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d not get bread; and through Lady Hamilton's hold on Nelson, he was led to use the British fleet in furtherance of Neapolitan royalist conspiracies, and in defiance of orders from home. But you don't find any of that in Southey! You are told that when Nelson returned to England, he "separated from" his wife; the fact being that his wife left him because he insisted on bringing the "vamp" lady to live in the home with her! In view of these details, I asked Americans to consider whether it would not be better for their children to read about the democratic English heroes, such as John Milton and Oliver Cromwell and Isaac Newton and John Ruskin and Keir Hardie?

THE FEAR THAT KILLS

One more, and we are done with the melancholy tale of the poets who ran away from the French revolution.

William Wordsworth was born in 1770, his father being lawyer to a noble earl who robbed him of five thousand pounds. That may possibly have accounted for some of the early rebellious emotions of the poet. He was graduated from Cambridge at the age of twenty-one, and went to France at the height of the revolutionary fervor. He has told us in his verse of the stirrings which then possessed him; to be young at such a time "was very heaven."

But the poet, in telling us about his experiences in France, left out a vital part thereof. The story had to wait a century and a quarter before a professor of Princeton University dug it out. While Wordsworth was abroad he carried on an affair with a young French girl of good family. She bore him a daughter, but he did not marry her; instead, he came back to England, and lived most piously with his sister, and became a preacher of the proprieties. We can understand how, looking back on France, it seemed to him a land of license, meriting stern rebuke from a British moralist.

His first book of poems, "Lyrical Ballads," was published in 1798. He had by then become a reactionary in religion and politics, but in poetry he was an innovator, because he dealt with the simple, every-day feelings of his own heart, and with the peasant people of his neighborhood. He was mercilessly ridiculed by the critics, and retired into himself, to live a frugal life upon an income of a hundred pounds a year, bequeathed to him by a well-to-do friend. In the course of time the British ruling class realized that there was no real harm in this nature-mystic, and at the age of forty-three he received a salary as a distributor of stamps; nine years later an annuity was allowed him, and a year after that he became poet laureate. He passionately opposed every political reform, and composed a series of "Ecclesiastical Sonnets," dealing with the church rigmarole of England; also a pamphlet bitterly attacking the proposition to run a railroad into the country of his dreams. At the age of seventy-five we find him, white-haired and venerable, kneeling, in the presence of a large assembly, to kiss the hand of an extremely dull young girl by the name of Victoria.

Wordsworth was one of the teachers of my youth, and I do not want to be unjust to him because he turned Tory before thirty. What we have to do is to understand him, and to draw a moral from him. The worship of Nature is like the worship of God; as a rule it is a reactionary influence, cutting one off from real life; but here and there it may be a source of inner energy, enabling a man to stand for his own convictions against the world. To Wordsworth in his early days Nature was that, and no poet has uttered in more noble and beautiful language this sense of oneness with the great mother of all life. His writing at its best is as beautiful, and also as sound, as anything in English.

But here is the point to get clear: practically all this poetry was written in eight years; you might count on your ten fingers and ten toes all the lines that Wordsworth wrote after the age of thirty-five which are worth anyone's while to read. In my youth, when I was studying poetry, it was my habit to go through a poet, beginning with the first page of volume one and ending with the last page of volume five, or ten, or whatever it might be. In the case of Wordsworth, it was volume twelve, and he was the one poet with whom I fell down. The "Ecclesiastical Sonnets" finished me; I testify that of all the dreary drivel in the world's literature, this carries the prize.

There were two men in Wordsworth: the instinctive man, who experienced overwhelming feelings, and the conscious man, who was terrified by those feelings. This is no guess of mine, but something which Wordsworth himself explained over and over again: "My apprehensions come in crowds.... My former thoughts returned: the fear that kills.... Me this unchartered freedom tires; I feel the weight of chance desires." So the Wordsworth who believed in the Tory party and the Thirty-nine Articles put the screws on the poet, and not merely the emotions, but the brains of a great genius withered before the age of forty.

The cases of Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth suggest the inquiry: is it possible for a great poet to be a conservative? In old times, yes; for the conservatives then had something to say for themselves. But in the last hundred years the meaning of the class struggle has become so apparent, the consequences of class exploitation have become so obvious, that a man who fails to see them must be deficient in intelligence, a man who fails to care about them must be deficient in heart and conscience; and these are things without which great poetry cannot be made.

THE FIRST LORD OF LETTERS

Fortunately not all the poets of England let themselves be frightened into reaction by the French revolution.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, was born in 1788. His father was a rake and blackguard. "Your mother is a fool," said a schoolmate; and Byron answered, "I know it." This, you must admit, was a poor start in life for a boy. He had a club foot, concerning which he was frightfully sensitive; but in other ways he was divinely handsome, and much sought after by the ladies; so he alternated between fits of solitude and melancholy, and other fits of amorous excess. Being a lord, he was a great person all his life. Being a man of genius, he enormously increased his greatness. He lived always before the world, in one sublime pose or another, and composed whole epics about himself and his moods.

He traveled, and became a cosmopolitan figure, and wild tales were spread concerning his adventures in Europe. Then he came back to England, and published a poem, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," which made such a sensation as Britain had never known before. "I awoke one morning and found myself famous," he said. But he affected to despise this fame; he, a noble lord, must not be confused with vulgar writing fellows. He would toss a manuscript to his publishers with a careless gesture--though the manuscript might be worth one or two thousand pounds. I cannot recall any high-up aristocrat who achieved literary greatness to compare with Byron; he was the first lord of letters of that age and of all ages.

He composed a series of verse romances, tales of Eastern despots and their crimes, in the fashion of the day. They were full of melody and rhythm, and their heroes were always that melancholy, sublime, outlaw figure which we known as "Byronic." This autobiographic hero was eagerly taken up by the fashionable world, especially the female part. One great lady, already supplied with a husband, adored the poet wildly, then despised him, threatened to kill him, attacked him in a novel, and finally, when she met his funeral cortege in the street, fainted and went insane.

He married an heiress, quite cynically for her money, spent the money, and had everything he owned attached by his creditors. Then his wife left him, with hints of mysterious wickedness. He was overwhelmed by a storm of abuse, and went into exile for the rest of his life. The wife never told her story, but many years later the American novelist, Harriet Beecher Stowe, published what she claimed was the truth, that Byron had been guilty of incest with his half-sister. His lordship had by that time become a "standard author," and the critics were outraged by Mrs. Stowe's indiscretion; even now they do not speak out loud about the matter.

In Switzerland the poet met Shelley, the best influence that ever came into his life. He recognized this new friend as the purest soul he knew, and praised his character ardently in his letters, though he never paid the public tribute to Shelley's writings which they deserved. Shelley turned Byron's thoughts to politics, and he wrote "The Prisoner of Chillon," one of the noblest of his poems. But then he went off to Venice, and amused himself with numerous intrigues, and got fat. He began "Don Juan," a new kind of epic poem, mocking itself, as well as everything else. It is a hateful picture of a hateful world, but it has almost infinite verve and energy, and we recognize in it a great spirit trying to lift itself above an age of corruption by the instrument of scorn.

It was the time of the "Holy Alliance," and the few men who cared for freedom were living in exile or hiding from the police. Byron associated with these revolutionists, and gave them both money and his name. He became a neighbor of Shelley's, and again immersed himself in politics and literature. He wrote his drama "Cain," in which he deals with the problems of human fate from the revolutionary point of view. To the religionists of the time, this was most awful blasphemy; the poet Southey frothed at the mouth, and wrote his "Vision of Judgment," portraying the damnation of Byron. His angry lordship came back with a poem of the same name--so effective that the publisher was jailed for six months! One stanza, describing the poet laureate, will serve for a sample of Byron's fighting mood:

He had written praises of a regicide; He had written praises of all kings whatever; He had written for republics far and wide, And then against them bitterer than ever: For pantisocracy he once had cried Aloud, a scheme less moral than 'twas clever; Then grew a hearty anti-jacobin-- Had turned his coat--and would have turned his skin.

Byron had now become the voice of liberty against reaction throughout Europe. And this was a brand new thing, seeming a kind of insanity to the Tories. There had been an abundance of dissipated lords, but never before a lord of revolt! Byron joined the secret society of the Carbonari, and took part in their attempt to free Italy. When they failed, he was not discouraged, but wrote: "There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end." In those words we know the voice of a thinker and a man.

He was now thirty-five years of age, restless, tormented by a sense of futility. The Greek people were carrying on a war for liberation against the Turks, and Byron went to help them, and thus set a crown upon his life. He died of a fever, early in the campaign; and so today, when we think of him, we think not merely of a nobleman and a poet, but of a man who laid down wealth and fame and worldly position for the greatest of all human ideals.

In the beginning he had written to amuse himself and his readers; he had catered to their sentimentalism and their folly. But in the end he came to despise his readers, and wrote only to shock them. They had made a world of lies; and one man would tell them the truth. That is why today we rank him as a world force in the history of letters. We are no longer the least bit thrilled by his wickedness; we think of such things as pathological and are moved only to pity. We do not see anything picturesque about a great lord who travels over Europe with a train of horses and carriages, dogs, fowls, monkeys, servants, and mistresses; the Sunday supplements of our newspapers have over-supplied us with such material. But we are interested in a poet who possessed a clear eye and a clear brain, who saw the truth, and spoke it to all Europe, and helped to set free the future of the race.

THE ANGEL OF REVOLT

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792, which made him four years younger than Byron. His father was the richest baronet in the county of Sussex, a great landlord and a ferocious Tory, who typified the spirit of his age and drove his son almost to madness.

The boy was sent to school at Eton, a dreadful place inhabited by gnomes who wear all day the clothes which our little rich boys wear to evening parties, and the hats which our grown-up rich boys wear to the opera. They had a system of child slavery known as "fagging," and Shelley revolted against it and was tortured. He was a swift, proud spirit, made frantic by the sight or even the thought of tyranny; so sensitive that he swooned at the scent of the flowers in the Alpine valleys. He was gifted with a marvelous mind, ravenous for knowledge, and absorbing it at incredible speed.

He went to Oxford, where at the age of nineteen he published a pamphlet entitled, "The Necessity for Atheism." A reading discloses that the title might better have been "The Necessity for Abolishing Ecclesiasticism Masquerading as Christianity." But it is not likely that such a change of title would have helped Shelley, who was unceremoniously kicked out of the university, and cast off by the Tory baronet who controlled his purse-strings.

So we find him, an outcast in London, living in lodgings and almost starving. He met a girl of sixteen, the daughter of a coffee-house proprietor, and hoping to convert her to his sublime faith, he ran away and married her. At the age of twenty we find him in Ireland, issuing an "Address to the Irish People" and circulating it on the streets. The scholarly critics of Shelley speak of this as the absurd extravagance of boyhood; whereas it was plain common sense and the obvious moral duty of every English poet. Infinitely touching it is to read this pamphlet, and note its beauty of spirit and sublimity of faith, not exceeded by the utterances of Jesus. All that was wrong with Shelley's advice was that it was too good both for Ireland and England. For distributing it Shelley's servant was sent to jail for six months.

The poet's wife had no understanding of his ideals, and the couple were unhappy. After two years of married life, Shelley met the sixteen-year-old daughter of Godwin, revolutionary philosopher, and ran away with her. That was the crime of his life, for which he was condemned to infamy by his own time, and has hardly yet been pardoned. Two years later his former wife drowned herself; and the British lord chancellor deprived the poet of the custody of their two children, on the ground that he was an unfit person. We shall discuss the ethics of this affair later on. Suffice it for the moment to say that Shelley, broken in heart but not in will, fled to the Continent for refuge, and devoted the last four years of his life to the task of overthrowing the British caste system. A hundred years have passed, and he has not yet succeeded; but let no one be too sure that he will not succeed in the end!

He lived in Switzerland and Italy, and worked with desperate intensity, so that he brought on tuberculosis. There are no four years in the life of any other writer which gave us such treasures of the mind and spirit. The critics of Shelley judge him by his boyhood and his horrible scandal. But taking these last years, the impression we get is of maturity of mind, dignity of spirit, firmness of judgment. If you want to know this Shelley, read the wonderful letters he wrote from Switzerland. Read his essay, recently discovered and published, "A Philosophical View of Reform," in which the whole program of radical propaganda is laid out with perfect insight and beauty of utterance. Read "The Defense of Poetry," one of the finest pieces of eloquence in English. Note the soundness of his critical judgment, which erred in only one respect--an under-estimate of his own powers. He was humble to Byron, a lesser person both as poet and as man.

One after another Shelley now poured out the marvelous works on which his fame is based. He took the old myth of Aeschylus and wrote a drama, "Prometheus Unbound," which might be described as the distilled essence of revolt, the most modern of philosophical dramas, proclaiming the defiance of the human spirit to all ordained gods. At the other extreme, and written in the same year, was "The Cenci," a tragic story out of Renaissance Italy, human and simple, therefore poignant and real. The poet Keats died, and Shelley wrote "Adonais"--and those who think that art exists for art's sake and beauty for beauty's sake, make note that here is a work which combines all the perfections of poetry, and yet has a moral, a fighting message.

He wrote also political comedies in the style of Aristophanes--representing English society by an ecstatic chorus of pigs. So savage is this lashing that even today English critics keep silence about "Swellfoot the Tyrant." The odious fat lecher, King George IV, was sued for divorce by his wife, Queen Caroline, and it was a most horrible scandal, which Britain hardly dared to whisper. I remember when I was a student in college, twenty-five years ago, searching the libraries in an effort to find out the contents of the "Green Bag" which figures in Shelley's drama; but no commentator would tell me--and I don't know yet!

Shelley has the qualities of sublimity and fervor; also he has the defects of these qualities--he is often windy and wordy and unreal. But in his last miraculous years he shed these faults, and produced lyrics of such loveliness that he is today the poet of poets, the soul companion of generous and idealistic youth. In his "Mask of Anarchy" are songs of revolt which have reached the workers--and which therefore English critics still find it necessary to deprecate! A couple of years ago was celebrated in London the anniversary of Shelley's death, and there assembled a great number of people of the sort who would have skinned him while he was alive. A famous editor, Mr. J. C. Squires, took occasion to quote the poem: "Men of England, wherefore plow?" How obviously foolish! If the men of England did not plow, they would starve! But it just happens that Shelley did not say that; what he said was: "Men of England, wherefore plow for the lords who lay ye low?" And five million, five hundred thousand labor votes echo: "Wherefore?"

Even two generations later the evil spell was not broken. Matthew Arnold, standard English critic, read about Shelley's friends, and lifted his scholarly hands and cried: "What a set!" It did not occur to the critic to ask what other kind of set Shelley might have had. What people had he to choose among? Arnold had not tried being a radical, so as to see what queer people swarm about you--especially when you are known to have an income of four thousand pounds a year, and to give away nearly all of it! A poet who believes everything good about his fellows, and who lives in dreams of exalted nobleness, is the last person in the world to discover the faults of those who gather about him. And after he has made the discovery, he remains a dreamer; instead of casting them off, in the fashion of the good, respectable world, he clings to them, trying to help them, often in spite of themselves.

Shelley believed in "free love," and tried out his theories; and that horrified Matthew Arnold, who said after reading the record, "One feels sickened forever of the subject of irregular relationships." Quite so; I also have seen people try out this theory, and have felt sickened. But consider the question, in which way will the race more quickly acquire knowledge as to the rights and wrongs of sex--if men say honestly what they believe, and tell frankly what they do, or if they preach one code and practice another, and hide their sins in a dark corner?

Shelley followed the former course; he was young, and knew no older person who understood him and could give him wise advice. He believed that if your heart was full of generosity and kindness and unselfishness and a burning sense of justice, you could trust your desires, even those of love. He tried it, and filled his life with pain and tragedy. And seventy or eighty years later comes an eminent and well-established critic, and in solemn tones protests that it is a crime against good taste to give us these facts! Let poets follow the plan of Wordsworth, who sowed his one wild oat in a foreign land, and put a heavy stone of silence over the crop, and became a Tory laureate and pillar of Churchianity!

In the course of a hundred years we have got all the details of Shelley's two marriages; we know that when he eloped with Harriet Westbrook, his first wife, he told her his ideas on the subject of love. She professed to agree with him; but, of course, being a sixteen-year-old child, that meant nothing. She was ignorant, and in no way fitted to be the life companion of a great poet. When Shelley left her he took care of her and the two children; her suicide two years later was caused by the fact that she had an unhappy love affair with another man, and was with child by this man.

Here is a problem which will not be solved in our time, nor for a long time to come: what is to be done when two people have loved, and one ceases to love while the other goes on loving? For the present, our only task is to get straight the facts about Shelley's case; the central fact being that he was damned for holding a revolutionary opinion and acting on it. If all he had wanted was to indulge his passions and keep out of trouble, the way was clear before him; the old Tory baronet, his father, had explained with brutal frankness that he would never pardon a marriage with a woman below Shelley's rank in life, but he was willing to assume responsibility for the support of any number of illegitimate children the poet might wish to bring into existence. Such was the moral code against which Shelley revolted; such was the world in which he tried to live according to the principles of justice, freedom and love.

Shelley was one among the sons of Rousseau who did not falter and turn back to feudalism, Catholicism, or mysticism of any sort. He fixed his eyes upon the future, and never wavered for a moment. He attacked class privilege, not merely political, but industrial; and so he is the coming poet of labor. Some day, and that not so far off, the strongholds of class greed in Britain will be stormed, and when the liberated workers take up the task of making a new culture, they will learn that there was one inspired saint in their history who visioned that glad day, and gave up everything in life to bring it nearer. They will honor Shelley by making him their poet-laureate, and hailing him as the supreme glory of English letters.

THE STABLE-KEEPER'S SON

There is one more poet of this period with whom we must deal, and that is John Keats.

"And now you are going to have your hands full," says Mrs. Ogi. "Everyone is quite sure that Keats is one poet who cannot possibly be accused of propaganda."

"Yes," says her husband; "an amusing illustration of the extent to which leisure-class criticism is able to take the guts out of art. Here is a man whose life and personality constitute one of the greatest pieces of radical propaganda in the history of English literature."

"At least the issue is fairly joined," says Mrs. Ogi. "Go to it!"

Let us first take the life and personality, and afterwards the writings. John Keats was the son of a stable-keeper; and if you don't know what that meant to British snobbery there is no way I can convey it to you. He did not attend a public school or a university; he did not learn to walk and talk like an English gentleman. He was a simple, crude fellow--a little chap not much over five feet high--and his social experiences early taught him the lesson of extreme reserve; he held himself aloof from everyone who might by any possibility spurn him because of his low estate. Even with Shelley he would not forget that he was dealing with the son of a baronet; everyone who surrounded Shelley was trying to get money from him, and so Keats despised them and stayed apart.

"He was of the skeptical, republican school," wrote one of his boyhood intimates. "A fault finder with everything established." And the first poem which he got up the courage to show was a sonnet upon the release of Leigh Hunt, who had been sent to prison for two years for writing an article denouncing the prince regent. This poem was published in Hunt's paper, the "Examiner," and the notorious editor became the friend and champion of this twenty-year-old poet.

Meantime Keats had been apprenticed to a surgeon, and became a dresser in a hospital. He was called an apothecary's apprentice; and so when he published "Endymion," the ruling-class critics of the day fell upon him. The insolence of a low-bred fellow, imagining that he could write a poem dealing with Greek mythology, the field above all others reserved to university culture! "Back to your shop, John," cried the "Quarterly Review," "back to plasters, pills and ointment boxes!"

You see, it was not a literary issue at all; it was a political and social issue. In "Blackwood's" appeared a ferocious article, denouncing not merely Keats, but the whole "cockney school," as it was called; this including Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Lamb, Shelley and Keats. "Cockney" is the word by which the cultured gentry of England describe the vulgar populace of London, who drop their h's and talk about their "dyly pyper." The Tory reviewers were only incidentally men of letters; they were young country squires amusing themselves with radical-baiting, they were "athletes, outdoor men, sportsmen, salmon-fishers, deer-stalkers." They gathered at Ambrose's and drank strong Scotch whiskey, and sang a rollicking song of which the chorus ran: "Curse the people, blast the people, damn the lower orders." And when they attacked the "Cockney" poets, it was not merely because of their verses, but because of their clothing and their faces and even their complexions. "Pimply Hazlitt" was their phrase for the greatest essayist of their time; they alleged that both Hazlitt and Lamb drank gin--and gin was the drink for washerwomen.

Keats wrote "Endymion" at the age of twenty-one, and two years later he suffered a hemorrhage, which meant the permanent breaking of his health. He wrote his last lines at the age of twenty-four, and died early in his twenty-fifth year. So you see he had not long to win his way against these aristocratic rowdies. He was poor, and exquisitely sensitive; he suffered under such brutal attacks, but he went on, and did the best work he could, and said, very quietly: "I think I shall be among the English poets after my death." He realized the dignity of his calling, and in his letters made clear that he did not take the ivory tower attitude toward his art. "I am ambitious of doing the world some good," he wrote; "if I should be spared, that may be the work of future years." And in the course of his constant self-criticism and groping after new methods and new powers, he traveled far from the naive sensuousness of his early poems. His last work was a kind of prologue to "Hyperion," in which he discussed the poet and his function, and laid down the law that only those can climb to the higher altar of art

to whom the miseries of the world Are misery and will not let them rest.

How Keats felt on the subject of the class struggle was startlingly indicated in the last days of his life. Dying of consumption, he took a sea voyage to Italy, a journey which was a frightful strain upon him. He landed in Naples; and Naples, as we know, is warm and beautiful, a place for a poet to rest and dream in. But Keats would not dream; he smelt the foul atmosphere of royalist intrigue and tyranny, and would not stay. A friend took him to the theater, and he saw a gendarme standing on either side of the stage, and took that for a symbol of censorship and despotism, and would not sit out the performance!

He died in Rome, and after his death Shelley wrote "Adonais," a eulogy of Keats and an attack on his detractors. Little by little his fame began to spread, and everywhere it was recognized by the Tories as part of the class struggle of the time. Sir Walter Scott had been pained by the personal venom of Lockhart's attack in "Blackwood's"; but not enough to cause him to withdraw his subsidy from the magazine, nor to prevent his accepting Lockhart as his son-in-law and future biographer. A young Englishman of radical sympathies defended Keats, and a friend of Lockhart's intervened in the argument, and forced a duel with Keats' defender, and killed him. That is the way literary questions were settled in those days!

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