From Chaucer to Tennyson
which it was done, and the general average of excellence maintained,
perhaps the most marvelous literary feat on record. The series was
issued anonymously, and takes its name from the first number: _Waverley,
or 'Tis Sixty Years Since_. This was founded upon the rising of the
clans, in 1745, in support of the Young Pretender, Charles Edward
Stuart, and it revealed to the English public that almost foreign
country which lay just across their threshold, the Scottish Highlands.
The _Waverley_ novels remain, as a whole, unequaled as historical
fiction, although here and there a single novel, like George Eliot's
_Romola_, or Thackeray's _Henry Esmond_, or Kingsley's _Hypatia_, may
have attained a place beside the best of them. They were a novelty when
they appeared. English prose fiction had somewhat declined since the
time of Fielding and Goldsmith. There were truthful, though rather tame,
delineations of provincial life, like Jane Austen's _Sense and
Sensibility_, 1811, and _Pride and Prejudice_, 1813; or Maria
Edgeworth's _Popular Tales_, 1804. On the other hand, there were Gothic
romances, like the _Monk_ of Matthew Gregory Lewis, to whose _Tales of
Wonder_ some of Scott's translations from the German had been
contributed; or like Anne Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_. The great
original of this school of fiction was Horace Walpole's _Castle of
Otranto_, 1765; an absurd tale of secret trap-doors, subterranean
vaults, apparitions of monstrous mailed figures and colossal helmets,
pictures that descend from their frames, and hollow voices that proclaim
the ruin of ancient families.
Scott used the machinery of romance, but he was not merely a romancer,
or an historical novelist even, and it is not, as Carlyle implies, the
buff-belts and jerkins which principally interest us in his heroes.
_Ivanhoe_ and _Kenilworth_ and the _Talisman_ are, indeed, romances pure
and simple, and very good romances at that. But, in novels such as _Rob
Roy_, the _Antiquary_, the _Heart of Midlothian_, and the _Bride of
Lammermoor_, Scott drew from contemporary life, and from his intimate
knowledge of Scotch character. The story is there, with its entanglement
of plot and its exciting adventures, but there are also, as truly as in
Shakspere, though not in the same degree, the observation of life, the
knowledge of men, the power of dramatic creation. No writer awakens in
his readers a warmer personal affection than Walter Scott, the brave,
honest, kindly gentleman; the noblest figure among the literary men of
his generation.
Another Scotch poet was Thomas Campbell, whose _Pleasures of Hope_,
1799, was written in Pope's couplet, and in the stilted diction of the
18th century. _Gertrude of Wyoming_, 1809, a long narrative poem in
Spenserian stanza, is untrue to the scenery and life of Pennsylvania,
where its scene is laid. But Campbell turned his rhetorical manner and
his clanking, martial verse to fine advantage in such pieces as
_Hohenlinden_, _Ye Mariners of England_, and the _Battle of the Baltic_.
These have the true lyric fire, and rank among the best English
war-songs.
When Scott was asked why he had left off writing poetry, he answered,
"Byron _bet_ me." George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) was a young man of
twenty-four when, on his return from a two years' sauntering through
Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece, and the Levant, he published, in the
first two cantos of _Childe Harold_, 1812, a sort of poetic itinerary of
his experiences and impressions. The poem took, rather to its author's
surprise, who said that he woke one morning and found himself famous.
_Childe Harold_ opened a new field to poetry: the romance of travel, the
picturesque aspects of foreign scenery, manners, and costumes. It is
instructive of the difference between the two ages, in poetic
sensibility to such things, to compare Byron's glowing imagery with
Addison's tame _Letter from Italy_, written a century before. _Childe
Harold_ was followed by a series of metrical tales, the _Giaour_, the
_Bride of Abydos_, the _Corsair_, _Lara_, the _Siege of Corinth_,
_Parisina_, and the _Prisoner of Chillon_, all written in the years
1813-1816. These poems at once took the place of Scott's in popular
interest, dazzling a public that had begun to weary of chivalry romances
with pictures of Eastern life, with incidents as exciting as Scott's,
descriptions as highly colored, and a much greater intensity of passion.
So far as they depended for this interest upon the novelty of their
accessories, the effect was a temporary one. Seraglios, divans, bulbuls,
Gulistans, Zuleikas, and other oriental properties deluged English
poetry for a time, and then subsided; even as the tide of moss-troopers,
sorcerers, hermits, and feudal castles had already had its rise and
fall.
But there was a deeper reason for the impression made by Byron's poetry
upon his contemporaries. He laid his finger right on the sore spot in
modern life. He had the disease with which the time was sick, the
world-weariness, the desperation which proceeded from "passion incapable
of being converted into action." We find this tone in much of the
literature which followed the failure of the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic wars. From the irritations of that period, the disappointment
of high hopes for the future of the race, the growing religious
disbelief, and the revolt of democracy and free thought against
conservative reaction, sprang what Southey called the "Satanic school,"
which spoke its loudest word in Byron. Titanic is the better word, for
the rebellion was not against God, but Jupiter; that is, against the
State, Church, and society of Byron's day; against George III., the Tory
cabinet of Lord Castlereagh, the Duke of Wellington, the bench of
bishops, London gossip, the British constitution, and British cant. In
these poems of Byron, and in his dramatic experiments, _Manfred_ and
_Cain_, there is a single figure--the figure of Byron under various
masks--and one pervading mood, a restless and sardonic gloom, a
weariness of life, a love of solitude, and a melancholy exaltation in
the presence of the wilderness and the sea. Byron's hero is always
represented as a man originally noble, whom some great wrong, by others,
or some mysterious crime of his own, has blasted and embittered, and who
carries about the world a seared heart and a somber brow. Harold--who
may stand as a type of all his heroes--has run "through sin's
labyrinth," and feeling the "fullness of satiety," is drawn abroad to
roam, "the wandering exile of his own dark mind." The loss of a
capacity for pure, unjaded emotion is the constant burden of Byron's
lament;
No more, no more, O never more on me
The freshness of the heart shall fall like dew:
and again,
O could I feel as I have felt--or be what I have been,
Or weep as I could once have wept, o'er many a vanished scene;
As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish tho' they be,
So, midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me.
This mood was sincere in Byron; but by cultivating it, and posing too
long in one attitude, he became self-conscious and theatrical, and much
of his serious poetry has a false ring. His example infected the minor
poetry of the time, and it was quite natural that Thackeray--who
represented a generation that had a very different ideal of the
heroic--should be provoked into describing Byron as "a big sulky dandy."
Byron was well fitted by birth and temperament to be the spokesman of
this fierce discontent. He inherited from his mother a haughty and
violent temper, and profligate tendencies from his father. He was
through life a spoiled child, whose main characteristic was willfulness.
He liked to shock people by exaggerating his wickedness, or by
perversely maintaining the wrong side of a dispute. But he had traits of
bravery and generosity. Women loved him, and he made strong friends.
There was a careless charm about him which fascinated natures as unlike
each other as Shelley and Scott. By the death of the fifth Lord Byron
without issue, Byron came into a title and estates at the age of ten.
Though a liberal in politics he had aristocratic feelings, and was vain
of his rank as he was of his beauty. He was educated at Harrow and at
Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was idle and dissipated, but did a
great deal of miscellaneous reading. He took some of his Cambridge
set--Hobhouse, Matthews, and others--to Newstead Abbey, his ancestral
seat, where they filled the ancient cloisters with eccentric orgies.
Byron was strikingly handsome. His face had a spiritual paleness and a
classic regularity, and his dark hair curled closely to his head. A
deformity in one of his feet was a mortification to him, and impaired
his activity in many ways, although he prided himself upon his powers as
a swimmer.
In 1815, when at the height of his literary and social _eclat_ in
London, he married. In February of the following year he was separated
from Lady Byron, and left England forever, pursued by the execrations of
outraged respectability. In this chorus of abuse there was mingled a
share of cant; but Byron got, on the whole, what he deserved. From
Switzerland, where he spent a summer by Lake Leman, with the Shelleys;
from Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, and Rome, scandalous reports of his
intrigues and his wild debaucheries were wafted back to England, and
with these came poem after poem, full of burning genius, pride, scorn,
and anguish, and all hurling defiance at English public opinion. The
third and fourth cantos of _Childe Harold_, 1816-1818, were a great
advance upon the first two, and contain the best of Byron's serious
poetry. He has written his name all over the continent of Europe, and on
a hundred memorable spots has made the scenery his own. On the field of
Waterloo, on "the castled crag of Drachenfels," "by the blue rushing of
the arrowy Rhone," in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs, in the Coliseum at
Rome, and among the "Isles of Greece," the tourist is compelled to see
with Byron's eyes and under the associations of his pilgrimage. In his
later poems, such as _Beppo_, 1818, and _Don Juan_, 1819-1823, he passed
into his second manner, a mocking cynicism gaining ground upon the
somewhat stagey gloom of his early poetry--Mephistophiles gradually
elbowing out Satan. _Don Juan_, though morally the worst, is
intellectually the most vital and representative of Byron's poems. It
takes up into itself most fully the life of the time; exhibits most
thoroughly the characteristic alternations of Byron's moods and the
prodigal resources of wit, passion, and understanding, which--rather
than imagination--were his prominent qualities as a poet. The hero, a
graceless, amorous stripling, goes wandering from Spain to the Greek
islands and Constantinople, thence to St. Petersburg, and finally to
England. Every-where his seductions are successful, and Byron uses him
as a means of exposing the weakness of the human heart and the
rottenness of society in all countries. In 1823, breaking away from his
life of selfish indulgence in Italy, Byron threw himself into the cause
of Grecian liberty, which he had sung so gloriously in the _Isles of
Greece_. He died at Missolonghi, in the following year, of a fever
contracted by exposure and overwork.
Byron was a great poet but not a great literary artist. He wrote
negligently and with the ease of assured strength; his mind gathering
heat as it moved, and pouring itself forth in reckless profusion. His
work is diffuse and imperfect; much of it is melodrama or speech-making,
rather than true poetry. But, on the other hand, much, very much of it
is unexcelled as the direct, strong, sincere utterance of personal
feeling. Such is the quality of his best lyrics, like _When We Two