visions of Shelley, we at once recognize that it contains a strong realistic element. But mere inventory it surely is not. The powerful patriotic emotion which surges through it has quickened the poet's imagination, and has led to an idealization which is felt in the pulsing measure, the swelling diction showing pride in every adjective, and, above all, in the bestowal upon the scene of a magnificence of color which the scientific observer would seek in vain in that gray city by the northern sea. I do not think that it will be objected that this passage is exceptional in Scott. The patriotic emotion is often replaced by a heroic or romantic one rising out of the tale itself; but in general Scott's landscapes, while real and sometimes overcrowded, are suffused and unified by imagination and feeling. They are, in other words, romantic landscapes, but with a solid basis in observation and memory, thoroughly characteristic of Scott, who, with all his sympathy with romance, always kept his feet upon the ground. In very similar fashion, Scott's romantic medievalism had a firm foundation in his substantial archæological learning. Another instance of realism as a supporting but not a dominating quality is to be found in the descriptive poetry of Keats. In a previous chapter we noted that the weak element in Keats's early poetry was the intellectual, and that the invertebrate quality of Endymion was due mainly to a defective sense of form and a lack of rational coherence. As this missing element developed in the poet, the balance became more fairly adjusted, until he grew capable of the master work of the Odes. But the fault of Keats, when dealing with external nature, was never a lack of sense of fact. The passages already quoted 1 to show the suffusion of imagination in his descriptive poetry exhibited at the same time evidences of a delicate and precise observation. It is rare to find in Keats whole stretches of landscape transferred from nature to the page, feature by feature in their actual order, such as we find in Scott, and sometimes in Wordsworth. His realism appears rather in the apprehension of minute details, but these details are assembled because of their appeal to the same sense, or their suitability to a single mood, or because they have, as it were, a common flavor, not because of topographical proximity. An example oc1 See ante, pp. 94-95. curs in the list of "shapes of beauty" in the opening of Endymion, and another later in the same poem : O thou, to whom Broad leavéd fig-trees even now foredoom Their fairest blossom'd beans and poppied corn ; ... (Book 1, vv. 251-259.) Such unity as passages like these possess is not structural, for that is precisely where the young poet is weak, but sensuous. Every epithet bears evidence of a vivid recollection of the thrill of actual physical experience. Had not Keats's imagination been so extraordinarily and persistently active, we should have been bound to regard him as a realistic artist: as it is, this vivid consciousness of actual sense impressions gave even his early work a certain element of stability, and when he finally achieved a mastery of form, made possible the triumphs of his highest achievement. Shelley is all but a negative instance. The fault, it has been said, of Shelley's descriptions is that they do not describe; and in spite of the splendor of his visions of mountain and sky and forest, our pleasure is apt to be lessened by the pervading sense of insubstantiality, and we often long to feel a touch of the actual earth. So complete is the dominance of the imaginative over the actual in Shelley, that even when he is presenting to us a concrete picture, he seeks to make it more vivid by an illustration drawn from the world of spiritual experience, thus reversing the usual process of bringing ideal conceptions within our reach by physical similes. Here is an example from The Cenci: The road is rough and narrow, ... And winds with short turns down the precipice; And in its depths there is a mighty rock, With which it clings seems slowly coming down; Clings to the mass of life; yet clinging, leans; The melancholy mountain yawns below. (III, i, 244-257.) To Shelley the physical is less real than the ideal, and has to be made present by figures drawn from the world above the senses, in which the poet felt most at home. There is no question that this weakness on the realistic side has narrowed the appeal of Shelley's poetry, and, I believe, lessened its absolute artistic value. But with him, too, one can perceive an increase in balance towards the close. In spite of large ideal and subjective elements in Adonais, it seems as if the objective fact of the death of Keats had sufficed to give ballast to the vessel, so that, to a much greater extent than in Alastor, for instance, he is able to steer to a fixed port. Similarly, the concrete plot supplied to him by the story of the Cenci family gave to this drama a quality of the actual which is rare in his other work; and which, though it may appeal less to the Shelley worshipper, is likely to give it, in the judgment of posterity, a place among the finest and most permanent of his productions. II The satirical way of writing has usually been treated as characteristic of classical periods, and as in itself a classical form; and we have, in a previous chapter, discussed ex |
