Kitabı oku: «A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)», sayfa 9
Beddoes has sometimes been treated as a mainly bookish poet deriving from the Elizabethans and Shelley. I cannot agree with this. His very earliest work, written when he could not know much either of Shelley or Keats, shows as they do technique perhaps caught from Leigh Hunt. But this is quite dropped later; and his Elizabethanism is not imitation but inspiration. In this inspiration he does not follow, but shares with, his greater contemporaries. He is a younger and tragic counterpart to Charles Lamb in the intensity with which he has imbibed the Elizabethan spirit, rather from the nightshade of Webster and Tourneur than from the vine of Shakespeare. As wholes, his works are naught, or naught but nightmares; though Death's Jest-Book, despite its infinite disadvantages from constant rewriting and uncertainty of final form, has a strong grasp. But they contain passages, especially lyrics, of the most exquisite fancy and music, such as since the seventeenth century none but Blake and Coleridge had given. Beddoes does not seem to have been at all a pleasant person, and in his later days at any rate he would appear to have been a good deal less than sane. But the author of such things as the "Dirge for Wolfram" ("If thou wilt ease thine heart") in Death's Jest-Book, and the stanza beginning "Dream-Pedlary," "If there were dreams to sell," with not a few others of the same kind, attains to that small and disputed – but not to those who have thought out the nature of poetry disputable – class of poets who, including Sappho, Catullus, some mediæval hymn-writers, and a few moderns, especially Coleridge, have, by virtue of fragments only, attained a higher position than many authors of large, substantive, and important poems. They may be shockingly lacking in bulk, in organisation, in proper choice of subject, in intelligent criticism of life; but they are like the summer lightning or the northern aurora, which, though they shine only now and then, and only it may be for a few moments, shine, when they do shine, with a beauty unapproachable by gas or candle, hardly approached by sun or moon, and illuminate the whole of their world.
Although quotation is in the main impossible in this book, Beddoes, despite the efforts of his friend Kelsall, of Mr. Swinburne, of Mr. Gosse (thanks to whom a quasi-complete edition has at last appeared), and others, is still so little known, that a short one may be allowed in his case. I have known a critic who said deliberately of the above-mentioned stanza in "Dream-Pedlary" —
If there were dreams to sell,
What would you buy?
Some cost a passing bell,
Some a light sigh
That shakes from Life's fresh crown
Only a roseleaf down.
If there were dreams to sell —
Merry and sad to tell —
And the crier rung the bell,
What would you buy?
that these ten lines contain more pure poetry than the entire works of Byron. And the same touch will be found not merely in the "Wolfram Dirge" mentioned —
If thou wilt ease thine heart
Of Love and all its smart,
Then sleep, dear, sleep.
…
But wilt thou cure thine heart
Of Love and all its smart,
Then die, dear, die —
but in several other dirges (for the dirge is the form natural to Beddoes), in the "Song from Torrismond," in "Love in Idleness," in the "Song on the Water" (which is pure early Tennyson), in the exquisite "Threnody," and in many other things. They have been called artificial: the epithet can be allowed in no other sense than in that in which it applies to all the best poetry. And they have the note, which only a few true but imperfect poets have, of anticipation. Shadows before, both of Tennyson and Browning, especially of the latter, appear in Beddoes. But after all his main note is his own: not theirs, not the Elizabethan, not Shelley's, not another's. And this is what makes a poet.
As Beddoes' forte lay in short and rather uncanny snatches, so that of Richard Hengist Horne lay in sustained and dignified composition. He was not christened Hengist at all, but Henry. He had a curious life. In youth he knew Keats and Wells, having been, like them, at the private school of Mr. Clarke at Edmonton. He went to Sandhurst and was expelled for insubordination; joined the Mexican navy in the war of liberation; travelled widely; but seemed at about five and twenty to be settling down to literature and journalism in England. After writing various things, he produced in 1837 the fine but not quite "live" plays of Cosmo de Medici and The Death of Marlowe, and in 1843 the famous farthing epic, Orion, which was literally published at a farthing. This was the smallest part of a great literary baggage of very unequal value. In 1852 Horne, resuming the life of adventure, went to Australia, served in the gold police, and stayed at the Antipodes till 1869. Then he came home again and lived for fifteen years longer, still writing almost to his very death on 13th March 1884.
It is not true that Orion is Horne's only work of value; but it is so much better than anything else of his, and so characteristic of him, that by all but students the rest may be neglected. And it is an example of the melancholy but frequently exemplified truth, that few things are so dangerous, nay, so fatal to enduring literary fame, as the production of some very good work among a mass of, if not exactly rubbish, yet inferior stuff. I do not think it extravagant to say that if Horne had written nothing but Orion and had died comparatively young after writing it, he would have enjoyed very high rank among English poets. For, though doubtless a little weighted with "purpose," it is a very fine poem indeed, couched in a strain of stately and not second-hand blank verse, abounding in finished and effective passages, by no means destitute of force and meaning as a whole, and mixing some passion with more than some real satire. But the rather childish freak of its first publication probably did it no good, and it is quite certain that the author's long life and unflagging production did it much harm.
Of the other persons in the list above, Macaulay, Hartley Coleridge, and Lord Lytton are mainly something else than poets, and Talfourd, as a dramatist, will also be noticed elsewhere. Barnes and Hawker were both clergymen of the West of England: the former very highly ranked by some for his studies in Dorset dialect; the latter the author of the famous "Song of the Western Men" (long thought a genuine antique), of the exquisite "Queen Gwennyvar's Round," of the fine "Silent Tower of Bottreaux," of some beautiful sonnets, and of the stately "Quest of the Sangreal." Whether James Clarence Mangan, whose most famous poem is "Dark Rosaleen," a musical and mystic celebration of the charms and wrongs of Erin, is a great poet to whom Saxon jealousy has refused greatness for political reasons, or a not ungifted but not consummately distinguished singer who added some study to the common Irish gift of fluent, melodious verse-making, is a question best solved by reading his work and judging for the reader's self. It is not by any sane account so important that to dismiss it thus is a serious rifiuto, and it is probably impossible for Irish enthusiasm and English judgment ever to agree on the subject. Of "L. E. L." Sir Henry Taylor, Hood, and Praed, some more substantive account must be given.
Although it is not easy, after two generations, to decide such a point accurately, it is probable that "L. E. L." was the most popular of all the writers of verse who made any mark between the death of Byron in 1824 and the time when Tennyson definitely asserted himself in 1842. She paid for this popularity (which was earned not merely by her verse, but by a pretty face, an odd social position, and a sad and apparently, though it seems not really, mysterious end) by a good deal of slightly unchivalrous satire at the time and a rather swift and complete oblivion afterwards. She was born (her full name being Letitia Elizabeth Landon) in London on 14th August 1802, and was fairly well connected and educated. William Jerdan, the editor of the Literary Gazette (a man whose name constantly occurs in the literary history of this time, though he has left no special work except an Autobiography), was a friend of her family, and she began to write very early, producing novels and criticisms as well as verse in newspapers, in the albums and Souvenirs which were such a feature of the twenties and thirties, and in independent volumes. She was particularly active as a poet about 1824-35, when appeared the works whose titles —The Improvisatore, The Troubadour, The Golden Violet– suggested parodies to Thackeray. Her best novel is held to be Ethel Churchill, published in 1837. Next year she married Mr. Maclean, the Governor of Cape Coast Castle; and, going out with him to that not very salubrious clime, died suddenly in about two months. All sorts of ill-natured suggestions were of course made; but the late Colonel Ellis, the historian of the colony, seems to have established beyond the possibility of doubt that she accidentally poisoned herself with prussic acid, which she used to take for spasms of the heart.
It is tolerably exact, and it is not harsh, to say that "L. E. L." is a Mrs. Hemans with the influence of Byron added, not to the extent of any "impropriety," but to the heightening of the Romantic tone and of a native sentimentality. Her verse is generally musical and sweet: it is only sometimes silly. But it is too often characterised by what can but be called the "gush" which seems to have affected all the poetesses of this period except Sara Coleridge (1802-50) (who has some verses worthy of even her name in Phantasmion, her only independent book), and which appears in very large measure in the work of Mrs. Browning.
Sir Henry Taylor's poetical repute illustrates the converse of the proposition which is illustrated by that of Horne. It is probable that, if each is measured by his best things, Orion and Philip Van Artevelde, Horne must be allowed to be a good deal the better poet. But a placid official life enabled Taylor both to gain powerful friends and to devote himself to literature merely when and how he pleased. And so he has burdened his baggage with no mere hack-work. He was indeed a singularly lucky person. The son of a man of fair family but reduced fortune who had taken to farming, Henry Taylor began in the navy. But he disliked the service very much, and either obtained or received his discharge after only nine months' sea life as a mid-shipman during the year 1814. Then he entered the public store-keeper's department, but was ousted by rearrangements after four years' service. These beginnings were not very promising; but his father allowed him to stay quietly at home till by pure luck he obtained a third post under Government in the Colonial Office. This he held for nearly fifty years, during which it gave him affluence and by degrees a very high position, and left him abundance of time for society and letters. He resigned it in 1872, and died on 27th March 1886. He wrote some prose of various kinds, and just before his death published a pleasant autobiography. But his literary fame rests on a handful of plays and poems, all of them, except St. Clement's Eve, which did not appear till 1862, produced at leisurely intervals between 1827 (Isaac Comnenus) and 1847 (The Eve of the Conquest and other poems). The intervening works were Philip Van Artevelde (his masterpiece, 1834), Edwin the Fair (1842), some minor poems, and the romantic comedy of A Sicilian Summer (first called The Virgin Widow), which was published with St. Clement's Eve. He had (as, it may be noted curiously, had so many of the men of the transition decade in which he was born) a singular though scanty vein of original lyric snatch, the best example of which is perhaps the song "Quoth tongue of neither maid nor wife" in Van Artevelde; but his chief appeal lay in a very careful study of character and the presentation of it in verse less icy than Talfourd's and less rhetorical than Milman's. Yet he had, unlike either of these, very little direct eye to the stage, and therefore is classed here as a poet rather than as a dramatist. There is always a public for what is called "thoughtful" poetry, and Taylor's is more than merely thoughtful. But it may be suspected by observers that when Robert Browning came into fashion Henry Taylor went out. Citations of Van Artevelde, if not of the other pieces (none of which are contemptible, while the two last, inferior in weight to their predecessors, show advance in ease and grace), are very frequent between 1835 and 1865: rare I think between 1865 and 1895.
And so we come at last to the twin poets, in the proper sense humorous, – that is to say, jesting with serious thoughts behind, – of the first division of this class. They were very close in many ways – indeed it is yet a moot point which of the two borrowed certain rhythms and turns of word and verse from the other, or whether both hit upon these independently. But their careers were curiously different; and, except in comparative length of life (if that be an advantage), Praed was luckier than his comrade. Thomas Hood, who was slightly the elder, was born in 1798 or 1799 (for both dates are given) in the Poultry; his father being a bookseller and publisher. This father died, not in good circumstances, when the son was a boy, and Thomas, after receiving some though not much education, became first a merchant's clerk and then an engraver, but was lucky enough to enjoy between these uncongenial pursuits a long holiday, owing to ill-health, of some three years in Scotland. It was in 1820 or thereabouts that he fell into his proper vocation, and, as sub-editor of the London Magazine, found vent for his own talents and made acquaintance with most of its famous staff. He married, wrote some of his best serious poems and some good comic work, and found that while the former were neglected the latter was eagerly welcomed. It was settled that, in his own pathetic pun, he was to be "a lively Hood for a livelihood" thenceforward. It is difficult to say whether English literature lost or gained, except from one very practical point of view; for Hood did manage to live after a fashion by his fun as he certainly could not have lived by his poetry. He had, however, a bare pittance, much bad health, and some extremely bad luck, which for a time made him, through no fault of his own, an exile. His last five years were again spent in England, and in comparative, though very comparative, prosperity; for he was editor first of the New Monthly Magazine, then of a magazine of his own, Hood's Monthly, and not long before his death he received from Sir Robert Peel a civil list pension of £100 a year. The death was due to consumption, inherited and long valiantly struggled with.
The still shorter life of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, on the other hand, was passed under sufficiently favourable stars. He was born in 1802, and his father, Serjeant Praed, possessed property, practice at the bar, and official position. Praed was sent to Eton, where he became a pillar of the famous school magazine The Etonian, and thence to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he did extremely well, made the acquaintance of Macaulay, and wrote in Knight's Quarterly. After a short interval of tutoring and reading for the bar he entered Parliament in 1830, and remained in it for the rest of his life, which closed on 15th July 1839. He had latterly been secretary to the Board of Control, and it was thought that, had he lived, he might have made a considerable political reputation both as speaker and administrator.
The almost unchequered sunshine of one of these careers and the little sun and much shadow of the other have left traces – natural though less than might be supposed – of difference between the produce of the two men; but perhaps the difference is less striking than the resemblance. That Hood – obliged to write for bread, and outliving Praed by something like a decade at the two ends – wrote a great deal more than Praed did is of little consequence, for the more leisurely writer is as unequal as the duty labourer. Hood had the deeper and stronger genius: of this there is no doubt, and the advantage more than made up for Praed's advantages in scholarship and in social standing and accomplishment. In this serious work of Hood's —Lycus the Centaur, The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, The Elm Tree, The Haunted House– there is observable – to a degree never surpassed by any of the poets of this group except Beddoes, and more sustained and human, though less weird and sweet, than his – a strain of the true, the real, the ineffable tone of poetry proper. At this Praed never arrives: there are at most in him touches which may seem to a very charitable judgment to show that in other circumstances sorrow, passion, or the like might have roused him to display the hidden fire. On the other hand, neither Hood's breeding, nor, I think, his nature, allowed him to display the exquisite airiness, the delicate artificial bloom and perfection, of Praed's best vers de société– the Season, the Letter of Advice, and the rest. This last bloom has never been quite equalled – even Prior's touch is coarse to it, even that of the late Mr. Locker is laboured and deliberate. So too as there is nothing in Praed of the popular indignation – generous and fine but a little theatrical – which endears Hood to the general in The Bridge of Sighs and The Song of the Shirt, so there is nothing in Hood of the sound political sense, underlying apparent banter, of Praed's Speaker Asleep and other things.
But where the two poets come together, on a ground which they have almost to themselves, is in a certain kind of humorous poetry ranging from the terrific-grotesque, as in Hood's Miss Kilmansegg and Praed's Red Fisherman, to the simple, humorously tender study of characters, as in a hundred things of Hood's and in not a few of Praed's with The Vicar at their head. The resemblance here is less in special points than in a certain general view of life, conditioned in each case by the poet's breeding, temperament, and circumstance, but alike in essence and quality: in a certain variety of the essentially English fashion of taking life with a mixture of jest and earnest, of humour and sentiment. Hood, partly influenced by the need of caring for the public, partly by his pupilship to Lamb, perhaps went to further extremes both in mere fun and in mere sentiment than Praed did, but the central substance is the same in both.
Yet one gift which Hood has and Praed has not remains to be noticed – the gift of exquisite song writing. Compared with the admired inanities of Barry Cornwall, his praised contemporary, Hood's "Fair Ines," his "Time of Roses," his exquisite "Last Stanzas," and not a few other things, are as gold to gilt copper. Praed has nothing to show against these; but he, like Hood, was no inconsiderable prose writer, while the latter, thanks to his apprenticeship to the burin, had an extraordinary faculty of illustrating his own work with cuts, contrary to all the canons, but inimitably grotesque.
It is probable that even in this long survey of the great poetical production of the first third of this century some gaps may be detected by specialists. But it seemed to me impossible to give more than the barest mention here to the "single speech" accident of Charles Wolfe, the author of the "Burial of Sir John Moore," which everybody knows, and of absolutely nothing else that is worth a single person's knowing; to the gigantic and impossible labours of Edwin Atherstone; to the industrious translation of Rose and Sotheby; to the decent worth of Caroline Bowles, and the Hood-and-water of Laman Blanchard. And there are others perhaps who cannot be even mentioned; for there must be an end.
CHAPTER III
THE NEW FICTION
Although, as was shown in the first chapter, the amount of novel writing in the last decades of the eighteenth century was very considerable, and the talent displayed by at least some of the practitioners of the form distinctly great, it can hardly have been possible for any careful observer of it, either during the last ten years of the old age or the first fifteen of the new, to be satisfied with it on the whole, or to think that it had reached a settled or even a promising condition. Miss Burney (now Madame d'Arblay), whose brilliant début with Evelina was made just before the date at which this book begins, had just after that date produced Cecilia, in which partial and contemporary judges professed to see no falling off. But though she was still living and writing, – though she lived and wrote till the present century was nearly half over, —Camilla (1796) was acknowledged as a doubtful success, and The Wanderer (1814) as a disastrous failure; nor after this did she attempt the style again.
The unpopularity of Jacobinism and the growing distaste for the philosophy of the eighteenth century prevented much attempt being made to follow up the half political, half philosophical novel of Godwin, Holcroft, and Bage. No such causes, however, were in operation as concerning the "Tale of Terror," the second founder of which, Monk Lewis, was indeed no inconsiderable figure during the earlier part of the great age of 1810-30, while Charles Robert Maturin improved considerably upon Lewis himself. Maturin was born in Ireland (where he principally lived) in 1782, and died there in 1824. He took orders, but was too eccentric for success in his profession, and his whole heart was set on literature and the drama. Befriended by Scott and Byron, though very severely criticised by Coleridge, he succeeded in getting his tragedy of Bertram acted at Drury Lane with success; but his later theatrical ventures (Manuel, Fredolpho) were less fortunate. He also published sermons; but he lives in literature only by his novels, and not very securely by these. He produced three of them —The Fatal Vengeance: or, The Family of Montorio, The Wild Irish Boy, and the Milesian Chief– under a pseudonym before he was thirty; while after the success of Bertram he avowed Women (1818), Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and The Albigenses (1824), the last in a sort of cross style between his earlier patterns and Scott. But his fame had best be allowed to rest wholly on Melmoth, a remarkable book dealing with the supposed selling of a soul to the devil in return for prolonged life; the bargain, however, being terminable if the seller can induce some one else to take it off his hands. Although far too long, marvellously involved with tales within tales, and disfigured in parts by the rant and the gush of its class, Melmoth is really a powerful book, which gave something more than a passing shudder to its own generation (it specially influenced Balzac), and which has not lost its force even now. But the usual novel of this kind, which was written in vast numbers, was simply beneath contempt.
The exquisite artist who, as mentioned formerly, had taken these tales of terror as part subject of her youthful satire, had begun to write some years before the close of the eighteenth century. But Miss Austen's books were long withheld from the press, and she was considerably preceded in publication by Maria Edgeworth. These last are the only novels of the first decade of the nineteenth century which have held any ground, though they were but few among the crowds not merely of tales of terror but of fashionable novels, "Minerva Press" inanities, attempts in the bastard and unsuccessful kind of historical romance which preceded Scott's, and others. Miss Edgeworth, who was born in 1767, the daughter of an eccentric busybody of good family and property in Ireland, and who lived till 1848, had a great fame in her own day, deserved it, never entirely lost it, and has lately had it revived; while Scott declared (but in such matters Scott was a little apt to let his good-nature and his freedom from personal vanity get the better of strict critical truth) that her Irish novels had supplied the suggestion of his Scotch ones. Her chief works in this kind were Castle Rackrent (1801), a book with little interest of the strictly "novel" kind, but a wonderful picture of the varieties of recklessness and misconduct which in the course of a generation or two ruined or crippled most of the landlords of Ireland; Belinda (1803), her most ambitious and elaborate if not her most successful effort, which includes a very vivid and pregnant sketch of the feminine dissipation of the end of the last century; Tales of Fashionable Life, including the admirable Absentee; and Ormond, the most vivid of her Irish stories next to Castle Rackrent. She continued to write novels as late as 1834 (Helen), while some very charming letters of hers, though privately printed a good many years ago, were not published till 1894. Miss Edgeworth's father, Richard, was himself something of a man of letters, and belonged to the class of Englishmen who, without imbibing French freethinking, had eagerly embraced the "utility" doctrines, the political economy, and some of the educational and social crazes of the French philosophes; and he did his daughter no good by thrusting into her earlier work a strain of his own crotchet and purpose. Indirectly, however, this brought about in The Parent's Assistant, in other books for children, and in the Moral Tales, some of her most delightful work. In the novels (which besides these mentioned include Leonora, Harrington, Ennui, and Patronage, the longest of all) Miss Edgeworth occupies a kind of middle position between the eighteenth century novelists, of whom Miss Burney is the last, and those of the nineteenth, of whom Miss Austen is the first. This is not merely, though no doubt it is partly, due to the fact that the society which she saw (and she mixed in a great deal, from the highest downwards) was itself in a kind of transition state: it was at least as much owing to a certain want of distinct modernness and distinct universality in her own character, thought, and style. Miss Edgeworth, though possessed of delightful talents falling little short of genius, and of much humour (which last is shown in the charming Essay on Irish Bulls, as well as in her novels and her letters), missed, as a rule, the last and greatest touches; and, except some of her Irish characters, who are rather types than individuals, she has not created many live persons, while sometimes she wanders very far from life. Her touch, in short, though extremely pleasant, was rather uncertain. She can tell a story to perfection, but does not often invent it perfectly; and by herself she can hardly be said to have originated anything, though of course, if we could accept the above quoted statement of Scott's, she indirectly originated a very great deal.
Very different is the position occupied by Jane Austen, who was born at Steventon in Hampshire on 16th December 1775, being the daughter of the rector of that place, lived a quiet life chiefly at various places in her native county, frequented good society in the rank of not the richest country squires, to which her own family belonged, and died at Winchester unmarried on 24th July 1817. Of her six completed novels, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma were published during the last seven years of her life, while Northanger Abbey and Persuasion appeared, for the first time with an author's name, the year after her death. They had no enormous or sudden popularity, but the best judges, from Scott downwards, at once recognised their extraordinary merit; and it is not too much to say that by the best judges, with rare exceptions, that merit has been acknowledged with ever increasing fulness at once of enthusiasm and discrimination to the present day. With Scott, Miss Austen is the parent of nineteenth century fiction; or, to speak with greater exactness, she is the mother of the nineteenth century novel, just as he is the father of the nineteenth century romance.
One indeed of the most wonderful things about her is her earliness. Even the dates of publication of her first books precede those of any novelist of the same rank and the same modernity; but these dates are misleading. Northanger Abbey was written more than twenty years before it appeared, and the bulk of Pride and Prejudice (which some hold to be the best and most characteristic of all) is known to have been as old at least as Northanger Abbey. That is to say, almost at the very time of the appearance of Camilla (to which, by the way, Miss Austen was an original subscriber), a book not strikingly more nineteenth century in tone than the novels of Richardson, though a little more so in manners, a girl even younger than Miss Burney herself had been when she wrote Evelina was drawing other girls, who, putting aside the most trivial details of dress, speech, and so forth, might be living girls to-day.
The charm and the genius of Miss Austen are not universally admitted; the touch of old fashion in external detail apparently discontenting some readers, the delicate and ever-present irony either escaping or being distasteful to others, while the extreme quietness of the action and the entire absence of excitement probably revolt a third class. But the decriers do not usually attempt formal criticism. However, they sometimes do, and such an attempt once came under the notice of the present historian. It was urged that to extol Miss Austen's method is a masculine delusion, that method being nothing but the throwing into literature of the habit of minute and semi-satiric observation natural to womankind. It did not apparently occur to this critic that he (or she) was in the first place paying Miss Austen an extraordinarily high compliment – a compliment almost greater than the most enthusiastic "Janites" have ventured – inasmuch as no higher literary triumph can be even conceived than thus to focus, formulate, and crystallise the special talent and gift of an entire sex into a literary method. Nor did it probably occur to him that he was laying himself open to the damaging, or rather ruinous retort, "Then how is it that, of all the women who have preceded and followed Miss Austen as novelists, no other has displayed this specially and universally feminine gift?"
