A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

So, too, precise examination of his numerous but fragmentary remains as a literary critic makes it necessary to take a great deal for granted. Here, also, he Germanised much; and it is not certain, even with the aid of his fragments, that he was the equal either of Lamb or of Hazlitt in insight. Perhaps his highest claim is that, in the criticism of philosophy, of religion, and of literature alike he expressed, and was even a little ahead of, the nobler bent and sympathy of his contemporaries. We are still content to assign to Coleridge, perhaps without any very certain title-deeds, the invention of that more catholic way of looking at English literature which can relish the Middle Ages without doing injustice to contemporaries, and can be enthusiastic for the seventeenth century without contemning the eighteenth.6 To him more than to any single man is also assigned (and perhaps rightly, though some of his remarks on the Church, even after his rally to orthodoxy, are odd) the great ecclesiastical revival of the Oxford movement; and it is certain that he had not a little to do with the abrupt discarding of the whole tradition of Locke, Berkeley and Hartley only excepted. Difficult as it may be to give distinct chapter and verse for these assignments from the formless welter of his prose works, no good judge has ever doubted their validity, with the above and other exceptions and guards. It may be very difficult to present Coleridge's assets in prose in a liquid form; but few doubt their value.

It is very different with his poetry. Here, too, the disastrous, the almost ruinous results of his weaknesses appear. When one begins to sift and riddle the not small mass of his verse, it shrinks almost appallingly in bulk. Wallenstein, though better than the original, is after all only a translation. Remorse (either under that name or as Osorio) and Zapolya are not very much better than the contemporary or slightly later work of Talfourd and Milman. The Fall of Robespierre is as absurd and not so amusing as Southey's unassisted Wat Tyler. Of the miscellaneous verse with which, after these huge deductions, we are left, much is verse-impromptu, often learned and often witty, for Coleridge was (in early days at any rate) abundantly provided with both wit and humour, but quite occasional. Much more consists of mere Juvenilia. Even of the productions of his best times (the last lustrum of the eighteenth century and a lucid interval about 1816) much is not very good. Religious Musings, though it has had its admirers, is terribly poor stuff. The Monody on the Death of Chatterton might have been written by fifty people during the century before it. The Destiny of Nations is a feeble rant; but the Ode on the Departing Year, though still unequal, still conventional, strikes a very different note. The Three Graves, though injured by the namby-pambiness which was still thought incumbent in ballads, again shows no vulgar touch. And then, omitting for the moment Kubla Khan, which Coleridge said he wrote in 1797, but of which no mortal ever heard till 1816, we come to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the birth of the new poetry in England. Here the stutters and flashes of Blake became coherent speech and steady blaze; here poetry, which for a century and a half had been curbing her voice to a genteel whisper or raising it only to a forensic declamation, which had at best allowed a few wood-notes to escape here and there as if by mistake, spoke out loud and clear.

If this statement seems exaggerated (and it is certain that at the time of the appearance of the Ancient Mariner not even Wordsworth, not even Southey quite relished it, while there has always been a sect of dissidents against it), two others will perhaps seem more extravagant still. The second is that, with the exception of this poem, of Kubla Khan, of Christabel, and of Love, all of them according to Coleridge written within a few months of each other in 1797-98, he never did anything of the first class in poetry. The third is that these four – though Christabel itself does not exceed some fifteen hundred lines and is decidedly unequal, though the Ancient Mariner is just over six hundred and the other two are quite short – are sufficient between them to rank their author among the very greatest of English poets. It is not possible to make any compromise on this point; for upon it turns an entire theory and system of poetical criticism. Those who demand from poetry a "criticism of life," those who will have it that "all depends on the subject," those who want "moral" or "construction" or a dozen other things, – all good in their way, most of them compatible with poetry and even helpful to it, but none of them essential thereto, – can of course never accept this estimate. Mrs. Barbauld said that The Ancient Mariner was "improbable"; and to this charge it must plead guilty at once. Kubla Khan, which I should rank as almost the best of the four, is very brief, and is nothing but a dream, and a fragment of a dream. Love is very short too, and is flawed by some of the aforesaid namby-pambiness, from which none of the Lake school escaped when they tried passion. Christabel, the most ambitious if also the most unequal, does really underlie the criticism that, professing itself to be a narrative and holding out the promise of something like a connected story, it tells none, and does not even offer very distinct hints or suggestions or what its story, if it had ever been told, might have been. A thousand faults are in it; a good part of the thousand in all four.

But there is also there something which would atone for faults ten thousand times ten thousand; there is what one hears at most three or four times in English, at most ten or twelve times in all literature – the first note, with its endless echo-promise, of a new poetry. The wonderful cadence-changes of Kubla Khan, its phrases, culminating in the famous distich so well descriptive of Coleridge himself —

For he on honey dew hath fed,And drunk the milk of Paradise,

the splendid crash of the

Ancestral voices prophesying war,

are all part of this note and cry. You will find them nowhere from Chaucer to Cowper – not even in the poets where you will find greater things as you may please to call them. Then in the Mariner comes the gorgeous metre, – freed at once and for the first time from the "butter-woman's rank to market" which had distinguished all imitations of the ballad hitherto, – the more gorgeous imagery and pageantry here, the simple directness there, the tameless range of imagination and fancy, the fierce rush of rhythm: —

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,The furrow followed free:We were the first that ever burstInto that silent sea.

And thereafter the spectre of Life-in-Death, the water-snakes, the rising of the dead men, the snapping of the spell. There had been nothing like all this before; and in all the hundred years, for all the great poetry we have seen, we have seen nothing so new as it. Love gave the magnificent opening stanza, the motto and defence at once of the largest, the most genuine, the most delightful part of poetry. And Christabel, independently of its purple patches, such as the famous descant on the quarrels of friends, and the portents that mark the passage of Geraldine, gave what was far more important – a new metre, destined to have no less great and much more copious influence than the Spenserian stanza itself. It might of course be easy to pick out anticipations in part of this combination of iambic dimeter, trochaic, and anapæstic; but it never had taken thorough form before. And how it seized on the imagination of those who heard it is best shown by the well-known anecdote of Scott, who, merely hearing a little of it recited, at once developed it and established it in The Lay of the Last Minstrel. In verse at least, if not in prose, there is no greater master than Coleridge.

Robert Southey, the third of this curiously dissimilar trio whom partly chance and partly choice have bound together for all time, was born at Bristol on 12th August 1774. His father was only a linen-draper, and a very unprosperous one; but the Southeys were a respectable family, entitled to arms, and possessed of considerable landed property in Somerset, some of which was left away from the poet by unfriendly uncles to strangers, while more escaped him by a flaw in the entail. His mother's family, the Hills, were in much better circumstances than his father, and like the other two Lake Poets he was singularly lucky in finding helpers. First his mother's brother the Rev. Herbert Hill, chaplain to the English factory at Lisbon, sent him to Westminster, where he did very well and made invaluable friends, but lost the regular advancement to Christ Church owing to the wrath of the head-master Dr. Vincent at an article which Southey had contributed to a school magazine, the Flagellant. He was in fact expelled; but the gravest consequences of expulsion from a public school of the first rank did not fall upon him, and he matriculated without objection at Balliol in 1793. His college, however, which was then distinguished for loose living and intellectual dulness, was not congenial to him; and developing extreme opinions in politics and religion, he decided that he could not take orders, and left without even taking a degree. His disgrace with his own friends was completed by his engaging in the Pantisocratic scheme, and by his attachment to Edith Fricker, a penniless girl (though not at all a "milliner at Bath") whose sisters became Mrs. Coleridge and Mrs. Lovell. And when the ever-charitable Hill invited him to Portugal he married Miss Fricker the very day before he started. After a residence at Lisbon, in which he laid the foundation of his unrivalled acquaintance with Peninsular history and literature, he returned and lived with his wife at various places, nominally studying for the law, which he liked not better but worse than the Church. After divers vicissitudes, including a fresh visit (this time not as a bachelor) to Portugal, and an experience of official work as secretary to Corry the Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer, he at last, at the age of thirty, established himself at Greta Hall, close to Keswick, where Coleridge had already taken up his abode. This, as well as much else in his career, was made possible by the rare generosity of his friend of school-days and all days, Charles Wynn, brother of the then Sir Watkin, and later a pretty well known politician, who on coming of age gave him an annuity of £160 a year. This in 1807 he relinquished on receiving a government pension of practically the same amount. The Laureateship in 1813 brought him less than another hundred; but many years afterwards Sir Robert Peel, in 1835, after offering a baronetcy, put his declining years out of anxiety by conferring a further pension of £300 a year on him. These declining years were in part unhappy. As early as 1816 his eldest son Herbert, a boy of great promise, died; the shock was repeated some years later by the death of his youngest and prettiest daughter Isabel; while in the same year as that in which his pension was increased his wife became insane, and died two years later. A second marriage in 1839 to the poetess Caroline Bowles brought him some comfort; but his own brain became more and more affected, and for a considerable time before his death on 21st March 1843 he had been mentally incapable.

Many morals have been drawn from this melancholy end as to the wisdom of too prolonged literary labour, which in Southey's case had certainly been prodigious, and had been carried so far that he actually read while he was taking constitutional walks. It is fair to say, however, that, just as in the case of Scott the terrible shock of the downfall of his fortunes has to be considered, so in that of Southey the successive trials to which he, a man of exceptionally strong domestic affections, was exposed, must be taken into account. At the same time it must be admitted that Southey's production was enormous. His complete works never have been, and are never likely to be collected; and, from the scattered and irregular form in which they appeared, it is difficult if not impossible to make even a guess at the total. The list of books and articles (the latter for the most part written for the Quarterly Review, and of very great length) at the end of his son's Life fills nearly six closely printed pages. Two of these entries —the Histories of Brazil and of the Peninsular War– alone represent six large volumes. The Poems by themselves occupy a royal octavo in double columns of small print running to eight hundred pages; the correspondence, very closely printed in the six volumes of the Life, and the four more of Letters edited by the Rev. J. W. Warter, some five thousand pages in all; while a good deal of his early periodical work has never been identified, and there are large stores of additional letters – some printed, more in MS. Nor was Southey by any means a careless or an easy writer. He always founded his work on immense reading, some of the results of which, showing the laborious fashion in which he performed it, were published after his death in his Commonplace Book. He did not write very rapidly; and he corrected, both in MS. and in proof, with the utmost sedulity. Of the nearly 14,000 books which he possessed at his death, it is safe to say that all had been methodically read, and most read many times; while his almost mediæval diligence did not hesitate at working through a set of folios to obtain the information or the corrections necessary for a single article.

It is here impossible to mention more than the chief items of this portentous list. They are in verse —Poems, by R. Southey and R. Lovell, 1794; Joan of Arc, 1795; Minor Poems, 1797-99; Thalaba, 1801; Metrical Tales and Madoc, 1805; The Curse of Kehama, 1810; Roderick, 1814; with a few later volumes, the chief being the unlucky Vision of Judgment, 1821, in hexameters. A complete edition of the Poems, except one or two posthumously printed, was published by himself in ten volumes in 1837, and collected into one ten years later with the additions. This also includes Wat Tyler, a rhapsody of the poet's youth, which was (piratically and to his infinite annoyance) published in 1817.

In prose Southey's most important works are the History of Brazil, 1810-19 (this, large as it is, is only a kind of off-shoot of the projected History of Portugal, which in a way occupied his whole life, and never got published at all); the History of the Peninsular War, 1822-32; the Letters from England by Don Manuel Espriella, 1812; the Life of Nelson (usually thought his masterpiece), 1813; the Life of Wesley, 1820; The Book of the Church, 1824; Colloquies on Society (well known, if not in itself, for Macaulay's review of it), 1829; Naval History, 1833-40; and the great humorous miscellany of The Doctor (seven volumes), 1834-47; to which must be added editions, often containing some of his best work, of Chatterton, Amadis of Gaul, Palmerin of England, Kirke White, Bunyan, and Cowper, with divers Specimens of the British Poets, the charming prose and verse Chronicle of the Cid, the miscellany of Omniana, half-way between table- and commonplace-book, the Commonplace Book itself, and not a little else, besides letters and articles innumerable.

Certain things about Southey are uncontested and uncontestable. The uprightness and beauty of his character, his wonderful helpfulness to others, and the uncomplaining way in which he bore what was almost poverty, – for, high as was his reputation, his receipts were never a tithe of the rewards not merely of Scott or Byron or Tom Moore, but of much lesser men – are not more generally acknowledged than the singular and pervading excellence of his English prose style, the robustness of his literary genius, and his unique devotion to literature. But when we leave these accepted things he becomes more difficult if not less interesting. He himself had not the slightest doubt that he was a great poet, and would be recognised as such by posterity, though with a proud humility he reconciled himself to temporary lack of vogue. This might be set down to an egotistic delusion. But such an easy explanation is negatived by even a slight comparison of the opinions of his greatest contemporaries. It is somewhat staggering to find that Scott, the greatest Tory man of letters who had strong political sympathies, and Fox, the greatest Whig politician who had keen literary tastes, enjoyed his long poems enthusiastically. But it may be said that the eighteenth century leaven which was so strong in each, and which is also noticeable in Southey, conciliated them. What then are we to say of Macaulay, a much younger man, a violent political opponent of Southey, and a by no means indiscriminate lover of verse, who, admitting that he doubted whether Southey's long poems would be read after half a century, had no doubt that if read they would be admired? And what are we to say of the avowals of admiration wrung as it were from Byron, who succeeded in working himself up, from personal, political, and literary motives combined, into a frantic hatred of Southey, lampooned him in print, sent him a challenge (which luckily was not delivered) in private, and was what the late Mr. Mark Pattison would have called "his Satan"?

The half century of Macaulay's prophecy has come, and that prophecy has been fulfilled as to the rarity of Southey's readers as a poet. Has the other part come true too? I should hesitate to say that it has. Esteem not merely for the man but for the writer can never fail Southey whenever he is read by competent persons: admiration may be less prompt to come at call. Two among his smaller pieces – the beautiful "Holly Tree," and the much later but exquisite stanzas "My days among the dead are past" – can never be in any danger; the grasp of the grotesque-terrific, which the poet shows in the "Old Woman of Berkley" and a great many other places, anticipates the Ingoldsby Legends with equal ease but with a finer literary gift; some other things are really admirable and not a little pleasing. But the longer poems, if they are ever to live, are still dry bones. Thalaba, one of the best, is spoilt by the dogged craze against rhyme, which is more, not less, needed in irregular than in regular verse. Joan of Arc, Madoc, Roderick, have not escaped that curse of blank verse which only Milton, and he not always, has conquered in really long poems. Kehama, the only great poem in which the poet no longer disdains the almost indispensable aid to poetry in our modern and loosely quantified tongue, is much better than any of the others. The Curse itself is about as good as it can be, and many other passages are not far below it; but to the general taste the piece suffers from the remote character of the subject, which is not generally and humanly interesting, and from the mass of tedious detail.

To get out of the difficulty thus presented by indulging in contemptuous ignoring of Southey's merits has been attempted many times since Emerson foolishly asked "Who is Southey?" in his jottings of his conversation with Landor, Southey's most dissimilar but constant friend and panegyrist. It is extremely easy to say who Southey is. He is the possessor of perhaps the purest and most perfect English prose style, of a kind at once simple and scholarly, to be found in the language. He has written (in the Life of Nelson) perhaps the best short biography in that language, and other things not far behind this. No Englishman has ever excelled him in range of reading or in intelligent comprehension and memory of what he read. Unlike many book-worms, he had an exceedingly lively and active humour. He has scarcely an equal, and certainly no superior, in the rare and difficult art of discerning and ranging the material parts of an historical account: the pedant may glean, but the true historian will rarely reap after him. And in poetry his gifts, if they are never of the very highest, are so various and often so high that it is absolutely absurd to pooh-pooh him as a poet. The man who could write the verses "In my Library" and the best parts of Thalaba and Kehama certainly had it in his power to write other things as good, probably to write other things better. Had it been in his nature to take no thought not merely for the morrow but even for the day, like Coleridge, or in his fate to be provided for without any trouble on his own part, and to take the provision with self-centred indifference, like Wordsworth, his actual production might have been different and better. But his strenuous and generous nature could not be idle; and idleness of some sort is, it may be very seriously laid down, absolutely necessary to the poet who is to be supreme.

The poet who, though, according to the canons of poetical criticism most in favour during this century, he ranks lower than either Wordsworth or Coleridge, did far more to popularise the general theory of Romantic poetry than either, was a slightly older man than two of the trio just noticed; but he did not begin his poetical career (save by one volume of translation) till some years after all of them had published. Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh on the 15th of August 1771. His father, of the same name as himself, was a Writer to the Signet; his mother was Anne Rutherford, and the future poet and novelist had much excellent Border blood in him, besides that of his direct ancestors the Scotts of Harden. He was a very sickly child; and though he grew out of this he was permanently lame. His early childhood was principally spent on the Border itself, with a considerable interval at Bath; and he was duly sent to the High School and University of Edinburgh, where, like a good many other future men of letters, he was not extremely remarkable for what is called scholarship. He was early imprisoned in his father's office, where the state of relations between father and son is supposed to be pretty accurately represented by the story of those between Alan Fairford and his father in Redgauntlet; and, like Alan, he was called to the bar. But even in the inferior branch of the profession he enjoyed tolerable liberty of wandering about and sporting, besides sometimes making expeditions on business into the Highlands and other out-of-the-way parts of the country.

He thus acquired great knowledge of his fatherland; while (for he was, if not exactly a scholar, the most omnivorous of readers) he was also acquiring great knowledge of books. And it ought not to be omitted that Edinburgh, in addition to the literary and professional society which made it then and afterwards so famous, was still to no small extent the headquarters of the Scotch nobility, and that Scott, long before his books made him famous, was familiar with society of every rank. His first love affair did not run smooth, and he seems never to have entirely forgotten the object of it, who is identified (on somewhat more solid grounds than in the case of other novelists) with more than one of his heroines. But he consoled himself to a certain extent with a young lady half French, half English, Miss Charlotte Carpenter or Charpentier, whom he met at Gilsland and married at Carlisle on Christmas Eve 1797. Scott was an active member of the yeomanry as well as a barrister, an enthusiastic student of German as well as a sportsman; and the book of translations (from Bürger) above referred to appeared in 1796. But he did nothing important till after the beginning of the present century, when the starting of the Edinburgh Review and some other things brought him forward; though he showed what he could do by contributing two ballads, "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of St. John," to a collection of terror-pieces started by Monk Lewis, and added Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen to his translations. He had become in 1799 independent, though not rich, by being appointed Sheriff of Selkirkshire.

His beginnings as an author proper were connected, as was all his subsequent career, partly for good but more for ill, with a school friendship he had early formed for two brothers named Ballantyne at Kelso. He induced James, the elder, to start a printing business at Edinburgh, and unfortunately he entered into a secret partnership with this firm, which never did him much good, which caused him infinite trouble, and which finally ruined him. But into this complicated and still much debated business it is impossible to enter here. James Ballantyne printed the Border Minstrelsy, which appeared in 1802, – a book ranking with Percy's Reliques in its influence on the form and matter of subsequent poetry, – and then Scott at last undertook original work of magnitude. His task was The Lay of the Last Minstrel, published in 1805. It may almost be said that from that day to his death he was the foremost – he was certainly, with the exception of Byron, the most popular – man of letters in Great Britain. His next poems —Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810) – brought him fame and money such as no English poet had gained before; and though Byron's following – for following it was – for the time eclipsed his master, the latter's Rokeby, The Lord of the Isles, and others, would have been triumphs for any one else.