and more I ask myself, as I grow older, what is the good of it all? We
dress, we go out to dinner," I went on, "but surely we walk in a vain
show. How good this asparagus is! I often think asparagus is the most
delicious of all vegetables. And yet I don't know--when one thinks
of fresh green peas. One can get tired of asparagus as one can of
strawberries--but tender green peas and peaches I could eat for ever.
And there are certain pears, too, that taste like heaven. It's one of
my favourite day-dreams for my declining years to live alone, a formal,
greedy, selfish old gentleman, in a square house, say, in Devonshire,
with a square garden, whose walls are covered with apricots and figs
and peaches; and there are precious pears, too, of my own planting, on
espaliers along the paths. I shall walk out with a gold-headed cane
in the autumn sunshine, and just at the right moment pick a delicious
pear. However, that isn't at all what I was going to say----"
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY
By GEORGE SAINTSBURY
(_A paper based on, but not identical with, a discourse delivered at
what may be called the headquarters of the subject--the Pump Room,
Bath, October 1st, 1919_)
The effect of convincing anyone against his will is sufficiently
familiar, but it may be questioned whether there is not another state
of mind which is still more insusceptible of real conviction, which it
is still more of a labour of Sisyphus to convince. In this state there
is too much mere inertia for the word "will" to come in. There is no
intention of relapsing into the same opinion; there is indeed no need
of any, for the opinion is never disturbed. The attempts at convincing
need not be resisted or contemned; they may even be listened to and
enjoyed like a very pleasant song, but they are at once forgotten.
Something of this sort, it may be feared, is the case with the subject
of this present paper. People have made up their minds that there was
_no_ eighteenth-century poetry or, at best, that such as there was was
not properly eighteenth-century poetry at all, but merely a survival
or an anticipation. The present writer had a perhaps accidental but
certainly curious illustration of the fact in reference to the origin
of this very paper; for having expressed his intention of discussing
"eighteenth-century _poetry_," he found the subject announced at
first as "eighteenth-century _verse_." In face of such a popular
attitude--let us be bold and give it its proper name: such a vulgar
error--it may not be quite idle to make a fresh attempt against it. I
am not sure that in some of the versions of the Pagan Apocrypha it is
not recorded that Sisyphus _did_ get that stone lodged at last. At any
rate it is worth trying, even at the risk, which is almost a certainty,
of the very illogical suspicion that if you like eighteenth-century
poetry, you _don't_ like--or don't sufficiently understand--seventeenth
and nineteenth. On that point the present writer may, he thinks, slap
his sword home and decline duello with any man. But he will take the
liberty firstly, in order to confine the matter within reasonable
limits, of leaving Pope almost entirely out. Obviously the famous and
much-argued question, "Was Pope a poet?" can be answered, even in the
negative, without deciding our general point here.
There is, of course--the fact has been already admitted by glance--a
division of the poetry of 1700-1800 to which, in a more or less
grudging way, the poetical franchise is generally granted. Scraps
of Lady Winchilsea and Parnell quite early; Dyer and Thomson at the
beginning of the second quarter; Collins and Gray in the middle; Blake
and Burns and Chatterton if not also Cowper and Crabbe, in the last
division are admitted, if only to a sort of provincial or proselyte
membership. Gray, indeed, has always been granted special grace,
even, as some think, to an unfair comparative extent, and perhaps
Mr. Swinburne's exuberant championship was never less wasted than in
the cases of Collins and Blake. But Blake really does belong to no
time at all except in a few fragments, and most of the others are too
well known for further comment. Let us in the very limited space here
available, before passing to other aspects of the subject, take two
poems, one of the earlier, one of the later time, as examples of pure
poetry charged with special eighteenth-century difference--for that
is the point at issue. They shall be Dyer's _Grongar Hill_ and Mrs.
Greville's _Prayer for Indifference_. The one is a picture of that
external nature to which as a rule the century is supposed to have
been blind, yet charged with an "inwardness" to which that century is
equally supposed to have been callous. The other is a poem of mood,
almost a pathological poem, possessing the same inwardness, but charged
with a flutter of feeling, again supposed to be quite unknown to the
age of prose and sense. Both are curious examples of what is called the
conventional phraseology of the time, flushed and animated by something
additional--a characteristic which also appears in Collins, but is more
disputable in Gray, save perhaps in the remarkable "Vicissitude" ode.
_Grongar Hill_ ought to be given whole, but it is not difficult of
access; the "Hymn" is not so easy to get at, but it suffers less from
"sampling."
There is not the slightest extravagance, from any catholic point
of view over poetry, in calling _Grongar Hill_ simply beautiful. I
think it deserves that term better than anything of Gray's, though
not perhaps quite so well as some things of Collins's in the first
half of the century; while nothing outside them can touch it, and it
came before both. Its attractions, to a somewhat close student, are
manifold, not the least of them being the fashion in which, for the
first time since Milton, and in a way not directly imitated even from
him, it moulds the couplet of mixed eight and seven syllable lines. But
one need not neglect the late Mr. Lowell's remark that when Edgar Poe
talked of iambs and pentameters he made other people d----n metres.
The poem has plenty of other attractions for the most untechnical
reader. Dyer, who was himself a painter, invokes the Muse of Painting
as well as Her of Poetry, and it is really remarkable how, at this
time when hardly anybody is supposed to have had his eye on nature
except Thomson, and in the very year of _Winter_ itself, full eighty,
too, before Scott provoked from Pitt his famous surprise that verse
should be able to express the effect of painting--how visual as well as
audible effect is produced. The exordium to the
Silent nymph with curious eye,
Who in the purple evening lie
On the mountain's lonely van;
the following description of the landscape in general with its unusual
and extraordinarily true conclusion:
And swelling to embrace the light,
Spreads around beneath the sight,
in which everybody who has after climbing a hill turned round and seen
the prospect must acknowledge the felicity of "swelling," though he may
never have formulated the appearance before; the details of wood, and
ruin, and river, with the sudden and just sufficient moral:
A little rule, a little sway,
A sunbeam on a winter's day;
for the castle, and for the rivers:
Sometimes swift, sometimes slow,
Wave succeeding wave they go,
A various journey to the deep,
Like human life to endless sleep;
the fillings in of various detail and the penultimate passage formed
into a sort of roundel:
Now, even now, my joys run high
As on the mountain turf I lie,
While the wanton Zephyr sings
And in the vale perfumes his wings;
While the waters murmur deep,
While the shepherd charms his sheep,
While the birds unbounded fly,
And with music fill the sky--
Now, even now, my joys run high;
with the finale to Peace and Quiet, close allied to Pleasure--all these
and all the rest of the 150 lines or so of the poem have their own
appropriate agreeableness. And it will be very dangerous for anyone to
try the usual sneer at eighteenth-century convention, lest haply he be
thought to be blinded or hoodwinked by conventions of another sort.
He has, for instance, been taught to think "wanton Zephyr" very bad.
But has he quite realised the simplicity and perfection with which the
single word "sings" distinctively characterises the rush of the wind
aloft, and the next line brings before the mind's senses the flowers
and crops and woods, from which the "perfume" is derived below? Is
"unbounded," in the particular and yet fully legitimate sense, quite
what Edmond de Goncourt used disdainfully to call "everybody's epithet"
for the apparently limitless freedom of the birds' flight? Without
quoting the whole piece it would be impossible to show the singular
uniformity of pictorial and musical skill which distinguishes it; but
this can be left, with complete security of mind, to anyone who gives
it an impartial reading to discover for himself. Even the impartial
reader is not recommended to proceed from _Grongar Hill_ to _The Ruins
of Rome_, as the poet in this latter piece most unwisely invites him to
do--still less to _The Fleece_. But no attempt is being made here to
prove that the eighteenth century never produced bad poetry: one merely
endeavours to point out that it sometimes produced good.
The _Prayer for Indifference_ is much less varied in kind, and much
more limited in degree, of attraction, but it is perhaps subtler. The
personal application of it can escape no reader of Fanny Burney's
Diaries, but is not necessary to appreciation. The idea is that of an
appeal to Oberon for a "balm" slightly different from that which plays
so important a part in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_--a spell causing
neither love nor hate, but only indifference. The metre is ordinary
ballad or common measure; the language not very different from the
ordinary poetic diction of the time. You are not, as in _Grongar Hill_,
made to believe that you are not in the eighteenth century at all,
or, if at all, as far from its usual and central ways and thoughts as
Grongar itself was and is from London. But, by a quaint and pleasing
paradox, the suppliant infuses into her prayer qualities which were
the very opposite of that which she prays for, and which in a certain
sense might be said to be the quality of the century itself at least
on the common estimate. Indifference--in the sense of abstinence from
enthusiasm--certainly _was_ affected by many, and positively approved
by some, in those days. But when the lady says:
I ask no kind return in love,
No tempting charm to please--
Far from the heart such gifts remove
That sighs for peace and ease,
there is a quiver in verse and phrase and sense alike which indicates
and expresses very effectively aspirations quite different from
indifference. And the quiver becomes a throb, emphasised by the
repetition of that potent word "far," as she goes on:
Nor ease, nor peace that heart can know
That, like the needle true,
Turns at the touch of joy or woe,
But, turning, trembles too.
Far as distress the soul can wound,
'Tis pain in each degree;
'Tis bliss, but to a certain bound,
Beyond, 'tis agony.
And there is not much less real passion, though the expression has
become ironic instead of direct, in the concluding stanza:
And what of life remains to me
I'll pass in sober ease:
Half-pleased, contented I will be--
Content but half to please.
Now it is probably hopeless to expect readers who have been thoroughly
broken to other styles of poetry themselves to be contented, to be
even "half-pleased" with this. The metre will seem to them jog-trot,
the language hopelessly prosaic, the expression, as Nietzsche says of
John Stuart Mill, "offensively clear"; the absence of any attempt at
elaborate ornament or elaborate ugliness almost more offensive still.
And it may also seem idle boasting or sheer mendacity to observe that
there are people who delight in intricate versification, who love
even metaphysical ambiguousness and obscurity; people for whom Blake
is not too uncommonplace or Rossetti too flamboyant, or--to come to
more recent days, while keeping to the equal waters of the dead--Mary
Coleridge too problematic, who yet can enjoy this verse very much
indeed, and feel that, having known it, they could not do without it,
which some have held to be the great test of poetry. Indeed, to them,
not the least interesting point about it is that it _does_ take the
form and colour of the time to so large an extent and vindicates its
indispensableness thereby. On the other hand, if anyone says, "But I
do not perceive the quiver, or feel the throb of which you talk," why,
of course, there is nothing more to be done or said. For that person
Mrs. Greville's work is undoubtedly not poetry. But whether his or her
state is the more gracious, because of the fact, is a further question,
though one on which we need not enter. The whole purport of this paper
is once more to make an effort to establish the old position that there
are many mansions in the Heaven of Poetry, and that the mere fact that
some one does not care to live in or to recognise the existence of this
or that among them does not prove that they ought to be pulled down or
that they do not exist at all.
It may, however, be admitted--in fact no admission or confession
is required, no idea of contesting or denying having been
entertained--that neither the qualities of _Grongar Hill_ nor those
of the _Prayer_, that still less the general characteristics of
the group of romantic precursors from Collins to Blake distinguish
eighteenth-century poetry generally. And it may in the same way be
further allowed that some of the actual characteristics of this
poetry in general are not _strictly_ poetic at all. Its didacticism
is perhaps the chief of these; but there are undoubtedly others.
And we are busy not with what is not poetical in eighteenth-century
verse, but with what is poetical in eighteenth-century poetry. There
are two departments in which it is almost pre-eminent, in which it is
certainly very distinguished. The strict poeticalness of both of them
has indeed been denied by extremists. All of us probably have heard it
said, perhaps some of us have said it ourselves, that rhetoric is not
poetry; and (though here there may not have been so much agreement)
that "light" verse, whether regularly satiric or not, is at best poetry
by allowance and, short of the best, not poetry at all. Now undoubtedly
some rhetoric is not poetry, and a good deal of light verse is poetry
only by extremely generous allowance. But the complete ostracising of
either kind from the poetical city involves two propositions which are
contentious in the extreme, and which I and those who think with me
hold to be abominable heresies. The one is that "All depends on the
subject" in poetry, and the other is that "Verse is not an essential
feature of poetry." _We_ maintain that anything can be treated
poetically, though some things are very rebellious to such treatment,
and that though rhetoric is strictly a characteristic of prose, it cam
be, so to speak, super-saturated with poetry when it adopts poetical
form, the same contention extending to the subjects of satiric or of
merely light verse. A great deal of the abundant rhetorical verse of
the eighteenth century is no doubt not poetry, or not very poetical
poetry, and a good deal of its abundant satire, not a very little of
its _vers de société_ and trifles is not poetry or not very poetical.
But, on the other hand, not a very little of both kinds is poetry,
and the reason and origin of its poetical character are by no means
uninteresting to trace. There is no room, and indeed not much occasion,
to do this at length here. Suffice it to say that for its rhetorical
verse the century was very much indebted to Dryden, and that for its
light verse it was still more indebted to Prior.
The positions of the two were indeed different, for Dryden was a dead
man when the century opened, though he had died on its very eve,
while Prior was an actual member of its first great literary group.
And, further, Dryden's influence, though it continued to some extent
directly through the whole time, was largely exercised at second-hand
through Pope, while Prior's was first-hand all through. For which
reasons we need not say anything more here on Dryden himself, while we
must say something on Prior. But the rhetorical influence which had
produced such great poetry (for great it is, let who will gainsay)
as the finest passages of Dryden's satires, the opening of _Religio
Laici_, the "wandering fires" paragraph in _The Hind and the Panther_,
and not a few things in the neglected plays, was well justified of its
children in the following century. I have never seen any successful
attempt to deny the name of poetry to such magnificent things as the
close of _The Dunciad_ and the close of _The Vanity of Human Wishes_. I
have never seen any real fight at all made for this denial except the
endeavour to turn them, as scapegoats, into the wilderness of rhetoric.
And that, as I have said already, is really a begging of the question.
Most certainly there is rhetoric which is not poetry--there is a very
great deal of it--in fact most of it; as certainly there is rhetoric
which is. And the passages which may claim that name in the eighteenth
century, if never quite so great as the two just mentioned, are very
numerous. There is that fine one in Tickell's epitaph on Cadogan
which, after the eclipse of eighteenth-century verse in the earlier
nineteenth, Thackeray was the first to rediscover:
Ah, no! when once the mortal yields to fate
The blast of Fame's sweet trumpet sounds too late--
Too late to stay the spirit on its flight
Or soothe the new inhabitant of light,
with its later address to Fame herself:
Thou music, warbling to the deafened ear!
Thou incense, wasted on the funeral bier!
There is Akenside's still finer _Epistle to Curio_, which Macaulay
laughed at rather ignobly as unpractical. Well, Akenside, like Macaulay
himself, was a Whig, and I am a Tory; nor are the ideals expressed
in the following lines by any means mine. But if they are not fine
lines, if they are not, though in one of the outer provinces no doubt,
poetical, I will acknowledge that I know nothing at all about poetry:
Ye shades immortal, who by Freedom led,
Or in the field or on the scaffold bled,
Bend from your radiant seats a joyful eye,
And view the crown of all your labours nigh.
See Freedom mounting her eternal throne,
The sword submitted, and the laws her own;
See public power chastised beneath her stand,
With eyes intent and uncorrupted hand,
See private life by wisest arts reclaimed,
See ardent youth to noblest manners framed,
See us acquire whate'er was sought by you,
If Curio! only Curio! will be true.
Well, once more, Curio, _alias_ Pulteney, was _not_ true, but deserted
Akenside's party and became Earl of Bath and possessor of no small part
thereof. And private life and ardent youth were not reclaimed much in
the days of the historic Charteris and the fictitious Lovelace. And the
practical realisation of something like Akenside's undoubted principles
and aspirations was the French Revolution fifty and the Russian
Revolution nearer two hundred years later. But all this has nothing
to do with the question whether in this passage also rhetoric, which
hardly anybody will deny to it, has not passed under the influence and
received the transforming force of poetry. I say it has, though I am
perfectly willing to admit that it is not the best or the most poetical
form of poetry, and that it is very far indeed from the forms that I
myself like best. But one of the cries which the critic should never
be tired of uttering, whether in the streets or in the wilderness,
is that nothing is bad merely because it is different from another
thing which is good, and that in this world there is no equality or
fixed standard to which everything must be cut down or stretched out.
The best rhetorical poetry of the eighteenth century is not the best
poetry, but it is poetry in its own way, exhibiting the glow, the rush,
the passion, which strict prose cannot, and which poetry can, give.
There is less specific prejudice against "light" poetry on the part
of poetical highfliers than there is against poetical rhetoric, but
there is some. Once more I venture to disallow this prejudice _in
toto_ as far as kind is concerned, though, of course, each individual
specimen of that kind must pass its individual muster as a piece of
intenser thought or feeling, expressed in appropriate language and
inspired by the charm of verse-music. For that, though no one ever has
defined or will define poetry, is one of the divers good approaches
to a description of it. Now here, as was briefly said above, the
eighteenth century possessed, for nearly the whole of its first quarter
as an actual living practitioner, and for the whole of the rest of
it as a past contemporary of still living persons, an unsurpassed
general of light verse in Matthew Prior. On the whole I know few
English poets who have so seldom had full justice done to them. No
competent judge, indeed, has ever denied Prior's excellence in pure
lightness, but there have been frequent failures to allow for that
undercurrent of seriousness, sadness, and almost passion--that "feeling
in earnest while thinking in jest," according to the best definition
of humour--which characterises him. Thackeray has, indeed, equalled,
but in obvious and even frank following, the great lines written (or
not written) in Mézeray's _History of France_; but hardly anyone else
has come near them in irony and melancholy and music, blended as three
appeals in one. There is even a touch, though more than a touch would
have been out of place, in the famous _Child of Quality_, and a great
deal more, not quite so perfectly expressed, in the _Lines to Charles
Montague_. If the touch of sadness be for the moment unwelcome, there
is _Daphne and Apollo_ or the famous _English Padlock_, with a dozen or
several dozen others ready to hand. And to go to yet another _nuance_,
the recent discovery at Longleat of _Jinny the Just_, with its touches
of sincere sorrow and the three unequalled stanzas of kindly irony:
Thus still, while her morning unseen fled away,
In ord'ring the linen and making the tea,
That she scarce could have time for the psalms of the day--
And while after dinner the night came so soon
That half she proposed very seldom was done,
With twenty "God bless me's, how this day has gone!"
While she read, and accounted, and paid, and abated,
Ate and drank, played and worked, laughed and cried, loved and
hated,
_As answered the end of her being created_,
especially with that last unsurpassable line; all these and many
more exemplify and illustrate that indescribable raising of the
expression--that making the common as if it were not common--which is
the essence of poetry and the privilege of verse.