Charles Kingsley - Literary and General Lectures and Essays стр 7.

The answer so easy twenty years ago, that the new poetry was spoiled by an influx of German bad taste, will hardly hold good now, except with a very few very ignorant people.  It is now known, of course, that whatsoever quarrel Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe may have had with Pope, it was not on account of his being too severe an artist, but too loose a one; not for being too classical, but not classical enough; that English poets borrowed from them nothing but their most boyish and immature types of thought, and that these were reproduced, and laughed at here, while the men themselves were writing works of a purity, and loftiness, and completeness, unknown to the worldexcept in the writings of Miltonfor nearly two centuries.  This feature, however, of the new German poetry, was exactly the one which no English poet deigned to imitate, save Byron alone; on whom, accordingly, Goethe always looked with admiration and affection.  But the rest went their way unheeding; and if they have defects, those defects are their own; for when they did copy the German taste, they, for the most part, deliberately chose the evil, and refused the good; and have their reward in a fame which we believe will prove itself a very short-lived one.

We cannot deny, however, that, in spite of all faults, these men had a strength.  They have exercised an influence.  And they have done so by virtue of seeing a fact which more complete, and in some cases more manly poets, did not see.  Strangely enough, Shelley, the man who was the greatest sinner of them all against the canons of good taste, was the man who saw that new fact, if not most clearly, still most intensely, and who proclaimed it most boldly.  His influence, therefore, is outliving that of his compeers, and growing and spreading, for good and for evil; and will grow and spread for years to come, as long as the present great unrest goes on smouldering in mens hearts, till the hollow settlement of 1815 is burst asunder anew, and men feel that they are no longer in the beginning of the end, but in the end itself, and that this long thirty years prologue to the reconstruction of rotten Europe is played out at last, and the drama itself begun.

Such is the way of Providence; the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor the prophecy to the wise.  The Spirit bloweth where He listeth, and sends on his errandsthose who deny Him, rebel against Himprofligates, madmen, and hysterical Rousseaus, hysterical Shelleys, uttering words like the east wind.  He uses strange tools in His cosmogony: but He does not use them in vain.  By bad men if not by good, by fools if not by wise, Gods work is done, and done right well.

There was, then, a strength and a truth in all these men; and it was thisthat more or less clearly, they all felt that they were standing between two worlds; and the ruins of an older age; upon the threshold of a new one.  To Byrons mind, the decay and rottenness of the old was, perhaps, the most palpable; to Shelleys, the possible glory of the new.  Wordsworth declareda little too noisily, we think, as if he had been the first to discover the truththe dignity and divineness of the most simple human facts and relationships.  Coleridge declares that the new can only assume living form by growing organically out of the old institutions.  Keats gives a sad and yet a wholesome answer to them both, as, young and passionate, he goes down with Faust to the Mothers

And there, amid the old classic forms, he cries: These things, too, are eternal

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

These, or things even fairer than they, must have their place in the new world, if it is to be really a home for the human race.  So he sings, as best he can, the half-educated and consumptive stable-keepers son, from his prison-house of London brick, and in one mighty yearn after that beauty from which he is debarred, breaks his young heart, and dies, leaving a name not writ in water, as he dreamed, but on all fair things, all lovers hearts, for evermore.

Here, then, to return, is the reason why the hearts of the present generation have been influenced so mightily by these men, rather than by those of whom Byron wrote, with perfect sincerity:

These lines, written in 1818, were meant to apply only to Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey.  Whether they be altogether just or unjust is not now the question.  It must seem somewhat strange to our young poets that Shelleys name is not among those who are to try the question of immortality against the Lake School; and yet many of his most beautiful poems had been already written.  Were, then, The Revolt of Islam and Alastor not destined, it seems, in Byrons opinion, to live as long as the Lady of the Lake and the Mariners of England?  Perhaps not.  At least the omission of Shelleys name is noteworthy.  But still more noteworthy are these words of his to Mr. Murray, dated January 23, 1819:

Read Popemost of you dontbut do . . . and the inevitable consequence would be, that you would burn all that I have ever written, and all your other wretched Claudians of the day (except Scott and Crabbe) into the bargain.

And here arises a new questionIs Shelley, then, among the Claudians?  It is a hard saying.  The present generation will receive it with shouts of laughter.  Some future one, which studies and imitates Shakespeare instead of anatomising him, and which gradually awakens to the now forgotten fact, that a certain man named Edmund Spenser once wrote a poem, the like of which the earth never saw before, and perhaps may never see again, may be inclined to acquiesce in the verdict, and believe that Byron had a discrimination in this matter, as in a hundred more, far more acute than any of his compeers, and had not eaten in vain, poor fellow, of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  In the meanwhile, we may perceive in the poetry of the two men deep and radical differences, indicating a spiritual difference between them even more deep, which may explain the little notice which Byron takes of Shelleys poetry, and the fact that the two men had no deep sympathy for each other, and could not in any wise pull together during the sojourn in Italy.  Doubtless, there were plain outward faults of temper and character on both sides; neither was in a state of mind which could trust itself, or be trusted by those who loved them best.  Friendship can only consist with the calm and self-restraint and self-respect of moral and intellectual health; and both were diseased, fevered, ready to take offence, ready, unwittingly, to give it.  But the diseases of the two were different, as their natures were; and Shelleys fever was not Byrons.

Now it is worth remarking, that it is Shelleys form of fever, rather than Byrons, which has been of late years the prevailing epidemic.  Since Shelleys poems have become known in England, and a timid public, after approaching in fear and trembling the fountain which was understood to be poisoned, has begun first to sip, and then, finding the magic water at all events sweet enough, to quench its thirst with unlimited draughts, Byrons fiercer wine has lost favour.  Wellat least the taste of the age is more refined, if that be matter of congratulation.  And there is an excuse for preferring champagne to waterside porter, heady with grains of paradise and quassia, salt and cocculus indicus.  Nevertheless, worse ingredients than œnanthic acid may lurk in the delicate draught, and the Devils Elixir may be made fragrant, and sweet, and transparent enough, as French moralists well know, for the most fastidious palate.  The private sipping of eua-de-cologne, say the London physicians, has increased mightily of late; and so has the reading of Shelley.  It is not surprising.  Byrons Corsairs and Laras have been, on the whole, impossible during the thirty years peace! and piracy and profligacy are at all times, and especially nowadays, expensive amusements, and often require a good private fortunerare among poets.  They have, therefore, been wisely abandoned as ideals, except among a few young persons, who used to wear turn-down collars, and are now attempting moustaches and Mazzini hats.  But even among them, and among their bettersrather their more-respectablesnine-tenths of the bad influence which is laid at Byrons door really is owing to Shelley.  Among the many good-going gentlemen and ladies, Byron is generally spoken of with horrorhe is so wicked, forsooth; while poor Shelley, poor dear Shelley, is very wrong, of course, but so refined, so beautiful, so tendera fallen angel, while Byron is a satyr and a devil.  We boldly deny the verdict.  Neither of the two are devils; as for angels, when we have seen one, we shall be better able to give an opinion; at present, Shelley is in our eyes far less like one of those old Hebrew and Miltonic angels, fallen or unfallen, than Byron is.  And as for the satyr; the less that is said for Shelley, on that point, the better.  If Byron sinned more desperately and flagrantly than he, it was done under the temptations of rank, wealth, disappointed love, and under the impulses of an animal nature, to which Shelleys passions were