movement of the beginning of the nineteenth century the
signal attempt to apply freely the modern spirit was made in England by
two members of the aristocratic class, Byron and Shelley. Aristocracies
are, as such, naturally impenetrable by ideas; but their individual
members have a high courage and a turn for breaking bounds; and a man of
genius, who is the born child of the idea, happening to be born in the
aristocratic ranks, chafes against the obstacles which prevent him from
freely developing it. But Byron and Shelley did not succeed in their
attempt freely to apply the modern spirit in English literature; they
could not succeed in it; the resistance to baffle them, the want of
intelligent sympathy to guide and uphold them, were too great. Their
literary creation, compared with the literary creation of Shakespeare
and Spenser, compared with the literary creation of Goethe and Heine, is
a failure. The best literary creation of that time in England proceeded
from men who did not make the same bold attempt as Byron and Shelley.
What, in fact, was the career of the chief English men of letters, their
contemporaries? The gravest of them, Wordsworth, retired (in Middle-Age
phrase) into a monastery. I mean, he plunged himself in the inward life,
he voluntarily cut himself off from the modern spirit. Coleridge took to
opium. Scott became the historiographer-royal of feudalism. Keats
passionately gave himself up to a sensuous genius, to his faculty for
interpreting nature; and he died of consumption at twenty-five.
Wordsworth, Scott, and Keats have left admirable works; far more solid
and complete works than those which Byron and Shelley have left. But
their works have this defect,--they do not belong to that which is the
main current of the literature of modern epochs, they do not apply
modern ideas to life; they constitute, therefore, _minor currents_, and
all other literary work of our day, however popular, which has the same
defect, also constitutes but a minor current. Byron and Shelley will
long be remembered, long after the inadequacy of their actual work is
clearly recognized, for their passionate, their Titanic effort to flow
in the main stream of modern literature; their names will be greater
than their writings; _stat magni nominis umbra_.[156] Heine's literary
good fortune was superior to that of Byron and Shelley. His theatre of
operations was Germany, whose Philistinism does not consist in her want
of ideas, or