As a poet Milton wrote not by impulse but like a man of letters with the assistance of books, seeing objects as much through previous writings as in themselves, adding to his images the images of others, borrowing and recasting their inventions. He made thus for himself a composite and brilliant style, less natural than that of his precursors, less fit for effusions, less akin to the lively first glow of sensation, but more solid, more regular, more capable of concentrating in one large patch of light all their sparklings and splendours. He compacted and ennobled the poets' domain.
When, however, after seventeen years of fighting and misfortune had steeped his soul in religious ideas, mythology yielded to theology, the habit of discussion subdued the lyric light. The poet no longer sings sublime verse, he harangues in grave verse, he gives us correct solemn discourses. Adam and Eve the first pair! I listen and hear two reasoners of the period—Colonel Hutchinson and his wife. Heavens! dress them at once. Folks so cultivated should have invented before all a pair of trousers and modesty. This Adam enters Paradise via England. There he learnt respectability and moral speechifying. Adam was your true pater familias with a vote, an old Oxford man, consulted at need by his wife, and dealing out to her with prudent measure the scientific explanations which she requires. The flow of dissertations never pauses. From Paradise it gets into Heaven. Milton's Jehovah is a grave king who maintains a suitable state something like Charles I. The finest thing in connection with Paradise is Hell; and in this history of God, the chief part is taken by the devil. No poetic creation equals in horror and grandeur the spectacle that greeted Satan on leaving his dungeon.
But what a heaven! One would rather enter Charles I's troops of lackeys, or Cromwell's Ironsides. What a gap between this monarchical frippery and the visions of Dante! To the poet of the Apocalypse the voice of the deity was "as the sound of many waters; and he had in his right hand seven stars; and his countenance was as the sun shining in his strength; and when I saw him I fell at his feet as dead." When Milton arranged his celestial show, he did not fall at his feet as dead.
When we take in, in one view, the vast literary region of England, extending from the restoration of the Stuarts to the French Revolution, we perceive that all the productions bear a classical impress, such as is met with neither in the preceding nor in the succeeding time. This classical art finds its centre in the labours of Pope, and above all in Pope, whose favourite author is Dryden, of all English poets the least inspired and the most classical. Pope gave himself up to versification. He did not write because he thought, but he thought in order to write. I wish I could admire his works of imagination, but I cannot. I know the machinery. There is, however, a poet in Pope, and to discover him we have only to read him in fragments. Each verse in Pope is a masterpiece if taken alone. There is a classical architecture of ideas, and of all the masters who have practised it in England Pope is the most skilled.
The Modern Spirit
The spirit of the modern revolution broke out first in a Scotch peasant, Robert Burns. Scarcely ever was seen together more of misery and talent. Burns cries out in favour of instinct and joy. Love was his main business. In him for the first time a poet spoke as men speak, or, rather, as they think, without premeditation, with a mixture of all styles. Burns was much in advance of his age, and the life of men in advance of their age is not wholesome. He died worn out at 37. In him old narrow moralities give place to the wide sympathy of the modern man.
Now appeared the English romantic school. Among the multitude of its writers we may distinguish Southey, a clever man, a producer of decorative poems to suit the fashion; Coleridge, a poor fellow who had steeped himself in mystical theories; Thomas More, a witty railer; and Walter Scott, the favourite of his age, who was read over the whole of Europe, was almost equal to Shakespeare, had more popularity than Voltaire, earned about £200,000, and taught us all history. Scott gave to Scotland a citizenship of literature. Scott loves men from the bottom of his heart. By his fundamental honesty and wide humanity he was the Homer of modern life.
When the philosophical spirit passed from Germany to England, transformed itself and became Anglican, deformed itself and became revolutionary, it produced a Wordsworth, a Byron, a Shelley. Wordsworth, a new Cowper, with less talent and more ideas, was essentially an interior man, engrossed by the concerns of the soul. To such men life becomes a grave business on which we must incessantly and scrupulously reflect. Wordsworth was a wise and happy man, a thinker and dreamer, who read and walked and listened in deep calm to his own thoughts. The peace was so great within him and around him that he could perceive the imperceptible. He saw grandeur and beauty in the trivial events which weave the woof of our most commonplace days. His "Excursion" is like a Protestant temple—august though bare and monstrous.
Shelley, one of the greatest poets of the age, beautiful as an angel, of extraordinary precocity, sweet, generous, tender, overflowing with gifts of heart, mind, birth, and fortune, marred his life by introducing into his conduct the enthusiastic imagination he should have kept for his verse. His world is beyond our own. We move in it between heaven and earth, in abstraction, dreamland, symbolism. Shelley loved desert and solitary places, where man enjoys the pleasure of believing infinite what he sees—infinite as his soul. Verily there is a soul in everything; in the universe is a soul; even beyond the sensible form shines a secret essence and something divine which we catch sight of by sublime illuminations, never reaching or penetrating it. The poets hear the great heart of nature beat; they would reach it. One alone, Byron, succeeds.
I have reserved for the last the greatest and most English artist, from whom we may learn more truths of his country and of his age than from all the rest. All styles appear dull, and all souls sluggish by the side of Byron's. No such great poet has had so narrow an imagination. They are his own sorrows, his own revolts, his own travels, which, hardly transformed and modified, he introduces into his verses. He never could make a poem save of his own heart. If Goethe was the poet of the universe, Byron was the poet of the individual; and if the German genius found its interpretation in the one, the English genius found its interpretation in the other.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
"Walden"
Henry David Thoreau, America's poet-naturalist, as he might be called, was born at Concord, Mass., on July 12, 1817. His great-grandparents were natives of the Channel Islands, whence his grandfather emigrated. Thoreau was educated at Hartford, and began work as a teacher, but under the influence of Emerson, in whose house he lived at intervals, made writing his hobby and a study of the outdoor world his occupation. In 1845, as related in "Walden," he built himself a shanty near Walden Pond, on land belonging to Emerson. There he busied himself with writing his "Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers," and in recording his observations in the woods. After the Walden experiment he mingled the pursuit of literature and the doing of odd jobs for a living. His books, "The Maine Woods," "A Yankee in Canada," "Excursions in Field and Wood," were mostly published after his death. He died on May 6, 1862, from consumption. Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott were his warm friends in life, and helped the world to appreciate his genius. A poet in heart, Thoreau was only successful in giving his poetry a prose setting, but that setting is harmonised with the utmost delicacy. No one has produced more beautiful effects in English prose with simpler words.