DR. JOHNSON AND HIS TIME
By 1730 the authors whose work made the "classic" school in England were
dead or had ceased writing; by the same date Samuel Johnson had begun
his career as a man of letters. The difference between the period of his
maturity and the period we have been examining is not perhaps easy to
define; but it exists and it can be felt unmistakably in reading. For
one thing "Classicism" had become completely naturalized; it had ceased
to regard the French as arbiters of elegance and literary taste; indeed
Johnson himself never spoke of them without disdain and hated them as
much as he hated Scotsmen. Writing, like dress and the common way of
life, became plainer and graver and thought stronger and deeper. In
manners and speech something of the brutalism which was at the root of
the English character at the time began to colour the refinement of the
preceding age. Dilettantism gave way to learning and speculation; in the
place of Bolingbroke came Adam Smith; in the place of Addison, Johnson.
In a way it is the solidest and sanest time in English letters. Yet in
the midst of its urbanity and order forces were gathering for its
destruction. The ballad-mongers were busy; Blake was drawing and
rhyming; Burns was giving songs and lays to his country-side. In the
distance--Johnson could not hear them--sounded, like the horns of
elf-land faintly blowing, the trumpet calls of romance.
If the whole story of Dr. Johnson's life were the story of his published
books it would be very difficult to understand his pre-eminent and
symbolic position in literary history. His best known work--it still
remains so--was his dictionary, and dictionaries, for all the licence
they give and Johnson took for the expression of a personality, are the
business of purely mechanical talents. A lesser man than he might have
cheated us of such delights as the definitions of "oats," or "net" or
"pension," but his book would certainly have been no worse as a book. In
his early years he wrote two satires in verse in imitation of Juvenal;
they were followed later by two series of periodical essays on the model
of the _Spectator_; neither of them--the _Rambler_ nor the _Idler_--were
at all successful. _Rasselas_, a tale with a purpose, is melancholy
reading; the _Journey to the Western Hebrides_ has been utterly eclipsed
by Boswell's livelier and more human chronicle of the same events. The
_Lives of the Poets_, his greatest work, was composed with pain and
difficulty when he was seventy years old; even it is but a quarry from
which a reader may dig the ore of a sound critical judgment summing up
a life's reflection, out of the grit and dust of perfunctory
biographical compilations. There was hardly one of the literary coterie
over which he presided that was not doing better and more lasting work.
Nothing that Johnson wrote is to be compared, for excellence in its own
manner, with _Tom Jones_ or the _Vicar of Wakefield_ or the _Citizen of
the World_. He produced nothing in writing approaching the magnitude of
Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, or the profundity of
Burke's philosophy of politics. Even Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose main
business was painting and not the pen, was almost as good an author as
he; his _Discourses_ have little to fear when they are set beside
Johnson's essays. Yet all these men recognised him as their guide and
leader; the spontaneous selection of such a democratic assembly as men
of genius in a tavern fixed upon him as chairman, and we in these later
days, who are safe from the overpowering force of personality
and presence--or at least can only know of it reflected in
books--instinctively recognize him as the greatest man of his age. What
is the reason?
Johnson's pre-eminence is the pre-eminence of character. He was a great
moralist; he summed up in himself the tendencies of thought and
literature of his time and excelled all others in his grasp of them; and
he was perhaps more completely than any one else in the whole history of
English literature, the typical Englishman. He was one of those to whom
is applicable the commonplace that he was greater than his books. It is
the fashion nowadays among some critics to speak of his biographer
Boswell as if he were a novelist or a playwright and to classify the
Johnson we know with Hamlet and Don Quixote as the product of creative
or imaginative art, working on a "lost original." No exercise of
critical ingenuity could be more futile or impertinent. The impression
of the solidity and magnitude of Johnson's character which is to be
gathered from Boswell is enforced from other sources; from his essays
and his prayers and meditations, from the half-dozen or so lives and
reminiscences which were published in the years following his death
(their very number establishing the reverence with which he was
regarded), from the homage of other men whose genius their books leave
indisputable. Indeed the Johnson we know from Boswell, though it is the
broadest and most masterly portrait in the whole range of biography,
gives less than the whole magnitude of the man. When Boswell first met
him at the age of twenty-two, Johnson was fifty-four. His long period of
poverty and struggle was past. His _Dictionary_ and all his works except
the _Lives of the Poets_ were behind him; a pension from the Crown had
established him in security for his remaining years; his position was
universally acknowledged. So that though the portrait in the _Life_ is a
full-length study of Johnson the conversationalist and literary
dictator, the proportion it preserves is faulty and its study of the
early years--the years of poverty, of the _Vanity of Human Wishes_ and
_London_, of _Rasselas_, which he wrote to pay the expenses of his
mother's funeral, is slight.
It was, however, out of the bitterness and struggle of these early
years that the strength and sincerity of character which carried Johnson
surely and tranquilly through the time of his triumph were derived. From
the beginning he made no compromise with the world and no concession to
fashion. The world had to take him at his own valuation or not at all.
He never deviated one hair's breadth from the way he had chosen. Judged
by the standards of journalistic success, the _Rambler_ could not well
be worse than he made it. Compared with the lightness and gaiety and the
mere lip-service to morality of Addison its edification is ponderous.
Both authors state the commonplaces of conduct, but Addison achieves
lightness in the doing of it, and his manner by means of which
platitudes are stated lightly and pointedly and with an air of novelty,
is the classic manner of journalism. Johnson goes heavily and directly
to the point, handling well worn moral themes in general and dogmatic
language without any attempt to enliven them with an air of discovery or
surprise. Yet they were, in a sense, discoveries to him; not one of them
but was deeply and sincerely felt; not one but is not a direct and to us
a pathetically dispassionate statement of the reflection of thirty years
of grinding poverty and a soul's anguish. Viewed in the light of his
life, the _Rambler_ is one of the most moving of books. If its literary
value is slight it is a document in character.
So that when he came to his own, when gradually the public whom he
despised and neglected raised him into a pontifical position matched by
none before him in England and none since save Carlyle, he was sure of
himself; success did not spoil him. His judgment was unwarped by
flattery. The almost passionate tenderness and humanity which lay
beneath his gruffness was undimmed. His personality triumphed in all the
fullness and richness which had carried it in integrity through his
years of struggle. For over twenty years from his chair in taverns in
the Strand and Fleet Street he ruled literary London, imposed his
critical principles on the great body of English letters, and by his
talk and his friendships became the embodiment of the literary
temperament of his age.
His talk as it is set down by Boswell is his best monument. It was the
happiest possible fate that threw those two men together, for Boswell
besides being an admirer and reporter sedulously chronicling all his
master said and did, fortunately influenced both the saying and the
doing. Most of us have some one in whose company we best shine, who puts
our wits on their mettle and spurs us to our greatest readiness and
vivacity. There is no doubt that Boswell, for all his assumed humility
and for all Johnson's affected disdain, was just such a companion for
Johnson. Johnson was at his best when Boswell was present, and Boswell
not only drew Johnson out on subjects in which his robust common sense
and readiness of judgment were fitted to shine but actually suggested
and conducted that tour in Scotland which gave Johnson an opportunity
for displaying himself at his best. The recorded talk is
extraordinarily varied and entertaining. It is a mistake to conceive
Johnson as a monster of bear-like rudeness, shouting down opposition,
hectoring his companions, and habitually a blustering verbal bully. We
are too easily hypnotized by Macaulay's flashy caricature. He could be
merciless in argument and often wrongheaded and he was always acute,
uncomfortably acute, in his perception of a fallacy, and a little
disconcerting in his unmasking of pretence. But he could be gay and
tender too and in his heart he was a shrinking and sensitive man.
As a critic (his criticism is the only side of his literary work that
need be considered), Johnson must be allowed a high place. His natural
indolence in production had prevented him from exhausting his faculties
in the more exacting labours of creative work, and it had left him time
for omnivorous if desultory reading, the fruits of which he stored in a
wonderfully retentive memory against an occasion for their use. To a
very fully equipped mind he brought the service of a robust and acute
judgment. Moreover when he applied his mind to a subject he had a
faculty of intense, if fitful concentration; he could seize with great
force on the heart of a matter; he had the power in a wonderfully short
time of extracting the kernel and leaving the husk. His judgments in
writing are like those recorded by Boswell from his conversation; that
is to say he does not, as a critic whose medium was normally the pen
rather than the tongue would tend to do, search for fine shades of
distinction, subdivide subtleties, or be careful to admit _caveats_ or
exceptions; he passes, on the contrary, rapid and forcible verdicts,
not seldom in their assertions untenably sweeping, and always decided
and dogmatic. He never affects diffidence or defers to the judgments of
others. His power of concentration, of seizing on essentials, has given
us his best critical work--nothing could be better, for instance, than
his characterisation of the poets whom he calls the metaphysical school
(Donne, Crashaw, and the rest) which is the most valuable part of his
life of Cowley. Even where he is most prejudiced--for instance in his
attack on Milton's _Lycidas_--there is usually something to be said for
his point of view. And after this concentration, his excellence depends
on his basic common sense. His classicism is always tempered, like
Dryden's, by a humane and sensible dislike of pedantry; he sets no store
by the unities; in his preface to Shakespeare he allows more than a
"classic" could have been expected to admit, writing in it, in truth,
some of the manliest and wisest things in Shakespearean literature. Of
course, he had his failings--the greatest of them what Lamb called
imperfect sympathy. He could see no good in republicans or agnostics,
and none in Scotland or France. Not that the phrase "imperfect
sympathy," which expresses by implication the romantic critic's point of
view, would have appealed to him. When Dr. Johnson did not like people
the fault was in them, not in him; a ruthless objectivity is part of the
classic equipment. He failed, too, because he could neither understand
nor appreciate poetry which concerned itself with the sensations that
come from external nature. Nature was to him a closed book, very likely
for a purely physical reason. He was short-sighted to the point of
myopia, and a landscape meant nothing to him; when he tried to describe
one as he did in the chapter on the "happy valley" in _Rasselas_ he
failed. What he did not see he could not appreciate; perhaps it is too
much to ask of his self-contained and unbending intellect that he should
appreciate the report of it by other men.
(2)
As we have seen, Johnson was not only great in himself, he was great in
his friends. Round him, meeting him as an equal, gathered the greatest
and most prolific writers of the time. There is no better way to study
the central and accepted men of letters of the period than to take some
full evening at the club from Boswell, read a page or two, watch what
the talkers said, and then trace each back to his own works for a
complete picture of his personality. The lie of the literary landscape
in this wonderful time will become apparent to you as you read. You will
find Johnson enthroned, Boswell at his ear, round him men like Reynolds
and Burke, Richardson and Fielding and Goldsmith, Robertson and Gibbon,
and occasionally drawn to the circle minnows like Beattie and a genius
like Adam Smith. Gray, studious in his college at Cambridge, is
exercising his fastidious talent; Collins' sequestered, carefully
nurtured muse is silent; a host of minor poets are riding Pope's poetic
diction, and heroic couplet to death. Outside scattered about is the
van of Romance--Percy collecting his ballads; Burns making songs and
verses in Scotland; the "mad" people, Smart and Chatterton, and above
all Blake, obscurely beginning the work that was to finish in Wordsworth
and Coleridge and Keats.
Of Johnson's set the most remarkable figure was Edmund Burke--"the
supreme writer," as De Quincey called him, "of his century." His
writings belong more to the history of politics than to that of
literature, and a close examination of them would be out of place here.
His political theory strikes a middle course which offends--and in his
own day offended--both parties in the common strife of political
thinking. He believed the best government to consist in a patriotic
aristocracy, ruling for the good of the people. By birth an Irishman, he
had the innate practicality which commonly lies beneath the flash and
colour of Irish forcefulness and rhetoric. That, and his historical
training, which influenced him in the direction of conceiving every
institution as the culmination of an evolutionary development, sent him
directly counter to the newest and most enthusiastically urged political
philosophy of his day--the philosophy stated by Rousseau, and put in
action by the French Revolution. He disliked and distrusted
"metaphysical theories," when they left the field of speculation for
that of practice, had no patience with "natural rights" (which as an
Irishman he conceived as the product of sentimentalism) and applied what
would nowadays be called a "pragmatic" test to political affairs.
Practice was the touchstone; a theory was useless unless you could prove
that it had worked. It followed that he was not a democrat, opposed
parliamentary reform, and held that the true remedy for corruption and
venality was not to increase the size of the electorate, but to reduce
it so as to obtain electors of greater weight and independence. For him
a member of Parliament was a representative and not a delegate, and must
act not on his elector's wishes but on his own judgment. These opinions
are little in fashion in our own day, but it is well to remember that in
Burke's case they were the outcome not of prejudice but of thought, and
that even democracy may admit they present a case that must be met and
answered.
Burke's reputation as a thinker has suffered somewhat unjustly as a
result of his refusal to square his tenets either with democracy or with
its opposite. It has been said that ideas were only of use to him so far
as they were of polemical service, that the amazing fertility and
acuteness of his mind worked only in a not too scrupulous determination
to overwhelm his antagonists in the several arguments--on India, or
America, on Ireland or on France--which made up his political career. He
was, said Carlyle, "vehement rather than earnest; a resplendent
far-sighted rhetorician, rather than a deep and earnest thinker." The
words as they stand would be a good description of a certain type of
politician; they would fit, for instance, very well on Mr. Gladstone;
but they do Burke less than justice. He was an innovator in modern
political thought, and his application of the historical method to the
study of institutions is in its way a not less epoch-making achievement
than Bacon's application of the inductive method to science. At a time
when current political thought, led by Rousseau, was drawing its
theories from the abstract conception of "natural rights" Burke was
laying down that sounder and deeper notion of politics which has
governed thinking in that department of knowledge since. Besides this,
he had face to face with the affairs of his own day, a far-sightedness
and sagacity which kept him right where other men went wrong. In a
nation of the blind he saw the truth about the American colonies; he
predicted with exactitude the culmination of the revolution in Napoleon.
Mere rhetorical vehemence cannot explain the earnestness with which in a
day of diplomatic cynicism he preached the doctrine of an international
morality as strict and as binding as the morality which exists between
man and man. Surest of all, we have the testimony, uninfluenced by the
magic of language, of the men he met. You could not, said Dr. Johnson,
shelter with him in a shed for a few moments from the rain without
saying, "This is an extraordinary man."
His literary position depends chiefly on his amazing gift of expression,
on a command of language unapproached by any writer of his time. His
eloquence (in writing not in speaking; he is said to have had a
monotonous delivery) was no doubt at bottom a matter of race, but to his
Irish readiness and flash and colour he added the strength of a full
mind, fortified by a wonderful store of reading which a retentive and
exact memory enabled him to bring instantly to bear on the subject in
hand. No writer before him, except Defoe, had such a wide knowledge of
the technicalities of different men's occupations, and of all sorts of
the processes of daily business, nor could enlighten an abstract matter
with such a wealth of luminous analogy. It is this characteristic of his
style which has led to the common comparison of his writing with
Shakespeare's; both seem to be preternaturally endowed with more
information, to have a wider sweep of interest than ordinary men. Both
were not only, as Matthew Arnold said of Burke, "saturated with ideas,"
but saturated too in the details of the business and desire of ordinary
men's lives; nothing human was alien from them. Burke's language is,
therefore, always interesting and always appropriate to his thought; it
is also on occasion very beautiful. He had a wonderful command of clear
and ringing utterance and could appeal when he liked very powerfully to
the sensibilities of his readers. Rhetoricians are seldom free from
occasional extravagance, and Burke fell under the common danger of his
kind. He had his moments of falsity, could heap coarse and outrageous
abuse on Warren Hastings, illustrate the horrors of the Revolution by
casting a dagger on the floor of the House of Commons, and nourish
hatred beyond the bounds of justice or measure. But these things do not
affect his position, nor take from the solid greatness of his work.
Boswell we have seen; after Burke and Boswell, Goldsmith was the most
brilliant member of the Johnson circle. If part of Burke's genius is
referable to his nationality, Goldsmith's is wholly so. The beginning
and the end of him was Irish; every quality he possessed as a man and as
a writer belongs to his race. He had the Irish carelessness, the Irish
generosity, the Irish quick temper, the Irish humour. This latter gift,
displayed constantly in a company which had little knowledge of the
peculiar quality of Irish wit and no faculty of sympathy or imagination,
is at the bottom of the constant depreciation of him on the part of
Boswell and others of his set. His mock self-importance they thought
ill-breeding; his humorous self-depreciation and keen sense of his own
ridiculousness, mere lack of dignity and folly. It is curious to read
Boswell and watch how often Goldsmith, without Boswell's knowing it, got
the best of the joke. In writing he had what we can now recognise as
peculiarly Irish gifts. All our modern writers of light half-farcical
comedy are Irish. Goldsmith's _She Stoops to Conquer_, is only the first
of a series which includes _The School for Scandal, The Importance of
being Earnest_, and _You Never can Tell_. And his essays--particularly
those of the _Citizen of the World_ with its Chinese vision of England
and English life--are the first fruit of that Irish detachment, that
ability to see "normally" English habits and institutions and foibles
which in our own day has given us the prefaces of Mr. Shaw. As a writer
Goldsmith has a lightness and delicate ease which belongs rather to the
school of the earlier eighteenth century than to his own day; the
enthusiasm of Addison for French literature which he retained gave him a
more graceful model than the "Johnsonian" school, to which he professed
himself to belong, could afford.
(3)
The eighteenth century novel demands separate treatment, and of the
other prose authors the most eminent, Edward Gibbon, belongs to
historical rather than to literary studies. It is time to turn to
poetry.
There orthodox classicism still held sway; the manner and metre of Pope
or Thomson ruled the roost of singing fowl. In the main it had done its
work, and the bulk of fresh things conceived in it were dull and
imitative, even though occasionally, as in the poems of Johnson himself
and of Goldsmith, an author arose who was able to infuse sincerity and
emotion into a now moribund convention. The classic manner--now more
that of Thomson than of Pope--persisted till it overlapped romanticism;
Cowper and Crabbe each owe a doubtful allegiance, leaning by their
formal metre and level monotony of thought to the one and by their
realism to the other. In the meantime its popularity and its assured
position were beginning to be assailed in the coteries by the work of
two new poets.
The output of Thomas Gray and William Collins is small; you might almost
read the complete poetical works of either in an evening. But for all
that they mark a period; they are the first definite break with the
classic convention which had been triumphant for upwards of seventy
years when their prime came. It is a break, however, in style rather
than in essentials, and a reader who seeks in them the inspiriting
freshness which came later with Wordsworth and Coleridge will be
disappointed. Their carefully drawn still wine tastes insipidly after
the "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" of romance. They are fastidious
and academic; they lack the authentic fire; their poetry is "made"
poetry like Tennyson's and Matthew Arnold's. On their comparative merits
a deal of critical ink has been spilt, Arnold's characterisation of Gray
is well known--"he never spoke out." Sterility fell upon him because he
lived in an age of prose just as it fell upon Arnold himself because he
lived too much immersed in business and routine. But in what he wrote he
had the genuine poetic gift--the gift of insight and feeling. Against
this, Swinburne with characteristic vehemence raised the standard of
Collins, the latchet of whose shoe Gray, as a lyric poet, was not worthy
to unloose. "The muse gave birth to Collins, she did but give suck to
Gray." It is more to our point to observe that neither, though their
work abounds in felicities and in touches of a genuine poetic sense, was
fitted to raise the standard of revolt. Revolution is for another and
braver kind of genius than theirs. Romanticism had to wait for Burns and
Blake.
In every country at any one time there are in all probability not one
but several literatures flourishing. The main stream flowing through
the publishers and booksellers, conned by critics and coteries,
recognized as the national literature, is commonly only the largest of
several channels of thought. There are besides the national literature
local literatures--books, that is, are published which enjoy popularity
and critical esteem in their own county or parish and are utterly
unknown outside; there may even be (indeed, there are in several parts
of the country) distinct local schools of writing and dynasties of local
authors. These localized literatures rarely become known to the outside
world; the national literature takes little account of them, though
their existence and probably some special knowledge of one or other of
them is within the experience of most of us. But every now and again
some one of their authors transcends his local importance, gives
evidence of a genius which is not to be denied even by those who
normally have not the knowledge to appreciate the particular flavour of
locality which his writings impart, and becomes a national figure. While
he lives and works the national and his local stream turn and flow
together.
This was the case of Robert Burns. All his life long he was the singer
of a parish--the last of a long line of "forbears" who had used the
Scottish lowland vernacular to rhyme in about their neighbours and their
scandals, their loves and their church. Himself at the confluence of the
two streams, the national and the local, he pays his tribute to two sets
of originals, talks with equal reverence of names known to us like Pope
and Gray and Shenstone and names unknown which belonged to local
"bards," as he would have called them, who wrote their poems for an
Ayrshire public. If he came upon England as an innovator it was simply
because he brought with him the highly individualized style of Scottish
local vernacular verse; to his own people he was no innovator but a
fulfilment; as his best critic[5] says he brought nothing to the
literature he became a part of but himself. His daring and splendid
genius made the local universal, raised out of rough and cynical
satirizing a style as rich and humorous and astringent as that of
Rabelais, lent inevitableness and pathos and romance to lyric and song.
But he was content to better the work of other men. He made hardly
anything new.
[Footnote 5: W.E. Henley, "Essay on Burns." Works, David Nutt.]
Stevenson in his essay on Burns remarks his readiness to use up the work
of others or take a large hint from it "as if he had some difficulty in
commencing." He omits to observe that the very same trait applies to
other great artists. There seem to be two orders of creative writers. On
the one hand are the innovators, the new men like Blake, Wordsworth,
Byron and Shelley, and later Browning. These men owe little to their
predecessors; they work on their own devices and construct their medium
afresh for themselves. Commonly their fame and acceptance is slow, for
they speak in an unfamiliar tongue and they have to educate a generation
to understand their work. The other order of artists have to be shown
the way. They have little fertility in construction or invention. You
have to say to them "Here is something that you could do too; go and do
it better," or "Here is a story to work on, or a refrain of a song; take
it and give it your subtlety, your music." The villainy you teach them
they will use and it will go hard with them if they do not better the
invention; but they do not invent for themselves. To this order of
artists Burns like Shakespeare, and among the lesser men Tennyson,
belongs. In all his plays Shakespeare is known to have invented only one
plot; in many he is using not only the structure but in many places the
words devised by an older author; his mode of treatment depends on the
conventions common in his day, on the tragedy of blood, and madness and
revenge, on the comedy of intrigue and disguises, on the romance with
its strange happenings and its reuniting of long parted friends. Burns
goes the same way to work; scarcely a page of his but shows traces of
some original in the Scottish vernacular school. The elegy, the verse
epistle, the satirical form of _Holy Willie's Prayer_, the song and
recitative of _The Jolly Beggars_, are all to be found in his
predecessors, in Fergusson, Ramsay, and the local poets of the
south-west of Scotland. In the songs often whole verses, nearly always
the refrains, are from older folk poetry. What he did was to pour into
these forms the incomparable richness of a personality whose fire and
brilliance and humour transcended all locality and all tradition, a
personality which strode like a colossus over the formalism and
correctness of his time. His use of familiar forms explains, more than
anything else, his immediate fame. His countrymen were ready for him;
they could hail him on the instant (just as an Elizabethan audience
could hail Shakespeare) as something familiar and at the same time more
splendid than anything they knew. He spoke in a tongue they could
understand.
It is impossible to judge Burns from his purely English verse; though he
did it as well as any of the minor followers of the school of Pope he
did it no better. Only the weakest side of his character--his
sentimentalism--finds expression in it; he had not the sense of
tradition nor the intimate knowledge necessary to use English to the
highest poetic effect; it was indeed a foreign tongue to him. In the
vernacular he wrote the language he spoke, a language whose natural
force and colour had become enriched by three centuries of literary use,
which was capable, too, of effects of humour and realism impossible in
any tongue spoken out of reach of the soil. It held within it an
unmatched faculty for pathos, a capacity for expressing a lambent and
kindly humour, a power of pungency in satire and a descriptive vividness
that English could not give. How express in the language of Pope or even
of Wordsworth an effect like this:--
"They reeled, they set, they cross'd, they cleekit,
Till ilka carlin swat and reekit,
And coost her duddies to the wark,
And linket at it in her sark."
or this--
"Yestreen when to the trembling string,
The dance gaed thro' the lighted ha'
To thee my fancy took its wing--
I sat but neither heard nor saw:
Tho' this was fair, and that was braw,
And yon the toast of a' the toun,
I sigh'd and said amang them a',
You are na Mary Morison."
It may be objected that in all this there is only one word, and but two
or three forms of words that are not English. But the accent, the
rhythm, the air of it are all Scots, and it was a Burns thinking in his
native tongue who wrote it, not the Burns of
"Anticipation forward points the view ";
or
"Pleasures are like poppies spread,
You grasp the flower, the bloom is shed."
or any other of the exercises in the school of Thomson and Pope.
It is easy to see that though Burns admired unaffectedly the "classic"
writers, his native realism and his melody made him a potent agent in
the cause of naturalism and romance. In his ideas, even more than in his
style, he belongs to the oncoming school. The French Revolution, which
broke upon Europe when he was at the height of his career, found him
already converted to its principles. As a peasant, particularly a Scotch
peasant, he believed passionately in the native worth of man as man and
gave ringing expression to it in his verse. In his youth his
liberal-mindedness made him a Jacobite out of mere antagonism to the
existing régime; the Revolution only discovered for him the more
logical Republican creed. As the leader of a loose-living, hard drinking
set, such as was to be found in every parish, he was a determined and
free-spoken enemy of the kirk, whose tyranny he several times
encountered. In his writing he is as vehement an anti-clerical as
Shelley and much more practical. The political side of romanticism, in
fact, which in England had to wait for Byron and Shelley, is already
full-grown in his work. He anticipates and gives complete expression to
one half of the Romantic movement.
What Burns did for the idea of liberty, Blake did for that and every
other idea current among Wordsworth and his successors. There is nothing
stranger in the history of English literature than the miracle by which
this poet and artist, working in obscurity, utterly unknown to the
literary world that existed outside him, summed up in himself all the
thoughts and tendencies which were the fruit of anxious discussion and
propaganda on the part of the authors--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb--who
believed themselves to be the discoverers of fresh truth unknown to
their generation. The contemporary and independent discovery by Wallace
and Darwin of the principle of natural selection furnishes, perhaps, a
rough parallel, but the fact serves to show how impalpable and universal
is the spread of ideas, how impossible it is to settle literary
indebtedness or construct literary genealogy with any hope of accuracy.
Blake, by himself, held and expressed quite calmly that condemnation of
the "classic" school that Wordsworth and Coleridge proclaimed against
the opposition of a deriding world. As was his habit he compressed it
into a rude epigram,
"Great things are done when men and mountains meet;
This is not done by jostling in the street."
The case for nature against urbanity could not be more tersely nor
better put. The German metaphysical doctrine which was the deepest part
of the teaching of Wordsworth and Coleridge and their main discovery, he
expresses as curtly and off-handedly,
"The sun's light when he unfolds it,
Depends on the organ that beholds it."
In the realm of childhood and innocence, which Wordsworth entered
fearfully and pathetically as an alien traveller, he moves with the
simple and assured ease of one native. He knows the mystical wonder and
horror that Coleridge set forth in _The Ancient Mariner_. As for the
beliefs of Shelley, they are already fully developed in his poems. "The
king and the priest are types of the oppressor; humanity is crippled by
"mind-forg'd manacles"; love is enslaved to the moral law, which is
broken by the Saviour of mankind; and, even more subtly than by Shelley,
life is pictured by Blake as a deceit and a disguise veiling from us the
beams of the Eternal."[6]
[Footnote 6: Prof. Raleigh.]
In truth, Blake, despite the imputation of insanity which was his
contemporaries' and has later been his commentators' refuge from
assenting to his conclusions, is as bold a thinker in his own way as
Neitzsche and as consistent. An absolute unity of belief inspires all
his utterances, cryptic and plain. That he never succeeded in founding a
school nor gathering followers must be put down in the first place to
the form in which his work was issued (it never reached the public of
his own day) and the dark and mysterious mythology in which the
prophetic books which are the full and extended statement of his
philosophy, are couched, and in the second place to the inherent
difficulty of the philosophy itself. As he himself says, where we read
black, he reads white. For the common distinction between good and evil,
Blake substitutes the distinction between imagination and reason; and
reason, the rationalizing, measuring, comparing faculty by which we come
to impute praise or blame is the only evil in his eyes. "There is
nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so;" to rid the world
of thinking, to substitute for reason, imagination, and for thought,
vision, was the object of all that he wrote or drew. The implications of
this philosophy carry far, and Blake was not afraid to follow where they
led him. Fortunately for those who hesitate to embark on that dark and
adventurous journey, his work contains delightful and simpler things. He
wrote lyrics of extraordinary freshness and delicacy and spontaneity; he
could speak in a child's voice of innocent joys and sorrows and the
simple elemental things. His odes to "Spring" and "Autumn" are the
harbingers of Keats. Not since Shakespeare and Campion died could
English show songs like his
"My silks and fine array."
and the others which carry the Elizabethan accent. He could write these
things as well as the Elizabethans. In others he was unique.
"Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry."
In all the English lyric there is no voice so clear, so separate or
distinctive as his.