1. Charles Wells, a former schoolmate of Tom for the Champion. Keats. 7. Charles Armitage Brown, John Hamilton Reyn2. Benjamin West (1738-1820), painter of histor-olds, and Charles Wentworth Dilke were all writers ical pictures, was an American who moved to and friends of Keats. Keats interrupted the writing England and became president of the Royal Acad-of this letter after the dash; beginning with "Brown emy. The Christ Rejected mentioned a few sen-& Dilke" he is writing several days after the pretences farther on is also by West. ceding sentences. 3. Keats's solution to a problem at least as old as 8. Christmas pantomimes were performed each Aristotle's Poetics: why do we take pleasure in the year at Drury Lane and Covent Garden theaters. aesthetic representation of a subject that in life 9. This famous and elusive phrase has been much would be ugly or painful? discussed. Keats coins it so as to distinguish 4. Keats's close friend Benjamin Haydon, painter between, on the one hand, a poetry that is eviof large-scale historical and religious pictures. dently shaped by the writer's personal interests and 5. Smith was one of the best-known literary wits beliefs and, on the other hand, a poetry of imperof the day; the others mentioned were men of let-sonality that records the writer's receptivity to the ters or of literary interests. "uncertainties" of experience. This second kind of 6. Edmund Kean, noted Shakespearean actor. His poetry, in which a sense of beauty overcomes con- popularity in the early 19th century was conten-siderations of truth versus falsehood, is that protious because he made no secret of his humble duced by the poet of "negative capability." Cf. class origins. Keats had written an article on Kean Keats's dislike, in his letter to John Hamilton Reyn


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LETTERS / 95 1


tainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason�


Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught


from the Penetralium1 of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content


with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us


no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.


Shelley's poem2 is out & there are words about its being objected too, as much as Queen Mab was. Poor Shelley I think he has his Quota of good qualities, in sooth la!! Write soon to your most sincere friend & affectionate Brother


John


To John Hamilton Reynolds'


[WORDSWORTH'S POETRY]


[February 3, 1818] My dear Reynolds, * * * It may be said that we ought to read our Contemporaries, that Words-


worth &c should have their due from us. but for the sake of a few fine imag


inative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain Philosophy


engendered in the whims of an Egotist�Every man has his speculations, but


every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage


and deceives himself�Many a man can travel to the very bourne2 of Heaven,


and yet want confidence to put down his halfseeing. Sancho3 will invent a


Journey heavenward as well as any body. We hate poetry that has a palpable


design upon us�and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches


pocket.4 Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's


soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.�How


beautiful are the retired flowers! how would they lose their beauty were they to


throng into the highway crying out, "admire me I am a violet! dote upon me I


am a primrose! Modern poets differ from the Elizabethans in this. Each of the


moderns like an Elector of Hanover governs his petty state, & knows how many


straws are swept daily from the Causeways in all his dominions & has a contin


ual itching that all the Housewives should have their coppers well scoured: the


antients were Emperors of large Emperors of vast Provinces, they had only


heard of the remote ones and scarcely cared to visit them.�I will cut all this�


I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt5 in particular�Why should we be


of the tribe of Manasseh, when we can wander with Esau?6 why should we kick


olds, February 3, 1818, of "poetry that has a pal-clerk and also an able poet and man of letters. pable design upon us" (p. 943). 2. Boundary.


1. The Latin penetralia signified the innermost 3. Sancho Panza, the earthy squire in Cervantes's and most secret parts of a temple. Don Quixote. 2. Laon and Cythna (1817), whose treatment of 4. I.e., sulks and refuses to interact with. incest created scandal and which had to be with-5. Leigh Hunt, a poet who earlier had strongly drawn by the author. Shelley revised and repub-influenced Keats's style. lished it as The Revolt of Islam (1818). In Queen 6. I.e., why should we carry on a conventional way Mab (1813) Shelley had presented a radical pro-of life (as did the tribe of Manasseh in Old Testa- gram for the achievement of a millennial earthly ment history) when we can become adventurers state through the elimination of "kings, priests, and (like Esau, who sold his birthright in Genesis statesmen." 25.29�34 and became an outlaw). 1. A close friend who was at this time an insurance


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94 4 / JOHN KEATS


against the Pricks, when we can walk on Roses? Why should we be owls, when


we can be Eagles? Why be teased with "nice Eyed wagtails," when we have in


sight "the Cherub Contemplation"?7�Why with Wordsworths "Matthew with


a bough of wilding in his hand" when we can have Jacques "under an oak


&c"8�The secret of the Bough of Wilding will run through your head faster


than I can write it�Old Matthew spoke to him some years ago on some noth


ing, & because he happens in an Evening Walk to imagine the figure of the old


man�he must stamp it down in black & white, and it is henceforth sacred�I


don't mean to deny Wordsworth's grandeur & Hunt's merit, but I mean to say


we need not be teazed with grandeur & merit�when we can have them uncon


taminated & unobtrusive. Let us have the old Poets, & robin Hood9 Your letter


and its sonnets gave me more pleasure than will the 4th Book of Childe Har


old1 & the whole of any body's life & opinions. * * *


Yr sincere friend and Coscribbler


John Keats.


To John Taylor1


[KEATS'S AXIOMS IN POETRY]


[February 27, 1818] My dear Taylor, Your alteration strikes me as being a great improvement�the page looks


much better. * * * It is a sorry thing for me that any one should have to


overcome Prejudices in reading my Verses�that affects me more than any


hypercriticism on any particular Passage. In Endymion I have most likely but


moved into the Go-cart from the leading strings.2 In Poetry I have a few Axi


oms, and you will see how far I am from their Centre. 1st I think Poetry should


surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity�it should strike the Reader


as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remem


brance�2nd Its touches of Beauty should never be half way therby making


the reader breathless instead of content: the rise, the progress, the setting of


imagery should like the Sun come natural natural too him�shine over him


and set soberly although in magnificence leaving him in the Luxury of twi


light�but it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it�and


this leads me on to another axiom. That if Poetry comes not as naturally as


the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all. However it may be with me


I cannot help looking into new countries with "O for a Muse of fire to


ascend!"3�If Endymion serves me as a Pioneer perhaps I ought to be content.


I have great reason to be content, for thank God I can read and perhaps


7. Milton, "II Penseroso," line 54. "Nice Eyed Endymion was being put through the press. wagtails": from Hunt's Nymphs. 2. Go-carts were the wheeled walkers in which 8. Shakespeare's As You Like It 2.1.31. The 19th-century toddlers learned to walk. Leading- Wordsworth phrase is from his poem "The Two strings were the harnesses with which they were April Mornings." A "wilding" is a wild apple tree. guided and supported while they learned. Keats's 9. A reference to two sonnets on Robin Hood, point appears to be that as a poet he has not written by Reynolds, which he had sent to Keats. advanced and may even have regressed in Endym1. Canto 4 of Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage ion. was being eagerly awaited by English readers. 3. Altered from Shakespeare's Henry V, Prologue, 1. Partner in the publishing firm of Taylor and line 1. Hessey, to whom Keats wrote this letter while


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LETTERS / 95 1


understand Shakspeare to his depths, and I have I am sure many friends, who,


if I fail, will attribute any change in my Life and Temper to Humbleness rather


than to Pride�to a cowering under the Wings of great Poets rather than to a


Bitterness that I am not appreciated. I am anxious to get Endymion printed


that I may forget it and proceed. * * *


Your sincere and obligd friend


John Keats�


P.S. You shall have a sho[r]t Preface in good time� To John Hamilton Reynolds


[MILTON, WORDSWORTH, AND THE CHAMBERS OF HUMAN LIFE]


[May 3, 1818] My dear Reynolds.


4


* 4 Were I to study physic or rather Medicine again,�I feel it would not make the least difference in my Poetry; when the Mind is in its infancy a Bias


is in reality a Bias, but when we have acquired more strength, a Rias becomes


no Bias. Every department of knowledge we see excellent and calculated


towards a great whole. I am so convinced of this, that I am glad at not having


given away my medical Books, which I shall again look over to keep alive the


little I know thitherwards; and moreover intend through you and Rice to


become a sort of Pip-civilian.1 An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking


people�it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation,


to ease the Burden of the Mystery:2 a thing I begin to understand a little, and


which weighed upon you in the most gloomy and true sentence in your Letter.


The difference of high Sensations with and without knowledge appears to me


this�in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep


and being blown up again without wings3 and with all [the] horror of a Case


bare shoulderd Creature�in the former case, our shoulders are fledged4 and


we go thro' the same Ftr air and space without fear. * * * You say "I fear there is little chance of any thing else in this life." You seem


by that to have been going through with a more painful and acute test zest the


same labyrinth that I have�I have come to the same conclusion thus far. My


Branchings out therefrom have been numerous: one of them is the consider


ation of Wordsworth's genius and as a help, in the manner of gold being the


meridian Line of worldly wealth,�how he differs from Milton.5�And here I


have nothing but surmises, from an uncertainty whether Miltons apparently


less anxiety for Humanity proceeds from his seeing further or no than Words-


worth: And whether Wordsworth has in truth epic passions, and martyrs him


self to the human heart, the main region of his song6�In regard to his genius


alone�we find what he says true as far as we have experienced and we can


1. Apparently "a small-scale layman." James Rice, Observatory, England, is the reference for measura lawyer, was one of Keats's favorite friends. ing degrees of longitude), so Milton is the standard 2. Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey," line 38. of poetic value, by which we may measure Words3. Recalls the description of Satan's flight through worth. Chaos (Milton, Paradise Lost 2.933-34). 6. In the Prospectus to The Recluse, Wordsworth, 4. Grow wings. laying out his poetic program, had identified "the 5. I.e., as gold is the standard of material wealth Mind of Man" as "My haunt, and the main region (in the way that the meridian line of Greenwich of my song" (lines 40�41).


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94 6 / JOHN KEATS


judge no further but by larger experience�for axioms in philosophy are not


axioms until they are proved upon our pulses: We read fine things but


never feel them to [the] full until we have gone the same steps as the Author.�


I know this is not plain; you will know exactly my meaning when I say, that


now I shall relish Hamlet more than I ever have done�Or, better�You are


sensible no man can set down Venery7 as a bestial or joyless thing until he is


sick of it and therefore all philosophizing on it would be mere wording. Until


we are sick, we understand not;�in fine, as Byron says, "Knowledge is Sor


row";8 and I go on to say that "Sorrow is Wisdom"�and further for aught we


can know for certainty! "Wisdom is folly." * * * 1 will return to Wordsworth�whether or no he has an extended vision or a


circumscribed grandeur�whether he is an eagle in his nest, or on the wing�


And to be more explicit and to show you how tall I stand by the giant, I will


put down a simile of human life as far as I now perceive it; that is, to the point


to which I say we both have arrived at�Well�I compare human life to a large


Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of


the rest being as yet shut upon me�The first we step into we call the infant


or thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think�We


remain there a long while, and notwithstanding the doors of the second Cham


ber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to hasten to


it; but are at length imperceptibly impelled by the awakening of the thinking


principle�within us�we no sooner get into the second Chamber, which 1


shall call the Chamber of Maiden-Thought,9 than we become intoxicated with


the light and the atmosphere, we see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think


of delaying there for ever in delight: However among the effects this breathing


is father of is that tremendous one of sharpening one's vision into the head


heart and nature of Man�of convincing ones nerves that the World is full of


Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression�whereby This Cham


ber of Maiden Thought becomes gradually darken'd and at the same time on


all sides of it many doors are set open�but all dark�all leading to dark pas


sages�We see not the ballance of good and evil. We are in a Mist�We are


now in that state�We feel the "burden of the Mystery," To this point was


Wordsworth come, as far as I can conceive when he wrote "Tintern Abbey"


and it seems to me that his Genius is explorative of those dark Passages. Now


if we live, and go on thinking, we too shall explore them, he is a Genius and


superior [to] us, in so far as he can, more than we, make discoveries, and shed


a light in them�Here I must think Wordsworth is deeper than Milton�


though I think it has depended more upon the general and gregarious advance


of intellect, than individual greatness of Mind�From the Paradise Lost and


the other Works of Milton, I hope it is not too presuming, even between


ourselves to say, his Philosophy, human and divine, may be tolerably under


stood by one not much advanced in years, In his time englishmen were just


emancipated from a great superstition�and Men had got hold of certain


points and resting places in reasoning which were too newly born to be


doubted, and too much oppressed opposed by the Mass of Europe not to be


thought etherial and authentically divine�who could gainsay his ideas on


virtue, vice, and Chastity in Comus, just at the time of the dismissal of Cod


pieces' and a hundred other disgraces? who would not rest satisfied with his


7. Sexual indulgence. in "maiden voyage") of a first undertaking. 8. Manfred 1. 1.10: "Sorrow is knowledge." 1. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the codpiece 9. I.e., innocent thought, with the implication (as was a flap, often ornamental, that covered an open


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LETTERS / 95 1


hintings at good and evil in the Paradise Lost, when just free from the inqui


sition and burrning in Smithfield?2 The Reformation produced such immedi


ate and great benefits, that Protestantism was considered under the immediate


eye of heaven, and its own remaining Dogmas and superstitions, then, as it


were, regenerated, constituted those resting places and seeming sure points


of Reasoning�from that I have mentioned, Milton, whatever he may have


thought in the sequel,3 appears to have been content with these by his writ


ings�He did not think into the human heart, as Wordsworth has done�Yet


Milton as a Philosop[h]er, had sure as great powers as Wordsworth�What is


then to be inferr'd? O many things�It proves there is really a grand march of


intellect�, It proves that a mighty providence subdues the mightiest Minds


to the service of the time being, whether it be in human Knowledge or Reli


gion� 41 * * Tom4 has spit a leetle blood this afternoon, and that is rather a


damper�but I know�the truth is there is something real in the World Your


third Chamber of Life shall be a lucky and a gentle one�stored with the wine


of love�and the Bread of Friendship� * * *


Your affectionate friend


John Keats.


To Richard Woodhouse1


[A POET HAS NO IDENTITY]


[October 27, 1818] My dear Woodhouse, Your Letter gave me a great satisfaction; more on account of its friendliness,


than any relish of that matter in it which is accounted so acceptable in the


"genus irritabile"2 The best answer 1 can give you is in a clerklike manner to


make some observations on two principle points, which seem to point like


indices into the midst of the whole pro and con, about genius, and views and


atchievements and ambition and coetera. 1st As to the poetical Character


itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort


distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing


per se and stands alone) it is not itself�it has no self�it is every thing and


nothing�It has no character�it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto,3 be


it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated�It has as much


delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.4 What shocks the virtuous phi


losopher, delights the camelion5 Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the


dark side ol things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because


they both end in speculation.6 A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in


ing in the front of men's breeches. In Milton's and letters. masque the chastity of a young lady is put to the 2. "The irritable race," a phrase Horace had proof by the evil enchanter Comus. applied to poets (Epistles 2.2.102).


2. An open place northwest of the walls of the City 3. Hazlitt had defined gusto in his 1816 essay as of London where, in the 16th century, heretics "power or passion" (p. 538). were burned. 4. Iago is the villain in Shakespeare's Othello and 3. Later on. Imogen the virtuous heroine in his Cymheline. 4. Keats's younger brother, then eighteen, who 5. The chameleon is a lizard that camouflages was dying of tuberculosis. itself by changing its color to match its surround1. A young lawyer wilh literary interests who early ings. recognized Keats's talents and prepared, or pre-6. I.e., without affecting our practical judgment or served, manuscript copies of many of his poems actions. Cf. Keats's discussion of the poet of


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94 8 / JOHN KEATS


existence; because he has no Identity�he is continually in for7�and filling


some other Body�The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who


are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable


attribute�the poet has none; no identity�he is certainly the most unpoetical


of all God's Creatures. If then he has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the


Wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very


instant [have] been cogitating on the Characters of saturn and Ops?8 It is a


wretched thing to confess; but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can


be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature�how


can it, when I have no nature? When I am in a room with People if I ever am


free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home


to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to to press upon


me9 that, I am in a very little time an[ni]hilated�not only among Men; it


would be the same in a Nursery of children: I know not whether I make myself


wholly understood: I hope enough so to let you see that no dependence is to


be placed on what I said that day. In the second place I will speak of my views, and of the life I purpose to


myself�I am ambitious of doing the world some good: if I should be spared


that may be the work of maturer years�-in the interval I will assay to reach to


as high a summit in Poetry as the nerve bestowed upon me will suffer. The


faint conceptions I have of Poems to come brings the blood frequently into


my forehead�All I hope is that I may not lose all interest in human affairs�


that the solitary indifference I feel for applause even from the finest Spirits,


will not blunt any acuteness of vision I may have. I do not think it will�I feel


assured I should write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the


Beautiful even if my night's labours should be burnt every morning and no


eye ever shine upon them. But even now I am perhaps not speaking from


myself; but from some character in whose soul I now live. I am sure however


that this next sentence is from myself. I feel your anxiety, good opinion and


friendliness in the highest degree, and am Your's most sincerely


John Keats


To George and Georgiana Keats1


[THE VALE OF SOUL-MAKING]


[February 14-May 3, 1819] My dear Brother & Sister� �" I have this moment received a note from Haslam2 in which he expects


the death of his Father who has been for some time in a state of insensibility�


"negative capability" in his letter to George and 9. Perhaps "so to press upon me." Thomas Keats begun on December 21, 1817 1. Keats's brother and his wife, who had emigrated


(p. 942). to Louisville, Kentucky, in 1818. This is part of a 7. Instead of "in for," Keats may have intended to long letter that Keats wrote over a period of several write "informing." months, and into which he transcribed several of 8. Characters in Keats's Hyperion. Woodhouse his poems, including "Ode to Psyche." The date of had recently written Keats to express concern at a this first extract is March 19. remark by the poet that, because former writers 2. William Haslam, a young businessman and had preempted the best poetic materials and styles, close friend. there was nothing new left for the modern poet.


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LETTERS / 95 1


his mother bears up he says very well�I shall go to [town] tommorrow to see


him. This is the world�thus we cannot expect to give way many hours to


pleasure�Circumstances are like Clouds continually gathering and bursting�


While we are laughing the seed of some trouble is put into he the wide arable


land of events�while we are laughing it sprouts [it] grows and suddenly bears


a poison fruit which we must pluck�Even so we have leisure to reason on


the misfortunes of our friends; our own touch us too nearly for words. Very


few men have ever arrived at a complete disinterestedness3 of Mind: very few


have been influenced by a pure desire of the benefit of others�in the greater


part of the Benefactors of & to Humanity some meretricious motive has sullied


their greatness�some melodramatic scenery has facinated them�From the


manner in which I feel Haslam's misfortune I perceive how far I am from any


humble standard of disinterestedness.�Yet this feeling ought to be carried to


its highest pitch, as there is no fear of its ever injuring society�which it would


do I fear pushed to an extremity�For in wild nature the Hawk would loose


his Breakfast of Robins and the Robin his of Worms The Lion must starve as


well as the swallow�The greater part of Men make their way with the same


instinctiveness, the same unwandering eye from their purposes, the same ani


mal eagerness as the Hawk�The Hawk wants a Mate, so does the Man�look


at them both they set about it and procure on[e] in the same manner�They


want both a nest and they both set about one in the same manner�they get


their food in the same manner�The noble animal Man for his amusement


smokes his pipe�the Hawk balances about the Clouds�that is the only dif


ference of their leisures. This it is that makes the Amusement of Life�to a


speculative Mind. I go among the Feilds and catch a glimpse of a stoat4 or a


fieldmouse peeping out of the withered grass�the creature hath a purpose


and its eyes are bright with it�I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see


a Man hurrying along�to what? The Creature has a purpose and his eyes are


bright with it. But then as Wordsworth says, "we have all one human heart"5�


there is an ellectric fire in human nature tending to purify�so that among


these human creature[s] there is continually some birth of new heroism�The


pity is that we must wonder at it: as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish�I


have no doubt that thousands of people never heard of have had hearts


completely disinterested: I can remember but two�Socrates and Jesus�


their Histories evince it�What I heard a little time ago, Taylor observe with


respect to Socrates, may be said of Jesus�That he was so great as man that


though he transmitted no writing of his own to posterity, we have his Mind


and his sayings and his greatness handed to us by others. It is to be lamented


that the history of the latter was written and revised by Men interested in the


pious frauds of Religion. Yet through all this I see his splendour. Even here


though I myself am pursueing the same instinctive course as the veriest human


animal you can think of�I am however young writing at random�straining


at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness�without knowing the


bearing of any one assertion of any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free


from sin? May there not be superior beings amused with any graceful, though


instinctive attitude my mind [may] fall into, as I am entertained with the alert


ness of a Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer? Though a quarrel in the streets is a


thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest Man


3. Transcendence of self-interest, of one's selfish 4. A weasel. instincts. 5. "The Old Cumberland Beggar," line 153.


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95 0 / JOHN KEATS


shows a grace in his quarrel�By a superior being our reasoning[s] may take


the same tone�though erroneous they may be fine�This is the very thing in


which consists poetry; and if so it is not so fine a thing as philosophy�For


the same reason that an eagle is not so fine a thing as a truth�Give me this


credit�Do you not think I strive�to know myself? Give me this credit�and


you will not think that on my own accou[n]t I repeat Milton's lines "How charming is divine Philosophy


Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose


But musical as is Apollo's lute"�6 No�no for myself�feeling grateful as I do to have got into a state of mind


to relish them properly�Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced�


Even a Proverb is no proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it� * * * * * * I have been reading lately two very different books Robertson's America


and Voltaire's Siecle De Louis xiv7 It is like walking arm and arm between


Pizarro and the great-little Monarch.8 In How lementabl[e] a case do we see


the great body of the people in both instances: in the first, where Men might


seem to inherit quiet of Mind from unsophisticated senses; from uncontami


nation of civilisation; and especially from their being as it were estranged from


the mutual helps of Society and its mutual injuries�and thereby more imme


diately under the Protection of Providence�even there they had mortal pains


to bear as bad; or even worse than Baliffs,9 Debts and Poverties of civilised


Life�The whole appears to resolve into this�that Man is originally "a poor


forked creature"1 subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest,


destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other. If he improves


by degrees his bodily accommodations and comforts�at each stage, at each


accent there are waiting for him a fresh set of annoyances�he is mortal and


there is still a heaven with its Stars abov[e] his head. The most interesting


question that can come before us is, How far by the persevering endeavours


of a seldom appearing Socrates Mankind may be made happy�I can imagine


such happiness carried to an extreme�but what must it end in?�Death�


and who could in such a case bear with death�the whole troubles of life


which are now frittered away in a series of years, would the[n] be accumulated


for the last days of a being who instead of hailing its approach, would leave


this world as Eve left Paradise�But in truth I do not at all believe in this sort


of perfectibility�the nature of the world will not admit of it�the inhabitants


of the world will correspond to itself�Let the fish philosophise the ice away


from the Rivers in winter time and they shall be at continual play in the tepid


delight of summer. Look at the Poles and at the sands of Africa, Whirlpools


and volcanoes�Let men exterminate them and I will say that they may arrive


at earthly Happiness�The point at which Man may arrive is as far as the


paralel state in inanimate nature and no further�For instance suppose a rose


to have sensation, it blooms on a beautiful morning it enjoys itself�but there


comes a cold wind, a hot sun�it can not escape it, it cannot destroy its annoy-


ances�they are as native to the world as itself : no more can man be happy in


6. Comns, lines 475�77. exploits are described in Robertson's America. The 7. Two books of history, Voltaire's Le Siecle de "Monarch" is Louis XIV of France. Louis XIV (1751) and William Robertson's The 9. Bailiffs: officers of the law whose duties History of America (1777). In this second extract included making arrests for had debts. from the journal-letter, Keats is writing toward the 1. Shakespeare's King Lear 3.4.95�97. Lear savs end of April (on the 21st or 28th). of "Poor Tom," "Unaccommodated man is no more 8. Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish explorer whose but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art."


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LETTERS / 95 1


spite, the world[l]y elements will prey upon his nature�The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is "a vale of tears" from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven�What a little circumscribe[d] straightened notion! Call the world if you Please "The vale of Soul-making" Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms tor human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it) I say "Soul making" Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence�There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions�but they are not Souls the till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception� they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God� how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them�so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because I think it a grander system of salvation than the chrysteain religion�or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation2�This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years�These three Materials are the Intelligence�the human heart (as distinguished from intelligence or Mind) and the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the Son/ or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive�and yet 1 think I perceive it� that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible�I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read�I will call the human heart the horn Bookused in that School�and I will call the Child ahle to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, It is the Minds Bible, it is the Minds experience, it is the teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity�As various as the Lives of Men are�so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the sparks of his own essence�This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity�I am convinced that many difficulties which christians labour under would vanish before it�There is one wh[i]ch even now Strikes me � the Salvation of Children�In them the Spark or intelligence returns to God without any identity�it having had no time to learn of, and be altered by, the heart�or seat of the human Passions�It is pretty generally suspected that the christian scheme has been coppied from the ancient persian and greek Philosophers. Why may they not have made this simple thing even more simple for common apprehension by introducing Mediators and Personages in the same manner as in the hethen mythology abstractions are personified�Seri


2. Keats is struggling for an analog)' that will that we possess at birth and thus to shape it into a embody his solution to the ancient riddle of evil, rich and coherent "identity," or "soul." This result as an alternative to what he understands to be the provides a justification ("salvation") for our suffer- Christian view: that evil exists as a test of the indi-ing in terms of our earthly life: i.e., experience is vidual's worthiness of salvation in heaven, and this its own reward. world is only a proving ground for a later and better 3. A child's primer, which used to consist of a life. Keats proposes that the function of the human sheet of paper mounted on thin wood, protected experience of sorrow and pain is to feed and dis-by a sheet of transparent horn. cipline the formless and unstocked "intelligence"


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95 2 / JOHN KEATS


ously I think it probable that this System of Soul-making�may have been the Parent of all the more palpable and personal Schemes of Redemption, among the Zoroastrians the Christians and the Hindoos. For as one part of the human species must have their carved Jupiter; so another part must have the palpable and named Mediatior and saviour, their Christ their Oromanes and their Vishnu4�If what I have said should not be plain enough, as I fear it may not be, I will [put] you in the place where I began in this series of thoughts�I mean, I began by seeing how man was formed by circumstances�and what are circumstances?�but touchstones of his heart�? and what are touch stones?�but proovings of his hearrt?5�and what are proovings of his heart but fortifiers or alterers of his nature? and what is his altered nature but his soul?�and what was his soul before it came into the world and had These provings and alterations and perfectionings?�An intelligences�without Identity�and how is this Identity to be made? Through the medium of the Heart? And how is the heart to become this Medium but in a world of Circumstances?� There now I think what with Poetry and Theology you may thank your Stars that my pen is not very long winded� * * *


This is the 3d of May & every thing is in delightful forwardness; the violets are not withered, before the peeping of the first rose; You must let me know every thing, how parcels go & come, what papers you have, & what Newspapers you want, & other things�God bless you my dear Brother & Sister


Your ever Affectionate Brother


John Keats�


To Fanny Brawne


[FANNY BRAWNE AS KEATS'S "FAIR STAR"]


[July 25, 1819]


My sweet Girl,


I hope you did not blame me much for not obeying your request of a Letter on Saturday: we have had four in our small room playing at cards night and morning leaving me no undisturb'd opportunity to write. Now Bice and Martin are gone I am at liberty. Brown to my sorrow confirms the account you give of your ill health. You cannot conceive how I ache to be with you: how I would die for one hour for what is in the world? I say you cannot conceive; it is impossible you should look with such eyes upon me as I have upon you: it cannot be. Forgive me if I wander a little this evening, for I have been all day employ'd in a very abstr[a]ct Poem1 and I am in deep love with you�two things which must excuse me. I have, believe me, not been an age in letting you take possession of me; the very first week I knew you I wrote myself your vassal; but burnt the Letter as the very next time I saw you I thought you manifested some dislike to me. If you should ever feel for Man at the first sight what I did for you, I am lost. Yet I should not quarrel with you, but hate myself if such a thing were to happen�only I should burst if the thing were not as fine


4. The deity who creates and preserves the world, religion of ancient Persia. in Hindu belief. Oromanes (Ahriman) was the 5. I.e., experiences by which the human heart is principle of evil, locked in a persisting struggle with put to the test. Ormazd, the principle of good, in the Zoroastrian 1. Probably The Fall of Hyperion.


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LETTERS / 953 1


as a Man as you are as a Woman. Perhaps I am too vehement, then fancy me on my knees, especially when I mention a part of you Letter which hurt me; you say speaking of Mr. Severn2 "but you must be satisfied in knowing that I admired you much more than your friend." My dear love, I cannot believe there ever was or ever could be any thing to admire in me especially as far as sight goes�I cannot be admired, I am not a thing to be admired. You are, I love you; all I can bring you is a swooning admiration of your Beauty. I hold that place among Men which snub-nos'd brunettes with meeting eyebrows do among women�they are trash to me�unless I should find one among them with a fire in her heart like the one that burns in mine, You absorb me in spite of myself�you alone: for I look not forward with any pleasure to what is call'd being settled in the world; I tremble at domestic cares�yet for you 1 would meet them, though if it would leave you the happier I would rather die than do so. I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute. I hate the world: it batters too much the wings of my self-will, and would I could take a sweet poison from your lips to send me out of it. From no others would I take it. I am indeed astonish'd to find myself so careless of all cha[r]ms but yours�remembring as I do the time when even a bit of rib- band was a matter of interest with me. What softer words can I find for you after this�what it is I will not read. Nor will I say more here, but in a Postscript answer any thing else you may have mentioned in your Letter in so many words�for I am distracted with a thousand thoughts. I will imagine you Venus


tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a Hethen.3


Your's ever, fair Star,


John Keats.


To Percy Bysshe Shelley1


[LOAD EVERY RIFT WITH ORE]


[August 16, 1820]


My dear Shelley,


I am very much gratified that you, in a foreign country, and with a mind almost over occupied, should write to me in the strain of the Letter beside me. If I do not take advantage of your invitation it will be prevented by a circumstance I have very much at heart to prophesy2�There is no doubt that an english winter would put an end to me, and do so in a lingering hateful manner, therefore I must either voyage or journey to Italy as a soldier marches up to a battery. My nerves at present are the worst part of me, yet they feel soothed when I think that come what extreme may, I shall not be destined to remain in one spot long enough to take a hatred of any four particular bedposts. I am glad you take any pleasure in my poor Poem;3�which I would


2. Joseph Severn, who later looked after Keats in in Pisa. Rome during his final illness. 2. His own death. 3. See Keats's sonnet "Bright star" (p. 898) for 3. Keats's Endymion, Shelley had written, con- parallels to this and other remarks in the present tains treasures, "though treasures poured forth letter. with indistinct profusion." Keats here responds 1. Written in reply to a letter urging Keats (who with advice in kind. was ill) to spend the winter with the Shelleys


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95 4 / JOHN KEATS


willingly take the trouble to unwrite, if possible, did I care so much as I have done about Reputation. 1 received a copy of the Cenci,4 as from yourself from Hunt. There is only one part of it 1 am judge of; the Poetry, and dramatic effect, which by many spirits now a days is considered the mammon. A modern work it is said must have a purpose,5 which may be the God�a n artist must serve Mammon�he must have "self concentration" selfishness perhaps. You 1 am sure will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and "load every rift"'' of your subject with ore. The thought of such discipline must fall like cold chains upon you, who perhaps never sat with your wings furl'd for six Months together. And is not this extraordinary talk for the writer of Endymion? whose mind was like a pack of scattered cards�I am pick'd up and sorted to a pip.7 My Imagination is a Monastry and I am its Monk�you must explain my metap"8 to yourself. I am in expectation of Prometheus1' every day. Could I have my own wish for its interest effected you would have it still in manuscript�or be but now putting an end to the second act. I remember you advising me not to publish my first-blights, on Hampstead heath�1 am returning advice upon your hands. Most of the Poems in the volume I send you' have been written above two years, and would never have been publish'd but from a hope of gain; so you see I am inclined enough to take your advice now. I must exp[r]ess once more my deep sense of your kindness, adding my sincere thanks and respects for M" Shelley. In the hope of soon seeing you I remain


most sincerely yours,


John Keats�


To Charles Brown1


[KEATS'S LAST LETTER]


Rome. 30 November 1820.


My dear Brown,


'Tis the most difficult thing in the world to me to write a letter. My stomach continues so bad, that I feel it worse on opening any book,�yet 1 am much better than I was in Quarantine.2 Then I am afraid to encounter the proing and conning of any thing interesting to me in England. I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence. God knows how it would have been�but it appears to me�however, I will not speak of that subject. I must have been at Bedhampton nearly at the time you were writing to me from Chichester*�how unfortunate�and to pass


4. Shelley's blank-verse tragedy, The Cenci, had been published in the spring of 1820. 5. Wordsworth had said this in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads. For "Mammon" see Matthew 6.24 and Luke 16.13: "Ye cannot serve God and mammon." 6. From Spenser's description of the Cave of Mammon in The Faerie Queene 2.7.28: "With rich metall loaded every rifte." 7. Perfectly ordered; all tile suits in the deck matched up ("pips" are the conventional spots on playing cards). 8. Metaphysics. 9. Prometheus Unbound, of which Shelley had promised Keats a copy. 1. Keats's volume of 1820. including Lamia, The Eve of St. Agnes, and the odes. When Shelley drowned he had this small book open in his pocket. 1. Written to Keats's friend Charles Armitage Brown from the house on the Spanish Steps, in the Pi a//a di Spagna, where Keats was being tended in his mortal illness by the devoted Joseph Severn. 2. When it landed at Maples, Keats's ship had been quarantined for ten miserably hot days. 3. Bedhampton and Chichester are both near the harbor town of Portsmouth, where Keats had embarked for Naples two months before.


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MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY / 95 5


on the river too! There was my star predominant!4 I cannot answer any thing in your letter, which followed me from Naples to Rome, because I am afraid to look it over again. I am so weak (in mind) that I cannot bear the sight of any hand writing of a friend 1 love so much as I do you. Yet I ride the little horse,�and, at my worst, even in Quarantine, summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of my life. There is one thought enough to kill me�I have been well, healthy, alert &c, walking with hers�and now�the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem are great enemies to the recover)' of the stomach. There, you rogue, 1 put you to the torture,�but you must bring your philosophy to bear�as I do mine, really�or how should I be able to live? Dr Clarke is very attentive to me; he says, there is very little the matter with my lungs, but my stomach, he says, is very bad. I am well disappointed in hearing good news from George,�for it runs in my head we shall all die young. 1 have not written to x x x x x yet,6 which he must think very neglectful; being anxious to send him a good account of my health, I have delayed it from week to week. If 1 recover, 1 will do all in my power to correct the mistakes made during sickness; and if I should not, all my faults will be forgiven. I shall write to x x x to-morrow, or next day. I will write to x x x x x in the middle of next week. Severn is very well, though he leads so dull a life with me. Remember me to all friends, and tell x x x x I should not have left London without taking leave of him, but from being so low in body and mind. Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess;�and also a note to my sister�who walks about my imagination like a ghost�she is so like Tom.7 I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a


letter. I always made an awkward bow.


God bless you!


John Keats.


4. I.e., that was mv usual luck. Cf. Shakespeare's crosses for the names til Keats's friends to conceal The Winters Tale 1.2.202-03: "It is a bawdy their identities. planet, that will strike / Where 'tis predominant." 7. Keats's youngest brother, whom Fanny, his only 5. Fanny Brawne. sister, closely resembled, had died of tuberculosis 6. Charles Brown, whose manuscript transcrip-on December 1, 1818. George was John Keats's tion is the only text for this letter, substituted younger brother. MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY 1797-1851


Percy Shelley wrote of his young wife, in the Dedication to Laon and Cythnu:


They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth,


Of glorious parents, thou aspiring Child.


The "glorious parents" were William Godwin, the leading reformer and radical philosopher of the time, and Man' Wollstonecraft, famed as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft had died as the result of childbed fever incurred when she gave birth to Mary. Four years later Godwin married a widow, Mary Jane Clairmont, who soon had more than she could cope with trying to manage a family of five children of diverse parentage, amid increasing financial difficulties. Mary bitterly resented her stepmother but adored her father, who, she later said, "was


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95 6 / MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY


my God�and I remember many childish instances of the excess of attachment I bore for him."


To ease the situation Mary was sent at the age of fourteen to live in Dundee, Scotland, with the family of William Baxter, an admirer of Godwin. After two pleasant years roaming the countryside, daydreaming, and writing stories (which have been lost), she returned in 1814 to her father's house in London. There, at the age of sixteen, she encountered the twenty-one-year-old poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a devotee of Godwin's and an almost daily visitor, who had become estranged from his wife, Harriet. The young people fell in love; within a few months Mary was pregnant. On July 28 they ran off to Europe, taking with them her stepsister Jane Clairmont, who later changed her name to Claire. Mary described their happy though heedless wanderings through France, Switzerland, and Germany in her first book, History1 of a Six Weeks' Tour, published anonymously in 1817.


Back in England she gave premature birth to a daughter who lived only twelve days; a year later, in 1816, she bore a son, William. Shelley was usually in financial difficulties and often had to hide from his creditors to avoid arrest. Nonetheless, he contributed substantial sums (borrowed against his expectations as heir to his father, Sir Timothy) to Godwin's support, even though Godwin, despite his earlier advocacy of free love, refused to countenance Shelley's liaison with his daughter. Claire Clairmont meanwhile sought out and had a brief affair with Byron, who left her pregnant. In the spring of 1816, the Shelleys went abroad again with Claire, and at the latter's behest settled in Geneva, where Byron, accompanied by his physician and friend John William Polidori, set up residence in the nearby Villa Diodati. Mary Shelley tells us, in the introduction to Frankenstein, how her imagination was fired by their animated conversations during many social evenings. Encouraged and assisted by Shelley, she wrote Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, her story of the man of science who, with catastrophic consequences, seeks to conquer nature, rival the divinity, and make new life, and who then withholds love from the life he has made. Since its anonymous publication in 1818, the novel has never been out of print. As the basis for innumerable plays (beginning in 1823) and movies (beginning in 1910), the story has become a central myth of modern Western culture.


The last six years of Mary's life with her husband, spent first in England and then in Italy, were filled with disasters. In October 1816 her sensitive and moody half- sister, Fanny Imlay, feeling herself an unloved burden on the Godwin household, committed suicide by an overdose of laudanum. Two months later Shelley's abandoned wife, Harriet, pregnant by an unknown lover, drowned herself in the Serpentine lake at Hyde Park in London. Shelley at once married Mary, but the courts denied him custody of Harriet's two children on the grounds that he was morally unfit to rear them. In September 1818 came the death of Mary's third baby, Clara, followed less than nine months later by the death from malaria, rampant in Rome at the time, of her adored son, William: "We came to Italy thinking to do Shelley's health good," Mary wrote bitterly, "but the Climate is not [by] any means warm enough to be of benefit to him & yet it is that that has destroyed my two children." These tragedies and her own ill health threw her into a depression that was only partly relieved by the birth of a second son, Percy Florence, in November 1819, and was deepened again the next spring by a miscarriage, as well as by the death of Claire's daughter, Allegra, whom Byron had placed in an Italian convent. Mary Shelley's habitual reserve, which masked the depth of her feelings, now became an apathy that caused her to withdraw, emotionally, from her husband. He became distant in turn, giving their friend Jane Williams the affection he denied his wife. When he was drowned in the Gulf of Spezia in July 1822, Mary was left with a persisting sense that she had failed her husband when he most needed her.


An impoverished widow of twenty-four, she returned to England with two ambitions. One was to disseminate the poetry and to rescue the character of Shelley, whom she idolized in memory; the other was to support by her writings her surviving son.


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MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY / 95 7


Her only financial assistance was a small allowance given her by Sir Timothy Shelley, which he threatened to cut off if she wrote a biography of his radical and scandal- haunted son. In the remaining quarter century of her life, Mary Shelley became a notable success as a professional woman of letters, publishing as "The Author of 'Frankenstein' " to comply with Sir Timothy's demand that she never use the Shelley name. After Frankenstein she wrote first a novella and then five more novels, of which the first two are the best. The novella, Matilda, written in 1819 but left in manuscript and not published until 1959, deals with the disastrous results of a father's incestuous passion for a daughter who resembles his dead wife. Valperga (1823), set in the Italian Middle Ages, is a historical romance about a quasi-Napoleonic figure who sacrifices his love and humanity to his lust for political power and about the two women whom he betrays. The Last Man (1826), set in the twenty-first century, tracing the progress of a plague that destroys all of humankind except for one survivor, the novel's narrator, almost equals Frankenstein in its analysis of human isolation. This novel also served Shelley as a forum in which to write autobiographically, for as she reflected in a diary entry, her own companions, like her ever-mourning narrator's, were gone, become "the people of the grave." She in fact arranged to endow two characters in the novel, her narrator's associates, with traits recognizably those of Percy Shelley and Byron, whose death in Greece occurred as she began writing.


Shelley all this while also contributed short stories to the gift books and literary annuals that were a publishing phenomenon during the 1820s and 1830s: deluxe volumes, gorgeously bound and lavishly illustrated, whose literary selections mingled pieces by esteemed authors�Scott, Hemans, Wordsworth, Coleridge�with contributions by the most fashionable members of the aristocracy. (All writers, however, were by the makers of gift books deemed less important thari the visual artists: the stories or poems were often commissioned to accompany preexisting illustrations.) In


1835�39 she contributed to the Cabinet Cyclopedia five volumes of admirable biographical and critical studies of Continental authors. She also published several separate editions of her husband's writings in verse and prose. In accordance with what was then standard editorial procedure, she altered and emended Shelley's texts; she also added prefaces and notes, relating Shelley's writings to the circumstances of his life and thought, that have been an important resource for scholars of Romantic literature.


Not until old Sir Timothy died in 1844, leaving his title and estate to her son, did she find herself in comfortable circumstances. Her last years were cheered by the devotion of her son�who was an amiable man but entirely lacked the genius of his parents�and by her close friendship with Jane St. John, an admirer of Shelley's poetry, whom Sir Percy Florence married in 1848. Mary Shelley died three years later, at the age of fifty-three.


During her widowhood she craved social acceptance and status and, although she maintained liberal principles, tried hard, by adapting herself to conventional standards in her writings and her life, to work free from the onus of what her contemporaries regarded as the scandalous careers of her mother, father, and husband. In later life she wrote an apologia in her journal, dated October 21, 1838, that reveals the stresses of a life spent trying to measure up to the example, yet escape the bad reputations, of her parents and husband.


In the first place, with regard to "the good cause"�the cause of the advancement of freedom and knowledge, of the rights of women, etc.�I am not a person of opinions. . . . Some have a passion for reforming the world; others do not cling to particular opinions. That my parents and Shelley were of the former class, makes me respect it. . . . For myself, I earnestly desire the good and enlightenment of my fellow creatures, and see all, in the present course, tending to the same, and rejoice; but I am not for violent extremes, which only brings on an injurious reaction. . . .


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95 8 / MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY


To hang back, as I do, brings a penalty. 1 was nursed and fed with a love of glory. To be something great and good was the precept given me by my father; Shelley reiterated it. . . . But Shelley died, and I was alone. . . . My total friendlessness, my horror of pushing, and inability to put myself forward unless led, cherished and supported�all this has sunk me in a state of loneliness no other human being ever before, I believe, endured�except Robinson Crusoe. .. .


But I have never crouched to society�never sought it unworthily. If I have never written to vindicate the rights of women, I have ever defended women when oppressed. At every risk I have befriended and supported victims to the social system; but I make no boast, for in truth it is simple justice I perform; and so am I still reviled for being worldly. . . .


Such as I have written appears to me the exact truth.


From The Last Man


Introduction1


I visited Naples in the year 1818. On the 8th of December of that year, my companion and I crossed the Bay, to visit the antiquities which are scattered on the shores of Baiae.2 The translucent and shining waters of the calm sea covered fragments of old Roman villas, which were interlaced by sea-weed, and received diamond tints from the chequering of the sun-beams; the blue and pellucid element was such as Galatea might have skimmed in her car of mother of pearl;3 or Cleopatra, more fitly than the Nile, have chosen as the path of her magic ship.4 Though it was winter, the atmosphere seemed more appropriate to early spring; and its genial warmth contributed to inspire those sensations of placid delight, which are the portion of every traveller, as he lingers, loath to quit the tranquil bays and radiant promontories of Baiae.


We visited the so called Elysian Fields and Avernus:5 and wandered through various ruined temples, baths, and classic spots; at length we entered the gloomy cavern of the Cumaean Sibyl.6 Our Lazzeroni7 bore flaring torches, which shone red, and almost dusky, in the murky subterranean passages, whose darkness thirstily surrounding them, seemed eager to imbibe more and more of the element of light. We passed by a natural archway, leading to a second gallery, and enquired, if we could not enter there also. The guides pointed to the reflection of their torches on the water that paved it, leaving us


1. A contribution to Romantic-period investigations of the nature of creativity, Shelley's Introduction to The Last Man (composed 1824 and published at the start of 1826) enigmatically identifies the novel that follows as a strange blend of creative work, transcription, and translation, in which biography (Shelley's personal history of suffering) is subsumed by history and myth. Playing with the convention of Gothic romances that involves the protagonist's discovery of a decaying, all but illegible, manuscript from the past, Shelley leaves it an open question whether she is the editor or author of her "sibylline leaves." 2. Shelley begins with an actual event�the visit she and Percy paid in December 1818 to the ancient Roman resort of Baiae near Naples. See "Ode to the West Wind," lines 32-34 (p. 774). 3. Name given to a sea nymph in Greek mythology. 4. See Enobarbus's description of Cleopatra's ship in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra 2.2.197


203. 5. Sites near Naples named for places in mythology: the fields thought to be inhabited after death by those favored by the gods, and the entrance to the underworld, by tradition located at Lake Avernus. 6. The prophetess, inspired by the god Apollo, whose mad frenzies and cryptic accounts of future history are most famously described in the Aeneid, book 6. Other accounts describe how the sibyl wrote her prophecies on leaves, which she placed at the entrance to her cave; when the wind dispersed them, they became unintelligible. Coleridge had titled his 1817 collection of poems Sibylline Leaves so as to allude, he said, "to the fragmentary and widely scattered state in which [the poems] have been long suffered to remain." 7. Generic term for the poor of Naples, here employed as guides.


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THE LAST MAN / 959


to form our own conclusion; but adding it was a pity, for it led to the Sibyl's Cave. Our curiosity and enthusiasm were excited by this circumstance, and we insisted upon attempting the passage. As is usually the case in the prosecution of such enterprizes, the difficulties decreased on examination. We found, on each side of the humid pathway, "dry land for the sole of the foot."8 At length we arrived at a large, desert, dark cavern, which the Lazzeroni assured us was the Sibyl's Cave. We were sufficiently disappointed�Yet we examined it with care, as if its blank, rocky walls could still bear trace of celestial visitant. On one side was a small opening. Whither does this lead? we asked: can we enter here?�"Questo poi, no,"9�said the wild looking savage, who held the torch; "you can advance but a short distance, and nobody visits it."


"Nevertheless, I will try it," said my companion; "it may lead to the real cavern. Shall 1 go alone, or will you accompany me?"


1 signified my readiness to proceed, but our guides protested against such a measure. With great volubility, in their native Neapolitan dialect, with which we were not very familiar, they told us that there were spectres, that the roof would fall in, that it was too narrow to admit us, that there was a deep hole within, filled with water, and we might be drowned. My friend shortened the harangue, by taking the man's torch from him; and we proceeded alone.


The passage, which at first scarcely admitted us, quickly grew narrower and lower; we were almost bent double; yet still we persisted in making our way through it. At length we entered a wider space, and the low roof heightened; but, as we congratulated ourselves on this change, our torch was extinguished by a current of air, and we were left in utter darkness. The guides bring with them materials for renewing the light, but we had none�our only resource was to return as we came. We groped round the widened space to find the entrance, and after a time fancied that we had succeeded. This proved however to be a second passage, which evidently ascended. It terminated like the former; though something approaching to a ray, we could not tell whence, shed a very doubtful twilight in the space. By degrees, our eyes grew somewhat accustomed to this dimness, and we perceived that there was no direct passage leading us further; but that it was possible to climb one side of the cavern to a low arch at top, which promised a more easy path, from whence we now discovered that this light proceeded. With considerable difficulty we scrambled up, and came to another passage with still more of illumination, and this led to another ascent like the former.


After a succession of these, which our resolution alone permitted us to surmount, we arrived at a wide cavern with an arched dome-like roof. An aperture in the midst let in the light of heaven; but this was overgrown with brambles and underwood, which acted as a veil, obscuring the day, and giving a solemn religious hue to the apartment. It was spacious, and nearly circular, with a raised seat of stone, about the size of a Grecian couch, at one end. The only sign that life had been here, was the perfect snow-white skeleton of a goat, which had probably not perceived the opening as it grazed on the hill above, and had fallen headlong. Ages perhaps had elapsed since this catastrophe; and the ruin it had made above, had been repaired by the growth of vegetation during many hundred summers.


8. Allusion to Genesis 8.9: the dove sent by Noah 9. Definitely not! (Italian), from the ark finds "no rest for the sole of her foot."


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96 0 / MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY


The rest of the furniture of the cavern consisted of piles of leaves, fragments of bark, and a white filmy substance, resembling the inner part of the green hood which shelters the grain of the unripe Indian corn. We were fatigued by our struggles to attain this point, and seated ourselves on the rocky couch, while the sounds of tinkling sheep-bells, and shout of shepherd-boy, reached us from above.


At length my friend, who had taken up some of the leaves strewed about, exclaimed, "This is the Sibyl's cave; these are Sibylline leaves." On examination, we found that all the leaves, bark, and other substances were traced with written characters. What appeared to us more astonishing, was that these writings were expressed in various languages: some unknown to my companion, ancient Chaldee,1 and Egyptian hieroglyphics, old as the Pyramids. Stranger still, some were in modern dialects, English and Italian. We could make out little by the dim light, but they seemed to contain prophecies, detailed relations of events but lately passed; names, now well known, but of modern date; and often exclamations of exultation or woe, of victory or defeat, were traced on their thin scant pages. This was certainly the Sibyl's Cave; not indeed exactly as Virgil describes it; but the whole of this land had been so convulsed by earthquake and volcano, that the change was not wonderful, though the traces of ruin were effaced by time; and we probably owed the preservation of these leaves, to the accident which had closed the mouth of the cavern, and the swift-growing vegetation which had rendered its sole opening impervious to the storm. We made a hasty selection of such of the leaves, whose writing one at least of us could understand; and then, laden with our treasure, we bade adieu to the dim hypaethric2 cavern, and after much difficulty succeeded in rejoining our guides.


During our stay at Naples, we often returned to this cave, sometimes alone, skimming the sun-lit sea, and each time added to our store. Since that period, whenever the world's circumstance has not imperiously called me away, or the temper of my mind impeded such study, I have been employed in deciphering these sacred remains. Their meaning, wondrous and eloquent, has often repaid my toil, soothing me in sorrow, and exciting my imagination to daring flights, through the immensity of nature and the mind of man. For awhile my labours were not solitary; but that time is gone; and, with the selected and matchless companion of my toils, their dearest reward is also lost to me�


Di mie tenere frondi altro lavoro Credea mostrarte; e qual fero pianeta Ne' nvidio insieme, o mio nobil tesoro?3


I present the public with my latest discoveries in the slight Sibylline pages. Scattered and unconnected as they were, I have been obliged to add links, and model the work into a consistent form. But the main substance rests on the truths contained in these poetic rhapsodies, and the divine intuition which the Cumaean damsel obtained from heaven.


I have often wondered at the subject of her verses, and at the English dress of the Latin poet. Sometimes I have thought that, obscure and chaotic as they are, they owe their present form to me, their decipherer. As if we should give


1. Language of ancient Babylon, famed for its (1304�1374): "From my tender leaves, I thought astronomical and astrological knowledge. to show you a different work, and what fierce 2. Open to the sky. planet ended our being together, oh, my noble 3. Quoted from the Italian of a sonnet by Petrarch treasure?"


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to another artist, the painted fragments which form the mosaic copy of Raphael's Transfiguration in St. Peter's; he would put them together in a form, whose mode would be fashioned by his own peculiar mind and talent.4 Doubtless the leaves of the Cumaean Sibyl have suffered distortion and diminution of interest and excellence in my hands. My only excuse for thus transforming them, is that they were unintelligible in their pristine condition.


My labours have cheered long hours of solitude, and taken me out of a world, which has averted its once benignant face from me, to one glowing with imagination and power. Will my readers ask how I could find solace from the narration of misery and woeful change? This is one of the mysteries of our nature, which holds full sway over me, and from whose influence I cannot escape. I confess, that I have not been unmoved by the development of the tale; and that I have been depressed, nay, agonized, at some parts of the recital, which I have faithfully transcribed from my materials. Yet such is human nature, that the excitement of mind was dear to me, and that the imagination, painter of tempest and earthquake, or, worse, the stormy and ruin-fraught passions of man, softened my real sorrows and endless regrets, by clothing these fictitious ones in that ideality, which takes the mortal sting from pain.


I hardly know whether this apology is necessary. For the merits of my adaptation and translation must decide how far I have well bestowed my time and imperfect powers, in giving form and substance to the frail and attenuated Leaves of the Sibyl.


1824 1826


The Mortal Immortal1


A Tale


JULY 16, 1833.�This is a memorable anniversary for me; on it I complete my three hundred and twenty-third year! The Wandering Jew?2�certainly not. More than eighteen centuries have passed over his head. In comparison with him, I am a very young Immortal.


Am I, then, immortal? This is a question which I have asked myself, by day and night, for now three hundred and three years, and yet cannot answer it. 1 detected a gray hair amidst my brown locks this very day�that surely signifies decay. Yet it may have remained concealed there for three hundred years� for some persons have become entirely white-headed before twenty years of age.


I will tell my story, and my reader shall judge for me. I will tell my story, and so contrive to pass some few hours of a long eternity, become so wearisome to me. For ever! Can it be? to live for ever! I have heard of enchantments, in


4. The Italian Renaissance artist Raphael's paint-consequences of scientific ambition with Shelley's ing of the transfiguration of Christ is copied in best-known novel. With a certain irony, given its mosaic on the altarpiece of the Cappella Clemen-original setting in a volume that its publisher martina of St. Peter's in Rome. keted as a lasting memento of affection that might I. Cf. Keats's Endymion 1.843^14: "if this earthly be purchased for a loved one, "The Mortal Immorlove has power to make / Men's being mortal, tal" also examines the question of whether love can immortal." "The Mortal Immortal" is one of the survive time's ravages if beauty does not. sixteen stories Shelley during her career contrib-2. The man who, according to legend, taunted uted to The Keepsake, a gift book published Christ on the road to the crucifixion and was annually between 1828 and 1857. This tale shares therefore condemned to wander the earth until its first-person narrative form and interest in the Judgment Day.


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which the victims were plunged into a deep sleep, to wake, after a hundred years, as fresh as ever: I have heard of the Seven Sleepers3�thus to be immortal would not be so burthensome: but, oh! the weight of never-ending time� the tedious passage of the still-succeeding hours! How happy was the fabled Nourjahad!4- -But to my task.


All the world has heard of Cornelius Agrippa.5 His memory is as immortal as his arts have made me. All the world has also heard of his scholar, who, unawares, raised the foul fiend during his master's absence, and was destroyed by him.6 The report, true or false, of this accident, was attended with many inconveniences to the renowned philosopher. All his scholars at once deserted him�his servants disappeared. He had no one near him to put coals on his ever-burning fires while he slept, or to attend to the changeful colours of his medicines while he studied. Experiment after experiment failed, because one pair of hands was insufficient to complete them: the dark spirits laughed at him for not being able to retain a single mortal in his service.


I was then very young�very poor�and very much in love. 1 had been for about a year the pupil of Cornelius, though I was absent when this accident took place. On my return, my friends implored me not to return to the alchymist's abode. I trembled as I listened to the dire tale they told; I required no second warning; and when Cornelius came and offered me a purse of gold if I would remain under his roof, I felt as if Satan himself tempted me. My teeth chattered�my hair stood on end:�I ran off as fast as my trembling knees would permit.


My failing steps were directed whither for two years they had every evening been attracted,�a gently bubbling spring of pure living waters, beside which lingered a dark-haired girl, whose beaming eyes were fixed on the path I was accustomed each night to tread. I cannot remember the hour when I did not love Bertha; we had been neighbours and playmates from infancy�her parents, like mine, were of humble life, yet respectable�our attachment had been a source of pleasure to them. In an evil hour, a malignant fever carried off both her father and mother, and Bertha became an orphan. She would have found a home beneath my paternal roof, but, unfortunately, the old lady of the near castle, rich, childless, and solitary, declared her intention to adopt her. Henceforth Bertha was clad in silk�inhabited a marble palace�and was looked on as being highly favoured by fortune. But in her new situation among her new associates, Bertha remained true to the friend of her humbler days; she often visited the cottage of my father, and when forbidden to go thither, she would stray towards the neighbouring wood, and meet me beside its shady fountain.


She often declared that she owed no duty to her new protectress equal in sanctity to that which bound us. Yet still I was too poor to marry, and she grew weary of being tormented on my account. She had a haughty but an impatient


3. Legendary Christian youths who took refuge in works are among the books that Victor Frankena cave in Ephesus to escape their pagan persecu-stein reads when young and that prompt him to tors and slept for 187 years. begin "the search of the philosopher's stone" 4. Title character of Frances Sheridan's Oriental (which had the power to transmute base metal into tale of I 767, who is tricked into believing that he gold) and of "the elixir of life"; his "favourite has become immortal and that, when he sleeps, he authors" also promise to teach the "raising of does so for several years at a time. For an excerpt ghosts or devils." from Nourjahad, see "Romantic Orientalism" at 6. The story was told by Robert Southey in a 1798 Norton Literature Online. poem entitled "Cornelius Agrippa: A Ballad of a 5. The 16th-century German researcher of the Young Man That Would Read Unlawful Books." occult and the alchemical sciences. Agrippa's


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spirit, and grew angry at the obstacles that prevented our union. We met now after an absence, and she had been sorely beset while I was away; she complained bitterly, and almost reproached me for being poor. I replied hastily,�


"I am honest, if I am poor!�were I not, 1 might soon become rich!" This exclamation produced a thousand questions. I feared to shock her by owning the truth, but she drew it from me; and then, casting a look of disdain on me, she said�


"You pretend to love, and you fear to face the Devil lor my sake!"


I protested that 1 had only dreaded to offend her;�while she dwelt on the magnitude of the reward that I should receive. Thus encouraged�shamed by her�led on by love and hope, laughing at my late fears, with quick steps and a light heart, I returned to accept the offers of the alchymist, and was instantly installed in my office.


A year passed away. I became possessed of no insignificant sum of money. Custom had banished my fears. In spite of the most painful vigilance, I had never detected the trace of a cloven foot; nor was the studious silence of our abode ever disturbed by demoniac howls. I still continued my stolen interviews with Bertha, and Hope dawned on me�Hope�but not perfect joy; for Bertha fancied that love and security were enemies, and her pleasure was to divide them in my bosom. Though true of heart, she was somewhat of a coquette in manner; and I was jealous as a Turk. She slighted me in a thousand ways, yet would never acknowledge herself to be in the wrong. She would drive me mad with anger, and then force me to beg her pardon. Sometimes she fancied that I was not sufficiently submissive, and then she had some story of a rival, favoured by her protectress. She was surrounded by silk-clad youths�the rich and gay�What chance had the sad-robed scholar of Cornelius compared with these?


On one occasion, the philosopher made such large demands upon my time, that I was unable to meet her as I was wont. He was engaged in some mighty work, and I was forced to remain, day and night, feeding his furnaces and watching his chemical preparations. Bertha waited for me in vain at the fountain. I ler haughty spirit fired at this neglect; and when at last 1 stole out during the few short minutes allotted to me for slumber, and hoped to be consoled by her, she received me with disdain, dismissed me in scorn, and vowed that any man should possess her hand rather than he who could not be in two places at once for her sake. She would be revenged!�And truly she was. In my dingy retreat I heard that she had been hunting, attended by Albert Hoffer. Albert Hoffer was favoured by her protectress, and the three passed in cavalcade before my smoky window. Methought that they mentioned my name� it was followed by a laugh of derision, as her dark eyes glanced contemptuously towards my abode.


Jealousy, with all its venom, and all its misery, entered my breast. Now I shed a torrent of tears, to think that I should never call her mine; and, anon, I imprecated a thousand curses on her inconstancy. Yet, still I must stir the fires of the alchymist, still attend on the changes of his unintelligible medicines.


Cornelius had watched for three days and nights, nor closed his eyes. The progress of his alembics7 was slower than he expected: in spite of his anxiety, sleep weighed upon his eyelids. Again and again he threw off drowsiness with


7. Distilling apparatuses that Agrippa uses in his alchemical investigations.


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more than human energy; again and again it stole away his senses. He eyed his crucibles wistfully. "Not ready yet," he murmured; "will another night pass before the work is accomplished? Winzy,8 you are vigilant�you are faithful� you have slept, my boy�you slept last night. Look at that glass vessel. The liquid it contains is of a soft rose-colour: the moment it begins to change its hue, awaken me�till then I may close my eyes. First, it will turn white, and then emit golden flashes; but wait not till then; when the rose-colour fades, rouse me." I scarcely heard the last words, muttered, as they were, in sleep. Even then he did not quite yield to nature. "Winzy, my boy," he again said, "do not touch the vessel�do not put it to your lips; it is a philter9�a philter to cure love; you would not cease to love your Bertha�beware to drink!"


And he slept. His venerable head sunk on his breast, and I scarce heard his regular breathing. For a few minutes I watched the vessel�the rosy hue of the liquid remained unchanged. Then my thoughts wandered�they visited the fountain, and dwelt on a thousand charming scenes never to be renewed� never! Serpents and adders were in my heart as the word "Never!" half formed itself on my lips. False girl!�false and cruel! Never more would she smile on me as that evening she smiled on Albert. Worthless, detested woman! I would not remain unrevenged�she should see Albert expire at her feet�she should die beneath my vengeance. She had smiled in disdain and triumph�she knew my wretchedness and her power. Yet what power had she?�the power of exciting my hate�my utter scorn�my�oh, all but indifference! Could I attain that�could I regard her with careless eyes, transferring my rejected love to one fairer and more true, that were indeed a victory!


A bright flash darted before my eyes. I had forgotten the medicine of the adept; I gazed on it with wonder: flashes of admirable beauty, more bright than those which the diamond emits when the sun's rays are on it, glanced from the surface of the liquid; an odour the most fragrant and grateful stole over my sense; the vessel seemed one globe of living radiance, lovely to the eye, and most inviting to the taste. The first thought, instinctively inspired by the grosser sense, was, I will�I must drink. I raised the vessel to my lips. "It will cure me of love�of torture!" Already I had quaffed half of the most delicious liquor ever tasted by the palate of man, when the philosopher stirred. I started�I dropped the glass�the fluid flamed and glanced along the floor, while I felt Cornelius's gripe at my throat, as he shrieked aloud, "Wretch! you have destroyed the labour of my life!"


The philosopher was totally unaware that I had drunk any portion of his drug. His idea was, and I gave a tacit assent to it, that I had raised the vessel from curiosity, and that, frighted at its brightness, and the flashes of intense light it gave forth, I had let it fall. I never undeceived him. The fire of the medicine was quenched�the fragrance died away�he grew calm, as a philosopher should under the heaviest trials, and dismissed me to rest.


I will not attempt to describe the sleep of glory and bliss which bathed my soul in paradise during the remaining hours of that memorable night. Words would be faint and shallow types of my enjoyment, or of the gladness that possessed my bosom when I woke. I trod air�my thoughts were in heaven. Earth appeared heaven, and my inheritance upon it was to be one trance of delight. "This it is to be cured of love," I thought; "I will see Bertha this day,


8. The narrator's name suggests the Scots winze, 9. Magic potion, meaning "curse."


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and she will find her lover cold and regardless; too happy to be disdainful, yet how utterly indifferent to her!"


The hours danced away. The philosopher, secure that he had once succeeded, and believing that he might again, began to concoct the same medicine once more. He was shut up with his books and drugs, and I had a holiday. I dressed myself with care; I looked in an old but polished shield, which served me for a mirror; methought my good looks had wonderfully improved. I hurried beyond the precincts of the town, joy in my soul, the beauty of heaven and earth around me. I turned my steps towards the castle�I could look on its lofty turrets with lightness of heart, for I was cured of love. My Bertha saw me afar off, as I came up the avenue. I know not what sudden impulse animated her bosom, but at the sight, she sprung with a light fawn-like bound down the marble steps, and was hastening towards me. But I had been perceived by another person. The old high-born hag, who called herself her protectress, and was her tyrant, had seen me, also; she hobbled, panting, up the terrace; a page, as ugly as herself, held up her train, and fanned her as she hurried along, and stopped my fair girl with a "How, now, my bold mistress? whither so fast? Back to your cage�hawks are abroad!"1


Bertha clasped her hands�her eyes were still bent on my approaching figure. I saw the contest. How I abhorred the old crone who checked the kind impulses of my Bertha's softening heart. Hitherto, respect for her rank had caused me to avoid the lady of the castle; now I disdained such trivial considerations. I was cured of love, and lifted above all human fears; I hastened forwards, and soon reached the terrace. How lovely Bertha looked! her eyes flashing fire, her cheeks glowing with impatience and anger, she was a thousand times more graceful and charming than ever�I no longer loved�Oh! no, I adored�worshipped�idolized her!


She had that morning been persecuted, with more than usual vehemence, to consent to an immediate marriage with my rival. She was reproached with the encouragement that she had shown him�she was threatened with being turned out of doors with disgrace and shame. Her proud spirit rose in arms at the threat; but when she remembered the scorn that she had heaped upon me, and how, perhaps, she had thus lost one whom she now regarded as her only friend, she wept with remorse and rage. At that moment I appeared. "O, Winzy!" she exclaimed, "take me to your mother's cot; swiftly let me leave the detested luxuries and wretchedness of this noble dwelling�take me to poverty and happiness."


I clasped her in my arms with transport. The old lady was speechless with fury, and broke forth into invective only when we were far on our road to my natal cottage. My mother received the fair fugitive, escaped from a gilt cage to nature and liberty, with tenderness and joy; my father, who loved her, welcomed her heartily; it was a day of rejoicing, which did not need the addition of the celestial potion of the alchymist to steep me in delight.


Soon after this eventful day, I became the husband of Bertha. I ceased to be the scholar of Cornelius, but I continued his friend. I always felt grateful to him for having, unawares, procured me that delicious draught of a divine elixir, which, instead of curing me of love (sad cure! solitary and joyless remedy for evils which seem blessings to the memory), had inspired me with courage and resolution, thus winning for me an inestimable treasure in my Bertha.


1. In the Keepsake volume this is the scene that the artist and engraver picture.


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I often called to mind that period of trance-like inebriation with wonder. The drink of Cornelius had not fulfilled the task for which he affirmed that it had been prepared, but its effects were more potent and blissful than words can express. They had faded by degrees, yet they lingered long�and painted life in hues of splendour. Bertha often wondered at my lightness of heart and unaccustomed gaiety; for, before, I had been rather serious, or even sad, in my disposition. She loved me the better for my cheerful temper, and our days were winged by joy.


Five years afterwards I was suddenly summoned to the bedside of the dying Cornelius. He had sent for me in haste, conjuring my instant presence. I found him stretched on his pallet, enfeebled even to death; all of life that yet remained animated his piercing eyes, and they were fixed on a glass vessel, full of a roseate liquid.


"Behold," he said, in a broken and inward voice, "the vanity of human wishes! a second time my hopes are about to be crowned, a second time they are destroyed. Look at that liquor�you remember five years ago I had prepared the same, with the same success;�then, as now, my thirsting lips expected to taste the immortal elixir�you dashed it from me! and at present it is too late."


He spoke with difficulty, and fell back on his pillow. I could not help saying,�


"How, revered master, can a cure for love restore you to life?"


A faint smile gleamed across his face as I listened earnestly to his scarcely intelligible answer. "A cure for love and for all things�the Elixir of Immortality. Ah! if now I might drink, I should live for ever!"


As he spoke, a golden flash gleamed from the fluid; a well-remembered fragrance stole over the air; he raised himself, all weak as he was�strength seemed miraculously to re-enter his frame�he stretched forth his hand�a loud explosion startled me�a ray of fire shot up from the elixir, and the glass vessel which contained it was shivered to atoms! I ttirned my eyes towards the philosopher; he had fallen back�his eyes were glassy�his features rigid�he was dead!


But I lived, and was to live for ever! So said the unfortunate alchymist, and for a few days I believed his words. I remembered the glorious drunkenness that had followed mv stolen draught. I reflected on the change I had felt in my frame�in my soul. The bounding elasticity of the one�the buoyant lightness of the other. I surveyed myself in a mirror, and could perceive no change in my features during the space of the five years which had elapsed. I remembered the radiant hues and grateful scent of that delicious beverage�worthy the gift it was capable of bestowing 1 was, then, liVlMOBTAL!


A few days after I laughed at my credulity. The old proverb, that "a prophet is least regarded in his own country," was true with respect to me and my defunct master. I loved him as a man�I respected him as a sage�but I derided the notion that he could command the powers of darkness, and laughed at the superstitious fears with which he was regarded by the vulgar. He was a wise philosopher, but had no acquaintance with any spirits but those clad in flesh and blood. His science was simply human; and human science, I soon persuaded myself, could never conquer nature's laws so far as to imprison the soul for ever within its carnal habitation. Cornelius had brewed a soul-refreshing drink�more inebriating than wine�sweeter and more fragrant than any fruit: it possessed probably strong medicinal powers, imparting gladness to the heart and vigor to the limbs; but its effccts would wear out;


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already were they diminished in my frame. I was a lucky fellow to have quaffed health and joyous spirits, and perhaps long life, at my master's hands; but my good fortune ended there: longevity was far different from immortality.


I continued to entertain this belief for many years. Sometimes a thought stole across me�Was the alchymist indeed deceived? But my habitual credence was, that I should meet the fate of all the children of Adam at my appointed time�a little late, but still at a natural age. Yet it was certain that I retained a wonderfully youthful look. I was laughed at for my vanity in consulting the mirror so often, but I consulted it in vain�my brow was untrenched� my cheeks�my eyes�my whole person continued as untarnished as in my twentieth year.


I was troubled. I looked at the faded beauty of Bertha�I seemed more like her son. By degrees our neighbours began to make similar observations, and I found at last that I went by the name of the Scholar bewitched. Bertha herself grew uneasy. She became jealous and peevish, and at length she began to question me. We had no children; we were all in all to each other; and though, as she grew older, her vivacious spirit became a little allied to ill-temper, and her beauty sadly diminished, I cherished her in my heart as the mistress I had idolized, the wife I had sought and won with such perfect love.


At last our situation became intolerable: Bertha was fifty�I twenty years of age. I had, in very shame, in some measure adopted the habits of a more advanced age; I no longer mingled in the dance among the young and gay, but my heart bounded along with them while I restrained my feet; and a sorry figure I cut among the Nestors2 of our village. But before the time I mention, things were altered�we were universally shunned; we were�at least, 1 was� reported to have kept up an iniquitous acquaintance with some of my former master's supposed friends. Poor Bertha was pitied, but deserted. I was regarded with horror and detestation.


What was to be done? we sat by our winter fire�poverty had made itself felt, for none would buy the produce of my farm; and often I had been forced to journey twenty miles, to some place where I was not known, to dispose of our property. It is true we had saved something for an evil day�that day was come.


We sat by our lone fireside�the old-hearted youth and his antiquated wife. Again Bertha insisted on knowing the truth; she recapitulated all she had ever heard said about me, and added her own observations. She conjured me to cast off the spell; she described how much more comely gray hairs were than my chestnut locks; she descanted on the reverence and respect due to age� how preferable to the slight regard paid to mere children: could 1 imagine that the despicable gifts of youth and good looks outweighed disgrace, hatred, and scorn? Nay, in the end I should be burnt as a dealer in the black art, while she, to whom I had not deigned to communicate any portion of my good fortune, might be stoned as my accomplice. At length she insinuated that I must share my secret with her, and bestow on her like benefits to those I myself enjoyed, or she would denounce me�and then she burst into tears.


Thus beset, methought it was the best way to tell the truth. I revealed it as tenderly as I could, and spoke only of a very long life, not of immortality� which representation, indeed, coincided best with my own ideas. Whenended, I rose and said,


"And now, my Bertha, will you denounce the lover of your youth?�You will


2. Village elders. In the Iliad Nestor is the old and battle-scarred advisor to the Greek army.


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not, I know. But it is too hard, my poor wife, that you should suffer from my ill-luck and the accursed arts of Cornelius. I will leave you�you have wealth enough, and friends will return in my absence. I will go; young as I seem, and strong as I am, I can work and gain my bread among strangers, unsuspected and unknown. I loved you in youth; God is my witness that I would not desert you in age, but that your safety and happiness require it."


I took my cap and moved towards the door; in a moment Bertha's arms were round my neck, and her lips were pressed to mine. "No, my husband, my Winzy," she said, "you shall not go alone�take me with you; we will remove from this place, and, as you say, among strangers we shall be unsuspected and safe. I am not so very old as quite to shame you, my Winzy; and I dare say the charm will soon wear off, and, with the blessing of God, you will become more elderly-looking, as is fitting; you shall not leave me."


I returned the good soul's embrace heartily. "I will not, my Bertha; but for your sake I had not thought of such a thing. I will be your true, faithful husband while you are spared to me, and do my duty by you to the last."


The next day we prepared secretly for our emigration. We were obliged to make great pecuniary sacrifices�it could not be helped. We realised a sum sufficient, at least, to maintain us while Bertha lived; and, without saying adieu to anyone, quitted our native country to take refuge in a remote part of western France.


It was a cruel thing to transport poor Bertha from her native village, and the friends of her youth, to a new country, new language, new customs. The strange secret of my destiny rendered this removal immaterial to me; but I compassionated her deeply, and was glad to perceive that she found compensation for her misfortunes in a variety of little ridiculous circumstances. Away from all tell-tale chroniclers, she sought to decrease the apparent disparity of our ages by a thousand feminine arts�rouge, youthful dress, and assumed juvenility of manner. I could not be angry�Did not I myself wear a mask? Why quarrel with hers, because it was less successful? I grieved deeply when I remembered that this was my Bertha, whom I had loved so fondly, and won with such transport�the dark-eyed, dark-haired girl, with smiles of enchanting archness and a step like a fawn�this mincing, simpering, jealous old woman. I should have revered her gray locks and withered cheeks; but thus!� �It was my work, I knew; but I did not the less deplore this type of human weakness.


Her jealousy never slept. Her chief occupation was to discover that, in spite of outward appearances, I was myself growing old. I verily believe that the poor soul loved me truly in her heart, but never had woman so tormenting a mode of displaying fondness. She would discern wrinkles in my face and decrepitude in my walk, while I bounded along in youthful vigour, the youngest looking of twenty youths. I never dared address another woman: on one occasion, fancying that the belle of the village regarded me with favouring eyes, she bought me a gray wig. Her constant discourse among her acquaintances was, that though I looked so young, there was ruin at work within my frame; and she affirmed that the worst symptom about me was my apparent health. My youth was a disease, she said, and I ought at all times to prepare, if not for a sudden and awful death, at least to awake some morning white-headed, and bowed down with all the marks of advanced years. I let her talk�I often joined in her conjectures. Her warnings chimed in with my never-ceasing speculations concerning my state, and I took an earnest, though painful, inter


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est in listening to all that her quick wit and excited imagination could say on the subject.


Why dwell on these minute circumstances? We lived on for many long years. Bertha became bed-rid and paralytic: I nursed her as a mother might a child. She grew peevish, and still harped upon one string�of how long I should survive her. It has ever been a source of consolation to me, that I performed my duty scrupulously towards her. She had been mine in youth, she was mine in age, and at last, when I heaped the sod over her corpse, I wept to feel that I had lost all that really bound me to humanity.


Since then how many have been my cares and woes, how few and empty my enjoyments! I pause here in my history�I will pursue it no further. A sailor without rudder or compass, tossed on a stormy sea�a traveller lost on a widespread heath, without landmark or star to guide him�such have I been: more lost, more hopeless than either. A nearing ship, a gleam from some far cot, may save them; but I have no beacon except the hope of death.


Death! mysterious, ill-visaged friend of weak humanity! Why alone of all mortals have you cast me from your sheltering fold? O, for the peace of the grave! the deep silence of the iron-bound tomb! that thought would cease to work in my brain, and my heart beat no more with emotions varied only by new forms of sadness!


Am I immortal? I return to my first question. In the first place, is it not more probable that the beverage of the alchymist was fraught rather with longevity than eternal life? Such is my hope. And then be it remembered, that I only drank half of the potion prepared by him. Was not the whole necessary to complete the charm? To have drained half the Elixir of Immortality is but to be half immortal�my For-ever is thus truncated and null.


But again, who shall number the years of the half of eternity? I often try to imagine by what rule the infinite may be divided. Sometimes I fancy age advancing upon me. One gray hair I have found. Fool! do I lament? Yes, the fear of age and death often creeps coldly into my heart; and the more I live, the more I dread death, even while I abhor life. Such an enigma is man�born to perish�when he wars, as I do, against the established laws of his nature.


But for this anomaly of feeling surely I might die: the medicine of the alchymist would not be proof against fire�sword�and the strangling waters. I have gazed upon the blue depths of many a placid lake, and the tumultuous rushing of many a mighty river, and have said, peace inhabits those waters; yet I have turned my steps away, to live yet another day. I have asked myself, whether suicide would be a crime in one to whom thus only the portals of the other world could be opened. I have done all, except presenting myself as a soldier or duellist, an object of destruction to my�no, not my fellow-mortals, and therefore I have shrunk away. They are not my fellows. The inextinguishable power of life in my frame, and their ephemeral existence, place us wide as the poles asunder. I could not raise a hand against the meanest or the most powerful among them.


Thus I have lived on for many a year�alone, and weary of myself�desirous of death, yet never dying�a mortal immortal. Neither ambition nor avarice can enter my mind, and the ardent love that gnaws at my heart, never to be returned�never to find an equal on which to expend itself�lives there only to torment me.


This very day I conceived a design by which I may end all�without self- slaughter, without making another man a Cain�an expedition, which mortal


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97 0 / LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON


frame can never survive, even endued with the youth and strength that inhabits mine. Thus I shall put my immortality to the test, and rest for ever�or return, the wonder and benefactor of the human species.3


Before I go, a miserable vanity has caused me to pen these pages. I would not die, and leave no name behind. Three centuries have passed since I quaffed the fatal beverage: another year shall not elapse before, encountering gigantic dangers�warring with the powers of frost in their home�beset by famine, toil, and tempest�I yield this body, too tenacious a cage for a soul which thirsts for freedom, to the destructive elements of air and water�or, if 1 survive, my name shall be recorded as one of the most famous among the sons of men; and, my task achieved, I shall adopt more resolute means, and, by scattering and annihilating the atoms that compose my frame, set at liberty the life imprisoned within, and so cruelly prevented from soaring from this dim earth to a sphere more congenial to its immortal essence.


1833 1834 3. Cf. Walton in Frankenstein, who describes his eration," or Frankenstein, who likewise anticipates expedition to the North Pole as conferring "inesthe gratitude of posterity: "A new species would timable benefit... on all mankind to the last genbless me as its creator and source."


LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON 1802-1838


Letitia Elizabeth Landon, whose initials became one of the most famous literary pseudonyms of nineteenth-century Britain, was born and educated in Chelsea, London. She published her first poem in the weekly Literary Gazette in March 1820, when she was seventeen, and soon thereafter became a principal writer and reviewer for the magazine. Her first important collection of poems, published in 1824, was The hnprovisatrice�a work that suggests Landon's fascination with Germaine de Stael's Corinne and with the Italy that she never visited but encountered in the pages of Stael, the Shelleys, and Byron. It went through six editions in its first year and was followed by The Troubadour, Catalogue of Pictures, and Historical Sketches (1825), which went through four. She quickly followed these with The Golden Violet (1827), the first of many editions of her Poetical Works (1827), and The Venetian Bracelet (1829). She also wrote essays, short fiction, children's stories, several novels, and a play; and she edited�and contributed hundreds of poems to�the albums, gift books, and annual anthologies that became a staple of British literary production of the


1820s and 1830s. All this highly remunerative work appeared from the pen of "L.E.L.," the pseudonym that she first used in the Literary Gazette and that attracted increasing numbers of readers and also poetic responses, as it was disclosed by stages that the author behind the initials was female, young, and a great beauty. To this day many of Landon's books continue to be catalogued under the pseudonym, and one "feminist companion" to literature in English has an entry for "L.E.L." but none for "Landon."


Landon and Felicia Hemans, as "L.E.L." and "Mrs. Hemans," were the two bestselling poets of their time�the decade and a half following the deaths of Keats, Percy Shelley, and Byron in the early 1820s�and were major inspirations to subsequent writers such as Elizabeth Barrett and Christina Bossetti. Unlike Hemans, Landon attracted scandal, partly because of her casual social relations with men and partly


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THE PROUD LADYE / 97 1


because of her principal subject matter, the joys and especially the sorrows of female passion. (In her preface to The Venetian Bracelet, she attempted wittily, but without success, to forestall this biographical reading of her poems: "With regard to the frequent application of my works to myself, considering that I sometimes pourtrayed love unrequited, then betrayed, and again destroyed by death�may I hint the conclusions are not quite logically drawn, as assuredly the same mind cannot have suffered such varied modes of misery. However, if I must have an unhappy passion, I can only console myself with my own perfect unconsciousness of so great a misfortune.") There were rumors of affairs with, among others, William Jerdan, who was editor of the Literary Gazette, the journalist William Maginn, and the artist Daniel Maclise. She was engaged to the editor John Forster, future biographer of Dickens, but had to break the engagement because of these rumors. In 1838 she married someone she had known for only a short time, George Maclean, governor of the British settlement at Cape Coast Castle, west Africa (in what is now Ghana). She arrived with Maclean at Cape Coast in August 1838 and two months later was dead, reportedly from an overdose of prussic acid�though whether the cause was accident, suicide, or murder has never been determined.


Landon perfected, and reviewers helped maintain, several personas in her work: the pseudonymous, therefore anonymous, writer of passionate love lyrics; the Romantic "improvisatrice" jotting down verses in the interstices of an intense social life; the renowned beauty who constantly fails in love and, in lamenting her crushed feelings, becomes the female equivalent of the Byronic hero; and an early version of the Victorian "poetess" composing songs to appeal to a burgeoning cult of domesticity. As in Hemans's poetry, some of these personas are not wholly compatible with some of the others. But their variety and vitality captivated readers and, during Landon's short life, provided her a fortune in sales and royalties.


The Proud Ladye1


Oh, what could the ladye's beauty match, An� it were not the ladye's pride? if An hundred knights from far and near Woo d at that ladye's side.


5 The rose of the summer slept on her cheek, Its lily upon her breast, And her eye shone forth like the glorious star That rises the first in the west.


1. This ballad is . . . taken, with some slight change, from a legend in Russell's Germany [Landon's note]. The story, in John Russell's A TOUT in Germany (1824), chap. 11, relates how "the fair Cunigunda, equally celebrated for her charms and her cruelty . . . would listen to no tale of love, and dreaded marriage as she did a prison. At length, to free herself from all importunities, she made a solemn vow never to give her hand but to the knight who should ride round the castle on the outer wall . . . [which) runs along the very brink of hideous precipices. . . . History has not recorded ihe precise number of those who actually made the attempt; it is only certain that every one of them broke his neck. .. . At length, a young and handsome knight appeared at the castle gate . . . [to] try his fortune. .. . In a short time, a shout from the menials announced that the adventure had been achieved; and Cunigunda, exulting that she was conquered, hastened into the court. . . . But the knight stood aloof, gloomy and severe. 'I can claim you,' said he; 'but I am come, and I have risked my life, not to win your hand, but to humble your pride and punish your barbarity'�and thereupon he read her a harsh lecture on the cruelty and arrogance of her conduct towards her suitors. The spirit of chivalry weeps at recording, that he finished his oration by giving the astonished beauty a box on the ear." Landon's ballad (in the same stanza as Keats's story of another belle dame sans merci) was included as a separate piece within a long poem, The Troubadour, that she published in


1825.


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97 2 / LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON


There were some that woo'd for her land and gold, And some for her noble name, And more that woo'd for her loveliness; But her answer was still the same.


"There is a steep and lofty wall, Where my warders0 trembling stand; guards 15 He who at speed shall ride round its height, For him shall be my hand."


Many turn'd away from the deed, The hope of their wooing o'er; But many a young knight mounted the steed He never mounted more.


At last there came a youthful knight, From a strange and far countrie, The steed that he rode was white as the foam Upon a stormy sea.


25 And she who had scorn'd the name of love, Now bow'd before its might, And the ladye grew meek as if disdain Were not made for that stranger knight.


She sought at first to steal his soul By dance, song, and festival; At length on bended knee she pray'd He would not ride the wall.


But gaily the young knight laugh'd at her fears, And flung him on his steed,� 35 There was not a saint in the calendar That she pray'd not to in her need.


She dar'd not raise her eyes to see If heaven had granted her prayer, Till she heard a light step bound to her side,� The gallant knight stood there!


And took the ladye Adeline From her hair a jewell'd band, But the knight repell'd the offer'd gift, And turn'd from the offer'd hand.


45 "And deemest thou that I dared this deed, Ladye, for love of thee? The honour that guides the soldier's lance Is mistress enough for me.


"Enough for me to ride the ring, The victor's crown to wear; But not in honour of the eyes Of any ladye there.


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LOVE' S LAS T LESSO N / 97 3 55"I had a brother whom I lost Through thy proud crueltie, And far more was to me his love, Than woman's love can be. 60"I came to triumph o'er the pride Through which that brother fell, I laugh to scorn thy love and thee, And now, proud dame, farewell!" And from that hour the ladye pined, For love was in her heart, And on her slumber there came dreams She could not bid depart. 65 Her eye lost all its starry light, Her cheek grew wan and pale, Till she hid her faded loveliness Beneath the sacred veil. 70And she cut off her long dark hair, And bade the world farewell, And she now dwells a veiled nun In Saint Marie's cell. 1825 Love's Last Lesson 5IO15"Teach it me, if you can,�forgetfulness!1 I surely shall forget, if you can bid me; I who have worshipp'd thee, my god on earth, I who have bow'd me at thy lightest word. Your last command, 'Forget me,' will it not Sink deeply down within my inmost soul? Forget thee!�ay, forgetfulness will be A mercy to me. By the many nights When I have wept for that I dared not sleep,� A dream had made me live my woes again, Acting my wretchedness, without the hope My foolish heart still clings to, though that hope Is like the opiate which may lull a while, Then wake to double torture; by the days Pass'd in lone watching and in anxious fears, When a breath sent the crimson to my cheek, Like the red gushing of a sudden wound; By all the careless looks and careless words Which have to me been like the scorpion's stinging;


1. An allusion to Byron's Manfred 1.1.135-36: Other Byronic echoes in lines 14�15, 18�23, 85� "What wouldst thou with us, son of mortals� 86, and 95-98 further link Landon's speaker to the say?"�to which Manfred replies, "Forgetfulness." protagonists of Childe Harold and Manfred.


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97 4 / LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON


20 By happiness blighted, and by thee, for ever; By thy eternal work of wretchedness; By all my wither'd feelings, ruin'd health, Crush'd hopes, and rifled heart, I will forget thee! Alas! my words are vanity. Forget thee!


25 Thy work of wasting is too surely done. The April shower may pass and be forgotten, The rose fall and one fresh spring in its place, And thus it may be with light summer love. It was not thus with mine: it did not spring,


30 Like the bright colour on an evening cloud, Into a moment's life, brief, beautiful; Not amid lighted halls, when flatteries Steal on the ear like dew upon the rose, As soft, as soon dispersed, as quickly pass'd;


35 But you first call'd my woman's feelings forth, And taught me love ere I had dream'd love's name. I loved unconsciously: your name was all That seem'd in language, and to me the world Was only made for you; in solitude,


40 When passions hold their interchange together, Your image was the shadow of my thought; Never did slave, before his Eastern lord, Tremble as I did when I met your eye, And yet each look was counted as a prize;


45 I laid your words up in my heart like pearls Hid in the ocean's treasure-cave. At last I learn'd my heart's deep secret: for I hoped, I dream'd you loved me; wonder, fear, delight, Swept my heart like a storm; my soul, my life,


50 Seem'd all too little for your happiness; Had I been mistress of the starry worlds That light the midnight, they had all been yours, And I had deem'd such boon but poverty. As it was, I gave all I could�my love,


55 My deep, my true, my fervent, faithful love; And now you bid me learn forgetfulness: It is a lesson that I soon shall learn. There is a home of quiet for the wretched, A somewhat dark, and cold, and silent rest,


60 But still it is rest,�for it is the grave."


She flung aside the scroll, as it had part In her great misery. Why should she write? What could she write? Her woman's pride forbade To let him look upon her heart, and see


65 It was an utter ruin;�and cold words, And scorn and slight, that may repay his own, Were as a foreign language, to whose sound She might not frame her utterance. Down she bent Her head upon an arm so white that tears


70 Seem'd but the natural melting of its snow, Touch'd by the flush'd cheek's crimson; yet life-blood Less wrings in shedding than such tears as those.


.


LOVE' S LAST LESSO N / 97 5 And this then is love's ending! It is like The history of some fair southern clime. 75 Hot fires are in the bosom of the earth, And the warm'd soil puts forth its thousand flowers, Its fruits of gold, summer's regality, And sleep and odours float upon the air: At length the subterranean element so Breaks from its secret dwelling-place, and lays All waste before it; the red lava stream Sweeps like the pestilence; and that which was A garden in its colours and its breath, Fit for the princess of a fairy tale, 85 Is as a desert, in whose burning sands, And ashy waters, who is there can trace A sign, a memory of its former beauty? It is thus with the heart; love lights it up With hopes like young companions, and with joys 90 Dreaming deliciously of their sweet selves. This is at first; but what is the result? Hopes that lie mute in their own sullenness, For they have quarrel] d even with themselves; And joys indeed like birds of Paradise:2 95 And in their stead despair coils scorpion-like Stinging itself;3 and the heart, burnt and crush'd With passion's earthquake, scorch'd and wither'd up, Lies in its desolation,�this is love. What is the tale that I would tell? Not one IOO Of strange adventure, but a common tale Of woman's wretchedness; one to be read Daily in many a young and blighted heart. The lady whom I spake of rose again From the red fever's couch, to careless eyes 105 Perchance the same as she had ever been. But oh, how alter'd to herself! She felt That bird-like pining for some gentle home To which affection might attach itself, That weariness which hath but outward part i IO In what the world calls pleasure, and that chill Which makes life taste the bitterness of death. And he she loved so well,�what opiate Lull'd consciousness into its selfish sleep?� He said he loved her not; that never vow ii5 Or passionate pleading won her soul for him; And that he guess'd not her deep tenderness. Are words, then, only false? are there no looks, Mute but most eloquent; no gentle cares


2. In Eastern tales, the bird of Paradise never rests (1813), Byron had written of how "The Mind, that on the earth [Landon's notel. broods o'er guilty woes, / Is like the Scorpion girt 3. In The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale by fire" (lines 423-24).


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97 6 / LETITI A ELIZABET H LANDO N That win so much upon the fair weak things 120 They seem to guard? And had he not long read Her heart's hush'd secret in the soft dark eye Lighted at his approach, and on the cheek Colouring all crimson at his lightest look? This is the truth; his spirit wholly turn'd 125 To stern ambition's dream, to that fierce strife Which leads to life's high places, and reck'd0 notWhat lovely flowers might perish in his path. cared And here at length is somewhat of revenge: For man's most golden dreams of pride and power 130 Are vain as any woman-dreams of love; Both end in weary brow and wither'd heart, And the grave closes over those whose hopes Have lain there long before. 1827 Revenge Ay, gaze upon her rose-wreathed hair, And gaze upon her smile; Seem as you drank the very air Her breath perfumed the while: 5 And wake for her the gifted line, That wild and witching lay, And swear your heart is as a shrine, That only owns her sway. 10'Tis well: I am revenged at last,� Mark you that scornful cheek,� The eye averted as you pass'd, Spoke more than words could speak. 15Ay, now by all the bitter tears That I have shed for thee,� The racking doubts, the burning fears,� Avenged they well may be� 20By the nights pass'd in sleepless care, The days of endless woe; All that you taught my heart to bear, All that yourself will know. I would not wish to see you laid Within an early tomb; I should forget how you betray'd, And only weep your doom:


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THE LITTLE


25 But this is fitting punishment, To live and love in vain,-�Oh my wrung heart, be thou content, And feed upon his pain. 30Go thou and watch her lightest sigh,� Thine own it will not be; And bask beneath her sunny eye,� It will not turn on thee.


'Tis well: the rack, the chain, the wheel, Far better had'st thou proved; 35 Ev'n I could almost pity feel, For thou art not beloved.


The Little Shroud


She put him on a snow-white shroud, A chaplet0 on his head; And gather'd early primroses To scatter o'er the dead.


5 She laid him in his little grave� 'Twas hard to lay him there, When spring was putting forth its flowers, And every thing was fair.


She had lost many children�now io The last of them was gone; And day and night she sat and wept Beside the funeral stone.


One midnight, while her constant tears


Were falling with the dew, 15 She heard a voice, and lo! her child Stood by her weeping too!


His shroud was damp, his face was white: He said,�"I cannot sleep, Your tears have made my shroud so wet; 20 Oh, mother, do not weep!"


Oh, love is strong!�the mother's heart Was filled with tender fears; Oh, love is strong!�and for her child Her grief restrained its tears.


25 One eve a light shone round her bed, And there she saw him stand�


SHROUD / 977


1829


wreath


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97 8 / LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON


Her infant, in his little shroud, A taper in his hand.


"Lo! mother, see my shroud is dry, And I can sleep once more!" And beautiful the parting smile The little infant wore.


And down within the silent grave He laid his weary head; 35 And soon the early violets Grew o'er his grassy bed.


.


The Victorian As e


1830-1901


1832: The First Reform Bill 1837: Victoria becomes queen 1846: The Corn Laws repealed 1850: Tennyson succeeds Wordsworth as poet laureate 1851: The Great Exhibition in London 1859: Charles Darwin's Origin of Species published 1870�71: Franco-Prussian War 1901: Death of Victoria


In 1897 Mark Twain was visiting London during the Diamond Jubilee celebrations honoring the sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's coming to the throne. "British history is two thousand years old," Twain observed, "and yet in a good many ways the world has moved farther ahead since the Queen was born than it moved in all the rest of the two thousand put together." And if the whole world had "moved" during that long lifetime and reign of Victoria's, it was in her own country itself that the change was most marked and dramatic, a change that brought England to its highest point of development as a world power.


In the eighteenth century the pivotal city of Western civilization had been Paris; by the second half of the nineteenth century this center of influence had shifted to London, a city that expanded from about two million inhabitants when Victoria came to the throne to six and a half million at the time of her death. The rapid growth of London is one of the many indications of the most important development of the age: the shift from a way of life based on the ownership of land to a modern urban economy based on trade and manufacturing. "We have been living, as it were, the life of three hundred years in thirty" was the impression formed by Dr. Thomas Arnold during the early stages of England's industrialization. By the end of the century�after the resources of steam power had been more fully exploited for fast railways and iron ships, looms, printing presses, and farmers' combines, and after the introduction of the telegraph, intercontinental cable, photography, anesthetics, and universal compulsory education�a late Victorian could look back with astonishment on these developments during his or her lifetime. Walter Besant, one of these late Victorians, observed that so completely transformed were "the mind and habits of the ordinary Englishman" by 1897, "that he would not, could he see him, recognize his own grandfather."


Because England was the first country to become industrialized, its transformation was an especially painful one: it experienced a host of social and


979


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98 0 / THE VICTORIAN AGE


economic problems consequent to rapid and unregulated industrialization. England also experienced an enormous increase in wealth. An early start enabled England to capture markets all over the globe. Cotton and other manufactured products were exported in English ships, a merchant fleet whose size was without parallel in other countries. The profits gained from trade led also to extensive capital investments in all continents. After England had become the world's workshop, London became, from 1870 on, the world's banker. England gained particular profit from the development of its own colonies, which, by 1890, comprised more than a quarter of all the territory on the surface of the earth; one in four people was a subject of Queen Victoria. By the end of the century England was the world's foremost imperial power.


The reactions of Victorian writers to the fast-paced expansion of England were various. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) relished the spectacle with strenuous enthusiasm. During the prosperous 1850s Macaulay's essays and histories, with their recitations of the statistics of industrial growth, constituted a Hymn to Progress as well as a celebration of the superior qualities of the English people�"the greatest and most highly civilized people that ever the world saw." Other writers felt that leadership in commerce and industry was being paid for at a terrible price in human happiness, that a so-called progress had been gained only by abandoning traditional rhythms of life and traditional patterns of human relationships. The melancholy poetry of Matthew Arnold often strikes this note:


For what wears out the life of mortal men?


'Tis that from change to change their being rolls;


'Tis that repeated shocks, again, again,


Exhaust the energy of strongest souls.


Although many Victorians shared a sense of satisfaction in the industrial and political preeminence of England during the period, they also suffered from an anxious sense of something lost, a sense too of being displaced persons in a world made alien by technological changes that had been exploited too quickly for the adaptive powers of the human psyche.


QUEEN VICTORIA AND THE VICTORIAN TEMPER


Queen Victoria's long reign, from 1837 to 1901, defines the historical period that bears her name. The question naturally arises whether the distinctive character of those years justifies the adjective Victorian. In part Victoria herself encouraged her own identification with the qualities we associate with the adjective�earnestness, moral responsibility, domestic propriety. As a young wife, as the mother of nine children, and as the black-garbed Widow of Windsor in the forty years after her husband's death in 1861, Victoria represented the domestic fidelities her citizens embraced. After her death Henry James wrote, "I mourn the safe and motherly old middle-class queen, who held the nation warm under the fold of her big, hideous Scotch-plaid shawl." Changes in the reproduction of visual images aided in making her the icon she became. She is the first British monarch of whom we have photographs. These pictures, and the ease and cheapness with which they were reproduced, facilitated her representing her country's sense of itself during her reign.


Victoria came to the throne in a decade that does seem to mark a different


historical consciousness among Britain's writers. In 1831 John Stuart Mill


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INTRODUCTION / 98 1


asserts, "we are living in an age of transition." In the same year Thomas Carlyle writes, "The Old has passed away, but alas, the New appears not in its stead; the Time is still in pangs of travail with the New." Although the historical changes that created the England of the 1830s had been in progress for many decades, writers of the thirties shared a sharp new sense of modernity, of a break with the past, of historical self-consciousness. They responded to their sense of the historical moment with a strenuous call to action that they selfconsciously distinguished from the attitude of the previous generation.


In 1834 Carlyle urged his contemporaries, "Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe." He was saying, in effect, to abandon the introspection of the Romantics and to turn to the higher moral purpose that he found in Goethe. The popular novelist Edward Rulwer-Lytton in his England and the English (1833) made a similar judgment. "When Byron passed away," he wrote, ". . . we turned to the actual and practical career of life: we awoke from the morbid, the dreaming, 'the moonlight and dimness of the mind,' and by a natural reaction addressed ourselves to the active and daily objects which lay before us." This sense of historical self-consciousness, of strenuous social enterprise, and of growing national achievement led writers as early as the 1850s and 1860s to define their age as Victorian. The very fact that Victoria reigned for so long sustained the concept of a distinctive historical period that writers defined even as they lived it.


When Queen Victoria died, a reaction developed against many of the achievements of the previous century; this reinforced the sense that the Victorian age was a distinct period. In the earlier decades of the twentieth century, writers took pains to separate themselves from the Victorians. It was then the fashion for most literary critics to treat their Victorian predecessors as somewhat absurd creatures, stuffily complacent prigs with whose way of life they had little in common. Writers of the Georgian period (1911�36) took great delight in puncturing overinflated Victorian balloons, as Lytton Strachey, a member of Virginia Woolf's circle, did in Eminent Victorians (1918). A subtler example occurs in Woolf s Orlando (1928), a fictionalized survey of English literature from Elizabethan times to 1928, in which the Victorians are presented in terms of dampness, rain, and proliferating vegetation:


Ivy grew in unparalleled profusion. Houses that had been of bare stone were smothered in greenery. . . . And just as the ivy and the evergreen rioted in the damp earth outside, so did the same fertility show itself within. The life of the average woman was a succession of childbirths. . . . Giant cauliflowers towered deck above deck till they rivaled . . . the elm trees themselves. Hens laid incessantly eggs of no special tint. . . . The whole sky itself as it spread wide above the British Isles was nothing but a vast feather bed.


This witty description not only identifies a distinguishing quality of Victorian life and literature�a superabundant energy�but reveals the author's distaste for its smothering profusion. Woolf was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen (1832�1904), an eminent Victorian. In her later life, when assessing her father's powerful personality, Woolf recorded in her diary that she could never have become a writer if he had not died when he did. Growing up under such towering shadows, she and her generation mocked their predecessors to make them less intimidating. In his reminiscences Portraits from Life (1937), the novelist Ford Madox Ford recalled his feelings of terror when he confronted


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98 2 / THE VICTORIAN AGE


the works of Carlyle and Ruskin, which he likened to an overpowering range of high mountains. The mid-Victorians, he wrote, were "a childish nightmare to me."


The Georgian reaction against the Victorians is now only a matter of the history of taste, but its aftereffects still sometimes crop up when the term Victorian is employed in an exclusively pejorative sense, as prudish or old- fashioned. Contemporary historians and critics find the Victorian period a richly complex example of a society struggling with the issues and problems we identify with modernism. Rut to give the period the single designation Victorian reduces its complexity. Since it is a period of almost seventy years, we can hardly expect generalizations to be uniformly applicable. It is, therefore, helpful to subdivide the age into three phases: early Victorian (1830-48), mid-Victorian (1848-70), and late Victorian (1870-1901). It is also helpful to consider the final decade, the nineties, as a bridge between two centuries.


THE EARLY PERIOD (1830-48): A TIME OF TROUBLES


In the early 1830s two historical events occurred of momentous consequence for England. In 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened, becoming the first steam-powered, public railway line in the world. A burst of railway construction followed. By 1850 6,621 miles of railway line connected all of England's major cities. By 1900 England had 15,195 lines of track and an underground railway system beneath London. The train transformed England's landscape, supported the growth of its commerce, and shrank the distances between its cities. The opening of England's first railway coincided with the opening of the country's Reform Parliament. The railway had increased the pressure for parliamentary reform. "Parliamentary reform must follow soon after the opening of this road," a Manchester man observed in


1830. "A million of persons will pass over it in the course of this year, and see that hitherto unseen village of Newton; and they must be convinced of the absurdity of its sending two members to Parliament while Manchester sends none." Despite the growth of manufacturing cities consequent to the Industrial Revolution, England was still governed by an archaic electoral system whereby some of the new industrial cities were unrepresented in Parliament while "rotten boroughs" (communities that had become depopulated) elected the nominees of the local squire to Parliament.


Ry 1830 a time of economic distress had brought England close to revolution. Manufacturing interests, who refused to tolerate their exclusion from the political process any longer, led working men in agitating for reform. Fearing the kind of revolution it had seen in Europe, Parliament passed a Reform Bill in 1832 that transformed England's class structure. The Reform Bill of 1832 extended the right to vote to all males owning property worth .10 or more in annual rent. In effect the voting public thereafter included the lower middle classes but not the working classes, who did not obtain the vote until 1867, when a second Reform Rill was passed. Even more important than the extension of the franchise was the virtual abolition of the rotten boroughs and the redistribution of parliamentary representation. Because it broke up the monopoly of power that the conservative landowners had so long enjoyed (the Tory party had been in office almost continuously from 1783 to 1830), the Reform Bill represents the beginning of a new age, in which middle-class economic interests gained increasing power.


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Yet even the newly constituted Parliament was unable to find legislative solutions to the problems facing the nation. The economic and social difficulties attendant on industrialization were so severe that the 1830s and 1840s became known as the Time of Troubles. After a period of prosperity from 1832 to 1836, a crash in 1837, followed by a series of bad harvests, produced a period of unemployment, desperate poverty, and rioting. Conditions in the new industrial and coal-mining areas were terrible. Workers and their families in the slums of such cities as Manchester lived in horribly crowded, unsanitary housing; and the conditions under which men, women, and children toiled in mines and factories were unimaginably brutal. Elizabeth Barrett's poem "The Cry of the Children" (1843) expresses her horrified response to an official report on child labor that described five-year-olds sitting alone in darkness to open and close ventilation doors, and twelve-year-olds dragging heavy tubs of coal through low-ceilinged mine passages for sixteen hours a day.


The owners of mines and factories regarded themselves as innocent of blame for such conditions, for they were wedded to an economic theory of laissezfaire, which assumed that unregulated working conditions would ultimately benefit everyone. A sense of the seemingly hopeless complexity of the situation during the Hungry Forties is provided by an entry for 1842 in the diary of the statesman Charles Greville, an entry written at the same time that Carlyle was making his contribution to the "Condition of England Question," Past and Present. Conditions in the north of England, Greville reports, were "appalling."


There is an immense and continually increasing population, no adequate demand for labor, .. . no confidence, but a universal alarm, disquietude, and discontent. Nobody can sell anything. . . . Certainly I have never seen .. . so serious a state of things as that which now stares us in the face; and this after thirty years of uninterrupted peace, and the most ample scope afforded for the development of all our resources. . . . One remarkable feature in the present condition of affairs is that nobody can account for it, and nobody pretends to be able to point out any remedy.


In reality many remedies were proposed. One of the most striking was put forward by the Chartists, a large organization of workers. In 1838 the organization drew up a "People's Charter" advocating the extension of the right to vote, the use of secret balloting, and other legislative reforms. For ten years the Chartist leaders engaged in agitation to have their program adopted by Parliament. Their fiery speeches, delivered at conventions designed to collect signatures for petitions to Parliament, created fears of revolution. In "Locksley Hall" (1842), Alfred, Lord Tennyson seems to have had the Chartist demonstrations in mind when he wrote: "Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher, / Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire." Although the Chartist movement had fallen apart by 1848, it succeeded in creating an atmosphere open to reform. One of the most important reforms was the abolition of the high tariffs on imported grains, tariffs known as the Corn Laws (the word corn in England refers to wheat and other grains). These high tariffs had been established to protect English farm products from having to compete with low-priced products imported from abroad. Landowners and farmers fought to keep these tariffs in force so that high prices for their wheat would be ensured; but the rest of the population suffered severely from the exorbitant price of bread or, in years of bad crops, from scarcity of food. In


1845 serious crop failures in England and the outbreak of potato blight in


Ireland convinced Sir Robert Peel, the Tory prime minister, that traditional


98 4 / THE VICTORIAN AGE


protectionism must be abandoned. In 1846 the Corn Laws were repealed by Parliament, and the way was paved for the introduction of a system of free


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trade whereby goods could be imported with the payment of only minimal tariff duties. Although free trade did not eradicate the slums of Manchester, it worked well for many years and helped relieve the major crisis of the Victorian economy. In 1848, when revolutions were breaking out all over Europe, England was relatively unaffected. A large Chartist demonstration in London seemed to threaten violence, but it came to nothing. The next two decades were relatively calm and prosperous.


This Time of Troubles left its mark on some early Victorian literature. "Insurrection is a most sad necessity," Carlyle writes in his Past and Present, "and governors who wait for that to instruct them are surely getting into the fatalest courses." A similar refrain runs through Carlyle's history The French Rei'olution (1837). Memories of the French Reign of Terror lasted longer than memories of British victories over Napoleon at Trafalgar and Waterloo, memories freshened by later outbreaks of civil strife, "the red fool-fury of the Seine" as Tennyson described one of the violent overturnings of government in France. The most marked response to the industrial and political scene, however, comes in the "Condition of England" novels of the 1840s and early 1850s. Vivid records of these times are to be found in the fiction of Charles Kingsley (1819-1875); Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865); and Benjamin Disraeli (1804�1881), a novelist who became prime minister. For his novel Sybil (1845), Disraeli chose an appropriate subtitle, The Two Nations�a phrase that pointed out the line dividing the England of the rich from the other nation, the England of the poor.


THE MID-VICTORIAN PERIOD (1848-70): ECONOMIC PROSPERITY, THE GROWTH OF EMPIRE, AND RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY


In the decades following the Time of Troubles some Victorian writers, such as Charles Dickens, continued to make critical attacks on the shortcomings of the Victorian social scene. Even more critical and indignant than Dickens was John Ruskin, who turned from a purely moral and aesthetic criticism of art during this period to denounce the evils of Victorian industry, as in his The Stones of Venice (1851�53), which combines a history of architecture with stern prophecies about the doom of technological culture, or in his attacks on laissez-faire economics in Unto This Last (1862). Generally speaking, however, the realistic novels of Anthony Trollope (1815�1882), with their comfortable tolerance and equanimity, are a more characteristic reflection of the mid-Victorian attitude toward the social and political scene than are Ruskin's lamentations. Overall, this second phase of the Victorian period had many harassing problems, but it was a time of prosperity. On the whole its institutions worked well. Even the badly bungled war against Russia in the Crimea (1854�56) did not seriously affect the growing sense of satisfaction that the challenging difficulties of the 1840s had been solved or would be solved by English wisdom and energy. The monarchy was proving its worth in a modern setting. The queen and her husband, Prince Albert, were models of middle-class domesticity and devotion to duty. The aristocracy was discovering that free trade was enriching rather than impoverishing their estates; agriculture flourished together with trade and industry. And through a sue


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INTRODUCTION / 98 5


cession of Factory Acts in Parliament, which restricted child labor and limited hours of employment, the condition of the working classes was also being gradually improved. When we speak of Victorian complacency or stability or optimism, we are usually referring to this mid-Victorian phase�"The Age of Improvement," as the historian Asa Briggs has called it. "Of all the decades in our history," writes G. M. Young, "a wise man would choose the eighteen- fifties to be young in."


In 1851 Prince Albert opened the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, where a gigantic glass greenhouse, the Crystal Palace, had been erected to display the exhibits of modern industry and science. The Crystal Palace was one of the first buildings constructed according to modern architectural principles in which materials such as glass and iron are employed for purely functional ends (much late Victorian furniture, on the other hand, with its fantastic and irrelevant ornamentation, was constructed according to the opposite principle). The building, as well as the exhibits, symbolized the triumphant feats of Victorian technology. As Benjamin Disraeli wrote to a friend in 1862: "It is a privilege to live in this age of rapid and brilliant events. What an error to consider it a utilitarian age. It is one of infinite romance."


England's technological progress, together with its prosperity, led to an enormous expansion of its influence around the globe. Its annual export of goods nearly trebled in value between 1850 and 1870. Not only the export of goods but that of people and capital increased. Between 1853 and 1880 2,466,000 emigrants left Britain, many bound for British colonies. By 1870 British capitalists had invested .800 million abroad; in 1850 the total had been only .300 million. This investment, of people, money, and technology, created the British Empire. Important building blocks of the empire were put in place in the mid-Victorian period. In the 1850s and 1860s there was large- scale immigration to Australia; in 1867 Parliament unified the Canadian provinces into the Dominion of Canada. In 1857 Parliament took over the government of India from the private East India Company, which had controlled the country, and started to put in place its civil service government. In


1876 Queen Victoria was named empress of India. Although the competitive scramble for African colonies did not take place until the final decades of the century, the model of empire was created earlier, made possible by technological revolution in communication and transportation. Much as Rome had built roads through Europe in the years of the Roman Empire, Britain built railways and strung telegraph wires. It also put in place a framework for education and government that preserves British influence in former colonies even today. Britain's motives, in creating its empire, were many. It sought wealth, markets for manufactured goods, sources for raw materials, and world power and influence. Many English people also saw the expansion of empire as a moral responsibility�what Rudyard Kipling, in another context, termed "the White Man's burden." Queen Victoria stated that the imperial mission was "to protect the poor natives and advance civilization." Missionary societies flourished, spreading Christianity in India, Asia, and Africa.


At the same time that the British missionary enterprise was expanding, there was increasing debate about religious belief. By the mid-Victorian/period the Church of England had evolved into three major divisions: Evangelical, or Low Church; Broad Church; and High Church. The Evangelicals emphasized spiritual transformation of the individual by conversion and a strictly moral Christian life. Zealously dedicated to good causes (they were responsible for the


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98 6 / THE VICTORIAN AGE


emancipation of all slaves in the British Empire as early as 1833), advocates of a strict Puritan code of morality, and righteously censorious of worldliness in others, the Evangelicals became a powerful and active minority in the early part of the nineteenth century. Much of the power of the Evangelicals depended on the fact that their view of life and religion was virtually identical with that of a much larger group external to the Church of England: the Nonconformists, or Dissenters�that is, Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, and other Protestant denominations. The High Church was also associated with a group external to the Church of England; it was the "Catholic" side of the Church, emphasizing the importance of tradition, ritual, and authority. In the 1830s a High Church movement took shape, known both as "the Oxford movement," because it originated at Oxford University, and as "Tractarianism," because its leaders developed their arguments in a series of pamphlets or tracts. Led by John Henry Newman, who later converted to Roman Catholicism, Tractarians argued that the Church could maintain its power and authority only by resisting liberal tendencies and holding to its original traditions. The Broad Church resisted the doctrinal and ecclesiastical controversies that separated the High Church and Evangelical divisions. Open to modern advances in thought, its adherents emphasized the broadly inclusive nature of the Church.


Some rationalist challenges to religious belief that developed before the Victorian period maintained their influence. The most significant was Utilitarianism, also known as Benthamism or Philosophical Radicalism. Utilitarianism derived from the thought of Jeremy Bentham (1748�1832) and his disciple James Mill (1773-1836), the father of John Stuart Mill. Bentham believed that all human beings seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. The criterion by which we should judge a morally correct action, therefore, is the extent to which it provides the greatest pleasure to the greatest number. Measuring religion by this moral arithmetic, Benthamites concluded that it was an outmoded superstition; it did not meet the rationalist test of value. Utilitarianism was widely influential in providing a philosophical basis for political and social reforms^ but it aroused considerable opposition on the part of those who felt it failed to recognize people's spiritual needs. Raised according to strict utilitarian principles by his father, John Stuart Mill came to be critical of them. In the mental and spiritual crisis portrayed in his Autobiography (1873), Mill describes his realization that his utilitarian upbringing had left him no power to feel. In Sartor Resartus (1833�34) Carlyle describes a similar spiritual crisis in which he struggles to rediscover the springs of religious feeling in the face of his despair at the specter of a universe governed only by utilitarian principles. Later both Dickens, in his portrayal of Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times (1854), "a man of facts and calculations" who is "ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature," and Ruskin, in his Unto This Last, attack utilitarianism.


In mid-Victorian England, however, the challenge to religious belief gradually shifted from the Utilitarians to some of the leaders of science, in particular to Thomas Henry Huxley, who popularized the theories of Charles Darwin. Although many English scientists were themselves individuals of strong religious convictions, the impact of their scientific discoveries seemed consistently damaging to established faiths. Complaining in 1851 about the "flimsiness" of his own religious faith, Ruskin exclaimed: "If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful hammers! I


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INTRODUCTION / 98 7


hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses."


The damage lamented by Ruskin was effected in two ways. First the scientific attitude of mind was applied toward a study of the Bible. This kind of investigation, developed especially in Germany, was known as the "Higher Criticism." Instead of treating the Bible as a sacredly infallible document, scientifically minded scholars examined it as a mere text of history and presented evidence about its composition that believers, especially in Protestant countries, found disconcerting, to say the least. A noteworthy example of such Higher Criticism studies was David Friedrich Strauss's Das Leben Jesu, which was translated by George Eliot in 1846 as The Life of Jesus. The second kind of damage was effected by the view of humanity implicit in the discoveries of geology and astronomy, the new and "Terrible Muses" of literature, as Tennyson called them in a late poem. Geology, by extending the history of the earth backward millions of years, reduced the stature of the human species in time. John Tyndall, an eminent physicist, said in an address at Belfast in 1874 that in the eighteenth century people had an "unwavering trust" in the "chronology of the Old Testament" but in Victorian times they had to become accustomed to


the idea that not for six thousand, nor for sixty thousand, nor for six thousand thousand, but for aeons embracing untold millions of years, this earth has been the theater of life and death. The riddle of the rocks has been read by the geologist and paleontologist, from sub-Cambrian depths to the deposits thickening over the sea bottoms of today. And upon the leaves of that stone book are . . . stamped the characters, plainer and surer than those formed by the ink of history, which carry the mind back into abysses of past time.


The discoveries of astronomers, by extending a knowledge of stellar distances to dizzying expanses, were likewise disconcerting. Carlyle's friend John Sterling remarked in a letter of 1837 how geology "gives one the same sort of bewildering view of the abysmal extent of Time that Astronomy does of Space." To Tennyson's speaker in Maud (1855) the stars are "innumerable" tyrants of "iron skies." They are "Cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand / His nothingness into man."


In the mid-Victorian period biology reduced humankind even further into "nothingness." Darwin's great treatise The Origin of Species (1859) was interpreted by the nonscientific public in a variety of ways. Some chose to assume that evolution was synonymous with progress, but most readers recognized that Darwin's theory of natural selection conflicted not only with the concept of creation derived from the Bible but also with long-established assumptions of the values attached to humanity's special role in the world. Darwin's later treatise The Descent of Man (1871) raised more explicitly the haunting question of our identification with the animal kingdom. If the principle of survival of the fittest was accepted as the key to conduct, there remained the inquiry: fittest for what? As John Fowles writes in his 1968 novel about Victorian England, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Darwin's theories made the Victorians feel "infinitely isolated." "By the 1860s the great iron structures of their philosophies, religions, and social stratifications were already beginning to look dangerously corroded to the more perspicacious."


Disputes about evolutionary science, like the disputes about religion, are a reminder that beneath the placidly prosperous surface of the mid-Victorian


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98 8 / THE VICTORIAN AGE


age there were serious conflicts and anxieties. In the same year as the Great Exhibition, with its celebration of the triumphs of trade and industry, Charles Kingsley wrote, "The young men and women of our day are fast parting from their parents and each other; the more thoughtful are wandering either towards Rome, towards sheer materialism, or towards an unchristian and unphilosophic spiritualism."


THE LATE PERIOD (1870-1901): DECAY OF VICTORIAN VALUES


The third phase of the Victorian age is more difficult to categorize. At first glance its point of view seems merely an extension of mid-Victorianism, whose golden glow lingered on through the Jubilee years of 1887 and 1897 (years celebrating the fiftieth and sixtieth anniversaries of the queen's accession) down to 1914. For many affluent Victorians, this final phase of the century was a time of serenity and security, the age of house parties and long weekends in the country. In the amber of Henry James's prose is immortalized a sense of the comfortable pace of these pleasant, food-filled gatherings. Life in London, too, was for many an exhilarating heyday. In My Life and Loves the Irish- American Frank Harris (1854�1931), often a severe critic of the English scene, records his recollections of the gaiety of London in the 1880s: "London: who would give even an idea of its varied delights: London, the center of civilization, the queen city of the world without a peer in the multitude of its attractions, as superior to Paris as Paris is to New York." The exhilarating sense of London's delights reflects in part the proliferation of things: commodities, inventions, products that were changing the texture of modern life. England had become committed not only to continuing technological change but also to a culture of consumerism, generating new products for sale.


The wealth of England's empire provided the foundation on which its economy was built. The final decades of the century saw the apex of British imperialism, yet the cost of the empire became increasingly apparent in rebellions, massacres, and bungled wars, such as the Indian Mutiny in 1857; the Jamaica Rebellion in 1865; the massacre of General Gordon and his troops at Khartoum, in the Sudan, in 1885, where he had been sent to evacuate the British in the face of a religiously inspired revolt; and the Anglo-Boer War, at the end of the century, in which England engaged in a long, bloody, and unpopular struggle to annex two independent republics in the south of Africa controlled by Dutch settlers called Boers. In addition the "Irish Question," as it was called, became especially divisive in the 1880s, when home rule for Ireland became a topic of heated debate�a proposed reform that was unsuccessfully advocated by Prime Minister Gladstone and other leaders. And outside the British Empire, other developments challenged Victorian stability and security. The sudden emergence of Bismarck's Germany after the defeat of France in 1871 was progressively to confront England with powerful threats to its naval and military position and also to its preeminence in trade and industry. The recovery of the United States after the Civil War likewise provided new and serious competition not only in industry but also in agriculture. As the westward expansion of railroads in the United States and Canada opened up the vast, grain-rich prairies, the typical English farmer had to confront lower grain prices and a dramatically different scale of productivity, which England could not match. In 1873 and 1874 such severe economic depressions


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INTRODUCTION / 98 9


occurred that the rate of emigration rose to an alarming degree. Another change in the mid-Victorian balance of power was the growth of labor as a political and economic force. In 1867, under Disraeli's guidance, a second Reform Bill had been passed that extended the right to vote to sections of the working classes; and this, together with the subsequent development of trade unions, made labor a powerful political force that included a wide variety of kinds of socialism. Some labor leaders were disciples of the Tory-socialism of John Ruskin and shared his idealistic conviction that the middle-class economic and political system, with its distrust of state interference, was irresponsible and immoral. Other labor leaders had been influenced instead by the revolutionary theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as expounded in their Communist Manifesto of 1847 and in Marx's Das Kapital (1867, 1885, 1895). The first English author of note to embrace Marxism was the poet and painter William Morris, who shared with Marx a conviction that Utopia could be achieved only after the working classes had, by revolution, taken control of government and industry.


In much of the literature of this final phase of Victorianism we can sense an overall change of attitudes. Some of the late Victorian writers expressed the change openly by simply attacking the major mid-Victorian idols. Samuel Butler, for example, set about demolishing Darwin, Tennyson, and Prime Minister Gladstone, figures whose aura of authority reminded him of his own father. For the more worldly and casual-mannered Prime Minister Disraeli, on the other hand, Butler could express considerable admiration: "Earnestness was his greatest danger, but if he did not quite overcome it (as who indeed can? it is the last enemy that shall be subdued), he managed to veil it with a fair amount of success." In his novel The Way of All Flesh (1903), much of which was written in the 1870s, Butler satirized family life, in particular the tyrannical self-righteousness of a Victorian father, his own father (a clergyman) serving as his model. In a different vein Walter Pater and his followers concluded that the striving of their predecessors was ultimately pointless, that the answers to our problems are not to be found, and that our role is to enjoy the fleeting moments of beauty in "this short day of frost and sun." It is symptomatic of this shift in point of view that Edward FitzGerald's beautiful translation (1859) of The Ruhaiyat of Omar Khayyam, with its melancholy theme that life's problems are insoluble, went virtually unnoticed in the 1860s but became a popular favorite in subsequent decades.


THE NINETIES


The changes in attitude that had begun cropping up in the 1870s became much more conspicuous in the final decade of the century and give the nineties a special aura of notoriety. Of course the changes were not in evidence everywhere. At the empire's outposts in India and Africa, the English were building railways and administering governments with the same strenuous energy as in the mid-Victorian period. The stories of Kipling and Joseph Conrad variously record the struggles of such people. Also embodying the task of sustaining an empire were the soldiers and sailors who fought in various colonial wars, most notably in the war against the Boers in South Africa (1899� 1902). But back in England, Victorian standards were breaking down on several fronts. One colorful embodiment of changing values was Victoria's son and heir, Edward, Prince of Wales, who was entering his fiftieth year as the


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nineties began. A pleasure-seeking easygoing person, Edward was the antithesis of his father, Prince Albert, an earnest-minded intellectual who had devoted his life to hard work and to administrative responsibilities. Edward's carryings-on were a favorite topic for newspaper articles, one of which noted how this father of five children "openly maintained scandalous relations with ballet dancers and chorus singers."


Much of the writing of the decade illustrates a breakdown of a different sort. Melancholy, not gaiety, is characteristic of its spirit. Artists of the nineties, representing the aesthetic movement, were very much aware of living at the end of a great century and often cultivated a deliberately fin de siecle ("endof- century") pose. A studied languor, a weary sophistication, a search for new ways of titillating jaded palates can be found in both the poetry and the prose of the period. The Yellow Book, a periodical that ran from 1894 to 1897, is generally taken to represent the aestheticism of the nineties. The startling black-and-white drawings and designs of its art editor, Aubrey Beardsley, the prose of George Moore and Max Beerbohm, and the poetry of Ernest Dowson illustrate different aspects of the movement. In 1893 the Austrian critic Max Nordau summed up what seemed to him to be happening, in a book that was as sensational as its title: Degeneration.


From our perspective, however, it is easy to see in the nineties the beginning of the modernist movement in literature; a number of the great writers of the twentieth century�Yeats, Hardy, Conrad, Shaw�were already publishing.


In Dickens's David Copperfield (1850) the hero affirms: "I have always been thoroughly in earnest." Forty-five years later Oscar Wilde's comedy The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) turns the typical mid-Victorian word earnest into a pun, a key joke in this comic spectacle of earlier Victorian values being turned upside down. As Richard Le Gallienne (a novelist of the nineties) remarked in The Romantic Nineties (1926): "Wilde made dying Victorianism laugh at itself, and it may be said to have died of the laughter."


THE ROLE OF WOMEN


Political and legal reforms in the course of the Victorian period had given citizens many rights. In 1844 Friedrich Engels observed: "England is unquestionably the freest�that is the least unfree�country in the world, North America not excepted." England had indeed done much to extend its citizens' liberties, but women did not share in these freedoms. They could not vote or hold political office. (Although petitions to Parliament advocating women's suffrage were introduced as early as the 1840s, women did not get the vote until 1918.) Until the passage of the Married Women's Property Acts (1870


1908), married women could not own or handle their own property. While men could divorce their wives for adultery, wives could divorce their husbands only if adultery were combined with cruelty, bigamy, incest, or bestiality. Educational and employment opportunities for women were limited. These inequities stimulated a spirited debate about women's roles known as the "Woman Question." Some of the social changes that such discussion helped foster eventually affected the lives of all, or many, of the country's female population; nevertheless, it is important to recognize that this Victorian debate, despite the inclusive claims of its title was, with a few exceptions, conducted by the middle classes about middle-class women.


Arguments for women's rights were based on the same libertarian principles


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that had formed the basis of extended rights for men. In Hardy's last novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), his heroine justifies leaving her husband by quoting a passage from Mill's On Liberty (1859). She might have quoted another work by Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869), which, like Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), challenges long-established assumptions about women's role in society. Legislative measures over the course of the nineteenth century gradually brought about changes in a number


of areas.


The Custody Act of 1839 gave a mother the right to petition the court for access to her minor children and custody of children under seven (raised to sixteen in 1878). The Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 established a civil divorce court (divorce previously could be granted only by an ecclesiastical court) and provided a deserted wife the right to apply for a protection order that would allow her rights to her property. Although divorce remained so expensive as to be available only to the very rich, these changes in marriage and divorce laws, together with the Married Women's Property Acts, began to establish a basis for the rights of women in marriage.


In addition to pressuring Parliament for legal reform, feminists worked to enlarge female educational opportunities. In 1837 none of England's three universities was open to women. Tennyson's long poem The Princess (1847), with its fantasy of a women's college from whose precincts all males are excluded, was inspired by contemporary discussions of the need for women to obtain an education more advanced than that provided by the popular finishing schools such as Miss Pinkerton's Academy in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847�48). Although by the end of the poem Princess Ida has repented of her Amazonian scheme, she and the prince look forward to a future in which man will be "more of woman, she of man." The poem reflects a climate of opinion that led in 1848 to the establishment of the first women's college in London, an example later recommended by Thomas Henry Huxley, a strong advocate of advanced education for women. By the end of Victoria's reign, women could take degrees at twelve universities or university colleges and could study, although not earn a degree, at Oxford and Cambridge.


There was also agitation for improved employment opportunities for women.


Writers as diverse as Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Flor


ence Nightingale complained that middle-class women were taught trivial


accomplishments to fill up days in which there was nothing important to do.


Had they been aware of such complaints, women from the majority lower-


class population might have found it hard to show sympathy: the working lives


of poor English women had always been strenuous, inside and outside the


house, but industrial society brought unprecedented pressures. Although the


largest proportion of working women labored as servants in the homes of


the more affluent, the explosive growth of mechanized industries, especially


in the textile trade, created new and grueling forms of paid employment.


Hundreds of thousands of lower-class women worked at factory jobs under


appalling conditions, while the need for coal to fuel England's industrial devel


opment brought women into the mines for the first time. A series of Factory


Acts (1802�78) gradually regulated the conditions of labor in mines and fac


tories, eventually reducing the sixteen-hour day and banning women from


mine work altogether; but even with such changes, the lot of the country's


poorest women, whether factory operatives or housemaids, seamstresses or


field laborers, was undoubtedly hard. Bad working conditions and underem


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99 2 / THE VICTORIAN AGE


ployment drove thousands of women into prostitution, which in the nineteenth century became increasingly professionalized�and the subject of an almost obsessive public concern, whose manifestations included frequent literary and artistic representation.


For the most part, prostitution was a trade for working-class women, but there was considerable anxiety about the possible fates of what contemporary journalists called the "surplus" or "redundant" women of the middle classes� that is, women who remained unmarried because of the imbalance in numbers between the sexes. Such women (of whom there were approximately half a million in mid-Victorian England) had few employment opportunities, none of them attractive or profitable. Emigration was frequently proposed as a solution to the problem, but the number of single female emigrants was never high enough to significantly affect the population imbalance. The only occupation at which an unmarried middle-class woman could earn a living and maintain some claim to gentility was that of a governess, but a governess could expect no security of employment, only minimal wages, and an ambiguous status, somewhere between servant and family member, that isolated her within the household. Perhaps because the governess so clearly indicated the precariousness of the unmarried middle-class woman's status in Victorian England, the governess novel, of which the most famous examples are Jane Eyre (1847) and Vanity Fair, became a popular genre through which to explore women's roles in society.


As such novels indicate, Victorian society was preoccupied not only with legal and economic limitations on women's lives but with the very nature of woman. In The Subjection of Women, John Stuart Mill argues that "what is now called the nature of women is eminently an artificial thing�the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others." In Ten- nyson's The Princess the king voices a more traditional view of male and female roles, a view that has come to be known as the doctrine of "separate spheres":


Man for the field and woman for the hearth: Man for the sword and for the needle she: Man with the head and woman with the heart: Man to command and woman to obey.


The king's relegation of women to the hearth and heart reflects an ideology that claimed that woman had a special nature peculiarly fit for her domestic role. Most aptly epitomized by the title of Coventry Patmore's immensely popular poem The Angel in the House (1854�62), this concept of womanhood stressed woman's purity and selflessness. Protected and enshrined within the home, her role was to create a place of peace where man could take refuge from the difficulties of modern life. In "Of Queens' Gardens" (1865), John Ruskin writes:


This is the true nature of home�it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is allowed either by husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home; it is then only a part of that outer world which you have roofed over, and lighted fire in. But so far as it is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by


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Household Gods, .. . so far it vindicates the name, and fulfills the praise, of home.


Such an exalted conception of home placed great pressure on the woman who ran it to be, in Ruskin's words, "enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise�wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation." It is easy to recognize the oppressive aspects of this domestic ideology. Paradoxically, however, it was used not only by antifeminists, eager to keep woman in her place, but by some feminists as well, in justifying the special contribution that woman could make to public life.


In his preface to The Portrait of a Lady (1881) Henry James writes: "Millions of presumptuous girls, intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is it open to their destiny to he, at the most, that we should make an ado about it?" Every major Victorian novelist makes the "ado" that James describes in addressing the question of woman's vocation; by the 1890s the "New Woman," an emerging form of emancipated womanhood, was endlessly debated in a wave of fiction and magazine articles. Ultimately, as Victorian texts illustrate, the basic problem was not only political, economic, and educational. It was how women were regarded, and regarded themselves, as members of a society.


LITERACY, PUBLICATION, AND READING


Literacy increased significantly during the Victorian period, although precise figures are difficult to calculate. In 1837 about half of the adult male population could read and write to some extent; by the end of the century, basic literacy was almost universal, the product in part of compulsory national education, required by 1880 to the age of ten. There was also an explosion of things to read. Because of technological changes in printing�presses powered by steam, paper made from wood pulp rather than rags, and, toward the end of the century, typesetting machines�publishers could bring out more printed material more cheaply than ever before. The number of newspapers, periodicals, and books increased exponentially during the Victorian period. Books remained fairly expensive, and most readers borrowed them from commercial lending libraries. (There were few public libraries until the final decades of the century.) After the repeal of the stamp tax and duties on advertisements just after midcentury, an extensive popular press developed.


The most significant development in publishing from the point of view of literary culture was the growth of the periodical. In the first thirty years of the Victorian period, 170 new periodicals were started in London alone. There were magazines for every taste: cheap and popular magazines that published sensational tales; religious monthlies; weekly newspapers; satiric periodicals noted for their political cartoons (the most famous of these was Punch); women's magazines; monthly miscellanies publishing fiction, poetry, and articles on current affairs; and reviews and quarterlies, ostensibly reviewing new books but using the reviews, which were always unsigned, as occasions for essays on the subjects in question. The chief reviews and monthly magazines had a great deal of power and influence; they defined issues in public affairs, and they made and broke literary reputations. They also published the major writers of the period: the fiction of Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Trollope, and Gaskell; the essays of Carlyle, Mill, Arnold, and Ruskin; and the


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poetry of Tennyson and the Brownings all appeared in monthly magazines.


The circumstances of periodical publication exerted a shaping force on literature. Novels and long works of nonfiction prose were published in serial form. Although serial publication of works began in the late eighteenth century, it was the publication of Dickens's Pickwick Papers (1836�37) in individual numbers that established its popularity. All of Dickens's novels and many of those of his contemporaries were published in serial form. Readers therefore read these works in relatively short, discrete installments over a period that could extend more than a year, with time for reflection and interpretation in between. Serial publication encouraged a certain kind of plotting and pacing and allowed writers to take account of their readers' reactions as they constructed subsequent installments. Writers created a continuing world, punctuated by the ends of installments, which served to stimulate the curiosity that would keep readers buying subsequent issues. Serial publication also created a distinctive sense of a community of readers, a sense encouraged by the practice of reading aloud in family gatherings.


As the family reading of novels suggests, the middle-class reading public enjoyed a common reading culture. Poets such as Tennyson and Elizabeth Rarrett Browning and anthologies such as Palgrave's Golden Treasury (1861) appealed to a large body of readers; prose writers such as Carlyle, Arnold, and Ruskin achieved a status as sages; and the major Victorian novelists were popular writers. Readers shared the expectation that literature would not only delight but instruct, that it would be continuous with the lived world, and that it would illuminate social problems. "Tennyson," one of his college friends warned him, "we cannot live in Art." These expectations weighed more heavily on some writers than others. Tennyson wore his public mantle with considerable ambivalence; Arnold abandoned the private mode of lyric poetry in order to speak about public issues in lectures and essays.


By the 1870s the sense of a broad readership, with a shared set of social concerns, had begun to dissolve. Writers had begun to define themselves in opposition to a general public; poets like the Pre-Raphaelites pursued art for art's sake, doing exactly what Tennyson's friend had warned against; mass publication included less and less serious literature. Ry the end of Victoria's reign, writers could no longer assume a unified reading public.


THE NOVEL


The novel was the dominant form in Victorian literature. Initially published, for the most part, in serial form, novels subsequently appeared in three-volume editions, or "three-deckers." "Large loose baggy monsters," Henry James called them, reflecting his dissatisfaction with their sprawling panoramic expanse. As their size suggests, Victorian novels seek to represent a large and comprehensive social world, with the variety of classes and social settings that constitute a community. They contain a multitude of characters and a number of plots, setting in motion the kinds of patterns that reveal the author's vision of the deep structures of the social world�how, in George Eliot's words, "the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time." They presents themselves as realistic, that is, as representing a social world that shares the features of the one we inhabit. The French novelist Stendhal (1783�1842) called the novel "a mirror wandering down a road," but the metaphor of the mirror is somewhat deceptive, since it implies that writers exert


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INTRODUCTION / 99 5


no shaping force on their material. It would be more accurate to speak not of realism but of realisms, since each novelist presents a specific vision of reality whose representational force he or she seeks to persuade us to acknowledge through a variety of techniques and conventions. The worlds of Dickens, of Trollope, of Eliot, of the Brontes hardly seem continuous with each other, but their authors share the attempt to convince us that the characters and events they imagine resemble those we experience in actual life.


The experience that Victorian novelists most frequently depict is the set of social relationships in the middle-class society developing around them. It is a society where the material conditions of life indicate social position, where money defines opportunity, where social class enforces a powerful sense of stratification, yet where chances for class mobility exist. Pip can aspire to the great expectations that provide the title for Dickens's novel; Jane Eyre can marry her employer, a landed gentleman. Most Victorian novels focus on a protagonist whose effort to define his or her place in society is the main concern of the plot. The novel thus constructs a tension between surrounding social conditions and the aspiration of the hero or heroine, whether it be for love, social position, or a life adequate to his or her imagination. This tension makes the novel the natural form to use in portraying woman's struggle for self-realization in the context of the constraints imposed upon her. For both men and women writers, the heroine is often, therefore, the representative protagonist whose search for fulfillment emblematizes the human condition. The great heroines of Victorian fiction�Jane Eyre, Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea Brooke, Isabel Archer, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, even Becky Sharp�all seem in some way to illustrate George Eliot's judgment, voiced in the Prelude to Middlemarch (1871�72), of "a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with meanness of opportunity."


From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the novel was more than a fertile medium for the portrayal of women; women writers were, for the first time, not figures on the margins but major authors. Jane Austen, the Brontes, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot�all helped define the genre. When Charlotte Bronte screwed up her courage to write to the poet laureate, Bobert Southey, to ask his advice about a career as a writer, he warned her, "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be." Charlotte Bronte put this letter, with one other from Southey, in an envelope, with the inscription "Southey's advice to be kept forever. My twenty-first birthday." Bronte's ability ultimately to depart from Southey's advice derived in part from how amenable the novel was to women writers. It concerned the domestic life that women knew well�courtship, family relationships, marriage. It was a popular form whose market women could enter easily. It did not carry the burden of an august tradition as poetry did, nor did it build on the learning of a university education. In his essay "The Lady Novelists" (1852) George Henry Lewes declared, "The advent of female literature promises woman's view of life, woman's experience." His common-law wife, George Eliot, together with many of her sister novelists, fulfilled his prophecy.


Whether written by women or men, the Victorian novel was extraordinarily various. It encompassed a wealth of styles and genres from the extravagant comedy of Dickens to the Gothic romances of the Bronte sisters, from the satire of Thackeray to the probing psychological fiction of Eliot, from the social and political realism of Trollope to the sensation novels of Wilkie Collins. Later in the century a number of popular genres developed�crime, mystery,


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and horror novels, as well as science fiction and detective stories. For the Victorians the novel was both a principal form of entertainment and a spur to social sympathy. There was not a social topic that the novel did not address. Dickens, Gaskell, and many lesser novelists tried to stimulate efforts for social reform through their depiction of social problems. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Joseph Conrad defined the novel in a way that could speak for the Victorians: "What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow- men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?"


POETRY


Victorian poetry developed in the context of the novel. As the novel emerged as the dominant form of literature, poets sought new ways of telling stories in verse; examples include Tennyson's Maud, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1857), Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (1868�69), and Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage (1857�58). Poets and critics debated what the appropriate subjects of such long narrative poems should be. Some, like Matthew Arnold, held that poets should use the heroic materials of the past; others, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, felt that poets should represent "their age, not Charlemagne's." Poets also experimented with character and perspective. Amours de Voyage is a long epistolary poem that tells the story of a failed romance through letters written by its various characters; The Ring and the Book presents its plot�an old Italian murder story�through ten different perspectives.


Victorian poetry also developed in the shadow of Romanticism. By 1837, when Victoria ascended the throne, all the major Romantic poets, save William Wordsworth, were dead, but they had died young, and many readers consequently still regarded them as their contemporaries. Not even twenty years separated the birth dates of Tennyson and Browning from that of John Keats, but they lived more than three times as long as he did. All the Victorian poets show the strong influence of the Romantics, but they cannot sustain the confidence that the Romantics felt in the power of the imagination. The Victorians often rewrite Romantic poems with a sense of belatedness and distance. When, in his poem "Resignation," Arnold addresses his sister upon revisiting a landscape, much as Wordsworth had addressed his sister in "Tintern Abbey," he tells her the rocks and sky "seem to bear rather than rejoice." Tennyson frequently represents his muse as an embowered woman, cut off from the world and doomed to death. The speakers of Browning's poems who embrace the visions that their imaginations present are madmen. When Hardy writes "The Darkling Thrush," in December 1900, Keats's nightingale has become "an aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small."


Victorian poets build upon this sense of belated Romanticism in a number of different ways. Some poets writing in the second half of the century, like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, embrace an attenuated Romanticism, art pursued for its own sake. Reacting against what he sees as the insufficiency of an allegory of the state of one's own mind as the basis of poetry, Arnold seeks an objective basis for poetic emotion and finally gives up writing poems altogether when he decides that the present age lacks the culture necessary to support great poetry. The more fruitful reaction to


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the subjectivity of Romantic poetry, however, was not Arnold's but Browning's. Turning from the mode of his early poetry, modeled on Percy Bysshe Shelley, Browning began writing dramatic monologues�poems, he said, that are "Lyric in expression" but "Dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine." Tennyson simultaneously developed a more lyric form of the dramatic monologue. The idea of creating a lyric poem in the voice of a speaker ironically distinct from the poet is the great achievement of Victorian poetry, one developed extensively in the twentieth century. In Poetry and the Age (1953), the modernist poet and critic Randall Jarrell acknowledges this fact: "The dramatic monologue, which once had depended for its effect upon being a departure from the norm of poetry, now became in one form or other the norm."


The formal experimentation of Victorian poetry, both in long narrative and in the dramatic monologue, may make it seem eclectic, but Victorian poetry shares a number of characteristics. It tends to be pictorial, using detail to construct visual images that represent the emotion or situation the poem concerns. In his review of Tennyson's first volume of poetry, Arthur Henry Hallam defines this kind of poetry as "picturesque," as combining visual impressions in such a way that they create a picture that carries the dominant emotion of the poem. This aesthetic brings poets and painters close together. Contemporary artists frequently illustrated Victorian poems, and poems themselves often present paintings. Victorian poetry also uses sound in a distinctive way. Whether it be the mellifluousness of Tennyson or Swinburne, with its emphasis on beautiful cadences, alliteration, and vowel sounds, or the roughness of Browning or Gerard Manley Hopkins, a roughness adopted in part in reaction against Tennyson, the sound of Victorian poetry reflects an attempt to use poetry as a medium with a presence almost independent of sense. The resulting style can become so syntactically elaborate that it is easy to parody, as in Hopkins's description of Browning as a man "bouncing up from table with his mouth full of bread and cheese" or T. S. Eliot's criticism of Swinburne's poetry, where "meaning is merely the hallucination of meaning." Yet it is important to recognize that these poets use sound to convey meaning, to quote Hallam's review of Tennyson once more, "where words would not." "The tone becomes the sign of the feeling." In all of these developments�the experimentation with narrative and perspective, the dramatic monologue, the use of visual detail and sound�Victorian poets seek to represent psychology in a different way. Their most distinctive achievement is a poetry of mood and character. They therefore sat in uneasy relationship to the public expectation that poets be sages with something to teach. Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold showed varying discomfort with this public role; poets beginning to write in the second half of the century distanced themselves from their public by embracing an identity as bohemian rebels. Women poets encountered a different set of difficulties in developing their poetic voice. When, in Barrett Browning's epic about the growth of a woman poet, Aurora Leigh's cousin Romney discourages her poetic ambitions by telling her that women are "weak for art" but "strong for life and duty," he articulates the prejudice of an age. Women poets view their vocation in the context of the constraints and expectations upon their sex. Perhaps because of this, their poems are less complicated by the experiments in perspective than those of their male contemporaries.

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