ern poet, not one, has had so great and so lasting an influence. That you may judge the extent of the influence, listen to the following facts. First of all, Scott, having heard "Christabel" recited to him before it was published, adopted the metre, wrote his "Lay of the Last Minstrel" in imitation, and founded all the mass of his narrative poetry upon the same basis. Byron did the very same thing—and, mind you, before "Christabel" had been published at all! Indeed, it was Byron who induced Murray to publish it. Shelley, Keats, and after them nearly every other great poet of our time, have shown to some extent the influence of Coleridge. There is a great deal of Coleridge in the early work even of Tennyson. There are traces of this influence in Browning. And, as for Rossetti, who hated the poetry of Wordsworth, he represents the very highest possible expression of Coleridge's teaching and inspiration. Now what did Coleridge do? He invented a new form of verse, which everybody adopted after him. When I say invented, I mean in the ordinary and true sense of invention. As a matter of scientific fact, there is no such thing possible as invention in the vulgar understanding of that word. All invention is but a recombination of what has already been. The elements of Coleridge's invention existed, scattered through English poetry, long before he was born. But he was the first to weld them together so as to make an entirely new form of narrative poetry. He invented a verse which is the most flexible and the most musical in which a story can possibly be told. The body of the verse is mostly lines of eight syllables; but these sometimes shrink up to four syllables only, and sometimes lengthen out to twelve syllables. Thus there is a range of from four to twelve. In rhyme the form is equally flexible. Rhymes may change places; they may double at will in the same line. Finally cadences change, and verse that is iambic for, say, half a page may then suddenly become trochaic. Thus every possible liberty which a poet could wish for exists in this measure. Nothing is wanting. Alliteration and double rhymes give a particular richness to the verse, as in these examples— In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud It perched for vespers nine; Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white, 'Tis the middle of night by the castle-clock Tu-whit!-tu-whoo! And hark again, the crowing cock. How drowsily it crew! The last example, from "Christabel," especially shows the elasticity of the verse. ears. Now we see the immense advantage that such a measure as this affords to narrative poetry. In the first place, monotony is avoided; and monotony is one of the main obstacles to most forms of narrative verse. Rhyme in narrative verse when copious is unbearable, except in short pieces; and even the Spenserian stanza has become intolerable to modern But in the form imagined by Coleridge one has the opportunity of using rhyme, alliteration or different kinds of feet at will. To use rhymes constantly alternating in the same way would be tiresome; therefore the rhymes are made to alternate in a great variety of ways. At moments they are doubled, to give more musical effect; at other times they are reduced. The line may lengthen or shorten according to the tone of the emotion to be expressed; the cadences can change according to change of feeling. No wonder that Scott and Byron availed themselves immediately of the new discovery. Yet neither of them could obtain the same effects with it as Coleridge did. Coleridge is always exquisite in this kind of verse; Byron never, and Scott only at occasional moments. You will observe also that nearly everything of value written by Coleridge is in this form, except the ballads. In the "Ancient Mariner" the form is least varied; in "Kubla Khan" the variation is most striking. So much for the influence of Coleridge on prosody. But he had another influence also, of an even more far-reaching kind. He infused into poetry something new in tone, in feeling, in emotional expression. It is very hard to define this something precisely; you must be able to feel it. It is something ghostly. The feeling of the supernatural was expressed by Coleridge in a much finer way than it had been ever expressed by any one before. And it is the sentiment of the supernatural in Coleridge which afterwards so beautifully affected the imaginative work of Rossetti in directions that Coleridge never dreamed of. CHAPTER IX BYRON EXTREMES of morality provoke a reaction, just as do extremes of immorality. Contrary to the vulgar proverb, there can be too much of a good thing. The namby-pamby morality of Richardson provoked a reaction in prose, headed by Fielding. We are now going to see how the same kind of reaction came into poetry during the next century. People were tired of the coldness and the speculative tendencies of poetry. They wanted passion instead of philososphy; they wanted human characters instead of ghosts. They did not say so, but they felt that way. Wordsworth did not give them anything which they could understand that was not tiresome. Coleridge and Scott and Southey gave them fairy-tales. And they were quite ready to listen to anybody else who could give them a change. Anything for a change-even a little immorality and a little atheism. could not do much harm. There had been altogether too much talk about virtue and religion and the soul. When the Satanic School began to speak, the Lake School immediately ceased to interest the public at all. Everybody stopped even trying to read the Lake Poets, and Sir Walter Scott himself was obliged as early as 1814 to stop writing poetry. Byron had begun to sing his cynical and splendid song. Byron is the chief figure of the Satanic School; and it is impossible to consider justly the history of this school without considering also the extraordinary lives of the men who belonged to it. We must therefore speak of Byron himself before we speak of his work. Byron was at once extraordinarily fortunate and unfortunate. Though of noble descent, and heir to a fortune, he had inherited from his an cestors characteristics of a most unhappy sort. On his father's side, for some time back, the race had morally degenerated. Byron's father, Captain Byron, was as handsome as he was wicked. He had been obliged to leave the army because of conducting himself in such a manner that no one of his brother officers would speak to him. He was not only a rake, a spendthrift and a drunkard; he had figured as an adulterer, having eloped with another man's wife, by whom he had had a child, Byron's half sister. Other male relations of the future poet were equally good for nothing. The nobleman from whom Byron inherited the estate was known all round the country as "the wicked lord." Byron's mother was of good family but intensely passionate, fretful, and vindictive in her disposition-a disposition which was aggravated by the treatment received from Byron's father. He had married her only to get her money, and having spent that in debauchery, he left the family by his death almost destitute. All these misfortunes so embittered Byron's mother that she often acted like an insane woman, and very probably she was, or had been made, a little insane. Even at the time of the boy's birth she acted wildly and foolishly, with the result that the foot of the child was deformed. With such parents, and with such ancestral tendencies to be reckoned with, Byron's future could not be altogether happy. Yet he was unusually gifted in body as well as in mind, with the solitary exception of the injury to his foot. He was certainly one of the handsomest men of his time, having that dark type of beauty especially admired in England, perhaps because it is there less common than elsewhere. If he had inherited his father's beauty, he had also inherited something of his father's passions. But in youth these only seemed part of his natural charm; the intensity of his likes and dislikes, of his love or anger, did not appear to indicate anything sinister beyond the common. Perhaps Byron would never have been in any respect disrep |