The Surprise of the Castle.

There is a letter extant from the Dorsetshire Committee of Sequestrators, signed by Ri. Broderipp' and 'Jno°. Whitway,' to their superiors in London, requesting their Lordships' advice as to the prosecution of the sequestration, and the case of difficulty arising concerning the Lady Bankes. But, as Mr. Bankes observes, their Lordships in London were at that time too much occupied in the division of the spoil to find time for an answer to inquiries which related only to the maintenance of those who had been plundered.

THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON.

THE poets, who forty years ago proclaimed their intention of working

a

purpose, recommended especially a more simple and truthful view of nature. The established canons of poetry were to be discarded as artificial; as to matter, the poet was to represent mere nature as he saw her; as to form, he was to be his own law. Freedom and nature were to be his watchwords.

No theory could be more in harmony with the spirit of the age, and the impulse which had been given to it by the burning words of Jean Jacques Rousseau. The school which arose expressed fairly the unrest and unruliness of the time, its weariness of artificial restraint and unmeaning laws, its craving after a nobler and a more earnest life, its sense of a glory and mystery in the physical universe, hidden from the poets of the two preceding centuries, and now revealed by science. So far all was hopeful. But it soon became apparent, that each poet's practical success in carrying out the theory was, paradoxically enough, in inverse proportion to his belief in it; that those who like Wordsworth, Southey, and Keats, talked most about naturalness and freedom, and most openly reprobated the school of Pope, were, after all, least natural and least free; that the balance of those excellencies inclined much more to those who like Campbell, Rogers, Crabbe, and Moore, troubled their heads with no theories, but followed the best old models which they knew; and that the rightful sovereign of the new Parnassus, Lord Byron, protested against the new movement, while he followed it; upheld to the last the models which it was the fashion to decry, and kept crying to the last, in poetry as in morals, Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor,' and uttering prophecies of the downfal of English poetry and English taste, which seem to be on the eve of realization.

Now no one will, we presume, be silly enough to say that humanity has gained nothing by all the very beautiful poetry which has been poured out on it during the last thirty years in England. Nevertheless, when we see poetry dying down among us year by year, although the age is becoming year by year more marvellous and inspiring, we have a right to look for some false principle in a school which has had so little enduring vitality, which seems now to be able to perpetuate nothing of itself but its vices. The answer so easy twenty years ago, that the new poetry was spoiled by an influx of German bad taste, will hardly hold good now, except with a Very few very ignorant people. It is now known, of course, that whatsoever quarrel Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe may have had with Pope, it was not on account of his being too severe an artist, but too loose a one; not for being too classical, but not classical enough; that English poets borrowed from them nothing but their most boyish and immature types of thought, and that these were reproduced, and laughed at here, while the men themselves were writing works of a purity, and loftiness, and completeness, unknown to the world-except in the writings of Milton-for nearly two centuries. This feature, however, of the new German poetry, was exactly the one which no English poet deigned to imitate, save Byron alone; on whom, accordingly, Goethe always looked with admiration and affection. But the rest went their way unheeding; and if they have defects, those defects are their own; for when they did copy the German taste, they, for the most part, deliberately chose the evil, and refused the good; and have their reward in a fame which we believe will prove itself a very short-lived one. On this subject we had occasion to speak in our last number. We now go on to consider a few points which, as it seems to us, are connected with it.

We cannot deny that, in spite of all faults, these men had a strength. They have exercised an influence. And they have done so by virtue of seeing a fact which more complete, and in some cases more manly poets, did not see. And strangely enough, Shelley, the man who was the greatest sinner of them all against the canons of good taste, was the man who saw that new fact, if not most clearly, still most intensely,

1853.]

The Strength of the New School.

569

and who proclaimed it most boldly. And his influence, therefore, is outliving that of his compeers, and growing and spreading, for good and for evil; and will grow and spread for years to come, as long as the present great unrest goes on smouldering in men's hearts, till the hollow settlement of 1815 is burst asunder anew, and men feel that they are no longer in the beginning of the end, but in the end itself, and that this long thirty years' prologue to the reconstruction of rotten Europe is played out at last, and the drama itself begun.

Such is the way of Providence; the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor the prophecy to the wise. The Spirit bloweth where He listeth, and sends on His errands-those who deny Him, rebel against Him-tyrants, profligates, madmen, Henry the Eighths and Voltaires, hysterical Rousseaus, hysterical Shelleys, uttering words like the east wind. He uses strange tools in His cosmogony: but He does not use them in vain. By bad men if not by good, by fools if not by wise, His work is done, and done right well.

There was, then, a strength and a truth in all these men; and it was this-that more or less clearly, they all felt that they were standing between two worlds; amid the ruins of an older age; upon the threshold of a new one. To Byron's mind, the decay and rottenness of the old was, perhaps, the most palpable; to Shelley's, the possible glory of the new. Wordsworth declared a little too noisily, we think, as if he had been the first to discover the truth, the dignity and divineness of the most simple human facts and relationships. Coleridge declares that the new can only assume living form, by growing organically out of the old institutions. Keats gives a sad, and yet a wholesome answer to them both, as, young and passionate, he goes down with Faust to the Mothers,'

To the rich warm youth of the nations,

Childlike in virtue and faith, though childlike in passion and pleasure, Childlike still, still near to the gods, while the sunset of Eden Lingered in rose-red rays on the peaks of Ionian mountains.'

And there, amid the old classic forms, he cries-These things, too, are eternal:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

These, or things even fairer than they, must have their place in the new world, if it is to be really a home for the human race.' So he sings, as best he can, the half-educated and consumptive stable-keeper's son, from his prison-house of London brick, and in one mighty yearn after that beauty from which he is debarred, breaks his young heart, and dies, leaving a name not writ in water,' as he dreamed, but on all fair things, all lovers' hearts, for evermore.

Here then, to return, is the reason why the hearts of the present generation have been influenced so mightily by these men, rather than by those of whom Byron wrote, with perfect sincerity

'Scott, Rogers, Campbell, Moore, and Crabbe, will try

'Gainst you the question with posterity.'

These lines, written in 1818, were meant to apply only to Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey. Whether they be altogether just or unjust, is not now the question; yet it must seem somewhat strange to our young poets, that Shelley's name is not among those who are to try the question of immortality against the Lake School, and yet many of his most beautiful poems had been already written. Were, then, 'The Revolt of Islam and Alastor,' it seems, not destined, in Byron's opinion, to live as long as the Lady of the Lake,' and the Mariners of England ? Perhaps not. At least the omission of Shelley's name is noteworthy. But still more noteworthy are these words of his to Mr. Murray, dated January 23,

1819:

Read Pope-most of you don't-but do and the inevitable consequence would be, that you would burn all that I have ever written,

and all your other wretched Claudians of the day (except Scott and Crabbe) into the bargain.' .

And here arises a new question-Is Shelley, then, among the Claudians? It is a hard saying. The present generation will receive it with shouts of laughter. Some future one, which studies and imitates Shakspeare instead of anatomizing him, and which gradually awakens to the now forgotten fact, that a certain man named Edmund Spenser once wrote a poem, the like of which the earth never saw before, and perhaps may never see again, may be inclined to acquiesce in the verdict, and believe that Byron had a discrimination in this matter, as in a hundred more, far more acute than any of his compeers, and had not eaten in vain, poor fellow, of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In the meanwhile, we may perceive in the poetry of the two men deep and radical differences, indicating a spiritual difference between them even more deep, which may explain the little notice which Byron takes of Shelley's poetry, and the fact that the two men had no deep sympathy for each other, and could not in anywise' pull together' during their sojourn in Italy. Doubtless, there were plain outward faults of temper and character on both sides; neither was in a state of mind which could trust itself, or be trusted by those who loved them best. Friendship can only consist with the calm and self-restraint and self-respect of moral and intellectual health; and both were diseased, fevered, ready to take offence, ready, unwittingly, to give it. But the diseases of the two were different, as their natures were; and Shelley's fever was not Byron's. And it is worth remarking, that it is Shelley's form of fever, rather than Byron's, which has been of late years the prevailing epidemic. Since Shelley's poems have become known in England, and a timid public, after approaching in fear and trembling the fountain which was understood to be poisoned, has begun first to sip, and then, finding the magic water at all events sweet enough, to quench its thirst with unlimited draughts, the Byron's Head has lost its customers. Well-at least the taste of the age is more refined, if that be matter of congratulation. And there is an excuse for preferring eau sucré to waterside porter, heady with grains of paradise and quassia, salt and coccum indicum. Nevertheless, stronger ingredients than capillaire may be disguised by the delicate draught, and the Devil's Elixir may be made fragrant, and sweet, and transparent enough, as French moralists well know, for the most fastidious palate. The private tippling of eau-decologne, say the London physicians, has increased mightily of late; and so has the reading of Shelley. It is not surprising. Byron's Corsairs and Laras have been, on the whole, impossible during the thirty years' peace; and piracy and profligacy are at all times, and especially now-a-days, expensive amusements, and often require a good private fortune-rare among poets. They have, therefore, been wisely abandoned as ideals, except among a few young persons, who used to wear turn-down collars, and are now attempting mustachios and Mazzini hats. But even among them, and among their betters rather their more-respectables-nine-tenths of the bad influence which is laid at Byron's door, really is owing to Shelley. Among the many good-going gentlemen and ladies, Byron is generally spoken of with horror -he is ' so wicked,' forsooth; while poor Shelley, poor dear Shelley,' is very wrong, of course,' but 'so refined,' 'so beautiful,' so tender'-a fallen angel, while Byron is a satyr and a devil. We boldly deny the verdict. Neither of the two are devils: as for angels, when we have seen one, we shall be better able to give an opinion; at present, Shelley is in our eyes far less like one of those old Hebrew and Miltonic angels, fallen or unfallen, than Byron is. And as for the satyr; the less that is said for Shelley, on that point, the better. If Byron sinned more desperately and flagrantly than he, it was done under the temptations of rank, wealth, disappointed love, and under the impulses of an animal nature, to which Shelley's passions were

As moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.

And, at all events, Byron never set to work to consecrate his own sin into a religion, and proclaim the worship of uncleanness as the last and