nibal, Tiberius and Vipsania, give a lofty idea of the spirit of ancient Rome. Not less eloquently are the Middle Ages evoked in those between Joan of Arc and Agnes Sorel, Leofric and Godiva, John of Gaunt and Joanna of Kent, Tancredi and Constantia, Leonora di Este and Panigarola. Later ages yielded some comparable with these-between Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn, Essex and Spenser, Lady Lisle and Lady Elizabeth Gaunt, Bossuet and the Duchesse de Fontanges. Though he was never good at telling a story, Landor's thrifty method of indicating rather than describing justifies itself in the tense drama of the dialogues, where by means of silence as well as speech he makes us feel the effects of incidents that are not related. But he disdains to be realistic. His characters live in an ideal world: all is generalized, remote, and in consequence vague. This is a fault of the academic mind, and accounts for the relative failure of many dialogues. Reflective Dialogues. In the less dramatic dialogues, where Landor was less intent on realizing a specific character, he tends to become a ventriloquist, putting his own opinions and meditations into the mouth of his characters. Except for the attraction of his splendid style, the interest becomes purely intellectual. And though Landor could put time-honoured platitudes into a new and arresting form, and his thoughts always have a certain sanity and individuality, he was a poor reasoner, and could not disguise triteness and shallowness from those who look below the superficial beauty of his phrasing. The sentiments are always noble; the aphorisms have the merit of a perfect equipoise of force and grace; the same beauty marks the fables occasionally introduced. It is only when we regard him as a thinker that his deficiencies become apparent. Style.-Landor's prose style, like his diction in verse, was affected largely by his habit of writing in Latin. The following is from the last letter of Pericles to Aspasia : It is right and orderly, that he who has partaken so largely in the prosperity of the Athenians, should close the procession of their calamities. The fever that has depopulated our city returned upon me last night, and Hippocrates and Acron tell me that my end is near. When we agreed, O Aspasia, in the beginning of our loves, to communicate our thoughts by writing, even while we were both in Athens, and when we had many reasons for it, we little foresaw the more powerful one that has rendered it necessary of late. We never can meet again. The laws forbid it, and love itself enforces them. Let wisdom be heard by us as imperturbably, and affection as authoritatively, as ever; and remember that the sorrow of Pericles can arise but from the bosom of Aspasia. There is only one word of tenderness we could say, which we have not said oftentimes before; and there is no consolation in it. The happy never say, and never hear said, farewell. THOMAS DE QUINCEY (1785-1859).-Landor and De Quincey are the two chief masters of rhetorical prose in this period. Landor wrote poetry also; but De Quincey never attempted verse, claiming, however, to have attained similar effects by his novel handling of the resources of prose. He was born on the outskirts of Manchester, one of the eight children of a well-to-do merchant; went to school at Bath and Manchester, and ran away. His wanderings in North Wales and in London; his hunger, his meeting with the outcast of the streets, and how he came first to take opium, are told in his Confessions. Eventually he was induced to go to Oxford, where his knowledge of Greek astonished the examiners. But he left without a degree, and led an unsettled life, now in London calling on Lamb, and now visiting Coleridge at Bristol and Wordsworth at Grasmere. When Wordsworth left his cottage De Quincey took it, and occupied it for twenty years. was at Grasmere that he became a slave to the opium habit, and here he began his married life. In 1821 his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater appeared in the London Magazine, and their author became famous. His life from now consisted of alternate periods of indulgence and torpor, and fits of literary activity. He spent perhaps a quarter of his life in London, till 1825, when he transferred his services as a contributor from the London to Blackwood. In 1843 he removed with his family to a village near Edinburgh. About fifty papers by De Quincey have been reprinted from Blackwood. Another outlet for his work was Tait's Magazine, to which he contributed about as many. His only work published as a book was The Logic of Political Economy. His essays were first collected in an American edition in twenty volumes, which De Quincey ultimately sanctioned, and he revised an English edition in fourteen volumes (1853-60), under the title Selections Grave and Gay, to which many additions have been made since. Works.-The following are the most important of the groups into which De Quincey's miscellaneous essays may be assorted: Autobiographic Writings, headed by the Confessions; Biographical Essays, including the study of Kant's metaphysics; Historical Studies, ranging from the scholarly research evinced in Casar and The Essenes, to those dream-transfigured narratives, The Revolt of the Tartars and The Spanish Military Nun; Speculative and Theological Essays; Political Economy and Politics; Literary Theory and Criticism, comprising the essay, On Style, where he defends impassioned writing unfettered by metre, concluding, " after it has ceased to be a badge of inspiration, metre will be retained as a badge of professional distinction; " and the final and most important class, Imaginative Writings, including, along with miscellaneous trifles, his masterpieces in impassioned prose. Characteristics. De Quincey's scholarship was wider even than Landor's, and his versatility than that of Hazlitt. What is more surprising is, that a man of such a nervous and retiring disposition should have such an extensive knowledge of human nature and public and private affairs. He was a thinker; but unfortunately his projected studies of German metaphysics never got beyond Lessing and Kant. He wrote critical estimates of Pope, Richter, Wordsworth, and others. He understood and appreciated the romantic poets, though he was obtusely prejudiced against Keats and Shelley. His sardonic humour shows best in his Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts. But his most characteristic theme was himself -his sensations, tumults of the brain, and those impressions of the material and the ideal worlds that were blended and transfigured in his opium dreams. His Subjective Writings.-A large and the most distinctive part of De Quincey's writings have been aptly described as "impassioned autobiography." These consist not only of the Confessions and his Autobiographic Sketches, but also of his dream narratives, and many other studies in which he viewed what he described or related through an atmosphere of dream. His introspective habit of mind was not originally due to opium, though this intensified it abnormally. Its development can be traced in the Autobiographic Sketches, where early incidents reappear transformed by the poetry of remembrance, and proceed to a higher stage of transfiguration in the dream echoes. He tells how a loved sister, nine years old when he was six, died, and how he surreptitiously visited the chamber where her body lay, and realized for the first time the meaning of death. I stood checked for a moment; awe, not fear, fell upon me; and, whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow-the saddest that ear ever heard. It was a wind that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand centuries. . . it is in this world the one great symbol of eternity. Instantly, when my ear caught this vast Æolian intonation, when my eye filled with the golden fullness of life, the pomps of the heavens above, or the glory of the flowers below, and turning when it settled upon the frost which overspread my sister's face, instantly a trance fell upon me. Psychological experiences of deep suffering or joy, he says, first attain their entire fullness of expression when they are reverberated from dreams. In The English Mail Coach he exhibits the process of transformation, from the actual incident that first impressed him to the gorgeous and sublime visions into which they expanded in the Dream-Fugue. The Revolt of the Tartars is an example of a piece of history poetized by a similar process of visualization. De Quincey's natural attitude was a form of egoism, free from selfishness and from self-conceit. With intense concentration and yet a calm detachment he studied his inner life, as a being in an infinite universe, as an individual in an infinite multitude of human beings. Whatever the subject, he approached it, to borrow his own phrase, by "making himself central"; and thus, in a natural and spontaneous way, was able to deal with themes in prose that had hitherto found expression only in the higher kinds of lyric poetry. Style. An instrument of extraordinary compass was needed for such a feat. De Quincey had an example for his daring use of prose in the works of that bold dreamer, Jean Paul Richter. Thence he learned the swift transitions from earth to the empyrean, his continual personification, making abstractions the subjects of predicates as if they were living things, the vivid metaphors, and the elaborate similes, in which every correspondence is exhausted for the sake of perfect clearness as well as for ornament's sake. Aiming at the effects of impassioned verse, De Quincey required stately rhythms and complicated harmonies. Only a predominantly Latin vocabulary would furnish this majestic movement; and the sentences must be complex, and for the most part periodic in structure, holding the attention in suspense to the full-orbed close. But the complex rhythm did not end with the sentence: it beat throughout the paragraph, in which the sentences were co-ordinated with the same elaboration—the intricacy being often increased by his bad habit of digressing. In De Quincey we see the culmination of romantic prose. He was of the school of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and had unconscious affinities with Shelley and Keats: but his prose-masters were Raleigh, Jeremy Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne. The evolution of an ornate and emotional prose, having kindred properties to those of verse, which had begun with Berners and Lyly, reached its highest modern development in him. SUPPLEMENTARY READING LIST Texts.-JEFFREY, F.: Contributions to the Edinburgh Review (Longman, 1853, o.p.).—SMITH, SYDNEY: Works (Longman, 1850).-WILSON, JOHN: Works, ed. Ferrier (12 vols., Blackwood, 1855-8).-COLERIDGE, S. T.: Anima Poeta, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Heinemann, 1895); Table-talk and Omniana, ed. T. Ashe (Bell, 1884).—Lamb, C.: Collected Works, ed. Canon Ainger (6 vols., Macmillan, 1899-1900); Works, ed. W. Macdonald (12 vols., Dent, 1903).-HAZLITT, W.: Collected Works, ed. A. R. Waller and A. Glover (13 vols., Dent, 1901-6); Works (Bohn's Standard Library, 8 vols., Bell).-HUNT, LEIGH: Imagination and Fancy; A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla; Wit and Humour; Men, Women, and Books; Tabletalk (5 vols., Smith, Elder, 1891-7).—LANDOr, W. S.: Works, ed. C. G. Crump (10 vols., Dent, 1891–3). -DE QUINCEY, T.: Collected Works, ed. D. Masson (14 vols., Black, 1853-60, 4th ed. 1878). Critical Studies.-English Men of Letters: Sydney Smith, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, Landor, De Quincey (Macmillan, v.y.).—STEPHEN, L.: Hours in a Library, Vol. I.; De Quincey, Vol. II.; Hazlitt (Smith, Elder, 1874-6).- MINTO, W.: Manual of English Prose Literature-De Quincey (Blackwood, 1872, 3rd ed. 1886). CHAPTER 5. THE SECOND WAVE OF ROMANTIC POETRY Tennyson: Classic and Romantic Poems, English Idylls; In Memoriam, Idylls of the ALFRED TENNYSON (1809-92) Life.-Alfred Tennyson was born at Somersby Rectory, Lincolnshire, on August 6, 1809. In 1826 he and his brother Charles published in collabora tion a small volume of verse, entitled Poems by Two Brothers. In 1828 he entered Cambridge, and the next year gained the vice-chancellor's medal for a poem on Timbuctoo. In 1833 a heavy blow fell upon him in the death of his dear friend Arthur Hallam. In 1850 he married Emily Sellwood, and was appointed poet laureate in succession to Wordsworth. Thenceforth his life was placid and uneventful. Active in his art to the last, he died at Farringford, near Freshwater, Isle of Wight, on October 6, 1892. He had been raised to the peerage in 1883 as Baron Tennyson of Aldworth and Farringford. Works. His principal publications are: Poems, chiefly Lyrical Alfred Tennyson. (1830); Poems (1833); Poems (1842); The Princess (1847); In Memoriam (1850); Maud (1855); Idylls of the King (1859-85);. Enoch Arden (1864); Queen Mary (1875); Harold (1876); Ballads, etc. (1880); The Cup and the Falcon (1884): Becket (1884); Tiresias and other Poems (1885); Locksley Hall Sixty Years after (1886); Demeter and other Poems (1889); The Death of Enone, etc (1892). |