The literature of the Georgian era ..

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CORNELL

UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

FROM

Preface

The following lectures by Professor Minto on " The Literature of the Georgian Era " were originally delivered, not to the Arts students whom he addressed in the University class-room, but to a special audience brought together in the Music Hall of Aberdeen, under the auspices of the Local Examination Committee of the Senatus Academicus. This will explain why some points are treated in greater detail than would have been necessary in addressing advanced students. As explained in the Introduction, to Mr. John H. Lobban belongs the credit — as he had all the labor — of looking up and copying out the illustrative extracts from the authors referred to or criticized by his master.

In addition to these Lectures, and as a cognate Supplement, it has been thought expedient to publish three essays by Professor Minto, which were ready for press before his death, and were meant by him to be included in a work to be entitled "Reconsiderations of some Current Conceptions about Eminent Poets." Two of them are devoted to Pope, the former being a criticism of Mr. Courthope's Biography, and the latter a noteworthy discussion on "The Supposed Tjrranny of Pope." These were contributed to Macmillan's Magazine in January, 1890, and Sep-

IV PEBFACE

tember, 1888, and the right of reproducing them has been generously conceded by the owners of the copyright. The other, on Burns, has not been previously published. It was delivered as a lecture before the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution. In reference to it, as Mr. Lobban tells us. Professor Minto said that it was "most distinctly the best thing " that he had ever written. The projected "Reconsiderations" would have included, among others, an essay on John Donne, two papers on Wordsworth, — originally contributed to the Nineteenth Century^ — and another on " Matthew Arnold's Meliorism." As the last of these does not fall within the literature of the era included in the lectures which follow, and the first belongs to a previous period, while Wordsworth has been discussed in the course of this volume, these papers are not included in the Supplement.

W. K.

Contents

BIOQBAFHICAL INTBDOUCTION IX

LECTURES CHAPTEE I

THE POSITION or MEK OF LETTEBS IN THE EIOHTEENTH CENTUBT

Chapter I The Position Op Men Op Letters In The Eighteenth Cbnttjet

DBCLINB OF ROYAL PATRONAGE — WHY IS THE GEORGIAN BRA A DISTINCT LITERARY PERIOD ? — CONDITION OP POETRY DUR- ING THE CENTURY, AND VIEWS OP ITS CRITICS AS TO THE MEANING OP NATURE

The combined reigns of the four Georges may possibly he thought an arbitrary and artificial section of literary history to choose as a subject for a course of lectures. What had the four Georges to do with literature? is a question that naturally occurs when they are proposed as the figure-heads of a literary period ; and the answer must be that they had little or nothing to do with literature beyond occasionally furnishing in their illustrious persons fairly good themes for the humorist and the satirist. If you read Thackeray on the four Georges, you will see that these reigns supplied ample materials both for the laughing philosopher and the weeping philosopher. But neither of the first two Georges cared for literature, or did any thing directly to encourage literature, and it was perhaps as well that they let it alone. Matters mended a little under the second two. George IV. had an interview with Dr. Johnson, the record of which is one

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of the best known passages in Boswell's " Life." But this was after Dr. Johnson's fame was fully established. The most conspicuous instance of royal patronage of literature in these reigns — patronage that really helped a rising man — occurred in the first year of this century, when the Prince who afterward became George IV. put down his name among the subscribers to Thomas Moore's translation of Anacreon, and admitted the youthful poet to the honor of personal acquaintance. Moore was overjoyed at this piece of good fortune ; and well he might be, for it greatly helped him in his career of fashionable popularity. In a sense it may be said that literature owes the anacreontic lays of Tom Little to royal favor ; and this is its only obligation to the favor of the four Georges — an obligation that cannot be thought of with altogether unmingled gratitude. The Georges did little or nothing for literature. But, though it looks like a paradox, this fact, so far from being a reason against choosing their reigns as a literary period, is one of the reasons why the accession of the dynasty constitutes a material point of departure for a historical survey. There is a certain interest in seeing how literature prospered when it was no longer sunned by the royal countenance, and what new influences came in to compensate the loss. Up to the time of the first George every eminent man of letters had received direct encouragement from the Court. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries literature was almost entirely dependent on royal favor, and there was always some member of the royal family who took a warm interest in letters. In the time of Edward III. Chaucer was patronized by John of Gaunt, taken into the royal household, and rewarded with lucrative public appointments. Gower undertook his most celebrated poem at the personal request of Richard II. One of the first cares of Henry IV. when he usurped the Crown was to remember and provide for the wants of

COtTET INFLUENCE UPON LITBEATUEB 3

his father's old favorite, the po6t of the " Canterbury- Tales." The ladies of this royal house connected their memories with all that was best in the literature of the time. Lady Jane Beaufort, granddaughter of John of Gaunt, inspired the author of the "King's Quhair." Her niece, the Countess of Pembroke, mother of Henry VII., was the principal promoter of learning in her generation. Margaret, the sister of Edward IV., who married the Duke of Burgundy, encouraged Caxton in the literary enterprise which led to the introduction of printing into England. Another Margaret, daughter of Henry VII., by her marriage with James IV. of Scotland gave a new tone to the poetry of the Scottish Court. I need not give examples of the influence of the Court in literature during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The circle of education began to widen very rapidly after the introduction of the printing-press, and the creative faculty was brought within the reach of many and diverse incitements to pi'oduce ; capitalists pressed forward eager to divine and satisfy the new demands ; but among the diverse influences on literary production one was always conspicuous, the influence of the Court. Even when, as in the case of the great Shakespearian dramatic literature, writers did not receive their flrst impulse from the Court, the Court hastened to put the seal of its approbation on the new product. It was an entirely novel and unprecedented situation when the throne was filled by a king who could hardly speak a word of English, and who was entirely destitute of interest in English or any other literature ; and it cannot but be interesting to examine what effect, if any, this circumstance had on literary production. At an earlier stage of literary history, in an earlier state of civilization, the withdrawal of royal patronage would have been like the withdrawal of the sun from the solar system. Did it produce any perceptible effect on the literature of

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the eighteenth century? It did not ; the centre of literary life and heat had shifted ; where, then, are we to look for this centre ?

The mere fact that the personal tastes of the king and his intimate circle ceased to have any directing influence on literature would alone make the Hanoverian accession a notahle literary epoch. But this event affected literature much more profoundly in another way — namely, by putting an end to a long period of political uncertainty. The settlement of the long-vexed question of the succession to the Crown made a change in the position of the man of letters that can only be described as a revolution. A long explanation is required to enable you to understand the full significance of this change, unless you happen to be versed in the history of the period. First, you must take notice of the means by which public opinion in those days was appealed to. There was no reporting of political speeches ; there were no daily newspapers with leading articles ; every thing was done by means of occasional pamphlets in prose or verse. Nowadays, if you wish to know the minds of the leaders of opinion you read the magazines and the leading articles in the newspapers. But in the time of Queen Anne, and for half a century before, the work of expressing and enlightening opinion was carried on by means of pamphlets. Whenever the public mind was excited on any question, — a war, or a parliamentary election, or a great commercial enterprise, or a disastrous calamity, — swarms of such pamphlets poured from the press ; and if tlie public excitement ran high and the pamphlet was effectively written, it was sold in the shops and hawked about the streets in thousands. Next, you must take notice of the character of the great political question of the time — the succession to the kingdom. From the Revolution of 1688 to the accession of George I. the succession was uncertain. The nation was divided

COtJET INFLUENCE UPON XITEBATUKE 5

into two great parties of Whig and Tory, the one eager to keep out, the other to bring back, the exiled family of Stewarts. Cart-loads of pamphlets were written to work on the public mind for the one purpose or the other. It is difficult for us in these days to understand the intense, absorbing, passionate character of the political struggles that went on while the succession lay in dispute and uncertainty. A few years ago there was not a little excitement in this country over the Eastern Question. There were public meetings and speeches and articles without end ; sides were taken with considerable earnestness and warmth. But the heat of a struggle is always in proportion to the importance for the combatants of the issue at stake ; and no issue raised then could come home to the electors with one-tenth of the force of the momentous question, who should be the king of the country. The power of the Crown was great in those days ; and the leaders in the dispute about the succession fought with the fierce earnestness of men whose whole fortunes are bound up with the issue. Their properties, and even their lives, were at stake as well as their political power. If they took an active part on one side or the other, degradation, impoverishment, exile, even death, might follow upon failure. Triumph meant honors, wealth, and power ; defeat might mean forfeiture of their estates and banishment. Such were the high stakes for which the leaders were playing ; and for the common people also the political struggle was intensely exciting. It was in great part a religious question with them; encouragement, toleration, persecution, awaited their doctrines and forms of worship according as a Protestant or a Papist filled the throne ; and their feelings were thus profoundly interested. No such issues hang upon political struggles now, and the passion of the conflict, however earnest and determined, can never reach the same pitch of absorbing intensity.

6 MEN OF LETTEES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CBNTUET

This, then, being the state of things, the leading combatants deeply in earnest, the public mind quick and susceptible, every incident closely watched and sharply taken advantage of, and pamphlets the recognized means of working on public opinion, what was the eflfect on literature ? The political situation had a direct and immediate effect on the position of men of letters. The man who could write pamphlets, whether in prose or in verse, at once became a person of importance. Men of letters were sought after, caressed, rewarded, — ^we must not say bribed, — as they had never been before by ambitious politicians and grasping Ministers. Versifiers were in especial demand, and, of course, the patrons were met half-way. Young gentlemen at the Universities, with an elegant knack of versification, celebrated birthdays and battles, and even party triumphs in Parliament, and sent their effusions to the powerful, in the hope of being rewarded by solid appointments in the public service, of course irrespective of special fitness. The splendid successes of a few helped to crowd this avenue to fame and fortune. You all know the story of Addison and his poem on the battle of Blenheim ; how the Lord Treasurer Godolphin complained to Lord Halifax of the poor quality of the poems generally written on such occasions, how Halifax said that he knew of a young poet who could do better, how a nobleman was sent to Addison's garret in the Haymarket to solicit his services, and how munificently the poet was recompensed with public appointments. This story is familiar, but it is only the most striking one of scores of a similar kind in Johnson's Lives of the Poets of that time. Addison himself, earlier in his career, when he was fresh from the University, was rewarded with a pension of three hundred pounds for a poem on the Peace of Ryswick. Lord Halifax, the patron who helped him to the favor of the Crown, himself owed his first advancement to literature. When plain Charles Montagu, he had co-

LITERATITRE LIBERALLY REWARDED 7

operated with Prior in writing the political satire of "The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse." He was afterward introduced to King William with the words : " Sir, I have brought a mouse to wait on your Majesty." " You do well to put me in the way of making a man of him," the king is said to have replied, and forthwith ordered him a pension of five hundred pounds. Montagu's collaborator, Prior, was made secretary to an embassy. The political hits in his tragedy of " Tamerlane " obtained for Rowe an under-secretaryship in the Treasury; Hughes obtained a place in the office of Oi'dnance for an ode on the Peace of Ryswick ; Dr. Blackmore's indirect compliments to the king in his "Prince Arthur" procured him a knighthood and the post of royal physician. And so on and so on throughout the reigns of William and Anne. Places of all kinds in the gift of the Ministers of the Crown were freely distributed among men of letters, without the slightest regard to any qualification except their power of making men and measures popular by direct and indirect panegyric.

The effect of this extensive patronage on the character of Queen Anne poetry, on the poetry as poetry, we shall try to trace afterward ; meantime, I wish to make clear the position of men of letters before the accession of George I., and how completely this position was changed by the settlement of the disputed succession. Observe that the patronage of literature was not disinterested. The great office of the best literature is to elevate, strengthen, gladden, and purify human life, to expand the soul, to quicken the fancy, to enlarge the understanding, to lift the mind out of the narrow round of personal concerns and enable it to command a wider horizon. It was not to enable men of letters to fulfil this mission that the Ministers of King William and of Queen Anne lavished places and pensions on them. It was purely as party writers that they were patronized, as brilliant political pamphleteers, useful rhetorical

8 MEN OF LETTERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENT0EY

panegyrists and biting satirists ; and when the need for their services passed away, the fountains of patronage were dried up. Very soon after George's accession it was apparent that the golden age was at an end. The batch of Whig poets who had remained faithful during the Tory Ministry of Queen Anne's last four years, — Addison, Steele, Rowe, Tate, Tickell, and other minor celebrities, — were munificently provided for in the first blush of the Whig triumph, but this was practically the last of the system. When Sir Robert Walpole got the reins of power firmly in his hands, and settled down into his policy of establishing the dynasty by peaceful measures, he saw that the poets, powerful enough agents in a time of warlike excitement, could be of little service to him, and he turned the golden stream from the Royal Treasury in another direction. Another circumstance helped to destroy the influence of the brilliant occasional writer, the rapid development of the periodical press, of newspapers and political journals. This was almost coincident with the accession of George I. There had been newspapers in the land from the time of the great Civil War, and regular political periodicals were established in the reign of Queen Anne, the first being Defoe's celebrated Meview ; but the chronicling of news and the expression of opinion were distinct functions, left to different organs. Such sheets as the Flying Post and the Mercury gave nothing but news ; the Tatler and the Spectator were confined to social essays ; the Mcaminer and the Whig Examiner, Mercator and the British Merchant, were purely political journals. The newspapers strictly so-called were not impartial ; they were in the pay of different parties, and their intelligence was garbled in different interests ; but they expressed no opinions, and it was only by the manipulation of news that they sought to influence the opinions of their readers. The " leading article," or " letter introductory," as it was at first called, — a pref-

atoiy dissertation intended to lead the readers to certain conclusions, — was the invention of the acute genius of Defoe early in the reign of George I. From that time various news-journals began to retain a letter- writer, as the writer of leading articles was then called, and journalism became a distinct occupation. Much of the public money that had gone in the reign of Queen Anne to the occasional pamphleteer now found its way to the pockets of the professional journalist. It was a corrupt time, measured by our modern ideas of literary independence. Walpole, a hard, unsentimental man of business, who believed in paying for services directly in solid cash, is said to have paid £50,000 in ten years to the literary supporters of his administration ; and one of them, Arnall, a journalist whose name you will find in no history of literature, boasted that he had received in three years no less a sum than £10,997, 6s. 8d. When we compare "Walpole's system of securing literary support for his measures with that prevalent in the time of Queen Anne, we are compelled to admit that the great political patrons of the earlier period, Somers and Halifax, and Oxford and Bolingbroke, did have some respect for literature as literature, and took a certain pride in playing the rdle of Maecenas, altogether apart from their sense of the political advantages of having men of letters on their side.

The great change effected in the position of men of letters at the accession of George I. is, then, a solid reason for beginning a literary survey from that date. But the reign of the four Georges really owes its completeness as a literary period to an accident. It so happened that Pope's masterpiece, the " Hape of the Lock," was published in its complete form in the first year of the first George ; while the last year of the last George witnessed the publication of his first volume of poems by our late Poet-Laureate, Lord Tennyson. We thus find at the beginning of our period the leader of one

10 MEN OF LBTTEBS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUET

great school of poetry in the full blaze of his reputation ; and at the end the dawn of another great luminary and the foundation of a new school. What had poetry gained in the interval — an interval containing the splendid poetic achievements of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, with the great names of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and Scott and Byron, and Keats and Shelley ? At first sight it might seem as if there had been only a full circle revolution of a fixed wheel, an oscillation of a pendulum to and fro — as if poetry had only moved from the elaborate artistic care of Pope to the freedom and spontaneity of Wordsworth and Byron, and back to the elaborate art of Tennyson. But there was a real progi'ession. Tennyson embodies new poetic ideals in his art, and these ideals were conceived and shaped in the interval between him and Pope. The age of Wordsworth and Byron was not only a season of great creative energy, but also a season of vivid and searching criticism. Not only were new masterpieces produced, but new life was given to the discussion of the first principles of the art of Poetry. And not only were the technicalities of poetry discussed — publicly discussed — by some of the leading masters in the art, the principles of diction, metre, imagery, and general construction, as had been done by hundreds of writers on the art of Poetry from Aristotle and Horace down to the Duke of Buckingham and Mr. Hayley, but new topics were introduced, and chief among them the nature of the poetic faculty, and the principles on which rank should be assigned to poets in their various degrees as spiritual benefactors of mankind. Wordsworth led the way both in creation and in criticism. Wordsworth was by no means the most popular poet in his generation, he had by no means the most powerful influence on the public, but he had unquestionably of all men in his generation the greatest influence on men of letters, on the producers of poetry. It is, to use the language of macaulat's ceitioism of pope 11

political economy, among the manufacturers and not the consumers of poetry that his influence is to be traced, and upon them it was enormous. For us, as students of poetry, the most significant and instructive fact in the reign of the four Georges is the gradual rise of the reputation of Wordsworth, and the gradual fall of the reputation of Pope. About the close of the reign of George IV. the reputation of Wordsworth had reached its zenith ; the reputation of Pope, supreme and unchallenged throughout the eighteenth century, had fallen to its nadir. We may fairly take Macaulay's essay on Byron, published in 1831, as marking the triumph of the Wordaworthian school. This essay, written with all the energy of Macaulay's brilliant rhetoric, laid hold of what had before been little more than an esoteric doctrine, and spread it far and wide over the public mind. Macanlay danced a sort of breakdown over the prostrate body of the great poet of the eighteenth century. He concentrated and emphasized all that had been said in disparagement of Pope. Pope had no imagination in the highest sense ; he had no correctness in the highest sense ; he was a painstaking slave to artificial rules ; his poetry was like a trimly kept garden, with smoothshaven grass, flower-beds in geometrical flgares, symmetrical walks and terraces, and pillars and urns and statues, and trees and hedges clipped into unnatural shapes. Hundreds of writers since Macaulay have repeated his comparison of Pope's poetry to a trim garden, and have said after him that such poetry could be enjoyed only in an age of hoops and periwigs. For the last flfty years Macaulay's vigorous caricature has dominated the public opinion about Pope. Pope's faults have been put in the foreground ; his merits have been admitted grudgingly ; his admirers have been obliged to adopt an apologetic tone.

Pope, then, was the hero of the first part of our period, and the dethroned idol of its closing years, knocked

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from his pedestal and rolled in the dust. Ought he to be set up again ? Not all the king's horses, nor all the king's men, could restore him to the place that he once occupied in public estimation, side by side with the greatest men in literature. But, on the other hand, there can be no doubt that the reaction against him in public estimation was carried mucli too far. His rank in public estimation — I wish to lay emphasis on that expression ; for, paradoxical as it may seem, I believe that among the few who make poetry a serious study — and there were such men in the eighteenth century as well as in the nineteenth (Macaulay cannot be included in the number) — there has been no substantial oscillation of opinion about the merits of Pope. They have felt that his range of subjects was limited, and that his power of expression was not of the very highest, but that within his limits and the measure of his power his execution was of unrivalled brilliancy. Wordsworth and Coleridge felt and acknowledged this, if not as heartily, at least as explicitly, as Byron and Campbell. It is true that Wordsworth and Coleridge and other disciples had not the same full sympathy with Pope's subject-matter, and consequently were less hearty in their acknowledgment of his excellences, and more disposed to dwell upon his defects. Byron, who had tried his hand at satire, was more forward to acknowledge the brilliant point and masterly condensation of Pope's work. But they were in substantial agreement intellectually. They knew equally well where Pope's strength lay, and where his weakness lay. They knew the master's hand, and they drew the line at its limitations. There was no such nice discrimination, however, in the public estimation of the poet, based upon the treatment of him by poetical and critical authorities. The general easy-going reader who does not, in Wordsworth's language, make poetry a study, knows no middle station between good and bad, between admi-

CRITICISM OP EIGHTBENTH-CENTUET POETS 13

rable and the reverse. He either admires heartily or he is wholly uninterested and contemptuous. And in so far as he is influenced by authority, he is apt to be wholly led away by what is put in the foreground, to look at this only, and neglect the qualifications ranged in the middle distance and the background. Thus it happened that when Wordsworth's school, who put Pope's defects and limitations in the foreground, became the leaders of critical opinion, the hero of the eighteenth century was thrown from his pedestal in public estimation. It is a most diflBcult thing to gauge public opinion ; but a very fair test of it, as regards either men or measures, is to be found in the attitude of moderate advocates. If moderate advocates are apologetic and conciliatory, the man or the measure, we may be sure, does not stand high in the estimation of the public addressed. Now, applying this principle in the case of Pope, we find that in the eighteenth centuiy, before his poetry had passed through the crucible of the Wordsworthian school, such a moderate critic as Joseph Warton had to be cautious in hinting at defects ; whereas in recent years such temperate admirers as Mr. Carruthers or Mr. Mark Pattison have to guard themselves carefully against the charge of putting Pope's merits too high. Such incidents as these are significant of Pope's changed position between the accession of the first George and the demise of the last. He had fallen immeasurably in public estimation, and he was rated much below his deserts.

Now, although it is impossible ever to restoi-e Pope to the position he once occupied, it is our business here to try to obtain just ideas about poets, and to sweep away from our minds all artificial impediments to the enjoyment of various kinds and degrees of excellence in poetry — to clear our minds of prejudice and look at poets fairly for ourselves. The disciples of Wordsworth and Coleridge, in their wholesale condemnation of the

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poetry of the eighteenth century, have fixed in the public mind a great many erroneous conceptions. We shall endeavor to see for ourselves, taking them one by one, what manner of men the eighteenth-century poets were, what aspirations they had in their art, and how their aspirations were limited by their personal character and circumstances, and by the circumstances of their times, especially by the ruling traditions of poetry in their respective generations.

A very common impression about the poets of the eighteenth century is that they lived in slavish subjection to a set of narrow and exclusive rules of criticism ; that they had no love for nature, either in scenery or in human affections or passions— ^a finicking race of artists, conventional and artificial, shuddering at Shakespeare as a wild and irregular genius, or, as Voltaire called him, an untutored savage. Now, if, with these prepossessions in your minds, you take up any eighteenth-century poet of rank, from Pope down to Hayley, one of George III.'s laureates, who represents the low-water mark of eighteenth-century poetry, and if you read the language in which they speak of nature and of Shakespeare, you will open your eyes in astonishment. Take, for example, the following passage :

"A tree is a nobler object than a prince in his coronation robes. Education leads us from the admiration of beauty in natural objects to the admiration of artificial or customary excellence. I do not doubt but that a thoroughbred lady might admire the stars because they twinkle like so many candles on a birthnight."