the Reformation.

Our 1800-1830.

43

A few years afterwards, the great English middle class, the kernel of the nation, the class whose intelligent sympathy had upheld a Shakspeare, entered the prison of Puritanism, and had the key turned upon its spirit there for two hundred years. He enlargeth a nation, says Job, and straiteneth it again.

In the literary movement of the beginning of the nineteenth century the signal attempt to apply freely the modern spirit was made in England by two members of the aristocratic class, Byron and Shelley. Aristocracies are, as such, naturally impenetrable by ideas; but their individual members have a high courage and a turn for breaking bounds; and a man of genius, who is the born. child of the idea, happening to be born in the aristocratic ranks, chafes against the obstacles which prevent him from freely developing it. But Byron and Shelley did not succeed in their attempt freely to apply the modern spirit in English literature; they could not succeed in it; the resistance to baffle them, the want of intelligent sympathy to guide and uphold them, were too great. Their literary creation, compared with the literary creation of Shakspeare and Spenser, compared with the literary creation of Goethe and Heine, is a failure. The best literary creation of that time in England proceeded from men who did not make the same bold attempt as Byron and Shelley. What, in fact, was the career of the chief English men of letters, their contemporaries? The

greatest of them, Wordsworth, retired (in Middle-Age phrase) into a monastery. I mean, he plunged himself in the inward life, he voluntarily cut himself off from the modern spirit. Coleridge took to opium. Scott became the historiographer royal of feudalism. Keats passionately gave himself up to a sensuous genius, to his faculty for interpreting nature; and he died of consumption at twenty-five. Wordsworth, Scott, and Keats have left admirable works; far more solid and complete works than those which Byron and Shelley have left. But their works have this defect ;—they do not belong to that which is the main current of the literature of modern epochs, they do not apply modern ideas to life; they constitute, therefore, minor currents, and all other literary work of our day, however popular, which has the same defect, also constitutes but a minor current. Byron and Shelley will long be remembered, long after the inadequacy of their actual work is clearly recognised, for their passionate, their Titanic effort to flow in the main stream of modern literature; their names will be greater than their writings; stat magni nominis umbra.-Essays in Criticism.

PRODIGALITY OF NATURE.

WHAT a spendthrift, one is tempted to cry, is Nature! With what prodigality, in the march of generations, she employs human power, content to gather almost always

Prodigality of Nature.

45

little result from it, sometimes none! Look at Byron, that Byron whom the present generation of Englishmen are forgetting; Byron, the greatest natural force, the greatest elementary power, I cannot but think, which has appeared in our literature since Shakspeare. And what became of this wonderful production of nature? He shattered himself, he inevitably shattered himself to pieces, against the huge, black, cloud-topped, interminable precipice of British Philistinism. But Byron, it may be said, was eminent only by his genius, only by his inborn force and fire; he had not the intellectual equipment of a supreme modern poet; except for his genius he was an ordinary nineteenth-century English gentleman, with little culture and with no ideas. Well, then, look at Heine. Heine had all the culture of Germany; in his head fermented all the ideas of modern Europe. And what have we got from Heine? A half-result, for want of moral balance, and of nobleness of soul and character. is what I say; there is so much power, so many seem able to run well, so many give promise of running well; -so few reach the goal, so few are chosen. Many are called, few chosen.-Essays in Criticism.

SYMBOLISM IN POETRY.

That

THE first part of 'Faust' is undoubtedly Goethe's best work in poetry. And it is so for the plain reason that, except his 'Gedichte,' it is his most straightforward

work in poetry. Mr. Hayward's is the best of the translations of 'Faust' for the same reason,-because it is the most straightforward. To be simple and straightforward is, as Milton saw and said, of the essence of first-rate poetry. All that M. Scherer says of the ruinousness, to a poet, of 'symbols, hieroglyphics, mystifications,' is just. When Mr. Carlyle praises the 'Helena' for being 'not a type of one thing, but a vague, fluctuating, fitful adumbration of many,' he praises it for what is in truth its fatal defect. The 'Mährchen,' again, on which Mr. Carlyle heaps such praise, calling it 'one of the notablest performances produced for the last thousand years,' a performance 'in such a style of grandeur and celestial brilliancy and life as the Western imagination has not elsewhere reached;' the 'Mährchen,' woven throughout of 'symbol, hieroglyphic, mystification,' is by that very reason a piece of solemn inanity, on which a man of Goethe's powers could never have wasted his time, but for his lot having been cast in a nation which has never lived.-Mixed Essays.

GOETHE'S CORPORALISM.

LET us remark that it was not 'snobbishness' in Goethe, as M. Scherer harshly calls it, which made him take so seriously the potentate who loved Lola Montes; it was simply his German 'corporalism.' A disciplinable and much-disciplined people, with little humour, and without the experience of a great national life, regards its official

Goethe's Corporalism.

47

To a

authorities in this devout and awe-struck way. German it seems profane and licentious to smile at his Dogberry. He takes Dogberry seriously and solemnly, takes him at his own valuation.-Mixed Essays.

SIMPLICITY AND ‘SIMPLESSE.'

FRENCH criticism, richer in its vocabulary than ours, has invented a useful word to distinguish the semblance of simplicity from the real quality. The real quality it calls simplicité, the semblance simplesse. The one is natural simplicity, the other is artificial simplicity. What is called simplicity in the productions of a genius essentially not simple, is in truth simplesse. The two are distinguishable from one another the moment they appear in company. For instance, let us take the opening of the narrative in Wordsworth's 'Michael:'

Upon the forest-side in Grasmere Vale

There dwelt a shepherd, Michael was his name;
An old man, stout of heart, and strong of limb.
His bodily frame had been from youth to age
Of an unusual strength; his mind was keen,
Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs;

And in his shepherd's calling he was prompt

And watchful more than ordinary men.

Now let us take the opening of the narrative in Mr. Tennyson's 'Dora: '

With Farmer Allan at the farm abode

William and Dora. William was his son,
And she his niece. He often look'd at them,

And often thought, I'll make them man and wife'