The Augustans
The Romantic Movement in England was a part of the general European
reaction against the spirit of the eighteenth century. This began
somewhat earlier in England than in Germany, and very much earlier than
in France, where literacy conservatism went strangely hand in hand with
political radicalism. In England the reaction was at first gradual,
timid, and unconscious. It did not reach importance until the seventh
decade of the century, and culminated only in the early years of the
nineteenth century. The medieval revival was only an incident--though a
leading incident--of this movement; but it is the side of it with which
the present work will mainly deal. Thus I shall have a great deal to say
about Scott; very little about Byron, intensely romantic as he was in
many meanings of the word. This will not preclude me from glancing
occasionally at other elements besides medievalism which enter into the
concept of the term "romantic."
Reverting then to our tentative definition--Heine's definition--of
romanticism, as the reproduction in modern art and literature of the life
of the Middle Ages, it should be explained that the expression, "Middle
Ages," is to be taken here in a liberal sense. Contributions to romantic
literature such as Macpherson's "Ossian," Collins' "Ode on the
Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands," and Gray's translations form
the Welsh and the Norse, relate to periods which antedate that era of
Christian chivalry and feudalism, extending roughly from the eleventh
century to the fifteenth, to which the term, "Middle Ages," more strictly
applies. The same thing is true of the ground-work, at least, of ancient
hero-epics like "Beowulf" and the "Nibelungen Lied," of the Icelandic
"Sagas," and of similar products of old heathen Europe which have come
down in the shape of mythologies, popular superstitions, usages, rites,
songs, and traditions. These began to fall under the notice of scholars
about the middle of the last century and made a deep impression upon
contemporary letters.
Again, the influence of the Middle Age proper prolonged itself beyond the
exact close of the medieval period, which it is customary to date from
the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The great romantic poets of Italy,
Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, wrote in the full flush of the pagan revival and
made free use of the Greek and Roman mythologies and the fables of Homer,
Vergil, and Ovid; and yet their work is hardly to be described as
classical. Nor is the work of their English disciples, Spenser and
Sidney; while the entire Spanish and English drama of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries (down to 1640, and with an occasional exception,
like Ben Jonson) is romantic. Calderon is romantic; Shakspere and
Fletcher are romantic. If we agree to regard medieval literature, then,
as comprising all the early literature of Europe which drew its
inspiration from other than Greek-Latin sources, we shall do no great
violence to the usual critical employment of the word. I say _early_
literature, in order to exclude such writings as are wholly modern, like
"Robinson Crusoe," or "Gulliver's Travels," or Fielding's novels, which
are neither classic nor romantic, but are the original creation of our
own time. With works like these, though they are perhaps the most
characteristic output of the eighteenth century, our inquiries are not
concerned.
It hardly needs to be said that the reproduction, or imitation, of
mediaeval life by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romanticists,
contains a large admixture of modern thought and feeling. The brilliant
pictures of feudal society in the romances of Scott and Fouqué give no
faithful image of that society, even when they are carefully correct in
all ascertainable historical details.[1] They give rather the impression
left upon an alien mind by the quaint, picturesque features of a way of
life which seemed neither quaint nor picturesque to the men who lived it,
but only to the man who turns to it for relief form the prosaic, or at
least familiar, conditions of the modern world. The offspring of the
modern imagination, acting upon medieval material, may be a perfectly
legitimate, though not an original, form of art. It may even have a
novel charm of its own, unlike either parent, but like Euphorion, child
of Faust by Helen of Troy, a blend of Hellas and the Middle Age. Scott's
verse tales are better poetry than the English metrical romances of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Tennyson has given a more perfect
shape to the Arthurian legends than Sir Thomas Malory, their compiler, or
Walter Map and Chrestien de Troyes, their possible inventors. But, of
course, to study the Middle Ages, as it really was, one must go not to
Tennyson and Scott, but to the "Chanson de Roland," and the "Divine
Comedy," and the "Romaunt of the Rose," and the chronicles of
Villehardouin, Joinville, and Froissart.
And the farther such study is carried, the more evident it becomes that
"mediaeval" and "romantic" are not synonymous. The Middle Ages was not,
at all points, romantic: it is the modern romanticist who makes, or
finds, it so. He sees its strange, vivid peculiarities under the glamour
of distance. Chaucer's temper, for instance, was by no means romantic.
This "good sense" which Dryden mentions as his prominent trait; that "low
tone" which Lowell praises in him, and which keeps him close to the
common ground of experience, pervade his greatest work, the "Canterbury
Tales," with an insistent realism. It is true that Chaucer shared the
beliefs and influences of his time and was a follower of its literary
fashions. In his version of the "Romaunt of the Rose," his imitations of
Machault, and his early work in general he used the mediaeval machinery
of allegory and dreams. In "Troilus and Cresseide" and the tale of
"Palamon and Arcite," he carries romantic love and knightly honor to a
higher pitch than his model, Boccaccio. But the shrewdly practical
Pandarus of the former poem--a character almost wholly of Chaucer's
creation--is the very embodiment of the anti-romantic attitude, and a
remarkable anticipation of Sancho Panza; while the "Rime of Sir Thopas"
is a distinct burlesque of the fantastic chivalry romances.[2] Chaucer's
pages are picturesque with tournament, hunting parties, baronial feasts,
miracles of saints, feats of magic; but they are solid, as well, with the
everyday life of fourteenth-century England. They have the _naïveté_ and
garrulity which are marks of mediaeval work, but not the quaintness and
grotesquerie which are held to be marks of romantic work. Not archaic
speech, but a certain mental twist constitutes quaintness. Herbert and
Fuller are quaint; Blake is grotesque; Donne and Charles Lamb are
willfully quaint, subtle, and paradoxical. But Chaucer is always
straight-grained, broad, and natural.
Even Dante, the poet of the Catholic Middle Ages; Dante, the mystic, the
idealist, with his intense spirituality and his passion for symbolism,
has been sometimes called classic, by virtue of the powerful construction
of his great poem, and his scholastic rigidity of method.
The relation between modern romanticizing literature and the real
literature of the Middle Ages, is something like that between the
literature of the renaissance and the ancient literatures of Greece and
Rome. But there is this difference, that, while the renaissance writers
fell short of their pattern, the modern schools of romance have outgone
their masters--not perhaps in the intellectual--but certainly in the
artistic value of their product. Mediaeval literature, wonderful and
stimulating as a whole and beautiful here and there in details of
execution, affords few models of technical perfection. The civilization
which it reflected, though higher in its possibilities than the classic
civilization, had not yet arrived at an equal grade of development, was
inferior in intelligence and the natured results of long culture. The
epithets of Gothic ignorance, rudeness, and barbarism, which the
eighteenth-century critics applied so freely to all the issue of the
so-called dark ages, were not entirely without justification. Dante is
almost the only strictly mediaeval poet in whose work the form seems
adequate to the content; for Boccaccio and Petrarca stand already on the
sill of the renaissance.
In the arts of design the case was partly reversed. If the artists of
the renaissance did not equal the Greeks in sculpture and architecture,
they probably excelled them in painting. On the other hand, the
restorers of Gothic have never quite learned the secret of the mediaeval
builders. However, if the analogy is not pushed too far, the romantic
revival may be regarded as a faint counterpart, the fragments of a
half-forgotten civilization were pieced together; Greek manuscripts
sought out, cleaned, edited, and printed: statues, coins, vases dug up
and ranged in museums: debris cleared away from temples, amphitheaters,
basilicas; till gradually the complete image of the antique world grew
forth in august beauty, kindling an excitement of mind to which there are
few parallels in history; so, in the eighteenth century, the despised
ages of monkery, feudalism, and superstition began to reassert their
claims upon the imagination. Ruined castles and abbeys, coats of mail,
illuminated missals, manuscript romances, black-letter ballads, old
tapestries, and wood carvings acquired a new value. Antiquaries and
virtuosos first, and then poets and romancers, reconstructed in turn an
image of medieval society.
True, the later movement was much the weaker of the two. No such fissure
yawned between modern times and the Middle Ages as had been opened
between the ancient world and the Middle Ages by the ruin of the Roman
state and by the barbarian migrations. Nor had ten centuries of rubbish
accumulated over the remains of mediaeval culture. In 1700 the Middle
Ages were not yet so very remote. The nations and languages of Europe
continued in nearly the same limits which had bounded them two centuries
before. The progress in the sciences and mechanic arts, the discovery
and colonizing of America, the invention of printing and gunpowder, and
the Protestant reformation had indeed drawn deep lines between modern and
mediaeval life. Christianity, however, formed a connecting link, though,
in Protestant countries, the continuity between the earlier and later
forms of the religion had been interrupted. One has but to compare the
list of the pilgrims whom Chaucer met at the Tabard, with the company
that Captain Sentry or Peregrine Pickle would be likely to encounter at a
suburban inn, to see how the face of English society had changed between
1400 and 1700. What has become of the knight, the prioress, the sumner,
the monk, pardoner, squire, alchemist, friar; and where can they or their
equivalents be found in all England?
The limitations of my subject will oblige me to treat the English
romantic movement as a chapter in literary history, even at the risk of
seeming to adopt a narrow method. Yet it would be unphilosophical to
consider it as a merely aesthetic affair, and to lose sight altogether of
its deeper springs in the religious and ethical currents of the time.
For it was, in part, a return of warmth and color into English letters;
and that was only a symptom of the return of warmth and color--that is,
of emotion and imagination--into English life and thought: into the
Church, into politics, into philosophy. Romanticism, which sought to
evoke from the past a beauty that it found wanting in the present, was
but one phase of that revolt against the coldness and spiritual deadness
of the first half of the eighteenth century which had other sides in the
idealism of Berkeley, in the Methodist and Evangelical revival led by
Wesley and Whitefield, and in the sentimentalism which manifested itself
in the writings of Richardson and Sterne. Corresponding to these on the
Continent were German pietism, the transcendental philosophy of Kant and
his continuators, and the emotional excesses of works like Rousseau's
"Nouvelle Héloise" and Goethe's "Sorrows of Werther."
Romanticism was something more, then, than a new literary mode; a taste
cultivated by dilettante virtuosos, like Horace Walpole, college recluses
like Gray, and antiquarian scholars like Joseph and Thomas Warton. It
was the effort of the poetic imagination to create for itself a richer
environment; but it was also, in its deeper significance, a reaching out
of the human spirit after a more ideal type of religion and ethics than
it could find in the official churchmanship and the formal morality of
the time. Mr. Leslie Stephen[3] points out the connection between the
three currents of tendency known as sentimentalism, romanticism, and
naturalism. He explains, to be sure, that the first English
sentimentalists, such as Richardson and Sterne, were anything but
romantic. "A more modern sentimentalist would probably express his
feelings[4] by describing some past state of society. He would paint
some ideal society in mediaeval times and revive the holy monk and the
humble nun for our edification." He attributes the subsequent interest
in the Middle Ages to the progress made in historical inquiries during
the last half of the eighteenth century, and to the consequent growth of
antiquarianism. "Men like Malone and Stevens were beginning those
painful researches which have accumulated a whole literature upon the
scanty records of our early dramatists. Gray, the most learned of poets,
had vaguely designed a history of English poetry, and the design was
executed with great industry by Thomas Warton. His brother Joseph
ventured to uphold the then paradoxical thesis that Spenser was as great
a man as Pope. Everywhere a new interest was awakening in the minuter
details of the past." At first, Mr. Stephen says, the result of these
inquiries was "an unreasonable contempt for the past. The modern
philosopher, who could spin all knowledge out of his own brain; the
skeptic, who had exploded the ancient dogma; or the free-thinker of any
shade, who rejoiced in the destruction of ecclesiastical tyranny, gloried
in his conscious superiority to his forefathers. Whatever was old was
absurd; and Gothic--an epithet applied to all medieval art, philosophy,
or social order--became a simple term of contempt." But an antiquarian
is naturally a conservative, and men soon began to love the times whose
peculiarities they were so diligently studying. Men of imaginative minds
promptly made the discovery that a new source of pleasure might be
derived from these dry records. . . The 'return to nature' expresses a
sentiment which underlies . . . both the sentimental and romantic
movements. . . To return to nature is, in one sense, to find a new
expression for emotions which have been repressed by existing
conventions; or, in another, to return to some simpler social order which
had not yet suffered from those conventions. The artificiality
attributed to the eighteenth century seems to mean that men were content
to regulate their thoughts and lives by rules not traceable to first
principles, but dependent upon a set of special and exceptional
conditions. . . To get out of the ruts, or cast off the obsolete
shackles, two methods might be adopted. The intellectual horizon might
be widened by including a greater number of ages and countries; or men
might try to fall back upon the thoughts and emotions common to all
races, and so cast off the superficial incrustation. The first method,
that of the romanticists, aims at increasing our knowledge: the second,
that of the naturalistic school, at basing our philosophy on deeper
principles.[5]
The classic, or pseudo-classic, period of English literature lasted from
the middle of the seventeenth till the end of the eighteenth century.
Inasmuch as the romantic revival was a protest against this reigning
mode, it becomes necessary to inquire a little more closely what we mean
when we say that the time of Queen Anne and the first two Georges was our
Augustan or classical age. In what sense was it classical? And was it
any more classical than the time of Milton, for example, or the time of
Landor? If the "Dunciad," and the "Essay on Man," are classical, what is
Keats' "Hyperion"? And with what propriety can we bring under a common
rubric things so far asunder as Prior's "Carmen Seculare" and Tennyson's
"Ulysses," or as Gay's "Trivia" and Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon"?
Evidently the Queen Anne writers took hold of the antique by a different
side from our nineteenth-century poets. Their classicism was of a
special type. It was, as has been often pointed out, more Latin than
Greek, and more French than Latin.[6] It was, as has likewise been said,
"a classicism in red heels and a periwig." Victor Hugo speaks of "cette
poésie fardée, mouchetée, poudrée, du dix-huitième siècle, cette
litèrature à paniers, à pompons et à falbalas."[7] The costumes of
Watteau contrast with the simple folds of Greek drapery very much as the
"Rape of the Lock," contrasts with the Iliad, or one of Pope's pastorals
with an idyl of Theocritus. The times were artificial in poetry as in
dress--
"Tea-cup times of hood and hoop,
And when the patch was worn."
Gentlemen wore powdered wigs instead of their own hair, and the power and
the wig both got into their writing. _Perruque_ was the nickname applied
to the classicists by the French romanticists of Hugo's generation, who
wore their hair long and flowing--_cheveaux mérovigiennes_--and affected
an _outré_ freedom in the cut and color of their clothes. Similarly the
Byronic collar became, all over Europe, the symbol of daring independence
in matters of taste and opinion. Its careless roll, which left the
throat exposed, seemed to assist the liberty of nature against cramping
conventions.
The leading Queen Anne writers are so well known that a somewhat general
description of the literary situation in England at the time of Pope's
death (1744) will serve as an answer to the question, how was the
eighteenth century classical. It was remarked by Thomas Warton[8] that,
at the first revival of letters in the sixteenth century, our authors
were more struck by the marvelous fables and inventions of ancient poets
than by the justness of their conceptions and the purity of their style.
In other words, the men of the renaissance apprehended the ancient
literature as poets: the men of the _Éclaircissement_ apprehended them as
critics. In Elizabeth's day the new learning stimulated English genius
to creative activity. In royal progresses, court masques, Lord Mayors'
shows, and public pageants of all kinds, mythology ran mad. "Every
procession was a pantheon." But the poets were not careful to keep the
two worlds of pagan antiquity and mediaeval Christianity distinct. The
art of the renaissance was the flower of a double root, and the artists
used their complex stuff naïvely. The "Faërie Queene" is the typical
work of the English renaissance; there hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods
mingle unblushingly with knights, dragons, sorcerers, hermits, and
personified vices and virtues. The "machinery" of Homer and Vergil--the
"machinery" of the "Seven Champions of Christendom" and the "Roman de la
Rose"! This was not shocking to Spenser's contemporaries, but it seemed
quite shocking to classical critics a century later. Even Milton, the
greatest scholar among English poets, but whose imagination was a strong
agent, holding strange elements in solution, incurred their censure for
bringing Saint Peter and the sea-nymphs into dangerous juxtaposition in
"Lycidas."
But by the middle of the seventeenth century the renaissance schools of
poetry had become effete in all European countries. They had run into
extravagances of style, into a vicious manner known in Spain as
Gongorism, in Italy as Marinism, and in England best exhibited in the
verse of Donne and Cowley and the rest of the group whom Dr. Johnson
called the metaphysical poets, and whose Gothicism of taste Addison
ridiculed in his _Spectator_ papers on true and false wit. It was France
that led the reform against this fashion. Malherbe and Boileau insisted
upon the need of discarding tawdry ornaments of style and cultivating
simplicity, clearness, propriety, decorum, moderation; above all, good
sense. The new Academy, founded to guard the purity of the French
language, lent its weight to the precepts of the critics, who applied the
rules of Aristotle, as commented by Longinus and Horace, to modern
conditions. The appearance of a number of admirable writers--Corneille,
Molière, Racine, Bossuet, La Fontaine, La Bruyère--simultaneously with
this critical movement, gave an authority to the new French literature
which enabled it to impose its principles upon England and Germany for
over a century. For the creative literature of France conformed its
practice, in the main, to the theory of French criticism; though not, in
the case of Regnier, without open defiance. This authority was
re-enforced by the political glories and social _éclat_ of the _siècle de
Louis Quatorze_
It happened that at this time the Stuart court was in exile, and in the
train of Henrietta Maria at Paris, or scattered elsewhere through France,
were many royalist men of letters, Etherege, Waller, Cowley, and others,
who brought back with them to England in 1660 an acquaintance with this
new French literature and a belief in its aesthetic code. That French
influence would have spread into England without the aid of these
political accidents is doubtless true, as it is also true that a reform
of English versification and poetic style would have worked itself out
upon native lines independent of foreign example, and even had there been
so such thing as French literature. Mr. Gosse has pointed out couplets
of Waller, written as early as 1623, which have the formal precision of
Pope's; and the famous passage about the Thames in Denham's "Cooper's
Hill" (1642) anticipates the best performance of Augustan verse:
"O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full."
However, as to the general fact of the powerful impact of French upon
English literary fashions, in the latter half of the seventeenth century,
there can be no dispute.[9]
This change of style was symptomatic of a corresponding change in the
national temper. It was the mission of the eighteenth century to assert
the universality of law and, at the same time, the sufficiency of the
reason to discover the laws, which govern in every province: a service
which we now, perhaps, undervalue in our impatience with the formalism
which was its outward sign. Hence its dislike of irregularity in art and
irrationality in religion. England, in particular, was tired of
unchartered freedom, of spiritual as well as of literary anarchy. The
religious tension of the Commonwealth period had relaxed--men cannot be
always at the heroic pitch--and theological disputes had issued in
indifference and a skepticism which took the form of deism, or "natural
religion." But the deists were felt to be a nuisance. They were
unsettling opinions and disturbing that decent conformity with generally
received beliefs which it is the part of a good citizen to maintain.
Addison instructs his readers that, in the absence of certainty, it is
the part of a prudent man to choose the safe side and make friends with
God. The freethinking Chesterfield[10] tells his son that the profession
of atheism is ill-bred. De Foe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Johnson all
attack infidelity. "Conform! Conform!" said in effect the most
authoritative writers of the century. "Be sensible: go to church: pay
your rates: don't be a vulgar deist--a fellow like Toland who is poor and
has no social position. But, on the other hand, you need not be a
fanatic or superstitious, or an enthusiast. Above all, _pas de zèle!_"
"Theology," says Leslie Stephen, "was, for the most part, almost as
deistical as the deists. A hatred for enthusiasm was as strongly
impressed upon the whole character of contemporary thought as a hatred of
skepticism. . . A good common-sense religion should be taken for granted
and no questions asked. . . With Shakspere, or Sir Thomas Browne, or
Jeremy Taylor, or Milton, man is contemplated in his relations to the
universe; he is in presence of eternity and infinity; life is a brief
drama; heaven and hell are behind the veil of phenomena; at every step
our friends vanish into the abyss of ever present mystery. To all such
thoughts the writers of the eighteenth century seemed to close their eyes
as resolutely as possible. . . The absence of any deeper speculative
ground makes the immediate practical questions of life all the more
interesting. We know not what we are, nor whither we are going, nor
whence we come; but we can, by the help of common sense, discover a
sufficient share of moral maxims for our guidance in life. . . Knowledge
of human nature, as it actually presented itself in the shifting scene
before them, and a vivid appreciation of the importance of the moral law,
are the staple of the best literature of the time."[11]
The God of the deists was, in truth, hardly more impersonal than the
abstraction worshiped by the orthodox--the "Great Being" of Addison's
essays, the "Great First Cause" of Pope's "Universal Prayer," invoked
indifferently as "Jehovah, Jove, or Lord." Dryden and Pope were
professed Catholics, but there is nothing to distinguish their so-called
sacred poetry from that of their Protestant contemporaries. Contrast the
mere polemics of "The Hind and the Panther" with really Catholic poems
like Southwell's "Burning Babe" and Crashaw's "Flaming Heart," or even
with Newman's "Dream of Gerontius." In his "Essay on Man," Pope
versified, without well understanding, the optimistic deism of Leibnitz,
as expounded by Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke. The Anglican Church itself
was in a strange condition, when Jonathan Swift, a dean and would-be
bishop, came to its defense with his "Tale of a Tub" and his ironical
"Argument against the Abolition of Christianity." Among the Queen Anne
wits Addison was the man of most genuine religious feeling. He is always
reverent, and "the feeling infinite" stirs faintly in one or two of his
hymns. But, in general, his religion is of the rationalizing type, a
religion of common sense, a belief resting upon logical deductions, a
system of ethics in which the supernatural is reduced to the lowest
terms, and from which the glooms and fervors of a deep spiritual
experience are almost entirely absent. This "parson in a tie-wig" is
constantly preaching against zeal, enthusiasm, superstition, mysticism,
and recommending a moderate, cheerful, and reason religion.[12] It is
instructive to contrast his amused contempt for popular beliefs in
ghosts, witches, dreams, prognostications, and the like, with the
reawakened interest in folk lore evidenced by such a book as Scott's
"Demonology and Witchcraft."
Queen Anne literature was classical, then, in its lack of those elements
of mystery and aspiration which we have found described as of the essence
of romanticism. It was emphatically a literature of this world. It
ignored all vague emotion, the phenomena of subconsciousness, "the
electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound," the shadow that rounds
man's little life, and fixed its attention only upon what it could
thoroughly comprehend.[13] Thereby it escaped obscurity. The writings
of the Augustans in both verse and prose are distinguished by a perfect
clearness, but it is a clearness without subtlety or depth. They never
try to express a thought, or to utter a feeling, that is not easily
intelligible. The mysticism of Wordsworth, the incoherence of Shelley,
the darkness of Browning--to take only modern instances--proceed,
however, not from inferior art, but from the greater difficulty of
finding expression for a very different order of ideas.
Again the literature of the Restoration and Queen Anne periods--which may
be regarded as one, for present purposes--was classical, or at least
unromantic, in its self-restraint, its objectivity, and its lack of
curiosity; or, as a hostile criticism would put it, in its coldness of
feeling, the tameness of its imagination, and its narrow and imperfect
sense of beauty. It was a literature not simply of this world, but of
_the_ world, of the _beau monde_, high life, fashion, society, the court
and the town, the salons, clubs, coffee-houses, assemblies,
ombre-parties. It was social, urban, gregarious, intensely though not
broadly human. It cared little for the country or outward nature, and
nothing for the life of remote times and places. Its interest was
centered upon civilization and upon that peculiarly artificial type of
civilization which it found prevailing. It was as indifferent to Venice,
Switzerland, the Alhambra, the Nile, the American forests, and the
islands of the South Sea as it was to the Middle Ages and the manners of
Scotch Highlanders. The sensitiveness to the picturesque, the liking for
local color and for whatever is striking, characteristic, and peculiarly
national in foreign ways is a romantic note. The eighteenth century
disliked "strangeness added to beauty"; it disapproved of anything
original, exotic, tropical, bizarre for the same reason that it
disapproved of mountains and Gothic architecture.
Professor Gates says that the work of English literature during the first
quarter of the present century was "the rediscovery and vindication of
the concrete. The special task of the eighteenth century had been to
order, and to systematize, and to name; its favorite methods had been
analysis and generalization. It asked for no new experience. . . The
abstract, the typical, the general--these were everywhere exalted at the
expense of the image, the specific experience, the vital fact."[14]
Classical tragedy, _e.g._, undertook to present only the universal,
abstract, permanent truths of human character and passion.[15] The
impression of the mysterious East upon modern travelers and poets like
Byron, Southey, De Quincey, Moore, Hugo,[16] Ruckert, and Gérard de
Nerval, has no counterpart in the eighteenth century. The Oriental
allegory or moral apologue, as practiced by Addison in such papers as
"The Vision of Mirza," and by Johnson in "Rasselas," is rather faintly
colored and gets what color it has from the Old Testament. It is
significant that the romantic Collins endeavored to give a novel turn to
the decayed pastoral by writing a number of "Oriental Eclogues," in which
dervishes and camel-drivers took the place of shepherds, but the
experiment was not a lucky one. Milton had more of the East in his
imagination than any of his successors. His "vulture on Imaus bred,
whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds"; his "plain of Sericana where
Chinese drive their cany wagons light"; his "utmost Indian isle
Taprobane," are touches of the picturesque which anticipate a more modern
mood than Addison's.
"The difference," says Matthew Arnold, "between genuine poetry and the
poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school is briefly this: their
poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is
conceived and composed in the soul." The representative minds of the
eighteenth century were such as Voltaire, the master of persiflage,
destroying superstition with his _souriere hideux_; Gibbon, "the lord of
irony," "sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer"; and Hume, with his
thorough-going philosophic skepticism, his dry Toryism, and cool contempt
for "zeal" of any kind. The characteristic products of the era were
satire, burlesque, and travesty: "Hudibras," "Absalom and Achitophel,"
"The Way of the World," "Gulliver's Travels" and "The Rape of the Lock."
There is a whole literature of mockery: parodies like Prior's "Ballad on
the Taking of Namur" and "The Country Mouse and the City Mouse";
Buckingham's "Rehearsal" and Swift's "Meditation on a Broomstick";
mock-heroics, like the "Dunciad" and "MacFlecknoe" and Garth's
"Dispensary," and John Phillips' "Splendid Shilling" and Addison's
"Machinae Gesticulantes"; Prior's "Alma," a burlesque of philosophy;
Gay's "Trivia" and "The Shepherd's Week," and "The Beggars' Opera"-a
"Newgate pastoral"; "Town Eclogues" by Swift and Lady Montague and
others. Literature was a polished mirror in which the gay world saw its
own grinning face. It threw back a most brilliant picture of the surface
of society, showed manners but not the elementary passions of human
nature. As a whole, it leaves an impression of hardness, shallowness,
and levity. The polite cynicism of Congreve, the ferocious cynicism of
Swift, the malice of Pope, the pleasantry of Addison, the early
worldliness of Prior and Gay are seldom relieved by any touch of the
ideal. The prose of the time was excellent, but the poetry was merely
rhymed prose. The recent Queen Anne revival in architecture, dress, and
bric-a-brac, the recrudescence of society verse in Dobson and others, is
perhaps symptomatic of the fact that the present generation has entered
upon a prosaic reaction against romantic excesses and we are finding our
picturesque in that era of artifice which seemed so picturesque to our
forerunners. The sedan chair, the blue china, the fan, farthingale, and
powdered head dress have now got the "rime of age" and are seen in
fascinating perspective, even as the mailed courser, the buff jerkin, the
cowl, and the cloth-yard shaft were seen by the men of Scott's generation.
Once more, the eighteenth century was classical in its respect for
authority. It desired to put itself under discipline, to follow the
rules, to discover a formula of correctness in all the arts, to set up a
tribunal of taste and establish canons of composition, to maintain
standards, copy models and patterns, comply with conventions, and
chastise lawlessness. In a word, its spirit was academic. Horace was
its favorite master--not Horace of the Odes, but Horace of the Satires
and Epistles, and especially Horace as interpreted by Boileau.[17] The
"Ars Poetica" had been englished by the Earl of Roscommon, and imitated
by Boileau in his "L'Art Poetique," which became the parent of a numerous
progeny in England; among others as "Essay on Satire" and an "Essay on
Poetry," by the Earl of Mulgrave;[18] an "Essay on Translated Verse" by
the Earl of Roscommon, who, says Addison, "makes even rules a noble
poetry";[19] and Pope's well-known "Essay on Criticism."
The doctrine of Pope's essay is, in brief, follow Nature, and in order
that you may follow nature, observe the rules, which are only "Nature
methodized," and also imitate the ancients.
"Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem;
To copy nature is to copy them."
Thus Vergil when he started to compose the Aeneid may have seemed above
the critic's law, but when he came to study Homer, he found that Nature
and Homer were the same. Accordingly,
"he checks the bold design,
And rules as strict his labor'd work confine."
Not to stimulate, but to check, to confine, to regulate, is the unfailing
precept of this whole critical school. Literature, in the state in which
they found it, appeared to them to need the curb more than the spur.
Addison's scholarship was almost exclusively Latin, though it was
Vergilian rather than Horatian. Macaulay[20] says of Addison's "Remarks
on Italy"; "To the best of our remembrance, Addison does not mention
Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bolardo, Berni, Lorenzo de' Medici, or
Machiavelli. He coldly tells us that at Ferrara he saw the tomb of
Ariosto, and that at Venice he heard the gondoliers sing verses of Tasso.
But for Tasso and Ariosto he cared far less than for Valerius Flaccus and
Sidonius Apollinaris. The gentle flow of the Ticino brings a line of
Silius to his mind. The sulphurous stream of Albula suggests to him
several passages of Martial. But he has not a word to say of the
illustrious dead of Santa Croce; he crosses the wood of Ravenna[21]
without recollecting the specter huntsman, and wanders up and down Rimini
without one thought of Francesca. At Paris he had eagerly sought an
introduction to Boileau; but he seems not to have been at all aware that
at Florence he was in the vicinity of a poet with whom Boileau could not
sustain a comparison: of the greatest lyric poet of modern times [!]
Vincenzio Filicaja. . . The truth is that Addison knew little and cared
less about the literature of modern Italy. His favorite models were
Latin. His favorite critics were French. Half the Tuscan poetry that he
had read seemed to him monstrous and the other half tawdry."[22]
There was no academy in England, but there was a critical tradition that
was almost as influential. French critical gave the law: Boileau,
Dacier, LeBossu, Rapin, Bouhours; English critics promulgated it: Dennis,
Langbaine, Rymer, Gildon, and others now little read. Three writers of
high authority in three successive generations--Dryden, Addison, and
Johnson--consolidated a body of literary opinion which may be described,
in the main, as classical, and as consenting, though with minor
variations. Thus it was agreed on all hands that it was a writer's duty
to be "correct." It was well indeed to be "bold," but bold with
discretion. Dryden thought Shakspere a great poet than Jonson, but an
inferior artist. He was to be admired, but not approved. Homer, again,
it was generally conceded, was not so correct as Vergil, though he had
more "fire." Chesterfield preferred Vergil to Homer, and both of them to
Tasso. But of all epics the one he read with most pleasure was the
"Henriade." As for "Paradise Lost," he could not read it through.
William Walsh, "the muses' judge and friend," advised the youthful Pope
that "there was one way still left open for him, by which he might excel
any of his predecessors, which was by correctness; that though indeed we
had several great poets, we as yet could boast of none that were
perfectly correct; and that therefore he advised him to make this quality
his particular study." "The best of the moderns in all language," he
wrote to Pope, "are those that have the nearest copied the ancients."
Pope was thankful for the counsel and mentions its giver in the "Essay on
Criticism" as one who had
"taught his muse to sing,
Prescribed her heights and pruned her tender wing."
But what was correct? In the drama, _e.g._, the observance of the
unities was almost universally recommended, but by no means universally
practiced. Johnson, himself a sturdy disciple of Dryden and Pope,
exposed the fallacy of that stage illusion, on the supposed necessity of
which the unities of time and place were defended. Yet Johnson, in his
own tragedy "Irene," conformed to the rules of Aristotle. He pronounced
"Cato" "unquestionably the noblest production of Addison's genius," but
acknowledge that its success had "introduced, or confirmed among us, the
use of dialogue too declamatory, of unaffecting elegance and chill
philosophy." On the other hand Addison had small regard for poetic
justice, which Johnson thought ought to be observed. Addison praised old
English ballads, which Johnson thought mean and foolish; and he guardedly
commends[23] "the fairy way of writing," a romantic foppery that Johnson
despised.[24]
Critical opinion was pronounced in favor of separating tragedy and
comedy, and Addison wrote one sentence which condemns half the plays of
Shakspere and Fletcher: "The tragi-comedy, which is the product of the
English theater, is one the most monstrous inventions that ever entered
into a poet's thought."[25] Dryden made some experiments in
tragi-comedy, but, in general, classical comedy was pure comedy--the
prose comedy of manners--and classical tragedy admitted no comic
intermixture. Whether tragedy should be in rhyme, after the French
manner, or in blank verse, after the precedent of the old English stage,
was a moot point. Dryden at first argued for rhyme and used it in his
"heroic plays"; and it is significant that he defended its use on the
ground that it would act as a check upon the poet's fancy. But afterward
he grew "weary of his much-loved mistress, rhyme," and went back to blank
verse in his later plays.
As to poetry other than dramatic, the Restoration critics were at one in
judging blank verse too "low" for a poem of heroic dimensions; and though
Addison gave it the preference in epic poetry, Johnson was its persistent
foe, and regarded it as little short of immoral. But for that matter,
Gray could endure no blank verse outside of Milton. This is curious,
that rhyme, a mediaeval invention, should have been associated in the
last century with the classical school of poetry; while blank verse, the
nearest English equivalent of the language of Attic tragedy, was a
shibboleth of romanticizing poets, like Thomson and Akenside. The reason
was twofold: rhyme came stamped with the authority of the French tragic
alexandrine; and, secondly, it meant constraint where blank verse meant
freedom, "ancient liberty, recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome
and modern bondage of rhyming."[26] Pope, among his many thousand rhymed
couplets, has left no blank verse except the few lines contributed to
Thomson's "Seasons." Even the heroic couplet as written by earlier poets
was felt to have been too loose in structure. "The excellence and
dignity of it," says Dryden, "were never fully known till Mr. Waller
taught it; he first made writing easily an art; first showed us how to
conclude the sense most commonly in distichs, which, in the verse of
those before him, runs on for so many lines together, that the reader is
out of breath to overtake it."[27] All through the classical period the
tradition is constant that Waller was the first modern English poet, the
first correct versifier. Pope is praised by Johnson because he employed
but sparingly the triplets and alexandrines by which Dryden sought to
vary the monotony of the couplet; and he is censured by Cowper because,
by force of his example, he "made poetry a mere mechanic art."
Henceforth the distich was treated as a unit: the first line was balanced
against the second, and frequently the first half of the line against the
second half.
"To err is human, to forgive divine."
"And so obliging, that he ne'er obliged."
"Charms strike the eye, but merit wins the soul," etc., etc.
This type of verse, which Pope brought to perfection, and to which he
gave all the energy and variety of which it was capable, so prevailed in
our poetry for a century or more that one almost loses sight of the fact
that any other form was employed. The sonnet, for instance, disappeared
entirely, until revived by Gray, Stillingfleet, Edwards, and Thomas
Warton, about the middle of the eighteenth century.[28] When the poets
wished to be daring and irregular, they were apt to give vent in that
species of pseudo-Pindaric ode which Cowley had introduced--a literary
disease which, Dr. Johnson complained, infected the British muse with the
notion that "he who could do nothing else could write like Pindar."
Sir Charles Eastlake in his "History of the Gothic Revival" testifies to
this formal spirit from the point of view of another art than literature.
"The age in which Batty Langley lived was an age in which it was
customary to refer all matters of taste to rule and method. There was
one standard of excellence in poetry--a standard that had its origin in
the smooth distichs of heroic verse which Pope was the first to perfect,
and which hundreds of later rhymers who lacked his nobler powers soon
learned to imitate. In pictorial art, it was the grand school which
exercised despotic sway over the efforts of genius and limited the
painter's inventions to the field of Pagan mythology. In architecture,
Vitruvius was the great authority. The graceful majesty of the
Parthenon--the noble proportions of the temple of Theseus--the chaste
enrichment which adorns the Choragic monument of Lysicrates, were
ascribed less to the fertile imagination and refined perceptions of the
ancient Greek, than to the dry and formal precepts which were invented
centuries after their erection. Little was said of the magnificent
sculpture which filled the metopes of the temple of the Minerva; but the
exact height and breadth of the triglyphs between them were considered of
the greatest importance. The exquisite drapery of caryatids and
canephorae, no English artist, a hundred years ago, thought fit to
imitate; but the cornices which they supposed were measured inch by inch
with the utmost nicety. Ingenious devices were invented for enabling the
artificer to reproduce, by a series of complicated curves, the profile of
a Doric capital, which probably owed its form to the steady hand and
uncontrolled taste of the designer. To put faith in many of the theories
propounded by architectural authorities in the last century, would be to
believe that some of the grandest monuments which the world has ever seen
raised, owe their chief beauty to an accurate knowledge of arithmetic.
The diameter of the column was divided into modules: the modules were
divided into minutes; the minutes into fractions of themselves. A
certain height was allotted to the shaft, another to the entablature. . .
Sometimes the learned discussed how far apart the columns of a portico
might be."[29]
This kind of mensuration reminds one of the disputes between French
critics as to whether the unity of time meant thirty hours, or
twenty-four, or twelve, or the actual time that it took to act the play;
or of the geometric method of the "Saturday papers" in the _Spectator_.
Addison tries "Paradise Lost" by Aristotle's rules for the composition of
an epic. Is it the narrative of a single great action? Does it begin
_in medias res_, as is proper, or _ab ovo Ledae_, as Horace has said that
an epic ought not? Does it bring in the introductory matter by way of
episode, after the approved recipe of Homer and Vergil? Has it
allegorical characters, contrary to the practice of the ancients? Does
the poet intrude personally into his poem, thus mixing the lyric and epic
styles? etc. Not a word as to Milton's puritanism, or his
_Weltanschauung_, or the relation of his work to its environment.
Nothing of that historical and sympathetic method--that endeavor to put
the reader at the poet's point of view--by which modern critics, from
Lessing to Sainte-Beuve, have revolutionized their art. Addison looks at
"Paradise Lost" as something quite distinct from Milton: as a
manufactured article to be tested by comparing it with standard fabrics
by recognized makers, like the authors of the Iliad and Aeneid.
When the Queen Anne poetry took a serious turn, the generalizing spirit
of the age led it almost always into the paths of ethical and didactic
verse. "It stooped to truth and moralized its song," finding its
favorite occupation in the sententious expression of platitudes--the
epigram in satire, the maxim in serious work. It became a poetry of
aphorisms, instruction us with Pope that
"Virtue alone is happiness below;"
or, with Young, that
"Procrastination is the thief of time;"
or, with Johnson, that
"Slow rises worth by poverty depressed."
When it attempted to deal concretely with the passions, it found itself
impotent. Pope's "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard" rings hollow: it is
rhetoric, not poetry. The closing lines of "The Dunciad"--so strangely
overpraised by Thackeray--with their metallic clank and grandiose
verbiage, are not truly imaginative. The poet is simply working himself
up to a climax of the false sublime, as an orator deliberately attaches a
sounding peroration to his speech. Pope is always "heard," never
"overheard."
The poverty of the classical period in lyrical verse is particularly
significant, because the song is the most primitive and spontaneous kind
of poetry, and the most direct utterance of personal feeling. Whatever
else the poets of Pope's time could do, they could not sing. They are
the despair of the anthologists.[30] Here and there among the brilliant
reasoners, _raconteurs_, and satirists in verse, occurs a clever
epigrammatist like Prior, or a ballad writer like Henry Carey, whose
"Sally in Our Alley" shows the singing, and not talking, voice, but
hardly the lyric cry. Gay's "Blackeyed Susan" has genuine quality,
though its _rococo_ graces are more than half artificial. Sweet William
is very much such an opera sailor-man as Bumkinet or Grubbinol is a
shepherd, and his wooing is beribboned with conceits like these:
"If to fair India's coast we sail,
Thy eyes are seen in diamonds bright,
Thy breath is Afric's spicy gale,
Thy skin is ivory so white.
Thus every beauteous prospect that I view,
Wakes in my soul some charm of lovely Sue."
It was the same with the poetry of outward nature as with the poetry of
human passion.[31] In Addison's "Letter from Italy," in Pope's
"Pastorals," and "Windsor Forest," the imagery, when not actually false,
is vague and conventional, and the language abounds in classical
insipidities, epithets that describe nothing, and generalities at second
hand from older poets, who may once, perhaps, have written with their
"eyes upon the object." Blushing Flora paints the enameled ground;
cheerful murmurs fluctuate on the gale; Eridanus through flowery meadows
strays; gay gilded[32] scenes and shining prospects rise; while
everywhere are balmy zephyrs, sylvan shades, winding vales, vocal shores,
silver floods, crystal springs, feathered quires, and Phoebus and
Philomel and Ceres' gifts assist the purple year. It was after this
fashion that Pope rendered the famous moonlight passage in his
translation of the Iliad:
"Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise,
A flood of glory bursts from all the skies," etc.
"Strange to think of an enthusiast," says Wordsworth, "reciting these
verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having his raptures in
the least disturbed by a suspicion of their absurdity." The poetic
diction against which Wordsworth protested was an outward sign of the
classical preference for the general over the concrete. The vocabulary
was Latinized because, in English, the _mot propre_ is commonly a Saxon
word, while its Latin synonym has a convenient indefiniteness that keeps
the subject at arm's length. Of a similar tendency was the favorite
rhetorical figure of personification, which gave a false air of life to
abstractions by the easy process of spelling them with a capital letter.
Thus:
"From bard to bard the frigid caution crept,
Till Declamation roared whilst Passion slept;
Yet still did Virtue deign the stage to tread,
Philosophy remained though Nature fled,. . .
Exulting Folly hailed the joyful day,
And Pantomime and Song confirmed her sway."[33]
Everything was personified; Britannia, Justice, Liberty, Science,
Melancholy, Night. Even vaccination for the smallpox was invoked as a
goddess,
"Inoculation, heavenly maid, descend!"[34]
But circumstances or periphrasis was the capital means by which the
Augustan poet avoided precision and attained nobility of style. It
enabled him to speak of a woman as a "nymph," or a "fair"; of sheep as
"the fleecy care"; of fishes as "the scaly tribe"; and of a picket fence
as a "spiculated paling." Lowell says of Pope's followers: "As the
master had made it an axiom to avoid what was mean or low, so the
disciples endeavored to escape from what was common. This they contrived
by the ready expedient of the periphrasis. They called everything
something else. A boot with them was
"'The shining leather that encased the limb.'
"Coffee became
"'The fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown.'"[35]
"For the direct appeal to Nature, and the naming of specific objects,"
says Mr. Gosse,[36] "they substituted generalities and second-hand
allusions. They no longer mentioned the gillyflower and the daffodil,
but permitted themselves a general reference to Flora's vernal wreath.
It was vulgar to say that the moon was rising; the gentlemanly expression
was, 'Cynthia is lifting her silver horn!' Women became nymphs in this
new phraseology, fruits became 'the treasures of Pomona,' a horse became
'the impatient courser.' The result of coining these conventional
counters for groups of ideas was that the personal, the exact, was lost
in literature. Apples were the treasures of Pomona, but so were
cherries, too, and if one wished to allude to peaches, they also were the
treasures of Pomona. This decline from particular to general language
was regarded as a great gain in elegance. It was supposed that to use
one of these genteel counters, which passed for coin of poetic language,
brought the speaker closer to the grace of Latinity. It was thought that
the old direct manner of speaking was crude and futile; that a romantic
poet who wished to allude to caterpillars could do so without any
exercise of his ingenuity by simply introducing the word 'caterpillars,'
whereas the classical poet had to prove that he was a scholar and a
gentleman by inventing some circumlocution, such as 'the crawling scourge
that smites the leafy plain.'. . . In the generation that succeeded Pope
really clever writers spoke of a 'gelid cistern,' when they meant a cold
bath, and 'the loud hunter-crew' when they meant a pack of foxhounds."
It would be a mistake to suppose that the men of Pope's generation,
including Pope himself, were altogether wanting in romantic feeling.
There is a marked romantic accent in the Countess of Winchelsea's ode "To
the Nightingale"; in her "Nocturnal Reverie"; in Parnell's "Night Piece
on Death," and in the work of several Scotch poets, like Allan Ramsay and
Hamilton of Bangour, whose ballad, "The Braces of Yarrow," is certainly a
strange poem to come out of the heart of the eighteenth century. But
these are eddies and back currents in the stream of literary tendency.
We are always in danger of forgetting that the literature of an age does
not express its entire, but only its prevailing, spirit. There is
commonly a latent, silent body of thought and feeling underneath which
remains inarticulate, or nearly so. It is this prevailing spirit and
fashion which I have endeavored to describe in the present chapter. If
the picture seems to lack relief, or to be in any way exaggerated, the
reader should consult the chapters on "Classicism" and "The
Pseudo-Classicists" in M. Pellisier's "Literary Movement in France,"
already several times referred to. They describe a literary situation
which had a very exact counterpart in England.
[1] As another notable weakness of the age is its habit of looking, to the
past ages--not understanding them all the while . . . so Scott gives up
nearly the half of his intellectual power to a fond yet purposeless
dreaming over the past; and spends half his literary labors in endeavors
to revive it, not in reality, but on the stage of fiction: endeavors
which were the best of the kind that modernism made, but still successful
only so far as Scott put under the old armor the everlasting human nature
which he knew; and totally unsuccessful so far as concerned the painting
of the armor itself, which he knew _not_. . . His romance and
antiquarianism, his knighthood and monkery, are all false, and he knows
them to be false.--_Ruskin, "Modern Painters,"_ Vol. III. p. 279 (First
American Edition, 1860).
[2] See also the sly hit at popular fiction in the _Nonnë Prestës Tale_:
"This story is also trewe, I undertake,
As is the book of Launcelot de Lake,
That women hold in ful gret reverence."
[3] "History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century," Vol. II. chap
xii, section vii.
[4] Sentimentalism approaches its subject through the feelings;
romanticism through the imagination.
[5] Ruskin, too indicates the common element in romanticism and
naturalism--a desire to escape from the Augustan formalism. I condense
the passage slightly: "To powder the hair, to patch the cheek, to hoop
the body, to buckle the foot, were all part and parcel of the same system
which reduced streets to brick walls and pictures to brown stains.
Reaction from this state was inevitable, and accordingly men steal out to
the fields and mountains; and, finding among these color and liberty and
variety and power, rejoice in all the wildest shattering of the mountain
side, as an opposition to Gower Street. It is not, however, only to
existing inanimate nature that our want of beauty in person and dress has
driven us. The imagination of it, as it was seen in our ancestors,
haunts us continually. We look fondly back to the manners of the age
sought in the centuries which we profess to have surpassed in
everything. . . This romantic love of beauty, forced to seek in history
and in external nature the satisfaction it cannot find in ordinary
life."--_Modern Painters_, Vol. III. p. 260.
[6] Although devout in their admiration for antiquity, the writers of the
seventeenth century have by no means always clearly grasped the object of
their cult. Though they may understand Latin tradition, they have
certainly never entered into the freer, more original spirit of Greek
art. They have but an incomplete, superficial conception of
Hellenism. . . Boileau celebrates but does not understand Pindar. . .
The seventeenth century comprehended Homer no better than Pindar. What
we miss in them is exactly what we like best in his epopee--the vast
living picture of semi-barbarous civilization. . . No society could be
less fitted than that of the seventeenth century to feel and understand
the spirit of primitive antiquity. In order to appreciate Homer, it was
thought necessary to civilize the barbarian, make him a scrupulous
writer, and convince him that the word "ass" is a "very noble" expression
in Greek--_Pellisier: "The Literary Movement in France" (Brinton's
translation, _1897), pp. 8-10. So Addison apologizes for Homer's failure
to observe those qualities of nicety, correctness, and what the French
call _bienséance_ (decorum,) the necessity of which had only been found
out in later times. See _The Spectator_, No. 160.
[7] Preface to "Cromwell."
[8] "History of English Poetry," section lxi. Vol III. p. 398 (edition of
1840).
[9] See, for a fuller discussion of this subject, "From Shakspere to Pope:
An Inquiry into the Causes and Phenomena of the Rise of Classical Poetry
in England," by Edmund Gosse, 1885.
[10] The cold-hearted, polished Chesterfield is a very representative
figure. Johnson, who was really devout, angrily affirmed that his
celebrated letters taught: "the morality of a whore with the manners of a
dancing-master."
[11] "History of English Thought in the Eighteen Century," Vol. II. chap.
xii. Section iv. See also "Selections from Newman," by Lewis E. Gates,
Introduction, pp. xlvii-xlviii. (1895).
[12] See especially _Spectator_, Nos. 185, 186, 201, 381, and 494.
[13] The classical Landor's impatience of mysticism explains his dislike
of Plato, the mystic among Greeks. Diogenes says to Plato: "I meddle not
at present with infinity or eternity: when I can comprehend them, I will
talk about them," "Imaginary Conversations," 2d series, Conversation XV.
Landor's contempt for German literature is significant.
[14] "Selections from Newman," Introduction, pp. xlvii-xlviii.
[15] Racine observes that good sense and reason are the same in all ages.
What is the result of this generalization? Heroes can be transported
from epoch to epoch, from country to country, without causing surprise.
Their Achilles is no more a Greek than is Porus an Indian; Andromache
feels and talks like a seventeenth-century princess: Phaedra experiences
the remorse of a Christian.--_Pellissier, "Literary Movement in France,"_
p. 18.
In substituting men of concrete, individual lives for the ideal figures
of tragic art, romanticism was forced to determine their physiognomy by a
host of local, casual details. In the name of universal truth the
classicists rejected the coloring of time and place; and this is
precisely what the romanticists seek under the name of particular
reality.--_Ibid._ p. 220. Similarly Montezuma's Mexicans in Dryden's
"Indian Emperor" have no more national individuality than the Spanish
Moors in his "Conquest of Granada." The only attempt at local color in
"Aurungzebe"--an heroic play founded on the history of a contemporary
East Indian potentate who died seven years after the author--is the
introduction of the _suttee_, and one or two mentions of elephants.
[16] See "Les Orientales" (Hugo) and Nerval's "Les Nuits de Rhamadan" and
"La Légende du Calife Hakem."
[17] The rules a nation, born to serve, obeys;
And Boileau still in right of Horace sways.
--_Pope, "Essay on Criticism,"_
[18] These critical verse essays seem to have been particularly affected
by this order of the peerage; for, somewhat later, we have one, "On
Unnatural Flights in Poetry," by the Earl of Lansdowne--"Granville the
polite."
[19] "Epistle to Sacheverel."
[20] "Essay on Addison."
[21] Sweet hour of twilight!--in the solitude
Of the pine forest, and the silent shore
Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood,
Rooted where once the Adrian wave flowed o'er,
To where the last Caesarian fortress stood,
Evergreen forest! which Boccaccio's lore
And Dryden's lay made haunted ground to me,
How have I loved the twilight hour and thee!
--_Don Juan_
[22] I must entirely agree with Monsieur Boileau, that one verse of Vergil
is worth all the _clinquant _or tinsel of Tasso.--_Spectator_, No. 5.
[23] _Spectator_, No. 419.
[24] See his "Life of Collins."
[25] _Spectator_, No. 40.
[26] "The Verse": Preface to "Paradise Lost."
[27] Dedicatory epistle to "The Rival Ladies."
[28] Mr. Gosse says that a sonnet by Pope's friend Walsh is the only one
"written in English between Milton's in 1658, and Warton's about 1750,"
Ward's "English Poets," Vol. III, p. 7. The statement would have been
more precise if he had said published instead of _written_.
[29] "History of the Gothic Revival," pp. 49-50 (edition of 1872).
[30] Palgrave says that the poetry of passion was deformed, after 1660, by
"levity and an artificial time"; and that it lay "almost dormant for the
hundred years between the days of Wither and Suckling and the days of
Burns and Cowper," "Golden Treasury" (Sever and Francis edition, 1866).
pp. 379-80.
[31] Excepting the "Nocturnal Reverie" of Lady Winchelsea, and a passage
or two in the "Windsor Forest" of Pope, the poetry of the period
intervening between the publication of the "Paradise Lost" and the
"Seasons" [1667-1726] does not contain a single new image of external
nature.--_Wordsworth. Appendix to Lyrical Ballads_, (1815).
[32] _Gild_ is a perfect earmark of eighteenth-century descriptive verse:
the shore is gilded and so are groves, clouds, etc. Contentment gilds
the scene, and the stars gild the gloomy night (Parnell) or the glowing
pole (Pope).
[33] Johnson, "Prologue at the Opening of Drury Lane," 1747.
[34] See Coleridge, "Biographia Literaria," chap. Xviii
[35] Essay on Pope, in "My Study Windows."
[36] "From Shakespere to Pope," pp. 9-11.