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 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 _Beggar's Opera_ or a _Rape of the {194} 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 1726-30, 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 much of 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 lameness 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 1747-57,
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 {195} 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 a taste for old ballads. Richard Hurd's
_Letters on Chivalry and Romance_, Thomas Warton's _History of English
Poetry_, 1774-78, 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 mediaeval 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 {196} 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 upon 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 descends 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 {197} 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 {198} 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 Elisabethan writers.
Thomas Warton published, in 1753, his _Observations on the Faerie
Queene_. Beattie's _Minstrel_, Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_,
William Shenstone's _Schoolmistress_, and John Dyer's _Fleece_, 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_. The _Fleece_ was a poem 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, {199}
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 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 {200} 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 {201} 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, regular
parterres, etc., 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 MSS., 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 printed, in 1757. Both Gray and Walpole were
good correspondents, and their printed letters are among the most
delightful literature of the kind.
{202} The central figure among the English men of letters of that
generation was Samuel Johnson (1709-84), 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 {203} 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 {204} 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 Villier's _Rehearsal_,
Johnson said, "It has not wit enough to keep it sweet;" then paused and
{205} 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_, 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_, {206} 1748, was the tragical
history of a high spirited young lady, who being driven from 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 of 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 that current
{207} 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.
This 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 awhile in much
splendor as a {208} country gentleman, and afterward in a reduced
condition as a rural justice with a salary of 500 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 {209} 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 Blas_ in 1735, are very perceptible
in Smollett.
A genius of much finer mold was Lawrence Sterne, the author of
_Tristram Shandy_, 1759-67, 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. {210} 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 titilation 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 {211} 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.
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 {212}
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 1776-88, 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
(1759-96). 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
{213} 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 {214}
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 out-door as well as an in-door 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; {215} 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 {216} 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 {217} 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 {218} Brewed a Peck o' Maut_, but the
headlong fun of _Tam O'Shanter_, and 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_,
_Two 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 {219} him, he had to go back to farming again,
carrying with him a bitter sense of injustice and neglect. He leased a
farm in 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 {220} 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 his
constant lapse into rhetorical affectation and fine writing.
1. T. S. Perry's English Literature in the Eighteenth Century.
2. James Thomson. The Castle of Indolence.
3. The Poems of Thomas Gray.
{221}
4. William Collins. Odes.
5. The Six Chief Lives from Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Edited by
Matthew Arnold. Macmillan, 1878.
6. Boswell's Life of Johnson [abridged]. Henry Holt & Co., 1878.
7. Samuel Richardson. Clarissa Harlowe.
8. Henry Fielding. Tom Jones.
9. Tobias Smollett. Humphrey Clinker.
10. Lawrence Sterne. Tristram Shandy.
11. Oliver Goldsmith. Vicar of Wakefield and Deserted Village.
12. William Cowper. The Task and John Gilpin.
13. The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns.
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