The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch 60 Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eve-drops fall 70 Or if the secret ministry of frost CHAPTER XI THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT THE title of the Romantic movement has been so widely and so loosely applied that we may well despair of bringing it under any precise definition. Goethe and Jean Paul, Hugo and Gautier, Berlioz and Schumann have all been called Romantics, and in each pair the points of contrast are as significant as the points of resemblance. But, roughly speaking, we may say that there are two qualities which the movement generally displays-the sense of revolt and the sense of adventure. Suivons les règles' is a maxim which at once rouses the Romantics into opposition. The laws may be political, or literary, or musical; the fact that they claim authority is a reason for challenging them. The bark sets out upon an unknown sea, with youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm: it will steer its own course; it will defy storm and whirlwind; it is confident that a craft so gallantly manned and equipped can never come to shipwreck. Veterans who call advice from the shore are timorous pedants who have never ventured beyond the harbour; their methods are outworn, their charts are obsolete; the illimitable sea is calling, and beyond the horizon lie the happy isles 1. And with this sense of adventure comes the sense of the remote or the exotic. Scott, his imagination full of border ballads, writes about moss-troopers and knights and castles in lonely islands; Byron, aflame with the spirit of Greek independence, writes 1 It may be worth recalling the fact that Byron died at thirtysix, Shelley at thirty, and Keats at twenty-six. 2 The Giaour and The Corsair and The Siege of Corinth; Shelley defies orthodoxy in The Revolt of Islam, and paints a distant ideal in Epipsichidion; Keats finds his favourite topics in Hyperion and Endymion and the Ode to a Grecian Urn. The restrictions of everyday life are too narrow, the emotions of common folk are too trivial; poetry demands a more emphatic event and an atmosphere more highly charged. Of our three greatest Romantic poets Byron has throughout Europe the widest reputation. For this three reasons may be given. First, that he is the / direct antagonist of that Pharisaic narrowness with which we are accredited by our continental neighbours. The persecution from which he suffered accentuated his feeling of revolt, and he stands, in the eyes of France and Germany, for the liberator who helped to free England from Puritan trammels. Second, that of all English poets he loses the least by translation. He had little feeling for the mot juste, he had little ear for niceties of rhythm, he wrote, as he thought, at the white-heat of improvisation, and, like a better man than he, seldom blotted a line. Third, and most important, there is in his imagination a certain lavish virility which pours forth the emotions of the moment without ever counting the cost. He is absolutely fearless, he says whatever is in his mind, he gives us, in the slang phrase, a human document' which no scholiast has ever revised. And the same is true of his verse. It is often imperfect, it is often slipshod, but it is full of a reckless and spendthrift ease which we cannot help admiring. A stanza in Don Juan begins : Having wound up with this sublime comparison, Methinks we may proceed upon our narrative, and never doubts that the rhymes will come. No doubt he was a poseur. To be so was in his temperament, it was encouraged by every circumstance in his career; and to this we may attribute the fact that his lyrics are always the weakest of his work. But he had satire and humour and a vivid sense of the picturesque; he could tell a story from the outside, and fill its characters to the measure of his own personality. In all his writing there is not one line which touches the Infinite; there are a thousand which reveal the autobiography of one who, with all his affectations, pourtant était un homme.' The central idea of Shelley's poetry is that love is the only thing in the world which is of serious account, and that love is immortal. He has an intense belief in human goodness, and an equally intense desire to emancipate it from all the laws and conventions which seem to hamper its freedom. Arnold has called him 'ineffectual', but the word is unduly harsh; it ignores the vitalizing and stimulating power which he wields by very force of earnestness. He is unpractical, he is visionary; the world which he depicts is of the substance of the rainbow; yet if he more often inspires than convinces we may remember that the function of poetry is less to convince than to inspire. As an artist he is the complement and antithesis of Byron: he has less humour, he has less virility; but his passion is far deeper and more genuine, his imagination far richer and more creative. And the whole is clothed with an exquisite melody of verse which, if a little too iridescent in colour, yet fills the ear with loveliness of tone and cadence. In Prometheus, in Alastor, in Epipsichidion, in Adonais we seem to have passed the frontier which separates poetry from music; the lines sing like a tune, the epithets glow like a chromatic harmony: The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night Yet the greatest melody is not that which flashes with separate points of colour, but that which shines in a continuous radiance; which is saturated with its emotion, which holds its diversities of hue in such perfect organic unity that they seem not like details of an artistic composition, but like features of a living form1. And such melody is that of Keats. His verse is perhaps the most flexible in English literature: so flexible that the reviewers picked out its most admirable lines and scornfully inquired how they were intended to scan; yet, like the music of Schubert, it gives us the impression of absolute spontaneity. There are few devices, few 'colour words', and those always set at a point of emotional intensity: now and then he dwells upon a phrase with evident delight in its beauty, but we feel that the delight follows the choice, and does not determine it. On one side he is the most sensuous of our great poets; on the other side he can express his artistic creed with perfect sincerity in the words :· Beauty is truth, truth beauty: that is all Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know. Nor is this apparent contradiction hard to reconcile. Keats had the temperament of the new Romance, but he had the spirit of the Greek. His sonnet on Chapman's Homer unlocks his heart. Nothing could be less like his verse than the great solid rough-hewn periods of the Elizabethan translator but through these he penetrated into that world of heroic beauty where Homer sits enthroned with Sophocles at his feet. We are too apt to think of Greek poetry as cold, sculpturesque, unemotional: it was none of these. Greek poetry is pulsing with life and passion, it is exquisitely sensitive to human pleasure and human pain; yet it controls these with 1 See for example the opening stanza of The Eve of St. Agnes. |