Donald Grant Mitchell

“ No wonder that a man loving nature and loving solitude, as Wordsworth did love them, should have demurred to the project of railways, and have shuddered—as does Ruskin now—at the whistling of the demon of civilization among those hills. But it has come there, notwithstanding, and come to stay; and from the station beyond Bowness, upon the charmingest bit of Windermere, there lies now only an early morning’s walk to the old home of Wordsworth at Rydal. ”

“ It throve afterward under the coddling of the most literary of the Tory gentlemen in London, and its title has always been associated with the names of John Wilson Croker, of Dr. Southey, and of Mr. Lockhart. It is a journal, too, which has always been tied by golden bonds to the worship of tradition and of vested privilege, and which has always been ready with its petulant, impatient bark of detraction at reform or reformers, or at any books which may have had a scent of Liberalism. Leigh Hunt, of course, came in for periodic scathings—some of them deserved; some not deserved. ”

“ He had not the art—perhaps he would have disdained the art—to touch all these with picturesque color, and to make that page of the world’s history glow and palpitate with life.
Among those great griefs which weighed upon the historian, and to which allusion has been made, I name that one only with which you are perhaps familiar—I mean the sudden death of his son Arthur, a youth of rare accomplishments—counted by many of more brilliant promise than any young Englishman of his time—yet snatched from life, upon a day of summer’s travel, as by a thunderbolt. ”

“ Yet no weak man could have written either one of these almost forgotten poems of Southey; recondite learning makes its pulse felt in them; bright fancies blaze almost blindingly here and there; old myths of Arabia and Welsh fables are galvanized and brought to life, and set off with special knowledge and cumbrous aids of stilted and redundant prosody; but all is utterly remote from human sympathies, and all as cold—however it may attract by its glitter—as the dead hand
“Shrivelled, and dry, and black,” which holds the magic taper in the Dom Daniel cavern of Thalaba. ”

“ Meanwhile, we have a sorry story to tell of Landor’s home belongings. There is a storm brewing in that beautiful villa of Fiesole. Children have been born to the house, and he pets them, fondles them—seems to love them absorbingly. Little notelets which pass when they are away, at Naples, at Rome, are full of pleasantest paternal banter and yearning. But those children have run wild and are as vagrant as the winds. ”

“ Then came the Rhine, with its castles and traditions, glittering afresh in the fresh stories that he wove; and after these his settlement for a while upon the borders of Lake Geneva—where, in some one of these talks of ours we found the studious Gibbon, under his acacia-trees, and where Rousseau left his footprints—never to be effaced—at Clarens and Meillerie. One would suppose that literature could do no more with such outlooks on lake and mountain, as seem to mock at language. ”

“ The father’s first London home was near by Lombard Street, where he managed an African agency under the firm name of Macaulay & Babington; and the baby Macaulay used to be wheeled into an open square near by, for the enjoyment of such winter’s sunshine as fell there at far-away intervals. His boyish memories, however, belonged to a later home at Clapham, then a suburban village. There, was his first schooling, and there he budded out—to the wonderment of all his father’s guests—into young poems and the drollest of precocious talk. ”

“ Again we shall follow traces of a great poet—but never a favorite one—who has left markings of his career, strong and deep; a man who had a Greek’s delight in things of beauty, and a Greek’s subtlety of touch; but one can fancy a faun’s ears showing their tips upon his massive head, and (without fancy) grow conscious of a heathenism clouding his great culture. ”

“ Then came the passages of love—with Mary Chaworth, which was real and vain; with a Milbanke, which was a mockery and ended in worse than mockery; all these experiences whetting the edge of that sword of song with which he carved a road of romance for thousands of after journeymen to travel, through the old Iberian Peninsula, and the vales of Thessaly. Then there was the turning away, in rage, from the shores of England, the episode with the Shelley household on the borders of Lake Leman, with its record of “crag-splitting” storms and sunny siestas ”

“ Redeem, O France, thine ancient fame!
Revenge thy sufferings and thy shame!
Open thine eyes! Too long hast thou been blind!
Take vengeance for thyself and for mankind!” This seems to me only the outcry of a tempestuous British scold; and yet a late eulogist has the effrontery to name it in connection with the great prayerful burst of Milton upon the massacre of the Waldenses:—
“Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold.” No, no; Southey was no Milton—does not reach to the height of an echo of Milton. ”

“ And then came the trumpet blasts of mingled wit, bravado, and tenderness, which broke into those pages, and which made young college men in England or Scotland or America, fling up their hats for Christopher North. Not altogether a safe guide, I think, as a rhetorician; too much bounce in him; too little self-restraint; too much of glitter and iridescence; but, on the other hand—bating some blackguardism—he is brimful of life and heartiness and merriment—lighted up with scholarly hues of color. ”

“ But considered as a poet whose longish work ought to live and charm the coming generations, [162] his reputation certainly does not hold to the old illuminated heights. Poems of half a century ago, which Lalla Rookh easily outshone, have now put the pretty orientalisms into shade. Nor can we understand how so many did, and do, put such twain of verse-makers as Byron and Moore into one leash, as if they were fellows in power. ”

“ Nor is it strange that a world of more reasonable motives should urge this subtle poet—whose head is carried of purpose, and by love, among the clouds—to turn his back on that grimy, matter-of-fact England, and set his face toward those southern regions where Art makes daily food, and where he may trail his robes without the chafings of law or custom. ”

“ Yet I am to speak of a man whose life was full of tumult, and whose work was full of learning and power—sometimes touched with infinite delicacy.
He was born four years after Sydney Smith and Walter Scott—both of whom he survived many years; indeed he lacked only eleven years of completing a century when he died in Florence, where most of his active—or rather inactive—life was passed. I allude to the poet and essayist, Walter Savage Landor. [45] He is not what is called a favorite author; he never was; he never will be. ”

“ Southey is stark unbeliever in the mystic fields where Shelley grazes. Wordsworth is conquered by the Art, but has melancholy doubts of the soul that seems caught and hindered in the meshes of its own craftsmanship. Landor, of a certainty, has detected with his keen insight the high faculties that run rampant under the mazes of the new poet’s language; but Landor, too, is in exile—driven [229] hither and thither by the same lack of steady home affinities which has overset and embroiled the domesticities of the younger poet. ”

“ A score of years at least before ever the chandeliers of her Irish ladyship were lighted in Gore House, Byron [62] had [188] gone sailing away from England under a storm of wrath; and he never came back again. Indeed it is not a little extraordinary that one of the most typical of English poets, should—like Landor, with whom he had many traits in common—have passed so little of his active life on English ground. Like Landor, he loved England most when England was most behind him. Like Landor, he was gifted with such rare powers as belonged to few Englishmen of that generation. ”

“ He has his fleet of yachts and barges upon the lake; he knows every pool where any trout lurk—every height that gives far-off views. He is a pugilist, a swimmer, an oarsman—making the hills echo with his jollity, and dashing off through the springy heather with that slight, seemingly frail De Quincey in his wake—who only reaches to his shoulder, but who is all compact of nerve and muscle. For Greek they are fairly mated, both by love and learning ”

“ Never was a man pelted away from his native shores with more anathemas; never one in whose favor so few appealing voices were heard. It was not so much a memory of his satirical thrusts, as a jealousy begotten by his late extraordinary successes, which had alienated nearly the whole literary fraternity. Only Rogers, Moore, and Scott were among the better known ones who had forgiven his petulant verse, and were openly apologetic and friendly ”

“ Crabb Robinson—who knew all the prominent men of this epoch, and has given us such entertaining chit-chat about them, as we all listen to, and straightway forget. Afterwards we had a look at that strange, intellectual, disorderly creature De Quincey—he living a long while in the Lake Country—and in his more inspired moments seeming to carry us by his swift words, into that mystical region lying beyond the borders of what we know and see. ”

“ These great names and their quarterly organ call up comparison with that other, southern and distinctive Quarterly of Albemarle Street, which was dressed for literary battle by writers like Gifford, Croker, Southey, and Lockhart.
The Prince Regent puts in an appearance in startling waistcoats and finery—vibrating between Windsor and London; so does the bluff Sailor-King William IV. Next, Walter Savage Landor leads the drifting paragraphs of our story—a great, strong man; master of classicism, and master of language; now tender, and now virulent; never quite master of himself. ”

“ The vigorous mind has mountains to climb and valleys to repose in. Is there any sea without its shoal? On that which the poet navigates, he rises intrepidly as the waves riot around him, and sits composedly as they subside.... ”

“ The Childe Harold has been brought to its conclusion long before; its cantos, here and there splendidly ablaze with Nature—its storms, its shadows, its serenities; and the sentiment—now morbid, now jubilant—is always his own, though it beguiles with honeyed sounds, or stabs like a knife.
There have been a multitude of lesser poems, and of dramas which have had their inception [239] and their finish on that wild Continental holiday—beginning on Lac Leman and ending at Pisa and Genoa ”

“ And so, she thinks something more of marriage than as some highly reckoned conventionality—under whose cover bickerings may go on and spend their force, and the decent twin masks be always worn. And in him, we can imagine lingering traces of a love for the feminine features in her—for the grace, the dignity, the sweet face, the modesties—but all closed over and buckled up, and stanched by the everlasting and all encompassing buckram that laces her in, and that has so little of the compensating instinctive softness and yieldingness which might hold him in leash and win him back. ”

“ Coleridge is for awhile a fellow-tenant with him there, then blunders away to Grasmere—to London, to Highgate, and into that over-strained, disorderly life of which we know so much and yet not enough. But Southey does not lack self-possession, or lack poise: he has not indeed so much brain to keep on balance; but he thinks excellently well of his own parts; he is disgusted when people look up to him after his Irish appointment—“as if,” he said, “the author of Joan of Arc, and of Thalaba, were made a great man by scribing for the Chancellor of the Exchequer.” ”

“ And the spirit and dash of those four lines were quickly recognized as marking a new power in Scotch letters; and an echo of them, or of their spirit, in some shape or other, may be found, I think, in all his succeeding poems and in all the tumults and struggles of his life. The elder Scott does not like this philandering with rhyme; it will spoil the law, and a solid profession, he thinks; and true enough it does. ”

“ Naturally enough, our poet is beaming with the success of his satire, which is widely read, and which has made him foes of the first rank; but what cares he for this? He goes down with a [195] company of fellow roisterers, and makes the old walls of Newstead ring with the noisy celebration of his twenty-first birthday; and on the trail of that country revel, and with the sharp, ringing couplets of his “English Bards” crackling on the public ear, he breaks away for his first joyous experience of Continental travel. ”

“ The mourning for him was something extraordinary in its reach, and its sincerity; a remarkable man—whose politics never up-rooted his affections, and whose study of the laws of trade did not spoil his temper, or make him abusive. His example, and his repeated advices, in connection with the early history of the Review, were always against the personalities and ugly satire which were strong features of it in the first years, and which had their source—very largely—in the influences and pertinacity of another member of the Review Syndicate; I mean Henry Brougham. ”

“ Most surely it is wise for a writer to hold attention by what arts he can: failing of this, he fails of the best half of his intent; but if he gains this by simple means, by directness, by limpid language, and no more of it than the thought calls for, and by such rhythmic and beguiling use of it as tempts the reader to follow, he is a safer exemplar than one who by force of genius can accomplish his aims by loose expressions and redundance of words. ”

“ This volume—the fourth in its series of English Lands and Letters—opens upon that always delightful country of hills and waters, which is known as the Lake District of England;—where we found Wordsworth, stalking over the fells—and where we now find the maker of those heavy [vi] poems of Thalaba and Madoc, and of the charming little biography of Nelson. There, too, we find that strange creature, De Quincey, full of a tumult of thoughts and language—out of which comes ever and anon some penetrating utterance, whose barb of words fixes it in the mind, and makes it rankle. ”

“ Indeed, I am half-disposed [164] to repent what may have seemed a too flippant mention of this very graceful poet and essayist. Of a surety, there is an abounding affluence of easy language—gushing and disporting over his pages—which lures one into reading and into dreamy acquiescence; but read as much as we may, and as long as we will, we shall go away from the reading with a certain annoyance that there is so little to keep out of it all—so little that sticks to the ribs and helps. ”

“ Sometimes money comes from the yielding father—sometimes none; he is abstemious; bread and water mostly his diet; his home is without order or thrift or [219] invitingness—the lapses of the hoydenish girl-wife stinging him over and over and through and through.
But Shelley has read Godwin’s Political Justice—one of those many fine schemes for the world’s renovation, by tearing out and burning up most of the old furniture, which make their appearance periodically—and in virtue of his admiration of Godwin, Shelley counts him among the demi-gods of the heaven which he has conjured up. ”

“ Hunt. A greater master would have brought in, maybe, all those natural beauties of the landscape—the woods, the fountains, the clear heaven—but they would all have been toned down to the low, tragic movement, which threatens, and creeps on and on, and which dims even the blue sky with forecast of its controlling gloom. ”