No More Learning



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[ch.
Keats
become a kind of symbol for all beauty, and he himself a new
Endymion, the implicit hero of the story he told; and, by the
same symbolism, a lover of all loveliness, so that nothing in the
universe of real or imagined beauty was irrelevant to his quest.
Hence, we pass easily to and fro from this to other legends not
otherwise akin-Cybele, Glaucus and Scylla, Arethusa. Neither
his grip upon his subject nor his technical mastery yet avail to
make these felt otherwise than as digressions. On the other
hand, the Hymn to Pan (book 1), and the roundelay of Bacchus
(O Sorrow) (book iv), where the dreamy pacing of the verse
gathers into lyric concentration and intensity, mark the highest
reach of the whole poem.
In the brief, manly preface to Endymion—its sufficing com-
ment-Keats told his critics that he recognised in it
a feverish attempt rather than a deed accomplished. . . . It is just that this
youngster should die away; a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope
that while it is dwindling I may be plotting, and fitting myself for verses fit
to live.
In particular, he dreamed of trying once more to touch, 'before
I bid it farewell,' the 'beautiful mythology of Greece. '
Before Endymion was complete, he had planned with his
friend Reynolds a volume of tales from Boccaccio. Keats chose
the fifth story of the fourth day of The Decameron, that of
Lisobeta and the pot of basil. It was, no doubt, an advantage
for the author of Endymion to work upon a story which, with
many openings for romantic and visionary imagination, was yet,
in substance, close-knit and coherent. Its setting in the business
world of an Italian city was less favourable to his art, and,
throughout the first half of the tale, Keats is not completely
at ease.
But the romance owes to him almost all its delicate
beauty. Boccaccio's lovers give some pretext to the brothers'
violence; Isabel and Lorenzo are the innocent victims of a sordid
crime, the memory of which comes back upon the perpetrators
like the smoke of Hinnom. But it is after Lorenzo's murder that
the poetic transformation of the romance is most complete. The
apparition in Boccaccio is a conventional ghost-scene; Keats
imagines the shadowy life of the murdered man in his forest-
grave, slowly growing one with the earth and strange to mortal
things, but quickened anew in the presence of Isabel. The great
scene in the forest is told with an impassioned calm like that of
Isabel herself, as she presses towards the kernel of the grave. '
Boccaccio had evaded the ghostlier suggestions of the scene by


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Iv]
83
Letters
making the body miraculously intact. Keats does not evade
them; but he ennobles what he will not conceal, and compels us
to see not the wormy circumstance but 'Love impersonate, cold-
dead indeed, but not dethroned. '
Great as is the advance of Isabella upon Endymion, it must
still be reckoned among his immature works, in view of the
wonderful creations of the following autumn and spring. The
six months which followed were a time of immensely rapid
growth, not merely in imaginative power and technical mastery,
but in intellectual range and vigour, and in moral grip. The not
very precocious boy of eighteen and twenty is on the verge of
the truly marvellous manhood of his twenty-fourth year, and
the man, as well as the genius, is awake. His letters, after The
Prelude the most precious document we possess of the growth
of a poet's mind, are especially illuminating for the year 1818.
*To enjoy the things that others understand' might have satisfied
his aspiration in 1817; in April 1818, he turns away dissatisfied
from his own 'exquisite sense of the luxurious,' and feels the
need of 'philosophy, bracing experience and activity for his
fellow-men. He will learn Greek and Italian,
and in other ways prepare myself to ask Hazlitt in about a year's time the
best metaphysical road I can take. . . . I find there is no worthy pursuit but
the idea of doing some good in the world.
In July, during a foot-tour with his friend Brown through the
Highlands, he writes :
I should not have consented to these four months' tramping, . . . but that I
thought it would give me more experience, rub off more prejudice, use me to
more hardship, identify finer scenes, load me with grander mountains, and
strengthen more my reach in poetry than would stopping at home among my
books.
The germ of such thoughts can be found, it is true, in much
earlier letters, and, as we have seen, in his first poetic profession
of faith ; for Keats was at no time the weakling suggested by
much of his youthful verse. But they are pronounced with new
conviction, they mark no fugitive aspiration, but a spiritual de-
liverance already, in effect, accomplished.
He had, indeed, 'great allies'; Shakespeare and Wordsworth
cooperated in deepening and enlarging the scope of his genius;
to its richness they could not add. All through 1817, Shakespeare
had been a companion ; Endymion is strewn with his diction; in
April 1818 (sonnet On sitting down to read King Lear once again),
the golden harmonies of romance seemed thin and poor beside the
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[CH.
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P
f
>
passion and the heights and depths of Shakespearean tragedy.
He was already past Endymion, and knew it, as his contem-
porary preface attests. And Wordsworth led him, by other, not
less enthralling or less enduring, paths, to the same deeper under-
standing of sorrow. He was never weary, Brown tells us, of
repeating the Immortality ode; its sublime portrayal of a mind
redeemed by discipline and suffering and ' an eye that hath kept
watch o'er man's mortality' perhaps contributed to the doctrine.
of the world as a 'Vale of Soul-making' through pain and trouble,
which he unfolds in his beautiful letter of April 1819 to his
brother George.
And Wordsworth helped to draw him nearer to one whose
poetry provided a yet sterner discipline for the effeminate
elements of his genius. In Milton, he recognised a poet who
‘with an exquisite passion for poetic luxury, had yet preferred
the ardours to the pleasures of song. ' It was under these
conditions and in this temper that he prepared to carry out the
intention expressed in the preface to Endymion. Six months
after the completion of Endymion, Hyperion was begun. It was
a giant step forward, which neither the intimate study of Milton
nor his first experience, on the Highland tour, of grand scenery,
of mountain glory and gloom, or of the relics of fallen faiths (like
the druid cirque at Keswick), makes less wonderful. In the story
of Hyperion, he found a theme equal in its capacity for epic
grandeur to that of Paradise Lost, and, with apparent ease, he
rose to its demands, as if Milton had merely liberated a native
instinct of greatness from the lure of inferior poetic modes.
Endymion was a tissue of adventures, the romantic history of a
soul; in Hyperion, we watch a conflict of world-powers, the
passing of an old order and the coming of a new, the ruin and
triumph of gods. The indecisive dreamy composition gives place
to a noble architectonic. Keats was not at all points at a dis-
advantage in his bold rivalry with Milton. If he could not bring
the undefinable weight of experience, of prolonged and passionate
participation in great and memorable events, which is impressed
on every line of Paradise Lost, his austerest restraint is touched
with the freshness and entrain of young genius. If he has less than
Milton's energy, he has more than his magic; if he has less of dra-
matic passion and movement, he has more of sculpturesque repose.
It is here, however, that the doubt arises whether the magnificent
torso could have been completed on an epic scale. Milton's
theology introduced a conflict of purpose into his epic which is
7


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85
Hyperion
>
never overcome; but it secured to the vanquished fiends a cause
and a triumph; they move us by their heroic resolve as well as by
their suffering. Keats's “theology' was the faith proper to a
devotee of the principle of beauty in all things, 'that first in
beauty shall be first in might'; but this law, recognised and pro-
claimed by the defeated Titans themselves, makes any enterprise
like Satan's not merely unnecessary to the scheme of things, but
in flagrant contradiction with it. The ruined Titans are inferior
not only in nobility, but in strength and spirit. The pathos of
a hopelessly and finally lost cause broods from the first over the
scene; the contrast between the passionate recovery of the still
mighty archangel from his fall, and the slow, sad awakening of aged
Saturn, is typical. Satan's defiance is more poetic and so, in the
deeper sense, more beautiful, than the sad resignation of Adam
and Eve; but, in Keats, it is sorrow, not hate, that is ‘more
beautiful than beauty's self. '
Hyperion, incomplete, perhaps inevitably incomplete, as it is,
remains the greatest achievement of Keats in poetry. Yet, its
want of root in his intimate experience compels us to class it
among the sublime tours de force, not among the supreme poems,
of the world. And the effort to be Miltonic, even in his own way,
finally grew oppressive. If Milton liberated, he also constrained,
and Keats, in the later parts of the fragment, is often himself
in a way that is un-Miltonic. After the close of 1818, Hyperion
was only fitfully pursued ; in September 1819, he writes that he
has definitively given it up. Two months later, however, he had
new plans with it. During November and December, he was
deeply engaged,' records Brown, 'in remodelling the fragment
of Hyperion into the form of a vision. ' Though The Fall of
Hyperion betrays the impending failure of his powers, it is of
surpassing interest as an index to the ways of his mind. There
is little doubt that, from Milton, he had passed, during 1819, to
a renewed study of Dante (in Cary's translation). In the pregnant
symbolism of The Divine Comedy, he found a mode of expressing
ideas more akin to his own than Milton's austere grandeur.
Dante's gradual purification, also, in Purgatory, by pain,
answered to his own youthful conception in Sleep and Poetry)
of a progress, through successive illusions, towards the true state
of the poet. And, as Dante has to climb the mountain and pass
through the fire before he can receive the vision of Beatrice,
so Keats represents himself as passing successively through the
indolent romance of the dreamer, the 'garden’and the 'temple,'
a


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[CH.
Keats
up to the 'shrine' where the poet, taught, at length, to grapple
directly with experience, endures the fiery proof of those
to whom the miseries of the world
Are miseries, and will not let them rest.
Only thus may he receive the vision of the meaning of beauty
disclosed in the story of Hyperion, now, at length, 'retold.
Moneta, the Beatrice of this vision, is, however, no radiant
daughter of heaven, but a 'forlorn divinity,' the 'pale Omega
of a wither'd race,' though, also, as the fostress of Apollo, the
' Alpha' of a new. Thus, insistently, did Keats, with symbol and
image, press home the thought that beauty, the ideal, can only
be won through pain, and that poetry is incomplete if it evade
and leave unexpressed 'the agonies, the strife of human hearts. '
Though The Fall does not approach Hyperion in sustained
splendour, and diverges from it in the passages common to both,
mostly for the worse, yet, it contains some lines which he never
surpassed; and his attempt to charge the myth with a richer
and deeper import, unskilful as it was, justifies the surmise that,
had his powers not failed, he might have given to England
a poem more nearly comparable than any other with Goethe's
Faust,
In the meantime, however, a rich harvest of poetry had been
gathered in. The Eve of St Agnes, begun at Chichester, January
1819, throws some light on the causes which had gradually detached
his interest from Hyperion. For it betrays an almost conscious
revulsion from the austere grandeur, the cosmic scenery and the
high prophetic theme of Milton. It is, in the loftiest sense of the
words, a young man's poem, pervaded by the glow, the romance,
the spiritual and sensuous exaltation of youth. Chatterton and
Spenser here take Milton's place with Keats, and both are more
nearly of his kin. A few lines of Burton's Anatomy, describing the
legend, were, probably, the sole nucleus of this magical creation.
The romance of Madeline and Porphyro, unlike that of Isabella
and Lorenzo, shone out to his imagination against the background
of harshly alien forces. But, everything that there made for drama
and conflict is here subdued, almost effaced, while everything of
purely beautiful and harmonious appeal, whether to soul or sense, is
enriched and heightened. The menace of murderous kinsmen is
now merely the distant clamour of gross revelry heard fitfully
through an opening door. The 'bitter chill' of the winter land-
scape, the snow and storm without, though drawn with an intensity
of imagination hardly matched in winter-painting elsewhere, merely


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The Eve of St Agnes
encompass with their aridity and torpor, but cannot invade or
impair, the glow and warmth of fragrance and gracious soul-light
of Madeline's chamber. Everything here—from the tender glories
of the painted window to the delicate cates of the banquet—is
imagined with a consummate instinct for beauty which explores
and exhausts all the sources of sensuous appeal, yet so transfigures
them that nothing merely sensuous is left. The stanza-handled
with a mastery equalled, save in The Faerie Queene, only in
Adonais, where it is much less Spenserian-shows, with certain
archaisms, that Spenser was in his mind. But, Porphyro and
Madeline are of a more breathing and human world than Spenser's ;
their passion and their purity, the high chivalry, the awed rapture
of the scene, are untouched by allegory; and, if Madeline, with
the exquisite naïveté of her maiden love, has any lineage, it is not
to be found in a Britomart or Una, radiant champions and symbols
of chastity, but in an Imogen or a Perdita.
What remains of the companion piece, The Eve of St Mark's,
though conceived at the same time, was written some months later,
and it remained unfinished. Once more, a saint's day legend sets
astir the devout heart of a young girl. But the pictorial artistry,
even more exquisite, is in the subtler, more reticent, manner of
Christabel. 'It is quite in the spirit of town quietude,' wrote
Keats. An old minster, 'on a coolish evening,' echoing footfall,
drowsy chimes and Bertha's chamber in the gloaming with the
play of her flickering shadow upon screen and panel-subdued
effects like these replace the 'bitter cold,' the gules and argent of
St Agnes. And there are hints of a delicate grotesquerie equally
foreign to that poem, but, like its delicate finished realism, ita
miniature description, foreshadowing Rossetti, who regarded it as,
together with La Belle Dame, 'in manner the choicest and chastest of
Keats's work. ' The other, not less wonderful, romance of this spring,
La Belle Dame sans Merci (April 1819), may, also, be called a com-
panion poem of The Eve of St Agnes; but the ways of Keats's genius
are here seen in a totally different, almost opposite, aspect. The
woeful knight at arms, like Madeline, has awakened from a dream;
but his awakening is poignant disillusion, not blissful fulfilment ;
the desolate moor, not the fragrant chamber and the lover's
presence. And his weird chant is in subtlest sympathy with his
forlornness. Instead of the jewelled richness, the saturated colour
of The Eve of St Agnes, we have a style of horror-stricken reticence
and suggestion, from which colour and definite form have been with-
drawn; and a music of brief haunting cadences, not of eloquent,


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[CH.
Keats
hl
articulated phrase. The character of each poem is accentuated
in the final line of its stanza: the Alexandrines of The Eve of
St Agnes are points of heightened entrain, the short slow closing
verses of La Belle Dame (And no birds sing'), moments of
keener suspense.
Lamia, last of the tales in verse, followed after an interval of
some months and under widely different intellectual conditions. The
summer of 1819 found Keats adventuring in regions more than ever
remote from the dream-world of Endymion. Shakespeare draws
him to the historic drama; to these months belong his experiments,
Otto the Great and Stephen ; a little later came The Cap and Bells.
And now it was the supple and sinewy narrative, the sensuous
splendour, the ringing, metallic rimes of Dryden's verse-tales that
attracted his emulation. The story of Lamia (June—September)
which he found in Burton resembled those of Isabella and of The
Eve of St Agnes in representing two lovers united by a secret and
mysterious bond; but, here, the mystery becomes sheer witchcraft.
The witch-maiden Lamia, in the hands of the author of La Belle
Dame, might well have yielded a counterpart of Coleridge's
Geraldine. The influence of Dryden's robust and positive genius
has almost banished the delicate reticences of the earlier poems.
Lamia's transformations have the hard brilliance of mosaics; the
'volcanian yellow' invades her silver mail 'as the lava ravishes
the mead. ' The same influence told more happily in the brilliant
precision of the picture of the city festival, each half-line a distinct
and living vignette. There are not wanting—there could not be-
touches of descriptive magic, but the charm of Lamia is rather
described than felt; whether woman be her true nature (1 118)
or her disguise (11 306) (and this is not made clear), she has not
the defined character of either; as a psychological portrait, she
cannot stand beside Isabel or Madeline. And the cynical tone
of restoration gallantry has, here and there, betrayed Keats into
lapses of taste elsewhere overcome, as in the terrible line i 330
('there is not such a treat among them all. . . . As a real woman'),
and the opening of part II. Keats felt intensely the contrast
between the romance of passion and the outer world of cold
reflection. In The Eve of St Agnes, the flame-like glow of light
colour which surrounds the lovers is symbolically contrasted with
the frozen world without. In Lamia, this symbolism is less
telling. But it is helped out by an explicit comment on the
climax of the story. The sophist's eye transfixes the serpent-lady,
and dissolves the pageant of her love. So, 'cold philosophy


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Odes
destroys romance. The ‘moral expressed an antagonism dear to
Keats's passionately intuitive mind; but its introduction implied
just such an obtrusion of reflection upon poetry as it purported
to condemn.
It is easy, in tracing the growth of an artist who studied so
intently the genius of others, to lay too much stress on his artistic
seriousness. His famous counsel to Shelley, too, might suggest
that he himself was, above all, a curious and elaborate artificer.
Some of his manuscripts, no doubt, support this impression.
Yet, Keats was not only extraordinarily spontaneous: he could
play lightly with the passing mood. His quick sensitiveness of
eye and ear and fancy tempted him along many poetic byways
beside the way he deliberately chose He did not write only in
his singing-robes, but delighted to weave pleasant rimes in familiar
undress. The brother and sister-in-law in America, and his friend
Reynolds, received many such rimed interludes in his letters-lively
fountains of verse springing up unbidden in the garden of his prose.
Such are the four poems, Robin Hood, Lines on the Mermaid
Tavern, Fancy and The Bards of Passion and of Mirth, all written
in the short couplet of L'Allegro, with a delicacy of music of which
Milton had helped him to the secret, and a daintiness and playful-
ness of fancy akin to Beaumont and Fletcher, and other haunters
of the Mermaid, bards of 'mirth’even more than of 'passion. '
It is natural to contrast with these light and sparkling improvisa-
tions the rich and concentrated style-loaded with gold in every
rift'-and the intricate interwoven harmonies of the majority of
the contemporary odes. But, most of these were impromptus, too,
.
born of the same sudden inspiration, and their crowded felicities
were not studiously inlaid, but of the vital essence of the speech.
A may morning, an autumn afternoon, a nightingale's song in a
Hampstead garden, a mood of dreamy relaxation after sleep-
from intense, almost momentary, experiences like these sprang
poems which, beyond anything else in Keats, touch a universal
note. In the earliest of these, the fragmentary Ode to Maia
(May 1818), the recent singer of Endymion breathes yet another
lyric prayer to the old divinities of antique Greece, seeking the
‘old vigour' of its bards, and, yet more, their noble simplicity,
'content' to make 'great verse' for few hearers. The author of
the preface to Endymion already possessed that temper; and, if
he ever won the pellucid purity of Greek speech, it was in these
lines. The other odes belonged to the spring of 1819, save Autumn,
the latest, written in September. Psyche, almost the last of the
6
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୨୦
Keats
[CH.
group, was, he tells his brother George, “the first and only one with
which I have taken even moderate pains. ' Yet this, like Indolence,
falls somewhat short of the flawless art of the rest. In both, he is,
at moments, luxuriant and unstrung like his earlier self. Psyche,
‘loveliest vision far' of faded Olympus, becomes now, like Maia, a
living symbol of the beauty he worships, and he will be the priest
of her sanctuary. The Miltonic reminiscences are palpable, and by
no means confined to an incidental phrase or image. The passing
of the gods of Greece, moving, in spite of himself, to the poet of the
Nativity Ode, Keats mourned more naively than Schiller had
done twenty years before; then, by a beautiful, perhaps 'illogical,'
transition, lament passes into a rapturous hymn to the deathless
Psyche whose living temple was the poet's mind. Indolence com-
memorates a mood, as genuine, indeed, but less nearly allied to the
creative springs of Keats’s genius. Love and ambition and poetry
itself appear as ghostly or masque-like figures on a 'dreamy urn’;
for them he builds no sanctuary, but turns away from their lure
to the honied joys of sense—the sweetness of 'drowsy noons,' his
'head cool-bedded in the flowery grass. '
In the nearly contemporary Ode on a Grecian Urn, the
symbolism of the urn-figures became far more vital. From the
drowsed intoxication of the senses, he rises to a glorious clear-eyed
apprehension of the spiritual eternity which art, with its unheard
melodies,' affords. The three consummate central stanzas have
themselves the impassioned serenity of great sculpture. Only less
noble are the daring and splendid imagery of the opening, and the
immortal paradox of the close. “Their lips touched not, but had
not bade adieu,' Keats later said of the sleeping lovers in Psyche,
recalling, perhaps, with the carved figures of the Grecian Urn,
the wistful joy of Melancholy. In both these great odes, however,
the words imply a more spiritual and complex passion than the
naïve bliss of Psyche and Cupid. They meant a stranger and rarer
insight into the springs of both joy and sorrow than was thus
conveyed. The worship of beauty is the clue to everything in
Keats; and, as he came to feel that an experience into which no
sadness enters belongs to an inferior order of beauty, so he found
the most soul-searching sorrow 'in the very Temple of Delight. '
But the emotional poise is other than in the Grecian Urn: there,
he contemplates the passing of 'breathing human beauty' from the
serene heights of eternal art; here, it fills him with a poignant,
yet subtly Epicurean, sadness. Melancholy is thus nearer to the
mood of Indolence, and, like it, suffers from some resurgence of


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Sonnets
the earlier Keats ; but the closing lines are of consummate quality.
In the Ode to a Nightingale, the work of a morning in his friend
Brown's Hampstead garden, the poignant sense of life as it is,
'where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,' and the reaching
out to a visionary refuge-the enchanted world created by the
bird's song—are present together, but with changing dominance,
the mood's ecstatic self-abandonment being shattered, at its very
acme, by the knell-like 'forlorn,' which 'tolls' him back to his
'sole self. '
In Autumn, finally, written after an interval of some months,
the sense that beauty, though not without some glorious com-
pensation, perishes, which, in varying degrees, dominates these
three odes, yields to a serene and joyous contemplation of beauty
itself. The 'season of mellow fruitfulness' wakens no romantic
vision, no romantic longing, like the nightingale's song; it satisfies
all senses, but enthralls and intoxicates none; everything breathes
contented fulfilment without satiety, and beauty, too, is fulfilled
and complete. Shelley, whose yet greater ode was written a few
weeks later, gloried in the 'breath of autumn's being'—the wild
west wind as the forerunner and 'creator' of spring. Keats feels
here no need either of prophecy or of retrospect. If, for a
moment, he asks 'Where are the songs of spring? ' it is only to
reply "Think not of them, thou hast thy music too. This is the
secret of his strength, if, also, of his limitation-to be able to
take the beauty of the present moment so completely into his
heart that it seems an eternal possession.
With one exception, the Autumn ode is the last great and
complete poem of Keats. The last of all, written a year later,
is, with Milton's Methought I saw, among the most moving of
English sonnets. Of the sixty-one sonnets he wrote, more than
thirty are later than those in the 1817 volume, already noticed,
and nearly all belong to the fifteen months following January
1818. He had written no sonnet during the last eight months
of 1817. But his close and eager study of Shakespeare's poems
towards the end of that year sent him back with renewed zest
to sonnet-writing, and, henceforth, after an interval of hesitation,
it was exclusively on the Shakespearean rime-scheme. The sonnet
which shows him most decisively under the spell of Shakespeare
(On sitting down to read King Lear once again, January 1818)
still, it is true, follows (save for the final couplet) the Petrarchian
form. But, a few days later, he wrote the noble When I have
fears, with the beautiful repetition of the opening phrase in each


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[CH.
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quatrain, reminiscent of Shakespearean sonnets, such as In me
thou see'st. One or two, as the charming June's sea, copy the
Elizabethan manner too cleverly to be very like Keats, nor are
his mind and passion at all fully engaged. But, often, he pours
into the Shakespearean mould a phrase and music nobly his own.
To Homer (“Standing aloof') contains the line “There is a
budding morrow in midnight' which Rossetti pronounced the
noblest in English poetry. To Sleep is full of the poppied
enchantment of the Nightingale ode. A new, and tragic, note
sounds in The Day is gone, I cry you mercy-with one or
two exceptions (Ode to Fanny and To. . . ) the only reflection in
his poetry of the long agony of his passion for Fanny Brawne.
Finally, after a long interval, came that September day of 1820
when, 'for a moment,' writes Severn, he became like his former
self,' and wrote his last sonnet and last verse Bright star! He
still aspires, as in the great odes, towards something steadfast and
unchangeable; but now, when he is at the end of his career, and
aware that it is the end, the breathing human passion counts
more for him than the lone splendour of the star.
Save for this sonnet, the year 1820 was a blank. Even before
the seizure of 3 February, his poetic power had declined, though still
capable of glorious flashes such as redeem the revised Hyperion.
With the publication of his last volume, in July, some perception
of his real stature at length dawned in the high places of criticism.
Jeffrey, in The Edinburgh, did not conceal his admiration ; Byron
admitted that, in Hyperion, the surgeon's apprentice had really
'done something great’; Shelley, strangely indifferent to the rest
of the volume, declared that, if Hyperion were not grand poetry,
none had been written in his time. Neither Shelley nor Keats
completely understood each other ; but the younger poet here fell
short, both in critical discernment and in modesty, of the elder;
his chief recorded utterance about Shelley, and addressed to him,
expresses only the annoyance of a lover of fine phrases at the
‘magnanimity' of the idealist which stood in their way.
Of the
fact that Shelley's mind, with some limitations from which he
was exempt, had a far larger reach than his own, he nowhere
betrays any perception. To Shelley's cordial overtures of friend-
ship, he had, throughout, responded with reserve; and an
invitation now received from him (August 1820), to spend the
winter with him in Italy, was declined. Even such companionship
could not be faced by a dying man. A month later, Keats set
out for Rome in care of the devoted Severn, who, during this


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Summary
6
last brief, sad phase of the poet's life, takes the place of the
no less devoted Brown. There, after a relapse from which he
never recovered, he died on 23 February 1821. Four days later,
he was buried in the protestant cemetery. In April, the self-
effacing epitaph which described him as 'one who had writ in
water' was magnificently belied by Adonais.
I am certain of nothing,' Keats once wrote, but the holiness
of the heart's affections and the Truth of Imagination. Neither
Wordsworth nor Shelley put so trenchantly the faith that was
implicit in the poetry of both. Nor would either have asserted
with the same daring simplicity that he had ' pursued the principle
of Beauty in all things. Abstractions distinguishable from beauty-
nature, liberty, love—and truths with which imagination had little
to do, counted for as much, or more, with both; and beauty itself is
with neither of them so comprehensive, with neither so near and
intimate, as it is with Keats. Shelley's worship is remote and
'intellectual,' at once too abstract and too simple to take in much
of the concrete and complex actual world. It was the 'Life of
Life,' and his gaze pressed home to it through the shimmering veil
of the material beauty by which other men's senses were arrested
and detained. It was a harmony, perfectly realised only in a
world completely at one with itself. The complexities and con-
flicts of life, and its resulting pain and sorrow, thus remained,
for him, purely evil things, of inferior status, even in poetry.
Keats could not compare with Shelley in range of ideas, but
neither was he weighted with Shelley's speculative incubus; if
his thought was not illuminated by Plato, neither was it distorted
by Godwin; if he had not access to the sublimities of Aeschylus,
he was steeped in the rich humanity of Shakespeare and Spenser
and Browne and Wordsworth. His whole imaginative and
emotional life was permeated by his eager and acute sensations ;
while his senses—it is but the other side of the same fact-were
transfigured by imagination and emotion. He projected himself
instinctively and eagerly into the nature of other living things, not
merely some 'immortal' nightingale whose song set wide the magic
casements of romance in his heart, but the mere sparrow picking
about the gravel before his window. He was no subtle-souled
psychologist like Coleridge, but he rendered emotions with a power
and richness in which exquisiteness of feeling and poignancy of
sensuous symbolism have equal part. Shelley's explanation of his
unlettered mastery of the myths of Greece— He was a Greek'
was more generous than apt; he was nearer akin to the Elizabethans,


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94
Keats
[CH. IV
6
nearer to Wordsworth, nearer even to Shelley himself; but he
recovered more completely than any of them the intense humanis-
ing vision of nature of which primeval myth was born. And he
won his way from the 'Asiatic 'luxury of his first work to a power
of striking home by the fewest and most familiar words, as in La
Belle Dame, which, utterly un-Greek in atmosphere and spirit, has
the magical simplicity of some lyrics of the Anthology. He did
not learn to express beauty so comprehensively as he perceived
and understood it; probably, he would never have approached in
drama the full compass of the beauty which lies, he knew, in the
agonies and strife of life--the beauty of
the fierce dispute
Between damnation and impassion'd clay
in King Lear or Macbeth. But, in the imaginative intensity of
single phrases, no English poet has come nearer to Shakespeare
or oftener recalls him.
And, in Hyperion, he showed himself master, not only of a
poetic speech for which no theme was too noble or too great, but
of a power of construction by no means to be explained by the
great example he had before him. It would be rash to say what in
poetry would have been beyond the reach of one who, at twenty-
five, compels the comparison with Shakespeare and Milton, and
yet, deeply as he came under their spell, was lifted by their genius
only into more complete possession of his own.


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CHAPTER V
LESSER POETS, 1790-1837
ROGERS, CAMPBELL, MOORE AND OTHERS
IN two wellknown lines of the dedication of Don Juan,
Byron, pursuing his quarrel with the lake poets, or, rather, with
Southey, but grouping the three in a common disparagement, laid
it down that
Scott, Rogers, Campbell, Moore, and Crabbe will try
'Gainst you the question with posterity.
It is needless to say that posterity has decided that question,
group for group, in a sense opposite to the noble poet's real or
apparent anticipation. Southey, indeed, may have been “knocked
out of the competition, on the one side, in the general opinion, and
Scott and Crabbe, on the other, may hold their ground, though
with considerably fewer points to their credit than Wordsworth
and Coleridge. But something like critical unanimity or, at least, ,
a vast majority of critical votes, would disallow, despite admitted
merits, the possibility of Rogers, Campbell and Moore continuing
the fight on anything like even terms. Still, the grouping remains;
and, as Scott falls out of any possible treatment in such a chapter
as this and Crabbe has received his measure already, the remaining
poets of Byron's fancy may properly occupy us first, to be followed
by a large and, in few cases, quite uninteresting or undistinguished
train of poets, sometimes of rare excellence in special lines,
but, now for this reason now for that, not classable or, at any rate,
not generally classed, among the greater singers. The whole body
will represent, in some cases with a little overflow, the time
before the appearance of distinctly Victorian poets—the time, for
the most part, anterior to that most noteworthy 'Lament for Dead
Makers' which Wordsworth, less happily than Dunbar, called An
Extempore Efusion on the Death of James Hogg, which mentions


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96
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837
a
other and greater writers than the Ettrick shepherd, and which
actually marks an important dividing line between the dead and
the living poets of the earlier nineteenth century, when a full third
of that century had passed.
The “knock-out' above suggested in Southey's case might or
might not really have surprised Byron ; for it is clear that it was
Southey's principles and personality, rather than his poetry,
that annoyed his assailant. But he might have been much more
certainly disappointed at the corresponding drop in the public
estimation of Rogers. At the present time, it is probably a very
exceptional thing to find anyone who, save in a vague traditional
way, thinks of the author of The Pleasures of Memory as a poet
at all; and, even where that tradition survives, it is extremely
;
questionable whether it is often supported by actual reading. At
one time, of course, Rogers was quite a popular poet; and it is
a task neither difficult nor disagreeable for the literary historian
to trace the causes of his popularity. He had, like Campbell, the
very great advantage of beginning at a dead season and, again like
Campbell, he had the further, but more dangerous, advantage of
writing in a style which, while thoroughly acceptable to established
and conventional criticism, had certain attractions for the tastes,
as yet undeveloped, which were to bring about new things. He
kept this up later, with some deliberate heed to younger tastes,
in Italy and Jacqueline, thus shifting, but still retaining, his grasp.
His wealth left him free to write or not, exactly as he pleased :
and, in the famous case of Italy itself, to reinforce his work in
a manner which appealed to more tastes than the purely literary by
splendid presentation with the aid of great pictorial art. If he had
a sharp tongue, and, perhaps, not exactly a kind heart, he had
a very generous disposition; and he was most powerfully assisted
by the undefinable gift, by no means a necessary consequence of
his affluence, which enabled a parvenu to become something like
a master of society. He really had taste of various kinds : he
might have been a greater poet if he had had less. And so he hit
the bird of public taste on several of its many wings.
But the greater number, if not the whole, of these attractions
have now ceased to attract; like the plates of Italy itself, they have
generally become 'foxed’ with time. We ask, nowadays, simply,
Was Rogers a poet ? ' and, if so, 'What sort of a poet was he? '
There cannot, for reasons above glanced at, be many people whose
answer to this question would be worth much, unless it is based
on a dispassionate re-reading of the documents in the case. Such


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v]
Rogers
97
a re-reading may, to some extent, qualify earlier and more impul-
sive judgments of the same critic; but it is not likely, whatever
power of correcting his impressions that critic may possess, to
produce any very material alteration of opinion. For Rogers, very
distinctly and unmistakably, comes on one side of the dividing line
which marks off sheep from goats in this matter; though, on
which side the goats are to be found and on which the sheep
will depend entirely on the general and foregone attitude of the
investigator of poetry. Rogers's subjects are good ; his treatment
of them is scholarly, and never offends against the ordinary canons
of good taste ; his versification is smooth and pleasing on its own
limited scale; from some points of view, he might be pronounced
an almost faultless writer. But will all this make him a poet? If
it will not, we might, perhaps, explain the failure worse than by
applying to him that opposition of 'quotidian' and 'stimulant’
which his very near contemporary William Taylor of Norwich
devised as a criterion; which Carlyle laughed at; which Taylor
himself made somewhat ridiculous in application ; but which has
something to say for itself, and which will not be found quite
useless in regard to many, if not most, of the subjects of this
chapter.
Rogers is always quotidian. You may read The Pleasures of
Memory at different times of life (and the more different these
periods and the longer the intervals the better). It is not difficult
or unpleasant to read ; and though, if not at first, certainly a little
later, you may feel pretty sure that, if Akenside, on the one hand,
and Goldsmith, on the other, had not written, The Pleasures of
Memory might never have been, this is far from fatal. The question
is 'What has it positively to give you? ' Here is one of its very
best couplets :
Ethereal Power! who at the noon of night
Recallst the far-fled spirit of delight.
That is good; ‘far-fled spirit of delight' is good. But is it, to
borrow once more La Rochefoucauld's injurious comparison, 'de-
licious'? Is it even satisfying ? Could you not very well do
without it? Now, the phrases of a real poet, though there are,
fortunately, thousands and myriads of them, are always delicious;
they are always satisfying; and no one of them will enable you to
do without any of the others.
Let us try another text and test. The duke of Wellington
(as Rogers himself most frankly records in a note to the poem)
had told Rogers, with his usual plainness of speech and absence
7
E. L. XII.
CH. V.


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98
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837 [CH.
>
of pose, a striking story, how, when he went to sleep after the
great slaughter of Assaye,
whenever I woke, which I did continually through the night, it struck me
that I had lost all my friends : nor could I think otherwise till morning came
and, one by one, I saw those that were living.
We know vaguely what mighty use the poets, the real poets, from
Shakespeare (one might even say from Chaucer) to Shelley would
have made of this. If the comparison with these be thought
unfair, we can guess from isolated touches in poems like Lochiel
and Lord Ullin's Daughter what a contemporary, a companion in
Byron's group and, as we may say, a “schoolfellow' like Campbell
could have made of it. This is the commonplace and conventional
generality which it suggested to Rogers :
Where many an anxious, many a mournful thought,
Troubling, perplexing, on his heart and mind
Preyed, ere to arms the morning trumpet called.
With equal frankness it would be unkind to call it insensibility),
he wrote Italy partly in verse partly in prose ; and there must
have been some, perhaps many, to whom the illiberal but critical
thought must have suggested itself “Why not all in prose ? ' The
somewhat famous story of Ginevra would have lost little; and,
perhaps, only one piece, and that the best of all, “The Campagna
of Rome,' might be saved, in almost its own figure, by the lines
6
Once again
We look; and lo! the sea is white with sails
Innumerable, wafting to the shore
Treasures untold; the vale, the promontories
A dream of glory; temples, palaces,
Called up as by enchantment; aqueducts
Among the groves and glades, rolling along
Rivers on many an arch high overhead-
And in the centre, like a burning sun
The Imperial City.
Let us leave Rogers with that line and a half and with only a
historical, not a spiteful, reference to Paradise Regained; for
hardly anywhere else, in short poem or in long, has he come so near
the 'poetic moment,' even if he has come near, also, to Milton in
more senses than one.
Not thus ungraciously can any critic speak of Campbell ; but,
anyone who spoke of him with unmixed graciousness would hardly
be a critic. To him, the moment' just mentioned was no stranger;
a


## p. 99 (#123) #############################################

v]
Campbell
99
they met, and he made almost or quite the best of it, again and
again. He has the glorious distinction of being, in three different
pieces, nearer than any other poet among many to being a
perfect master of the great note of battle-poetry. Of these, one,
Ye Mariners of England, is, to some extent, an adaptation,
though an immense improvement on its original; and The Battle
of the Baltic has some singular spots on its sun. But Hohenlinden
is unique; subject and spirit, words and music make an indivisible
quaternity and, except in two or three passages of Homer and
Aeschylus, there is nothing anywhere that surpasses the last and
culminating stanza in poignant simplicity. Perhaps no other poem
of Campbell can be named with these three, as a whole, but most of
his earlier and shorter poems give flashes of undoubted poetry.
There is no space here for a miniature anthology of these blooms;
but some of them are universally known, and no one with an eye
and ear for poetry can read, without recognising it in them,
Lochiel's Warning, Lord Ullin's Daughter (the central jewel of
this, however hackneyed, must be excepted for quotation,
a
And in the scowl of Heaven each face
Grew dark as they were speaking),
the less known, but, in parts, extremely beautiful Lines on Re-
visiting a Scene in Argyllshire, The Soldier's Dream, The Last
Man and others. All these are of a tragic and, if not romantic,
romantesque cast; but Campbell has retained not a little of the
eighteenth century epigram in such lines as the other stock
quotation
The torrent's smoothness ere it dash below.
He had a bluff felicity, as in The Song of Hybrias the Cretan,
which is not too common at any time; and, in other songs, such as
Withdraw not yet those lips and fingers, or How delicious is the
winning, there are strange reminiscences of that seventeenth
century feeling to which he sometimes did justice in his critical
Specimens and which greater singers have not been able to
command in their actual verse.
So far so good; but, unfortunately, no historical account of
Campbell's poetry can be arrested at this point. He did not write
much verse in his fairly long life; not because he was prevented
by untoward circumstances (for, though he had some hackwork to
do, it was never oppressive or prohibitory), but, apparently, because
he did not feel inclined to write much. But, at a rough guess, he
SAY! !
7-2


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Іоо
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837
wrote some six or seven thousand lines in all, and it is certain that
the poems referred to above, even taking the bad or indifferent
(which, in some, is the much larger) part with the good, do not
amount to anything like six or seven hundred. The long, or
comparatively long, Pleasures of Hope, which at once made his
fame and his fortune, is much better (though Byron did not think
80) than its companion and predecessor Memory, for, as has been
said, Campbell was a poet and Rogers, save by chance-medley, was
not. But, with less flatness, it has nearly as much artificiality;
it scarcely ever gets beyond metred rhetoric; and this rhetoric
itself, as in the tag
And Freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell,
6
is not always firstrate. Freedom, whether she sits crowned upon
the heights or, for the time, dies fighting on the field, has something
else to do than to shriek. Of the other long poems, Gertrude of
Wyoming, perhaps, is the clumsiest caricature of the Spenserian
stanza ever achieved by a man of real poetic power; the comparison
with Thomson which has sometimes been made of it is an insult to
The Castle of Indolence; and it is even far below Beattie. As for
Theodoric and The Pilgrim of Glencoe, they have, from the first,
been carefully confessed and avoided' by Campbell's warmest
admirers when these had any taste at all. But, it may be said,
this long-poem practice was not his vein. The accidents of time
and other things had, in the dead season of 1799, made The
Pleasures of Hope a success, and he had to try to repeat it.
But he did not by any means confine himself to these long
poems; and it will have been noticed that, even in reference to
the shorter ones and the best of them, it was necessary to speak in
all but one instance with reservations. In his Specimens, Campbell
showed himself, though rather a limited, not a bad, critic, and,
though his dislikel to the prevailing romantic school (which yet he
followed in a sidelong and recalcitrant manner) made him take
a questionable part in the Bowles-Pope controversy, he was not
contemptible there. But, of self-criticism at least of such self-
criticism as prevents a man from publishing inferior work—he
seems to have had little or nothing. It would be dangerous to
take his asserted confession, at one moment, that The Pleasures of
Hope was 'trash,' as a serious utterance; besides, it is not exactly
1 It has been urged that, in 1842, he acknowledged the greatness of Wordsworth.
“'Tis somewhat late, as the voice said in Christmas Eve and Easter Day, but, no
doubt, better than never.


## p. 101 (#125) ############################################

v]
Campbell
IOI
that. Yet, he could deliberately publish, as a version of a chorus
in Medea, the following lines:
Hallowed Earth! with indignation
Mark! oh mark! the murderous deed-
Radiant eye of wide creation
Watch the accursed infanticide(ceed].
In the vales of placid gladness
Let no rueful maniac range;
Chase afar the fiend of madness,
Wrench the dagger from Revengeſvange).
a
a
Which looks like an attempt to match Pope's Song by a Person of
Quality in the serious blood-and-thunder vein. Nor, if he is
seldom quite so bad as this, does he avoid, in a very large number
of cases, coming only too near to it.
Cases of 'the poet dying young' (all Campbell's best work was
done when he was a little past thirty) and the man surviving are,
of course, common enough; and, in most of them, there is little or
no need to seek for a special and philosophical explanation. In
Campbell's, we may, perhaps, find a particular one beyond the
undoubted and obvious fact that the springs of his Helicon were
neither frequent nor full; and that it required a special stamp
of one breed of Pegasus to set them flowing. He probably suffered
not a little from being, in a rather peculiar manner, recalcitrant to
his time. He was younger than Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott
and Southey, and, though he did not live to be a very old man,
Tennyson's Poems of 1842 and Browning's Bells and Pomegranates,
1841, were published before his death. But he withstood the
romantic grace, and yet he could not thoroughly rest and be
content with the older classical dispensation. It has been said
that Collins would probably have benefited unequivocally by the
chance of writing at the time when Campbell actually did write.
It is not too great a compliment to the author of Hohenlinden
to say that there are not a few touches in him which remind us of
Collins. But, if he did not exactly, in the language of his own
country, sin the mercies' that Collins did not receive, he made little
use of them. And so he remains an interesting example, both in
himself and to literary history, of the dangers of a transition period.
It can hardly be said that either Rogers or Campbell is a
difficult poet to criticise, for, though estimates of both may differ
considerably, the difference, as hinted already, will depend almost
entirely on the general attitude of the particular critic towards poetry


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102
[CH.
Lesser Poets, ,
1790—1837
-a thing which can be allowed for, and compensated, with almost
mathematical accuracy. No such process seems to be available in
the case of the third remaining member of Byron's selected group',
Moore. It is almost unnecessary to say that he was extraordinarily
popular in his own time; and this popularity had the most solid
results, running hard, in all material ways, that of Scott and Byron.
Not only did he receive three thousand pounds for the copyright
of Lalla Rookh, but the actual sale of the much shorter and vastly
inferior Loves of the Angels brought him in one thousand in the
first few months. Although not a few of the Irish Melodies are
masterpieces in their own kind, it would be interesting to know if
any other poet ever received, as Moore is said to have done, during
a great number of years, 'a hundred guineas apiece' or their
equivalent at the time, for each of more than a hundred and thirty
short songs? The Paradise Lost comparison, misleading as it
may be, certainly does come rather pat here. But the rebate of
posthumous criticism on this prodigal reward has been heavy.
For something like half a century it has been rare to find an
estimate of Moore which, if not positively contemptuous, has not
been at least apologetic. He is, perhaps, the best example existing
to prove that, in literature, an accumulation of venial sins is much
more dangerous than the commission of one capital sin or even
more; and that, to any but exceptionally critical judgments to that
manner happily born, and in that manner carefully bred, such an
accumulation will not be compensated by an accompanying ac-
cumulation of non-capital merits.
And yet, Moore's sins are but slight; in no case more than
defects, and, in some cases, capable of being vindicated from the
charge of being sins at all; while his merits are extremely numerous
and, in some cases, of a kind the reverse of vulgar. It is not true
that he was, in any bad sense, a toadeater, though, in certain ways,
like Kingsley's John Brimblecombe, he might appear to have 'a
gnathonical or parasitic spirit. ' He had, indeed, a catlike dis-
position to curl himself up near something or somebody comfortable;
1 We have—a trivial but not quite irrelevant fact—one record in Moore's own pleasant
words (Poems, 1. vol. edn, p. 432 and note) of a meeting of all this group except Scott,
with no one else present, at dinner in Campbell's house at Sydenham. Into further
biographical details, save those glanced at in the text, it is not necessary to enter in
the case of any of the three. All lived literary lives of the ordinary kind, varied, in
Rogers’s case, with a little business; in his, and in Moore's, with a great deal of
society; and in all with a certain amount of foreign travel. Campbell's domestic
life was rather exceptionally unhappy, by no one's fault; Moore's was very happy.
? Even if there is a mistake here, and the payment was 'a hundred guineas a part,'
of which there were ten and a supplement, it would have been handsome.


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v]
103
Moore
and it is amusing to find that, even in Paris, he was wretched till
he managed to find a new Mayfield or Sloperton, not at Lord
Moira's or Lord Lansdowne's door, but in 'a cottage belonging to
our kind Spanish friends the V. . . . . . Is, and a few steps from their
house. But it does not appear that Moore was any more in-
clined to put up with insulting treatment than the cat itself is.
Nobody ever doubted his courage, though the Jeffrey duel may
have had a touch of the ludicrous; his conduct in the difficulties
brought upon him by the fraud and flight of his deputy at Bermuda
presents a memorable contrast, refreshing on his side if saddening
on the other, to the conduct of Theodore Hook in almost precisely
similar circumstances; and, even with that rather difficult person
Byron, he seems to have maintained perfectly independent rela-
tions. For some time past, indeed, there has been a tendency to
affect disgust at his destruction of Byron's Memoirs. One would
like to be quite sure, considering the symptoms of public taste at
all times and certainly not least of late, whether resentment at the
loss of something supposed to be piquant and naughty has not
more to do with this than virtuous indignation at an imputed
breach of trust. At any rate, it is nearly certain that, putting
certain famous cruces aside, the Memoirs were much more likely
to show Byron's bad side than his good one; that they were left
to Moore in absolute property; and that their publication would
have brought him in far more money than the Life, good as it was
and handsomely as it was remunerated.
But someone may say 'Never mind his character or his life.
He shall be a not dishonourable little fellow if you like. But
there is a foible, if not a taint, all over his literature. He is almost
always trivial; and, even when he is not that, he is never intense.
He never reaches passion, but only sentiment; and that sentiment
is too often mawkish if not even rancid. He is almost purely
imitative—at least in poems of any pretension. He is a clever
craftsman, but never a real artist. He plays with patriotism,
with politics, with everything. His “prettiness" is only a mincing
artificial variety; and his “favour" was a thing of mere fashion,
not long out of date. ' That, one believes, is a pretty fair summary
of the unfavourable, which seems to have become also the general,
attitude to Moore; for nobody pays much attention now to the
schoolboy 'improprieties of the ‘Little' poems, which were never
very shocking, and of which, indeed, the poems have been purged
in all their legitimate editions for more than a century.
And, certainly, no person of sense will regard Moore as a serious


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104
[ch.
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837
'traitor. ' Indeed, it is a clause in the more savage indictments
that his nationalism was wholly insincere. The more moderate
charge suggested above can, perhaps, be best traversed by a counter
statement a little more in detaill.
There can be little doubt that Moore has suffered in more
ways than one from the extreme voluminousness of his writings.
The standard one-volume edition of his Poems, subtracting The
Epicurean (an exceedingly good piece of ornate prose), contains
nearly seven hundred double columned pages, which frequently
themselves contain from eighty to a hundred lines apiece. The
table of contents fills nearly twenty columns, with sometimes sixty
entries in each—the individual poems running from a distich to
a series of some thousands of lines. It does not suit the habits of
the present day to read all this; still less, to take the slight trouble
necessary to understand it; for much of it is 'occasional' and
requires commentary. And yet, it may be said unhesitatingly that,
unless the whole of it is read, or, at least, what seems to the present
writer an impossibly exhaustive selection of all its departments,
Moore will not be properly known.
For one remarkable point about him will otherwise escape
notice; and that is the curiously pervading and adequate character
of such goodness as he possesses. Moore may not meet the lofty
demands of lovers of “high seriousness, but he is never bad
except in his few and short serious satires, Corruption, Intolerance,
etc. , where he was trying something-and a very difficult thing-
for which he was not in the least fitted; and in the rant of the
'Phelim Connor' letters in The Fudge Family, which may itself
have been intended as satire of the kind which he could manage. He
may not soar very high, he may not dive very deep; but he skims
the surface with a curiously light, deft and variously fluttering wing.
Trivial he may be; mediocre, in a certain sense, he may be; but
one remembers the just protest of even the severe Boileau in
another case-Il n'est pas médiocrement gai; and some would
add and maintain pretty stoutly that, now and then, Il n'est pas
médiocrement tendre.
One thing no competent and fairminded enemy has ever
6
1 To bring compurgators' for Moore at any length here would be superfluous. But
Hazlitt's praise, though it has been discounted as due to political partisanship, must
not be neglected. And those who think it sufficient to dismiss Moore with the stock
ticket of 'tawdry' should, perhaps, be informed that Hartley Coleridge, a very con-
siderable critic and a man than whom it is hardly possible to imagine anyone
more unlike Moore in blood, temper, literary tastes and almost everything else, quite
seriously called the Irish poet's Pegasus 'a milk-white palfrey with rainbow wings. '


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105
Moore
denied him—an almost unique faculty of marrying words to music
and music to words. Part of this skill, it may be said, has little or
nothing to do with poetical merit, but another part of it has; and
Moore has rarely received sufficient credit for the remarkable skill
with which he effects strictly prosodic variations. But the still
more purely poetical value, excluding even prosodic considerations,
of the best of his songs in Irish Melodies, in National Airs and
in half a dozen other collections has been strangely belittled by
some good judges. Grant that to transfer Ben Jonson's scorn
from prose to verse, some of the most popular, such as The Minstrel
Boy and The Last Rose of Summer, and a good many others are
somewhat 'flashy things,' only prejudice or that lack of freshness
of taste which transfers its own faults to the things distasted, or
sheer insensibility, can deny a true, if not the rarest or finest,
poetic touch to Oft in the stilly night (however little fond one may
be of forms like 'stilly'), At the mid hour of night when stars
are weeping (a wonderful rhythm), I saw from the beach and
others yet which might be named almost by dozens. The
notes to Lalla Rookh (which nobody need read) are said to bore
a generation which thinks it knows everything already; and the
verse-tale of this particular kind is wholly out of fashion. Yet,
there are some who, after knowing the poem almost by heart in
youth and reading it at different times later, have still found 'The
Veiled Prophet' a much more interesting person to read about
than some others of their youthful acquaintances; while, in the
way of light, sweet, meringue-like verse, 'Paradise and the Peri'
is still not easily to be beaten.