FROM THE DEATH OF POPE TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.
1744-1789.
Pope's example continued potent for fifty years after his death.
Especially was this so in satiric and didactic poetry. Not only Dr.
Johnson's adaptations from Juvenal, _London_, 1738, and the _Vanity of
Human Wishes_, 1749, but Gifford's _Baviad_, 1791, and _Maeviad_, 1795,
and Byron's _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, 1809, were in the
verse and the manner of Pope. In Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_, 1781,
Dryden and Pope are treated as the two greatest English poets. But long
before this a revolution in literary taste had begun, a movement which
is variously described as the Return to Nature or the Rise of the New
Romantic School.
For nearly a hundred years poetry had dealt with manners and the life of
towns--the gay, prosaic life of Congreve or of Pope. The sole concession
to the life of nature was the old pastoral, which, in the hands of
cockneys like Pope and Ambrose Philips, who merely repeated stock
descriptions at second or third hand, became even more artificial than a
_Beggars Opera_ or a _Rape of the Lock_. These at least were true to
their environment, and were natural just because they were artificial.
But the _Seasons_ of James Thomson, published in installments from
1726-1730, had opened a new field. Their theme was the English
landscape, as varied by the changes of the year, and they were written
by a true lover and observer of nature. Mark Akenside's _Pleasures of
Imagination_, 1744, published the year of Pope's death, was written,
like the _Seasons_, in blank verse; and although its language had the
formal, didactic cast of the Queen Anne poets, it pointed unmistakably
in the new direction. Thomson had painted the soft beauties of a highly
cultivated land--lawns, gardens, forest-preserves, orchards, and
sheep-walks. But now a fresh note was struck in the literature, not of
England alone, but of Germany and France--romanticism, the chief element
in which was a love of the wild. Poets turned from the tameness of
modern existence to savage nature and the heroic simplicity of life
among primitive tribes. In France, Rousseau introduced the idea of the
natural man, following his instincts in disregard of social conventions.
In Germany Bodmer published, in 1753, the first edition of the old
German epic, the _Nibelungen Lied_. Works of a similar tendency in
England were the odes of William Collins and Thomas Gray, published
between 1747 and 1757; especially Collins's _Ode on the Superstitions of
the Highlands_, and Gray's _Bard_, a Pindaric in which the last survivor
of the Welsh bards invokes vengeance on Edward I., the destroyer of his
guild. Gray and Mason, his friend and editor, made translations from the
ancient Welsh and Norse poetry. Thomas Percy's _Reliques of Ancient
English Poetry_, 1765, aroused the taste for old ballads. Richard Kurd's
_Letters on Chivalry and Romance_, Thomas Warton's _History of English
Poetry_. 1774-1778, Tyrwhitt's critical edition of Chaucer, and Horace
Walpole's Gothic romance, the _Castle of Otranto_, 1765, stimulated this
awakened interest in the picturesque aspects of feudal life, and
contributed to the fondness for supernatural and mediæval subjects.
James Beattie's _Minstrel_, 1771, described the educating influence of
Scottish mountain scenery upon the genius of a young poet. But the most
remarkable instances of this passion for wild nature and the romantic
past were the _Poems of Ossian_ and Thomas Chatterton's literary
forgeries.
In 1762 James Macpherson published the first installment of what
professed to be a translation of the poems of Ossian, a Gaelic bard,
whom tradition placed in the 3d century. Macpherson said that he made
his version--including two complete epics, _Fingal_ and _Temora_--from
Gaelic MSS., which he had collected in the Scottish Highlands. A fierce
controversy at once sprang up over the genuineness of these remains.
Macpherson was challenged to produce his originals, and when, many years
after, he published the Gaelic text, it was asserted that this was
nothing but a translation of his own English into modern Gaelic. Of the
MSS. which he professed to have found not a scrap remained: the Gaelic
text was printed from transcriptions in Macpherson's handwriting or in
that of his secretaries.
But whether these poems were the work of Ossian or of Macpherson, they
made a deep impression at the time. Napoleon admired them greatly, and
Goethe inserted passages from the "Songs of Selma" in his _Sorrows of
Werther_. Macpherson composed--or translated--them in an abrupt,
rhapsodical prose, resembling the English version of Job or of the
prophecies of Isaiah. They filled the minds of their readers with images
of vague sublimity and desolation; the mountain torrent, the mist on the
hills, the ghosts of heroes half seen by the setting moon, the thistle
in the ruined courts of chieftains, the grass whistling on the windy
heath, the gray rock by the blue stream of Lutha, and the cliffs of
sea-surrounded Gormal.
"A tale of the times of old!"
"Why, thou wanderer unseen! Thou bender of the thistle of Lora; why,
thou breeze of the valley, hast thou left mine ear? I hear no distant
roar of streams! No sound of the harp from the rock! Come, thou huntress
of Lutha, Malvina, call back his soul to the bard. I look forward to
Lochlin of lakes, to the dark billowy bay of U-thorno, where Fingal
decends from Ocean, from the roar of winds. Few are the heroes of Morven
in a land unknown."
Thomas Chatterton, who died by his own hand in 1770, at the age of
seventeen, is one of the most wonderful examples of precocity in the
history of literature. His father had been sexton of the ancient Church
of St. Mary Redcliff, in Bristol, and the boy's sensitive imagination
took the stamp of his surroundings. He taught himself to read from a
black-letter Bible. He drew charcoal sketches of churches, castles,
knightly tombs, and heraldic blazonry. When only eleven years old, he
began the fabrication of documents in prose and verse, which he ascribed
to a fictitious Thomas Rowley, a secular priest at Bristol in the 15th
century. Chatterton pretended to have found these among the contents of
an old chest in the muniment room of St. Mary Redcliff's. The Rowley
poems included two tragedies, _Aella_ and _Goddwyn_, two cantos of a
long poem on the _Battle of Hastings_, and a number of ballads and minor
pieces. Chatterton had no precise knowledge of early English, or even of
Chaucer. His method of working was as follows. He made himself a
manuscript glossary of the words marked as archaic in Bailey's and
Kersey's English dictionaries, composed his poems first in modern
language, and then turned them into ancient spelling, and substituted
here and there the old words in his glossary for their modern
equivalents. Naturally he made many mistakes, and though Horace Walpole,
to whom he sent some of his pieces, was unable to detect the forgery,
his friends, Gray and Mason, to whom he submitted them, at once
pronounced them spurious. Nevertheless there was a controversy over
Rowley hardly less obstinate than that over Ossian, a controversy made
possible only by the then almost universal ignorance of the forms,
scansion, and vocabulary of early English poetry. Chatterton's poems are
of little value in themselves, but they are the record of an industry
and imitative quickness marvelous in a mere child, and they show how,
with the instinct of genius, he threw himself into the main literary
current of his time. Discarding the couplet of Pope, the poets now went
back for models to the Elizabethan writers. Thomas Warton published in
1753 his _Observations on the Faerie Queene_. Beattie's _Minstrel_,
Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_, and William Shenstone's
_Schoolmistress_ were all written in the Spenserian stanza. Shenstone
gave a partly humorous effect to his poem by imitating Spenser's
archaisms, and Thomson reproduced in many passages the copious harmony
and luxuriant imagery of the _Faerie Queene_. John Dyer's _Fleece_ was a
poem in blank verse on English wool-growing, after the fashion of
Vergil's _Georgics_. The subject was unfortunate, for, as Dr. Johnson
said, it is impossible to make poetry out of serges and druggets. Dyer's
_Grongar Hill_, which mingles reflection with natural description in the
manner of Gray's _Elegy written in a Country Churchyard_, was composed
in the octosyllabic verse of Milton's _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_.
Milton's minor poems, which had hitherto been neglected, exercised a
great influence on Collins and Gray. Collins's _Ode to Simplicity_ was
written in the stanza of Milton's _Nativity_, and his exquisite unrimed
_Ode to Evening_ was a study in versification, after Milton's
translation of Horace's _Ode to Pyrrha_, in the original meters.
Shakspere began to be studied more reverently: numerous critical
editions of his plays were issued, and Garrick restored his pure text to
the stage. Collins was an enthusiastic student of Shakspere, and one of
his sweetest poems, the _Dirge in Cymbeline_, was inspired by the
tragedy of _Cymbeline_. The verse of Gray, Collins, and the Warton
brothers abounds in verbal reminiscences of Shakspere; but their genius
was not allied to his, being exclusively lyrical and not at all
dramatic. The Muse of this romantic school was Fancy rather than
Passion. A thoughtful melancholy, a gentle, scholarly pensiveness, the
spirit of Milton's _Il Penseroso_, pervades their poetry. Gray was a
fastidious scholar, who produced very little, but that little of the
finest quality. His famous _Elegy_, expressing a meditative mood in
language of the choicest perfection, is the representative poem of the
second half of the 18th century, as the _Rape of the Lock_ is of the
first. The romanticists were quietists, and their scenery is
characteristic. They loved solitude and evening, the twilight vale, the
mossy hermitage, ruins, glens, and caves. Their style was elegant and
academic, retaining a little of the stilted poetic diction of their
classical forerunners. Personification and periphrasis were their
favorite mannerisms: Collins's Odes were largely addressed to
abstractions, such as Fear, Pity, Liberty, Mercy and Simplicity. A poet
in their dialect was always a "bard;" a countryman was "the untutored
swain," and a woman was a "nymph" or "the fair," just as in Dryden and
Pope. Thomson is perpetually mindful of Vergil, and afraid to speak
simply. He uses too many Latin epithets, like _amusive_ and
_precipitant_, and calls a fish-line
The floating line snatched from the hoary steed.
They left much for Cowper and Wordsworth to do in the way of infusing
the new blood of a strong, racy English into our exhausted poetic
diction. Their poetry is impersonal, bookish, literary. It lacks
emotional force, except now and then in Gray's immortal _Elegy_, in his
_Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College_, in Collins's lines, _On the
Death of Thomson_, and his little ode beginning, "How sleep the brave."
The new school did not lack critical expounders of its principles and
practice. Joseph Warton published, in 1756, the first volume of his
_Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope_, an elaborate review of
Pope's writings _seriatim_, doing him certainly full justice, but
ranking him below Shakspere, Spenser, and Milton. "Wit and satire,"
wrote Warton, "are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion are
eternal....He stuck to describing modern manners; but those manners,
because they are familiar, artificial, and polished, are, in their very
nature, unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse. Whatever poetical
enthusiasm he actually possessed he withheld and stifled. Surely it is
no narrow and niggardly encomium to say, he is the great Poet of Reason,
the first of Ethical authors in verse." Warton illustrated his critical
positions by quoting freely not only from Spenser and Milton, but from
recent poets, like Thomson, Gray, Collins, and Dyer. He testified that
the _Seasons_ had "been very instrumental in diffusing a general taste
for the beauties of nature and landscape." It was symptomatic of the
change in literary taste that the natural or English school of landscape
gardening now began to displace the French and Dutch fashion of clipped
hedges, and regular parterres, and that Gothic architecture came into
repute. Horace Walpole was a virtuoso in Gothic art, and in his castle
at Strawberry Hill he made a collection of ancient armor, illuminated
manuscripts, and bric-a-brac of all kinds. Gray had been Walpole's
traveling companion in France and Italy, and the two had quarreled and
separated, but were afterward reconciled. From Walpole's private
printing-press at Strawberry Hill Gray's two "sister odes," the _Bard_,
and the _Progress of Poesy_, were first issued in 1757. Both Gray and
Walpole were good correspondents, and their printed letters are among
the most delightful literature of the kind.
The central figure among the English men of letters of that generation
was Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), whose memory has been preserved less by
his own writings than by James Boswell's famous _Life of Johnson_,
published in 1791. Boswell was a Scotch laird and advocate, who first
met Johnson in London, when the latter was fifty-four years old. Boswell
was not a very wise or witty person, but he reverenced the worth and
intellect which shone through his subject's uncouth exterior. He
followed him about, note-book in hand, bore all his snubbings patiently,
and made the best biography ever written. It is related that the doctor
once said that if he thought Boswell meant to write his life, he should
prevent it by taking Boswell's. And yet Johnson's own writings and this
biography of him have changed places in relative importance so
completely that Carlyle predicted that the former would soon be reduced
to notes on the latter; and Macaulay said that the man who was known to
his contemporaries as a great writer was known to posterity as an
agreeable companion.
Johnson was one of those rugged, eccentric, self-developed characters so
common among the English. He was the son of a Lichfield book-seller, and
after a course at Oxford, which was cut short by poverty, and an
unsuccessful career as a school-master, he had come up to London, in
1737, where he supported himself for many years as a book-seller's hack.
Gradually his great learning and abilities, his ready social wit and
powers as a talker, caused his company to be sought at the tables of
those whom he called "the great." He was a clubbable man, and he drew
about him at the tavern a group of the most distinguished intellects of
the time: Edmund Burke, the orator and statesman; Oliver Goldsmith, Sir
Joshua Reynolds, the portrait painter, and David Garrick, the great
actor, who had been a pupil in Johnson's school, near Lichfield. Johnson
was the typical John Bull of the last century. His oddities, virtues,
and prejudices were thoroughly English. He hated Frenchmen, Scotchmen,
and Americans, and had a cockneyish attachment to London. He was a high
Tory, and an orthodox churchman; he loved a lord in the abstract, and
yet he asserted a sturdy independence against any lord in particular. He
was deeply religious, but had an abiding fear of death. He was burly in
person, and slovenly in dress, his shirt-frill always covered with
snuff. He was a great diner out, an inordinate tea-drinker, and a
voracious and untidy feeder. An inherited scrofula, which often took the
form of hypochondria and threatened to affect his brain, deprived him of
control over the muscles of his face. Boswell describes how his
features worked, how he snorted, grunted, whistled, and rolled about in
his chair when getting ready to speak. He records his minutest traits,
such as his habit of pocketing the orange peels at the club, and his
superstitious way of touching all the posts between his house and the
Mitre Tavern, going back to do it, if he skipped one by chance. Though
bearish in his manners and arrogant in dispute, especially when talking
"for victory," Johnson had a large and tender heart. He loved his ugly,
old wife--twenty-one years his senior--and he had his house full of
unfortunates--a blind woman, an invalid surgeon, a destitute widow, a
negro servant--whom he supported for many years, and bore with all their
ill-humors patiently.
Among Johnson's numerous writings the ones best entitled to remembrance
are, perhaps, his _Dictionary of the English Language_, 1755; his moral
tale, _Rasselas_, 1759; the introduction to his edition of Shakspere,
1765, and his _Lives of the Poets_, 1781. Johnson wrote a sonorous,
cadenced prose, full of big Latin words and balanced clauses. Here is a
sentence, for example, from his _Visit to the Hebrides_: "We were now
treading that illustrious island which was once the luminary of the
Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived
the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion. To abstract the
mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavored,
and would be foolish, if it were possible." The difference between his
colloquial style and his book style is well illustrated in the instance
cited by Macaulay. Speaking of Villiers's _Rehearsal_, Johnson said, "It
has not wit enough to keep it sweet;" then paused and added--translating
English into Johnsonese--"it has not vitality sufficient to preserve it
from putrefaction." There is more of this in Johnson's _Rambler_ and
_Idler_ papers than in his latest work, the _Lives of the Poets_. In
this he showed himself a sound and judicious critic, though with
decided limitations. His understanding was solid, but he was a thorough
classicist, and his taste in poetry was formed on Pope. He was unjust to
Milton and to his own contemporaries, Gray, Collins, Shenstone, and
Dyer. He had no sense of the higher and subtler graces of romantic
poetry, and he had a comical indifference to the "beauties of nature."
When Boswell once ventured to remark that poor Scotland had, at least,
some "noble wild prospects," the doctor replied that the noblest
prospect a Scotchman ever saw was the road that led to London.
The English novel of real life had its origin at this time. Books like
De Foe's _Robinson Crusoe_, _Captain Singleton_, _Journal of the
Plague_, etc., were tales of incident and adventure rather than novels.
The novel deals primarily with character and with the interaction of
characters upon one another, as developed by a regular plot. The first
English novelist, in the modern sense of the word, was Samuel
Richardson, a printer, who began authorship in his fiftieth year with
his _Pamela_, 1740, the story of a young servant girl who resisted the
seductions of her master, and finally, as the reward of her virtue,
became his wife. _Clarissa Harlowe_, 1748, was the tragical history of a
high-spirited young lady who, being driven from her home by her family
because she refused to marry the suitor selected for her, fell into the
toils of Lovelace, an accomplished rake. After struggling heroically
against every form of artifice and violence, she was at last drugged and
ruined. She died of a broken heart, and Lovelace, borne down by remorse,
was killed in a duel by a cousin of Clarissa. _Sir Charles Grandison_,
1753, was Richardson's portrait of an ideal fine gentleman, whose
stately doings fill eight volumes, but who seems to the modern reader a
bore and a prig. All these novels were written in the form of letters
passing between the characters, a method which fitted Richardson's
subjective cast of mind. He knew little of life, but he identified
himself intensely with his principal character and produced a strong
effect by minute, accumulated touches. _Clarissa Harlowe_ is his
masterpiece, though even in that the situation is painfully prolonged,
the heroine's virtue is self-conscious and rhetorical, and there is
something almost ludicrously unnatural in the copiousness with which she
pours herself out in gushing epistles to her female correspondent at the
very moment when she is beset with dangers, persecuted, agonized, and
driven nearly mad. In Richardson's novels appears, for the first time,
that sentimentalism which now began to infect European literature.
_Pamela_ was translated into French and German, and fell in with the
current of popular feeling which found fullest expression in Rousseau's
_Nouvelle Heloise_, 1759, and Goethe's _Leiden des Jungen Werther_,
which set all the world a-weeping in 1774.
Coleridge said that to pass from Richardson's books to those of Henry
Fielding was like going into the fresh air from a close room heated by
stoves. Richardson, it has been affirmed, knew _man_, but Fielding knew
_men_. The latter's first novel, _Joseph Andrews_, 1742, was begun as a
travesty of _Pamela_. The hero, a brother of Pamela, was a young footman
in the employ of Lady Booby, from whom his virtue suffered a like
assault to that made upon Pamela's by her master. This reversal of the
natural situation was in itself full of laughable possibilities, had the
book gone on simply as a burlesque. But the exuberance of Fielding's
genius led him beyond his original design. His hero, leaving Lady
Booby's service, goes traveling with good Parson Adams, and is soon
engaged in a series of comical and rather boisterous adventures.
Fielding had seen life, and his characters were painted from the life
with a bold, free hand. He was a gentleman by birth, and had made
acquaintance with society and the town in 1727, when he was a handsome,
stalwart young fellow, with high animal spirits and a great appetite for
pleasure. He soon ran himself into debt and began writing for the
stage; married, and spent his wife's fortune, living for a while in
much splendor as a country gentleman, and afterward in a reduced
condition as a rural justice with a salary of five hundred pounds of
"the dirtiest money on earth." Fielding's masterpiece was _Tom Jones_,
1749, and it remains one of the best of English novels. Its hero is very
much after Fielding's own heart, wild, spendthrift, warm-hearted,
forgiving, and greatly in need of forgiveness. The same type of
character, with the lines deepened, re-appears in Captain Booth, in
_Amelia_, 1751, the heroine of which is a portrait of Fielding's wife.
With Tom Jones is contrasted Blifil, the embodiment of meanness,
hypocrisy, and cowardice. Sophia Western, the heroine, is one of
Fielding's most admirable creations. For the regulated morality of
Richardson, with its somewhat old-grannified air, Fielding substituted
instinct. His virtuous characters are virtuous by impulse only, and his
ideal of character is manliness. In _Jonathan Wild_ the hero is a
highwayman. This novel is ironical, a sort of prose mock-heroic, and is
one of the strongest, though certainly the least pleasing, of Fielding's
writings.
Tobias Smollett was an inferior Fielding with a difference. He was a
Scotch ship-surgeon, and had spent some time in the West Indies. He
introduced into fiction the now familiar figure of the British tar, in
the persons of Tom Bowling and Commodore Trunnion, as Fielding had
introduced, in Squire Western, the equally national type of the
hard-swearing, deep-drinking, fox-hunting Tory squire. Both Fielding and
Smollett were of the hearty British "beef-and-beer" school; their novels
are downright, energetic, coarse, and high-blooded; low life, physical
life, runs riot through their pages--tavern brawls, the breaking of
pates, and the off-hand courtship of country wenches. Smollett's books,
such as _Roderick Random_, 1748; _Peregrine Pickle_, 1751, and
_Ferdinand Count Fathom_, 1752, were more purely stories of broadly
comic adventure than Fielding's. The latter's view of life was by no
means idyllic; but with Smollett this English realism ran into vulgarity
and a hard Scotch literalness, and character was pushed to caricature.
"The generous wine of Fielding," says Taine, "in Smollett's hands
becomes brandy of the dram-shop." A partial exception to this is to be
found in his last and best novel, _Humphrey Clinker_, 1770. The
influence of Cervantes and of the French novelist, Le Sage, who finished
his _Adventures of Gil Bias_ in 1735, are very perceptible in Smollett.
A genius of much finer mold was Lawrence Sterne, the author of _Tristram
Shandy_, 1759-1767, and the _Sentimental Journey_, 1768. _Tristram
Shandy_ is hardly a novel: the story merely serves to hold together a
number of characters, such as Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, conceived
with rare subtlety and originality. Sterne's chosen province was the
whimsical, and his great model was Rabelais. His books are full of
digressions, breaks, surprises, innuendoes, double meanings,
mystifications, and all manner of odd turns. Coleridge and Carlyle unite
in pronouncing him a great humorist. Thackeray says that he was only a
great jester. Humor is the laughter of the heart, and Sterne's pathos is
closely interwoven with his humor. He was the foremost of English
sentimentalists, and he had that taint of insincerity which
distinguishes sentimentalism from genuine sentiment, like Goldsmith's,
for example. Sterne, in life, was selfish, heartless, and untrue. A
clergyman, his worldliness and vanity and the indecency of his writings
were a scandal to the Church, though his sermons were both witty and
affecting. He enjoyed the titillation of his own emotions, and he had
practiced so long at detecting the latent pathos that lies in the
expression of dumb things and of poor, patient animals, that he could
summon the tear of sensibility at the thought of a discarded postchaise,
a dead donkey, a starling in a cage, or of Uncle Toby putting a house
fly out of the window, and saying, "There is room enough in the world
for thee and me." It is a high proof of his cleverness that he
generally succeeds in raising the desired feeling in his readers even
from such trivial occasions. He was a minute philosopher, his philosophy
was kindly, and he taught the delicate art of making much out of little.
Less coarse than Fielding, he is far more corrupt. Fielding goes bluntly
to the point; Sterne lingers among the temptations and suspends the
expectation to tease and excite it. Forbidden fruit had a relish for
him, and his pages seduce. He is full of good sayings both tender and
witty. It was Sterne, for example, who wrote, "God tempers the wind to
the shorn lamb."
A very different writer was Oliver Goldsmith, whose _Vicar of
Wakefield_, 1766, was the earliest, and is still one of the best, novels
of domestic and rural life. The book, like its author, was thoroughly
Irish, full of bulls and inconsistencies. Very improbable things
happened in it with a cheerful defiance of logic. But its characters are
true to nature, drawn with an idyllic sweetness and purity, and with
touches of a most loving humor. Its hero, Dr. Primrose, was painted
after Goldsmith's father, a poor clergyman of the English Church in
Ireland, and the original, likewise, of the country parson in
Goldsmith's _Deserted Village_, 1770, who was "passing rich on forty
pounds a year." This poem, though written in the fashionable couplet of
Pope, and even containing a few verses contributed by Dr. Johnson--so
that it was not at all in line with the work of the romanticists--did,
perhaps, as much as any thing of Gray or of Collins to recall English
poetry to the simplicity and freshness of country life.
[Illustration: Johnson, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns.]
Except for the comedies of Sheridan and Goldsmith, and, perhaps, a few
other plays, the stage had now utterly declined. The novel, which is
dramatic in essence, though not in form, began to take its place, and to
represent life, though less intensely, yet more minutely than the
theater could do. In the novelists of the 18th century, the life of the
people, as distinguished from "society" or the upper classes, began to
invade literature. Richardson was distinctly a _bourgeois_ writer, and
his contemporaries--Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith--ranged
over a wide variety of ranks and conditions. This is one thing which
distinguishes the literature of the second half of the 18th century from
that of the first, as well as in some degree from that of all previous
centuries. Among the authors of this generation whose writings belonged
to other departments of thought than pure literature may be mentioned,
in passing, the great historian, Edward Gibbon, whose _Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire_ was published from 1776-1788, and Edmund Burke,
whose political speeches and pamphlets possess a true literary quality.
The romantic poets had addressed the imagination rather than the heart.
It was reserved for two men--a contrast to one another in almost every
respect--to bring once more into British song a strong individual
feeling, and with it a new warmth and directness of speech. These were
William Cowper (1731-1800) and Robert Burns (1759-1796). Cowper spoke
out of his own life-experience, his agony, his love, his worship and
despair; and straightway the varnish that had glittered over all our
poetry since the time of Dryden melted away. Cowper had scribbled verses
when he was a young law student at the Middle Temple in London, and he
had contributed to the _Olney Hymns_, published in 1779 by his friend
and pastor, the Rev. John Newton; but he only began to write poetry in
earnest when he was nearly fifty years old. In 1782, the date of his
first volume, he said, in a letter to a friend, that he had read but one
English poet during the past twenty years. Perhaps, therefore, of all
English poets of equal culture, Cowper owed the least impulse to books
and the most to the need of uttering his inmost thoughts and feelings.
Cowper had a most unhappy life. As a child he was shy, sensitive, and
sickly, and suffered much from bullying and fagging at a school whither
he was sent after his mother's death. This happened when he was six
years old; and in his affecting lines written _On Receipt of My
Mother's Picture_, he speaks of himself as a
Wretch even then, life's journey just begun.
In 1763 he became insane and was sent to an asylum, where he spent a
year. Judicious treatment restored him to sanity, but he came out a
broken man and remained for the rest of his life an invalid, unfitted
for any active occupation. His disease took the form of religious
melancholy. He had two recurrences of madness, and both times made
attempts upon his life. At Huntingdon, and afterward at Olney, in
Buckinghamshire, he found a home with the Unwin family, whose kindness
did all which the most soothing and delicate care could do to heal his
wounded spirit. His two poems _To Mary Unwin_, together with the lines
on his mother's picture, were almost the first examples of deep and
tender sentiment in the lyrical poetry of the last century. Cowper found
relief from the black thoughts that beset him only in an ordered round
of quiet household occupations. He corresponded indefatigably, took long
walks through the neighborhood, read, sang, and conversed with Mrs.
Unwin and his friend, Lady Austin, and amused himself with carpentry,
gardening, and raising pets, especially hares, of which gentle animals
he grew very fond. All these simple tastes, in which he found for a time
a refuge and a sheltered happiness, are reflected in his best poem, _The
Task_, 1785. Cowper is the poet of the family affections, of domestic
life, and rural retirement; the laureate of the fireside, the tea-table,
the evening lamp, the garden, the green-house, and the rabbit-coop. He
draws with elegance and precision a chair, a clock, a harpsichord, a
barometer, a piece of needle-work. But Cowper was an outdoor as well as
an indoor man. The Olney landscape was tame, a fat, agricultural region,
where the sluggish Ouse wound between plowed fields and the horizon was
bounded by low hills. Nevertheless Cowper's natural descriptions are at
once more distinct and more imaginative than Thomson's. _The Task_
reflects, also, the new philanthropic spirit, the enthusiasm of
humanity, the feeling of the brotherhood of men to which Rousseau had
given expression in France, and which issued in the French Revolution.
In England this was the time of Wilberforce, the antislavery agitator;
of Whitefield, the eloquent revival preacher; of John and Charles
Wesley, and of the Evangelical and Methodist movements which gave new
life to the English Church. John Newton, the curate of Olney and the
keeper of Cowper's conscience, was one of the leaders of the
Evangelicals; and Cowper's first volume of _Table Talk_ and other poems,
1782, written under Newton's inspiration, was a series of sermons in
verse, somewhat intolerant of all worldly enjoyments, such as hunting,
dancing, and theaters. "God made the country and man made the town," he
wrote. He was a moralizing poet, and his morality was sometimes that of
the invalid and the recluse. Byron called him a "coddled poet." And,
indeed, there is a suspicion of gruel and dressing-gowns about him. He
lived much among women, and his sufferings had refined him to a feminine
delicacy. But there is no sickliness in his poetry, and he retained a
charming playful humor--displayed in his excellent comic ballad _John
Gilpin_; and Mrs. Browning has sung of him,
How, when one by one sweet sounds and wandering lights departed,
He bore no less a loving face, because so broken-hearted.
At the close of the year 1786 a young Scotchman, named Samuel Rose,
called upon Cowper at Olney, and left with him a small volume, which had
appeared at Edinburgh during the past summer, entitled _Poems chiefly in
the Scottish Dialect by Robert Burns_. Cowper read the book through
twice, and, though somewhat bothered by the dialect, pronounced it a
"very extraordinary production." This momentary flash, as of an electric
spark, marks the contact not only of the two chief British poets of
their generation, but of two literatures. Scotch poets, like Thomson and
Beattie, had written in southern English, and, as Carlyle said, _in
vacuo_, that is, with nothing specially national in their work. Burns's
sweet though rugged Doric first secured the vernacular poetry of his
country a hearing beyond the border. He had, to be sure, a whole
literature of popular songs and ballads behind him, and his immediate
models were Allan Ramsay and Robert Ferguson; but these remained
provincial, while Burns became universal.
He was born in Ayrshire, on the banks of "bonny Doon," in a clay biggin
not far from "Alloway's auld haunted kirk," the scene of the witch dance
in _Tam O'Shanter_. His father was a hard-headed, God-fearing tenant
farmer, whose life and that of his sons was a harsh struggle with
poverty. The crops failed; the landlord pressed for his rent; for weeks
at a time the family tasted no meat; yet this life of toil was lightened
by love and homely pleasures. In the _Cotter's Saturday Night_ Burns has
drawn a beautiful picture of his parents' household, the rest that came
at the week's end, and the family worship about the "wee bit ingle,
blinkin' bonnily." Robert was handsome, wild, and witty. He was
universally susceptible, and his first songs, like his last, were of
"the lasses." His head had been stuffed, in boyhood, with "tales and
songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks,
spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights," etc., told him by one
Jenny Wilson, an old woman who lived in the family. His ear was full of
ancient Scottish tunes, and as soon as he fell in love he began to make
poetry as naturally as a bird sings. He composed his verses while
following the plow or working in the stack-yard; or, at evening,
balancing on two legs of his chair and watching the light of a peat fire
play over the reeky walls of the cottage. Burns's love songs are in many
keys, ranging from strains of the most pure and exalted passion, like
_Ae Fond Kiss_ and _To Mary in Heaven_, to such loose ditties as _When
Januar Winds_, and _Green Grow the Rashes O_.
Burns liked a glass almost as well as a lass, and at Mauchline, where
he carried on a farm with his brother Gilbert, after their father's
death, he began to seek a questionable relief from the pressure of daily
toil and unkind fates, in the convivialities of the tavern. There, among
the wits of the Mauchline Club, farmers' sons, shepherds from the
uplands, and the smugglers who swarmed over the west coast, he would
discuss politics and farming, recite his verses, and join in the singing
and ranting, while
Bousin o'er the nappy
And gettin' fou and unco happy.
To these experiences we owe not only those excellent drinking songs,
_John Barleycorn_ and _Willie Brewed a Peck o' Maut_, but the headlong
fun of _Tam O'Shanter_, the visions, grotesquely terrible, of _Death and
Dr. Hornbook_, and the dramatic humor of the _Jolly Beggars_. Cowper had
celebrated "the cup which cheers but not inebriates." Burns sang the
praises of _Scotch Drink_. Cowper was a stranger to Burns's high animal
spirits, and his robust enjoyment of life. He had affections, but no
passions. At Mauchline, Burns, whose irregularities did not escape the
censure of the kirk, became involved, through his friendship with Gavin
Hamilton, in the controversy between the Old Light and New Light clergy.
His _Holy Fair_, _Holy Tulzie_, _Twa Herds_, _Holy Willie's Prayer_, and
_Address to the Unco Gude_, are satires against bigotry and hypocrisy.
But in spite of the rollicking profanity of his language, and the
violence of his rebound against the austere religion of Scotland, Burns
was at bottom deeply impressible by religious ideas, as may be seen from
his _Prayer under the Pressure of Violent Anguish_, and _Prayer in
Prospect of Death_.
His farm turned out a failure, and he was on the eve of sailing for
Jamaica, when the favor with which his volume of poems was received
stayed his departure, and turned his steps to Edinburgh. There the
peasant poet was lionized for a winter season by the learned and polite
society of the Scotch capital, with results in the end not altogether
favorable to Burns's best interests. For when society finally turned the
cold shoulder on him he had to go back to farming again, carrying with
him a bitter sense of injustice and neglect. He leased a farm at
Ellisland, in 1788, and some friends procured his appointment as
exciseman for his district. But poverty, disappointment, irregular
habits, and broken health clouded his last years, and brought him to an
untimely death at the age of thirty-seven. He continued, however, to
pour forth songs of unequaled sweetness and force. "The man sank," said
Coleridge, "but the poet was bright to the last."
Burns is the best of British song-writers. His songs are singable; they
are not merely lyrical poems. They were meant to be sung, and they are
sung. They were mostly set to old Scottish airs, and sometimes they were
built up from ancient fragments of anonymous popular poetry, a chorus,
or stanza, or even a single line. Such are, for example, _Auld Lang
Syne_, _My Heart's in the Highlands_, and _Landlady, Count the Lawin_.
Burns had a great, warm heart. His sins were sins of passion, and sprang
from the same generous soil that nourished his impulsive virtues. His
elementary qualities as a poet were sincerity, a healthy openness to all
impressions of the beautiful, and a sympathy which embraced men,
animals, and the dumb objects of nature. His tenderness toward flowers
and the brute creation may be read in his lines _To a Mountain Daisy_,
_To a Mouse_, and _The Auld Farmer's New Year's Morning Salutation to
his Auld Mare Maggie_. Next after love and good fellowship, patriotism
is the most frequent motive of his song. Of his national anthem, _Scots
wha hae wi' Wallace bled_, Carlyle said: "So long as there is warm blood
in the heart of Scotchman, or man, it will move in fierce thrills under
this war ode."
Burns's politics were a singular mixture of sentimental Toryism with
practical democracy. A romantic glamour was thrown over the fortunes of
the exiled Stuarts, and to have been "out" in '45 with the Young
Pretender was a popular thing in parts of Scotland. To this purely
poetic loyalty may be attributed such Jacobite ballads of Burns as _Over
the Water to Charlie_. But his sober convictions were on the side of
liberty and human brotherhood, and are expressed in _The Twa Dogs_, the
_First Epistle to Davie_, and _A Man's a Man for a' that_. His sympathy
with the Revolution led him to send four pieces of ordnance, taken from
a captured smuggler, as a present to the French Convention, a piece of
bravado which got him into difficulties with his superiors in the
excise. The poetry which Burns wrote, not in dialect, but in the
classical English, is in the stilted manner of his century, and his
prose correspondence betrays his lack of culture by its constant lapse
into rhetorical affectation and fine writing.
* * * * *
1. James Thomson. The Castle of Indolence.
2. The Poems of Thomas Gray.
3. William Collins. Odes.
4. The Six Chief Lives from Johnson's Lives of the Poets.
Edited by Matthew Arnold. Macmillan, 1878.
5. Boswell's Life of Johnson [abridged]. Henry Holt &
Co., 1878.
6. Samuel Richardson. Clarissa Harlowe.
7. Henry Fielding. Tom Jones.
8. Tobias Smollett. Humphrey Clinker.
9. Lawrence Sterne. Tristram Shandy.
10. Oliver Goldsmith. Vicar of Wakefield and Deserted
Village.
11. William Cowper. The Task and John Gilpin. (Globe
Edition.) London: Macmillan & Co., 1879.
12. The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns. (Globe
Edition.) London: Macmillan & Co., 1884.