A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century by Henry A. Beers

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A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

by

HENRY A. BEERS

Author of _A Suburban Pastoral_, _The Ways of Yale_, etc.

New York
Henry Holt and Company

1918

ROMANCE

My love dwelt in a Northern land.
A grey tower in a forest green
Was hers, and far on either hand
The long wash of the waves was seen,
And leagues on leagues of yellow sand,
The woven forest boughs between.

And through the silver Northern light
The sunset slowly died away,
And herds of strange deer, lily-white,
Stole forth among the branches grey;
About the coming of the light,
They fled like ghosts before the day.

I know not if the forest green
Still girdles round that castle grey;
I know not if the boughs between
The white deer vanish ere the day;
Above my love the grass is green,
My heart is colder than the clay.

ANDREW LANG.

PREFACE.

The present volume is a sequel to "A History of English Romanticism in
the Eighteenth Century" (New York; Henry Holt & Co., 1899). References
in the footnotes to "Volume I." are to that work. The difficulties of
this second part of my undertaking have been of a kind just opposite to
those of the first. As it concerns my subject, the eighteenth century
was an age of beginnings; and the problem was to discover what latent
romanticism existed in the writings of a period whose spirit, upon the
whole, was distinctly unromantic. But the temper of the nineteenth
century has been, until recent years, prevailingly romantic in the wider
meaning of the word. And as to the more restricted sense in which I have
chosen to employ it, the mediaevalising literature of the nineteenth
century is at least twenty times as great as that of the eighteenth, both
in bulk and in value. Accordingly the problem here is one of selection;
and of selection not from a list of half-forgotten names, like Warton and
Hurd, but from authors whose work is still the daily reading of all
educated readers.

As I had anticipated, objection has been made to the narrowness of my
definition of _romanticism_. But every writer has a right to make his
own definitions; or, at least, to say what his book shall be about. I
have not written a history of the "liberal movement in English
literature"; nor of the "renaissance of wonder"; nor of the "emancipation
of the ego." Why not have called the book, then, "A History of the
Mediaeval Revival in England"? Because I have a clear title to the use
of _romantic_ in one of its commonest acceptations; and, for myself, I
prefer the simple dictionary definition, "pertaining to the style of the
Christian and popular literature of the Middle Ages," to any of those
more pretentious explanations which seek to express the true inwardness
of romantic literature by analysing it into its elements, selecting one
of these elements as essential, and rejecting all the rest as accidental.

M. Brunetiere; for instance, identifies romanticism with lyricism. It is
the "emancipation of the ego." This formula is made to fit Victor Hugo,
and it will fit Byron. But M. Brunetiere would surely not deny that
Walter Scott's work is objective and dramatic quite as often as it is
lyrical. Yet what Englishman will be satisfied with a definition of
_romantic_ which excludes Scott? Indeed, M. Brunetiere himself is
respectful to the traditional meaning of the word. "Numerous
definitions," he says, "have been given of Romanticism, and still others
are continually being offered; and all, or almost all of them, contain a
part of the truth. Mme. de Stael was right when she asserted in her
'Allemagne' that Paganism and Christianity, the North and the South,
antiquity and the Middle Ages, having divided between them the history of
literature, Romanticism in consequence, in contrast to Classicism, was a
combination of chivalry, the Middle Ages, the literatures of the North,
and Christianity. It should be noted, in this connection, that some
thirty years later Heinrich Heine, in the book in which he will rewrite
Mme. de Stael's, will not give such a very different idea of
Romanticism." And if, in an analysis of the romantic movement throughout
Europe, any single element in it can lay claim to the leading place, that
element seems to me to be the return of each country to its national
past; in other words, mediaevalism.

A definition loses its usefulness when it is made to connote too much.
Professor Herford says that the "organising conception" of his "Age of
Wordsworth" is romanticism. But if Cowper and Wordsworth and Shelley are
romantic, then almost all the literature of the years 1798-1830 is
romantic. I prefer to think of Cowper as a naturalist, of Shelley as an
idealist, and of Wordsworth as a transcendental realist, and to reserve
the name romanticist for writers like Scott, Coleridge, and Keats; and I
think the distinction a serviceable one. Again, I have been censured for
omitting Blake from my former volume. The omission was deliberate, not
accidental, and the grounds for it were given in the preface. Blake was
not discovered until rather late in the nineteenth century. He was not a
link in the chain of influence which I was tracing. I am glad to find my
justification in a passage of Mr. Saintsbury's "History of Nineteenth
Century Literature" (p. 13): "Blake exercised on the literary _history_
of his time no influence, and occupied in it no position. . . . The
public had little opportunity of seeing his pictures, and less of reading
his books. . . . He was practically an unread man."

But I hope that this second volume may make more clear the unity of my
design and the limits of my subject. It is scarcely necessary to add
that no absolute estimate is attempted of the writers whose works are
described in this history. They are looked at exclusively from a single
point of view. H. A. B.

APRIL, 1901.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

CHAPTER

I. WALTER SCOTT

II. COLERIDGE, BOWLES, AND THE POPE CONTROVERSY

III. KEATS, LEIGH HUNT, AND THE DANTE REVIVAL

IV. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN GERMANY

V. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN FRANCE

VI. DIFFUSED ROMANTICISM IN THE LITERATURE OF
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

VII. THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

VIII. TENDENCIES AND RESULTS

A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM.

CHAPTER I.

Walter Scott.[1]

It was reserved for Walter Scott, "the Ariosto of the North," "the
historiographer royal of feudalism," to accomplish the task which his
eighteenth-century forerunners had essayed in vain. He possessed the
true enchanter's wand, the historic imagination. With this in his hand,
he raised the dead past to life, made it once more conceivable, made it
even actual. Before Scott no genius of the highest order had lent itself
wholly or mainly to retrospection. He is the middle point and the
culmination of English romanticism. His name is, all in all, the most
important on our list. "Towards him all the lines of the romantic
revival converge." [2] The popular ballad, the Gothic romance, the
Ossianic poetry, the new German literature, the Scandinavian discoveries,
these and other scattered rays of influence reach a focus in Scott. It
is true that his delineation of feudal society is not final. There were
sides of mediaeval life which he did not know, or understand, or
sympathize with, and some of these have been painted in by later artists.
That his pictures have a coloring of modern sentiment is no arraignment
of him but of the _genre_. All romanticists are resurrectionists; their
art is an elaborate make-believe. It is enough for their purpose if the
world which they re-create has the look of reality, the _verisimile_ if
not the _verum_. That Scott's genius was _in extenso_ rather than _in
intenso_, that his work is largely improvisation, that he was not a
miniature, but a distemper painter, splashing large canvasses with a
coarse brush and gaudy pigments, all these are commonplaces of criticism.
Scott's handling was broad, vigorous, easy, careless, healthy, free. He
was never subtle, morbid, or fantastic, and had no niceties or secrets.
He was, as Coleridge said of Schiller, "master, not of the intense drama
of passion, but the diffused drama of history." Therefore, because his
qualities were popular and his appeal was made to the people, the general
reader, he won a hearing for his cause, which Coleridge or Keats or
Tieck, with his closer workmanship, could never have won. He first and
he alone _popularised_ romance. No literature dealing with the feudal
past has ever had the currency and the universal success of Scott's. At
no time has mediaevalism held so large a place in comparison with other
literary interests as during the years of his greatest vogue, say from
1805 to 1830.

The first point to be noticed about Scott is the thoroughness of his
equipment. While never a scholar in the academic sense, he was, along
certain chosen lines, a really learned man. He was thirty-four when he
published "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805), the first of his series
of metrical romances and the first of his poems to gain popular favour.
But for twenty years he had been storing his mind with the history,
legends, and ballad poetry of the Scottish border, and was already a
finished antiquarian. The bent and limitations of his genius were early
determined, and it remained to the end wonderfully constant to its
object. At the age of twelve he had begun a collection of manuscript
ballads. His education in romance dated from the cradle. His lullabies
were Jacobite songs; his grandmother told him tales of moss-troopers, and
his Aunt Janet read him ballads from Ramsay's "Tea-table Miscellany,"
upon which his quick and tenacious memory fastened eagerly. The ballad
of "Hardiknute," in this collection, he knew by heart before he could
read. "It was the first poem I ever learnt--the last I shall ever
forget." Dr. Blacklock introduced the young schoolboy to the poems of
Ossian and of Spenser, and he committed to memory "whole duans of the one
and cantos of the other." "Spenser," he says, "I could have read
forever. Too young to trouble myself about the allegory, I considered
all the knights and ladies and dragons and giants in their outward and
exoteric sense, and God only knows how delighted I was to find myself in
such society." A little later Percy's "Reliques" fell into his hands,
with results that have already been described.[3]

As soon as he got access to the circulating library in Edinburgh, he
began to devour its works of fiction, characteristically rejecting love
stories and domestic tales, but laying hold upon "all that was
adventurous and romantic," and in particular upon "everything which
touched on knight-errantry." For two or three years he used to spend his
holidays with his schoolmate, John Irving, on Arthur's Seat or Salisbury
Crags, where they read together books like "The Castle of Otranto" and
the poems of Spenser and Ariosto; or composed and narrated to each other
"interminable tales of battles and enchantments" and "legends in which
the martial and the miraculous always predominated." The education of
Edward Waverley, as described in the third chapter of Scott's first
novel, was confessedly the novelist's own education. In the "large
Gothic room" which was the library of Waverley Honour, the young
book-worm pored over "old historical chronicles" and the writings of
Pulci, Froissart, Brantome, and De la Noue; and became "well acquainted
with Spenser, Drayton, and other poets who have exercised themselves on
romantic fiction--of all themes the most fascinating to a youthful
imagination."

Yet even thus early, a certain solidity was apparent in Scott's studies.
"To the romances and poetry which I chiefly delighted in," he writes, "I
had always added the study of history, especially as connected with
military events." He interested himself, for example, in the art of
fortification; and when confined to his bed by a childish illness, found
amusement in modelling fortresses and "arranging shells and seeds and
pebbles so as to represent encountering armies. . . . I fought my way
thus through Vertot's 'Knights of Malta'--a book which, as it hovered
between history and romance, was exceedingly dear to me."

Every genius is self-educated, and we find Scott from the first making
instinctive selections and rejections among the various kinds of
knowledge offered him. At school he would learn no Greek, and wrote a
theme in which he maintained, to the wrath of his teacher, that Ariosto
was a better poet than Homer. In later life he declared that he had
forgotten even the letters of the Greek alphabet. Latin would have fared
as badly, had not his interest in Matthew Paris and other monkish
chroniclers "kept up a kind of familiarity with the language even in its
rudest state." "To my Gothic ear, the 'Stabat Mater,' the 'Dies
Irae,'[4] and some of the other hymns of the Catholic Church are more
solemn and affecting than the fine classical poetry of Buchanan." In our
examination of Scott's early translations from the German,[5] it has been
noticed how exclusively he was attracted by the romantic department of
that literature, passing over, for instance, Goethe's maturer work, to
fix upon his juvenile drama "Goetz von Berlichingen." Similarly he
learned Italian just to read in the original the romantic poets Tasso,
Ariosto, Boiardo, and Pulci. When he first went to London in 1799, "his
great anxiety," reports Lockhart, "was to examine the antiquities of the
Tower and Westminster Abbey, and to make some researches among the MSS.
of the British Museum." From Oxford, which he visited in 1803, he
brought away only "a grand but indistinct picture of towers and chapels
and oriels and vaulted halls", having met there a reception which, as he
modestly acknowledges, "was more than such a truant to the classic page
as myself was entitled to expect at the source of classic learning."
Finally, in his last illness, when sent to Rome to recover from the
effects of a paralytic stroke, his ruling passion was strong in death.
He examined with eagerness the remains of the mediaeval city, but
appeared quite indifferent to that older Rome which speaks to the
classical student. It will be remembered that just the contrary of this
was true of Addison, when he was in Italy a century before.[6] Scott was
at no pains to deny or to justify the one-sidedness of his culture. But
when Erskine remonstrated with him for rambling on

"through brake and maze
With harpers rude, of barbarous days,"

and urged him to compose a regular epic on classical lines, he
good-naturedly but resolutely put aside the advice.

"Nay, Erskine, nay--On the wild hill
Let the wild heath-bell[7] flourish still . . . .
Though wild as cloud, as stream, as gale,
Flow forth, flow unrestrained, my tale!" [8]

Scott's letters to Erskine, Ellis, Leyden, Ritson, Miss Seward, and other
literary correspondents are filled with discussions of antiquarian
questions and the results of his favourite reading in old books and
manuscripts. He communicates his conclusions on the subject of "Arthur
and Merlin" or on the authorship of the old metrical romance of "Sir
Tristram." [9] He has been copying manuscripts in the Advocates' Library
at Edinburgh. In 1791 he read papers before the Speculative Society on
"The Origin of the Feudal System," "The Authenticity of Ossian's Poems,"
"The Origin of the Scandinavian Mythology." Lockhart describes two
note-books in Scott's hand-writing, with the date 1792, containing
memoranda of ancient court records about Walter Scott and his wife, Dame
Janet Beaton, the "Ladye" of Branksome in the "Lay"; extracts from
"Guerin de Montglave"; copies of "Vegtam's Kvitha" and the "Death-Song of
Regner Lodbrog," with Gray's English versions; Cnut's verses on passing
Ely Cathedral; the ancient English "Cuckoo Song," and other rubbish of
the kind.[10] When in 1803 he began to contribute articles to the
_Edinburgh Review_, his chosen topics were such as "Amadis of Gaul,"
Ellis' "Specimens of Ancient English Poetry," Godwin's "Chaucer,"
Sibbald's "Chronicle of Scottish Poetry," Evans' "Old Ballads," Todd's
"Spenser," "The Life and Works of Chatterton," Southey's translation of
"The Cid," etc.

Scott's preparation for the work which he had to do was more than
adequate. His reading along chosen lines was probably more extensive and
minute than any man's of his generation. The introductions and notes to
his poems and novels are even overburdened with learning. But this,
though important, was but the lesser part of his advantage. "The
old-maidenly genius of antiquarianism" could produce a Strutt[11] or even
perhaps a Warton; but it needed the touch of the creative imagination to
turn the dead material of knowledge into works of art that have delighted
millions of readers for a hundred years in all civilised lands and
tongues.

The key to Scott's romanticism is his intense local feeling.[12] That
attachment to place which, in most men, is a sort of animal instinct, was
with him a passion. To set the imagination at work some emotional
stimulus is required. The angry pride of Byron, Shelley's revolt against
authority, Keats' almost painfully acute sensitiveness to beauty,
supplied the nervous irritation which was wanting in Scott's slower,
stronger, and heavier temperament. The needed impetus came to him from
his love of country. Byron and Shelley were torn up by the roots and
flung abroad, but Scott had struck his roots deep into native soil. His
absorption in the past and reverence for everything that was old, his
conservative prejudices and aristocratic ambitions, all had their source
in this feeling. Scott's Toryism was of a different spring from
Wordsworth's and Coleridge's. It was not a reaction from disappointed
radicalism; nor was it the result of reasoned conviction. It was inborn
and was nursed into a sentimental Jacobitism by ancestral traditions and
by an early prepossession in favour of the Stuarts--a Scottish
dynasty--reinforced by encounters with men in the Highlands who had been
out in the '45. It did not interfere with a practical loyalty to the
reigning house and with what seems like a somewhat exaggerated deference
to George IV. Personally the most modest of men, he was proud to trace
his descent from "auld Wat of Harden" [13] and to claim kinship with the
bold Buccleuch. He used to make annual pilgrimages to Harden Tower, "the
_incunabula_ of his race"; and "in the earlier part of his life," says
Lockhart, "he had nearly availed himself of his kinsman's permission to
fit up the dilapidated _peel_ for his summer residence."

Byron wrote: "I twine my hope of being remembered in my line with my
land's language." But Scott wished to associate his name with the land
itself. Abbotsford was more to him than Newstead could ever have been to
Byron; although Byron was a peer and inherited his domain, while Scott
was a commoner and created his. Too much has been said in condemnation
of Scott's weakness in this respect; that his highest ambition was to
become a _laird_ and found a family; that he was more gratified when the
King made him a baronet than when the public bought his books, that the
expenses of Abbotsford and the hospitalities which he extended to all
comers wasted his time and finally brought about his bankruptcy. Leslie
Stephen and others have even made merry over Scott's Gothic,[14]
comparing his plaster-of-Paris 'scutcheons and ceilings in imitation of
carved oak with the pinchbeck architecture of Strawberry Hill, and
intimating that the feudalism in his romances was only a shade more
genuine than the feudalism of "The Castle of Otranto." Scott was
imprudent; Abbotsford was his weakness, but it was no ignoble weakness.
If the ideal of the life which he proposed to himself there was scarcely
a heroic one, neither was it vulgar or selfish. The artist or the
philosopher should perhaps be superior to the ambition of owning land and
having "a stake in the country," but the ambition is a very human one and
has its good side. In Scott the desire was more social than personal.
It was not that title and territory were feathers in his cap, but that
they bound him more closely to the dear soil of Scotland and to the
national, historic past.

The only deep passion in Scott's poetry is patriotism, the passion of
place. In his metrical romances the rush of the narrative and the vivid,
picturesque beauty of the descriptions are indeed exciting to the
imagination; but it is only when the chord of national feeling is touched
that the verse grows lyrical, that the heart is reached, and that tears
come into the reader's eyes, as they must have done into the poet's. A
dozen such passages occur at once to the memory; the last stand of the
Scottish nobles around their king at Flodden; the view of
Edinburgh--"mine own romantic town "--from Blackford Hill;

"Fitz-Eustace' heart felt closely pent:
As if to give his rapture vent,
The spur he to his charger lent,
And raised his bridle-hand,
And, making demi-volte in air,
Cried, 'Where's the coward that would not dare
To fight for such a land?'"

and the still more familiar opening of the sixth canto in the
"Lay"--"Breathes there the man," etc.:

"O Caledonia! stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! what mortal hand
Can e'er untie the filial band
That knits me to thy rugged strand?"

In such a mood geography becomes poetry and names are music.[15] Scott
said to Washington Irving that if he did not see the heather at least
once a year, he thought he would die.

Lockhart tells how the sound that he loved best of all sounds was in his
dying ears--the flow of the Tweed over its pebbles.

Significant, therefore, is Scott's treatment of landscape, and the
difference in this regard between himself and his great contemporaries.
His friend, Mr. Morritt of Rokeby, testifies; "He was but half satisfied
with the most beautiful scenery when he could not connect it with some
local legend." Scott had to the full the romantic love of mountain and
lake, yet "to me," he confesses, "the wandering over the field of
Bannockburn was the source of more exquisite pleasure than gazing upon
the celebrated landscape from the battlements of Stirling Castle. I do
not by any means infer that I was dead to the feeling of picturesque
scenery. . . . But show me an old castle or a field of battle and I was
at home at once." And again: "The love of natural beauty, more
especially when combined with ancient ruins or remains of our fathers'
piety[16] or splendour, became with me an insatiable passion." It was
not in this sense that high mountains were a "passion" to Byron, nor yet
to Wordsworth. In a letter to Miss Seward, Scott wrote of popular
poetry: "Much of its peculiar charm is indeed, I believe, to be
attributed solely to its _locality_. . . . In some verses of that
eccentric but admirable poet Coleridge[17] he talks of

"'An old rude tale that suited well
The ruins wild and hoary.'

"I think there are few who have not been in some degree touched with this
local sympathy. Tell a peasant an ordinary tale of robbery and murder,
and perhaps you may fail to interest him; but, to excite his terrors, you
assure him it happened on the very heath he usually crosses, or to a man
whose family he has known, and you rarely meet such a mere image of
humanity as remains entirely unmoved. I suspect it is pretty much the
same with myself."

Scott liked to feel solid ground of history, or at least of legend, under
his feet. He connected his wildest tales, like "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve
of St. John," with definite names and places. This Antaeus of romance
lost strength, as soon as he was lifted above the earth. With Coleridge
it was just the contrary. The moment his moonlit, vapory enchantments
touched ground, the contact "precipitated the whole solution." In 1813
Scott had printed "The Bridal of Triermain" anonymously, with a preface
designed to mislead the public; having contrived, by way of a joke, to
fasten the authorship of the piece upon Erskine. This poem is as pure
fantasy as Tennyson's "Day Dream," and tells the story of a knight who,
in obedience to a vision and the instructions of an ancient sage "sprung
from Druid sires," enters an enchanted castle and frees the Princess
Gyneth, a natural daughter of King Arthur, from the spell that has bound
her for five hundred years. But true to his instinct, the poet lays his
scene not _in vacuo_, but near his own beloved borderland. He found, in
Burns' "Antiquities of Westmoreland and Cumberland" mention of a line of
Rolands de Vaux, lords of Triermain, a fief of the barony of Gilsland;
and this furnished him a name for his hero. He found in Hutchinson's
"Excursion to the Lakes" the description of a cluster of rocks in the
Vale of St. John's, which looked, at a distance, like a Gothic castle,
this supplied him with a hint for the whole adventure. Meanwhile
Coleridge had been living in the Lake Country. The wheels of his
"Christabel" had got hopelessly mired, and he now borrowed a horse from
Sir Walter and hitched it to his own wagon. He took over Sir Roland de
Vaux of Triermain and made him the putative father of his mysterious
Geraldine, although, in compliance with Scott's romance, the embassy that
goes over the mountains to Sir Roland's castle can find no trace of it.
In Part I. Sir Leoline's own castle stood nowhere in particular. In Part
II. it is transferred to Cumberland, a mistake in art almost as grave as
if the Ancient Mariner had brought his ship to port at Liverpool.

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