A History of English Literature

useful for atmosphere and background.
In minor matters, in the novels also, there is much carelessness. The
style, more formal than that of the present day, is prevailingly wordy and
not infrequently slipshod, though its vitality is a much more noticeable
characteristic. The structure of the stories is far from compact. Scott
generally began without any idea how he was to continue or end and sent off
each day's instalment of his manuscript in the first draft as soon as it
was written; hence the action often wanders, or even, from the structural
point of view, drags. But interest seldom greatly slackens until the end,
which, it must be further confessed, is often suddenly brought about in a
very inartistic fashion. It is of less consequence that in the details of
fact Scott often commits errors, not only, like all historical novelists,
deliberately manipulating the order and details of the actual events to
suit his purposes, but also making frequent sheer mistakes. In 'Ivanhoe,'
for example, the picture of life in the twelfth century is altogether
incorrect and misleading. In all these matters scores of more
self-conscious later writers are superior to Scott, but mere correctness
counts for far less than genius.
When all is said, Scott remains the greatest historical novelist, and one
of the greatest creative forces, in world literature.
THE LAST GROUP OF ROMANTIC POETS. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, and Scott
had mostly ceased to produce poetry by 1815. The group of younger men, the
last out-and-out Romanticists, who succeeded them, writing chiefly from
about 1810 to 1825, in some respects contrast strongly with them. Byron and
Shelley were far more radically revolutionary; and Keats, in his poetry,
was devoted wholly to the pursuit and worship of beauty with no concern
either for a moral philosophy of life or for vigorous external adventure.
It is a striking fact also that these later men were all very short-lived;
they died at ages ranging only from twenty-six to thirty-six.
Lord Byron, 1788-1824. Byron (George Gordon Byron) expresses mainly the
spirit of individual revolt, revolt against all existing institutions and
standards. This was largely a matter of his own personal temperament, but
the influence of the time also had a share in it, the time when the
apparent failure of the French Revolution had thrown the pronounced
liberals back upon their own resources in bitter dissatisfaction with the
existing state of society. Byron was born in 1788. His father, the violent
and worthless descendant of a line of violent and worthless nobles, was
just then using up the money which the poet's mother had brought him, and
soon abandoned her. She in turn was wildly passionate and uncontrolled, and
in bringing up her son indulged alternately in fits of genuine tenderness
and capricious outbursts of mad rage and unkindness. Byron suffered also
from another serious handicap; he was born with deformed feet, so that
throughout life he walked clumsily--a galling irritation to his sensitive
pride. In childhood his poetic instincts were stimulated by summers spent
among the scenery of his mother's native Scottish Highlands. At the age of
ten, on the death of his great-uncle, he succeeded to the peerage as Lord
Byron, but for many years he continued to be heavily in debt, partly
because of lavish extravagance, which was one expression of his inherited
reckless wilfulness. Throughout his life he was obliged to make the most
heroic efforts to keep in check another inherited tendency, to corpulence;
he generally restricted his diet almost entirely to such meager fare as
potatoes and soda-water, though he often broke out also into periods of
unlimited self-indulgence.
From Harrow School he passed to Trinity College, Cambridge, where Macaulay