The Mentor: Famous English Poets, Vol. 1, Num. 44, Serial No. 44

What ground was there for an estimate which gave Byron a place by himself among English poets? “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” was a telling satire written by a confident boy of genius, effective in “hits” which the time understood, but defective in critical insight; “Childe Harold,” the early stanzas of which appeared after travel had inspired him, was a splendid piece of rhetoric which often attains a very noble eloquence. “The Giaour” (jow´-er), “Manfred,” the “Corsair,” “Lara” (lah´-rah), stirred an age which was in revolt against rigid and often artificial conventions. “Don Juan” (hoo-ahn´), like “Childe Harold,” is a poetic journal which lacks dramatic unity, but contains descriptions of compelling beauty. Some of the shorter pieces, like the “Prisoner of Chillon,” “When We Two Parted,” “She Walks in Beauty,” have the power of deep feeling when it becomes eloquent; while such stanzas as “The Isles of Greece,” scattered through “Childe Harold,” make history as moving as poetry.

The wife of the poet.]

From the engraving by Lupton after the painting by Thomas Phillips.]

Byron had richness of imagination rather than wealth of thought; he had a full-throated, operatic voice rather than purity of tone; he had splendor rather than clarity of mind; he had great natural force of genius rather than command of the resources of art. He was generous in impulse, enthusiastic in temper, and he loved liberty. It was the presence of these qualities in his nature, and his spirit of revolt, that led Mazzini (maght-see´-nee), to predict, “The day will come when Democracy will remember all that it owes to Byron.”

Shelley, too, was a lover of freedom; but of a freedom that was the breath of the soul rather than social or political liberty. He lacked humor, he bore no yoke in his youth, his father was a matter-of-fact and eccentric tyrant, and the boy of genius lost his way in a world which nobody helped him to understand. When one reads the story of his brief and confused career, of the shabby and immoral things he did, it must be remembered that he discovered how to fly, but nobody taught him how to walk. He was always a splendid, wayward child, to whom visions were more real than facts. He died at thirty, and his life was only beginning.

But what a splendid prelude it was! “Alastor,” the “Stanzas Written in Dejection,” the “Ode to the West Wind,” “The Cloud,” the immortal lines “To a Skylark,” are flights of poetry which reflect the splendor of the sky under which they seem to move as if impelled by wings. “Prometheus Unbound,” “The Revolt of Islam,” and other long poems show his hatred of tyranny, whether human or divine, his ardent passion for humanity. He was only at times a great artist: his verse often lacks substance and reality, and has the beauty and remoteness of cloud pictures. His critical faculty was obscured by the spontaneity and facility of his creative moods; but he had the power of growth. His best work was at the end of his career, and he died at the moment the signs of maturity were showing themselves. He had no creed save that of resistance to tyranny, and he defined nothing; but he had noble visions, a beautiful voice, a splendid faith. With all the faults of his youth, and they were of tragic seriousness, there was something angelic about him, and he made life richer and more splendid.

Designed by E. Onslow Ford.]

The poets of the first quarter of the last century died young: Byron at thirty-six, Shelley at thirty, Keats at twenty-six. What Byron’s future would have been no one will venture to predict; but Shelley and Keats were rapidly gaining in power when the end came. The first was the fiery leader of revolt, the second was the idealist, concerned, not with present oppressive traditions, but with untrammeled freedom of thought and of life.

Keats cared for none of these things: he was in love with beauty. One must go back to Spenser to find an Englishman of his sensitiveness to beauty, and he was much simpler than Spenser, whose moral idealism expressed itself in a refined symbolism. Keats was the son of a stable keeper, went to school for a few years, and was conspicuous chiefly for his pugnacious disposition. The impression that he was a weak, sentimental boy and man is without foundation. He became the victim of a heart-breaking disease; but his was essentially a brave and manly nature.

Attributed to Haydon by the artist Joseph Severn. From a cast made in New York, presumably from a cast of the original. An electrotype of the mask is in the National Portrait Gallery, London.]

His later work is notable not only for its beauty, but for its solidity of texture. He became an apprentice to a surgeon. Through his acquaintance with a family of cultivated people he became a reader of good books, and discovered his vocation when he opened the “Faerie Queene.” That poem did not make him a poet: it opened his eyes to the fact that he was a poet. “Endymion,” published when he was twenty-three years old, was immature in construction and diction; but it was the first bloom of a beautiful genius. “Hyperion,” which came near the end, is a fragment, for he was still very young in knowledge of life and the practice of art; but it has nobility and a certain largeness of handling that predict strength as well as art. The first line of “Endymion” showed where he stood as a poet, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” and on his deathbed he said, “I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.” He not only loved it, but gave it illustration in short poems of unsurpassed perfection. “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the “Ode to a Nightingale,” the “Ode to Autumn,” the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” have a deathless loveliness and are stamped by that finality of shape which marks the best pieces of Greek sculpture. Matthew Arnold said of these shorter poems that they had “that rounded perfection and felicity of loveliness of which Shakespeare is the great master.”

While these poets died before maturity, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning had ample time in which to harvest all the fruits of their genius. Wordsworth’s life was in striking contrast to the lives of his brilliant contemporaries. Born before them, he lived twenty-seven years after the oldest of them died. Byron was an extensive traveler, Shelley lived five years in Italy, and Keats’ last months were spent in the same country. Byron died in Greece, Shelley was drowned in the Gulf of Spezia (spet´-see-eh), and Keats came to the end of his sufferings in the little room that looks out on the Spanish steps which are gay with flowers in the Roman spring.

At Town End, Grasmere.]

With the exception of a brief residence in France and Germany, Wordsworth spent eighty years on English soil, and mainly in the Lake Country. He was born in the North, went to school in a little village near Lake Windermere, and spent his life at Grasmere and at Rydal Mount only three or four miles distant. His life was free from struggles, either mental or material, and was one of meditation and quiet growth. In contrast with Byron, he was a poet of reflection; unlike Shelley, he saw Nature as the intimate companion of the spirit; and he sought beauty in the simplicity of obscure lives and daily experience rather than in the richness of imagination or in that fairy land of mythology which laid its spell on Keats. He was deeply religious, and saw Nature as a revelation of the divine mind; a visible and material creation, penetrated and filled by the divine spirit. His years of inspiration were few; but his conscientious industry was untiring. In his creative moods he wrote some of the noblest and most perfect poetry in English; in his moods of faithful industry he wrote much thoughtful but unpoetic verse. In the latter class fall his long poems; in the former class fall many of his shorter pieces, in which lofty thought and deep feeling are fused in an art of exquisite simplicity and purity. “The Prelude” and “The Excursion” contain passages of great beauty; but they are valuable chiefly to students. In the ten years which followed the publication of the “Lyrical Ballads” in 1798 he wrote many poems which are for all people and for all time. Such poetry as “Lucy,” “To a Highland Girl,” “The Solitary Reaper,” “To a Cuckoo,” “I Wandered Lonely,” “She Was a Phantom of Delight,” “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shade,” ought to be planted in the minds of children as refuges from the commonplace, and as a protection from all that is cheap and inferior in life and art. In the “Ode to Duty,” that on “Intimations of Immortality,” in many stanzas from the long poems, and in a group of sonnets, Nature and Life are interpreted in an art which is both commanding and beautiful. At his best, in depth of thought, loyalty to truth, spiritual insight, purity of feeling, and that simplicity which is the last achievement of art, Wordsworth belongs among the half-dozen great poets of England.