disturbed and distracted times, still more difficult was it to carry
into execution any designs for his good--and much was there even to
excuse his countrymen then in power for looking upon him with an evil
eye. But Bloomfield led a pure, peaceable, and blameless life. Easy,
indeed, would it have been to make him happy--but he was as much
forgotten as if he had been dead; and when he died--did England mourn
over him--or, after having denied him bread, give him so much as a
stone? No. He dropt into the grave with no other lament we ever heard of
but a few copies of poorish verses in some of the Annuals, and seldom
or never now does one hear a whisper of his name. O fie! well may the
white rose blush red--and the red rose turn pale. Let England then leave
Scotland to her shame about Burns; and, thinking of her own treatment of
Bloomfield, cover her own face with both her hands, and confess that it
was pitiful. At least, if she will not hang down her head in humiliation
for her own neglect of her own "poetic child," let her not hold it high
over Scotland for the neglect of hers--palliated as that neglect was by
many things--and since, in some measure, expiated by a whole nation's
tears shed over her great poet's grave.
What! not a word for Allan Ramsay? Theocritus was a pleasant Pastoral,
and Sicilia sees him among the stars. But all his dear Idyls together
are not equal in worth to the "Gentle Shepherd." Habbie's Howe is a
hallowed place now among the green airy Pentlands. Sacred for ever the
solitary murmur of that waterfa'!
"A flowerie howm, between twa verdant braes,
Where lassies use to wash and bleach their claes;
A trotting burnie, wimpling through the ground,
Its channel pebbles, shining, smooth, and round:
Here view twa barefoot beauties, clean and clear,
'Twill please your eye, then gratify your ear;
While Jenny what she wishes discommends,
And Meg, with better sense, true love defends!"
"About them and siclike" is the whole poem. Yet "faithful love shall
memorise the song." Without any scenery but that of rafters, which
overhead fancy may suppose a grove, 'tis even yet sometimes acted by
rustics in the barn, though nothing on this earth will ever persuade a
low-born Scottish lass to take a part in a play; while delightful is
felt, even by the lords and ladies of the land, the simple Drama of
humble life; and we ourselves have seen a high-born maiden look
"beautiful exceedingly" as Patie's Betrothed, kilted to the knee in the
kirtle of a Shepherdess.
We have been gradually growing national overmuch, and are about to grow
even more so, therefore ask you to what era, pray, did Thomson belong?
To none. Thomson had no precursor--and till Cowper no follower. He
effulged all at once sunlike--like Scotland's storm-loving,
mist-enamoured sun, which till you have seen on a day of thunder, you
cannot be said ever to have seen the sun. Cowper followed Thomson merely
in time. We should have had "The Task," even had we never had "The
Seasons." These two were "heralds of a mighty train ensuing;" add them,
then, to the worthies of our own age, and they belong to it--and all the
rest of the poetry of the modern world--to which add that of the
ancient--if multiplied by ten in quantity--and by twenty in
quality--would not so variously, so vigorously, and so truly image the
form and pressure, the life and spirit of the mother of us all--Nature.
Are then "The Seasons" and "The Task" Great Poems? Yes.--Why? What! Do
you need to be told that that Poem must be great, which was the first to
paint the rolling mystery of the year, and to show that all its Seasons
are but the varied God? The idea was original and sublime; and the
fulfilment thereof so complete, that some six thousand years having
elapsed between the creation of the world and of that poem, some sixty
thousand, we prophesy, will elapse between the appearance of that poem
and the publication of another equally great, on a subject external to
the mind, equally magnificent. We further presume, that you hold sacred
the "hearth." Now, in "The Task," the "hearth" is the heart of the poem,
just as it is of a happy house. No other poem is so full of domestic
happiness--humble and high; none is so breathed over by the spirit of
the Christian religion.
Poetry, which, though not dead, had long been sleeping in Scotland, was
restored to waking life by THOMSON. His genius was national; and so,
too, was the subject of his first and greatest song. By saying that his
genius was national, we mean that its temperament was enthusiastic and
passionate, and that, though highly imaginative, the sources of its
power lay in the heart. "The Castle of Indolence" is distinguished by
purer taste and finer fancy; but with all its exquisite beauties, that
poem is but the vision of a dream. "The Seasons" are glorious realities;
and the charm of the strain that sings the "rolling year" is its truth.
But what mean we by saying that "The Seasons" are a national
subject?--do we assert that they are solely Scottish? That would be too
bold, even for us; but we scruple not to assert, that Thomson has made
them so, as far as might be without insult, injury, or injustice, to
the rest of the globe. His suns rise and set in Scottish heavens; his
"deep-fermenting tempests are brewed in grim evening" Scottish skies;
Scottish is his thunder of cloud and cataract; his "vapours, and snows,
and storms" are Scottish; and, strange as the assertion would have
sounded in the ears of Samuel Johnson, Scottish are his woods, their
sugh, and their roar; nor less their stillness, more awful amidst the
vast multitude of steady stems, than when all the sullen pine-tops are
swinging to the hurricane. A dread love of his native land was in his
heart when he cried in the solitude--
"Hail, kindred glooms! congenial horrors, hail!"
The genius of HOME was national--and so, too, was the subject of his
justly famous Tragedy of "Douglas." He had studied the old Ballads;
their simplicities were sweet to him as wallflowers on ruins. On the
story of Gill Morice, who was an Earl's son, he founded the Tragedy,
which surely no Scottish eyes ever witnessed without tears. Are not
these most Scottish lines?--
"Ye woods and wilds, whose melancholy gloom
Accords with my soul's sadness!"
And these even more so,--
"Red came the river down, and loud and oft
The angry Spirit of the water shriek'd!"
The Scottish Tragedian in an evil hour crossed the Tweed, riding on
horseback all the way to London. His genius got Anglified, took a
consumption, and perished in the prime of life. But nearly half a
century afterwards, on seeing the Siddons in _Lady Randolph_, and
hearing her low, deep, wild, woe-begone voice exclaim, "My beautiful! my
brave!" "the aged harper's soul awoke," and his dim eyes were again
lighted up for a moment with the fires of genius--say rather for a
moment bedewed with the tears of sensibility re-awakened from decay and
dotage.
The genius of Beattie was national, and so was the subject of his
charming song--"The Minstrel." For what is its design? He tells us, to
trace the progress of a poetical genius born in a rude age, from the
first dawning of reason and fancy, till that period at which he may be
supposed capable of appearing in the world as a Scottish Minstrel; that
is, as an itinerant poet and musician--a character which, according to
the notions of our forefathers, was not only respectable, but sacred.
"There lived in Gothic days, as legends tell,
A shepherd swain, a man of low degree;
Whose sires perchance in Fairyland might dwell,
Sicilian groves and vales of Arcady;
But he, I ween, was of the North Countrie;
A nation famed for song and beauty's charms;
Zealous, yet modest; innocent, though free;
Patient of toil, serene amid alarms;
Inflexible in faith, invincible in arms.
The shepherd swain, of whom I mention made,
On Scotia's mountains fed his little flock;
The sickle, scythe, or plough he never sway'd:
An honest heart was almost all his stock;
His drink the living waters from the rock;
The milky dams supplied his board, and lent
Their kindly fleece to baffle winter's shock;
And he, though oft with dust and sweat besprent,
Did guide and guard their wanderings, wheresoe'er they went."
Did patriotism ever inspire genius with sentiment more Scottish than
_that_? Did imagination ever create scenery more Scottish, Manners,
Morals, Life?
"Lo! where the stripling rapt in wonder roves
Beneath the precipice o'erhung with pine;
And sees, on high, amidst th' encircling groves
From cliff to cliff the foaming torrents shine:
While waters, woods, and winds, in concert join,
And echo swells the chorus to the skies!"
Beattie chants there like a man who had been at the Linn of Dee. He wore
a wig, it is true; but at times, when the fit was on him, he wrote like
the unshorn Apollo.
The genius of Grahame was national, and so too was the subject of his
first and best poem--"The Sabbath."
"How still the morning of the hallow'd day!"
is a line that could have been uttered only by a holy Scottish heart.
For we alone know what is indeed Sabbath silence--an earnest of
everlasting rest. To our hearts, the very birds of Scotland sing holily
on that day. A sacred smile is on the dewy flowers. The lilies look
whiter in their loveliness; the blush-rose reddens in the sun with a
diviner dye; and with a more celestial scent the hoary hawthorn sweetens
the wilderness. Sorely disturbed of yore, over the glens and hills of
Scotland, was the Day of Peace!
"O, the great goodness of the _Saints of Old_!"
the Covenanters. Listen to the Sabbath bard,--
"With them each day was holy; but that morn
On which the angel said, 'See where the Lord
Was laid,' joyous arose; to die that day
Was bliss. Long ere the dawn by devious ways,
O'er hills, through woods, o'er dreary wastes, they sought
The upland muirs, where rivers, there but brooks,
Dispart to different seas. Fast by such brooks
A little glen is sometimes scoop'd, a plat
With greensward gay, and flowers that strangers seem
Amid the heathery wild, that all around
Fatigues the eye: in solitudes like these,
Thy persecuted children, Scotia, foil'd
A tyrant's and a bigot's bloody laws.
There, leaning on his spear (one of the array
Whose gleam, in former days, had scathed the rose
On England's banner, and had powerless struck
The infatuate monarch, and his wavering host!)
The lyart veteran heard the word of God
By Cameron thunder'd, or by Renwick pour'd
In gentle stream; then rose the song, the loud
Acclaim of praise. The wheeling plover ceased
Her plaint; the solitary place was glad;
And on the distant cairn the watcher's ear
Caught doubtfully at times the breeze-borne note.
But years more gloomy follow'd; and no more
The assembled people dared, in face of day,
To worship God, or even at the dead
Of night, save when the wintry storm raved fierce,
And thunder-peals compell'd the men of blood
To couch within their dens; then dauntlessly
The scatter'd few would meet, in some deep dell
By rocks o'ercanopied, to hear the voice,
Their faithful pastor's voice. He by the gleam
Of sheeted lightning oped the sacred book,
And words of comfort spake; over their souls
His accents soothing came, as to her young
The heathfowl's plumes, when, at the close of eve,
She gathers in, mournful, her brood dispersed
By murderous sport, and o'er the remnant spreads
Fondly her wings; close nestling 'neath her breast
They cherish'd cower amid the purple bloom."
Not a few other sweet singers or strong, native to this nook of our
isle, might we now in these humble pages lovingly commemorate; and "four
shall we mention, dearer than the rest," for sake of that virtue, among
many virtues, which we have been lauding all along, their
nationality;--These are AIRD and MOTHERWELL (of whom another hour), MOIR
and POLLOK.
Of Moir, our own "delightful Delta," as we love to call him--and the
epithet now by right appertains to his name--we shall now say simply
this, that he has produced many original pieces which will possess a
permanent place in the poetry of Scotland. Delicacy and grace
characterise his happiest compositions; some of them are beautiful in a
cheerful spirit that has only to look on nature to be happy; and others
breathe the simplest and purest pathos. His scenery, whether sea-coast
or inland, is always truly Scottish; and at times his pen drops touches
of light on minute objects, that till then had slumbered in the shade,
but now "shine well where they stand" or lie, as component and
characteristic parts of our lowland landscapes. Let others labour away
at long poems, and for their pains get neglect or oblivion; Moir is seen
as he is in many short ones, which the Scottish Muses may "not willingly
let die." And that must be a pleasant thought when it touches the heart
of the mildest and most modest of men, as he sits by his family-fire,
beside those most dear to him, after a day past in smoothing, by his
skill, the bed and the brow of pain, in restoring sickness to health, in
alleviating sufferings that cannot be cured, or in mitigating the pangs
of death.
Pollok had great original genius strong in a sacred sense of religion.
Such of his short compositions as we have seen, written in early youth,
were but mere copies of verses, and gave little or no promise of power.
But his soul was working in the green moorland solitudes round about his
father's house, in the wild and beautiful parishes of Eaglesham and
Mearns, separated by thee, O Yearn! sweetest of pastoral streams that
murmur through the west, asunder those broomy and birken banks and
trees, where the grey-linties sing, is formed the clear junction of the
rills, issuing, the one from the hill-spring above the Black-waterfall,
and the other from the Brother-loch. The poet in prime of youth (he died
in his twenty-seventh year) embarked on a high and adventurous emprise,
and voyaged the illimitable Deep. His spirit expanded its wings, and in
a holy pride felt them to be broad, as they hovered over the dark abyss.
"The Course of Time," for so young a man, was a vast achievement. The
book he loved best was the Bible, and his style is often Scriptural. Of
our poets, he had studied, we believe, but Milton, Young, and Byron. He
had much to learn in composition; and, had he lived, he would have
looked almost with humiliation on much that is at present eulogised by
his devoted admirers. But the soul of poetry is there, though often
dimly developed, and many passages there are, and long ones too, that
heave, and hurry, and glow along in a divine enthusiasm.
"His ears he closed, to listen to the strains
That Sion's bards did consecrate of old,
And fix'd his Pindus upon Lebanon."
Let us fly again to England, and leaving for another hour Shelley and
Hunt and Keats, and Croly and Milman and Heber, and Sterling and Milnes
and Tennyson, with some younger aspirants of our own day; and Gray,
Collins, and Goldsmith, and lesser stars of that constellation, let us
alight on the verge of that famous era when the throne was occupied by
Dryden, and then by Pope--searching still for a Great Poem. Did either
of them ever write one? No--never. Sir Walter says finely of glorious
John,
"And Dryden in immortal strain,
Had raised the Table Round again,
But that a ribald King and Court,
Bade him play on to make them sport,
The world defrauded of the high design,
Profaned the God-given strength, and marr'd the lofty line."
But why, we ask, did Dryden suffer a ribald king and court to debase and
degrade him, and strangle his immortal strain? Because he was poor! But
could he not have died of cold, thirst, and hunger--of starvation? Have
not millions of men and women done so, rather than sacrifice their
conscience? And shall we grant to a great poet that indulgence which
many a humble hind would have flung with scorn in our teeth, and rather
than have availed himself of it, faced the fagot, or the halter, or the
stake set within the sea-flood? But it is satisfactory to know that
Dryden, though still glorious John, was not a Great Poet. He was seldom
visited by the pathetic or the sublime--else had his genius held fast
its integrity--been ribald to no ribald--and indignantly kicked to the
devil both court and king. But what a master of reasoning in verse! And
of verse what a volume of fire! "The long-resounding march and energy
divine." Pope, again, with the common frailties of humanity, was an
ethereal creature--and played on his own harp with finest taste, and
wonderful execution. We doubt, indeed, if such a finished style has ever
been heard since from any one of the King Apollo's musicians. His
versification may be monotonous, but without a sweet and potent charm
only to ears of leather. That his poetry has no passion is the creed of
critics "of Cambyses' vein;" "Heloise" and "The Unfortunate Lady" have
made the world's heart to throb. As for Imagination, we shall continue
till such time as that Faculty has been distinguished from Fancy, to see
it shining in "The Rape of the Lock," with a lambent lustre; if high
intellect be not dominant in his "Epistles" and his "Essay on Man," you
will look for it in vain in the nineteenth century; all other Satires
seem complimentary to their victims when read after "The Dunciad"--and
could a man, whose heart was not heroic, have given us another Iliad,
which, all unlike as it is to the Greek, may be read with transport,
even after Homer's?
We have not yet, it would seem, found the object of our search--a Great
Poem. Let us extend our quest into the Elizabethan age. We are at once
sucked into the theatre. With the whole drama of that age we are
conversant and familiar; but whether we understand it or not, is another
question. It aspires to give representations of Human Life in all its
infinite varieties, and inconsistencies, and conflicts, and turmoils
produced by the Passions. Time and space are not suffered to interpose
their unities between the Poet and his vast design, who, provided he can
satisfy the spectators by the pageant of their own passions moving
across the stage, may exhibit there whatever he wills from life, death,
or the grave. 'Tis a sublime conception--and sometimes has given rise to
sublime performance; but has been crowned with full success in no hands
but those of Shakespeare. Great as was the genius of many of the
dramatists of that age, not one of them has produced a Great Tragedy. A
Great Tragedy indeed! What! without harmony or proportion in the
plan--with all puzzling perplexities and inextricable entanglements in
the plot--and with disgust and horror in the catastrophe? As for the
characters, male and female--saw ye ever such a set of swaggerers and
rantipoles as they often are in one act--Methodist preachers and demure
young women at a love-feast in another--absolute heroes and heroines of
high calibre in a third--and so on, changing and shifting name and
nature, according to the laws of the Romantic Drama forsooth--but in
hideous violation of the laws of nature--till the curtain falls over a
heap of bodies huddled together, without regard to age or sex, as if
they had been overtaken in liquor. We admit that there is gross
exaggeration in the picture; but there is always truth in a tolerable
caricature--and this is one of a tragedy of Webster, Ford, or Massinger.
It is satisfactory to know that the good sense, and good feeling, and
good taste of the people of England, will not submit to be belaboured by
editors and critics into unqualified admiration of such enormities. The
Old English Drama lies buried in the dust with all its tragedies. Never
more will they move across the stage. Scholars read them, and often with
delight, admiration, and wonder; for genius is a strange spirit, and has
begotten strange children on the body of the Tragic Muse. In the closet
it is pleasant to peruse the countenances, at once divine, human, and
brutal, of the incomprehensible monsters--to scan their forms, powerful
though misshapen--to watch their movements, vigorous though
distorted--and to hold up one's hands in amazement on hearing them not
seldom discourse most excellent music. But we should shudder to see them
on the stage enacting the parts of men and women--and call for the
manager. All has been done for the least deformed of the tragedies of
the Old English Drama that humanity could do, enlightened by the
Christian religion; but nature has risen up to vindicate herself against
such misrepresentations as they afford; and sometimes finds it all she
can do to stomach Shakespeare.
But the monstrosities we have mentioned are not the worst to be found in
the Old English Drama. Others there are that, till civilised Christendom
fall back into barbarous Heathendom, must for ever be unendurable to
human ears, whether long or short--we mean the obscenities. That sin is
banished for ever from our literature. The poet who might dare to commit
it, would be immediately hooted out of society, and sent to roost in
barns among the owls. But the Old English Drama is stuffed with
ineffable pollutions; and full of passages that the street-walker would
be ashamed to read in the stews. We have not seen that volume of the
Family Dramatists which contains Massinger. But if made fit for female
reading, his plays must be mutilated and mangled out of all likeness to
the original wholes. To free them even from the grossest impurities,
without destroying their very life, is impossible; and it would be far
better to make a selection of fine passages, after the manner of Lamb's
Specimens--but with a severer eye--than to attempt in vain to preserve
their character as plays, and at the same time to expunge all that is
too disgusting, perhaps, to be dangerous to boys and virgins. Full-grown
men may read what they choose--perhaps without suffering from it; but
the modesty of the young clear eye must not be profaned--and we cannot,
for our own part, imagine a _Family_ Old English Dramatist.
And here again bursts upon us the glory of the Greek Drama. The
Athenians were as wicked, as licentious, as polluted, and much more so,
we hope, than ever were the English; but they debased not with their
gross vices their glorious tragedies. Nature in her higher moods alone,
and most majestic aspects, trod their stage. Buffoons, and ribalds, and
zanies, and "rude indecent clowns," were confined to comedies; and even
there they too were idealised, and resembled not the obscene samples
that so often sicken us in the midst of "the acting of a dreadful thing"
in our old theatre. They knew that "with other ministrations, thou, O
Nature!" teachest thy handmaid Art to soothe the souls of thy
congregated children--congregated to behold her noble goings-on, and to
rise up and depart elevated by the transcendent pageant. The Tragic muse
was in those days a Priestess--tragedies were religious ceremonies; for
all the ancestral stories they celebrated were under consecration--the
spirit of the ages of heroes and demigods descended over the vast
amphitheatre; and thus were Aeschylus, and Sophocles, and Euripides, the
guardians of the national character, which, we all know, was, in spite
of all it suffered under, for ever passionately enamoured of all the
forms of greatness.
Forgive us--spirit of Shakespeare! that seem'st to animate that
high-brow'd bust--if indeed we have offered any show of irreverence to
thy name and nature; for now, in the noiselessness of midnight, to our
awed but loving hearts do both appear divine! Forgive us--we beseech
thee--that on going to bed--which we are just about to do--we may be
able to compose ourselves to sleep--and dream of Miranda and Imogen, and
Desdemona and Cordelia. Father revered of that holy family! by the
strong light in the eyes of Innocence we beseech thee to forgive
us!--Ha! what old ghost art thou--clothed in the weeds of more than
mortal misery--mad, mad, mad--come and gone--was it Lear?