From Chaucer to Tennyson
reviews, the _Edinburgh_, was established in 1802, as the organ of the
Whig party in Scotland. This was followed by the London _Quarterly_, in
1808, and by _Blackwood's Magazine_, in 1817, both in the Tory interest.
The first editor of the _Edinburgh_ was Francis Jeffrey, who assembled
about him a distinguished corps of contributors, including the versatile
Henry Brougham, afterward a great parliamentary orator and lord
chancellor of England, and the Rev. Sydney Smith, whose witty sayings
are still current. The first editor of the _Quarterly_ was William
Gifford, a satirist, who wrote the _Baviad_ and _Maeviad_ ridicule of
literary affectations. He was succeeded in 1824 by John Gibson Lockhart,
the son-in-law of Walter Scott, and the author of an excellent _Life of
Scott_. _Blackwood's_ was edited by John Wilson, Professor of Moral
Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, who, under the pen-name of
"Christopher North," contributed to his magazine a series of brilliant
imaginary dialogues between famous characters of the day, entitled
_Noctes Ambrosianae_, because they were supposed to take place at
Ambrose's tavern in Edinburgh. These papers were full of a profuse,
headlong eloquence, of humor, literary criticism, and personalities
interspersed with songs expressive of a roystering and convivial Toryism
and an uproarious contempt for Whigs and cockneys. These reviews and
magazines, and others which sprang up beside them, became the _nuclei_
about which the wit and scholarship of both parties gathered. Political
controversy under the Regency and the reign of George IV. was thus
carried on more regularly by permanent organs, and no longer so largely
by privateering, in the shape of pamphlets, like Swift's _Public Spirit
of the Allies_, Johnson's _Taxation No Tyranny_, and Burke's
_Reflections on the Revolution in France_. Nor did politics by any means
usurp the columns of the reviews. Literature, art, science, the whole
circle of human effort and achievement passed under review.
_Blackwood's_, _Fraser's_, and the other monthlies published stories,
poetry, criticism, and correspondence--every thing, in short, which
enters into the make-up of our magazines to-day, except illustrations.
Two main influences, of foreign origin, have left their trace in the
English writers of the first thirty years of the 19th century, the one
communicated by contact with the new German literature of the latter
half of the 18th century, and in particular with the writings of Goethe,
Schiller, and Kant; the other springing from the events of the French
Revolution. The influence of German upon English literature in the 19th
century was more intellectual and less formal than that of the Italian
in the 16th and of the French in the 18th. In other words, the German
writers furnished the English with ideas and ways of feeling rather than
with models of style. Goethe and Schiller did not become subjects for
literary imitation as Moliere, Racine, and Boileau had become in Pope's
time. It was reserved for a later generation and for Thomas Carlyle to
domesticate the diction of German prose. But the nature and extent of
this influence can, perhaps, best be noted when we come to take up the
authors of the time one by one.
The excitement caused by the French Revolution was something more
obvious and immediate. When the Bastile fell, in 1789, the enthusiasm
among the friends of liberty and human progress in England was hardly
less intense than in France. It was the dawn of a new day; the shackles
were stricken from the slave; all men were free and all men were
brothers, and radical young England sent up a shout that echoed the roar
of the Paris mob. Wordsworth's lines on the _Fall of the Bastile_,
Coleridge's _Fall of Robespierre_ and _Ode to France_, and Southey's
revolutionary drama, _Wat Tyler_, gave expression to the hopes and
aspirations of the English democracy. In after life, Wordsworth, looking
back regretfully to those years of promise, wrote his poem on the
_French Revolution as it Appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement_.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive;
But to be young was very heaven. O times
In which the meager, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a country in romance.
Those were the days in which Wordsworth, then an under-graduate at
Cambridge, spent a college vacation in tramping through France, landing
at Calais on the eve of the very day (July 14, 1790) on which Louis XVI.
signalized the anniversary of the fall of the Bastile by taking the oath
of fidelity to the new constitution. In the following year Wordsworth
revisited France, where he spent thirteen months, forming an intimacy
with the republican general, Beaupuis, at Orleans, and reaching Paris
not long after the September massacres of 1792. Those were the days,
too, in which young Southey and young Coleridge, having married sisters
at Bristol, were planning a "Pantisocracy," or ideal community, on the
banks of the Susquehannah, and denouncing the British government for
going to war with the French Republic. This group of poets, who had met
one another first in the south of England, came afterward to be called
the Lake Poets, from their residence in the mountainous lake country of
Westmoreland and Cumberland, with which their names, and that of
Wordsworth, especially, are forever associated. The so-called "Lakers"
did not, properly speaking, constitute a school of poetry. They differed
greatly from one another in mind and art. But they were connected by
social ties and by religious and political sympathies. The excesses of
the French Revolution, and the usurpation of Napoleon disappointed them,
as it did many other English liberals, and drove them into the ranks of
the reactionaries. Advancing years brought conservatism, and they became
in time loyal Tories and orthodox churchmen.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), the chief of the three, and, perhaps,
on the whole, the greatest English poet since Milton, published his
_Lyrical Ballads_ in 1798. The volume contained a few pieces by his
friend Coleridge--among them the _Ancient Mariner_--and its appearance
may fairly be said to mark an epoch in the history of English poetry.
Wordsworth regarded himself as a reformer of poetry; and in the preface
to the second edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_, he defended the theory
on which they were composed. His innovations were twofold: in
subject-matter and in diction. "The principal object which I proposed to
myself in these poems," he said, "was to choose incidents and situations
from common life. Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in
that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil
in which they can attain their maturity...and are incorporated with
the beautiful and permanent forms of nature." Wordsworth discarded, in
theory, the poetic diction of his predecessors, and professed to use "a
selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation." He
adopted, he said, the language of men in rustic life, "because such men
hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of
language is originally derived."
In the matter of poetic diction Wordsworth did not, in his practice,
adhere to the doctrine of this preface. Many of his most admired poems,
such as the _Lines written near Tintern Abbey_, the great _Ode on the
Intimations of Immortality_, the _Sonnets_, and many parts of his
longest poems, _The Excursion_ and _The Prelude_, deal with philosophic
thought and highly intellectualized emotions. In all of these and in
many others the language is rich, stately, involved, and as remote from
the "real language" of Westmoreland shepherds as is the epic blank verse
of Milton. On the other hand, in those of his poems which were
consciously written in illustration of his theory, the affectation of
simplicity, coupled with a defective sense of humor, sometimes led him
to the selection of vulgar and trivial themes, and the use of language
which is bald, childish, or even ludicrous. His simplicity is too often
the simplicity of Mother Goose rather than of Chaucer. Instances of this
occur in such poems as _Peter Bell_, the _Idiot Boy_, _Goody Blake and
Harry Gill_, _Simon Lee_, and the _Wagoner_. But there are multitudes of
Wordsworth's ballads and lyrics which are simple without being silly,
and which, in their homeliness and clear profundity, in their production
of the strongest effects by the fewest strokes, are among the choicest
modern examples of _pure_, as distinguished from decorated, art. Such
are (out of many) _Ruth_, _Lucy_, _She was a Phantom of Delight_, _To a
Highland Girl_, _The Reverie of Poor Susan_, _To the Cuckoo_, _The
Solitary Reaper_, _We Are Seven_, _The Pet Lamb_, _The Fountain_, _The
Two April Mornings_, _Resolution and Independence_, _The Thorn_, and
_Yarrow Unvisited_.
Wordsworth was something of a Quaker in poetry, and loved the sober
drabs and grays of life. Quietism was his literary religion, and the
sensational was to him not merely vulgar, but almost wicked. "The human
mind," he wrote, "is capable of being excited without the application of
gross and violent stimulants." He disliked the far-fetched themes and
high-colored style of Scott and Byron. He once told Landor that all of
Scott's poetry together was not worth sixpence. From action and passion
he turned away to sing the inward life of the soul and the outward life
of nature. He said:
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
And again:
Long have I loved what I behold.
The night that charms, the day that cheers;
The common growth of mother earth
Suffices me--her tears, her mirth,
Her humblest mirth and tears.
Wordsworth's life was outwardly uneventful. The companionship of the
mountains and of his own thoughts, the sympathy of his household, the
lives of the dalesmen and cottagers about him furnished him with all the
stimulus that he required.
Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
His only teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
He read little, but reflected much, and made poetry daily, composing, by
preference, out of doors, and dictating his verses to some member of his
family. His favorite amanuensis was his sister Dorothy, a woman of fine
gifts, to whom Wordsworth was indebted for some of his happiest
inspirations. Her charming _Memorials of a Tour in the Scottish
Highlands_ records the origin of many of her brother's best poems.
Throughout life Wordsworth was remarkably self-centered. The ridicule of
the reviewers, against which he gradually made his way to public
recognition, never disturbed his serene belief in himself, or in the
divine message which he felt himself commissioned to deliver. He was a
slow and serious person, a preacher as well as a poet, with a certain
rigidity, not to say narrowness, of character. That plastic temperament
which we associate with poetic genius Wordsworth either did not possess,
or it hardened early. Whole sides of life were beyond the range of his
sympathies. He touched life at fewer points than Byron and Scott, but
touched it more profoundly. It is to him that we owe the phrase "plain
living and high thinking," as also a most noble illustration of it in
his own practice. His was the wisest and deepest spirit among the
English poets of his generation, though hardly the most poetic. He wrote
too much, and, attempting to make every petty incident or reflection the
occasion of a poem, he finally reached the point of composing verses
_On Seeing a Harp in the shape of a Needle Case_, and on other themes