A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895). Saintsbury George
lonely house named Casa Magni, on the Bay of Spezia, he and his friend Lieutenant Williams set out in a boat from Leghorn. The boat either foundered in a squall or was run down. At any rate Shelley's body was washed ashore on the 19th, and burnt on a pyre in the presence of Byron, Hunt, and Trelawny.
Little need be said of Shelley's character. If it had not been for the disgusting efforts of his maladroit adorers to blacken that not merely of his hapless young wife, but of every one with whom he came in contact, it might be treated with the extremest indulgence. Almost a boy in years at the time of his death, he was, with some late flashes of sobering, wholly a boy in inability to understand the responsibilities and the burdens of life. An enthusiast for humanity generally, and towards individuals a man of infinite generosity and kindliness, he yet did some of the cruellest and some of not the least disgraceful things from mere childish want of realising the pacta conventa of the world. He, wholly ignorant, would, if he could, have turned the wheel of society the other way, reckless of the horrible confusion and suffering that he must occasion.
But in pure literary estimation we need take no note of this. In literature, Shelley, if not of the first three or four, is certainly of the first ten or twelve. He has, as no poet in England except Blake and Coleridge in a few flashes had had before him for some century and a half, the ineffable, the divine intoxication which only the di majores of poetry can communicate to their worshippers. Once again, after all these generations, it became unnecessary to agree or disagree with the substance, to take interest or not to take interest in it, to admit or to contest the presence of faults and blemishes—to do anything except recognise and submit to the strong pleasure of poetry, the charm of the highest poetical inspiration.
I think myself, though the opinion is not common among critics, that this touch is unmistakable even so early as Queen Mab. That poem is no doubt to a certain extent modelled upon Southey, especially upon Kehama, which, as has been observed above, is a far greater poem than is usually allowed. But the motive was different: the sails might be the same, but the wind that impelled them was another. By the time of Alastor it is generally admitted that there could or should have been little mistake. Nothing, indeed, but the deafening blare of Byron's brazen trumpet could have silenced this music of the spheres. The meaning is not very much, though it is passable; but the music is exquisite. There is just a foundation of Wordsworthian scheme in the blank verse; but the structure built on it is not Wordsworth's at all, and there are merely a few borrowed strokes of technique, such as the placing of a long adjective before a monosyllabic noun at the end of the line, and a strong cæsura about two-thirds through that line. All the rest is Shelley, and wonderful.
It may be questioned whether, fine as The Revolt of Islam is, the Spenserian stanza was quite so well suited as the "Pindaric" or as blank verse, or as lyrical measures, to Shelley's genius. It is certainly far excelled both in the lyrics and in the blank verse of Prometheus Unbound, the first poem which distinctly showed that one of the greatest lyric poets of the world had been born to England. The Cenci relies more on subject, and, abandoning the lyric appeal, abandons what Shelley is strongest in; but Hellas restores this. Of his comic efforts, the chief of which are Swellfoot the Tyrant and Peter Bell the Third, it is perhaps enough to say that his humour, though it existed, was fitful, and that he was too much of a partisan to keep sufficiently above his theme. The poems midway between, large and small—Prince Athanase, The Witch of Atlas (an exquisite and glorious fantasy piece), Rosalind and Helen, Adonais, Epipsychidion, and the Triumph of Life—would alone have made his fame. But it is in Shelley's smallest poems that his greatest virtue lies. Not even in the seventeenth century had any writer given so much that was so purely exquisite. "To Constantia Singing," the "Ozymandias" sonnet, the "Lines written among the Euganean Hills," the "Stanzas written in Dejection," the "Ode to the West Wind," the hackneyed "Cloud," and "Skylark," "Arethusa," the "World's Wanderers," "Music, when soft voices die," "The flower that smiles to-day," "Rarely, rarely, comest thou," the "Lament," "One word is too often profaned," the "Indian Air," the second "Lament," "O world! O life! O time!" (the most perfect thing of its kind perhaps, in the strict sense of perfection, that all poetry contains), the "Invitation," and the "Recollection,"—this long list, which might have been made longer, contains things absolutely consummate, absolutely unsurpassed, only rivalled by a few other things as perfect as themselves.
Shelley has been foolishly praised, and it is very likely that the praise given here may seem to some foolish. It is as hard for praise to keep the law of the head as for blame to keep the law of the heart. He has been mischievously and tastelessly excused for errors both in and out of his writings which need only a kindly silence. In irritation at the "chatter" over him some have even tried to make out that his prose—very fine prose indeed, and preserved to us in some welcome letters and miscellaneous treatises, but capable of being dispensed with—is more worthy of attention than his verse, which has no parallel and few peers. But that one thing will remain true in the general estimate of competent posterity I have no doubt. There are two English poets, and two only, in whom the purely poetical attraction, exclusive of and sufficient without all others, is supreme, and these two are Spenser and Shelley.
The life of John Keats was even shorter and even less marked by striking events than that of Shelley, and he belonged in point of extraction and education to a somewhat lower class of society than any of the poets hitherto mentioned in this chapter. He was the son of a livery stable keeper who was fairly well off, and he went to no school but a private one, where, however, he received tolerable instruction and had good comrades. Born in 1795, he was apprenticed to a surgeon at the age of fifteen, and even did some work in his profession, till in 1817 his overmastering passion for literature had its way. He became intimate with the so-called "Cockney school," or rather with its leaders Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt—an intimacy, as far as the former was concerned, not likely to chasten his own taste, but chiefly unfortunate because it led, in the rancorous state of criticism then existing, to his own efforts being branded with the same epithet. His first book was published in the year above mentioned: it did not contain all the verse he had written up to that time, or the best of it, but it confirmed him in his vocation. He broke away from surgery, and, having some little means, travelled to the Isle of Wight, Devonshire, and other parts of England, besides becoming more and more familiar with men of letters. It was in the Isle of Wight chiefly that he wrote Endymion, which appeared in 1818. This was savagely and stupidly attacked in Blackwood and the Quarterly; the former article being by some attributed, without a tittle of evidence, to Lockhart. But the supposed effect of these attacks on Keats' health was widely exaggerated by some contemporaries, especially by Byron. The fact was that he had almost from his childhood shown symptoms of lung disease, which developed itself very rapidly. The sense of his almost certain fate combined with the ordinary effects of passion to throw a somewhat hectic air over his correspondence with Miss Fanny Brawne. His letters to her contain nothing discreditable to him, but ought never to have been published. He was, however, to bring out his third and greatest book of verse in 1820; and then he sailed for Italy, to die on the 23rd of February 1821. He spoke of his name as "writ in water." Posterity has agreed with him that it is—but in the Water of Life.
Nothing is more interesting, even in the endless and delightful task of literary comparison, than to contrast the work of Shelley and Keats, so alike and yet so different. A little longer space of work, much greater advantages of means and education, and a happier though less blameless experience of passion, enabled Shelley to produce a much larger body of work than Keats has to his name, even when this is swollen by what Mr. Palgrave has justly stigmatised as "the incomplete and inferior work" withheld by Keats himself, but made public by the cruel kindness of admirers. And this difference in bulk probably coincides with a difference in the volume of genius of the two writers. Further, while it is not at all improbable that if Shelley had lived he would have gone on writing better and better, the same probability is, I think, to be more sparingly predicated of Keats.
On the other hand, by a not uncommon connection or consequence, Keats has proved much more of a "germinal" poet than Shelley. Although the latter was, I think, by far the greater, his poetry had little that was national and very little that was imitable about it. He has had a vast influence; but it has been in the main the influence, the inspiration of his unsurpassed exciting power. No one has borrowed or carried further