LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. Class MINEL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ERA OF EXPANSION, 17501850. ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES, AND THE POETRY OF ITS PERIOD OF PREPARATION, 1750 1800. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX. BY J. MACMILLAN BROWN, M.A., - Professor of English Literature, Canterbury College. CHRISTCHURCH AND DUNEDIN, N.Z. AND I COUSIN LANE, DOWGATE, LONDON : WHITCOMBE AND TOMBS LIMITED 1894 PREFACE. THE addition of Anglo-Saxon and Early English to the work in English for the Pass Degree by the Senate of the University of New Zealand at its 1893 session has necessitated the writing of this manual. Each of the periods of literature set for 1894 an d 1895, viz. from 1750 to 1800 and from 1800 to 1850, is so full of authors and books and so worthy of detailed study, and yet has so little upon it in any of the available textbooks, that it needs two hours' lecture a week during the session. One of these hours has now, I found, to be devoted to the teaching of Old English. And I have had to spend my long vacation in attempting a manual that would supply the deficiency. After I had written the general chapters on the characteristics and influences of the two periods, I saw that the vacation would be too short for the detailed study of the literature of both. I have now found it to be too short for the completion of even the first period ; and the approach of the beginning of the session has compelled me to print only the general chapters and the^ chapter on its poetry. The other chapters will be delivered as lectures during the session. Yet what is printed forms a natural unity. It sketches in the first three chapters the features of the great era of the rise of modern literature, and then, taking poetry, the form that has hitherto been the most essentially literary and the most sensitive to coming change, describes its development, and illustrates in detail the application of the general conclusions of the earlier chapters. Nor would a correct view of the evolution of the poetry of the period of preparation (175 to 1800) have been gained, unless by throwing it into perspective, by seeing its relation to the period of fulfilment (1800 to 1850), for which it was a preparation. Hence not merely is the era of expansion (175 to 1850) described as a whole, but each of the two stages or periods is described separately. The biographical tables in the appendix have been prepared by Mr.^ James Hight, B.A. They include the life and works of all the authors J who wrote poetry during the period (1750 to 1800). J. MACMILLAN BROWN. March igth, 1894. 209967 CONTENTS CHAPTER I. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES OF THE ERA OF EXPANSION. 1750-1850. Section l.(i) There are no exact limits for any era. (2) Artificial limits are needed for the sake of convenience. (3) Those of the modern era of English literature are less definite than of any other. (4) It was the era of expansion. (5) It was preceded by a period of as great contraction. (6) The absence of literary taste in the Georges weakened the power of patronage over English literature. (7) Other- wise a national literature could not have reappeared. (8) Yet the centralistic spirit lingered on in various forms throughout the era. ... ... ... ... I 3 Section 2. (i) The audience expanded by the inclusion of the new middle classes; (2) which at the same time purified and narrowed the scope of the literary art, (3) nationalised the literature, (4) abridged the freedom of authors in depicting the passion of love, (5) and generated senument- alism. (6) The process was aided by the inclusion of women amongst authors and readers, (7) which explains the predominance of the novel. ... ... ... 3 6 Section 3. (i) New literary centres came into prominence outside of London especially in Scotland, (2) also in Ireland, (3) in provincial England, (4) and in America. (5) The Continent drew English literary men to it. (6) But there was a movement towards recentralisation after the middle of this century. ... ... ... ... 6 & Section 4. (i) The decentralisation resulted in the expansion of topics, (2) and especially in the annexation of middle class life, lowly life, (3) and provincial life. (4) The insularity of English literature disappeared ; (5) and foreign countries were ransacked by fiction for its themes, (6) and past ages too. (7) The inclusion of the new leisured classes in the audience of literature made the modern novel a necessity, (8) as the portal into other spheres of literature. 8 12 CONTEXTS v Section 5. (i) The expansion also made it a grent poetic era. (2) But it was the expansion of the thought that most - affected poetry. (3) English poetry was reborn with the lavish material of the Elizabethan era and the finish of the v^- Queen Anne period ; (4) and gained passion from revolu- , tionism, (5) that did not find vent ; (6) and it became seer- like especially in its later phases. (7) The renaissance of English poetry is to be accounted for more by the urbanis- ing of the population than by reaction. (8) All poetry, even the reactionary, was touched by the new philanthropy ; (9) it did not feel any recoil from the Revolution. ... 12 17 Section 6. (i) All passions and thoughts, all history and science and philosophy were revivified by the new point of view. (2) A new kinship with nature was discovered;' (3) and a new interest in the future awakened ; (4) whilst the feeling of a new relationship to God made the period almost an age of faith. (5) The new religious enthusiasm was due rather to the resurgence of the puritan middle classes than to reaction ; (6) was felt in all spheres ; (7) and transfigured poetry. ... ... ... ... 17 21 Section 7. ( l ) All knowledge had to be reorganised and ^/ encyclopedism appeared ; (2) whilst the demand for con- temporary knowledge originated journalism. (3) Scholar- ship too received a new spirit, (4) and an enormous expansion in sphere. ... ... ... ... 21 24 Section 8. (i) The scholarship of old English literature and especially Elizabethan literature began to predominate. S (2) The publication of Percy's Reliques, as well as the new study of the Elizabethan drama, was an evidence of the reintroduction of the people into the realm of cultured literature. (3) The popularity of Ossian was a sign of the new birth of national instinct in literature. (4) The great antiquarian movement in liteiature pointed in the same direction. (5) English scholarship and English national life 'came together for the first time. (6) The nationalism of the audience attracted the genius and talent of the nation into literature. (7) But the French Revolution divided the era into a period of preparation and a period of fulfilment. 24 30 CHAPTER II. SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES. THE PERIOD OF PREPARATION. 1750-1800. Section I. (i) Reaction is to some extent implied in develop- ment in that there is criticism and, as a consequence, an liquation of the old. (2) Pope's influence lingered on, v j CONTENTS (3) 'and appeared even in the poetry that completely belonged to the new time. (4) The prose was still much affected by the Queen Anne style. Section 2. (i) The Revolution rendered the struggle with the old spirit easier ; (2) yet, not finding free vent in politics and public life, (3) it generated philanthropy in the active- minded and sentimentalism in the indolently leisured, (4) and only in the last decade of the century did its violent forms find expression in literature. ... 3336 Section 3. (i) Sentimentality and romance were two of its best literary safety-valves in England. (2) Romantic interest in the past revived the study of history, without changing its method ; (3) although its philosophical treat- now appeared and originated political economy, (4) and the discussion of questions as to origins. (5) The same growth of cosmopolitanism was shown by the increase of books of travel. (6) The East especially excited the" imagination. (7) But only towards the close of the period is the influence on literature fully apparent. ... ... 3639 Section 4. (i) So the expansion of science only superficially affected the poetry of the period ; (2) yet natural history had advanced so far as to introduce into literature a new feeling for nature ; (3) and the practical sciences became literary material long before the speculative. (4) Optimism and materialism existed side by side ; (5) and utilitarianism came into being as a working philosophical principle. (6) Science also made observation, thought, and the use of language more exact. (7) Yet its full effect was not yet attained. ... ... ... ... ... _ 4044 Section 5. (i) It is the same with the influence of art. (2) The stage could never become national again, but, through comedy especially, moulded the modern novel. (3) Music after the Elizabethan era had not great influence over poetry or prose till the nineteenth century. (4) Architec- ture and sculpture began to attract imaginative writers and to mould their ideas. (5) But it was painting that most developed during the period and most influenced literature 6) It came to be allied with literature in the illustration of books. (7) The result was greater picturesqueness in both poetry and prose. ... r 44 _ Sr Section 6. -(i) Literature was "deeply affected by oratory, which now reached its climax in England. (2) The Jhnsoman balanced period was produced by it, (3) and affected all forms of prose and many of poetry. (4) The new political oratory was more dignified than either pu pit or forensic oratory. (5) It helped prose to a more natural and regular style, a result finally accomplished by the new fiction and the new poetry. ... ... 7 l _ CONTENTS Vil Section 7. (i) The great individualities of the Commons of this period were bound to make oratory predominate ; (2) for it was a period of great individualities throughout Europe; but these were all absorbed by public life. (3) In England the consciousness of the world-wide questions and issues inspired the oratory. ... ... ... 5456 Section 8. (i) France was the great theme of the last decade of the century. (2) But France all through the period had greatly influenced the literary forms and style. (3) French science and philosophy still more influenced English literature, (4) but more as a subtle spirit than as a mould. ... ... ... ... ... 56 59 Section 9. (i) The political influence of other European countries was but small ; (2) it was their older literature and not their contemporary that had most effect upon the English mind. (3) Germanism began to predominate at the close of the century. (4) At first it was not altogether wholesome. (5) German music assisted the lyrical move- ment of English poetry towards the close of the century. (6) This lyricism revealed a return to older and more national literary forms. ... ... ... ... 59 6z CHAPTER III. SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES. THE PERIOD OF FULFILMENT. 1800-1850. Section I. (i) But the great period of Germanism in our literature is 1800 to 1850. (2) It is the great period of experimentation in metre and verse, (3) and in prose rhythms and styles; (4) nay, the larger harmonies of German music have their analogies in prose. (5) Opera influenced the drama ; (6) and the sentimentalism of German plays held its own for a time ; (7) whilst the translations of Goethe's and Schiller's plays confirmed the tendency to a literary drama ; (8) Faust especially had a deep influence upon English imaginative writers. (9) Goethe s Wilhelm Meister moulded the English philosophical novel. (10) The study of German brought back to English some of its older Teutonic habits, (n) So German scholarship led Englishmen back to the glories of their own literature ; (12) and recreated English scholarship, criticism, and his- tory. (13) But it was German philosophy that most influenced English thought and imaginative work. ... 6370 CONTENTS Section 2. (l) French interpretation aided this philosophical movement towards idealism. (2) But the more natural influence of France was towards positivism. (3) French science more deeply affected English literature than French philosophy. (4) The dramatic and philosophical style of French historians was acclimatised in England. (5) So too was the sympathetic and imaginative style of French critics. (6) France popularised the study of economics. (7) It introduced a sensuous type of poetry. (8) French fiction affected English novels, but still more English comedy. (9) French mysticism tinged the literature of the Oxford movement. (10) But older French thought and writings still held their own. ... ... ... 7 75 Section 3. (i) It was older Italy, too, that chiefly influenced the English poets, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. (2) Yet the struggle for freedom and progress affected English literature as much as the Italian Church and the memories of Italian art. ... ... ... ... .. 7577 Section 4. (i) The struggles of Poland, Greece, and Spain drew English attention to them ; but it was the older history and literature of the two latter that impressed the imagination. (2) Scandinavian literature, both old and new, began to have appreciable influence over English writers. (3) The other countries of Europe gave but little impulse to English literature during the period. ... 77 79 Section 5. (i) But what stirred the English literary mind X/nost was the rapidly expanding English empire. (2) The English language grew conscious of its great capacity and drew new treasures from all sources. (3) Classical scholar- ship was also refined and made more living, yet began to take a subordinate place. ... ... ... ... go __ 82 Section 6. (i) Most important was the rediscovery of the /treasures of older English literature. (2) The new national V audience demanded a wider and more national vocabulary. (3) The Latin elements of it were as much needed as the Saxon, but came to be mastered by the imagination instead of mastering it. (4) The foreign and native elements were so amalgamated as to fit the purpose of every writer, and to make the diction more flexible. (5) Lamb's Essays of Elia furnish a crucial instance of the return on the older vocabu- lary and literature ; it reveals that the new audience had pre- served the older words and tastes. (6) The Authorised Version and the books moulded upon it now supplied the medium for addressing the new audience. (7) Shakespeare had also become a national book and tinged the new medium. (8) The audience having been again nationalized, the cultured poets were again the popular poets. 8290 CONTENTS ix Section 7. (i) The spread of musical taste made lyricism again dominant in poetry, and melody and harmony in prose. (2) Sculpture, architecture, and painting had also their moulding influence on the literature of the period. (3) But the stage was the art that most influenced the literature, even though it was not and would never again become the national institution it had been in the Eliza- bethan age. (4) The acting drama affected the fiction, and the literary drama affected the poetry and the imag- inative prose. (5) Verbatim reporting raised oratory into a more accurate and thoughtful art. (6) And oratory through journalism and the pulpit affected the style of most writers. ... ... ... ... ... 90 95 Section 8. (i) Astronomy first amongst the sciences supplied new thought and illustration. (2) Geology and biology revolutionised thought, and the minuter study of nature that they introduced appeared in both poetry and prose. (3) Science, in fact, changed the whole life of imaginative literature. ... ... ... ... 95 97 Section 9. ( I ) The kinship of man with the infinities first became a source of poetic inspiration. (2) World- anguish, arising from the dethronement of the ego, combined with revolutionism, and became in some pessi- mistic, in others optimistic. (3) Philosophy had to be revised from the new point of view, and, as in all ages of progressive science, its positivist revision u as the domi- nant. (4) But the positivist attitude in imaginative literature is barren. (5) Science by resolving all matter into energy and making it immortal has gradually confirmed the idealistic attitude in literature ; (6) and throughout the poetry and imaginative prose of the period this predominates. (7) But science and the positive attitude led to a religious reaction in the second quarter of the century ; the Broad-church movement influenced literature more widely and deeply than the High-church movement. ... ... ... ... 97 102 Section 10. (i) It was rather the practical application of science that first influenced the popular audience. (2) A new mediating literature arose to interpret cultured and scientific results for the new classes. ... ... 102 104 Section n.--(i) The novel has gradually mastered the whole of this mediating realm. (2) It absorbed the functions and purposes of poetry and the drama. (3) And this was the period of great movements rather than of great individualities, and made more demand upon - the most popular form of literature. (4) Yet the novel still comes after poetry and the drama as a literary form and as a sensitive test of popular feeling. ... ... 104 107 x CONTENTS CHAPTER IV. ENGLISH POETRY OF THE PERIOD OF PREPARATION. 1750-1800. Section I. (i) It needs a great poet in a period to make it abandon precedent. (2) The poetry of this period is at best one" of tendencies. (3) The most prominent tendency in the first half of it is to follow Pope. (4) Johnson, in spite of his strong character, was mastered by it. (5) In his poetry he adds a certain clumsy dignity of his own to the Popian couplet. (6) Whilst conservative in form and in political and religious spirit, he anticipates the revolutionism of the new class in social opinions. 108 112 Section 2. (i) Goldsmith is his true successor in poetry, but carries the spirit of social revolt farther. (2) He is nearer the coming age than Johnson, and more like to Rousseau in his sentiments. (3) His Traveller chiefly N. expresses the middle class love of hearth and home, and \ the rising middle class philanthropy, and, whilst deploring the evils of wealth and luxury, inconsistently closes with a Johnsonian peroration on the safety of absolutism. (4) It therefore became an English household book. (5) The Deserted Village though less of a unity became more popular, because it gave fullest expression to ( ,^ -the rising love of nature and romance. (6) It inaugur- ated the poetry of regret which lingered round abandoned hamlets or cottages. (7) The Wealth of Nations, pub- lished soon after, elaborately refuted the economic fallacy it expresses, but could not have so immediate an effect as this poem so full of beautiful melody and pictures of reminiscence. (8) The poem touched the hearts of the newly urbanised masses, although a moment's thought would have convinced them of the inaccuracy of the assertion that " men decay". (9) He defended the fallacy in his prose dedication, and seemed quite unconscious that he was giving expression to the rising revolutionism of Europe. (10) He is also with the literary revolution, that was about to reject patronage, to cast off the fetters of pedantry, and to abandon the personal invective of satire. ( 1 1 ) His occasional verses are best when they are humorous, and reveal in him a vein not unlike Hood's. ... ... ... _ 112123 Section 3 (i) Crabbe is his successor, but, by his realistic method and closer study of Pope, even in his first poem Inebriety, misses the romantic tinge of Goldsmith, and merits the name " Pope in worsted stockings." (2) Conservative though he was, and free from the sentimental fallacy, his poetry belongs to the revolu- tionism of the new time. (3) Inebriety " paints with CONTENTS Xl Dutch faithfulness the drinking customs of the time, and, with more epigram than he ever afterwards used, satirises the upper classes, and especially the clergy, for their indulgence. (4) The second The Candidate, is enslaved to Pope. (5) His next, The Library, is as conventional and dull as the worst of the didactic poems in vogue during the eighteenth century. (6) The Village returned to the manner of Goldsmith, and to realism, and gave self-confidence to the naturalness of " Burns " ; (7) in the first book, it is a running pessimistic comment on Goldsmith's romantic picture, but in its second it lapses into the Queen Anne style. (8) His next, The News- paper, though Queen Anne in form, gives a picture of a new phenomenon of the time that has not been antiquated by a century of much-lauded journalistic progress. (9) The Revolution made him feel belated and remain silent for more than twenty years. (10) The Parish Register, produced in 1807, is more realistic, more careless of all the niceties of art, and more prosaic than any of his eighteenth century poems, (n) The new passion for story gradually mastered him. (12) The Borough is more intense in art and more psychological than The Village, and yet it is true eighteenth century ; (13) it consists of a long series of letters giving descriptions of various characters, scenes, and institu- tions ; (14) at the close he reveals that the secrets of his art are sympathy with his themes, and first-hand observation. (15) The Tales have little of the new time in them, and still show him to be the representative of the middle class churchman of the eighteenth century. 123 138 Section 4. Campbell and Bloomfield belong to the nine- teenth century, Rogers as much to the eighteenth as to the nineteenth ; he is imitative, first of Gray, then of Goldsmith, and lastly of Pope, but in his nineteenth century poems follows the narrative and descriptive styles of the time ; he was a revolutionist, yet shows no revolutionism ; he had a satiric genius, yet never wrote satire. ... ... ... ... 139140 Section 5. He is really a disciple of the school of blank verse didactic poets, who appeared in the second quarter of the century with the resurgence of the middle class and their long acquaintance with metaphysical theology and Paradise Lost. ... ... -.. 141142 Section 6. Akenside is the most important poet of the school ; his Pleasures of the Imagination (1744) is a cross between Paradise Lost and The Essay on Man ; it was written at Edinburgh University and represents the influx of Gallicism into the northern capital. ... 142 144 x jj CONTENTS Section 7 -(i) The Night Thoughts of Edward Young was a poem published about the same time and addressed to the same type of audience in Miltonic blank verse ; but it is perpetually marred by insincerities and bathos. Blair's Grave has the same faults ; but has true poetry ... 144140 in it. Section 8. (i) John Dyer was as real a poet and followed the Puritan secular poets in his Grongar Hill, whilst he used Miltonic blank verse in his RuinsofRome. (2) But it was his Fleece (1757) that best showed how much the new audience was to be found in the middle and industrial classes. (3) Glover reveals in his blank verse poems the middle class interest in commerce and passion for political freedom. (4) Armstrong's blank verse poems come closer in spirit to the Queen Anne age, and yet show promise of the coming poetry. (5) Grainger's Sugar Cane shows the drift of the new audience towards industrialism. (6) Didacticism and blank verse changed as the century advanced ; the one became more concrete, the other more like prose. (7) The history of the heroic couplet is, on the contrary, one of decay ; its true period is the eighteenth century. (8) Its original and proper use was either satiric or didactic ; but later on in the century it was used for all purposes ; and in the last quarter there was a distinct renaissance of it. ... 146 152 Section 9. Its use for descriptive purposes is best illustrated by Falconer's Shipwreck, one of the first indications of an imaginative interest in the nautical pursuits of the English nation ; it is marked by the pedantic pseudo- classicism of the Queen Anne period and the pedantic technicalism of the new industrial era, by the stiff rhetoric of the past age and the passion for nature of the coming age. ... ... ... ... ... 152 154 Section 10. (i) Darwin's Botanic Garden shows a similar medley of the new and the old, and illustrates the didactic use of the heroic couplet for scientific purposes. (2) The poem, especially in its third part The Economy of Vegetation, is deeply tinged with revolutionism. (3) The Anti-Jacobin set itself to ridicule the revolutionists, and laughed at Darwin's Loves of the Plants in The Loves of the Triangles. (4) He was the centre of the Lichfield coterie, and had introduced into it advanced Gallicism from Edinburgh University ; he was material- istic in his philosophy, and advocated a theory of evolution by transformations. ... ... ... 154 150, Section n. Satire was the true function of the heroic couplet ; but there was no great satirist in our period, because the greater spirits were too earnest for it, and CONTENTS Xili the lesser found new vent in journalism. (2) Churchill was the chief satirist and wrote in the decade best suited to satire (1760-1770) ; in politics he took the side of Wilkes and reform against the king and Bute, and attacked most of the eminent men of the time including Garrick, Smollett, and Falconer, who replied. (3) He quarrelled with Hogarth and Dr. Johnson, and in all his satires was perhaps more personal than witty ; yet the news of his death killed his sister and her betrothed Lloyd, and Cowper remained loyal to his memory. ... 159 165 Section 12. (i) Chatterton in his satires caught his tone, political, social, moral, and literary, and attacked without any principle or personal reason many of the victims of Churchill's. (2) He even followed him in his Voltairian tone, and sneered at religion and morality. (3) He used the heroic couplet for didactic purposes only in two or three poems ; and by far his best satirical production his ironical will. ... ... ... ... ... 165 171 Section 13. (i) The mantle of Churchill fell upon John Wolcot, who, however, preferred the ode to the heroic couplet ; another form of satire of the time was represented by The New Bath Guide of Christopher Anstey. (2) A serious rival to Wolcot for a time was The Rolliad, a series of political satires from the side of the Opposition. ... ... ... ... ... 171 172 Section 14. (i) On the model of this Canning, Gifford, Frere, and others started a satirical journal called The Anti-jacobin in 1797 to counteract revolutionary principles. (2) It ran for less than a year, but was followed by various dull imitations up till 1833. (3) It satirises new experiments in verse with the same vigour as it attacks the new humanitarianism and the new re- publicanism ; it is indiscriminate too in its ridicule of writers, joining Charles Lamb with Coleridge and Southey. (4) The New Morality is bitter against every new phase of opinion and civilisation. (5) The poems range through all literature for forms to parody. (6) The longer efforts are the best and get at the very heart of revolutionism ; The Progress of Man, though in form a burlesque of Payne Knight's Progress of Civil Society, attacks all the phases of it, sentimental, romantic, utilita- rian, socialistic. (7) The Loves of the Triangles adheres more closely to its immediate purpose of ridiculing Darwin and parodying his Loves of the Plants. (8) The Rovers burlesques the new German plays with their sentimen- talism and matrimonial intricacies. ... ... ... 172 180 Section 15. (i) Gifford had already attacked these plays in his Mseviad. (2) But an even more striking, though more ephemeral, literary fashion was Dellacruscanism, a xiv CONTENTS hybrid of Wertherism and falsetto lyricism. (3) Gifford had little trouble in satirising it in his Baviad ; for it was ridiculous in most of its features, and a more wholesome poetic taste was rising with Wordsworth and Coleridge. 180 184 Section 16. (i) In his attacks, he joined the study of older English literature with revolutionism ; and to some extent he was right ; for in the new poets and prose- writers all his poetry and his principles of criticism were rejected. (2) English imagination was about to overleap the Queen Anne period and its Cavalier and Restoration predecessors, and find a more national inspiration in the great national age of English history, the reign of Elizabeth, and in the products of the great popular past, the ballads. ... ... ... ... 184186 Section 17. (i) A false start was made by the new poetic spirit with Spenserianism, of which Shenstone's School- mistress was the first example ; most of his other work imitates the Queen Anne style ; but some of his elegies anticipate Gray's Elegy. (2) Thomson's Castle of Indolence comes four years later (1746), and, though tinged with burlesque, comes nearer to its model ; it has also more of the new time in it than the rest of Thomson's poetry. (3) The other Spenserians were William Julius Mickle in his Syr Martyn, and James Beattie in his Minstrel ; they also reveal the new poetic sentiment. ... 186 192 Section 18. (i) Gray came also of the Gothic revival ; but, / as he addressed an academic audience, was naturally /conservative. (2) In his famous Elegy, he was ever con- scious of the new audience through the maternal house- hold, for which it was chiefly written ; it is simple in diction and melody, and expresses the simpler emotions of the middle class. (3) His other poems are more formal and more like the Queen Anne verse ; his odes and Collins's reveal a tendency to revolt against the metaphysical didacticisms of the poetry of the time, and yet show its effect in their use of personified abstractions. (4) His later study of the older Celtic and Teutonic literatures brought him into closer touch with the new poetic movement ; and his two great Pindaric odes, The Progress of Poesie, and The Bard, along with half a dozen other lyrical poems were the result. ... ... 192 197 Section 19. (i) Collins also shows the revolt against the heroic couplet, even when in his earlier poems he uses it. (2) There is great variety of metre in his odes ; but the best are those that have Miltonic echoes. (3) He most anticipates the new time in his Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands ; but neither Gray nor he had sufficient strength to develop the new elements. (4) The nation was about to return to primitive sources of national feeling. ... ... ... ... 197201 CONTENTS XV Section 20. (i) Macpherson's Ossian is an instance of this. (2) It had great influence all over Europe last century. (3) It originated careful research into Celtic literature. (4) It was of the eighteenth century in its method of treatment of the past. (5) In it he confused various ages and cycles of legend. (6) It is full of the eighteenth century, its nakedness of religion, its humani- tarian morality, and its sentimentalism. (7) Eighteenth century ghosts abound in it. (8) It shows a careful study of Homer. (9) It adopts the diction and imagery of the authorised version of the Bible. (10) It avoids anachronisms, adopts figures from the scenery of the Highlands, and often attains genuine poetry, (n.) There is much of the stucco of the eighteenth century in the edifice. (12) Yet it gave a fresh impulse to the period. ... ... ... ... .. ... 201 211 Section 21. (i) Percy's Reliques followed. (2) It was taken from various manuscript and printed sources, and, though despised by the culture of London, became popular. (3) The ballads had greatly deteriorated by transmission and transcription and printing ; and Percy still more changed them by revision and addition. (4) In their original form they would not have commended themselves to eighteenth century taste. (5) His book is as much an anthology from known poets as a collection of ballads. (6) The ballads given are from various periods. (7) Their resemblances to ballads of other nations do not all imply community of descent. (8) There is little of fairy lore or the supernatural in them. (9) As the products of the popular imagination, they express the primitive passions, and with the people they were to enter into literature again. (10) The ballads of war and adventure predominate as they suited the time best. Some of them Percy rewrote so as to adapt them to the eighteenth century ; Sir Cauline e.g. is made less supernatural, less rude, and more sentimental. (11) The copious tears and romance of the new versions were needed for the sensibility of the new time ; the emotions of the originals are pre-Christian, tinged sometimes by the age of chivalry, sometimes by the popular fancy ; many collections followed. (12) It is always the Border version of an incident, whether Scotch or English, that is the best, and it was out of the ballad districts of the Border that the post-revolutionary renaissance of English poetry and fiction came. ... ... ... ... 211 225 Section 22. -(i) The Lowlands of Scotland had mingled the qualities of various races, and, after having been the arena of history, was to be the arena of literature. (2) The history of the district prepared it for literary success in English, and lyrical triumphs in the local dialect by the Xvi CONTENTS eighteenth century. (3) The puritan training of the new audience demanded a revision of the old ballads and songs. (4) Burns came at the meeting time of two great currents of history, and his creed was troubled and uncertain. (5) He mirrored his nation and time, and thus raised their literature to European importance. (6) He was essentially a lyrist belonging as he did to a lyrical age and people. (7) It was the great lyrical period of the Lowlands of Scotland ; the sound of Revolution in the distance raised passion to white heat. (8) Robert Burns, born in 1759, grew up in a lyrical and revolutionary atmosphere, and even his earliest attempts show the marks. (9) He came for a time under the influence of Robert Fergusson's satirical and descriptive poems, but in the last period of his life he returned to lyricism, with which he began. (10) He expresses deep sympathy with the lowly and oppressed, and is at times almost social- istic ; he appeals often to the brotherhood of man, and his breaches of what is now considered necessary to the dignity of man have failed to be forgotten because he has engraved them so deeply on the page of literature. ( 1 1 ) His attacks on the church are chiefly against the hypo- crites in it ; and he means to be the friend of true religion. (12) His social satires are more genial; the best is his Tarn o'Shanter. (13) His songs represent the true genius of the man. Section 23. (i) Cowper was, like Burns, a product of his time, and unconsciously anticipated the coming age because he belonged to the new audience. They had a deep fundamental likeness. (2) Cowper addressed the didactic and puritan section of the new audience. (3) His youthful attempts feebly anticipate his mature manner and style. (4) His Clney Hymns and his first satire show none of the power or the imagination of his later poems. (5) Churchill was his model in The Progress of Error ; but the spirit is puritan. (6) " Truth ' ' first shows his power as a picturesque satirist. (7) In Table Talk, although he still follows Churchill and Pope, he gives voice to the revolutionary spirit of the new time. (8) In Expostulation he is the Evangelical Jeremiah. (9) Hope and Charity are better, and give some vigorous satiric pictures of the time. (10) Con- versation and Retirement are the best ; the former especially is full of pungent and ever-relevant satire. (n) In Retirement he is becoming more and more the poet of nature, and less and less a mere satirist and preacher. (12) The minor poems in the volume show the lyricism of the age. (13) The Task (1785) raised him at once into all but the front rank of English poets ; its blank verse freed him from his limitations. (14) CONTENTS XVJi Book I., the Sofa, passes from gentle humour into pictures of the country as contrasted with the town. (15) The second book, The Time-piece, is full of eloquent indignation over the state of England. (16) The third book, The Garden, is more eighteenth century in spirit and method, though it has touches of the new philan- thropy. (17) In the fourth book, The Winter Evening, he looks with direct and unromantic vision at nature and the state of the country. (18) The fifth book, The Winter Morning Walk, is marked by fine poetic pictures of winter, and by a vehement revolutionism. (19) The last, The Winter Walk at Noon, is longest and most miscellaneous, yet is fullest of sympathy with nature. (20) The Task is significant in the evolution of poetry, as the first poetic attempt to please both the old audience and the new. (21) His later poems show the gathering gloom towards the close of his life, and the growing lyricism. (22) Minor poems and minor poets grew in number towards the close of the century. ... ... 241 262 Section 24. (i) There are many poets known by one brief poem ; but the sonnet begins to overshadow all the minor poems. (2) The new hurry of industrial life demanded briefer forms of poetry as of prose ; hence the ode and sonnet. ... ... , ... 262 263 Section 25. (i) Chatterton was a product of this new movement and of that for older literature and sham- antiques ; he started manufacturing old documents and poems in 1763. (2) He became frantic in his efforts to make himself famous by literature and committed suicide. (3) His Rowley poems are most elaborately wrought ; but are written in a mongrel language that belongs to no age or locality ; the overdone Spenserianism shows a lack of true poetic taste. (4) The drama Aella has some poetry in its lyrics; but most of its poetry is from Spenser, whilst its story and characters are from the romances of the day. (5) The poems are varied and follow the forms and methods of the age. (6) His acknowledged poems, and especially his eclogues, contain his best poetry, though they are also mere echoes. (7) His ambition is greater than his performance ; he is nothing when he is not imitative. ... ... ... ... ... 263 271 Section 26. (i) Blake was as isolated and precocious, but far more original. (2) He was a truer symptom of the coming time ; and expressed revolutionism more fully than Cowper ; he was a genuine product of a pre- revolutionary age. (3) He printed, illustrated, and published most of his own poems ; only a few of them are free from obscurity. (4) His Poetical Sketches were written between twelve and twenty, and have more poetry in two or three of them than in all Chatterton's XV111 CONTENTS work put together. (5) The Songs of Innocence anticipate Wordsworth in their love of simple language, and in their idealism. (6) The Songs of Experience are mystical, pessimistic, and revolutionary. (7) The Book of Thel is the least obscure of his mystical poems ; it is an allegory of self-sacrifice as the spirit that lives in nature. (8) He is the most transcendental of all the poets ; he hates materialism, the sensuous, and the fleshly. (9) He is the most pronounced poet of revolutionism in all its phases except its atheism, and anticipates all the spiritual qualities of the new poetry and especially of Shelley's. ... ... ... ... 271282 Section 27. (i) Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Landor were stirred as deeply by the revolutionary impulse which, not being merely political or French, lasted far into our century. (2) Wordsworth felt the French Revolution to be the most natural thing in the world. (3) His early poems, and especially his Evening Walk, are marked by all the qualities that distinguish his poetry ; his Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches are in heroic couplet, yet have little of the Queen Anne spirit. (4) They were unnoticed when published. Yet he con- tinued to write poetry ; and his next, Guilt and Sorrow, has the merits and faults of his narrative poems. (5) In the south of England he wrote The Borderers, his only dramatic attempt, full of Elizabethan echoes and pas- sages of power, and worthy of a better fate than it met. (6) His intercourse with Coleridge confirmed the revolu- tion against conventional poetry, and led to the Lyrical Ballads (1798). (7) In this volume there are specimens of his most commonplace narrative style, theory run mad. (8) But the Lines Written above Tintern Abbey ennoble the volume with the new philosophy and worship of Nature. (9) At last the yearning of pastoral poetry had been satisfied in this deeper intercourse with nature. (10) In a passage from The Prelude published in 1799 he finds the same serenity and refuge from the meanness of man in nature, (n) So in "Nutting" we see a passionate, almost personal, love of nature. (12) "A Poet's Epitaph" is the poetic apology for his life, and Lines in Early Spring, and To My Sister express phases of his higher pantheism. (13) His sympathy with lowly human life is generally put into ballad stanza and form. (14) His Essay on Poetry was the manifesto of the new poetic school against the critics ; its principles had been already in practice amongst poets. (15) Rural or simple life in common or simple language had been the ideal of Cowper, Burns, and Blake, and was to be the ideal of the coming literature. (16) He almost struck upon the true source of all the new literary CONTENTS XIX movements, the disturbance of established habits of the people by the industrial current. (17) Truth was his aim in both observation and language, and this came from the re-alliance of literature and national feeling. (18) His chief discovery was that there is no essential difference between the greatest imaginative prose and the greatest poetry. (19) In the latter part of the essay he describes the mission of the poet in language that is as truly poetical as that of his best poetry, and he strikes upon the truth that new ideas have to become familiar to men's minds before they become poetic material. (20) Yet he misses the secret of the power of his own poetry over our century, the interfusion of philosophy and poetry, and the lofty moral attitude. ... ... 282 302 Section 28. (l) Coleridge was more influenced by the romantic and sentimental movements, and appreciated the true spirit of the ballad. (2) The Ancient Mariner is in the ballad spirit, especially its first version ; yet it mingles the mediaeval, Elizabethan, and modern in the manner of eighteenth century romanticism. (3) The spirit of his own day especially enters into it, and even the collision of the old creed of vengeance and the new creed of love. (4) There is in the ballad a dreamy atmosphere that distinguishes it from the old ballads and kins it with Blake's poems and Turner's pictures. (5) With all its incongruity of materials, it is a true work of art. (6) Christabel is inferior in every respect, although it has the same dreamy atmosphere and finer modern elements in it. (7) The Ballad of the Dark Ladie promised a nearer approach to the true ballad. (8) Kubla Khan was composed in a dream and has the same hypnotic mistiness of outline as the other. (9) His tragedy, Remorse, has many fine passages in it, and is touched with the spirit of the new revolutionary time. (10) It is even in politics revolutionary, as is, still more distinctly, The Fall of Robespierre by Coleridge and Southey. (n) The boyhood and youth of both poets had been marked by revolt. (12) His lectures, Conciones ad Popnlum, delivered in 1795, and his Poems on Several Occasions, published in 1797, are full of trancendentalism and revolutionism. (13) The sonnets in his first volume of poems are poor in art and violently revolutionary in tone. (14) His Monody on the Death of Chatterton is like an ode in form and combines the personifications of eighteenth century poetry with pantisocracy. (15) "To a Young Ass" is pantisocratic and full of sympathy with animal life ; Lewti is sensuous. (16) His Ode to the Departing Year (1796) is still revolutionary; but his splendid "France, an Ode" (1798) recants all his revolutionism. (17) Fears in Solitude, and Frost at XX CONTENTS Midnight show strong sympathy with nature. (18) His visit to Germany confirmed his tendency to metaphysics. (19) Not the opium habit or his Germanism, but the ebb of his revolutionary passion, killed the poet in him. 302 324 Section 29. -(i) Southey was by nature a prose- writer, raised for a time into poetry by the revolutionary fervour. (2) He was, therefore, a most voluminous poet. (3) His first epic, Joan of Arc, is full of nature-worship, revolutionism, and unitarianism. (4) The Vision of the Maid of Orleans was afterwards made into a separate poem, and, in imitation of Dante, painted the punish- ments and the bliss of the other world. (5) Thalaba and Madoc followed, the one, an epic of the East, the other of the far west. (6) His early drama, Wat Tyler, is true to history, as well as relevant to the times of Pitt and the French War. (7) His English Eclogues are far more truly revolutionary and socialistic. (8) All through this period he had been writing and publishing short poems, and he collected these in "Metrical Tales" (1805). (9) His ballads are by far the most successful work, especially his ballads of the supernatural, (ic) The other sections of his early poems are very varied, both in form and spirit, some of them humorous or satiric, most of them didactic, (u) He had most of the sympathies of the Lake school, but he had none of the emotional qualities that make a man a better writer of poetry than of prose. (12) Landor was revolutionary by temperament as well as by the incidents of his boy- hood and youth. (13) His republicanism and his verse never amalgamated, and in his earlier poems he drew his models from the earlier part of the eighteenth century. (14) His later poetic efforts changed their character with the change of his taste in reading. (15) Gebir was his most ambitious effort, and most original ; it is a story of conquest, love, and magic. (16) It is marred by singular caprices of diction and style, and yet has felicities that sometimes rise to the Shakespearian in power. (17) His revolutionism peeps through only here and there ; it was his later work that showed it most ; for he was a revolu- tionist not from his surroundings, but by his nature. (18) His ferment came when the fetters were soldered down on Europe again ; his passion then demanded the dramatic form and at last prose. (19) The whole period was one of preparation for the full and varied develop- ment of prose. ... ... ... ... ... 324344 THE ERA OF THE EXPANSION OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 17501850. CHAPTER I. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES. Section i. 1. It is difficult to fix the termini of any era or period. Any date is an artificial point in the history of a movement or current. For spiritual influences have no definite birth or death. They have a life unseen long before the event or personality that seems to originate them ; and when they are supposed to be killed they are only scotched. All changes in the spirit or form of the public products of the human faculties are only stages in their development and not revolutions. 2. But dominant influences have their rise, climax, and declension. These mark off clearly enough one period from another. And history has, for the sake of convenience, had to adopt definite limits for them in fixed dates. Yet it is better, after having adopted such boundary' lines, to follow the influences or products beyond them wherever completeness of treatment demands it. 3. The more modern section of English literature can have none of the rounded completeness of the age of Chaucer or the Elizabethan era or the Queen Anne period ; for its products are so varied and extensive, the influences that moulded it so numerous, far-derived, and far-reaching 2 ERA OF EXPANSION that some of them will seem more naturally to belong to what precedes or what follows. 4. It is this very expansion of English literature in all directions during the last century and a half that demands a period for itself ; whilst the latter third of it is still too near us to allow the proper perspective for correct study and classification of its authors and books. 5. In all previous ages the literature of England clustered round some local centre of influence and patronage, which was as a rule the court. Most of the imaginative writers were courtiers or their clients or followers. The chidf exception was the seventeenth century, when England was split up into two camps and the books and writers may be arranged without much difficulty into Puritan and Cavalier. But this was followed by a period that of Queen Anne which became narrow, if not sectarian, in its centralisation. Though the monarch herself had little to do with this in either force of character or taste, her statesmen emulated the Augustan ages of Rome and France in patronage of writers. It was the great period of political rewards to literary men great and small. And to London all the provincials of ambition or talent found their way sooner or later. A limited standard of taste, a limited clique of critics hedged in both poetry and prose. And though the authors thought they were laying down the ultimate code of literary laws and producing the final forms of literary art, the waters of revolution have swept over the age, and new standards, laws, and forms have antiquated all but the writings of three or four and left these to be read only in fragments or quotations. 6. It was a happy thing for English literature that the first Georges knew little of books and less of English, and that they preferred statesmen that, like Walpole, showed scorn of letters. Without this political repulsion, it might have continued to be for several generations the hanger-on of a court, the hireling of state and politics, and the great decentralisation movement would have been postponed a century or more. 7. Its gradual enfranchisement from patronage during the eighteenth century has been recognised by most as one CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 3 of the most striking features of its development. Had even a knot of courtiers or of men of state influence in London continued to protect or encourage young and rising writers by giving them money or sinecures or lending them the publicity of their name, then would English imagination have been " tongue-tied by authority " or narrow fashion ; men of letters would have continued to dance to the piping of aristocratic society. A people's literature might have grown up like the ballads or Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress ; but it would have been scorned and neglected by literary fame, a mere pariah, emancipated from London convention and London taste. 8. Through the latter half of last century and the first half of this, the process of enfranchisement went on. For even when the life of the writer and the form he adopted had completely thrown off the trammels of court and fashionable society, the spirit remained to some extent enslaved. Several sections of imaginative literature, and especially fiction, continued for generations to prefer themes from high life, and looked upon the life of the people as unworthy of their attention. The tradition that literature is a satellite ot courts has been hard to kill, and still lingers about certain types of journalism and fiction. Section 2. I. But the most fundamental expansion of English literature during the era has been that of its audience. The new wealth that invention and enterprise and new markets brought created a new leisured or partially leisured class all over Great Britain. The boundary-line of the struggle for existence receded and left a rapidly-increasing middle class which had not yet scope for its idle hours in the sports and land of the country aristocracy or in the politics and fashion of London life. Its liberated energies and time demanded some amusement or occupation suited to its traditional tastes. It became the new audience of English literature, ambitious in culture, yet largely Puritan in its sympathies, morality, and religion, whether within or without the church. 4 ERA OF EXPANSION 2. There followed, therefore, from this expansion of the audience what is considered by French critics a serious contraction of the scope of the writers. From Fielding to Thackeray there went on, sometimes slowly, in other decades rapidly, the purification of English fiction. The process was almost complete by 1850, and since that date there has been a tendency to reaction under the influence of French examples. Even Thackeray had begun to feel the limitation ; in the preface to Pendennis dated November 26th. 1850, he says "Since the author of Tom Jones was buried, no writer of fiction amongst us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a man. We must drape him and give him a certain conventional simper. Society will not tolerate the natural in our art." This is putting as a revolution of last century what was a process through the whole period from 1750 to 1850. Novelists who desired to have the widest possible audience had to purify .their pages. But the process of expansion had practically only begun in 1750 and for many decades the best writers were able to ignore the new elements in their audience. Even as late as the third decade of our century Shelley and Byron at times broke down the traditional pales of convention and dealt with forbidden topics. But they were bold with the spirit of revolt and they suffered for the outrage. 3. To English literature, the purification has been an enormous, though not unmitigated, gain. It has opened the pages of the ablest and the greatest books to both sexes and to all ages. It has identified the best imaginative literature with the purest, and made prurient literature an outcast without authoritative ally or friend. It has made the possible audience almost co-extensive with the English-speaking world. Whilst it has opened the door for all the noblest passions and emotions into the higher literature ; for these are the natural allies of purity. 4. On the other side there has to be set down a certain loss and along with it a certain gain that is not a true gain. Novelists and poets, as Thackeray indicates, had the freedom of their art restricted on the side of the passion of love ; they could not paint realistically all that men and women were or could be, as the later Elizabethan and the CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 5 Restoration dramatists painted them. But the amorous could not wholly be ejected from imaginative hooks, least of all from fiction. 5. For the coarser phases of it was substituted the sentimental with a complete set of conventions in phraseology and spiritual attitude. As soon as the audience began to expand in last century, and the expansion began to drive out the unreserved description of lawless love, the artificial substitute appeared, at first mingled in a prudish, condemnatory way with the other, as in Richardson's novels, but afterwards gradually eliminating that which it condemned, as in the . ladies' novels at the close of last century. But even as late as the Minerva Press fiction at the beginning of our century, devoted though it was to the romance of love, the pages are not all that the purist would sanction. The artificial substitute for the opener delineation of the passion failed for a time to drive out its antithesis. 6. What aided it most was the inclusion of women in the audience of literature. Expansion in this direction had begun with Addison and Steele and the periodicals they wrote. The Tatler and The Spectator were meant for both sexes, as we can see as well by their topics as by their treatment of them. The coarseness of the Restoration comedy had driven women from the theatre, and Cavalier literature was seldom fit for the eyes of innocence. Addison saw how he could multiply his readers if only he could keep his pages pure. 7. But the expansion in this direction proceeded at a much accelerated rate after the middle of last century. For, where the growth of industrial wealth gave one man leisure, it gave a dozen women most of their time to themselves. Women's education, therefore, became a necessity, and though for almost a century of the flimsiest kind, it was enough to give them a passion for novel-reading. This was the element in the new audience that created a demand for the romances of sentiment and for other books expressive of sentimentalism. The spread of wholesomer ideas and sounder methods of education exorcised this new and sickly spirit before the period closed. But these had to come 6 ERA OF EXPANSION from women themselves. The abler and more energetic among them had to find more active spheres than the luxury of novel-reading. Some of them took to novel- writing. It became indeed one of the most striking phenomena of our period, the number of authoresses who appeared. And it was women like Jane Austen, Miss Mitford, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss Ferrier who did most to drive the spirit of sentimentalism out of novels and raise their tone not merely by purer morality, but by gentle satire. Fiction under their guidance took new lines of development ; it grew more minute in its observation and more elevated in its purpose. That they joined the ranks of both readers and writers and came to have a foremost place is doubtless one of the reasons why the novel absorbs so much of the literary power of our century. Section 3. I. But almost as important a result of the new wealth and the new leisure was the expansion of the area of English literature, its decentralisation. The new talent formed cultured centres to address outside of London. Hitherto clever young men with a turn for writing had left their native places in Ireland, Scotland, or the country dis- tricts of England and settled in the great city. There were the publishers, the critics, the educated audiences, and the patrons. Even the Elizabethan had been a London literature. But in this new era all was changing. Edinburgh became a most important literary rival to the English capital. There were gathered some of the finest philosophical thinkers of the time Hume, Dugald Stewart, Brown, Lord Kames, Blair, Campbell, Alison, and Ferguson ; there some of the finest litterateurs of the period like Christopher North and Hogg and Moir had their centre of inspiration ; thither Burns went when he had his poems to publish and patrons to seek ; there Jeffrey and Sydney Smith started the Edinburgh Review and attempted to rule English politics and poetry by smart critical essays ; thence Scott dazzled the new reading world with his series of romances. And this was not the only literary centre in Scotland ; Kilmarnock had its press and its bevy of minor CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 7 poets and Glasgow had its Adam Smith. And all over Scotland there was a ferment that produced a rich literature of lyric and story and legend. 2. Ireland, too, though less fertile in writers than it had been in the previous hundred years, had much intellectual life centred in Dublin and her university. Moore and Banim, Lover and Lever never denationalised themselves as their predecessors had done by going to London, though Burke and Goldsmith and Sheridan adopted the life of the English capital as their own. 3. In England itself there was a vigorous decentralisation. Lichfield had its literary clique with Erasmus Darwin as its leader last century. Bristol issued the earlier poems of Chatterton and the earlier volumes of Coleridge and Southey. The English lakes drew round Wordsworth and Southey a lake literary circle. Yorkshire had her Ebenezer Elliot and her Brontes, who remained in the locality and drew, the one from his artisan surroundings, the others from the moors, a distinctive colouring for their productions. The South of England, too, nursed in various rural districts talents that could not have lived in London ; Gilbert White and Jane Austen during the earlier part of the period kept to the parishes in which they lived and studied with microscopic care the natural or human history of them. Norwich with her Taylors and Martineaus was one of the first channels for Germanism, and the new philosophical thought and the new revolutionary spirit. Growing industrial centres like Manchester with her Chetham Society, encouraged local literature or research. And the University centres, like Oxford with her religious and philosophical movement of 1840-50, showed signs of imaginative and literary life that had no connection with the capital. 4. There were indications of even more distant revolt against the predominance of London. By the close of last century the New England States of America felt the duty of developing a literature of their own laid upon them by their new independence; and though Washington Irving could not fail to take English writers as his models and sources of 8 ERA OF EXPANSION inspiration, yet there is strong local colouring in many of his works, as in his History of New York. And the first half of our century sees Canada enter into English literature with a new flavour of her own in the Sam Slick of Judge Haliburton, although the colonies and India do not appear as distinct English literary centres till after 1850. 5. It was the Mediterranean and especially Italy that drew English talent and especially poetic talent away from London. But this was in the latter half of our period. Goldsmith had finished his education by wandering from the Scheldt to the Po ; Gibbon had written much of his Decline and Fall at Lausanne and had visited Italy ; Mary Wollstonecraft and some other advanced writers had drunk in the revolutionary spirit in France itself. But there was no migration of writers to continental towns till our own century. Byron and Shelley and Landor showed how inspiring residence in Italy could be for poetic genius ; and the Brownings and others followed the example and took up their abode in Florence. x\0LM -* t' OL X 6. There can be little doubt that this was the great era of decentralisation of English literature ; and though the move- ment did not wholly cease after 1850 on account of the great development of the Colonies, of America, and of Anglo-Indian life, it began to receive a distinct check within the United Kingdom itself; London tends to become again the natural centre of English literary life, the exchange and clearing house of English imagination and ideas : thither have gathered again the great publishing houses and the literary ambition of the kingdom, and thence issue again the chief magazines and critical journals. The facilities for travel, that before 1850 had tended to scatter writers and literary influence, are now acting in the opposite direction and gathering the most critical audience and the most- ambitious writers into the vast city, that again draws all leisured circles to it as it did in the Queen Anne age. Section 4. I. So great an expansion of area over which literary energy was spread and so vigorous a decentralisation of CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 9 criticism and literary influence could not but have a whole- some effect upon the writers and books of the century under discussion. Its best effect was to introduce variety into the themes. Swift and Pope, Addison and Steele, had but a narrow space wherein to show their talent, the topics of the coffee-houses and the gossip of town society. When the imagination and criticism of a people are both practically cooped up within the limits of one city, their influence upon each other is narrowing ; they soon prescribe rigid conven- tions and a confined sphere to move in ; the writers get to feel that all they need for success is the approval of a small circle ; a clique comes to tyrannise over national taste. But as soon as this thraldom is broken, and there is a possible appeal to other critics and other centres of taste, new kinds of topics have a chance of being heard, new talent may choose its own theme, new genius may find a public that does not acknowledge the yoke of professional criticism, new schools of thought and art may arise that reject the authoritative models and rules. 2. It was this that occurred between 1750 and 1850 the gradual expansion of the sphere of English literature. Before this, poetry and the drama and fiction moved only in lofty circles ; kings and heroes were preferred ; but if they could not be found convenient, lords and ladies, courtiers and their parasites, might suffice. If a lowlier social stratum were touched, they condescended to it, either in a humorous or mock-heroic way or in amazement at the traits of humanity to be found in it. The rise of the middle classes to wealth and power brought them above the level of mere literary condescension and opened up many neglected regions to the serious fiction-writer, if not to the poet too. Even Addison looks from above when he treats of any theme or character outside of fashionable London life. Now Goldsmith and Blake and Cowper enter with full sympathy into the life of the lowly and obscure. The evangelical tone of the new wealth and leisure brought sympathy with the oppressed into the sphere of imagination ; and one of the distinctive features of the later fiction and poetry of the era is the sympathetic and unpatronising description of the life of the peasant, the artisan, and the slave. 10 ERA OF EXPANSION 3. Provincial life ceased to be neglected. Towards the close of the period, after Miss Austen, Miss Mitford, and Miss Edgeworth, Scott, and Gait had led the way, it became the favourite scene of fiction. Nor did even poetry leave its pathos and tragedy unsung ; it came to have its own poets like Crabbe and Bloomfield, Ebenezer Elliot and Burns. 4. But if themes of heroic level were still to be treated, they were oftener sought in other lands and other times. Two vast new worlds were opened to imagination, the contemporary world outside of England and the world of the past. These had been practically lost to English literature after the Elizabethan era ; they were now rediscovered, and the growing insularity of English thought and fancy was broken up. Again imagination ventured out into distant lands and seas and times and reconquered them for the new reading public. 5. Fiction began to search over the whole world for scenes and themes. The new romances of the close of last century found Italy, France, and Spain the best arena for their mystery and sensation. Beckford in his Vathek went as far afield as Persia and Hope in his Anastasius chose modern Greece as his scene; whilst Johnson made Abyssinia the starting-point of his Rasselas. But it was the first half of our own century that expanded the field of the novel most. The women romance-writers especially investigated continental history and contemporary life to find themes. And Scott and Lytton followed. American life, both Indian and Anglo-Saxon, was explored chiefly by American novelists like Fenimore Cooper and Hawthorne. And Eastern life gave themes to Morier and Miss Pardoe. 6. But it was history that gave the most striking expansion to the novel. Scott led the way and by his wizardry drew after him Lytton and most of the fiction writers that followed ; even those who had a special genius for other types of novel, like Dickens and Thackeray, made attempts at the historical, the one in Barnaby Rudge and the other in Esmond. And during the first half of our century every age was ransacked for subjects. CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES II 7. And it was the expansion of the audience that made the novel the chief imaginative form of our era and gave it an importance and development that quite overshadowed the growth of every other literary form. Narrative is the first literary instinct and desire of men, and through no other portal can the mass of new readers pass into apprecia- tion of literature. The sermon, the speech, the essay soon tire the untrained mind ; and even biography, travel, and history are too systematic and too fond of the bare fact to attract the primitive imagination. It is the story a section of life told so as to rise to a denouement that interests the mind unaccustomed or disinclined to patient or methodical thought ; the child will listen by the hour to it. And the novel was the modern substitute for it, when reading took the place of listening ; or rather, by incorporating the sermon, essay, satire, study of character, philosophical theory, biography, travels, or history in it, it superseded all other literature for the new reading public, in gratifying their primitive passion for narrative. In previous ages of English literature the audience consisted chiefly of a highly educated circle who had had their minds trained in other literatures ; and in the Elizabethan age, the only age when the reading public tended to become the nation, the develop- ment of the drama, an art that appealed to the mind rather through spectacle than through literary form, postponed the invention and growth of the novel. It was the new wealth of the eighteenth century that, liberating a considerable section of the English who were able to read from the necessity of continual toil, made fiction a prime essential of English literature. They had from their Puritan traditions an invincible objection to the drama and the impurity of the Restoration theatre confirmed it. A new form of literary art was a necessity, a form that would, in using the love of story, allow of infinite variations of the limited material of story. The number of types of striking incident in human history is soon exhausted; they repeat themselves with singular monotony in the collections of various nations and ages. The modern novel, by change of scene and character and spiritual atmosphere, by commixture with different forms of literature, drama, satire, history, biography, philosophy, description of nature, succeeded in concealing 12 ERA OF EXPANSION the inborn poverty or rather automatism of the story-telling fancy. It is this incorporation of most other literary elements and forms that has made it the dominant form of the nineteenth century. It has fitted itself to almost all classes of readers and threatens to make the primitive instinct for narrative the permanent medium of all literary ideas and imaginings During its earlier stage, from 1750 to 1850, it justified its existence by professing to be the intermediary and teacher for raising the newly enleisured masses into the higher classes of readers. But the gradual recession of the fringe of ignorance has kept adding every decade to the possible audience of literature ; and the appeal through fiction to their uneducated minds and inherent preference of story has fixed novel-writing into modern civilisation as a permanent literary habit. 8. During our period it did help to increase the number of readers of other forms of literature. History, biography, travels, the didactic treatise felt the new expansion of sphere and audience too, and flourished as they had not done before. The essay held its own in the latter half of the eighteenth century and was as popular as it had been in the earlier part; whilst in the first half of the nineteenth century it came to be organised into the magazine article. Section 5. I. But it was poetry that next to fiction felt the new impetus most, allied, as it was, as closely with imagination. Though there is no poet in this era to rank with Shakespeare or Milton, there are more of those that may be placed next to them than in any other era Burns, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning ; indeed there are not as many in all the rest of English literature put together ; whilst of poets of the third rank the number still more exceeds all other periods, Gray, Collins, Goldsmith, Beattie, Blake, Chatterton, Cowper, Crabbe, Rogers, Campbell, Scott, Moore, Southey, Hood, Bowles, Landor, Kirk White, Hunt, Elliot, Hogg, Clough. The list would be greatly lengthened if minor poets and writers of occasional poetry were added. And the excellence and CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 13 variety of the technique and style, as well as of the imagina- tion and thought, amongst them would alone be enough to classify this era of expansion amongst great poetic eras. 2. But poetry is more affected by the expansion of thought and feeling than by the expansion of audience or sphere. It had more readers, of course for the growth of sentimentalism made it a great favourite with the new audience as well as with the old audienc'e of critics and cultured men and women ; religious and free-thinking, philosophical and matter-of-fact, scientific and practical, all had their schools or types of poetry to suit their tastes. For its sphere and variety of topics had also widened. In this respect it is a marked contrast to that of the Queen Anne period. It ranges over the whole orb of human knowledge. It emulates like fiction all other forms of literature ; and to take its narrative form alone it searches as widely as the novel for variety of scene; from court to peasant's hut, from "China to Peru," from the earliest ages down to contemporary life. 3. It is however, rather in the growth of its thought and inspiration that the century is to be considered a great poetic era. When Johnson wrote his Lives of the Poets, English poetry seemed almost to have completed its cycle. Dryden and Pope were to him the perfecters of it as an art. And it was just at this point, the beginning of the last quarter of last century, that it was about to be reborn to a greater activity of thought and imagination, a greater variety and beauty of art, than it had ever experienced. Burns, Blake, Cowper, and Crabbe were already composing the poems that, published a few years after, were to show that a new era in poetry had come, an era that would rival in power and surpass in variety and scope the Elizabethan. Already had the way been prepared for it, as Johnson might have seen in the popularity of Ossian, in the collection of folk-ballads and songs by Bishop Percy, and even in the new spirit of sympathy with the lowly expressed in the poetry and prose ot his own friend and protege, Goldsmith. Enthusiasm had been driven out by the Queen Anne period ; it was now to come back into English literature and especially poetry like a flood. But it could neither ignore 14 ERA OF EXPANSION nor overbear the finish that that age had given to English poetic style. Now the exuberance of the Shakespeare time, its fulness of emotion and inspiration, and its lavishness of thought were to be combined in poetry with the choiceness of diction, the polish of style, and the dominance of art, that Dryden and Pope had taught. The poetry of the era was about to take all nature and human nature for its themes, to seek inspiration and models in every age and literature, to reject all the classical rules that criticism had formulated and made tyrannous. It is an era of poetic discovery and rediscovery, and one, too, of rapidly perfecting poetic art. By the close of it nothing but the loftiest thought and emotion put into the most melodious and fitting words could find a permanent place in the literature. Wordsworth and Byron and Browning have been able, from the penetration of their thought or the strength of their character, to outrage the conventional melody and art of poetry at times ; but it was at the risk of losing the name of poet with the mass of readers. Rogers, Moore, Landor, and others reached their place as poets chiefly by the excellence of their technique ; but they had to exhibit more emotion than the Queen Anne poets and it was only an inferior place they reached. 4. The especial mark of the poetry of this era is its intensity of passion or insight expressing itself in finished or melodious form. And what gave it this intensity was not the new and wider audience but the revolutionary character of the era. Revolution, that never breaks out into civil war, that never involves all the talent of the country in death- grips, works underground and raises the passion of the thinkers p.r.d speakers and writers to white heat. The fear of some dread issue makes every man feel and think and speak with vehemence, if not extravagance. Through the whole of the era from 1750 to 1850 the sense of possible explosion in the future pervaded the leading minds of England and filled them with passionate hope or reactionary terror. It rekindled the enthusiasm that had been almost dead in English literature for two generations or more. The flood-gates of emotion were opened. New springs of sympathy broke forth and found channels in the evangelical CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 15 movement, the new philanthropy, and such crusades as the anti-slavery agitation. But this resurgence of passion affected literature almost as much ; for to it was due the new birth of English poetry, with its strength of thought and character, its fervour of temperament, and its freshness of inspiration. 5. It was not the French Revolution alone that stirred such excitement in English feeling, though that gave body and form to the inner fears and hopes that had long haunted the English mind. The American revolution had already shown how real was the possibility of successful revolt against long-established authority and precedent. And though the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic wars made reaction seem patriotic and be strong, no sooner did this foreign fear subside than the suffering masses expressed their passion in riot and revolt. Advancing legislation, however reluctant, assuaged the fear of worse and brought the more confident and prosperous section of the people over to the side of government. The French revolutions of 1830 and 1848 stirred to new life the old hopes and fears, and Chartism gave them semblance of possible realisation. But after 1850 the growth of philanthropy and of sympathy with the people has led the aggrieved to think rather of reform through legislation than of revolution. The century from 1750 to 1850 may well be called the English era of suppressed revolution. 6. And it was this veiled passion that made it so great a poetic era at a stage in the development of English literature when poetry might have been expected to give way to prose. After so many generations of criticism and of conscious effort in literature English genius with surpris- ing recoil sprang back into the rapt attitude that true poetry demands. After Addison and Pope and Johnson it is difficult to realise how there could have come a Blake, a Wordsworth, a Keats, a Shelley. Yet there is nothing wonderful in it, when we understand that all through this great era there was a wild ferment in the English mind and that it never found issue in politics or civil war. There is something of the seer in much of the work of these poets, and this implies at least a partial return of the poetic soul 1 6 ERA OF EXPANSION of the time to the simplicity and inspiration of earlier ages r an indication strongly confirmed by the resurgence and rapid growth of the primitive passion for narrative. Even Byron, self-conscious and vain though he was, belongs his naive egotism and the fervid rush of his poetry to a time like that of the trouveres, if not like that of the old bards. And even if Ossian had wholly belonged to the eighteenth century, as much of the sentiment and style undoubtedly does, it would have been no false sign of the coming inspiration in poetry. There was a torrent-like advance in the imaginative work of the era that ill-brooked the check of criticism. 7. Nor is this strange phenomenon due to mere- reaction from an artificial and unenthusiastic period. Reaction alone increases the volume and power of a movement and does not originate. If we trace it back to its ultimate cause, we shall find it in the expansion of the area of thought and feeling throughout the era. The organisation of industry brought the scattered population of England into teeming centres, in which thought and feeling tend to be epidemic. Town life concentrates discontent and gives it vital nuclei. And the predominance of it in a nation or an age fosters revolutionary tendencies. New ideas move more quickly than in a rural people. And any talent for speech or writing that appears catches the newest passion and gives it utterance. But even if no talent arises in the new urban masses, they join the reading public and give a new impetus to a writer, from whatever class he may come. The era saw the possibilities of an audience for literature widened more and more ; it annexed first the new middle class and during our own century the new industrial classes. The first half of it fitted English literature to the new wealth and leisure that the growth of industry and commerce produced. It was the other half of it that con- summated this adaptation and grew conscious of the vast field still to be cultivated in the artisans themselves. It was, taken as a whole, the great era of middle class literature ; but it was for a middle class not yet far enough separated from its relations to labour to lose sympathy with it. The poor and lowly, the toiling and oppressed had CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 17 their full share in the poetry and other imaginative pro- ductions of the period, even though it was only towards the close of it that the working classes began to be part of the audience ; and by that time a section of the middle class was losing touch with labour. 8. During the time that the new wealth was kept out of politics by the aristocracy and their followers, it sympathised with revolutionary tendencies till the Reign of Terror alarmed a large section of it into reaction. Goldsmith, Burke, Cowper, and Crabbe wrote for it and were essentially conservative in their religion and politics ; and yet their productions are full of the new philanthropy, the new feeling for the oppressed. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey began their literary career by the greatest enthusiasm for revolutions and revolutionists ; but the development of events in Paris during 1792 threw them violently back upon tradition, never, however, to be wholly free of the passion and the broader thought that the revolutionary spirit bred. Blake, Burns, and Godwin were by nature outcasts and rebels and lost little of their sympathy with the new movement during the eighteenth century. 9. It was the first quarter of our own century that saw the most violent reaction against the revolutionary spirit. But after that it began to gather renewed energy and step by step to find its way into politics as reform. The impulse it had given to poetry suffered no backward movement ; for only opinions and political action were affected by the recoil. The tide of poetic passion flowed on unchecked till it exhausted itself in the latter half of our century. Nay, poets like Byron and Shelley had increase of fervour from the revulsion. The whole of the imaginative literature, even that which was produced by the most conservative of natures, like Scott's, felt the impetus ; the thoughts were expanded, the passion was intensified. Section 6. I. Every human thought or relation, however old or threadbare in its literary treatment, took new colour and life. It glowed with such passion that it seemed to the writers and speakers to be born again. Such a hackneyed theme B 1 8 ERA OF EXPANSION as love, dealt with a thousand times over from Chaucer to Herrick, counted dead or at least artificial for a century, awakened to a new existence and was sung in an infinite variety of new tunes and songs from Burns to Tennyson, whilst in the hands of the novelist it seemed to have entered on perennial literary life. The relation of man to his past was again steeped in imagination and feeling, not by the birth and marvellous growth of historical fiction alone, but by means of the new science and the philosophy based on it. English and classical history had already fully occupied the English fancy during various eras. But from the point of view of the new thoughts of mankind as consisting, not merely of monarchs, nobles, and warriors, but of merchants, and artisans, and toilers of all kinds, these had again to be studied, again to be worked up by the literary arts. There was an even vaster expansion of his relation to his past. Science had begun to see that his existence upon earth reached far beyond the beginnings of history ; and the civilisations of the East and of America, the slave and the savage gave new themes and new thoughts to literature ; nor can it ever return again to the insularising treatment of civilised history. The new philosophy, too, based as it was upon science, threw a new imaginative halo around old questions ; the fountain and birth of the soul, the sources of its instincts and unaccountable memories, its nature and destiny were treated again and again both from the materialistic and idealistic side with such freshness and poetic fancy as made them seem new ; Wordsworth in his Ode on the Intimations of Immortality and Shelley in his Queen Mab and Epipsychidion are examples of the beauty that the new passion could give to abstract topics such as these. 2. Still more was man's relation to nature recreated. Science had raised the curtain upon an infinite universe of which the earth was but an atom, and endowed it with an existence into which man's terrestrial life seemed to vanish. Yet he began to feel himself more and more a part of all that he surveyed or knew. The animals, that had been to him before only pieces of matter moulded and animated to serve his wants, now claimed more intimate connection, and stretched the chain of their existence myriads of ages beyond CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 19 his past. The plants and rocks, the seas and winds had now a nature and a history as full of meaning as he had himself. No wonder that he began to recognise in his best self a living sympathy with all these, a kinship that was not to be denied, and a spirit of beauty that had escaped his mental vision before. Wordsworth most fully and poetically expressed the revolution in his attitude to nature ; but Burns, Shelley, and Tennyson had as genuine an insight into it ; and no modern English writer can well be called poetic without emotional recognition of it. We find it as early as The Seasons of Thomson ; and it gained strength and fulness of spiritual meaning as the era went on. 3 Man's relation to his future was as much renewed and ilealised. In previous ages the speculation, whether imaginative or practical, on what man was to be, was limited and narrow. Books like the Utopia and the New Atlantis dealt with the problem in rigid relation to his actual state, either political, social, or educational. Now thought reached out to limits far beyond the practicable. Godwin and Shelley especially indulged in dreams that seemed to them feasible. The Political Justice of the one, written in philosophical prose with cool self-repression anticipates the most advanced dreams of the anarchists of our own day ; whilst the Queen Mab, Laon and Cythna, and Prometheus Unbound of the other tell in impassioned poetry the hopes of the future of man that the revolutionary spirit stirred. These productions belong by nature to an era of revolution and express in the most striking way the thoughts that haunted the minds of the most advanced thinkers. And there were few imaginative writers but had in them as they wrote some picture of man's destiny, optimistic or pessimistic according to their revolutionary or reactionary tendencies. It was the uneasy sense of coming change, of threatened overthrow of convention and tradition that set men looking into the future. 4. But perhaps the most complete transformation by feeling was that of man's relation to God. Even the believers in the earlier part of the eighteenth century were cold, theological, and apologetic in their religion; they argued out rather than felt it. The sense of the relationship 2O ERA OF EXPANSION to the divine power was practically lost ; and there was an unreality about all worship in the age of common-sense. But before the middle of the century everything religious had begun to change. Wesley and Whitefield were preaching their crusade against formalism, by the time that Butler had published his Analogy and Pope his Essay on Man, the two most striking attempts to place religion on a basis of rationality. And before the century closed, the Evangelical movement within the Church and Methodism outside it had gone far to set English religious tnought on fire ; the era, as far as the majority of the nation were concerned, may be classed with the ages of faith, so fervid and crusading did it become on its religious side. 5. Nor was this due to reaction alone, though reaction explains more in the sphere of faith than in those of thought and imagination. The old Puritanism of England, that had retired crushed after the Civil War, had begun again to hold up its head ; the growing comfort or wealth of the middle class gave it confidence in its traditional religious feelings, and the uneasiness of suppressed revolution gave warmth to them. The Bible and the Pilgrim's Progress, their literary legacy from the previous century, again became suffused with the glow of practical faith ; and books of piety began to increase and pass into household gods. The mood became lyrical and fervid ; hymns grew apace in the era. By the middle of it the bulk of the English religious world had outlived the necessity of reasoning out their faith. Paley's Evidences of Christianity with its cool utilitarianism is addressed rather to the upper stratum of culture wherein the old deism lingered than to the new reading public. 6. Even the deism had come to be transfused with passion. There is far less argument and reasoned statement in Paine's Age of Reason than fervid rhetoric, vituperation, and scorn. And we have only to look into Shelley's Queen Mab to see how the Revolution had transformed the old scepticism and attacks on Christianity into ardent crusades. It is not surprising, then, that religion itself had kindled into a blaze that warmed the church to missionary zeal. The secular literature felt the glow ; Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and many more of the poets have none of the CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 21 reserve the Queen Anne writers had shown on the subject of piety. And a large section of imaginative literature devoted itself to the new religious ardour ; writers like Cowper and Kirke White, Bernard Barton and James Montgomery, Heber and Keble, Pollok and Graham abounded. And even those who were accounted worldlings, like Burns and Byron, are seldom unconscious of the new philanthropy, while at times, as the one in his Cottar's Saturday Night, and the other in his Hebrew Melodies, they catch some of the new glow of religion. 7. The era is, in short, the renaissance of feeling in English literature. Its whole thought is transfigured by passion. Philosophy both in poetry and prose deals in a reverent way with the mysteries of existence and man's relations to them. Wordsworth in his Ode on the Intimations of Immortality and Shelley in his Prometheus Unbound, Tennyson in his In Memoriam and Browning in his Paracelsus reveal how nobly secular thought could now deal with the loftiest religious problems ; in these there is no attempt to conciliate orthodoxy, and yet the most worshipful might draw from them new strength ; they amalgamate poetry and philosophy and raise the treatment of the fundamental questions of life to that elevated phase which they reach in the greatest poets, like Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. It is the revolutionary, passion-transfigured age rather than the individual that has accomplished this. Section 7. I. And in the light of the new enthusiasm all knowledge had to be reorganised. It is, like all great eras, marked by encyclopedism. Stirred to activity by the rapid expansion of the audience and the eagerness of the newly-leisured class for light upon the world around them and within them, scientists and scholars set themselves to focus all that was known. On the Continent, as in England, the passion for universal knowledge had to be satisfied. In France the phenomenon appeared as a phase of revolutionism ; Diderot's Encyclopedic, like Bayle's Dictionary before it, attempted to mould opinion as well as communicate information ; and by its sceptical tendencies helped to overturn the old world 22 ERA OF EXPANSION of thought and social and political custom. In Britain many great cyclopaedias were published during the era ; but none of them attempted to do more than concentrate and systematise all knowledge or some great department of it. They did not speculate but report; they did not preach creeds but only communicated information in a classified form. And yet the phenomenon was closely connected with the revolutionism of the era, as well as with the expansion of the audience. It was felt that all knowledge had to be summed up again in the light of the new enthusiasm; the whole universe had completely changed, because man's spirii had changed its attitude to it. They were, therefore, unconsciously saturated with the changing thoughts, and the thoughts that were about to introduce still greater change. The inconsistencies of items and departments of knowledge, the clash of what were universally accepted as facts, came into strong light even for the ordinary reader in these summaries of all that was known. They therefore excited thinkers, especially in science, to find conciliating theories or principles ; they roused speculation and supplied stimuli and materials for a new type of scepticism. And as the era proceeded their use spread more widely and found its way even among the new industrial classes. The first half of our century saw the beginning of that great movement towards the cheapening of literature and manuals of knowledge which has brought the best books and the newest advances of thought within the reach of the poorest. 2. The development of journalism and magazinism was a part of the same phenomenon. The desire for fuller and more accurate knowledge of events and facts, and interest in the newest speculations and researches spread from the small circle of cultivated men in London to which it had before been confined till they reached all but the uneducated. A method of intimating to the reading public the progress of the world at briefer and more regular intervals than the publication of books became a new necessity. A periodical literature was an essential result of the expansion of the audience, of the rapidly spreading interest in mankind as a whole and in nature, and of the new passion for conquest in the realms of speculation and knowledge. There had CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 23 been a few straggling attempts at it since the revolution of 1688 and the liberation of the press ; but it now began to be one of the important features of civilisation. A few of the greatest daily and weekly journals were started in the last quarter of last century, and the most prominent had been established by the middle of our century. And the essay- periodical of the Queen Anne period, generally the rostrum of some one didactic writer and lasting at most two or three years, now became the organised magazine having an editor and a varying staff of writers and running through long periods. Whilst the rapid increase in the publication of books demanded a new type of periodical, the review. Even the most cultivated and omnivorous of readers had not time to test all the new productions of the press, and some professional and regular guide was needed to give an account and criticism of the ablest and most useful of them. The Edinburgh Review and The Quarterly Review were started early in our century to supply the want. These were published only four times a year ; but as the century went on, monthly and even weekly reviews became necessary. 3. The same activity and expansion showed themselves in the study and criticism of the literature of former ages. A deeper and more intelligent appreciation of Greek and Latin classics came into vogue. The new effort and capacity to enter into the civilisation and spirit of other ages extended to their books. And scholarship ceased to be a thing of "shreds and patches", a mere revision of the languages according to new standards of criticism. The scholar or translator was now generally a man of imagination and poetical sympathies ; he tried to get behind the mere form of the book he manipulated and set himself at the point of view of the author. Translations began to give much of the essence of the original. And hence it was that Keats, without knowing Greek, was able to take the Greek standpoint in his work and produce poems that are acknow- ledged to be Hellenic in their spirit and beauty, though modern and sensuous in their art. 4. But there was also a vast expansion of scholarship. The literatures of other countries than ancient Greece and Rome were discovered to be worthy of careful study. 24 ERA OF EXPANSION France had already supplied frequent sources of inspiration in former ages of English literature ; and so had Spain and modern Italy. But Germany was a new discovery ; and Sweden, Holland, and Russia began to attract translators and students to their contemporary, if not to their folk, litera- ture. The East, too, for the first time came upon the scene ; the rapid extension of European and especially English conquests in Asia drew the attention of scholars, like Sir William Jones, to the antiquity of its literatures. Persia and India became new sources of inspiration for the imaginative writer. Moore and Southey are only prominent instances of poets that sought in them themes and material for their poetic work. And Beckford's Vathek was only the beginning of a long series of fiction that laid its scene in the East. Section 8. I. The greatest discovery of English scholarship was the literary past of its own country. A few spasmodic attempts at Shakespeare criticism and revision heralded an era that might almost be called the Shakespeare era, so dominated was its scholarship by study of the great dramatist. A new method of looking at him and his contemporaries was established by Lamb and Coleridge, a method based upon imaginative sympathy and poetic insight ; they were not thought of now as mere playwrights and dealt with merely by stage managers and adapters ; they were looked on as poets whose works could afford new fountains of wisdom and inspiration ; they were sought by thinkers and philosophers and artists who could find in them the most living illustrations of their own department of thought or art. It was really due to the reappearance of the people as the best part of the audience of literature that this revival of Elizabethanism became so influential amongst writers ; the popular or rather national instinct had ceased to be a factor in moulding the fashionable and recognised literature of England since the age of Elizabeth ; and its resurgence gradually made the new era one of nationalism and a national literature. The narrow pales that the Queen Anne period had set up were broken down and the old fertility of CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 25 thought and fancy and exuberance of language and metaphor reappeared ; but the demand for literary finish established by the age of Pope and Addison excluded the Elizabethan eccentricity of style and form. Spenser was, as often before, a source of inspiration for poets ; but none would now imitate him in the elaboration of allegory or the intricacy of rhythms or the artificial use of archaisms. The true influence of his spirit and imagination begins ; Cowley and Dryden and Pope speak of him as their early master in verse ; but their poetry shows scarcely a trace of him. Keats was the first genuine poet-student of his Faery Queen ; Thomson and Shenstone were too near to the Queen Anne period to follow anything but its form in the Castle of Indolence and the Schoolmistress. But it was the drama of the Elizabethan age that chiefly moulded the poetic spirit of the new era ; for the drama was the only section of its poetry that was truly national ; the rest of its literature was more dependent on court patronage and the appreciation of cultivated and scholarly circles. The plays, though also addressed to the courtiers, were meant primarily for the people ; and it was the popular spirit that moulded their thought and feeling ; it was the nation that gave them its own life. This is the reason that, when the people came again into English literature in our era, writers found most inspiration in the drama of the Elizabethan period. 2. The conclusion is confirmed by other features of the scholarship of the time. One of the most fertile of all the reproductions of the latter half of the eighteenth century was the Reliques of Ancient Poetry published in 1765. This was an attempt to present in popular form the ballads and songs that were the remains of the former unwritten literature of the people. Age after age had added to them, improved them or mutilated them ; and Bishop Percy tried to piece the fragments together. No event is so good a sign of the coming amalgamation of the scholarly audience and the popular as the publication of this book. A people that could make and appreciate such beautiful narrative and lyrical poetry, if it became educated enough to listen to higher and more prolonged strains, was certain to transform English literature. Although the book was not a great 26 ERA OF EXPANSION success at first, the very fact of its publication by a scholar like Percy and the fact that Shenstone meant to share in the work of editing, whilst the poets and scholars of the day gave encouragement to the undertaking, show better than any other literary event the renaissance of the old poetic instincts of the people and the coming passion for romance and sentiment in literature. It is true that the literature of the new religious movements the sermons and hymns and pietistic books of methodism and evangelicalism does not for many years reveal any very high standard of style, or any demand for imaginative work. Even literary art was shunned as sinful by the new religious instincts of last century. Not till Cowper was there any sign of the approach of faith and art in writing. But there was a secular side to the new confidence of the people in their own desires and instincts. They were not all or always listening to sermons or singing hymns or reading books of devotion. We know from the story of Burns's life how even in pious households, like that ot his father, the old songs were sung over the cradle and by the winter hearth, and the old ballads were treasured in the memories of even religious women like his mother. It was this survival of the old popular poetry, taking strength from the new passion, that accounts to some extent for the appearance of such a poet. And around him we can see from his epistles and addresses, there abounded throughout his native district minor secular poets and strong secular poetic instincts for the appreciation of even his most scathing attacks on religious hypocrisy. And this state of poetic sentiment and power could not have been confined to Ayrshire ; the whole of the kingdom must have felt the renaissance of the people, and their more natural tastes in imaginative work. 3. The publication of Ossian and the antique form adopted by Chatterton in his attempts to gain a hearing point in the same direction. There must have been a larger audience than mere antiquarians for the old narrative poetry of the people. Indeed antiquarianism was but another symptom of the revival of the popular past, of the resurgence of the nation in the broader sense of the term- What had been buried in oblivion by the polished CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 27 sectarianism of the seventeenth century with its Stuart jealousy of popular rights and its civil wars, and by the urban narrowness of imagination and literary interests in the Queen Anne period now found resurrection, at first indiscriminately, and afterwards with growing power to distinguish good from bad. The nation was about to take the place of a mere section of it, whether court or aristocracy. And everything that seemed to come from the national past on the other side of the Stuart misdirection of national energy attracted attention. Celtic or Saxon it was all the same ; it chimed in with the growing desire and consciousness of a national life. Nay, a fictitious past had to be manufactured to meet the new demand. Historical romance sprang into being, and lived a quick, almost unnaturally exuberant, existence during the greater part of the era. Not satisfied with this the earlier half of it had to read its new sentiments into other ages. It was this that made so popular the strange amalgam of eighteenth century feelings and the fragmentary legends of an almost forgotten Celtic past, worked up by Macpherson into his Fingal, an epic poem published in 1762, and Temora published in 1763. The two, professing to be the production of an ancient Celtic bard Ossian, in spite of the critical controversy that raged over them and tended to prove them forgeries, fascinated the spirit of the time. They gratified the passion for the heroic or national past of great races, perhaps the most striking sign of the new birth of the nation ; whilst they fed the love of romance and the sentiment that were to hold sway in imaginative literature for half a century or more The admiration for this modernised prose epic and its medley of eighteenth century Homerism, rhetoric, and sentiment with the floating imagery and ideals from a great Celtic past spread to the Continent and deeply impressed Goethe and Napoleon, and along with them, German, Russian, and French literature. 4. Throughout the whole era this interest in the past grew rapidly. Individual antiquarians were unable to supply its demands, although more men of ability devoted their time to gratifying it than in all the other eras of English literature put together; men like the Wartons, 28 ERA OF EXPANSION Tynvhitt, Pinkerton, Ritson, Ellis, Collier, Halliwell, Maidment, and Walter Scott set themselves to rescuing from oblivion every relic they could find of the national past. Many private gentlemen set up presses that occupied themselves chiefly with reproducing old books and pamphlets and fragments of popular literature ; the Straw- berry Hill press of Horace Walpole, the Lee Priory press of Sir Egerton Brydges, the Middle Hill press of Sir T. Phillips, the Auchinleck press of Sir J. Bos well, the Darlington press of G. Allan issued between four and five hundred reprints. Yet societies were needed as well to cope with the new demand for the preservation or revival of the past. The Record Commission and the Master of the Rolls began their long task of printing or publishing accounts of important historical documents. And some twenty or thirty literary corporations, like the Maitland Club, the Bannatyne Club, the Surtees Society, the Hakluyt Society, the Aelfric Society, the Caxton Society, the Early English Text Society and the Shakespeare Society were established during the first half of our century and published hundreds of old works and documents from forgotten corners of libraries. Antiquarian and dryasdust though these labours may now seem, they were no merely factitious amusement of learned leisure, but the outcome of the renewed national life and an essential basis of the new literature. Without them the fiction of the era, and especially Sir Walter Scott's use of it, would have been maimed ; poetry would have lacked many of its new themes and inspirations ; and nineteenth century history, with its fuller and more accurate use of contemporary material from the age it studies, could scarcely have existed. 5. English scholarship on the one hand and the English language and national life on the other had been brought together for the first time. For although the drama had appealed to the whole nation in the reign of Elizabeth, the more cultured sections of literature and the scholarship never appealed to it or worked for it, unless we include sermons and hymns in these. In all previous periods classical studies had absorbed the best energies of English scholars. Now, though these were by no means neglected, CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 29 it was the native literature that roused the greatest enthusiasm in scholarly minds ; and it was the native literature that supplied -the best materials and models and sources of inspiration for imaginative work. 6. For English literature now outgrew the narrowing pales that patronage and courtly circles had set up. It emancipated itself from the yoke of city or court fashion for the first time. There was now such a large reading public that at least the great authors had sufficient emolu- ment from the unassisted sale of their books. An audience personally unknown to them stimulated their imagination without cramping it. Even when criticism came to be organised and professional, and stood at the entrance to the new auditorium of literature, demanding attention to certain conventional rules and forms, new authors of striking originality have been able to overleap the barriers and find a public for themselves. The latter half of the era has especially been productive of new types of poetry and fiction and of new literary channels of ideas. It was not the new elements of the audience that caused the appear- ance of so much exceptional literary talent ; but they permitted it freer scope for originality. Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, Gibbon, Burke, Godwin, Bentham, Scott, De Quincey, Landor, Thackeray, Hallam, Macaulay, without the nation to address, would have been narrowed in their ideals, thought, and form, and many of them would probably have sought other spheres than literature for their activity and character. The new and more national audience first attracted them to writing, then moulded their genius and gave it stimulus and purpose and lastly enabled them to ignore whatever hostile criticisms culture, scholar- ship, and professional journalism might pass upon their earlier efforts. There is nothing in the whole history of literature to compare to the effect of the expansion of the audience during this era. 7. But there are two distinct divisions of the movement. One, extending from about the middle to near the end of last century, is more preparatory in its characteristics ; the other, covering the first half of our century, fulfils it and 30 ERA OF EXPANSION completes it. We feel that there is some common quality in the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, and Tennyson, that is not to be found in Goldsmith and Crabbe, or even Cowper and Burns, a sense of the mystery of life and passion and thought. So the imaginative work of Scott and Lytton and Thackeray has in it a consciousness of the great problems that lie before the human mind, when Richardson and Fielding, Smollet and Horace Walpole lack it completely. It is undoubtedly the French Revolution that parts the era in two. The English mind, though restless with suppressed passion for revolt long before 1792, had not experienced how much revolution might mean till the last years of last century. It had not felt how tragic contemporary history might be. The great French cataclysm revealed the dark depths of the problems of human nature v political and social, and the dread possibilities of national movements. English literature of the era of expansion, therefore, naturally divides into that before the close of last century and that after the tragic revelation of human possibilities given by the reign of Terror and the events that followed. CHAPTER II. SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES. PERIOD OF PREPARATION. I75O I8OO. Section i. 1. There is, of course, something of reaction implied in the earlier part of a new era reaction against the dominant fashions of thought and feeling. For the new can antiquate the old only by antagonistic criticism of it. But there is also the living connection of development between two adjacent periods. Out of the old must grow the new. The thoughts and methods and symbols of the old must be used by the new to overthrow its power; else it could never appeal or make itself intelligible to the human beings who have been nurtured in the old. The process of develop- ment has two movements, rejection of the elements and forms that have begun to decay and would clog progress, and acceptance of the living elements and forms that still mingle with these. 2. We have no difficulty in tracing the influence of the age of Queen Anne over the literature of the latter half of last century. Down even to Byron Pope was the master- spirit in poetry, though the Wordsworthian protests indicated that his reign was about to end. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, his first success, is moulded by admiration for the Dunciad. But it and Gifford's Baviad and Maeviad show the last flicker of the Queen Anne satire, that incarnation of the spirit of revenge by means of stinging personalities on rival authors so epigrammatic as to be quotable. 32 ERA OF EXPANSION 3. Through this whole period there were few poets who did not acknowledge some allegiance to the rhythmic phrase-maker of the Queen Anne period. The satires of Johnson London (1738), and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), though steeped in pessimism and Juvenalian gloom, were written under the shadow of Pope. But his Lives of the Poets, composed as late as 1779, and revealing signs of a new and more natural method of prose, is still guided in all its criticisms and dicta by the standards of Dryden and Pope and exhibits unbounded admiration of these two great poets. Gray and Collins, though coming at the beginning of the era, and touched with its love of pathos, its naturalness and emotionalism, fill their odes with the personified abstractions of the great metaphysical period of poetry. Dyer, Armstrong, Akenside, Grainger, Erasmus I )anvin, writing though they do in the latter half of the century, are as much given over to the didactic spirit as Pope and his contemporaries in their versified essays. Even the new nature poets cannot throw off the yoke. Goldsmith, Falconer, Cowper, Crabbe, Rogers, and Campbell have to adapt the heroic couplet to the new purpose of sympathetic description. And whenever satire is attempted, it has to echo Pope's manner, even when its spirit is new as in Cowper's earlier poems. Christopher Smart's Hilliad, Churchill's Rosciad, Wolcot's Lousiad, Gifford's Baviad prove by their very titles the Dunciad as the source of their inspiration. Even Shenstone, Beattie, Chatterton, and Burns, though turning back to an older and more natural era for their models, have some tinge of the Queen Anne period in their methods of art ; they cannot keep wholly free from the conventional abstractions that had made poetry so frigid, from the conventional talk about the muse that grows so tedious in the poets of the earlier part of the century, or from the artificial atmosphere that had separated the pastoral and lyric from nature. 4. Still more did the prose of the period acknowledge in its style and diction its descent from that of a pseudo- classical era. It was natural for Adam Smith and Paley and \ Bentham and even Gibbon to adopt a diction highly \ Latinised and a heavy yet balanced style ; it suited the CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 33 purposes of philosophical discussion and historical descrip- tion. But the same diction and style cling to the more imaginative literature too ; the light social essay in Johnson's Rambler and the other periodicals of the time is often elephantine in its movement. Burke in his speeches prefers the involved period and the difficult, intricately woven style of an inflected language. Even the novel falls into ponderous rhetoric in its descriptions, sentimental passages, and conversations. One would expect the epistolary style to have first emancipated itself from the stiff brocaded eloquence of the Queen Anne period ; yet when we turn to the letters of Burns, we find them modelled on those of Pope, always laboured exercises in trying to be unaffected, often pompous expressions of fine sentiment. Section 2. 1. The first half of the era is the long struggle of the more natural English mind with the precedents that the genius of Dryden and the art of Pope had fixed for eighteenth century literature. The turmoil and passion of the French Revolution liberated the new spirit from the coils of tradition and made originality and a more natural manner easy for nineteenth century writers. 2. The latter half of the last century never saw the new spirit wholly freed from the yoke of the Augustan Age, except perhaps in Blake and in the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge. For the revolutionary move- ment in England seldom became overt as it did in France, and it found satisfaction in the spheres of religion, philanthropy, and emotional and imaginative literature. The struggles for the rights of public meeting, of petitioning parliament, of publication of the debates in the House of Commons, of uncontrolled elections and of free speech and free journalistic comment on the actions and words of public men were symptoms of the revolutionary fervour that existed in England. But they only once approached the form of outbreak and riot, during the controversy about John Wilkes. The much later Lord George Gordon Riots and the Birmingham Riots of 1793-94 were reactionary in purpose though revolutionary in form. Some of these C 34 ERA OF EXPANSION rights were partially or wholly conceded, whilst the opposition of authority to the others was not paraded. Such galling abuses of power as oppressed the middle classes and peasantry in France had ceased to exist, thanks to the great struggle of the seventeenth century. There was plenty of injustice, both in the laws and customs, and in the use made of them ; but the growth of industry and commerce, whilst urbanising a large part of the population spread more comfort amongst them, and the memory of the Civil War and its horrors still gave them wholesome warning. The Commons, therefore, never assumed the bold attitude and character of the French National Assembly ; the system of party government gave free vent in it to revolutionary ardour, like the sympathy with the American colonies in their revolt ; the remedy of abuses was postponed till legitimate means could be adopted. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the one by its terror, the other by the patriotism and warlike passion they excited and by their drafting off the restless elements out of England, produced a violent reaction and sent the English revolutionary spirit underground. They postponed reform for a generation or more. 3. The middle classes sought, in most cases uncon- sciously, other vents for the revolutionary instinct, that had begun to work in their hearts. They felt, as they had never felt before, the woes of life. Johnson's deep-rooted pessimism belonged as much to his age as to himself ; only he accepted it as the law of nature. His contemporaries on the Continent blamed the government and social institutions for what is really the outcome of the struggle for existence. His countrymen either accepted it as a legitimate theme to weep over, and indulged in sentimentality, or set themselves to cure it by preaching and praying or crusading against the more crying abuses of custom. They never thought of attributing it all to political or social institutions. The resurgent puritanism of the new classes sent them back to original sin as the source of it. The more secularised sections of them took with Howard to philanthropy or with Wilberforce and Clarkson and Granville Sharpe to anti- slavery agitation ; prison reform and the decision of Lord CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 35 Mansfield that whoever touched the soil of England was free were but the outcome of the unconscious revolutionism of the time. The worldly section of the new wealth was quite as conscious of the sadness and the wrongs of life. But the consciousness drove them to no action, in fact never demanded action, as it did in the readers and followers of Rousseau in France. They were satisfied with tears and sighs over the picturesque stories of the woes of men and the pains of animal life. And from Richardson on to Mrs. Radcliffe there were always writers and especially writers of fiction ready to supply cheap stimulus of lachrymation. And there is nothing reveals the sentimentalism of the period so well as the fountain of tears that Sterne could turn on in his books at a moment's notice. In this it forms a marked contrast to the Queen Anne period, which laughed down all enthusiasm and was ashamed of the unrestrained expression of emotion. Nor was the luxury of self-commiseration and sentimentality over the lot of men and animals confined to England. Rousseau's Julie and Goethe's Werther were only the most prominent symptoms of the same disease of the feelings in France and Germany. It was a result of the revolutionism of the times ; the coming industrialism and the development of urban life had opened the eyes of a new class to the abuses that had seemed consecrated by time and privilege. The aristocracy were smitten with the same passion for city life and ceased to fulfil their feudal duties to the people of their districts without ceasing to draw the revenues that were attached to those duties. Personal loyalty vanished and the one-sided nature of the relationship stood out in all its nakedness. The new reading public in the growing towns, with their comfort and leisure, wept over the injustice of their own position and the wrongs of the peasantry. But in France the increase of financial pressure on the government and through taxation on the new classes and the rustics made the sentimentality practical. Unless the burden were removed, the new feeling was certain to find volcanic issue. Hence it is that Rousseau and similar writers charge political and social institutions with the existing misery and preach a return to a state of nature free from the evils of government and society. 36 ERA OF EXPANSION 4. In England this revolutionism was in the air, we can feel as we read the Letters of Junius, which appeared as early as 1769-71. But the pressure of taxation was not so great and the feudal burdens had almost disappeared. Whilst industrialism and commerce grew more rapidly and made a larger proportion of the new classes contented or at least comfortable. English sentimentalism therefore remained in its inherently unpractical state and showed no more vigorous desire for a state of nature than we can see in such poems as Goldsmith's Deserted Village till after the Revolution in France had broken out. Then Godwin in his Political Justice practically advocated anarchy guided by debate ; and Tom Paine urged the French view of govern- ment in his Rights of Man. But these were solitary voices in England and were little to be feared in the violent reaction of the last decade of the century. Section 3. 1. Revolutionism remained a matter of emotion in England and found practical shape only in the spheres of faith and philanthropy. In literature it shed tears over the existing state of mankind and reached no farther back towards the state of nature than early historic times. Sentimentality and romanticism were two of its best safety- valves and became two of the most powerful allies of Tory reaction. They mingled often in the same book especially if it was fiction, and most of the stories of the last quarter of last century both stimulate tears and satisfy the love of an heroic past. Macpherson and Chatterton were workers in the same school and revealed the strength of the new emotional fashions. Ossian and the Rowley poems tried to take the eighteenth century mind back to a forgotten past, in the one case to the times of Celtic dominion over the islands, in the other to the Saxon times preceding the Norman conquest, and thus to satisfy its craving for a civilisation and manners different from its own though in their origin the ; same. 2. The new historical research was only another phase of the same romanticism. Men's minds, dissatisfied with their immediate surroundings, turned with eagerness to CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 37 other ages and countries. There had been little of the historical spirit since Elizabethan times; there had been some antiquarianism in the first half of the seventeenth century, evidently the after-harvest of Elizabeth's reign ; but the rest of the century was too much engaged with its own struggle to attend to other times ; it was only the contemporary history of their own land that interested Englishmen up till the beginning of the era. Oxford had begun to study modern history. But it is Hume that, about the middle of the century, shows the revival of historical research ; it must have been a strong current of contemporary feeling that diverted him from his more congenial pursuit the philosophical analysis of human nature and civilisation ; for his History of England, commencing in 1754 with the reigns of James the First and Charles the First and in later volumes getting back to Julius Caesar, shows no new histori- cal talent and no great taste for the work. Smollett and Goldsmith were drawn similarly from their favourite literary work to history. The period is filled with second and third rate historians who show rather the passion of readers for knowledge of the past than any new capacity for research or for illuminating forgotten times. In Gibbon the dramatic and critical method of eighteenth century history culminated ; it could not well produce anything more characteristic or striking than the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And the succeeding period had to find a new method, that which is based on genuine sympathy with the past and on attempts to find its real spirit instead of reflections of modern times. Biography and research into antiquities were marked by the same defects as history during last century; they made no effort to find the spirit of the facts. The single exception to this is BoswelPs Life of Johnson; and the reason for its extraordinary merit is that it is an anticipation of modern reporting and interviewing combined and applied to one subject through a series of years ; it is biographical photography or realism, and it is an evidence of the new passion for minute personal knowledge of striking or famous literary characters, and of the wide audience that literature now had. 3. But one of the most promising methods of the new era in the realm of historical fact was the application of 38 ERA OF EXPANSION philosophical thought to it. Bolingbroke, just before the middle of the century, had during his residence in France caught some of the new French treatment of the past and had written his pamphlet On the Study of History. But it was Hume that in the political section of his Essays (1742) revealed to England how much could be made out of history studied in its special phases. Montesquieu made an elaborate application of philosophical thought to the study of history in his Esprit des Lois (1748). And a whole new section of semi-philosophical, semi-historical literature sprang into existence in England in the latter half of last century. It dealt especially with the constitutional, economical and social phases of English history and the laws that underlie them. De Lolme, Blackstone, Tytler, and others took the legal and constitutional phases, Ferguson, Burke, Godwin, and Bentham the social as well as constitutional and economical ; and a completely new science sprang into existence, professing to base itself upon the study of history ; political economy, though at first somewhat theroretical and a priori in method, showed able manipulation of the facts of history in the hands of Adam Smith and Malthus. Both history and the philosophy of history promised new types of literature and indicated the genuine interest of the new reading public in the past of man and the laws that moulded it. 4. Nor was it merely in the man of the English nation ; as the period went on, research and philosophy became more cosmopolitan : they grew interested in man as man ;. and the origins of his various faculties formed the frequent subject of investigation in the last quarter of the century. Lords Kames and Monboddo discussed prehistoric questions of man's existence, and so did many of the geologists ;. Harris and Home Tooke tried to get at some principle as to the origin and growth of language, and most of the writers on aesthetics and rhetoric attempted like Burke to explain the sources of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. 5. The same growing cosmopolitanism led Englishmen to make adventurous voyages and journeys into distant seas and lands as in the Elizabethan era, and to publish the results of their adventures. The English navy was reviving. CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 39 the glories of the sixteenth century, and the merchant sailors were extending English commerce into every sea. Voyages of investigation became again as common for ships commissioned by the government as in the era of the Spanish Armada. The voyages of Anson, Cook, Byron, and Vancouver show how much England was interested in unknown lands and seas and in savage man ; the published accounts of them became the most popular of books. And so did books like Bruce's Travels (1790), in spite of the belief that the more striking features of them were fiction. Nay, fiction that gave accounts of imaginary peoples came again into fashion, as we can see by the popularity of books like The Adventures of Peter Wilkins. Books on civilised countries were as popular ; the reading public became deeply interested in such travels as those of Arthur Young through France between 1787 and 1789. 6. But it was perhaps the East that awakened most curiosity on the part of Englishmen during the period. The great romance of the conquest of India was proceeding, and everything that could be told or imagined about it was of interest. Yet there was less literature on the subject than might have been expected. It was more the topic of conversation and discussion as in the great debates during the trial of Warren Hastings ; the immediacy and greatness of the events in the career of Clive and other Englishmen in the East rather excited the imagination than produced books communicating knowledge of it. The poetry and fiction are tinged with the romance of the history that was making before the eyes of England. 7. The period that followed experienced more fully in its literature the effect of this marvellous expansion of the empire and of knowledge. It takes a generation to digest the results of new research or discovery or conquest, before they become the nutriment of imaginative books; they have to become the easy possession of all cultivated circles before they touch the creative mind and grow to be sources of inspiration. The historical products and harvests of one age fertilises the soil of the next. It is only towards the close of this period that we begin to see the influence of the new spirit of adventure and conquest and the new growth of the English world upon literature proper. 40 ERA OF EXPANSION Section 4. 1. It was the same with the expansion of science. That of the first half of the eighteenth century told most on the literature of the second half. The astronomical investi- gations of Newton, Flamsteed, Halley, and Bradley had already begun to tell on the imagination of literary men by the time that Pope's Essay on Man was written (1734); for there we have the system of the universe introduced as the background of human existence. But it is after this that the poets show the deepest consciousness of the imaginative significance of the infinity of systems above and beyond the earth. The stars of night form one of the commonplaces of Ossianic rhetoric. Blake and Chatterton, Cowper and Bums reveal a growing sense of the spiritual beauty of the phenomena of night. It is not however till the beginning of our own century that this enters with power into poetry. Wordsworth and Shelley at last make it the very heart of poetic feeling. 2. The scientific advance that told most on the literature of the early period was that made in natural history. The work of Linnaeus and Buffon had drawn the attention of even the average reader to the wonders of the plant and animal world, and awakened a sense of the beauty that had remained so long unseen. Before the century closed both poets and prose writers were keenly observing or sympathising with the non-human world around them and enlisting the interest of the average reader. Gilbert White devoted his long life to the study of the utility and beauty of the nature of his native village and district ; rock and soil, tree and flower, bird and insect, all claimed his attention as their historian ; and though his Natural History of Selborne is in the form of letters, it was manifestly intended for a wider public than his correspondents. Already the gentle companionship with nature that rises to its finest expression in the poetry of Cowper had come into English literature, a something far more imaginative and humane than the passion for classification that marks the scarabaeist. White's correspondents, Pennant and Barrington, though amateurs, made the pursuit more of a CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 41 'business and published a number of books on the natural history of various districts. By the last quarter of the century the interest in the results of the natural sciences was so widely diffused that it affected the imagination of the poets. Blake in poems like that on the tiger, and Burns in those like his Address to the Mouse and Address to the Daisy, have not reached the Wordsworthian insight that almost combines the philosophy and worship of nature ; but they are stirred to the depths of their hearts by beauty of form and pathos of life in the common things around them an absolutely new phenomenon in literature. Even Sterne had to start his factory of public tears and weep for his readers over a dead donkey. The deeper and more philosophical study of plant and animal life that has resulted in biology and embryology was too young by the close of the century to influence poetry ; yet the speculations that connect themselves with the name of Lamarck had stirred thinkers like Monboddo to discuss the origin of man in prose, and imaginative men like Erasmus Darwin to attempt theories of nature in the form of didactic poems. 3. The sciences that were thought of as more practical by the average reader impressed him most during this period, and gave imagery, suggestion, and inspiration to the literature. The discoveries of geology and medicine, of physics and chemistry seemed to open up new worlds for the energy of man. New coal-fields and new mines and beds of valuable metals or stones or clay were more impressive for the common reader than Hutton's or Playfair's or Werner's or Laplace's speculations on the genesis and history of rocks and worlds, though these latter came also to affect the poetic imagination of the close of the century. The utility of Jenner's vaccination (1796) made itself immediately apparent to the average reader; but it was long before the work of Gregory or the Hunters or Bichat could fine its way into the literature that appealed to him. He could appreciate with the imagination the revolution that the steam engine of Watt, the spinning-jenny of Arkwright, the balloon of Montgolfier might work in his occupancy of the earth, and these supplied almost immediate .literary illustration and figure; but the investigations of 42 ERA OF EXPANSION Coulomb or Boscovich or the Bernouillis or Leslie took a generation before they could be made literary medium. Chemistry and engineering impressed him most immediately; for the new colours and the new canals and bridges appealed to his most practised sense, sight ; but the more speculative labours of Black and Smeaton, Carnot and Lavoisier were " caviare to the general " till they were put into popular or practical shape. The first type of new knowledge to become literary material is the pseudo-scientific ; the would-be sciences of Lavater and Mesmer, phrenology and animal magnetism touched the imagination of the reading public and crept into literature atmost at once. 4, The latter half of the period had indeed all the characteristics of a great scientific time ; long-stretching vistas were opened up into the future of man by the new discoveries and triumphs of scientific thought, and a strongly optimistic tone appeared in literature again ; Blake and Burns, Priestley and Godwin were but the salient instances of a wide-spread movement in England towards idealising the possibilities of human nature ; whilst in France revolution, as generally, based itself upon an exaggerated optimism as to what could be done if only men threw off the burdens of the present. And it is what science is doing that stirs the imagination to such idealising flights. And at the same time it gives a materialistic tinge to more advancing thought ; scientific thinkers dealing as they do with matter and its properties and seeing how much these explain in the constitution and history of man and in existence generally, come to have fixed in their minds the feeling that they can explain all and that all attempts at knowledge outside of the methods of science are futile. 5. The philosophy of the period, therefore, settles itself into the acceptance of this as the fundamental attitude of all speculation and research or into the struggle against it ;. Hume at the very beginning of the movement struck on its final issue and showed that it must land in universal scepticism ; yet it continued to stir writers like Hartley and Priestley and Erasmus Darwin to find new materialistic theories of man and the universe. On its practical side CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 43 philosophy felt the advance of science in a growing utili- tarianism ; so full of utilities had scientific thought shown itself, that the general principle of utility was applied to explain the various ethical and social phenomena of human existence ; and before the close of the century Bentham had taken up Hutcheson's phrase " The greatest happiness of the greatest number " and illuminated the spheres of govern- ment, legislation, and the ethics of criminality by -the application of it. Paley had to introduce the new principle supplied by science even into theology ; we can see how deeply practical and especially mechanical science had impressed the age when we reflect that his famous simile by which he explained the relation of God to the universe was taken from it. On the other side we have the Scotch school Reid and Dugald Stewart leading the struggle in philosophy against the principle that scientific advance had applied ; though even in the Scotch chairs of philosophy we find men like Adam Smith moulding their speculations under the influence of the new utilitarian movement ; his Moral Sentiments shows tendencies to analyse morality back into utilities ; whilst his Wealth of Nations was a direct outcome of the practical applications of science ; it is an attempt to discover laws in the material progress of nations. 6. Science had other influences on the literature of thought ; it made thinkers eager to discover and face the facts of existence ; and the result is a greater tendency in philosophy and other spheres to classify and analyse; the writers on metaphysics, ethics, and rhetoric attempt to get at law or rule from the side of reality, by observing and investigating instances minutely. And the same habit appears in the imaginative work. Poetry now prefers description of the world without to abstract treatment of its theme ; Falconer and Crabbe, Rogers and Campbell reveal the matter-of-fact vein in some of the poets of the time. Better still, it learns to abandon the metaphysical though personified entities of the earlier half of the century and to approach nature face to face ; there is almost scientific accuracy in the observation of natural phenomena shown in many of the poetic descriptions of them in the poems of Blake, Cowper, and Burns. Man himself is more accurately 44 ERA OF EXPANSION observed and described by the new poets, in spite of their great superiority to the Queen Anne poets in enthusiasm and the expression of feeling. Even the diction gained from the progress of science ; the need of careful definition of terms, in order to make sure any advance in scientific thought, influenced the popular critics towards the more exact use of words ; there was even a movement in prose towards an almost monotonous periodic style ; in Johnson and many of the writers that followed him, the phrases and sentences fall into serried ranks ; we have only to compare the Letters of Junius, the product of anonymous journalism, with the papers of the Spectator, or the chapters of Gibbon's Decline with the pages of Clarendon's History of the Rebellion to see the enormous advance made in the regularity of prose style and correctness of prose diction. And this is partly due to the defining and classifying method introduced by science. 7. But the full effect of the advance in scientific thought and discovery and invention is not to be found in the latter half of last century ; it rather belongs to the literature of our own. Section 5. 1. It is the same with the influence of the progress in art. Evidences of it are to be found in the prose and poetry of the earlier period ; but they are scattered and unconnected ; it came in like a flood during the later. In previous ages the only arts that had become English and given any impulse or mould to English literature were music and acting. Without them the Elizabethan poetry could never have taken the forms that distinguish it. 2. Without the development and love of the stage during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries we should never have had so great a dramatic age. It had become the national art spread by the church and the guilds widely throughout the provincial districts. The people had taken it up as the occupation of their leisure and all the popular talent entered into its cultivation with almost religious enthusiasm. For generations the writing and acting of CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 45 plays had stirred the best ambition of the artisans and rustics, and as soon as the art became secularised in the reign of Elizabeth, it monopolised the literary power that the new birth of learning and the new age of adventure had generated. Such a dramatic outburst could never occur again. For puritanism and the sectarian virulence of the civil war detached the tastes of the people from the art ; it became a court parasite and ultimately a parasite of fashionable London society; and a dozen other literary forms developed rapidly and absorbed the imagination. The eighteenth century with its spread of fashionable circles to the baths and spas in the provinces began to give promise of the revival of the drama as more than a mere London amusement. And the latter half of the century again saw genius devote itself to the histrionic art. Garrick and Kemble and Mrs. Siddons would by their tragic power upon the stage have drawn the national imagination to the theatre again if any actors could have done so. But poetry and the novel, with their audiences that made those of the drama seem insignificant, were now absorbing most of it as far as. it was concerned with the nobler passions ; the serious section of the cultivated public, which would have appreciated and stimulated great thought and tragic power in the drama, avoided the theatre as immoral or at least frivolous ; tragedy was, therefore, dead in England as a national art; these great actors had to be content with reviving Shakespeare's plays. It was comedy alone that could affect literature now. For it had had an unbroken, though somewhat fitful, life since the days of Elizabeth, and in our period it was rising again out of the impurity into which the Restoration had plunged it. Actors like Foote arose who devoted their whole talents to it. And literary men like Sheridan attached themselves to the stage and learned the subsidiary arts that could make the literary element of a comedy successful. Hence the permanent attraction of The School for Scandal and The Critic. And even talent, like Goldsmith's, that had no special training in the histrionic art, turned to comedy and made it a permanency in literature, as in his She Stoops to Conquer. But by far the most important influence of the drama on the literature of the period was the new mould it gave to the 46 ERA OF EXPANSION novel. Hitherto fiction had been mere descriptive narra- tive, as in Defoe's ; with Fielding, who had first written for the stage> it began to incorporate the dialogue of comedy. Smollet and Sterne developed this new dramatic element and during the nineteenth century it has become an essential of fiction ; and the two arts act and react upon each other. 3. Music was almost as early in its moulding influence over English literature. It began with the ballads ; and during the Elizabethan era it almost rivalled the stage in its power to attach the national imagination to literature. The sixteenth century was almost as much a lyrical age as a dramatic. And without music the genius of the country could never have found expression in the brief and melodious poem. The epic or long narrative would have been the only form for English poetry to take. Music fixed down upon it the habit of the melodious and varied stanza with its repeated harmonies and its refrain. The lyrical art as one that needs for its inspiration but a brief mood of strong feeling lived through the passion of the civil war. The age of common sense killed it and all other national forms of imaginative literature. The appearance of Handel and of opera and oratorio in England sufficed only to give a galvanic life to the lyric during the Queen Anne age; it took the form of the odes to music that became the fashion of the time. But as the century went on it came nearer and nearer to life. The success of native musicians like Arne encouraged the poets to write for them ; and hence we have songs like the Rule Britannia of Thomson or Mallet. But the lyrical faculty did not grow into full secular life till nearer the beginning of the nineteenth century and then chiefly in the dialects of the people. The songs of Dibdin were less in the literary language than in the popular : and Burns is the salient instance of the resurrection of the lyric ; he caught up the old Scotch tunes and the refrains of the old songs and fitted them to the new feelings. But most of the English poets of the time felt none of the impetus towards the lyric. It was felt rather in the religious instincts of the new audience ; it was the hymn that drew all the lyrical talent of the people. And the marvellous CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 47 development of the musical art in Germany failed to influence the melody of either poetry or prose till the later section of the era. The larger harmonies of Gliick and Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven began to affect English poets and prose writers only in the nineteenth century. Wordsworth and Coleridge reveal the influence only to a small extent in their Lyrical Ballads. 4. The arts that appeal to the eye had perhaps as much influence upon the English literature of the period as music ; English painting and architecture especially made rapid strides and began to touch the average imagination. The term Gothic now lost its old sense of barbaric and the old cathedrals and churches and other buildings that had been neglected and despised for their Gothic style began to draw the eyes of critics and travellers again and impress the age with their beauty. If we compare the descriptions in the romances of some of the old abbeys and churches and castles built in this long forgotten and scorned architecture with the remarks of Addison on them in his letters descriptive of his Continental tour we can see what a revolution in taste was coming about. The new romance revelled in architectural description. Whilst sculpture in Flaxman and Canova mastered again the sphere of beauty. It brought back to the eye and imagination of the reading public the features of the noblest Greek art. And both poetry and romance began to indulge in glowing descriptions of the beautiful human body. 5. But it was painting that advanced most and touched the fancy of readers and writers most. This was the first great period of native English painting. And the literary and the picturesque arts became close allies. Painters and engravers began to find it as remunerative to illustrate books for the reading public as to sell the originals of their pictures. Indeed it was the greatest period of English engraving. Foreigners like Piranesi and Bartolozzi worked for the English public ; and Woollett and Bewick and Sharpe made the reproduction of pictures for the new classes one of the fine arts. And the fertile imaginations of realists like Hogarth and caricaturists like Rowlandson and Gillray had to address themselves directly through engraving to the English mind 48 ERA OF EXPANSION instead of through painting. There is no better proof of the advancing culture of the new classes and their influence on the artistic imagination than the pictures of these keen observers of human nature. They watch the humours of the crowd as well as those of high life. The whole range of English existence comes within the scope of their art. Rowlandson and Gillray are more political than social in their themes : but they draw their illustrations and parallels from all spheres. And when we inspect the engravings of Hogarth, we feel that he belonged to the same age as Fielding and Smollett and Sterne and that he worked for the same public. Nor is it merely similarity of cause that produces the likeness between the arts ; interaction has as much to do with it. The novelists had not yet come to have their scenes and characters reproduced to the eye of the reader as in the latter half of the era. But Hogarth sometimes combined letter-press and picture. We can see that the novelists in their genre pictures have much aid in their delineation from the work of men like Hogarth and Rowlandson. And in the new romance of the last quarter of the century the development of portrait-painting by Reynolds and his contemporaries has led the writers to figure their characters more clearly ; they devote more space to the vivid description of the physical features of their men and women. But it was the new growth of landscape painting by Gainsborough, Morland, and others that most affected literature. Never before in English story- telling had there been any attempt to describe with deli- beration the nature and the scene in which the personages found themselves. It was not merely the new love of natural beauty that guided the hand of the novelist in picturesque description ; the pictures of the landscapes are so definitely given and so frequently sandwiched into the narrative that it is clearly the painter's art that has suggested them ; the reading public had come to look for vivid fancy in the description of scenery ; and in the nineteenth century this feature became a mannerism in fiction. The poetic imagination was also moulded by the vigorous development of all types of painting, portrait, landscape, historical, and fanciful, after the establishment of the Royal Academy in 1768. In Gray's Elegy, in Goldsmith's Traveller and CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 49 Deserted Village, in Falconer's Shipwreck, Crabbe's Village, and Cowper's Task, in Rogers's Pleasures of Memory, and Campbell's Pleasures of Hope, it is the picturesque imagina- tion that predominates ; picture follows picture or portrait portrait. This graphic description of natural scenes had appeared in English poetry before ; but in Denham's Cooper's Hill it is more topographical, and in Pope's Windsor Forest it is marred by personifications and other unrealities. Thomson's Seasons is the first anticipation of the true poetic use of it. And in the poetry of the latter half of the eighteenth century it monopolises the poetic imagination. Ossian's poems show their modern character in being a succession of pictures that take their clearness and definite- ness from the rapid development of the art of painting in the England of the period. The eye that observed the halls of Balclutha had studied the landscapes of Wilson and Gainsborough, if not those of the French and Italian schools of landscape painters. The poets now painted with the full consciousness of the true proportion and perspective of pictures and of the true harmony of colour. 6. Nay, the artists of last century offered freely their aid to the literary imagination. They set themselves with full enthusiasm to realise the scenes that had become famous in the English drama. Some of the most imaginative painters of the time joined in the work of illuminating Shakespeare ; Fuseli and Opie contributed to BoydelPs Shakespeare's Gallery (begun in 1786) some famous representations of the plays, the former, for example, his Hamlet and the ghost, Lear and Cordelia, Titania and Bottom, and the latter his Troilus, Cressida and Pandarus ; and Smirke contributed some of his best work in such illustrations as Katherine and Petruchio, and Dogberry and Verges. It came to be quite the fashion for the best painters and even the sculptors like Flaxman to illustrate the poets and prose imaginative writers. Flaxman's designs for Homer, Aeschylus, and Dante showed what sculpture, inspired by the relics of Greek art just unearthed at Pompeii, could do for the reading public in tfaining their minds to vivid realisation of beautiful form and pure outline. Hogarth had worked in his youth at the illustration of books, as in D 50 ERA OF EXPANSION his designs for Hudibras. But it was in the latter half of last century that this alliance between art and literature was made. Stothard even illustrated the periodicals as, for example, the Town and Country Magazine, and The Novelist's Magazine. Richardson's and Smollett's novels, the collection of poetry in Bell's Poets, Ossian, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim's Progress all drew new popularity from his pencil. The choice of books for his work of designing shows very clearly what public he addressed ; it was the new middle class with its old puritanism and its new sentimentalism and romance. Amongst foreign books the favourites for illustrators were Don Quixote, The Arabian Nights, and Rabelais. But it was Shakespeare, Bell's British Poets, and The British Theatre, that employed the best artistic talent of the last quarter of the century. Bewick with his new style of wood engraving confined himself chiefly to the illustration of natural history. And Blake stands apart as an illustrator of books. It was the taste of the age and the great expansion of the reading public that drew out his twin talents designing and writing. But it was largely his own striking individuality that dictated his choice of subjects during his later career. The new classes amongst whom he was brought up and for whom he worked led him to Biblical and religious subjects like the book of Job, Young's Night Thoughts, and Blair's Grave ; it was his Own tastes that led him to design six plates for Mary Wollstonecraft's Tales for Children, to illustrate Dante's Inferno, and to write and illustrate the mystical poems in his various prophetic books. His Songs of Innocence and of Experience and his illustrations of Chaucer are due partly to the primitive type of his own character and partly to the return of his age to older and more primitive forms of feeling. 7. We need not wonder at the growth of picturesqueness in the English literature of the period, when there was so much done directly by artists for the alliance of the literary and the artistic imagination. The books that had been household words for generations throughout the middle classes and the new books that fitted the new phases of feeling of these classes were those that were most and best CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 51 illustrated. It was the new reading public that could pay by its numbers and released art as well as literature from the more galling yoke of personal patronage. There were few well-to-do English households now that had not a finely illustrated copy of some English classic. And thus was trained not merely the young artistic talent of the country, but the young literary talent ; it learned to imagine more vividly and definitely the historical scenes and characters it conjured up and to " body forth the forms of things unknown," " turn them to shapes " , and "give to airy nothing A local habitation and a name." The natural consequence was greater picturesqueness in literature and especially in fiction and poetry. Section 6. I. An equally striking effect upon the prose of the period was produced by an art more nearly allied to nature than the literary. English political oratory rose to its greatest height during this period and moulded other kinds of prose as it never did before or again. For special conditions attached to it. The life given to parliamentary institutions by the revolution of 1688 reached its first vigour of youth in the latter half of last century. Party government had at last developed the House of Commons into a national arena, where the best leaders and orators each party could find were pitted against each other. The revolutionism of the age and the reaction against it gave them the heated atmosphere and the passion that make an art great. Even though the elections were still anything but a real test of national sentiment, the debates in the Commons revealed a consciousness of a listening nation. There is a dignity of manner and diction that belongs to the political oratory of no other period. For the right of public meeting was won late in the century and the habit of making great oratorical efforts before the electors had not yet been fostered by the development of journalism and verbatim reporting into a fixed feature of English civilisation. Thus the lower House was the one arena for the oratorical talent of the secular kind. And 52 ERA OF EXPANSION Chatham, Pitt, Burke, Fox, Sheridan, the greatest names in the history of English political eloquence, were gathered together in it during the last quarter of last century. They had splendid themes in the American and French revolutions and in the subsidiary movements that clustered round these and the new philanthropy. They had all the enthusiasm of the new time. And they had all the illustrative material that the expansion of the empire and of literature supplied. 2. It is not strange, then, that the oratory should react upon literature. And it had exceptional circumstances for such reaction. During the greater part of the period there could be no verbatim reporting of the speeches in parliament and the accounts of them published had for a time to seem fictitious ; imaginary names were given to the speakers and even the houses were spoken of in a veiled way. The reporters sent in by the publishers had, therefore, to be men of considerable literary power. And their training in the manipulation, if not transformation, of the speeches they heard had no mean influence upon the prose style of the time. Dr. Johnson was long engaged upon this service to the public ; and there is little doubt that the long balanced swing of the Johnsonian period was due to the necessity of polishing into the oratorical form the rough drafts that his or other men's memory bore out of the House. He had already acquired the tendency to rhetoric from Pope and the Queen Anne age. But he developed the. regularity of form into the long oratorical period. When he came to write for the public in Rasselas and the Rambler, he was unable to abandon the habit he had thus learned from his professional occupation. His last book, The Lives of the Poets, though removed farthest by time from this influence, and though freer in style than anything of his but his sayings reported by Boswell, has still much of the old habit ; he falls into it as soon as the escape from details and facts allows him to pass into an elaborate judgment or moralisation. 3. And his long dictatorship of the London literary world helped to make it almost a fixed habit of the prose of the period. It matters not to what literary type we turn, CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 53 there we find the elaborate sentence of balanced clauses and phrases. In Junius we see the public epistolary style take the type of brief debating speeches addressed to a small and educated assembly. History has the same kind of audience to address, if we are to judge by Gibbon's great work ; for it is marked by its long and intricate periodic style and condensed rhetoric. Philosophy has the same oratorical tinge, as we can see in the books of Campbell, Beattie, and Burke. Even Goldsmith in his essays, and Horace Walpole and Godwin in their novels occasionally fall into the declamatory style. The very poetry has some- thing of it. Goldsmith and Cowper and Rogers have at times in their poems the periodic or pendulum-like swing of the prose. 4. Nor was the oratory that thus moulded the literature of the time of a popular kind, like much that is political in our own century. It had ever in view the great classical orators, Demosthenes and Cicero ; and indulged often in a long classical quotation, and constantly in highly Latinised diction. Although in sentiment it might address the nation, it kept before it as its ideal of form an address to a small, aristocratic, and highly educated audience. It assumed great dignity of tone even when it was stabbing to the heart or torturing by keen irony or personal attack. It had none of the didacticism or direct appeal to the emotions that pulpit eloquence had adopted. Through the oratory of the sermon rhetoric had already entered into English prose during all periods. But it was essentially different from that which came from the House of Commons. It was more given to subtlety of thought and quaint illustration and more guided by the desire to teach. Even forensic eloquence was different ; it was more eager to persuade either the subtle or scholarly mind of a judge or the loose- jointed thinking powers of a jury. The oratory of the parliamentary rostrum was rather marked by a passion to state situations clearly and to bring the best historical light to bear on them than to persuade or convert. Arguments for a political creed, winged by fervid appeal to the past or to the broad sense of humanity, filled the speeches of Burke and Chatham and Fox. 54 ERA OF EXPANSION 5. And it was this type of oratory that so long affected written prose during the latter half of last century. There were many indications of the revolt of prose from the Latinised rhetoric that had fixed its yoke upon it almost from the age of Chaucer ; and this regularity and balance of construction that the new oratory gave it was one of its first aids towards a better and more natural style. But the two literary phenomena that were to emancipate it com- pletely from the yoke of oratory were the growth of the novel and the return of poetry to nature. Fiction, in having to address the new reading public, had to draw from the more Saxon fountains of English that persisted in the language of the Authorised Version and the Pilgrim's Progress and in the language of conversation, -and by its gradual incorporation of the didactic purposes of prose soon spread its influence widely over all other departments of writing. Poetry in throwing off the yoke of London society and appealing to the native instincts of the English people had to find a more natural type of expression than had been handed down from the age of Queen Anne ; the popular ballads and songs suggested the true sources of diction ; and it rejected the Latinised phraseology and the conventional forms that so long had cramped it; the simple language of the everyday life of the people was now preferred and that was largely tinged with the archaisms of the folk literature, the Bible, and the ballads. But this movement did not affect the diction of prose much till almost the beginning of the nineteenth century. Section 7. I. And it is not surprising that oratory held such an absolute sway over written prose during our period. For it was a period of great individualities, all over the civilised world, and these moved in the world of politics, especially in England. It is seldom that four such powerful characters as Chatham, Pitt, Burke, and Fox have been gathered together into one generation of the House of Commons. Whilst Johnson and Gibbon, two other striking individuali- ties, one by his occupation as reporter of the speeches and the other by his interest and ultimate appearance in the OF UNIVERSITY OF JSTICS AND INFLUENCES 55 House, assumed oratorical prose as the most natural expression of their thoughts. Such influences could not fail to keep style enslaved to oratory. And as we read the Letters of Junius we feel that they are addressed to the nation through the Commons. 2. This latter part of the eighteenth century indeed was marked like the Elizabethan era by the number of powerful individualities that appeared. What century could show such a record of greatness? Frederick the Great, Catherine of Russia, Napoleon, Wellington, Nelson, Washington, Mirabeau, have each of them a character that would have made any age notable. It was the revolutionism of the time that called them out and gave them missions that made them famous. Europe seethed with the rising tempest; and the new ideas naturally singled out exceptional force of character or will or mind either as their representatives or as reactionaries against them. The whole of civilisation was alive with threatening change and exceptional power was needed to give it issue and definite form. Hence from all spheres came wills and characters that could mould and impress ; and the very atmosphere of passion that surrounded them made them stronger in individuality. But it is the misfortune of such a time that politics and war draw off its genius from the arts and literature, though these alone could give it a form that would live as a personal influence over all ages. History alone gives us any record of their greatness, and but for it they would become a name. And apart from the revolutionism that produced them or called them forth, they cannot be said to have much more than a negative influence on the literature of the age. Their success stirs the talent of each nation to political and warlike ambition and only those, who are incapacitated for such public pursuits by weakness of health or timidity of disposition, prefer the gentler arts. Perhaps their careers quicken the blood in the veins of writers and stir them to seek heroic ages for their themes. Ossian and Chatterton's poems and the romances of the last quarter of the century are, perhaps, partly the outcome of such a stimulus. So too perhaps is the great development of historical literature that marks the period. Men who saw great history making 56 ERA OF EXPANSION before their very eyes became anxious to study the great past. Great individualities and great events dwarf literature and throw literary pursuits into shadow. It is when they have passed that the imagination of the solitary thinker and writer begins to know their fertilising influence. It is the first half of the nineteenth century that shows in literature the effect of the striking characters and occurrences of the eighteenth. Only in oratory and the prose that is moulded by it do we see a great impulse communicated by the immediate presence of surpassing individuality in the service of the state. 3. The English House of Commons and its orators felt that they were dealing with great issues when they were deciding on the action of the nation in India, in America, on the Continent. India did not trouble them much ; and yet the growth of an Eastern empire to govern became almost a romance before the close of the century and influenced the imagination of the reading public. Eastern ideas of luxury crept into the new literature of fiction and gave a sensuous atmosphere to it. Even the forensic oratory was touched into enthusiasm when it handled cases like that of Warren Hastings. The American revolution and its results excited the legislature only for a few years and then vanished for a time and the new continent reappeared only in the debates prompted by the anti-slavery agitation. Section 8. I. It was France that was the great protagonist in the struggles of English statesmanship and oratory, as it had been for a century or more. Never long was it out of the minds of the legislature, especially during the last decade of the century. Some of the finest speeches had the Revolution or the Napoleonic wars as their theme. And all the literature that came within the influence of oratory (history, journalism, pamphleteering, political philosophy,) was bent in this direction. On the one side we have as permanent results the Reflections on the French Revolution by Burke and the smart burlesques and lyrics of Canning in The Anti-Jacobin. On the other we have the Political CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 57 Justice of Godwin, the Rights of Women of Mary Wollstonecraft, the political lyrics of Burns, and the writings of Jeremy Bentham. The enormous pamphlet and journal- istic literature of the time has vanished ; only the carica- tures of Gillray and Rowlandson show how deeply English public opinion was stirred by events in France. 2. But through the whole period French thought and literature had influenced English and that more directly and less in the reactionary way than the Revolution affected them. Hume and Adam Smith and Gibbon owed much of their clearness of style to their knowledge of French and many of the cues and startmg-points of their thought to their sojourn on the Continent and their study of French authors. Helvetius and Voltaire strengthened the destruc- tive and sceptical ideas in the mind of David Hume. Montesquieu with his Esprit des Lois and Turgot and the physiocrats suggested many of the points of view of The Wealth of Nations. Rousseau and the Encyclopedists are to some extent responsible for the tone of antagonism to Christianity and religion in general apparent in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And it is the sneers of Voltaire that are reproduced in such books and pamphlets as Tom Paine's Age of Reason. Voltaire and Diderot, Condorcet and Volney had taken their first lessons from the English deists of the Queen Anne period ; but they gave back to England sharper and more keenly polished the weapons they had drawn from her. Reaction from them also produced a considerable literature, including Paley's Evidences of Christianity. And the same writers that showed the emotional effect of the new revolution revealed like Cowper this reactionary tendency. Rousseau and St. Pierre had an undoubted influence on the romantic and sentimental movements in England, though they did not originate them. The salons of Paris and the system of journals and letter-writing that rayed from them had much to do with the evolution of the English epistolary and conversational style. The letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Horace Walpole, the Diary of Madame D'Arblay, and the conversations introduced into the fiction of the time owe much to French example; and coteries, 58 ERA OF EXPANSION like the Blue-stocking Club formed by Mrs. Montagu, originated in the customs of French society. Madame du Deffand, Madame D'Epinay, Mademoiselle L'Espinasse, Madame Recamier, and other Parisian ladies gave the intellectual and emotional cue to English ladies of literary and learned proclivities. And the style of English prose bt'nan to show again the influence of the study of French. Beckford wrote his Vathek in that language and then translated it into English. Mary \Vollstonecraft and Godwin and Bentham reveal in the lucidity and definiteness of their style a close study of it. Even as early as Gold- smith imaginative prose had benefited by it in clearness of expression and brevity of sentences. Whilst Sheridan in his dramas and epigrams, if not in his speeches too, reveals the influence of Beaumarchais and the French comedians and epigrammatists. 3. And the thought of England had profited as much from French research. In science and philosophy France showed extraordinary activity during this period ; her whole spirit seemed moved by the latent revolutionism to enterprise in the world of thought ; no sphere seemed too difficult to traverse in search of new fact, new cause, or new theory. If we select only the names that have European fame, the list is striking compared with that of any other period or country. Buffon and Cuvier, Lamarck and Bichat, the Bernouillis and Coulomb, Lagrange and Legendre, Lavoisier and Carnot, D'Alembert and Laplace, Voltaire and Rousseau, Condillac and Diderot and Condorcet explored every region of human knowledge and mapped them out or added to them. It was the preparation for the Revolution and not the Revolution itself that drew this extraordinary array of power into the world of research and speculation. For in the period after the Revolution the names of French scientists and thinkers are far fewer and less known ; war and the state then absorbed the ambition and talent of the country. The passion and struggle for half a century before the great cataclysm were within the human spirit. 3. Hence the great influence of France of last century upon the thought of England. Few departments of English science and philosophy but profited by the glowing life of CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 59 contemporary French thought. Some of their most eminent representatives crossed the Channel in order to draw inspira- tion by direct intercourse. Others studied the results with ardour. Whilst all English thought, whether advancing or retrogressive, profited by the atmosphere of French thought. We can see how far it penetrated when we find it in the pietism of Cowper, the chopped-up Homerism of Ossian, the early fervours of Southey, and the localised inspiration of Burns. It was a subtle influence breathing through the soul of English literature more than a definite mould or model for it. Section 9. 1. All the rest of Europe put together had less effect upon the minds of English writers. The struggles of oppressed nationalities like Poland roused poetry to fitful sympathy or pity as in Cowper and Campbell. The enthusiasm of patriots like Paoli gave momentary fervour to certain literary circles through such books as BoswelPs concerning the Corsican general. The moral gaucheries and intellectual advancement and sympathies of Catherine of Russia gave an occasional romantic thought or illustration to English imagination. Frederick's victories and the expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal and Spain might have stimulated history to philosophical thought. But it was France that was the centre of European stimulus. 2. From other countries it was iheir old literature and art and thought that still awakened echoes in England. Mickle translated the Lusiad of Camoens, feeling doubtless that the epic of the great past of Portugese enterprise in the East would interest England with her growing Indian empire. It was the Spain of the Elizabethan era that still interested Englishmen ; and Smollett and others had to translate again for the eighteenth century her ever-green Don Quixote ; whilst her old picaresque novels, chiefly, it is to be said, through the French imitation Gil Bias, moulded English fiction in the hands of Fielding and Smollett ; Tom Jones and Jonathan Wild, Roderick Random and Ferdinand Count Fathom have all the meandering art and life-likeness of Lazarilio de Tormes and the hero of Le Sage's book. 60 ERA OF EXPANSION So it was the great past of Italy that gave new stimulus ; the discovery of Pompeii in 1750 made ancient Rome a perennial source of living interest to English travel and thought; the specimens of Greek art found in the excavations gave new birth to sculpture and architecture and even painting. And English painters began to visit Italy and study her great collections of pictures as the true school of art. Contemporary Italy influenced England chiefly through science and the drama. Galvani and Volta gave new develop- ments to electricity and two new words to the English language Metastasio, Goldoni, and Alfieri, chiefly through France, had some influence on English comedy in the hands of Goldsmith and Sheridan. But it was the opera through which Italy most effected the English stage. Musical operettas and farces became the order of the day in London and gave a distinct form for a time to English drama. 3. But the country that was now to approach France in influence upon England was Germany. Before the close of last century it began to be evident that this Teutonic people was about to mould certain sections of English thought and art. Her great era of literature, philosophy, and music had begun by the middle of the century. Bodmer and Gottsched had entered on their duel concerning classical and romantic literature and Klopstock had published his Messiah. Bach and Handel had accomplished their greatest triumphs in music. Winckelmann and Lessing had studied classical art and tried to find its true spirit. And Kant had already begun to reflect upon Hume's scepticism and think out his new theory of the world and human knowledge. But the great period of German literature and music and philosophy covers rather the last quarter of last century and the first quarter of this, and their influence on English literature belongs rather to the nineteenth century. 4. Yet we have the ballads of Burger and the early plays of Goethe affecting the mind of Scott so much that he publishes translations from them. But it was the unwhole- some sentimentalism of Goethe's Werther and Kotzebue's plays that most attracted the new English audience. Translations of the latter were frequent and were put upon CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 6 1 the stage even by critics and wits like Sheridan. Their indulgence in tears and morbid sentiment confirmed the taste for weak self-pity and futile self-analysis that had already appeared in English literature. 5. The influence of German music was far sounder. Handel had acclimatised it in England, and Gliick, Haydn, and Mozart had shown how its greatest effects might be secularised. And in reforming the taste for grand concerted music, they confirmed the popular English taste for song and hymn. There was a complete revival of the lyric in English literature in the last quarter of the century. The new naval glories of England drew Dibdin into songs of the sea. Blake and Cowper, though diverted by their circum- stances into other literary forms, were largely lyrical in their genius ; hence they appear at their best in the brief poem that expresses a single emotion and has a refrain, as, for example, Blake in his Cradle Song and Cowper in his lyric To Mary. Some of the most popular English songs, like the British Grenadiers, The Friar of Orders Gray, The Miller of Dee, and The Lass of Richmond Hill, belong to this period. And few of the poets but attempted the lyrical vein. Even Wordsworth and Coleridge in spite of their strongly metaphysical bent were drawn in the last decade of the century into the lyrical and ballad form. Their joint volume of Lyrical Ballads issued in 1798 is an evidence of the great lyrical movement that was sweeping through English poetry ; it reveals their philosophical leanings and yet attempts to adapt itself to the fashion of song. But it was in Scotland that the influence of music upon literature was most apparent. John Logan's Braes of Yarrow and Jane Elliott's Lament for Flodden show the pathos that Scottish song was capable of; and Mickle's Sailor's Wife shows its humorous and familiar side. It is a mistake to think that Burns was a marvellous lyrical genius that sprang up in the midst of unlyrical surroundings. He only took the songs of the people and added to the stanzas or revised them. His name has overshadowed and absorbed the reputation of a hundred Scottish song-writers of last century; and though he surpasses all of them in variety of power and in uniform beauty and vigour of 62 ERA OF EXPANSION melody, individual songs of theirs like the two first mentioned and Lady Lindsay's Auld Robin Gray and Lady Nairn's Land of the Leal equal his best in pathos of appeal to the national or to the human heart. 6. The extraordinary development of hymn-writing is due as much to the evangelical and other religious move- ments as to the influence of music. But we cannot well account for the reappearance of the secular lyric in all its old Elizabethan beauty and power except by the popular demand for melody such as Euglishmen could sing without instrumentation or organised choirs. The old love of the simple song was revived and confirmed by the power which German music began to obtain in oratorio and symphony and opera over the English public. Nothing shows the resurgence of the people so clearly as this influence of a newly Teutonised art, and this revival of the lyric. It reveals at the same time the return of literature to its primitive Teutonic sources and forms, to nature and an older and broader nationalism. CHAPTER III. SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES. PERIOD OF FULFILLMENT. I800 Section i. 1. The great period of Germanism in our literature is the second division of our era, 1800 to 1850. German criticism and philosophy, poetry and fiction, drama and music gave or confirmed new impulses or movements in the English world of letters. 2. To take music first, who can doubt that the wonderful development of musical genius in Germany had a close connection with the experimentation in melody by the English poetry of the period ? It is one of the most striking features of the latter that so many metres and rhythms are attempted. Most ages of poetry had preferred some favourite form ; as, for example, the Dryden and Pope age chose the heroic couplet and seldom departed from it. Even the Elizabethan age had its preference for blank verse and a stanza like the Spenserian. But during the first half of our century there is no predominance of any one metre or form ; rhyme is as natural to the poets as blank verse, the heroic couplet as the long stanza, the sonnet as the lyric with refrain; and the desire for variety is shown in the continual experiments made by Coleridge, Southey, Tennyson, and Browning in new or foreign metres and forms, anapaestic verse, hexameter, sapphic. Even the tuneless Byron experimented in his lyrics and Hebrew melodies and by no means confined himself to one metre in his longer poems. The poetic power of the age had attained such confidence in its harmony and melody that it could venture out with success in any metre or stanza. 64 ERA OF EXPANSION 3. It is almost the same with prose. There had been two or three typical styles in all previous ages, and no writer could depart far from them without losing command of his expression. Now we have continual variety and experiment in the prose books. The vigorous, abrupt Saxon of Cobbett, the regular, balanced paragraph, and rhetorical, Latinised sentence of Macaulay, the half- colloquial and half-archaic quaintness of Lamb, the prosaic, matter-of-fact style of Grote and Hallam, the passion-lit eccentricity of Carlyle, the solid and undistinctive though copious diction of Scott, and the imaginative brilliancy and polish of Landor seem almost as if they belonged each to a different age. Nay, the same writer develops and changes his style as he proceeds in his literary career, if not within the same year and work. Now he is Saxon, again he is Latinised ; now he prefers the Johsonian, again he indulges in the short and irregular melody of more modern prose. There is a variety of rhythm and style that often makes it difficult to identify a passage. Only mannerists like Carlyle cling to the one style and intensify its singularity. Most other writers vary their style according to their theme and model. But whatever their method of expression, as a rule, the writer has now full command of its rhythm and is conscious of the beauty of melody in it. And this is undoubtedly the effect of the spread and development of musical taste under the tutorship of Germany. 4. There is, too, in some, as often in De Quincey and Landor, and occasionally in Lamb and Hazlitt, a large harmony in passages that seems to find its analogy only in the greater musical compositions of Beethoven, Schubert, or Mendelssohn. Can we doubt that, without such genius in music as Germany produced, there would have been less of the arts of melody and harmony in the English prose of the period ? 5. The drama was still under the influence of the opera, which had been greatly developed both in Italy and Germany and had drawn to it the finest musical talent as well for execution as for composition ; so important had this section of the drama become in England, that a theatre especially for it, the English Opera House, was opened in CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 65 1816 ; great singers like Malibran and Catalani and Mario devoted themselves to it and spread its popularity, and English composers like Balfe set themselves to this combination of music and the drama. The day of Teutonic opera had not yet come; but Mozart's and Beethoven's were popular and helped to mould the public taste to more musical diction in the drama proper. 6. But the chief influence of the drama was negative. The ever-recurring lyric was thrown out, and the mongrel plays, half concert, half drama, that had been such favourites in the previous period began to disappear from the stage. Singers with dramatic power had now full scope in the opera and were drawn off from the drama proper. But German plays continued to affect it. The sentimen- talism of Kotzebue moulded many of the plays that could fill a London theatre. Even in those of Sheridan Knowles and Douglas Jerrold there is some tinge of it, whilst in Bulwer Lytton's Lady of Lyons it is rampant. The laughter stirred by The Rovers, Canning's burlesque of these German and Germanised plays, gave only a temporary check to their popularity. 7. By far the most important influence of the German drama was the development of a new species in English literature, the purely literary drama. Coleridge was first attracted by the plays of Schiller, and translated Wallenstein and! the Piccolomini; and inspired by these he and his friends started to write plays ; he wrote Robespierre, and got his Osorio, an imitation of Schiller's Robbers, put upon the stage without permanent success; Southey began with his Wat Tyler, and Wordsworth with his Borderers. So Scott, stimulated by his translation of Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen, wrote several brief tragedies and dramatic scenes as, for example, Auchendrane ; but they were never acted and indeed were incapable of being acted. The stimulus was purely artificial so early in the period as the beginning of the century ; none of these poets had essentially dramatic power. 8. The literary drama was to come later, after Goethe's greatest effort, Faust, had begun to be translated and to affect the English imagination. It was this striking product E 66 ERA OF EXPANSION of the German mind, unfitted as it was for the stage, that, along with the deeper study of Shakespeare's tragedies, drew the best English poets to the unhistrionic dramatic form. Byron reveals imitation of Goethe's drama in his Manfred and The Deformed Transformed, and all his plays were undoubtedly written under its inspiration. It was this, too, along with the tragedies of Aeschylus that turned so undramatic poets as Shelley and Mrs. Browning to the drama in the Prometheus Unbound and the Drama of Exile. Keats, Landor, Browning, Tennyson, Joanna Baillie, Hannah More, Croly, Wells, Clough, Home, Kingsley, Darley, all attempted the literary dramatic form for many of their poems. And the reading drama or dramatic scene has come to be established as one of the most popular types of poetry in nineteenth century literature ; it originated with Faust, but it has drifted far from its origin, drawing inspiration from varied sources. And it has its counterpart in prose in the dramatic dialogue and conversation, made so artistic by Landor and Helps. Nor was the influence of Goethe's Faust confined to the dramatic art and form. It greatly stirred the imagination of Carlyle, as we can see in Sartor Resartus. And De Quincey shows his study of it in his more imaginative essays and in his Opium-eater. The fiction of the supernatural benefited by it being deepened and made more philo- sophical in its treatment of the ever-attractive theme. 9. But it was Goethe's novel, Wilhelm Meister, that most affected English fiction. It gave birth to a new division of it, the philosophical, that, in the hands of Kingsley, Hawthorne, and George Eliot, attempted the most difficult problems of modern life and yet remained artistic. At first its dissertations and discussions led to such novels as Plumer Ward's Tremaine ; but later in the period it inspired Bulwer Lytton to shallower and more rhetorical and yet more interesting efforts in fiction. Carlyle translated it amongst his earliest literary attempts. And he also helped the English literary public to appreciate the new era in German literature by his brilliant essay upon it and by his translations from its prominent fictionists, Musaeus, Tieck, Richter. CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 67 10. Jean Paul Richter tinged Carlyle's own style and diction deeply by the strange patchwork of humour, simile, and poetical philosophy, in which his novels were dressed. To Novalis the maximist and him is due the introduction of the sententious, almost oracular, aphoristic style that culminated in Emerson and still has its disciple in George Meredith. Carlyle developed the bizarre tendency he had acquired from Richter into a mannerism that made a Carlylean school of style impossible. There is almost none of it in his earlier essays and his Life of Schiller ; and in Sartor Resartus there is more of Richter's humour and love of concentration, of striking poetry and thought and simile in strange epithet and compound. His later style became more conventional according to his own model than picturesque. Yet it infected nineteenth century English with a distinct Germanising tendency. The free creation of compounds was a habit of the oldest English that had been curtailed and almost lost by the many centuries of French influence. The study of German and the example of great imaginative writers like Carlyle have re-established it to the great advantage of our language. The older habit of more numerous adjectival epithets has revived in the same way, and the use of an active infinitive for the more usual passive dependent on a noun or adjective. A less advantageous tendency derived from German is the dislocation of the article or pronoun from its noun by a series of adjectives or epithets ; it interferes greatly with the rhythm of phrases and the balance of sentences. Even melodious writers of prose like Lamb, writing early in the century, were infected with this epithetic habit. The chief service that the influence of German has done to English has been to recall it to its Teutonic origin. Without rejecting the French and Latin words and idioms that have been completely acclimatised in our language, English prose diction has become more conscious of the power of its Saxon elements, and in all its developments towards poetic power and the expression of pathos and the emotions has learned to go back to the simpler words that the Saxonism of the common people has retained for more than a thousand years and has saturated with national feeling. 68 ERA OF EXPANSION 11. It was the Germanism of the early part of our century, too, that sent us back to the treasures of our own literature. The previous period had begun this good work of retreat upon our footsteps. But Coleridge on his return from Germany introduced into England the more sympathetic and at the same time more scholarly study of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan writers. And Lamb and a host of less imaginative scholars and critics than he drew both readers and writers back to the greatness of the English literary past and supplied native fountains of inspiration. Scott had already been confirmed in his researches into folk-literature amongst the old legends and ballads of the Borders by the new ballads and narrative poems of Germany It made Englishmen proud of their own literature to find another nation studying every age of it with both poetic enthusiasm and minute scholarship. They had dealt with all but the greatest writers like Shakespeare and Milton and Spenser in a half-apologetic way, and even at times chimed in with French critics in their condemnation of the barbaric grandeur of these great poets. The new consciousness of the beauty of the Gothic in architecture and the Teutonic in literature grew into confidence in the old English poets and prose-writers as the best sources of inspiration. And the nineteenth century witnessed a great Anglicising move- ment in all kinds of composition, thanks largely to the influence of Germany and German scholarship. 12. German scholarship and criticism were recreating the past. Heyne and Adelung, Wolf and Voss had revolu- tionised the study ot the classics from the side of both literature and language. Winckelmann and Lessing analysed the spirit of classical art. Schleiermacher and Neander were bringing the new critical methods to bear on the Bible and its history. And Heeren and Savigny, Niebuhr and Bunsen were illuminating various phases of past civilisation by means of them. The Schlegels and Grimms, Tieck and most of the imaginative writers studied Teutonic and especially English literature and legend and folk-lore with great enthusiasm and industry. Such activity in scholarship and criticism could not but spread to England in so vigorous a period as the first half of the nineteenth CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 69 century. And the new methods appeared not only in classical study but in the study of English literature. Coleridge and Hazlitt as sympathetic critics, Isaac Disraeli and Hone, Collier and Knight, as editors and collectors gave evidences of the new method and the new industry. Their application to history appeared in the work of Turner and Kemble, Hallam and Palgrave, Macaulay and Napier, Arnold and Milman, Thirlwall and Grote. These were historians of the new and German type who left no docu- ment or authority unexamined, no doubt or question ignored, before they would describe an event or a character, a scene or an episode. 13 But it was in philosophy that German influence became more apparent as the period advanced. There had been a native development of abstract thought all through the eighteenth century in England towards utilitarianism, and this was carried on under French stimulus by Bentham, the Mills, and George Henry Lewes. But with Coleridge's return from Germany there entered in a strong idealistic opposition to this. The great names of Kant and Hegel, Fichte and Schelling could not but give an impetus to English philosophy as soon as Germanism found a footing ; and these were all idealists. Coleridge was the first to introduce the taste for highly abstract statements of the principles and formulae of life and knowledge ; and through his writings and lectures and monologues, the subjective and the objective and the ideal became common even in popular didactic prose. No great school of English idealistic philosophy yet arose. But we see the influence of Kant and even of Fichte in the thought of lecturers and writers like Hamilton and Mansel and a tinge of idealism appears occasionally in even popular prose-writers like Carlyle and De Quincey, Bulwer Lytton and Ruskin, Emerson and Hawthorne. Perhaps the most striking effect is to be found in poetry, which is by nature idealistic. Wordsworth and Coleridge reintroduced the philosophical point of view ; and few poets of the nineteenth century are without that tinge of philosophy which distinguishes the Elizabethans. The imaginative and even the dramatic statement of the most abstract problems became a common feature of the poetry 70 ERA OF EXPANSION of the early half of our century. The Queen Anne poetry had occasionally come across them with its didactic method ; but it had no conception of their power to suggest thought or sound the imaginative depths of human life ; it could not Shakespearianise them as Shelley and Browning and Tennyson were able to do. The Prometheus Unbound, Paracelsus, and In Memoriam, all products of the first half of our century, range through the most difficult problems of philosophy and are yet as far from the didactic spirit as Shakespeare from Pope ; they have around them an atmosphere of idealistic thought and suggestion that the Germanism introduced by Coleridge and Carlyle must have done much to create. Section 2. 1. Through France and French philosophy some of this idealism came from Germany into England. St. Hilaire, Royer Collard, Maine de Biran, Jouffroy, and Cousin stripped German idealism of its bristling technicalities and made its chief mental attitudes familiar and almost easy to popular readers ; in short they Gallicised Kant and Fichte. And though Coleridge brought the new view of life and knowledge direct from its source with all its Germanism upon it, English philosophy and popular thought during the earlier part of our century preferred to take it as clarified by French minds. Thus it was ready for use in popular literature, in sermon and essay, poem and novel, a genera- tion before it could have filtered down through English philosophy direct from its home. 2. The attitude more natural to French philosophy is the positive that adheres to classification of facts and prefers a materialistic or utilitarian solution of problems. Comte claimed to be its supreme representative, if not its re-discoverer, in the nineteenth century. And from him and Bentham the English popularisers of utilitarianism drew much of their inspiration, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, George Henry Lewes, Bain, Buckle, and Grote. Though his classification of the sciences was by no means the final, it gave stimulus to the encyclopedism that marked CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 71 the whole period, whilst his view of history, as consisting of stages that close in the positive, which looks at all things in an unsupernatural, un metaphysical way, led men like George Henry Lewes, Buckle, and Grote to suggestive revisions of the facts of the past. Not till the latter half of our century, not till Darwin and Spencer had revolutionised our view of the past by the theory of development, did the positive attitude to life have much effect upon imaginative literature. Without such a fertile and illuminative thought, its influence upon poets and artists could only be negative and chilling. Perhaps the chief imaginative influence of Comtism in the earlier part of the century was directly, by its lifeless, faithless version of the Catholic church, to encourage the Oxford religious reaction, and indirectly, by its confident and dogmatic negative to idealism and the treatment of the supernatural, to bring about that pathetic scepticism which takes such poetical beauty in Clough's poems and Tennyson's In Memoriam. 3. It was French science that, after the absorption of talent by the Napoleonic wars, grew apace and moulded English thought most. In biological and physiological investigation, physics, chemistry, astronomy, and geology France took one of the foremost places in Europe. And though Germany, especially in the second quarter of the period, made as great strides in scientific discovery as France, her scientific work did not so closely or so deeply affect English thought and literature. It was the practical tendency and lucid exposition of French science that appealed at once to the popular imagination, and brought illustration and simile into English poetry and suggestion of plot and incident into English fiction. 4. But pure literature was more affected by French history and criticism than by either philosophy or science. Into these the new spirit of the Revolution introduced such an emotional element as made them almost as interesting as fiction. From Chateaubriand to Michelet there was a long series of French writers who found in history the elements of romance and dealt with it as a succession of striking pictures; the great drama of the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars had been so impressive, so rapid, and 72 ERA OF EXPANSION sensational in its acts and denouements, that the historical imagination was touched into life by it and sought like romantic material in other periods and countries. The dramatic and picturesque style of French historians became the model of many of our historians. And Macaulay, Napier, Milman, Merivale, Prescott, Kinglake, Ticknor, Motley, and Bancroft bring out the romance of various periods with an imagination and style almost poetic. Even Carlyle, Germanised so deeply though he was, caught the dramatic fervour of history from the French and raised the new style to its highest romantic pitch in his French Revolution. The new philosophical treatment of history in, France as a series of phenomena social, political, and economical, and represented especially by Guizot, l)e Tocqueville, and Comte, took as deep root in England, but later in the century. George Henry Lewes, Buckle, and Draper were only the founders of this new combination of history and philosophy in England which has been so fertile during the latter half of the century ; and they drew their first inspiration from France. 5. Criticism also learned for the first time in France to be philosophical and picturesque. Villemain, Saintebeuve, Janin, and Scherer taught English critics that to use the lash was not their only function ; they brought the sympathetic imagination of the poet to bear on contem- porary books as well as books of the past ; and in the hands of De Quincey, Macaulay, Matthew Arnold, and Greg, who had their natural tendency to sympathetic insight confirmed by French example, criticism rose in England to the rank of literature. Nor has it ceased to feel its higher mission or to drink at French sources of inspiration. Heine, with his Gallicised Germanism, taught it another combination, that of wit, poetry, and philosophy, and there has been much effort to follow in his footsteps since the middle of the century. 6. Even the more difficult task of popularising economics was accomplished by France. St. Simon and Fourier infused into the new science a certain element of romance by introduc- ing into it the whole sphere of government and society ; they gave it the socialistic bent which has later in the century made it the special study of the new artisan reading public. CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 73 But even without this atttaction, writers like Bastiat, Chevalier, and Lavaleye popularised it by their illustrative style and their lucid exposition. John Stuart Mill, Miss Martineau, Senior, and Bagehot followed their example and made it easy reading for even the average public. 7. But it was French imaginative literatuie that most influenced English during the last part of our period. The French romantic movement, that culminated in the practical sphere in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, could not fail to affect the literature of the neighbouring country as soon as the reaction from the great Revolution had lost its fierceness of antagonism. And it was the second quarter of the century that began to feel the influence of the new French poetry and fiction. Lamartine and Victor Hugo, Gautier and De Musset and Baudelaire, though the last three repelled at first by their sensuous themes and tone, gave an impulse to the romantic and passionate treatment of love in English poetry, which had been bent in that direction already by Shelley and Keats and Byron. It is apparent in the poems of Mrs. Browning, the early lyrics of Tennyson, and the Pauline of Browning. But it was rather after the middle of the century than before it that this influence became most apparent. The romance and poetry of sensuousness do not <:ome fully into English literature till the Songs before Sunrise of Swinburne. 8. Almost the same may be said of the new French fiction The influence of even Balzac and Dumas and George Sand comes rather in the latter half of the century, though we can see that Bulwer Lytton and Lever, Thackeray and Charlotte Bronte have felt it, if not studied their books. English fiction learned from Balzac to deal with separate passions or problems or phases of human nature, from Dumas in his Gallicised imitations of Scott to treat sections of history or contemporary life in a romantic, if not sensational, way, and from Paul de Kock and Eugene Sue to concentrate interest in a dramatic plot. The later novels of George Sand, and those of Gautier, Flaubert, and Murger belong to the latter half of the century and have little influence till our own generation. French fiction at first rather affected the English acting drama. Now was 74 ERA OF EXPANSION begun the habit of dramatising novels and that of adapting from French plays or romances. Theatrical audiences were not yet sufficiently acquainted with the language to find the sources of plots. And play-wrights began to hunt in its preserves. The new literary drama seldom looked to France for either material or inspiration. 9. When it or any other branch of English poetry did, it found them in a different type of literature either in the mystical prose rhapsodies of Senancour in Obermann, or in the romantic poetry or prose of Hugo or Lamartine. For there were two distinct attitudes in the French imagination of the second quarter of the century, corresponding to the English literary movement of half a century before the sentimental and the romantic. The one turned sadly to nature and the past and found material and scenes for melancholy reflection that rose into almost poetic eloquence when expressed ; it drew somewhat from German sources and was perhaps already affected with the pessimism which had begun again to appear in Europe in Schopenhauer the German thinker and Leopardi the Italian artist ; for it found little hope in the actual state of the world ; all its consolation came from mystic sympathy with either nature or religion ; and it found its most natural expression in prose that passed often from rhetoric into poetry. Chateaubriand and Joseph de Maistre formed the connecting link between this school and that of Rousseau and St. Pierre, which had been more optimistic ; and its most prominent representatives were Senancour, Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Eugenie and Maurice de Guerin. They gave some of the literary colour to the Oxford movement, not only to its High Church but to its Broad Church phase. Maurice and Matthew Arnold and Clough were as much tinged with their mysticism as Newman and Keble and Faber ; they all alike tried to find support for their faith in sad appeal to nature and most of them delighted in the harmonies of half-rhetorical, half-poetic prose as much as in verse. Mrs. Browning and Tennyson felt their influence too and indulged in a poetic mysticism that often became pessimistic in its view of the world. Still more was the English pulpit of the middle of the century affected by their half-poetical rhetoric as well as CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 75 their spiritual attitude ; Lamennais and Lacordaire could not but mould the young preachers of the time by their eloquence. The romantic movement represented by Lamartine and Hugo with its optimistic and revolutionary ardour was not so influential in English literature till after the middle of the century yet we can see its more cheerful attitude to the past and to nature in Macaulay and Thackeray, Kingsley and Longfellow. 10. The older literature of France continued to hold its own in the English literary mind against contemporary French literature. Rabelais, Montaigne, and Le Sage still showed their influence in the English essayists, humourists, and novelists. Moliere and Beaumarchais and the older dramatists moulded English plays as much as Scribe and De Vigny. Voltaire and Rousseau and Montesquieu continued to affect English philosophical prose throughout the period especially amongst utilitarians and advanced thinkers. Section 3. I. So was it with the literature of Italy and Spain. It was the older that was the more powerful over the English literary imagination. It was the Divine Comedy of Dante, the Sonnets of Petrarch, the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, the Jerusalem Delivered of Tasso, and Don Quixote that were frequently translated into English during the period. Few of the poets in the second quarter of the century but studied them with care. The earlier poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Scott and Byron, Shelley and Keats were less affected by them. And yet it was Byron and Shelley and Keats that first brought Italy into note as the natural exile- home of English poets. They found that land with its newly discovered treasures of ancient art and its atmosphere of traditional art one of the finest stimuli to the imagination. Venice and the Adriatic especially inspired Byron, Florence and the Mediterranean shore Shelley and Keats and Landor. And though they did not turn to Dante and Tasso, they found many of their best themes in the older history and literature. Byron sought the subjects of two of his dramas, Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari, in older Venice, and 76 ERA OF EXPANSION his stanza and the cue of the humour of Beppo and Don Juan in Pulci. Already Hookham Frere had taken the Morganti Maggiore as the model of his Monks and Giants. It was the satiric and even cynical genius of Italy that attracted the self-exiled English poet ; and it was this that in Leopardi was renewing its literature. Still more did the free if not licentious tone that still clung to Italian society from older times pass with the cynicism into Byron's later work ; his Beppo and Don Juan laugh morality to scorn. The genius of Shelley and Keats had no Byronic tinge and was affected by a totally different stratum of Italian life. It was the atmosphere from ancient times, the beauty of the relics of Greek art, that touched the spirit of the dying exile. Whilst it was the sense of the great human struggle towards freedom and light so manifest through all Italy and Italian history that along with the beauty of the atmosphere and the mouldering beauty of the past enamoured the imagina- tion of the great revolutionary idealist ; into the three best products of his Italian life, his Lines on the Euganean Hills, his Cenci, and his Prometheus Unbound, there passed respectively the three spirits that draw the imaginative mind to Italy, the contrastive nobleness of her scenery, of her plains and Alps, the strange medley of beauty and tragic conflict that floats down from her mediaeval life, and the footfall of ancient Greece and her incarnation of the eternal strivings of the soul of man against its conditions. 2. Landor, though coeval with these three poets, had his Italian life thrown into the second quarter of the century. He connects the later Italian influence with that of the time of Shelley and Keats. And he lived more amongst the classics of the literature. Boccaccio was his favourite and moulded his later art. The Pentameron and many of his Imaginary Conversations are attempts to revive the brilliant intellectual life of Florence of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In fact the idea of brief prose con- versations between two famous characters from the same or different eras seems to have been suggested to him by the older Italian life and literature. For it was Florence with her memories of the Medicean times and their elevation of social and intellectual intercourse into a fine art that CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 77 impressed him most deeply. And it was Florence that later drew the Brownings and George Eliot and many lesser English writers to Italy and stirred their imaginations to activity by some phase of her ever-changeful genius. Her struggle for liberty and unity awakened enthusiasm in the hearts of not merely politicians but poets ; and Landor, Mrs. Browning, and Swinburne gave fervid expression to the new spirit. Whilst the great shadow of her belated ecclesiasticism with all its memory of power and its atmosphere of art fell upon the minds of timid thinkers in the English Church and drew them in from the over- powering influence of new truths and new problems. Italianism in religion passed through the Oxford movement into English literature and thought either as an attractive or as a repellent force. Ancient and mediaeval Italy became again living powers in English imagination. Only in the latter half of the century did Italians in England, like the Rossettis, give direct impulse to English poetry and English art. The earlier impulse from Italians in England was more patriotic and revolutionary than artistic. Extra-parliamentary English politics was highly charged with Italian democratic fervour by Mazzini and his compatriots in London during the second quarter of the century. And his eloquent command of our language made his writings as popular with young English thought as with young Italy. There is a combination of philosophy and almost poetic inspiration in his prose that made his lofty idealism and his gospel of republicanism a powerful antidote to Carlyle's ideal of tyranny based on hero-worship. And the heroic life of Garibaldi and the practical statesmanship of Cavour helped him to keep the attention of young and imaginative England fixed upon Italy and her destinies. Section 4. I. The same revolutionary sympathy was extended to Greece, Poland, and Spain in their attempts to throw off old tyrannies. But they were all too far from the average English mind to affect literature deeply. In the first half of the period Byron and Shelley were stirred to the heart by Greek struggles for independence ; but part of their 7 8 ERA OF EXPANSION sympathy was due to their admiration for ancient Greece, as we can see in Byron's Greek poems and references in Shelley's Hellas. Polish ardour was scattered through all Western Europe and thus left some mark in its patriotic exile upon the love of liberty in English literature. Spain during the Peninsular War drew the attention of literary England to her; but it was rather Spain of the Moorish occupation and Spain of American adventure than Spain contemporary. Lockhart's Spanish Ballads, Southey's Roderick, the Last of the Goths, Landor's Gebir, and Julian, and Washington Irving's Legends of the Conquest of Granada, Tales of the Alhambra, and Life of Columbus show the direction which interest in Spain took early in the century. As far as contemporary interest in Spain went, it was chiefly historical ; Byron shows it in portions of Childe Harold, and Borrow in his Lavengro and other books. But Southey's Peninsular War and Napier's still more artistic and interesting history of the same episode in Spanish development are the truest outcome of English interest in contemporary Spain. In the second quarter of the century the reviving spirit of liberty and of literary and artistic taste drew new attention to the long-forgotten genius of the peninsula. And translations of Calderon and Lope de Vega, of Quevedo and Cervantes and of many of the old romances into English pointed out new sources of inspiration in Spain. 2. The North of Europe began in this period to enter on the stage of European literature. Swedenborg had already affected English religious thought by his mystic interpretations of the Bible and the world ; and small churches of his disciples had been established in various cities of England before the close of the eighteenth century. But it was in the nineteenth that his influence spread to literature. Coleridge in the first quarter and Emerson in the second quarter of the century reveal in their lectures and essays traces of careful study of his works ; he strengthened their idealism and tendency to mysticism without drawing them into his religious and philosophical eccentricities. But the English imagination was turned to a more wholesome fountain of poetry in the old Sagas by CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 79 the Frithiofsaga and other poems of the Swedish Tegner and the tragedies of the Danish dramatist Oehlenschlager. English literature began to recognise its Scandinavian kinship ; the Norse epics and chronicles were translated and the old influence that had moulded Anglo-Saxon literature and language again appeared and quickened the reaction towards the Teutonic elements of the national character and culture. The astonishing popularity of the novels of Frederika Bremer and of the folk tales of Hans Christian Andersen in England and America amongst the middle classes confirmed the interest in the Teutonic North and brought it to bear as a wholesome literary influence, especially in the new directions of purifying literature for the inclusion of women in its audience, and of enlisting it in the service of children. And this purification was perhaps affected by the wide fame of the Danish Thorwaldsen and his popularisation of sculpture in works that would appeal to the least sensuous and most puritan imagination. 3. Holland had long lost touch with England and the English spirit ; nor did she regain it in this period unless we take into account the scholarship in her universities and especially in Leyden and the power that her old painters of low life still had over our realists with the pencil and the pen. Not a few of the English novelists and sketchers of the life of the people during both this century and last, like Fielding and Smollett, Gait and Dickens, Hogarth and Gillray, Cruikshank and Phiz, have manifestly studied the pictures of Teniers and Jan Steen. Russia had only begun to creep within the pale of literary Europe ; and there may be perhaps a trace of the fables of Kriloff or the satirical novels of Gogol apparent in the atmosphere of English literature towards the middle of our century. But not till the last two decades of it do the traces of it become unmistakable ; for then Ivan Turgenief and Dostoiefsky and Tolstoi were translated into English and were colouring the French influence on English fiction. Bowring's trans- lations from Russian, Servian, Polish, Spanish, Magyar, Bohemian and Dutch poets, between 1821 and 1832, familiarised English writers with foreign work. 8o ERA OF EXPANSION Section 5. 1. It was the vast expansion of Anglo-Saxondom in America, the East, and the Southern hemisphere that told most on the literature of the nineteenth century. The British dominions alone meant a lifetime of travel for a man of culture, if he were to make himself acquainted with them all. Books of travel came to be as common as the publication of letters and journals in the previous century. The doings of the English abroad, of the English navy and army and administrators, grew important enough to occupy a large part of the English literary world. The Napoleonic wars had drawn England far afield ; and her interests lay in every section of the globe. Now it was an American war, again a new conquest in India ; now an Ashantee war, again the opium war with China ; now the abolition of slavery in the West Indies and at the Cape of Good Hope, again the war in Rurmah ; now the constitutional agitations in Canada, again the growth of settlement in Australia ; now the romance of Arctic voyagers, Parry or Franklin, again the achievements of a solitary Englishman like Rajah Brooke in Borneo. Newspapers, magazines, and books were busy with the ever-changing scenes of British energy abroad and the ever-growing labyrinth of British interests. Some of the literary men went out and saw the new Anglo-Saxon world for themselves ; Macaulay went as legislator to India, Gait went to Canada. Some like Coleridge and Southey with their pantisocracy scheme on the Susquehanna contemplated settlirg in one of its distant parts ; the economists and political thinkers busied themselves with the relations that should hold between the various kinds of new dominion and the home country ; historians prepared to record the development of the empire ; orators in parliament like Brougham and Cobden and Bright gained or widened their reputation for eloquence on the new topics ; pessimist and imaginative writers like Carlyle, driven to point out practical remedies for the evils they deplored, found them in emigration to the new dominions of the Anglo-Saxon race. 2. The restless, almost feverish, activity that had taken possession of all spheres of the English-speaking world had already shown itself in literature and thought. It came CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 8 1 from the ferment of an empire expanding into every corner of the earth, and now not merely by means of war or commerce, but by settlement, discovery, and missionary effort. A feeling began to arise that the English race and English language were about to cover the whole world. The imperial note of Elizabethan literature that had come from the ubiquitous enterprise of the time reappeared in the sphere of imagination and thought. Writers grew proud of the task of perfecting their own tongue. From all sides flowed words and expressions into it through the channels of science and art, scholarship and commerce. And yet it became conscious of its own genius and its new destiny and looked back with more eagerness and dignity to native models and sources. It looked to classics and to foreign literatures rather as a conqueror that would master and annex than as a worshipper that would admire and follow. It had something of the same attitude in Shakespeare and Spenser; all languages and literatures, and especially the classical, were imperially despoiled of their treasures to fit out the new world of English imagination. During the two centuries between, except perhaps in Milton, the English tongue had been willing to take the place of a disciple, glad of any precedent consecrated by time. Now it ranged again through all spheres and tongues and literatures and brought in spoils that were to be built into its own structure and seem almost native to itself. The fashion of quoting from foreign languages and especially classics in order to embellish was now rapidly antiquated by the imperial sense of native power. The tyranny of classical precedent and model broke down before the fast-growing pride in home-grown art. 3. And classical scholarship itself benefited by this revolution. A sense of the humanity that lived in Greek and Roman breasts crept into it. It studied the ancient world now as a living thing with an individuality of its own and not as an ideal anticipation of modern life. The Greeks and Romans were no longer taken as having laid down literary and artistic and political laws for all time, but as wise experimenters in the same directions as modern civilisation. Lessons could be learned from their solutions 82 ERA OF EXPANSION of the problems of life and art, but not final wisdom. Imaginative men became scholars and touched the old material and style into new life. Poets like Shelley and Mrs. Browning set themselves to give English readers the true beauty and greatness of classical poetry and prose, as Marlowe and Chapman had done before in the Elizabethan age. And translation became a fine art that did its best to lose none of the fine gold in the process of passing ancient thought and feeling through the crucible. Greek and Roman history had to be re-written from the new point of view that imaginative sympathy and the discoveries of philology and archaeology had given. The ancient world was no less enthusiastically studied' than before ; but in the vast expansion of the audience and of the interests of scholarship and art, of literature and thought, it seemed to fall into the background compared with its place in former periods. Other studies and the growth of modern science and art began to overshadow it. Section 6. I. But nothing was more effective in this respect than the re-discovery of native literature made before the century began. It was indeed a surprise to scholars brought up in the pseudo-classical bigotry of the Queen Anne literature to find such power, such imagination, such suggestiveness of style, such wealth of diction and illustration in the long- despised poetry and prose of England. Even in Anglo- Saxon and in the deranged and uncertain language of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there was found astonishing activity of fancy and thought and research. Critics saw Homeric power as well as a native shadowy grandeur of poetry in the Beowulf and a variety of imaginative interests and talents in the trove of the Exeter and Vercelli books. They saw in the alloy of the middle English period much pure gold that might be refined again and used in the noblest poetry. Indeed the movement became reactionary and extreme, as is the case with all re-discoveries ; beauty and power were seen where there were none ; and tedious and commonplace productions that had deserved the oblivion they had fallen into were dragged forth and offered CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 83 to factitious and happily brief admiration. English scholar- ship in the first half of our century tended to grow antiquarian. 2. But its growth had a great effect upon style both poetic and prose. The native words that had held their own even in the most Latinised diction were illuminated by the new research and gained a new sense of their long ancestry ; they gathered to them an atmosphere of suggestive vigour and poetry that renewed their life. Words and idioms too that had been banished by a pseudo-classical age from recognised literary style began to reassert them- selves as the true stuff of poetry and imaginative prose. Saxonism became with some a passion and an eccentricity. But with most it did not drive out the old Latinism, but only took its natural place as ally. There was a vigorous resort especially by poetry to the older and more Saxon vocabulary; but foreign words that had taken root in the language and assumed the native habits were accepted as indigenous. Shorter poems and especially lyrics threw off the cumbrous phraseology in which the Restoration and the Queen Anne age had almost stifled natural emotion. Without this return to native sources of diction, the new outburst of poetry and imaginative prose could never have found expression that would appeal to the whole of the new-born national audience ; it would have been maimed ; in fact it could not have come into existence; the more Saxonised utterance was as essential a condition and result of the re-admission of the people to English literature as the new emotion or thought. Narrow cultured circles would never have overleapt the precedents of the Queen Anne period, however fresh or striking the fancies they had to express. It was the nationalisation of the literature that demanded appeal to all the resources of the language, the old as well as the more recent, the native as well as the foreign. And it was the new popular element in the audience that made a return to Saxonism a necessity ; the more popular forms of both poetry and prose reveal an increasing use of native words and phrases and idioms. 3. But the true antidote to over-Saxonism lay in the preference shown for the Elizabethan literature. There the 84 ERA OF EXPANSION writers saw how natural a Latinised diction was to dignity of thought and emotion, how unsuited the merely Saxon elements ot the vocabulary were to the higher and more abstract problems and thoughts that belong to the noblest poetry. In the tragedies of Shakespeare they felt the power that lay in an amalgam of Saxon and Latin words ; they saw how difficult it would have been to express the sublimer meditations of Hamlet or Timon or the greater passions of Lear or Macbeth or Othello without the free use of foreign words that the Renaissance had introduced. Milton, too, showed them how sublime the music that English could reach, if it rejected none of the foreign elements it had incorporated. The simpler emotions and more primitive phases of civilisation could be put more powerfully and melodiously in the native diction. But when poetry and more imaginative prose rose to heights of abstract reflection or of great or subtle passion, or indulged in the more refined humour, if broke down. Anglo-Saxon, when it came into contact with Latin civilisation was the language of a primitive people accustomed to maritime and war-like pursuits, incapable of philosophical thought, untouched by the refinements of art, or the subtleties of a highly developed religion. The vocabulary that could fit itself to the expression of all but the primitive emotions and thoughts had to come from without ; and it came with Latin Christianity and the Gallicised Latinism of the Normans. And when at last the English people emerged from its inchoate and mongrel stage into the full-grown and vigorous and united nation of the Elizabethan age, a still greater influx of foreign words was needed to express its higher thoughts and passions. So varied and subtle were the developments of the new national life that the old language could not have covered them ; and a vast expansion of both the diction and the style was an absolute essential. The inundation of Latinisms was as necessary to the greatness of Elizabethan literature as the unification of the people and the growth of patriotism and national thought. For the English mind ventured out into new regions that needed more than the mere descriptive vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon. All the new literary forms that based themselves upon generalisation and abstract speculation demanded a wider CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 85 and more varied linguistic sphere to draw from. And hence it is that, when poetry became didactic and philosophical after the Restoration, it became Latinised in diction. And whenever in the age of expansion or nationalization it rose above the merely lyrical or conversational, or the utterance of the simpler emotions and social facts, it retained and extended the sphere of Latinism. The main advance it made on the Queen Anne use of the classical vocabulary was that it took a more masterly grasp of it ; it learned from the Elizabethans and Milton to make Latin words and idioms humbly serve its highest purposes, instead of fitting its purposes to them. One of the differences between the use of classical elements by Shakespeare and Pope may be expressed thus ; the older poet melted them and ran them into whatever mould he desired ; the later chiseled his forms out of them by patient art and without the heat of passion, and he had to fit the result to the natural grain and flaws of his material. 4. There was a return to the Shakespearean method in the new age of expansion. The writers took hold of the etymology and the inner meaning of the classical elements of English and fitted them anew to their imaginative purposes, like a living garment of thought and feeling. The complete fusion of the Latin and Saxon elements of our vocabulary was the mark of the best prose as of the best poetry ; for the primitive feelings must mingle with the deep- est thought in all permanent literature ; and for pathos, awe, pity, sympathy with nature, sorrow, joy, the old Teutonic words and idioms, saturated with nationalism for a thousand years and more, must ever be the best ; whilst for the treat- ment of all the abstract problems of the higher thought and for the purposes of the more urban types of humour, satire, irony, sarcasm, burlesque, the mock-heroic, the less concrete vocabulary of an advanced civilisation was needed ; and here the Latin elements of English came in. If we take an imaginative prose-writer like Lamb we see almost at a glance how " mingled is the yarn" of English diction in his age, and how superior it is for variety and flexibility to the prose of Dr Johnson or even of The Spectator ; it is fitted to every mood; and in his Elia he keeps running over the whole 86 ERA OF EXPANSION gamut of human emotion and caprice ; now he is almost Johnsonian in the expression of humour, in his mock-heroic vein ; in the next paragraph he has become almost purely Saxon and lyrical in his pathos. In his essays on The South Sea House, New Year's Eve, and A Quaker's Meeting, for example, he delights in testing the variety of the English tongue, and proving the versatility of its composite character; he approaches to lyrical rhythm and diction in some of the passages that stir memory or the sublimer feelings ; but he neighbours them with passages almost as Latinised as philosophical prose. 5. And it is in Lamb that we see the high-water mark of the style that deals in reminiscence of former English literature. Every sentence of his Elia has some flavour of the older periods. It would need one who knew the whole range of English poetry and prose from 1650 down to 1820 to home his phraseology. He does not so often quote or rather pretend to quote as take a phrase, a metaphor, a word, an old usage, from the older authors or from his contemporaries. His mind is so saturated with the best English literature that he has often hedged in quotation points what is a mere adaptation or rough mosaic from an author whilst he constantly leaves unmarked scraps that belong to his favourites. And his chief favourites are Shakespeare, Milton, and the Authorised Version ; the other Elizabethan dramatists, the great prose contemporaries of our epic poet, the essay-writers and play-wrights of the Queen Anne period attract him only in a secondary degree. But how thoroughly the diction of the earlier half of our century was dyed with the great past of English literature and especially with Elizabethanism, nothing would show better than a good commentary on Elia. Out of the new middle class Lamb came and for it he wrote ; and we see they delighted in the old words and old usages, the quaint idioms that lingered on in the provincial circles, in the sect of the Quakers, and in the speech of New England. His archaisms had no artificial sound to most of the new audience, the readers of such periodicals as The London Magazine, in which the essays appeared. They still used in daily conversation the idioms and words and meanings that CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 87 had become antiquated in the London literature of the eighteenth century. For the old ballads, the Authorised Version of the Bible, Milton, and Bunyan had left them green and still threw a halo of imagination around them. Lamb was only stirring the deepest feelings of the more national audience when he ventured on giving such a quaint flavour to his diction. 6. And in the poetry of the time it was not Wordsworth's crusade against Pope's conventions that originated this return to the older and more popular sources of the language. The crusade was only a symptom of the renaissance of the people in literature. Out of the people came the fresh impulse to a great poetry, and to the people it had to address itself. It was the popular tongue that it had to adopt and refine, that tongue which had been so ennobled by perpetual study of the English Bible. The natural affinity of poetry to the linguistic past led it at once when it was bent again towards nature to seek its new language in the traditional literature of the people the ballads, the Bible, Milton, and Bunyan; there the best phraseology of the Elizabethan era had become consecrated by long use amongst the people in their highest moods and there the popular language had been elevated and refined by constant intercourse with lofty thought and passion. This older literature of the people gave the only possible medium of communication between the new authors and the new audience. The imaginative literature of a nation must address the national mind and not a narrow cultured circle, if it is to be permanent. And when its audience broadens from the court or capital to the people it is the people's language and not the language of learning or culture that it must adopt. And through the long genera- tions of submergence the English people had been ennobling their language and raising it into fitness for a great literature in continual study of the English Bible and of the books that were based on it, books like Paradise Lost and the Pilgrim's Progress. It is the Biblical tinge that was the striking feature of the new diction, when the people emerged again and formed the new patrons of literature. In the eighteenth century it had been the price 88 ERA OF EXPANSION of the book that made it lucrative to the writer, and rich and influential patrons were all that was needed. Now it was the numbers of a book sold that made it pay ; and the larger audience freed the author from the tyranny of a small and immediate circle. But if a book was to succeed it had to be in the literary language of the people. And hence the large influence that the English Bible now seemed to have over the diction of prose as well as poetry. 7. But culture and scholarship, following in the lines that the popular movement took, had discovered another noble source of inspiration and influence in Shakespeare's plays. By the second half of the era of expansion a large portion of the new audience had lost the keen edge of their traditional puritanism and were to some extent secularised in tastes. They no longer objected to all plays as wicked, and, reading the Elizabethan dramatists and especially Shakespeare, they found little that was impure and much that chose the very highest plane of thought and feeling. Shakespeare thus came to be added to the old literature of the people, his works became a household book in a large section of the middle and artisan classes during the earlier half of the nineteenth century. And hence it is that so many of the poets Shakespearianised and that there was so deep a tinge of Shakespearianism in the best prose diction. From Wordsworth to Tennyson the poetry adopted his phraseology and echoed his rhythms and felt no shame ; from Lamb to Kingsley and Ruskin prose counted it one of its highest prerogatives to weave in Shakespearian suggestion. 8. And from all kinds and periods of English literature the style took new life and found new material and cues. For the learned societies, the reprints, the scholarship and research brought even the oldest prose and poetry within reach of every writer and reader. The movement towards simplicity and variety in style and diction found no difficulty in models and expression. For every age contributed its vocabulary and forms. In poetry especially we have an inundation of archaisms ; the beautiful old words and phrases that had been forgotten by the highly cultured age of Queen Anne were resumed in numbers ; Wordsworth, Keats, CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 89 Browning, Tennyson had no hesitation in reviving idioms and words that had dropped out of the literary language, provided they were dipped in emotion, expressive, and melodious. So the old poetry was studied for its effects. There was no attempt as there had been in the age of Dryden and Pope to modernise Chaucer. But his quaint picturesqueness and humour reappear in prose as well as in poetry. Washington Irving shows his influence in the one, Hood and Hunt in the other. But it was the Elizabethan era that gave the best models and next to it the seventeenth century with its Milton in poetry and Sir Thomas Browne, Fuller, and Taylor in prose. So wide-spread was the influence of these that nothing short of the analysis of the whole of the imaginative literature would reveal it in full. In drama and lyric it is perhaps most apparent. For Lamb, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Browning, Tennyson were all led to the dramatic and lyric form by the Elizabethan and Miltonic example. As the drama of Shakespeare was now better studied than acted, the dramatic poems now written addressed themselves to a student audience rather than a theatrical. And all the old lyrical metres and themes and even the phrases were revived. No poetry could find its way so quickly to the hearts of the people as the lyric. And the recognition of the ancient ballads and songs by literature opened again the fountain of song even to the most cultured writers. No quality is more striking in the new poetry than its lyricism. This at once reveals an essential similarity between the first half of the nineteenth century and the Elizabethan age. The secret is that the literary audience was again national. And the simpler forms, that appeal directly to the human heart without need of much education, were certain to be successful again. Out of no other age except the Elizabethan could so many beautiful lyrics be gathered. Every poet tried the form and often succeeded in it. Satire, drama, epic, ode, sonnet needed a medium of culture. A good song, like good wine, " needed no bush ; " it commended itself at once to every ear and heart and fixed itself for ever in the national con- sciousness. We have, therefore, the same phenomenon in the period as appeared in the reign of Elizabeth ; the literary poets were also the popular poets ; however 90 ERA OF EXPANSION philosophical or didactic, sublime or satirical they might be in their more elaborate efforts, they could be at times as simple in emotion, language, and melody as the writers of the old ballads and songs. Section 7. I. What made this lyrical movement easy was the development and spread of music. Singing was not merely cultivated as a fine art by great vocalists like Malibran and Mario and Grisi ; but in every town and village choirs sprang up and every sweet voice was trained. Originality was not confined to the great composers in oratorio and opera, like Beethoven, Bellini, and Mendelssohn ; as in the Elizabethan age there were many native composers who could touch the heart with the simpler forms of melody and imitate the pathos of the old English music. Instrumenta- tion spread with the piano into every household during the period and confirmed or revived musical taste. Few poets but had the old tunes sing in the ear of their boyhood and youth ; melody entered as a natural element into every imaginative mind and this the melody of the lyric. Hence the outburst of lyricism in the period. Some poets like Moore and Tannahill devoted most of their talents to the writing of songs. Others like Scott and Shelley and Mrs. Browning introduced the lyrical spirit into every poem they wrote. Nor did the prose escape this tunefulness. The sentence became much more rhythmical ; phrases touched the ear as well as the mind ; the old alliteration reappeared in prose, but in a more artistic and concealed form. With- out the monotony of the Johnsonian period, the sentence attained all its balance and completeness. Moreover there came into the best prose a sense of larger harmony that took in the paragraph and in some cases long passages. In Carlyle, in spite of his often rugged phraseology, there is at times a musical unity in whole chapters. So is it with De Quincey and Ruskin. And Macaulay never fails to keep the ear as well as the mind in expectance through the paragraph. Prose became distinctly conscious of the great effects that music had attained by contrast and an intricate harmony. CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 9 1 2. The other arts felt the new impulse as much as music and developed rapidly during the first half of the century. Lawrence and Constable, Turner and David Cox, Etty and Landseer, Wilkie and Cruikshank raised the art of the brush and pencil higher than it had ever reached in England. Sculpture and architecture, though they did not advance as much as painting, received an impetus, the one from the study of the newly discovered specimens of Greek statuary, the other from the new enthusiasm for the old Gothic churches and abbeys. These arts have ever a refining influence on both writers and readers and they inspire literature and are inspired by it. The work of Turner with its hazy power and suggestiveness is the counterpart of much of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's and most of Shelley's and Keats'. The Lines on Tintern Abbey, The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel, Alastor, and Endymion have the grandeur of the half-seen and mystical about them ; they depict the beauty of nature with an atmosphere of the spiritual meaning that is behind it. Their pictures have the boundary line between the seen and the unseen left undefined, like those of Turner's later style. And most of the poets aimed at complete portraits or pictures of nature, whilst the novelists began to interpanel their scenes and conversations with landscape. And the art of illustration, now that it had been brought to bear on books, confirmed this tendency in fiction and descriptive or narrative poetry. Dickens began his career as a novelist by writing the letter-press for a series of plates by Seymour ; the result was the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club ; and the habit of keeping a definite picture in his mind seems to have followed him all through his novels. Thackeray had much of the same habit of mind from his work as a draughtsman. It is some striking scene that these two writers are ever aiming at for the display of their best art. In poetry it is the same ; Scott is nothing if he is not a picturesque poet, and Childe Harold is little else than a series of poetical pictures. Sculpture we can see guiding the imagination of many of the writers of the period: its influence is apparent in some of De Quincey's sketches, in Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein, and in Lander's Imaginary Conversations. Whilst the new developments of architecture enabled the poets and novelists to build with their 92 ERA OF EXPANSION imagination " wondrous pleasure-domes " in their pro- ductions. 3. But it is the arts of acting and oratory that are nearest to imaginative literature ; and though they had fallen into a subordinate place compared with other arts, they perhaps affected it more than they. The Kembles and Keans, Macready and Phelps quite sustained the histrionic art at the height to which Garrick had raised it. And not a few of the writers of the period were good actors, like Sheridan Knowles and Dickens, or stage critics like Lamb and Thackeray, or were ambitious of writing for the stage like Coleridge and Byron, Douglas Jerrold and Bulwer Lytton, Browning and Tennyson. The division of the drama into acting drama and poetical drama did not prevent the poets striving to succeed in both. The recurrent revival of Shakespeare's plays upon the stage kept alive the idea that stage success could be combined with true poetry and deep thought. It was ever forgotten that the drama was the chief medium of popular literature and thought in the reign of Elizabeth ; there was no journalism, no fiction, no secular oratory, no essay, no intellectual amusement then ; all those who wished to get into touch with the intellectual world or even the world of action went to the theatre, unless they were absorbed in theology; it was the national entertainment, the national rostrum, the national press ; it had no rival in the mind of the English people. All this had changed and draining through the Restoration comedy the art had lost its hold upon all the serious sections of the English public ; it had become but the passing amusement ot the more leisured strata of city society; the change of the time of representation from the afternoon to the three hours before midnight is significant ; the theatrical audiences of Elizabeth's time had brought their faculties in the keenest condition to the enjoyment of the plays ; it was a strenuous amusement, the mental counterpart to the open-air exercises of the English people ; by the nine- teenth century it had become a passive enjoyment to be ranked with that of any spectacle which would fill in the fagged hours between dinner and sleep. It matters not how poetic or creative the mind that may apply itself to the CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 93 dramatic art, it can never become national in England again, till its literary rivals are silenced and a national audience again brings the most strenuous thought to its enjoyment. 4. The acting drama remained in our period a subor- dinate literary form, with a strong influence over the dialogue and plot of fiction. It made readers expect a well-concealed denouement and a narrative interlarded with conversational scenes. The poetical drama affected both poetry and prose. Much of the poetry became dramatic in spirit even when it was not so in form ; the monologue in character, especially in the latter part of the period, grew to be a common type of vigorous poetry ; Browning raised it to its highest point of art. The dramatic scene or conversation also became a favourite with imaginative writers. In the hands of Landor and Helps it brought prose close to the realm of poetry. 5. Oratory, too, retired into the background of literature, although it progressed and developed greatly during the period. It was now drawn from the court of justice and the House of Commons to the hustings and the public meeting. It was largely popularised during the period. Even forensic and parliamentary eloquence acquired a popular tone from the elaborate reports of speeches in the daily newspapers. Verbatim reporting had introduced a new era into oratory ; it ensured for the best efforts of the art permanence in literature. And thus more brilliancy and imagination, more accuracy of style and more thought appeared in the finest productions of the forum and the pulpit. More attention was paid to oratory as an art ; Canning and Brougham, O'Connell and Shiel,, Macaulay and Derby, Cobden and Bright, Disraeli and Gladstone appeared as parliamentary and popular orators ; and their speeches had as great effect as the greatest of the past. Hall and Foster, Chalmers and Guthrie, Channing and Edward Irving, Newman and Wilberforce, Maurice and Robertson raised the reputation of English didactic eloquence. 6. It is a popular atmosphere and a great cause that nurture oratory best. And the American republic with its democratic atmosphere and its slavery question is one of the 94 ERA OF EXPANSION best examples of this ; it had more men of eloquence as compared with men of letters during this period than all the monarchies of Europe put together; Clay and Calhoun, Webster and Wendell Phillips, Channing and Theodore Parker, Sumner and Greely, Gough and Ward Beecher give oratory a disproportionate importance in American literature when compared with that of any other country in the time. In English literature it had a minor place; and yet it helped to mould the prose style. Journalism acquired a tinge of rhetoric from it. For some of the most brilliant critics and essayists entered parliament ; whilst others were engaged in discussing parliamentary and popular speeches in leading articles. The style of Brougham and Jeffrey and Sydney Smith was moulded by their oratorical pursuits ; and it gave the cue to magazinism through the earlier part of the period. The prose of Coleridge, philosophical though it meant to be, was tinged with his inclination to preach. Thomas Browne and Christopher North were drawn into a rhetorical style by the influence of their professional pursuits. And some of the most prominent writers were also clergymen ; the historical style of Milman and Thirlwall, Merivale and Lingard, the philosophical style of Maurice and Mansel, Whately and Martineau could not but be tinged by the rhetoric of the pulpit. Crabbe and Bowles, Heber and Croly, Keble and Kingsley could not escape in their poetry the didactic tone or the rhetorical form that their profession was certain to give. The influence of oratory is apparent in the essay-style of Hazlitt and De Quincey and in passages in the fiction of Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli and Kingsley. Even Carlyle and Buckle, philosophical and elevated though they aim at being, are often infected with the pulpiteering style of the age ; they can seldom refrain from preaching. But the salient instance of the influence of oratory is Macaulay; much as he protests against the Johnsonian balanced sentence, there is no better instance of regular rhetorical construction and rhythm in the nineteenth century than his own ; he is on the rostrum whether he is reviewing a book or drawing a character, making an abstract of a diary ; or homing a charge, writing an essay or making a speech, describing a battle or whitewashing a hero. Essayist or parliamentary orator, critic or historian, it is all the same; he CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 95 is ever the rhetorician and preacher with a popular but educated audience before him. The new reading public had been accustomed for generations to sermons ; and when they turned to a secular literature they still expected some- thing of the sermon. It was this that made the essay next to the novel the most important form of literature ; and it was this that made Macaulay so popular and fiction so didactic. Section 8. I. But if the arts moulded the style and coloured the spirit of literature, the sciences had most to do with renewing its ideas. And never was there a period more fertile in the results of scientific research. But of the sciences it was astronomy that most impressed the popular mind ; its discoveries and thoughts and speculations gave infinite meaning to the nightly spectacle that met the eye of the commonest observer and chimed with the most reverent of religious feelings. In the earlier half of the century no science was so popular as this. With little trouble the astronomer could strip his thoughts and discoveries of all abstruseness and appeal direct to the primitive sense of poetry in the human breast. It was thus that the names of Herschel, Whewell, Nichol, Brewster, Baden Powell, Mary Somerville were as widely known amongst popular readers as in the scientific world. The vast spaces and numbers and sizes to be dealt with were deeply impressive to minds that were essentially arithmetical from long contact with trade and commerce. The East, out of which the Bible the book of the new audience came, had been as devoted to astronomy ; this is the science that moulds the thought and picturesqueness of some of its most striking poetry. It was natural then that minds saturated with Biblical imagery should greatly enjoy the discoveries that the great telescopes now made. Astronomy seemed almost a religious science, it gave such a sense of that infinity which is the essence of Godhead ; it deepened that awe which is the basis of worship. It was, therefore, the science that most gave its spirit and thought to the new literature. We find it tinge some of the best sermons and stimulate great eloquence as in Chalmer's Astronomical Discourses. It became part of 96 ERA OF EXPANSION the stock-in-trade of the scenic novelist. It supplied the never-failing background for Carlyle's most impressive pictures ; the infinities and the immensities give solemnity if not sublimity to some of the finest passages of Sartor Resartus and afterwards grew into a mannerism in his writings. But poetic imagination was most touched by it. No school of poetry but found it a treasure-house of simile and illustration and emotional stimulus. Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Rogers, Moore, Clough, Tennyson, all appeal to it when they mean to be most impressive. Later on, when the question of life and especially intellectual and emotional life on other worlds came to be hotly discussed and seemed to introduce a doubt into the doctrine of the atonement, the more religious section of the new audience began to shrink from their favourite science as sharing in the unorthodox reputation of all science. 2. But that which shook theology to its centre again was the science that was deciphering the history of the earth. Geology, as soon as it began to throw back life on the earth millions of years, touched the interpretation of the Bible. The story of creation in Genesis became the arena of the hottest discussions of the century. Books like the Vestiges of Creation seemed to threaten the very foundations of religion for a time. Hugh Miller tried to stem the flood of doubt that broke into the sphere of theology, by taking the Mosaic account of creation as allegorical and attempting to reconcile it with the story that the rocks told. By his reverent treatment of the subject and his lucid half-poetical style he made the science popular with the orthodox section of the new audience. But the theory of development, which the record of the strata and their fossils seemed to point out and confirm, proved too much for his attempt at conciliation, and the two spheres became again divorced. Geology grew again into a word of evil omen, till biology set up for itself and took upon it the chief odium of the evolutionary theory and its proof. The great era of fertilisation of literature by these two sciences came later in the century. Yet Buckland and Lyell, Forbes and Murchison in geology, and Prichard and Owen and Carpenter in the history of living tissue did much to popularise the more striking discoveries and CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 97 speculations of the new sciences. And before the close of the period we find imaginative writers, like Ruskin in his Modern Painters, bringing them in as the best allies of art and poetry. It was indeed the new microscopic and speculative study of nature that had chiefly aided in revolutionising the picturesque style. Landscape and poetic description, even in the latter half of last century, had never got beyond the broader features of scenery. Now they entered into the minuter beauty of life upon the earth ; they attempted truth of detail. And the worshipful sympathy with nature, that had become with Wordsworth the spirit of poetry, entered into painting and into prose literature. Turner is the best instance in the one, and Ruskin in the other. Whilst the novelists had to make description of scenery one of the features of their art ; and as the century went on, it grew at once more subtle, more poetic, and more like the painter's art. 3. But the effect of science on the literature of the nineteenth century was far greater as an atmosphere round it than as a shaping, tutoring hand. Its general conclusions soon pass into the spiritual air we breathe and carry germs of health or disease. And imaginative work, as having a larger element of emotion in it, is the first to feel any change, however subtle, in the atmosphere of thought. Not the mere metaphors or similes or illustrations are changed, but its very life. A new epoch-making idea, therefore, soon revolutionises the art of an age. And no period reveals such a change in spirit as the first half of the nineteenth century. Section 9. I. For it was an era of marvellous expansion of thought by science. The curtain of the sky had been drawn and the human race had now infinity and eternity as the back- ground of its drama. The spiritual eye gazed through worlds and systems that had no end and were yet all related to our own cosmic atom ; it seemed, in tracing back the origin of the microcosm, to traverse countless aeons of the past. The Prometheus Unbound of Shelley and the Sartor G 98 ERA OF EXPANSION Resartus of Carlyle best illustrate the effect of this delimita- tion of human view upon literature ; the drama glories in the power of the human spirit to overleap all boundaries of time and space ; and the eye of Teufelsdrockh is seldom off the stars and the ocean of being of which they are but the spindrift. It is true that Paradise Lost is as deeply immersed in stellar infinity ; but it is as an external system, unrelated to the human system except through the cam- paigning genius of Satan. In these more modern books the infinities and eternities themselves are stirred to their depths by sympathy with human fate ; the great worlds of night have " a tear for pity ". It was this new sense of the kinship of the cosmos that transformed the poetic spirit in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. The eighteenth had felt nothing of it even though in the poems of Ossian the stars and the tempests are the commonest of stage properties. The human soul now ranged through space and time seeking and finding brotherhood a part of all that it had thought or known. Wordsworth and Byron, the idealist and the satirist, alike felt the new impulse to transcend the limits of mere human life and human senses. The one is ever linking the little tragedies of life on the earth with the destinies of the universe. The other in his Cain, and Heaven and Hell brings the Newtonian system to bear on the dramatisation of Genesis, and in Manfred makes the stars the confidantes of his world-anguished hero. 2. World-anguished was indeed the characteristic note of the new imaginative literature all over Europe an amalgam of the revolutionism of the time and the sense of vastitude that science had given to thought. Kin as the human spirit now felt itself with infinity, it had been dwarfed and crushed by the decentralisation of the world on which it found itself. Even the planetary system was but an atom in the all ; and what was the individual ego to that atom ? A sadness, a self-pity came over the thoughts of men. And at the same time there came the revolutionary stimulus of the age in reaction against this imprisonment and over- shadowing of the ego. Passion would revolt against the insignificance of man's destiny and place in the universe, as it had revolted against the yoke of his own customs and CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 99 in bloodshed overthrown their tyranny. The new world- anguish was bold as well as self-pitiful and in the poetry of Byron and Shelley would force its way into the shrine of being and free man from the limitations of his insignificance ; it would assert his divinity, his equality with the best of the universe, his freedom in it. This deification of the human spirit, so common a poetic reaction from the world-anguish, was hardened into a creed too in the religion of positivism, which at once recognised the limitations of man and asserted his divine claims. In Byron it took the form of a cynical egotism that would laugh down creeds and moralities, and, finding itself still impotent, ended in pessimism, as with Leopardi, Schopenhauer, and. to some extent, Carlyle. In Shelley it became optimistic ; belief in the power of revolution to overthrow all limitations of the human spirit ended in the passionate thought that only tyrants, and tyrannical laws and customs and creeds had to be removed, and man would reveal all his native divinity; the world would be as it ought to be. World-anguish, which indeed often pressed heavy on his mind, was not seldom trans- figured during his creative efforts into world-happiness. 3. The new sense of man's kinship with the cosmos demanded a revision of philosophy as well as of the poetic art. And this revision was as usual accomplished in two ways that took opposite directions. Idealism, culminating in Hegel, sought the explanation of all the phenomena of the universe in spirit ; positivism, taking its cue from Comte, immersed the whole of existence in matter ; the one gloried in speculation, the other was content to observe and await the result of observation. The expansion of scientific thought made the positive view of life the most victorious and progressive ; it seemed to fit into all the new inventions and discoveries and methods of discovery. It falls into the background during an age in which science is unproductive ; the utilities then seem of little avail in the world of thought, and matter seems the barren element. A period like the nineteenth century with its exceptional triumphs of observation and reasoning on observation could not fail to adopt the positive attitude even in literature. But its greatest successes during the earlier half of our century IOO ERA OF EXPANSION were in logic and history. It led to the renascence of Baconian logic, the enthusiastic study of those mental forms that are suited more to investigation and to the proof of the results of observation than to subtlety of conclusions. Induction seemed again a new thing and completely overshadowed deductive logic. So in history the past had to be re-observed from the new point of view : documentary evidence became the all-important factor in writing of the past ; the methods of the law-courts became the methods of historical research ; and research and the correct presenta- tion of facts triumphed over interpretation. Yet even in the speculative treatment of history the positive attitude had its successes. Buckle and others took the new materialistic views of life and applied them to the past ; they tried to find the sources of historical events and developments and characteristics in the material conditions and surroundings. 4. As a rule the positive mode of viewing life is unfertile in the realm of pure imagination. For it insists on limiting all flights of the mind to the range of facts. It makes the speculative faculty move in harness and yokes it to observa- tion. Imagination has to become a patient drudge that awaits the bidding of the senses. Not yet had realism come into fiction with its professions of scientific purpose and scientific method. Had it appeared early in the century, it would have meant a period meagre in imaginative literature. For realistic portraiture and picture have soon to pass into mere photography. The positive method affected poetry and fiction only so far as to import the results of the new sciences into them as illustrations, figures, and even atmosphere ; the truths that astronomy, geology, and biology taught about the universe and man's place in it became new starting-points for imaginative flights. And poetry and fiction breathed a freer air in the new infinitudes of space and time that science seemed to give them. 5. It is ever the idealistic view of life that gives fertility to the imaginative literature of a period, the view that the spirit is the creative element, the only true existence in the world. And during the nineteenth century science on its more speculative side has more and more tended to confirm this view ; for it has in its progress broken down the barriers CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES IOI that the senses seemed to set up on the basis of indisputable fact; by the increasing powers of the telescope and the microscope and the spectrum it has unfolded spheres of existence that the boldest positivism would not have dreamt of; by its attempts to get at the principle of things, it has resolved, in the ultimate analysis that transcends the senses, all matter into energy and to this it has given immortality. But for long science and the positive method were thought of as the antagonists of imagination as of faith. And idealism seemed rather a reaction than an independent and originative attitude. 6. From Wordsworth to Tennyson, from Godwin to Hawthorne, whatever views and thoughts of science poetry and fiction might adopt, however agnostic or sceptical or antagonistic they might be in the sphere of faith, they ever idealised their material, they dealt with life as transcending all the knowledge of the senses, they found spirit the true originative element. Both poets and novelists attempted scientific problems and adopted the most advanced scientific thought ; but always from the speculative and spiritual point of view. Wordsworth, for example, in his Ode on Intimations of Immortality treats heredity as but resurrection of spirit; Mrs. Shelley in her Frankenstein idealises the investigations of physiology and biology and attempts to imagine the science of life as an art, the art of creation. But it would need analysis of all the poetry and the fiction of the period to follow out the idealistic attitude. 7. In the realm of faith the positive atmosphere seemed wholly antagonistic and destructive. And in the second quarter of the century, a violent reaction set in against the burden of doubt or the indifference of agnostic- ism. It took two forms in England ; the one continued the romantic movement in religion and sought the forms and beliefs of a former period ; the other accepted reason as the final court of appeal in matters of faith as in matters of fact, but found the reconciliation of faith and fact in the ideal sphere. The Oxford High Church movement, which led so many ot its foremost adherents to its logical issue, emigration to the oldest representative of Christianity, and the Broad-Church movement, which led a number to 102 ERA OF EXPANSION Unitarianism, had a more immediate effect in literature than religious phenomena usually have. The fiery passion of the post-Revolution time and the centralisation of the movements in one of the English universities were the causes of this. And on the one side we have Newman and Faber, Keble and Pusey, and on the other Maurice and Jowctt, Stanley and Mark Pattison, F. W. Newman and J. A. Froude, F. W. Robertson and Kingsley, Clough and Matthew Arnold. It is a noticeable feature that, though the Broad-Church movement never spread widely, it stirred the literary imagination to its depths ; it had a far larger result in literature. The reason was that it was less of a reaction . from the positive spirit of the period than of an adaptation of it to idealistic purposes. It seized upon the facts of religion and the world and spiritualised them by interpreta- tion ; it took the religious doubt that was in the very air of the time and gave it consolation and rest in broader solutions of religious problems and loftier moral aims. It used and tinged the ideas of culture more and spread farther outside the church than within it. Large sections of thoughtful men and women who had become dis-churched drew towards religion again, and read with avidity not only the discourses and productions of the Broad Church, but the more secular appeals of men like Emerson, Martineau, Carlyle, and Ruskin. Section 10. I. But it was by a more indirect way that the progress in science influenced the great bulk of the new audience. The popular mind seldom troubles itself about the spiritual meaning of a new discovery or movement. At its first approach to literary culture it is not sensitive to subtle influences from spheres outside of religious feeling. And hence the speculations of biology or the discoveries of astronomy or geology did not perturb it at first. It was through the practical applications of science that it felt the influences of the new stir of thought. The triumphs of physics and chemistry and engineering and the mechanical inventions that aided them or followed from them appealed to it at once in a striking way. It did not need much CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES -103 imagination to appreciate the wonders of the new applications of steam or electricity or chemical analysis. And the popular audience was stirred to new emotional and intellectual life by them. 2. The indirect effect was still greater. Life became a swifter current both in country and city through the acceleration and cheapening of traffic and industry. And the torrent-like rush was not confined to the daily routine and external work. The mind was involved in the bustle of production and conquest. And it was the feverish quality of the new life that quickened the pulse of popular literature. Throughout the period the eagerness for news grew and spread, and developed newspapers at a rate that is surpassed only by that of the latter half of the century. And the passion for novelty drew writers into new spheres and types of literature. It was, therefore, a period of surprises both in poetry and prose. Some new poet or novelist or essayist was ever gratifying the passionate desire for something -new. Some striking book was ever issuing from the press. And the press itself acquired accelerated speed in its work of publication. The annual issue of books increased in an exceptional way. And authors like Scott who had caught the ear of the new audience could make or retrieve fortunes in a few years by their literary labours. An exceptional or highly cultured note that took long to reach the mind of the people had to wait for its lucrative audience. Literature, especially popular literature, became tainted with the commercial spirit and publishers became wealthy and speculative. Books that would mediate between scientific thought or philosophy or culture and the people grew rapidly in number what were called popular books. They were the more permanent counterpart of popular lectures, which sprang into being with the establishment of Mechanics' Institutes not long before the Reform Bill. Circulating libraries had become a common feature of provincial towns by the beginning of the century : but they appealed more to the new leisured class that had risen to comfort or wealth with the expansion of enterprise. A still wider audience was found for literature as soon as the burden of the long French wars was removed from 104 ERA OF EXPANSION commerce and industry and the new applications of science and invention were allowed full scope in a demand for the concentration of artisans in towns. The minds of workmen were set free on the one hand from the stagnation of country life or on the other from the struggle for mere existence. The new masters, the new middle class, in many cases, were stirred by the spirit of philanthropy, and tried to organise elevating pursuits for the leisure of their factory hands. The Mechanics' Institute with its library, its reading-room filled with newspapers and magazines, and its courses of lectures and educative classes, was the form that had most permanent effect. It was thus that Scott's novels and Byron's poems found their way into every cottage in Britain ; it v r as thus that so Europeanised a cynic as Byron came to condescend to simple untainted narratives in verse and to Hebrew melodies; it was thus that series of brief knowledge books became the order of the day. For the first time English literature in the sense of printed books may be said to belong to the whole people. And the wider the audience grew and the cheaper that steam and machinery and the organisation of industry made books, the more the literature came to be a possession of the people as a whole. There were still, of course, literatures of narrow circles ; but they were more and more interpreted and influenced by the spirit ot the intermediate literary world that stood between them and what corresponded to the old chap-book hawked through the streets and country districts. Section n. I. As the period went on, the novel gradually mastered and absorbed this mediating realm. The essay and the knowledge-manual threatened for a time to act as the chief intermediaries. But as the novel adapted itself to different purposes and spheres and showed itself to be the most plastic of educators, it became supreme in national literature. Had any man a new gospel to preach, political, social, or religious, he found his largest and most attentive audience from this pulpit. His lessons sank impalpably into the popular mind. As the primitive instinct for narrative was stirred and CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 105 satisfied, the thoughts and feelings remained quiescent in its presence ; they took whatever colour the writer chose. Narrative had been the oldest method of unwritten literature for impressing or moulding the national consciousness ; it was the newest method of written literature. Poetry gave up its primitive universality of power ; for now, that reading had spread so widely, literature addressed the mind through the eye and not through the ear. The drama, that had taken the place of poetry as the national literature in the first strong civilisations after the arts of spectacle were developed, had prepared the way for this new form by addressing both eye and ear. Printing first threatened the empire of poetry and the drama by spreading copies of books widely. The industrial era with its cheapening of all processes, its urbanising of intelligence, and its spread of education completed the revolution, and made it clear that the literary form that was to have the widest audience must address it through the eyes alone, through books. Poetry can never regain its empire over the universal audience ; for to the popular section of it an art that still retains the forms and attractions of a literature for recitation appears artificial upon paper ; the brief lyric that can be wedded to popular music and pass from lip to lip is the only poetic type that can appeal to all sections untrained as well as trained. The drama, again, needs a stage and elaborate subsidiary arts, and at best can gather only a few thousands in its theatres. It will never hold its own against a literary form that can pass into every household. 2. The modern novel is the attempt to amalgamate the essential attractions of these two primitive types, the appeal of the one to the emotions and to the love of romance, and the power of the other to concentrate life and the striking situations of life and place them before the imagination. Its description and analysis and teaching function come from poetry ; its plot and denouement, its scenic arrangement and dialogue come from the drama. It gratifies two primitive and almost universal passions, the love of story and the love of striking scene. Hence its growing absorption of the talent of our period. Hence its use as a pulpiteering medium. Every movement, political, social, IO6 ERA OF EXPANSION religious, philosophical, has found its most effective utterance through it. 3. And this was a period of great movements, just as the previous period was one of great individualities. The great men of last century vanished or sank into insignificance before the middle of the second decade of ours. Revolution had drawn forth European genius to meet it in politics and war. But once it had culminated and passed, literature and thought claimed the best talent, and the revolutionary harvest had to be reaped in the form of the theories held by numbers with such passion as ever and again to threaten new but scattered attempts at revolution. In religion the mediaeval and the rationalistic movements rent the church ; in politics the Reform Bill, the anti-slavery agitation, and the demand for the repeal of the Corn Laws made party feeling almost volcanic; in the economic world the swift development of industrialism, the rage against the intro- duction of new machinery, the fluctuations of wealth and poverty, the strikes and riots, the famines and threats of famine kept thought in perpetual ferment ; socialism first appeared in the schemes of St. Simon, Fourier, and Owen ; science overturned all the traditional bases of belief; wild patriotism and the most unscrupulous tyranny existed side by side ; passion made all antagonisms fierce ; even the meditative calm of philosophy was disturbed, torn as it was into the opposing camps of optimism and pessimism, the positive attitude and the idealist. And imaginative literature was deeply affected by all these movements and phases of thought and life. It is more sensitive than even religion to the atmospheric phenomena of the national mind. Poetry, the drama, and fiction stir to every wind of thought or feeling. 4. But of all, poetry, as the older and as the product chiefly of the emotional side of man, comes first in sensitive- ness ; it is the first literary form to feel an approaching change. Next comes the drama in antiquity of origin and instability of equilibrium before national movements ; it echoes all the social and political cries. The novel, as last developed, as appealing to a far more varied audience, and as more deliberately written, was during the era least subject CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 1 07 of the three to new gusts of passion or new phases of thought. This is the natural order in which they should be treated in the history of literature poetry, drama, fiction. And after them comes the literature of pure thought and pure fact, of observation and investigation, of knowledge and speculation. CHAPTER IV. ENGLISH POETRY OF THE PERIOD OF PREPARATION. 1750-1800 Section i. 1. There is a natural conservatism in minor poetry that makes much of one period seem but an echo of the last. It clings to the forms if not to the spirit of the past. Nor will it relinquish its models unless some striking genius arises and masters the younger poets by the attraction of his melody or greatness of his thought. 2. And in English poetry of this period no masterful individuality appeared. Burns, the only approach to it, was imprisoned within a dialect and could not reach the general current of English poetry, although we have one evidence of his immediate influence in a copy of his poems that belonged to Cowper, liberally marked and underlined by that poet and bearing the date 1787. Chatterton died a mere boy. Blake gave his power to pseudo-prophecy and art. And Wordsworth and Coleridge only touch the rim of the century with their first poetic efforts. There was no great force of character in the poetry of the period to mould it to new purposes. There was a complete absence of great creative power or seer-like inspiration. All the poetry that appeared was a poetry of tendencies rather than of fruition. The greatest energies of the time were drawn off into the political sphere. 3. The first tendency we should expect to find is an imitation of Pope, conscious or unconscious. He was the great poet of the Queen Anne period and his last triumphs fall as late as 1744. Whilst the great edition of his works by Warburton appeared in 1751. It was the most natural THE POETRY I 09 thing in the world that he should have disciples in the third quarter of the century if not in the fourth. 4. Samuel Johnson, the sturdy, autocratic adherent of the immediate past, comes first. His youth and earliest literary ambitions fell in the period of Pope's greatest influence and fame. And with all his respect for the genius of Dryden, he never could rid himself of the yoke of the great artist of versified epigram. His Lives of the Poets, written in the last quarter of the century and marked by the presence of the new movement in prose, is still dominated by the poetic ideals that Pope had consecrated by his work. Strong though his character was, he had to view English poetry through the medium of these. So masterful indeed were the) that he allowed the publishers of the collection of the poets that he edited to exclude Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare from it and condemned as unpoetic some of the most beautiful poems of Milton like Lycidas. His own satires in verse, imitations though they were of Juvenal and inspired by the gloomiest pessimism, are echoes of the satiric optimist whose Essay on Criticism, Rape of the Lock, and translation of the Iliad he so much admired And his feeling that poetry after Pope "could no farther go " grew upon him so that after the middle of the century he practically abandoned the pursuit ; his only attempts after this were his prologues and his lines On the Death of Dr. Robert Levett. This last written in 1782 shows in its form the influence of the new time ; though composed in his dignified, moralising vein and with his usual sonorous eloquence, it adopts the brief ballad stanza of four octosyllabic lines with alternating rhymes ; the heroic couplet of his master was abandoned for the first time. 5. In his London (1738), Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), Prologue to Comus, at its production for the benefit of a granddaughter of Milton (1750), Prologue to Goldsmith's Goodnatured Man (1769), and Prologue to A Word to the Wise (1777), he is emulating the epigrammatic terseness, the balanced rhetoric, the antithetic moralising of Pope. He adds a certain elephantine dignity of his own to the expression, a dignity, that belonged to his nature, but was confirmed by his employment in oratorising notes of I1O PERIOD OF PREPARATION the discussions in parliament for The Gentleman's Magazine in his Reports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput. Most of his poems were written whilst he was busy at this, and they bear the marks ; though they also reveal the wealth of vigorous Saxon phrase that he had at command. Their pith ofte,n lies in a line or phrase of Latinised eloquence followed by one of vigorous conversational English. There are not many couplets all stiff rhetorical brocade like these from The Vanity of Human Wishes ; " Let observation, with extensive view, Survey mankind from China to Peru." " Impeachment stops the speaker's powerful breath, And restless fire precipitates on death." There are more like these ; " This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, Slow rises worth by poverty depressed." (London) " He left the name at which the world grew pale To point a moral or adorn a tale.'Y Vanity of Human Wishes) " Safe in his power, whose eyes discern afar The secret ambush of a specious prayer." ( Vanity &c.) " Existence saw him spurn hiir bounded reign, And panting time toiled after him in vain." (Prologue at Dntry Lane) His Prologue at the Opening of Drury Lane versifies literary history and is quite in the style of the Queen Anne period and the Essay on Criticism in particular. But he exalts Shakespeare, and decries the Restoration drama, in which " declamation roared while passion slept." 6. His other prologues reveal his manly and independent and yet sympathetic nature. In them he tutors the theatrical audiences or chides them for their bad taste or heartless conduct. He was as fearless of their frown as of Chesterfield's, and helped more than any man to give an upright attitude to literature and to abolish the influence of patronage. Coming from the provinces and the middle classes as he did, he expressed their growing confidence in their judgments and standards as against those of the city and aristocratic circles. Even when most imitative of the Queen Anne poetry in form, he anticipated the new age by his embodiment of middle class feelings and morality. He had no sympathy with the shallow optimism of Pope and Shaftesbury, or with the fashionable cynicism THE POETRY 1 1 I of their time, that treated with levity the old-fashioned virtues and the practical piety of the quiet average Englishman. It was only in politics that he was opposed to the new middle class ; he hated their Puritan ancestors and Cromwell and was almost a Jacobite in his unreasoning devotion to absolute monarchy. In his two satires he retails the new commonplaces, that, whilst pious in tone and distrustful of rationalism, were real symptoms of the coming revolution. In his London he is almost as passionate as Rousseau against the evils and vices of advanced and centralised society, as fierce as the most fervent socialist against the injustice to poverty and the lust for gold, as strong in his hatred of oppression as Shelley, whilst he has none of their impieties and rests in the guiding hand of Heaven. " Grant me, kind Heaven, to find some happier place Where honesty and sense owe no disgrace." ' ' Here let those reign whom pensions can incite To vote a patriot black, a courtier white." " All crimes are safe but hated poverty." here, where all are slaves to gold, Where looks are merchandise and smiles are sold." " Quick let us rise, the happy seats explore, And bear oppression's insolence no more. " In The Vanity of Human Wishes he is happier in spirit, and farther removed from the bitterness of personal illustration, that he learned from Pope ; yet he is still the middle class moralist of last century, who finds the whole world dark but for the light from faith in Heaven. He is even farther from the attitude of the Queen Anne period virtuoso who could sneer at the virtues as well as the vices of his neighbours 'and yet hold that " whatever is, is best." He has the recoil from cities and city life that was coming into vogue with the growing wealth of the provinces and was about to bring back poetry to nature and simplicity. He mourns over the havoc that the desire for gold, the taste for luxury, and the pride of ambition work in human existence ; and paints at length the fall of Wolsey and the end of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden. The humble have the best of it ; " How much more safe the vassal than the lord!" Yet over unambitious life there is the shadow ; 112 PERIOD OF PREPARATION " Our supple tribes repress their patriot throats, And ask no questions hut the price of votes ; With weekly libels and septennial ale, Their wish is full to riot and to rail." Misfortune, sorrow, and death dog the footsteps of the lowliest. The best, outlive their time ; " Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage." There is no hope but in Heaven for " helpless man, " who, without its aid, must " roll darkling down the torrent of his fate." This was the philosophy that had consoled the silenced Puritans during their exclusion from all public life and was now spreading, through evangelicalism, methodism, and philanthropy, upwards into literature. Johnson had the cue from Juvenal, he had the spirit from the surroundings of his boyhood and youth at Lichfield. Section 2. I. His true poetical successor was Oliver Goldsmith. He brought with him from his father's humble parsonage in Ireland into the dark turmoil of the city that love of simplicity and home which was to be one of the freshest notes of literature. His poetry has the same mingling of old echoes and new tones, of conservatism of form and revolutionism of feeling. Long before he knew Johnson, when he was loitering in 1755-56 "by the lazy Scheldt or wandering Po", he had adopted the heroic couplet for the first sketch of his Traveller, and after he had corrected and -revised and polished, as his master, Pope, had ever done, he published the poem in 1764, Popian in form, romantic in spirit. In it he takes a text, like Pope and Johnson, and enforces its lessons in a series of balanced paragraphs leading on to a brilliant peroration ; he is as deeply imbued with the methods of pulpit eloquence as they ; he varies the didactic with the descriptive, the abstract lesson with the example ; he makes his couplets move in the same serried array ; he even adopts at times the rare Latinised word or phrase as in "Woods over woods in gay theatric pride," "While sea-born gales their gelid wings expand," " No vernal bloom their torpid rocks array," ''The gay grandsire skilled in gestic lore," and THE POETRY 113 " Seen opulence, her grandeur to maintain, Lead stern depopulation in her train." But here the likeness to Pope ends; he proceeds much further than Johnson in the direction that was to lead to the overthrow of the Queen Anne empire in literature. Johnson had substituted for the personal and contemporary portraits, with which he had learned from Pope to point his satire, characters like Wolsey famous in history. Goldsmith dismissed portraiture and put in its place landscape or picture of national or local type. With Johnson too he v rejected the satire of scorn and adopted that of pity or of indignation. He had an eye for the sorrows of men rather than for their weaknesses and vices. Sympathy wings any approach he makes to epigram, and not contempt. His well-polished couplets, much as in rhythm they resemble Pope's, are a complete contrast to them in spirit. Tender- ness for the lowly and oppressed, love of the poor, worship of simplicity reign supreme. Rousseau's gospel of the return to the happiness of nature is preached with picturesque eloquence. The new philanthropy is already full-fledged in his two longer poems. His real poetic genius led him to abandon the Queen Anne method of epigrammatic attack on city vices, and to paint instead their melancholy results in national character and rustic life. There is in his Traveller and his Deserted Village the true pastoral beauty mingled with that indignant sorrow over the woes of civilisation which is the raw material of revolutionism and socialism. 2. He is, therefore, even more truly than Johnson a precursor of the new era. For he had no strong political prejudices to interfere with his middle class sympathies. His only strong prejudice was the economic fallacy that wealth destroys all virtue and pure happiness, and leads to desolation in rural districts. And this was the basis of that romantic sentiment which was about to take possession of English literature. The new leisured middle class saw, as Rousseau saw in France, much to deplore in the actual condition of men, and particularly the poor, and turned back for the ideal state of life to an older world, whose harsh features had been softened into enchantment by H 114 PERIOD OF PREPARATION i distance. Both his long poems regret a past that is fast vanishing with human happiness. 3. In " The Traveller or Prospect of Society " he makes a survey of the parts of Europe he has visited, Italy, Switzerland, France, Holland, Britain, and after picturing the fair side of each nation he turns to the reverse and mourns over the vices and the outlook. In Italy he sees everything that can please the senses ; " but small the bliss that sense alone bestows " ; " Man seems the only growth that dwindles here " ; he is luxurious, vain, trifling, untrue. " All evils here contaminatejhe mind, That opulence departed leaves behind ". The Swiss are a " nobler race " , uncursed by the presence of palace or "costly lord". The peasant fears no such contrast ; " Cheerful at morn he wakes from short repose, Breasts the keen air, and carols as he goes ". "At night returning, every labour sped, He sits him down, the monarch of a shed ". The rough voices of nature make him the better patriot, as "scaring sounds" make the child cling "closer to the mother's breast ". But he is boorish, tied to a narrow round of life, heedless of all those larger pleasures that culture gives, unrefined in morals, unprogressive. France has gentler manners, " gay, sprightly land of mirth and social ease", "idly busy, rolls her world away". But all her people are too fond of praise, " nor weigh the solid worth of self-applause " ; ostentation, vanity, and other follies result. " For praise too dearly loved or warmly sought Enfeebles all internal strength of thought. " Holland and her victory over the ocean next occupies his page, with " The slow canal, the yellow-blossomed vale, The willow-tufted bank, the gliding sail ". But view the Dutch closer, " craft and fraud appear, Even liberty itself is bartered here ;> ; it is " a land of tyrants and a den of slaves " ; " Heavens ! How unlike their Belgic sires of old, Rough, poor, content, ungovernably bold ". THE POETRY 115 Patriotism brings him to his own countrymen, " Pride in their port, defiance in their eye ". But Britons prize independence too highly ; " Ferments arise, imprisoned factions roar ". Here alone does the Johnsonian conservatism appear. He girds against the wealth that industrialism was beginning to clot and mingles the reactionary politics he took from his friend with the natural Rousseau-like regret for a past golden age. " As nature's ties decay, As duty, love, and honour fail to sway, Fictitious bonds, the bonds of wealth and law, Still gather strength and force unwilling awe ". He illogically charges this with the neglect of ability ; " talent sinks " ; "Till time may come, when, stripped of all her charms, The land of scholars and the nurse of arms, One sink of level avarice shall lie, And scholars, soldiers, kings, unhonoured die ". Yet, like Johnson too, he would not " flatter kings or court the great". And he works in the favourite constitutionalism of the time that in Delolme and Burke showed the English government to be perfection as the embodiment of the balance of power and the harmony of all parts ; " Those that think must govern those that toil"; but " Should one order disproportioned grow, Its double weight must ruin all below ". " Oh then, how blind to all that truth requires, Who think it freedom when a part aspires ". He indignantly protests against the attempt of the rich oligarchs of the upper classes to absorb all power ; " Laws grind the poor and rich men rule the law". He anticipates the anti-slavery agitation of the next half century, and the democratic spirit of our era, in his passion against wealth " pillaged from slaves to purchase slaves at home". He ends, with some inconsistency, in the Johnsonian absolutism; " I fly from petty tyrants to the throne ". And he evidently thinks that it was the Puritan revolution, striking "at regal power", that " gave wealth to sway the mind with double force ". From this reactionary lesson, that he Il6 PERIOD OF PREPARATION had so ill learned from his dogmatic friend, he passes into a more natural lament over the desertion of rural districts and hamlets, and anticipates his Deserted Village. The centralis- ation of the people for industrial purposes had already begun, , and emigration to America helped to depopulate the country, and let "the smiling, long-frequented village fall". He closes with the sentiment, which was all around him and in his own heart, distrust in legislative panaceas ; " our own felicity we make or find". The introduction written before he knew Johnson expresses feelings far more natural to his emotional nature and his middle class sympathies than this fiery polemic against the new plutocracy and in favour of absolutism. In consequence it is simpler and truer poetry. His "heart untravelled fondly turns" to his brother, and his native place, and the hospitable parsonage, " where all the ruddy family" "learn the luxury of doing good". He catches the glow of the rising philanthropy, which was soon to overleap all barriers of race and climate ; " Wiser he whose sympathetic mind Exults in all the good of all mankind." "Creation's heir, the world, the world is mine". And yet he pines with all the passion of the English peasantry and middle class for his own hearth, for some spot " Where my worn soul, each wandering hope at rest, May gather bliss to see my fellows blest ". " His first best country ever is at home ". 4. It was this love of home that was one of the distinctive notes of the new audience of literature as against the upper classes, who still, as in the Queen Anne period, left their country seats and flitted about London and the court. And it was this that made The Traveller the first great popular success of the era; it became an English household book like the Pilgrim's Progress. For it expressed, in language that was, on the whole, simple, one of the fundamental emotions of the new audience. And it was as natural to the author as to those whom he addressed. 5. Hence he turned for his second love-task to another phase of the same theme and wrote his Deserted Village. In it he throws the new romantic sentiment round rustic life ; and, as he lived in narrow city streets or lanes during the half dozen years that he spent on it, the lament over its THE POETRY I 17 decay grows almost artificial in its pastoral intensity from the contrast. The poem bears the marks of the distractions of his London life and is far less of a unity than his first. Yet, when published in 1770, four years before his death, it won immediate and widespread popularity, and raised him to the zenith of his fame. It chimed with that love of nature and simple, primitive life, which in England was about to cancel the long divorce between the literature and the people; and it anticipated the romantic movement by its poetry of reminiscence and regret. It had little of the rhetorical eloquence of The Traveller and none of its political diatribes ; and, in spite of the economic fallacy that ran through it, it became far more popular, because of its greater melody, the pastoral beauty of its pictures, the more natural flow of its emotions, and the essential simplicity of its art. Many poems have given more phrases and lines to the English language ; none have fixed in the national consciousness so many passages, pictures, and character- sketches. 6. The very name of the village, "Sweet Auburn", has almost become proverbial in English. It is neither English nor Irish ; it is the ideal village of middle class sentiment, in both its happy and its ruined state. The descendants of the Puritans still cherished the memory of the exodus of their American relations for the sake of their religion ; and the romance and the terrors of the English world across the great sea were revived amongst them by the visits of their preachers Whitefield and Wesley. Oppression or failure of employment still kept up the stream of emigration. Hence the almost religious feeling that lingered round a ruined cottage or homestead or an abandoned hamlet. Nor did they strictly distinguish between the effect of colonisation and that of the new emigration from the country to industrial centres. All alike formed the natural fountain of the poetry of regret amongst the rapidly expanding audience of literature. With Goldsmith it was almost instinctive to choose the theme. He was a being wholly of sentiment, and he never lost touch with the middle class life of his own family. Hence the naturalness of the expression, in spite of its Queen Anne echoes ; and hence the great popularity Il8 PERIOD OF PREPARATION of the poem, in spite of the departure of the theme from all the traditions of London critics. 7. And its fundamental fallacy that wealth was the ruin of all that was simple and great in a nation must have been a widespread sentiment throughout Britain ; else Adam Smith would not have put such vigour into the refutation of it and into the elucidation of the laws that guide national prosperity. It is significant that The Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776, six years after the publication of The Deserted Village. Something rational was needed to stem the current of popular antagonism to the new industrial development now made so romantic by this sweet-natured poet of memory. And such a melodious work of art was then stronger than a dozen of the most persuasive and lucid treatises on political economy. Lines like these sang in the ear like lyrics : " And parting Summer's lingering blooms delayed " ; " Along thy glades, a solitary guest, The hollow-sounding bittern guards his nest ; Amidst thy desert walks the lapwing flies." " No busy steps the grass-grown foot-way tread ; For all the bloomy flush oflife is fled." And the pictures of "innocence and ease", of "humble happiness", were exactly those that would appeal to the hearts of rustics cooped up in factories and cities with the memory of the life they had left all idealised ; to them the omission of the sordid details, the narrow routine, the hard struggle with poverty, the coarse ignorance, the often brutal jealousies and envies, and the injustice of village gossip, would seem anything but unnatural. Memory is the boldest magician ; and this poem brought it into full play and expressed their best ideals : " Remembrance wakes with all her busy train, Swells at my breast, and turns the past to pain." " I still had hopes, my long vexations past, Here to return and die at home at last." And the half-humourous, half-pathetic portraits of the village preacher, "passing rich with forty pounds a year," the beggar, the broken soldier, "shouldering his crutch and showing how fields were won," the schoolmaster whose " one small head could carry all he knew," would please the longings of the urbanised rustics for their old life. So too THE POETRY 119 would the series of vivid sketches of scenes, often Teniers- like in their faithfulness, and yet ever idealised ; " the hawthorn bush with seats beneath the shade," the sports and dancing in the twilight, the kindly parson as " he watched and wept," " prayed and felt for all," " allured to brighter worlds and led the way," making " fools who came to scoff, remain to pray," smiling over his flock as he saw them at work or leisure, the village school with its humours and terrors, the bout at argument between the parson and the master, the village alehouse with its " varnished clock," that "clicked behind the door," and its "village statesmen talking with looks profound," the farmer telling his news, the barber his tale, the woodman singing his ballad, the smith clearing his dusky brow, and the coy maid " kissing the cup to pass it to the rest." 8. No wonder that the poem went straight to the heart / of the emigrant yeomen and artisans in the great centres. *" And its philosophy harmonised with the latent socialism of men who saw members of their class rise to great wealth, and wealth develop into extravagant luxury, and the latent democracy of men who were soon to sympathise with the struggle of their brethren in America for freedom. It sank into their hearts strengthened by the revolutionism of the time. " Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen, And desolation saddens all thy green ". " Princes and lords may flourish and may fade ; A breath can make them as a breath has made. But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied ". " For him no wretches, born to work and weep, Explore the mine or tempt the dangerous deep ". " Unpractised he to fawn, or seek for power, By doctrines fashioned to the varying hour ". It mattered not that the basis of his sentiment was a mistake / of fact ; wealth was accumulating, it was true ; but men were not decaying ; they were only shifting the scene of their labours from agriculture to manufactures, from country to town, and were thus progressing towards greater intelligence and greater knowledge ; and but for the great wars of the period recklessly undertaken by the government, their grow thin numbers, and in prosperity or real value of wages, I2O PERIOD OF PREPARATION would have struck even a sentimentalist who romanced about the past. 9. He defends the mistake and the consequent fallacy in his prose dedication to Sir Joshua Reynolds. He says he has made excursions into the country for four or five years and made inquiries. And ho professes that his theory about the destructive effects of luxury will be met with "the shout of modern politicians " , as it has been " the fashion " , " for twenty or thirty years past " , " to consider luxury as one of the greatest national advantages". He holds with " the wisdom of antiquity ". He seems quite unconscious that he is really expressing the Puritan feeling of the new middle classes, and the revolutionary feeling of the new European times that was to culminate twenty years after in the overthrow of both monarchic and aristocratic luxury in France. He was really interpreting the voice of the new audience of literature, as against London society. 10. His protest against dedications points in the same direction. English literature was in the throes of rejecting patronage and he was doing his best for the revolution. "The only dedication I ever made was to my brother, because I loved him better than most men. He is since dead." And the dedication he refers to is quite as manly as this, and as revolutionary in literary doctrines. He refers to the decay of poetry, and to the favour shown by " the powerful " to her new rivals, painting and music. Nor does he regret the disappearance of patronage. He mourns as as much over u the mistaken efforts of the learned to improve poetry". t "What criticisms have we not heard of late in favour of blank verse, and Pindaric Odes, choruses, anapaests, and iambics, alliterative care, and happy negligence ! " In short he will have nothing to do with the school of Gray and Collins or that of Akenside. He feels, though he does not say so, that it will never suit the more natural tastes of the new audience. So does he condemn, but with more vehemence, the satiric school that indulged in party distortion and calumny. This manifestly refers to Churchill and his disciples, though they were only carrying out one tradition of the age of Pope and Swift, which he too followed. " Some half-witted thing, who waits to be thought THE POETRY I 21 a bold man, having lost the character of a wise one", " they dignify with the name of poet ; his tawdry lampoons are called satires ; his turbulence is said to be force and his phrenzy fire." II. When he departed from his own special poetic line, it was either to join the new ballad school, or the school of humourous society verses, that belongs to every highly artificial social organisation. His verses to suit occasions were often happy ; and none of them ever approached to ill-nature ; they were the outcome of his lighter moods, not only witty in themselves, but " the cause that wit was in others." His best were " The Haunch of Venison, a Poetical Epistle to Lord Clare," written in 1771, and Retaliation, written in 1774, to take humourous revenge on some friends who had in his absence composed epitaphs upon him at St. James's Coffee House, where they often met ; the best was Garrick's ; " Here lies Poet Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll, Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll." Goldsmith's epitaph on the great actor in reply was also the best and keenest-edged in the poem ; " On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting ; 'Twas only that when he was off he was acting. Of praise a mere glutton, he swallowed what came, And the puff of a dunce he mistook it for fame." These were the sharpest thrusts ; all else was the acknowledg- ment of his great talents. His character-sketch of Burke is quite as good, and, though the orator had the best of his career to pass through, nothing equals it in truth ; " Who, too deep for his hearers, still went on refining, And thought of convincing while they thought of dining." " Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit." " Too fond of the right to pursue the expedient." ' ' Who, born for the universe, narrowed his mind, And to party gave up what was meant for mankind." One of the most striking things about Goldsmith's genius was its surprises ; he "talked like poor Poll," and blundered through life, and yet no man of his time has survived his age so well ; his best productions are evergreen in their attractions ; in society he was ever so busy rescuing himself from the jests at his expense and from his own clumsiness 122 PERIOD OF PREPARATION that he seemed incapable of observation ; yet no man of his circle had so keen an eye for the foibles of human nature ; he could not fail to be a successful dramatist or novelist, to judge by this character-poem. The other " The Haunch of Venison " is more dramatic ; but it is slighter and has no epigram in it. His prologues and epilogues are nearly all in heroic couplet and semi-dramatic in spirit ; one, an Intended Epilogue to She Stoops to Conquer is dramatic or rather operatic in form. Twice he was employed to write libretto for music, and on each occasion he reached only an average success ; his " Threnodia Augustalis, Sacred to the Memory of her Royal Highness the Princess Dowager of Wales " was written, or rather compiled, he says, in two days and had too solemn a theme to suit him ; the lyrics are abortive attempts at hymns, and in his recitative he once or twice resorts to the blank verse to which he so objected. His Oratorio (1764), though it has a theme, the Captivity in Babylon, that might have given scope to his never-dying love of home, is in the same style, and not much better ; he was too far removed from the genius of Milton to manage a religious topic that demanded sublimity. Two or three imitations of Swift's octosyllabic humour have themes and treatment much more to his taste. His epitaphs are too solemn to be successful. His best short pieces are an anticipation of the style of Hood with a clever instance of intentional bathos in every verse ; they were An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog (in the Vicar of Wakefield), and An Elegy on that Glory of her Sex, Mrs. Mary Blaize ; a stanza from each will illustrate ; " But soon a wonder came to light, That showed the rogues they lied ; The man recovered of the bite, The dog it was that died." " But now her wealth and finery fled, Her hangers-on cut short all. The doctors found, when she was dead, Her last disorder mortal." Had Goldsmith been less of a butt in private life, and fallen upon a period of comic periodicals, he would have developed more into a versifying punster. OFTHE UNIVERSITY y/ THE POETRY 123 12. It was a happy thing for literature that he did not ; his bright humour and goodhumour served better to set off the romance and sentiment that he drew from the new currents of his age. There is none of it to relieve the love-story of his one ballad " Edwin and Angelina," which he wrote in 1764, and inserted in his Vicar of Wakefield (1766), under the title of The Hermit, putting it into the mouth of the baronet disguised as Mr. Burchill, who recites it to the impoverished but happy family of the vicar as an appeal to Sophia's love and romantic feeling. His friend Percy, afterwards bishop, was just about to publish his famous Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765), and was collect- ing and collating for the book. Goldsmith at once felt the true poetry of these products of the popular genius, and knew that nothing would so appeal to the heart of the new audience ; he had never forgotten the folk-lyrics of his boyhood, and Peggy Golden's singing of "Johnny Armstrong's Good-night" on the hearth at dear Lissoy. And his instincts told him that the people, with passion for the romance and sentiment of love, were about to take,// possession of English literature again. Hence his Edwin and Angelina, with its story of the rejected lover turning hermit and having to entertain in his cell his repentant mistress wandering disguised as a youth, has become to modern sentiment and burlesque the typical expression of amorous romance. He had to write to the St. James' Chronicle in June 1767 to refute the charge of plagiarism or imitation, and to explain that his ballad was shown to Percy before the latter " formed the fragments of Shakespeare " into his " Friar of Orders Grey. Section 3. I. But this is isolated and is significant only as connect- ing him with the new popular movement in poetry. It was by his Traveller and Deserted Village that he affected the i current of English poetry. Crabbe, his lineal descendant, V was sixteen years old and already ambitious in verse when the latter first ran through so many editions in 1770. His first poem, Inebriety, published at Ipswich in 1775, shows more study of Pope than of Goldsmith in its rhythm, style, 124 PERIOD OF PREPARATION and diction. But its strong realistic portraits of the various types of the drinkers of last century have their art from his contemporary, and make the pompous Queen-Anne verse in which they appear sound like a burlesque of Pope ; verses like these have almost a mocking echo of the great epigrammatist in them : " Champagne the courtier drinks, the spleen to chase, The colonel burgundy, and port his grace." " O'er hills and vales the jovial savage reels, Fire in his head and frenzy at his heels ; From path direct the bending hero swerves, And shapes his way in ill-proportioned curves ". " Go wiser thou ! and in thy scale of taste, Weigh gout and gravel against ale and rest ; Laugh at poor sots with insolent pretence, Yet cry, when tortured, where is Providence?" " The frantic soul bright reason's path defies, Now creeps on earth, now triumphs in the skies ; Swims in the seas of error, and explores, Through midnight mists, the fluctuating shores." " Old Torpio nods and as the laugh goes round Grunts through the nasal duct and joins the sound." " Learn'd but not wise, and without virtue brave, A gay, deluding, philosophic knave." " Pope in worsted stockings " was no random epithet of Horace Smith's for the man who could write such couplets. The " worsted stockings " came, partly from Goldsmith, partly from his own surroundings. At twenty years of age he never could have had the confidence to choose such themes for poetry, had The Deserted Village not pointed the way. And through his earlier poems at least there are numerous echoes of lines from that and The Traveller, as, for example, in the First Book of The Village ; " Who only skilled to take the finny tribe The yearly dinner or septennial bribe." He had been brought up by his father on Milton and Young j but there is not a trace of the rhythm or style of either; he rejected blank verse and never departed from the heroic couplet, as modelled by Pope and modified by Johnson and Goldsmith, except in four brief and by no means successful poems written in 1807. And his style is completely formed in this his earliest attempt ; it has the didactic purpose, the descriptive method, and the earnestly satiric touch ; it aims at the full-length portrait, and the THE POETRY 125 rhetorical balance and rise of the period and paragraph ; and it never shrinks from any details of rustic life as too low for poetry. What is new is the microscopic observation \ of both nature and human nature, and the almost scientific love of fact. His early profession, that of a surgeon, seems to have bent his mind almost morbidly in the direction of watching the most repulsive details of life as symptoms of disease, even when he had no remedy. And his sympathy with the growing sciences, his interest, first in botany, and afterwards in geology, kept alive his .faculty of minute observation, when he had entered the church. His mental constitution indeed was scientific rather than artistic; he had little faculty of selection, no special instinct for beauty ; fidelity to fact was his ruling passion ; his pictures were almost photographs, and the framework of his poems almost V classifications ; only his strong middle class feelings and his stoical ethics kept him from anticipating the coarse realism of the latest fiction. As it is, his poetry is as documentary, as scientifically faithful to fact, as any Zolaesque novel. But Balzac and Zola and Taine would have shuddered at the simplicity and openness of his morals. He could never refrain from preaching, the surest mark in the literature of <' last century of an author or book coming from or appealing to the middle class, even though he hated all dissent and the efforts of Wesley and Whitefield. Every poem is as naked and commonplace in its ethics as a copy-book heading. And yet it is the inner and spiritual results of crime or vice that he paints with most tragic pathos. 2. We can see that he is far closer to the heart of the . middle class, far more representative of its real thoughts y and feelings and modes of viewing life than Goldsmith. The romantic and sentimental fallacies never came between him and his theme. In his two excursions out of the provincialism of his class, the first when a youth in London he lived in Burke's house, and the second when he was chaplain to the Duke of Rutland, he seems to have wholly escaped the influence of these half-cultured moods. And yet there is no surer sign of the rising power of the middle class in literature than his poetry. The return to nature was nothing but the literary resurgence of the people 126 PERIOD OF PREPARATION trained by their long intercourse with reality and by their direct struggle with the powers of nature. And he rejects more than any poet of the new time all the traditional methods of looking at man and his surroundings ; he will have no illusions, no poetical glamour, such as even Goldsmith continued to throw around the peasant; the coarsest detail is as worthy of record and as true poetry as the greatest tragedy or deepest pathos. And it was this intrusion of the painful realities of provincial life upon the notice of the governing classes and of culture that formed the essence of English revolutionism in last century ; conservative in all his feelings, unconscious of all the new movements, and completely eighteenth century in the performance of his clerical duties though he was, he did more than any literary man of his time for the new philanthropy, the revolt of England against old abuses, the return to nature. His faithful yet tragic pictures of the sorrows and wrongs of the provincial poor were worth a generation of blue-books and commissions. 3. In this, his first published poem, " Inebriety ", he anticipates the best that has been said by temperance orators in the century between ; and, more than a generation before the total abstinence movement began, in the very midst of the customs he paints, he describes their horrors with more tragic and humourous power than Gough. His pictures of the merry toper in the alehouse must have been studied by Burns for Tarn o' Shanter ; " O'er the dull embers happy Colin sits, Colin, the prince of joke and rural wits ; Whilst the wind whistles through the hollow panes, He drinks, nor of the rude assault complains ; And tells the tale from sire to son retold Of spirits vanishing near hidden gold ". The picture of the return of the jovial savage to his home, and of the after effects (" Intoxication flies as fury fled ; On rooky pinions quits the aching head ". ), the portrait of the " Easy chaplain of an atheist lord ", that of Fabricio who " Hates the bottle, yet but thinks it right To boast next day the honours of the night ", THE POETRY 127 and that of the drinking vicar, " Whose various texts excite a loud applause Favouring the bottle and the good old cause ", are all Dutch in their minute fidelity to eighteenth century fact. There is no mistaking the individuality of the portraits or the widespread mischief of the custom. " Sots in embroidery and sots in crape Of every order, station, rank, and shape ", from " The king who nods upon his rattle throne ", " the staggering peer", and " slow-tongued bishop" to "the humble pensioner and gownsman dry". And through it all runs a horror of the atheism and irreligion that were still fashionable in higher circles. He is quite pleased with the ale-drinking of the rustics who do not " In the pride of reason curse their God", and shrinks from "The knaves who scoff", from " The jest profane that mocks the offended God ", and from the witticisms at the expense of " holy writ ". He satirises with most success the vicar at the table of the drinking rout ; " Rather than hear his God blasphemed, he takes The last loved glass and then the board forsakes "; " Vicars must with discretion go astray, Whilst bishops may be damned the nearest way ". There is a flavour of Hudibras in the satire. Nor do any of his later poems approach it in striving after epigram. The pseudo-classicism of the Queen Anne age appears in his adopting classical names for types, Curio, Flaminius, Milo, in his speaking of the morn as Lucina, and in addressing his muse. The influence of the new time makes him introduce a picture of winter in the second paragraph ; his own lack of taste makes it stiff and artificial. 4. His next poem, The Candidate, was the first effort in London to test the opinion of the greater world of letters. He had given up the medical profession and determined to embark on the sea of literature. He sent it in 1780 to The Monthly Review with an introduction, and a prose address "to the reader". He says it is "addressed to the authors 128 PERIOD OF PREPARATION of the Monthly Review, as to critics of acknowledged merit". It deserved the neglect it met. For, unlike his first, there are only poor echoes of Pope in it ; it is full of personified abstractions, contains one of the feeblest and most trans- parent of allegorical dreams and has perpetual reference to his muses. And its whole purport is to express his ambition to be a poet, with the fear of "relentless critics and avenging wits" before his eyes. The only trace of his own individual- ity is in his resolve not to sing of kings and heroes but of Mira the name under which he addressed his future wife Miss Sarah Elmy. 5. In spite of the objection to patronage expressed in it, he was driven at last to try this old-fashioned refuge of the poet. He appealed to various noblemen without success ; and at last in despair wrote to Burke. The struggling orator took the struggling poet into his house, and thence was issued The Library in June 1781. It is a thoroughly conventional poem of the school of Pope ; the whole structure, the episodes, and even the lines are modelled on the Queen Anne poets. The only difference is in the subject and its treatment. All the didactic poems of the beginning of the century took the form of " arts ", " Art of Criticism ", " Art of Translation " ; and these allowed of much smart satire on contemporary literature. After the death of Pope poetic didacticism became more prosaic ; it chose subjects that admitted only of classificatory or philosophical treatment, The Pleasures of the Imagination, The Fleece, The Sugar Cane. The only relief to their dulness was the chance of picturesque description. The Library belongs to this type. It is irremediably dull. It describes the advantage of books, the arrangement of them in a library, the bindings, the various classes divinity, philosophy, medicine, law, history, drama, romance, criticism. There is no opportunity for the picture or the portrait. The only breaks in the current of commonplace are the debate between a Rousseau-like poet who believes in a primitive age of happiness and the representative of common-sense and the philosophy of law, who is evidently Blackstone, the satiric picture of a typical scene of romance the captive queen and the conventional vision of the THE POETRY 129 genius of the library at the close. The theme itself shows how common a feature of life libraries were becoming and the growth of publication in numbers (" E'en light Voltaire is numbered through the town.") Its treatment shows that he was about to abandon medicine for divinity. (" Buried in dust and lost in silence dwell ; Most potent, grave, and reverend friends farewell.") His reference to the Duke of Rutland towards the end shows that he already had prospect of the chaplaincy which he afterwards obtained. He was licensed in August 1782, became curate of his native village of Aldborough, then domestic chaplain at Belvoir Castle; married in 1783 and took the rectorship of Strathern ; passed from rectorship to rectorship till he finally settled at Trowbridge in 1813, where he died in 1832. 6. It was under the influence of Burke that he turned to his natural themes and sources of inspiration. Helped by the new patronage, his poem was welcomed by the critics, in spite of its dulness, and he gained confidence to describe what he knew and loved. He abandoned the guidance of Pope and the didactic school, and accepted Goldsmith again as his model. The Village, published in 1783, showed to the London world, as Inebriety might have done, if it had been read, that a new spirit had come into poetry, the spirit of realism. From its instant and great popularity, novelists, as well as poets, took heart of grace to look at nature and human nature through their own eyes and to give up the old medium of conventionalities and the new medium of sentiment. At the time of its publication, Burns was already in his twenty-fourth year and writing those lyrics and poems that were in 1786 and 1787 to astonish Scotland. Pope had somewhat tainted his peasant ambitions to paint the life around him ; The Village made him stand by the natural expression of all the joys and / sorrows, the sordidness as well as the nobility of rustic toil. Without Crabbe's rejection of the romance and sentiment, with which Goldsmith had misted over the life of the peasant, Burns might have maimed his faculty of seeing imaginatively the reality around him, and preferred to express second-hand sublimities in stilted verse. K 130 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 7. There is in this poem wholesome, almost scientific, power of observing the world in all the nakedness of its struggle for existence. The poet has his Deserted Village at his elbow as he writes it, we can see ; and he deliberately paints out all the rose colour, and leaves nothing but stern fact seen by a true, and not romantic, pessimist. He will have nothing to do with the unrealities of the pastoral, but give " the real pictures of the poor." It is his first master, Pope, that he is thinking of, when he refuses to give " Mechanic echoes of the Mantuan song " ; from truth and nature he will not " widely stray," as Virgil and his imitators did. He gives an often-quoted picture of the Suffolk coast, " Where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er, Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor," and " Poppies nodding mock the hope of toil." He describes the poverty-stricken village with its "wild amphibious race," who " scowl at strangers with suspicious eye." " Where are the swains who, daily labour done, With rural games played down the setting sun ? " For Goldsmith's romantic picture he substitutes the smugglers running their pinnace on shore ; for the simple life he finds 4i rapine, wrong and fear," and "a bold, artful, surly, savage race"; no "plenty smiles"; but a "famished land," is ever lessened by " the greedy waves " ; instead of the singing swain returning in the twilight, he has a portrait of the consumptive husband "contending with weakness, weariness, and shame " ; instead of " rural ease " and a peaceful con- tented old age, he has the broken-down peasant " journeying to his grave in pain," goaded on by the disdain of all, weeping " beneath the hillock," and burying his white locks in the snow as he tends the sheep ; instead of the cottage of the respected sage of Auburn, resting at times in the ale- house or the church, loved by all, he gives us his famous picture of the workhouse, " Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door," the only home of " The lame, the blind, and far the happiest they ! The moping idiot and the madman gay " ; THE POETRY 131 the humourous picture of the village schoolmaster he replaces by that of the apothecary " All pride and business, bustle and conceit," " who first insults the victim whom he kills," and " carries fate and physic in his eye " and " contempt upon his sapient sneer " ; the dying pauper calls for the last consolation of the parish priest ; " And doth not he, the pious man, appear, He, passing rich with forty pounds a year ? Ah ! no ; a shepherd of a different stock." " A jovial youth who thinks his Sunday task As much as God or man can fairly ask ; The rest he gives to loves and labours light ; " at last the miserable funeral is described ; the busy priest is not there to bless the " poor man's bones " ; that is the end. "There lie the happy dead, from trouble free, And the glad parish pays the frugal fee." The Second Book begins with a promise of the other side of village life ; " I too must yield, that oft amidst these woes Are gleams of transient mirth and hours of sweet repose '. He seems to be about to picture the tranquillity and happi- ness of the peasant's life especially on the sabbath ; yet he almost immediately lapses back into his pessimistic vein ; drunkenness and slander break the peace. He wishes " To show the great, those mightier sons of pride, How near in vice the lowest are allied." He bids the poor cease to envy " those they call the great " ; and makes the latter half of the poem another tribute to the Rutland family, by painting their grief over Lord Robert Manners killed in battle in 1782, and eulogising his virtues; it is a return to the Queen Anne poetry of patronage full of over-drawn praise and apostrophe, panelled with long similes introduced by " as " or " as when " and formally rhetorical. 8. This close was a symptom of retreat from his true sphere upon mere imitation of Pope. And his next poem, The Newspaper, published in 1785, though modern in theme, is Queen Anne in its form, treatment, and many of its references. It is as emi-satirical description of a new feature of city life, the development of the desire for news, and of the means of gratifying it. In his prose preface he says : 132 PERIOD OF PREPARATION " I am willing to take the strongest hold I can upon the reader, by offering something which has the claim of novelty". And it reveals, better than any statistics could do, how thoroughly established in 1783 was the modern newspaper with all its variety, bustle, ephemeral efforts, "party rage", virulence, personality, scandal-monging, puffs, advertise- ments, and how little that is new in kind has been developed in the century since by all the concentration of talent in journalism. He mourns over his " busy, bustling time " , that "suits ill with writers, very ill with rhyme", and sighs for the return of the golden age of literature, evidently the Queen Anne period, " when all found readers who could find a rhyme ". The " daily swarm " of newspapers, Heralds, Posts, Gazettes, Ledgers, Chronicles, and even Sunday Monitors, have drawn readers away from more solid and permanent literature ; the Town forsakes " the smoothest numbers for the harshest prose " , written by " a traitor crew who thrive in troubled times ". " Blind themselves, these erring guides hold out Alluring lights to lead us far about " , and screen scandal, slander, fraud, falsehood, and folly. Yet they spread ; " a master-passion is the love of news " , and " I too must aid, and pay to see my name Hung in these dirty avenues to fame ". He has to advertise his poems, and feels that he is almost encouraging a vice ; " For daily bread the dirty trade they ply, Coin their fresh tales, and live upon the lie ". He closes by a warning to avoid the poet's corner ; " Go ! to your desks and counters all return, Your sonnets scatter, your acrostics burn ". 9. Crabbe had a practical turn of mind and followed his own advice for more than twenty years. He kept on writing, but ceased to publish till 1807, when The Parish Register appeared. And all his manuscript including three novels he made a bonfire of. The reason for this long silence was doubtless not merely personal. His Newspaper, however fresh its theme, was belated in style. Chatterton had already lived and died, Cowper had just issued his first poems, and Burns and Blake were writing those lyrics THE POETRY 133 that were to shake the Queen Anne trammels off poetry, and lead it back to nature. The cool and measured description, in which Crabbe dealt, was quite unsuited to the " troubled times " of the French Revolution. Through all the poems he had written he had shown unconscious sensitiveness to the new revolutionism, and by his pessimistic pictures he had helped to stir the long sleeping discontent. But passion was needed when the uneasiness issued in revolution. The didactic poet and moralist had to stand aside. 10. When he awakened in 1807, his style, though not hi-s verse, had changed. It had become far more matter-of- fact and more unpolished, if not actually slovenly. Lines in The Parish Register, The Borough, and The Tales make the parody in Rejected Addresses little of a parody ; " That Bible, bought by sixpence weekly saved, Has choicest prints, by famous hands engraved ". " Aged were both, that Dawkins, Ditchem this, Who much of marriage thought, and much amiss". Couplets like these are not uncommon. He had abandoned even the appearance of art that had affiliated him to the school of Pope, and the atmosphere of pathos and romance that he had found in Goldsmith. But his theme had also changed. The wars had run off the dregs of village life, and the great development of industry, through the application of machinery and steam, had given comfort and hope, if not prosperity, to the villagers who remained. Crabbe himself had grown well-to-do and contented. Hence it is that his nineteenth century pictures of lowly life have bright colours in them. His Inebriety and The Village are all gloom. In The Parish Register he gives a large space to the virtuous and happy peasantry, though not ignoring the vicious, criminal, and tragic elements. " Auburn and Eden can no more be found " he insists ; yet he has room for "fair scenes of peace". The poem is nothing but versified notes of the births, marriages, and deaths recorded in the parish register. There is no attempt made to classify or connect them. Part First, on Baptisms, is the most commonplace and lacking in sequence ; the best of it lies in the occasional story that of Lucy the miller's daughter and that of the foundling who rose to be 134 PERIOD OF PREPARATION a knight ; the satire appears in the description of the gardener with his " high-sounding words " and names like " Lonicera " for his children. Part Second, on Marriages, has most unity ; and Part Third, on Deaths, most pathos. The best in the one is the common but melancholy story of Phoebe Davvson ; in the other the portraits of the manly peasant, Isaac Ashford, whom death delivers from fear of the workhouse, of the managing widow, Frankford, and of old Dibble, the sexton to five different rectors, are, though less poetical, more realistic than any he had yet drawn. He has grown superior to the graces of poetry and more and more devoted himself to reality. He now deliberately selects prosaic features and prosaic details and expression. His new audience, with their eyes opened by the Revolution to the tragedies of the life around them, have become satisfied with the romance that lies in the tacts of every-day life. Crabbe, therefore, simply arranges his own experiences of parish life in a portrait gallery and saws up his dialogue and description into couplets that have drifted far from the heroic. The increase of portraiture shows the tendency in this eighteenth century poet to depart from the abstractness of his native didacticism. 11. And this grows upon him in his next poem The Borough (1809), and, along with the tendency to dialogue, brings him at last to the versified narrative in his last poems, Tales in Verse (1812) and Tales of the Hall (1819). The passion of the new audience for story has at last mastered him, as it mastered Byron about the same time, and as it had produced Scott. Fiction in verse became one of the distinctive features of the first quarter of the century. The poets felt they had to appeal to a novel-reading public. 12. The Borough is but The Village " writ large," and dashed with some brighter colours. It has more poetry in it than The Parish Register, in spite of its more classificatory form, and more of the spirit of the nineteenth century, even though more reactionary. It is still the product of an eighteenth century poet, unelevated by the passion of post- revolutionary times, untouched by the new idealism. Commonsense moulds all the philosophy and all the art that it has, and keeps its flight not far above that of prose. THE POETRY 135 It is still dedicated to a patron, the Duke of Rutland, and it assumes a favourite eighteenth century form, that of a series of letters. It still echoes Pope, and occasionally Young, Gray, and Goldsmith. And it is still his native Suffolk village, seaside Aldborough, that he begins to paint. It is indeed this that brings memory into play and throws a slight halo round it. Nature is still observed with the eye of a realist; but it is more observed and more painted. Human nature is still watched from the outside, but with an intensity that, as in Peter Grimes, makes it almost psychologically dramatic. There is one flourish about liberty in the latter part of " The Election " ; all else, politics, religion, social ideas, belong to the latter half of the eighteenth century ; only, the middle class ecclesiasticism and conservatism are deepened somewhat by the reactionary movement of the first two decades of our century. 13. The letters deal in order with the following themes ; a description of the borough with a dramatic picture of a shipwreck ; the church with a pathetic story of a consumptive sailor and his love ; the vicar, (" fiddling and fishing were his arts ; at times he altered sermons "), and the curate (" Pity a man so good, so mild, so meek, At such an age should have his bread to seek ") ; the dissenters, with an apology in prose for the representation of their spirit and sermons; the election with satirical pictures of the treatment of the candidates and the sale of votes ; the legal profession, with a Hogarthian portrait of the scoundrel attorney Swallow ("Satan helped him to his pen and ink ") ; the medical profession, with a scathing analysis of the quack ; the industries, with a loving portrait of the entomologist weaver, and a dramatic picture of the hard wealthy merchant ; the amusements, with a vivid description of a winter fog ; the clubs, and social meetings ; the inns with an invocation to the muse of John Phillips, Shenstone, and Pope, to help him with his unusual and prosaic theme ; the strolling players (" Sad, happy race ! soon raised and soon depressed, Your days all passed in jeopardy and jest ") ; the almshouse and trustees, with an excursion into aristo- cratic life in Sir Denys Brand ; the life of Blaney, a wealthy 136 PERIOD OF PREPARATION heir reduced by extravagance to the almshouse; Clelia, a fast young lady brought to the same end ; Benbow, a Bardolph of the time, another inmate ; the hospital and governors, a piece written earlier in life ; the poor and their dwellings, with a denunciation of the workhouse system, or system of indoor relief, and a realistic picture of a fisherman's hut and household ; the parish clerk, a keenly satirical picture of the tragic fall of Jachin a censoriously virtuous critic of his neighbours, (" Not Satan's friends, nor Satan's self, could bear The cautious man who took of souls such care ") ; the story of Ellen Orford, the victim of injustice and misfortune ; that of Abel Keene who falls by passing from piety to scepticism ; that of Peter Grimes who comes to be haunted by the victims of his cruelty ; the prisons with a prisoner's dream of his youth and his native place, (" Where dwarfish flowers among the gorse are spread And the lamb browses by the linnet's bed "); and the schools, with portraits of the various types of teachers and scholars. 14. He closes with a lamentation over the outward futility of a scholar's life, and a brief paragraph on its inward pleasures. From this he passes to his conception of his own purpose as a poet. " Man as he is to place in all men's view, Yet none with rancour, none with scorn pursue." He never meant to be personal in his portraits ; " ' This is a likeness' may they all declare, 4 And I have seen him, but I know not where'." " I search, a Quixote, all the land about, To find its giants and enchanters out"; " But is there man whom I would injure ? No ! I am to him a fellow not a foe ". Here he reveals the secret of his power. He is in full sympathy with all his topics. He paints lowly life and he is a part of it the secret of Goldsmith, of Cowper, of Burns, that made them the true pioneers of a popular, a national literature. In a note to Pecer Grimes he appeals for the justification of his tragic picture to Scott's Marmion, where "the ruffian" " has no shame or remorse, but the corrosion of helpless want ". But the introduction of Ellen Orford THE POETRY 137 shows how little sympathy he had with the heroes, villains, or victims, of romance. He laughs at the second-hand pictures of life in the novels of the day. " I've often marvelled " "that books" "should show so little how we truly live"; their characters are but " Creatures borrowed and again conveyed From book to book, the shadow of a shade ". *' Time have I lent I would their debt were less To flow'ry pages of sublime distress ; And to the heroine's soul-distracting fears I early gave my sixpences and tears ". He turns to the lowly, and never shrinks from the lowliest and most sordid detail, that he may paint reality, "the stronger features of the soul ". 15. The chief evidence of the poem being written in the nineteenth century consists in one or two indirect references to the French Revolution, in the change in the state of the country population through industrialism, and in the growth of the story element. It is the same with his Tales, though they are rather character-sketches than tales. He has gone back to the older English poetry for his inspiration and models. In his prose preface he appeals to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and, at the beginning of each of the twenty-one Tales, he has three or four appropriate quotations from Shakespeare. He had been recommended to write an heroic poem ; this is the nearest approach he or his age could make to it. As he rejected the unrealities of the new fiction, so he rejects the sublimities of the epic. He appeals, with Dryden, " to the plain sense and sober judgement " of his readers, and wishes only to entertain them. But they are full of moral lessons ; they are, in fact, sermons for the middle classes in the shape of anecdotes and satirical sketches. One of the horrors of the new audience of literature during the early part of this century was free- thinking ; they shrank from everything that savoured of it as they would from crime. And a number of these sketches have as their theme the fate of those who read books and think thoughts that are critical of religious traditions ; The Gentleman Farmer, The Learned Boy, and Edward Shore, deal with the careers of men who reject religion for reason, the two former satirically, the last tragically. The 138 PERIOD OF PREPARATION middle class churchmen of the time, too, had great scorn and hatred of the survival of Puritanism, and the appearance of new sects ; The Frank Courtship, The Struggles of Conscience, and The Convert, treat, with some humour and perhaps a shadow of intolerance, the household troubles and the inner conflict of minds that did not accept the common- sense teaching of the church. Another prominent feature of the new middle class life was the collision between now social or educational ambitions and old circumstances or tastes. Procrastination, The Widow's Tale, The Mother, and The Brothers, hold up to scorn, with almost the irony of Thackeray, the affectations that the new wealth or comfort bred. Squire Thomas, and Advice paint the rude, often immoral, life led by the country gentleman of the beginning of the century. The Patron is a story of elections and the tragic fate of ambitious genius. The Dumb Orators slily satirises the pompous and cowardly garrulity of many of the occupants of the bench, and of the atheistical and revolutionary orators. Arabella as slily laughs at self-deceiving prudery. The Parting Hour, The Lover's Journey, and Jesse and Colin, are the usual stories of love and its rugged course. The Confidant, Resentment, and The Wager, deal with the tragic or amusing features of domestic life. They are all the observations of a keen, and, on the whole, impartial, insight into the human nature of the post-revolutionary English middle class. They are as realistic, and as mildly satirical, as his previous poems ; but they are less poetical, if we exclude The Parish Register. Taken all together, his poetry gives the truest picture of the new reading public ; it both paints them and mirrors them ; for Crabbe belonged to them. It stands intermediate between the literature of learning and culture of narrow circles and the literature of the people. In it can best be studied the tastes and manners of the new audience. It gives us the keynote of both periods. For it stands aloof from the French Revolution and its influence, and passes, with the interests of the class that was about to pay authors by their nnmbers, out of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth. THE POETRY 139 Section 4. Campbell and Bloomfield, though also representing the emotions and tastes of the new classes, and publishing each his first poem in the heroic couplet, and before the century closed, belong to the latter period. Rogers is divided between the two. He began in the school of Gray with his Ode to Superstition (1786), when he was twenty-three years of age; he passed into the school of Goldsmith in his Pleasures of Memory (1792), and of Pope in his Epistle to a Friend (1798); his Columbus (1812) and Jaqueline (1814) are the outcome of the new passion for the romantic past and for narrative; and his Human Life (1819) and Italy (1822) belong in spirit and treatment to the first half of the nineteenth century. A minor poet is bound to change with the literature that surrounds him, or he falls out of the ranks. It is only through his earlier poems that Rogers belongs to the eighteenth century. His Ode to Superstition he had in the style of the poets of the Queen Anne period elaborated with the most painful self-criticism ; though running to only 156 lines, it took him two years to write. It is but an academic exercise modelled on the Pindaric odes of Gray and Collins, but especially on Gray's Bard. It refers to the picturesque features of various ancient rites, Greek, Hindoo. Scandinavian, Egyptian, Persian, Celtic, and deals like its models in personifications. It is formal and second-hand in its emotions and fancy. The Pleasures of Memory shows a great advance both in its choice of models and in its art. Goldsmith had met the new backward-turning fancy of the people by his poecry of reminiscence. And Rogers set himself to systematise it. He followed the psychological poets like Akenside in his choice of an abstract theme. But he fitted his treatment to the growing love of nature ; he made his poem a series of landscapes and pictures, sometimes in the manner of Goldsmith, sometimes in that of Thomson, with many touches from Pope. The result is a poem of much picturesque effect and fine melody. He begins with a village scene, backed by a fancy-picture of his native place, his childhood, his school, the fortune-telling gipsy, and the old church-yard, where "I search the record of each. 140 PERIOD OF PREPARATION mouldering stone ". He then apostrophises Memory, and under her guidance brings up various scenes typical or historic ; he pictures the faithful memory of the horse and dog, and the instinctive memory of the dove and the bee. In the Second Part he passes from sensuous memory, that belongs to animals as well as to man, and descants upon emotional and intellectual memory, that is only human. He versifies the romance it throws round the nun taking the veil, the African slave, the dream during sleep, the Savoyard with " pipe of merry sound " , the wreck of genius, and the veteran soldier at Chelsea, and he closes with a pathetic tale of love of young Florio losing his Julia when crossing one of the lakes of Cumberland. In this last he anticipates somewhat the fervid insight of the Lake school into the beauty of mountain scenery. In An Epistle to a Friend there is not much development, except in his classi- cal reading, and in his appreciation of the treasures of ancient art, many of which he had seen on his visit to Paris in 1791. He stands up for the wholesomeness of a country life, although in the following year he removed to the city and became a thorough denizen of it. He paints, in the style of Horace, Boileau, and Pope, all the advantages of his house, or, as he calls it, " his hermit cell", " Far from the joyless glare, the maddening strife, And all the dull impertinence of life ". And he boasts of the "clear mirror of his moral page", scorning " the false lustre of licentious thought ". Even this is purely imitative. He belonged essentially to the city, like the Queen Anne poets, and it was merely the new classes from which he came that drew him to the description of nature. His imitativeness is best shown by the fact that though he was brought up at the feet of Price, the sympathiser with the French Revolution, and in the midst of revolutionism, his poetry was little affected by it ; and still more by the fact that though his sayings prove him to have been one of the best epigrammatists of the day and one of the keenest satirists, he chose the favourite didactic and descriptive poetry of his youth to work in, and rejected satire. THE POETRY 14! Section 5. He really belonged to the school 'of Akenside, although he adopted the heroic couplet as moulded by Goldsmith, and often echoed Pope. He mingled moralising with description, high-flown rhetoric with metaphysical purpose in the same way as that didactic poet. He belonged to the same current of literary ambition, which, rising just before the middle of the century with the reappearance of the middle class and the growth of the industry that gave them wealth and comfort, gradually prepared the way for nineteenth century literature. One of the most noteworthy features of English poetry just after the Queen Anne period was the large number of second-rate poets, all of them coming from the new audience of literature ; another was its tendency to metaphysics, and a third was its adoption of Miltonic blank verse. They are closely connected. The establishment of the Hanoverian dynasty on the throne had freed the descendants of the Puritans and of the opponents of Stuart absolutism from all fear of persecution, and given them confidence in their own instincts, tastes, and opinions. And the application of water-power and machinery to manufactures and the development of commerce had begun to give them comfort and leisure. They had never abandoned the love of philosophy that their theological tastes had implied ; nor had they ceased to read their Paradise Lost. In this atmosphere their youth were brought up and many of them began to aspire to literary fame. They had plenty of poetic sentiment without any real poetic power ; they had the average power of philo- sophising without any capacity for exact thought. Hence the strange hybrid of philosophy and poetry that was such a favourite last century, the metaphysical essay in verse. And there was evidently a growing audience for it ; else the supply would soon have ceased. The yeomen, tradesmen, and merchants of the middle classes had been nurtured on weekly sermons and Milton, and took naturally to the results of cross-fertilisation between them. And from 1740 onwards through the century we have an unfailing stream of didactic blank verse that alternates mbralisation or analysis and picture. Addison had shewn that he meant The 142 PERIOD OF PREPARATION Spectator for the wider audience, for the descendants of the Puritans, as well as for London society, when he contributed his papers on Milton and on Imagination. But he went no deeper than the surface of either subject with his Queen Anne pseudo-classicism ; and the true appreciation of Miltonic verse, and the poetical treatment of philosophical subjects, did not appear till the age of Addison and Pope was vanishing, and the middle classes were beginning to mould literature more than London society. It is true that we have blank verse reappearing in poetry as early as Thomson's Seasons (1726-28), and that Pope felt the philosophical tendencies of his new audience so much as to turn to metaphysics and ethics in his Essay on Man (1733-34). But the combination of philosophy and blank verse does not appear till close on the death of Pope (1744). Section 6. I. The best representative of it was Mark Akenside, who in January 1744 published his Pleasures of Imagination when twenty-three years of age. Dodsley the publisher gave him, on the advice of Pope, a price that was quite exceptional for a new poet's work ^120. And a second edition was demanded before the year was out. Later in life he set himself to the task of recasting its three books into four. The first, which deals with the beauty and greatness of nature and the connection of beauty with truth and goodness, appeared in 1757 ; the second, which treats of truth, virtue, vice, ridicule, and the passions, appeared in 1765 ; and a fragment of the third and one of the fourth were published after his death in 1770. But the first form is acknowledged by all to be the best, to be more poetical though less methodic or philosophical. It is more concrete ; the second book, for example, is more than half filled with the speech or tale of a sage, whom he calls Harmodius, "wont to teach my early age" "thy lonely-whispering voice, O faithful Nature " ; the aged teacher and prophet narrates a vision he had had " in the windings of an ancient wood " ; " the genius of human kind " appeared to him as he was mourning over the dead Parthenia and brought before his eyes a landscape that is a copy of Milton's Eden, and a THE POETRY 143 dramatic scene not unlike Milton's description of the fall, hut really an allegory of the eternal union of virtue and pleasure. This disappears in the new version. The poem is full of splendidly rhetorical pictures and apostrophes, the product rather of philosophic eloquence than of poetic imagination ; it is Milton narrowed down to The Essay On Man ; even the verse is a cross between the Miltonic sublimity and the Popian balance and antithesis. The philosophy is puritanism edited by Shaftesbury ; it has a back-ground of stoical theology; in its account of creation it is calvinistic and predestinarian ; yet it adopts the optimistic dream of " Characteristics " ; its ethics are, like Shaftesbury's, a compromise between the utilitarianism natural to the time and the moral sense theory that was about to rule philosophy through Scotland; its aesthetics are Addison's deepened somewhat by Hutcheson ; and it treats the Newtonian physics and astronomy with an approach to sublimity. The " high-born soul soars The blue profound, and hovering round the sun, Beholds him pouring the redundant stream Of light ; beholds his unrelenting sway Bend the reluctant planets to absolve The fated rounds of Time " ; " Amazed she views The empyreal waste " ; " And fields of radiance, whose unfading light Has travelled the profound six thousand years, Nor yet arrived in sight of mortal things." Most of the learning and philosophy of the book he acquired at Edinburgh University where he wrote it. And it is noteworthy that a majority of the writers of blank verse and of didactic poetry in the eighteenth century were either born or trained in Edinburgh. Thomson, Blair, Mallet, the author of Albania, Wilkie, Armstrong, Grainger, Michael Bruce, Falconer were all Scotchmen and all attempted blank verse or the didactic descriptive poem. Edinburgh had grown since the Union a centre of literary ambition and influence almost as important as London though still subsidiary to it. It had direct intercourse with France, and, in Hume, Adam Smith, Smollett, Mackintosh, and a dozen more, brought the new French movements, literary and philosophical, revolutionary and sceptical, to bear upon English literature. Yet it retained a deep impress from the 144 PERIOD OF PREPARATION older puritanism. The Moderates had not the best of it in the country districts. And there Paradise Lost and the Pilgrim's Progress were as much household books as the Bible, Boston's Fourfold State, and Doddridge's Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul. Thus it was that when the literary didacticism of the Queen Anne age was some- what exhausted, a semi-religious, semi-philosophical didacticism chiefly in the guise of Miltonic blank verse, and indulging much in pictures of nature came to reinforce it, and prepare it for the hands of Cowper and Wordsworth. It came largely from Scotland and began to appear about the time of the retirement of Walpole (1742), though Arbuthnot and Thomson are two Scotch writers who appeared in the London world earlier in the century. With the necessity of conciliating Scotland after the rebellion of 1745, and the growing influence of Scotch politicians like Bute, the emigration of Scottish talent to London became one of the favourite themes of witty or satiric jealousy ; the best of it remained at home, and in Hume, Adam Smith, Burns, Dugald Stewart, Scott, deeply influenced European thought and literature. Section 7. I. Miltonic didacticism was not confined to Scotland. About the same date (1740) it forced a true representative of the Queen Anne spirit, Edward Young, out of the heroic couplet and satire into blank verse and religious moralisings. He was nearly sixty before he began his most famous poem, Night Thoughts. He had spent youth and manhood partly in dissipation, partly in wooing preferment by fulsome odes to monarchs and statesmen. He followed the drift of his time in writing at first pompously didactic poems (The Last Day 1713, The Force of Religion 1715), pompous tragedies (Busiris 1719, and Revenge 1721) and rhetorical satires in the heroic couplet (The Universal Passion The Love of Fame, 1725). By his versified flatteries he gained a pension of ^200 a year which he enjoyed to his death in 1765. Not long after gaining it he professed to have become tired of the world and courtiership, and entered the church, married a titled widow, and got the living of Welwyn in THE POETRY 145 Hertfordshire, where he remained much against his real desires for the rest of his life. He lost his wife and his two daughters when nearly sixty, and the bereavement gave a brief term of sincerity to his poetic lament over life in the Night Thoughts, which he began to publish the year after (1742), and continued till he had finished nine books or nights in 1745. The first three nights are devoted to Philander, Narcissa, Lucia, absurdly idealised represen- tations of his dead stepson and stepdaughters, keep to the mood of lament, and are most successful. Yet even here his optimistic utilitarianism and religious affectation intrude and spoil genuine eloquence by low ideals. The grief has not changed his nature any more than his retirement from the world did. He has only extended the sphere of his sycophancy; he has been all his life the parasite of men; he is now besides the spaniel of God ; he does not resign the hope of worldly favours ; he still addresses possible patrons in fulsome terms ; but proximity to death makes him think of the supreme and ultimate favour, and he concentrates all his armoury of praise and apostrophe upon its arbiter. The hollowness of the Miltonic sublimities becomes more apparent as the nights proceed, till in the ninth, called " Consolation," the straining after effect and the pharisaic pietisms grow ridiculous. God descends to the last judgment with groans from hell and " shouts of joy from heaven"; "The charmed spectators thunder their applause"; and the "sever'd throng" pass to "distinct abodes sulphurous or ambrosial." The " goddess " " Turns her adamantine key's enormous size Through Destiny's inextricable wards, and flings it "from the crystal battlements of heaven ", and hell. " Returns in groans the melancholy roar " ; " Its hideous groans Join Heaven's sweet Hallelujahs in Thy praise ". The Newtonian astronomy is a perfect treasure-house of illustration and inflated eloquence ; it enables him to sit on Saturns' ring and see " Perhaps the villas of descending gods". L 146 PERIOD OF PREPARATION But the balance and antithesis of the heroic couplet follow him and make even his best cosmic picture or parallel monotonous: he has none of the varied rhythm of even The Pleasures of Imagination. Nor are there the lofty ideals of that poem to give atmosphere to the straining after religious thought. And even his best passages are spoiled by trivial analogies ; as, for example, when speaking of the star of night ; " Divine Instructor ! Thy first volume this For man's perusal ! All in capitals ! " 2. A far nearer approach to Miltonism applied to gloomy moralisation was made by Robert Blair, a Scotch clergyman, in his poem "The Grave," published in 1743, but written long before. The pulpiteering rhetoric is not sawn up into equal lengths, but has been strengthened by an appreciative study of Shakespeare. Yet it reveals its time as much in the approaches it makes, like the Night Thoughts, to bathos. The antitheses of death take the place of those of the worlds above and are equally marred by mean analogies. Lines like these show that Blair was a true poet ; " Tis but a night, a long and moonless night, We make the grave our bed and then are gone. Thus at the shut of eve the weary bird Leaves the wide air and in some lonely brake Cowers down." Section 8. I. As real a poet was John Dyer, a Welshman, who, in his Grongar Hill, published in the same year as Thomson's Winter (1726), revealed the fact that in the more mountainous districts lay all the material for the regeneration of English poetry. It is a brief poem in rhyming octosyl- labics giving a picture of the scenes to be viewed from Grongar Hill. It shows a close study of the Puritan secular poets, and especially Marvell, and as true an appreciation of the beauty of nature as The Seasons. And there is a tinge of melancholy in it, that adds grace to it, as in these lines : " But transient is the smile of fate ! A little rule, a little sway THE POETRY 147 A sunbeam in a winter's day, Is all the proud and mighty have Between the cradle and the grave ". And this love of the shadowed side of life developed, and along with a trip to Italy and his study of Milton, produced his blank verse poem The Ruins of Rome in 1740. 2. But the poem that showed best how much he belonged to the middle of the eighteenth century was The Fleece, published in 1757, the year before his death. He had given up the profession of painter, and, entering the church, held livings in Leicestershire, Huntingdonshire, and .Lincolnshire. It was the industrial era just opening, and his pastoral surroundings, that forced the theme and its treatment on his imagination. All the processes connected with wool, its rearing, and manufacture, are described in blank verse, often with genuine poetry, even the making of the steel shears at Sheffield being versified. The poem tells better than any contemporary history could where the new audience of literature was to be found ; in the shepherds' huts, and the great centres of industry and commerce Milton was still read, and the realities of the growing industrial life were most talked of. 3. Richard Glover (1712-1785) had already attempted to find the poetry of commercial life in his " London or the Progress of Commerce" (1739). A merchant himself, he also showed that English merchants could see the romance of ancient times as well as of modern. In his Leonidas, first published in 1737, enlarged from nine to twelve books in 1770, and added to in its sequel, the Athenaid, published posthumously (1788), he revealed the influence of both Milton and Pope on himself and his class and readers. It weaves modern romance and the passion for political freedom and English patriotism into the story of Thermopylae. He was, like Akenside and all the progressive minds of the middle class, opposed. to Walpole and his policy, and uses all these poems, as well as his Ballad of Admiral Hosier's Ghost, as political propaganda. But the pseudo-classicism of the Queen Anne era bears the art down, whilst the Popian balance destroys the Miltonic rhythm of the blank verse. The poems were too monotonous to live. 148 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 4. John Armstrong (1709-1779), like his friend James Thomson, a son of the manse, brought up in Roxburghshire, and trained at Edinburgh University, came closer in spirit to the Queen Anne age. His occupation as a medical man in London brought him, like his countryman, Arbuthnot, into close intimacy with the utilitarian, commonsense, and often gross tone of fashionable life. His poems, The Art of Preserving Health (1744), and The Economy of Love (1739), though written in Thomsonian blank verse, and sometimes striving after sublimities, represent well the common level Queen Anne poetry could reach when it was didactic without satire ; they are marred both by the vulgarities and bathos of Night Thoughts, and by the grossnesses of Swift. And yet there is promise of the coming poetry, as also in the stanzas contributed by him to Thomson's Castle of Indolence, where too he is portrayed ; he "quite detested talk", "oft stung by spleen", often " inly thrilled " by " pensive fury " ; " Nor ever uttered wojd, save when first shone The glittering star of eve, ' Thank Heaven, the day is done. ' ' His description of the sweating sickness in The Art of Preserving Health has much of the vigour and the repulsive picturesqueness of that by Lucretius of the plague at Athens. His verse is now Miltonic, again Thomsonian ; but oftenest it needs but rhyme to be Popian, as, for example : "Who never fasts no banquet e'er enjoys : Who never toils or watches never sleeps." And in his later and briefer poems, Benevolence, and Taste, he returns to the heroic couplet and to the satiric poetry of the Queen Anne age. 5. Another Edinburgh-trained doctor, James Grainger (1721-1766), practising first in London, and afterwards in the West Indies, followed the fashion of his time, and tried to elevate by a tumid sounding verse a theme from industrial life. In his Sugar Cane (1764), he describes the employ- ments of the negroes, whom he conventionally calls swains, and the various kinds of work on a plantation, discussing even rats, monkeys, flies, and hurricanes. Like Dyer's Fleece, it reveals the drift of English civilisation towards industrialism and the change in the audience of literature. THE POETRY 149 6. But the most frequent didactic use of blank verse during the period was for the description of out-door scenes strung together, as in Thomson's Seasons, by some theme that took its poet into the presence of nature, like Somerville's Chase (1734) and Mason's English Garden (1772-1782). Thus was the way prepared for Cowper's Task ; and following him the use was continued in the nineteenth century by poems like Graham's Sabbath (1804) and Pollok's Course of Time. Another favourite use of it for the same purpose was to deal with a special locality. Instances were Albania, describing Scotland (1737), Am well, by John Scott, the Quaker-poet, describing his native place (1776), Lochleven not published till 1770 after the death of its young author Michael Bruce (1746-1767), Lewesdon Hill (1786) by the Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Rev. William Crowe, and Beachy Head by the authoress of The Old Manor House, Mrs. Charlotte Smith (1749-1806). And Wordsworth, in his Lines written near Tintern Abbey (1798), had only to infuse the new spirit into this old form. A less common use was to take an incident or narrative and interweave descriptions of nature and reflections on it. Mallet's Amyntor and Theodora, which leads Aurelius a refugee from the religious persecutions of the Restoration to St. Kilda (1747), is an instance. Wordsworth took this up and made it his own in Michael and other shorter poems and also in The Excursion. And during the century the blank verse developed into something quite different from its Miltonic use. It gave up its larger harmonies and its grandeur, its difficult syntax, and its learned and new use of words. It approached nearer to prose, and even acquired the simplicity and brevity of conversational English. It still made efforts at the old variety of rhythm and melody. But it never returned to the greatness and intensity it had shown in Milton's hands. So it was with the didacticism ; it gradually gave up the abstractness of its source, and resorted more to pictures or character-sketches or narrative ; it put off the guise of teacher or preacher, and tried to conceal its primary purpose ; it moralised less and less. If we compare The Pleasures of Memory of Rogers and The Pleasures of Hope of Campbell, coming at the close of the century, with the Pleasures of Imagination of Akenside (1744) and The 150 PERIOD OF PREPARATION Pleasures of Melancholy of Thomas Warton (1745), the increasing concreteness becomes apparent. The earlier poems are all apostrophe and maxim ; the later are all picture and suggestion. Its use for narrative gets more and more predominant, as in Southey's Joan of Arc (1793), and Lander's Gebir (1795). As we advance in the nineteenth century, the blank verse becomes more plastic and the didacticism more narrative and picture. In the hands of Browning in Pauline and Paracelsus, of Mrs. Browning in Aurora Leigh, and of Tennyson in Morte d' Arthur, they lose all traces of their origin ; these poets teach their lesson by dramatic scene or psychological analysis of character, whilst they give their verse all the freedom and adaptability of the new prose and all the melody of true poetry. 7. The history of the heroic couplet is one rather of decay than development. When Johnson in his Lives of the Poets spoke of poetry having reached its highest point in Dryden and Pope and expressed something approaching despair of its ever surpassing their art, he meant, of course, poetry as represented by the heroic verse. Its true me'tier was epigrammatic satire, satire that had its point in the couplet, or at least in nothing longer than the paragraph rising to a climax ; its balance demanded continual halting- places to clench its point and to prevent monotony. Pope in his Rape of the Lock and Satires revealed this about it, and raised it to its highest. The rest of the century went back again and again to the study of his use of it and only brought out more and more clearly its lack of plasticity and freedom by applying it to other purposes than satire. And in the nineteenth century a consciousness grew in the minds of poets and their readers that its day was past and it has sunk into an academic exercise. Cowper and Crabbe galvanised it into popularity, and some poets like Byron began their career by using it ; but they at once abandoned it. Its history is practically confined to the eighteenth century. Few minor poets of the latter half of that period could keep from trying their hand at it. For no great poet arose to snatch the laurel from the head of Pope and give a new model ; and the conditions out of which it grew still persisted in London society, the artificial manners, the love of wit, the low ideal of life, the rhetorical prose, and the dominant influence of political oratory. THE POETRY 151 8. Its most frequent use in the eighteenth century was the satiric ; yet the didactic also claimed it as a method of expression ; and as the century proceeded these gave way to the descriptive and finally to the narrative, though both of the primary uses of it in the Queen Anne period, satiric and didactic, continued to tinge them. Even the moralising Miltonist Akenside and the Pindarists Gray and Collins were drawn to it ; the former in his satiric attack on Pulteney for his desertion of the opposition to Walpole, Epistle to Curio, afterwards rewritten in stanzas, and in his British Philippic on the Spanish war ; the latter, Gray, in his The Alliance of Education and Government, and Collins in some of his Eclogues such as Hassan or The Camel-driver, the one didactic, the other narrative. Gilbert West's Ad Amicos (1740), Lord Lyttelton's Advice to a Lady, Armstrong's Benevolence, and Taste, Byrom's Pastoral, are instances of its power to attract writers of the most varied talents and purposes before the turning point of the century ; the occasional poem, society verses, the didactic satire, and the pastoral all chose it as their medium. And whenever a minor poet took up an elaborate task in verse, he was as much inclined to the heroic couplet as to blank verse, as, for example, the Scotchman, John Wilson in his descriptive poem The Clyde (1767), Dr. William Wilkie in his echo of Pope's Homer, The Epigoniad (1757), and William Julius Mickle in his translation of the Lusiad of the Portuguese poet Camoens (1771-1776). There seems indeed to have been a distinct renaissance of the heroic couplet for didactic and narrative purposes in the last quarter of the century, probably due to the influence of Johnson in his Lives of the Poets and to the example of Goldsmith. Not only did Crabbe, Rogers, and Bloomfield adopt it as their chief medium of poetic expression, and Kirke White, Campbell, and Byron prefer it in their earliest attempts, but the imitators and minor schools of poetry, though ever anxious to show themselves abreast of their time by newness of form, resorted to this old-fashioned verse. Its use by William Hayley, the dellacruscan and biographer of Cowper, is perhaps the best proof of its renewed popularity. He wrote most of his much-read didactic poems in it, his poetical essays, Essay on History (1780), Essay en Epic 152 PERIOD OF PREPARATION Poetry (1782), Essay on Old Maids (1785), Essay on Sculpture (1800) and his various " Triumphs," Triumphs of Temper (1781), The Triumph of Music (1804), according to Byron " for ever feeble and for ever tame ". Section 9. I. But its freshest and most striking use by the minor poets for the didactic and descriptive was in Falconer's Shipwreck (1762) and Dr. Erasmus Darwin's Botanic Garden. It is a strange thing that so oceanic a nation as Britain should leave her pursuits and conquests on the sea so long unsung. Most of the stories of Elizabethan adventure are told in prose. And it is still stranger that the prosaic, uninspired eighteenth century should begin the task of singing the romance of the sea. Gay's Black-eyed Susan, Glover's Admiral Hosier's Ghost, and the sea-songs of Dibdin alone, would show that there was something exceptional in the age calling out the imaginations of Englishmen towards the sea ; the Translation of the Lusiad, and Falconer's Shipwreck, point to the same conclusion. It was the naval victories of the time that stirred the English sea-fancy. Commercial struggle, adventure, and conquest are gradual and unobtrusive ; and they remain voiceless till national victories by national ships throw a halo round the everyday pursuit. But it was singular that it was a Scotch sailor in the mercantile marine that first attempted the romance of his calling. William Falconer, the son of an Edinburgh barber, and the butt of his school, took with him to sea a strong taste for classics and Queen Anne poetry ; and having been wrecked, in 1750 at eighteen, off Cape Colonna in Greece, he set himself to work up his adventure into a poem. The result of twelve years' polishing was The Shipwreck, first published in 1762. It brought him a post in the navy, and he revised the poem and enlarged it ; the new edition (1764) had 900 more lines. After a period on land he went to sea again in 1769, and his ship The Aurora never returned. He had left another revision which was published on his departure. The additions and changes were no improvements ; the first version, though marred by all the technicalities of a ship THE POETRY 153 and ship life, another symptom of the close approach that eighteenth century poetry made to the functions of prose, is full of naivete and pathos, and less encumbered by the artificialities and the pedantic pseudo-classicisms of the Queen Anne poetry. In the second edition he interwove a strand from the new romance of the time ; he introduced a love story and characters in the manner of the fiction that was growing so fashionable. He gives them names from the Gothic stories that were coming into vogue ; Albert is the master of the ship, Rodmond the mate, Arion evidently the poet himself, the second mate, and Palemon the passenger whose love for Anna is sandwiched, in the form of story and apostrophe, into the narrative. The first canto describes the characters of these four, and various aspects of nature on the coast of Candia, which the ship leaves on her return home, a calm noon, a magnificent sunset " a sea of living gold ", a midnight with a haloed moon ; the descriptions are varied by Palemon's love story, Arion's dream, and the picture of the ship as she would appear from the shore. The second describes the voyage from the coast of Candia to that of Greece ; they burst a waterspout and catch a dolphin ; and then the action begins ; the wind rises, the main-sail is split ; the ship is driven from her course as the sun sets lowering ; four seamen are lost whilst reefing as she dips her yard-arm into the sea ; a sea bursts over her and she labours ; the crew work at the pumps ; the officers consult, and the master addresses them in a style that evidently emulates the speeches of Aeneas in Dryden's Virgil, and would better suit the House of Commons that listened to Burke than the crew of a ship that was driving on a lee shore ; there is in the speeches of Albert, Rodmond, and Arion a reminiscence of Pope's translations of the speeches in the councils of the gods in the Iliad. Popian sublimities sound burlesque on eighteenth century sailors' lips ; streams of tobacco juice from the ruminated quid were more native to them than such streams of eloquence ; " Unhappy partners in a wayward fate ! Whose courage now is known perhaps too late ; You who unmoved behold this angry storm, In conflict all the rolling deep deform ". And so on for nearly a hundred lines. The end is that they 154 PERIOD OF PREPARATION cut the mizzen-mast and scud before the wind. In the third canto the poet lingers for nearly four hundred lines over the historical glories of the shores upon which they were drifting to death. At line 378 he resumes his subject, addresses the spirits of the storm, and describes with considerable power the incidents of the wreck, the helmsman blinded by lightning, the masts and spars falling, the struggle for life, the parting of the ship, the death of the officers, and the dying scene of Palemon on the beach. The final version is a wonderful medley of old art and new times. The industrial era stirs the poet to the choice of his theme, the Queen Anne period to the choice of his verse ; the romantic movement compels him to introduce a love-story ; the pseudo-classicism of Dryden and Pope makes him follow the Homeric and Virgilian method, and throw in a long passage of versified classical learning ; the learned pedantry of the old scholarship and the technical pedantry of the new era of industry mingle on his pages. We find couplets like these side by side all through the poem ; " The reef enwrapped, the inserted knittles tied, The halyards, throat and peak, are next applied ". " When sacred Orpheus on the Stygian coast With notes divine deplored his consort lost". So the new insight into nature, and love of the picturesque and wild, neighbour the old didacticism, moralisation, and rhetorical sublimities. The poem is worthy of attention, if only for its illustration of both the vanishing and the coming time. Section 10. I. So it is with The Botanic Garden, a poem that came almost a generation after The Shipwreck. Its author, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of the great evolutionist of our century, would have repudiated any sympathy or affinity with a satirist who could attack Chatham and all the advocates of freedom and progress so fiercely as Falconer did in The Demagogue (1765); and yet he is as truly conservative in his art ; whilst thinking that he surpasses Dryden and Pope in polish, he really returns to the use of THE POETRY 155 the heroic couplet as it was before these poets took it up ; and in the intellectual machinery of the poem he adopts the elaborate allegory of seventeenth century poetry and the belated sylphs and gnomes of The Rape of the Lock. It plainly comes after the Queen Anne poets, and profits by the melody and balance of their couplets ; but it often has a stammer or halt in its metre, and as often indulges in imperfect rhymes like " air " and " car ", " broad " and "road". Passages in it attain an airy beauty that reminds us of Pope's mock-heroic ; " Stay thy soft-murmuring waters, gentle rill ; Hush, whispering winds, ye rustling leaves be still ; Rest, silver butterflies, your quivering wings ; Alight, ye beetles, from your airy rings ; Ye painted moths, your gold -eyed plumage furl, Blow your wide horns, your spiral trunks uncurl. " Or again in the invocation to the goddess of botany ; " O'er the still dawn thy placid smile effuse, And with thy silver sandals print the dews ; In noon's bright blaze thy vermeil vest unfold, And wave thy emerald banner starred with gold." But as a rule the similes and pictures are overdrawn and tedious, the other oraments are meretricious, and there is a sense of bathos in the contrast between the prosaic purpose and the pompous verse. 2. It is the spirit of revolutionism in the poem that is most interesting ; it was unconscious in Goldsmith and Cowper ; it is a deliberate creed in Darwin. For example, in a passage which draws an analogy to a tropical plant, drifted to the Norwegian shore, from the finding of the child Moses amongst the bulrushes, he closes with a denunciation of slavery and an appeal to " Britannia's bands of senators " ending ; ' Hear him, ye senates ! hear this truth sublime, He who allows oppression, shares the crime ' ! " So, in the second canto of the Economy of Vegetation, he welcomes the French Revolution as well as the American, and approves of the risings in Ireland ; " Immortal Franklin watched the callow crew" of "tyrant Power", "And stabbed the struggling vampires ere they flew " ; the contagion of freedom spread ; " hill lighted hill and man electrised 156 PERIOD OF PREPARATION man " ; the " giant warrior " Liberty " Helmed his bold course to fair Hibernia's vales " ; and " sad superstition wails her empire torn " ; he then rent the " iron cage " that 1 ' enthralled " him in the Bastille, bound "by the weak hands of confessors and Kings " ; " High o'er his foes his hundred arms he rears, Ploughshares his swords, and pruning hooks his spears ; Calls to the good and brave with voice that rolls Like Heaven's own thunder round the echoing poles ". And this, the third part of his poem, the Economy of Vegetation, was published in 1792, when the September Massacres and the execution of the king and queen were preparing the way for the Reign of Terror. But even in the earlier parts, the Botanic Garden (1781), and The Loves of the Plants (1789), though there is no passage so pro- nounced as this, the revolutionary spirit ever and again appears. 3. It was little wonder that Canning, Frere, Ellis, and Gifford singled out Darwin to pillory in their Anti-Jacobin, a weekly journal (1797-98), meant to satirise the French Revolution and its principles. They had already laughed in The Progress of Man at the teaching of Godwin's Political Justice as represented by Payne Knight in his Progress of Civil Society, a didactic poem in heroic couplets (1796), and in it they had glanced at Darwin's doctrines of development by transformation. But in April 1798 they attacked him directly in The Loves of the Triangles, a Mathematical and Philosophical Poem inscribed to Dr. Darwin. In the prose preface they connect him with the " new principles," which are but "the principles of primeval nature," first " whatever is is wrong," " that institutions civil and religious" "are so many badges of man's degradation"; second " the eternal and absolute perfectibility of man ", that, if, " as is demonstrable, we have risen from a level with the cabbages of the field ", we should when freed from king- craft and priest-craft rise from our " present biped state ", be "as it were all mind", "feed on oxygen and never die but by our own consent ". And thus they identify him with the doctrines that Godwin had formulated in his Political Justice. The Loves of the Plants, with its attempt to transmute trees and flowers into the romantic and THE POETRY 157 sentimental young men and women of the time, lay ready to the hand of the parodist ; though there are some fine passages in it, such as the pathetic picture of the death of Eliza on the battlefield of Minden, and the innocent prattle of her children over her as their soldier father comes up, yet much of it is already almost an unintentional burlesque ; " Or mark with shining letters Kunkel's name In the pale phosphor's self-consuming flame. So the chaste heart of some enchanted maid Shines with insidious light, by love betrayed ". It is not surprising that the parody was so successful, and kept alive the name of the original. 4. Darwin was the leader of a circle in Lichfield that prided itself upon its literary power and advanced thought. The best known amongst these ambitious and mutually admiring thinkers and authors were Anna Seward the writer of elegies, Richard Edgeworth the father of the novelist a bohemian and erratic Irishman who followed Rousseau's doctrines, and Day the writer of Sandford and Merton. But occasional visitors and sympathisers were Dr. Priestley the revolutionary chemist and preacher, Sir Joseph Banks the naturalist, Dr. Parr the scholar, and Lord Monboddo the first believer in the descent of man from the monkey. All looked up to the speculative physician as their great cham ; Johnson, who was a native of Lichfield, hated and despised him and his disciples. He had got his medical training in Edinburgh and, like Akenside and Armstrong, had acquired at that University somewhat advanced opinions. Hume and other admirers of French thought, as represented by Rousseau, Voltaire, and the Encyclopedists, had created an atmosphere of revolutionism and scepticism in the northern capital; and thence it found its way through Scotch emigrants or English medical men into London or English provincial centres. It was Edinburgh that had the first martyrs of revolutionism ; and it was to Edinburgh that English revolutionists looked for their inspiration for a time. Erasmus Darwin brought the new spirit of inquiry and antagonism to the past with him to Lichfield when he settled there in 1757 at the age of 26. He was afraid to 158 PERIOD OF PREPARATION give literary expression to his opinions till the fortune of his second wife made him independent of his profession. He was nearly fifty before he wrote his Botanic Garden. His coterie and especially Miss Seward raised a shout of applause ; she described the poem as sublime ; its " successive pictures alternately possess the sublimity of Michael Angelo, the correctness and elegance of Raphael, with the glow of Titian ; " its " landscapes have at times the strength of Salvator, and at others the softness of Claude " ; its " numbers are of stately grace and artful harmony ". Hayley and even Cowper wrote poems in its praise ; and Horace Walpole went into raptures over passages. And when he came to dispose of the copyright of the whole, he is said to have got ten shillings a line. Like all the didactic poems of the time, it varies its monotony by innumerable and often irrelevant episodes. His are chiefly on the triumphs of science. He is wholly materialist in his philosophy, and traces insects to the anthers of flowers, man to the oyster, and all instinct to the senses. He practically identifies animal and vegetable life. And in his prose book, Zoonomia, he says, "give me a fibre susceptible of irritation, and I will make a tree, a dog, a horse, a man ". His theory is evidently evolution by transformations like that of the tadpole into the frog or that of the caterpillar into the butterfly. He was especially struck with the Linnaean system of botany and fascinated by the sexual principle which it discovered in all plant life. But he did not confine himself to botany. He sang the triumphs of engineering in a passage about Brindley, the discoveries of chemistry and physics and geology in various semi-prosaic paragraphs, and the wonders of astronomy in one fine apostrophe, in which these couplets occur ; " Flowers of the sky ! ye too to age must yield, Frail as your silken sisters of the field. Star after star from heaven's high arch shall rush, Suns sink on suns and systems systems crush ; Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm, Immortal nature lifts her changeful form ". There is real eloquence, if not real poetry, in passages like this ; but he too often deals in absurd, far-fetched, and fine-spun allegory, analogy, simile, and epithet, like the THE POETRY 159 Dellacruscan school which was pilloried in Gifford's Baviad (1794), as bringing their "laboured nothings home". And it was this elaborate artificiality that made the popularity of Darwin's poems brief; it would have died out before he died in 1802 but for the Anti- Jacobin parody; and his Temple of Nature which he left to be published had little success. Section u. 1. Satire was the true and natural function of the heroic couplet ; it lent itself especially to bathos, epigram, and the mock-heroic. And it held its own for these purposes right into the nineteenth century. It came to its full heritage in a polemical time and it fits a polemical atmosphere. For it needs passion or personal epigram to give its monotonous balance fire. It lives especially in the troubled sea of politics. And yet in the second half of the century we have no great satirist like Dryden or Pope or Swift, and very little satire that was worthy to live, unless we include amongst satirists those poets who, like Goldsmith, Cowper, and Crabbe, watched the evils of human society and mourned over them in verse. The new audience was more interested in romance and sentiment, in religion and philanthropy, than in the petty jealousies and quarrels and partisanships wherein satire has its life and being. Wherever, as at the close of the century, the questions are those of national life or death, and the issues are world- wide, the passions become too deep for such an ephemeral expression of them. There was satire on the Revolution both in verse and picture; but the greater spirits, like Burke and Wordsworth and Coleridge, were too earnest to peddle in satire. Moreover the growth of journals and daily newspapers since the age of Queen Anne gave scope to much of the literary energy and talent that would have been used in satiric poems. Journalism supplied a swift popularity and easy death for all the ephemeral productions of spite or indignation or partisanship that would before have risen to the dignity of books. 2. The chief satirist of the time was Charles Churchill, who came to his powers just at the moment when English l6o PERIOD OF PREPARATION politics had become a petty scramble for place, and every writer chose the weapon that was readiest to his hand. From 1760 to 1770 was the decade that was best fitted for satire in the period. George the Third had come to the throne in 1760, and almost at once he placed his old tutor and friend, Lord Bute, at the helm of affairs. Mediocrity and corruption returned to power. And no literary instru- ment was considered too mean to use against the king and his ministry ; personal invective became the order of the day ; politics and political literature became a loud hoarse squabble. It is in such a time that satire flourishes. And Churchill, who was born in 1731, discovered his talent just as it began. His boon companion and schoolfellow at Westminster, Robert Lloyd, had abandoned school- mastering and made a great literary success with his now forgotten satire The Actor. Churchill had grown weary of his clerical profession, as his parishioners of St. John's, Westminster had grown weary of him ( " sleep at his bidding crept from pew to pew" he says of himself). He set himself, therefore, to follow in his comrade's footsteps ; he first adopted Swift's favourite octosyllabic verse and wrote The Bard ; it could find no publisher ; the same occurred with his second satire on his immediate governors, the Chapter of Westminster. Then he frequented the theatres, like Lloyd, and wrote The Rosciad (1761), a pungent and somewhat personal criticism of the actors of the day, in the style of Dryden's MacFlecknoe. It took the town, and made him famous and almost independent of his profession. He never surpassed it ; for he never had such eagerness to succeed or to avoid his habitual slovenliness. And one or two passages have survived the oblivion that has overtaken his work. Of Davies ; " With him came mighty Davies. (On my life That Davies hath a very pretty wife !) Statesman all over ! In plots famous grown ! He mouths a sentence as curs mouth a bone ". Of Yates ; " When blindly thwarting nature's stubborn plan, He treads the stage by way of gentleman, From side to side he struts, he smiles, he prates, And seems to wonder what's become of Yates ''. THE POETRY l6l Of Quin ; " In whate'er cast his character was laid, Self still, like oil, upon the surface played ". Of Foote ; " By turns transformed into all kinds of shapes, Constant to none, Foote laughs, cries, struts, and scrapes ". And, as in almost all his satires, he could not keep out reference to himself ; he ever tried to anticipate the natural retort on his own broad face and ugly features by self- criticism ; " Even I, whom nature cast in hideous mould, Whom, having made, she trembled to behold, Beneath the load of mimicry may groan, And find that nature's errors are my own ". His portrait of Garrick was one of the best and most generous in the satire. The actor met it with a sneer. And the satirist flung it back in his Apology to the Critical Reviewers ; " Forgetful of himself he rears his head, And scorns the dunghill where he first was bred ; On this great stage, the world, no monarch e'er Was half so haughty as a monarch player." The little actor replied by a feeble satire he called The Fribbleriad. But Churchill had enough to do to meet his other enemies that he had brought round his head like a swarm of mosquitoes. Foote wrote a satiric dialogue against him ; and pamphlets innumerable in reply to The Rosciad came out ; The Churchilliad, The Anti-Rosciad, The Farthing Candle, are three out of the crowd. He reserved himself for the larger quarry ; Smollett had attacked the satire in his journal The Critical Review. And in An Apology to the Critical Reviewers (1761), after acknowledg- ing the novelist's talent as second only to Fielding's (having " hailed the honours of thy matchless name "), he takes his other work to pieces ; Smollett had himself written satires, Advice (1746), and Reproof (1747), attempted a History of England (1757), and a tragedy The Regicide (1749)- Churchill laughs at him for these, but especially for the last ; " Others for plots and under-plots may call, Here's the right method have no plot at all." His success made him abandon his clerical dress and appear M 1 62 PERIOD OF PREPARATION in " blue and gold." Dean Pearce and his parishioners remonstrated ; he resigned, and threw himself completely into a life of literary bohemianism and dissipation ; he was free to sneer at both religion and morality. Yet in the same year (1761), we have signs of repentance and bitter- ness, as well as of rakishness, in his poetical epistle to Robert Lloyd, entitled " Night," which The Critical Review called "cold, long, dark, and dirty." In it he professes to flout the world and to turn the flank of its criticisms by defending open vice and contrasting with it the hypocritical virtue so common. He assumes the role of the manly man about town who is not ashamed of his peccadilloes, and of the manly poet and satirist who is proud of outraging poetical convention and rules of art. He delights in the freedom of his life and work ; " By custom safe, the poet's numbers flow Free as the light and air some years ago ; " (referring to the window-tax recently re-imposed) ; " No statesman e'er will find it worth his pains To tax our labours and excise our brains." The poem was inspired by Armstrong's Epistle to John Wilkes, a poem called Day. And it is from this time we must date the influence of the great demagogue upon the satirist. The rebellious genius of the two brought them together as the poet and the orator of the new revolutionism. The friends of Lord Bute had begun a newspaper called The Briton ; the two new allies started another called, in travesty of it, The North Briton, intended to attack the prime minister and the king who favoured him. The two chief points of attack were their nationality ; the one was a Scotchman, the other was a German, by descent ; and they were therefore incapable of ruling Englishmen and must be tyrants. Johnson and Junius from different camps showed the same intolerance of Scottish influence, as Swift had shown it before them. The Union had brought down to London a number of poets and place-hunters, critics and physicians to seek fortune ; just as the accession of James the First had done. Ireland, Wales, North England, and the other sections of Britain had already been in the habit of contributing their best talent to the literature, politics, and professions of the great metropolis. Only the second or THE POETRY 163 third rate ability emigrated from Scotland at that time ; for it had vigorous literary and professional centres of its own, in which men, like Hume and Adam Smith, Burns and Scott, found appreciative audiences. It was natural then that this hostility to Scotchmen should become a commonplace of satire in London, where so many of them seemed to succeed without much ability. Bute's influence over the king con- centrated the gall. And The North Briton spent its best energies in giving it expression. Churchill devoted himself to articles in the paper ; but preferred rhyme. One article on the favourite theme he recast at the last minute into verse, and issued it early in 1763 under the name of "The Prophecy of Famine ; a Scottish Pastoral." His admirers thought it surpassed both Dryden and Pope ; and perhaps it does approach to The Rosciad in ability ; but it had its chief vogue from the popular hatred of Bute and the fear of another Jacobite rising in Scotland ; some of the couplets are good ; Jockey " With mickle art could on the bagpipes play, E'en from the rising to the setting day ; Sawney as long without remorse could bawl Home's madrigals and ditties from Fingal. " "The plague of locusts they secure defy ; For in three hours a grasshopper must die. No living thing, whate'er its food, feasts there, But the chameleon who can feast on air." But as usual with Churchill there is more invective than- wit, more personal abuse than satire. In this very poem he confesses that " no judgment tempers " him, he " boasts no merit but mere knack of rhyme," "short gleams of sense and satire out of time"; whilst ''taste with contempt beholds" him "uncouth." Falconer replied by The Demagogue, not published till 1765, too late for Churchill to answer ; it is as overdrawn a piece of abuse of Pitt and his champions in heroic verse ; it rails at every principle that the progressive and revolutionary party respected, and joins Pitt with Wilkes as a "bellowing demagogue," who "disembogues" "expressions of immeasurable length," "splay-footed words that hector, bounce, and swagger." What enrages him most is " England shall rule America no more " ; " Howl on, ye ruffians ! * Liberty and Wilkes.' " ' 164 PERIOD OF PREPARATION He talks of Churchill's "clumsy club" and his "feeble meteor-ray." But before the satire could be issued Churchill had died of fever at Boulogne ; he had gone to join his exiled friend Wilkes in France in October 1764. 3. Hogarth had also replied to his satire in his first print of The Times caricaturing Pitt and other Whigs. Churchill retaliated in The North Briton. On Wilkes's trial for the attack on the king in the 45th number Hogarth caricatured the demagogue. The satirist defended his friend in his Epistle to William Hogarth (1763), acknowledging the painter's talents, but attacking his opinions and weak- nesses. It brought out from the artist the print of the poet as a bear in canonicals with a beer-pot in one paw and a cudgel in theother. Churchill said he was kept from retaliation by "the woman whom he loved," his last romance of vice. In The Conference (1763) he attempted to defend his character, and in one passage rises almost to pathos in the expression of remorse ; " 'Tis not the babbling of a busy world, Where praise and censure are at random hurlM, Which can the meanest of my thoughts control, Or shake one settled purpose of my soul. Free and at large might their wild courses roam, If all, if all alas ! were well at home. No, 'tis the tale which angry Conscience tells." He had evidently drawn swarms of enemies around him and in the turmoil he had begun to appeal for pity. But he continued his crusades ; The Duellist appeared in the same year (1763), satirising a social custom that still survived times of constant warfare. He had already in 1762 attempted to laugh down a superstition, that was as hard to kill, in The Ghost, his longest poem, and in the style of Swift's octosyllabics ; in this he gave a portrait of Johnson who never forgave him for it ; for it was near enough to fact to strike home ; " Pomposo, insolent and loud, Vain idol of a scribbling crowd, Whose every name inspires an awe, Whose every word is sense and law ; " " Who, cursing flattery, is the tool Of every fawning, flattering fool ; " "Who makes each sentence current pass, With ' puppy ' , ' coxcomb ' , ' scoundrel ' , ' ass' ; " THE POETRY 165 " Who, to increase his native strength, Draws words six syllables in length ". The year in which he died was his busiest; during it he issued no less than six satires, each of some length, The Candidate, The Author, Gotham, The Farewell, The Times, and Independence. Cowper, his old schoolfellow at Westmins- ter and his life-long defender, considered Gotham, which was a picture of the true "patriot-king", as his best, "a noble and beautiful poem ". The Author is the most personal, The Times most repulsive. The Farewell almost prophetic in its appeal against the desecration of his grave, Independence most interesting as somewhat autobiographi- cal ; in this last he paints his own portrait and that not a flattering one ; late in life " He started up a fop, and, fond of show, Looked like another Hercules turn'd beau ". This " comet of a season " , as Byron calls him, in his elegy over Churchill's grave, blazed out and fell into oblivion almost as soon as the earth was over him. Devoted though he was to Wilkes, (Hogarth calls him "Wilkes's toad-echo"), the revolutionary "patriot" forgot his last wishes to write his biography, and save his memory from desecration. Lloyd, his friend, died of grief at his death, and his fiancee, Churchill's sister, died with the double shock of bereave- ment. The only friend that cherished his memory long was the gentle Cowper, who spoke of him as " the great Churchill", and, as late as 1782, inserted in his Table Talk N a panegyric and analysis of his genius, closing thus ; "The laurel seemed to wait on his command, He snatched it rudely from the Muses' hand ". Section 12. I. But his satires continued to inspire most satiric attempts from the side of the Opposition during the rest of the century. We can see a close study of his style in the personal abuse and invective of the Letters of Junius (1769- 1772), though they were in prose. His influence is apparent in the satires that Chatterton attempted. This " marvellous boy " began to write poetry when he was at school in Bristol, his native place. He sent several of his productions to Felix Farley's Bristol Journal. Many of them are l66 PERIOD OF PREPARATION satirical and are in the octosyllabic verse of Churchill's Ghost. This poem appeared in 1763, when the charity school boy was eleven years of age. He must have been deeply impressed by its popularity. For in all his earliest satires he shows the most careful study of it. In Farley's Journal of January 7th, 1764 appeared "The Churchwarden and the Apparition," which is evidently Chattertons' and is an attack upon some churchwarden of St. Mary Redcliffe who had ordered the levelling of the churchyard and was taking the clay to make bricks ; in it Conscience appears to him when he is at his ghoulish task and makes " Joe " , as he is called, desist. The poem begins in the same way as Sly Dick, another satire of this same period of his life, with the description of a winter night ; " The night was cold, the wind was high, And stars bespangled all the sky ". In this latter an apparition also appears and gives Sly Dick advice. A third, Apostate Will, is in the same metre, and attacks some tradesman who veered from the Church to the Wesleyans and back to suit his pocket. Only three of his later and political satires adopt this verse, a fragment called Fables for the Court, "Journal 6th. Saturday Sept. 3oth. 1769", (consisting of three pieces, one a conversation between a dean and a rector, the second a portrait of a rake, and the third an ode attacking Whitefield and his doctrines), and The Prophecy, attacking Bute and the king. All his others are. in the heroic couplet and are manifestly modelled on Churchill's political poems. They are on the side of the Opposition, and adopt his principles and methods of personal abuse. They are tinged with revolutionism, make gross attacks on the character of The Princess Dowager of Wales, the widow of George the Third's father, the king, Bute, and his followers. They adopt Churchill's fury against Scotland and Scotchmen, and adore Wilkes. He refers only once to his model by name ; but he imitates his rhythms, rhymes, phrases, and references. , He mingles with these echoes attacks on Bristol dignitaries,^ and on the new objects of popular hostility, Grafton and North. They have much of the vigour of Churchill's and all their fatal fluency of verse. The most extensive is Kew Gardens, a coarse attack on the mother of George the Third THE POETRY 167 and her supposed relations to Lord Bute. It is full of asterisks for names suppressed. But he has no compunction in introducing the name of any Bristolian against whom he had felt pique ; Broderip, an organist who had turned him out of the organ-loft, Catcott, a clergyman who had told him the faults of his poems, and Bishop Newton, and Dean Barton as dogmatic authorities his natural enemies. It was written by March 1769; and he tried to get it into "a patriotic newspaper" of a printer Edmunds. But it evidently did not reach the light; for he used its 1500 lines during the last feverish months of his life as a quarry out of which he could hew new political satires. The Whore of Babylon, another attack on Lord Bute, this time without any mask of asterisks, has 600 lines from it. It is called Book the First, and was evidently intended to extend to several books. There are only one or two references to the Princess of Wales ; and Mansfield, North, Colonel Luttrell, Warburton, and the Bristol church dignitaries suffer ; but it is Samuel Johnson that is most severely handled, partly because Churchill had attacked him, and partly because he had accepted a pension from the Tory government: everyone who had received any favour from Bute or his friends was to him, as to Churchill, an enemy of freedom and his country. He refers to Johnson's belief in the reality of the famous Cock-lane ghost for which Churchill had laughed at the great cham ; and he represents him as dead and resurrected as a ghost. Bute had "with royal favour pensioned Johnson dead"; "his ghost is risen in a venal theme ". " Some blockhead, ever envious of his fame, Massacred Shakespeare in the doctor's name ". The "Rambler will no longer roam"; "released from servitude", "he'll prove it perfect happiness to drink"; Irene, his play, put the theatre asleep and " critics snor'd applause ". Sawney, as he, following Churchill, calls Bute, "actuates" like a divinity, the system of things; " The clockwork of thy conscience turns about, Just as his maxims wind thee in and out." " Rest Johnson, hapless spirit, rest and drink. No more defile thy claret glass with ink." No wonder the literary dictator of the time called him " a 1 68 PERIOD OF PREPARATION vulgar, uneducated stripling", "a whelp." The echo ot Churchill was too smart and too transparent. He had even caught Churchill's Voltairian sneer at Christianity, and Churchill's boast of open immorality; " Woman of every happiness the best Is all my heaven religion is a jest." He seems to feel his genius and fate to have close affinity and likeness to such literary bohemians as Churchill and Savage. " Nay prudent neighbours (who can read) would see Another Savage to be starved in me." He descends from literature and politics "to lash the ministers of God ", " where Revolution's farthing candle shines ", and " conscience is a prostitute for pay ". 2. In his satire called Happiness (1769), his free thinking and free morality are still more pronounced ; " opinion is the only God we know " ; " Where's the foundation of religion placed? On every individual's fickle taste ". " Conscience, the soul-chameleon's varying hue, Reflects all notions, to no notion true ". " The saint and sinner, fool and wise, attain An equal share of easiness and pain ". He laughs at " the useless bolt of vengeance " divine, and at "priestcraft" "father of misery, origin of sin ". He was, like Churchill and the more advanced thinkers of his age, against all authority in the universe as well as in England. It was revolutionism moving in his blood. And for such a boy it reaches great vigour of expression in this poem. That he would, when he had reached the higher, broader views of wisdom, have developed into a genius of the foremost rank, is indicated by its satiric power and pathetic pessimism ; " Content is happiness, as sages say But what's content ? The trifle of a day ". '* Since happiness was not ordaine.d for man, Let's make ourselves as easy as we can ". Of a divine, " Praise him for sermons of his curate bought, His easy flow of words, his depth of thought ; His great devotion when he drawls to pray ". THE POETRY 169 Of a young scholar ; " He rings bob-majors by Leibnitzian rules". In his Epistle to the Reverend Mr. Catcott (December 1769) he again plays with the edged tools of Voltaire and Churchill, and laughs at the same time at the clergyman's dabbling in geology and chemistry ; in it there are many successful phrases and couplets ; " if angels contradict me, angels lie " ; " all have intervals of being vain " ; " we need not inspiration how to see "; " infallibility is not for men " ; " we trample on our God, for God is earth " ;