Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/535

ENGLAND remember, first, that his brilliant, undisciplined, passionate work, though it never reached the height of the noblest art, yet taught a lesson of force, vitality, and sincerity to an age which, in spite of its good, was marked by much artificiality, callousness, and insincerity in both life and literature. He did this in a rude and melodramatic way, but he did it. And secondly, let those who judge Byron's wild private career not forget to read the last poem that he wrote, and realize that a change of temper, aspiration towards nobler things, was awakening in him before he died.

Keats and Shelley invite comparison; their difference and their likeness are equally striking. They lived the same length of time, did all their work before thirty, dying young and with tragedy. They left behind them poetry of the highest order—their lyrics are masterpieces—containing the promise of still finer work. They were the devoted lovers of beauty. believing in it as the supreme reality, and were in earnest over their art, both of them leaving behind grave poems expressing their unfinished, and therefore often unsatisfactory and misleading, philosophy of life. Each poet also has written remarkable prose. It is a great mistake to consider Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) as the "ineffectual angel" sketched by Matthew Arnold. He was quite half human, and not at all ineffectual. His most ethereal lyrics will be found to possess a basis of logical thought, while his prose writings show him as a thinker quite capable of keeping the imagination in her place. There are signs, too, in the development of his work that he was growing more and more capable of preserving the balance of the intellect and the imagination. The work that he accomplished in his short life is much and varied. Putting aside his early poems, there is the almost perfect "Adonais", the grave and beautiful lyrical drama of "Prometheus Unbound", in which he states his hopes (not always well grounded and apparently anti-Christian, though he reverenced certain elements in Christianity) for the future of the world; there is a crowd of short and exquisite lyrics—the highest watermark of English poetry of this kind—as well as the fateful and mystic "Triumph of Life", to say nothing of many others, and amongst them some fine dramatic work in blank verse. And he was only twenty-eight when he was drowned. Upon his errors of thought and of conduct we need not dwell. They are plain before us in his life. Outside his literary work, and, now and then intruding into it, a certain crudity of youth appears. But all he does and says is in good faith, and for his errors he suffered bitterly during his short life. One of the noblest and most discerning of tributes ever paid to his genius has been lately published from the pen of the now well-known Catholic poet, Francis Thompson. John Keats (1795-1821) accomplished less actual work, but had in him, it is generally allowed, greater potentiality of genius. He started life handicapped in circumstance and physical health, while he had no influence or following in his own short lifetime, and "it is the copious perfection of work accomplished so early and under so many disadvantages which is the wonder of biographers". His odes on "The Nightingale", "A Grecian Urn", and "Autumn" are supreme art. Some of his narrative poems are among the best of their kind and his fragment of "Hyperion" shows what he might have accomplished had he lived to practice this graver type of poetry. His fame, however, is now established, and his poetic influence has been one of the strongest in the nineteenth century.

After the death of Keats poetry seems for a time to have exhausted itself. There is little to chronicle except the chirpings of small poets until the great age of Victorian poetry opens with Tennyson and Browning. But, to fill up the early years of the century, there is fine work in prose. The great series of Sir Walter Scott's novels extend from 1814 to 1831, and many smaller efficient writers are ranged round this central figure. The wild enthusiasm with which the Waverley novels were received can perhaps never be renewed. A multitude of causes have tended to divert and disturb the public taste for these great books, and it now fluctuates sometimes farther from, sometimes nearer to, them. But such work as his is immortal, and regardless of human fluctuations, it will, and does, appeal always to a multitude of readers—learned or unlearned—whose mind and imagination are open to receive the gifts of genius apart from the trend of fashion. Scott's novels are full of kindly humanity, of close and accurate drawing of many types of character, only to be equalled by Shakespeare or Chaucer, of wide and detailed historical knowledge, though, to Catholic regret, he never understood or adequately represented the Church, handled magnificently with equal imagination and sanity, so that age after age lives again, not only as the dry facts of history which have been brought laboriously together "bone to his bone", but as a living human world whose dwellers have been raised out of silence to their feet by the creative voice—"an exceeding great army". Of Scott's work even more than of Chaucer's, we may say, with Dryden, "Here is God's plenty".

Scott died in 1832, and the Victorian age opened in literary faintness. Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning were on the verge of the horizon, but it was not until 1840 or so that there came that dazzling revival of literature such as had not been seen since the Elizabethan age, and which in extent and swiftness of production eclipsed that age. Into the causes of this it is impossible here to enter. Tennyson and Browning are leaders among the poets far into the century, while Elizabeth Barrett Browning makes a distant third. Tennyson and Browning are representative of the most important phases of the Victorian age, universally acknowledged, though general opinion is still divided as to their relative merits. Both are artists of a high order, but Tennyson is the greater and more consistent. Both feel the importance, gravity, and interest of life. Both take a religious view of life and have that spirit of reverence which is lacking in many of their followers. Both believe in their mission to call men to forsake materialism, and each, in his own particular way, is a lover of natural beauty. Browning's sympathies are, in a sense, wider than Tennyson's, but Tennyson's feeling goes deeper, perhaps, on the great religious and moral questions than Browning's.

If we are still too near Tennyson and Browning to be able to form a true estimate of them, we are even less able to judge the writers of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The numerous streams of literature become bewildering to follow. We distinguish before the end of the career of the two greatest poets the fine. but smaller figures of Rossetti, William Morris, Matthew Arnold, and others, doing work of true genius though not all of equal power. None of them, however, have the vivid inspirations of great, impelling, impersonal ideas such as filled Wordsworth and Shelley. The note of melancholy and uncertainty concerning life and its meaning and the future beyond this life, is always more or less there in undertone. The optimism of Browning and the faith of Tennyson are not to be found, but their love of beauty is fervent and stimulating.

In the last quarter of the century poetry has taken on many strange and sometimes beautiful forms. A high level of excellence has prevailed on the whole. Poets of remarkable promise and achievement have appeared. Amongst these, Francis Thompson (1859-1907), in the opinion of most, takes the commanding place. The appreciation of him by well-known and most able critics has been extraordinarily unanimous and unstinted. He seems "to have reached the peaks of Parnassus at a bound". He has been compared