meadow, waterfall and lake, rose and vine, which the landscape artists
also loved to depict, and which, together with ruined temples and
castles, unknown in Paradise, became the cherished ideal of landscape
gardening. By the influence of _Paradise Lost_ upon the gardeners, no
less than by the influence of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ upon the
poets, Milton may claim to be regarded as one of the forefathers of the
Romantic Revival. There is no need to distinguish carefully between
poetry and painting in discussing their contributions to Romance. A
great outcry was raised, in the last age, against literary criticism of
pictures. But in this question we are concerned with this effect of
pictures on the normal imagination, which is literary, which cares for
story, and suggested action, and the whole chain of memories and desires
that a picture may set in motion. Do not most of those who look at a
romantic landscape imagine themselves wandering among the scenes that are
portrayed? And are not men prone to admire in Nature what they have been
taught by Art to notice? The landscape art of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries taught them to imagine themselves in lonely scenes,
among old ruins or frowning rocks, by the light of sunrise or sunset,
cast on gleaming lakes. These were the theatre of Romance; and the
emotions awakened by scenes like these played an enormous part in the
Revival. It was thus that poets were educated to find that exaltation in
the terrors of mountainous regions which Gray expressed when he said:
"Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with
religion and poetry."
The weaker side of modern Romance, the play-acting and pretence that has
always accompanied it, may be seen in the gardening mania. It was not
enough to be a country gentleman; the position must be improved by the
added elegances of a hermit's cell and an Egyptian pyramid. It is like
children's play; the day is long, the affairs of our elders are tedious,
we are tired of a life in which there is no danger and no hunger; let us
pretend that we are monks, or ancient Romans. The mature imagination
interprets the facts; this kind of imagination escapes from the facts
into a world of make-believe, where the tyranny and cause and effect is
no longer felt. It is not a hard word to call it childish; the
imagination of these early Romantics had a child's weakness and a child's
delightful confidence and zest.
The same play activity expressed itself in literature, where an orgy of
imitation ushered in the real movement. The antiquarian beginnings of
Romantic poetry may be well illustrated by the life and works of Thomas
Warton. He passed his life as a resident Fellow of Trinity College,
Oxford, and devoted his leisure, which was considerable, to the study of
English poetry and Gothic architecture. He was not yet thirty when, in
1757, he was elected Professor of Poetry, a post which he held for ten
years. During this time he planned a complete History of English Poetry,
a task which Pope and Gray in turn had contemplated and abandoned. The
historical interest which is so conspicuous in early Romanticism owed not
a little, it may be remarked in passing, to the initiative of Pope, who
must therefore be given a place in any full genealogy of the Romantic
family. Warton's _History_, so far as it was completed, was published
between 1774 and 1781, when he relaxed his efforts, and took up lesser
tasks. In 1785 he was made Poet Laureate on the strength of his early
poems and later scholarship. He died in 1790.
Warton's poems are a curious study. Spenser and Milton are his masters,
and he is a docile pupil. His poetry is all derivative, and might be
best described as imitation poetry. Christopher North said of him that
"the gods had made him poetical, but not a poet," a saying which contains
the whole truth. He puts together a mosaic of phrases borrowed from his
teachers, and frames them in a sentimental setting of his own. Here are
some passages from _The Pleasures of Melancholy_, which, though he wrote
it at the age of seventeen, does not differ in method or inspiration from
the rest of his poetical work:
Beneath yon ruin'd abbey's moss-grown piles
Oft let me sit, at twilight hour of eve,
Where thro' some western window the pale moon
Pours her long-levell'd rule of streaming light;
While sullen sacred silence reigns around,
Save the lone screech-owl's note, who builds his bow'r
Amid the mould'ring caverns dark and damp,
Or the calm breeze, that rustles in the leaves
Of flaunting ivy, that with mantle green
Invests some wasted tow'r. . . .
Then, when the sullen shades of ev'ning close,
Where thro' the room a blindly-glimm'ring gleam
The dying embers scatter, far remote
From Mirth's mad shouts, that thro' th' illumin'd roof
Resound with festive echo, let me sit,
Blest with the lowly cricket's drowsy dirge. . . .
O come then, Melancholy, queen of thought!
O come with saintly look, and steadfast step,
From forth thy cave embower'd with mournful yew,
Where ever to the curfeu's solemn sound
List'ning thou sitt'st, and with thy cypress bind
Thy votary's hair, and seal him for thy son.
Melancholy seems not to have answered these advances. In later life
Warton was a short, squat, red-faced man, fond of ale, and a cheerful
talker, with a thick utterance, so that he gobbled like a turkey-cock.
Some of his verses are cheerful. This is from the _Ode on the Approach
of Summer_:
Haste thee, Nymph! and hand in hand
With thee lead a buxom band;
Bring fantastic-footed Joy,
With Sport, that yellow-tressed boy:
Leisure, that through the balmy sky
Chases a crimson butterfly.
Bring Health, that loves in early dawn
To meet the milk-maid on the lawn;
Bring Pleasure, rural nymph, and Peace,
Meek, cottage-loving shepherdess!
It is all like this, fluent and unnecessary. Perhaps no verses in
English were ever made so exactly in the approved fashion of modern Latin
verses. Warton writes pleasantly, his cento of reminiscences is skilful,
and his own epithets are sometimes happy, yet nothing comes of it. His
work suggests the doubt whether any modern Latin verse, even the best,
would deceive an intelligent citizen of ancient Rome.
The strange thing about the Romantic Revival is that an epidemic of this
sort of imitation at last produced real poetry and real romance. The
industrious simulation of the emotions begot the emotions simulated. Is
there not a story told of a young officer who, having dressed himself in
a sheet to frighten his fellows, was embarrassed by the company of a real
ghost, bent on the same errand; and retired from the enterprise, leaving
it wholly to the professional? That, at any rate, is very much what
happened to the Romantic impersonators.
Another parallel may perhaps be found in the power of vulgarity to
advance civilization. Take, for instance, the question of manners.
Politeness is a codification of the impulses of a heart that is moved by
good will and consideration for others. If the impulses are not there,
the politeness is so far unreal and insincere--a cheap varnish. Yet it
is insisted on by society, and enforced by fear and fashion. If the
forms are taught, the soul of them may be, and sometimes is, breathed in
later. So this imitative and timid artifice, this conformity to opinions
the ground and meaning of which is not fully understood, becomes a great
engine of social progress. Imitation and forgery, which are a kind of
literary vulgarity, were the school of Romanticism in its nonage. Some
of the greater poets who passed this way went on to express things
subtler and more profound than had found a voice in the poetry that they
imitated.
The long debate on the so-called poems of Ossian is now ended. They are
known to be a not very skilful forgery by James Macpherson. Yet their
importance in literary history remains undiminished, and the life of
Macpherson has a curious kind of pathos. He was the creature and victim
of the Romantic movement, and was led, by almost insensible degrees, into
supplying fraudulent evidence for the favorite Romantic theory that a
truer and deeper vein of poetry is to be found among primitive peoples.
Collins's _Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland_
and Gray's _Bard_ show the literary world prepared to put itself to
school to Celtic tradition. Macpherson supplied it with a body of poetry
which exactly fulfilled its expectations. The crucial date in his
history is his meeting in 1759 with John Home, the author of the once
famous tragedy of _Douglas_. In the summer of that year Home was
drinking the waters at Moffat, and among the visitors assembled there
found Thomas Graham, afterwards Lord Lynedoch, then a boy of ten, and his
tutor, James Macpherson, a young Highlander, shy and ambitious, who had
been educated at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and had dabbled in verse. Home,
full of the literary gossip of the hour, seized upon the opportunity to
question Macpherson concerning the poems that were rumored to have
survived among the Gaelic-speaking population of Scotland. In the light
of what we now know it is not difficult to understand the genesis of this
great European fraud. Macpherson was proud of his race, which he had
celebrated in an heroic poem called _The Highlander_. He had interested
himself in Gaelic poetry, though his knowledge of the tongue was not
good, and he had by him some fragments of genuine Gaelic poems. He was
flattered by Home's appeal to him, and, feeling perhaps that the few and
slight genuine poems which he could produce would hardly warrant the
magnificence of his allusions to Gaelic literature, he forged a tale in
poetic prose, called _The Death of Oscar_, and presented it to Home as a
translation from the Gaelic. The poem was much admired, and Macpherson,
unable now to retrace his steps without declaring himself a cheat, soon
produced others from the same source. These were submitted to the
literary society of Edinburgh, with the great Dr. Blair at its head, and
were pronounced to be the wonder of the world. From this point onward,
during a long and melancholy life, poor Macpherson was enslaved to the
fraud which had its beginning in the shyness and vanity of his own
character. He was bound now to forge or to fail; and no doubt the
consciousness that it was his own work which called forth such rapturous
applause supported him in his labors and justified him to his own
conscience. A subscription was easily raised in Edinburgh to enable him
to travel and collect the remains of Celtic poetry. For a few months he
perambulated the western highlands and islands, and returned to Edinburgh
bringing with him _Fingal_, a complete epic poem in six books. This was
followed by _Temora_, in eight books, also attributed to the great Gaelic
bard Ossian; and the new Celtic fashion was established.
These poems had an immense success. Everyone knows how they influenced
the youth of Goethe, and captured the imagination of Napoleon. It is
less surprising that they enraptured the poet Gray, and were approved by
the professor Blair, for they were exactly modelled on the practice and
theory of these two critics. All the fashionable doctrine of that age
concerning the history of poetry was borne out by these works. Poetry,
so it was held, is to be found in its perfection only in primitive
society, before it is overlaid by the complexities of modern
civilization. Its most perfect, and therefore its earliest, form, is the
epic; and Dr. Blair must have been delighted to find that the laws of the
epic, which he so often explained to his class in Edinburgh University,
were minutely observed by the oldest of Scottish bards. He died without
suspecting that the inspiration of the Ossianic poems had come partly
from himself.
The belief that Celtic literature is essentially and eternally
melancholy,--a belief which persisted down to the time of Matthew Arnold,
also drew its strength from the poems of Ossian. Here again theory
showed the way to practice. The melancholy of the Ossianic poems is not
the melancholy of the Celt, but a melancholy compounded of many simples,
and extracted from works that were held in high esteem in the eighteenth
century--Young's _Night Thoughts_, Blair's _Grave_, Gray's _Bard_, and
the soliloquies of Milton's Satan.
Macpherson was soon challenged, and his whole life was passed in a brawl
of controversy. Two famous men dismissed him contemptuously. Dr.
Johnson, who knew what honesty means among scholars, treated him as an
impudent impostor. Wordsworth, who knew what simplicity means in poetry,
declared that all the imagery of the poems is false and spurious. But
the whole question early became a national quarrel, and the honor of
Scotland was involved in it. There are signs that Macpherson would
gladly have escaped from the storm he had raised. Aided by his early
literary success, he became a prosperous man, held a well-paid post at
court, entered Parliament, and was pensioned by the government. Still
the controversy persisted. He had found it easy to take up a haughty
attitude towards those hostile critics who had doubted his good faith and
had asked him to produce his Gaelic originals. But now the demand for
the originals came from his champions and friends, who desired to place
the fame of Scotland's oldest and greatest poet on a sure foundation. He
wriggled on the hook, and more than once timidly hinted that the poems
owed not a little to the poetic genius of the translator. But this half-
hearted attempt to rob the great Ossian of a part of his fame stirred the
Caledonian enthusiasts to a frenzy of indignation. At last, when he was
no longer able to restrain his supporters, the wretched Macpherson found
no escape but one. In middle age, some twenty years after his first
appearance on the poetic horizon, he sat down, with a heavy heart and an
imperfect knowledge of the Gaelic tongue, to forge the originals. In
1807, eleven years after his death, these were at last published. The
progress of genuine Celtic scholarship during the succeeding century did
the rest; and the old blind bard rejoined the mists and vapors which were
the inspiration of his Muse. {78} The poems of Ossian are only one,
though perhaps the most signal, instance of the forgeries which prevailed
like an epidemic at the time of the Romantic Revival. Some of these,
like Ireland's Shakespeare forgeries, were little better than
cold-blooded mercenary frauds. Others, like Chatterton's Rowley Poems
and Horace Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, are full of the zest and
delight of play-acting. Even Coleridge's _Ancient Mariner_, though it is
free from the reproach of forgery, is touched by the same spirit. The
severe morality of scholarship had not yet been applied to mediaeval or
modern matter. Scholars are the trustees of poets; but where this trust
is undertaken by men who are poets themselves, there is usually a good
deal of gaiety and exuberance in its performance.
I have now traced some of the neglected sources of revived Romance, and
have shown how in this movement, more notably, perhaps, than in any other
great movement in literature, it was not the supply which created the
demand, but the demand which created the supply. The Romantic change was
wrought, not by the energy of lonely pioneers, but by a shift in public
taste. Readers of poetry knew what it was they wanted, even before they
knew whether it existed. Writers were soon at hand to prove that it had
existed in the past, and could still be made. The weakness of vague
desire is felt everywhere in the origins of the change. Out of the
weakness came strength; the tinsel Gothic castle of Walpole was enlarged
to house the magnanimous soul of Scott; the Sorrows of Werther gave birth
to _Faust_.
The weakness of the Romantic movement, its love of mere sensation and
sentiment, is well exhibited in its effect upon the sane and strong mind
of Keats. He was a pupil of the Romantics; and poetry, as he first
conceived of it, seemed to open to him boundless fields of passive
enjoyment. His early work shows the struggle between the delicious swoon
of reverie and the growing pains of thought. His verse, in its
beginnings, was crowded with "luxuries, bright, milky, soft, and rosy."
He was a boy at the time of England's greatest naval glory, but he thinks
more of Robin Hood than of Nelson. If Robin Hood could revisit the
forest, says Keats,
He would swear, for all his oaks
Fallen beneath the dockyard strokes,
Have rotted on the briny seas.
His use of a word like "rich," as Mr. Robert Bridges has remarked, is
almost inhuman in its luxurious detachment from the human situation.
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave.
By his work in this kind Keats became the parent and founder of the
Aesthetic School of poetry, which is more than half in love with easeful
death, and seeks nothing so ardently as rest and escape from the world.
The epilogue to the Aesthetic movement was written by William Morris
before ever he broke out from those enchanted bowers:
So with this earthly paradise it is,
If ye will read aright, and pardon me
Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea,
Where tossed about all hearts of men must be,
Whose ravening monsters mighty men must slay,
Not the poor singer of an empty day.
Yet there is another side to the work of Keats, more wonderful in its
broken promise than all the soft perfections of his tender Muse. He grew
tired of imitation and ease. Weakness may exclude the world by
forgetting it; only strength can conquer the world. What if this law be
also the law of beauty? The thought inspires his last great attempt, the
fragment of _Hyperion_. Men have their dynasties and revolutions; but
the immortals also, whom men worship, must change to live.
So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,
A power more strong in beauty.
And this power cannot be won by those who shirk the challenge of ugly
facts.
O folly! for to bear all naked truths,
And to envisage circumstance, all calm,
That is the top of sovereignty.
As if to enforce his thought by repetition, Keats made an allegorical
framework for his revised version of the poem. There he exhibits himself
as wandering among the delights of the garden of this life, and indulging
himself to the point of drunkenness. Awaked from his swoon, he finds
himself at the steps of the temple of fame. He is told he must climb or
die. After an agony of struggle he mounts to the top, and has speech
there with a veiled figure, who tells him that this temple is all that
has been spared in the war between the rival houses of the Gods. When he
asks why he has been saved from death, the veiled figure makes reply:
"None can usurp this height," return'd that shade,
"But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest."
* * * * *
"Are there not thousands in the world," said I,
Encourag'd by the sooth voice of the shade,
"Who love their fellows even to the death,
Who feel the giant agony of the world,
And more, like slaves to poor humanity,
Labour for mortal good? I sure should see
Other men here, but I am here alone."
"Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries,"
Rejoined that voice; "they are no dreamers weak;
They seek no wonder but the human face,
No music but a happy-noted voice:
They come not here, they have no thought to come;
And thou art here, for thou art less than they.
What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe,
To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing,
A fever of thyself: think of the earth;
What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee?
What haven? every creature hath its home,
Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,
Whether his labours be sublime or low--
The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct:
Only the dreamer venoms all his days,
Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve."
In this, which is almost his last deliberate utterance, Keats expresses
his sense of the futility of romance, and seems to condemn poetry itself.
A condemnation of the expression of profound thought in beautiful forms
would come very ill from Keats, but this much he surely had learned, that
poetry, the real high poetry, cannot be made out of dreams. The worst of
dreams is that you cannot discipline them. Their tragedy is night-mare;
their comedy is nonsense. Only what can stand severe discipline, and
emerge the purer and stronger for it, is fit to endure. For all its sins
of flatness and prosiness the Classical School has always taught
discipline. No doubt it has sometimes trusted too absolutely to
discipline, and has given us too much of the foot-rule and the tuning-
fork. But one discipline, at least, poetry cannot afford to neglect--the
discipline of facts and life. The poetry that can face this ordeal and
survive it is rare. Some poets are tempted to avoid the experience and
save the dream. Others, who were poets in their youth, undergo the
experience and are beaten by it. But the poetry which can bear all naked
truth and still keep its singing voice is the only immortal poetry.
Footnotes:
{78} For some of the facts in this account of Ossian I am indebted to
Mr. J. S. Smart's fascinating book, _James Macpherson_, _an Episode in
Literature_ (David Nutt, 1905).