nature beat; they wish to reach it; they try all spiritual and sensible approaches, through Judea and through Greece, by consecrated doctrines and by proscribed dogmas. In this splendid and fruitless effort the greatest become exhausted and die. Their poetry, which they drag with them over these sublime tracks, is torn to pieces. One alone, Byron, attains the summit; and of all these grand poetic draperies, which float like banners, and seem to summon men to the conquest of supreme truth, we see now but tatters scattered by the wayside. Yet these men did their work. Under their multiplied efforts, and by their of the beautiful is changed, and other unconscious working together, the idea ideas change by contagion. Conserva. tives contribute to it as well as revolutionaries, and the new spirit breathes through the poems which bless and those which curse Church and State. We learn from Wordsworth and Byron, by profound Protestantism † and con *Shelley's Works, 1853, The Secrive Plant. losophy is dried up. Amidst the agitations of sects, endeavoring to transform each other, and rising Unitarianism, we hear at the gates of the sacred ark the continental philosophy roaring like a tide. Now already it has reached literature: for fifty years all great writers have plunged into it,-Sydney Smith, by his sarcasms against the numbness of the clergy, and the oppres sion of the Catholics; Arnold, by his protests against the religious monopoly of the clergy, and the ecclesiastical monopoly of the Anglicans; Macaulay by his history and panegyric of the liberal revolution; Thackeray, by attacking the nobles, in the interests of the middle class; Dickens, by attacking dignitaries and wealthy men, in the interests of the lowly and poor; Currer Bell and Mrs. Browning, by defending the initiative and independence of women; Stanley and Jowett, by introducing the German exegesis, and by giving precision to biblical criticism; Carlyle, by importing German metaphysics in an English form; Stuart Mill, by importing French positivism in an English form; Tennyson himself, by extending over the beauties of all lands and all ages the protection of his amiable dilettantism and his poetical sympathies, each according to his power and his difference of position; all retained within reach of the shore by their practical prejudices, all strengthened against falling by their moral prejudices; all bent, some with more of eagerness, others with more of distrust, in welcoming or giving entrance to the growing tide of modern democracy and philosophy in State and Church, without doing damage, and gradually, so as to destroy nothing. and to make every thing bear fruit firmed skepticism, that in this sacred cant-defended establishment there is matter for reform or for revolt; that we may discover moral merits other than those which the law tickets and opinion accepts; that beyond conventional confessions there are truths; that beyond respected social conditions there are grandeurs; that beyond regular positions there are virtues; that greatness is in the heart and the genius; and all the rest, actions and beliefs, are subaltern. We have just seen that beyond literary conventionalities there is a poetry, and consequently we are disposed to feel that beyond religious dogmas there may be a faith, and beyond social institutions a justice. The old edifice totters, and the Revolution enters, not by a sudden inundation, as inFrance, but by slow infiltration. The wall built up against it by public intolerance cracks and opens: the war waged against Jacobinism, republican and imperial, ends in victory; and henceforth we may regard opposing ideas, not as opposing enemies, but as ideas. We regard them, and, accommodating them to the different countries, we import them. Roman Catholics are enfranchised,rotten boroughs abolished, the electoral franchise lowered; unjust taxes, which kept up the price of corn, are repealed; ecclesiastical tithes changed into rent-charges; the terrible laws protecting property are modified, the assessment of taxes brought more and more on the rich classes; old institutions, formerly established for the advantage of a race, and in this race of a class, are only maintained when for the advantage of all classes; privileges become functions; and in this triumph of the middle class, which shapes opinion and assumes the ascendency, the aristocracy, passing from sinecures o services, seems now legitimate only 25 a national nursery, kept up to furnish public men. At the same time narrow orthodoxy is enlarged. Zoology, astronomy, geology, botany, anthropology, all the sciences of observation, so much cultivated and so popular, forcibly introduce their dissolvent discoveries. Criticism comes in from I HAVE reserved for the last the greatGermany, re-handles the Bible, re-writes est and most English of these literary he history of dogma, attacks dogma men; he is so great and so English itself. Meanwhile poor Scottish phi-that from him alone we shall lears CHAPTER II Lord Byron. I |