XXV. RESTORATION THEATRE
In England, when the King came to his own again (29 May, 1660) and the reign of the Saints was ended, it was certain that the Theatre also would come to her own. The stage had been bad enough, in verse, taste, and manners, before the doors were closed in 1642. When the dramatic Muse returned, she brought with her, like the man in the parable, seven other devils worse than herself. The morals and tastes of the town and Court were what, after so many years of Puritan sway, they might be expected to be. They are most livelily delineated in the "Diary" of Mr. Pepys; and the drama of the Restoration was their child, and worthy of them. At first the stage was occupied by the older plays of Fletcher, Jonson, and Shirley; no new names of note appear till Dryden's "Wild Gallant" failed in 1663, and Sir George Etherege's "Love in a Tub" prospered in 1664.
No age will be content with old plays, the mould and fashion of the time must be exhibited. Pictures of the brutal mirth and the horseplay of triumphant licence, of the flirtations and intrigues of lackeys and lords and ladies, all genteel and witty à la mode of the Court and town as we know them from Pepys and Grammont, were presented.
Everything must be "new". As we hear of "the new morality," "the new theology," and so on, so, in "The Rehearsal" (1671), a burlesque by the Duke of Buckingham and other hands, on the plays of the last ten years, the word "new" is constantly reiterated. "You must know this is the new way of writing, and these hard things please forty times better than the old plain way of writing."
The butt of "The Rehearsal," Bayes, a mixture of Davenant with the mannerisms of Dryden, keeps bragging that this or that absurdity is "new". "New," certainly, and not worthy to wax old, was the extravagant "heroic" tragedy, copying the flights of the French school of bombastic romances, and written in rhyming couplets. The authors of "The Rehearsal" stitch together scraps and parodies of the new plays, in that which is being rehearsed, with plenty of farcical "business" under Mr. Bayes, who gives amusing snatches of his "Ars Poetica," while there are gibes at the new style of prologues and epilogues, which Dryden wrote so copiously. But "The Rehearsal" is less witty than Sheridan's "The Critic". As for the "new" rhyming "heroic" plays, Dryden ascribes their origin to Davenant. Forbidden to act the old sort of plays under the Reign of the Saints, he introduced examples of moral virtue, "writ in verse" (in rhyme), "and performed in recitative music". He combined the Italian opera with characters in the manner of Corneille. At the Restoration, he turned his "Siege of Rhodes" into "a just drama," but without "design and variety of characters". Dryden took the manner up, and, inspired by Ariosto, made love and valour the theme of the new heroic tragedy on a superhuman scale, and with supernatural incidents, ghosts for example. Then came rant and extravagance expressed in rhymed couplets, and even triplets, till Dryden returned to blank verse, and Lee and Otway and others followed him. But the drama remained as heroic and absurd as when Dryden wrote that masterpiece "The Conquest of Granada". In this he has a ghost, the ghost of the mother of the heroic Almanzor. Scott supposes that she was brought in to prove the courage of her son, even in face of an apparition. Really, the courtesy of Almanzor is more to be admired; the stage direction shows that he bowed to the spectre!
Many critics of the age regarded the heroic tragedy with no more respect than we are apt to do now. Dryden replied with arguments which are not quite to the point. The heroic tragedy is a perfectly legitimate form of art; the Greek tragedies deal with divine heroes and gods, and Æschylus in "The Persians" does not disdain the ghost of Darius, and in "The Eumenides" introduces the Furies. Dryden pleaded for a similar licence in the heroic play, but all depends on the manner of the doing. His ghosts are not majestic, like that of Darius; they are absurd. For boldness of language he also claimed a privilege; persons engaged in superhuman struggles may talk above the pitch of ordinary men. But they must not, like the heroes of the Caroline tragedies, soar or slip into bombast; they must rise on the wings of poetry, not on bladders full of gas. "Are all the flights of heroic poetry to be concluded bombast, unnatural, and mere madness because they," the critics, "are not affected by their excellences?" asks Dryden, in his "Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence". "No, not all," the critics might have answered, "but many of your flights of heroic poetry are bombast"; and they might, indeed they did, produce examples. For instance, in his "The State of Innocence," in which, accepting Milton's permission given in blank verse,
Ay, you may tag my verses if you will,
he rhymed "Paradise Lost" into an opera, Dryden wrote thus:--
Seraph and cherub, careless of their charge, And wanton, in full ease, who live at large, Unguarded leave the passes of the sky, And all dissolved in hallelujahs lie.
The spectacle of wanton seraphs lying dissolved in hallelujahs naturally provoked laughter, but Glorious John did not see the absurdity of the situation. He took his image from Virgil, he says, where the Greeks enter Troy which "lay buried in sleep and wine". But Trojans were not seraphs, and sleep and wine are not dissolving hallelujahs. In the same way Virgil, following Homer, describes the Cyclops as a monster of mountainous height, as in fact he was. Goliath was only about ten feet high. But Dryden applauds Cowley for writing of Goliath--
The valley, now, this monster seemed to fill, And we, methought, looked up to him from our hill.
"The passage is horrible bombast," says Scott. Not living in an early heroic age, in which exaggeration is natural and pardonable, but in the age of scepticism and the Royal Society, Dryden exceeded the ancient licence, and, as when a hero takes off his hat to his mother's ghost, mingled modern manners with more than heroic audacities. Criticism should look for beauties, not faults, said Dryden, but the critics could reply that the whole scheme of the heroic drama was faulty. The result is extravagance and rant, indeed rant was then the fault of the actors on the French stage. Molière had to warn his company that a King, conversing with his Minister, "does not necessarily speak like a dæmoniac".
Turning to comedy, we find it but little instructed, in refinement, creation of character, and wit, by the example of Molière.
Etherege's three plays "Love in a Tub" (1664), "She Would if She Could" (1667), and "The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter" (1676), are the work of a courtier and amateur concerning whose life and death little is known. The merriment of "Love in a Tub" is a picture of contemporary manners; compared with its prose, the rhyming ten-syllabled couplets of the graver and sentimental characters are almost a relief.
The author (1635-1691?), in the Prologue, admits that "wit" (dramatic genius in this case), "has now declined"; avers that "the older and graver sort" would decry new plays in the manner of Fletcher and Ben Jonson; and bids the audience "Only think upon the modern way of writing". In an Epilogue to "Sir Fopling Flutter," Dryden characterizes the hero admirably:--
True fops help Nature work, and go to school, To file and finish God Almighty's fool.
If these' pieces have wit, they "have not wit enough to keep them sweet".
Thomas Shadwell (1642-1692) was made immortal when he became the butt of Dryden's satire. His plays are useful to students of contemporary manners, and he was the Laureate of William and Mary in succession to "Glorious John".
Sir Charles Sedley and Mrs. Aphra Behn have left nothing imperishable but a few songs, the swan songs of the dying Muse of lyric.
All these playwrights had before their eyes the inimitable and immortal comedies with which Molière was endowing the literature of France. But, even when they tried to follow this model, their imitations were barbarous: for compared with the literary taste and manners of the Court of Louis XIV, those of the reign of Charles II were brutal.
The least unsuccessful of those who directed themselves by the light of Molière was William Wycherley (1640?-1716?). Here we sketch his career and that of his successors, reserving for a separate section the great name of Dryden. Wycherley was of an old family in Shropshire, had a handsome person, was brought up, in boyhood, at Paris, in the literary circle of Madame de Montausier, later resided at Oxford, and, if we could believe what Pope says that Wycherley reported of himself, wrote his first play, "Love in a Wood," before he came to London, to the Middle Temple. This would make Wycherley prior to Etherege, but either his own or Pope's memory is supposed to have been incorrect. The play was not acted till 1672: it was not much in advance of Etherege in merit.
Of "The Gentleman Dancing Master" (1673), "The Country Wife" (1673), and "The Plain Dealer" (1674) the last is by far the best. In the Prologue, the line
And with faint praises one another damn,
was remembered, unconsciously, by Pope, in his "Damn with faint praise" (in the character of "Atticus," Addison).
"The Plain Dealer" is a comedy of humours, like Jon son's, the chief humorist being the benevolent railing Manly, taken from the Alceste of Molière's "Le Misanthrope". Manly "of an honest, surly, nice humour," is a gallant British sea captain, who holds all the world in contempt but his friend and his love, who, of course, betray him. He is beloved by Fidelia, who, for his sake, has abandoned her large fortune, and taken service as a seaman with Captain Manly. Many scenes of conversation, in imitation of Molière, are vigorous; one perhaps was in Sheridan's mind when he wrote "The School for Scandal". Wycherley defends his "Country Wife" from the assaults of a false prude, who, at least, shows us that, even under Charles II, "The Country Wife" was thought superfluously indecent. The Widow Blackacre, a female Peter Peebles, a litigious she-lawyer, with her oaf of a son, is "in very gracious fooling". The intrigue, and the part assigned to Fidelia, are odious enough, and impossible enough, but the nobility of Fidelia is demonstrated by allowing her, occasionally, to talk in blank verse. When we remember Wycherley's French education, we may suppose that he dealt so much in matter which a French audience would not have endured, because he knew the taste of the theatre-going part of his countrymen.
Wycherley is said to have suffered much from a jealous wife of noble birth, who caused him a world of legal troubles by the bequest of her money. He married again at 75, and shortly afterwards died. The most interesting thing in his later years was his acquaintance with Pope, then a lad, and the characteristic use which Pope made of his opportunity.
Congreve.
Heaven, that but once was prodigal before, To Shakespeare gave as much, she could not give him more
than she conferred on Congreve. So wrote Dryden: and probably half believed what he wrote. Dryden was a literary dictator; literary opinion followed his lead; and there was a period when the town recognized the equal of Shakespeare in the sprightly author of comedies no longer ravishing.
William Congreve was born (1670) near Leeds: his family was of Staffordshire. His father settling in Ireland, Congreve was educated at the grammar school of Kilkenny, and at Trinity College, Dublin. He was a very handsome man, with an air of greatness; he easily conquered both the courtly and the literary world when he came to London; he won the admiration and affection of the generous Dryden, who applauded and opened the doors of the theatre to his first comedy, "The Old Bachelor". The play is not better than a fair specimen of Wycherley's manner, but "The Double Dealer" (1693) is much more readable and interesting. The complicated passions of Lady Touchwood have a kind of greatness, the more complicated plots of Maskwell nearly lead to a sanguinary conclusion; Maskwell being as near an approach to the regular villain of comedy as the conditions of comedy permitted. Lady Froth is rather more learned than Mrs. Malaprop, and as vicious under her zeal for astronomy and "mathemacular proof" as the unkindness of man will allow her to be. The haughty refusal of Lord Froth to laugh, even when he is amused, is amusing; Brisk and Careless are agreeable rattles, Sir Paul Plyant is almost to an incredible degree "an uxorious, foolish, fond old knight," and the heroine, Cynthia, is a good girl. The constant bustle, and the involutions of a plot full of surprises ought to have made the play more popular on the stage than it was at first. Leigh Hunt, who edited "The Comedies of the Restoration" (or rather of the date from the Restoration to Queen Anne), candidly says, "speaking for ourselves, we can never attend sufficiently to the plots of Congreve. They soon puzzle us and we cease to think of them."
The student who would enjoy Congreve must first peruse each play very carefully, and make out a summary of the plot, with diagrams illustrating the secret staircases, back doors, screens, and other places of ambush: he must also master the details of the various marriages which are arranged for the various heiresses, amiable bankrupts, and old gentlemen. When the reader has thus given his full attention to the details he may re-read the plays with more ease and pleasure.
In "Love for Love" (1695) Sir Sampson Legend has some of the diverting traits of Sir Anthony Absolute; there are unlooked-for glimpses of romance in the assumed madness of his impoverished son Valentine (the sympathetic rake of comedy--the Charles Surface of an earlier day). The sailor son, Ben Legend, is the stock simple sailor, with some gross sense under the breezy manners of the untutored mariner. Foresight, with his rich collection of superstitions, is a "character part" of interest to the folklorist; one scene between two moral sisters who simultaneously detect each other's sins is diverting: the wit of Jeremy the valet, however, does not come within sight of the wit of Molière's Mascarille; and Miss Prue is a tomboy not remarkable for innocence.
The pearl of "The Way of the World" (1700) is the high-hearted Millamant, who, when she at last rewards one of the thousands that sigh for her, makes a very spirited private marriage contract with her adorer. Her song,
If there's delight in love,'tis when I see That heart, which others bleed for, bleed for me,
is famous among the lyrics of Congreve. We do not often care for Congreve's characters, nor do they try to win our affection, but Millamant conquers all hearts.
Congreve's tragedy in blank verse "The Mourning Bride," holds much the same place in his plays as "Don Garcie de Navarre" does in those of Molière.
After a long, fashionable, and applauded life, Congreve died in 1729, deeply lamented by the Duchess of Marlborough (daughter of the great Duke), and by the once beautiful and delightful actress, Mrs. Bracegirdle. He held rich sinecures under Government, as did other wits while the Tories were in office.
Vanbrugh.
He writes your comedies, draws schemes, and models, And builds Dukes' houses upon very odd hills
is a contemporary couplet which sums up a few of the accomplishments of Sir John Vanbrugh. His family seem to have been Protestants driven from Ghent in the wars of Alva. He was born in 1666[1] "in a French bastile" he said. He was educated in France; entered the English army; produced his first play, "The Relapse," in 1696, and was the architect of Castle Howard, the Earl of Carlisle's house, in 1701. Carlisle procured for him the herald's post of Clarencieux; as a Whig he was sent to carry the Order of the Garter to the Elector of Hanover (later George I); he built the palace of Blenheim, and, like all who met her, was insulted by Sarah Duchess of Marlborough. He seems to have been friendly with the wits of both parties, being as jovial as versatile. He died on 26 March, 1726.
"The Relapse, or Virtue in Danger," is a kind of continuation of Colley Cibber's "Love's Last Shift"; as Fielding's "Joseph Andrews" continues and burlesques Richardson's "Pamela". From the Preface we learn that, as the second title leads us to think probable, "The Relapse" was accused of obscenity and blasphemy. The Prologue, spoken by Miss Cross on the first night, would, in our delicate age, clear all the women out of the stalls and boxes. The piece opens with a long dialogue in blank verse, between Loveless, a newly married rake, rejoicing in
the happy cause of my content,
and Amanda, his bride, that Sappy cause. They are going to town, and Amanda is afraid that Loveless's Virtue will Relapse. An amusing character is Lord Foppington, a knight newly made a peer; "While I was but a knight I was a very nauseous fellow," he confesses. He holds an absurd levee with his tailor, wigmaker, and hosier, and snubs his brother, Tom Fashion, who is penniless. Through an old nauseous match-maker, Coupler, Tom learns that the peer is contracted to a rustic heiress, whom he has never seen, Miss Hoyden, daughter to Sir Tunbelly Clumsey. Tom decides to go down, personate his brother, and marry the wealthy Miss Hoyden. Yet he has a qualm of conscience and will give Foppington another chance.
Arrived in town, Loveless and Amanda drop blank verse for prose. Amanda confesses her distaste for the obscenities of, the stage. Loveless admits that he has admired a lady at the play; Amanda flutters with jealousy; her cousin, Berinthia, enters; she is the woman admired by Loveless. Enter Lord Foppington bent on the conquest of Amanda. He dislikes the quiet of a country life: "For 'tis impossible to be quiet without thinking; now thinking is to me the greatest fatigue in the world". His lordship is a lover of books, of their bindings, "The inside, I must confess, I am not altogether so fond of". For this he gives his exquisite reasons, and describes the glories of his everyday occupations. From 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. he drinks. "Thus, ladies, you see my life is a perpetual round of delights." This peer is worth a wilderness of Sir Fopling Flutters. On Sundays, "a vile day I must confess," Foppington imitates the course of Mr. Badman. He ends by making a declaration to Amanda, who replies with a box on the ear. Loveless and Foppington fight, Foppington falls, exclaiming "Ah,--quite through the body. Stap my vitals!"
Like Shakespeare, Vanbrugh "has brave notions," and like him, as Ben Jonson said, "he needs to be stopped" before swords are drawn in ladies' company. His Lordship, of course, is no more killed than was the Master of Ballantrae when the sword hilt "dirled on his breast-bone".
Berinthia and Amanda now discuss not "the practical part of unlawful love," "that is abominable"; "but for the speculative; that, we must all confess, is entertaining". Amanda admits an interest in a speculative inquirer, her husband's friend, Mr. Worthy, and, most unnaturally, for she is very jealous, invites Berinthia, a merry widow, to be her guest.
Lord Foppington, happily recovered, airs his original philosophy of life for his brother's edification. "Look you, Tam, of all things that belong to a woman I have an aversion to her heart. For when once a woman has given you her heart, you can never get rid of the rest of her body." This philosopher declines to give Tom a penny, and Tom returns to the raid upon Miss Hoyden and her fortune.
Loveless is now found--ah! woful change--not only talking in blank verse--indicative of a serious passion--with Berinthia, but kissing her: the discovery is made by Worthy, her old lover. "O God!" exclaims Berinthia. Worthy now knows that Berinthia adores Loveless, and Berinthia--that Worthy adores Amanda. They contrive a plot against Amanda very worthy of their ingenuous principles.
We next find Tom at Sir Tunbelly Clumsey's door, which is garrisoned like the Tower, and all to seclude that Danaë, Miss Hoyden. Both Tom and Miss Hoyden are eager to be married with no more delay than Tom Jones and Sophia, but Sir Tunbelly is more set on ceremonies than Squire Western.
The proceedings of Berinthia now justify the censures of the moralist, and "turning the other page," as Chaucer recommends, we find Tom and Miss Hoyden privately married by Chaplain Bull, when Foppington arrives with two coaches and twenty foot-men, the military skill of Sir Tunbelly, convinced that the newcomer is an impostor, enables him to rout Lord Foppington's guard and arrest his person. Presently a Sir John Friendly arrives; he knows and recognizes the genuine Foppington, who has admirably preserved the calm dignity of his philosophy. The blushless Hoyden now avows to her Nurse and the Chaplain her resolve to prevent trouble by at once wedding the real Lord Foppington.
Meanwhile, by aid of virtue and blank verse, Amanda converts the passion of Mr. Worthy into profound admiration and esteem. The natural denouement follows: Miss Hoyden is recognized as Mrs. Tom Fashion, and Lord Foppington, who would have gone to the guillotine as gallantly as any gentleman, congratulates his brother: "Dear Tam, you have married a woman beautiful in her person, charming in her airs, prudent in her conduct, constant in her inclinations, and of a nice morality. Split my windpipe!"
Vanbrugh's quality, his absence of sentiment, his large and lively handling of old comic types, may be guessed at from this brief analysis of his first play. He was thought to have surpassed it in "The Provoked Wife" (1697) and "The Confederacy" (1705). He also adapted pieces by Molière, and a French writer nearly forgotten, Boursault.
George Farquhar.
George Farquhar, born 1678, at Londonderry, was the son of a clergyman, and was a University wit of Trinity College, Dublin. He early became an actor, and early left the stage; it is said because he had done accidentally what Mr. Lenville proposed to do of set purpose to Nicholas Nickleby, severely wounded a fellow-player in a stage duel. He then obtained a commission in the army, and wrote plays, "A Trip to the Jubilee," "Sir Harry Wildair," "The Way to Win Him," "The Recruiting Officer," "The Beaux' Stratagem" (1707), and others; the characters, such as Scrub, Sergeant Kite, Archer, Lady Bountiful, Captain Plume, and others, were great favourites with Sir Walter Scott, and by him are often quoted. Farquhar died young, at about the age of 30. George Farquhar with his gaiety, his gallantry, his happy military swagger, his heroes who are not lost to honour, his plots, so comprehensible, and sources of so many merry adventures, wins more sympathy and affection,--dying in the arms of Victory as he did, during the triumph of his last and best play,--than any of the other comic writers of the Restoration.
Otway.
Otway, like most dramatists of his day, cannot be fairly judged by his printed works. They want the splendid costumes and decor, the setting of the stage, and the pathos and brilliance of the beautiful actresses, for Otway was most successful in such tender and distraught heroines as Belvidera and Monimia. Born in 1652, Thomas Otway, the son of the rector of Woolbeding, in Sussex, entered Christ Church, Oxford, in 1669, but soon left it, on the death of his father, for London. Here he hung about the Duke of York's Theatre, where he failed as an actor. In 1675 he produced a play, "Alcibiades," though, as he says in a preface to his "Don Carlos," "I might as well have called it 'Nebuchadnezzar,'" for Alcibiades acted in a way not consistent with his character. The caprice of the witty, miserable Earl of Rochester won the good will, if nothing more substantial, of the Duke of York for the poet, who dedicates to him the heroic play of "Don Carlos" (1676). In this, according to Otway, Dryden declared that "I know not a line I would not be author of," so the play must have been, and in fact was, a success. It is written in rhyming couplets, and even triplets; the rhymes are often surprisingly bad. The history of the death of Don Carlos, who was mad, is obscure, and Otway treats it with extreme poetic licence. Philip of Spain is here a tender, though avenging, father and husband, who repents and rants monstrously, though rant is not the common fault of Otway. There is tenderness and pathos enough to account for the popularity of the play; moreover Otway was known to be hopelessly in love with Mrs. Barry, the beautiful actress; Rochester who presently satirised Otway, being his rival. After a luckless campaign with Monmouth in Flanders, Otway, following Dryden's example, abandoned rhyme for blank verse in "The Orphan" (1680), based on a stock situation in a novel of the seventeenth century. The intrigue, though the crucial situation is not acceptable now on the stage, is ingeniously contrived to bring out the characters of the rival brothers, and Monimia, a very pathetic character, must have drawn many tears. There is the usual number of deaths in the last act. The blank verse has no great distinction, and abounds in redundant feet. Otway, in fact, did not take by literary perfections, but "The Orphan" has no lines so far below the tragic level as the words of the Queen in "Don Carlos".
How hard it is his passion to confine, I'm sure 'tis so if I may judge by mine!
The phrase of Monimia when she learns the depth of her misery, "Oh, when shall I be mad indeed!" is of other metal.
In 1682, Otway produced his "Venice Preserved," certainly his best play, which long held the stage, and was acted now and then up to the middle of the nineteenth century. The conspirators in the play may be said to rant, but moderation of language does not mark the eloquence of violent revolutionaries with the most bitter personal wrongs to avenge. Belvidera may be "stagey," but she has genuine tenderness and pathos; there is dramatic development of character in Jaffier; "the moving incident" is abundant; the absence of poetry was not marked or missed. The scenes with Antonio, a caricature of the Shaftesbury of Titus Oates's plot, with his "I'll prove there's a plot with a vengeance, a bloody, horrid, execrable, damnable, and audacious plot," must have delighted audiences who had just escaped from Oates's reign of lies and terror. The bloody ghosts who appear in the conclusion are an unhappy reversion to the devices of Chapman. Otway wrote other things, the comedy of "The Soldier's Fortune," for example, which, even then, was "so filthy, no modest woman ought to be seen at it," as, Otway tells us, a woman of "a nice morality" declared. Certainly Otway had no real comic genius. Before he wrote "Venice Preserved" Otway was destitute, till relieved by the Duchess of Portsmouth, to whom the play is dedicated. On the death of Charles II the Duchess ceased, it appears, to succour the poet, who died in deep distress, in April, 1685; as to the manner of his death, stories vary. Probably he was not a careful liver; profits from plays were slight; and patrons were niggardly. Otway is undeniably more coherent, more capable in construction than the majority of the tragedians from Chapman to Ford; but he did not inherit that remarkable, if occasional, gift of greatness in style which was their common portion.
Nat Lee.
The reader of the plays in which Nat Lee (1653-1692) employs blank verse, finds it much more satisfactory in its cadences and in movement than the blank verse of Otway. There is something of the old ring in
For I am doz'd so weary with complaining. That I could stand and listen to the winds,
or
For straight when the sick priest had breathed his last, The sacred oil which for a hundred years Supplied the sun behind the golden veil, Went out and all the mystic lights were quenched.
Undeniably there was poetry in Lee, but to the pathos, concentration, and construction of Otway he does not attain. He was born in Hertfordshire, and educated in Westminster, and Trinity, Cambridge. He was at intervals insane, and while reading the speeches of his characters we sometimes seem to "stand and listen to the winds" of a wild night of autumn.
There is a kind of furious magnificence in the tempestuous tirades of Pharnaces with which the play of "Mithradates" opens, and throughout the terrors of that piece "The old winds cease not blowing and all the night thunders". The same vigour displays itself in his first tragedy (1675), written partly in "new" rhymed heroic couplets. The ghost of Caligula would
Burn palaces; like Thunder I would rove, Tear the tall woods, and rend each sacred grove.
Lee is, by the way, far too prodigal of his ghosts. His age, at all events the theatre-going part of his contemporaries, was apt to jest at ghosts, following Webster and Wagstaffe, and unconvinced by Henry More, Glanvill in "Sadducismus Triumphatus," and the other founders of "Psychical Research".
In 1677, Lee, with "The Rival Queens," made a success which long held the stage, and the names of Statira and Roxana, rivals for the love of Alexander the Great, live in memory. Dryden wrote the prologue of the piece, protesting that he was not "logrolling," and comparing the poet to "Titian and Angelo". Lee loved a ghost, and that of Philip of Macedon "shakes his truncheon at 'em," at the conspirators against Alexander, whom two queens adore with furious passion. Statira's first words demand
a knife, a draught of poison, flames!
but, instantly relenting, for she has heard that Alexander loves Roxana, she praises the faithless conqueror:--
Not the Spring's mouth, nor breath of jesamin, Nor violets' infant sweets, nor opening buds, Are half so sweet as Alexander's breast.
Though "well-matched for a pair of quiet ones," Statira, of the two, is of milder mood.
The staging of the play must have been arduous, a battle of crows and ravens fills the air, an eagle and dragon meet and fight; the eagle and birds drop dead, the dragon flies away, and "soldiers walk off, shaking their heads," and no wonder! especially as the ghost of Philip is still walking, and a "monstrous child" is weeping blood into a silver bowl and throwing the gore over the percipients. When the jealous Roxana reaches Babylon, she is as passionate as Statira, and cries to the spectators,
Away, be gone, and give a whirlwind room!
The two queens meet with gentle words, but when their blood is up their language is on the level of the situation. Roxana is the readier with her knife; the dying Statira forgives her; Alexander dies in a delirium, with a lucid interval at the close.
Dryden and Lee worked together in "The Duke of Guise" (assassinated by order of Henri III) and in "Œdipus". The last is worth reading as an example of the taste of the time. The foundation is the "Œdipus Tyrannus" of Sophocles, from which passages are translated in blank verse. In the preface we learn that Corneille's "Œdipe" "is inferior to the original". The "Œdipus" of Lee and Dryden goes very far beyond,--and in that sense surpasses--the masterpiece of the Athenian. "All that one could gain out of Corneille was that an episode must lie, but not his way." For "custom has obtained that there must be an underplot of second persons," as, alas! there is, while the over-elaboration of the loves of Œdipus and Jocasta, "very curious and disgusting," would have seemed to Sophocles the work of Læstrygonians or some such uncouth barbarians. Jocasta murders all her children--she hangs the girls and stabs the boys, which proves that the taste of Englishmen was infinitely more brutal than that of the prehistoric framers of the original legend. Œdipus, after putting out his eyes as in the Greek, commits suicide--by jumping out of an upper floor window! The love affair of Eurydice, and the charge against her of being the murderess of Laius, are supremely absurd, while the ghost of Laius drives about in a chariot with those of three of his retainers. Even this nonsense is capped by a song about fiends who use red-hot tongs, and boiling cauldrons, and torture "with molten lead in it".
Lee and Dryden seem to have stimulated each the other's ambition to outdo the worst excesses of the most frantic Elizabethan playwrights. They knew, of course, that Œdipus, in the Attic myth, did not kill himself, like a distraught housemaid, by jumping out of a window; they knew that he lived, and that the children of Jocasta lived and furnished the materials for two noble dramas of Sophocles. But they thought that the blood could not be spread too thick.[2]
Dryden.
Though Dryden was a dramatist of the Restoration, he was so much else, was a link so strong in the golden chain of our poetry and prose, that he must be considered apart from smaller wits.
John Dryden was born in 1631, at Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire. His name is common in Teviotdale: his family was landed, and had a baronetcy: in Scotland it is not a landed name. From Westminster school Dryden went to Trinity, Cambridge, where he was known to Mr. Samuel Pepys. He entered in 1650, at 19, an age later than was usual. For some reason he did not like his University.
Thebes did his green unknowing youth engage, He chooses Athens in his riper age,
that is Oxford, the home of lost causes, like his own. In 1663 married Lady Elizabeth Howard; wrote plays for a livelihood (his rents were small); in 1670 became Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal: acted, we may say, in both capacities in his great satires of the troubles following on the Popish Plot and other poems down to the birth of the Prince of Wales (10 June, 1688), and, after the Revolution, supported himself by play-writing, translating Virgil, by his "Fables," and other works, till his death on 1 May, 1700.
Setting aside Milton, who dwelt apart, Dryden was by far the greatest man of letters of the Restoration and the reign of our Dutch deliverer. Under Dryden, and to a great extent through his versatile and manly genius, English literature matured and clarified itself. Though not averse to far-fetched "conceits" in his early poems, Dryden shook them off; he made the heroic couplet the instrument for Pope and his successors, he gave it a nobility, a richness and depth of music which it had not possessed: it was stronger, more varied, more poetical, in his hands than in those of Pope. Prose, touched by him, became much more lucid and rapid than it had been in the long involved periods of Clarendon, if not so purely simple as the prose of Swift.
It was, in a sense, the misfortune of Dryden that he was the poet of an age immersed in its own complicated and exciting, and now, to all but careful historical students, not easily understood affairs. We have no adequate and intelligent history of the Restoration. Dry den's verses, for the most part, are "topical," deal with events of the day: there is little time for meditation on what is universal; he is an urban poet, too: nature and landscape are rarely handled by him. If our ideal of poetry is derived from study of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and other recent moderns, we do not and cannot find in Dryden what they have taught us to desire and expect. His themes are of his time and of the men and the political passions of his time. His plays, many of them rhymed, are but little read; nobody strongly recommends his comedies, which are more coarse than comic; he did not, himself, think that comedy set his genius.
His lyrics, though spirited, have not the sweet spontaneity of the true English lyric from "Love has come with Lent to town" to those of the best nineteenth century makers. To read his best satires with entire enjoyment we need to be well acquainted with the obscure intrigues of an age of plots, royal, political, and religious. Yet, through all his poetic work, from his early "Heroic Stanzas" on the death of Cromwell, down to "Alexander's Feast," we see the note and hear the voice of a great poet; a voice new, noble, sonorous, and his own. There is, in almost all that Dryden did, in his criticism in prose not less than in his verse, a kind of conquering supremacy, an ease, an impetus, and a consciousness of his own greatness which is not arrogance, but lends facility and a triumphant speed to his verse; while his criticism is that of zest, of delight in excellence wherever he finds it; from Homer to Virgil, from Virgil to the then little understood Chaucer, to Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.
His "Heroic Stanzas" (published in 1659) in quatrains, may or may not have been inspired by appreciation of Cromwell; Dryden's kinsfolk were Presbyterian and Parliamentarian; but his heart and natural inclinations as a man and a poet, were more engaged (1660) in his "Astræa Redux," and verses to Charles II on his coronation. Dryden, like Waller, was (to our taste) more successful in praising the great usurper than the Merry Monarch. The first stanza in the poem on Cromwell strikes a ringing and a novel note, but the reader also requires a footnote on Roman imperial funereal ritual before he can understand what is meant. To say of Cromwell,
To our crown he did fresh jewels bring,
while, in fact, he sold the jewels, was to invite satire; to talk of
Stanching the blood by breathing of the vein,
was thought an odd way of alluding to regicide: though Dryden may perhaps have spoken of the wars in general.
Her safety rescued Ireland to him owes
is a strange compliment to the man of the Drogheda massacre. Dryden, at this time, wrote as a Protestant; much later he was reconciled to the ancient Church.
His "Astræa Redux," and poem on the Coronation of Charles II show his early mastery of the heroic couplet. Scott thought that in these poems the Muse awoke, like the Sleeping Beauty of the fairy tale "in the same antiquated and absurd vestments in which she had fallen asleep twenty years before". This means that the so-called "metaphysical" style of far-fetched conceits and comparisons (which Sir Walter heartily hated) still prevailed. There are, indeed, traces of the habits attributed by fable to elephants, and remote classical allusions, and abrupt changes of metaphor from anatomy to bait-fishing (of which Dryden was fond) and it is rather absurd to make a ship of war "groan beneath the weight" of a lad like the Duke of Gloucester! But the verse is excellent, and the spirit high and joyous, as became the great occasion. As much may be said of the lines addressed to Clarendon.
In the "Annus Mirabilis" (1667), concerning the naval war with Holland and the Great Fire of 1666, Dryden reverted to the quatrains made fashionable by Davenant's "Gondibert". Mr. Pepys, of the Admiralty, thought this "a very good poem," it came home to his bosom and business, and, as a poem of war, is much superior to Addison's "Campaign". There are still conceits, as when Dutch mariners killed on board a ship laden with spices and Oriental porcelain "by shattered porcelain fall," or "by aromatic splinters die". To appreciate the poem the reader needs a good chart and an intimate knowledge of naval history, but the vigour of the verses on the fire carries them on like the conflagration itself. The "Prayer of Charles II" is royal, and worthy of David, to whom Dryden had already compared him in "Astræa Redux," as later in "Absalom and Achitophel". Indeed Charles in certain points of conduct resembled the Psalmist.
For some fifteen years Dryden was now to be occupied with play-writing, and his tragedies and comedies, as his latest editor says, supply the historian with "the most troublesome and perhaps the most thankless... part of his task". But Dryden does not live by the merits of his dramas. When we have said that Scott, with all his zeal for old plays, did not like Dryden's, it is clear that people less omnivorous in literature and less devoted to the drama, will leave them alone.
Of Dryden's first comedy, "The Wild Gallant," 1663, Mr. Pepys said it was "so poor a thing as I ever saw in my life". It was condemned, but was amended and repeated. The judgment of Mr. Pepys was well deserved. The play is in prose.
"The Rival Ladies" (published 1664) was reckoned "innocent and most pretty witty" by Pepys: it is partly in poor blank verse, partly in rhymed couplets: in the preface Dryden says that Waller "first showed us to conclude the sense, most commonly in distiches, which, in the verse before him, runs on for so many lines together, that the reader is out of breath to overtake it". The plot is reckless of probability, but, on the whole, the thing is not coarse as well as shocking to the credulity of the reader.
In "The Indian Queen" (1664) Dryden added some scenes to a "heroic" play by Sir Robert Howard, and is credited with the part of Montezuma. The "heroic" play resembled the immense extravagant romances of the day ("Gondibert" is a versified romance of this kind); written by Mdlle. de Scudéry and her imitators. Intricate prolonged extravagance was then characteristic; and Sir George Mackenzie ("Bluidy Mackenzie"), who wrote such a romance about the civil war, reckoned these heroic tales the final and perfect type of the novel.
"The Indian Emperor," in rhyme (1665), was a contribution by Dryden to this class of drama. Cortez and Pizarro go conquering together, which is odd, "in a pleasant Indian country," within two leagues of Mexico. The High Priest's morning sacrifice has disposed of 500 human victims--love scenes with ladies of such Mexican names as Almeria and Cydaria follow; Cortez and Pizarro approach in arms, Cydaria and Cortez fall in love, in a song, and after much heroic passion, all ends happily for the lovers. The merits of the versification and the rhetoric are great; Montezuma is racked on the stage; and holds a dialogue about religion, in fine distiches, with his equally tormented High Priest. The priest expires, but Cortez releases Montezuma, and throws the blame on Pizarro.
"The Conquest of Granada" (1670) was a yet more triumphant play of the heroic variety; "The Rehearsal," a satirical piece, partly by the Duke of Buckingham, partly by collaborators, derided "Bayes" (as we have seen); and as Dryden received the Laureate's bays in 1670, he is, at least, in part, the object of the mockery. He took it very unconcernedly, and went on writing heroic plays, but in 1677-1678, in "All for Love," abandoned rhyme for blank verse. "The Spanish Friar" (1681) was a "topical" play, full of the Protestantism of Oates's Popish Plot.
The sequels of the Whig and Protestant lunacy of the Popish Plot, and the political turmoil and Whig conspiracies in the interests of Monmouth, and against the succession of the Duke of York (James II.), found Dryden on the side of the King, and gave occasion for his greatest works, the political satires, "Absalom and Achitophel" (Monmouth and Shaftesbury) and "The Medal" (1681-1682), while more amusing if less monumental, is "Mac-Flecknoe," the attack on the Whig playwright and versifier, Shadwell. "The Hind and Panther" (the Roman and Anglican Churches) is not very appropriate in its allegory, but magnificent in many passages of verse. Dryden came into the religion of the Duke of York, apparently from conviction, and so threw in his lot with a doomed cause. After the Revolution of 1688, no longer Laureate, he simply worked hard at literature for his livelihood. He translated Virgil with much spirit, into rhymed ten syllabled couplets; and wrote that Ode to the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew which contains his repentance for the prostitution of the Muse throughout the revel of the Restoration.
O gracious God I how far have we Profaned thy heavenly grace of poesy! Made prostitute and profligate the Muse, Debased to each obscene and impious use, Whose harmony was first ordained above For tongues of angels and for hymns of love.
Dryden's old age, as the dictator to the wits at Will's Coffee House, was tranquil and happy: he had sown his literary wild oats, his life was one of peaceful and honoured industry, without failure of mental force. He died in May, 1700, and was buried near Chaucer in Westminster Abbey, with strangely maimed rites, according to Farquhar, the author of "The Beaux' Stratagem," who was present.
Dryden's prose, chiefly critical, was addressed to that part of the literary world, the Court and the Town, and the Templars, which was mainly interested in the theatre. He could thus write with freedom, alertness, and gaiety, to appreciative readers concerned with the problems of the drama. It had almost expired by a kind of natural decay, moral and literary, before the theatres were closed by the Puritans. Now writers of plays looked back on the glories of the "former temple," to Jonson, Fletcher, and Shakespeare, and also looked abroad to the French stage then flourishing under Corneille and Molière. Which was the better way? Was the rhyme of French tragedy, and of many French comedies, to be imitated? It was imitated, and in his rhymed tragedies Dryden acquired his mastery of the couplet. What was to be said for and against the English practice of an upper and an under plot? What were the famous "unities" of time, place, and action? Should deaths be merely reported or presented on the stage? Dryden observes that the audiences used to laugh at dying scenes in tragedies: "it is the most comic part of the whole play".
Having such topics to discuss, Dryden adopted the prose style so justly appreciated, though it was the reverse of his own manner, by Dr. Johnson. Dryden's prefaces to his plays "have not the formality of a settled style, in which the first half of the sentence betrays the other. The clauses are never balanced, nor the periods modelled: every word seems to drop by chance, though it falls into its proper place. Nothing is cold or languid; the whole is airy, animated, and vigorous; what is little is gay; what is great is splendid."
The most famous essays are those of "Dramatic Poesy," and "The Preface to the Fables," adaptations or "translations" of Chaucer and Boccaccio. The former essay is, in form, a dialogue, held in a boat on the Thames, while the thunder of the guns, in a great naval battle against the Dutch (3 June, 1665) dies away from the English shores, with promise of an English victory. The speakers are Lord Buckhurst, Sir Robert Howard, Dryden's brother-in-law, the poet himself, and Sir Charles Sedley, the gayest of the four, though his knowledge of Aristotle's "Poetics" is far from adequate. The speeches are rather long; there is no rapid interchange of opinions. In Dryden's lips are placed the words, "Shakespeare was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul". Yet "he is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clinches, his serious swelling into bombast". Dryden, here, and in "The Preface to the Fables," was much more keen to praise Shakespeare than to blame him: in the second place the zest with which he applauds Shakespeare and Chaucer (whose scansion, unluckily, he did not understand), is worthy of himself and of them. He translated Virgil, but, when he did some Homeric passages into English, we see how entirely the Greek, to his taste, overcomes the Mantuan poet. "I have found, by trial, Homer a more pleasing task than Virgil... the Grecian is more according to my genius than the Latin poet."
Dryden himself, at the meeting of the ways of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, belonged by genius more to the past than the immediate future. His criticisms are like the conversation of a great artist, speaking of his art, and also (Dr. Johnson thought him too copious on this subject) of himself. But here Johnson resembles Dryden when he rebukes Andromache, at her last leave-taking with Hector, for speaking of her utter bereavement of father and brothers by the spear of Achilles. "The devil was in Hector," says Dryden, "if he knew not all this matter, as well as she who told it him, for she had been his bed-fellow for many years together"--an error in fact, and an example of Dryden's occasional frivolity.
The work of Thomas Southerne has for long been neglected, though Garrick, by making excisions and modifications, restored part of it to the stage. Southerne was born before the Restoration (1660), and lived to see the last effort of the Stuart cause crushed in 1746. Born in Dublin, he went to Oxford, neglected the law, gave his first play in 1682, paid court to the Duke of York, got a commission in the Duke of Berwick's regiment, and wrote, in 1687, a play, not acted till 1721, in which he satirized Mary, the daughter of James II. Dryden doubled, in Southerne's case, the price of a prologue, raising it from £5 to £10, but Southerne raised the gains of authors, getting £700 for a single piece, while Dryden never received more than £100. Southerne's new comedies were popular after the Revolution of 1688. The plot of his "Innocent Adultery" (dear to Lydia Languish) was taken from a novel, by Mrs. Aphra Behn--the play, in 1758, was revived by Garrick;--from Mrs. Behn also Southerne dramatized "Oroonoko, or the Loyal Slave". This piece, with the licentious comic scenes removed, was revived in 1759, and a new age saw how Southerne
"Touch'd their fathers' hearts with gen'rous woe, And taught their mothers' youthful eyes to flow,"
though
"With ribald mirth he stained his sacred page".
In 1725, the poetic fire of Southerne died out in "Money the Mistress". The author was liked by everybody, even by Pope, known to all as "honest Tom," and addressed by the Earl of Orrery in a letter as "My Dear Old Man". Southerne did not affect the development of the stage, and the better part of his "Oroonoko" is due to Mrs. Behn: people who laughed at the sub-plot were easily amused.
Of Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718) space suffices only for the statement that he was made Poet Laureate under George I., edited Shakespeare, and wrote "Jane Shore," "in imitation of Shakespeare's style". Here is a sample of the imitation:--
"If poor, weak woman swerve from Virtue's rule, If strongly charmed she leave the thorny way, And in the softer paths of pleasure stray, Ruin ensues, reproach and endless shame, And one false step entirely damns her fame."
The blank verse too is remote from the Shakespearean.
The stage (like the world after the death of Donne's Miss Drury) continued to exist after the death of Steele. Young and Johnson, Thomson and John Home wrote tragedies, and acting comedies abounded, but we do not find comedies that live and give pleasure in the reading till we come to Goldsmith and Sheridan.
[1] In 1664 in the Parish of St. Nicholas Aeons (see "Diet, of Nat. Biog." referring to the list of Baptisms in that Church).
[2] In the Achæan myth, first mentioned in the "Iliad," we read that "Œdipus fell," the Greek word is that used for falling in battle.
XXVI. AUGUSTAN POETRY
Alexander Pope.
Alexander Pope, the son of Catholic parents in the trading class, was born in the year of Revolution, 1688. His education was private, priests were his tutors, but he acquired Latin, and was from childhood a great reader of poetry, and an imitator of what he read. He was not born deformed, but overstudy, perhaps, or unnoted accident, made him the stunted and crooked thing that he became, while his health, and the hideous personal insults which his enemies used as freely as Hazlitt did in later times, exasperated his temper.
His parents withdrew to Windsor Forest, a centre of Catholic families like the Blounts and Englefields. Pope was early introduced to the coffee-house wits by the most chivalrous and accomplished of men, Charles Wogan, who, in 1719, rescued from prison in Austria, and brought to her affianced prince in Italy, Clementina Sobieska, mother of Prince Charles.
Pope corresponds very early, on literary subjects, with the veteran Wycherley (of whom Pope's account is, as always, quite untrustworthy) and with "knowing Walsh". He taught himself verse by translating the Latin poet Statius, and at 21 published, in 1709, his "Pastorals," "written at the age of 16," according to Pope.
It is not possible here to examine all Pope's statements about his works, all his really ingenious ways of fishing for fame, of mystifying; and, with none of the coarseness of our contemporary literary advertisement, of acting as his own interviewer and his own advertiser. He had no need to practise these arts, but his methods are amusing as exposed by his learned and hostile editor, Elwin. Pope's great delight was in literary quarrels, and he managed to pick some very pretty quarrels out of remarks on his pastorals and those of Philips which appeared in "The Guardian". Pope preluded his pastorals by an essay on pastoral poetry in general; a genre of which it may be said that Theocritus (using literary models, such as Stesichorus, and also familiar with the songs of Sicilian peasants) introduced it in immortal poems; Virgil imitated Theocritus: and Pope thinks that Virgil "refines upon his original, and in all points when judgment is principally concerned, he is much superior to his master". It would have been pleasant to set down Pope to the construing of a few passages from Theocritus. Pope kept pretty close to his originals: and follows his own advice "the numbers should be the smoothest, the most easy and flowing imaginable". The brevity of the pastorals, their smoothness, and their avoidance of the "burning questions" of the day, so commonly intruded into Elizabethan pastorals, permit Pope's to be read with ease and even with pleasure.
In the "Essay on Criticism" (1711) we find Pope with an ambition to reform the world of literature. It is not easy to find out exactly what he would be at, for he uses such terms as "Nature," "wit," "judgment," in various ways. Nature seems permanent enough, but human views of "Nature" differ perpetually, and when Pope says, "First follow Nature," what does he mean by "Nature"? Why are "wit" and "judgment" "at strife"? The poet refers them to Nature as interpreted by Greek art for a verdict; and of Greek art he knew very little. Read Homer and Virgil, especially Virgil, he says. The poem, though it teaches us little about criticism, is full of lines so witty and so pointed that they are now proverbial.
In 1713 he published "Windsor Forest," admired by Swift, his life-long friend; with Addison he was on apparently good terms, but he was already suspicious. He attacked Dennis, who had assailed Addison's "Cato," and he did so in a style which Addison, through Steele, repudiated. Addison's praise of Philips's pastorals, with their Fairies, to Pope appeared dispraise of his own; and in an article in "The Guardian" he made fun of Philips with ingenious irony of commendation.
Pope's great work, his version of the "Iliad," appearing in portions (1715-1720), met a kind of challenge in Tickell's version of the First Book. Addison spoke well of Tickell's specimen; did he write it, or inspire it, or set it up as a rival to Pope's? Pope, much later, told his own story of his wrongs and of his noble and dignified treatment of Addison. His most loyal biographer cannot accept the tale: at all events Pope wrote, and much later published, his famous verses on Addison (Atticus). (Published, 1722, after Addison's death.) The two men ceased to be friends, but Addison never hit back. Pope had also suspected him for doubts as to the wisdom of adding to the first shape of "The Rape of the Lock" (1712) the machinery of Sylphs and Gnomes in the second form (1714). The addition was deservedly successful, but Addison might well hesitate to recommend a change in that tiny mock-epic of a quarrel about the stealing of a lock of hair. It is perfection in its way, in its wit, sauciness, and gaiety.
The "Iliad," a terrible task for Pope, executed through long years of advice from all quarters, of doubt, and of weariness, was a triumph, celebrated in charming verses by Gay's "Welcome to Mr. Pope on His Return from Greece". In that strange age the noble, the great, the beautiful swelled Pope's triumph; literature was fashionable. Pope's "Iliad" can never be superseded as a masterpiece of English literature. He was no scholar, but he had many friends to help him, and his plan was to give the spirit of the Epic, as he conceived it, in a form which his age could appreciate. It is almost as if he had taken Homer's theme and written the poem himself. The minor characteristics of the antique manner are gone; but his age would have thought them barbarous and fatiguing. Wherever there is rhetoric, as in the speeches of the heroes, Pope is magnificent; where there are pictures of external nature he is conventional. But he is never slow. His conventions were those of his age, and are extinct, but time cannot abate the splendour of his spirit.
In doing the "Odyssey," of which the first part appeared in 1725, he was aided by Fenton and Broome, who, under his supervision, wrote exactly like himself. With them, too, there were quarrels; they were not paid in what they reckoned a satisfactory style. Pope received about £10,000 in all for Homer, a large sum in those days, and not likely to be equalled by the gains of any later translator of Homer. He dabbled in the shares of the South Sea Bubble, and appears to have been rather a winner than a loser.
He had accumulated quarrels to his heart's content, hence "The Dunciad" of 1728-1729: a satire on minor men of letters, in which he shows wit and ill-nature enough, with a vein of true poetry in the conclusion; but the dirt and the personalities are now rather amazing than agreeable; while the necessary notes below drive the text into the garrets of the page. Not even Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had laughed at Pope's attempts to make love to her, escaped a flick of the whip of scandal in "The Dunciad". Perhaps Pope had not been gently treated, but nobody admires his revenges. The business of publication was managed with all the intricate wiles and subterfuges in which he took such strange delight. One of his butts, Cibber, retorted in kind, and was successful in giving pain: Theobald, a useful editor of Shakespeare, Pope assailed, because Theobald had not spared the errors in his own edition (1728).
His later works, Epistles to Burlington and Arbuthnot, "The Essay on Man," the "Imitations of Horace," are full of the wit and polished verse that were natural to Pope, and were fostered by his friendships with St. John (Bolingbroke), Swift, Gay, and Arbuthnot; friendships that never failed, and eternally testify to the better part in Pope, despite his tempers of malice and his feline arts. His enthusiasm for Atterbury, exhibited in letters written before the bishop's too well-merited exile, is the most romantic point in his career. Late in life he was kind to Johnson and Thomson; he had been a good son; his character greatly irritated his most learned editor, Mr. Elwin; but nobody suffered so much from his faults of jealousy and suspiciousness as Pope himself. He died on 30 May, 1744.
Ever since the romantic movement of the early nineteenth century, people have asked "Was Pope a poet?" He was, in the highest degree, the kind of poet that his age and the English society of his age desired and deserved; a town poet--where rural nature is concerned, conventional and unobservant; where Man is concerned a poet of Man, literary, political, and fashionable. In the great fight over Pope's claim to be a poet, of 1819, when Bowles was the assailant, Byron was the champion of Pope: Byron himself being a satirist and a poet of mankind, urban, political, and fashionable, as well as piratical. Horace was busied with the same field of human nature (not with the desperate pirate and remorseful Giaour) but nobody has asked "Was Horace a poet?"
Pope wrote in reaction against the conceited poetry of the seventeenth century; he did well, though the manner was already dead, but he never came within sight or hearing of the inspired songs of Lovelace and Carew. The world of Pope was in many ways a limited and evanescent and artificial world; but in his verse it lives eternally, and that is enough for his fame, and testimony sufficient to his genius. He brought his instrument, the decasyllabic couplet, to the perfection required for his purpose, each couplet existing in and for itself. But in reading him we feel that "paper-sparing Pope" wrote down his best passages, detached, on the backs of letters; they are separate inspirations, and are fitted into the whole like fragments of a mosaic: for example the lines on Atticus are fitted into "The Epistle to Arbuthnot". His rhymes, as "fault" to "thought," are not the things on which he bestowed most pains.
Concerning other poets--Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare--we feel that, in any age of literature, in any period of taste, under any conventions, they must have been great. Pope, on the other hand, cannot easily be thought of as having the capacity for greatness, except in the literary conditions of the early eighteenth century. But in that period he was supreme.
Prior.
From the galaxy of wits who dined with Harley and St. John and were addressed in that splendid society by their Christian names, Jonathan or Mat, Matthew Prior stands somewhat apart. His duties as a diplomatist carried him abroad; he owed his diplomatic posts to his wit, not to his birth, which Queen Anne spoke of as unpleasantly obscure. He was born on 14 July, 1664, at Wimborne or Winburn, in Dorsetshire; Westminster was his school, and St. John's, Cambridge, his college. Here he took his degree, in 1686, and obtained a fellowship in 1688. He attracted the notice of the Whigs by parodying Dryden's "Hind and Panther," in "The Town and Country Mouse," aided in the jest by Charles Montagu. Dryden is very improbably said to have wept; the Whigs, at all events, laughed, and in 1691 made Prior secretary to the Embassy in Holland. He held the same post at Versailles later; at this time he was a sincere eulogist of our Dutch deliverer, William III, whom he celebrated in "The Carmen Seculare" (1700), indeed constantly, like Horace, he "praising his tyrant sung". Reviewing history, he places William before a number of Roman heroes, and, remembering that William's wife is a Stuart, bids the god Janus
Finding some of Stuart's race Unhappy, pass their annals by.
But, as thou dwell'st upon that heavenly name To grief for ever sacred, as to fame, O! read it to thyself: in silence weep!
Is the name Charles or Mary? At this time there was a fashionable cult of Mary Stuart. This long ode, granting the mythology, has considerable merit, though, says Dr. Johnson, "Who can be supposed to have laboured through it?" Not the Doctor, as he candidly confesses.
Under Queen Anne, Prior was tempted over to the Tory party, and his doings, as a negotiator with France, were thought, and perhaps not unjustly, to smack of Jacobitism. He was in Paris when Beatrix Esmond's Duke of Hamilton was about to go thither on a mission, and there seems little doubt (from a record by Lockhart of Carnwath, the leader of the Scottish Cavaliers) that Hamilton was to bring over to England, in disguise, the exiled son of James II, "the Pretender," as Colonel Esmond does in Thackeray's novel. But Hamilton fell in a duel with Mohun, and that chance was lost.
As acknowledged ambassador, Prior was at the French Court from August, 1712, to August, 1714, when the death of Queen Anne scattered the Tories. Early in 1715 he was locked up on suspicion of treason, and was not released till three years later.
The hope of the Whigs was to decapitate Harley, who lay in the Tower; but Harley could have involved Marlborough, possessing a fatal letter of his, and finally Prior and Harley were released. He had now no resources except his college fellowship, but his friends by securing a large subscription for his poems, and by the generosity of the family of Harley, placed him beyond want. He died on September 18, 1721.
Prior does not live by his "Alma, or the Progress of the Mind," a long poem in rhymed eight syllable couplets, in the manner of Butler's "Hudibras". This work is a kind of comic history of Psychology, and ends with Barry Lyndon's rhyme to Aristotle, "Here, Jonathan, your master's bottle!" Prior's "Solomon," on the vanity of knowledge, pleasure, and power, in heroic rhymed verse, is best remembered for two lines to Abra, and might, so easily does the author take his theme, be called the vanity of melancholy, though it closes in serious admonitions to "the weary King Ecclesiast".
Prior's tales in the manner of Fontaine's "Contes," are lively, like these; and like these, may have seemed coarse to such a moralist as Sir Richard Steele.
Prior, in fact, lives by his merry, tender, light, and bright social verses, in tripping measures, for example, "Thus Kitty, beautiful and young" (for Gay's patroness, the Duchess of Queensberry), "To a Child of Quality," "The Merchant, to Secure His Treasure," "Dear Chloe, how blubber'd is that pretty face," and many other things; the best reminding us more of the charming trifles in the Greek Anthology than of Horace.
Gay.
The spoiled improvident child in the group of wits was John Gay, to whom Pope and Swift were attached by the most tender affection. Gay was an author who never aimed high, but who almost always hit his mark and pleased the Town. But his success was so much the consequence of choosing the happy moments, his poems are so completely poems of his age, that he is now praised at a venture rather than read. He was born at Barnstaple, in Devonshire (1685); though of an old family he "was without prospect of hereditary riches," and was "placed apprentice with a silk-mercer" in London.
Perhaps some fair customer discovered that he had a soul above silk; the Duchess of Monmouth, the heiress of the Scotts of Buccleuch, made him her secretary (1712). Becoming acquainted with Pope, Gay dedicated to him (1713) his "Rural Sports" in the usual heroic rhymed couplets. Gay's descriptions of nature, and his praises, are more genuine than, in that age of the Town, such things usually were. He writes of angling "with his eye on the object," in Wordsworth's phrase. His remarks on fishing with the worm, a theme unworthy of the Muse, are judicious. As to fly fishing, Gay is among those who advocate a search for the insect in the waters and an exact imitation. He would have us fish "fine and far off," with "a single hair" next the hook, and perhaps he is the first to recommend the use of the "dry" or floating fly: "Upon the curling surface let it glide," not sunk. The catching of a salmon is not ill described, but as Gay retains his "single hair," he must always have been broken if he did happen to hook a fish. For his own part, he never uses either worm or the natural fly: never tries for coarse fish--pike, perch, and so forth,--and this justifies the affection of his friends.
In "The Shepherd's Week" (1714) his Idylls describe real peasants with their folklore superstitions, but Virgil, or Theocritus, is still imitated. The pastoral is an extinct species of literature, but Gay's were more natural and popular than Pope's. Dedicated to St. John, in verses celebrating the recovery of Queen Anne, who presently died, the poems were ungrateful to the Hanoverian Court, and Gay lost the secretaryship to an ambassador.
Gay's "Welcome from Greece, to Mr. Pope on his having finished his translation of the 'Iliad,'" has already been mentioned as one of the most charming relics of that golden age of letters, wit, and friendship.
Friendship did not aid wit, when Pope and Arbuthnot took hands in, and ruined, Gay's "Three Hours after Marriage," a comedy which was not comic (1717). In 1720 his collected poems brought Gay £1000: but a gift of stock in the South Sea Bubble was profitless, as Gay would not sell out in time. In 1727 he was offered by George II a Court place so small and ludicrous that it was declined.
Gay next made an immense but not a lucrative success with "The Beggar's Opera," which had an unexampled run of seven weeks. A sequel was not licensed by the censor; Gay was recouped by a subscription, and fell out of Court favour. The Duchess of Queensberry (Prior's Kitty), carried him to her place in the country, and here he was petted till his death, which seems to have been caused by indolence and the pleasures of the table.
His "Trivia; or the Art of Walking the Streets of London," is a vivacious picture of the crowds, dirt, and bustle: his "Fables," though original and witty, are, like pastorals, an obsolete form of literary entertainment. He wrote his own epitaph,
Life is a jest, and all things show it, I thought so once, but now I know it.
He took a different view of this important theme in "Thoughts on Eternity".
Ambrose Philips.
But for his friendship with Addison and the collision of his "Pastorals," with those of Pope, producing Pope's famous ironical review, Ambrose Philips (1675-1749) would scarcely be remembered. The modern art of "booming" was illustrated in Philips's case. A whole 'Spectator' was devoted to a puff of his adaptation ("The Distressed Mother") of the "Andromache" of Racine: and another told how it affected Sir Roger de Coverley. As has occasionally happened more recently, though advertised by Addison, and by his own threat to birch Pope, "Philips became ridiculous, without his own fault, by the absurd admiration of his friends," and his Christian name, Ambrose, became the ludicrous nickname, Namby-pamby. But for Philips there was not lacking a patron, Boulter, Primate of Ireland, and in Ireland places were found for the exile. Philips translated several Odes of Pindar, and though he had not the pinion of the Theban eagle, the sentiments of Pindar are plainly visible in his versions.
Tickell.
Among the minor stars in the golden galaxy of Queen Anne's reign scrutiny detects Thomas Tickell. (Born in Cumberland in 1686, educated at Queen's, Oxford.) He is best remembered in connexion with Pope's story that to damage his translation of the "Iliad," Addison translated the First Book and published it, averring that Tickell was the author. That Addison was guilty of a villainous action is, says Macaulay, highly improbable, that Tickell was capable of a villainy is highly improbable, that the twain were united in a base conspiracy is improbable "out of all whooping". But that Pope's mind, resentful, brooding, and inventive, came to believe in the conspiracy, is, unfortunately, only too natural. We know the figments of all sorts which the imagination of Shelley imposed on him: they were, at least, more romantic than the figments of Pope. In both cases there is a resemblance to the fancy of persecutions which haunts the insane.
Tickell had the honour and happiness to be a friend of Addison, and wrote verses commendatory of his opera, "Rosamond," and of his tragedy, "Cato". His translation of the First Book of the "Iliad" is really good, when we consider the poetic conventions of the age, and the inevitable use of the rhyming heroic couplets. He who would estimate the difficulties of Pope's and Tickell's task, should endeavour, himself, to do a few of the lines of Homer into the classical metre of Queen Anne's day. When Tickell makes Agamemnon, speaking of Chryseis, say
Not Clytæmnestra boasts a nobler race, A sweeter temper, or a lovelier face,
he is comically remote from what Agamemnon does say in Homer, and the sweetness of Clytæmnestra's temper was never famous. Tickell's "Thou fierce-looked talker with a coward soul" is much less spirited and literal than Pope's "Thou dog in forehead and in heart a deer" ("Drunkard, with eyes of dog and heart of deer," is the literal version). Tickell, more bound by the taste of his age than Pope, shirks the dog and deer. None the less Tickell's version is spirited and lucid; the course of events can be easily followed: the reader is enabled to understand the tragic situation from which the whole epic evolves itself. If Pope had not written, if Tickell had finished his version as well as he began it, he would have satisfied public taste, and won considerable fame.
Tickell, following Addison, was a Whig, "most Whiggish of Whigs," Swift said. This makes his line on "An Original Picture of King Charles I, Taken at the Time of His Trial," all the more curious. The portrait, of which several replicas exist, was mezzotinted from the All Souls' copy in Tickell's day, about 1714. (Bower was the painter.)
How meagre, pale, neglected, worn with care, What steady sadness and august despair!
says Tickell. The look is one of melancholy scorn rather than of despair. Tickell falls foul of the artist:
Thy steady hands thy savage heart betray, Near thy bad work the stunn'd spectators faint, Nor see unmoved what thou unmoved could'st paint.
Bower, in fact, produced the most sympathetic portrait of the King. Tickell proceeds to curse Cromwell, bless the Restoration, and salute Queen Anne as a Stuart.
Not much Whiggery here! But when the Hanoverian dynasty and the Whigs came in, Tickell was strong on the winning side. His "Epistle from a Lady in England to a Gentleman at Avignon," from a Jacobite lady to a gentleman at James's Court, is very prettily written, and the following lines are true.
Then mourn not, hapless prince, thy kingdoms lost; A crown, though late, thy sacred brows may boast; Heaven seems, through us, thy empire to decree, Those who win hearts have given their hearts to thee,
On his side "James reckons half the fair".
Say, will he come again? Nay, Lady, never. Say, will he never reign? Ay, Lady, ever,
sings a modern poet, whose heart is true to George? However, Tickell's lady reflects that the Hanoverian sway is good for trade, and in the end prefers London to Avignon.
In 1717 Addison made Tickell his under-secretary--Tickell had always been his "understudy". In 1740 Tickell died, in the enjoyment of one of these lucrative places which rewarded the loyalty of literary Whigs.
With Tickell, the name of Thomas Parnell (1679-1718) goes naturally. He was a minor light among the wits; was befriended by Swift, and is remembered for "The Hermit," "The Night-Piece on Death," and one or two other effusions.
XXVII. AUGUSTAN PROSE
Steele.
Steele and Addison are the Twins among the stars of the age of Queen Anne. Swift impresses us as a greater genius than either Steele or Addison, but he is not loved, and he is not read as they are. Their lives, till two or three years before Addison's death, were united. They were schoolfellows at Charterhouse, fellow-undergraduates at Oxford, each was apt to take a hand in the other's play when the stage attracted them; they wrote together in the two famous journals, "The Tatler" and "The Spectator," which Steele created; some essays therein are a patchwork of pieces from both hands. They were both anxious to cleanse the stage; to bring decent morals and manners into fashion In the original manuscript of Steele's comedy, "The Conscious Lovers" (1722), are rough notes for a preface, written after Addison's death, "The fourth act was the business of the play. The case of duelling I have fought nor shall I ever fight again... Addison told me I had a faculty of drawing tears... Be that as it will, I shall endeavour to do what I can to promote noble things...."
Both men were moralists, but while Addison was the more moral, Steele was infinitely the more greatly given to moralizing. His heart was in the right place. He honoured women and pure affection, and temperance, and the wedded state. But his many brief notes to his second wife "Prue" (Miss Scurlock), written from all manner of places and at all sorts of hours, prove that poor Prue had often to dine alone. Business detained her Richard; he came home with the milk, and had a terrible headache next day. With the posts which he held under Government, with what he gained by his pen (and he was the owner of his own paper, and his own paymaster), with Mrs. Steele's fortune, they had resources enough, but Richard at intervals sends Prue a guinea or two; Richard is constantly in hiding from the bailiffs; is never out of debt; sometimes there is no coal, candle, or meat in the house. Steele was the most affectionate of men and the most generous. He boasted that the world owed Addison's essays to him, because he had made Addison overcome his laziness, and he told the world how greatly Addison was his superior. He wishes that they might write together some work to be called "The Monument," the memorial of their friendship. He took the side of poor discharged soldiers, whipped from parish to parish for their poverty. He adored children; his tears were as ready and heroic as the tears of Homer's warriors. But when he yielded to the temptations of the bottle and of extravagance, his wife and children had to suffer just as much as if Richard, in place of being a Christian Hero, had been no better than the wicked. Like Balzac he was a man of debts and of projects; he even wasted money on alchemy, and had a scheme for getting wealth in connexion with a lottery, a scheme which even then was found to be illegal. Mr. Swinburne called Steele "a sentimental debauchee," and indeed he shone more in preaching than in practice. Addison calls him "poor Dick," he is "poor Dick" to all the world now, if he were Sir Richard "to all Europe". But, when lip preached, he meant what he said, and his pleasant sermons, or rather pleas for goodness, kindness, faith, did "promote noble things," and he left the world more decent and more human than he found it.
Steele was born in Dublin in 1672; his family were not Celtic Irish folk; his father was in what is reckoned the less noble branch of the legal profession. When Sir Richard assumed heraldic bearings he calmly annexed those of another family of Steele, as the elder Osborne, in "Vanity Fair," was supplied by his coachbuilder with the arms of the House of Leeds. Like the cousin of Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff, in "The Tatler" (No. 14), he was guilty of "treason against the Kings at Arms". Of his childhood we know only what he tells in that pathetic passage about his father's funeral: "I had a battledore in my hand and fell a-beating the coffin, and calling papa, for, I know not how, I had some idea that he was locked up there.... My mother was a very beautiful woman, of a noble spirit, and there was a dignity in her grief amidst all the wildness of her transport, which methought struck me with an instinct of sorrow that, before I was sensible what it was to grieve, seized my very soul and has made pity the weakness of my heart ever since" ("Tatler," No. 181). "Hence it is that in me good nature is no merit, but having been so frequently overwhelmed with her tears before I knew the cause of any affliction... I imbibed consideration, remorse, and an unmanly gentleness of mind, which has since ensnared me into ten thousand calamities...." So a "Night of Memories and Sighs" is consecrated by Richard to his beloved dead, "when my servant knocked at the door with a letter, attended by a hamper of wine, of the same sort with that which is to be put on sale at Garraway's coffee house. Upon the receipt of it I sent for three friends.... We drank two bottles a man," and, as Mr. Arthur Pendennis says, found that there "was not a headache in a hogshead".
The fluid, in fact, as we know from the advertisement in this number of "The Tatler," was "extraordinary French claret". Dick conscientiously tested its merits, and gave it a puff in addition to the advertisement which was paid for. Thus he "promoted everything noble," including the vintage of Bordeaux, and, as Thackeray saw, there is no more characteristic essay of Steele's than this meditation on death and grief and loyal memory: à léal souvenir!
Steele lost his mother also in his childhood. He had an uncle, Henry Gascoigne, who, like Swift's uncle, provided for his education, but more generously. Attached to "Erin's high Ormonde," Gascoigne obtained for Steele a nomination to Charterhouse (1684) (Thackeray's school), where Steele met Addison, and their friendship began. In 1689 Steele went up to Christ Church, Addison being at Magdalen; in 1691 Steele gained a "postmastership" (a scholarship) at Merton, a college to which he was warmly attached, presenting its ancient library with the volumes of "The Tatler". He left just before his Schools (that is his examination for a degree). In 1694 he entered the Duke of Ormonde's Guards as a trooper, apparently gentlemen did this as a way of approaching a commission. Steele got his as a reward for a poem on the death of Queen Mary--the piece was dedicated to Lord Cutts, Colonel of the Coldstreams. He befriended Steele, who, stationed at the Tower, made the acquaintance of Congreve and the wits, and defeated Captain Kelly in a duel. Probably the contrast between the delicacy of Steele's sentiments, and his vein of sincere piety, on one hand, with his addiction to mundane pleasures, on the other, made him as notable in his regiment as Aramis, Abbé d'Herblay, among the Musketeers of Louis XIV.
Steele, when once he took a pen in his hand, wrote much against duelling, exposing the ludicrousness of the institution. His remarks had no effect; what killed the duel in England was the use of the pistol: unromantic, fatal, and fortuitous. His duel may have made men more wary of bantering Steele, but his "Christian Hero," a work of military devotion (1701) lowered his character in the regiment. To restore it he wrote his comedy "The Funeral" (1701); to show that blasphemy and intrigue were no necessary components of a play: for he was wholly of the party of Jeremy Collier. The idea of the plot, the revival of Lord Brampton while his coffin is waiting for him, and his watching of the manœuvres of his hateful widow, while his fair ward, Lady Sharlot, escapes in the coffin from her enemies (a common situation in ancient ballads) is too grotesque. But the scenes with the hired mutes, with the poor broken soldiers, with Lady Brampton and her maid, are very amusing. Steele's exposure of the low tricks of lawyers, his appeal for cheap and accessible justice for all, are much in, Dickens's manner, and the loves of Lord Hardy and Lady Sharlot are as pure as bonny Kilmeny, while Lady Sharlot, in her encounter with Lady Brampton, gives proof of high spirit, and Lady Harriet is a flirt as harmless as lively.
Like the other wits, Steele was presented with lucrative posts, such as the editorship of the colourless official "Gazette". In the same year, 1707, he married his second wife, Miss Scurlock, the adored Prue, a woman of some property. He had a house at Hampton Wick, horses, gardeners, footmen, everything handsome about him. In 1709 he founded "The Tatler," a folio sheet of printed matter, appearing thrice a week and containing news, political and social, correspondence, and the charming essays which soon became most important. Steele wrote 188 of these papers, Addison, forty-two, in thirty-six both men took a hand. Swift wrote very seldom. The essays, with those which he wrote in "The Spectator," and in other papers, are the foundation of the fame of Steele. They vary much in theme and style. To digest the "Iliad" into a journal, and reckon up the days of the events, cannot have much amused the public. There is plenty of dramatic criticism. Steele openly avows that he is a member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners; blames the plays of Wycherley and the rest, and calls in the name of Virtue for frequent representations of Shakespeare. "The apt use of the theatre is the most agreeable and easy way of making a polite and moral gentry, which would end in making the rest of the people regular in their behaviour," a pleasing opinion which is not quite justified by experience.
Dick was a constant patron of the best plays, but regular his behaviour was not. Various, excellent, and amiable as are Steele's essays, neither in style nor in thought do they wear quite so well as Addison's. Yet it is scarcely just to draw a distinction which may rest only on individual taste.
"The Tatler's" last appearance was on 2 January, 1711. Steele ended with a paper in which he generously attributes to his friend the essays which he deemed of most value. On 1 March the first number of "The Spectator" appeared--it ceased to exist on 6 December, 1712. Steele's new journal, "The Guardian," lasted for six months in 1713; he was elected as member for Stockbridge, and then came a quarrel of Whig and Tory with Swift, who wrote in "The Examiner". The arrival of George I from Hanover procured various lucrative posts, a patent for a theatre, and a knighthood for Steele: he edited "The Englishman," and attacked Swift's fallen friends, Harley and St. John; and in 1716 he got an income of £1000 a year as one of the commissioners of the estates forfeited by the Scottish Jacobites who were out for their King in the rising of 1715. This was not a pleasant appointment to a man of feeling. Of the coolness between Steele and Addison we speak elsewhere.
In 1722 Steele's "Conscious Lovers," with another attack on duelling was acted with success, and dedicated to the "gracious and amiable sovereign," George I. Cibber the actor added scenes rather more gay than the rest, for so moral is this drama that Fielding's Parson Adams, in "Joseph Andrews," said "it contains some things almost solemn enough for a sermon". His connexion with the theatre brought Steele into more than one lawsuit; his failing health, and the assiduities of his creditors caused him to prefer to reside in Wales; he died in Carmarthen on I September, 1729. Like Goldsmith, Charles Lamb, Walton, and Scott, he has made all his readers his friends, and if his plays are not acted much, the Lydia Languish of Sheridan, and the Tony Lumpkin of Goldsmith, are reflections from his Biddy and Humphrey in "The Tender Husband," a not successful comedy of 1705.
Addison.
There were few forms of literature, from the sacred hymn to the libretto of an opera, in which Addison did not adventure himself with success more than respectable. It is, however, as an essayist that he survives, and is read and admired. Born on 1 May, 1672, he was the eldest son of the Rev. Lancelot Addison, who, after acting as chaplain to the garrisons of Dunkirk and, later, of Tangier, obtained the small living of Milston, married the sister of a bishop, and in 1683 received the Deanery of Lichfield. He was something of a Jacobite, and as an author had pleasing traits of humour and irony. His son Joseph passed through two local schools, and thence to Charterhouse (Thackeray's school) whence first to Queen's, then to Magdalen, Oxford, where he held a demyship (scholarship), and was later a Fellow.
"Addison's Walk" is in the little wood round which two branches of the Cherwell meander with a mazy motion. Addison was soon admired for the excellence of his Latin verses: he made Dryden's acquaintance, and complimented him in verse; he began a translation of Ovid for Tonson, in the usual ten-syllable rhyming couplets.
Some of the stories of the Metamorphoses remain, with notes of literary criticism, including a compliment to William III. "The smoothness of our English verse," he casually remarks, "is too much lost by the repetition of proper names," which, in fact, are sonorous ornaments of the verse of Milton, Scott, Tennyson, and others. But Addison, bent on "smoothness" had not yet come to appreciate Milton; still less, in his early "Account of the English Poets," Spenser, who
Can charm an understanding age no more.
The young champion of smoothness and common sense unblushingly rhymed "success" to "verse".
Reluctant to take Orders, without which his Fellowship must lapse, Addison, through Congreve, was introduced to Charles Montagu (later Halifax) who, with Somers, wished to enlist Addison for his powers as a writer. They obtained for him a travelling pension of £300 yearly, and in December, 1699, left Marseilles for Italy.
His published remarks on Italy, written in a simple and easy style, are of interest mainly because they are so unlike modern ecstasies about the country. What most pleased Addison was to compare the scenes and towns which he saw, with the descriptions of them which, in Latin authors, he had read. To the natural beauties of the land, and to the works of Christian art, he is almost blind; Paul Veronese leaves him cold; at Verona he says nothing of the tomb of Romeo and Juliet, which, perhaps, was not yet shown. At Venice he is most concerned about the military strength of the place; "Tintoret is in greater esteem than in other parts of Italy," and that is enough about Tintoret! The Venetian comedies "are more lewd than in other countries". Addison paid a good deal of attention to ancient coins; and Pope wrote commendatory verses for his "Dialogues on Medals," and hoped that, on medals, Addison and Craggs will be represented: Craggs's effigy is to have an inscription in six heroic lines. Though the Dialogues be antiquated as archæology the description of collectors of coins is amusing: one of the speakers hastens to add that the science "must appear ridiculous to those who have not taken the pains to examine it". Addison, in a kind humorous way, strove to convince his age that ignorance is not the best judge of the historical, social, and artistic value of numismatics.
Returning to England in 1703 Addison was poor, and had no prospect of employment. The Whigs, however, wanted to make the most of Marlborough's victory at Blenheim. Strange as it seems to us, poetry had influence, a poet was needed, Halifax recommended Addison; the Chancellor of the Exchequer found him "up three pairs of stairs," and "The Campaign" was written. The scene is familiar to readers of "Esmond". Thackeray, devoted to Addison as he was, asks "how many fourth form boys at Mr. Addison's school of Charterhouse could write as well as that now?" as well as Addison writes in several passages of "The Campaign". Probably no fourth form boys would write
With floods of gore that from the vanquished fell, The marshes stagnate, and the rivers swell.
However the simile of the Angel has been reckoned fine, and the poem "fulfilled the purpose for which it was written. It strengthened the position of the Whig Ministry" (what a task for the Muse!) and obtained patent places for the poet. As Under-secretary of State, Addison had leisure to write the libretto of "Rosamond," an opera, in which Queen Eleanor does not poison Rosamond, but gives her, like Juliet, a sleeping draught. The King says
O quickly relate This riddle of fate! My impatience forgive Does Rosamond live?
Eleanor explains the situation:--
Soon the waking nymph shall rise And, in a convent placed, admire The cloistered walls and virgin choir: With them in songs and hymns divine The beauteous penitent shall join.
Finally the King and Queen sing
Who to forbidden joys would rove That know the sweets of virtuous love?
Who indeed?
The rise of Blenheim Palace is prophesied, and Marlborough is flattered ingeniously by the Muse of Whiggery. The "understanding age" was not charmed: it was not absolutely destitute of humour. Nor was Addison. The intentionally funny parts of the opera, though not so comic as the serious passages, are not unworthy of Sir W. S. Gilbert. Sir Trusty, finding Rosamond's corpse, as he supposes, says
The King this doleful news shall read In lines of my inditing; Great Sir
Your Rosamond is dead, As I'm at present writing.
Addison's unacknowledged comedy, "The Drummer," based on the famous rapping spirit at Tedworth (1662), was a failure, and died on its third night (1715).
Of his lucky tragedy, "Cato," he seems to have written four acts in Italy. As early as April, 1711, Addison confided his ideas on Tragedy to the Town ("Spectator," No. 39). They show us how far the wits of "the understanding age" of Anne, had moved from the taste of the Restoration stage. Addison is "very much offended when I see a play in rhyme; which is as absurd in English, as a tragedy of hexameters would have been in Greek or Latin". But blank verse is "in such due medium between rhyme and prose that it seems wonderfully adapted to tragedy," as the Elizabethan tragedians had not failed to discover. The thoughts of English tragic writers, especially of Shakespeare, "are often obscured by the sounding phrases, hard metaphors, and forced expressions in which they are clothed". These expressions, however, have been admired by many. The English tragedian is apt to make his hero successful in the fifth act: Addison does not approve of a modernization of "Lear," in which, as in the chronicles which told the story, King Lear and Cordelia triumph in the end. Aristotle says, Addison reports, that the populace preferred tragedies which ended ill (but Addison himself has made the tale of Fair Rosamond end happily). He makes no universal rule, only protests that a tragedy should not be compelled to conclude with comfort. There is "nothing which delights and terrifies our English theatre so much as a ghost, especially when he appears in a bloody shirt. A spectre has very often saved a play." Addison applauds the handling of the ghost in "Hamlet": ghosts, in fact, need delicate handling. For the moving of pity, our principal machine is the handkerchief; and the introduction of an orphan or two, but not of half a dozen fatherless children. "That dreadful butchering of one another," with the use of racks, thumbscrews, and other instruments of torture, gives occasion to French critics to think us a people who delight in blood.
In practice, Addison produced a tragedy which political accidents made highly successful at the moment, and which has enriched the stock of quotations. But Dr. Johnson described it as rather a poem in dialogue than a drama, rather a succession of just sentiments in elegant language than a representation of natural affections.... The events are expected without solicitude, and are remembered without joy or sorrow. The "love interest," Pope says, was a popular after-thought, and Pope told Addison that the play was better fitted to be read than to be acted. Thanks to the habit of mingling literature with politics, the play (13 April, 1713) was "expected" with "solicitude" by Whigs and Tories. "All the foolish industry possible has been used to make it thought a party play," says Pope. The leaders of each party clapped loudly at each remark that might be twisted into a political allusion, while Addison, with Dr. Berkeley and two or three friends, in a side-box "had a table and two or three flasks of Burgundy and champagne, with which the author (though a very sober man) thought necessary to support his spirits". A run of thirty-five nights, a great marvel then, also sustained the spirits of Addison.
Addison does not hold his high and enviable place in our literature by virtue of his plays, poems, and work on Medals, but of his brief Essays in "The Tatler" and "The Spectator". We have already seen how Steele and he worked, in the most pleasant, kindly, and humorous tone, for the improvement of morals and manners in the Court and Town.
The aim of Addison was "to temper wit with morality and to enliven morality with wit," and he succeeded so well that, to this day, if one opens a volume of "The Spectator" for any reason, one cannot lay it down. The spectacle of that world comes before us in all its aspects--toy shops, theatres, streets, coffee-houses, masquerades: there are allegories, sportive or serious, reflections at the opera, or among the monuments of the dead at Westminster Abbey; there are letters, real or "done in the office," asking for advice on points of etiquette; there are musical strains of solemn prose, or passages of exquisite banter; there are creations of character, Sir Roger de Coverley, Will Wimble, and the rest. There are criticisms, as of Milton, which led taste back from the fantasies of the Restoration to that great poet who lived lonely, fallen on evil days and evil tongues. Even the folk-poetry of the past, "songs and fables that are come from father to son, and are most in vogue among the common people of the countries through which I passed," give Addison "a particular delight," he says, in his paper on Chevy Chase, "the favourite ballad of the common people of England". In our time, a critic would fall back on the history of the ballad, showing how "Chevy Chase" is a later version of "Otterbourne," a poem common, with patriotic variations, to England and Scotland. For Addison "Chevy Chase" is an heroic poem: as such he treats it, and shows how touches of Nature make it akin to Homer and Virgil.
Here we are far away from the Restoration, and the age of conceits; we are on the way to the romantic movement, to Scott and "The Lay of the Last Minstrel". In quite another style take Addison's musings on a "lady's library," mixed with "a thousand odd figures in China ware," Japanese lacquer, and old silver. Leonora has "all the Classic Authors--in wood," dummies! "A set of Elzevirs," small classic volumes of the famous Dutch press, "by the same hand"--the cabinetmaker's. There are several of the huge wandering heroic French romances, and "Locke of Human Understanding, with a paper of patches in it": "Clelia, which opened of itself in the place that describes two lovers in a bower." Most of the books were bought, not "for her own use," but "because the lady had heard them praised, or because she had seen the authors of them".
Addison, it must be confessed, did not take the learning of the sex very seriously. Now the learning of many of them is serious indeed; but, we ask, are either men or women more seriously inclined, on the whole, to study than they were in Queen Anne's day? Addison, says Thackeray, "walks about the world watching women's pretty humours--fashions, follies, flirtations, rivalries, and noting them with the most charming humour". It was not he, but Steele, who found in a lady's society "a liberal education". But it was Addison whom Lady Mary Wortley Montagu proclaimed to be "the best companion in the world".
There is still no better companion: we can still hear him "sweetly talk and sweetly smile" in his Essays. He knows so much, and he is never tedious in giving information. Like Coleridge in talk with Keats, he deals in ghost stories: and this child of an age of reason does not scout them. He makes the judicious remark that Lucretius, the Roman materialist, does not believe that the soul can exist apart from the body, yet "makes no doubt of the reality of apparitions, and that men often appeared after their death... he was so pressed with the matter of fact, which he could not have the confidence to deny...." He explains by "one of the most absurd unphilosophical notions that was ever started"--in a different way of statement this theory of Lucretius has lately been revived.
What a variety of themes Addison illustrates and adorns! His writings are like better conversation than was ever held save in the Fortunate Islands by the happy Dead.
The humour and the drawing of character in the papers on Sir Roger de Coverley, have a delicacy, a minuteness, a happy humour, which we scarcely meet again in our literature till they reappear, a century later, in the novels of Miss Austen. It must be admitted that Addison's manner of writing sent son vieux temps, is not "up to date," but this only lends an agreeable quaintness. Nobody, to-day, in writing of the scene in the "Odyssey" where the hero beholds, in the next world, "the far-renowned brides of ancient song," would speak of them as "a circle of beauties," "the finest women". Nor, when the hero says "each of them gave me an account of her birth and family," would a critic now say "this is a gentle satire upon female vanity"! To give such an account is the universal practice in Homer, when strangers meet, whether men or women.
"The Spectator" was dropped after running for about two years, not before Addison had praised in his paper Pope's "Essay on Criticism". Steele introduced Pope to Addison; perhaps they never were very attached friends, for a man of Addison's sense could not but be watchful of himself in the company of the vain and irritable little satirist. Pope's jealousy and suspicions produced a coldness, and, after Addison was dead, Pope emitted his venom in the poisonous character of "Atticus":--
Blest with each talent and each art to please, And born to live, converse, and write with ease;
yet,
Bears, like the Turk, no brother near the throne,"
and so forth. Nothing that inspired skill and spite can do is better than this satire; had Addison been alive when it was given to the world he could not have hit a return blow, for cruelty was not in his nature, and Pope was so sensitive that any retort on him was cruel.
In 1715 Addison conducted for six months another paper, "The Freeholder," in the Whig interest; was made one of the Commissioners for Trade and the Colonies, and married the Dowager-Countess of Warwick. He died in 1719, "three years after that splendid but dismal union," says Thackeray. A dowager-countess is not usually splendid, and we really have no reason to think that the union was "dismal". Addison's position as Secretary of State was sufficiently good, not to speak of his fame, popularity, and genius. In 1719 Addison was matched against Steele in a newspaper controversy: Steele probably was not welcome to Lady Warwick at Holland House, but the two men, says Steele, "still preserved the most passionate concern for their mutual welfare. When they met they were as unreserved as boys...."
Addison with Steele, founded a school of essayists of merit, who never came near the supremacy of their masters: Addison not only delighted his world, but left it better than he found it; not by preaching violent sermons, not by "lashing the vices of the age," but by sensibly lowering the tyranny of the fashion which insisted on the duty of being vicious.
Swift.
Concerning the genius, character, and career of Jonathan Swift there are interesting varieties of opinion, but nobody denies that the genius was great or that the career was sad, strange, even mysterious. In an old-fashioned comedy of Humours, Swift would have been cast for the part of Wycherley's Captain Manly in "The Plain Dealer"; the man of tender heart who hates an age and a society that do not come up to his ideals. Swift had, indeed, depths of affection, and a noble capacity for friendship, but, unlike Captain Manly, he would never have made Fidelia, or any other woman, happy. He lived in this world the life of a flogging schoolmaster. He expresses a hope, at about the age of 26, that, in his poems,
Each line shall stab, shall blast, like daggers and like fire.
He hopes, at the same hopeful period, that
My hate, whose lash just heaven has long decreed, Shall on a day make Sin and Folly bleed.
He lashed away, but Sin and Folly remained "more than usual calm," they did not hear, they did not heed him; and the presentable part of his most comprehensive and ferocious satire of humanity, the one book published by him which is still generally known, "Gulliver's Travels," has been an innocent source of amusement to many generations of children.
At about the age of 37, Swift, in a private letter, wrote thus of his own case, "I envy very much your prudence and temper, and love of peace and settlement: the reverse of which has been the great uneasiness of my life, and is like to continue so". He recognizes one source of his sorrows. As to "prudence," Swift had even too much of it, if "prudence" were the motive which made him put off marriage with the woman ("Stella," Esther Johnson) whom he loved, and who loved him. But for "peace and settlement," he had no partiality; and his temper was no better than he deemed it.
The curses of Swift were, first, his just consciousness of powers far superior to those of the great politicians who adulated, and used, and failed to reward him. With their wine, and their amours, and their bitter, petty jealousies, they let the great opportunity go by, and, lo! Harley is in the Tower; and Bolingbroke, a fugitive, drinks, and loves, and intrigues in France, vituperating the Prince whose cause he has helped to ruin; while Swift eats out his own heart in that Ireland which he hated.
Another curse was that he had attached himself as a priest to the Church of England; while the author of "The Tale of a Tub," however loyal he might be in practice, certainly cannot have been "a trusty and undoubting Church of England man". Of all the creeds, of all the Churches and Sects, in his heart he thought like the Jupiter of his poem,
You, who in various Sects were shamm'd, And come to hear each other damn'd.
This bleak lucidity of soul, this consciousness of being able "to see forward with a fatal clearness," this knowledge of the greatness of his own genius,--thwarted by poverty, driven wild by servitude, lacerated by the torments of a mysterious disease, crushed by terrible forebodings of the appointed end; these things drove Swift to cut himself among the tombs, and to curse in the wilderness.
Though born in Dublin (30 Nov. 1667) Swift was no Irishman: his father belonged to an old Yorkshire, his mother to an old Leicestershire family. But on his father's death, his mother being left ill-provided, Swift's was the position of a poor relation. His training at Kilkenny school and Trinity College, Dublin, was paid for by his uncle, Godwin Swift, who was either poor or penurious. Men like Swift seldom yield much attention to their tutors; and Swift, though he did well in Greek and Latin, failed in physics and took no pains with his Latin essay. He was, however, allowed to pass. In 1688 he went to England, to his mother at Leicester, and in the following year entered the household of Sir William Temple, a politician and diplomatist, retired from active life, busy with literature and gardening, but in friendly relations with William III and with men of affairs.
Sir William Temple (1628-1699) was himself a writer admired for his style, especially in his Essay on Poetry. His periods, though long, are graceful and well balanced, but seldom have such brief melancholy cadences as this reflection "when all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over".
Swift's position, at first, was between those of a secretary and an upper servant; he left Temple's house for Ireland, in 1690; returned in 1691: next year obtained a degree at Oxford; and in 1694, in Ireland, took Orders, and received a small benefice, Kilroot, near Belfast, where the people were Presbyterians, and he had no congregation worth mentioning. He entangled himself with a Miss Waring (Varina) and wrote "Pindaric" poems. Dryden, a remote cousin of his, told him that he would never be a poet, and no other reason has been discovered for Swift's flouts and jeers at Dryden's reputation. The anecdote may be untrue, and, as a Catholic, Dryden would be disapproved of by Swift.
In 1696 Swift was reconciled with Temple, and during the next two years was treated with more favour, met politicians, met the King; educated Stella, an inmate of Temple's house, then a girl of 15; read much in Temple's library, and was about to attach himself to the double-dyed traitor, Sunderland, when Sunderland was dismissed from office. Swift went back to Ireland, held a living at Laracor, lived much with Lord Berkeley at the Castle, Dublin; wrote lively verses of the lighter sort, wrote a political pamphlet which was successful, and showed leanings towards the Whig party. In London (1704) his "Tale of a Tub" was published anonymously: it had been composed in 1696-1697.
In "An Apology" (1709) Swift, still, as always, anonymous, writes "the book seems calculated to live as long as our language and our taste admit no great alterations". In taste great alterations have been admitted. Though excellent judges still applaud this whimsical allegory, few readers who approach it with high expectations are likely to escape disappointment. The allegory of Peter (Rome) Martin (Anglicans and Lutherans) and Jack (Presbyterians and all other Protestant sects), is utterly incoherent. At present no self-respecting person would write of the religions of Islam and Buddha in such terms and such temper as Swift wrote about the Churches and sects of Christianity. Whatever we may think of Transubstantiation and Vestments, we do not make uproarious fun of them.
Already Swift indulges his half-insane delight in malodorous references; the wit of the dirty schoolboy scrawling on the walls. Few things in the work are more witty than this on Dryden: "he has often said to me in confidence, that the world would never have suspected him to be so great a poet, if he had not assured them so frequently in his prefaces, that it was impossible they could ever doubt or forget it".
Thackeray remarks, "I think the world was right, and the Bishops who advised Queen Anne not to appoint the author of 'The Tale of the Tub' to a Bishopric, gave perfectly good advice". James IV did not give Dunbar a benefice: the line must be drawn somewhere. Swift, in his "Apology," denied that he had attacked religion: be it so, he had written on matters ecclesiastical with amazingly bad taste. His "Argument against Abolishing Christianity" (1708) is not the sort of argument that we expect from a bishop-postulant, but its irony seems as charming and dexterous now as it did two centuries ago. In "The Tale of a Tub," on the other hand, we seldom find a passage that wins a smile, except in "those fine curses" which Peter spoke, and in some of the gambols of Jack. The apologue, in feet, is heavy-handed; the author does not clearly know where he is making for; the perfect clearness of his later style is absent. (These observations, entirely candid, are at odds with the usual applause of "The Tale of a Tub".)
With "The Tale of a Tub" was published, in the same volume, "The Battle of the Books," written about 1697; this was a now belated contribution to the controversy as to the relative merits of the Ancients and the Moderns, begun in France by Charles Perrault, the author of our most familiar fairy tales. As it happened, Temple, in an essay, had taken up the cause of the Ancients, and had chosen, as proofs of superiority of the oldest books, the Fables ascribed to Æsop, and the Letters attributed to Phalaris, the half-mythical tyrant of Agrigentum. The matter of the fables is prehistoric, but the crooked slave, Æsop, did not contribute their form; and the Letters of Phalaris were a literary exercise composed long after the tyrant's date. Wotton, with some help from the greatest scholar of his day, Richard Bentley, King's Librarian, and (1700) Master of Trinity, Cambridge, replied to Temple, and Charles Boyle, of Christ Church, Oxford, introduced a personal squabble with Bentley. The Christ Church wits, including the formidable Atterbury, sided with Boyle,--there was a war between elegant scholars, on Boyle's side; and the nascent science of the Royal Society allied with perfect scholarship and Bentley, on the other. Boyle did not insist that the Letters of Phalaris were genuine; Bentley displayed his sagacious learning in his proof that they were not. Temple was discreetly silent, but Swift espoused the cause of the wits in "The Battle of the Books". The Books in the King's Library, Ancient and Modern, meet in a parody of a fight in Homer. The goddess, Dulness, befriends the Moderns, as Aphrodite, in Homer, protects Paris and Æneas. The mock-Homeric manner was not then outworn, and it amused; while Swift heaped personal scorn on Bentley, and, of course, on Dryden, who is ridiculed for being old. Bentley, crooked-legged and hump-backed, is armed with a flail, and "a vessel full of ordure". Boyle transfixes Bentley and Wotton as a cook spits a brace of woodcocks--and that is the humour of it.
Infinitely more amusing were Swift's predictions of the death of a prophetic almanac-maker, Partridge (1708), and the sequel of that jest. Swift styled himself Isaac Bickerstaff, and lent the name to Steele, for use in his new paper "The Tatler". He lived in close friendship with Addison, Steele, Congreve, and Prior; and began his love affair with Miss Vanhomrigh, the unfortunate Vanessa, rival of Stella. Like Lord Foppington, Swift probably coveted nothing less than her heart, which she gave, and his difficulty was "to get rid of the rest of her body".
After a visit to Ireland, Swift returned to find the Tories in power, "a new world" (September, 1710). He met Harley (Lord Oxford), took service under him, and for three years was the Achitophel of the Tories, writing for them lampoons and political pamphlets which "were cried up to the skies". For half a year (1710-1711) Swift's papers appeared in "The Examiner". Swift dined with Harley and St. John--they called him, "Jonathan"; he snubbed their attempts to treat him as a mere gentleman of the Press; and in the delightful pages of his familiar "Journal to Stella," he paints the age, and himself, triumphant, adulated, powerful, but "seeing all his own mischance"; "I believe they will leave me Jonathan as they found me".
Among the pamphlets of this period are "The Hue and Cry after Dismal" (Lord Nottingham,'ancestor of Horace Walpole's "black funereal Finches"), and the more important "Conduct of the Allies". By 1713 Swift hoped "that the present age and posterity would learn who were the real enemies of the country". The old question of Tory Short and Whig Codlin! But he had cruelly offended the Duchess of Somerset by "The Windsor Prophecy"; and the Queen could not endure the author of "The Tale of a Tub". He asked for his reward, and with much trouble obtained the Deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin (June, 1713). He went to Ireland, but he could not get rid of Vanessa. Her letters pursued him; other letters called him to town--Harley and St. John were at odds, and he was needed. He engaged in a paper war with Steele, now an enemy; he wrote "The Public Spirit of the Whigs"; he offended the Scottish members, and the Duke of Argyll, the hero of Malplaquet, an ill man to meddle with. He was consoled by the friendship of Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot, a good man and a great humorist. They founded the Martinus Scriblerus Club, for the writing of facetious papers: but politics went ill, Harley and St. John quarrelled in the Queen's presence: her death was near; Harley was overthrown by St. John; St. John had no courage, and, on the death of Anne, was checked by Argyll and his regiment. Bishop Atterbury would have proclaimed the King, King James over the Water; the laymen dared not back him; the Elector of Hanover occupied the throne; and of Swift's great friends St. John fled to France, and Harley was imprisoned in the Tower; while Swift, hooted by the pressmen whom he had bullied, made for Ireland. The Jacobite Cause was lost, and we cannot here ask, would Swift (as St. John says in "Esmond") have accepted the Primacy of England from la bonne cause, the young Catholic King?
My life is now a burden grown To others, ere it be my own,
Swift wrote. He corresponded (1716) with Atterbury, and Atterbury was at the head of the Jacobite party in England. In 1719 Swift dedicated to a Swedish diplomatist, Count Gyllenborg, a History of England. "My intention was to inscribe it to the King, your late Master, for whose great virtues I had ever the highest admiration, as I shall continue to bear to his memory." This King, Charles XII, in 1716 meant to land in Britain with an army in support of the Jacobites, and Gyllenborg, his ambassador, managed the plot in England. Charles had invited Swift, at an earlier date, to Sweden: now Swift dwells "in a most obscure disagreeable country" (Ireland), "and among a most profligate and abandoned people".
All this does not look like zeal for the Protestant succession.
The years 1719-1723 saw the completion of Swift's ambiguous poem, "Cadenus and Vanessa," and the arrival of Vanessa in Swift's neighbourhood. "In vain he protested, he vowed, he soothed and bullied; the news of the Dean's marriage to Stella at last reached her; and it killed her,--Vanessa died of that passion" (Thackeray). The marriage is still matter of controversy.
In 1724 Swift, who hated the English Government if he did not love Ireland, wrote the famous "Drapier's Letters" against a job in copper currency, and gained high popularity.
In 1726 he gave to the world the most famous of his books, "Gulliver's Travels," in which his gift of narrative, his amazing power of being truthful in the minutest details of the most extravagant imaginations, his misanthropy, his irony, and his delight in unsavoury things, are all carried to the highest perfection. In 1729 came the "Modest Proposal" for eating Irish children; in 1738 his "Polite Conversation" and "Directions to Servants," with the same merit of humour, and the same inveterate fault.
In visits to London (1726, 1727) Swift had enjoyed the society of his old friends and comrades in letters; and hoped there, perhaps, to find a Fountain of Youth. He felt himself slipping into the vice of hoarding; and rusting in a second-rate society. Bolingbroke had been allowed to return from exile; the banished King had found him worthless as a statesman: he had said his worst against the banished King; nobody wanted Bolingbroke and nobody was afraid of him. He played the philosopher, and Swift did not believe in his affectation of philosophy. Arbuthnot, Swift loved, Pope he had always admired; and he tried to protect Gay from his own reckless improvidence. He ridiculed, in "Gulliver," the proofs brought against Atterbury as a Jacobite agent: if Swift was not convinced by the evidence he must have shut his eyes very hard.
In January, 1728, Stella died: Swift tried to fill the gap in his life by activity in Irish politics. His disease, apparently some malady of the ear which gradually affected the brain, became more unendurable, but he had still to write some of his most powerful satires in verse. Then his memory began to fail, and he drifted slowly into the half-unconscious dotage of his last five years, dying on 19 October, 1745, unconscious, probably, of the meteoric adventure of Prince Charles.
The failure of his party, of his political ambition, and measureless hopes of greatness, gave Swift the retirement and the leisure to produce his greatest works. If fortune had "bantered us" as Bolingbroke said, he turned and bantered Fate and mankind. In the long array of his volumes, so seldom opened, are many brief flights, in verse and prose, which are full of entertainment, of wild fancy, orderly and gravely presented; and there is the "Journal to Stella," with its infinite tenderness of affection; and the Letters, the confidences of the wits from romantic Charles Wogan, who rescued from prison the bride of a King, and died as Governor of the appropriate province of La Mancha, to those of Pope and Arbuthnot and Gay. The works of Swift are a library in themselves.
De Foe.
"One man in his time plays many parts," and no man played more parts than Daniel Foe or De Foe. The son of a butcher in St. Giles's, born in 1661, he received at a Nonconformist school an education that was a sufficient basis for literary undertakings, but not tending to such "classical" flights as led young University men to profitable sinecures under Government. He is said to have been out under Monmouth in 1685. He betook himself to commerce of various kinds, thus acquiring little or no money (in 1692 he "broke," like Mr. Badman), but a competent knowledge of the currents of trade, and the courses of financial speculation, exhibited in his "Essay on Projects," projects, educational and social as well as financial (1698). In 1701 his "True Born Englishman," showing in the interest of William III that the English are a mixed race, was successful.
In 1702 his famous "Shortest Way with the Dissenters" was discovered to be, not a candid plea for the Church of England, but an irritating parody of High Church pretensions, nearly as serious as Swift's apology for cannibalism. De Foe was pilloried, but not pelted, and imprisoned for his waggery; was released, probably through the agency of Harley, Lord Oxford, the wavering and enigmatic "Dragon" of Swift's correspondence; and while editing and indeed writing a weekly "Review," the precursor in its social columns of Steele's "Tatler," De Foe served Harley in divers subterranean ways. In Scotland, in the autumn of 1706, he acted as Harley's spy and newsagent: his letters to Harley contain an admirable picture of the struggles for and against the Union of Scotland and England, and of De Foe's own versatile, acute and daring character. He made himself "all things to all men," could talk to each citizen as a member of his own trade, explained all the economic conditions of the country, understood, and did not revere, the Kirk, and the preachers; and, by securing the services of that lively and humorous rogue and sham-fanatic, Ker of Kersland, broke up an unholy alliance between the extreme "Cameronians" and the Jacobite gentry and clansmen of Perthshire and Angus. They had intended to break up the Parliament; but the wild Whigs did not keep tryst.
It is plain that Harley treated De Foe very ill, and that, like most spies, he was underpaid. Still he was working for a cause which he had at heart; as he was later, when, to all appearance, playing the part of journalist in the Tory or even Jacobite interest under Government.
The needy De Foe was a man of dark corners, an absolute "Johannes Factotum". Swift called him "a grave, sententious, dogmatical rogue". He professed that he received assistance from "The Divine Spirit".
No man who wrote so much and so variously has written so well. His favourite topic, if we may judge by the frequency with which he handled it, was "psychical research". Like Glanvill, Henry More, and other writers in the sceptical age of the Restoration, he collected, and told in his own inimitable manner, many current anecdotes of wraiths, death-warnings, second sight, and phantasms of the dead. The most prominent merit of De Foe, in fiction, is his power of convincing the reader by the minute and sober realism of his details. Some of his novels, in autobiographic form, have caused disputes as to whether they be romances, or actual memoirs.
"A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal, on September 8, 1705" (published in 1706) has been described as "the first instance of De Foe's wonderful lies like truth". "This relation is matter of fact," said De Foe in the Preface. Sir Walter Scott, a ghost-hunter himself, explained the "fact" by saying that De Foe invented and wrote the story as a puff of Drelincourt "On Death," which the appearance of Mrs. Veal, on the day after her death recommended to her friend (who believed her to be alive), Mrs. Bargrave.
But Mr. George Aitken has proved "that the piece was, as De Foe said, 'a true relation of matter of fact,'" that is, De Foe merely wrote the story as told by Mrs. Bargrave--"the percipient"--the person who saw and conversed with the dead Mrs. Veal about her gown--"a scoured silk, newly made up". Mr. Aitken found a manuscript note of 21 May, 1714, by some one who had interviewed Mrs. Bargrave, and for whom Mrs. Bargrave made three or four minute additions. As for Mrs. Veal herself, she died on 7 September, appeared on 8 September to Mrs. Bargrave, and we have the record of her burial on 10 September, in the register of St. Mary's, Dover.
In another case, "The Botethan Ghost," told in an appendix to De Foe's "Duncan Campbell," the tale was really written, as De Foe says, not by himself, but by one of the people who saw the spectre, the Rev. Mr. Ruddle of Launceston in Cornwall, in June, 1665; the narrative was written on 4 September of the same year.
Thus De Foe's extraordinary gift of making things fictitious seem true has caused him to be charged with inventing stories which he merely retold, or printed from the manuscript of another.
De Foe was 60 years of age, and had suffered from apoplexy, when he wrote the masterpiece which made him immortal, "Robinson Crusoe" (1719). New editions appeared in May, June, and August; a sequel followed which few read; still more scarce are readers of De Foe's "Serious Reflections and Vision of the Angelic World" (1720). The "metapsychical" world was always very near De Foe, practical and shrewd man as he was.
"Crusoe" is based on Captain Rogers's narrative of the adventures of Alexander Selkirk, a mariner of Largo, in Fife, marooned (1704) on the Island of Juan Fernandez. An allegory of De Foe's own life has been suspected, the idea is unimportant.
It is superfluous to dilate on the sterling merits of "Robinson Crusoe". Before he published it a critic had recognized "the little art he is truly master of, of forging a story, and imposing it on the world for truth". The style is as simple as Swift's, and more "homely". The tale of love was not De Foe's trade, any more than "the moving accident" was Wordsworth's. "Moll Flanders," and "Roxana" are no doubt meant to have a moral influence; but their readers are looking for something else: like the readers of the edifying Monsieur Zola.
De Foe was one of the fathers of journalism, and almost "the only begetter" of the story of adventure, the desert island romance, and, in "Memoirs of a Cavalier," and "A Journal of the Plague Year," of the historical autobiographical novel. "It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard, in ordinary discourse, that the plague was returned again in Holland...." That keynote reverberates in scores of the historical romances of 1885-1900.
The modern novelist, of course, avoids De Foe's strict statistical method. De Foe's story reads precisely like a historical document, and the modern reader dislikes nothing more than that sort of reading. De Foe's hero saw a number of people looking at "a ghost walking on a grave stone". Less fortunate Mr. Pepys "went forth, to see (God forgive my presumption!) whether I could see any dead corpse going to the grave, but, as God would have it, did not".
By a truly realistic touch De Foe's contemplative saddler closes his journal with "a coarse but sincere stanza of my own,"
A dreadful plague in London was In the year sixty-five, Which swept an hundred thousand souls Away; yet I alive!
The modern reader finds that De Foe's fictions are too like facts, and, often, in the moral and religious reflections, too like tracts, for his taste. On the other hand, to a contemplative mind, "Robinson Crusoe," carefully read, and compared with its descendants in fiction, is a source of delight. De Foe, at the age of 60, must have been, while he wrote it, as happy as his innumerable readers. For example, we compare Robinson's felling of a cedar tree "five feet ten inches diameter at the lower part..." and his construction of a vessel "fit to carry twenty-six men," a vessel quite unlaunchable, with the practicable coracle, the most "home-made" of things in "Treasure Island". We compare the trial trips of the two crafts (Robinson's second boat); we see that R. L. Stevenson has produced the less impossible narrative of the twain, and that both rejoice the heart.
The mass, and the variety, of what must be called the "pot-boilers" of De Foe are unequalled. In better conditions of authorship he would have been a rich man, but he died poor, in distress, and under a cloud, in 1731.
A history of literature is not necessarily a history of philosophical, metaphysical, and theological speculation. In such speculation the age was rich that saw the volcanic eruption of sects and heresies during the religious frenzy of the Civil War, and also beheld the reaction from all "enthusiasm" to the passion for common sense and for science as "organized common sense" which came in with the Restoration. Hobbes's works did not encourage religious "enthusiasm," or mysticism, or belief in the ineffable spiritual experiences of devout men, from John Bunyan with his visions, to Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), an Anglican divine, with his Neoplatonic hints at Union with the Absolute ("True Intellectual System of the Universe," "Eternal and Immutable Morality"). The learned and the unlearned wrote books on either side, sceptical or in favour of belief.
The Royal Society impartially included Joseph Glanvill (16361680) with his "Vanity of Dogmatising," and his "Sadducismus Triumphatus," the pioneer of Psychical Research, with its tales of Poltergeists, wraiths, and levitations, some of them fairly well authenticated. The Royal Society also gave a place to the far more famous philosopher of liberal common sense philosophy, John Locke (1632-1704). Locke's first eighteen years were passed under the shadow of the Great Rebellion, and at Christ Church, Oxford, under a Head who was an Independent divine. He did not like the new freedom, in which he found the old slavery, but after the Restoration he found liberty for discussion, in which "enthusiasm" was not permitted to enter. His attitude towards mental philosophy was not unlike that of Bacon. He disliked Aristotelianism as then held at Oxford, thinking that words usurped the place of facts, and in his "Essay on the Human Understanding" he employed that plain style which the Royal Society enjoined. The work was written at intervals during seventeen years, disturbed when as a friend of Shaftesbury, Dryden's Achitophel, the turbulent patron of Titus Oates, he was sent into exile. The burden of the essay, which appeared in 1690, is opposition to the theory of "innate ideas"--the terms need defining--and insistence that we derive our ideas from the presentations of our senses. "Average common sense was always kept in his view," and "he wrote for the most part in the language of the market-place". He wanted man to think as a human being very limited in his faculties, "to distinguish between what is, and what is not comprehensible by us," and his treatise had the most potent and enduring effects on continental as well as on English Philosophy. He was a friend of his junior, Berkeley, whose philosophic fancy took a wider and more audacious range. His "Treatise on Government" and "Thoughts on Education" followed rapidly. He obtained a place as Commissioner of Trade and Plantations (Colonies), and advised England to anticipate Scotland in founding an emporium at Darien, in Spanish territory, as the Scots were to discover.
We have not space for much more than the names of other prose writers of this great age. John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), a Scot in London, was an admirable humorist, a great physician, and the friend of all the wits; himself a good-humoured Swift in prose satire. Bishop Atterbury (1662-1732) excited an enthusiastic devotion in Pope, who proposed to accompany this clerical conspirator into exile, after his great Jacobite plot was crushed in 1723. Atterbury was an accomplished general writer, while the great scholar and Master of Trinity, Richard Bentley (1662-1742), gave to his classical criticism of the forged "Epistles of Phalaris" the merit of vigorous literature. His conjectural various readings in Milton's text are now and then comical, and seem a parody of classical criticism. The Viscount Bolingbroke, Henry St. John (1678-1751), was a wit among politicians, the patron, friend, and inspiration of the wits; he had his fame as an eloquent rhetorician in his life, and as a daring thinker, but he really wrote best when he wrote simply and humorously, as in his satire of his Jacobite allies, "The Epistle to Windham" (1716). His "Ideal of a Patriot King" also preserves his literary reputation (1738). Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), was an elegant philosopher, a thinker of taste; while George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (born at Kilkenny 1685, died 1753), was an idealistic philosopher and man of science ("The Theory of Vision") whose style, in grace and irony, is akin to the manners of Plato and of Pascal. The best and most delightful of his works is the dialogue "Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher," directed against the Sceptics, and deistical writers. Berkeley's character was not less admirable than his works.
XXVIII. GEORGIAN POETRY
I.
Edward Young.
"Is it to the credit or discredit of Young, as a poet, that of his 'Night Thoughts' the French are particularly fond?" So asks Croft, the sardonic author of a notice on Young in Dr. Johnson's "Lives of the Poets". The preference is certainly not to the credit of the French! Born in Hampshire in 1683, the son of a clergyman, Young lived till 1765: writing much verse, and more prodigal of praises to "the Great" than any other poet of any age.
Young's father, in 1703, appears to have been poor, for the son, to save expense, was hospitably entertained in the lodges of the Warden of New College and the President of Corpus. A Fellowship was found for him at All Souls', and as he was chosen to make and speak the Latin oration at the founding of the fine Codrington Library, it may be supposed that, at All Souls', he was held to be more than mediocriter doctus (the qualifications for a Fellow were said to be "well born, well dressed, moderately learned").
Young's earlier poems, and his dedications always, seem bids for patronage and preferment. In his "Last Day" (1710),
An archangel eminently bright From off his silver staff of wondrous height Unfurls the Christian flag, which waving flies And shuts and opens more than half the skies.
Angels are asked, on the annihilation of the universe, to say where Britannia is now?
All, all is lost, no monument, no sign, Where once so proudly blazed the great machine.
In the Dedication, which Young later suppressed, nothing was left but Queen Anne, whom the poet distinctly saw floating upwards, and leaving the fixed stars behind her. The clever but eccentric and unfortunate Jacobite Duke of Wharton was a patron of Young, and the defender of Atterbury. The Duke died, under arms for the exiled James III, or Chevalier de St. George, at Lerida; he was then composing a tragedy on Mary, Queen of Scots. Young suppressed, in later years, the dedication to Wharton of his successful tragedy, "The Revenge" (1721).
In 1725-1726 Young published his Satires, "The Universal Passion". They read like a poor imitation of Pope's satires, but in point of time they precede the "Dunciad".
Why slumbers Pope, who leads the tuneful train, Nor hears that Virtue, which he loves, complain?
Pope was not slumbering, he was counting every groan of Virtue, to whom he was so devoted, and was about to lash Vice with the best of them. The Universal Passion which Young flogs, is the Love of Fame. Every one is the fool of Fame except this earl or that, at whom Young dedicates his strings of epigrams which remind us of Pope, with a difference. Sloane and Ashmole are derided for their Museums. Young even dedicated a satire to Sir Robert Walpole; he must smile, "or the Nine inspire in vain". He also adulated the Duke of Newcastle in 1745, when
a pope-bred princeling crawled ashore,
meaning,
The Prince who did in Moidart land With seven men at his right hand, And all to conquer kingdoms three. Oh, he's the lad to wanton me!
as a poet of the opposite party exclaimed. The inglorious Duke is
Holles! immortal in far more than fame!
In 1727 Young became a clergyman, at the ripe age of 44. His "Night Thoughts" in blank verse, are of 1741-1742, in Nine Nights
My song the midnight raven has outwinged,
and the midnight owl was outshrieked.
From short (as usual) and disturbed repose I wake, how happy they who wake no more! Yet that were vain, if dreams infest the grave.
We remember
In that sleep of death what dreams may come!
A few lines are in the common stock of quotations such as,
An undevout astronomer is mad.
There are good passages, here and there, but long sermons in a kind of blank verse which "does not overstimulate" are not immortal. "Young has the trick of joining the turgid with the familiar... but with all his faults he was a man of genius and a poet." He was not, as people, misled by the existence of one William Young, foolishly supposed, the original of Fielding's Parson Adams in "Joseph Andrews", But Young may be the original of Robert Montgomery, who added to the piety of Young the ebullitions of an unprecedented genius for nonsense.
James Thomson.
Romance secured a firm footing in English literature, after the artificialities of the eighteenth century had sunk into dotage, through the genius of a Borderer, Sir Walter Scott. But another Borderer, long before, had seen glimmerings and had heard strains of the fairy world and the fairy songs. This was James Thomson, son of the parish minister of Ednam in Roxburghshire. The father was presently translated to Southdean, in the Cheviots, and on the old line of Scottish marches: by that way they rode, as Froissart shows, to Otterbourne fight. Thomson's father died while trying to lay a ghost in a house near Southdean, when the son was at the University of Edinburgh. The haunted house was demolished. Thomson studied divinity, but abandoned the prospective pulpit for poetry, and went to London to seek his fortune in 1725. He lost his letters of introduction, and he needed a pair of shoes; his only resource was the manuscript of his "Winter," in "The Seasons". A dedication brought to Thomson twenty guineas: the piece was praised by Aaron Hill and Malloch (or Mallet, Malloch is a Macgregor name); the poem was liked; "Spring" and "Summer" followed, and Thomson dallied over "Autumn" till 1730.
In 1730 he Had been successful with the moral tragedy of "Sophonisba": though in opposition to the Court party, Thomson had obtained several noble patrons, and they did their best for his drama. A long poem on Liberty was not a triumph: but the Prince of Wales gave the author a pension of £100 yearly. His tragedy of "Tancred and Sigismunda" was popular (1745), and a patent place brought to the poet £300 a year, which he did not long enjoy, dying on 27 August, 1748. Thomson was notoriously indolent, and his last, perhaps his best, work is "The Castle of Indolence" in the Spenserian stanza.
"The Seasons" are in blank verse, a welcome change from the eternal rhyming couplets, and prove that Thomson, unlike his contemporaries, wrote "with his eye on the object". He had been bred in "the wide places of the shepherds," among the lonely Border moors and hills; he had not always been a man of towns. In the sunless winter day
scarce The bittern knows his time, with bill ingulpht To shake the sounding marsh; or from the shore The plovers when to scatter o'er the heath, And sing their wild notes to the listening waste.
This was a new voice. Being a Borderer, Thomson was an angler, and describes fly-fishing well, though not better than Gay.
In that old theme of the Middle Ages "the symphony of spring," the songs of birds, he shows knowledge of their ways, and if he makes the hen nightingale the singer, so does Homer, following the myth. In "Summer," Thomson describes, with wonderful tact, sultry climes in which he never breathed, and adds the little idyll of Musidora.
"Autumn" includes a picture of fox-hunting, a sport which James probably did not indulge in, and celebrates the Argyll of Malplaquet and Duncan Forbes of Culloden, and the water of Tweed,
Whose pastoral banks first heard my Doric reed.
Despite his power of rendering nature, the artificiality of his age is still strong with Thomson, and it cannot be said that "The Seasons" are very attractive to modern readers.
"The Castle of Indolence," by virtue of the poet's return to the measure of an author in his day despised, Spenser, yields a welcome change from the eternal rhymed couplets.
A pleasant land of drowsyhead it was.
like the land of the Lotus-eaters in Tennyson. The stanza beginning
And when a shepherd of the Hebrid isles, Set far amid the melancholy main
is the voice of reviving poetry, and is immortal. Nobody has the slightest sympathy with
The Knight of arts and industry, And his achievements fair; That by his castle's overthrow Secur'd and crowned were.
The castle is a very good castle, it is good to be there, where no cocks disturb the dawn, no dogs murder sleep, "no babes, no wives, no hammers" make a din,
But soft-embodied Fays through airy portals stream.
William Collins.
"The grandeur of wildness and the novelty of extravagance, were always desired by Collins, but not always attained," says Dr. Johnson. After half a century of tame poets, we are happy to meet with one who did not cultivate the trim parterre, and who sometimes did attain to being "exquisitely wild".
Collins was born at Chichester on Christmas Day, 1721, was educated at Winchester, and at Oxford was a "demy," or scholar of Magdalen, like Addison. About 1744 he came to London with many literary projects in his mind, and very little money in his pockets. Johnson met him, while "immured by a bailiff". Collins cleared his debt with money advanced by a confiding bookseller on the credit of a contemplated translation of Aristotle's "Poetics," with a commentary. A legacy of £2000 from an uncle, Colonel Martin, was "a sum which Collins could scarcely think exhaustible, and which he did not live to exhaust". His mind weakened: he died in 1759: sane, but incapable of composition. His Odes (1746-1747) are the firm base of his renown: the little volume is extremely scarce; Collins is said to have burned, in disappointment, the greater part of the edition.
Of his "Persian Eclogues" (1742) Collins said that they were his "Irish Eclogues," being inadequately Oriental in local colour. The brief "Ode" (1746) "How Sleep the Brave" (of Fontenoy and Culloden) in ten lines has the magic of an elder day, and of all time. The "Ode to Evening," where the poet sees
hamlets brown and dim discovered spires And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all Thy dewy fingers draw The gradual dusky veil,
has escaped from the manner of the eighteenth century, and preludes to Keats.
There are fine free passages in "The Ode to the Passions," and the "Dirge in Cymbeline" is not unworthy of its place. The "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands," was long lost, and did not receive the poet's final touches. He obtained his knowledge of the Second Sight from John Home, author of "Douglas," who was a Hanoverian volunteer in the Forty-five, and inspired in Collins an unfulfilled desire to visit Tay and Teviotdale and Yarrow. The conventions of his age sometimes disfigure Collins's poems, but his face was set towards the City of Romance. Tastes still vary as to the relative merit of Collins and Gray: Matthew Arnold being the advocate of Gray; Swinburne of Collins. There is no way of settling such disputes; each writer, at his best, was truly a poet; neither, at his best, is staled or dimmed by time; both were almost portentous exceptions, when really inspired, to the conventional rules of their age in England.
Thomas Gray.
Nature occasionally brings into the world pairs of men destined to be distinguished in literature, and, without their own consent, to be pitted against each other as rivals. We have Scott and Byron, Dickens and Thackeray, Tennyson and Browning, and Collins and Gray. Gray was the elder, born in 1716 (Collins was born in 1721). If Collins's father was a hatter, Gray's mother was a bonnet-maker, if milliners make bonnets. Collins went to Oxford, after being at Winchester; Gray, before going to Peterhouse, Cambridge, was at Eton. Both poets wrote little: the health of Collins broke down; Gray, from his boyhood, was of a gentle morbid melancholy, and had humour enough to laugh at himself. Collins was neglected; Gray died, later, at the age of 54, beyond competition or dispute the foremost of English poets at the moment. Both men had their faces set to the North as the home of old poetry and poetic beliefs. Collins wrote his Ode on Highland Superstitions; Gray was delighted (at first) by Macpherson's "Ossian," he translated ancient Norse poems, visited Scotland, and appreciated the Highlands, and the lakes that Wordsworth was to make famous. Both men were scholars: Collins meant to translate Aristotle's "Poetics"; Gray meant to write a history of English Poetry. Both broke away from the tyranny of the rhymed heroic couplet; both especially cultivated the Ode.
There is no doubt as to which of the two is and always has been the more popular. Eton has made Gray her own. The great General Wolfe, before falling in the arms of Victory at Quebec, recited the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" to one of his officers, saying, "I would prefer being the author of that poem to the glory of beating the French to-morrow".
It is not easy to criticize Gray, because so many of his lines are household words, and have been familiar to us from childhood. It may perhaps be said that Gray never attains to the magical effect of Collins's "How Sleep the Brave," and of the "Ode to Evening". But there are cadences in "The Elegy," and sentiments noble, pure, pious, and modest in his poems which lend to them an unspeakable charm, while the ideas are such as come home to men's bosoms. It is true that his habit of personifying abstract ideas is an unfortunate survival of the weary allegorical company of the "Romance of the Rose," and no more than Collins does he escape from the mannerisms of his age. But like Collins, and indeed like his friend Horace Walpole, he was passing towards the kingdom of Romance.
At Eton he acquired Walpole's friendship; and if, after leaving Cambridge, he and Walpole quarrelled in Italy, Walpole confessed that he was to blame, made the first steps to reconciliation, and cherished, admired, and at last regretted Gray with all the ardour of a heart devoted and constant in friendship.
For the rest, Gray's life was passed quietly, and in a melancholy way, at Cambridge, which he reckoned a bear garden, and a home of Indolence; and, with his mother and aunt at Stoke Pogis, where he wrote the Elegy. His poems distilled very slowly from his genius: the Eton Ode appeared, and was unnoticed, in 1747. In the same year were written, to Horace Walpole, the rather hard-hearted lines on Walpole's handsome cat,
'Twas on a lofty vase's side.
The Eton Ode was composed, with a beautiful sonnet commemorating a private sorrow, in 1742:--
In vain to me the smiling mornings shine.
Earlier in the same year the "Ode to Spring," marked "to be sent to Fav,"--to West, his friend commemorated in the sonnet,--had been written, "not knowing he was then dead". Again, in October, 1742, another death prompted "The Elegy," which lay unfinished for about eight years. Grief had shaken Gray out of causeless melancholy, and 1742 was his great poetic year. In 1750 he wrote the light and bright "Long Story," on an unexpected visit from some poet-hunting ladies. In 1753, Walpole had Gray's "Six Poems" published, in twenty-one pages, with illustrations by Bentley. In 1754 he began the "Pindaric Odes," of which "The Progress of Poesy" is the noblest, and displays most of
the pride and ample pinion That the Theban eagle bear Sailing with supreme dominion Thro' the azure deep of air.
To compose "The Bard" (the Welsh Bard) took two years and a half, and neither the style nor the ideas of the Odes were thought pleasing, or comprehensible, by the public and Dr. Johnson. In his demure way the little poet was a rebel, and Dr. Johnson knew it. Gray never practised the adulation of "the great" that was customary; he asked for no places, he refused the Laureateship. Late in life a sinecure Professorship at Cambridge was given to him. The professor never lectured: not to lecture was the convention, and against this happy convention Gray did not rebel. He studied, made notes, learned Norse, translated, visited haunted Glamis, with the chamber where Malcolm II was murdered, visited the Lakes, wrote the most delightful letters, and died at 54 in 1771, the year of the birth of Sir Walter Scott, the year of Burns's twelfth birthday.
Gray had genius--not a great, but a new genius, and had many accomplishments. His satires were surprisingly sharp and fierce. He had the light French touch of the day in verses of society. There is something of the noble pensiveness and mysteriously appealing music of Virgil in his best poems: if he be "a second-rate poet" (an unkind way of saying that he is not a Shakespeare or Homer), he shares with first-rate poets the power of moving all readers; he is not the poet of a set of refined amateurs. He who moved and soothed the heart of James Wolfe in the crisis of his fortunes, and who has charmed every generation of the English race since Wolfe and Montcalm gloriously fell, has done more than enough for fame.
The Wartons.
Gray's taste for ancient Scandinavian poetry, itself a symptom of the tendency to study all poetry, however old, exotic, and unconscious of the rules of the eighteenth century, was not a new thing. We are apt to think of Swift's patron, Sir William Temple, as an example of mere gentlemanly and conventional ideas, though happy in the gift of a pure and sometimes exquisite style in prose. But Temple in his essay "Of Heroic Virtue" shows that he was capable of taking sincere pleasure in old Norse poetry, though he knew it only through the Latin translations "by Olaus Wormius in his 'Literatura Runica' (who has very much deserved from the commonwealth of learning, and is very well worth reading by any that love poetry); and to consider the several stamps of that coin, according to several ages and climates". Temple speaks of "The Death Song" of Ragnar Lodbrog as a "sonnet" and applauds "An Ode of Scallogrim" (Skalagrim); but his remarks, "I am deceived if in this sonnet and ode there be not a vein truly poetical, and in its kind Pindaric, taking it with the allowance of the different climates, fashions, opinions, and languages of such different countries," though well meant, show a curious idea of the nature of the sonnet.
Here we have, before the end of the seventeenth century, the essence of historical comparative criticism of literature; and admiration for a kind of poetry as remote as possible from the standards of the eighteenth century. Temple handed on the torch to the elder Thomas Warton, Professor of Poetry at Oxford in his day, who himself translated from the Latin, as "a Runic ode," two stanzas of the Death Song of Regnar Lodbrog.[1]
One of Warton's sons, Thomas (born 1728), was Professor of Poetry, at Oxford (1757-1767), and, from 1774 onwards (he died in 1790), published a History of English Poetry, which may be unsystematic, but is both interesting and erudite. Warton had to read the earlier and later mediaeval poets, French and English, in the manuscripts, and he quoted profusely from sources then scarcely known. "Partly through the store of new matter that is provided for 'the reading public,' partly through the zest and enthusiasm of its students--the spirit of adventure which is the same in Warton as in Scott"--his book "did more than any theory to correct the narrow culture, the starved elegance, of the preceding age". The elder brother of Thomas, Joseph Warton, born 1722, was a schoolfellow of Collins, and published "Odes" in the same year as he (1746). In his preface he boldly said that "the fashion of moralizing in verse has been carried too far," and "he looks upon invention and imagination to be the chief faculties of a poet". He preached what Collins practised; he wrote good criticism in Dr. Johnson's paper, "The Adventurer"; in his essay on Pope he tried "to impress on the reader that a clear head and acute understanding are not sufficient alone to make a Poet," "that it is a creative and glowing imagination... and that alone, that can stamp a writer with this exalted and very uncommon character...." These were to be the watchwords of the Romantic movement, into which Warton, dying in 1800, did not live to enter.
John Dyer.
Of John Dyer we know from his most famous poem, "Grongar Hill," that, on a certain occasion, he
Sate upon a flowery bed With my hand beneath my head.
If he had lain upon a flowery bed the posture would have been more poetical. In blank verse, deserting Grongar Hill, he found
Lo, the resistless theme, imperial Rome.
His "Ruins of Rome" are less impressive than Spenser's sonnets translated from Du Bellay. His "Fleece," an instructive epic of the wool trade, though praised by the illustrious Akenside, proved no golden fleece to its publisher. The prose summaries are pleasing. "Disputes between France and England on the coast of Coromandel, censured".
Dyer, at his best, is less successful than Thomson. He was born in 1700, son of an eminent solicitor of Carmarthen, was educated at Westminster, attempted the painter's art, visited Italy, took holy orders, published "The Fleece," in 1757, and died in 1758.
Briefer notes must suffice for the Rev. Mr. Blair of Athelstaneford (1699-1746) who wrote "The Grave," later recommended to amateurs by Blake's illustrations; and Matthew Green, who wrote "The Spleen" (1696-1737), a somewhat lively subsatirical effort.
William Shenstone.
Shenstone was one of the many poets who owe their reputation to their luck in being contemporaries of their biographer, Dr. Johnson. No Johnson could keep records of all the versifiers of the nineteenth century who have occasionally written good things. William Shenstone was born in November, 1714, at the Leasowes, in Halesowen. His life was much devoted to landscape gardening; and his harmless taste made him a noted character in his day. "He learned to read of an old dame," and pleasantly described her, or some other old dame, in "The School Mistress," an agreeable idyll in the Spenserian measure.
In 1732 Shenstone went to Johnson's college, his "nest of singing birds," Pembroke, in Oxford. He took no degree, he rhymed, printed his rhymes, and "The School Mistress" appeared in 1742. Thenceforth he landscape-gardened, being so little of an angler that he was indignant, says Johnson, when asked if there were any trout in his purely ornamental water. His expenses in gardening brought the haunting forms of bailiffs into his groves, but Johnson informs us gravely that "his life was unstained by any crime". He died in February, 1763. Several of his innocent poems, such as
I have found out a gift for my fair, I have found where the wood pigeons breed,
are still familiar to many memories: they are from the "Pastoral Ballad". He perceived the demerits of the rhyming heroic couplet (as it was then written), as "apt to render the expression either scanty or constrained," and preferred the verse of four lines with alternate rhymes. Thus, on the death of Pope
Now sadly lorn, from Twit'nam's widow'd bow'r The drooping muses take their casual way, And where they stop a flood of tears they pour, And where they weep, no more the fields are gay.
Of such matter are Shenstone's Elegies composed: his ballad on Jemmy Dawson, a martyr of the Jacobite cause, was celebrated and popular; poor Jemmy's lady-love died of grief and horror at his execution.
[1] Posthumously published in 1748. See Mr. W. P. Ker's "Warton Lecture on English Poetry," "Proceedings of the British Academy," Vol. IV.
XXIX. GEORGIAN POETRY
II.
Thomas Chatterton.
The name of Thomas Chatterton, the youngest and most short-lived of English poets, is curiously connected with that of Horace Walpole. Born, at Bristol, on 20 November, 1752, under the shadow of the beautiful old church of St. Mary Redcliffe, Chatterton from infancy became, as it were, possessed by the charm of the edifice and of the Middle Ages. Members of Chatterton's family had for more than a century been associated with the church as sextons; probably they had never given a thought to its beauty and historical associations, but these haunted their descendant, and the story of his childhood reads like a fantasy by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Among the clergy and people of Bristol the spirit of the eighteenth century, indeed the natural, usual contempt for things old, beautiful, and not understood, was complacently active. The chests which contained the archives of the church had been broken into by the Vestry, and quantities of old parchment documents, some of them illuminated, had been thrown about. Chatterton's father (died 1752), a schoolmaster, had taken as much of the stuff as he chose, and manuscripts in the house of the boy's mother were used for domestic purposes. The little boy, till the age of 6, had been curiously lethargic (and far from truthful); the sight of the illuminated parchments awakened his intellect; he stored all that he could find in a den of his own, and became a voracious reader. In 1760 he was sent to Colston's Hospital, a school resembling Christ's Hospital in London. He was soon, at the age of 10, a versifier, his Muse was first the sacred, then the satiric; but already, by the age of 11, he had made for himself, as some children do, a society of "invisible playmates," notably "T. Rowlie, a secular priest," of the age of Henry VI and Edward IV, and already he was writing, in a kind of old English made up out of glossaries, poems which he passed off as Rowlie's, found by himself in the derelict archives of the church.
In short, Chatterton might have seemed to be a victim of "split personality," and to be now Rowlie, and a number of other secondary selves, now the actual Chatterton, apprentice to an attorney. His conduct was almost as abnormal as his genius was precocious, and his passion for fame or notoriety was not quite sane. But, in fact, he knew very well what he was about, and, in December, 1768, attempted to dispose of "Rowley's ancient poems," including "The Tragedy of Aella," to Dodsley, the publisher. The success of Percy's ballads from the Old Folio (1765) may have suggested his scheme to the boy, but Dodsley was not tempted. Horace Walpole had published the first edition of "The Castle of Otranto" at the end of 1764. He used the conventional device (already familiar to the Greek romancers in the third century A.D.) of pretending to have found the tale in an ancient manuscript. Chatterton had proclaimed his discoveries in manuscripts in the summer of 1764, when he was 12 years old; in Horace Walpole he recognized, in 1769, a kindred spirit, and offered to show Walpole not only poems by Rowlie, but a history of English painters by the same learned divine. Walpole replied very courteously and gratefully, but "I have not the happiness of understanding the Saxon language". In a reply Chatterton explained his circumstances; his youth and position; and Gray had assured Walpole that the manuscripts sent were forgeries. Walpole therefore advised Chatterton to adhere to his profession, adding that experts were not convinced of the genuineness of the papers. He took no notice of several letters from Chatterton, and, after receiving a curt and angry note (24 July, 1769), sent back the manuscripts without further comment, and thought no more of the matter till he heard from Goldsmith, at a dinner of the Royal Academy, that Chatterton had committed suicide in London. After an attempt to support himself by hackwork, political and other, the poor boy, whose pride could not stoop to soliciting charity, had poisoned himself on the night of 24 August, 1770. Six weeks earlier he had been buying and sending presents of porcelain, fans, and snuff, to his mother and sister; twelve days before his death he had written that he intended to go abroad as a surgeon's mate.
Even when he wrote in ordinary English, Chatterton showed rare precocity. When he wrote in "Rowleian," in an invented dialect as remote from real English of any day as the language of the planet Mars, evolved by Mlle. Hélène Smith, is remote from French, Chatterton often produced lyrics of great charm as in "The Tragedy of Aella," and he invented a curious form of the Spenserian stanza. His touches in descriptions of Nature are sometimes charming. But he never quite escapes, as is natural, from the conventions of the eighteenth century; and his best inspiration is derived from Percy's "Reliques". What he might have been and might have done, in happier circumstances, it is impossible to conjecture. Genius he had, with more than the wonted abnormality of genius.
William Cowper.
The overlapping of styles in poetry and of tastes in poetry is pleasantly illustrated in the case of Cowper. He was born in 1731, Scott was born in 1771, and in Miss Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" we find the sensible Marianne Dashwood hesitating between the rival charms of Cowper and Scott; Byron, it appears, had not yet reached her fair hands. Cowper is a bridge between Thomson and Wordsworth. He was averse to the Popeian couplet; in his translation of Homer he preferred a blank verse which, at best, is not rapid. In writing of Nature he "had his eye on the object". His exit from the triumphant common sense of the eighteenth century was by way of spiritual religion, the Evangelical Revival promoted by Wesley, Whitefield, and their followers. They made appeal to the souls, not to the passions, of the populace; and Cowper's own sympathy with their bodies, with their poverty, like his love of retirement, and of newspapers, makes him akin to Wordsworth.
Born of the powerful Whig family of Cowper, the poet was the son of the rector of Great Berkhampstead; his mother, whom he lost when he was 6 years of age, yet ever remembered daily with intense affection, was of the name and lineage of Donne. He was cruelly bullied in childhood at a preparatory school. The innate savagery of boys of fifteen sometimes wreaks itself on a single small child, and we might think that his sufferings had their share in depressing the spirits of Cowper, did he not tell us that, at his public school, Westminster, he was eminent in cricket, which Horace Walpole and Gray despised at Eton. His master, "Vinny" Bourne, a Latin poet, was dear to him; he made many clever and lively friends, and, despite his attack on public schools in "Tirocinium" (1784), he seems to have been reasonably happy at Westminster, though he learned no more in one way than to write "lady's Greek without the accents
"Tirocinium" is a vigorous satire in Pope's metre. But Cowper, despite the vices and brutalities of school life, confesses his affection for the old place. The clergy at large come under Cowper's birch,
The parson knows enough who knows a Duke! Behold your Bishop I well he plays his part, Christian in name and infidel in heart.
In denouncing emulation for prizes, Cowper hit a blot that seems to have vanished, for anything like ungenerous emulation of this kind appears to be a lost vice. No boy studies
Less for improvement than to tickle spite.
Macaulay's victims, Warren Hastings and Elijah Impey, were at school with Cowper. He went to no University, but was articled to a solicitor; and idly "giggled and made giggle" with his cousins, Theodora and Harriet. He was in love with Theodora, but was disappointed, Harriet (Lady Hesketh) was one of his best friends. At the age of 32 (1763) hypochondria or hysteria shattered' his life; in a private asylum he was suddenly converted, and recovered, and religion was henceforth, now his joy and happiness, now, when the black cloud came over him, the cause of his despair. At Huntingdon, and later, at the uninviting village of Olney, he lived retired, the friend of Mrs. Unwin ("My Mary") and of a clerical ex-slave-trader, the Rev. John Newton. With Newton, Cowper wrote hymns, the ladies encouraged him to occupy himself with moral poems, "Table Talk," "Truth," "The Progress of Error," "Retirement," "Charity," "Hope," all in the metre of Pope; and all more or less satirical. Kings, in "Table Talk," are the first to suffer: one of the speakers in the dialogue is rather revolutionary. Indeed the mild tea-drinking Cowper, with his denunciations of "the great," the clergy, and the unthinking squires, preludes to the French Revolution, which he took very calmly. After politics comes talk of poetry: and the well-known lines on Pope occur; he
Made poetry a mere mechanic art, And every warbler has his tune by heart.
Of poets in his own age Cowper prefers the reckless satirist, Churchill; of Gray and Collins nothing is said. In "The Progress of Error" the much-enduring Nimrod is attacked, in company with the well-graced popular preacher; and novelists are assailed as "flesh-flies of the land," while men who study art in Italy come home worse dunces than they went, and finally the deist and atheist are publicly birched.
It is not for his satires that Cowper is remembered: they were suggested to him, in the interests of religion and morals, by Mrs. Unwin, while Lady Austen, a lively person of quality, appointed to Cowper "The Task," or rather gave him the subject of "The Sofa," out of which grew "The Task". The poet ambles, in an essay in blank verse, as much at his ease and as fond of digressions as Montaigne, from the days when man squatted on the ground, to his invention of a three-legged stool, the addition of a fourth leg, cushions, arm-chairs, the settee, finally the sofa. The sofa pleases the gouty; never may the poet have gout; he has done nothing to deserve it; in boyhood he
Has fed on scarlet and strong haws, The bramble, black as jet, and sloes austere.
This introduces a rural digression.
Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o'er, Conducts the eye along his sinuous course, Delighted.
We think of
a river winding slow By cattle, on an endless plain; The ragged rims of thunder brooding low With shadow streaks of rain.
How different are the methods of the two painters in words! The poet, finding geologists in the course of his wanderings, pities them, truth disclaiming them. Like Wordsworth he praises "retirement," welcomes the newspaper, and welcomes tea. In the charming lines, "The Retired Cat," temporarily shut up in a drawer lined "with linen of the softest kind," he seems to smile at his own cosy retirement; the teacups, the happy listening ladies. He is full of human kindness, of love for children, cats, and his own tame hares; he sets out to gather flowers, he says, and comes home laden with moral fruits, and religious reflections, and with his sketch book full of landscapes like Gainsborough's, and studies of cattle like Morland's. "The Task" won for the poet countless friends who never saw his face; and, though we have become attuned to blank verse of many beautiful modulations which he never dreamed of (though now and then they were attained by Thomson), "The Task" may still be read with sympathy and pleasure.
Many of Cowper's shorter poems, grave or gay, are in all memories: "The Wreck of the Royal George," as spirited and sad as a ballad; the ringing notes of "Boadicea"; the idyllic sweetness of
The poplars are felled, farewell to the shade And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade;
the lines, "Addressed to a Young Lady," brief and beautiful as the most tender epigrams of "The Greek Anthology," from which Cowper's translating hand gathered a little garland. Of these "The Swallow," "Attic Maid with Honey Fed," are worthy of the original, as is "The Grass-hopper". Cowper shone in occasional verses on trifling matters such as "The Dog and the Water-lily"; and pretty kindly compliments, such as "Gratitude" (to his cousin, Lady Hesketh), and things tender and touched with the sense of tears in mortal things, as in the "Epitaph on a Hare," and the "To Mary" (of 1793). His "John Gilpin" is an unusual frolic.
The translations, in blank verse, of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" could not displace those of Pope, who, in Cowper's opinion, had done all that could be done in rhyme. Blank verse, especially that of Cowper, cannot convey, as Pope does, the sense of the speed of the great epic; nor was Cowper's scholarship exempt from curious errors. He was overworked; Mrs. Unwin fell into the condition described in "To Mary," his terrible melancholy returned, but his last original verses, "The Cast-away" (1798), are penned by no "maniac's hand," nor can a poet have written them without pleasure in his own genius. Cowper died in 1800.
His letters are reckoned among the best in our language, and their delightful wit and gaiety fortunately assure us that there was much happiness in a life so blameless.
Literature in Scotland (1550-1790).
Before approaching the great northern contemporary of Cowper, Robert Burns, it is necessary to cast a backward glance at his predecessors in Scottish letters. We left them in the reign of James V, when Sir David Lyndsay was the reigning poet of the Court and of the people. It is not easy to fit some remarks on Scottish literature after Sir David Lyndsay into a chronological sequence parallel with the development of literature in England. The Scottish writers under James VI and I produced no effect on their English contemporaries: the King's "Reulis and Cautelis" in poetical criticism, and his "Basilikon Doron," a treatise on king-craft, with his "Counterblast to Tobacco," and his "Demonology" are the work of a clever general writer, but now only interest the curious. Alexander Scott and Alexander Montgomery continued to practise in Scots, the style of Dunbar, though Scott shone most in love lyrics, often musical, while Montgomery survives in an allegory of the old sort, "The Cherry and the Slae"; and an old-fashioned "flyting". Sir Robert Ayton (1570-1638) lived in London with the wits of the time, and, like the Earl of Stirling (died in 1640) and William Drummond of Hawthornden, deserted for English the Scots vernacular. The most distinguished of these poets William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649) entertained Ben Jonson at his beautiful house, and has left brief notes of Ben's rather crabbed criticisms of his great contemporaries. In the previous year, when James, "with a salmonlike instinct" (1617) revisited his native country, Drummond celebrated the event in "Forth Feasting," a panegyric in fairly regular rhymed heroic couplets. Some of his sonnets have charm and are not forgotten; but the times darkened, and Drummond (who showed common sense and public spirit when Charles I unjustly persecuted Lord Balmerino (1633), advising the King to read George Buchanan's book on the Royal power in Scotland), was unlikely to find an audience for his learned verse during the subsequent troubles. His "Cypress Grove," a meditation in prose on death, is poetic in phrasing and cadences, while the periods are not over-long and over burdened. But the brief years in which Scottish wits might have learned many lessons from the great contemporary literature of England soon went by; and Scottish writers for nearly a century were confined to wranglings over theology and sermons, and to bitter tracts and pamphlets, valuable to the historical but not to the literary student.
The great Marquis of Montrose is credited with one charming Cavalier lyric, "My dear and only love, I pray," and with verses sincere but rugged and full of conceits on his own death and his King's, but he "tuned his elegies to trumpet sounds". The favourite measure of Burns was kept alive by Sempill of Beltrees, in his vernacular elegy over a piper,
On bagpipes now no body blaws Sen Habbie's dead.
The translation of Rabelais (1653) by the learned, militant, and eccentric Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty (1611?-1660) is an imperishable monument of the author's amazing wealth of strange vocabularies, and vigour of appropriate style. The task of making Rabelais talk in English seemed little fit for a Scottish Cavalier who fought at Worcester, but Urquhart, aided by Rabelais, won a kind of immortality by his success. His translation is final and decisive; in which it stands alone. Of the preachers and controversialists, bitter or humorous, there is no space to speak, but the saintly character and gentle eloquence of Archbishop Leighton (1611-1684) live in his Commentary on the First Epistle of St. Peter and his other expository writings. The historical works of Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), Bishop of Salisbury, are English, except in their occasional Scotticisms, as much of his life was spent in England. He had seen much of the inner wheels and springs of politics, was fond of talking of himself and of his part in great affairs, and, like Leighton, represents the Scottish divine, politician, and author, who has been Anglicized out of the Presbyterian precision and acerbity, and is as English as he can make himself.
His very conceit, and his almost incredible want of tact, make this "Scotch dog," as Swift loves to call him, a most entertaining gossip. His "History of My Own Times" was judiciously kept from publication till after his death. Burnet cannot be relied on as a safe authority either in what he insinuates most basely, against William III, or states, without an atom of corroboration, against James II. In the latter case, however, Macaulay has accepted and given circulation to Burnet's narrative.
By far the greatest man of letters of the Restoration, north of Tweed, is "that noble wit of Scotland," in Dryden's phrase, Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh (1636?-1691). Beginning with a "heroic romance," "Aretina," influenced by Sidney's "Arcadia" (1660), and the French school of heroic romances, and with verses, in which he did not shine, Mackenzie, in the "Religio Stoici" (1663) shows that he, like R. L. Stevenson, has been "the sedulous ape" of Sir Thomas Browne. He has many admirably harmonious sentences, a very lively wit, and a becomingly pensive air of disenchantment. "The scuffle of drunken men in the dark," the bloodshed and bitterness of the wars of the Covenant, have saddened him, and left him an enthusiast for Montrose,
At once his country's glory and her shame.
But political and professional ambitions carried Mackenzie away from pure literature into dark and tortuous paths. His work on the Criminal Law of Scotland has considerable literary as well as great legal merit; his observations on the persecution of witches are of great interest; and the worst of his "Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland" is the fragmentary condition of the manuscript. Mackenzie was the cause of the foundation of the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh: after the Revolution of 1688 he retired to Oxford, where he was hospitably welcomed.
The Rev. Robert Wodrow (1679-1734) a country clergyman, would gladly have taken all knowledge for his province; his was a most inquiring mind, and perhaps no man so assiduous in his parochial duties ever left behind him so huge a mass of unpublished manuscript. His great work is "The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution". He was, of course, a partisan, but an honest partisan; he consulted all accessible documents, and often printed them at full length; he occasionally makes errors in the direction of his bias, but never makes them consciously. He neglects not one of the humblest of the sufferers, and, as he did not belong to the extreme left of the Covenanting party, he was savagely criticized by its members. He is a most serviceable writer, and his "Analecta, or Materials for a History of Remarkable Providences" (published long after his death), is a delightful collection of ghost-stories, and tales of witches. The evidence for the ghosts is extremely frail. Wodrow was in frequent correspondence with an American divine, as simple, learned, and credulous as himself, the Rev. Cotton Mather. Wodrow, after 1714, saw the beginnings of "Latitudinarianism," or "Moderatism," in the Kirk: young ministers began to study the "Characteristics" of that polite philosopher, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713); to doubt whether virtuous heathens and Catholics must inevitably be excluded from salvation; to wander from the Calvinism of John Knox; to aim at rhetorical airs and graces; and to regard the chief end of religion as the promotion of virtue. These Moderates despised "enthusiasm," and while the fiercer Presbyterian leaders separated themselves from the Kirk, the abler Moderates attempted, sometimes with much success, to distinguish themselves in secular studies, and took part in secular amusements, being patrons of the stage.
To understand the new Georgian revival of polite letters among the clergy and laity of Scotland, we should study the writings and life of Professor Francis Hutcheson of Glasgow University (1694-1746) a follower of Shaftesbury, and a writer on æsthetics and on moral philosophy. But for a true, lively, and Humorous picture of ministers who loved society, the stage, and the company of the wits, in London and in Edinburgh, we should read the autobiography, posthumously published, of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, minister of Inveresk (1722-1805). In youth he had revelled and drunk deep with the wicked Lord Lovat, and that stern Presbyterian, dear to Wodrow, Lord Grange, well remembered for his energy in packing off his termagant wife to seclusion on the Isle of St. Kilda. Carlyle had seen the rout of Sir John Cope at Prestonpans; he had amazed Garrick, at his villa on the Thames, by the accuracy of his driving at golf; he had championed his brother minister, John Home, when Home offended the Kirk by writing the once famous play of "Douglas"; and he lived to be the acquaintance of Sir Walter Scott. Carlyle, called "Jupiter Carlyle" from his noble presence, knew every one worth knowing in Scotland; and if we think him a kind of good-humoured pagan, he is nevertheless reported to have been an excellent parish minister. "For human pleasure" in the reading, the memoirs of this most unspiritual of divines are the best thing that the literary revival in Scotland has bequeathed to us. Very few Scottish writers had paid attention to the graces of composition, except in the period of the tenure by James I of the English Crown, and in the cases of Sir George Mackenzie and Archbishop Leighton during the Restoration. But the papers of Addison and Steele, "The Tatler" and "The Spectator," went everywhere, were eagerly read in Scotland, and provoked imitation in the matter of style. Literary clubs met in Edinburgh taverns: and men corresponded with Berkeley on philosophical subjects, as Mackenzie had corresponded on literature with John Evelyn. In addition to the literary clubs a centre of interest in poetry and prose was the shop of Allan Ramsay (1686-1758) who passed from the trade of a wigmaker to that of a bookseller. In 1724 he published "The Evergreen," a collection of old Scots verses from the manuscript made by George Bannatyne (1545-1608) during a visitation of the plague (1568).[1] Ramsay's "Tea-table Miscellany" (1724-1727) was a medley of old Scots and new songs and lyrics: the new made by Ramsay and his disciples to be sung to the old Scots tunes. The old verses were the basis of the new, which are a mixture of the simple ancient matter with that of the eighteenth century. Hamilton of Gilbertfield, who, by modernizing Blind Harry's "Wallace," produced a book very inspiring to Burns, was a contemporary of Ramsay: they wrote to each other "epistles" in verse, in the manner continued by Burns. Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd" (1725) contains matter more true to Scottish shepherd life than is common in pastoral poetry: and Ramsay's elegies, in Burns's favourite metre, on such personages as Maggy Johnstoun, an ale-wife, were models for Fergusson and Burns. Allan was no friend of the more rigid Presbyterian party, and once, at least, in the pretty song of "The Blackbird," he showed the colours of the Jacobite. Another poet, Hamilton of Bangour (1704-1754) was actually out with Prince Charles in 1745; his slim volume of 1744, "Poems on Several Occasions," contains little that dwells in the memory except the beautiful and melancholy song of Yarrow,
Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny Bride.
In this little renaissance, whose poets always had their eyes on the romantic past, Lady Wardlaw (1677-1727) produced what was taken for an old ballad, "Hardyknute," the first, Scott said, that he ever learned, the last that he would ever forget. But it needed "a poetic child" to find so much merit in "Hardyknute". Ladies like Lady Grizel Baillie (1665-1746) with "Were na my heart licht I wad dee," and Miss Jean Elliot of Minto, with "The Flowers of the Forest," a lament for Flodden, were surpassed in the number, and equalled in the merit of their songs by Lady Nairne (an Oliphant of Gask, and a hereditary Jacobite) (1766-1845). She was the best of the known and named poets of the Cause which has had so many singers; and her strains were continued by the last of these lady minstrels and musicians, Lady John Scott, a Spottiswoode (1810-1900). The new day was dawning in Scotland, thus early in the eighteenth century, and the birds were singing prelusive to Burns, Scott, and Hogg. Indeed, Lady Nairne's "Will ye no come back again?" and "The Auld House," and "Wi' a Hundred Pipers and a,'" and "The Land o' the Leal," are far better remembered than the poems of Robert Fergusson (1750-1774) who died so young, the harmless, hapless Villon of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, and, in certain poems, the model of Burns.
These poets were not more determined to be Scots (though Ramsay and Fergusson also wrote in English) than the wits who attempted prose were set on speaking English with the English accent, and on avoiding Scotticisms. The Select Society (1754) was a debating society whose members were taught to speak English by an Irishman, the father of the famous author of "The School for Scandal". The results were matter of admiration. They produced an "Edinburgh Review" which survived into two numbers: it had intended to appear every six months, but expired, though Edinburgh was full of literati, including the Rev. Hugh Blair, a once celebrated preacher, and Hume's friend, the Rev. John Home (1722-1808) whose tragedy, "Douglas," "gave the clergy cause for speculation". Hume declared that Home possessed "the true theatric genius of Shakespeare and Otway, refined from the unhappy barbarism of the one, and licentiousness of the other". Posterity has not confirmed Hume's verdict, but Home is the one "mellow glory" of the Scottish stage.
The Rev. Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), as chaplain of the Black Watch, went in at Fontenoy with the claymore. "Remember your commission, Sir," shouted his colonel. "D-- my commission, Sir!" shouted the chaplain. His "History of Margaret, otherwise called Sister Peg" (1760), is a humorous and valuable sketch of the antipathy between England and Scotland in 1760-1770. These men, and many others,--Lord Kames, Lord Monboddo, Lord Hailes, a serviceable critical historian, Beattie, the poet of "The Minstrel," and the satirist of the dead Churchill,--kept alive the interest in all forms of literature. The great men of the time, to be treated in a later chapter, alas! fall under the censure of Charles Lamb, that their "books are no books," but Charles's sympathy with Scotland was confessedly imperfect.
Out of this medley of new and old, of the vernacular Scots with the affected English of Edinburgh, out of the ancient ballads and old frolicsome rural ditties, arose the style of Burns.
Robert Burns.
The place of Burns in poetry may be called unique. His genius was the incarnation, as it were, of his country people's through many centuries, generations, from the one musical stanza on the death of Alexander III (1285) to the simplest song that the milkmaids crooned at their work. In literary poetry, as we have seen, the part played by Scotland had been partly derivative. The greatest poets, those of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, were professed followers of Chaucer: Drummond of Hawthornden was a lyrist and sonneteer under Italian and Elizabethan influences. Of Barbour and Blind Harry, Burns had little but the burning patriotism: his real predecessors were the many named or nameless popular song-makers, and makers of lays of rural merriment; and the music of the Scottish tunes to which their words were wedded. Of the popular ballads, romantic or historical, he professed no high esteem: no "white plumes were dancing in his eye," chivalry was not his subject: his matter was rural life and Nature; and he had the true Scottish love of the rivers and burns of his country. In the furnace of his genius all the ancient poetic material, all the folk-song (but not "the fairy way of writing") was recast and refashioned in forms singularly varied, vivid, and real: while, to pursue the metaphor, the furnace was fanned by all the winds of his age--now of democracy; now of loyalty to "a man undone," and a dying dynasty; now of patriotic resistance to "haughty Gaul," and her threats of invasion.
In the fire of his nature and of his passions Burns resembled Byron, but his humour was kindlier, his ear more tuneful, and his gift of creating character was infinitely more varied. He had the eye of Molière or of Fielding for a hypocrite; and combined the delusion that the Covenanters were the friends of freedom, with a scornful contempt of the discipline and doctrines of the successors of the Covenanters. In affairs of the heart he exhibits the usual pastoral morality, that of the shepherds and goatherds of Theocritus, with little of the Sicilian grace and charm.
The life of Burns is so familiarly known that the briefest survey must suffice. Born on 25 January, 1759, in a clay bigging in the parish of Alloway, in Ayrshire, he was the son of a small labouring farmer of the class whence so many of the martyrs and stout fighting men of the Covenant sprang. His father, a "grave liver" and devout, like them, managed to obtain for Burns, and out of every book which came in his way Burns picked-up for himself, a fair literary education. He owed much, especially many opportunities of reading, to a young tutor, Mr. Murdoch. He never was such a bookish man as Hogg, neglected as Hogg's education was in youth, but he acquired a knowledge of French, and studied Molière. The hardships of a poor farmer, in a cold soil, under a heartless "factor," the severest struggles for existence were known to Burns, but he also had his fill of dancing and "daffing," and the consequent "Kirk discipline". On this aspect of his life and adventures what is best to say has been said by Keats, in a letter written from Burns's country.
Entanglements of love affairs, and despair of success in life, caused Burns to contemplate emigration to the West Indies, but first he published at Kilmarnock (July, 1786), a collection of his songs and verses which instantly made him famous. Invited to Edinburgh, he passed a winter there in learned, noble, and festive society, carrying the celebrated Duchess of Gordon "off her feet," as she said, but winning far more admirers and boon companions than serviceable friends.
The Earl of Glencairn, whom Burns immortalized in sincere and glowing verse, died young; the age of Harley and Bolingbroke, of pensions and places for poets, was long dead. Burns met Scott, then a boy of 15; Scott later said that he was unworthy to tie Burns's shoes, but had the men been of equal age, better work would have been found for Burns than the perilous and bitterly uncongenial task of the exciseman (1789).
Not successful as a farmer at Ellisland (his capital was no more than the scanty profits of his poems), Burns settled in the pretty little town of Dumfries. Here his wit and genius made him the guest of the town and country, of lairds and tourists, and tradesmen. A constitution naturally robust, though injured by early privation, broke down; he had not the energy to continue in the vein of "Tam o' Shanter"; but poured out his songs, original, or re-creations of old popular ditties, till his death on 21 July, 1796.
Burns was singular as a poet, in one point: he needed, as it were, to have a key-note struck for him, and he prolonged and glorified the note which had inspired him. Far from concealing the fact, he acknowledged, with perfect candour and generosity, his debt to Robert Fergusson. This poet, born in Edinburgh (1750), and educated at the University of St. Andrews, died, after an interval of madness, in 1774. He, like Burns, had been too welcome a guest of more seasoned convivialists for the sake of his wit. His verses in English are commonplace, but his lyrics, in Burns's favourite measure, on the rude pleasures of Edinburgh tavern life, his "Leith Races," "The Farmer's Ingle," "Ode to the Gowdspink," and other pieces, gave Burns the needed key-note for "The Cottar's Saturday Night," "The Holy Fair" (the sacramental meeting in the open air, a relic of Covenanting days), and, perhaps, for the poems on "The Mouse," and "The Mountain Daisy". Burns has so entirely eclipsed Fergusson that he is scarcely remembered, even in Scotland.
"Poor Mailie's Elegy" had a much older predecessor; and, generally, Burns's songs start from an old tune, to which, through the ages, new verses had been set in new generations. There was a Jacobite "Auld Lang Syne," there was a Jacobite "For a' that," there was a very improper "Green grows the Rashes, o'" and so on, endlessly. But Burns, in many cases, transfigured his original. That he shone more in Scots than in English is admitted--but the best verses in his "Jolly Beggars" are in English, and there is only one word spelled in the Scots fashion in
Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met or never parted-- We had ne'er been broken hearted.
The same song contains the conventional lines--
Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee, Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.
The vigour and variety, the humour, the pity, the scorn, and the sentiment of Burns were all entirely new when he wrote, and his variety enabled him to please the most widely different tastes. Critics who were horrified by "The Jolly Beggars," and "The Holy Fair," and the reckless song to Anna found consolation in "The Cottar's Saturday Night," and the lament for "Highland Mary"
Thou ling'ring star with lessening ray,
in English. Poems in the manner of these two last are sometimes spoken of as "sentimental," but the sentiment was as real a mood, while it lasted, as the scorn, or the revelry.
Of Burns it may be said that, beloved as he has been, not always for his best qualities, by the uncritical, he has been no less admired by the greatest poets of the age that followed his own, Keats, Scott, and Wordsworth. No poet ever was more truly national; none had more of the genius of the popular past, and the aspirations of the popular future; none was more essentially and spontaneously lyrical; none was more at home with Mature, with human society (with the life of the animal world, too, as in "The Twa Dogs"), and, in the humorous tale, none has excelled "Tam o'Shanter". No poet wears better in the changes of circumstance and taste. His letters, though of capital biographical interest, are sometimes of a comic complexion; "the style of the Bird of Paradise" prevails, now and then, in his English prose. But his English verse, as Scott found to be the way with his countrymen when they had, in passionate moments, "gotten to their English," is sometimes the natural vehicle of high reflection or of sincere grief.
Charles Churchill.
Satire is the least worthy kind of poetry; for it is almost never sincere. The writer is always in a fatiguing state of virtuous indignation about matters for which he really cares very little, except when his virulence is brewed out of personal spite. Satire, in fact, is only tolerable when combined with the smiling humour of Horace, the occasional majesty of Juvenal, the grace, wit, and finish of Pope, or the airy contempt and sonorous lines of Dryden. Charles Churchill had little of the qualities of these poets, yet was, no doubt, the most popular writer of satire in the rhymed heroic couplet between Pope and Byron. He was born in 1731, the son of the Rector at Rainham; was at Westminster School a contemporary of Cowper and Warren Hastings; did not study at either University, though he was admitted to Trinity, Cambridge; married at 18, and married unwisely; took orders, and returned to lay costume and pursuits, and in 1761, looking about for a theme of satire that promised notoriety, had the happy thought of attacking the actors and actresses of the day in "The Rosciad". "The profession" is sensitive; the actors were not silent about their wrongs; there was plenty of hubbub, and the satire was remunerative. Any man who stoops to taunt actors, and even actresses, by personal attacks in rhyme, can make himself notorious. Perhaps the best-known rhymes of Churchill are
On my life That Davies hath a very pretty wife.
There were replies and hostile reviews, and Churchill, in "The Apology," assailed Garrick as "the vain tyrant" with
His puny green-room wits and venal bards.
Garrick is said not to have dared to contemn things contemptible, and to have propitiated Churchill. As ally of Jack Wilkes, he "took the Wilkes and Liberty" to assail Scotland in "The Prophecy of Famine".
Waft me, some Muse, to Tweed's inspiring stream . . . . . . . . . . Where, slowly winding the dull waters creep And seem themselves to own the power of sleep.
In fact, "the glittering and resolute streams of Tweed," as the old Cromwellian angler, Richard Franck, styles them, are only dull and sleepy in the "dubs" where England provides their flat southern bank.
In 1763 Churchill assailed Hogarth in an epistle, and Hogarth replied in kind with a truly English caricature. He wrote several other satires and a Hudibrastic skit, in Four Books, on Dr. Johnson's incursion into psychical research, in the matter of the famous Cock Lane Ghost. Churchill died at Boulogne, in November, 1764, and is buried at Dover. In private life he displayed some kindly and honourable qualities, and Byron, before leaving England for ever, in 1816, consecrated a poem to his grave. To the discredit of Scotland, Dr. Beattie lampooned Churchill--after he was dead!
George Crabbe.
Born more than twenty years after Cowper, but making his first noticeable entry into literature at the same time as he, Crabbe belongs in curious ways to different schools and different ages. In verse he follows the tradition of Pope and Goldsmith; writing, in his best-known works, in the rhymed ten syllables, and much influenced by Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," and by reaction against the smiling conventional "pastorals", But perhaps Crabbe's genius, stern and almost grim, was unfortunate in finding no other vendible vehicle of his thought than verse, for his natural bent was to the modern "realistic" novel on the squalor, sufferings and sins of the neglected rural poor. He had a genius like that of several modern novelists, for painting all that in nature or human nature is dark, lowering, and sullen; he is unsparingly devoted to actual study from the life; and yet he has a peculiar humour of his own. His later works were "Tales," short stories in the measure of Pope, but destitute of brilliance, and extremely prolix, so that, though these narratives in verse were apparently more popular than the contemporary novels of Miss Austen, the rapid rise and universal popularity of the prose novel began to deprive Crabbe of readers even in his own later years. Crabbe, who had been praised by Dr. Johnson, lived to enjoy the generous applause of Scott, Byron, Miss Austen, and, what was more rare, the approval of Wordsworth. But as, in the beginning of his career, he censured the Newspaper as the supplanter of poetry, so, before his death in 1832, he found that the world preferred novels in prose to short tales of modern life in verse. He profited by the brief period of the bloom of poetry, but his biographer, Canon Ainger, observes that "Crabbe is practically unknown to the readers of the present day". The gaiety and grace which in Cowper alternate with gloom, and make many of his poems so generally familiar, were not elements in the genius of Crabbe.
He was born at Aldeburgh, on the coast of Suffolk, on Christmas Eve, 1754, the son of a man who had been a schoolmaster, but later obtained a small post in the Customs. In Crabbe's day Aldeburgh was not, as now, a watering-place, but through the inroads of the sea, was become a squalid smuggling village with a desolate background of poor and ill-cultivated land: as described in "The Village". Crabbe was from childhood a great devourer of books, and at the second of his two country schools acquired Latin enough for his later purposes. He was apprenticed to a surgeon, fell early in love, at 18 won a prize for a magazine poem, "Hope," made songs to his mistress's eyebrow, printed (1775) a moral poem ("Inebriety"), at Ipswich practised medicine in a humble way, and in April, 1780, went to London with his surgical instruments and three pounds in his pocket. He wrote poems which were declined by publishers; though there was an opening for a poet--
When Verse her wintry prospect weeps, When Pope is gone, and mighty Milton sleeps, When Gray in lofty lines has ceased to soar, And gentle Goldsmith charms the Town no more.
(Lines of 1780.) But the opening was occupied by Cowper, and Crabbe was as destitute as Chatterton, when a letter written by him to Burke excited the sympathy of that generous heart in 1781. Burke offered encouragement and hospitality, Thurlow gave money; Crabbe was introduced to Fox, Reynolds and Dr. Johnson, took orders, was made curate of his native village, liked it not, and became chaplain of the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir. Later he held a variety of livings, and, for a poet so satirical about clerical neglect of the poor, was, inconsistently, a pluralist and an absentee, till his Bishop made him mend his ways.
His first poem of any note, "The Library" (1781-2) has no great merit: we see that the novel, to Crabbe's mind, was represented by the old heroic romance,
bloody deeds Black suits of armour, masks, and foaming steeds.
In "The Village" (1783) Crabbe showed his true self in realistic descriptions of wretchedness. He first tells the Pastoral Muse that her day is over:--
I paint the cot, As Truth will paint it, and as bards will not.
There follows a perfect masterpiece of landscape in his manner, "the thin harvest with its withered ears" beyond the "burning sands"; the blighted rye, the thistles, poppies, blue bugloss, slimy mallow, the tares, the charlock. The peasants are "a wild amphibious race" of smugglers and fishers; the farm-labourers
hoard up aches and agues for their age,
and
mend the broken hedge with icy thorn.
In the poorhouse, amidst unspeakable filth, the dying are neglected by the doctor and the sporting curate, and the dead are buried without rites. There is not a gleam of hope or sunshine, except in the accidental mention of "the flying ball, the bat, the wicket". The poet ends with applause of the heroic death in action of Lord Robert Manners, and with consolatory remarks to the Duke of Rutland.
The poem was successful and was admired by Scott, then a lad of 18: a few lines had been contributed by Dr. Johnson.
Deserting the topics in which he was strongest, Crabbe (1785) published "The Newspaper"; the papers are
A daily swarm that banish every Muse, For these unread the noblest volumes lie, For these unsoiled in sheets the Muses die....
For daily bread the dirty trade they ply, Coin their fresh tales and live upon the lie.
"The puffing poet" is also censured.
Crabbe continued to write, but not till 1807 did he publish "The Parish Register," which returns to the theme of "The Village". He was now doing duty at his parish, Muston, and, not unnaturally, found that, in various forms, the people had become Nonconformists. He now took a much more cheerful view of "the cot," and found its book-shelf well occupied by the Bible, Bunyan, and old English fairy tales; while the garden was rich in salads, carnations, hyacinths, and tulips. But Crabbe turns with more zest
To this infected row we term our street,
he enumerates the smells, and describes the horrible results of overcrowded dwellings; and catalogues the disguises, the weapons, and the implements of the poacher. There follows the sad story of "The Miller's Daughter"; and another girl who thus addresses her clerical rebuker,
Alas! your Reverence, wanton thoughts, I grant, Were once my motive, now the thoughts of want.
This is a fair example of Crabbe's favourite punning antitheses, like
loose in his gaiters, looser in his gait.
In "The Parish Register" Crabbe reduces the story of a life to the brevity of an anecdote, and in the dearth of novels his book was very popular. A better book of a similar scope and aim, in prose, Galt's "Annals of the Parish," was being written, but, taking time by the forelock, Crabbe, in 1810, produced "The Borough," descriptions of a large country town, including tales in verse of more considerable length. But, in 1804-1805, he had written a poem which is strange in his work, "Sir Eustace Grey," a tale told by a madman, a record of the dreams of madness, closely resembling De Quincey's account of the visions begotten by opium, and, in essence, not unlike Coleridge's "Pains of Sleep". The metre is that of the French ballade, and of the oldest Scottish ditty on the death of Alexander III. Thus
They hung me on a bough so small, The rook could build her nest no higher, They fixed me on the trembling ball That crowns the steeple's quivering spire;
They set me where the seas retire, But drown with their returning tide; And made me flee the mountain's fire When rolling from its burning side.
This adventure into romance has imaginative merits, and a speed of movement elsewhere unexampled in the work of Crabbe. The hymn with which poor Sir Eustace consoles himself might have been written by Cowper when first converted and "from cells of madness unconfined":--
Pilgrim, burdened with thy sin, Come the way to Zion's gate; There, till Mercy let thee in, Knock and weep, and watch and wait. Knock! He knows the sinner's cry: Weep! He loves the mourner's tears: Watch! for saving grace is nigh: Wait! till heavenly light appears.
Crabbe thought it necessary to apologize for the "enthusiasm" of the hymn, and to point out that Sir Eustace, had he been sane, would not have been converted by "a methodistic call". "The World of Dreams," in the same stanza, might take its place in "Sir Eustace Grey," so similar are the processions of terrible fantastic visions. These things are very strange among the vigorous but heavy-footed marches of Crabbe's habitual style.
To return to "The Borough," Crabbe paints its very aspect with his Dutch precision; and, incidentally, strikes at his rivals, the enthusiasts of various sects, who were much more popular preachers than himself.
Their, earth is crazy and their heaven is base,
he says of the followers of Swedenborg. As for the Jews,
They will not study and they dare not fight,
he exclaims; making an exception for Mendoza and other famed Semitic bruisers. The poem is of some value to the social historian, and the tales of the country coquette, and the horrible and haunted Peter Grimes, have a gloomy vigour, and somewhat resemble, in poetry, the moral pictures of Hogarth.
Crabbe's later works were collections of tales in verse, and with all their merits their versification condemns them to general neglect. His "Lady Barbara, or the Ghost" is not so successful in rendering the well-known story of "The Beresford Ghost" as is Scott's early ballad "The Eve of St John". To read with attention novels of everyday life narrated in the metre of Pope, without the skill of Pope, requires a vigorous effort.
In his Tales (as when a sturdy orthodox farmer expels the demon of scepticism from his son by a sound trouncing) Crabbe is often somewhat remote from our sympathetic modern tolerance of honest doubt. His method of narration is obsolete. In "The Patron," the patronized youth of humble birth, who has loved the Squire's daughter, is neglected,
And in the bed of death the youth reposed.
The nymph of his adoration is thus corrected by her mother:--
"Emma," the lady cried, "my words attend, Your syren-smiles have killed your humble friend; The hopes you raised can now delude no more, Nor charms, that once inspired, can now restore."
People did not speak in that style in Miss Austen's day; or in any other day.
Crabbe died in the same year as Sir Walter Scott, who, like Byron, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, appreciated that in him which was rare, excellent, and original.
[1] The Bannatyne Club, for the printing and preservation of old manuscripts, a kind of Scottish Roxburghe Club, was founded by Sir Walter Scott in memory of the old lover of poetry.