CHAPTER XXII. POETS OF THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (1800-1850). As we begin the nineteenth century, we find that the strong force which was leading men to question and cast off authority had not lost its energy. It was the springing up of new life, and it could not be stifled or crushed. The wild, destroying power could only be controlled, as men found out that above themselves and above their fellow-men there was a rule to which it was no slavery to submit, but the noblest, freest life-the rule of reason and conscience, the self-controlled obedience of each individual to law and to God. It was the noblest and most enlightened minds which saw this first, the "Happy Warriors," who gained the victory for themselves, and then helped others to conquer too; and of these Wordsworth stands as the leader in this, the great battle of the nineteenth century. There were other poets, his contemporaries, who did not see so far; they felt the crushing weight of artificial forms and needless tyrannies; they looked only at man's representation of God, and they rose in fierce revolt against God and man, and threw off individual allegiance to duty and law. Byron represents in this way the strong energy of revolt and the bare assertion of self-will as the principle of life. He belonged to a family in which unsoundness of mind seems to have been hereditary, and he was brought up by his mother, who was a capricious and violent woman There was nothing in his training to teach him self-control or self-renunciation for the good of others; and, drifting on the current of the time, he rose against the restraints of society and law which in any way interfered with his own individual action. He was born in 1788, and in 1807 published his first collection of short poems, "Hours of Idleness." In the years from 1807 to 1823 he wrote "Childe Harold," "The Giaour," "The Bride of Abydos," "The Corsair," "Lara," "The Prisoner of Chillon," "Manfred," and "Don Juan." Most of these poems are narratives, of which he is himself the hero; and the concentration of thought and feeling around himself caused that natural weariness of the subject which made him look on the world and life with bitterness and disgust. The power and eloquence with which he appealed to the world for sympathy with himself, and the energy with which he expressed the free spirit of that time, gave his poetry a strong hold over the readers of his own day. It must not be forgotten that, while he asserted for himself and others the unrestrained action of individual selfishness as the principle of life, he had sympathy with the wider aspirations of patriotism. It was with the desire to help others to freedom that, in 1823, he threw himself into the cause of the Greeks, who were then asserting their independence of the Turks, by whom they had been greatly oppressed. Lord Byron went to Greece, and helped to rouse the national feeling of the people, and to unite them as one man in the struggle for liberty. At Missolonghi he was seized with fever, and his constitution being already worn out by his lawless life, he sank under it. There is something sad in his death in a strange land, and without a friend near him; yet compared with his life, it is like the thin gleam of golden sunlight cast across the world at the sunset of a dark, stormy day. Another poet who in his own way expressed the spirit of revolt against tyranny, was Percy Bysshe Shelley; but in him it was not so much the desire for individual freedom of action which gave energy to his poetry, as the grand conception he had formed of the "future of the world that was to be." He was of all poets the most ideal; he could imagine a perfection of human character and life far beyond all that had yet been attained; and, like Cowper, he believed in the new hope of a more glorious day. Meantime his spirit rose against all that held men down and thwarted their higher development, with a force equal to his love for man, his faith in the possibilities of a better time, and his earnest longings for its coming. Shelley's power of conceiving the purest ideal led him to see how much there was which had, at different times, entered into man's conception of God that was inconsistent with the perfection of love, justice, and truth; so that the human colouring tinged and distorted the Divine image, like an object seen through a painted window, or as he himself expresses it : 66 Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Until Death tramples it to fragments. Die, If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek." Shelley desired the immediate realisation of the ideal. Like all the nobler minds of the time, he hoped much from the French Revolution, and when he saw the failure of political theories to regenerate a world not ripe for them, he felt the bitter chill of disappointment; had he lived longer he might have passed onward to the deeper lessons Wordsworth taught that it is only by individual regeneration and development that the human race advances—and have learnt in faith to work and wait. His intense sympathy with humanity, and the very strength of his love, made him rise against the fires of suffering which are a part of the process of purification and spiritual refinement; he pas sionately longed to see man become at once "Good, great, and joyous, beautiful and free;" but in the energy of his love and sympathy he could not bear to look upon the "great tribulation," through which alone man rises to the higher glory. Shelley's life was short. He was born in 1792; and in 1822 he was drowned by the upsetting of a boat, in crossing the Gulf of Spezzia. His body was recovered, and was burnt on the shore by Lord Byron and some of his friends. The ashes were buried in the Protestant burial-ground at Rome; and on his tomb were written the words "Cor cordium," "Heart of hearts;" fitly expressing that intense depth of sympathy which had beaten in unison with all the sorrows and joys of humanity. Adonais," a lament One of Shelley's last poems was for another young poet, John Keats. sense of the ideal was also strong; but it was the ideal of beauty which filled his soul. For him the world with all its evil and its wrongs could not be wholly dark and miserable. In his first larger poem, "Endymion," he says: 66 A thing of beauty is a joy for ever; Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. A flowery band to bind us to the earth, That for themselves a cooling covert make Keats sought beauty in Nature, and in "lovely tales" of human life in past ages; and in "Hyperion" he teaches the lesson, which we are only just beginning to understand, that beauty has its place and work in the elevation of the human race, and that it is the heritage of all. Keats was consumptive, and died at Rome in his twentysixth year, about six months before Shelley's death. Wordsworth was born in 1770, and was nearly twenty years older than Byron, and more than twenty years older than Shelley and Keats; but he lived till 1850, and his work carries us on from the ferment of the stormy time of the French Revolution into the calm, working days which have succeeded it. Wordsworth's father was an attorney, living at Cockermouth, in Cumberland. Here he was born, within sight of Skiddaw, and on the border of the Lake District, which is now for ever associated with him. At eight years old he was sent to school at Hawkeshead, in the vale of Esthwaite. The school had been founded by Archbishop Sandys, in 1585; and the boys lodged in different houses near. William Wordsworth and his brother Richard were boarded in the house of Dame Tyson. Wordsworth thus grew up surrounded by Nature in its grandest and simplest forms; and the influence over his mind and character was very great and lasting. He says— "Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up Fostered alike by Beauty and by Fear." |