novel, 'Adam Blair,' is best remembered for his achievement as a translator of ancient Spanish ballads and songs. "That old Spanish minstrelsy,' as he calls it, 'which has been preserved in the different Cancioneros and Romanceros of the sixteenth century,' was unknown in England before Lockhart, in 1823, published his vivid and glowing versions, which will always have their place among the romantic work of the period. He revealed a whole new world, in which chivalry was lofty, with the proud dignity, sombre simplicity, strange barbarity and stranger gentleness of the Spaniard, with, through it all, an Oriental undercurrent, the incalculable mystery of the Moor. What a sense, in these old ballads, which at times wail with the lamenting voice that one can still hear at night on any country road in Spain, of the dramatic moment, the situation, the crisis! The Spanish, as he says, 'is, like the sister Italian, music in itself, though music of a bolder character.' This music Lockhart rendered for the most part in that galloping measure which so easily delights men's ears, and which is a living and moving thing, no less when it turns to the childlike humour of 'My ear-rings! my ear-rings! they've dropt into the well' or to the witty delicacy of some of the Moorish songs. There is one song, 'The Wandering Knight's Song,' which I must give in full, for it anticipates, by nearly three centuries, a masterpiece of Keats, 'La Belle Dame sans Merci': 'My ornaments are arms, My pastime is in war, My bed is cold upon the wold, My lamp yon star. 'My journeyings are long, My slumbers short and broken; From hill to hill I wander still, 'I ride from land to land, I sail from sea to sea; Some day more kind I fate may find, Some night kiss thee.' After that nothing that Lockhart wrote in his own person, not even the song written to comfort Carlyle in bereavement, though that has a rare twist of the mind, 'Be constant to the dead, The dead cannot deceive '; not that even rises to the wild and patient ecstasy of the Spanish Song. And there is one other ballad, of his own writing, with its fine refrain of 'For we ne'er shall see the like of Captain Paton no mo'e!' which, in its shedding of 'punch and tears' for this 'prince of good deal fellows,' is splendid, and not since excelled in its kind. THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881) CARLYLE was a poet in prose, as Ruskin, marvellously eloquent, never was. Thus when Ruskin wrote verse, it was lamentable, not because it was uncouth, like Carlyle's few uneasy fragments, but because there was no poet at work in it Carlyle has said supreme things about a few great poets whom he cared for most; he has shown a sense of what poetry really was, under a cynic's cloak of ragged contempt. Has anything more fundamental been said of drama than this, in a letter to Barry Cornwall: 'What I object to in our damnable dramatists is that they have in them no thing, no event or character, that looks musical and glorious to them'? Many things looked so to Carlyle, but he had no skill beyond his prose. His ear could not discriminate between the good line and the bad, and in his few attempts at verse he has chosen the bad tune because he could not help it. Some of the best sayings in them seem as if translated laboriously from the German, as in this stanza: : 'What is Man? A foolish baby, Vainly strives, and fights, and frets; He tries to call back for his use the old ballad form, with its repetitions, and is then at his best, particularly in the sententious little song of the wind's way: - 'The wind blows east, the wind blows west, And the frost falls and the rain; A weary heart went thankful to rest, And must rise to toil again, 'gain, And must rise to toil again.' How that stumbles, unable to say what it wants, like the epigram on the beetle: 'What Debrett's peer surpasseth thee? Thy ancestor was in Noah's Ark.' It is Dr. Garnett, who, in one of his characteristic images, has said the final thing: 'The demand for poetical form is to Carlyle what the vase is to the imprisoned Genie, abolish it and the mighty figure overshadows land and sea.' JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)1 KEATS had the courage of the intellect and the cowardice of the nerves. That 'terrier-like resoluteness' which a schoolfellow observed in him as a boy was still strong when the first certainty of his death came to him. 'Difficulties nerve the spirit of a man,' he wrote, with a full sense of the truth to himself of what he was saying; and there is genuine intellectual courage in the quaint summing-up: 'I never quite despair, and I read Shakespeare.' When the 'Quarterly' and 'Blackwood' attacked him, he wrote: 'Praise or blame has but 1 (1) Poems, 1817. (2) Endymion. A Romance, 1818. (3) Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and other Poems, 1820. (4) Poetical Works, published by Smith, 1840 and 1841. (5) Poetical Works, Moxon, 18461851. (6) Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, edited by Richard Monckton Milnes, 2 vols., 1848. (7) Poetical Works, Aldine Edition, 1876. (8) Poetical and other Writings now first brought together, edited by H. Buxton Forman, 4 vols., 1883. a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.' But, at the age of seventeen, he could write, with an equally keen selfknowledge: 'Truth is, I have a horrid morbidity of temperament, which has shown itself at intervals; it is, I have no doubt, the greatest stumbling-block I have to fear; I may surer say, it is likely to be the cause of my disappointment.' 'I carry all matters to an extreme,' he says elsewhere, 'so that, when I have any little vexation, it grows, in five minutes, into a theme for Sophocles.' To the man who has nerves like this, calmness under emotion is impossible; all that can be asked of him is that he shall realise his own condition, and, as far as may be, make allowances for it. This, until perhaps the very end, when, on his death-bed, he put aside unopened the letters that he dared not read, Keats had always the intellectual strength to do; after the event, if not before it, and generally at the very moment of the event. When he writes most frantically to Fanny Brawne, he confesses, in every other sentence, that he does not really mean what he is saying, at the same time that he cannot help saying it. And are not such letters written, after all, with so touching a confidence in their being understood, seen through, by the woman to whom they were written, really a kind of thinking aloud? A letter, when it is the expression of emotion, is as momentary as a mood, which may come and go indeed while one is in the act of writing it down; so that a letter of two pages may begin with the bitterest reproaches, and end, just as sincerely, and with no sense of contradiction, in a flood of tenderness. One is loth to believe that Fanny Brawne ever complained of what the critics have been so ready to complain of on her behalf. She may have understood Keats very little as a poet, and the fact that he tells her nothing of his work seems to show that he was aware of it, and probably more than half indifferent to it; but if she did not understand him as a man, as a lover, if she would have had him change one of his reproaches into a compliment, or wipe out one of the insults of his agony, then she had less of a woman's 'intelligence in love' than it is possible to imagine in a woman beloved by Keats. That man must have loved very calmly and very contentedly, with a strange excess of either materialism or spirituality, who has not felt much of what Keats expressed with so intense and faithful a truth to nature. Keats was not a celestial lover, nor a sentimentalist, nor a cynic. He was earthly in his love, as in the very essence of his imagination; passion was not less a disease to him than the disease of which he died, or than the act of writing verse. Stirred to the very depths of his soul, it was after all through the senses, and with all the aching vividness to which he had trained those senses, that memory came to him. And he was no less critical of love than of everything else in the world; he had no blind beliefs, and there were moments when even poetry seemed to him 'a mere Jack o' Lanthorn to amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance.' Doubting himself so much, he doubted others, of whose intentions he was less certain; and, in love, doubt is part of that torture without which few persons of imagination would fling themselves quite heartily into the pursuit. Had he been stronger in body, he would have luxuriated in just those lacerating pains which seemed, as it was, to be bringing him daily nearer to the grave. It was always vision that disturbed him, the too keen sense of a physical life going on, perhaps so calmly, so near him, and yet as much beyond his control as if he were at the end of the earth. Have you ever thought of the frightful thing it is to shift one's centre? That is what it is to love a woman. Jone's nature no longer radiates freely, from its own centre; the centre itself is shifted, is put outside one's self. Up to then, one may have been unhappy, one may have failed, many things may seem to have gone wrong. But at least there was this security: that one's enemies were all outside the gate. With the woman whom one loves one admits all one's enemies. Think: all one's |