I. ORTHODOXY AND CLASSICISM QUIESCENT (1700-1725) The clearest portrayal
of the prominent features of an age may sometimes be seen in poems which
reveal what men desire to be rather than what they are; and which express
sentiments typical, even commonplace, rather than individual. John
Pomfret's _Choice_ (1700) is commonplace indeed; it was never deemed
great, but it was remarkably popular. "No composition in our language,"
opined Dr. Johnson, "has been oftener perused,"--an opinion quite
incredible until one perceives how intimately the poem harmonizes with
the prevalent mood of its contemporary readers. It was written by a
clergyman (a circumstance not insignificant); its form is the heroic
couplet; its content is a wish, for a peaceful and civilized mode of
existence. And what; is believed to satisfy that longing? A life of
leisure; the necessaries of comfort plentifully provided, but used
temperately; a country-house upon a hillside, not too distant from the
city; a little garden bordered by a rivulet; a quiet-study furnished with
the classical Roman poets; the society of a few friends, men who know the
world as well as books, who are loyal to their nation and their church,
and whose; conversation is intellectually vigorous but always polite; the
occasional companionship of a woman of virtue, wit, and poise of manner;
and, above all, the avoidance of public or private contentions. Culture
and peace--and the greater of these is peace! The sentiment characterizes
the first quarter of the eighteenth century.
The poets of that period had received an abundant heritage from the
Elizabethans, the Cavaliers, Dryden, and Milton. It was a poetry of
passionate love, chivalric honor, indignant satire, and sublime faith.
Much of it they admired, but their admiration was tempered with
fear. They heard therein the tones of violent generations,--of men whose
intensity, though yielding extraordinary beauty and grandeur, yielded
also obscurity and extravagance; men whom the love of women too often
impelled to utter fantastic hyperbole, and the love of honor to glorify
preposterous adventures; quarrelsome men, who assailed their opponents
with rancorous personalities; doctrinaires, who employed their fiery
energy of mind in the creation of rigid systems of religion and
government; uncompromising men, who devoted to the support of those
systems their fortunes and lives, drenched the land in the blood of a
civil war, executed a king, presently restored his dynasty, and finally
exiled it again, thus maintaining during half a century a general
insecurity of life and property which checked the finer growths of
civilization. Their successors trusted that the compromise of 1688 had
reduced political and sectarian affairs to a state of calm equilibrium;
and they desired to cultivate the fruits of serenity by fostering in all
things the spirit of moderation. In poetry, as in life, they tended more
and more to discountenance manifestations of vehemence. Even the poetry
of Dryden, with its reflections of the stormy days through which he had
struggled, seemed to them, though gloriously leading the way toward
perfection, to fall short of equability of temper and smoothness of form.
To work like Defoe's _True-Born Englishman_ (1701) and _Hymn to the
Pillory_ (1703), combative in spirit and free in style, they gave only
guarded and temporary approval.
Inevitably the change of mood entailed losses. Sir Henry Wotton's
_Character of a Happy Life_ (c. 1614) treats the same theme as Pomfret's
_Choice_; but Pomfret's contemporaries were rarely if ever visited by
such gleams as shine in Wotton's lines describing the happy man as one
who never understood
How deepest wounds are given by praise,
and as one
Who God doth late and early pray
More of his grace than gifts to lend.
Such touches of penetrative wisdom and piety, like many other precious
qualities, are of an age that had passed. In the poetry of 1700-1725,
religion forgoes mysticism and exaltation; the intellectual life, daring
and subtlety; the imagination, exuberance and splendor. Enthusiasm for
moral ideals declines into steadfast approval of ethical principles. Yet
these were changes in tone and manner rather than in fundamental views.
The poets of the period were conservatives. They were shocked by the
radicalism of Mandeville, the Nietzsche of his day, who derided the
generally accepted moralities as shallow delusions, and who by means of a
clever fable supported a materialistic theory which implied that in the
struggle for existence nothing but egotism could succeed:
Fools only strive
To make a great and honest hive.
Obloquy buried him; he was a sensational exception to the rule. As a
body, the poets of his time retained the orthodox traditions concerning
God, Man, and Nature.
Their theology is evidenced by Addison, Watts, and Parnell. It is a
Christianity that has not ceased to be stern and majestic. In Addison's
_Divine Ode_, the planets of the firmament proclaim a Creator whose power
knows no bounds. In the hymns of Isaac Watts, God is as of old a jealous
God, obedience to whose eternal will may require the painful sacrifice
of temporal earthly affections, even the sacrifice of our love for our
fellow-creatures; a just God, who by the law of his own nature cannot
save unrepentant sin from eternal retribution; yet an adored God, whose
providence protects the faithful amid stormy vicissitudes,--
Under the shadow of whose throne
The saints have dwelt secure.
Spirits as gentle and kindly as Parnell insist that the only approach
to happiness lies through a religious discipline of the feelings, and
protest that death is not to be feared but welcomed--as the passage from
a troublous existence to everlasting peace. In most of the poetry of
the time, religion, if at all noticeable, is a mere undercurrent; but
whenever it rises to the surface, it reflects the ancient creed.
Traditional too is the general conception of human character. Man is
still thought of as a complex of lofty and mean qualities, widely
variable in their proportion yet in no instance quite dissevered. To
interpret--not God or Nature--but this self-contradictory being, in both
his higher and his lower manifestations and possibilities, remains the
chief vocation of the poets. They have not ceased the endeavor to lend
dignity to life by portraying its nobler features. Addison, in _The
Campaign_, glorifies the national hero whose brilliant victories thwarted
the great monarch of France on his seemingly invincible career toward
the hegemony of Europe, the warrior Marlborough, serene of soul amid the
horror and confusion of battle. Tickell, in his noble elegy on Addison,
not only, while voicing his own grief, illustrates the beauty of
devoted friendship, but also, when eulogizing his subject, holds up to
admiration, as a type to be revered, the wise moralist, cultured and
versatile man of letters, and adept in the art of virtuous life. Pope,
in the most ambitious literary effort of the day, his translation of the
_Iliad_, labors to enrich the treasury of English poetry with an epic
that sheds radiance upon the ideals and manners of an heroic age. In such
attempts to exalt the grander phases of human existence, the poets were,
however, owing to their fear of enthusiasm, never quite successful. It is
significant that though most critics consider Pope's Homer no better than
a mediocre performance, none denies that his _Rape of the Lock_ is, in
its kind, perfection.
Here, as in the _vers de société_ of Matthew Prior and Ambrose Philips,
the age was illuminating with the graces of poetry something it really
understood and delighted in,--the life of leisure and fashion; and here,
accordingly, is its most original and masterly work. _The Rape of the
Lock_ is the product of a society which had the good sense and good
breeding to try to laugh away incipient quarrels, and which greeted with
airy banter the indiscreet act of an enamoured young gallant,--the kind
of act which vulgarity meets with angry lampoons or rude violence. The
poem is an idyll quite as much as a satire. The follies of fashionable
life are treated with nothing severer than light raillery; and its
actually distasteful features,--its lapses into stupidity, its vacuous
restlessness, its ennui,--are cunningly suppressed. But all that made it
seem the height of human felicity is preserved, and enhanced in charm.
"Launched on the bosom of the silver Thames," one glides to Hampton Court
amid youth and gayety and melting music; and for the nonce this realm of
"airs, flounces, and furbelows," of merry chit-chat, and of pleasurable
excitement, seems as important as it is to those exquisite creatures of
fancy that hover about the heroine, assiduous guardians of her "graceful
ease and sweetness void of pride." Of that admired world likewise are the
lovers that Matthew Prior creates, who woo neither with stormy passion
nor with mawkish whining, but in a courtly manner; lovers who deem
an epigram a finer tribute than a sigh. So the tender fondness of a
middle-aged man for an infant is elevated above the commonplace by
assuming the tone of playful gallantry.
The ignobler aspects of life,--nutriment of the comic sense,--were not
ignored. The new school of poets, however deficient in the higher vision,
were keen observers of actuality; and among them the satiric spirit,
though not militant as in the days of Dryden, was still active. The value
which they attached to social culture is again shown in the persistence
of the sentiment that as man grew in civility he became less ridiculous.
The peccadilloes of the upper classes they treated with comparatively
gentle humor, and aimed their strokes of satire chiefly against the
lower. Rarely did they idealize humble folk: Gay's _Sweet William's
Farewett to Black-Eyed Susan_ is in this respect exceptional. Their
typical attitude is seen in his _Shepherd's Week_, with its ludicrous
picture of rustic superstition and naive amorousness; and in Allan
Ramsay's _Gentle Shepherd_, where the pastoral, once remote from life,
assumes the manners and dialect of the countryside in order to arouse
laughter.
The obvious fact that these poets centered their attention upon
Man, particularly in his social life, and that their most memorable
productions are upon that theme, led posterity to complain that they
wholly lacked interest in Nature, were incapable of delineating it, and
did not feel its sacred influence. The last point in the indictment,--and
the last only,--is quite true. No one who understood and believed, as
they did, the doctrines of orthodoxy could consistently ascribe divinity
to Nature. To them Nature exhibited the power of God, but not his will;
and the soul of Man gained its clearest moral light directly from a
_super_natural source. This did not, however, imply that Nature was
negligible. The celebrated essays of Addison on the pleasures of the
imagination (_Spectator_, Nos. 411-414) base those pleasures upon the
grandeur of Nature; upon its variety and freshness, as of "groves,
fields, and meadows in the opening of the Spring"; and upon its beauty of
form and color. The works of Nature, declares Addison, surpass those of
art, and accordingly "we always find the poet in love with a country
life." Such was the theory; the practice was not out of accord therewith.
Passages appreciative of the lovelier aspects of Nature, and not, despite
the current preference for general rather than specific terms, inaccurate
as descriptions, were written between 1700 and 1726 by Addison himself,
Pope, Lady Winchilsea, Gay, Parnell, Dyer, and many others. Nature
worshippers they were not. Nature lovers they can be justly styled,--if
such love may discriminate between the beautiful and the ugly aspects
of the natural. It is characteristic that Berkeley, in his _Prospect of
Planting Arts and Learning in America_, does not indulge the fancy that
the wilderness is of itself uplifting; it requires, he assumes, the aid
of human culture and wisdom,--"the rise of empire and of arts,"--to
develop its potentialities.
A generation which placidly adhered to the orthodox sentiments of its
predecessors was of course not moved to revolutionize poetical theories
or forms. Its theories are authoritatively stated in Pope's _Essay on
Criticism_; they embrace principles of good sense and mature taste which
are easier to condemn than to confute or supersede. In poetical diction
the age cultivated clearness, propriety, and dignity: it rejected words
so minutely particular as to suggest pedantry or specialization; and
it refused to sacrifice simple appropriateness to inaccurate vigor of
utterance or meaningless beauty of sound. Its favorite measure, the
decasyllabic couplet, moulded by Jonson, Sandys, Waller, Denham, and
Dryden, it accepted reverently, as an heirloom not to be essentially
altered but to be polished until it shone more brightly than ever. Pope
perfected this form, making it at once more artistic and more natural. He
discountenanced on the one hand run-on lines, alexandrines, hiatus, and
sequence of monosyllables; on the other, the resort to expletives and the
mechanical placing of caesura. If his verse does not move with the "long
resounding pace" of Dryden at his best, it has a movement better suited
to the drawing-room: it is what Oliver Wendell Holmes terms
The straight-backed measure with the stately stride.
Thus in form as in substance the poetry of the period voiced the mood,
not of carefree youth, nor yet of vehement early manhood, but of still
vigorous middle age,--a phase of existence perhaps less ingratiating than
others, but one which has its rightful hour in the life of the race as of
the individual. The sincere and artistic expression of its feelings will
be denied poetical validity only by those whose capacity for appreciating
the varieties of poetry is limited by their lack of experience or by
narrowness of sympathetic imagination.