"When on the pausing theatre of earth When they no longer doubt, no longer fear Rising with hurried croak and throat outstretch't, Doubts gather strength from habit, like disease; Like a blue bubble floating in the bay " Marmoreal, trophied round with golden hair"; Those faded eyes and fill'd them from the stars?” Dalica describes Charoba's childhood in language of great beauty and power; "she thought the crown a play-thing to amuse, Herself, and not the people", and when she "watcht grave elders look with awe On such a bauble", "She was afraid her parents should suspect They had caught childhood from her in a kiss "; she had great courage and high thought, and, when she saw the ocean first, she cried, "Is this the mighty ocean! Is this all !"; she had lost this wondrous soul, "Soul discontented with capacity". 17. Landor's passionate revolutionism seldom breaks through the cold sculpturesque outlines of the poem. The third book with its visit to hell gives clearest expression to it; he pictures monarchs and statesmen as tortured; in the other books only an occasional touch shows this phase of his beliefs, the portrait of Charoba in childhood toying with the sceptre and crown, mere baubles to the eye of truth, the taunt in the second book tɔ "mighty men" to "invade far cities" and get as the treasure for their heirs only serpents, and the beginning of the seventh book with its references to mortal's "trampled by tyranny or scoff't by scorn", its warning "man, spare thy kind", and its allusion to Rousseau's dream of a golden age ;— "Many still bend their beauteous heads unblest, And sigh aloud for elemental man ". But there is little evidence of the strength of his opinions in the frame-work of the poem. One of the peculiarities of Landor is that his revolutionism and his wild indignation against despotism instead of passing away with the French Revolution grow more pronounced and appear more clearly in his productions as he grows older. In Chrysaor, written in 1801, and afterwards included in his Hellenics, he speaks out with fierceness against the peace-embracing, warinciting king" of "fair Hesperia," evidently George the Third, and against all kings and superstitions, "the pest of men below and curse of gods above", "Religion's helm assuming ". "Hers are the last worst tortures, they inflict The piece that follows this in the Hellenics, originally called Regeneration and written some thirty years after, is bolder still in its adoration of freedom. He addresses England ;"Thou recreant slave, That sittest afar off and helpest not, O thou degenerate Albion ! with what shame And prompt and keen to pierce the wounded side! With Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth the wild passion, that came to them from the very atmosphere of the last decade of last century, turned round into its opposite, as strong conservatism; Landor had it by nature rather than from his surroundings; he was born a rebel and worshipper of freedom. 18. This perhaps may account partly for the statuesque coldness of his poetry, and especially his early poetry; the ferment without seemed to him nothing exceptional, but a part of that which was within him. These other poets, by nature conservative, felt in their first youth as if the world was getting upheaved and some great age was about to be born. The defeat of their hopes, the fall of the Girondins, and the rise of the Napoleonic tyranny threw them back upon themselves, and all seemed commonplace again. Landor felt the dull, sullen atmosphere of revolution and freedom and hope suppressed to be what was unnatural, and his true inspiration came when his fiery disposition chafed against the re-soldered fetters. He threw off his chastely classical poetic form and adopted prose dialogue as best suited to the quick interchange of mood and thought that was his nature. He abandoned the epic for the dramatic; the abrupt transitions of his mind marred his narrative; the give and take of dialogue was what his temperament demanded. He passed from poem to dramatic scene in blank verse, and thence into the prose of his Imaginary Conversations, the work by which he will live. This transition was not merely the development of his own genius; it was a part of the evolution of English literature. The literary drama took strong hold of English poets during the first half of our century; and by degrees it passed into the poetic novel and gave way to it. This natural bond between drama and fiction was the outcome of the conditions of the earlier period, that of preparation, the latter half of last century. 19. Thus fifty years of poetical experiment had prepared the way, not only for a new outburst of poetry, but for a nobler and more varied prose. It seemed as though the prosaic spirit of Queen Anne prose had mastered verse; but a new era dawned for both in the renaissance of the people, and the resurgence of national feeling. Many poets still found their model in Pope; but they had to clothe him in "worsted stockings ", or recreate him with the breath of a new sentiment. Others attempted to revive the sublimities of Paradise Lost; but the intellectualism of the time killed the blank verse. Some sought the Elizabethan age, and thought that the archaistic style of Spenser was needed; they found it but a passing fashion. So did those who went still farther back to Chaucer and his predecessors in their attempt to clothe the new passion for the old in the garments of the dead. It was the ballad simplicity of Percy's Reliques that pointed the true way; the people had brought with them through the period of obscuration their taste for this; and Blake and Burns, Wordsworth and Coleridge adapted it to the new ideas and the new times. It was the Biblical splendours and the poetic prose of Ossian that pointed still more surely to the coming time. The people had acquired in their march through the night a strong taste for such prose as is to be found in the Authorised Version. And Macpherson had secularised it and given it a modern and British tinge, that fascinated the new audience, in spite of the Celtic tinsel with which he bespangled it. And imagination finds a wider field and audience in prose fiction than in poetry. The lyric is the only form that seems strong enough to assert its superiority and naturalness; for it has an invincible ally in music. Epic, idyll, drama, satire, have an almost artificial air now, when put into verse. Thus both for poetry and prose did its poetry make the latter half of last century a period of preparation. |