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- 4. Discover the thorough instruction you need to build dynamic, interactive Web sites from scratch with NEW PERSPECTIVES ON HTML5, CSS3, AND JAVASCRIPT, 6E. This user-friendly book provides comprehensive coverage of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with an inviting approach that starts with the basics and does not require any prior knowledge on the subject. Detailed explanations of key concepts and skills make even the most challenging topics clear and accessible. Case scenarios and case problems place the most complex concepts within an understandable and practical context. You develop important problem solving skills as you work through realistic exercises. Proven applications and an interesting approach help you retain the material and apply what you’ve learned in a professional environment. 1. Preface 2. Brief Contents 3. Table of Contents 4. Tutorial 1: Getting Started with HTML5: Creating a Website for a Food Vendor 5. Session 1.1 Visual Overview: The Structure of an HTML Document 6. Exploring the World Wide Web 7. Introducing HTML 8. Tools for Working with HTML 9. Exploring an HTML Document 10. Creating the Document Head 11. Adding Comments to Your Document 12. Session 1.1 Quick Check 13. Session 1.2 Visual Overview: HTML Page Elements 14. Writing the Page Body 15. Linking an HTML Document to a Style Sheet 16. Working with Character Sets and Special Characters 17. Working with Inline Images 18. Working with Block Quotes and Other Elements 19. Session 1.2 Quick Check 20. Session 1.3 Visual Overview: Lists and Hypertext Links 21. Working with Lists 22. Working with Hypertext Links 23. Specifying the Folder Path 24. Linking to a Location within a Document 25. Linking to the Internet and Other Resources 26. Working with Hypertext Attributes 27. Session 1.3 Quick Check 28. Review Assignments 29. Case Problems 30. Tutorial 2: Getting Started with CSS: Designing a Website for a Fitness Club 31. Session 2.1 Visual Overview: CSS Styles and Colors 32. Introducing CSS 33. Exploring Style Rules 34. Creating a Style Sheet
- 5. 35. Working with Color in CSS 36. Employing Progressive Enhancement 37. Session 2.1 Quick Check 38. Session 2.2 Visual Overview: CSS Typography 39. Exploring Selector Patterns 40. Working with Fonts 41. Setting the Font Size 42. Controlling Spacing and Indentation 43. Working with Font Styles 44. Session 2.2 Quick Check 45. Session 2.3 Visual Overview: Pseudo Elements and Classes 46. Formatting Lists 47. Working with Margins and Padding 48. Using Pseudo-Classes and Pseudo-Elements 49. Generating Content with CSS 50. Inserting Quotation Marks 51. Session 2.3 Quick Check 52. Review Assignments 53. Case Problems 54. Tutorial 3: Designing a Page Layout: Creating a Website for a Chocolatier 55. Session 3.1 Visual Overview: Page Layout with Floating Elements 56. Introducing the display Style 57. Creating a Reset Style Sheet 58. Exploring Page Layout Designs 59. Working with Width and Height 60. Floating Page Content 61. Session 3.1 Quick Check 62. Session 3.2 Visual Overview: Page Layout Grids 63. Introducing Grid Layouts 64. Setting up a Grid 65. Outlining a Grid 66. Introducing CSS Grids 67. Session 3.2 Quick Check 68. Session 3.3 Visual Overview: Layout with Positioning Styles 69. Positioning Objects 70. Handling Overflow 71. Clipping an Element 72. Stacking Elements 73. Session 3.3 Quick Check 74. Review Assignments 75. Case Problems 76. Tutorial 4: Graphic Design with CSS: Creating a Graphic Design for a Genealogy Website 77. Session 4.1 Visual Overview: Backgrounds and Borders 78. Creating Figure Boxes 79. Exploring Background Styles
- 6. 80. Working with Borders 81. Session 4.1 Quick Check 82. Session 4.2 Visual Overview: Shadows and Gradients 83. Creating Drop Shadows 84. Applying a Color Gradient 85. Creating Semi-Transparent Objects 86. Session 4.2 Quick Check 87. Session 4.3 Visual Overview: Transformations and Filters 88. Transforming Page Objects 89. Exploring CSS Filters 90. Working with Image Maps 91. Session 4.3 Quick Check 92. Review Assignments 93. Case Problems 94. Tutorial 5: Designing for the Mobile Web: Creating a Mobile Website for a Daycare Center 95. Session 5.1 Visual Overview: Media Queries 96. Introducing Responsive Design 97. Introducing Media Queries 98. Exploring Viewports and Device Width 99. Creating a Mobile Design 100. Creating a Tablet Design 101. Creating a Desktop Design 102. Session 5.1 Quick Check 103. Session 5.2 Visual Overview: Flexbox Layouts 104. Introducing Flexible Boxes 105. Working with Flex Items 106. Reordering Page Content with Flexboxes 107. Exploring Flexbox Layouts 108. Creating a Navicon Menu 109. Session 5.2 Quick Check 110. Session 5.3 Visual Overview: Print Styles 111. Designing for Printed Media 112. Working with the @page Rule 113. Working with Page Breaks 114. Session 5.3 Quick Check 115. Review Assignments 116. Case Problems 117. Tutorial 6: Working with Tables and Columns: Creating a Program Schedule for a Radio Station 118. Session 6.1 Visual Overview: Structure of a Web Table 119. Introducing Web Tables 120. Adding Table Borders with CSS 121. Spanning Rows and Columns 122. Creating a Table Caption 123. Session 6.1 Quick Check
- 7. 124. Session 6.2 Visual Overview: Rows and Column Groups 125. Creating Row Groups 126. Creating Column Groups 127. Exploring CSS Styles and Web Tables 128. Tables and Responsive Design 129. Designing a Column Layout 130. Session 6.2 Quick Check 131. Review Assignments 132. Case Problems 133. Tutorial 7: Designing a Web Form: Creating a Survey Form 134. Session 7.1 Visual Overview: Structure of a Web Form 135. Introducing Web Forms 136. Starting a Web Form 137. Creating a Field Set 138. Creating Input Boxes 139. Adding Field Labels 140. Designing a Form Layout 141. Defining Default Values and Placeholders 142. Session 7.1 Quick Check 143. Session 7.2 Visual Overview: Web Form Widgets 144. Entering Date and Time Values 145. Creating a Selection List 146. Creating Option Buttons 147. Creating Check Boxes 148. Creating a Text Area Box 149. Session 7.2 Quick Check 150. Session 7.3 Visual Overview: Data Validation 151. Entering Numeric Data 152. Suggesting Options with Data Lists 153. Working with Form Buttons 154. Validating a Web Form 155. Applying Inline Validation 156. Session 7.3 Quick Check 157. Review Assignments 158. Case Problems 159. Tutorial 8: Enhancing a Website with Multimedia: Working with Sound, Video, and Animation 160. Session 8.1 Visual Overview: Playing Web Audio 161. Introducing Multimedia on the Web 162. Working with the audio Element 163. Exploring Embedded Objects 164. Session 8.1 Quick Check 165. Session 8.2 Visual Overview: Playing Web Video 166. Exploring Digital Video 167. Using the HTML5 video Element 168. Adding a Text Track to Video
- 8. 169. Using Third-Party Video Players 170. Session 8.2 Quick Check 171. Session 8.3 Visual Overview: Transitions and Animations 172. Creating Transitions with CSS 173. Animating Objects with CSS 174. Session 8.3 Quick Check 175. Review Assignments 176. Case Problems 177. Tutorial 9: Getting Started with JavaScript: Creating a Countdown Clock 178. Session 9.1 Visual Overview: Creating a JavaScript File 179. Introducing JavaScript 180. Working with the script Element 181. Creating a JavaScript Program 182. Debugging Your Code 183. Session 9.1 Quick Check 184. Session 9.2 Visual Overview: JavaScript Variables and Dates 185. Introducing Objects 186. Changing Properties and Applying Methods 187. Writing HTML Code 188. Working with Variables 189. Working with Date Objects 190. Session 9.2 Quick Check 191. Session 9.3 Visual Overview: JavaScript Functions and Expressions 192. Working with Operators and Operands 193. Working with the Math Object 194. Working with JavaScript Functions 195. Running Timed Commands 196. Controlling How JavaScript Works with Numeric Values 197. Session 9.3 Quick Check 198. Review Assignments 199. Case Problems 200. Tutorial 10: Exploring Arrays, Loops, and Conditional Statements: Creating a Monthly Calendar 201. Session 10.1 Visual Overview: Creating and Using Arrays 202. Introducing the Monthly Calendar 203. Introducing Arrays 204. Session 10.1 Quick Check 205. Session 10.2 Visual Overview: Applying a Program Loop 206. Working with Program Loops 207. Comparison and Logical Operators 208. Program Loops and Arrays 209. Session 10.2 Quick Check 210. Session 10.3 Visual Overview: Conditional Statements 211. Introducing Conditional Statements 212. Completing the Calendar App 213. Managing Program Loops and Conditional Statements
- 9. 214. Session 10.3 Quick Check 215. Review Assignments 216. Case Problems 217. Tutorial 11: Working with Events and Styles: Designing an Interactive Puzzle 218. Session 11.1 Visual Overview: Event Handlers and Event Objects 219. Introducing JavaScript Events 220. Creating an Event Handler 221. Using the Event Object 222. Exploring Object Properties 223. Session 11.1 Quick Check 224. Session 11.2 Visual Overview: Event Listeners and Cursors 225. Working with Mouse Events 226. Introducing the Event Model 227. Exploring Keyboard Events 228. Changing the Cursor Style 229. Session 11.2 Quick Check 230. Session 11.3 Visual Overview: Anonymous Functions and Dialog Boxes 231. Working with Functions as Objects 232. Displaying Dialog Boxes 233. Session 11.3 Quick Check 234. Review Assignments 235. Case Problems 236. Tutorial 12: Working with Document Nodes and Style Sheets: Creating a Dynamic Document Outline 237. Session 12.1 Visual Overview: Exploring the Node Tree 238. Introducing Nodes 239. Creating and Appending Nodes 240. Working with Node Types, Names, and Values 241. Session 12.1 Quick Check 242. Session 12.2 Visual Overview: Exploring Attribute Nodes 243. Creating a Nested List 244. Working with Attribute Nodes 245. Session 12.2 Quick Check 246. Session 12.3 Visual Overview: Style Sheets and Style Rules 247. Working with Style Sheets 248. Working with Style Sheet Rules 249. Session 12.3 Quick Check 250. Review Assignments 251. Case Problems 252. Tutorial 13: Programming for Web Forms: Creatings Forms for Orders and Payments 253. Session 13.1 Visual Overview: Forms and Elements 254. Exploring the Forms Object 255. Working with Form Elements 256. Working with Input Fields 257. Working with Selection Lists
- 10. 258. Working with Options Buttons and Check Boxes 259. Formatting Numeric Values 260. Applying Form Events 261. Working with Hidden Fields 262. Session 13.1 Quick Check 263. Session 13.2 Visual Overview: Passing Data between Forms 264. Sharing Data between Forms 265. Working with Text Strings 266. Introducing Regular Expressions 267. Programming with Regular Expressions 268. Session 13.2 Quick Check 269. Session 13.3 Visual Overview: Validating Form Data 270. Validating Data with JavaScript 271. Testing a Form Field against a Regular Expression 272. Testing for Legitimate Card Numbers 273. Session 13.3 Quick Check 274. Review Assignments 275. Case Problems 276. Tutorial 14: Exploring Object-Based Programming: Designing an Online Poker Game 277. Session 14.1 Visual Overview: Custom Objects, Properties, and Methods 278. Working with Nested Functions 279. Introducing Custom Objects 280. Session 14.1 Quick Check 281. Session 14.2 Visual Overview: Object Classes and Prototypes 282. Defining an Object Type 283. Working with Object Prototypes 284. Session 14.2 Quick Check 285. Session 14.3 Visual Overview: Objects and Arrays 286. Combining Objects 287. Combining Objects and Arrays 288. Session 14.3 Quick Check 289. Review Assignments 290. Case Problems 291. Appendix A: Color Names with Color Values, and HTML Character Entities 292. Appendix B: HTML Elements and Attributes 293. Appendix C: Cascading Styles and Selectors 294. Appendix D: Making the Web More Accessible 295. Appendix E: Designing for the Web 296. Appendix F: Page Validation with XHTML 297. Glossary 298. Index
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- 12. must not venture into the depths of reality. Molière would probably have had a short way with those who cannot laugh at Tartuffe, as Cervantes would have had a short way with those who cannot laugh at Don Quixote. There is as much imagination—as much sympathy, even, perhaps—in the laughter of the great comic writers as in the tears of the sentimentalist. And Molière’s aim was laughter achieved through an exaggerated imitation of reality. He was the poet of good sense, and he felt that he had but to hold up the mirror of good sense in order that we might see how absurd is every form of egotism and pretentiousness. He took the side of the simple dignity of human nature against all the narrowing vices, the anti-social vices, whether of avarice, licentiousness, self-righteousness or preciosity. He has written the smiling poetry of our sins. Not that he is indulgent to them, like Anatole France, whose view of life is sentimental. Molière’s work was a declaration of war against all those human beings who are more pleased with themselves than they ought to be, down to that amazing coterie of literary ladies in Les Femmes savantes, concerning whose projected academy of taste one of them announces in almost modern accents: Nous serons par nos lois les juges des ouvrages; Par nos lois, prose et vers, tout nous sera soumis; Nul n’aura de l’esprit hors nous et nos amis; Nous chercherons partout à trouver à redire, Et ne verrons que nous qui sache bien écrire. Molière has been accused of writing an attack on the higher education of women in Les Femmes savantes. What we see in it to- day is an immortal picture of those intellectual impostors of the drawing-room—the not-very-intelligentsia, as they have been wittily called—who exist in every civilised capital and in every generation. The vanities of the rival poets, it is true, are caricatured rather extravagantly, but the caricature is essentially true to life. This is what men and women are like. At least, this is what they are like
- 13. when they are most exclusive and most satisfied with themselves. Molière knew human nature. That is what makes him so much greater a comic dramatist than any English dramatist who has written since Shakespeare. Molière has been taken to task by many critics since his death. He has been accused even of writing badly. He has been accused of padding, incorrectness, and the use of jargon. He has been told that he should have written none of his plays in verse, but all of them, as he wrote L’Avare, in prose. All these criticisms are nine-tenths fatuous. Molière by the use of verse gave comic speech the exhilaration of a game, as Pope did, and literature that has exhilarating qualities of this kind has justified its existence, whether or not it squares with some hard-and-fast theory of poetry. If we cannot define poetry so as to leave room for Molière and Pope, then so much the worse for our definition of poetry. As for padding, I doubt whether any dramatist has ever kept the breath of life in his speech more continuously than Molière. His dialogue is not a flowing tap but a running stream. That Molière’s language may be faulty I will not dispute, as French is an alien and but half-known tongue to me. He produces his effects, whatever his grammar. He has created for us a world, delicious even in its insincerities and absurdities—a world seen through charming, humorous, generous, remorseless eyes—a world held together by wit—a world in which the sins of society dance to the ravishing music of the alexandrine.
- 14. IV EDMUND BURKE Burke, we are told, was known as “the dinner-bell” because the House of Commons emptied when he rose to speak. This is usually put down to the uncouthness of his delivery. But, after all, there was nothing in his delivery to prevent his indictment of Warren Hastings from so affecting his hearers in places that, as Lord Morley writes, “every listener, including the great criminal, held his breath in an agony of horror,” and “women were carried out fainting.” I fancy Burke’s virtues rather than his vices were at the bottom of his failure in the House of Commons. He took the imagination of an artist into politics, and he soared high above the questions of the hour among eternal principles of human nature in which country gentlemen had only a very faint interest. Not that he was a theoretical speaker in the sense of being a doctrinaire. He had no belief in paper Utopias. His object in politics was not to construct an ideal society out of his head but to construct an acceptable society out of human beings as their traditions, their environment, and their needs have moulded them. He never forgot that actual human beings are the material in which the politician must work. His constant and passionate sense of human nature is what puts his speeches far above any others that have been delivered in English. Even when he spoke or wrote on the wrong side, he was often right about human nature. Page after page of his Reflections on the French Revolution is as right about human nature as it is wrong about its ostensible subject. One might say with truth that, whatever his ostensible subject may be, Burke’s real subject is always human nature.
- 15. If he was indignant against wrong in America or India or Ireland, it was not with the indignation of a sentimentalist so much as of a moralist outraged by the degradation of human nature. He loved disinterestedness and wisdom in public affairs, and he mourned over the absence of them as a Shakespeare might have mourned over the absence of noble characters about whom to write plays. In his great Speech at Bristol he pilloried that narrow and selfish conception of freedom according to which freedom consists in the right to dominate over others. Burke demanded of human nature not an impossible perfection but at least the first beginnings of magnanimity. Thus he loathed every form of mean domination, whether it revealed itself as religious persecution or political repression. He attacked both the anti-Catholic and the anti-American would-be despots in the Speech at Bristol, and his comment may serve for almost any “anti” in any age: It is but too true that the love, and even the very idea, of genuine liberty is extremely rare. It is but too true that there are many whose whole scheme of freedom is made up of pride, perverseness and insolence. They feel themselves in a state of thraldom, they imagine that their souls are cooped and cabined in, unless they have some man, or some body of men, dependent on their mercy. This desire of having some one below them descends to those who are the very lowest of all; and a Protestant cobbler, debased by his poverty, but exalted by his share of the ruling Church, feels a pride in knowing it is by his generosity alone that the peer, whose footman’s instep he measures, is able to keep his chaplain from a jail. This disposition is the true source of the passion which many men in very humble life have taken to the American War. Our subjects in America, our colonies, our dependants. This lust of party-power is the liberty they hunger and thirst for; and this syren song of ambition has charmed ears that one would have thought were never organised to that sort of music.
- 16. All through his life Burke set his face against what may be called the lusts of human nature. As a Member of Parliament he refused to curry favour with his constituents by gratifying their baser appetites. In the farewell speech from which I have quoted, he has left us an impassioned statement of his position: No man carries farther than I do the policy of making government pleasing to the people. But the widest range of this politic complaisance is confined within the limits of justice. I would not only consult the interest of the people, but I would cheerfully gratify their humours. We are all a sort of children that must be soothed and managed. I think I am not austere or formal in my nature. I would bear, I would even myself play part in, any innocent buffooneries to divert them. But I will never act the tyrant for their amusement. If they will mix malice in their sports, I shall never consent to throw them any living, sentient creature whatsoever—no, not so much as a kitling—to torment. Burke spent the greater part of his life summoning men to the discipline of duty and away from anarchic graspings after rights. George III’s war against America, as well as the French Revolution is the assertion of a “right,” and Burke’s hatred of the war, as of the Revolution, arose from his belief that the assertion of “rights,” not for great public ends, but from ill-tempered obstinacy in clinging to a theory, was no likely means of increasing the happiness and liberties of human beings. He once received a letter from a gentleman who declared that, even if the assertion of her right to tax America meant the ruin of England, he would nevertheless say “Let her perish!” All through the American War Burke saw that what prevented peace was this sort of doctrinaire theory of the rights of England. In 1775 the American Congress appointed a deputation to lay a petition before the House of Commons. The Cabinet refused to receive an “illegal” body. Penn brought over an “olive branch of peace” from Congress in the same year, and again, holding fast to their theory of
- 17. the rights of Empire, ministers replied that Congress was an illegal body. Burke saw the vital thing to decide between England and America was not some metaphysical point in the disputed question of rights, but the means by which two groups of human beings could learn to live in peace and charity in the same world. I do not wish to suggest that he cared nothing for the rights or wrongs of the quarrel. He was the impassioned champion of right, in the noble sense of the word, beyond any other statesman of his time. On the other hand, he detested the assertion of a right for its own sake— the politics born of the theory that one has the right (whether one is a man or a nation) to do what one likes with one’s own. Burke saw that this is the humour of children quarrelling in the nursery. “The question with me is,” he said, “not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy.” He regarded peace as almost an end in itself, and he besought his fellow-countrymen not to stand upon their rights at the cost of making peace impossible. “Whether liberty be advantageous or not,” he told them during the war, “(for I know it is a fashion to decry the very principle), none will dispute that peace is a blessing; and peace must in the course of human affairs be frequently bought by some indulgence of liberty.” Thus we find him all through the war reminding his fellow-countrymen that the Americans were human beings—a fact of a kind that is always forgotten in time of war—and that the Anglo-American problem was chiefly a problem in human nature. “Nobody shall persuade me,” he declared, drawing on his knowledge of human nature, “when a whole people are concerned, that acts of lenity are not means of conciliation.” Again, when he was told that America was worth fighting for, his reply was: “Certainly it is, if fighting a people be the best way of gaining them.” Though opposed to the separation of America, he was in the end convinced that, if the alternatives were separation and coercion, England was more likely to gain a separate America than a bludgeoned America as a friend. Addressing his former constituents, he said:
- 18. I parted with it as with a limb, but as a limb to save the body; and I would have parted with more if more had been necessary: anything rather than a fruitless, hopeless, unnatural civil war. This mode of yielding would, it is said, give way to independency without a war. I am persuaded from the nature of things, and from every information, that it would have had a directly contrary effect. But if it had this effect, I confess that I should prefer independency without war to independency with it; and I have so much trust in the inclinations and prejudices of mankind, and so little in anything else, that I should expect ten times more benefit to this kingdom from the affection of America, though under a separate establishment, than from her perfect submission to the Crown and Parliament, accompanied with her terror, disgust and abhorrence. Bodies tied together by so unnatural a bond of union as mutual hatred are only converted to their ruin. There, again, you see the appeal to the “nature of things,” the use of the imagination instead of blind partisan passion. He himself might have called this distinguishing quality not imagination so much as a capacity to take long views. He looked on the taking of long views as itself a primary virtue in politics. He praised Cromwell and other statesmen whom he regarded as great bad men because “they had long views, and sanctified their ambition by aiming at the orderly rule, and not the destruction of their country.” Who, reading to-day his speeches on America and India, can question that Burke himself possessed the genius of the long view, which is only another name for imagination in politics? Mr. Murison’s admirable student’s edition of some of the writings of Burke gives us examples of Burke not only during the American but during the French period. He has called his book, indeed, not after the Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol or the Speech at Bristol, but after the Letter to a Noble Lord, in which Burke defends himself in the French period against the Duke of Bedford. Here, as during the
- 19. American War, we find him protesting against the introduction of “metaphysical” disputes about rights into politics. During the American War he had said, in regard to the question of rights: “I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions. I hate the very sound of them.” Now, during the Revolution, he declared: “Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty and passion of man.” Unfortunately, Burke himself was something of a “metaphysician” in his attack on the French Revolution. He wrote against France from prejudice and from theory, and his eye is continually distracted from the facts of human nature to a paper political orthodoxy. Even here, however, he did not forget human nature, and, in so far as the French Revolution was false to human nature—if the phrase is permissible—Burke has told the truth in lasting prose. His greatness as an artist is shown by the fact that he can move us to silent admiration even when we disagree with him. There is plenty of dull matter in most of his writings, since much of them is necessarily occupied with the detail of dead controversies, but there is a tide of eloquence that continually returns into his sentences and carries us off our feet. We never get to love him as a man. We do not know him personally as we know Johnson. He is a voice, a figure, not one of ourselves. His eloquence is the eloquence of wisdom, seldom of personal intimacy. He is not a master of tears and laughter, but, like Milton, seems rather to represent a sort of impassioned dignity of human nature. But what an imagination he poured into the public affairs of his time—an imagination to which his time was all but indifferent until he used his eloquence in support of (in Lord Morley’s phrase) “the great army of the indolent good, the people who lead excellent lives and never use their reason.” Even then, however, the imagination survived, and, hackneyed though it is by quotation, one never grows weary of coming on that great passage in which he mourns over the fate of Marie Antoinette and the passing of the age of chivalry from Europe.
- 20. It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in; glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiments and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness. As we read these sentences we cease to ask ourselves whether Burke was on the right or the wrong side in the French Revolution. We are content that a great artist has spoken from the depths of his
- 21. soul. He has released the truth that is in him to the eternal enrichment of the human race.
- 22. V KEATS 1. THE VARIOUS KEATSES Most men who write in praise of Shakespeare write in praise of themselves. Shakespeare is their mirror. Respectable middle-aged professors generally think of him as the respectable middle-aged man of the Stratford bust. Mr. Frank Harris sees him as Mr. Frank Harris with a difference. Mr. Charles Whibley imagines him as a Whibleyesque Tory with a knotted whip ever ready for the back of democracy. After reading The John Keats Memorial Volume, consisting of appreciations in prose and verse from all manner of contributors, great and little, one comes to the conclusion that most men interpret Keats in the same easy-going way. Thus, Mr. Bernard Shaw notes that the poet of the Ode to a Nightingale and the Ode on Melancholy was “a merry soul, a jolly fellow, who could not only carry his splendid burthen of genius, but swing it round, toss it up and catch it again, and whistle a tune as he strode along,” and he discovers in three verses of The Pot of Basil “the immense indictment of the profiteers and exploiters with which Marx has shaken capitalistic civilisation to its foundations, even to its overthrow in Russia.” To Dr. Arthur Lynch, on the other hand, Keats is primarily a philosopher, whose philosophic principles “account for his Republicanism as well as for his criticisms of poetry.” Mr. Arthur Symons takes an opposite view. “John Keats,” he tells us, “at a time when the phrase had not yet been invented, practised the theory of art for art’s sake.... Keats had something feminine and twisted in his
- 23. mind, made up out of unhealthy nerves ... which it is now the fashion to call decadent.” To Sir Ian Hamilton (who contributes a beautiful comment, saved by its passion from the perils of high- flownness) Keats was the prototype of the heroic youth that sacrificed itself in the war. Did he not once declare his willingness to “jump down Etna for any great public good”; and did he not write: The Patriot shall feel My stern alarum and unsheath his steel? And, if we dip into the thousands of other things that have been written about Keats, including the centenary appreciations, we shall find this personal emphasis on the part of the critic again and again. Lord Houghton even did his best to raise Keats a step nearer in the social scale by associating him with “the upper rank of the middle class”—an exaggeration, however, which is no more inaccurate than the common view that Keats was brought up on the verge of pauperdom. As a matter of fact, Keats’s father was an ostler who married his employer’s daughter, and his grandfather, the livery stable keeper of Finsbury Pavement, left a fortune of £13,000. But it is not only with regard to his birth that attempts to bring Keats into the fold of respectability are common. His character, and the character of his genius, are unconsciously doctored to suit the tastes of those who do not apparently care for Keats as he actually was. The Keats who thrashed the butcher is more important for them than the Keats who fell in love with Fanny Brawne. They prefer canonising Keats to knowing him, and the logical consequence of their attitude is that the Keats who might have been means more to them than the Keats who was. I do not deny that a great deal that is said about Keats on all sides is true: possibly most of it is true. But much of it is true only as an argument. The manly Keats is the true answer to the effeminate Keats, as the effeminate Keats is the true answer to the manly Keats. The Keats who said: “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death,” and the Keats who was
- 24. “snuffed out by an article” similarly answer one another; and the Keats of The Fall of Hyperion is the perfect critic of the Keats of the Ode on Indolence, and vice versa. Keats was a score of Keatses. He was luxurious and ascetic, heroic and self-indulgent, ambitious and diffident, an artist and a thinker, vulgar and an æsthete, perfect in phrase and gauche in phrase, melancholy and merry, sensual and spiritual, a cynic about women and one of the great lovers, a teller of heart-easing tales and a would-be redeemer. The perfect portrait of Keats will reveal him in all these contradictory lights, and we shall never understand Keats if we merely isolate one group of facts, such as the thrashing of the butcher, or another group, such as that he thought for a moment of abandoning Hyperion as a result of the hostile reviews of Endymion. Keats’s life was not that of a planet beautifully poised as it wheels on its lonely errand. He was a man torn by conflicting demons—a martyr to poetry and love and, ultimately, to ideals of truth and goodness. He bowed before altars that, even when he bowed, he seems to have known were altars of the lesser gods. Not that he blasphemed the greater gods in doing so. He believed that the altar at the foot of the hill was a stage in the poet’s progress to the altar at the summit. As he grew older, however, his vision of the summit became more intense, and a greater Muse announced to him: None can usurp this height But those to whom the miseries of the world Are miseries and will not let them rest. He was exchanging the worship of Apollo for the worship of Zeus and, like Tolstoy, he seemed to condemn his own past work as a denial of the genius of true art. Even here, however, Keats was still tortured by conflicting allegiances, and it is on Apollo, not on Zeus, he calls in his condemnation of Byron in The Fall of Hyperion:
- 25. Apollo! faded! O far-flown Apollo! Where is thy misty pestilence to creep Into the dwellings, through the door crannies Of all mock lyrists, large self-worshippers And careless Hectorers in proud bad verse? Though I breathe death with them it will be life To see them sprawl before me into graves. But he was Zeus’s child, as he lay dying, and the very epitaph he left for himself, remembering a phrase in The Maid’s Tragedy of Beaumont and Fletcher, “Here lies one whose name is writ in water,” was a last farewell to an Apollo who seemed to have failed him. The Keats who achieved perfection in literature, however, was Apollo’s Keats—Apollo’s and Aphrodite’s. His odes, written out of a genius stirred to its depths for the first time by his passion for Fanny Brawne—he does not seem to have been subject to love, as most poets are, in his boyhood—were but the perfect expression of that idolatry that had stammered in Endymion. Keats in his masterpieces is still the Prince breaking through the wood to the vision of the Sleeping Beauty. He has not yet touched her into life. He almost prefers to remain a spectator, not an awakener. He loves the picture itself more than the reality, though he guesses all the while at the reality behind. That, perhaps, is why men do not go to Keats for healing, as they go to Wordsworth, or for hope, as they go to Shelley. Keats enriches life rather with a sense of a loveliness for ever vanishing, and with a dream of what life might be if the loveliness remained. Regret means more to him than hope:
- 26. Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? What little town by river or sea-shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return. The world at its most beautiful is for Keats a series of dissolving pictures—of “fair attitudes” that only the artist can make immortal. His indolence is the indolence of a man under the spell of beautiful shapes. His energy is the energy of a man who would drain the whole cup of worship in a beautiful phrase. His æsthetic attitude to life—as æsthetic in its way as the early Pater’s—appears in that letter in which he writes: I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a Stoat or a field-mouse peeping out of the withered grass—the creature hath a purpose, and its eyes are bright with it. I go amongst the buildings of a city, and I see a Man hurrying along—to what? The Creature has a purpose, and his eyes are bright with it. In this very letter, no doubt, the disinterested philosopher as well as the æsthete speaks, but it is Keats’s longing for philosophy, not his philosophy itself, that touches us most profoundly in his greatest work. Our knowledge of his sufferings gives his work a background of Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self
- 27. against which the exquisite images he wrought have a tragic and spiritual appeal beyond that of any other poet of his kind. The Keats we love is more than the Keats of the poems—more even than the Keats of the letters. It is the Keats of these and of the life—that proud and vehement spirit, that great-hearted traveller in the realms of gold, caught in circumstances and done to death in the very temples where he had worshipped. 2. THE ARTIFICER It is an interesting fact that most of the writers who use words like artificers have been townsmen. Milton and Gray, Keats and Lamb, were all Londoners. It is as though to some extent words took the place of natural scenes in the development of the townsman’s genius. The town boy finds the Muse in a book rather than by a stream. He hears her voice first, perhaps, in a beautiful phrase. It would be ridiculous to speak as though the country-bred poet were uninfluenced by books or the town-bred poet uninfluenced by bird and tree, by winds and waters. All I suggest is that in the townsman the influence of literature is more dominant, and frequently leads to an excitement over phrases almost more intense than his excitement over things. Milton was thus a stylist in a sense in which Shakespeare was not. Keats was a stylist in a sense in which Shelley was not. Not that Milton and Keats used speech more felicitously, but they used it more self-consciously. Theirs, at their greatest, was the magic of art rather than of nature. They had not, in the same measure as Shakespeare and Shelley, the freedom of the air—the bird-like flight or the bird-like song. The genius of Keats, we know, was founded on the reading of books. He did not even begin writing till he was nearly eighteen, when Cowden Clarke lent him the treasures of his library, including The Faëry Queene. The first of his great poems was written after
- 28. reading Chapman’s Homer, and to the end of his life he was inspired by works of art to a greater degree than any other writer of genius in the England of his time. This may help to explain why he was, as Mr. John Bailey has pointed out, the poet of stillness. Books, pictures, and Grecian urns are still. They fix life for us in the wonder of a trance, and, if Keats saw Cortes “silent upon a peak in Darien,” and grey-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair; and figure after figure in the same sculptured stillness, may this not have been due to the fact that his genius fed so largely on the arts? Keats, however, was the poet of trance, even apart from his stay in the trance-world of the artists. One of his characteristic moods was an ecstatic indolence, like that of a man who has tasted an enchanted herb. He was a poet, indeed, whose soul escaped in song as on the drowsy wings of a dream. He may be said to have turned from the fever of life to the intoxication of poetry. He loved poetry —“my demon poesy”—as a thing in itself, as, perhaps, no other poet equally great has done. This was his quest: this was his Paradise. He prayed, indeed:
- 29. That I may die a death Of luxury, and my young spirit follow The morning sunbeams to the great Apollo Like a fresh sacrifice; or, if I can bear The o’erwhelming sweets, ’twill bring me to the fair Visions of all places: a bowery nook Will be elysium—an eternal book Whence I may copy many a lovely saying About the leaves and flowers—about the playing Of nymphs in woods, and fountains; and the shade Keeping a silence round a sleeping maid. This was the mood in which he wrote his greatest work. At the same time Keats was not an unmixed æsthete. He recognised from the first, as we see in this early poem, “Sleep and Poetry,” that the true field of poetry is not the joys of the senses, but the whole of human life: And can I ever bid these joys farewell? Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life, Where I may find the agonies, the strife Of human hearts. Modern critics, reading these lines, are tempted to disparage the work Keats actually accomplished in comparison with the work that he might have accomplished, had he not died at twenty-five. They prefer “The Fall of Hyperion,” that he might have written, to “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the “Nightingale,” and the “Grecian Urn” that he did write. They love the potential middle-aged Keats more than the perfect youthful Keats. This seems to me a perversity, but the criticism has value in reminding us how rich and deep was the nature that expressed itself in the work even of the young Keats. Keats was an æsthete, but he
- 30. was always something more. He was a man continually stirred by a divine hunger for things never to be attained by the ecstasies of youth—for knowledge, for truth, for something that might heal the sorrows of men. His nature was continually at war with itself. His being was in tumult, even though his genius found its perfect hour in stillness. But it was the tumult of love, not the tumult of noble ideals, that led to the production of his greatest work. Fanny Brawne, that beautiful minx in her teens, is denounced for having murdered Keats; but she certainly did not murder his genius. It was after meeting her that he wrote the Odes and “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and “Lamia” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” There has been too much cursing of Fanny. She may have been the cause of Keats’s greatest agony, but she was also the cause of his greatest ecstasy. The world is in Fanny’s debt, as Keats was. It was Fanny’s Keats, in a very real sense, who wrote the immortal verse that all the world now honours. 3. FANNY BRAWNE “My dear Brown,” wrote the dying Keats, with Fanny Brawne in his thoughts, in almost the last of his surviving letters, “for my sake, be her advocate for ever.” “You think she has many faults,” he had written a month earlier, when leaving England; “but, for my sake, think she has none.” Thus did Keats bequeath the perfect image of Fanny Brawne to his friend. And the bequest is not only to his friend but to posterity. We, too, must study her image in the eyes of Keats, and hang the portrait of the lady who had no faults in at least as good a position on the wall with those other portraits of the flawed lady—the minx, the flirt, the siren, the destroyer. Sir Sidney Colvin, in his noble and monumental biography of Keats, found no room for this idealised portrait. He was scrupulously fair to Fanny Brawne as a woman, but he condemned her as the
- 31. woman with whom Keats happened to fall in love. To Sir Sidney she was not Keats’s goddess, but Keats’s demon. Criticising the book on its first appearance, I pointed out that almost everything that is immortal in the poetry of Keats was written when he was under the influence of his passion for Fanny Brawne, and I urged that, had it not been for the ploughing and harrowing of love, we should probably never have had the rich harvest of his genius. Sir Sidney has now added a few pages to his preface, in which he replies to this criticism, and declares that to write of Fanny Brawne in such a manner is “to misunderstand Keats’s whole career.” He admits that “most of Keats’s best work was done after he had met Fanny Brawne,” but it was done, he insists, “not because of her, but in spite of her.” “At the hour when his genius was naturally and splendidly ripening of itself,” he writes, “she brought into his life an element of distracting unrest, of mingled pleasure and torment, to use his own words, but of torment far more than of pleasure.... In writing to her or about her he never for a moment suggests that he owed to her any of his inspiration as a poet.... In point of fact, from the hour when he passed under her spell he could never do any long or sustained work except in absence from her.” Now all this means little more than that Fanny Brawne made Keats suffer. On that point everybody is agreed. The only matter in dispute is whether this suffering was a source of energy or of destruction to Keats’s genius. Keats has left us in one of his letters his own view of the part suffering plays in the making of a soul. Scoffing at the conception of the world as a “vale of tears,” he urges that we should regard it instead as “the vale of soul-making,” and asks: “Do you not see how necessary a world of pain and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” Thus, according to his own philosophy, there is no essential contradiction between a love that harrows and a love that enriches. As for his never having suggested that he owed any of his inspiration to his love for Fanny, he may not have done this in so many words, but he makes it clear enough that she stirred his nature to the depths for the first time and awakened in him that fiery energy which is one of the first conditions of genius in poetry.
- 32. “I cannot think of you,” he wrote, “without some sort of energy— though mal à propos. Even as I leave off, it seems to me that a few more moments’ thought of you would uncrystallise and dissolve me. I must not give way to it—but turn to my writing again—if I fail I shall die hard. O my love, your lips are growing sweet again to my fancy—I must forget them.” Sir Sidney would read this letter as a confession that love and genius were at enmity in Keats. It seems to me a much more reasonable view that in the heat of conflict Keats’s genius became doubly intense, and that, had there been no struggle, there would have been no triumph. It is not necessary to believe that Fanny Brawne was the ideal woman for Keats to have loved: the point is that his love of her was the supreme event in his life. “I never,” he told her, “felt my mind repose upon anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment—upon no person but you.” “I have been astonished,” he wrote in another letter, “that men could die martyrs for religion—I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more— I could be martyr’d for my religion—love is my religion—I could die for that. I could die for you. My creed is love, and you are its only tenet.” And still earlier he had written: “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks—your loveliness and the hour of my death. O, that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.... I will imagine you Venus to-night and pray, pray, pray to your star like a heathen.” It is out of emotional travail such as we find in these letters that poetry is born. Is it possible to believe that, if Keats had never fallen in love—and he had never been in love till he met Fanny —he would have been the great poet we know? I hold that it is not. Hence I still maintain the truth of the statement which Sir Sidney Colvin sets out to controvert, that, while Fanny “may have been the bad fairy of Keats as a man, she was his good fairy as a poet.” Keats’s misfortune in love was a personal misfortune, not a misfortune to his genius. He was too poor to marry, and, in his own phrase, he “trembled at domestic cares.” He was ill and morbid: he had longed for the hour of his death before ever he set eyes on Fanny. Add to this that he was young and sensual and as jealous as
- 33. Othello. His own nature had in it all the elements of tragic suffering, even if Fanny had been as perfect as St. Cecilia. And she was no St. Cecilia. He had called her “minx” shortly after their first meeting in the autumn of 1818, and described her as “beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange.” Even then, however, he was in love with her. “The very first week I knew you,” he told her afterwards, “I wrote myself your vassal.... If you should ever feel for man at the first sight what I did for you, I am lost.” It is clear from this that his heart and his head quarrelled about Fanny. At the same time, after those first censures, he never spoke critically of her again, even to his most intimate friends. Some of his friends evidently disliked Fanny and wished to separate the lovers. He refers to this in a letter in which he speaks angrily of “these laughers who do not like you, who envy you for your beauty,” and writes of himself as “one who, if he never should see you again, would make you the saint of his memory.” But Keats himself could not be certain that she was a saint. “My greatest torment since I have known you,” he tells her, “has been the fear of you being a little inclined to the Cressid.” He is so jealous that, when he is ill, he tells her that she must not even go into town alone till he is well again, and says: “If you would really what is called enjoy yourself at a party—if you can smile in people’s faces, and wish them to admire you now—you never have nor ever will love me.” But he adds a postscript: “No, my sweet Fanny—I am wrong—I do not wish you to be unhappy—and yet I do, I must while there is so sweet a beauty—my loveliest, my darling! Good-bye! I kiss you—O the torments!” In a later letter he returns to his jealousy, and declares: “Hamlet’s heart was full of such misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia, ‘Go to a nunnery, go, go!’” He tells this fragile little worldly creature that she should be prepared to suffer on the rack for him, accuses her of flirting with Brown, and, in one of the most painful of his letters, cries out: I appeal to you by the blood of that Christ you believe in: Do not write to me if you have done anything this month which it would have pained me to have seen. You may have
- 34. altered—if you have not—if you still believe in dancing rooms and other societies as I have seen you—I do not want to live —if you have done so I wish the coming night may be my last. I cannot live without you, and not only you, but chaste you, virtuous you.... Be serious! Love is not a plaything—and again do not write unless you can do it with a crystal conscience. Poor Keats! Poor Fanny! That Fanny loved Keats is obvious. In this at least she showed herself unworldly. She cannot have been dazzled by his fame, for at that time he was to all appearance merely a minor poet who had been laughed at. He was of humble birth, and he had not even the prospect of being able to earn a living. Add to this that he was an all but chronic invalid. Her love must, in the circumstances, have been a very real and unselfish affair, and there is no evidence to suggest that, for all her taste for dancing and for going into town, it was fickle. Keats asked too much of her. He wished to enslave her as she had enslaved him. He knew in his saner moments that he was unfair to her. “At times,” he wrote, “I feel bitterly sorry that ever I made you unhappy.” There was unhappiness on both sides—the unhappiness of an engagement that could come to nothing. “There are,” as Keats mournfully wrote, “impossibilities in the world.” It was Fate, not Fanny, that wrecked the life of Keats. “My dear Brown,” he wrote near the end, “I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well.” That is not the comment a man makes on a woman whom he regards as his destroying angel. Nor is it a destroying angel that Keats pictures when he writes to Fanny: “You are always new. The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last movement the gracefullest. When you passed my window home yesterday, I was filled with as much admiration as if I had then seen you for the first time.” Love such as this is not the enemy of poetry. Without it there would be no poetry but that of patriots, saints and hermits. A biography of Keats should not be a biography without a heroine. That would be Hamlet without Ophelia.
- 35. Sir Sidney Colvin’s is a masterly life which is likely to take a permanent place in English biographical literature. But it has one flaw. Sir Sidney did not see how vital a clue Keats left us to the interpretation of his life and genius in that last despairing appeal: “My dear Brown, for my sake be her advocate for ever.”
- 36. VI CHARLES LAMB Charles Lamb was a small, flat-footed man whose eyes were of different colours and who stammered. He nevertheless leaves on many of his readers the impression of personal beauty. De Quincey has told us that in the repose of sleep Lamb’s face “assumed an expression almost seraphic, from its intellectual beauty of outline, its childlike simplicity, and its benignity.” He added that the eyes “disturbed the unity of effect in Lamb’s waking face,” and gave a feeling of restlessness, “shifting, like Northern lights, through every mode of combination with fantastic playfulness.” This description, I think, suggests something of the quality of Lamb’s charm. There are in his best work depths of repose under a restless and prankish surface. He is at once the most restful and the most playful of essayists. Carlyle, whose soul could not find rest in such quietistic virtue as Lamb’s, noticed only the playfulness and was disgusted by it. “Charles Lamb,” he declared, “I do verily believe to be in some considerable degree insane. A more pitiful, rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering tomfool I do not know. He is witty by denying truisms and abjuring good manners.” He wrote this in his Diary in 1831 after paying a visit to Lamb at Enfield. “Poor Lamb!” he concluded. “Poor England, when such a despicable abortion is named genius! He said: ‘There are just two things I regret in England’s history: first, that Guy Fawkes’ plot did not take effect (there would have been so glorious an explosion); second, that the Royalists did not hang Milton (then we might have laughed at them), etc., etc.’ Armer Teufel!”
- 37. Carlyle would have been astonished if he had foreseen that it would be he and not Lamb who would be the “poor devil” in the eyes of posterity. Lamb is a tragically lovable figure, but Carlyle is a tragically pitiable figure. Lamb, indeed, is in danger of being pedestalled among the saints of literature. He had most of the virtues that a man can have without his virtue becoming a reproach to his fellows. He had most of the vices that a man can have without ceasing to be virtuous. He had enthusiasm that made him at home among the poets, and prejudices that made him at home among common men. His prejudices, however, were for the most part humorous, as when, speaking of L. E. L., he said: “If she belonged to me I would lock her up and feed her on bread and water till she left off writing poetry. A female poet, a female author of any kind, ranks below an actress, I think.” He also denounced clever women as “impudent, forward, unfeminine, and unhealthy in their minds.” At the same time, the woman he loved most on earth and devoted his life to was the “female author” with whom he collaborated in the Tales from Shakespeare. But probably there did exist somewhere in his nature the seeds of most of those prejudices dear to the common Englishman—prejudices against Scotsmen, Jews, and clever women, against such writers as Voltaire and Shelley, and in favour of eating, drinking and tobacco. He held some of his prejudices comically, and some in sober earnest, but at least he had enough of them mixed up in his composition to keep him in touch with ordinary people. That is one of the first necessities of a writer—especially of a dramatist, novelist or essayist, whose subject-matter is human nature. A great writer may be indifferent to the philosophy of the hour or even to some extent to the politics of the hour, but he cannot safely be indifferent to such matters as his neighbour’s love of boiled ham or his fondness for a game of cards. Lamb sympathised with all the human appetites that will bear talking about. Many noble authors are hosts who talk gloriously, but never invite us to dinner or even ring for the decanter. Lamb remembers that a party should be a party.
- 38. It is not enough, however, that a writer should be friends with our appetites. Lamb would never have become the most beloved of English essayists if he had told us only such things as that Coleridge “holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple dumplings,” or that he himself, though having lost his taste for “the whole vegetable tribe,” sticks, nevertheless, to asparagus, “which still seems to inspire gentle thoughts.” He was human elsewhere than at the table or beside a bottle. His kindness was higher than gastric. His indulgences seem but a modest disguise for his virtues. His life was a life of industrious self-sacrifice. “I am wedded, Coleridge,” he cried, after the murder of his mother, “to the fortunes of my sister and my poor old father”; and his life with his sister affords one of the supreme examples of fidelity in literary biography. Lamb is eminently the essayist of the affections. The best of his essays are made up of affectionate memories. He seems to steep his very words in some dye of memory and affection that no other writer has discovered. He is one of those rare sentimentalists who speak out of the heart. He has but to write, “Do you remember?” as in Old China, and our breasts feel a pang like a home-sick child thinking of the happiness of a distant fireside and a smiling mother that it will see no more. Lamb’s work is full of this sense of separation. He is the painter of “the old familiar faces.” He conjures up a Utopia of the past, in which aunts were kind and Coleridge, the “inspired charity-boy,” was his friend, and every neighbour was a figure as queer as a witch in a fairy-tale. “All, all are gone”—that is his theme. He is the poet of town-bred boyhood. He is a true lover of antiquity, but antiquity means to him, not merely such things as Oxford and a library of old books: it means a small boy sitting in the gallery of the theatre, and the clerks (mostly bachelors) in the shut- up South-Sea House, and the dead pedagogue with uplifted rod in Christ’s Hospital, of whom he wrote: “Poor J. B.! May all his faults be forgiven; and may he be wafted to bliss by little cherub boys, all head and wings, with no bottoms to reproach his sublunary infirmities.” His essays are a jesting elegy on all that venerable and
- 39. ruined world. He is at once Hamlet and Yorick in his melancholy and his mirth. He has obeyed the injunction: “Let us all praise famous men,” but he has interpreted it in terms of the men who were famous in his own small circle when he was a boy and a poor clerk. Lamb not only made all that world of school and holiday and office a part of antiquity; he also made himself a part of antiquity. He is himself his completest character—the only character, indeed, whom he did not paint in miniature. We know him, as a result of his letters, his essays, and the anecdotes of his friends, more intimately even than we know Dr. Johnson. He has confessed everything except his goodness, and, indeed, did his reputation some harm with his contemporaries by being so public with his shortcomings. He was the enemy of dull priggishness, and would even set up as a buffoon in contrast. He earned the reputation of a drunkard, not entirely deserved, partly by his Confessions of a Drunkard, but partly by his habit of bursting into singing “Diddle, diddle, dumpling,” under the influence of liquor, whatever the company. His life, however, was a long, half-comic battle against those three friendly enemies of man— liquor, snuff and tobacco. His path was strewn with good resolutions. “This very night,” he wrote on one occasion, “I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realised.” The perfect anecdote of Lamb’s vices is surely that which Hone tells of his abandonment of snuff: One summer’s evening I was walking on Hampstead Heath with Charles Lamb, and we talked ourselves into a philosophic contempt of our slavery to the habit of snuff- taking, and with the firm resolution of never again taking a single pinch, we threw our snuff-boxes away from the hill on which we stood, far among the furze and the brambles below, and went home in triumph. I began to be very miserable, and was wretched all night. In the morning I was walking on the same hill. I saw Charles Lamb below, searching among the bushes. He looked up laughing, and saying, “What, you are
- 40. come to look for your snuff-box too!” “Oh, no,” said I, taking a pinch out of a paper in my waistcoat pocket, “I went for a halfpennyworth to the first shop that was open.” Lamb’s life is an epic of such things as this, and Mr. Lucas is its rhapsodist. He has written an anthological biography that will have a permanent place on the shelves beside the works of Lamb himself.
- 41. VII BYRON ONCE MORE It will always be easy to take an interest in Byron because he was not only a scamp but a hero—or, alternatively, because he was not only a hero but a scamp. As a hero he can be taken seriously: as a villain he can be taken comically. His letters, like Don Juan, reveal him at their best chiefly on the comic side. He was not only a wit, but an audacious wit, and there is a kind of audacity that amuses us, whether in a guttersnipe or in a peer. Byron was a guttersnipe in scarlet and ermine. He enjoyed all the more playing the part of a guttersnipe, because he could play it in a peer’s robe. He was obviously the sort of person who, if brought up in the gutter, would be sent to a reformatory. Imagine a reformatory boy, unreformed and possessed of genius, loosed on respectable society, and you will have a picture of Byron. Not that Byron did not share the point of view of respectable society on the most important matters. He had no sympathy with the heresies of Shelley, whom he thought “crazy against religion and morality.” He did not want a new morality, as Shelley did: he was quite content with the old morality and the old immorality. He never could have run away with a woman on principle. Love with him was not a principle, but an appetite. He was a glutton who did not know where to stop. He himself never pretended that it was the desire of the moth for the star that was the cause of his troubles. He was an orthodox materialist, as we may gather from one of his unusually frank letters to Lady Melbourne, a lady in her sixties, to whom he ran with the tale of every fresh amour, like a newsboy with the stop-press edition of an evening paper. We find him at the age of twenty-five or so writing to explain that he was sure to die fairly young. “I began very early and very