Goldsmith's application of sentimental ideas to contemporary affairs
foreshadowed what was to be one of the marked tendencies of the movement
in the last quarter of the century. Thus in 1777 Thomas Day interpreted
the American Revolution as a conflict between the pitiless tyranny of a
corrupt civilization and the appealing virtues of a people who had found
in sequestered forests and prairies the abiding place of Freedom and the
only remaining opportunity "to save the ruins of the human name." At the
same time the justification of sentimentalism on historical grounds was
strengthened by the young antiquarian and poet, Thomas Chatterton. Like
Macpherson, he answers to Pope's description of archaizing authors,--
Ancients in words, mere moderns in their sense.
He fabricated, in what he thought to be Middle English, a body of songs
and interludes, which he attributed to a monk named Thomas Rowleie,
and which showed that, in the supposedly unsophisticated simplicity of
medieval times, charity to Man and love for Nature had flourished as
beautifully as lyric utterance. Even more lamentable than Chatterton's
early death is the fact that his fanciful and musical genius was shrouded
in so grotesque a style.
In 1781 appeared a new poet of real distinction, George Crabbe, now the
hope of the conservatives. Edmund Burke, who early in his great career
had assailed the radicals in his ironic _Vindication of Natural Society_,
and who to the end of his life contended against them in the arena of
politics, on reading some of Crabbe's manuscripts, rescued this cultured
and ingenuous man from obscurity and distress; and Dr. Johnson presently
aided him in his literary labors. In _The Library_ Crabbe expressed the
reverence of a scholarly soul for the garnered wisdom of the past, and
satirized some of the popular writings of the day, including sentimental
fiction. He would not have denied the world those consolations which flow
from the literature that mirrors our hopes and dreams; but his honest
spirit revolted when such literature professed to be true to life.
His acquaintance with actual conditions in humble circles, and with
hardships, was as personal as Goldsmith's; but he was not the kind of
poet who soothes the miseries of mankind by ignoring them. In _The
Village_ he arose with all the vigor and intensity of insulted common
sense to refute the dreamers who offered a rose-colored picture of
country life as a genuine portrayal of truth and nature. So evident
was his mastery of his subject, his clearness of perception, and his
earnestness of feeling, that he attracted immediate attention; and he
might well have led a new advance under the ancient standards. But
silence fell upon Crabbe for many years; and this proved, to be the last
occasion in the poetical history of the century that a powerful voice was
raised in behalf of the old cause.
The poet who became the favorite of moderate sentimentalists, in what
were called "genteel" circles, was William Cowper. He presented little
or nothing that could affright the gentle emotions, and much that
pleasurably stimulated them. He enriched the poetry of the domestic
affections, and had a vein of sadness which occasionally, as in _To
Mary_, deepened into the most touching pathos. In _The Task_, a
discursive familiar essay in smooth-flowing blank verse, he dwelt fondly
upon those satisfactions which his life of uneventful retirement offered;
intimated that truth and wisdom were less surely found by poring upon
books than by meditating among beloved rural scenes; and, turning his sad
gaze toward the distant world of action, deplored that mankind strained
"the natural bond of brotherhood" by tolerating cruel imprisonments,
slavery, and warfare. Such humanitarian views, when they seek the aid of
religious ethics, ought normally to find support in that sentimentalized
Christianity which professes the entire goodness of the human heart;
but the discordant element in Cowper's mind was his inclination towards
Calvinism, which goes to the opposite extreme by insisting on total
depravity. Personally he believed that he had committed the unpardonable
sin (against the Holy Spirit),--a dreadful thought which underlies
his tragic poem, _The Castaway_; and probably unwholesome, though
well-intentioned, was the influence upon him of his spiritual adviser,
John Newton, whose gloomy theology may be seen in the hymn, _The Vision
of Life in Death_. Cowper's sense of the reality of evil not only
distracted his mind to madness, but also prevented him from carrying his
sentimental principles to their logical goal. What the hour demanded were
poets who, discountenancing any mistrust of the natural emotions, should
give them free rein. They were found at last in Burns and in Blake.
The sentimentalists had long yearned for the advent of the ideal poet.
Macpherson had presented him,--but as of an era far remote; latterly
Beattie, in _The Minstrel_, had set forth his growth under the
inspiration of Nature,--but in a purely imaginary tale. Suddenly Burns
appeared: and the ideal seemed incarnated in the living present. The
Scottish bard was introduced to the world by his first admirers as "a
heaven-taught ploughman, of humble unlettered station," whose "simple
strains, artless and unadorned, seem to flow without effort from the
native feelings of the heart"; and as "a signal instance of true and
uncultivated genius." The real Burns, though indeed a genius of song, was
far better read than the expectant world wished to believe, particularly
in those whom he called his "bosom favorites," the sentimentalists
Mackenzie and Sterne; and his sense of rhythm and melody had been trained
by his emulation of earlier Scotch lyricists, whose lilting cadences flow
towards him as highland rills to the gathering torrent. Sung to the notes
of his native tunes, and infused with the local color of Scotch life, the
sentimental themes assumed the freshness of novelty. Giving a new ardor
to revolutionary tendencies,--Burns revolted against the orthodoxy of the
"Auld Lichts," depicting its representatives as ludicrously hypocritical.
He protested against distinctions founded on birth or rank, as in _A
Man's a Man for A' That_; and, on the other hand, he idealized the homely
feelings and manners of the "virtuous populace" in his immortal _Cotter's
Saturday Night_. He scorned academic learning, and protested that true
inspiration was rather to be found in "ae spark o' Nature's fire,"--or at
the nearest tavern:
Leese me on drink! It gies us mair
Than either school or college.
Like Sterne, who boasted that his pen governed him, Burns praised and
affected the impromptu:
But how the subject theme may gang,
Let time or chance determine;
Perhaps it may turn out a sang,
Perhaps turn out a sermon.
His Muse was to be the mood of the moment. Herein he brought to
fulfillment the sentimental desire for the liberation of the emotions;
but his work, taken as a whole, can scarcely be said to vindicate the
faith that the emotions, once freed, would manifest instinctive purity.
At his almost unrivalled best, he can sing in the sweetest strains the
raptures or pathos of innocent youthful love, as in _Sweet Afton_ or _To
Mary in Heaven_; but straightway sinking from that elevation of feeling
to the depths of vulgarity or grossness, he will chant with equal zest
and skill the indulgence of the animal appetites.[1] He hails the joys of
life, but without discriminating between the higher and the lower. Yet
these exuberant animal spirits which, unrestrained by conscience
or taste, drove him too often into scurrility, gave his work that
passion--warm, throbbing, and personal--which had been painfully wanting
in earlier poets of sensibility. It was his emotional intensity as well
as his lyric genius that made him the most popular poet of his time.
In Burns, sentimentalism was largely temperamental, unreflective, and
concrete. In William Blake, the singularity of whose work long retarded
its due appreciation, sentimentalism was likewise temperamental; but,
unconfined to actuality, became far broader in scope, more spiritual,
and more consistently philosophic. Indeed, Blake was the ultimate
sentimentalist of the century. A visionary and symbolist, he passed
beyond Shaftesbury in his thought, and beyond any poet of the school
in his endeavor to create a new and appropriate style. His contemporary,
Erasmus Darwin, author of _The Botanic Garden_, was trying to give
sentimentalism a novel interpretation by describing the life of plants
in terms of human life; but, Darwin being destitute of artistic sense,
the result was grotesque. Blake, by training and vocation an engraver,
was primarily an artist; but, partly under Swedenborgian influences, he
had grasped the innermost character of sentimentalism, perceived all its
implications, and carried them fearlessly to their utmost bounds. To him
every atom of the cosmos was literally spiritual and holy; the divine
and the human, the soul and the flesh, were absolutely one; God and Man
were only two aspects of pervasive "mercy, pity, peace, and love."
Nothing else had genuine reality. The child, its vision being as yet
unclouded by false teachings, saw the universe thus truly; and Blake,
therefore, in _Songs of Innocence_, gave glimpses of the world as the
child sees it,--a guileless existence amid the peace that passes all
understanding. He hymned the sanctity of animal life: even the tiger,
conventionally an incarnation of cruelty, was a glorious creature of
divine mould; to slay or cage a beast was, the _Auguries of Innocence_
protested, to incur anathema. The _Book of Thel_ allegorically showed
the mutual interdependence of all creation, and reprehended the maiden
shyness that shrinks from merging its life in the sacrificial union
which sustains the whole.
To Blake the great enemy of truth was the cold logical reason, a
truncated part of Man's spirit, which was incapable of attaining wisdom,
and which had fabricated those false notions that governed the practical
world and constrained the natural feelings. Instances of the unhappiness
caused by such constraint, he gave in _Songs of Experience_, where _The
Garden of Love_ describes the blighting curse which church law had laid
upon free love. To overthrow intellectualism and discipline, Man must
liberate his most precious faculty, the imagination, which alone can
reveal the spiritual character of the universe and the beauty that life
will wear when the feelings cease to be unnaturally confined. Temporarily
Blake rejoiced when the French Revolution seemed to usher in the
millennium of freedom and peace; and his interpretation of its earlier
incidents in his poem on that theme[2] illustrates in style and spirit
the highly original nature of his mind. More than any predecessor he
understood how the peculiarly poetical possibilities of sentimentalism
might be elicited, namely by emphasizing its mystical quality. Thus
under his guidance mysticism, which in the early seventeenth century had
sublimated the religious poetry of the orthodox, returned to sublimate
the poetry of the radicals; and with that achievement the sentimental
movement reached its climax.
Burns died in 1796; Blake, lost in a realm of symbolism, became
unintelligible; and temporarily sentimentalism suffered a reaction. The
French Revolution, with its Reign of Terror, and the rise of a military
autocrat, though supported, even after Great Britain had taken up arms
against Napoleon, by some "friends of humanity" who placed universal
brotherhood above patriotism, seemed to the general public to demonstrate
that the sentimental theories and hopes were untrue to life and led to
results directly contrary to those predicted. Once again, in Canning's
caustic satires of _The Anti-Jacobin_, conservatism raised its voice. But
by this time sentimentalism was too fully developed and widely spread to
be more than checked. Under the new leadership of Wordsworth, Coleridge,
and Southey, the movement, chastened and modified by experience, resumed
its progress; and the fame of its new leaders presently dimmed the memory
of those pioneers who in the eighteenth century had undermined the
foundations of orthodoxy, slowly upbuilt a new world of thought,
gradually fashioned a poetic style more suited to their sentiments than
the classical, and thus helped to plunge the modern world into that
struggle which, in life and in literature, rages about us still.