But then neither is Milton a match for Keats in work like this: Throughout all the isle There was no covert, no retired cave Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves, Yet here in this book we are not concerned with what might have been. Hyperion fails to hold us, even while we admire: one feels vaguely that the subject is not wholly in the artist's grip. What of Keats must be held indispensable to any right knowledge of English literature is comprised in the Eve of St. Agnes and Isabella; the sonnet on Chapman's Homer, and two others, both autobiographic (the first expressing his youthful scorn of a great yet undefined task weighing on him, "When I have fears lest I should cease to be"; the second, that exquisite last verse of love, written on his way to Italy where he died, "Bright star would I were steadfast as thou art"); the ballad, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, with one or two lesser lyrics; and above and before all the three odes, To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn, and To Autumn. Among these odes criticism can hardly choose; in each of them the whole magic of poetry seems to be contained. The singer is bold in his touch upon words; he disdains none. Autumn conspires with sunshine To set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells. We recognise at once the boldness and the perfect felicity. But his power of evocation is not only to the sense. He seizes upon the imagination with its store of history, and in the simplest and barest phrase presents a whole way of living, as in the Ode on a Grecian Urn, when he questions: Who are these coming to the sacrifice? What little town by river or sea-shore, Is emptied of its folk this pious morn? Or again, as he "listens darkling" to the nightingale, he takes our mind ranging out of the woodland peace into dim and mysterious distances of tumult or of solitude-either of them rising before us at an enchanted phrase: Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam Thought melts into thought, image into image, with a connection that is of music rather than of logic the sense is plain, and yet he speaks in a mystery, as is the manner only of the greatest poets. CHAPTER XX. VICTORIAN LITERATURE. IT is not unreasonable to date a new literary epoch from the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign. Keats, Shelley, and Byron had died in the three years ending in 1824. In 1830 Scott had followed; in 1834 Coleridge and Lamb. Of that mighty generation, Wordsworth alone lived on, and death did not overtake him till 1850. By that date the next rank had arisen, and some were already famous. But chronology is misleading; we have here to do with a question of affinities and kindred influences. Keats and Carlyle were born in 1795, yet Keats is of Wordsworth's period, Carlyle of Tennyson's. And the writers of that generation, of which Carlyle and Tennyson are perhaps the most conspicious figures, stand notably nearer us than those of Wordsworth's group. We cannot judge them with the same detachment, and they call for a somewhat different method of discussion. Those among them, however, who appear most distinct and apart from ourselves are the great novelists; for the novel, relying as it does mainly on the charm of narrative and an artistic presentment of character, relies also upon its interest as a social commentary. It is occupied, that is, with things of permanent interest; it is also occupied with transient fashions. And since small concrete differences of this sort strike the mind strongly, we are conscious of a distance of time between ourselves and the personages of Pickwick, Vanity Fair, or Middlemarch; whereas the early poems of Tennyson or Browning have almost a contemporary appeal. We shall begin, therefore, with the novelists. Charles Dickens, born in 1812, was the son of a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, and his early recollections connected themselves with the surroundings of Chatham and Rochester, where also he settled in the days of his later life, and where he died. The whole tideway of the Thames plays a great part in his fictions. Before the boy was ten his family had moved to London, and misfortune began to draw in on them, soon driving the elder Dickens to take up his abode in the Marshalsea or debtor's prison, which the son has made immortal in David Copperfield. And the wretched history of David's experiences as a small boy sent out to earn his bread in London, living alone in lodgings, is simply a piece of autobiography. Times mended; the family emerged from their retreat, and Dickens was sent to school for a couple of years, but by the age of seventeen was set to work again, on the business to which his father had taken that of shorthand reporting. His first original contribution to literature was a comic sketch printed in the Monthly Magazine, quickly followed by others, which soon began to be signed Boz. In 1836, when the author was only twentyfour, there appeared in two volumes, with drawings by Cruikshank, the Sketches by Boz, and Dickens was fairly launched. The publishers, Chapman & Hall, suggested that he should write a text to accompany illustrations by the comic artist R. Seymour, and the notion of a "Nimrod Club" of ineffectual sportsmen was suggested. Dickens accepted but modified the proposal; and thus also in 1836, began the publication in monthly parts of the Pickwick Papers. Long before it was completed Charles Dickens was a household word. The early sketches had shown a genius for comic situation, and above all, for highly charged and minutely detailed description. Pickwick had revealed a master in the fantastic delineation of character; and before Pickwick was closed Dickens had turned to the proper vehicle for his talents, the novel, in which all these faculties could be made to subserve the unfolding of a story. Oliver Twist, the first of the novels proper, showed the whole man. Here, for the first time, we come on the portrayal of those "dregs of life," the folk outside the pale, who lie in the gutters of every great town; here also is Dickens's characteristic onslaught upon officialdom, as exemplified by Mr. Bumble and all his works; and here especially is the forced, melodramatic, but always moving pathos in his presentment of the weak and appealing figures-Oliver himself and poor Nancy. The phrase "melodramatic" must always be applied to Dickens, but it may lose in time much of its power to depreciate. An over-indulgence in violent contrasts of good and evil, tenderness and cruelty, was characteristic of the early Victorian period, and it reached its climax of unreality on the stage. And Dickens, who was fully in and of his time, had the passion and the gift for the stage and, above all, for the melodramatic stage. Later in life, when he took to giving readings, he made of his books a kind of theatrical entertainment, |