Halleck's New English Literature Part 53

The _Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Ode on Melancholy, Lamia_, and _Isabella_,--all show the unusual charm of Keats. He manifests the greatest strength in his unfinished fragment _Hyperion_, "the Gotterdammerung of the early Grecian G.o.ds." The opening lines reveal the artistic perfection of form and the effectiveness of the sensory images with which he frames the scene:--

"Deep in the shady sadness of a vale Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star, Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair; Forest on forest hung about his head Like cloud on cloud."

General Characteristics.--Keats is the poetic apostle of the beautiful. He specially emphasizes the beautiful in the world of the senses; but his definition of beauty grew to include more than mere physical sensations from attractive objects. In his _Ode to a Grecian Urn_, he says that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," and he calls to the Grecian pipes to play--

"Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone."

Those poets who thought that they could equal Keats by piling up a medley of sense images have been doomed to disappointment. The transforming power of his imagination is more remarkable than the wealth of his sensations.

His mastery in choosing, adapting, and sometimes even creating, apt poetic words or phrases, is one of his special charms. Matthew Arnold says: "No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats." Some of his descriptive adjectives and phrases, such as the "deep-damasked wings"

of the tiger-moth, have been called "miniature poems." In the eighty lines of the _Ode to a Nightingale_, we may note the "_full-throated ease_" of the nightingale's song, the vintage cooled in the "_deep-delved_ earth," the "_beaded bubbles winking_ at the brim" of the beaker "_full of the warm South_," "the coming musk-rose, full of _dewy wine_," the sad Ruth "amid the _alien_ corn," and the "_faery lands forlorn_."

A contemporary critic accused Keats of "sp.a.w.ning" new words, of converting verbs into nouns, of forming new verbs, and of making strange use of adjectives and adverbs. Some contemporaries might object to his "_torched_ mines," "_flawblown_ sleet," "_liegeless_ air," or even to the "_calm-throated_" thrush of the immortals. Modern lovers of poetry, however, think that he displayed additional proof of genius by enriching the vocabulary of poetry more than any other writer since Milton.

Keats was not, like Byron and Sh.e.l.ley, a reformer. He drew his first inspiration from Grecian mythology and the romantic world of Spenser, not from the French Revolution or the social unrest of his own day. It is, however, a mistake to say that he was untouched by the new human impulses. There is modern feeling in the following lines which introduce us to the two cruel brothers in _Isabella_:--

"...for them many a weary hand did swelt In torched mines and noisy factories.

For them the Ceylon diver held his breath, And went all naked to the hungry shark; For them his ears gushed blood; for them in death The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark Lay full of darts."

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Matthew Arnold wrote of Keats: "He is with Shakespeare." Andrew Bradley, a twentieth century professor of poetry in the University of Oxford, says: "Keats was of Shakespeare's tribe." These eminent critics do not mean that Keats had the breadth, the humor, the moral appeal of Shakespeare, but they do find in Keats much of the youthful Shakespeare's lyrical power, mastery of expression, and intense love of the beautiful in life. When Keats said: "If a sparrow comes before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel," he showed another Shakespearean quality in his power to enter into the life of other creatures. At first he wrote of the beautiful things that appealed to his senses or his fancies, but when he came to ask himself the question:--

"And can I ever bid these joys farewell?"

he answered:--

"Yes, I must pa.s.s them for a n.o.bler life, Where I may find the agonies, the strife Of human hearts."[26]

In _Isabella_, the _Ode to a Nightingale, Lamia_, and _Hyperion_, he was beginning to paint these "agonies" and "the strife"; but death swiftly ended further progress on this road. Before he pa.s.sed away, however, he left some things that have an Elizabethan appeal. Among such, we may mention his welcome to "easeful death," his artistic setting of a puzzling truth:--

"...Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips, Bidding adieu,"

his line to which the young world still responds:--

"Forever wilt thou love and she be fair,"

and especially the musical call of his own young life, "yearning like a G.o.d in pain."

THOMAS DE QUINCEY, 1785-1859

[Ill.u.s.tration: THOMAS DE QUINCEY. _From the painting by Sir J.W.

Gordon, National Portrait Gallery_.]

Life.-Thomas de Quincey was born in Manchester in 1785. Being a precocious child, he became a remarkable student at the age of eight.

When he was only eleven, his Latin verses were the envy of the older boys at the Bath school, which he was then attending. At the age of fifteen, he was so thoroughly versed in Greek that his professor said of him to a friend: "That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one." De Quincey was sent in this year to the Manchester grammar school; but his mind was in advance of the instruction offered there, and he unceremoniously left the school on his seventeenth birthday.

For a time he tramped through Wales, living on an allowance of a guinea a week. Hungering for books, he suddenly posted to London. As he feared that his family would force him to return to school, he did not let them know his whereabouts. He therefore received no money from them, and was forced to wander hungry, sick, and dest.i.tute, through the streets of the metropolis, with its outcasts and waifs. He describes this part of his life in a very entertaining manner in his _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_.

When his family found him, a year later, they prevailed on him to go to Oxford; and, for the next four years, he lived the life of a recluse at college.

In 1808 he took the cottage at Grasmere that Wordsworth had quitted, and enjoyed the society of the three Lake poets. Here De Quincey married and lived his happiest years.

The latter part of his life was clouded by his indulgence in opium, which he had first taken while at college to relieve acute neuralgia.

At one time he was in the habit of taking an almost incredible amount of laudanum. Owing to a business failure, his money was lost. It then became necessary for him to throw off the influence of the narcotic sufficiently to earn a livelihood, In 1821 he began to write. From that time until his death, in 1859, his life was devoted mainly to literature.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROOM IN DOVE COTTAGE OCCUPIED BY WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, AND DE QUINCEY.]

Works.--Nearly all De Quincey's writings were contributed to magazines. His first and greatest contribution was _The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, published in the _London Magazine_. These _Confessions_ are most remarkable for the brilliant and elaborate style in which the author's early life and his opium dreams are related. His splendid, yet melancholy, dreams are the most famous in the language.

De Quincey's wide reading, especially of history, supplied the material for many of them. In these dreams he saw the court ladies of the "unhappy times of Charles I.," witnessed Marius pa.s.s by with his Roman legions, "ran into paG.o.das" in China, where he "was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms," and "was buried for a thousand years, in stone coffins, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids" in Egypt.

His dreams were affected also by the throngs of people whom he had watched in London. He was haunted by "the tyranny of the human face."

He says:--

"Faces imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries: my agitation was infinite, my mind tossed, and surged with the ocean."

Sound also played a large part in the dreams. Music, heart-breaking lamentations, and pitiful echoes recurred frequently in the most magnificent of these nightly pageants. One of the most distressing features of the dreams was their vastness. The dreamer lived for centuries in one night, and s.p.a.ce "swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity."

To present with such force and reality these grotesque and weird fancies, these vague horrors, and these deep oppressions required a powerful imaginative grasp of the intangible, and a masterly command of language.

In no other work does De Quincey reach the eminence attained in the _Confessions_, although his scholarly acquirements enabled him to treat philosophical, critical, and historical subjects with wonderful grace and ease. His biographer, Ma.s.son, says, "De Quincey's sixteen volumes of magazine articles are full of brain from beginning to end."

The wide range of his erudition is shown by the fact that he could write such fine literary criticisms as _On Wordsworth's Poetry_ and _On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth_, such clear, strong, and vivid descriptions of historical events and characters as _The Caesars, Joan of Arc_, and _The Revolt of the Tartars_, and such acute essays on unfamiliar topics as _The Toilette of a Hebrew Lady, The Casuistry of Roman Meals_, and _The Spanish Military Nun_.

He had a contemplative, a.n.a.lytic mind which enjoyed knotty metaphysical problems and questions far removed from daily life, such as the first principles of political economy, and of German philosophy. While he was a clear thinker in such fields, he added little that was new to English thought.

The works which rank next to _The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_ are all largely autobiographical, and reveal charming glimpses of this dreamy, learned sage. Those works are _Suspiria de Profundis (Sighs from the Depths), The English Mail Coach_, and _Autobiographic Sketches_. None of them contains any striking or unusual experience of the author. Their power rests upon their marvelous style. _Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow_ in _Suspiria de Profundis_ and the _Dream Fugue_ in the _Mail Coach_ are among the most musical, the most poetic, and the most imaginative of the author's productions.

General Characteristics.--De Quincey's essays show versatility, scholarly exactness, and great imaginative power. His fame, however, rests in a large degree upon his style. One of its most prominent characteristics is, precision. There are but few English essayists who can compare with him in scrupulous precision of expression. He qualifies and elaborates a simple statement until its exact meaning becomes plainly manifest. His vocabulary is extraordinary. In any of the multifarious subjects treated by him, the right word seems always at hand.

Two characteristics, which are very striking in all his works, are harmony and stateliness. His language is so full of rich harmonies that it challenges comparison with poetry. His long, periodic sentences move with a quiet dignity, adapted to the treatment of lofty themes.

De Quincey's work possesses also a light, ironic humor, which is happiest in parody. The essay upon _Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts_ is the best example of his humor. This selection is one of the most whimsical:--

"For, if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he come, to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop."

De Quincey's gravest fault is digression. He frequently leaves his main theme and follows some line of thought that has been suggested to his well-stored mind. These digressions are often very long, and sometimes one leads to another, until several subjects receive treatment in a single paper. De Quincey, however, always returns to the subject in hand and defines very sharply the point of digression and of return. Another of his faults is an indulgence in involved sentences, which weaken the vigor and simplicity of the style.

Despite these faults, De Quincey is a great master of language. He deserves study for the three most striking characteristics of his style,--precision, stateliness, and harmony.

SUMMARY

The tide of reaction, which had for same time been gathering force, swept triumphantly over England in this age of Romanticism.

Men rebelled against the aristocracy, the narrow conventions of society, the authority of the church and of the government, against the supremacy of cold cla.s.sicism in literature, against confining intellectual activity to tangible commonplace things, and against the repression of imagination and of the soul's aspirations. The two princ.i.p.al forces behind these changes were the Romantic movement, which culminated in changed literary ideals, and the spirit of the French Revolution, which emphasized the close kinship of all ranks of humanity.

The time was preeminently poetic. The Elizabethan age alone excels it in the glory of its poetry. The princ.i.p.al subjects of verse in the age of Romanticism were nature and man. Nature became the embodiment of an intelligent, sympathetic, spiritual force. Cowper, Burns, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, and Keats const.i.tute a group of poets who gave to English literature a new poetry of nature. The majority of these were also poets of man, of a more ideal humanity.

The common man became an object of regard. Burns sings of the Scotch peasant. Wordsworth pictures the life of shepherds and dalesmen.

Byron's lines ring with a cry of liberty for all, and Sh.e.l.ley immortalizes the dreams of a universal brotherhood of man. Keats, the poet of the beautiful, pa.s.sed away before he heard clearly the message of "the still sad music of humanity."