From Chaucer to Tennyson
criticisms, and miscellaneous papers are exceedingly rich and varied.
The most famous of them was his _Confessions of an English Opium Eater_,
published as a serial in the _London Magazine_, in 1821. He had begun to
take opium, as a cure for the toothache, when a student at Oxford, where
he resided from 1803 to 1808. By 1816 he had risen to eight thousand
drops of laudanum a day. For several years after this he experienced the
acutest misery, and his will suffered an entire paralysis. In 1821 he
succeeded in reducing his dose to a comparatively small allowance, and
in shaking off his torpor so as to become capable of literary work. The
most impressive effect of the opium habit was seen in his dreams, in the
unnatural expansion of space and time, and the infinite repetition of
the same objects. His sleep was filled with dim, vast images;
measureless cavalcades deploying to the sound of orchestral music; an
endless succession of vaulted halls, with staircases climbing to heaven,
up which toiled eternally the same solitary figure. "Then came sudden
alarms, hurrying to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives;
darkness and light; tempest and human faces." Many of De Quincey's
papers were autobiographical, but there is always something baffling in
these reminiscences. In the interminable wanderings of his pen--for
which, perhaps, opium was responsible--he appears to lose all trace of
facts or of any continuous story. Every actual experience of his life
seems to have been taken up into a realm of dream, and there distorted
till the reader sees not the real figures, but the enormous, grotesque
shadows of them, executing wild dances on a screen. An instance of this
process is described by himself in his _Vision of Sudden Death_. But his
unworldliness and faculty of vision-seeing were not inconsistent with
the keenness of judgment and the justness and delicacy of perception
displayed in his _Biographical Sketches_ of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
other contemporaries: in his critical papers on _Pope_, _Milton_,
_Lessing_, _Homer and the Homeridae_: his essay on _Style_; and his
_Brief Appraisal of the Greek Literature_. His curious scholarship is
seen in his articles on the _Toilet of a Hebrew Lady_, and the
_Casuistry of Roman Meals_; his ironical and somewhat elaborate humor in
his essay on _Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts_. Of his
narrative pieces the most remarkable is his _Revolt of the Tartars_,
describing the flight of a Kalmuck tribe of six hundred thousand souls
from Russia to the Chinese frontier: a great hegira or anabasis, which
extended for four thousand miles over desert steppes infested with foes,
occupied six months' time, and left nearly half of the tribe dead upon
the way. The subject was suited to De Quincey's imagination. It was like
one of his own opium visions, and he handled it with a dignity and force
which make the history not altogether unworthy of comparison with
Thucydides's great chapter on the Sicilian Expedition.
An intimate friend of Southey was Walter Savage Landor, a man of kingly
nature, of a leonine presence, with a most stormy and unreasonable
temper, and yet with the courtliest graces of manner, and with--said
Emerson--"a wonderful brain, despotic, violent, and inexhaustible." He
inherited wealth, and lived a great part of his life at Florence, where
he died in 1864, in his ninetieth year. Dickens, who knew him at Bath,
in the latter part of his life, made a kindly caricature of him as
Lawrence Boythorn, in _Bleak House_, whose "combination of superficial
ferocity and inherent tenderness," testifies Henry Crabb Robinson, in
his _Diary_, was true to the life. Landor is the most purely classical
of English writers. Not merely his themes, but his whole way of thinking
was pagan and antique. He composed indifferently in English or Latin,
preferring the latter, if any thing, in obedience to his instinct for
compression and exclusiveness. Thus, portions of his narrative poem,
_Gebir_, 1798, were written originally in Latin and he added a Latin
version, _Gebirius_, to the English edition. In like manner his
_Hellenics_, 1847, were mainly translations from his Latin _Idyllia
Heroica_, written years before. The Hellenic clearness and repose which
were absent from his life, Landor sought in his art. His poems, in their
restraint, their objectivity, their aloofness from modern feeling, have
something chill and artificial. The verse of poets like Byron and
Wordsworth is alive; the blood runs in it. But Landor's polished,
clean-cut _intaglios_ have been well described as "written in marble."
He was a master of fine and solid prose. His _Pericles and Aspasia_
consists of a series of letters passing between the great Athenian
demagogue; the hetaira, Aspasia; her friend, Cleone of Miletus;
Anaxagorus, the philosopher, and Pericles's nephew, Alcibiades. In this
masterpiece, the intellectual life of Athens, at its period of highest
refinement, is brought before the reader with singular vividness, and he
is made to breathe an atmosphere of high-bred grace, delicate wit, and
thoughtful sentiment, expressed in English "of Attic choice." The
_Imaginary Conversations_, 1824-1846, were Platonic dialogues between a
great variety of historical characters; between, for example, Dante and
Beatrice, Washington and Franklin, Queen Elizabeth and Cecil, Xenophon
and Cyrus the Younger, Bonaparte and the president of the Senate.
Landor's writings have never been popular; they address an aristocracy
of scholars; and Byron--whom Landor disliked and considered
vulgar--sneered at him as a writer who "cultivated much private renown
in the shape of Latin verses." He said of himself that he "never
contended with a contemporary, but walked alone on the far Eastern
uplands, meditating and remembering."
A school-mate of Coleridge at Christ's Hospital, and his friend and
correspondent through life, was Charles Lamb, one of the most charming
of English essayists. He was a bachelor, who lived alone with his sister
Mary, a lovable and intellectual woman, but subject to recurring
attacks of madness. Lamb was "a notched and cropped scrivener, a votary
of the desk;" a clerk, that is, in the employ of the East India Company.
He was of antiquarian tastes, an ardent playgoer, a lover of whist and
of the London streets; and these tastes are reflected in his _Essays of
Elia_, contributed to the _London Magazine_ and reprinted in book form
in 1823. From his mousing among the Elizabethan dramatists and such old
humorists as Burton and Fuller, his own style imbibed a peculiar
quaintness and pungency. His _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_,
1808, is admirable for its critical insight. In 1802 he paid a visit to
Coleridge at Keswick, in the Lake Country; but he felt or affected a
whimsical horror of the mountains, and said, "Fleet Street and the
Strand are better to live in." Among the best of his essays are _Dream
Children_, _Poor Relations_, _The Artificial Comedy of the Last
Century_, _Old China_, _Roast Pig_, _A Defense of Chimneysweeps_, _A
Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis_, and _The Old
Benchers of the Inner Temple_.
The romantic movement, preluded by Gray, Collins, Chatterton,
Macpherson, and others, culminated in Walter Scott (1721-1832). His
passion for the mediaeval was excited by reading Percy's _Reliques_ when
he was a boy; and in one of his school themes he maintained that Ariosto
was a greater poet than Homer. He began early to collect manuscript
ballads, suits of armor, pieces of old plate, border-horns, and similar
relics. He learned Italian in order to read the romancers--Ariosto,
Tasso, Pulci, and Boiardo--preferring them to Dante. He studied Gothic
architecture, heraldry, and the art of fortification, and made drawings
of famous ruins and battle-fields. In particular he read eagerly every
thing that he could lay hands on relating to the history, legends, and
antiquities of the Scottish border--the vale of Tweed, Teviotdale,
Ettrick Forest, and the Yarrow, of all which land he became the
laureate, as Burns had been of Ayrshire and the "West Country." Scott,
like Wordsworth, was an outdoor poet. He spent much time in the saddle,
and was fond of horses, dogs, hunting, and salmon-fishing. He had a keen
eye for the beauties of natural scenery, though "more especially," he
admits, "when combined with ancient ruins or remains of our forefathers'
piety or splendor." He had the historic imagination, and, in creating
the historical novel, he was the first to throw a poetic glamour over
European annals. In 1803 Wordsworth visited Scott at Lasswade, near
Edinburgh; and Scott afterward returned the visit at Grasmere.
Wordsworth noted that his guest was "full of anecdote, and averse from
disquisition." The Englishman was a moralist and much given to
"disquisition," while the Scotchman was, above all things, a
_raconteur_, and, perhaps, on the whole, the foremost of British
story-tellers. Scott's Toryism, too, was of a different stripe from
Wordsworth's, being rather the result of sentiment and imagination than
of philosophy and reflection. His mind struck deep root in the past; his
local attachments and family pride were intense. Abbotsford was his
darling, and the expenses of this domain and of the baronial hospitality
which he there extended to all comers were among the causes of his
bankruptcy. The enormous toil which he exacted of himself, to pay off
the debt of L117,000, contracted by the failure of his publishers, cost
him his life. It is said that he was more gratified when the Prince
Regent created him a baronet, in 1820, than by the public recognition
that he acquired as the author of the Waverley Novels.
Scott was attracted by the romantic side of German literature. His first
published poem was a translation made in 1796 from Buerger's wild ballad,
_Leonora_. He followed this up with versions of the same poet's _Wilde
Jaeger_, of Goethe's violent drama of feudal life, _Goetz Von
Berlichingen_, and with other translations from the German, of a similar
class. On his horseback trips through the border, where he studied the
primitive manners of the Liddesdale people, and took down old ballads
from the recitation of ancient dames and cottagers, he amassed the
materials for his _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_, 1802. But the
first of his original poems was the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_,
published in 1805, and followed, in quick sucession by _Marmion_, the
_Lady of the Lake_, _Rokeby_, the _Lord of the Isles_, and a volume of
ballads and lyrical pieces, all issued during the years 1806-1814. The
popularity won by this series of metrical romances was immediate and
wide-spread. Nothing so fresh or so brilliant had appeared in English
poetry for nearly two centuries. The reader was hurried along through
scenes of rapid action, whose effect was heightened by wild landscapes
and picturesque manners. The pleasure was a passive one. There was no
deep thinking to perplex, no subtler beauties to pause upon; the
feelings were stirred pleasantly, but not deeply; the effect was on the
surface. The spell employed was novelty--or, at most, wonder--and the
chief emotion aroused was breathless interest in the progress of the
story. Carlyle said that Scott's genius was _in extenso_, rather than
_in intenso_, and that its great praise was its healthiness. This is
true of his verse, but not altogether so of his prose, which exhibits
deeper qualities. Some of Scott's most perfect poems, too, are his
shorter ballads, like _Jock o' Hazeldean_, and _Proud Maisie is in the
Wood_, which have a greater intensity and compression than his metrical
tales.
From 1814 to 1831 Scott wrote and published the _Waverley_ novels, some
thirty in number; if we consider the amount of work done, the speed with