First Publication as a Sacred Poet.
The fact that the first work published by Watts was the “Sacred Lyrics”
may justify this early estimate of his character as a sacred poet. It
is probable, nay it is certain, that the time bestowed by Watts upon
poetry was very slight and insignificant compared with that which he
devoted to the graver pursuits of life, and the various studies connected
with philosophy, theology, preaching, and education. He first, however,
appeared in print as the author of the “Horæ Lyricæ,” the Lyrical
Poems: and Dr. Johnson judges that they entitled him to an honourable
place amongst our English poets. Watts himself thought very modestly
of his claims in this way, and speaks concerning his own compositions
in the humblest language. “I make no pretences,” he says, “to the name
of a poet, or a polite writer in an age wherein so many superior souls
shine in their works through the nation.” In many of his hymns he
unquestionably deserves the highest honour: but for the most part it
is not in the lyrics we are to seek, as we certainly shall not find,
the noblest illustrations of his poetical genius; nor, perhaps, is it
probable that we should turn to them with much interest or expectation
but that they are the production of Dr. Watts, and that he was the
author of those hymns so dear to the Church of Christ, and the “Divine
and Moral Songs for Children.” In all our judgments and criticisms upon
Watts as a poet, two things must be borne in mind: first, as we have seen
above, that he not only disclaimed the character himself, but proved his
sincerity by regarding it only as the recreation of grave and serious
studies, and the very natural occupation of a man of fine taste and
largely cultivated sensibility; and next, we must remember, that the
poetry of the age in which he lived was artificial, formed for the most
part upon classical models, whose rules were very greatly inapplicable to
English verse. The sweetest and most perfect poet in any near approach to
those times was Oliver Goldsmith, and he was the writer least imbued with
classical lore, and the one who left all classical rules and allusions
furthest behind him, content to express himself in simple and pleasing
English. Johnson was a poet, and Joseph Addison, but although so much
more ambitious and devoted to the pursuit, they neither of them have
produced sentiments or expressions which charm us more than those we find
in the productions of Watts. Thomas Gray was a poet, but only in two or
three instances did the simplicity and purity of the English language,
and the simple metre, succeed in winning him from the trammels of
classical formularies. Indeed there was something ludicrous in the poetry
of the time; and the great genius of Pope, which really was equal to
anything in verse, seemed almost to struggle in vain against the pedantic
rules he imposed upon himself. It was the age of fantastic ornament and
of formal symmetry, of artificial gardening, of trimmed yews, when even
Nature herself in her trees, hedgerows, and flower-beds was made to look
ridiculous. A sort of tulip-mania, a false admiration in colour and in
form, took possession not merely of the speculators in the market, but
of the devotees of the fine arts. Years passed on before English poetry
liberated itself from these false trammels, and the first great English
writer who subsequently gave freedom and freshness, a combination of
sublimity and simplicity to English verse, was William Cowper.
We must separate and distinguish between Watts as a poet, the author
of the “Lyrics,” and Watts as a hymnologist, and the author of those
pieces which, as they have been, so we trust they will continue to be,
a precious legacy of the Church, and the expression of its deepest,
highest, and tenderest emotions. In a letter to the “Gentleman’s
Magazine,” when his judgment was appealed to for a poetical decision, he
said, “Though I have sported with rhyme as an amusement in younger life,
and published some religious composures to assist the worship of God, yet
I never set myself up among the numerous competitors for a poet of the
age, much less have I presumed to become their judge.” There is a writer
of one or two immortal hymns in our language who sometimes suggests a
comparison with Dr. Watts. Watts was capable of poetry. He was not only
a poet in his hymns, but a poetic nature often broke through the turgid
pindarics he adopted as the vehicle of his expressions. But Ken was no
poet at all, and yet, unlike Watts, who disclaimed the character, this
was Ken’s one vanity. A writer in the “Quarterly Review,” which may be
accepted here as an unexceptionable umpire, says, “If there was any
vanity in the good man’s heart, it would seem to have been on the subject
of his poetical skill. He expresses, indeed, a belief that his verses are
open to the assaults of criticism, but he must have thought something
of them, for he left them for publication, and they fill four thick
volumes. The contrast is strange between the clear, free, harmonious
flow of his prose, and the barbarous, cramped, pedantic language, the
harsh dissonance, the extravagant conceits, which disfigure the great
mass of his verses. Mr. Anderson has tried the ingenious experiment
of reducing some passages from metre to prose, and no doubt they gain
considerably! But there is no getting over the fact that these four
volumes are altogether a mistake.”[12] Such a criticism as this can never
be pronounced on Watts, but it is yet true that some of the vices of Ken
disfigure the pages of the “Horæ Lyricæ,” and they are traceable to the
same cause—the forsaking simplicity and nature, and following artificial
models and straining after affected diction.
He was essentially a hymn writer, and among the lyrics the most beautiful
and effective pieces are those which either are hymns or approach nearest
to that order of composition. The modern reader will be impatient of
the frequent apostrophe, and, although “personification, that is, the
transformation of the qualities of the mind, and abstract ideas, and
general notions into living embodiments,” has ever been regarded as one
of the noblest exercises and proofs of the poetic faculty, we suppose few
will be disposed to regard Watts’ excursions in this way with favour. He
possessed this power in an eminent degree: instantaneously, apparently, a
sentiment became an image, and the image pointed to a tender and pathetic
treatment. His elegy on the death of William III. has often been cited as
a fine piece of elegiac personification; should it seem extravagant to
the reader, it would scarcely seem so to Lord Macaulay; and it must be
remembered that Dr. Watts was one who regarded himself and the nation as
profoundly indebted, surely not unnaturally, for freedom and prosperity
to the arms and government of the deceased king. He was young when he
wrote these verses. William, as we have said, died the day on which Watts
was ordained to the work of the ministry, 1702. The verses present a
picture of the illustrious hero lying in state, surrounded by the weeping
arts and graces of society. Dr. Gibbons, not inappropriately, speaks of
the piece as “the largest constellation of personifications occurring
amongst the Doctor’s Odes:”
Preserve, O venerable pile,
Inviolate thy sacred trust;
To thy cold arms the British isle,
Weeping, commits her richest dust.
Rest his dear sword beneath his head;
Round him his faithful arms shall stand:
Fix his bright ensigns on his bed,
The guards and honours of our land.
High o’er the grave _Religion_ set
In solemn guise; pronounce the ground
Sacred, to bar unhallowed feet,
And plant her guardian virtues round.
Fair _Liberty_, in sables drest,
Write his loved name upon his urn;
William, the scourge of tyrants past,
And awe of princes yet unborn.
Sweet _Peace_, his sacred relics keep,
With olives blooming round her head,
And stretch her wings across the deep
To bless the nations with the shade.
Stand on the pile, immortal _Fame_,
Broad stars adorn thy brightest robe;
Thy thousand voices sound his name
In silver accents round the globe.
_Flattery_ shall faint beneath the sound,
While hoary _Truth_ inspires the song;
_Envy_ grow pale, and bite the ground,
And _Slander_ gnaw her forky tongue.
Night and the grave, remove your gloom;
Darkness becomes the vulgar dead;
But glory bids the royal tomb
Disdain the horrors of a shade.
_Glory_ with all her lamps shall burn,
And watch the warrior’s sleeping clay,
Till the last trumpet rouse his urn,
To aid the triumphs of the day.
But he had a simpler manner, and even in his stronger expressions rose to
the majesty of simple strength, as in the following:
LAUNCHING INTO ETERNITY.
It was a brave attempt! advent’rous he,
Who in the first ship broke the unknown sea:
And leaving his dear native shores behind,
Trusted his life to the licentious wind.
I see the surging brine: the tempest raves:
He on the pine-plank rides across the waves,
Exulting on the edge of thousand gaping graves:
He steers the winged boat, and shifts the sails,
Conquers the flood, and manages the gales.
Such is the soul that leaves this mortal land,
Fearless when the great Master gives command.
Death is the storm: she smiles to hear it roar,
And bids the tempest waft her from the shore:
Then with a skilful helm she sweeps the seas,
And manages the raging storm with ease:
(Her faith can govern death) she spreads her wings
Wide to the wind, and as she sails she sings,
And loses by degrees the sight of mortal things.
As the shores lessen, so her joys arise,
The waves roll gentler, and the tempest dies,
Now vast eternity fills all her sight,
She floats on the broad deep with infinite delight,
The seas for ever calm, the skies for ever bright.
The weight and grandeur of his thoughts, the radiance of his perception,
the far-reaching, remote grandeur of the objects of his verse, must
always be taken into account, pondered, and allowed an adequate influence
over the reader’s mind, whenever attempts are made to estimate what he
was as a sacred poet. Not the less was his mind in ready accord with
objects of Nature. He had seen, probably, little of Nature in her more
grand and exciting moods. Men like him, horn to London life, and only
occasionally escaping thence to some near and quiet watering-place, saw
little of those ample pages which, in our own or other lands, are now
unrolled to almost every designing eye. But his verses abundantly show
with what perfect sympathy every object touched him, how all the smaller
or greater things of Nature impressed the subtle sense within him, and
awoke the mystery and the awe. The following lines, not composed as a
hymn, but included in his “Miscellaneous Thoughts,” have always seemed to
us very cogently to illustrate this:
My God, I love, and I adore;
But souls that love would know Thee more.
Wilt Thou for ever hide, and stand
Behind the labours of Thy hand?
Thy hand unseen sustains the poles
On which this huge creation rolls:
The starry arch proclaims Thy power,
Thy pencil glows in every flower;
In thousand shapes and colours rise
Thy painted wonders to our eyes;
While beasts and birds, with labouring throats,
Teach us a God in thousand notes,
The meanest pin in Nature’s frame
Marks out some letter of Thy name.
Where sense can reach, or fancy rove,
From hill to hill, from field to grove,
Across the waves, around the sky,
There’s not a spot, or deep or high,
Where the Creator has not trod,
And left the footstep of a God.
And in the same strain, with what strength and majesty he sweeps every
chord of Nature in his sublime version of the 148th Psalm:
Loud hallelujahs to the Lord.
The strong nervousness of his expression, the passionate personification
(always the mark of a great poet) with which his verses abound,
sometimes, but more especially in his lyrics, give the appearance of
inflation to his expressions. But when attempting to describe adequate
themes, they only fitly represent the subject, as in the following fine
description of the glory of God in the clouds:
Thy hand, how wide it spreads the sky!
How glorious to behold!
Tinged with a blue of heavenly dye,
And starred with sparkling gold.
There Thou canst bid the globes of light
Their endless circles run;
Where the pale planet rules the night,
And day obeys the sun.
The noisy winds stand ready there
Thy orders to obey;
With sounding wings they sweep the air,
To make Thy chariot way.
There like a trumpet loud and strong,
Thy thunder shakes our coast;
While the red lightnings wave along,
The banners of Thy host.
On the thin air, without a prop,
Hang fruitful showers around;
At Thy command they sink, and drop
Their fatness to the ground.
Strong exception has been taken to Watts’ verse, on the score of its
frequent, almost passionate, expression of Divine love; in this he
frequently writes like Madame Guyon, or like some of those old monastic
spirits who passed their days in cloisters; and Watts’ life was almost
as cloisteral as that of a monk. Unlike his amiable friend, Philip
Doddridge, he was never diverted from any of the solemn pursuits of his
life by the claims of human passion or affection, although there are
not wanting verses which, perhaps, show that he had not been altogether
insensible to female charms:
Virgins, who roll your artful eyes,
And shoot delicious danger thence;
Swiftly the lovely lightning flies,
And melts our reason down to sense.
But perhaps his poem “Few Happy Matches,” reveals some reason why his
timid spirit refused to seek its happiness in matrimonial chains, and so
he turned to the higher affections, singing—
Life is a pain without Thy love;
Who can ever bear to be
Cursed with immortality,
Among the stars, but far from Thee?
But the author of many of these hymns must often have been wafted away
with a true mystic ecstasy. The warmth of this rapture has been objected
to; the objection lies, also, against the works of most of the great
mystics.
My God, the spring of all my joys,
is one of countless illustrations—
My God, my life, my love,
To Thee, to Thee, I call.
or—
Dearest of all the names above.
In such as these, if the reader feels unable to rise to them amidst the
delights of family joys—wife, and children, and society—let him remember
how Watts lived, his solitary nights, in a family where, no doubt, his
presence was a charm and blessing, but in which he must have been to
himself, comparatively, lonely as a monk, feeding his mind with thoughts
until they became passions and ecstasies to him, and even found their
vent in such words as the following:
His charm shall make my numbers flow,
And hold the falling floods;
While silence sits on every bough,
And bends the listening woods.
I’ll carve our passion on the bark;
And every wounded tree
Shall drop and hear some mystic mark
That Jesus died for me.
The swains shall wonder when they read,
Inscribed on all the grove,
That Heaven itself came down and bled
To win a mortal’s love.
To this same order of sacred personification also belong those verses,
which are certainly remarkable, and when properly apprehended among the
most tenderly antithetical in our language, on the Death of Moses:
Sweet was the journey to the sky
The wondrous prophet tried;
“Climb up the mount,” said God, “and die;”
The prophet climbed and died.
Softly his fainting head he lay
Upon his Maker’s breast;
His Maker kissed his soul away,
And laid his flesh to rest.
In God’s own arms he left the breath
That God’s own Spirit gave;
His was the noblest road to death,
And his the sweetest grave.
And while remarking upon the poet, we may notice that many of his pieces
reflect that quiet scholarly spirit of the age, in which not only Watts,
but so many other writers delighted to indulge; that Seneca-like musing
and moralizing, that contented dreaming beneath umbrageous woods and by
the side of purling streams. It has been said that Samuel Rogers, in
his “Human Life,” portrays the Twickenham side of existence. The Stoke
Newington side was very much like it, certainly wholly unlike the stir
and heat of the vivid passions, the painful introspections, and diseased
musings, which have forced their way into modern poetry. If Watts
described or dealt with these it was not in his verse, although many of
his prose writings seem to reveal that he was not ignorant of them; such
is his often quoted piece:
TRUE RICHES.
I am not concerned to know
What, to-morrow, fate will do:
’Tis enough that I can say,
I’ve possessed myself to-day:
Then, if haply midnight death
Seize my flesh, and stop my breath,
Yet to-morrow I shall be
Heir to the best part of me.
Glittering stones, and golden things,
Wealth and honours that have wings,
Ever fluttering to be gone,
I could never call my own:
Riches that the world bestows,
She can take, and I can lose;
But the treasures that are mine
Lie afar beyond her line.
When I view my spacious soul,
And survey myself a whole,
And enjoy myself alone,
I’m a kingdom of my own.
I’ve a mighty part within
That the world hath never seen,
Rich as Eden’s happy ground,
And with choicer plenty crowned.
Here on all the shining boughs
Knowledge fair and useful grows;
On the same young flow’ry tree
All the seasons you may see;
Notions in the bloom of light,
Just disclosing to the sight;
Here are thoughts of larger growth,
Rip’ning into solid truth;
Fruits refined, of noble taste;
Seraphs feed on such repast.
Here, in a green and shady grove,
Streams of pleasure mix with love:
There, beneath the smiling skies,
Hills of contemplation rise;
Now, upon some shining top,
Angels light, and call me up;
I rejoice to raise my feet,
Both rejoice when there we meet.
There are endless beauties more
Earth hath no resemblance for;
Nothing like them round the pole,
Nothing can describe the soul.
’Tis a region half unknown,
That has treasures of its own,
More remote from public view
Than the bowels of Peru;
Broader ’tis, and brighter far,
Than the golden Indies are;
Ships that trace the watery stage
Cannot coast it in an age;
Harts, or horses, strong and fleet,
Had they wings to help their feet,
Could not run it half-way o’er
In ten thousand days or more.
Yet the silly wand’ring mind,
Loath to be too much confined,
Roves and takes her daily tours,
Coasting round the narrow shores—
Narrow shores of flesh and sense,
Picking shells and pebbles thence:
Or she sits at Fancy’s door,
Calling shapes and shadows to her;
Foreign visits still receiving,
And to herself a stranger living.
Never, never would she buy
Indian dust, or Tyrian dye;
Never trade abroad for more,
If she saw her native store:
If her inward worth were known,
She might ever live alone.
Nor, much in the same vein, was he indisposed occasionally for a gentle
kind of satire, as in the following vigorous paraphrase, which some
readers may perhaps be surprised to find falling from the pen of Watts.
“When I meet with persons,” he says, “of a worldly character, they bring
to my mind some scraps of Horace:”
“Nos numerus sumus, et fruges consumere nati,
Alcinoique juventus
Cui pulchrum fuit in medios dormire dies,” etc.
PARAPHRASE.
There are a number of us creep
Into this world, to eat and sleep;
And know no reason why they’re born,
But merely to consume the corn,
Devour the cattle, fowl, and fish,
And leave behind an empty dish.
The crows and ravens do the same,
Unlucky birds of hateful name;
Ravens or crows might fill their places,
And swallow corn and carcases.
Then if their tombstone, when they die,
Ben’t taught to flatter and to lie,
There’s nothing better will be said,
Than that “They’ve eat up all their bread,
Drank up their drink, and gone to bed.”
And the following verses are surely very pleasing to the discontented and
unquiet:
’Tis a dull circle that we tread,
Just from the window to the bed,
To rise to see, and to be seen,
Graze on the world awhile, and then
We yawn, and stretch to sleep again.
But Fancy, that uneasy guest,
Still holds a longing in our breast:
She finds or frames vexations still,
Herself the greatest plague we feel.
We take great pleasure in our pain,
And make a mountain of a grain,
Assume the load, and pant and sweat
Beneath th’ imaginary weight.
With our dear selves we live at strife,
While the most constant scenes of life
From peevish humours are not free;
Still we affect variety:
Rather than pass an easy day,
We fret and chide the hours away,
Grow weary of this circling sun,
And vex that he should ever run
The same old track; and still, and still
Rise red behind yon eastern hill,
And chide the moon that darts her light
Through the same casement every night.
We shift our chambers and our homes,
To dwell where trouble never comes:
Sylvia has left the city crowd,
Against the court exclaims aloud,
Flies to the woods; a hermit saint!
She loathes her patches, pins and paint,
Dear diamonds from her neck are torn;
But humour, that eternal thorn,
Sticks in her heart: she’s hurried still,
’Twixt her wild passions and her will:
Haunted and hagged where’er she roves,
By purling streams, and silent groves,
Or with her furies, or her loves.
Then our native land we hate,
Too cold, too windy, or too wet;
Change the thick climate, and repair
To France or Italy for air.
Happy the soul that virtue shows
To fix the place of her repose,
Needless to move; for she can dwell
In her old grandsire’s hall as well.
Virtue that never loves to roam,
But sweetly hides herself at home.
And easy on a native throne
Of humble turf sits gently down.
Without claiming then for Watts a pre-eminent place among those who are
called poets, these citations will be sufficient to show that however
he might disclaim the dignity, he deserved the designation. And there
are poets whose eminence is in general more unquestioned, who deserve it
less. He was unjust to himself in this particular; verse and rhyme fell
from him easily, happily, naturally. Perhaps he succeeded least when he
most ambitiously attempted; but he had a remarkable and pleasant power
of instantly translating some sentiment which crossed his mind from the
classics into English verse, as in those well-known lines,—
Seize upon truth where’er ’tis found,
On Christian, or on heathen ground.
Amongst your friends, amongst your foes,
The flower’s divine where’er it grows,
Neglect the prickle and assume the rose.
In which he elevates the sentiment of Virgil,—
“Fas est ab hoste doceri.”
Referring to his translations, it has been very justly said that he
seldom translates or imitates a heathen poet but he either makes him
a Christian in the end, or shows his deficiency in not being one.
He consistently maintained throughout his writings, as a poet, the
determination expressed in the lines—
Thy name, Almighty Sire, and Thine,
Jesus, where His full glories shine,
Shall consecrate my lays.[13]
His familiar method of remembering the signs of the Zodiac is an
illustration of the rapid and neat way in which he could bind up
knowledge in a verse:
The ram, the bull, the heavenly twins,
And next the crab the lion shines,
The virgin and the scales;
The archer, scorpion, and the goat,
The man that holds the water-pot,
The fish with glittering tails.
And his receipt for the orderly conduct of Divine worship, for sustaining
a mental effort in prayer, is useful, beautiful, and perfect:
Call upon God, adore, confess,
Petition, plead, and then declare
You are the Lord’s, give thanks and bless,
And let Amen confirm the prayer.
The devout purpose which ruled and governed the whole life of Watts is
of course manifest in his poems. Such as he is, he is always a sacred
poet; he never forgets that his life has been consecrated and set apart
to religious teaching and to the promulgation of useful knowledge; his
moralities are recreation, never mere dreams; and if he never attempts
the great flights of poetry in epic or dramatic writing, we may remember
that in this, as in his yet more sacred pieces, he was a lyrist, and
reserved all his greater efforts for his work in the ministry, seeking
thus to make more sweet and serviceable the whole service of the House of
God.
Throughout these remarks we have left it to be inferred that the
verse-making, great as was the fame it procured the author, was regarded
by him merely as the _accident_ of his work; at the same time his nature
seems to have been truly in sympathy with all those impulses derived
from external scenery, calculated to stir a poetic sensibility. We fancy
his modest nature would almost have assented, without a rejoinder, even
to some of the very severe criticisms which modern fastidiousness has
pronounced upon him; but Dr. Gibbons assures us how swiftly and instantly
his spirit caught every impression of natural scenery and life; how he
delighted in the rural verdure, or the waving harvest-field, or the
resounding grove; how his nature was awed almost equally by the wonderful
and subtle labours of the industrious bee, or the sun walking through
the heavens in the greatness of his strength. In his lyrics, classical
forms, perhaps, rather hampered than aided him; he was fascinated by the
majestic roll of the Pindaric Greek; but from this fault the best of his
hymns are entirely free.
We have dwelt thus at length upon some of the characteristics of Watts’
verse, feeling that criticism upon it is far from exhausted; and that,
amidst its various representatives in our language, in spite of that
modern contempt which is creeping even into the circles of those who
profess to hold his faith and follow in his footsteps, he still deserves
to retain a place in the history of English poetry. We have referred
rather to those more striking and obvious marks of his genius; but
we must still prefer him in his more quiet and subdued strains of
devotion, those peaceful, pensive lines with which his works abound. It
is equally certain that he wrote a number of verses and lines perfectly
indefensible on the score of good taste: this is the more remarkable,
because his taste does seem to have been cultivated to the highest pitch
of excellence; and his mind was remarkable, not merely for the plenitude
of its ideas, but for the easy elegance with which he ordinarily gave
expression to them. However this may be, their bad taste and strange
conceits have not greatly repressed the reverence with which we regard
the works of George Herbert or of Henry Vaughan; nor does the frequent
turgidity of Milton much interfere with the admiration and awe with which
we read most of his poems.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: ABNEY HOUSE, STOKE NEWINGTON.]
[Illustration]