human
Can you continue this poem for me?
  also Bombay Calcutta Madras Melbourne_
Again, our formula may be accused of cutting poetry away from its
contemplative imagination--imagination the reverse of empty or
emotionless, imagination saturated with the results of 'real'
interest in the man and his fate is only an intellectual or moral
tendency? Well, but the very same tendency vitiates much of our
Again, it is surely true that we cannot determine beforehand what
citizen, not in his capacity of artist.
distinguished from the form.
appearances of nature and the thoughts and feelings of men. Is it
consider separately the action or the characters of a play, and
'Bring forth the horse!' The horse was brought:
In truth he was a noble steed!
'Bring forth the steed!' The steed was brought:
In truth he was a noble horse!
To be or not to be, that is the question.
Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore;
It gives a very echo to the seat
Where love is throned;
Of old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago.
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence,
social--distinctly before him, and then, as we say, clothed it in
makes us seem
To patch up fragments of a dream,
Part of which comes true, and part
Beats and trembles in the heart.
We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence;
For it is as the air invulnerable,
And our vain blows malicious mockery.
It gives a very echo to the seat
 The lecture, as printed in 1901, was preceded by the following
slight expansion would do little to provide against
misunderstandings." A few verbal changes have now been made, some
 What is here called 'substance' is what people generally mean
when they use the word 'subject' and insist on the value of the
subject. I am not arguing against this usage, or in favour of the
 These remarks will hold good, _mutatis mutandis_, if by
'substance' is understood the 'moral' or the 'idea' of a poem,
although perhaps in one instance out of five thousand this may be
 On the other hand, the absence, or worse than absence, of style,
 This paragraph is criticized in Note D.
 Not that to Schiller 'form' meant mere style and versification.
 In Schiller's phrase, they have extirpated the mere 'matter.' We
Let us now take a further step. Can there be sublimity when such
Thou whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy soul's immensity....
Mighty prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest
Which we are toiling all our lives to find.
I was on my way home from hunting, and was walking up the garden
avenue. My dog was running on in front of me.
before his nose, and, all rumpled and flustered, with a plaintive
hoarse; it sank and died. It had sacrificed itself.
Love, I thought, is verily stronger than death and the terror of
death. By love, only by love, is life sustained and moved.
How nourished here through such long time
He knows who gave that love sublime,
And gave that strength of feeling, great
Above all human estimate.
We must develop this statement a little. Naturally the power, and
It seems clear, then, that sublimity very often arises from an
The air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.... The heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here.
The thing wins us and draws us towards itself without resistance.
second--there is a sense of being checked, or baffled, or even
But undoubtedly there is another kind of sublimity; and it is
In thoughts from the visions of the night
When deep sleep falleth on men,
Fear came upon me and trembling,
Which made all my bones to shake.
Then a spirit passed before my face;
The hair of my flesh stood up.
It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof.
An image was before mine eyes.
There was silence, and I heard a voice.
sovereign dominion over the visible and material world. And their
We cannot apprehend an object as sublime while we apprehend it as
transcendence.
 I have learned something from many discussions of this subject.
 Popular usage coincides roughly with this sense. Indeed, it can
hardly be said to recognise the wider one at all. 'Beauty' and
misfortune seems to be unavoidable, for there is no word in the
ordinary language which means 'whatever gives aesthetic
 I do not mean to imply that in aesthetic apprehension itself we
apprehension.
sparrow.
 The poet's language here has done our analysis for us.
 A word may be added here on a disputed point as to 'spiritual'
sublimity. It has been held that intellect cannot be sublime; but
sublimity? All that is true is, first, that the intellect must be
appears sublime in virtue not of its quality alone but of the
quantity, or force, of that quality.
 The same principle applies to other cases. If, for example, the
 The reader will remember that in one sense of the question, Is
there no more in the sublime than overwhelming greatness? this
 I am warning the reader against a mistake which may arise from
the complexity of aesthetic experience. We may make a broad
 In what follows I have spoken as if the two were always
commit myself to an opinion on the point, which is of minor
sublimity.
 'Ich fuehlte mich so klein, so gross,' says Faust, remembering
 At least if the 'Vision' is sublime its sublimity is not that of
 To avoid complication I have passed by the case where we compare
 I am far from being satisfied with the ideas imperfectly
expressed in the first and third of these Notes, but they require
suggestions.
 Hence a creature much less powerful than ourselves _may_, I
suppose, be sublime, even from the mere point of view of vital
energy. But I doubt if this is so in my own case. I have seen
'magnificent' or 'glorious' cocks and cats, but if I called them
'sublime' I should say rather more than I feel. I mention cocks,
Since Aristotle dealt with tragedy, and, as usual, drew the main
On certain characteristics of tragedy the briefest reminder will
intellectual).
excessive pretensions of its particular powers. In that sense, as
absoluteness of the claim of each.
interpretation, but it would not affect his principle, except for
matters.
On this main characteristic of modern tragedy others depend. For
individuals. But still they are comparatively simple and easy to
tragedy.
spiritual value in both the contending forces.
Beauty,--he will see how all this is connected with those
 See, primarily, _Aesthetik_, iii. 479-581, and especially
 His theory of tragedy is connected with his view of the function
fragmentary account of that theory.
 I say 'might,' because Hegel himself in the _Phaenomenologie_
 See Note at end of lecture.
 This interpretation of Hegel's 'abstract' is more or less
conjectural and doubtful.
 Hegel's meaning does not fully appear in the sentences here
condensed. The 'blessedness' comes from the sense of greatness or
 Hegel himself expressly guards against this misconception.
 The same point may be put thus, in view of that dangerous word
 In relation to _both_ sides in the conflict (though it may not
need to negate life in both). For the ultimate agent in the
Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont in 1807, may remind us of the common
Shakespeare's myriad-mindedness; it is, for good or evil or both,
That what we feel of sorrow and despair
From ruin and from change, and all the grief
The passing shows of Being leave behind,
Appeared an idle dream, that could not live
Where meditation was.
But thy most dreaded instrument
For working out a pure intent
Is Man arrayed for mutual slaughter;
Yea, Carnage is thy daughter.
expressed. But with Wordsworth, for most readers, this risk is
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.
But there remains something still more intimately Wordsworthian:
I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills.
eccentricity in dullness,' while Coleridge's judgment, though he
motherless, and her poverty (the poem is called _Alice Fell, or
But who is he, with modest looks,
And clad in homely russet brown?
He murmurs near the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.
He is retired as noontide dew,
Or fountain in a noon-day grove;
And you must love him, ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.
The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.
In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart,
--The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart.
But he is weak; both man and boy,
Hath been an idler in the land:
Contented if he might enjoy
The things which others understand.
And these are the words from Arnold's _Memorial Verses_:
He too upon a wintry clime
Had fallen--on this iron time
Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears
He found us when the age had bound
Our souls in its benumbing round--
He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.
He laid us as we lay at birth
On the cool flowery lap of earth;
Smiles broke from us and we had ease.
The hills were round us, and the breeze
Went o'er the sunlit fields again;
Our foreheads felt the wind and rain.
Our youth returned: for there was shed
On spirits that had long been dead,
Spirits dried up and closely furled,
The freshness of the early world.
Ah, since dark days still bring to light
Man's prudence and man's fiery might,
Time may restore us in his course
Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force;
But where will Europe's latter hour
Again find Wordsworth's healing power?
Others will teach us how to dare,
And against fear our breast to steel;
Others will strengthen us to bear--
But who, ah who, will make us feel?
The cloud of mortal destiny,
Others will front it fearlessly--
But who, like him, will put it by?
Keep fresh the grass upon his grave,
O Rotha! with thy living wave.
Sing him thy best! for few or none
Hears thy voice right, now he is gone.
_Yew-trees_, or why should he say,
For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep--and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil?
Some philosophic song
Of Truth that cherishes our daily life,
stimulation.' The violent excitement of public events, and 'the
enraptured by _Marmion_ and the earlier poems of Byron.
How great Wordsworth's success might have been in fields which he
Wordsworth's that he could not read with pleasure:
Arabian fiction never filled the world
With half the wonders that were wrought for him.
Earth breathed in one great presence of the spring;
Life turned the meanest of her implements,
Before his eyes, to price above all gold;
The house she dwelt in was a sainted shrine;
Her chamber-window did surpass in glory
The portals of the dawn; all paradise
Could, by the simple opening of a door,
Let itself in upon him:--pathways, walks,
Swarmed with enchantment, till his spirit sank,
Surcharged, within him, overblest to move
Beneath a sun that wakes a weary world
To its dull round of ordinary cares;
A man too happy for mortality!
dared to take
Life's rule from passion craved for passion's sake;
magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,
Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven
With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace;
lovelier, in its own retired abode
On Grasmere's beach, than Naiad by the side
Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere
Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance,
He told of the magnolia, spread
High as a cloud, high overhead,
The cypress and her spire;
Of flowers that with one scarlet gleam
Cover a hundred leagues, and seem
To set the hills on fire.
Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
The patriotism of these _Poems_ is equally characteristic. It
the only light
Of Liberty that yet remains on earth.
This Liberty is, first, national independence; and that requires
military power, the maintenance of which is a primary moral duty.
against Napoleon, is to him almost what the England of the Long
An old and haughty nation, proud in arms.
And his own pride in it is, like Milton's, in the highest degree
Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,
I see the lords of human kind pass by;
Wordsworth's lawlessness was of the innocuous kind, but it is a
superstition to suppose that he was a disgustingly well-regulated
But this he did all in the _ease_ of his heart.
Oh, better wrong and strife,
Better vain deeds and evil than such life.
He changed this shocking exclamation later, but it represents his
The still sad music of humanity,
the fierce confederate storm
Of Sorrow, barricadoed evermore
Within the walls of cities;
Amid the groves, under the shadowy hills,
The generations are prepared; the pangs,
The internal pangs, are ready; the dread strife
Of poor humanity's afflicted will
Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny;
At times when most existence with herself
Is satisfied,
For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep--and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.
to the very going out of youth
And sought _that_ beauty, which, as Milton says,
Hath terror in it.
with feelings of fraternal love
Upon the unassuming things that hold
A silent station in this beauteous world,
Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg_ (1835),
Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits,
Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has brother followed brother
From sunshine to the sunless land!
The transitory being that beheld
He apprehended all things, natural or human, as the expression of
modesty.'
Sometimes it is an intimation of boundlessness, contradicting or
One summer evening (led by her) I found
A little boat tied to a willow tree
Within a rocky cave, its usual home.
Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in
Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth
And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice
Of mountain-echoes did my boat move on;
Leaving behind her still, on either side,
Small circles glittering idly in the moon,
Until they melted all into one track
Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows,
Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point
With an unswerving line, I fixed my view
Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,
The horizon's utmost boundary; far above
Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
She was an elfin pinnace; lustily
I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow tree;
There in her mooring-place I left my bark,--
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood; but after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.
the wind and sleety rain,
And all the business of the elements,
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
And the bleak music from that old stone wall,
The noise of wood and water, and the mist
That on the line of each of those two roads
Advanced in such indisputable shapes.
Not un-informed with Phantasy, and looks
That threaten the profane.
Like something fashioned in a dream.
Will no one tell me what she sings?
In _Hartleap Well_ it is conveyed at first by slight touches of
Joy sparkled in the prancing courser's eyes;
The horse and horseman are a happy pair;
But, though Sir Walter like a falcon flies,
There is a doleful silence in the air.
A rout this morning left Sir Walter's hall,
That as they galloped made the echoes roar;
But horse and man are vanished, one and all;
Such race, I think, was never seen before.
Where is the throng, the tumult of the race?
The bugles that so joyfully were blown?
--This chase it looks not like an earthly chase;
Sir Walter and the Hart are left alone.
Now, here is neither grass nor pleasant shade;
The sun on drearier hollow never shone;
So will it be, as I have often said,
Till trees, and stones, and fountain all are gone.
The Being, that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creatures whom he loves.
_Hartleap Well_ is a beautiful poem, but whether it is entirely
And, drawing to his side, to him did say,
'This morning gives us promise of a glorious day.'
'How is it that you live, and what is it you do?'
We meet also with that perplexed persistence, and that helpless
The old man still stood talking by my side;
But now his voice to me was like a stream
Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;
And the whole body of the man did seem
Like one whom I had met with in a dream;
Or like a man from some far region sent,
To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.
While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
The old man's shape, and speech, all troubled me.
'Trouble' is a word not seldom employed by the poet to denote the
No living thing appeared in earth or air;
And, save the flowing water's peaceful voice,
Sound there was none ...
... still his form
Kept the same awful steadiness--at his feet
His shadow lay, and moved not.
How oft, amid those overflowing streets,
Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said
Unto myself, 'The face of every one
That passes by me is a mystery!'
Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed
By thoughts of what and whither, when and how,
Until the shapes before my eyes became
A second-sight procession, such as glides
Over still mountains, or appears in dreams;
And once, far-travelled in such mood, beyond
The reach of common indication, lost
Amid the moving pageant, I was smitten
Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare)
Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face,
Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest
Wearing a written paper, to explain
His story, whence he came, and who he was.
Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round
As with the might of waters; an apt type
This label seemed of the utmost we can know,
Both of ourselves and of the universe;
And, on the shape of that unmoving man,
His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed,
As if admonished from another world.
passage, the better. Wordsworth and Jones ('Jones, as from Calais
Imagination--here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say--
'I recognise thy glory': in such strength
Of usurpation, when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbours; whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.
proceeded on their way down the Defile of Gondo.
Downwards we hurried fast,
And, with the half-shaped road which we had missed,
Entered a narrow chasm. The brook and road
Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy strait,
And with them did we journey several hours
At a slow pace. The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent at every turn
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light--
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.
Like--but oh, how different!
Breathed immortality, revolving life,
And greatness still revolving; infinite.
There littleness was not; the least of things
Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped
Her prospects, nor did he believe,--he _saw_.
Two voices are there; one is of the sea,
One of the mountains; each a mighty voice.
Partly because he is the poet of mountains he is, even more
The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses _of deeper birth_
Have come to him in solitude.
leech-gatherer and the soldier on the moon-lit road had not been
The _single_ sheep and the _one_ blasted tree,
One voice, the solitary raven ...
An iron knell, with echoes from afar:
against the distant sky he descries the shepherd,
A solitary object and sublime,
Above all height! like an aerial cross
Stationed alone upon a spiry rock
Of the Chartreuse, for worship.
Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild.
O'er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.
perhaps too much
The self-sufficing power of Solitude.
reviewed. They were the symbol of power to stand alone, to be
'unconquerable mind' which through long years holds its solitary
Of Life continuous, Being unimpaired;
That hath been, is, and where it was and is
There shall endure,--existence unexposed
To the blind walk of mortal accident;
From diminution safe and weakening age;
While man grows old, and dwindles, and decays;
And countless generations of mankind
Depart; and leave no vestige where they trod.
I take this opportunity of airing a heresy about _We are Seven_.
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
'Nothing,' he says to Miss Fenwick, 'was more difficult for me in
 The following pages reproduce the two concluding lectures of a
short course on the Age of Wordsworth, given at Oxford in April,
English Language and Literature. A few passages from the other
lectures appear elsewhere in this volume. On the subject of the
course may I advise any reader who may need the advice to consult
 These statements, with the exception of the last, were chosen
 _Goody Blake_, to my mind, tries vainly to make the kind of
impression overwhelmingly made by Coleridge's _Three Graves_. The
And five times to the child I said,
Why, Edward, tell me why?
effect so delightfully reproduced in _Through the Looking-glass_
('I'll tell thee everything I can').
 Some remarks on _We are seven_ are added in a note at the end of
 The phrases quoted in this paragraph are taken chiefly from
 The publication of the _Excursion_ seems to have been postponed
 _Evening Voluntaries_, iv. We know that he refers to Byron.
 _Poems on the Naming of Places_, iv. Keats need not have been
ashamed to write the last line.
 ''Tis past, that melancholy dream,'--so he describes his sojourn
 Wordsworth's Letter to Major-General Pasley (_Prose Works_, i.)
 I am writing of the years of the Napoleonic War. Later, he lost
 [This great line, as I am reminded, refers to the Welsh
(_Comus_, 33); but it does not seem necessary to change the
quotation.]
 In saying that what Wordsworth could not bear was torpor, of
 The third quotation is from a speech by the Solitary
 The second half of this sentence, true of the Wordsworth of the
_Excursion_, is perhaps not quite true of his earlier mind.
 This is just the opposite of the 'wise passiveness' of
imaginative but unreflective feeling.
 I add here some notes which would have disturbed the lecture,
experience), is frequent or constant in Wordsworth, and it ought
always to be borne in mind in regard to his language about
'immortality' or 'eternity.' His sense or consciousness of
entirely outside Wordsworth's mind in passages like that just
There is an illuminating passage on 'the visionary power' and the
and hence, from the same source,
Sublimer joy; for I would walk alone,
Under the quiet stars, and at that time
Have felt whate'er there is of power in sound
To breathe an elevated mood, by form
Or image unprofaned; and I would stand,
If the night blackened with a coming storm,
Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are
The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
Or make their dim abode in distant winds.
Thence did I drink the visionary power;
And deem not profitless those fleeting moods
Of shadowy exultation: not for this,
That they are kindred to our purer mind
And intellectual life; but that the soul,
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, whereto
With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain, they yet
Have something to pursue.
'twas a sound
Of something without place or bound.
 _Yes, it was the mountain echo_, placed in Arnold's selection,
with his usual taste, next to the earlier poem _To the Cuckoo_.
 This was Coleridge's opinion.
conceals them from many readers. I wish, at the cost of all the
Any one familiar with the manner in which Shelley in his verse
conscious work of invention and execution is regarded as quite
attention to its means of utterance. And what he does say on the
embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character, and
weakness of his own practice, his tendency to portray a thin and
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity;
I pass to his views on a last point. If the business of poetry is
therefore, 'to be greatly good must imagine intensely and
interpretation which we find inexhaustibly instructive, because
 Statements equally emphatic on this subject may be found in a
 I cannot find the passage or passages to which I referred in
The ardours of a vision which obscure
The very idol of its portraiture.
 I do not discuss the adequacy of Shelley's position, or assert
that he held it quite clearly or consistently. In support of my
interpretation, of it I may refer to the Preface to the _Cenci_.
Shelley's position in the _Defence_, it may be added, is in total
wrote to Miss Hitchener, 'My opinion is that all poetical beauty
 'I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political
science,' he says in a letter to Peacock, Jan. 1819.
 And, I may add, the more it does this, so long as it does it
accomplishment?
Matthew Arnold, in his essay on _The Function of Criticism at the
observe, is a peculiar phenomenon. If we go back as far as the
Elizabethan age we shall find no parallel to it. The one kind was
themselves, and especially to their prose writings, letters, and
reflection. Yet most of the greater poets, especially in their
imagination, which formed the ostensible subject of the poetry.
There was a Being whom my spirit oft
Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft
In the clear golden prime of my youth's dawn.
emphatically great poems, solid coherent structures of concrete
imagination? It seems more than doubtful. To confine ourselves to
knowledge has made immensely wide and rich. His art, further, has
But doubtless Shelley is, in a sense, the typical example of this
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest his head.
E caddi come corpo morto cade.
One mighty wave of thought and joy
Lifting mankind again.
It must surely be vain for the poet to seek an escape from modern
 The material of these pages belongs in part to the course
false impression that the writer's admiration for those poems is
lukewarm, or that he has any tendency to reaction against the
Romantic Revival of Wordsworth's time.
 This, and not the permanent value of the scientific product, is
the point.
 The narrative poems that satisfy most, because in their way they
 Demogorgon is an instance of such a figure.
 This incongruity is not the only cause of the discomfort with
ridiculous. _Political Justice_ would never have fascinated such
 The theory criticised in this paragraph arises, I think, from a
misapplication of the truth that the content of a genuine poem is
matter,' and that accordingly 'the arts may be represented as
continually struggling after the law or principle of music, to a
condition which music alone completely realises' (Pater, _The
intellectual nature, not merely sensitive and delicate, but open,
The mouldering arch,
Shaded o'er by a larch,
Lives next door to Wilson the hosier
(that should be discoverable). But we hear most of the clear
religious Bailey came perhaps the thoughts expressed later in the
About a year after this, Keats went with his friend Brown on a
After Skiddaw, we walked to Ireby, the oldest market town in
cosmopolitanism of some of Keats's friends.
Notwithstanding the part which the Liberals take in the cause of
Napoleon, I cannot but think he has done more harm to the life of
* Especially as I have a black eye.
crime.' These passages, taken alone, even when we observe his
In this same letter he copies out for his correspondents several
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
I know three people of no wit at all, each distinct in his
In the second passage Keats is describing one of his friends:
thoughts and speculations freely enough to Bailey and to his
Socrates mankind may be made happy. I can imagine such happiness
itself. Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the rivers in
The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and
Surely, when Keats's education is considered, this, with all its
crudity, is not a little remarkable. It would not be easy to find
_Excursion_. We know it from _Endymion_, and the letter about the
Hier wird's Ereigniss.'
thou wast the deep glen--
Thou wast the mountain-top--the sage's pen--
The poet's harp--the voice of friends--the sun;
Thou wast the river--thou wast glory won;
Thou wast my clarion's blast--thou wast my steed--
My goblet full of wine--my topmost deed:--
Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!
O what a wild and harmonised tune
My spirit struck from all the beautiful!
And can I ever bid these joys farewell?
And he answers:
Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts.
half-heartedly; and of the further idea that beauty is not only
'tis the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might.
that sustaining Love
Which, through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst;
beauty. Hence, though well aware how little he has as yet of the
truth.' He writes of a passage in _Endymion_: 'The whole thing
Coleridge or Shelley, a poet pure and simple.
The common influence to which I refer was that of Wordsworth, and
reminiscent of Wordsworth's poem. Its Preface too reminds one
Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone,
Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind.
The reader will find this impression confirmed if he compares the
greatly, and Keats, of course, was writing without any conscious
On some bright essence could I lean, and lull
Myself to immortality: I prest
Nature's soft pillow in a wakeful rest.
But, gentle Orb! there came a nearer bliss--
My strange love came--Felicity's abyss!
She came, and thou didst fade, and fade away.
In spite of the dissimilarities, surely the 'wakeful rest' here
'None can usurp this height,' returned that shade,
'But those to whom the _miseries of the world_
Are misery, and will not let them rest.
_All else_ who find a haven in the world,
Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days,
If by a chance into this fane they come,
Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half.'
'Are there not thousands in the world,' said I,
Encouraged by the sooth voice of the shade,
'Who _love their fellows_ even to the death,
Who feel the giant agony of the world,
And more, like slaves to poor humanity,
Labour for mortal good?'
entirely. But I will add that there seems to me some reason to
 The Letters (except those to Miss Brawne, and a few others) have
punctuation, etc.; but for my present purpose these are usually
 Keats himself, it is strange to think, was born in the same year
 These passions were in his last two years overclouded at times,
 LII, C., LV, F. The quotations above are from XIV, XVI, C., XV,
thanked Keats for his bishopric.
 From the letter last quoted. See also CXVI, CXVIII, CXIX, C.,
 'Pain had no sting and pleasure's wreath no flower.'
 CXVI, C., CXXXVII, F. The word 'turn' in the last sentence but
two seems to be doubtful. Mr. Colvin reads 'have.'
 Keats's use of the word is suggested, probably, by Milton's
'pure intelligence of heaven.'
 CLXVI, F., LXXIII, C., LXXXI, F. In XLI, C., XLIV, F., occurs a
passage ending with the words, 'they are able to "_consecrate
Spirit of BEAUTY that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon?
 The first critic, I believe, who seriously attempted to
investigate Keats's mind, and the ideas that were trying to take
shape in some of his poems, was F. M. Owen, whose _John Keats, a
Study_ (1880) never attracted in her too brief life-time the
attention it deserved. Mr. Bridges's treatment of these ideas is
 A notable (but not isolated) remark, seeing that the poetic
 He contemplates even the study of metaphysics, LI, C., LIV, F.
 Cf. in addition to the letters already referred to, the obscure
question still remains whether a truth which is also beauty, or a
 CLV, C., CCVI, F. See on these sentences the Note at the end of
the lecture.
 An expression used in reference to Wordsworth, XXXIV, C., XXXVI,
 I have not space to dwell on this distinction, but I must warn
Selincourt's edition.
 That is, in 'half-knowledge,' 'doubts,' 'mysteries' (see p.
 The ultimate origin of the dream-passage in both poems may well
be Adam's dream in _Paradise Lost_, Book viii.:
She disappear'd, and left me dark: I waked
To find her, or for ever to deplore
Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure.
Keats alludes to this in XXII, C., XXIV, F.
 It is tempting to conjecture with Mr. Forman that the full-stop
The good die first,
And those whose hearts are dry as summer's dust
Burn to the socket.
composed, Shakespeare wrote, and he afterwards revised, the very
FAL. God save thy grace, King Hal! my royal Hal!
PIST. The heavens thee guard and keep, most royal imp of fame!
FAL. God save thee, my sweet boy!
KING. My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man.
CH. JUST. Have you your wits? Know you what 'tis you speak?
FAL. My King! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!
KING. I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane;
But being awaked I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:
Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn'd away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots:
Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.
For competence of life I will allow you,
That lack of means enforce you not to evil:
And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,
We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my lord,
To see perform'd the tenour of our word.
Set on.
Go, carry Sir John Falstaff to the Fleet;
Take all his company along with him.
What are our feelings during this scene? They will depend on our
Nym, thou hast spoke the right,
His heart is fracted and corroborate,
Now why did Shakespeare end his drama with a scene which, though
disapproval of that which he represents; and hence where _they_
disapprove and _he_ says nothing, they fancy that he does _not_
wheresomever he is.
imperative, and our station and its duties, and conscience, and
twenty-two yards of satin on trust from Master Dombledon the
absurdum_, had scarcely any self-respect, and only a respect for
make-believe, not merely as his tragic world is, but in a further
humorist, but as an object of ridicule and even of aversion. And
Yet all these excellent devices fail. They cause us momentary
The last words are significant. Morgann was conscious that he was
notwithstanding, "a man, take him for all in all," very highly
respectable for his genius and his learning.'
 Roetscher, _Shakespeare in seinen hoechsten Charaktergebilden_,
 Cf. Hazlitt, _Characters of Shakespear's Plays_.
 See Note at end of lecture.
 Panurge too was 'naturally subject to a kind of disease which at
 I seem to remember that, according to Gervinus, Shakespeare did
disgrace Sir Toby--by marrying him to Maria!
Coleridge's assertion that in _Antony and Cleopatra_ Shakespeare
It is curious to notice, for example, alike in books and in
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies.
Why, let us begin by asking, is _Antony and Cleopatra_, though so
And the structure of the play might seem at first to suggest this
exceedingly characteristic. When Antony in rage and desperation
brother-in-law; or did he merely mean it to be a source of future
Be you not troubled with the time, which drives
O'er your content these strong necessities;
But let determined things to destiny
Hold unbewailed their way.
'Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved,
Now leaves him.
positive element in the final tragic impression, the element of
Look, where they come:
Take but good note, and you shall see in him
The triple pillar of the world transformed
Into a strumpet's fool: behold and see.
With the next words the other aspect appears:
CLEO. If it be love indeed, tell me how much.
ANT. There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned.
CLEO. I'll set a bourne how far to be beloved.
ANT. Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.
Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space.
Kingdoms are clay: our dungy earth alike
Feeds beast as man: the nobleness of life
Is to do thus.
Here is the tragic excess, but with it the tragic greatness, the
the odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.
I here importune death awhile, until
Of many thousand kisses the poor last
I lay upon thy lips;
or the first words he utters when he hears of Cleopatra's death:
Unarm, Eros: the long day's task is done,
And we must sleep.
No rest but the grave for the pilgrim of love.
And he is more than love's pilgrim; he is love's martyr.
consummate art. When she cannot exert it on the present lover she
She looks like sleep,
As she would catch another Antony
In her strong toil of grace.
I am fire and air; my other elements
I give to baser life.
The fire and air which at death break from union with those other
We are to understand, surely, that Enobarbus dies of 'thought'
represented on a public stage in his time.
The scene is the first of the third Act. Here Ventidius says:
Caesar and Antony have ever won
More in their officer than person: Sossius,
One of my place in Syria, his lieutenant,
For quick accumulation of renown,
Which he achieved by the minute, lost his favour.
Plutarch (North, sec. 19) says that 'Sossius, one of Antonius'
Introduction and Dr. Furness's Preface.
Whose eye beck'd forth my wars, and call'd them home,
Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end,--
Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,
Beguil'd me to the very heart of loss.
 As this lecture was composed after the publication of my
_Shakespearean Tragedy_ I ignored in it, as far as possible, such
 'Now whilest Antonius was busie in this preparation, Octavia his
 The point of this remark is unaffected by the fact that the play
 Of the 'good' heroines, Imogen is the one who has most of this
spirit of fire and air; and this (in union, of course, with other
The answer of course will be that our biographical knowledge of
self-reproach and self-defence, his weariness of life and his
consciousness of immortal genius. And as, according to Mr. Lee's
And this is not all. As a matter of fact, the great majority of
attempting to define it further, and without dilating on its
This figure that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut:
There remain certain traditions and certain facts; and without
The Moor is of a free and open nature,
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so.
The king says that Hamlet,
being remiss,
Most generous, and free from all contrivings,
Will not peruse the foils.
disposition.
Lord! what fools these mortals be!
Shakespeare was the victim of a Cressida or even the lover of a
There remain the sonnets addressed to the friend. Even if it were
increased and special pleasure in the beauty of the young. If we
I have many enemies in Orsino's court,
But, come what may, I do adore thee so
That danger shall seem sport, and I will go.
infinitely stranger in a play of Shakespeare's, and it may be
slanders, or injuries of strangers or the world, and that he bore
He carried anger as a flint bears fire;
Who, much enforced, shows a hasty spark
And straight is cold again;
a charm
To make bad good and good provoke to harm.
Give me some music: music, moody food
Of us that trade in love:
--the words are Cleopatra's. Did Shakespeare as he wrote them
Again, if we may draw any conclusion from the frequency and the
Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,
And Phoebus gins arise,
The setting sun, and music at the close,
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last;
wonderful line in Sonnet 132,
And that full star that ushers in the even,
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west:
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all in rest.
And this feeling, though not often so solemn, is on the whole the
Stir with the lark to-morrow, gentle Norfolk.
I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,
The more you beat me I will fawn on you:
Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,
Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,
Unworthy as I am, to follow you.
This may show that Shakespeare was alive to the baseness of a
Knee-crooked court'sies and base spaniel-fawning;
his Antony exclaims:
the hearts
That spaniel'd me at heels, to whom I gave
Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets
On blossoming Caesar.
She loves him not, she wants the natural touch;
profoundly pathetic?
conditions. We find no hint, for example, in _Julius Caesar_ that
they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a jot further,
Some of the vices which seem to have been particularly odious to
position and his mind. Hamlet had never experienced
the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
and that make the patient soul weary of life; the man who had
experienced them was the writer of Sonnet 66, who cried for death
desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
suffice. 'Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar, and the
man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.
It is Isabella who says that; but it is scarcely in character;
Shakespeare himself is speaking.
To this I will add two remarks. To every one, I suppose, certain
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will;
and about those other words of his:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy;
Without adducing more of the endless but baffling material for a
Whether to this 'religion' he joined a more or less conventional
Happy is your grace,
That can translate the stubbornness of fortune
Into so quiet and so sweet a style.
Then is there mirth in heaven
When earthly things made even
Atone together.
If, again, the question were put to us, which of Shakespeare's
corresponds with our impression of Shakespeare, or rather of
 It was said of him, indeed, in his lifetime that, had he not
played some kingly parts in sport (_i.e._ on the stage), he would
 Nor, _vice versa_, does the possession of these latter qualities
former or of gentleness.
 Fuller may be handing down a tradition, but it is not safe to
 See, for example, Act IV. Sc. v., to which I know no parallel in
 I allude to Sonnet 110, Mr. Beeching's note on which seems to be
 It is perhaps most especially in his rendering of the shock and
I will weep for thee;
For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like
Another fall of man.
 There is nothing of this semi-reality, of course, in the
Rosaline corresponds roughly with Coleridge's view; and, without
 It is not implied that these scenes are certainly Shakespeare's;
 That experience, certainly in part and probably wholly, belongs
to an earlier time, since sonnets 138 and 144 were printed in the
 _The Sonnets of Shakespeare with an Introduction and Notes._
 I find that Mr. Beeching, in the Stratford Town edition of
Shakespeare (1907), has also urged these considerations.
 I do not mean to imply that Meres necessarily refers to the
sonnets we possess, or that all of these are likely to have been
 A fact to be remembered in regard to references to the social
position of the friend.
 Mr. Beeching's illustration of the friendship of the sonnets
from the friendship of Gray and Bonstetten is worth pages of
argument.
 In 125 the poet repudiates the accusation that his friendship is
 This does not imply that the Sonnets are as early as the _Two
Gentlemen of Verona_, and much less that they are earlier.
 This seems to be referred to in lines by John Davies of
 'Mistress Tearsheet' too 'would fain hear some music,' and
'Sneak's noise' had to be sent for (2 _Henry IV._, II. iv. 12).
 It is tempting, though not safe, to infer from the _Tempest_ and
overwhelming than that in which, after listening not without
difficulty to the writer of the first two Acts of _Pericles_,
suddenly, as the third opens, one hears the authentic voice:
Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges
That wash both heaven and hell.... The seaman's whistle
Is as a whisper in the ears of death,
imagined that he did more than touch up Acts I. and II. passes my
I may call attention to another point. Unless I mistake, there is
corresponds with the feeling of Timon's last speech, beginning,
Come not to me again: but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood:
a feeling made more explicit in the final speech of Alcibiades.
 The lily seems to be in almost all cases the Madonna lily. It is
 But there is something disappointing, and even estranging, in
says:
I trod upon a worm against my will,
But I wept for it.
 Three times in one drama Shakespeare refers to this detestable
 Nor can I recall any sign of liking, or even approval, of that
 The _locus classicus_, of course, is _Troilus and Cressida_, I.
 Of all the evils inflicted by man on man those chosen for
 Having written these paragraphs, I should like to disclaim the
 Allusions to puritans show at most what we take almost for
granted, that he did not like precisians or people hostile to the
 In the Sonnets, for example, there is an almost entire absence
According to Sonnet 129, lust in action is
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame;
but no word shows that it is also felt as alienation from God. It
 It is only this 'quiet but deep sense' that is significant. No
Shakespeare's.
 With the first compare, what to me has, though more faintly, the
If powers divine
Behold our human actions, as they do:
with the second, Helena's
It is not so with Him that all things knows
As 'tis with us that square our guess by shows;
But most it is presumption in us when
The help of heaven we count the act of men:
followed soon after by Lafeu's remark:
They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons
Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves
unknown fear.
 It is worth noting that the reference, which appears in the
First Quarto version of 'To be or not to be,' to 'an everlasting
judge,' disappears in the revised versions.
 The suggested inference, of course, is that this speech, thus
example of the suggested elaboration of a commonplace.)
 What actions in particular _his_ conscience approved and
disapproved is another question and one not relevant here.
 This does not at all imply to Shakespeare, so far as we see,
that evil is never to be forcibly resisted.
 I do not mean to reject the idea that in some passages in the
_may_ have been such a thought in the words,
And thence retire me to my Milan, where
Every third thought shall be my grave;
and also in those lines about prayer and pardon which close the
Epilogue, and to my ear come with a sudden effect of great
 It may be added that _As You Like It_, though idyllic, is not so
 This has been strongly urged and fully illustrated by Mr.
 It may be suggested that, in the catalogue above, I should have
I may add, however, another item to the catalogue. We do not feel
conditions under which his plays were produced. At any rate, such
I have begun with these questions because I sympathise with their
But my present subject is rather the tastes of the audience than
scaling-ladders, two street-scuffles, four single combats, four
Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous.
If we examine Shakespeare's battles we shall observe a certain
_Coriolanus_--scenes containing less than three hundred and fifty
But this is not all. Such purposes were also served by noises not
important, made no great difference to the dramas themselves.
stage.
movable scene, that of the Elizabethan stage was formed by the
Secondly, on the top of the tiring-house was the 'upper stage' or
('Hoboyes' were used also in the witch-scene just mentioned).
We have now to observe certain ways in which this stage with its
performance. We may safely assume that not less than a hundred of
The absence of scenery, however, will not wholly account for the
presume, to Burbage or Taylor, but even Mr. Vezin or Mr. Forbes
Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burned is Apollo's laurel-bough,
That sometime grew within this learned man.
activities, while stage-pictures demand very little; and
Shakespeare. Did they ever 'spell ruin to managers' if they were,
Look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east;
and to its mind's eye they were there. It looked at a shabby old
 This, one may suspect, was also the position of Webster, who
praises Shakespeare, but groups him with Dekker and Heywood, and
mentions him after Chapman, Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher
(1) There is no general presumption against interpolations in an
believing that 'Shakespeare's plays' contain a good deal that
Shakespeare never wrote. We cannot therefore simply take it for
published by himself, or by scrupulously careful men of letters
immediately after his death.
(3) Jonson defied his audience, yet he wrote a good deal that we
attributable to a conscious sacrifice of art to the tastes of the
 To us their first appearance is of interest chiefly because it
 I do not refer to the Globe.
 The latter, no doubt, accompanied by the band, except when the
clown played the tabor while he danced alone.
 This may possibly be one of the signs that _Macbeth_ was altered
 This question will not be answered by the citation of one famous
assistant
Sure, a continuation for this poem could be:
  above, I must add that, while my impression is that what has been
 When the lecture was given (in 1902) I went more fully into
details, having arrived at certain conclusions mainly by an
examination of Elizabethan dramas. I suppress them here because I
 This is a description of a public theatre. A private one, it
 'The doors are open, and the surfeited grooms Do mock their
charge with snores,' says Lady Macbeth on the stage below; and no
 This view, into the grounds of which I cannot go, implies that
difficulty about that.
 Perhaps. It seems necessary to suppose that the sides of the
 Where this contrivance was used at all it probably only
 It is possibly significant that _Macbeth_ and the _Tempest_,
plays containing more 'shews' than most, are exceptionally short.
 It suffices for this rough experiment to read a column in an
 I do not know whether the average size of our theatres differs
 I mean by a scene a section of a play before and after which the
 So it very nearly does in some Restoration comedies. In the _Way
 The 'back' stage, which had curtains, must, I suppose, have been
closing of the curtains, the kind of effect referred to in the
 I do not refer to such deliberate and sustained effort as a
reader may sometimes make. It is not commonly realised that
continuous attention to any imaginative or intellectual matter,
continuous, is comparatively easy.
 I am not referring here, or elsewhere, to such a moderate use of
 When, in the time of Malone and Steevens, the question was
hopelessly ludicrous.
 'Enter invisible' (a common stage-direction) means 'Enter in the
 Probably he never needed to think of the audience, but wrote
 Their abundance in _Hamlet_ results partly from the character of
disposition to shorten long poetical speeches.
In some of these lectures--for the duties and pleasures that have