Literary and General Lectures and Essays - Charles Kingsley 4 стр.

The answer so easy twenty years ago, that the new poetry was spoiled by an influx of German bad taste, will hardly hold good now, except with a very few very ignorant people.  It is now known, of course, that whatsoever quarrel Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe may have had with Pope, it was not on account of his being too severe an artist, but too loose a one; not for being too classical, but not classical enough; that English poets borrowed from them nothing but their most boyish and immature types of thought, and that these were reproduced, and laughed at here, while the men themselves were writing works of a purity, and loftiness, and completeness, unknown to the worldexcept in the writings of Miltonfor nearly two centuries.  This feature, however, of the new German poetry, was exactly the one which no English poet deigned to imitate, save Byron alone; on whom, accordingly, Goethe always looked with admiration and affection.  But the rest went their way unheeding; and if they have defects, those defects are their own; for when they did copy the German taste, they, for the most part, deliberately chose the evil, and refused the good; and have their reward in a fame which we believe will prove itself a very short-lived one.

We cannot deny, however, that, in spite of all faults, these men had a strength.  They have exercised an influence.  And they have done so by virtue of seeing a fact which more complete, and in some cases more manly poets, did not see.  Strangely enough, Shelley, the man who was the greatest sinner of them all against the canons of good taste, was the man who saw that new fact, if not most clearly, still most intensely, and who proclaimed it most boldly.  His influence, therefore, is outliving that of his compeers, and growing and spreading, for good and for evil; and will grow and spread for years to come, as long as the present great unrest goes on smouldering in mens hearts, till the hollow settlement of 1815 is burst asunder anew, and men feel that they are no longer in the beginning of the end, but in the end itself, and that this long thirty years prologue to the reconstruction of rotten Europe is played out at last, and the drama itself begun.

Such is the way of Providence; the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor the prophecy to the wise.  The Spirit bloweth where He listeth, and sends on his errandsthose who deny Him, rebel against Himprofligates, madmen, and hysterical Rousseaus, hysterical Shelleys, uttering words like the east wind.  He uses strange tools in His cosmogony: but He does not use them in vain.  By bad men if not by good, by fools if not by wise, Gods work is done, and done right well.

There was, then, a strength and a truth in all these men; and it was thisthat more or less clearly, they all felt that they were standing between two worlds; and the ruins of an older age; upon the threshold of a new one.  To Byrons mind, the decay and rottenness of the old was, perhaps, the most palpable; to Shelleys, the possible glory of the new.  Wordsworth declareda little too noisily, we think, as if he had been the first to discover the truththe dignity and divineness of the most simple human facts and relationships.  Coleridge declares that the new can only assume living form by growing organically out of the old institutions.  Keats gives a sad and yet a wholesome answer to them both, as, young and passionate, he goes down with Faust to the Mothers

And there, amid the old classic forms, he cries: These things, too, are eternal

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

These, or things even fairer than they, must have their place in the new world, if it is to be really a home for the human race.  So he sings, as best he can, the half-educated and consumptive stable-keepers son, from his prison-house of London brick, and in one mighty yearn after that beauty from which he is debarred, breaks his young heart, and dies, leaving a name not writ in water, as he dreamed, but on all fair things, all lovers hearts, for evermore.

Here, then, to return, is the reason why the hearts of the present generation have been influenced so mightily by these men, rather than by those of whom Byron wrote, with perfect sincerity:

These lines, written in 1818, were meant to apply only to Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey.  Whether they be altogether just or unjust is not now the question.  It must seem somewhat strange to our young poets that Shelleys name is not among those who are to try the question of immortality against the Lake School; and yet many of his most beautiful poems had been already written.  Were, then, The Revolt of Islam and Alastor not destined, it seems, in Byrons opinion, to live as long as the Lady of the Lake and the Mariners of England?  Perhaps not.  At least the omission of Shelleys name is noteworthy.  But still more noteworthy are these words of his to Mr. Murray, dated January 23, 1819:

Read Popemost of you dontbut do . . . and the inevitable consequence would be, that you would burn all that I have ever written, and all your other wretched Claudians of the day (except Scott and Crabbe) into the bargain.

And here arises a new questionIs Shelley, then, among the Claudians?  It is a hard saying.  The present generation will receive it with shouts of laughter.  Some future one, which studies and imitates Shakespeare instead of anatomising him, and which gradually awakens to the now forgotten fact, that a certain man named Edmund Spenser once wrote a poem, the like of which the earth never saw before, and perhaps may never see again, may be inclined to acquiesce in the verdict, and believe that Byron had a discrimination in this matter, as in a hundred more, far more acute than any of his compeers, and had not eaten in vain, poor fellow, of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  In the meanwhile, we may perceive in the poetry of the two men deep and radical differences, indicating a spiritual difference between them even more deep, which may explain the little notice which Byron takes of Shelleys poetry, and the fact that the two men had no deep sympathy for each other, and could not in any wise pull together during the sojourn in Italy.  Doubtless, there were plain outward faults of temper and character on both sides; neither was in a state of mind which could trust itself, or be trusted by those who loved them best.  Friendship can only consist with the calm and self-restraint and self-respect of moral and intellectual health; and both were diseased, fevered, ready to take offence, ready, unwittingly, to give it.  But the diseases of the two were different, as their natures were; and Shelleys fever was not Byrons.

Now it is worth remarking, that it is Shelleys form of fever, rather than Byrons, which has been of late years the prevailing epidemic.  Since Shelleys poems have become known in England, and a timid public, after approaching in fear and trembling the fountain which was understood to be poisoned, has begun first to sip, and then, finding the magic water at all events sweet enough, to quench its thirst with unlimited draughts, Byrons fiercer wine has lost favour.  Wellat least the taste of the age is more refined, if that be matter of congratulation.  And there is an excuse for preferring champagne to waterside porter, heady with grains of paradise and quassia, salt and cocculus indicus.  Nevertheless, worse ingredients than œnanthic acid may lurk in the delicate draught, and the Devils Elixir may be made fragrant, and sweet, and transparent enough, as French moralists well know, for the most fastidious palate.  The private sipping of eua-de-cologne, say the London physicians, has increased mightily of late; and so has the reading of Shelley.  It is not surprising.  Byrons Corsairs and Laras have been, on the whole, impossible during the thirty years peace! and piracy and profligacy are at all times, and especially nowadays, expensive amusements, and often require a good private fortunerare among poets.  They have, therefore, been wisely abandoned as ideals, except among a few young persons, who used to wear turn-down collars, and are now attempting moustaches and Mazzini hats.  But even among them, and among their bettersrather their more-respectablesnine-tenths of the bad influence which is laid at Byrons door really is owing to Shelley.  Among the many good-going gentlemen and ladies, Byron is generally spoken of with horrorhe is so wicked, forsooth; while poor Shelley, poor dear Shelley, is very wrong, of course, but so refined, so beautiful, so tendera fallen angel, while Byron is a satyr and a devil.  We boldly deny the verdict.  Neither of the two are devils; as for angels, when we have seen one, we shall be better able to give an opinion; at present, Shelley is in our eyes far less like one of those old Hebrew and Miltonic angels, fallen or unfallen, than Byron is.  And as for the satyr; the less that is said for Shelley, on that point, the better.  If Byron sinned more desperately and flagrantly than he, it was done under the temptations of rank, wealth, disappointed love, and under the impulses of an animal nature, to which Shelleys passions were

As moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.

At all events, Byron never set to work to consecrate his own sin into a religion and proclaim the worship of uncleanness as the last and highest ethical development of pure humanity.  NoByron may be brutal; but he never cants.  If at moments he finds himself in hell, he never turns round to the world and melodiously informs them that it is heaven, if they could but see it in its true light.

The truth is, that what has put Byron out of favour with the public of late has been not his faults but his excellences.  His artistic good taste, his classical polish, his sound shrewd sense, his hatred of cant, his insight into humbug above all, his shallow, pitiable habit of being always intelligiblethese are the sins which condemn him in the eyes of a mesmerising, table-turning, spirit-rapping, spiritualising, Romanising generation, who read Shelley in secret, and delight in his bad taste, mysticism, extravagance, and vague and pompous sentimentalism.  The age is an effeminate one, and it can well afford to pardon the lewdness of the gentle and sensitive vegetarian, while it has no mercy for that of the sturdy peer proud of his bull neck and his boxing, who kept bears and bull-dogs, drilled Greek ruffians at Missoloughi, and had no objection to a pot of beer; and who might, if he had reformed, have made a gallant English gentleman; while Shelley, if once his intense self-opinion had deserted him, would have probably ended in Rome as an Oratorian or a Passionist.

We would that it were only for this count that Byron has had to make way for Shelley.  There is, as we said before, a deeper moral difference between the men, which makes the weaker, rather than the stronger, find favour in young mens eyes.  For Byron has the most intense and awful sense of moral lawof law external to himself.  Shelley has little or none; less, perhaps, than any known writer who has ever meddled with moral questions.  Byrons cry is, I am miserable because law exists; and I have broken it, broken it so habitually, that now I cannot help breaking it.  I have tried to eradicate the sense of it by speculation, by action; but I cannot

There is a moral law independent of us, and yet the very marrow of our life, which punishes and rewards us by no arbitrary external penalties, but by our own consciousness of being what we are:

This idea, confused, intermitted, obscured by all forms of evilfor it was not discovered, but only in the process of discoveryis the one which comes out with greater and greater strength, through all Corsairs, Laras, and Parasinas, till it reaches its completion in Cain and in Manfred, of both of which we do boldly say, that if any sceptical poetry at all be right, which we often question, they are right and not wrong; that in Cain, as in Manfred, the awful problem which, perhaps, had better not have been put at all, is nevertheless fairly put, and the solution, as far as it is seen, fairly confessed; namely, that there is an absolute and eternal law in the heart of man which sophistries of his own or of other beings may make him forget, deny, blaspheme; but which exists eternally, and will assert itself.  If this be not the meaning of Manfred, especially of that great scene in the chamois hunters cottage, what is?If this be not the meaning of Cain, and his awful awakening after the murder, not to any mere dread of external punishment, but to an overwhelming, instinctive, inarticulate sense of having done wrong, what is?

Yes; that law exists, let it never be forgotten, is the real meaning of Byron, down to that last terrible Don Juan, in which he sits himself down, in artificial calm, to trace the gradual rotting and degradation of a man without law, the slave of his own pleasures; a picture happily never finished, because he who painted it was taken away before he had learnt, perhaps when he was beginning to turn back fromthe lower depth within the lowest deep.

Now to this whole form of consciousness, poor Shelleys mind is altogether antipodal.  His whole life through was a denial of external law, and a substitution in its place of internal sentiment.  Byrons cry is: There is a law, and therefore I am miserable.  Why cannot I keep the law?  Shelleys is: There is a law, and therefore I am miserable.  Why should not the law be abolished?Away with it, for it interferes with my sentimentsAway with marriage, custom and faith, the foulest birth of time.We do not wish to follow him down into the fearful sins which he defended with the small powers of reasoningand they were peculiarly smallwhich he possessed.  Let any one who wishes to satisfy himself of the real difference between Byrons mind and Shelleys, compare the writings in which each of them treats the same subjectnamely, that frightful question about the relation of the sexes, which forms, evidently, Manfreds crime; and see if the result is not simply this, that Shelley glorifies what Byron damns.  Lawless love is Shelleys expressed ideal of the relation of the sexes; and his justice, his benevolence, his pity, are all equally lawless.  Follow your instincts, is his one moral rule, confounding the very lowest animal instincts with those lofty ideas of might, which it was the will of Heaven that he should retain, ay, and love, to the very last, and so reducing them all to the level of sentiments.  Follow your instinctsBut what if our instincts lead us to eat animal food?  Then you must follow the instincts of me, Percy Bysshe Shelley.  I think it horrible, cruel; it offends my taste.  What if our instincts lead us to tyrannise over our fellow-men?  Then you must repress those instincts.  I, Shelley, think that, too, horrible and cruel.  Whether it be vegetarianism or liberty, the rule is practically the samesentiment which, in his case, as in the case of all sentimentalists, turns out to mean at last, not the sentiments of mankind in general, but the private sentiments of the writer.  This is Shelley; a sentimentalist pure and simple; incapable of anything like inductive reasoning; unable to take cognisance of any facts but those which please his taste, or to draw any conclusion from them but such as also pleases his taste; as, for example, in that eighth stanza of the Ode to Liberty, which, had it been written by any other man but Shelley, possessing the same knowledge as he, one would have called a wicked and deliberate liebut in his case, is to be simply passed over with a sigh, like a young ladys proofs of table-turning and rapping spirits.  She wished to see it soand therefore so she saw it.

For Shelleys nature is utterly womanish.  Not merely his weak points, but his strong ones, are those of a woman.  Tender and pitiful as a woman; and yet, when angry, shrieking, railing, hysterical as a woman.  The physical distaste for meat and fermented liquors, coupled with the hankering after physical horrors, are especially feminine.  The nature of a woman looks out of that wild, beautiful, girlish facethe nature: but not the spirit; not

The lawlessness of the man, with the sensibility of the woman. . . .  Alas for him!  He, too, might have discovered what Byron did; for were not his errors avenged upon him within, more terribly even than without?  His cries are like the wails of a child, inarticulate, peevish, irrational; and yet his pain fills his whole being, blackens the very face of nature to him: but he will not confess himself in the wrong.  Once only, if we recollect rightly, the truth flashes across him for a moment, and the clouds of selfish sorrow: