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 " ; 
 
 <f If God made order, order never made 
 
 Such nice distinctions in the preaching trade ". 
 
 In A Defence, written later in the month, he reiterates his 
 belief in reason as our only guide, ("Religion's but Opinion's 
 bastard son ", and the man who thinks for himself " is to 
 himself the minister of God ".), at the same time 
 protests against his being taken for an atheist, ("I own a 
 God, immortal, boundless, wise."), and claims tolerance for 
 all creeds. In "Sunday a fragment", and in a "Frag- 
 ment ", dated October 28th. he becomes flippant if not 
 coarse. Half of this rebellious mood was second-hand, 
 affected to ape Churchill, half was due to his hard fate and 
 the sensitive nature that it threatened to crush. He had a 
 marvellous power of self-effacement, of assuming a role, and 
 this, if developed, might have resulted in a great dramatic 
 genius. As it was, it only fitted him to imitate the newest 
 fashion amongst the revolutionists whom he most admired. 
 In Resignation, another political satire in heroic verse, 
 which he manufactured out of Kew Gardens, we think we 
 hear the voice of Churchill as we read. Its seven or eight 
 hundred lines are made up of the aptest imitations of his 
 favourite sarcasms against Bute and scandals concerning the 
 Princess of Wales, the Carlton Sybil, as he calls her. There 
 are symptoms of a better ideal, an occasional picture of a 
 scene in nature, an occasional piece of indignant eloquence ; 
 but it is, like his model, often mean and scurrilous in 
 professing to be manly, and personal in attempting to be 
 witty ; and some passages would seem coarse even to last 
 century. In The Consuliad he goes back to Pope for his 
 model. It is a mock-heroic description of a banquet in 
 
1 70 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 which political supporters of the ministry come to blows. 
 Yet even here we feel he is but echoing Churchill. That 
 most of his satirical opinions and tone were taken from that 
 poet is confirmed by a look at his prose letters, which, under 
 the signature of Decimus, he contributed to the Middlesex 
 Journal in the early part of 1770. They are bald imitations 
 of Junius and yet much of their material is from his inspirer ; 
 for example, he addresses one to the Princess of Gotham, 
 that is, the Princess of Wales, in allusion to Churchill's satire 
 " Gotham ", and in it apostrophises Charles the First in 
 terms that are taken straight from " The Candidate " and 
 made into prose ; to quote one sentence, " hadst thou died 
 quietly and in peace, thou hadst died infamous ", echoes 
 
 " Hadst thou in peace and years resigned thy breath 
 thy name had been in pieces torn". 
 
 And the purpose of the apostrophe is the same to show 
 the evil that a woman does in standing between a monarch 
 and a people by her lies. 
 
 3. The only use of the didactic that he made in the 
 heroic couplet was in a descriptive poem called Clifton, 
 remarkable only as painting his native place, and as an 
 elegant apostrophe to the memory of a tragedian called 
 Powell, and in two most pathetic anticipations of his death, 
 Sentiment, some seven lines written in 1769 in defence of 
 suicide, and the farewell satiric address to the Bristolians 
 who had given him small loans, included in his ironical will 
 written on April 2oth, 1770, two days before he left for 
 London ; in this last there is some vigorous irony, and it 
 breaks off with 
 
 " Poor superstitious mortals ! wreak your hate 
 Upon my cold remains " ; 
 
 he had intended to commit suicide, but the document 
 having been found by his master the attorney Lambert on 
 his office desk, he was dissuaded ; and he postponed the act 
 till August 24th in the same year. In the prose of this will 
 he says "the most perfect masters of human nature in Bristol 
 distinguish me by the title of the Mad Genius; therefore, if I 
 do a mad action, it is conformable to every action of my life, 
 which all savoured of insanity " ; "I give and bequeath to 
 Mr. Matthew Mease a mourning ring with this motto * Alas 
 
THE POETRY IJI 
 
 poor Chatterton ', provided he pays for it himself"; and his 
 epitaph was to be ''Reader, judge not; if thou art a 
 Christian believe that he will be judged by a superior 
 Power to that Power alone is he now answerable ". 
 There is great satiric vigour in the document ; in fact, it has 
 a strong resemblance to Hamlet's graveyard humour 
 without imitation, although the writer was not much more 
 than seventeen years old. 
 
 Section 13. 
 
 I. The lighter social satire, which also prevailed at this 
 time beside the political, had little influence on his 
 productions. It was generally written in some other metre 
 than the heroic couplet often a long line in dactylic metre, 
 and sometimes in the form of the ode. The best represent- 
 ative of the former was The New Bath Guide (1766) of 
 Christopher Anstey, a tripping, witty, sometimes coarse de- 
 scription of the fashionable crowds that came to the wells and 
 their amusements. It was his style and verse that Goldsmith 
 took as his model in his lighter satires, A Haunch of Venison, 
 and Retaliation. The latter is best represented by the 
 satirical poems of Dr. John Wolcot (1738-1819), who wrote 
 under the name of Peter Pindar. Though he generally 
 rejected the old heroic couplet, and anticipating the new 
 movement in rhythm attempted the greatest variety in verse, 
 the mantle of Churchill really fell upon him. He shared 
 his facility, his personality of invective, his versatility in 
 theme, his disregard for all authority, his coarseness and 
 bohemianism, his flippancy, and his quickness of wit. He 
 began to write not long after the death of Churchill ; but 
 he did not begin his mock-laureateship of the people till about 
 T 7^5) when, after adventures as a clergyman in Jamaica, 
 and as a medical man in his native Cornwall, he settled in 
 London, and issued his Odes to the Royal Academicians. 
 He took up the role of Churchill in personal attack upon 
 George the Third. Yet there was less bitterness in his 
 satire, more of that easy good-humour, which should belong 
 to the true bohemian. He laughed at the simplicity of the 
 king, at his childish wonder over the obvious, at his fondness 
 for truisms, repetitions, and questions, and at other personal 
 
172 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 peculiarities. He generally chose an anecdote or incident 
 in George's life and told it in varied and tripping verse ; an 
 order that all the cooks in the palace should have their 
 heads shaved because of a parasite found in a royal dish 
 occasioned The Lousiad (1786), a burlesque of heroic 
 poems ; the famous inquiry as to how the apples got inside 
 the old wife's apple dumplings, his visit to Whitbread's 
 brewery, and similar topics, kept Wolcot busy making 
 London laugh. Boswell, Whitehead, the laureate, Banks 
 the naturalist, Bruce the traveller, were other favourite 
 themes. He poured out his burlesque odes and lyrics for 
 thirty years, gathering them together into complete editions 
 at intervals. And, though some of his versified anecdotes 
 have remained favourites with provincial reciters, his work 
 has as a whole been forgotten, so flimsy and coarse was 
 most of it. 
 
 2. About the time he settled in London he had a serious 
 rival to his claims as the successor of Churchill in The 
 Rolliad. This was a series of Opposition satires that 
 appeared in the newspapers during the years 1784 and 1785. 
 They began with a burlesque criticism of an imaginary epic 
 on Colonel Rolle ; they continued, more in Peter Pindar's 
 style, with Probationary Odes for the Laureateship, and 
 Political Eclogues ; and were all collected under the name 
 of the initiatory effort. Various Whig politicians and wits 
 contributed, such as Lord John Townsend, General 
 Burgoyne, General Fitzpatrick, Sir R. Adair, Tickell, and 
 George Ellis, minor poets, and Richardson a comedian. Dr. 
 Laurence directed the crusade, and edited the collection. 
 
 Section 14. 
 
 I. The success of this undertaking suggested to a small 
 .circle of literary supporters of the reactionary government 
 of Pitt the possibility of counteracting by a similar series 
 of satires the revolutionary doctrines and fervour so rife 
 amongst the strongest English thinkers and writers. They 
 started a weekly satirical paper, The Anti-Jacobin, at the 
 close of 1797. The editor was William Gifford, who had 
 already distinguished himself as a satirist ; but the moving 
 
THE POETRY 173 
 
 spirit was George Canning, who had just become under- 
 secretary of state, and who was afterwards to distinguish 
 himself so greatly as a statesman and orator : a third writer 
 was John Hookham Frere, who afterwards translated 
 Aristophanes, and, with his burlesque poem The Monks and 
 The Giants (1817), gave the model to Byron for his best 
 satires. A fourth was George Ellis, the antiquarian, who 
 had contributed to the Whig Rolliad and who published 
 Specimens of the Early English Poets (1790). Lord 
 Morpeth, afterwards Earl of Carlisle, Lord Mornington 
 afterwards Marquis Wellesley, Baron Macdonald, and a 
 few others also contributed ; but most of the paper was 
 written by the first four, and three of these had satirical 
 talent, that approached to genius. It is little wonder then 
 that many of the poems promised for a time to outlive their 
 themes. 
 
 2. The periodical started on November 2oth. 1797, and 
 appeared every Monday morning thereafter, till its vehemence 
 of attack threatened to detach the more moderate like 
 Wilberforce from the Government, and, at the suggestion 
 of Pitt, who had contributed a few articles and one or two 
 verses, it was stopped early in July 1798. The Anti-Jacobin 
 Review and Magazine, a monthly, at once took its place 
 and ran till 1821 ; but the old contributors were not on its 
 staff, and it became heavy and dull. The New Anti-Jacobin 
 Review went through three numbers in 1827, and the New 
 Anti-Jacobin through two in 1833. 
 
 3. Nothing throws so much light on the varied and 
 wide-spread revolutionism of the time. According to the 
 prospectus, written by Canning, it did not confine itself to 
 politics. It preferred "the country we live in " to France or 
 the world ; " in morals we are equally old-fashioned " and 
 adhere to principle, and not individual tastes; " we reverence 
 law ; we acknowledge usage ; we look even upon prescription 
 without hatred or horror"; it rejected the doctrine "that 
 every man who can divest himself of a moral sense in theory 
 has a right to be with impunity and without disguise a 
 scoundrel in practice " ; conscientious atheism and conscien- 
 tious murder it alike condemns, in short all "Jacobinism". 
 
174 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 It intended to show up the misrepresentations of the Morning 
 Chronicles, Morning Posts, Stars, and Couriers. And it 
 indicated that it thought there was Jacobinism in literary style 
 as in everything else. It objected to new experiments in 
 poetry, and began by attacking Southey for his sapphics 
 unryhmed imitations of Greek verse. The second number 
 contains the famous burlesque "The Friend of Humanity 
 and The Knife-grinder." The sympathisers with the 
 Revolution professed to rise above country and love 
 Humanity ; one of them meets a broken-down knife- 
 grinder and asks him to tell his story of the tyranny that 
 reduced him to this state ; 
 
 " Bleak blows the blast ; your hat has a hole in't, 
 
 So have your breeches ! " 
 " Story ! God bless you ! I have none to tell, sir " , 
 
 the wanderer replies ; he got the holes in a drunken scuffle ; 
 he never meddles with politics, and asks for a sixpence ; the 
 friend of humanity becomes indignant; 
 
 " I give the sixpence ! I will see thee damned first, 
 Spiritless outcast", 
 
 and " kicks the knife-grinder, overturns his wheel, and exit 
 in a transport of Republican enthusiasm and universal 
 philanthropy ". It was a parody of Southey's The Widow, 
 telling the story of her vain appeal for pity and her death ; 
 
 " Worn out with anguish, toil, and cold, and hunger, 
 Down sunk the wanderer ; sleep had seized her senses ; 
 There did the traveller find her in the morning 
 God had released her." 
 
 In the prose introduction, Canning, who was the writer, 
 explains that a Jacobin principle widely spread was "the 
 natural and eternal warfare of the poor and rich". " A 
 human being in the lowest state of penury and distress is a 
 treasure to a reasoner of this cast." In the first number, 
 Southey had been already attacked for his blank verse 
 " Inscription for the Apartment in Chepstow Castle, where 
 Henry Marten the Regicide was imprisoned thirty years.' 
 "We have not been able to find one good or true poet, of 
 sound principles and sober practice " ; " good morals ", and 
 "good politics" seemed "inconsistent with the true spirit 
 of poetry". So the writers will resort to "the Jacobin 
 Muse" to illustrate "the principles on which the poetical 
 
THE POETRY . 175 
 
 as well as the political doctrine of the New School is 
 established," and give imitations. "The poet in all ages 
 has despised riches and grandeur. The Jacobin poet 
 improves this sentiment into a hatred of the rich and the 
 great." He rejects all patriotism, and expands it " so as to 
 comprehend all mankind ". " Our poet points the thunder 
 of his blank verse at the head of the recruiting sergeant, or 
 roars in dithyrambics against the lieutenants of press-gangs ". 
 His muse " is betrayed by her drunken swagger and ruffian 
 tone ". The burlesque here is An Inscription for the door 
 of the cell in Newgate where Mrs. Brownrigg, the 'Prentice- 
 cide was confined previous to her Execution. The original 
 runs; 
 
 "Often have these walls 
 Echoed his foot-steps, as with even tread 
 He paced around his prison " ; 
 and ends; 
 
 " Blessed hopes awhile 
 From man withheld, even to the latter days, 
 When Christ shall come, and all things be fulfill'd ". 
 
 The burlesque runs ; 
 
 ' ' Often have these cells 
 Echoed her blasphemies, as with shrill voice 
 She screamed for fresh Geneva ", 
 
 and closes ; 
 
 "Harsh laws ! But time shall come, 
 When France shall reign, and laws be all repeal'd ". 
 
 This shows how indiscriminate was the attack. Every 
 production and writer that thought of man as idealised or 
 above his existing condition, every aspiration after something 
 nobler, every lament over the state of the world was taken 
 as belonging to the current of revolutionism. Southey had 
 republican ideals, and even for a brief space thought of 
 founding with Coleridge a socialistic community in America; 
 but these poems that are here burlesqued have nothing in 
 them that would not be considered to-day as the natural 
 theme or atmosphere of poetry. So in the closing poem of 
 the series, " The New Morality," by Canning, we have 
 Charles Lamb quoted as a prominent republican, though 
 he had no interest in politics or the Revolution. 
 
 " Coleridge and Southey, Lloyd and Lamb and Co, 
 Tune all your mystic harps to praise Lepaux " ; 
 
 " Lepaux, whom atheists worship, at whose nod, 
 Bow their meek heads the men without a God ". 
 
176 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 4. This is a long satire in the heroic couplet, attacking 
 the French republic, its sympathisers in England, and all 
 the doctrines that had been formulated by Godwin in his 
 Political Justice. It attacks 
 
 " The New Philosophy of modern times 
 Sprung from that parent of ten thousand crimes " ; 
 
 the " New Philanthrophy ", 
 
 " beneath whose baneful sway 
 Each patriot passion sinks, and dies away ", 
 
 " sweet Sensibility ", " sweet child of sickly Fancy ", nursed 
 by Rousseau, " to lisp the story of his wrongs and weep ", 
 and with Sterne " o'er a dead Jackass " to " pour the pearly 
 shower", and yet to "hear unmoved of crimes, that blot the 
 age, the world with shame ", and " hope that all is for the 
 best"; the new Freedom, the new Justice, "whose blood- 
 stain'd book one sole decree, one statute fills, ' The People 
 shall be free'", the new Candour ; (" Thou drivelling virtue 
 of this moral age ". which finds " Black's not so black, nor 
 white so very white ",); 
 
 " But of all plagues, good Heav'n, thy wrath can send, 
 Save, save, oh ! save me from the Candid Friend ". 
 
 The latter half of it is an ironical invocation to Lepaux, one 
 of the directors of the republic, with a description, 
 (occasionally coarse), of the prominent republicans, and a 
 eulogy of Burke. 
 
 5. The writers parody a song to British liberty by the 
 dellacruscan Member of Parliament, Andrews, a poem by 
 William Roscoe on the anniversary of the publication of 
 The Declaration of Rights, the old ballad style in laughing 
 at the Dukes of Bedford and Northumberland, who had 
 attempted to evade the new taxation, the heroic couplets of 
 Payne Knight's Progress of Civil Society in the witty 
 Progress of Man, Gray's Hymn to Adversity, Darwin's Loves 
 of the Plants in the amusing Loves of the Triangles, 
 Glover's Admiral Hosier's Ghost, Suckling's Ode to a Lover, 
 an ode of Catullus, and several odes of Horace. 
 
 6. By far the best are the longest, The Progress of Man, 
 The Loves of the Triangles, and The Rovers, a burlesque of 
 the new German plays. For they go to the very heart of 
 
THE POETRY 177 
 
 the new revolutionism. They do not attack mere sympathy 
 with the political movements in France, but all the social, 
 emotional, and intellectual results of the revolutionary 
 movements. We have seen that the Anti-Jacobin connected 
 even the new metres, the free use of blank verse, the. 
 reintroduction of the ballad, and the new use of unrhymed 
 Greek verse with the dangerous spirit that was threatening 
 everything established. It finds the very strongholds of 
 literary conservatism the long didactic poem in heroic 
 couplet, and the light comedy to be harbouring the new 
 enemies of prescription and authority. Erasmus Darwin 
 with his Linnsean idea of sexualism as penetrating into all 
 spheres of life, and Payne Knight with his Rousseauish 
 belief in the simplicity and happiness of natural society, and 
 adoption of Godwin's belief in the perfectibility of human 
 nature if conventions and laws and governments were 
 stripped off it, appropriated the old heroic couplet and 
 didactic purpose ; whilst Benjamin Thomson, afterwards the 
 famous scientist, Count Rumford, and Sheridan the famous 
 theatrical manager, comedy-writer, and revolutionary orator, 
 had translated The Stranger, a sentimental comedy from the 
 German Kotzebue, choosing the prose form of Steele and 
 Goldsmith intermixed with lyric. The whole of English 
 literary power seemed drifting over to the side of revolution ; 
 and the new military genius Buonaparte seemed as if he 
 were about to carry the new principles into every corner of 
 Europe. Something had to be done to help Pitt and the 
 reactionary government in their endeavour to stem this 
 torrent of revolutionism. Canning was the man, who saw, 
 how protean was the new movement, how its spirit pene- 
 trated all the new English literature, and in these three 
 satires, and The New Morality, of which he was the chief 
 author, he tried to ridicule it in all its phases ; the other 
 verses of the Anti-Jacobin never get beneath the surface ; 
 they laugh at its minor incidents and political results. What 
 he failed to see was that the movement had begun more 
 than half a century before in English literature, and that, 
 though the reactionary government of which he was a 
 member might by the military achievements of its armies 
 postpone political reform a whole generation, revolutionism 
 was to mould English thought and literature during the 
 
 N 
 
Ij8 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 whole succeeding period and make them great. His 
 keenness of vision is most apparent in detecting the hated 
 spirit in the sentimental and romantic movements, in the 
 utilitarian ethics of Jeremy Bentham, in the new scientific 
 view of man as a portion of the animal creation and linked 
 to the vegetable creation by many habits and instincts, in 
 the socialistic view of marriage as a bondage invented by 
 priests and politicians, and in the influx of the new German 
 literature. In The Progress of Man love is shown to 
 penetrate all nature ; it 
 
 " Cools the crimpt cod, fierce pangs to perch imparts, 
 .Shrinks shrivelled shrimps, but opens oyster's hearts"; 
 
 " The same with plants potatoes 'tatoes breed, 
 Uncostly cabbage springs from cabbage seed "; 
 
 man only 
 
 " Starts from his rank and mars creation's plan " ; 
 " Resigns his native rights for meaner things, 
 
 For faith and fetters, laws and priests and kings ". 
 
 He learns the taste for blood " and millions perish that a 
 king may reign"; marriage in the South Seas is described as 
 seen by Captain Cook; "no hireling Bonzes chant the mystic 
 rite " ; whereas in Britain, 
 
 " One man with one unceasing wife 
 
 Plays the long rubber of connubial life ". 
 
 The quotation from the poem closes with praise of 
 Kotzebue's play, as recently translated, calling it "The 
 Reformed Housekeeper ". 
 
 " On household cares intent with many a sigh 
 She turns the pancake and she moulds the pie ". 
 
 The Loves of the Triangles pursues the topic of the slavery 
 of marriage and the universality of love ; 
 
 " Nor you, ye legion friends of Church and Law, 
 
 Pollute these pages with unhallowed paw ! " 
 " For you no tangents touch, no angles meet, 
 No circles join in osculation sweet ". 
 
 The loves of the various mathematical figures are pursued 
 through all their devious romance ; 
 
 " Wanton Optics roll the melting eye " ; 
 " Alas that partial Science should approve 
 The sly Rectangle's too licentious love ". 
 
 Nor does the course of Parabola's or Hyperbola's love run 
 smooth. So, in " happy France " 
 
THE POETRY 179 
 
 " Reform greets Terror with fraternal kiss " ; 
 " Where mild Philosophy first taught to scan 
 The wrongs of Providence and Rights of Man ". 
 
 The Republican Directorate comes as the climax. 
 Isosceles wooes "coy Mathesis"; 
 
 " Where'er he moves, she sees his tall limbs trace 
 Internal angles equal at the base ; 
 Again she doubts him, but produced at will 
 She sees th' external angles equal still ". 
 
 At last " blest Isosceles " leads " the enamoured maid " to 
 " the Asses' Bridge ". This suggests London Bridge 
 and the crowds that sail under it, "Lodi's blood-stained 
 Bridge ", with young Freedom gazing at it, and the floating 
 frame with the guillotine intended for the invasion of 
 England and the decapitation of Pitt. 
 
 8. In The Rovers Canning turns to the German stage, 
 and especially Schiller's Robbers, which sent " the whole of 
 a German university on the highway ", his Cabal and Love, 
 which attacked prime ministers and reigning dukes, Goethe's 
 Stella, "which ends by placing a man bodkin between two 
 wives," and Kotzebue's Stranger, where " to two swains one 
 nymph her vows" gives. In the prose introduction, Mr. 
 Higgins, the professed author, says, that, if the play " has a 
 proper run, it will do much to unhinge the present notions 
 of men with regard to the obligations of civil society ", give 
 them "a contemptuous disgust at all that is", and "set 
 them about doing what they like, where they like, when 
 they like, and how they like". "Destroy the frame of 
 society, and see the elements fighting one against another 
 every man for himself, (stripped of prejudice, of bigotry, 
 and of feeling for others), against the remainder of his 
 species ; and there is then some hope of a totally new order 
 of things." " The German theatre appears to proceed on 
 this judicious plan ". Germany had imbibed revolutionism 
 from France, and turned it into a form suited to the middle 
 classes, " painted the beauties of forgery in glowing colours ", 
 and " showed that the presumption of virtue is in favour of 
 rapine and occasional murder on the highway". The 
 moral of The Rovers is that of German dramas, "the 
 reciprocal duties of one or more husbands to one or more 
 wives and to the children who may happen to arise out of 
 
l8o PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 this complicated and endearing connection " ; "I have 
 omitted only the swearing to which English ears are not 
 yet sufficiently accustomed ". It was in short an attack on 
 the German " Illuminati ", who had adopted the principles 
 of French scepticism and revolutionism. The Prologue is 
 in heroic couplets ; but the play itself is in prose. In the 
 first act Matilda Pottinger, who is in search of Casimere, the 
 father of some of her children, and Cecilia Muckenfield on 
 the same errand, meet at an inn in Weimar and embrace ; 
 Casimere also arrives ; whilst Rogero, who had been 
 immured for his love for Matilda, is shown soliloquising in 
 his dungeon, " where patience beside the bottomless pool 
 of despondency sits angling for impossibilities", he says, 
 and singing his song which ends with Pitt's verse ; 
 " Sun, Moon, and thou vain World, adieu, 
 That king and priests are plotting in ; 
 Here doomed to starve on water gru- 
 el never shall I see the U- 
 niversity of Gottigen." 
 
 In the second act young Pottinger, Matilda's brother, 
 arrives at Weimar in search of her, and meets Puddingfield 
 and Beefington, two English exiles, who have just heard of 
 the signing of the Magna Charta. The third act is omitted 
 and is only described as repeating the final double arrangement 
 of Goethe's Stella. In the fourth or last Casimere and the 
 two Englishmen join the waiter, who is a Knight Templar 
 in disguise, and young Pottinger, in freeing Rogero. In 
 one speech of Casimere there is a manifest reference to 
 Goethe's Werther, and this famous novel is clearly meant to 
 be ridiculed in the amorous tangle, the exaggerated despair, 
 and the overdrawn expression of sentiment. 
 
 Section 15. 
 
 I. The Anti-Jacobin thus points out by its satire the 
 chief influences that were to mould nineteenth century 
 literature and the chief currents of thought and feeling that 
 were to flow through its greatest productions. It was 
 Canning who thus raised the satire above mere temporary 
 interests. Yet it was probably Gifford who directed his 
 attention to the new translations of German plays and their 
 popularity, (three different English versions of The Stranger 
 
THE POETRY l8l 
 
 appeared at this time). For he had in 1795 attacked them 
 in his Mseviad, a satire in heroic couplets modelled on 
 Horace, characterising them as "lumbering, monotonous 
 stupidity." But his chief satiric interest had been in the 
 style of the Dellacruscan school of poetry, which had 
 attempted dramas as well as odes, elegies, and didactic 
 poems. This is clear when we turn to his Baviad (1794), 
 which, paraphrasing Persius, deals wholly with this new 
 poetic degeneration. 
 
 2. One of the most singular phenomena in English 
 poetry was the sudden appearance in 1785 of a mania for 
 writing silly sentimentalism in the shape of sonnets, odes, 
 and elegies. It started with the English colony in 
 Florence. Mrs. Piozzi, the friend of Dr. Johnson, was the 
 best known amongst them ; most of the names have passed 
 into oblivion. But they gathered their productions into The 
 Florence Miscellany. They grew so proud of their mutual 
 admiration society and its verses that they soon began to 
 publish them in the English newspapers. A Mr. Robert 
 'Merry brought over the contagion to England, and, by a 
 sonnet to love, inoculated the readers of The World news- 
 paper with it. Another newspaper The Oracle, caught the 
 epidemic, and for some years it raged in the two. Merry 
 had signed himself Delia Crusca from the name of the 
 famous Florentine Academia della Crusca, devoted to' the 
 compilation of a dictionary, and to new editions of the 
 Italian poets. Another mutual admiration circle of verse- 
 writers sprang up, and, adopting names, which they thought 
 as romantic as Delia Crusca, kept up a continual volley of 
 sentimental panegyrics ; they took most of their pseudonyms 
 from the fiction of the time. The chief of them were Mrs. 
 Hannah Cowley, the dramatist, author of "A Bold Stroke 
 for a Husband ", Mrs. Robinson, the actress, Countess 
 Cowper, a Mr. Parsons, a Mr. Greathead, a Mr. Williams, a 
 Mr. Adney, a Mr. Weston, a Mr. Jerningham ; their poetic 
 names were Anna Matilda, Laura Maria, Edwin, Orlando, 
 Arley, Bertie, Pasquin, Yenda. The phenomenon was to 
 some extent a phase of Wertherism ; Goethe's Sorrows of 
 the Young Werther (1774) had made tears and sentimental 
 suicide fashionable. The latent revolutionism that could 
 
1 82 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 not find vent in politics or war sought it in literary weeping 
 and sentiment. Of course it had already found this 
 expression in Richardson's novels, in Rousseau's Julie, and 
 even in the Vicar of Wakefield. But Werther brought it to 
 a head. Hundreds, who felt the poetic sentiment and the 
 tendency to tears, persuaded themselves that they had the 
 burden of the world's sorrow upon them and also the genius 
 for poetry. It was the Florentine emigrants that opened 
 the sluicegates ; and everyone who could fit rhymes longed 
 to commit suicide in verse or drop a poetic tear upon a 
 suicide's grave. The most artificial feeling and imagery 
 came into vogue, and hid from the writers the fact that they 
 were writing nonsense. The epidemic spread into other 
 circles. Erasmus Darwin and the Lichfield set, including 
 Miss Seward, felt its effects ; and most of the women- 
 writers of the day and most of the novelists were touched by 
 the fashion. Of course it had much that was symptomatic 
 of the coming age in it ; there was much emotional appeal 
 to nature, if not insight into it ; it was the precursor of the 
 passionate expression of Shelley, Keats, and Byron ; and the 
 last began his career with his Hours of Idleness, consisting of 
 lyrics that were not far off the Dellacruscan ; it drew poetry 
 from the didactic to the lyrical and the emotional ; it roused 
 interest in the romance of love. But it had its falsetto 
 notes ; it exaggerated passion, preferred the morbid, filled 
 its writers with conceit, and substituted a new conventional 
 language and imagery for the old. On one side, the form, 
 it was the last term of the decay of the Pindaric ode of the 
 Gray and Collins school ; on the other, it was the first 
 premonition of a poetic revolution. John Bell, the 
 publisher of The World, gathered the poems into two 
 volumes called The British Album. And the only item of 
 the collection that has survived is the song, " Wapping old 
 Stairs ", by Mr. Parsons ; doubtless it survived because it 
 chose a lower plane of life and language than the others. 
 
 3. Gifford had a splendid field for satire in the book and 
 the fashion that produced it. And he wrote his Baviad just 
 at the turning of the tide. The new audience were 
 beginning to be tired of the iteration of threadbare 
 sentiments ; the British public were beginning to fear 
 
THE POETRY 183 
 
 the revolutionism that they had so long toyed with, and the 
 political reaction was about to set in. Wordsworth and 
 Coleridge were writing their Lyrical Ballads, and Southey 
 was giving expression to real passion. Verses like these, 
 then, were the natural prey of the satirist ; 
 " Thou couldst the tear of rapture weep, 
 And feed on agony, and banish sleep ". 
 "Then point where on the sod his tear 
 Fell from its crystal source so clear, 
 And there my mingling tear may sink 
 And the same dust its moisture drink." 
 "Disordered, lost, from hill to plain I run, 
 
 And with my mind's thick gloom obscure the sun ". 
 " Summer tints begemm'd the scene 
 
 And silky ocean slept in glossy green ". 
 " And gauzy zephyrs, fluttering o'er the plain, 
 On twilight's bosom drop their filmy rain". 
 
 " the explosion came, 
 
 And burst the o'er-charged culverin of shame ". 
 " O better were it ever to be lost 
 In black negation's sea than reach the coast ". 
 
 The Baviad did not burlesque, (the poems were already 
 burlesque,) but poured invective, scorn, and indignation 
 upon their authors in the style of Churchill with a touch of 
 Pope. It is in dialogue between a mild defender of the 
 school and the poet himself. Like the Anti-Jacobin, it is 
 not very discriminating in its attack, classifying with the 
 Dellacruscans Morton and Holcroft, the dramatists and 
 actors, and Kemble, the antiquarian and historian. It 
 seems also to satirise prose of the Johnsonian type, choosing 
 Beaufoy's travels in Africa as the specimen ; 
 
 " There Fezzan's thrum-capped tribes, Turks, Christians, Jews, 
 Accommodate, ye Gods ! their feet with shoes. 
 There meagre shrubs inveterate mountains grace, 
 And brushwood breaks the amplitude of space ". 
 But it is the Dellacruscan poetry it ridicules chiefly; 
 "Topham's fustian", "Reynolds' flippant trash", 
 " Andrews ' doggerel ", " Greathead's idiot line", "Bertie's 
 namby-pamby madrigals of love", "Cowley's ding-dong 
 chime " , " Thrale's laboured nothings " , " canker'd 
 Weston's loathsome rhymes", and "Merry's Moorfields 
 whine ". The Dellacruscans evidently considered that they 
 were more modern and "sweet" than Pope; their "tender 
 strains" called "for the moist eye, bow'd head, and 
 
184 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 lengthened drawl ". For Gifford apologises to the memory 
 of Pope for such desecration. He also sets " Burns' pure 
 healthful nurture" against this sickly and often prurient 
 sentiment, this " metromania ". 
 
 " Now fools and children void their brains by loads, 
 And itching grandams spawl lascivious odes ". 
 
 The morbid fashion spread to the aristocracy, t;o " lords and 
 dukes cursed with a sickly taste ". The movement was 
 manifestly connected with that amongst women for the 
 acquisition of the learning of men ; for Gifford describes a 
 meeting at Mrs. Piozzi's house, where the Dellacruscans 
 weep over and applaud a poem called "The Wreath of 
 Liberty " ; 
 
 " With lemonade he gargles first his throat 
 Then sweetly preludes to the liquid note ". 
 
 " The summons her blue-stocking friends obey 
 Lur'd by the love of Poetry and tea ". 
 
 The "abortive thoughts", "truth sacrificed to letters", 
 " sense to sound ", false glare, " incongruous images ", 
 " noise and nonsense ", that marked the school, were 
 combined with all the forward movements of the time, all 
 that might be called revolutionism. He even connects with 
 it the new fashion of studying and reviving the oldest 
 English literature. He afterwards himself edited the plays 
 of Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Ben Jonson. But that was 
 after the study of older English literature had come to be 
 completely established. When he wrote The Baviad, 
 conservatism, stirred by the Revolution, was militant, and 
 attacked everything that departed from the fashion 
 established by the age before. Hence his laughter at the 
 harmless study of books that preceded the period of Dryden 
 and Pope. 
 
 Section 16. 
 
 I. But he was right in affiliating this to revolutionism. 
 It was the study of the older literature that was to overthrow 
 the dominion of the Queen Anne writers, and give new 
 scope to poetic imagination. It was this study that was to 
 change the face of English literature, and make his own work 
 old-fashioned. In the Quarterly Review, of which he was 
 editor from its starting in 1808 till his death in 1826, he 
 
THE POETRY 185 
 
 kept up the crusade against all who gave expression to the 
 new spirit and taste, or who followed the older poets in 
 looking into nature direct Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, 
 Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, Hunt. He came himself from 
 the new audience ; he was the son of a small tradesman in 
 Devonshire (born 1756), and was sent to Oxford somewhat 
 late in life; Lord Grosvenor befriended him, and he repaid the 
 kindness by devoting all his talents to reaction in poetry, 
 criticism, and politics ; he adopted the style and canons of 
 the Queen Anne period, and struggled all his life, by aid of 
 its somewhat virulent weapons too, against their inevitable 
 effacement. His criticism, like his Baviad and his 
 Maeviad, and the Anti-Jacobin, was destined to become as 
 antiquated as the ideas and poetry that he defended. 
 
 2. The reactionary crusade that he conducted was not 
 natural to him, if we are to judge by his appreciation of 
 Burns. Had he followed his natural bent, and looked to 
 the signs of the times in the poetry of Chatterton and Blake, 
 Cowper and Burns, he would have seen that the artificial 
 standards of the earlier part of the century were about to 
 pass away ; he would not have spent his time on such a 
 temporary form as Queen Anne satire. All the currents of 
 poetry that we have already traced in the period, though full 
 of indications of the coming time, were of the immediate 
 past, and were about to vanish. Those that were to flow on 
 through the new age, through the nineteenth century, 
 had their sources in an older past, in a past that was nearer 
 to the natural fountains of national greatness. It was the 
 Elizabethan literature that was to mould the new passion ; 
 and it was even older literature (the floating debris of an 
 unwritten literature, the popular ballads and songs, the tales 
 and legends of a half-mythical Celtic past,) that was to give 
 the deepest impulse to the literary spirit. All that was 
 nearer to the springs of the feeling and imagination of the 
 people, to the new and larger audience, was certain to reappear 
 in poetry as soon as the Revolution had emancipated the 
 popular element. The Cavalier, Restoration, and Queen 
 Anne literature was written to please a small section of the 
 court, an aristocracy, that to some extent belonged 
 ethnographically, like most of the aristocracies of Central 
 
1 86 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 and Northern Europe, to a smaller-skulled, stronger-willed 
 race than the bulk of the people. The large-brained race, 
 that had come so much to the surface after tfre Reformation 
 by means of the drama and the struggle with the Armada, was 
 about to come to its own again in English literature and 
 English national life. Thanks to the industrial move- 
 ment, and the torrent of revolutionism that flowed through 
 Europe, it was to mould the imagination of England into 
 truly national forms. Even the aristocracy, which was 
 however recruited from its wealth, was to abandon its 
 old hunting and military pursuits, and to write and exercise 
 the arts for it. Hence it was that poetry went back for its 
 models and inspiration to the older English literature. 
 
 Section 17. 
 
 I. But it was certain to make false starts, to attempt 
 forms of the old that would not suit the new. One of these 
 was Spenserianism. Cowley, Dryden, and Pope professed 
 to have studied Spenser as their master ; but we see little or 
 no trace of him in their poetry. It is not till Shenstone's 
 Schoolmistress (1742) that we get clear marks of imitation 
 of the great Elizabethan poet. And these marks are com- 
 bined with such a sympathetic insight into nature, and a 
 Dutch minuteness of study of lowly human nature, as 
 anticipate the coming age. Shenstone (1714-1763) was a 
 true student of the older literature, as is shown by his 
 exquisite Pastoral Ballad ( 1743), which has caught the true 
 tone of the pastoral poetry of Robert Greene, George 
 Wither, and William Browne, even though it is in a new, 
 tripping, anapaestic measure, and by his ballad of Jemmy 
 Dawson (1747), which has something of the ballad 
 simplicity, although on a contemporary topic. His poetry, 
 taken as a whole, is, like that of Collins and Gray, a singular 
 medley of the Queen Anne age and the age of Cowper and 
 Burns, of the artificial and the natural. On every page 
 stand side by side the influence of Pope and that of the 
 new audience. His Songs and Ballads are all mere 
 pastoral artificialities, like those of Gay and Prior, except 
 Jemmy Dawson, which was written towards the close of his 
 life, when he was assisting Percy to gather his Reliques of 
 
THE POETRY 187 
 
 Ancient Poetry. His Odes prepared the way for Gray, as 
 for example in Rural Elegance written in 1750, and yet are 
 tinged with pseudo-classicism. His Moral Pieces are half 
 Popian, half like Thomson ; The Judgment of Hercules 
 (1741) is in heroic couplet, and, though touched with the 
 love of nature that runs through The Seasons, has more of 
 the didacticism of the Essay on Man ; Economy, The 
 Ruined Abbey, and Love and Honour are in blank verse ; 
 but the balance of the rhymed couplet guides the ear that 
 wrote them ; the Progress of Taste, the longest and the 
 most interesting, is in the octosyllabic couplet of Swift ; it is 
 autobiographic, describing the development of the poet's 
 mind, and, his usual topic, the narrowness of his fortunes ; 
 it is full of Naiads and Dryads, Damon and Delia, the 
 Muses and Apollo, and all the other classical conventionali- 
 ties of the Queen Anne poetry; but there is a grace, an 
 appreciation of natural beauty, and a simple feeling that 
 anticipate the new time. His Levities, or Pieces of Humour, 
 are mere imitations of the society verses of Prior and Gay. 
 It is his Elegies that, in spite of their false echoes of Virgil's 
 Eclogues, are fullest of his long intercourse with nature, 
 whilst he was transforming his father's farm, The Leasowes, 
 into a garden ; they are deeply tinged with the melancholy 
 of a man, who, whilst loving the country, still sighed for the 
 city, who felt that, ambitious though he was, he was to live 
 and die in his birthplace ; all through them he repines at 
 the limits of fortune, and yet girds at the great and wealthy, 
 and praises simplicity ; he mourns over the sorrows of life, 
 (" how soon the pleasing novelty of life is o'er "), the 
 estrangement of a friend, untimely death, posthumous reputa- 
 tion, and yet, content with what he is, he will not go abroad. 
 They are in the same metre as Gray's famous Elegy, and 
 often anticipate its mournful sentiments and melody of 
 lamentation. In the eleventh elegy, for example, he bewails 
 the evanescence of youth's dream;- 
 
 " Ah me, my friend ! it will not, will not last ! 
 
 This fairy scene that cheats our youthful eyes ; 
 
 The charm dissolves ; the aerial music's past ; 
 
 The banquet ceases and the vision flies." 
 " Where are the splendid forms, the rich perfumes, 
 
 Where the gay tapers, where the spacious dome ? 
 
 Vanished the costly pearls, the crimson plumes, 
 
 And we delightless left to wander home." 
 
1 88 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 In the thirteenth, he tries to reconcile an estranged friend 
 and asks whether, if they met abroad, they would not 
 clasp each other's hand ; 
 
 " Life is that stranger land, that alien clime ; 
 Shall kindred souls forego their social claim ? 
 Launched in the vast abyss of space and time, 
 Shall dark suspicion quench the generous flame ? 
 " Then the keen anguish from thine eye shall start, 
 
 Sad as thou follow'st my untimely bier ; 
 ' Fool that I was if friends so soon must part, 
 To let suspicion intermix a fear ' ". 
 
 There is a personal note in them, and a pastoral note as 
 well, that do not belong to Gray's poem ; and unlike it, 
 they often fall into the prosaic, if not into bathos, as when 
 he devotes the eighteenth to a "lamentation over the state 
 of the woollen manufactory ", and meditates in the twenty- 
 first on the character of the ancient Britons, " written at the 
 time of a rumoured tax upon luxury" (1746). In spite of 
 their blemishes, they were the forerunners of Gray's Elegy, 
 and gave the sentiment, theme, metre, and often the imagery 
 and melody to that masterpiece. Johnson " damns them 
 with faint praise"; ("wanting combination, they want 
 variety " ; " the lines are sometimes smooth and easy " ; 
 "his diction is often harsh, improper, and affected "; "his 
 words ill-coined or ill-chosen ") ; and most critics since have 
 echoed his opinion. Burns is nearer the mark when he 
 says, " His divine elegies do honour to our language, our 
 nation, and our species " ; the Scotch poet shows in his 
 laments and songs traces of close study of them. But it is 
 The Schoolmistress that moulded The Cottar's Saturday 
 Night, and has kept his name alive. Gilbert West's On 
 the Abuse of Travelling (1739), a poem much praised by 
 Gray, had preceded it in date of publication as a Spenserian 
 poem in Spenserian stanza. But Shenstone is said to have 
 written his poem at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1736. 
 The combination of quaint humour and sympathetic obser- 
 vation, of archaic expression and modern realism of art, of 
 sounding heroic verse and homely theme, made it a favourite 
 all through the following century ; only recently has it 
 fallen into neglect. It takes the would-be elevated stand- 
 point of a student at college, and, softening the sublimity by 
 a touch of humour and of loving reminiscence, paints the 
 
THE POETRY 189 
 
 portrait of the dame under whose birch the poet in his 
 boyhood had doubtless often suffered ; there is indeed too 
 much of the birch in the poem as there probably was in the 
 school, although humour and pathos interchange upon the 
 subject. The picture of the " unruly brats " in school and 
 out of it is masterly andsympathetic ; 
 
 "They grieven sore in piteous durance pent, 
 Aw'd by the power of this relentless dame, 
 And ofttimes on vagaries idly bent. 
 For unkempt hair, or unconn'd talk, are sorely shent. " 
 
 The Spenserisms, which he deliberately adopts, are, like all 
 the eighteenth century reproductions of the past, loose and 
 inaccurate. So his imitation of Spenser's " simplicity " and 
 " peculiar tenderness of sentiment " is marred by the self- 
 conscious spirit that belongs to all the poetic art of the 
 Queen Anne period ; he adopts the mock-heroic and thus 
 departs completely from the atmosphere of the Elizabethan 
 poet. 
 
 2. The Castle of Indolence (1746) came four years after 
 The Schoolmistress, and, though less archaic, is nearer to 
 Spenser ; it is allegorical, it narrates the allegory as 
 adventures of knights, it introduces fiends and wonderful 
 castles and dungeons, and its diction does not rise so far 
 above its theme. Yet there is the taint of the Queen Anne 
 mock-heroic in it. Thomson (1700-1748) is conscious 
 that, in painting the horrors and downfall of Indolence the 
 magician and the victory of Sir Industry and his bard in the 
 British isles, he will arouse the laughter of the city wits, who 
 all know his indolent habits ; and so he tries to disarm their 
 jests by introducing burlesque portraits of himself and some 
 of his friends as inmates of the castle, " a bard more fat 
 than bard beseems ", " who loathed much to write, ne cared 
 to repent", and "a little round, fat, oily man of God", with 
 "a roguish twinkle in his eye"; his pictures of the scenes 
 upon "this ant-hill earth", viewed in the "huge, crystal, 
 magic globe " of vanity, of " the muckworm " at his desk with 
 his "scoundrel maxims", the "gaudy spendthrift heir"- 
 "the silly tenant of the summer air", the authors " scrawling 
 and scribbling " " to be praised " " when they can hear no 
 
IpO PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 more ", the politicians " shrugging the important shoulder ", 
 when, 
 
 " crown'd their cares, 
 In comes another set and kicketh them downstairs ", 
 
 the " most Christian kings " " with honourable ruffians in 
 their hire", "the languid beauties", ("their only labour was 
 to kill the time and labour dire it is and weary woe"), 
 Lethargy, Hydropsy, (" still he drank and yet he still was 
 dry "), Hypochondria, " mother of spleen ", Beggary, and 
 Scorn, have all a touch of satire, if not caricature, in them. 
 In his prose Advertisement he shows that he adopts 
 archaisms to give a quaint, and perhaps absurd, air to the 
 poem ; "The obsolete words and a simplicity of diction in 
 some of the lines border on the ridiculous ". Yet it is so 
 much influenced by the new currents of poetic inspiration 
 that 'it is, at least in its first book, the best and most 
 modern of Thomson's work. His Seasons come close to it 
 in attractiveness. But his long blank verse epic called 
 Liberty, (1735-1737), an historical account of the growth of 
 freedom, his Britannia (1727), his tragedies, Sophonisba 
 (1727), Agamemnon (1738), Edward and Eleonora (1739), 
 Tancred and Gismunda (1745), Coriolanus (posthumous), 
 all in blank verse, and his odes and songs, are frigid and 
 uninteresting compared with this. His best effort is his 
 last and his most imitative. Shenstone and he caught the 
 first inspiration of the new study of the older past, and, like 
 most pioneers, took the wrong track. Few poets followed 
 them in their choice of a model ; the stanza had to be 
 modified and made lighter, and the archaisms had to be 
 abandoned, before it could be moulded to the serious 
 passion of the nineteenth century by Burns and Shelley and 
 Keats, or to satire by Byron. 
 
 3. The only followers of these Spenserians in the 
 eighteenth century were two Scotchmen, William Julius 
 Mickle (1734-1788), the translator of the Lusiad (1775), 
 and best known as the writer of the ballad " Cumnor Hall ", 
 and the song " There's nae luck about the house ", and 
 James Beattie (1735-1803), the logic professor in Aberdeen, 
 and the author of a piece long well-known to school-books 
 and recitation-books The Hermit. Mickle's Spenserian 
 attempt was first published under the name of The 
 
THE POETRY 19 1 
 
 Concubine (1767), but in later editions, Syr Marty n ; it goes 
 farther than even The Schoolmistress in archaisms. 
 Beattie's Minstrel (1771, revised and continued 1774), 
 threw off almost all archaisms in its use of the stanza of 
 Spenser. According to the author's prose preface, he 
 " endeavoured to imitate Spenser in the measure of his 
 verse and in the harmony, simplicity, and variety of his 
 composition", and this because it seemed "from its gothic 
 structure and original to bear some relation to the subject 
 and spirit of the poem"; it allowed "the sententiousness of 
 the couplet as well as the more complex modulation of 
 blank verse." But subject and verse were the result and 
 symptom of the return to the far past for inspiration. The 
 poem professes " to trace the progress of a poetical genius 
 born in a rude age", till he appears "as a minstrel". And 
 the alternative title, "The Progress of Genius", seems to 
 show that it might have anticipated Wordsworth's Prelude. 
 But it is more a series of pictures of nature, and of a youth 
 conversant with nature than the narrative which it promises 
 to be at its beginning. The son of a shepherd, Edwin, 
 listens to the tales and ballads by the fire-side, and 
 communes with nature without^ and in the Second Book, 
 he comes across a hermit-sage, who intends to teach him all 
 the secrets of philosophy and science. But the poem closes 
 before the course of tuition has rightly begun. There is 
 the method of Akenside in it, metaphysics mingled with the 
 picturesque, and there are innumerable echoes of 
 Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Gray's Elegy, and even of 
 Goldsmith's Traveller, and Deserted Village. Yet the 
 result is a true product of the new poetic sentiment that was 
 arising with the expansion of the audience. One of the 
 finer stanzas will reveal this characteristic ; 
 
 " But who the melodies of morn can tell? 
 The wild brook babbling down the mountain-side, 
 The lowing herd, the sheepfold's simple bell, 
 The pipe of early shepherd, dim descried 
 In the lone valley, echoing far and wide 
 The clamorous horn along the cliffs above ! 
 The hollow murmur of the oceantide, 
 The hum of bees, the linnet's lay of love, 
 And the full choir that wakes the universal grove ". 
 
 His other poems are echoes of Gray or Collins, Odes to 
 
1 92 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 Peace and Hope, full of personified abstractions, Retire- 
 ment in short-lined stanzas, The Triumph of Melancholy, 
 The Judgment of Paris an Elegy, all in the verse and style 
 of Gray's Elegy, another Elegy in the heroic couplet, and 
 an invective against Churchill in the same, one or two 
 fables in Gay's octosyllabic verse, and a translation of 
 Virgil's Eclogues in the verse and style of Pope. 
 
 Section 18. 
 
 1. It was out of the Gothic revival that he grew ; he 
 often speaks of his " Gothic lyre ". So too did Gray, in 
 spite of his perpetual appeal to classical precedent, affiliate 
 to the new renaissance. He addressed an academic 
 audience, as so many poets of this period did, in place of 
 the audience of London coffee-house critics that Dryden 
 and Pope had appealed to. He lived all his literary life in 
 Cambridge, the only breaks being a long Continental 
 journey with Horace Walpole early in youth (1739-1741), a 
 trip into Scotland in 1765, and one to the English lakes in 
 1769. And this life he spent in reading, at first classics, 
 but afterwards history, travel, science, philosophy, and modern 
 literature, and in writing the few poems that he has left. It 
 was the academic standard that was in his mind whenever 
 he put pen to paper, and that is ever conservative ; if it 
 reaches beyond the studies of the universities, it is only as 
 far as the literature of the vanishing age. Dryden and 
 Pope were thus bound to fetter the imagination of Gray. 
 
 2. But he was also conscious of the new audience ; his 
 mother and aunts, whom he deeply loved, and whom he 
 kept visiting at Stoke near Windsor till their death, belonged 
 to it in all their sympathies ; and from this source welled in 
 upon his spirit the natural influences of the new sentiment, 
 the love of national literature, and even the sympathy with 
 
 xJthe lowly and obscure that was one of the main elements of 
 the nascent revolutionism. His Elegy in a Country 
 Churchyard was the unobstructed expression of this phase 
 of his life ; we can almost feel each stanza being moulded 
 amid the graves of Stoke church for the loving maternal ear 
 that listens for his return in the evening ; there is in it none 
 
THE POETRY 193 
 
 of the learning that usually choked his utterance ; and in 
 the revision of the poem, he substituted Hampden, Milton, 
 Cromwell, in one famous stanza for Cato, Tully, and Caesar, 
 and thus threw out the only classicism ; there is little of the 
 pseudo-classicism of the Queen Anne poetry. It is full or 
 the sentiments and emotions, the reflections and maxims, 
 that had become the commonplaces of middle class 
 households. And his fine ear and imagination, and his 
 long training enabled him to give these the simplest and 
 most melodious, nay, the final expression. Hence its 
 complete absorption into the consciousness of the new 
 audience, its adoption as almost the secular hymn of the 
 middle class. How nobly it expresses their sense of the 
 beauty of nature and especially of " parting day ", the time 
 sacred to happy yet sad reflection amongst all who have 
 their recurrent labour ! Then comes that poetry ot 
 reminiscence which was so to commend Goldsmith to the 
 hearts of the new audience, the sense of the far past linked 
 to the present by graves, of the long slumber of death, ot 
 the everlasting farewell that the mourner too must soon bid 
 to the open-air sounds and employments and to the loved 
 hearth. He anticipates the poetry of Crabbe, and rebukes 
 the condescension that would smile at " the short and 
 simple annals of the poor ". He has learned the democracy 
 of death that heeds no flattery or courtiership. Nay, it is 
 only occasion that has drawn the seeming gulf between 
 world-striking genius and the "celestial fire" hidden in 
 village bosoms. The necessity of substituting an English 
 name for Caesar's drove him into the traditional injustice to 
 Cromwell's memory, which Carlyle disposed of. His own 
 love of solitude makes him yearn for the rustic way of life. 
 He has only "the passing tribute of a sigh" for the 
 unlettered epitaphs on rustic tombs. They tell him of the 
 sadness of last farewells. And the personal note enters in 
 with the emotion ; he thinks of the mother from whom he 
 must for ever part before long. The thought of himself 
 laid to sleep " beneath some mouldering heap ", unconscious 
 of his loved ones, overcomes him, and he closes with the 
 ideal story of his death and burial told by " some hoary- 
 headed swain ", and his own epitaph. Much as he 
 depreciated this as compared with his other efforts, it is his 
 
 O 
 
194 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 only masterpiece, his only poem that appeals to the undying 
 heart of humanity. His sympathy with the new time and 
 the new audience led him to the perennial sources of human 
 emotion, and made him reject all the suggestions of 
 obtrusive learning and wit, all that would mar the simplicity. 
 Whilst his training in the great literatures of culture, and 
 especially in the school of Pope, enabled him to polish the 
 verse into its most melodious, and yet epigrammatic, form. 
 With all the critics of the third quarter of the eighteenth 
 century it placed him in the front rank of English poets. 
 The complete victory of the Lake school and their 
 amalgamation of poetry and philosophy overshadowed his 
 fame. But in Shelley, Keats, and Byron we see his influence 
 again Whilst in The Scholar Gipsy and the Thyrsis of 
 Matthew Arnold we hear the melody and even the phrases 
 of the Elegy echo. 
 
 3. It had not been his first attempt. During his tour 
 with Walpole he wrote most of his Latin poems. His 
 literary outset in English was a tragedy in the style of 
 Addison's Cato, called Agrippina ; he proposed to make it a 
 sequel to Racine's Britannicus ; he never got farther than a 
 scene and a fragment of the first act. His instinct and his 
 friend West were against its continuance. It is pseudo- 
 classical, stiff, and formal blank verse. His first true revolt 
 against the monotony of the Queen Anne verse was in his 
 Ode to Spring in 1742, when, after his Continental tour, he 
 had returned to Stoke. Yet it has many of the conven- 
 tional touches of Pope. Two other odes that he wrote in 
 this year, that On a Distant Prospect of Eton College, and 
 that On Adversity, have more promise of his own peculiarly 
 dignified music. Neither of them is marked by any depth 
 of thought or nobility of language ; they are memorable 
 only for their poetry of reminiscence and sadness, and for a 
 few felicitous expressions ; " his silver-winding way " 
 referring to the Thames, " slow-consuming Age ", and the 
 two now hackneyed quotations " And snatch a fearful joy " 
 and 
 
 " where ignorance is bliss, 
 Tis folly to be wise ". 
 
 Though Wordsworth somewhat discounted Gray's fame, his 
 famous Ode to Duty, beginning " stern daughter of the 
 
THE POETRY 195 
 
 voice of God ", has evidently drawn its inspiration from 
 Gray's second ode. The chief fault in both these early 
 poems is the use of personified abstractions, Anger, Fear, , 
 Folly, Justice, against which the Lake poets made their 
 chief protest. The same fault mars the odes that Collins 
 wrote some three years after, and published in 1746, all 
 unconscious of Gray's efforts in the same direction, which 
 did not appear till 1747. There was in all the poetry of theV 
 second quarter of the century a strong bent towards; 
 metaphysics, a love of abstractions and abstract subjectsr 
 It was the result on the one side of the generalising epigram- 
 atic movement in Queen Anne poetry, and on the other of 
 the controversial fervour of the time. Poetry had to resort to 
 the picturesque statement of generalities and first principles 
 in order to be original. Pope, Akenside, Young, Thomson, 
 Armstrong were all engaged at this time on would-be poetic 
 philosophy in blank verse or the heroic couplet. The mono- 
 tony of this drove these two forerunners of the new poetry 
 into revolt; they developed the jPindaric o_de, that had been a 
 petrified form of poetry since Cowley's attempts, into a 
 striking but irregular melody ; but the metaphysical 
 abstractions of their own time clung to them. The Elegy, 
 which was begun in 1742, but not finished till 1750, is 
 also marred by these personifications, Honour, Contem- 
 plation, Science, Melancholy. His Hymn to Ignorance 
 (1742) and Alliance of Education and Government (1750) 
 were posthumous fragments, that, by their use of the heroic 
 couplet, the one for mock-heroic, and the other for didactic 
 purpose, show how closely he was bound to the Queen 
 Anne age, as also does his unfinished Latin poem De 
 Principiis Cogitandi (1741). Dodsley published his Eton 
 Ode in 1747, and again in 1748 included it and the Ode to 
 Spring and the mock-heroic On Mr. Walpole's Cat in his 
 Collection of Poems. In 1751 his Elegy appeared; it 
 became at once popular and went through a dozen editions 
 in 1752. In March of that year all the poems mentioned 
 were published along with another society poem A Long 
 Story in one volume with illustrations. His Ode on the 
 Pleasure arising from Vicissitude in the same style as that 
 on Adversity and containing one or two felicities was written 
 i J 753j but not printed till after his death. 
 
196 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 4. It was in this latter period that he began to surrender 
 himself to the full current of the romantic movement. He 
 had only been dimly conscious of its beginning before this, 
 although he had given such full expression to one phase of it 
 in his Elegy. He did not abandon his classical studies and 
 precedents, but he devoted himself to the older literature 
 and legends of his country. He contemplated a history of 
 English poetry ; but, when he heard of Warton's similar 
 project, he handed over his notes to him. His studies bore 
 better fruit his two famous Pindaric Odes, The Progress of 
 Poesie (1754), and The Bard issued along with it in 1757. 
 They rank next to his Elegy in popularity, in melodious 
 approach to the tone of modern poetry, and in measured 
 dignity of language. They are both strictly Pindaric in 
 form, having strophe, antistrophe, and epode in each stanza, 
 and they are both unities in their art. The one describes in 
 a picturesque way, and with many beautiful passages and 
 expressions, the birth of the poetic art and its development 
 in Greece, Italy, and Britain ; in it occur phrases that have 
 become the current coin of literature ; of Shakespeare 
 
 " To him the mighty mother did unveil 
 Her awful face " ; 
 
 of Milton 
 
 " He passed the flaming bounds of time and space " ; 
 
 and of Dryden, Fancy 
 
 " Scatters from her pictured urn 
 Thoughts that breathe and words that burn ". 
 
 The other dramatises the legend of the massacre of the 
 Welsh bards by Edward the First and makes the bard before 
 \" plunging into the roaring tide " curse him and prophesy 
 \he Elizabethan era ; its noble language and style have had 
 even more influence than the former on later English poets, 
 like Shelley (in Hellas;, Keats (in his Odes), and Byron (in 
 his Isles of Greece) ; it contains lines, that have grown 
 familiar to all readers ; 
 
 " Dear lost companions of my tuneful art, 
 Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes, 
 Dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart ". 
 
 " Fair laughs the morn and soft the zephyr blows, 
 Whilst, proudly riding o'er the azure realm, 
 In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes, 
 Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm." 
 
THE POETRY 197 
 
 He was greatly delighted with Ossian; he studied the old 
 Norse and Welsh literatures ; and he paraphrased, in 
 vigorous ballad and octosyllabic verse, some passages from 
 their poetry, which he published in 1768. The pieces were 
 The Fatal Sisters, The Descent of Odin, and The Triumphs 
 of Owen ; other posthumous paraphrases were The Death 
 of Hoel, Caradoc, and Conon. They are instinct with the 
 picturesque power of the primitive Teutonic and Celtic 
 poetry, and they show that, if Gray had been born half a 
 century later, he would have been the foremost representative 
 of the new and more passionate poetry of the nineteenth 
 century. The only other poem he wrote worth notice was 
 his Ode for Music on the Installation of the Duke of 
 Grafton as Chancellor of Cambridge University (1769). 
 The minister had made him Professor of History the year 
 before. It is but a feeble echo. His career was over ; for 
 ill-health had taken possession of him ; and he died in 1771, 
 aged 55. 
 
 Section 19. 
 
 I. Another fastidious artist, who rose in revolt against 
 the heroic couplet and prepared the way for the lyric 
 outburst of a later time, was William Collins (1721-1759). 
 He began, as a boy at school and college, to imitate the 
 Queen Anne poets. His Persian Eclogues, or, as he 
 afterwards called them, Oriental Eclogues, written at 
 Winchester, and his Epistle to Sir Thomas Hanmer, written 
 at Oxford, and published, the one in 1 742 when he was 21, and 
 the other in 1743, are in the heroic couplet. It was by these 
 he was best known in his day. But there is in them some 
 promise of bis later odes and of the coming time. He breaks 
 them up into irregular paragraphs and stanzas, with occasion- 
 ally a refrain, as in the second and third eclogue ; and there is 
 in these two at least a lyrical passion that differs by a whole 
 world from the satiric or didactic or rhetorical use of the 
 verse by Pope. The first eclogue, Selim or The Shepherd's 
 Moral, and the fourth, Agib and Secander or The Fugitives, 
 are more like the frigid dramas of the time that modelled 
 themselves on Addison's Cato. But Hassan or The Camel 
 Driver, and Abra or The Georgian Sultana, are lit with 
 
198 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 genuine emotion ; they are both love lyrics, the one, 
 however, giving prominence to the expression of thirst in 
 the desert, and the other to the desire of a Sultan and 
 Sultana for simple rustic life. His Epistle to Hanmer " on 
 his edition of Shakespeare's works " shows an appreciative 
 study of Shakespeare. In the midst of its Popian pseudo- 
 classicism, there is evidence of a true insight into the 
 dramatist's study of man. 
 
 2. He left Oxford in 1744, and settled down in London 
 to a literary life, under the wing of Johnson. Here he 
 wrote his Odes, which he published in 1747. Some of them 
 are semi-pindaric, the Ode to Fear, the Ode to Mercy, and 
 the Ode to Liberty. Others have the structure of the odes for 
 St. Cecilia's day so popular in the age of Dryden and Pope 
 the well known Ode on the Passions intended for music, 
 and the Ode on the Poetical Character. " The Manners, 
 An Ode" and the much quoted "Ode written in the year 
 1746" beginning " How sleep the brave who sink to rest" 
 again are merely poems in the octosyllabic couplet. The 
 Odes To Pity, To Peace, To a Lady, take a six-lined stanza 
 that would be octosyllabic but for the third and sixth lines, 
 which rhyme and are of six syllables ; the ode To Simplicity 
 differs from these in using ten syllables in each of the third 
 and sixth lines. They all echo in their phrases and rhythms 
 Milton's youthful poems; but the echo has lost half its 
 music in a prosaic and metaphysical atmosphere ; the very 
 themes, abstractions personified, reveal the age in which they 
 were written. The Ode to Liberty has an opening strophe 
 that has in it the nobler music of Gray ; whilst the irregular 
 stanzas of that on The Passions have finely coloured 
 pictures of Hope, Revenge, Pity, Melancholy, and Cheerful- 
 ness that remind us of L' Allegro and II Penseroso ; thus of 
 cheerfulness, 
 
 " Her bow across her shoulders flung, 
 Her buskins gemm'd with morning dew, 
 Blew an inspiring air that dale and thicket rung ". 
 
 But the metaphysical fallacy, the love of fossilised allegory, 
 still mars the best of them. This cannot be said of his Ode 
 to Evening, which comes nearest to the sweetness of 
 Milton's early poems, and adopts a musical stanza of its own. 
 Miltonic echoes abound; 
 
THE POETRY I 99 
 
 "the beetle winds 
 His small but sullen horn " ; 
 " Many a nymph who wreathes her brow with sedge " ; 
 
 " thy folding-star arising shows 
 His paly circlet " ; 
 " Sallow autumn fills thy lap with leaves ". 
 
 It comes nearest of all his poems to Gray's Elegy in suita- 
 bility of theme and sentiment to the new audience. Two 
 stanzas will show the insight into nature and love of 
 simple life ; 
 
 " Or if chill, blustering winds, or driving rain, 
 
 Prevent my willing feet, be mine the hut, 
 
 That, from the mountain side, 
 
 Views wilds and swelling floods," 
 " And hamlets brown and dim-discovered spires, 
 
 And hears that simple bell and marks o'er all 
 
 The dewy fingers draw 
 
 The gradual dusky veil ". 
 
 We feel no want of the usual rhyme here. In spirit and in 
 freedom of treatment and of melody it anticipates the best 
 of the nineteenth century. 
 
 3. As he developed, he grew, unlike Gray, more simple 
 both in his metres and expression of emotion. In his dirge 
 in Cymbeline beginning 
 
 " To fair Fidele's grassy tomb " , 
 
 and in his Ode on the death of Thomson the poet, begin- 
 ning 
 
 " In yonder grave a Druid lies 
 Where slowly winds the stealing wave " , 
 
 both written in the same alternately rhyming four-lined 
 stanza, and evidently composed in 1748, the personification 
 of entities has been almost abandoned. He is getting nearer 
 and nearer to the simplicity of emotion and art that marks 
 the true elegy and ballad and lyric. And though in his 
 last poem, his Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the 
 Highlands (1749), he adopts an elaborate stanza and a 
 majestic note, he shows that he was about to develop into 
 a romantic poet such as Scott was half a century after. It 
 has only one allegorised abstraction, Virtue, and the only 
 mark of Queen Anne conventionalism in it is the frequent 
 reference to the " Muse ". It describes, in fourteen stanzas 
 of seventeen lines each, the romance of Highland legend 
 
200 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 and myth, their connection with the prehistoric past, and 
 their likeness to those that Tasso introduced into his 
 Jerusalem Delivered. He makes poetic reference to 
 Shakespeare's Macbeth, and Ben Jonson's visit to Drum- 
 mond of Hawthornden, and closes with a wish that he may 
 one day see with his own eyes Scotland's " splendid friths 
 and lakes " , and her 
 
 " Lowly glens o'er-hung with spreading broom, 
 Or o'er her mountains creep in awful gloom ". 
 
 Most striking is the stanza that pictures the shepherd's wife 
 waiting the return of her husband and seeing in dream his 
 wraith " drown'd by the kelpie's wrath ". The solid 
 material of the coming poetry abounds in the ode ; it has 
 more promise than all his other poetic work. And yet it is 
 academic and not national. Like Gray, he has ever the 
 consciousness of a small cultured circle around him. But, 
 like him too, he has mingled with this a dim sense of a 
 wider audience that has its love of poetry nearer to the 
 fountains of all humanity. Hence their revolt against the 
 monotony of the Dryden and Pope couplet. Like all 
 insurgents, they ran to the opposite extreme, and took up 
 with the intricacy of the Pindaric ode, with which previous 
 poets had toyed. The Elegy and the Ode to Evening 
 pointed in the true direction ; but their genius was not 
 strong enough to follow it before the old popular poetry and 
 the new popular audience had come to the front. They 
 distrusted their newer and better instincts, and, though their 
 odes have much affected the more lyric measures of Words- 
 worth, Coleridge, Southey, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Matthew 
 Arnold, and Swinburne, they fell more and more into the 
 background, as the passionate poetry of the Revolution, and 
 the more natural poetry of thought came into vogue. 
 
 4. It was only towards the close of their careers that 
 they allowed themselves to drink in the new romantic 
 atmosphere. Gray in The Bard and his Paraphrases from 
 the Norse and the Welsh, and Collins in his Ode on the 
 Highlands showed how the currents of poetic feeling were 
 changing. The narrow circles of culture were about 
 to lose their power, with their French and pseudo-classical 
 traditions and models. And the nation was about to turn 
 
THE POETRY 2OI 
 
 back to its primitive sources of national feeling and to 
 mould the new poetry. We have no clearer evidence of 
 this than in the number of attempts during the second half 
 of the century to palm off on the public manufactured or 
 dressed-up specimens of old poetry and the great success 
 that attended them. 
 
 Section 20. 
 
 1. The most striking instance of this was the publication 
 of The Poems of Ossian by James Macpherson, a school- 
 master at Ruthven in Inverness. At twenty years of 
 age he had published a poem called The Highlander in 
 1758. And in the following year he met John Home the 
 author of the once popular drama Douglas and the friend of 
 Collins who had addressed to him his Ode on Highland 
 Superstitions. The meeting resulted in what he called 
 translations of fragments of Gaelic poetry in 1760. The 
 Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh paid his expenses on a 
 tour of discovery through the Highlands. He professed to 
 have been most successful, and published in 1762 Fingal, 
 an Epic Poem in Six Books, and in 1763 Temora, an Epic 
 Poem in Eight Books. He was as vague as the portraits 
 of his heroes in his statements as to the originals. And 
 though a fierce controversy arose at once as to the 
 genuineness of the productions, the only original printed 
 before Macpherson died in 1796 was that of the seventh book 
 of Temora. When the Gaelic Ossian was published in 1807, 
 it was imperfect, and, according to accomplished Gaelic 
 scholars, utterly unlike true Gaelic poetry. It was in blank 
 verse, a form said to be quite unknown to Irish or Gaelic 
 poetry, and its diction has been criticised as modern and tinged 
 with anglicisms and even classicisms. Macpherson was 
 no Gaelic scholar, and evidently picked up the legends, 
 that he wove into the poems, from Highland friends 
 like Alexander Macdonald the poet, and afterwards had 
 his version of them translated into Gaelic by them. 
 
 2. The version passed like an epidemic through Europe, 
 and seems to have been responsible not only for the form 
 of Napoleon's bulletins, but for the quasi-heroic attitude in 
 
202 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 which he and his generals loved to pose. It awakened and 
 gave shape to the war-spirit throughout the last quarter of 
 y-ie century ; there were few of the military leaders but had 
 studied this eighteenth century edition of old warlike 
 legends of a primitive people. The sense of bardic fame 
 ringing through the ages explains the attitudes and deeds of 
 many of them and tinges their portraits both by painters 
 and historians of the time. The book was translated into 
 almost every European language ; and its influence is 
 apparent in Goethe's Werther, in Schiller's Robbers, and in 
 all the Storm-and-Stress literature of Germany, in the 
 productions and speeches of the French Revolutionists, in 
 the romantic literary movement that preceded and followed 
 the Revolution, and in much of the Italian, Spanish, and 
 Danish poetry of the time. It greatly affected the prose 
 style of eighteenth century romance, and was a direct 
 antidote to Johnsonianism in the imaginative literature. 
 In our own century it bent the genius of Scott to the 
 Highlands, and moulded the dramas of Byron, and the 
 often vague imagery of Shelley ; it appears in the style of 
 Kingsley's Hereward, and directly or indirectly it is respons- 
 ible for the pioneering efforts of Walt Whitman in prose 
 poetry and for the rapid growth of poetic prose through 
 De Quincey, Bulwer Lytton, and Ruskin. During last 
 century it stirred Blake to misty prophecies, led writers of 
 romance back into the less known periods of the past, and 
 gave the new audience a delight in mysterious and almost 
 formless legend and tale and idea. 
 
 3. It was little wonder that Macpherson so prospered, 
 and that so many attempted to follow in his footsteps ; in 
 1780 Dr. Smith of Campbelltown published "Sean Dana", 
 ancient poems " composed by Ossian, Orran, Ullin, and 
 other bards"; in 1787 Harold, an Irishman, printed at 
 Dusseldorf Ossianic poems in English; and in 1789 we 
 have Brooke's Reliques of Gaelic Poetry. The final result 
 was a full and genuine study of Celtic literature. 
 
 4. The book is as real a product of the eighteenth 
 century literary spirit as Gray's or Collins's poems. " The 
 Bard" takes a Welsh legend and puts it into would-be 
 
THE POETRY 203 
 
 Pindaric verse. Fingal takes a variety of Gaelic legends 
 about a hero of the second or third century after Christ and 
 weaves them into a would-be primitive Gaelic epic. Like 
 Rousseau, they reveal the tendency to find a refuge from 
 the artificiality and coils of modern society in an older age. 
 Like him too. they look at that primitive time through the 
 rose colour of their own century. Everything looms colossal 
 or heroic or happy through the mist of ages. The eighteenth 
 century did not reach the critical standpoint in history ; it 
 could not discriminate between the atmosphere of the past 
 and the medium of sentiment and opinion through what 
 seemed history. And it was out of this vague and confused 
 view of the past that its romance and romantic movement 
 grew ; these were nothing if they were not historical or at 
 least worshipful of the past especially the far past ; they 
 found their golden age in a time that had completely 
 vanished. 
 
 5. There was of course a real basis for Macpherson's 
 Ossian, as the more careful study of the old Irish literature 
 and the recovery of relics of old Gaelic poetry and legend 
 have shown. Most of his names both of personages and 
 localities belong to the cycle of Celtic tales, though ,a 
 number of them are somewhat Saxonised or Latinised by 
 him, as, for example, Finn is changed to Fingal, the form 
 he found in Barbour the old Scottish poet, and he mingles 
 names from the myths of the gods with names from the 
 heroic tales and from the semi-historic cycle. In the Book 
 of Leinster there are many poems and tales which circle 
 round the name of Finn, the son of Cumall, Oisin the bard 
 his son, and Oscar his grandson, and two of the poems are 
 ascribed to Oisin. The Scots came from Ireland and 
 established the kingdom of Dalriada in Argyleshire and the 
 South-west of Scotland; and for centuries there was the 
 closest intercourse between it and Ireland ; even as late as 
 the fifteenth century the Irish bards wandered round the 
 Highlands singing their songs and telling their tales. After 
 that the Scottish dialect of Irish began to become a distinct 
 language with poems and prose legends in it. The sixteenth 
 and seventeenth centuries saw it made subservient to Saxon 
 rule and ideas. But the myths and tales must have 
 
204 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 survived. These Macpherson gathered and probably 
 modified by a knowledge of the Irish manuscripts. Hence 
 his Ossian, so called from the supposition that Oisin, the 
 son of Finn, had sung the stories or written them in verse. 
 The idea of an epic, or of a drama, the form that some of the 
 fragments, as, for example, Comala, take, was foreign to 
 Celtic literature ; old Irish imagination used either the lyric 
 or the brief poetic narrative alternating with prose that 
 belongs to the stage preliminary to epic. He took the idea 
 from the Iliad, which he afterwards translated into prose. 
 He also confused the different types and ages of Celtic 
 poetry ; he took, for example, Cuthullin from the mytho- 
 logical cycle, and Darthula (Deirdre) from the heroic, and 
 placed them with Fingal and Ossian, who belong to the 
 historic period, on the borders of Christianity ; he also took 
 Starno and Swaran from the Norse times, and brought them 
 into conflict with these heroes of the third century, though 
 the Scandinavian did not appear on the Highland coast for 
 centuries after. But this confusion is common in oral 
 tradition and legend. 
 
 6. There is however a true mark of the eighteenth century 
 in the poems. Their material is stripped of all the super- 
 natural elements that belong to the very essence of Celtic 
 myth and legend; there is nothing of even the common 
 features of Highland tale and legend, the soothsaying, the 
 second sight, the talking ravens, the kelpies, that appear 
 even in Collins's Ode. In the preliminary " Dissertation 
 on the ^Era of Ossian ", this is acknowledged ; " It is a 
 singular case, it must be allowed, that there are no traces of 
 religion in the poems ascribed to Ossian ". " But gods are 
 not necessary when the poet has genius". The Gaelic bards, 
 it asserts, never mixed their religion and the deeds of their 
 heroes. Moreover Druidism was exploded, and Christianity 
 not yet established. " The extreme ignorance, on the part 
 of Ossian, of the Christian tenets, shows that that religion 
 had only lately been introduced ". Blair in his Dissertation 
 emphasises the point, as he also emphasises the high ideal 
 of sentiment and morality ; " no poet maintains a higher 
 tone of virtuous and noble sentiment throughout all 
 his works " ; Fingal ever shows magnanimity, heroism, 
 
THE POETRY 205 
 
 generosity ; so do all the other heroes ; " valour reigns ; but 
 it is a generous valour, void of cruelty, animated by honour, 
 not by hatred". "We behold no debasing passions among 
 Fingal's warriors ; no spirit of avarice or of insult ; but a 
 perpetual desire of being remembered for gallant actions ; a 
 love of justice ; and a zealous attachment to their friends 
 and their country ". " We find tenderness and even delicacy 
 of sentiment predominant over fierceness and barbarity". 
 "The horrors of war are softened by intermixed scenes of 
 love and friendship ". Foldath in Temora " abhors all fraud 
 and cruelty, is famous for his hospitality to strangers ; open 
 to every generous sentiment and to every soft and compas- 
 sionate feeling ". Many of the fheroes are " amiable ". 
 " Ossian himself appears to have been endowed by nature 
 with an exquisite sensibility of heart ; prone to tender 
 melancholy". " Covetousness and effeminacy are yet 
 unknown ". " His poetry deserves to be styled the poetry 
 of the heart ". Its " two characteristics are tenderness and 
 sublimity ". " It breathes nothing of the gay and cheerful 
 kind ". " No poet knew better how to seize and melt the 
 heart ". What is this but a description of the ideal humanity 
 that through Rousseau was to brood over the French 
 Revolution ? Macpherson came at the turning of the tide 
 between the cool intellectual deism and indifference to 
 religion of the age of Pope and the fervour of evangelicalism 
 that marked the time of Cowper. His age was religiously 
 naked, and Scotland, especially through its universities 
 including Aberdeen in which the young Highlander was 
 trained, felt the influence of Voltaire and the French 
 scepticism. It is really the neutral-tinted avoidance of all 
 religious sentiment or idea that homes Ossian to the middle 
 of the eighteenth century better than anything else. A lofty 
 moral ideal untinged by religious ideas was what the French 
 philosophers and their followers in England preached and 
 professed to find in nature. " Noble sentiments ", " sublime 
 and tender passions ", " a heart that glows ", " a heart that 
 is full and pours itself forth ", magnanimity, humanity, 
 generosity, mercy, pity, love prevail over all the tendencies 
 of warriors ; and they predominate in the romantic fiction 
 and poetry of the end of the eighteenth century. 
 " Sensibility " was the mark of every hero and heroine of the 
 
206 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 romantic movement, as it is of Ossian. Sadness is ever 
 falling upon the spirit of both the bard and his heroes and 
 heroines; "the joy of grief is one of his commonplaces." 
 Now the middle of last century is marked in English poetry 
 by a vein of melancholy, if not pessimism, not merely in 
 poems like Night Thoughts and The Grave, but in academic 
 poets like Collins and Gray, satiric poets like Johnson, and 
 popular poets like Goldsmith in spite of his cheerful 
 disposition. Most of the Queen Anne poets are optimistic 
 over the world as it is, most of the poets of the Revolution 
 period are optimistic over the world as it is to be. The 
 vale of tears lies between. And Ossian came in it. He and 
 his warriors and women indulge in tears as much as Werther 
 or the heroes and heroines of the romances. " I will 
 remember them with tears", "The tear is on their cheek", 
 "The young tear of the virgin will fall", "My crowding 
 tears rushed down " ; phrases like these" come on every 
 second page. Nay, we find the perfect hero Fingal and his 
 son Fillan indulge in the same way on the eve of battle in 
 Temora; the son wished to be leader of the array, "the 
 tear hung in his eye " ; the father saw this, and " he hid the 
 big tear with his locks." The wailing poetry of the book 
 consists in the sadness of memory, and in the sadness of 
 outlook towards the grave and oblivion, two emotions that 
 connect the middle of the eighteenth century and its 
 literature with the perennial springs of human feeling. 
 
 7. The only tinge of the supernatural that appears in the 
 book is also of this cosmopolitan type that marked the 
 century. Ghosts of the same transparent material as haunted 
 the ruined abbeys and castles of its romance, and frightened 
 a number of even the most determined materialists of the 
 time, abound in Ossian ; they stream down " like the 
 shadow of mist " upon battlefields or meditative warriors ; 
 " the stars dim-twinkle through " them ; they weep and talk 
 and sing and even fight and then " vanish like a mist that 
 melts on the sunny hill." " I saw the ghost of night ; his 
 robe of mist flew on the wind, I could behold his tears ". 
 The only instance of a spirit approaching the divine is " the 
 spirit of Loda " in " Carricthura " ; he comes and fights 
 with Fingal ; but this is in a Scandinavian episode and he is 
 
THE POETRY 207 
 
 a foreign deity. Even this small leaven of the supernatural 
 is shadowy and vague ; all that is substantial in it belongs 
 to the eighteenth century, the belief in ghosts that are in 
 every respect like men except that they can be seen through 
 and cannot be felt. Macpherson meant to appeal to the 
 new audience as well as to the old, to all Europe as well as 
 to England, and he took the right method. 
 
 8. To please the cultured he gave much attention to the 
 epic manner of Homer. In his two epics, Fingal and 
 Temora, epics of war, he followed, as Blair points out, the 
 fundamental rules drawn by Aristotle from the Iliad ; he 
 made the " action one, complete and great, feigned and not 
 merely historical, enlivened with characters and manners, 
 and heightened by the marvellous ". Many of the incidents 
 resemble those in Homer. But it is in the similes that there 
 is most resemblance. There is scarcely an episode without 
 a dozen of them. The most frequent are the similes 
 for two warriors or two armies about to come to grips ; they 
 are constantly compared to two torrents or two storms, or 
 the gathering of clouds ; next to these are the comparison 
 of a warrior entering battle to a star or meteor, and that of a 
 warrior falling to a tree cut down or smitten by a storm. 
 
 9. But he could not adopt the style of Homer, or even of 
 Homer as translated by Pope. In his 1773 preface he gives 
 a fragment of a Northern Tale, first in the peculiar chopped- 
 up prose of Ossian, and then in the heroic couplet ; the two 
 sound like the products of two different worlds ; the one 
 striking in its primitive rhythm, the other commonplace in 
 its smooth artificiality. Indeed Ossian was the chief 
 symptom of the revolt against the Queen Anne verse, and 
 could not appear in heroic rhymes. He turned to the Old 
 Testament as given in the Authorised ' Version for his 
 method of poetic expression. He gauged the new audience 
 better than any poet of the time. Their ear, their imagina- 
 tion, their emotions, as well as their belief, had been trained 
 in the splendid prose poetry of the Psalms, The Song of 
 Solomon, The Book of Job, and the Prophets. Any chapter 
 of Isaiah or Jeremiah will supply a dozen verses that have 
 manifestly been the models of the style and imagery of 
 Ossian ; the staccato sublimity of The Psalms and the 
 
208 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 amorous apostrophes of the Song of Solomon are still nearer ; 
 but they are secularised here. It is, however, the pessimism 
 of Job that has dictated the spirit of the poem. Echoes of 
 Biblical phrases and Biblical imagery are thickly studded 
 over it; " His face is without form and dark "; "And the voice 
 of the people is heard no more " ; " silence is in the house of 
 her fathers " ; " Loveliness was around her as light " ; " he 
 comes in the roar of a thousand storms, and scatters battles 
 from his eyes " ; " She was covered with the light of beauty, 
 but her heart was the house of pride " ; " Heroes stand not 
 in my presence ; they fall to earth from my hand " ; " Their 
 eyes are flames of fire " ; " Dwells he in the narrow house " ; 
 " My love is a son of the hill ". Every page will supply a 
 score of instances. What the eighteenth century was 
 waiting for was a detheologised Old Testament, full of the 
 spirit of war and chivalry, yet up to the level of modern 
 christianised morality and feeling, rich with magnificent 
 imagery, yet adapted to the modern love of nature, coloured 
 by the romance of a far distant past, yet fitted to readers of 
 prose, mystic in vague suggestion of sublimity like the 
 inspired book of a religion, yet stripped of all creed. Blake 
 was conscious of this yearning and so was Swedenborg. 
 Ossian satisfied it. Hence its marvellous popularity in last 
 century. 
 
 10. And how careful Macpherson was, in meeting the 
 desires of the new audience, to avoid all anachronisms that 
 could be easily detected, and all imagery that did not 
 belong to the Highlands of Scotland. The only mistakes 
 that the long and fierce controversy has been able to find 
 are the use of the bow by the early Gaels, an instrument 
 introduced long after the supposed time of Ossian, and the 
 use of the car in a land that had no plains. He rejected 
 the bag-pipes, the tartans, and the clans, which would have 
 attracted a less astute artist. He avoided humour and 
 definiteness of description ; for these would at once have 
 betrayed the age. He has a strongly metaphysical tendency 
 through the whole book; yet never does he once give way to 
 the personified abstractions of the poets of his time. He 
 adhered to the vague and the general ; and in order to give 
 to it the air of the concrete that belongs to early and 
 
THE POETRY 2 09 
 
 especially to Celtic poetry he furnished himself with a host 
 of names of personages and localities from the Celtic 
 legends and threw one into every other sentence ; in 
 order to produce the picturesque effect of a primitive poem, 
 he chopped up every sentence into a dozen or more and 
 attached a simile or metaphor to each ; and his comparisons 
 he drew like a true poet from the nature he saw around him, 
 the mountains and trailing clouds and mists, the torrents 
 and storms, the forests and heaths, the showers of spring 
 and the dews of night, the winters and brief days, the 
 colours of the sunrise and sunset, the foam of the sea and 
 the stillness of the lake, the stars and the moonlight. There 
 is in the book a far truer insight into turbid and colossal 
 nature than in any poet before Byron. There is genuine 
 poetry scattered all over it, especially in some of the shorter 
 poems like Cath-Loda, Carthon, The Songs of Selma, and 
 The Death of Cuthullin, the poetry of a man who has been 
 brought up amongst the mountains and has watched from 
 boyhood the clouds catch and tear upon their heads, the 
 mists wreath round them, and the moonlight play upon 
 their torrents. Sentences and descriptions like these 
 abound; "Thou art with the years that are gone; thou 
 fadest on my soul " ; " If on the heath she moved, her 
 breast was whiter than the down of Cana, if on the sea-beat 
 shore, than the foam of the rolling ocean. Her eyes were 
 two stars of light. Her face was heaven's bow in showers. 
 Her dark hair flowed round it like the streaming clouds. 
 Thou wert the dweller of souls, white-handed Strinadona ! " ; 
 " Like a ridge of fire they descend the hill "; "Autumn is 
 dark on the mountains ; grey mist rests on the hills " ; 
 " Warriors fell by thy sword as the thistle by the staff of a 
 boy " ; "I knew her as she came through the dusky night 
 along the murmur of Nora ; she was like the new morn seen 
 through the gathered mist"; "Why dost thou build the hall, 
 son of the winged days ? " ; " Age is dark and unlovely ; it is 
 like the glimmering light of the morn when it shines through 
 broken clouds and the mist is on the hills"; "We contended 
 like gales of spring as they fly above the hill and bend by 
 turns the feebly-whistling grass "; " When shall it be morn 
 in the grave to bid the slumberer awake?"; "Thy words 
 were the gale of the reeds " ; " The music was like the 
 
 P 
 
2IO PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 memory of joys that are past " ; " There, mixed with the 
 murmur of waters, rose the voice of aged men, who called 
 the forms of night to aid them in the war " ; " She came in 
 all her beauty like the morn from the cloud in the east. 
 Loveliness was around her as light. Her steps were like the 
 music of songs. She saw the youth and loved him. He 
 was the stolen sigh of her soul " ; "I hear the call of the 
 years. They say as they pass along, 'Why does Ossian 
 sing ? Soon shall he lie in the narrow house and no bard 
 shall raise his fame ' ". 
 
 11. But, frequent as such passages are, few of them are 
 not marred by the monotony and rhetoric of the age. The 
 edifice, though Gothic and sublime in plan, is largely built 
 of the stucco of the eighteenth century. Both heroes and 
 heroines are constantly " rolling their eyes " ; " she rolled 
 her eyes upon the hero " ; " he rolled awhile his silent 
 eyes " ; " wild rolled their eyes in rage " ; rolling is a habit 
 that everything falls into through the poem, the sea, the 
 waves, the mist, the clouds, the thunder, the people, the 
 years ; but it is perfectly epidemic amongst the eyes of the 
 personages. So the harp is always "the shell"; "the song 
 of Lulan of shells"; "the sounding shell"; "the feast of 
 shells " ; " the king of shells ". The wind is ever whistling 
 through beards ; " his grey beard whistled in the blast ". 
 A favourite epithet is " dark-brown " ; even the years are 
 dark-brown. Most of the heroines are " white-bosomed ", 
 most of the ships "dark-bosomed", most of the warriors 
 " blue-shielded " or "car-borne ". The epithets are repeated 
 till they become wearisome. And this, combined with the 
 perpetual apostrophe, and the minced-up sentences, makes 
 it impossible to read the book continuously. 
 
 12. But this did not mar its popularity ; the eighteenth 
 century was not conscious of these faults. The controver- 
 sialists failed to notice them or to see how closely the ideals 
 and sentiments and the morality fitted the best of the new 
 audience, how Biblical were the style and phraseology, how 
 free from the coarseness of a rude age every reference to 
 love, how like its treatment to the sentimental romances, how 
 like the spiritual atmosphere to that of the culture of the 
 time. It was both a symptom and a cause of the romantic 
 
THE POETRY 211 
 
 movement. Without it the storm-and-stress young poets 
 and orators and warriors, the tearful and sentimental young 
 women would have been without a conventional language. 
 Product though it was for the most part of the eighteenth 
 century, a fresh breeze from the primitive ages of the Celt 
 blew through it upon European literature and art. And 
 since its time it is the neglected races of Europe that have 
 been giving the newest impulses to Western poetry, fiction 
 and oratory, music and painting, the Celt, the Norseman, 
 the Slave, and the Jew. 
 
 Section 21. 
 
 1. The Reverend Thomas Percy, rector of a quiet 
 parish in Northamptonshire, had been feeling the same 
 impulse of the new audience towards the primitive forms 
 and sources of literature. He had turned to the Saxon past 
 that floated around him, to the ballads that he heard the 
 peasantry still recite. He had been collecting them for 
 many years when Ossian appeared ; yet his time had drawn 
 him into publishing a Chinese novel from the Portuguese 
 and Miscellaneous Pieces relating to the Chinese. He at 
 once published Five Pieces of Runic Poetry translated from 
 Icelandic (1763); and began to prepare for the publication 
 of his ballad collection. It appeared in February 1765, 
 under the name of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, in 
 three volumes. It immediately became popular and went 
 through four editions before the end of the century, whilst 
 it stirred men like Ritson and Pinkerton and Herd to make 
 similar collections. Like Macpherson, he prospered on the 
 fame of his book, in spite of the controversy it roused. He 
 became chaplain to the Earl of Northumberland, and 
 though a grocer's son from Shropshire, made himself out to 
 belong to the Earl's house ; became dean of Carlisle in 
 1778, and Bishop of Dromore in 1782 ; he died at the age 
 of 82 in 1811. 
 
 2. His famous book he professed to have based on a 
 folio manuscript of ballads he had found " lying dirty on the 
 floor " of a Shropshire friend, " being used by the maids to 
 light the fire ". But he had been gathering ballads himsel 
 
212 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 for years ; and of the 176 in the first edition only 45 came 
 from the manuscript, although it had 195 pieces. That he 
 had not been the first to collect is shown by the mere fact 
 that he had such manuscripts to draw from. This was 
 dated 1650. Another that he took largely from was Pepys's 
 collection at Cambridge, not yet published as a whole ; it 
 had been begun by John Selden and continued by Samuel 
 Pepys till 1700. He also consulted and collated from 
 Anthony Wood's collection of 200 in the Ashmolean library 
 at Oxford, a collection of political poems in the archives of the 
 London Antiquarian Society, and a folio volume of printed 
 ballads in the British Museum. He also drew upon private 
 collections, especially a " large folio volume which was lent 
 by a lady " ; and he had Scotch ballads from several 
 correspondents in Edinburgh. Nay, there had already been 
 some little demand for ballads by the readers of books and 
 journals. For D'Urfey included a few in his Pills to Purge 
 Melancholy (1719-20), and Allan Ramsay made them a 
 feature in his Evergreen (1724), and Tea-table Miscellany 
 (1724-27); and A Collection of Old Ballads in three 
 volumes was published in London between 1723 and 1725. 
 But the time had evidently not arrived for their full 
 influence upon English literature. It was not till about the 
 middle of the century that the new middle class began to 
 mould and direct literary ambitions. And the small circle 
 of London critics to whom Swift and Pope addressed 
 themselves felt ballads to be beneath their notice. There is 
 one exception. Addison in his Spectator papers becomes 
 almost enthusiastic about Chevy Chase, and mentions The 
 Two Children in the Wood as " one of the darling songs of 
 the common people ". But he was beginning to cater for 
 the coming audience as well as for the coffee-houses, and 
 there is a certain condescension in his references. And 
 this cultured condescension was still manifest in the first 
 reception of the Reliques by the culture of London ; 
 Warburton in a letter to Bishop Hurd speaks of the book 
 with scorn ; and Johnson parodied the ballad style in his 
 couplet ; 
 
 " I put my hat upon my head, and went into the Strand, 
 And there I saw another man with his hat in his hand ". 
 
 But the public that now bought books had far outgrown the 
 
THE POETRY 213 
 
 dictation of London critics, and the collection was widely 
 read, and had a lasting effect upon English literature. 
 
 3. Yet over much of the marble of the old popular 
 poetry the stucco of the eighteenth century was plastered. 
 Percy was so far influenced by his narrower audience as to 
 prune what he thought the vulgarities of many of the ballads, 
 to re-edit the conclusion of others so as to fit the sentiment 
 of the day, and to eke out a few more. The custom of 
 printing the popular poetry in broad sheets for sale, that 
 arose in the seventeenth century, had already done much to 
 vulgarise its most imaginative qualities. Oral transmission 
 amongst the peasantry seems rather to have refined their 
 gold. For the Scotch ballads, taken down from the recital 
 of some shepherd or rustic by Scott and other Scottish 
 collectors, have the true poetic fire in them. Whilst most 
 of the English ballads, especially those of the South of 
 England, taken as they were from black-letter prints, are 
 feeble and often prosaic. The rough-voiced and rough- 
 moralled hawkers from the city, like Autolycus in The 
 Winter's Tale, could not but debase their currency to suit 
 their own feelings and ideas of poetry. Even most of those 
 that Shakespeare wove into his dramas had been by his 
 time stripped of much of their real poetry, although his own 
 familiarity with them, and his assumption that his audience 
 was familiar with them show how close the frequenters of 
 the Elizabethan theatre were to the people and to the 
 springs of national life. Even the scholar and courtier, Sir 
 ^Philip Sydney, acknowledged that "the old song of Percy 
 and Douglas " moved his heart " more than with a trumpet ", 
 even though " sung by some blind crowder " ; and the 
 devotee of classical precedent, Ben Jonson, would have 
 rather been the author of it than of all his works ; the life- 
 blood of the nation ran through the veins of even the most 
 hide-bound pedant. The recovery of these children of the 
 wild and forest and wayside for English literature was the 
 natural precursor of another great national era. Yet the 
 eighteenth century could not help intruding its standard of 
 taste. Percy acknowledges as much in his preface ; " by a 
 few slight corrections and additions a most beautiful or 
 interesting sense hath started forth"; his "object was to 
 
214 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 please both the judicious antiquary and the reader of taste ; 
 and he hath endeavoured to gratify both without offending 
 either " ; and he pleads guilty to the charge of concealing 
 his own share in the amendments under some such genera) 
 title as "Modern Copy". In spite of Ritson's crusade 
 against him for vandalism, it was scarcely known how much 
 he had "amended" the ballads till Hales and Furnivall 
 reprinted (in 1867-8) the folio manuscript from which he 
 took so many. The Second Book of the First Series, 
 containing some eighteen ballads, poems, and songs, "that 
 illustrate Shakespeare", supplies a salient example of his 
 more obtrusive method of "correction and addition". The 
 Friar of Orders Gray is the greater part of it Percy's own on 
 a frame-work of scraps taken from various plays of the 
 Elizabethan dramatist. The first two lines 
 
 " It was the friar of orders gray 
 Walked forth to tell his beads " , 
 
 are modified from a scrap of Petruchio's introduced when 
 he is taming his shrew, 
 
 " It was the friar of orders gray 
 As he walked forth on his way. " 
 
 The third and fifth come without much alteration from the 
 mad carollings of Ophelia ; the fifteenth turns her most 
 pathetic verse into one most prosaic ; 
 
 " And will he not come again ! 
 No, no he is dead ; 
 Go to thy deathbed ; 
 He never will come again". 
 
 Percy's is ; 
 
 ' ' And will he ne'er come again ? 
 Will he ne'er come again ? 
 Ah ! no he is dead and laid in his grave, 
 For ever to remain ". 
 
 The seventeenth beginning, 
 
 " Sigh no more, lady, sigh no more ' ? , 
 
 is the first stanza of Balthazar's song in Much Ado About 
 Nothing. The other twenty-two verses eke out these, on 
 the model of Goldsmith's Edwin and Angelina in The Vicar 
 of Wakefield, into an eighteenth century story of romantic 
 love, with an occasional phrase from Shakespeare's repertory 
 of ballads, like "since summer trees were leavy," and 
 *' flaxen locks ". The friar turns out to be the youth whom 
 
THE POETRY 215 
 
 the lady had rejected and believed in her despair to be dead. 
 Percy revised, according to eighteenth century ideas, no less / 
 than twenty-nine, including The Heir of Lynne, Barbara 
 Allen's Cruelty, Sweet William's Ghost, Edom o' Gordon, 
 Gilderoy, King Estmere, Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne, 
 Sir Cauline, Aldingar, and The Child of Elle. " The last, for 
 example, he found with thirty-nine lines, he left it with fifty 
 verses of four lines each. 
 
 4. But on the whole English literature has to thank him 
 for meddling so little, when he had such a pretty turn for 
 song and ballad as he displays in his ' l O, Nancy wilt thou 
 go with me ", and his " Hermit of Warkworth ". Perhaps, 
 if he had left them " defective or corrupted " , as he found 
 them, they would not have so readily appealed to the literary 
 instinct of the time. We can see from Ossian how much 
 the pioneers of the older literatures had to bewig and 
 powder them for the audiences of the third quarter of the 
 century, lest they should be rejected as mere "anti- 
 quarianism " , a word Warburton applied to this collection 
 even as it was. Percy himself was afraid, he says in his 
 preface, that they were of too great " simplicity " , and was 
 " long in doubt whether in the present state of improved 
 literature, they would be deemed worthy the attention of the 
 public." And "to atone for the rudeness of the more 
 obsolete poems, each poem concludes with a few modern 
 attempts in the same kind of poetry writing ; and to take off 
 from the tediousness of the long narratives they are every- 
 where intermingled with little elegant pieces of the lyric 
 kind " ; " the artless productions are " " occasionally 
 confronted with specimens of the compositions of con- 
 temporary poets of a higher class ". Yet his better instincts 
 tell him that the former are often the better. 
 
 5. In other words the collection is by no means one of 
 old ballads alone. It is perhaps even more an anthology of 
 narrative, satiric, didactic, and lyrical poems from the two 
 previous centuries, a large number of them with the names 
 of the authors attached. For instance, we have Marlowe's 
 Passionate Shepherd to his Love, Wotton's philosophical 
 lyric "My Mind to me a Kingdom is", Drayton's Dowsabell, 
 a Sonnet by Queen Elizabeth, a song from a masque of 
 
2l6 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 Shirley, the seventeenth century dramatist, a passage from 
 Warner's Albion's England, Lovelace's To Althea from 
 Prison, Verses written by Charles the First in Carisbrook 
 Castle, A Mad Song from Tom D'Urfey, another by Henry 
 Carey, author of " Sally in our Alley ", Raleigh's The Lie, 
 Wither's Shall I wasting in despair, and a score of others 
 well known to readers or singers long before Percy's time. 
 And the absurdity of the common idea, that the Reliques 
 consisted wholly of the poetry of the people, grows more 
 patent when we see cavaliers, noblemen, and even monarchs 
 included in the list of authors. 
 
 6. Of the true metal there are not more than thirty or 
 forty. A few of these are evidently from some version of 
 the fourteenth or fifteenth century. The Ancient Ballad of 
 Chevy Chase, The Battle of Otterbourne, and Sir Cauline 
 are too full of obsolete words and phrases to come from any 
 later time. Of the first he also gives a form that has marks 
 of the seventeenth century upon it, the form that Addison 
 refers to. Child's variorum edition of the ballads (about to 
 be finished) shows as we should expect how numerous and 
 varied the versions of each ballad, some fresh from the 
 olden time, others marred by the prosaic spirit of the 
 ballad-hawkers. A large number of them bear the marks of 
 having been composed, or at least entirely recomposed, in 
 feudal or chivalric times. The Arthurian ballads, of course, 
 belong to this class, The Boy and the Mantle, The Marriage 
 of Sir Gawaine, Sir Lancelot du Lak, King Ryence's 
 Challenge. But these are by no means of the best. Others 
 make into romance or doggerel historical incidents, or 
 incidents concerning historical personages, and these are of 
 course not ancient. Fair Rosamond, Jane Shore, King 
 Edward the Fourth and the Tanner of Tamworth, Sir 
 Andrew Barton, Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament, The Bonny 
 Earl of Murray, Mary Ambree, The Brave Lord Willoughby, 
 and Chevy Chase are of this class. Another set, like 
 Gilderoy, the Scotch Robin Hood of the seventeenth 
 century, and George Barnwell, are tales of modern crime and 
 love. A few take themes from the times of the Crusades, 
 like " As ye came from the Holy Land". Some are marred 
 by the controversial spirit of the Reformation, as A Ballad 
 
THE POETRY 217 
 
 of Luther, and Little John Nobody. Others are spoiled by 
 abstractions and allegory like The Tower of Doctrine, The 
 Complaint of Conscience, and Plain Truth and Plain 
 Ignorance. Some are burlesques, as The Tournament of 
 Tottenham, The Sale of Rebellious Household Stuff, The 
 Dragon of Wantley, and St. George for England. These 
 three latter classes are not properly ballads, having nothing 
 of romance in them. Another class deal with Gothicised 
 stories from classical literature, Ulysses and the Siren, 
 Constant Penelope, and Queen Dido. A second set of the 
 same type deal with native legend, like St. George and the 
 Dragon, and Legend of Sir Guy. A third versify legends that 
 belong to all Europe, like The Wandering Jew, and King 
 Cophetua and the Beggar Maid. 
 
 7. Of course all the ballads have some bases or features 
 that resemble the ballads of other European and especially 
 Aryan nations. Whether these common elements reveal 
 their community of origin, or only the likeness of the climate 
 and nature and circumstances out of which they grew, is a 
 question that is practically insoluble. Those that have 
 their complete story in common with others have their 
 community from migration of legend. As for those that 
 have only a general likeness, there is so much that seems 
 almost automatic in the romance and reflections of human 
 beings that a common stage of development is more often 
 the true solution of the resemblance. 
 
 8. In Percy's collection there are few that are connected 
 with the oldest folk-magic, the fairies. " Robin Goodfellow ", 
 and " The Fairy Queen " are evidently poems from his own 
 time. Ballads there are none like Tamlane, or Thomas of 
 Ercildoune, that narrate stories of the intercourse of fairies 
 and human beings. The only supernatural elements that 
 we have in the true ballads of the collection are the use of 
 magical robes or weapons, as in The Boy and the Mantle, 
 and King Estmere, and the introduction of a ghost as in 
 Sweet William's Ghost, and Margaret's Ghost. But these 
 are rarer than in the Scottish ballads recovered by later 
 collectors. 
 
 9. The three great passions of the true ballads are love, 
 war, and adventure, especially adventure in hunting. They 
 
2l8 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 are the primitive and elemental passions. They form the 
 atmosphere of Ossian too. And it was the very primitive- 
 ness and simplicity of their exhibition that drew the latter 
 half of the eighteenth century to them. A literature and a 
 civilisation that have become too refined, subtle, and 
 artificial, must decay of exhaustion, unless they recruit 
 themselves at the primal fountains of racial power. Hence 
 the collection in last century all over Europe, not in 
 England alone, of those true products of primitive literary 
 instinct, the ballads. Another reason was that at this time 
 the people in the West were about to enter again into 
 literature and drive out of it the evil spirit of courts and 
 narrow circles ; they brought their tales with them. Covered 
 though so many of these ballads in Percy's collection were 
 with eighteenth century stucco, it was little wonder that they 
 became so popular ; the new writers felt, as they read or 
 copied them, that they were drinking at the pure fountains 
 of literature. 
 
 IO. The most picturesque, vigorous, and stirring of the 
 ballads dealt with war and adventure. And England in our 
 era was almost more than in any age devoted to those 
 pursuits. Englishmen were spreading through all countries 
 of the world and bringing back the romances of their travels ; 
 and English arms were busy in every quarter of the globe los- 
 ing or expanding the empire. Never were the ferocity, the 
 courage, the love of revenge, the passion for slaughter and 
 conquest, that characterise so many of the ballads, more 
 appreciated than now. Border strife, the struggles of 
 chivalry, and the long conflict between the Saracens and the 
 West, had been very fertile themes for the ballad faculty. 
 Chevy Chase, Sir Cauline, and King Estmere were 
 instances of each in the Reliques. Unfortunately it 
 has been found that these and The Child of Elle 
 have been most tampered with ; the latter three were 
 only fragments in the folio manuscript ; the forty- 
 six stanzas of Sir Cauline in it, for example, were expanded 
 into ninety-two by Percy, and the whole was planed and 
 rounded to make an eighteenth century version of a tale of 
 chivalry. Percy manages the task with great art and a 
 knowledge of ballad language gained by constant reading of 
 
THE POETRY 219 
 
 the ballads. An analysis of the additions and changes will 
 throw light on the tastes of the new audience. In the folio 
 manuscript it is less of a unity and more affiliated to the 
 supernatural ; the turns in events and emotions are more 
 abrupt and less romantic ; and the lady has fewer feelings 
 than in the sentimental revision. Sir Cauline loves the 
 daughter of his king, and falls ill from the passion. The 
 monarch sends the very cause of the illness, who, "is a 
 leech full fine ", to attend to him. He confesses his love. 
 And in stanzas that are lost she evidently pleads that she 
 cannot marry him. But she sends him to meet " the 
 eldridge king " on Eldridge Hill, thinking that this finally 
 disposes of him ; for 
 
 " Never man bare his life away, 
 Since the day that I was borne " . 
 
 He goes at midnight, and meets the furious king, fights with 
 him, and cuts his hands off. The lady that led the eldridge 
 king's horse pleads for him, and gets his life from the 
 knight, who goes off with the eldridge sword and rings, and 
 presents them to the king's daughter. There is a hiatus in 
 the poem ; it opens again with the appearance of a giant 
 " unmackley made ", who bears five heads " upon his 
 squier ", drinks the king's wine, " puts the cup in his sleeve " , 
 and says he will have the king's daughter, and burn his 
 temples unless a " pear " is found to meet him. The king 
 offers " broad lands ", and his daughter to wife to anyone 
 who will be the champion. Sir Cauline stands forth and 
 offers ; he arms himself with his " eldridge sword ", and the 
 "hend soldan " and he fight " a summer's day ", till at last the 
 terrible enemy is slain. The knight demands the daughter 
 to wife, and his demand is granted. But a "false steward " 
 sets a lion on him when he is weaponless; he takes his "mantle 
 of green" , and stuffs it into the mouth of the wild beast, " till 
 the lion's heart did burst ". 
 
 " Then he did marry the king's daughter 
 With gold and silver bright, 
 And fifteen sons this lady bore 
 To Sir Cauline the knight ". 
 
 That is the original. Percy adopts the picturesque style that 
 was coming into fashion in the poetry of his day with the 
 growth of the art of painting : slight details are made into 
 
220 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 pictures, and he fixes other details with the true ballad 
 instinct ; he places the king " in Ireland ", and calls his 
 daughter " Christabelle " ; and she becomes in his hands, 
 instead of the listless if not cruel leech, who disposes of the 
 awkward lover, a sympathetic, sentimental heroine of the 
 eighteenth century, especially towards the close. So the 
 " eldridge king's " lady appeals to him 
 
 " For the maiden's love that most you love " 
 
 to spare her lord; and he spares him on condition that "the 
 paynim " becomes a Christian. This makes the elfin less 
 supernatural, and identifies him more with the Saracens than 
 the original. The king's daughter receives her knight with 
 passionate welcome, 
 
 " Blushes scarlet red, 
 And fetches a gentle sigh " ; 
 
 and he kisses " her lily-white hand "and "the tears starte 
 from his ee' ". She could not marry him, but she would 
 marry no other man ; and they pass " many a pleasant 
 hour ", " in love and sweet dalliance ", in " a fair arbour ". 
 There the king finds them, " and an angry man was he"; 
 he banishes Sir Cauline never to return on pain of death ; 
 and imprisons " Fair Christabelle " in a tower, where she 
 "droopeth in her mind ", and doth "lament and weep", 
 refusing every suitor, king, duke, or lord. To cheer her, 
 her father proclaims a tournament ; and at it, a stranger 
 knight is ever victor, till a giant appears to avenge an affront 
 done him by a knight ; he will burn the halls and towers, 
 and take the king's daughter, and cut off the king's head 
 or fight with " a peer ". The king makes the offer of his 
 daughter's hand to anyone who will champion him. She is 
 woebegone, " casts her thought on her own true love ", and, 
 like the heroine of last century romance, weeps. The 
 stranger knight offers ; 
 
 " The lady sighed a gentle sigh 
 ' That this were my true knight ' " ; 
 
 and through six stanzas of the combat, she " deeply sighs ", 
 and " weeps for woe ", and " shrieks loud shriekings three ", 
 weeps again, and at the success of the knight, 
 
 " thanks Christ, 
 That had rescued her from thrall ". 
 
THE POETRY 221 
 
 He falls " into a swound ", and the king again sends his 
 daughter " a leech of skill ". She raises his beaver ; 
 " ' It is my life, my lord ', she says " 
 
 and 
 
 " Shrieked and swound away". 
 
 He just opens his eyes, gives her a parting look, then closes 
 them in death ; she 
 
 " Lays her pale cold cheek to his ", 
 recites a stanza over him, and 
 
 " Burst her gentle heart in twain, 
 Fair Christabelle did die ". 
 
 II. The contrast between the almost harsh directness of 
 the original ballad and this sentimental version brings out 
 more clearly than anything else could the genesis and 
 character of the romances of our period. Percy would 
 never have changed the happy ending into a tragedy, would 
 never have introduced such tempests of sighs and floods of 
 tears, so much of the sentimental amorous element, had he 
 not felt within his own breast the stirrings of the new forms 
 of the passion that were to dominate literature, had he not 
 been in sympathy with the new audience. The same 
 impulse led him and the writer of Ossian to such indulgence 
 in tears. Rousseau and Sterne, from two totally different 
 points of view and planes of feeling, had similar impulses 
 and similar results. It was the age of " sensibility " ; we 
 feel it to be a literary motive as late as Jane Austen's Sense 
 and Sensibility in which one of her heroines, Marianne, is 
 always on the brink of tears. It was the inclusion of 
 women in the new audience that produced the phenomenon ; 
 perhaps the habit of tears and sighs had its main sources in 
 the liberation of so many women from household drudgery 
 by the wealth of the new industrial age, in the amount of 
 idle time they had before new philanthrophic or artistic or 
 professional employment was allowed them, and in the 
 consequent weakness of nerves. The ladies of the old 
 ballads are far more manly, so to speak, than those of 
 Percy's versions ; they may " drop the tear from the ee ", or 
 cry " waly, waly ", but it is only for a moment, and for some 
 tragedy that has swept through their lives. One of the 
 truest marks of the old ballads is the brevity and almost 
 
222 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 prosaic directness of the sentiment or reflection, if they ever 
 indulge in it. Ferocity mingles even with their pathos, as in 
 the most beautiful of all the ballads, Helen of Kirkconnell. 
 Percy had to tone this down for his audience, and he had to 
 purify their tales of " fause love ", so as to escape the 
 unprurient and unprudish directness of their references, 
 that would have sounded gross to the new audience. 
 They delight, and without self-consciousness or 
 shame, in all those primitive passions that Chris- 
 tianity condemned, revenge, cruelty, hatred, super- 
 stitious fear, passionate love that never hesitates. It is only 
 their sense oi kinship and of property, and their monogamous 
 customs, that make their romance. Their fundamental 
 emotions and manners are pre-Christian, though they may 
 be often veneered over with Christian phrases and references. 
 Without the eighteenth century dress that Percy gave them, 
 they could never have appealed so deeply as they did to the 
 heart of his time. And they retained enough of their 
 primitive beauty, and almost savage simplicity, to make 
 readers feel that they were going back into a state of nature, 
 such as Rousseau painted and recommended. They also 
 retained enough from the strata of chivalry through which 
 so many of them had passed to satisfy the new desire for 
 chivalric romance ; in most of them there are knights and 
 fair ladies. Whilst their popular origin, apparent in them 
 all, could not well be effaced, and appealed to the revolu- 
 tionism of the time ; sympathy with rebels against social 
 custom and law runs through the whole of the Robin Hood 
 ballads, some forty in number, and many of the Border 
 ballads, like Adam Bell Clym of the Clough and William of 
 Cloudesley; and the century that saw so many punished 
 for breaches of the harsh game laws, so many riots, the 
 French Revolution, and the rise of the people, was certain 
 to drink in their spirit ; even the ballads of pure chivalry 
 are from the popular point of view ; they are generally tales 
 of unequal love, love of a knight for a king's daughter, or for 
 a peasant girl ; and if they tell of falsehood and malice and 
 slander, it is the little page, the representative of the people, 
 that reveals it, and comes off the hero, as in Aldingar, and 
 Old Robin of Portingale ; there are a few exceptions, like 
 Glasgerion, where the page does the wrong. Many, of 
 
THE POETRY 223 
 
 course, there are, that might have come from any class, 
 ballads expressive of a tragic breach of some great natural, 
 or national, or religious law, or of some tragic incident that 
 appeals to every human heart, Edom o'Gordon with its 
 wild story of revenge, Edward Edward the wail and curse 
 of a parricide, Sir Patrick Spence the elegy over brave 
 sailors and drowned courtiers. The Jew's Daughter a 
 common story of the slaughter of a Christian child, and Gil 
 Morrice the pathetic story of a son slain by his father, have 
 necessarily no democratic tinge in them. But by far the 
 most popular in last century were the love stories, The 
 Nutbrown Maid, The Beggar's Daughter of Bethnal Green, 
 Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, Lord Thomas and Fair 
 Annet, Fair Margaret and Sweet William, Barbara Allen's 
 Cruelty, and The Bailiffs Daughter of Islington. This 
 collection of ballads ushered in the great age of the romance 
 of love, often in poetry, but still oftener in prose fiction. 
 Other collections followed, especially in the North, and 
 revealed the riches of this kind of literature, Herd's Ancient 
 and Modern Scottish Songs, Heroic Ballads &c. (1769), 
 Pinkerton's Select Scottish Ballads (1783), Johnson's Scots 
 Musical Museum (1787-1803), Ritson's Ancient Songs and 
 Ballads (1792) and Robin Hood (1795), Scott's Minstrelsy 
 of the Scottish Border (1802-3), Jamieson's Popular Ballads 
 and Songs (1806), Sharpe's Ballad Book (1824), Maidment's 
 North Country Garland (1824), Kinloch's Ancient Scottish 
 Ballads (1827), Motherwell's Minstrelsy (1827), and Buchan's 
 Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland. 
 
 12. What gradually became apparent as this collection 
 and publication of ballads proceeded was that the best of 
 them belonged to the North of England and the Lowlands 
 of Scotland, and that, if two versions existed, by far the 
 most poetical and most pathetic was to be found in these 
 two districts ; the farther from the Border the worse the 
 ballad, and where the same incident or feature was used, it 
 was the Scotch ballad that made the most poetic use of it. 
 For instance, a common ending for a ballad love romance 
 is the burying of the unfortunate lovers in the same grave 
 and the growth of trees out of their grave. This is how it 
 
 put in Fair Margaret and Sweet William ; 
 
224 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 " Margaret was buried in the lower chancel 
 And William in the higher ; 
 Out of her breast there sprang a rose, 
 And out of his a briar. 
 
 They grew till they grew unto the church top 
 And then they could grow no higher ; 
 And there they tied in a true lover's knot, 
 Which made all the people admire. 
 Then came the clerk of the parish, 
 As you the truth shall hear, 
 And by misfortune cut them down 
 Or they had now been there." 
 
 In Lord Thomas and Fair Annet, a Scotch version of the 
 same story, it is put thus ; 
 
 " Lord Thomas was buried without the kirk wa', 
 Fair Annet within the quier ; 
 And o' the tane there grew a birk, 
 The other a bonny brier. 
 And ay they grew, and ay they threw, 
 As they wad fain be near ; 
 And by this ye may ken right weel 
 They were twa luvers dear." 
 
 This is no mere exception. The Scotch versions seldom 
 fall into bathos, and the English avoid it as their origin 
 approaches the Borders. The mingling of Celt, Saxon, and 
 Scandinavian in the district between the Humber and the 
 Forth, and the striking, though by no means overpowering, 
 aspects of nature throughout it must have had much to do 
 with this peculiar poetic faculty, the power of lyrical 
 narrative. And it was out of this district that the 
 renaissance of English literature came. It had remained 
 dumb for centuries, but for these natural utterances of the 
 tragedy that was in it ; but as soon as peaceful conditions 
 released the talent and energy that had so long been 
 absorbed in border forays, the South of Scotland and the 
 North of England rose again into the place they had 
 occupied in literature during the seventh and eighth 
 centuries, when they had formed one prosperous kingdom. 
 It was the Lake School, not Chatterton or Blake or Cowper, 
 that recreated poetry by the close of last century. And it 
 was Burns and Scott that drew English lyric and narrative 
 poetry and romantic fiction back to their natural fountains 
 of inspiration. There is needed no proof that the old 
 ballads deeply affected the genius of the last two. But we 
 
THE POETRY 225 
 
 X 
 
 are apt to forget that it was as balladists that Wordsworth 
 and Coleridge began their poetical career; their Lyrical 
 Ballads had appeared before the century was out. 
 And the simplicity of the old folk-poems impelled them 
 to a crusade against the conventional language and 
 ornament that had stifled English poetry since the days of 
 Milton. Wordsworth thought the Reliques the true 
 redemption of English poetry, and in his famous Essay on 
 Poetry said ; "I do not think that there is an able writer in 
 verse of the present day who would not be proud to 
 acknowledge his obligation to the Reliques ; I know that it 
 is so with my friends ; and for myself I am happy in this 
 occasion to make a public avowal of my own." He pointed 
 out that German poetry had by the close of last century 
 been greatly influenced by translations of the book, Burger 
 and Goethe and Schiller imitating the ballads. But after 
 Wordsworth wrote this came Scott with his marvellous 
 expansions of ballad romances into his novels, Byron with 
 his narrative poetry, and Browning, Tennyson, Rossetti, 
 Swinburne, and a hundred other poets, trained in the school 
 of ballads, and eager to shine as balladists. 
 
 Section 22. 
 
 I. But out of the very region and atmosphere of the 
 ballads came Burns, who had sung and died before 
 Wordsworth expounded his poetical creed. Afterwards the 
 English poet acknowledged the great beauty of the Scotch 
 ballads and songs, as how could he not, with his Northumbrian 
 birth and nurture ? But in his Essay he passed the Scotch lyrist 
 by, satisfied with classifying him beside Thomson. He had 
 not seen that the Lowlands was to be, with his own Lake 
 country, the native land of poetry for a time. In the 
 Lowlands indeed had been flourishing for centuries a lyric 
 power unsurpassed by any region of the world. It had been 
 civilised, and yet war-like and courageous, when the Romans 
 came north ; it was the first section of Britain under the 
 Saxons to become literary. It was for ages the scene of all 
 the struggles between race and race, religion and religion, 
 kingdom and kingdom, party and party. And yet it was 
 a land fitted for agriculture and the pursuits of peace. It 
 
 Q 
 
226 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 had scenery that was beautiful and often striking, and that 
 yet did not, like the Highlands, forbid close intercourse or 
 union ; the inhabitants of one district were not shut off by 
 high and bleak mountains from those of another. Nature 
 was impressive and yet not overpowering. The mingling 
 of races, too, gave a singular variety to the character of the 
 people and to their imagination the power of figurative 
 and emotional expression that belongs to the Celt, the 
 adventurous fancy of the Scandinavian, and the more 
 calculating intellectual faculty of the Saxon. Hence the 
 contradictory attributes assigned to the Scotch by different 
 critics, the " perfervidum ingenium " and the " cannieness ", 
 the humour and the impermeability to a joke, the religiosity 
 and the scepticism, the emotionalism and the metaphysical 
 subtlety, the rough candour and the " pawkieness " , the 
 reckless dash and the strenuous persistence essential for 
 worldly success, the revolutionism and the conservative 
 caution, the large generosity and the miserly watchfulness 
 over the pence. These contradictories are to be found in 
 every Lowland village, and are due to the intermixture of 
 such different racial types. 
 
 2. The northern dialect of Anglo-Saxon used in the 
 region was sufficiently isolated to preserve it from the foreign 
 influences that changed the southern dialects and to give it 
 a more distinctive character, yet not sufficiently to raise it 
 into a national language. It had the strong sense of nation- 
 ality in it during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and 
 boasted a vigorous literature. The accession of the Stuart 
 dynasty to the English throne drew off the best secular talent of 
 the district into England during the seventeenth century, whilst 
 its religious wars and persecutions absorbed its earnest 
 elements. The Union in the beginning of the eighteenth 
 century at first tended to attract its literary ability to London. 
 But the rise of a vigorous intellectual and national life in Scot- 
 land checked this emigration in the latter half of the century. 
 The cessation of border strife, the truce in the Highlands, 
 and the outlet abroad for Scottish enterprise began to give 
 great prosperity to the people ; and the long-suppressed 
 imagination and literary talent blossomed and fruited with 
 vigour. French freedom of thought and revolutionism 
 
THE POETRY 227 
 
 leavened the capital and the universities, and through them 
 the church and the country districts. The new audience of 
 literature was ready in the Lowlands of Scotland long before 
 it was getting under way in England. The educational 
 system established by Knox had made reading and writing 
 a prime necessity of life ; to be illiterate was deemed even 
 amongst the poorest a disgrace greater than outlawry or 
 vagabondage. The appreciation of literature had become 
 an instinct amongst the peasantry ; and, as soon as the Union 
 of the two kingdoms, and the final defeat of the Stuart 
 cause in the rebellion of 1745 left them free from the 
 harassment of civil strife and the fear ot political or religious 
 persecution, their talents addressed themselves to literature. 
 They were taught in their schools to look upon English as 
 the proper medium of prose and of more sustained poetic 
 efforts like the epic or didactic poem or the drama. But 
 the long centuries of oral transmission and, of song had 
 attached the Lowland dialect to the briefer poetic forms, 
 the lyric and the ballad. It was these that were dear to 
 every Scotch household and social gathering. Allan 
 Ramsay, it is true, attempted a dramatic pastoral in Scotch ; 
 but it was largely a collection of lyrics. 
 
 3. One of the first tasks of the new dialect poets was to 
 fit the old songs and ballads to the new national audience/ 
 Since they had been composed, puritanism had made 
 Christianity a more emotional and practical religion amongst 
 the Scotch ; it had swept the minds of the Scotch peasantry, 
 as it did the minds of the English middle class, of the old 
 tendency to grossness of imagination or expression. The 
 old minstrelsy had little regard for nice ears. And one of 
 the chief duties of the new poetry was to purify the old 
 songs and ballads. The advancing purification of literature 
 of the early part of our own century has made some of the 
 expressions of Ramsay and Burns seem broad, if not gross. 
 Yet their main function was to revise the older poetry and 
 fit it for the newer audience. There is little of the literature 
 of last century but is as plain-spoken at times as their poems 
 and songs. 
 
 4. Burns had the misfortune to come in the battle-time 
 of two ages. The last quarter of the century showed the 
 
22$ PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 collision of the old ideas and the new in every sphere, 
 religion, social life, politics, philosophy, poetry ; it was the 
 meeting of the waters of tradition and revolution ; and it 
 was difficult for even the coolest head to know which way 
 justice and purity pointed. It was little wonder that this 
 Scottish peasant, " following the plough along the mountain- 
 side", did not always show an unerring instinct in taste, 
 morality, or life. The Celt, the Saxon, and the Scandinavian 
 were at war within his breast. Without him warred powers 
 and principalities, philosophies and creeds. Now he was 
 stirred by the Jacobite traditions of his father's house, again 
 by the Covenanting ardour of his mother's forefathers ; now 
 by the sober blood of his father's didacticism, again by the 
 lyric fire of his mother's songs and ballads ; now by the pure 
 ideals of a cottar's Saturday night, again by the wild 
 bacchanalian customs of the social life of his time. In 
 politics he showed the same oscillation ; he was a revolu- 
 tionist one day, a patriot the next. In morality he vacillated 
 oetween the puritan and the riotous debauchee of the 
 eighteenth century. In principles he had no rest, now a 
 Voltairian, or materialist, again a champion of the idea of 
 God and the immortality of the soul. In religion he 
 fluctuated between the attitude of the silent reverent 
 worshipper and that of the scoffer. There is no fixed creed 
 of any kind to be made out of his writings. He was 
 "buffeted about by every wind of doctrine." And so was 
 his time. There was no firm standing-ground to be found, 
 no definite path of action, till the smoke of battle cleared 
 after the century closed. 
 
 5. His works, like his life, consist of magnificent 
 fragments, that can by no art be pieced together into a 
 unity. And in this way are they the truest mirror of the 
 age that produced them. His mind, like that of most of 
 his fellow-countrymen, was open to all the tempestuous 
 influences of the time. And his genius, his nation's perhaps 
 more than his own, raised its products into European 
 significance. They show "the very age and body of the 
 time his form and pressure." Into his mould of concen- 
 trated passion ran the molten material of a revolutionary 
 period. Howsoever he chose local theme and local form, 
 
THE POETRY 2 29 
 
 the result had absorbed the primal elements of human 
 thought and passion that belonged to the age. And these 
 it was that raised it, fragmentary and scattered though it 
 was, to the level of world- wide poetry. 
 
 6. He was essentially a lyrist, capable of only one violent, 
 or colossal passion at a time, and he belonged to a great 
 lyrical period of his country's literature. Read though he 
 did and admire Addison and Pope, Thomson and 
 Shenstone and Gray, Shakespeare and Milton, Richardson 
 and Smollett, Ossian and Sterne, these could not bend him, 
 except for a passing moment, from his true career. He 
 meditated an epic and a tragedy ; he wrote letters modelled 
 on a Collection of Letters by the wits of the Queen Anne 
 period which he came across when a boy ; he indulged at 
 times in Ossianesque attitudes and expressions. But he 
 fell back in his natural moods on Scotch song. His true 
 inspirers were Allan Ramsay's Works, A Select 
 Collection of English Songs, called The Lark, which fell in 
 his way when he was seventeen, and Robert Fergusson's 
 Poems, which began to stimulate him to poetic production 
 at twenty-three. Even in his satiric, descriptive, and 
 allegorical poems he could not get clear of the lyrical 
 mould ; it was a song that was ever guiding his ear ; and 
 it was a lyrical stanza or rhythm that he adopted. 
 
 7. Howsoever precedent and great example might have 
 imposed their fetters and moulds upon the poetry of the 
 Revolution, it was an age essentially lyrical, as all volcanic 
 ages are. And Scotland was the first to feel this. Long 
 before the sense of revolutionism had grown strong in the 
 century, all classes in that country had been inspired to 
 lyrical outburst. It was partly due to the Jacobite risings, 
 which stirred the upper ranks of Scotchmen in the Lowlands, 
 and even the middle classes in the North East, to passionate 
 expectation, and afterwards to passionate regret ; we have 
 William Hamilton of Bangour with his pathetic Braes of 
 Yarrow, Rev. John Skinner with his Tullochgorum, George 
 Halket the schoolmaster with his Whirry Whigs awa', and 
 Logic o' Buchan, and Adam Skirving the Haddingtonshire 
 farmer with his Hey Johnnie Cope. But it was not 
 Jacobitism alone that awakened in Scotland that stormy 
 
230 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 petrel of war and revolution, the song. It was responsible 
 for hundreds of lyrics, many of them prosaic and dull. 
 Lyricism extended to classes and districts and families that 
 had, through the religious persecutions of the times of 
 Charles the Second and James the Second, been driven 
 into intense hatred of the Stuarts and their cause. The 
 peasantry in the South had no sympathy with Jacobitism, 
 and it was from them and the families of the gentry that 
 were in touch with them, that most of the pathetic, amorous, 
 and humorous songs of the time came. Allan Ramsay, and 
 those who wrote for his Tea-table Miscellany, like Robert 
 Crawford, author of The Bush Aboon Traquair, and Lady 
 Grisell Baillie, the writer of " Were na my heart licht ", had 
 not yet caught the true inspiration ; their songs are touched 
 with the artificiality of the Queen Anne age. It was in the 
 latter half of the century, when revolutionism, hot from 
 America or France, was working Lowland thought into 
 ferment, that the true lyric pathos became common. The 
 time of the ballad, fiery though its narrative was, was long 
 past. A more direct appeal to the emotions was needed ; 
 and every type of Scotchman and Scotchwoman was stirred 
 to write song ; it came from castle and hut, from the 
 professions and the trades, from the puritan and the 
 vagabond, from the farmer and the shepherd. There is no 
 parallel to the phenomenon in the history of any literature. 
 We have " There's nae luck about the house " from a poor 
 schoolmistress, Jean Adams, " Ca' the yowes to the knowes " 
 from Isobel Pagan, a drunken frequenter of fairs, Mary's 
 Dream from John Lowe, a divinity student, Auld Robin 
 Gray from Lady Anne Barnard, daughter of the Earl 
 of Balcarres, the older version of The Flowers of the Forest 
 from Jane Elliot, the daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot of Minto, 
 himself a song writer, the new version from Mrs. Cockburn, 
 wife of an Edinburgh advocate, Logan Braes from John 
 Mayne, and " My only Jo and deary O " from Richard Gall, 
 both compositors, Mary of Castlecary from Hector Macneil, 
 a clerk, and after Burns's first volume, The Land o' the Leal, 
 Caller Herrin, Hunting-Tower, The Laird o' Cockpen and 
 several Jacobite songs, like " Will ye no come back again "> 
 and " Charlie is my darling ", from Caroline Oliphant, 
 afterwards Lady Nairn, Jenny Dang the Weaver, and 
 
THE POETRY 231 
 
 Jennie's Baubee from Sir Alexander Boswell, the son of 
 Johnson's Boswell, and The Braes o' Balquhither, The 
 Flower o' Dumblane, Gloomy Winter's now awa, and a 
 dozen others, from Robert Tannahill, the Paisley weaver. 
 These songs range through every key of human passion and 
 emotion. Most of them had old Scotch music to guide 
 them and old Scotch versions to revise. But in them all 
 there is the true lyrical fervour that can find utterance only 
 in the white heat of inspiration ; each is a unity, and 
 expresses one phase of emotion. And the mark of their 
 truth to nature and their appeal to the heart of mankind is 
 their continuous popularity even amongst those who are not 
 familiar with the Scotch dialect. 
 
 8. It was into a lyrical atmosphere such as this that 
 Robert Burns was born in January 1759. Round his child- 
 hood and youth it moved, and it passed into his inner nature. 
 His mother, an Ayrshire farmer's daughter, had a store of 
 songs and ballads ; and an old woman, called Betty 
 Davidson, who was much in his father's house, was never 
 weary of singing old songs and reciting old ballads and 
 telling old legends especially of the supernatural. The 
 wonder would have been that when he wrote poetry it was 
 anything but lyrical. Around him, too, was the atmosphere 
 of education, as it was in every Scotch household last 
 century. The Scottish peasant boy of that time had as good 
 a chance of acquiring literary tastes and ambitions as the boy 
 of the wealthy English middle class of to-day. He was 
 taught and encouraged to read, and the schoolmasters were 
 all university men, who were eager and able to teach him to 
 compose in English. It is this that explains the extra- 
 ordinary number of Scotchmen who take a considerable 
 place in the English literature of the era. Burns began to 
 write when he was seventeen or eighteen years of age. He 
 was willing to let his first efforts die, except one fragment, 
 which reveals his ambitions and leanings ; the piece 
 beginning, 
 
 " All devil as I am, a damned wretch," 
 
 is a soliloquy in a blank verse melodrama like those written 
 in the Queen Anne age by Rowe and Young ; in spirit it is 
 a curious anticipation of Byronism ; but for its monotonous 
 
32 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 rhythm it might be from Manfred. There is in it the 
 fundamental attitude of revolutionism ; his villain pities 
 human wretchedness, sighs over the distress of the poor, 
 sheds indignant tears over " the honest man's destruction ", 
 sorrows for " abandon'd vagabonds ", scorns " the seeming 
 good ", and repents the abuse of the powers an injured God 
 has given him. Here, when he was drudging on his father's 
 farm, before he had diverged in the least from the puritan 
 ideal of morality that guided his father's household, before 
 he plunged into the amorous dissipation of his Tarbolton 
 period, we have in this piece of artificiality and imitation 
 the revolutionary creed of his life. He loves the rebel 
 against all conventions, and has a lingering desire for 
 rebellion against them ; he is on the side of the poor and 
 lov.-ly and despised ; he has a suspicion that it is laws and 
 oppression and social and religious hypocrisies that ruin the 
 world and make it sinful. As soon as he read Paradise 
 Lost, he had a lurking sympathy with Satan in his pride and 
 rebelliousness ; and in his first volume, published when he 
 was twenty-six, he puts this sympathy into his Address to 
 the Deil. 
 
 " I'm wae to think upo' yon den, 
 Even for your sake ". 
 
 It was only in exceptional circumstances that he abandoned 
 the revolutionary attitude, when, towards the close of his 
 life, the reactionary movement from the Napoleonic wars 
 affected him, and he wrote (1795) two patriotic songs, 
 "Does haughty Gaul invasion threat", and "Their groves of 
 sweet myrtle let foreign lands reckon". His normal 
 sympathies were on the side of democracy, freedom, and 
 progress, and often on the side of the rebel and revolution. 
 
 9. He got clear of his factitious and foreign inspirations 
 by the time that he was twenty-two. His first two lyrics, " I 
 dreamed I lay where flowers were springing" (1776), and 
 " On Cessnock banks there lives a lass" (1781), have still 
 the fetters of the Queen Anne artificiality about them. So 
 too has Winter, A Dirge, a cry of suppressed rebellion 
 against his misfortunes, and John Barleycorn, a slight semi- 
 allegorical piece of humour. But the true lyric note has 
 begun to appear by 1781 in The rigs of barley, My Nannie 
 
THE POETRY 233 
 
 O, Now westlin winds and slaughtering guns, and Mary 
 Morison. There is the careless, pleasure-loving atmosphere 
 of the Tarbolton Lothario in the first two, and the quick 
 jigging rhythm of the fiddle and the dance that belongs to 
 so many of Burns's love songs and drinking songs. There is a 
 deeper note in the last two, in the one sympathy with animals 
 and hatred of the oppressor, and in the other the pathos of 
 timid reverent love and the full sense of the simple diction 
 of the lyric. In the song 'My Father ^was a Farmer upon 
 the Carrick Border " we have the epicurean creed that came 
 from his misfortunes and seemed to bring out the worst part 
 of his nature through all his life ; he could see no hope of 
 rising above his fate, and he determined to enjoy the hour. 
 In Poor Mailie, both the tale and the elegy, he reveals the 
 keen insight into the Jeelings of the animals, that so 
 distinguished Cowper, and was becoming one of the marks 
 of the new philanthropy ; he mourns with mingled humour 
 and pathos over the death of his pet ewe. In this last we 
 begin to see the rhythm and verse of Robert Fergusson, 
 whose poems had been collected in 1773, the year before 
 the death of that young Edinburgh satirist. The influence 
 of his predecessor in Scottish verse became more and more 
 apparent in the work of the next five years. He grew less 
 lyrical, and devoted himself to satire and description. In 
 his first volume, published at Kilmarnock in August 1786 to 
 pay the expenses of his proposed emigration to the West 
 Indies, most of the poems are in Fergusson's favourite 
 stanza and in his style, although they far surpass their 
 model in trenchant satire and poetic insight. The venture 
 was a great success, and he was turned from his purpose, 
 and spent a winter in Edinburgh getting his. democratic 
 pride and revolutionary principles more deeply ingrained by 
 his insight into the manner in which society lionised him. 
 The new edition of his poems, with some that he had 
 written in 1785 added, was published in 1787 and realised 
 such a sum as enabled him to lease another farm, Ellisland 
 near Dumfries, where he lost it all, and sank into misfortune 
 and ill health. He eked out a living for his wife and 
 children as an excise-officer, and died in 1796 aged 37. 
 This last is his great lyrical period, thanks to an agreement 
 made during his Edinburgh sojourn with James Johnson of 
 the Scots Musical Museum, a sort of lyrical magazine. 
 
234 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 10. In his Edinburgh volume we have all his best 
 non-lyrical poems, except his pathetic Elegy on Captain 
 Matthew Henderson, and his Tam O' Shanter, which were 
 both written in 1790. And they reveal, perhaps with more 
 clearness than his songs, how much he was a child of his 
 time, how deeply the tragedy of his life had engraved the 
 new creeds into his nature. Had prosperity made his 
 father's and his own circumstances easy, we should not have 
 had so passionate an expression of the growing sympathy 
 with the oppressed ; it runs through all his more serious 
 poems ; he seldom misses an opportunity to satirise the 
 oppressor ; perhaps the feeling is most apparent in the Twa 
 Dogs, one of the best of his attempts to interpret the 
 feelings of the animals in the style of the old fables ; Caesar, 
 the pampered dog of the upper classes, describes their life 
 to Luath a "ploughman's collie", who in return descants 
 on the sorrows and joys of the poor ; the result is by no 
 means to the advantage of " the gentry " ; their extravagance, 
 waste, corruption, hypocrisy, scandal-monging, ennui are 
 painted with unsparing satire ; Luath, the collie, gives us 
 the shadow thrown by their oppression ; 
 
 " There's monie a creditable stock 
 O' decent, honest, fawsont folk 
 Are riven out baith root and branch, 
 Some rascal's pridefu' greed to quench". 
 
 The impression from the dialogue is that man in general 
 has but a poor lot, but that the poor man has on the whole 
 the best of it, 
 
 (" They're maistly wonderfu' contented ") ; 
 
 Caesar, the " gentleman and scholar ", has much the lower 
 opinion of human capacity, 
 
 (" But human bodies are sic fools 
 For a' their colleges and schools ") ; 
 
 but both were 
 
 " rejoiced they were na men but dogs ". 
 
 This pessimism, which was one side of Rousseau's teaching 
 and the dominant phase of pre-revolutionary thought, is 
 even more pronounced in other poems ; his " Address to a 
 Mouse on turning her up in her nest with the plough, 
 November 1785" is deeply imbued with the new care for 
 
THE POETRY 235 
 
 animal life ; and it is as strong as Rousseau's books in the 
 belief in the state of nature ; 
 
 " I'm truly sorry man's dominion 
 Has broken nature's social union, 
 And justifies that ill opinion 
 Which makes thee startle 
 At me, thy poor earth-born companion, 
 And fellow-mortal." 
 
 Yet the woe of his lot is deepened in man by his foresight ; 
 
 " Still thou art blest, compared wi' me ; 
 The present only toucheth thee ". 
 
 His " Man was made to mourn, A Dirge " is saturated with 
 this pessimistic feeling over human oppression and wrong ; 
 he seems to approach to the socialistic indignation and 
 creed of the advanced revolutionists ; 
 
 " Man's inhumanity to man 
 
 Makes countless thousands mourn ". 
 " See yonder poor, o'er-labour'd wight, 
 
 So abject, mean, and vile, 
 
 Who begs a brother of the earth, 
 
 To give him leave to toil ; 
 
 And see his lordly fellow-worm 
 
 The poor petition spurn, 
 
 Unmindful, tho' a weeping wife 
 
 And helpless offspring mourn ". 
 " If I'm designed yon lordling's slave, 
 
 By nature's law design'd, 
 
 Why was an independent wish 
 
 E'er planted in my mind ? " 
 " O Death ! the poor man's dearest friend, 
 
 The kindest and the best ! " 
 
 The same note of sadness over the woes and wrongs of life 
 is strong in A Winter Night, to some extent an echo of 
 Shakespeare's Lear and Amiens' song in As You Like It, 
 "Blow, blow thou bitter wind", Despondency, An Ode, an 
 attempt in the style of Gray and Collins, praising the lot of 
 the hermit, and To a Mountain Daisy, 
 
 (" Such fate to suffering worth is given 
 
 By human pride or cunning driven 
 
 To misery's brink "). 
 
 He is ever on the side of the poor, and seems to identify 
 them with the honest. At least he counts misfortune often 
 as the mark of honest purpose and life. He is never weary 
 of insisting on the divinity of sincere and virtuous motive 
 
236 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 and work, as against the ephemeral, man-made nature of 
 titles and rank, wealth and position. In the Cottar's 
 Saturday Night he enshrines a verse from Pope's Epistles 
 a common habit of his being to appropriate and bring out 
 the force of favourite phrases from the poets ; Pope's 
 couplet is much feebler ; 
 
 " A wit's a feather and a chief a rod ; 
 An honest man's the noblest work of God." 
 Burns's setting revolutionises the meaning ; 
 
 " Princes and lords are but the breath of kings ; 
 ' An honest man's the noblest work of God '. 
 And certes in fair virtue's heavenly road 
 The cottage leaves the palace far behind ; 
 What is a lordling's pomp ? a cumbrous load, 
 Disguising oft the wretch of human kind, 
 Studied in arts of hell, in wickedness refin'd." 
 
 Perhaps the most concentrated expression of this basis of 
 the Revolution is to be found in his rattling song " For a' 
 that and a' that " ; its chorus ending, 
 
 " The rank is but the guinea stamp ; 
 The man's the gowd for a' that ", 
 
 gives it an epigrammatic form. It almost deifies the "honest 
 men " and " honest poverty " ; and it closes with the 
 revolutionary dream of the approaching brotherhood of 
 humanity ; 
 
 " It's coming yet for a' that 
 
 That man to man, the world o'er, 
 
 Shall brothers be for a' that ". 
 
 In all his numerous poetical appeals and addresses, To 
 James Smith, To Davie a brother poet, To Gavin Hamilton, 
 To John Lapraik an old Scottish bard, To William 
 Simpson, To John Rankine, To Robert Graham, To Major 
 Logan, To John Kennedy, there appear this pride of 
 poverty and integrity and this demand for brotherhood ; 
 they make the very essence of his irony in his Address to 
 the Deil. He evidently counted independent, virtuous 
 humanity as the theme of his poetry ; for he makes the 
 Scottish Muse in The Vision say, when she is about to 
 ' 'bind the holly round his head", 
 
 " Preserve the dignity of man 
 
 With soul erect 
 
 And trust the Universal Plan 
 
 Will all protect." 
 
THE POETRY 237 
 
 It has often been urged or admitted that he did not always 
 " preserve the dignity of man " ; he admits himself as much 
 in this very poem ; the muse says, 
 
 " I saw thy pulse's maddening play 
 
 Wild send thee Pleasure's devious way, 
 
 Misled by Fancy's meteor ray 
 
 By Passion driven ". 
 
 He makes her add the true explanation and defence ; 
 " But yet the light, that led astray, 
 Was light from Heaven ". 
 
 He had the inspired poet's unstable equilibrium of nature, 
 and he had come in a time when the drinking habits and 
 loose morality of the century, handed down to it by the" 
 court of Charles the Second, had to be bold and even 
 flippant in order to stand up in presence of the new criticism 
 and the new demand for purity of life and sincerity of 
 religion. Burns's enthusiastic and social disposition made 
 him the natural prey of these customs of all classes, customs 
 that were to suffer eclipse before his generation was out. 
 We find him, therefore, continually sway between lapse and 
 remorse for lapse ; his poems now applaud the sin and again 
 condemn and bewail the sinner. His repentance is as 
 sincere as his indulgence. The misfortune is that what 
 could be ignored and has been forgotten in most of the men 
 of last century, both prominent and obscure, has been in 
 his case made immortal by his poetry ; there, are recorded 
 all his breaches of what is now thought necessary to the 
 "dignity of man", all his championship of outrage on 
 convention and even moral law 7 , in verse that cannot be 
 forgotten ; he made his own " evil manners live in brass " ; 
 he had the writing of his own epitaph, and it has been so 
 etched in by the concentration of his satire and the fire of 
 his lyrics that his virtues and his fundamental creed have 
 fallen into oblivion. 
 
 II. It is one of the most tragic spectacles of last century, 
 this strong soul buffeted by the cross-currents of the ages, 
 and by the tempests of revolution. How often he falls back 
 upon his father's creed and life, and tries to get refuge in 
 them, only to find himself driven forth by his wild passions 
 and the epicurean practices or revolutionary theories of the 
 
238 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 time ! His Cottar's Saturday Night with its noble picture 
 of simple peasant virtue and household religion, his Prayer 
 and Stanzas in the Prospect of Death, almost Biblical in 
 their phraseology, his Epistle to a Young Friend (1786), 
 with its praise of heart religion and its 
 
 " An atheist's laugh's a poor exchange 
 For Ueity offended ", 
 
 his Lines Written in Glenriddel Hermitage 1788 with its 
 
 ' ' Life is but a day at most 
 
 Sprung from night, in darkness lost " , 
 and " Reverence with lowly heart 
 
 Him whose wondrous work thou art " , 
 
 must be set over against his erotic and bacchanalian songs, 
 and his satires that deal freely with religious names and 
 ideas. In many of the latter he felt himself justified by his 
 indignation against all hypocrisy and by the enthusiasm for 
 revolutionism. He was with the progressive theology of the 
 New Light preachers, who sympathised with the advance of 
 science and philosophy, and opposed the conversatism of 
 the Auld Light clergymen, men who would allow no tincture 
 of reason in their sermons or creed. As in every age, the 
 conflict between the old and the new in theology was very 
 bitter, and especially so in Ayrshire. And Burns, following 
 his father, naturally sympathised with the religion that took 
 into account the new thought. His public reproof by a 
 clergyman for seduction made him red-hot in his antagonism 
 to all those who favoured the old-fashioned Calvinism, 
 dogmatic preaching, fiery threats of future punishment, and 
 authoritative interference with social life. Some of the 
 Auld Lights were harsh and intolerant in the exercise of 
 their functions, and a few of the most obnoxiously rigid, as 
 in every creed, were hypocrites ; hence The Holy Fair with 
 its caustic picture of what a scoffer might see in a sacramen- 
 tal gathering, The Ordination with its bitter personalities, 
 The Calf with its flippant but clever wit, The Address to the 
 Unco Guid with its appeal for tolerance, 
 
 (" Then gently scan your brother man, 
 Still gentler sister woman "), 
 
 the milder ridicule of two quarreling preachers in The Twa 
 Herds, and the vitriolic burlesque Holy Willie's Prayer. 
 In the last he tears off the cloak of religious hypocrisy with 
 
THE POETRY 239 
 
 ruthless hand ; Holy Willie addresses Heaven as his special 
 patron, and thanks God that he is not as other men are ; he 
 assumes the deepest mock humility ; and in expressing 
 gratitude for being kept from the sins of drinking and 
 swearing and singing and dancing, confesses that he is 
 " fash'd wi' fleshly lust ", and asks pardon for his trans- 
 gressions ; he accounts for the weakness by supposing that 
 it has been sent to keep him from being too proud of his 
 holiness ; he puts in a word against his special enemies, and 
 flatters for the sake of future benefits. It is the climax of 
 the poet's satiric powers. And we can see from his Epistle to 
 the Rev. John McMath enclosing the poem that he meant by 
 it to purify religion. He hates the hypocrisy of the ranters 
 more than their doctrine, " their three-mile prayers and hauf- 
 mile graces " ; he would rather be " an atheist clean " than 
 hide his faults " under gospel colours ". 
 
 " All hail Religion ! maid divine ! 
 To stigmatise false friends of thine 
 Can ne'er defame thee ". 
 
 He acknowledges that there are many " manly preachers " 
 in the church. And his satires did not a little to purge it 
 of the faults he objected to. 
 
 12. His social satires and pictures are more genial, and 
 some of them are even more felicitous in their phrases than 
 these. Death and Doctor Hornbook is one of the most 
 vivid and it has much of the biting vigour of Holy Willie's 
 Prayer ; its satire is true against quacks in all ages. Tarn 
 Samson's Elegy, Scotch Drink, To a Haggis, To the 
 Toothache, and To a Louse are in the same stanza he 
 borrowed from Fergusson, and are more in the style of his 
 model, unelevated as their themes. His Hallowe'en, and 
 The Jolly Beggars, are faithful pictures of rough life, the 
 one full of folk-superstitions, and the other of rattling lyrics 
 of love and drink. His Brigs of Ayr a dialogue between 
 the new and old bridge, with satiric touches on new customs, 
 two of his Epistles to Robert Graham, and his theatrical 
 prologues and addresses are in the heroic couplet, and show 
 that he was not at his ease in the verse of Dryden and 
 Pope ; he tends to be stilted and artificial. The verse, that 
 he uses most naturally next to the stanza of Fergusson, is 
 
24* PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 the octosyllabic measure of Swift. He employs it in his 
 Twa Dogs, in his Dedication to Gavin Hamilton, in his 
 Lines written in Friars Carse Hermitage, and in the best of 
 his poems, Tarn O'Shanter ; the short line and the easy 
 construction of the rhyme suit his most humorous mood. 
 The last he wrote in a day at Dumfries in 1790, and, for 
 convivial pictures, beautiful and apt similes, absorbing 
 narrative and the mixture of irony and superstition, it is 
 unsurpassed; he is by turns the epicurean, the poet, the 
 satirist, and the awed rustic ; the only pieces that bear 
 separation from their context are his similes ; 
 
 " As bees flee hame wi' lades o' treasure, 
 The minutes winged their way wi' pleasure ; 
 Kings may be blest, but Tarn was glorious, 
 O'er a' the ills o' life victorious. 
 But pleasures are like poppies spread ; 
 You seize the flower, its bloom is shed, 
 Or like the snowfall in the river, 
 A moment white then melts for ever ". 
 
 13, But it cannot be said that he is at his very best in 
 any of his poems. He shows himself at his feeblest in his 
 epigrams, which exhibit more vigour in the intention than 
 in the effect. It was as a lyrist that he fitted his nation, his 
 age, and his own genius. No such body of song as his has 
 ever been produced by any one period of any nation, let 
 alone by any one man. He wrote close on three hundred 
 lyrics, one half of which are equal to the best of any 
 nationality. It is true, most of them were based on older 
 songs, but, like Shakespeare, he turned the coarse metal of 
 the originals into fine gold. They express every phase of 
 human passion, and fit every variety of mood. There are 
 Jacobite songs like " Here's a health to them that's awa ", 
 patriotic like " Scots wha hae " and " Does haughty Gaul 
 invasion threat", political like "When Guilford good our 
 pilot stood ", and revolutionary like Address to General 
 Dumourier, and " Is there for honest poverty " ; there are 
 ballads like " Lord Gregory ope thy door ", and sentimental 
 songs like Afton Water, My Nannie O, and Mary Morison, 
 pathetic songs like " Ye Banks and Braes o' bonny Doon ", 
 and bacchanalian songs like " Willie brew'd a peck o' maut ", 
 and Auld Lang Syne ; love songs like " O Whistle and I'll 
 come to you, my lad ", and The rigs o' barley, and songs of 
 
THE POETRY 241 
 
 domestic life " Of a' the airts the wind can blaw ", and 
 " John Anderson my jo " ; songs of love and money like " O 
 for ane and twenty, Tarn ", and " What can a young lassie 
 do wi' an auld man ", and humorous songs like " Last May a 
 braw wooer ", Willie Wastle, " Whistle owre the lave o't ", 
 and " The Deil's awa wi' the Exciseman " ; nature songs like 
 " Hark the mavis' evenin' sang ", My Nannie's awa, and 
 The Birks of Aberfeldy, and songs of incidents in his life 
 like Highland Mary, To Mary in heaven, "There was a 
 lad was born in Kyle ", and " The gloomy night is gathering 
 fast ". Most of them have indeed a close connection with 
 his life, and hence their vital quality. He seldom or never 
 chose an artificial topic or occasion. Perhaps none are so 
 near the perfection of simplicity as To Mary in Heaven, 
 Mary Morison, and " Ae fond kiss and then we sever"; 
 Byron and Scott agreed that nothing could surpass the 
 pathos and intensity of the last, especially of this half 
 stanza ; 
 
 " Had we never lov'd sae kindly, 
 
 Had we never lov'd sae blindly, 
 
 Never met, or never parted, 
 
 We had ne'er been broken-hearted ". 
 
 It is in lines like these that we realise how much the age of 
 the Revolution resembled in character and in lyrical power 
 the age of Elizabeth. Burns brings out better than any / 
 poet of last century the depth of the revolutionary current^ 
 in Britain. 
 
 Section 23. 
 
 I. But there is another poet of contrasted character and 
 genius who reveals it almost as well. It is William Cowper. 
 Born in 1731, twenty-eight years before Burns, he did not 
 begin to write poetry till the Scotch poet was writing his 
 first lyrics. Their work is wholly contemporary and, though 
 strongly contrasted in tone and expression, subject to the 
 same influences. By the circumstances of their lives they 
 came into close contact with nature as seen in the country 
 and were moulded by it. They were driven back on the 
 primitive sources of poetry and drank so deeply of them 
 that the poetical conventions of the immediate past would 
 not fit their emotions and ideas ; they were children of 
 
 R 
 
242 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 nature unfit for the intricate and artificial life of 
 modern society and certain to lose themselves if they 
 entered its labyrinth; they were satirists only by recoil from 
 it, keenly sensitive as they were to its temptations, its vices, 
 its inherent selfishness and cruelty, and its criticism and 
 mockery. They loved their poetry as the only unfailing 
 consolation of their lives ; they wrote primarily, as the birds 
 sing, to please themselves, to satisfy a strong instinct ; thus 
 they came nearer to the primitive attitude of poetry, to 
 inspiration, to the mood of the balladists, than any English 
 poet had come for a century or more. They could not long 
 keep to their models ; they had to speak as their emotions 
 prompted them; and all artificiality of attempt or inspiration 
 or theme led to immediate failure. They were thus the 
 truest representatives of the new audience that had been 
 secluded from pubtlicjife and highly organised society for so 
 many generations. They led poetry back to mother earth, 
 to its primitive elements, to its essential soil, and_they gave 
 it a language neaier to the simplicity of nature] Their 
 hearts were open to the larger influences of the coming age, 
 as no cultured or city poets could have been. In the turbid 
 atmosphere of political or social life it is only the immediate 
 issues that can be seen, and the tendencies that are about 
 to dominate seem to have no more importance than 
 ephemeral cries, or movements that are about to vanish ; 
 out in the open of a time the passionate spirit feels what is 
 elemental and what is local and evanescent. These two 
 poets were, therefore, each in his own way, the singers of 
 the new time, the preachers of revolutionism ; they taught 
 naturally and unconsciously what Rousseau made a 
 dogmatic creed ; without in the least knowing that they had 
 any resemblance to the French forerunner of the 
 Revolution, they were ever appealing to nature as nearer the 
 ideal standard and inspiring recoil from the artificiality of 
 human conventions. They were keenly conscious of the 
 hypocrisies and corruptions of society and felt at least 
 comparatively solaced in the woeful struggles of life by 
 sympathy with the oppressed and lowly, by intercourse with 
 1 the simplicity of nature and by giving utterance to its 
 melody or sorrow in verse. They were ever lauding freedom 
 though Burns coquetted with Jacobitism and Cowper was 
 
THE POETRY 243 
 
 opposed to the American struggle for independence. They 
 had both a deep belief in the sublimities of the puritan faith 
 their audience held, though they differed widely in their 
 expression of it. They both satirised the church for the 
 hypocrisies and mistaken missions that took refuge in it, 
 though Burns flippantly sympathised with the heterodox and 
 progressive preachers and Cowper earnestly followed the 
 new evangelical movement. Burns was a puritan in spite 
 of his epicurean and rebellious tendencies, Cowper a lover 
 of nature and revolutionist, in spite of his predestinarian 
 stoicism and Calvinistic faith. It was to keep off the deep 
 gloom of their inner thoughts of the world and man that 
 they often trifled with lighter themes ; they sang to keep up 
 their spirits like children in the dark. They were true 
 products of a revolutionary time, poets bewildered by its 
 cross-currents and by the lightning-flashes across its gloom, 
 and glad to take refuge in the melodious expression of their 
 doubt and sadness. 
 
 2. But Cowper was a preacher either by nature or J 
 circumstances. Burns was a lyrist both born and made ; 
 he addressed a section of the new audience that was 
 essentially lyrical by tradition and tastes. Cowper 
 discovered his poetic gift through religious lyricism ; he had 
 written a few love- lyrics in youth ; but his first real effort in 
 verse was his share of the Olney Hymns published in 1779, 
 when he was nearly fifty years of age. He had to address a 
 section of the new audience that was essentially didactic ; it 
 was the puritan part of the middle class, roused to new 
 enthusiasm by Wesley and Whitefield and other preachers, 
 that he had to write for. He began his true career as poet 
 in December 1780 when he was fifty years of age ; although 
 in one of the attacks of his mental malady he had been 
 under the care of a writer of light society verses, Dr. 
 Nathaniel Cotton, he had never thought of poetry as a 
 relief from the despondency that ever threatened renewed 
 attacks, till he had come under the influence of his 
 evangelical friends at Olney the Rev. John Newton and 
 the Unwins. Mrs. Unwin suggested the occupation and its 
 themes; and in 1782 was published his first volume, 
 containing amongst other poems his Table Talk, Progress 
 
244 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 of Error, Conversation, Retirement, and Verses supposed to 
 be written by Alexander Selkirk. The book was anything 
 but successful, one critic in The Critical Review calling it 
 " flat and tedious ", " coarse, vulgar, and unpoetical ". But 
 one or two favourable comments, especially one by 
 Benjamin Franklin encouraged him, and, at the suggestion 
 of Lady Austen, another Olney friend, he started The Task 
 in blank verse and published it with three other poems in 
 1785. The ballad John Gilpin was one of the three pieces, 
 and, having before been recited by an actor Henderson all 
 over the country with great success, called attention to the 
 other poems. They became at once popular and raised 
 him to the foremost position amongst the poets of his day. 
 He then entered on his period of translation and issued his 
 Homer in 1791. Before his death in 1800, in the midst of 
 threatening madness, ill health, and sorrow over the death of 
 old friends, he translated the Latin and Italian poems of 
 Milton, the Latin poems of Vincent Bourne, and various 
 pieces from the Latin and Greek classics. 
 
 3. He had been trained at Westminster School under 
 Vincent Bourne the Latinist and in a scribbling set that had 
 literary ambitions, Robert Lloyd who afterwards wrote a 
 satire in octosyllabic couplets called The Actor, George 
 Colman the actor, dramatist, and translator, Warren 
 Hastings, and Churchill the satirist. He joined a number 
 of them in 1754 in the Nonsense Club and wrote some 
 papers, moralising, and humorous, to the essay-periodical 
 The Connoisseur, started by Colman in 1754-56; some of 
 these in their theme and manner (for example On Conversa- 
 tion) anticipate his first poetic satires. He also contributed 
 one or two articles to The St. James's Chronicle, another of 
 Colman's ventures, and published a translation of two books 
 of Voltaire's Henriade in a magazine in 1759. In his 
 posthumous poems too we find that he had been dabbling 
 in verse from boyhood ; and his youthful attempts show that 
 he had been experimenting in the directions which he 
 afterwards adopted. In 1748 when seventeen years of age, 
 he uses blank verse in the mock-heroic style " On finding 
 the heel of a shoe " ; though feeble it is quite in the manner 
 of The Task; after the mock invocation and the satiric 
 
THE POETRY 245 
 
 picture of the shoe and its original wearer it draws the 
 moral for statesmen. He imitates Waller and Prior and 
 society-verse writers and ode writers of his day. Many of 
 them are humorous and trifling, as for example On Himself, 
 A Song to Celia advising her to give up girlish airs now she 
 is old, Upon a venerable Rival, An Epistle to Robert Lloyd 
 in octosyllabics apologising for his not letting poetry alone 
 since he has neither genius nor will and making pathetic 
 reference to the threatening madness "fierce banditti" of 
 the brain, (1754), and a burlesque Ode "Secundum artem" 
 after the style of Gray and Collins. A large number are 
 amorous addressed to Delia, and a pathetic light is thrown / 
 on them by the story of his youthful passion for his cousin / 
 Theodora and its fate in her father's refusal to allow their v 
 marriage. They are as graceful and musical as some of 
 Burns's average songs and suggest that a happier life might 
 have made him the lyrist that his time demanded. He has 
 one or two translations of the satires of Horace, one or two 
 in the stanza of Gray's Elegy, and one or two in the heroic 
 couplet. Thus he anticipates both the verse and the 
 manner of his mature poems. The only experiment he did 
 not repeat again was a pathetic poem in unrhymed Sapphics 
 called " Lines written under the influence of Delirium ". 
 " Damned below Judas, more abhorred than he was, 
 
 Who for a few pence sold his holy Master ! 
 
 Twice betrayed Jesus me the last delinquent 
 Deems the profanest ". 
 
 He also produced several " half-penny ballads " which have 
 been lost. 
 
 4. His fear of having to appear in the House of Lords 
 to claim a post that a relative had given him developed the 
 often-threatened madness in 1763. When he recovered 
 he retired first to Huntingdon and then to Olney 
 where he endeavoured by simple pursuits and the help of 
 his friends to keep off other attacks. His Olney Hymns, 
 though some of them have simple fervour like " Oh for a 
 closer walk with God ! " and " God moves in a mysterious 
 way," exhibit none of the poetic power that he revealed a 
 year or two after their publication ; the same may be said 
 of a poem called Anti-thelyphthora, attacking his cousin 
 Madan's book, Thelyphthora, on the polygamous doctrines 
 
246 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 of the Old Testament ; it was printed anonymously in 1781 
 and was "willingly let die". It is in heroic couplets, partly 
 on the model of Churchill, partly on that of Pope. The 
 satire is not trenchant, nor is the mock-heroic chivalry 
 graceful. 
 
 5. It was his old school-companion Churchill he took 
 as his model when he began his mature poetic work. Mrs. 
 Unwin suggested The Progress of Error as the subject of a 
 moral satire (December 1780) and the poem was soon 
 written. It was crude in its art and harsh in its spirit, 
 guided as it was by the unreasoning didacticism that 
 surrounded che poet. He runs through all the pet aversions 
 of the old puritans, writing as he was for the new audience 
 descended from them; instrumental music, cards, dancing, 
 and hunting he counts as deadly sins for the clergy ; 
 "Oh ! laugh, or mourn with me, the rueful jest, 
 A cassocked huntsman and a fiddling priest ". 
 
 His flock follow ; 
 
 " If he the tinkling harpsichord regards 
 As inoffensive, what offence in cards ? 
 Strike up the fiddles ! let us all be gay ! 
 Laymen have leave to dance, if parsons play." 
 
 Gluttony and drinking he pictures with some vigour ; 
 " Gorgonius sits abdominous and wan, 
 Like a fat squab upon a Chinese fan ". 
 
 Novel-reading and novel-writing he next attacks. And 
 then he satirically describes tbe education of the young man 
 of the time, who, after the school and university, travels 
 with a tutor, and, returning, " proclaims," 
 
 " By shrugs and strange contortions of the face 
 How much a dunce that has been sent to roam 
 Excels a dunce that has been kept at home ". 
 
 He closes with an attack on critics and interpreters of the 
 Bible, on the " god of our idolatry, the Press " which " makes 
 earth the vestibule of hell," and on philosophy, speculation, 
 and free-thinking. The style at the beginning, in spite of an 
 occasional line like " Musical as the chime of tinkling rills," 
 is very prosaic ; for example, 
 
 " Heaven from above and Conscience from within 
 Cry in his startled ear, * Abstain from sin ' ". 
 
THE POETRY 247 
 
 Bat it becomes more trenchant and the satire more pointed 
 as the poem proceeds. 
 
 6. His next attempt was Truth. And the first part of 
 this is a great improvement on his former satire. He begins 
 in the sermonising vein, and very inaptly compares the 
 pharisee to the peacock, " A praying synagogue-frequenting 
 beau ", and the true Christian to the pheasant. He then 
 gives a picture of the Christian hermit and the Bramin self- 
 tormentor, and on the whole prefers the latter. But his 
 satirical portrait of the " ancient-prude " shows his real 
 power ; it is as vigorous and realistic as anything in 
 Hogarth's pictures ; she 
 
 " Sails with lappet-head and mincing airs, 
 Duly at clink of bell to morning prayers ". 
 
 Behind her 
 
 " The shivering urchin, bending as he goes, 
 
 With slip-shod heels and dew-drop at his nose", 
 " Carries her Bible tucked beneath his arm, 
 
 And hides his hands to keep his fingers warm." 
 
 She counts herself " half an angel ", because " she fasts and 
 item goes to church " ; narrates fictions of " who spanned 
 her waist" and drank out of her slipper; "laughs at the 
 reputations she has torn ", and feeds on malice whilst she 
 mortifies the flesh. " True piety ", he adds, " is cheerful as 
 the day ". He compares the good servant and the base 
 hireling ; has a long-drawn and feeble simile for the sinner 
 alarmed; and draws a contrast between Voltaire, "the brilliant 
 Frenchman " to whom " the Scripture was a jest-book ", and 
 " yon cottager who weaves at her own door ", and " just 
 knows and knows no more the Bible true ". This is the 
 most striking part of the poem and thereafter he falls into 
 pulpiteering that becomes once or twice eloquent, but is 
 usually prosaic. 
 
 7. Then followed Table Talk, the most desultory poem 
 in the volume. It is practically a panegyric of liberty, of the 
 past, of the true poet, and of religion as the true theme of 
 poetry. But it is in the form of a dialogue like many of 
 Churchill's ; the speakers are simply called A and B, B 
 evidently representing the poet himself, and A a somewhat 
 subtle and carping critic of his theories. They begin on 
 
248 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 glory and the curse of war ; B passes from a eulogy of the 
 true patriot to a picture of the warlike tyrant, a " royal 
 mastiff " panting for blood, better represented by Death and 
 his scythe. " Man was made for kings " is the maxim of 
 the seldom logical " royal brains ". Kings made for men is 
 the true maxim. " Blest England ! if this happiness be 
 thine ". He will not flatter or lie like a poet-laureate. He 
 pities kings, brought up as they are, amid flattery, servility, 
 and dissimulation, 
 
 " Smooth dissimulation skilled to grace 
 A devil's purpose with an angel's face " ; 
 
 he would rather be poor and free than a king. A objects 
 it is easy for a poet to come from " dreaming study ", and 
 " prate and preach what others prove " ; better if he took a 
 practical subject like taxation. 
 
 " Not Brindley nor Bridgewater would essay 
 To turn the course of Helicon that way ", 
 
 is the reply, a reply that reveals awakening criticism of the 
 didactic schools of poetry that had so long held sway. The 
 Briton's love of freedom is then suggested as a theme. And 
 he explains it as a product of nature, of the rigorous climate. 
 France has a softer climate ; hence 
 
 ' ' The Frenchman, easy, debonair and brisk, 
 Give him his lass, his fiddle and his frisk, 
 Is always happy, reign whoever may, 
 And laughs the sense of misery away ". 
 
 Nature is here almost identified with Providence by the 
 poet. And, when it is objected that if Providence can 
 "encourage slavery to a smile" and "fill with discontent a 
 British isle", freedom and slavery come to the same, he 
 shows that freedom raises the mind, makes the nature noble, 
 encourages genius, science, religion. He bewails license 
 and tumult, and, in panegyrising Chatham, holds that 
 freedom neither came to life nor died with him. He con- 
 fesses the evils that exist, venality, perjury, 
 
 (" Stamps God's own name upon a lie just made 
 To turn a penny in the way of trade ' ) , 
 
 avarice, vice, mutiny ; and the tyranny and ruin as the inevit- 
 able result of luxury; but he feels that all is in the hand of 
 God. At the sneer from A, " mean you to prophesy or but 
 to preach", he answers by showing that the true poet is also 
 
THE POETRY 249 
 
 the prophet and by refusing the name of poet ("I play with 
 syllables and sport in song "). A says he wrote at West- 
 minster school when a boy; but verse now must have a 
 " creamy smoothness " to charm ; it depends on the ear, and 
 " A man of sense could scarce do worse 
 Than caper in the morris-dance of verse ". 
 
 B too objects to the poetry of the day for its artificiality, its 
 frivolity, its meaningless and hackneyed verse, and its "clock- 
 work tintinnabulum of rhyme ". The age of epic comes 
 rarely. In Eden " poetry was not an art " , but flowed 
 naturally with " God the theme ". Next it praised heroes 
 and kings ; then, under the influence of luxury, became 
 lascivious and bacchanal ; Anacreon and Horace played this 
 " bedlam part ". He objects as much to the puritan ideal 
 "harsh, intolerant, austere", and seems to be expressing 
 his usual defence of his art to the Rev. John Newton's 
 stoical condemnation of it, and to his own puritan 
 tendencies. With Charles the Second came Circean riot 
 into literature ; and the century was purging it of 
 "wantonness". Pope had great "musical finesse", and a 
 most " delicate touch " ; but he 
 
 " Made poetry a mere mechanic art, 
 And every warbler has his tune by heart ". 
 
 Of contemporaries he praises Churchill alone, and writes a 
 most eulogistic epitaph on his old school-fellow, acknow- 
 ledging at the same time his " negligence " ; " spendthrift 
 alike of money and of wit " , he " disdained the rules he 
 understood". Churchill corrected by Pope is evidently 
 still what he admires and aims at. He paints the ideal 
 poet, instinct with nature, and mourns that religion has never 
 been the theme of poetry. A interjects ; 
 
 " Hail Sternhold then and Hopkins hail ! " 
 
 and he answers "amen " ; they could shift if all the secular 
 poetry were lost. 
 
 8. His fourth poem Expostulation was ready by March 
 1781. It is manifestly an attempt to carry out the 
 suggestion at the close of Table Talk. For it is a jeremiad 
 over the neglect of religion in England. He compares the 
 country to Israel, and evidently considers it the chosen land 
 of modern times, if only it will purge itself of its vices and 
 
250 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 acknowledge the hand of God in everything. There are few 
 of the felicities of the three previous poems ; he is too 
 earnest to be epigrammatic or paint satiric portraits of types. 
 He gives a sketch of the history of Britain from the point of 
 view of an evangelical Jeremiah, and though there are some 
 good pictures, they are unrelieved by wit or humour, and 
 are heavy with sermonising. 
 
 p. Much the same fault belongs to " Hope " and 
 " Charity ", two that he wrote at the suggestion of his 
 publisher to fill out his volume whilst it awaited publication. 
 They are versified sermons of the most hackneyed type, yet 
 touched here and there into life by a strain of eloquence or 
 a satiric portrait. They are long, Hope being as long as 
 Table Talk, and they are full of the commonplaces of the 
 pulpit, text and simile, reference and persuasion, that seem 
 to have lost their life from repetition even by Cowper's time, 
 so automatically do they roll off in periods. The heroic 
 couplet makes them still more monotonous and soporific. 
 The only relief is here and there a picture done with the 
 true feeling and insight of the new poet. In Hope there 
 are the portraits of Jonquil the blase follower of fashion, 
 
 (" with almost every breath, 
 Sighs for his exit, vulgarly called death "), 
 
 of the schoolboy tyrant, of Vinosa, the wine-drinking 
 
 defender of good works against grace, 
 
 (" The Christian hope is Waiter draw the cork 
 If I mistake not Blockhead ! with a fork ! 
 Without good works, whatever some may boast, 
 Mere folly and delusion Sir, your toast. "), 
 
 and of Sir Smug, the pompous patron, who is lauded by his 
 guests as a prophet and oracle. But perhaps the most vivid 
 episode of the poem is the picture of the life and character 
 of Whitefield, the great preacher. 
 
 " Leuconomus (beneath well-sounding Greek 
 
 I slur a name a poet must not speak,) 
 
 Stood pilloried on infamy's high stage, 
 
 And bore the petty scorn of half an age." 
 " Reveal (the man is dead) to wondering eyes 
 
 This more than monster in his proper guise. 
 
 He loved the world that hated him ; the tear 
 
 That dropped upon his Bible was sincere. 
 
 Assailed by scandal and the tongue of strife, 
 
 His only answer was a blameless life." 
 
THE POETRY 251 
 
 The purple patches of " Charity " are a picture of Captain 
 Cook's treatment of the savages he met, contrasted with the 
 Spaniards' treatment of the Peruvians, an eloquent 
 denunciation of slavery, an attack upon philosophy, 
 speculation, and teaching, that are not religious, a satirical 
 portrait of Flavia the alms-giver, 
 
 (" Her superfluity the poor supplies, 
 But if she touch a character, it dies.") 
 
 and one of the squire, who finds amongst his guineas his 
 smallest gold coin for charity, to gratify " fame and self- 
 complacence ". Perhaps the most vigorous part of it is a 
 diatribe against the satire popular in his day ; 
 
 " When Scandal has new-minted an old lie, 
 
 Or taxed invention for a fresh supply, 
 
 'Tis called a Satire, and the world appears 
 
 Gathering around it with erected ears ; 
 
 A thousand names are tossed into the crowd ; 
 
 Some whispered softly and some twanged aloud." 
 *' Strange ! how the frequent interjected dash 
 
 Quickens a market and helps off the trash ; 
 
 The important letters that include the rest 
 
 Serve as a key to those that are suppressed." 
 
 But the didactic overshadows these. He was still held by 
 the idea of versifying Newton's sermons on abstract themes, 
 such favourites still with the religious section of the new 
 audience. 
 
 10. Whilst waiting for the publishing season he wrote 
 two other poems to please himself and to fill up the book. 
 Their themes were Conversation and Retirement ; and here 
 he struck upon his true poetical career, the Addisonian 
 essay turned into verse and tinged with genuine poetry. He 
 could not long be kept off his mission as " monitor not poet" ; 
 but didactic and religious passages were in these only 
 episodic and not the main current. They were the longest 
 poems in the volume, but the most entertaining and most 
 felicitous in expression. The first half of Conversation 
 contained more vigorous satire and flashes of epigram than 
 any poem in English since Pope. It draws the portraits of 
 the various types of conversationalists with the broad 
 power and minute insight of Hogarth. It begins with a 
 vigorous onslaught on conventional talk, on prurience, and 
 
252 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 on swearing ; then enters on its portrait-gallery ; Sir Soph, 
 the universally contradictory man, 
 
 (" Preserve me from the thing I dread and hate, 
 
 A duel in the form of a debate " ; 
 " For opposition gives opinion strength "; 
 " A noisy man is always in the right ") ; 
 
 Dubius, who 
 
 " Would not with a peremptory tone 
 
 Assert the nose upon his face his own ", 
 " Through constant dread of giving truth offence, 
 
 He ties up all his hearers in suspense " ; 
 
 the positive men, 
 
 " Where others toil with philosophic force, 
 
 Their nimble nonsense takes a shorter course " ; 
 
 the tedious story-teller and the lying story-teller; the smokers, 
 
 " The dozen sages drop the drowsy strain, 
 Then pause and puff, and speak and pause again " ; 
 
 the emphatic speaker, 
 
 " dearly loves to oppose, 
 In contact inconvenient, nose to nose " ; 
 
 the "fine puss-gentleman that's all perfume"; the "grave 
 coxcomb ", " an oracle within an empty cask ", " a fool with 
 judges, amongst fools a judge " ; the discoursers on their own 
 health, 
 
 " They thought they would have died they were so bad, 
 Their peevish hearers almost wish they had " ; 
 
 the fretful and capricious, 
 
 " His only pleasure is to be displeased " ; 
 
 the bashful man ; the " reeking, roaring hero of the chase " 
 who falls in companionship from horse to groom, from 
 groom to the club, " the school of coarse good fellowship 
 and noise ", " till none but beasts acknowledge him a 
 man ". The latter half of the poem falls back into the 
 sermonising vein and closes with a defence of his digressive 
 style and his didactic. 
 
 II. In Retirement he is getting more out of the range of 
 the dead satirist Churchill and the living preacher Newton. 
 He approaches nearer to the secluded yet secular part of the 
 new audience and sings the attractions of peace and solitude 
 with nature. He paints the weary routine of business, 
 
THE POETRY 253 
 
 "that oar, 
 Which thousands, once fast-chained to, quit no more ", 
 
 and the desire its slavery generates to seek some 
 " sequestered spot ", and " having lived a trifler, die a man ". 
 With all his love of meditative and religious retirement, he 
 would not approve " a superstitious and monastic course ". 
 Even the worldly seek seclusion. Some 
 
 " Hate the tumult half the world enjoys ", 
 and love 
 
 " the fall of waters and the song of birds ", 
 " The clouds that flit or slowly float away " ; 
 
 these are the " bards " that " seek success in rhyme ". The 
 lover, " tender idolater of absent charms ", and the states- 
 man, "the disencumbered Atlas of the state", make for 
 solitude. The citizen seeks his " suburban villa ", and 
 " breathes clouds of dust and calls it country air". "Modern 
 belles ", instead of going to Bristol baths and Tunbridge 
 wells, as their "prudent grandmammas" did, "fly to the 
 coast for daily, nightly joys ". The spendthrift youth gets 
 through his fortune and seeks retirement in the post of a 
 groom. But it is no easy thing to enjoy seclusion ; 
 
 " Absence of occupation is not rest, 
 A mind quite vacant is a mind distressed ". 
 
 The age is full of such idleness. " Luxury gives the mind a 
 childish cast " ; and " thinking heads " become rare, till 
 authors hear 
 
 " at length one general cry, 
 Tickle and entertain us or we die ". 
 
 This loud demand for amusement " makes fancy lame ", 
 and novels " offer nothing new ". The best of the poem 
 consists in the pictures of nature 
 
 " Fast by the banks of the slow-winding Ouse". 
 He is becoming more and more the nature-poet, and less 
 and less a mere satirist and preacher. 
 
 12. The minor poems published along with these were 
 significant only as showing the lyrical current of the age ; 
 the best were the lines beginning " I am monarch of all I 
 survey ", and Boadicea. A few of them were in the form of 
 fables, and dealt with the moral in the humorous and 
 allegorical style of Gay. 
 
254 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 13. In March 1782 the volume was published, and was 
 received coldly, even by his old school-fellows Lord 
 Chancellor Thurlow and Colman the dramatist, to whom he 
 sent copies. Cowper bade farewell to the latter for his 
 heartlessness in "Valediction". He soon recovered from 
 the disappointment ; for he had made another new friend, 
 Lady Austen, who got him to write some shorter pieces 
 like John Gilpin. And it was at her suggestion that he 
 began in the summer of 1783 The Task, his greatest poem. 
 She asked him to write in blank verse and gave him as 
 subject the " Sofa " on which he sat. The liberation from 
 the heroic couplet seemed to set free at the same time all 
 his powers of thought and melody, his love of nature, his 
 simpler unsermonising views of life and all the new thoughts 
 and emotions that belonged to the new time. He diverged 
 from his original theme into every topic that his rambles in 
 the neighbourhoed could suggest, and so much pleasure did 
 he take in this new " Task " set him, that the long poem 
 
 ! (over five thousand lines) appeared in June 1785. He had 
 found both the right medium blank verse and the right 
 atmosphere that of nature to work in. It is the only 
 blank verse poem between Paradise Lost and the Excursion 
 that can be called a classic. It raised him at once into all 
 but the front rank of English poets. 
 
 14. The Sofa, or Book I. begins in his old half- 
 | humorous style with the evolution of seats ; then, in 
 j descanting on the woes of gout and praying that he may 
 
 never feel them, he diverges into the joys of rambling in 
 youth ; this brings him to his own walks by the " slow- 
 winding Ouse " with his " dear companion ",- . 
 
 " Whose arm this twentieth winter I perceive 
 Fast locked in mine." 
 
 He paints the ploughman at his work in the distance, and 
 every feature of the scene ; he tells of the sounds of nature, 
 of the cottage on the hill, that he had called the " Peasant's 
 Nest," of the splendid grounds of his friend Mr. Throck- 
 morton, the " fleecy tenants " streaming out from the 
 sheepfold, the various tints of the trees, and the grove ; he 
 descants on the rotation of nature, on her superiority to art, 
 
THE POETRY 255 
 
 (" The love of nature and the scenes she draws 
 Is Nature's dictate "J, 
 
 on the repulsive sights of London society, and the beauty 
 of the sea-girt rock and the common ; he paints crazy Kate, 
 the gipsy camp, and the savage of the South seas who had 
 visited England ; he mourns over the luxury of London 
 and her vices (" God made the country, man made the 
 town "), and this wail passes into a description of the beauty 
 of rustic scenes ; 
 
 ("At eve, 
 
 The moonbeam sliding softly in between 
 The sleeping leaves is all the light they wish "). 
 
 15. The contrast suggests the theme of the second book, 
 the degeneracy of his time. He calls it The Time-piece, 
 perhaps because it tells the hour the world has reached, 
 the hour of midnight of the race of man. It is instinct with 
 the eloquence of indignation. He cannot restrain his 
 anger over the effeminacy and futile worship of fashion that 
 make the aristocracy, the clergy, the universities so incapable 
 of their true duties. It is another jeremiad like Expostu- 
 lation, but how different ! In the heroic couplet he is ever 
 falling into the sing-song and the abstract didacticism of 
 eighteenth century poetry and preaching ; here a living 
 passion seems to inspire every word ; he is a true prophet 
 come to tell England of her sins and make her repent ; he 
 often rises to sublimity that is almost Miltonic. He still 
 longs for solitude "a lodge in some vast wilderness", his 
 " ear is so pained " with report of " wrong and outrage with 
 which earth is filled". Like Burns he longs for the 
 brotherhood of man, yet finds it " severed as the flax at 
 the touch of fire ". Slavery still blots the earth ; and yet 
 slaves " touch our country and their shackles fall ". He 
 has strongly in him the new philanthropy and love of 
 freedom. But tempests, earthquakes, meteors, plagues, 
 famine " preach the general doom " ; he paints with great 
 power the ruin spread by an earthquake in Sicily. Yet 
 he thinks England, which with all her faults he loves still, 
 more guilty than that chastised island. For soldiers and 
 patriot orators she now has " effeminates " , 
 
 ' ' as smooth, 
 
 "And tender as a girl, all essenced o'er 
 With odours ". 
 
256 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 He evidently remembers Hotspur's description of the fop 
 ambassador in Shakespeare's Henry the Fourth. Chatham 
 and Wolfe are dead ; 
 
 " praise enough, 
 
 To fill the ambition of a private man, 
 That Chatham's language was his mother's tongue, 
 And Wolfe's great name compatriot with his own ". 
 
 All that England has now to teach France is "superior 
 jockeyship". The audience of poetry has grown "fastidious 
 or else listless ". It is not mere satire that is needed ; 
 
 " Leviathan is not so tamed ; 
 Laughed at, he laughs again ". 
 
 Earnest teaching from the pulpit is essential ; not sermons 
 bought from "the Doctor", "grand caterer and dry-nurse 
 of the church ". He appeals to the bishops not to lay 
 
 " careless hands 
 
 On skulls that cannot teach and will not learn "; 
 " The things that mount the rostrum with a skip 
 And then skip down again ; pronounce a text, 
 Cry hem ! and reading what they never wrote, 
 Just fifteen minutes, huddle up their work 
 And with a well-bred whisper close the scene ". 
 
 He scorns all affectation and loves simplicity. He hates the 
 facetious preacher, who courts a grin when he should woo a 
 soul, and seeks popular applause ; he hates the philosophic 
 and histrionic pulpiteer. He explains for his " gentle reader 
 yet unborn " the wooden " monitor ", evidently a board 
 strapped on to the back to keep the body erect, " one proof at 
 least of manhood ", but evidently the only one in the age. 
 He launches into indignant satire on the frequenters of 
 society, 
 
 "She that asks 
 
 Her dear five hundred friends, contemns them all 
 And hates their coming. They (what can they less ?) 
 Make just reprisals and with cringe and shrug 
 And bow obsequious, hide their hate of her ". 
 " So fare we in this prison-house of the world ; 
 And 'tis a fearful spectacle to see 
 So many maniacs dancing in their chains ". 
 
 " Profusion is the sire " of all this ; and " it is a hungry 
 vice ". It has taken all virtue away, it has killed the sage 
 Discipline at the universities, 
 
 "where Ignorance instils, 
 His cap well lined with logic not his own, 
 With parrot tongue performed the scholar's part, 
 Proceeding soon a graduated dunce ". 
 
THE POETRY 257 
 
 He closes with a pathetic eulogy of his dead brother and a 
 wail over the spawn, the " race obscene " , with which 
 profusion fills the land. 
 
 16. In the third book called The Garden he falls back 
 under the influence of the eighteenth century spirit. The 
 verse is more monotonous, the method more palpably 
 didactic, the judgment and principles often retrograde. 
 There is the same theme, the contrast between the over- 
 grown, turbulent, and vicious city and the peaceful and 
 innocent pleasures of the country. But he has got into his 
 preaching mood again, and he is satisfied with the moral, 
 and little anxious to send it home by felicitous phrase or 
 picture. He apostrophises domestic happiness twice, 
 condemns science, especially geology and astronomy, for their 
 audacity in trying to discover truth, their toil of " dropping 
 buckets into empty wells ", yet praises Newton, Milton, and 
 Sir Matthew Hale, goes into tedious prosaic details about 
 pruning and making a hot-bed and attending to a green- 
 house, and ends with an attack on gambling and 
 over-improving estates, and an apostrophe to London, the 
 "crowded coop". His description of gardening is quite on 
 a level with the most prosaic of eighteenth century didactic 
 poems like Dyer's Fleece and Grainger's Sugar Cane ; it is 
 almost bathos ; 
 
 "The stable yields a stercoraceous heap 
 Impregnated with quick fermented salts ". 
 
 " Then leisurely impose, 
 And lightly, shaking it with agile hand, 
 From the full fork, the saturated straw". 
 
 The most interesting passages are the autobiographical, 
 especially that beginning 
 
 " I was a stricken deer that left the herd 
 Long since ", 
 
 the description of the true lovers of the country, the 
 condemnation of the "detested sport", hunting, and the 
 compassionate picture of the hare which he has fed for ten 
 years. This last is to be placed along with Burns's Addresses 
 to a Mouse and to a Daisy, and his " On Seeing a Wounded 
 Hare Limp by me, which a fellow had just shot at ", as a true 
 product of the new sympathy with lower life. And in it he 
 approaches again to the attitude of Rousseau. 
 
 S 
 
258 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 17. In the fourth book called The Winter Evening he 
 gets into his true vein as painter of the joys of peaceful 
 home-life in the country. He becomes again the melodious 
 versifier of the half-humorous, half-meditative social essay. 
 He gets clear of his eighteenth century didacticism and 
 chats in melodious verse on topics that exactly suited the 
 new audience ; and in the course of the book he confesses 
 himself "reclaimed" from his "erroneous taste" for 
 " ingenious Cowley"; whilst he rejects all Arcadian pictures 
 of rural felicity, such as Virgil and Sir Philip Sidney give. 
 He abandons secondhand or artificial poetic raptures and 
 looks with his own eyes on the world around him. Hence 
 the attractive pictures of the cosy home on a winter's night 
 with the "bubbling urn", the "cups that cheer but not 
 inebriate" (a phrase from Bishop Berkeley's Siris), the 
 arrival of the post-boy with the newspaper and all its echoes 
 of the outside world, the suggestions of the snowstorm, the 
 struggling waggoner, and the sweet twilight gaze into the 
 "flickering fire". Hence too the pictures of the winter- 
 pinched yet honest poor, of the fowl-yard plunderer, and of 
 the village alehouse, an intentional contrast with its " stale 
 debauch" and "cheek-distending oath" to Goldsmith's 
 rose-coloured scene. In the latter part of the book he 
 mourns as usual over the degenerate days in which his lot 
 has fallen. He attributes the growing immorality and 
 crime to fashion, ("the town has tinged the country"), to 
 the desertion of their country-houses by the gentry and 
 nobility, to the corruption amongst magistrates, to 
 " universal soldiership ", the soldier returning with low 
 tnstes to corrupt his home and village, and to the growth of 
 commercial and other companies, which " build factories 
 with blood ". He closes with an assertion that the love of 
 nature is " born with all " and is never completely quenched 
 even in the city. The description of the newspaper must 
 have been written contemporaneously with Crabbe's 
 Newspaper (1785), and shows how the increase of journalism 
 was a new feature of country life that was changing its face. 
 
 18. The first part of the fifth book, The Winter Morning 
 Walk, contains perhaps the finest poetic picture of winter 
 scenes in English; they are the product of the keenest 
 
THE POETRY 259 
 
 powers of observation and the most loving fancy ; phrases, 
 like 
 
 " half petrified to sleep 
 In unrecumbent sadness " 
 
 of cattle waiting on the snow for their fodder, and 
 " Lean pensioners upon the traveller's track " 
 
 of the rooks after a snowstorm are whole pictures in 
 themselves. There follows his habitual indignation at war ; 
 but here it passes into revolutionism ; he shows the inflated 
 paltriness and tyrannical injustice of kings, 
 
 " The arbiters of this terraqueous swamp, 
 Storks among frogs " ; 
 
 and bursts into a glowing panegyric of freedom ; and in this 
 occurs the famous passage descriptive of the Bastille and its 
 horrors. 
 
 " There's not an English heart that would not leap 
 To hear that ye were fallen at last," 
 
 is his cry that was to be answered seven years after. He 
 mourns over England, yet loves her still as the home of 
 freedom. The latter half is his versified sermon, to which 
 his own earnestness, his idea of the poet's mission, and the 
 section of the new audience he addressed all prompted him. 
 It consists of a picture of man's depravity, an attack on the 
 futility of the deism of the time, a comparison of patriots 
 and martyrs and of their treatment by Hume the historian, 
 and an eloquent address to the Creator. 
 
 Ip. The last book, The Winter Walk at Noon, is the 
 longest ; it contains much noble eloquence and much 
 somewhat tedious didacticism, many pictures of nature, and 
 one or two satiric touches. He begins with the sound of 
 distant bells and the memories they awaken. And, as he 
 walks under the cloudless vault or beneath umbrageous 
 trees, he meditates, and thinks 
 
 " meditation here 
 May think down hours to moments " ; 
 
 he sees that wisdom is won by such meditation in 
 
 " Lanes in which the primrose ere her time 
 
 Peeps through the moss that clothes the hawthorn root " ; 
 
260 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 and wisdom differs from knowledge. He dilates upon the 
 beauty of the various flowers and the change that spring 
 works ; nature evincing 
 
 ' ' that there lives and works 
 A soul in all things and that soul is God ". 
 
 This looks like the shadowy pantheism of Wordsworth ; but 
 some fifty lines farther on he corrects his language ; 
 
 " Nature is but a name for an effect 
 Whose cause is God ". 
 
 He condemns the chess and billiards and shopping that 
 keep men and women at noon from looking into nature ; 
 and he laughs at the would-be connoisseur in pictures who 
 hangs about auction-rooms with 
 
 " Tongue accomplished in the fulsome cant 
 And pedantry " 
 
 of art-criticism. Better to seek the loveliness of nature and 
 the innocent sympathy with animal life in which Cowper 
 seems to anticipate the American solitary Thoreau. He 
 breaks into another eloquent attack on sportsmen ; 
 
 " Carnivorous through sin, 
 Feed on the slain, but spare the living brute ". 
 
 He tells a story of a young atheist Misagathus or Hater of 
 Good, who in braggart mood tries to ride over a cliff, but is 
 checked by his horse, though afterwards the horse throws 
 him from the saddle on to the rocks below. The poet 
 " would not enter on his list of friends " the man, however 
 polished, who " needlessly sets foot upon a worm ". The 
 latter part of the book is a long depreciation of human 
 encomiums of man ; however great like Handel or Garrick, 
 men should never cover them with fulsome praise. He ends 
 by defending his habit of seclusion. 
 
 20. The poem is important in the evolution of English 
 poetry more for its themes and method of treatment of them 
 than for its originality or the lasting nature of its music. It 
 revealed that the quiet religious middle-class were about to 
 join the audience of poetic literature and be its controlling 
 element. The Task emanated from their atmosphere and 
 was written for them ; and its great popularity proved that 
 the literary sceptre was about to pass from the hands of city 
 
THE POETRY 261 
 
 worldlings and critics. This meant the complete purifica- 
 tion of literature, its return to simpler tastes and simpler 
 language, a new sympathy with nature and a new reverence 
 for religious and earnest thought. Cowper was the first to 
 attempt the task of addressing both the old and the new 
 audience , his satire was meant for the one, his sermons and 
 his praise of the country and nature for the other. He 
 failed ; for he came too early in the movement to get the 
 elements to combine : the secular and the religious passages 
 in his poems are only mechanically united. Not till 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge, Browning and Tennyson, was 
 English poetry able to amalgamate the contrastive methods 
 and atmospheres. They rejected both the satire and the 
 sermon, and worked out the reverent study of both man and 
 nature that was the growing element in Cowper's poems. 
 The earlier poet failed because he wrote from the one camp 
 and had to preach at and attack the other. But his failure 
 was a brilliant one and the surest symptom of the passionate 
 poetry that was to follow the Revolution. 
 
 21. His Tirocinium or A Review of Schools, a recom- 
 mendation of home teaching, published along with The 
 Task, was a retrogression ^with its religious didacticism and 
 satire and its use of the heroic couplet. His attempts at 
 other long poems on The Four Ages of Man, on The 
 Mediterranean, and on Yardley Oak he soon abandoned. 
 He persevered at his translation of Homer, when he might 
 have been better employed in original work. After the 
 paralysis of Mrs. Unwin it was only into his smaller pieces 
 that he put his real poetic power ; his simple dirge over the 
 The Loss of The Royal George, his pathetic lines On The 
 Receipt of my Mother's Picture out of Norfolk, and the two 
 melancholy lyrics that were the outcome of the gathering 
 gloom, To Mary, and The Castaway, show better than any 
 of his poems the direction English poetry was to take and 
 anticipate the directness and the simple emotions of the 
 Lyrical Ballads. 
 
 22. They also show the tendency to poems of a few 
 stanzas like the ballads and songs ; Percy's Reliques gave a 
 great impetus to this ; but still more the increase of periodi- 
 cals, to the poets' corner of which it became the 
 
262 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 ambition of every man and woman of taste and of poetic 
 sentiment to contribute. The number of minor poets in 
 the period is therefore legion ; for there was no great poet 
 to overshadow their attempts and make them feel their 
 insignificance, whilst the approach of prose and poetry in 
 the previous age made many feel competent in verse, and 
 the new spirit of romance spread the sentiment of poetry 
 widely. 
 
 Section 24. 
 
 I. A few names that have not been buried in the 
 oblivion of the magazines may be given. Edward Moore, 
 the author of the drama The Gamester, is known for his 
 lyric The Happy Marriage, Dodsley the publisher for his 
 song The Parting Kiss, David Mallet the Scotch friend of 
 Gibbon for his ballad William and Margaret, John Byrom 
 for his Elizabethan lyric Careless Content, Smollett the 
 novelist for his Tears of Scotland, Blackstone of the 
 Commentaries for his Lawyer's Farewell to his Muse, John 
 Cunningham the actor for his song Kate of Aberdeen, 
 Michael Bruce the Scotch poet (cut off in his youth) for his 
 Elegy Written in Spring, John Logan the editor of his 
 remains for what is also attributed to Bruce the Ode to the 
 Cuckoo, Mickle the translator of the Lusiad for his ballad 
 Cumnor Hall, Christopher Smart for his most passionate 
 Song to David, Thomas Warton the historian of 
 English poetry for his sonnets, Joseph Warton his 
 brother for his Ode to Fancy, Miss Susanna Blamire 
 for her lyric The Nabob, and Mrs. Barbauld for her 
 Odes. One noticeable revival was the sonnet. As 
 the period went on it took the place of the ode as the 
 artificial expression of a single mood or phase of thought. 
 We find the Wartons by the last quarter of the century 
 trying it, and in the last decade Mrs. Charlotte Smith the 
 novelist and Rev. William Lisle Bowles. The sonnets of 
 the latter made a deep impression on Coleridge and Lamb 
 and prepared the way for those of Wordsworth and Keats. 
 Though the poet lived till 1850 he published his sonnets as 
 early as 1789. They had been inspired chiefly by those of 
 Shakespeare and Milton ; but they expressed the new 
 
THE POETRY 263 
 
 nsight into nature and the reaction against the school of 
 Pope. They are on such subjects as Bamborough Castle, 
 Dover Cliffs, The Bells, Ostend, A beautiful landscape, 
 Evening, Influence of time on grief, Music, Bereavement, 
 and are as a rule free from the frigid abstractions of 
 eighteenth century poetry. They are picturesque, melodious, 
 and sometimes passionate. And the thought of them is 
 elevating and idealising. His later poems, odes, ballads, 
 and simple lyrics of nature for children made less stir as 
 they came in the midst of a great poetic age. 
 
 2. The return to the sonnet, an artificial form that had 
 never commended itself to the Queen Anne age, has the 
 same significance as the cultivation of the Pindaric ode. 
 Neither the old heroic couplet nor the new blank verse or 
 the revived Spenserian stanza supplied any natural ending to 
 a poem ; the writer might go on and generally did go on in 
 them till his readers were tired. The didacticism of the 
 eighteenth century always spread itself out in lengthy works 
 that implied unlimited time and patience on the part of the 
 audience. But the bustle of modern industrial life had 
 already begun and the magazine was rapidly coming into 
 vogue with its brief articles to suit the scraps of leisure that 
 the men of the middle class could afford for reading. 
 Towards the middle of the century therefore there arose a 
 great demand for poetic forms that would confine the poet 
 within limits. The ode had already been used and now 
 became most popular amongst the cultured. The collection 
 of old ballads and songs that began with Percy gave two 
 other brief forms. The sonnet was too unvaried a form to 
 take any life from the personified abstractions of the poetry 
 of the time and had to wait for its new life later in the 
 century when the romantic and sentimental movements 
 had become strong. 
 
 Section 25. 
 
 I. Along with this demand for brevity in poetry came 
 the search for forms in older literature, a movement that 
 sprang from a different source, a desire to get away from the 
 sordid features of city life and the new industrial life. The 
 strangest product of the two was Thomas Chatterton. They 
 
264 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 had already produced in 1765 the sham-antique revisions of 
 the old ballads in the Reliques of English Poetry. The 
 demand for stucco antiquity had brought Macpherson's 
 Ossian into the world in 1760-63 and Horace Walpole's 
 Castle of Otranto in 1764. This singular movement, a 
 symptom of a still deeper change in the spiritual world, 
 awakened the ambition of a boy of eleven or twelve at 
 Colston's charity school, Bristol ; and he began to manu- 
 facture ancient manuscripts out of parchments his father had 
 brought from the monument room of the church of St. Mary 
 Redcliffe and deposited in the garret of his house. Every 
 Saturday half-holiday, whenever he returned home, the boy 
 Thomas Chatterton spent locked into this upper room. He 
 was little over ten when he had got inserted in Felix 
 Farley's Bristol Journal (January 8th 1763) sixteen lines on 
 Christ coming to judgment, marked by a fine ear for rhythm 
 and a considerable command of melodious language ; not a 
 year later he had written his fine devotional poem that has 
 been adopted in most hymnals beginning " Almighty 
 Framer of the sky ". He had also taken a great fancy to a 
 black-letter Bible, and had access to the documents of a 
 William Canynge a Bristol merchant of the time of Edward 
 the Fourth. Hence began the manufacture of old poems 
 and prose-writings, that deluded or puzzled antiquaries and 
 literary men for a generation or more, but, had there been 
 any genuine Old English scholarship, should never have 
 imposed on anyone, so little knowledge of the idioms and 
 grammar of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is there 
 shown in the productions, so superficial is the acquaintance 
 with the old words and their uses. His first was a pedigree 
 for a pewterer called Burgum and a poem called The 
 Romaunte of the Cnyghte purporting to be by an ancestor 
 John de Bergham. They brought him confidence and five 
 shillings. There is little poetry in the poem ; but the 
 "modernised" version in heroic couplet is marked by 
 considerable vigour of language and imaginative observation 
 of nature. He was encouraged in his much loved pursuit. 
 And when he went as apprentice into the office of one 
 Lambert a solicitor at fifteen he found an old copy of 
 Camden's Britannia and plenty of leisure to fulfil his 
 ambition. He also borrowed a copy of Speght's Chaucer 
 
THE POETRY 265 
 
 in black letter and wrote out from its glossary an alpha- 
 betical list of the modern English equivalents with the old 
 words opposite them. Most of his obsolete language 
 however he got from Kersey's and Bailey's dictionaries. 
 Thus it was easy for him to manufacture old documents for 
 a history of Bristol which a surgeon called Barrett was 
 writing. He got money and the loan of books for these and 
 spent most of his time in writing the Rowley Poems. He 
 professed that they were copied from the manuscript of a 
 monk of the fifteenth century called Rowley and tried to 
 get Dodsley the publisher to interest himself in them. 
 Then he wrote to Horace Walpole offering a document on 
 the rise of painting in England " Wroten by T. Rowlie 
 1469 for Mastre Canynge". Walpole did not discourage 
 him at first and he sent other documents and poems ; they 
 were submitted to Gray the poet and his friend Mason and 
 pronounced forgeries ; the episode closed with an unctuous 
 letter from the author of The Castle of Otranto. 
 
 2. He was still resolved to get into literature by one way 
 or another. He published the poems in The Town and 
 County Magazine. And getting weary of his office work 
 he left for London and tried to push his way into the society 
 of publishers and literary men. He kept writing prose and 
 poetry for various journals, The Town and Country 
 Magazine, The Court and City Magazine, The Gospel 
 Magazine, The London Museum and The Political Register. 
 He published Saxon poems, imitations of Ossian, as, for 
 example, Cutholf, African Eclogues, a burletta called The 
 Revenge, odes, ballads, songs, and satires. But his feverish 
 struggle was in vain and he committed suicide on August 
 25th, 1770. 
 
 3. The Rowley poems were his love-work and are on 
 the Whole his best. Stripped of their ridiculous mask of 
 antique spelling and old words they at once appear products 
 of the new romantic school of the eighteenth century as 
 Thomas Warton at the time showed them to be. And yet 
 they are at best only echoes. The Bristowe Tragedy or the 
 Death of Sir Charles Bawdin was evidently inspired by 
 Percy's Reliques; it is in the short ballad stanza, is a simple 
 narrative, and its archaisms are in the ballad style. The 
 
266 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 story is commonplace the execution of a knight by Edward 
 the Fourth and is spun out into ninety-eight verses, 
 though there is no romance to tell, nothing but the 
 various prayers to stay the hand of vengeance. Another, 
 Aella, is a tragedy, or, as it is called, a tragical 
 interlude. It begins with an epistle to Mastre 
 Canynge, a letter to " the digne Mastre Canynge ", 
 and an " Entroductionne ". At the close of the first, 
 " Thomas Rowleie" condemns plays on Scriptural subjects; 
 " we do the Godhead wrong". The third is in the "rhyme 
 royal " of Chaucer and the other two in modifications of it. 
 Almost all the dialogue is in Spenserian stanza, a metre 
 utterly unsuited to the drama, and chosen evidently for the 
 archaistic atmosphere that has always hung round it in 
 English. This feature alone might have shown that it 
 could not have been written by a monk of the fifteenth 
 century. But the language is as unrepresentative of its 
 professed age as its metres ; there are ten times as many 
 obsolete words in it as in any production even of Chaucer's 
 time. It is a diction "of shreds and patches"; the poet 
 seems to have been "at a feast of learning and stolen the 
 scraps " like Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost. He has 
 followed even the blunders of Kersey's dictionary ; for 
 instance in the first line of the Introduction he brings in 
 the word " cherisaunei " meaning comfort; this was a 
 printer's blunder in the dictionary for " cherisaunce." 
 Kersey, of course, had taken his obsolete words from many 
 centuries without marking their age. The result is that the 
 Rowley language is a coat of many colours, such as never 
 could have been worn in any age or any dialect. An 
 Anglo-Saxon poem is not more difficult and is more living 
 and yet more quaint than a Rowley poem. And Chatterton's 
 knowledge of the meaning of the words he uses is very 
 limited ; where it fails him, he ekes it out by imagination 
 and manufacture. Words are used by him in meanings 
 that they never had and in forms that never existed even in 
 the most eccentric scribe's manuscript. He had evidently 
 come across the Faery Queen ; for most of the Rowley 
 poems are saturated with Spenserianisms. But he out- 
 Spensers Spenser. The Elizabethan poet could be read by 
 his contemporaries as he can be read by our time without 
 
THE POETRY 267 
 
 much difficulty. These poems absolutely demand a constant 
 reference to Kersey's dictionary or to a glossary from it. 
 The Englishmen of no age could have read them without 
 some help. This alone would show how lacking the boy 
 was in that poetic taste which is one of the essentials of the 
 true poet. Not the most didactic or prosaic of the 
 eighteenth century poets would have dabbled in such 
 artificial and unfamiliar colours in order to attain the 
 quaintness of an old production. Had his posthumous 
 critics taken the trouble to understand his language, they 
 would not have so over-praised his work. His precocity 
 and the romance of his life account to some extent for the 
 raptures over it ; ignorance of the medium in which it is 
 written accounts for a good deal more. The controversial- 
 ists just after his death eulogised the Rowley poems into a 
 false antithesis to his other work in order to show that they 
 were genuine and not forgeries. Later critics have kept up 
 the strain. 
 
 4. This drama is perhaps the best of them, especially in 
 its minstrel's songs. These prove that he had a true lyric 
 vein worthy of development. That beginning " O sing unto 
 my roundelay" has considerable natural beauty. Two of 
 the best verses are these : 
 
 " Hark ! the raven flaps his wings 
 
 In the briared dell below ; 
 Hark ! the death-owl loud doth sing 
 
 To the night-mares as they go." 
 " See the white moon shines on high ; 
 
 Whiter is my true love's shroud ; 
 Whiter than the morning sky, 
 Whiter than the evening cloud." 
 
 It is an echo of the ballad scraps that Ophelia sings, and 
 that Percy had patched into his Friar of Orders Grey ; 
 and this is confirmed by the fact that the refrain 
 
 (" My love is dead 
 
 Gone to his death-bed ") 
 
 has the same source and that "A Friar of Orders White" is 
 one of the Rowley poems. The story of Aella is one such 
 as was common in the novels of Chatterton's time. The 
 scene is laid in Anglo-Saxon times; but the sentiment is 
 eighteenth century. Aella is just married to Birtha when 
 
268 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 the poem opens. The minstrels sing before them. But 
 news is brought that the Danes have landed again and he 
 must hasten off to repel their incursion, in spite of the 
 pleadings and indignant protests of his young wife. 
 Celmonde who loves her and has designs upon her makes 
 some flowery speeches and goes with him. The Danes are 
 defeated, but Aella is wounded ; yet he takes horse and 
 hurries off to his bride. Celmonde has been before him and 
 persuaded her to come to the battlefield to her husband. 
 Deep in a wood he unfolds his love and his black purpose 
 to her and she shrieks. Hurra the Danish leader hears, 
 rescues her by slaying Celmonde and restores her to her 
 husband ; but it is too late ; in a fit of jealous anger at her 
 disappearance he has stabbed himself; she has only 
 time to see him die; and she dies upon his body. The 
 characters have been much praised ; but they were the 
 ordinary types of the romance of Chatterton's day. The 
 Spenserian stanzas are very monotonous and make the 
 passion seem even more absurd than the artificial diction. 
 And where true poetry does shine out, it is generally from 
 the Faery Queen. 
 
 5. The same may be said of both his long narrative 
 p jems called The Battle of Hastings. The battles and gore 
 repeat themselves as monotonously as the stanza, or as the 
 favourite long-drawn simile of the falling oak or elm or rock ; 
 " So have I seen a mouatain oak". Modern sentiments and 
 modern words mingle in the same crude way with the piebald 
 vocabulary. u Before his optics danced a shade of night" is 
 one instance; and Chatterton adds the note "eyes". The 
 English Metamorphosis, an imitation of the second book of 
 the Faery Queen in versifying parts of Geoffrey ot 
 Monmouth, and The Tournament are in the same verse and 
 the same style. Goddwyn, a fragment of another drama of 
 the time of Edward the Confessor, is in Spenserian stanza, 
 though the Chorus at the close, a vigorous picture of 
 freedom, is in the long and short ballad verse alternating. 
 His Ballad of Charitie, written not long before his death, is 
 a return to the Chaucerian style and adopts the rhyme royal ; 
 it is a very picturesque mediaeval setting of the parable of the 
 good Samaritan. Two of his Eclogues, Robert and Ralph 
 
THE POETRY 269 
 
 a dialogue of two soldiers of the Wars of the Roses, and Nigel 
 a lament of a son for his father who has gone with King 
 Richard to Palestine, are Spenserian and in Spenserian stanza ; 
 the third, a dialogue between a man and a woman who are 
 about to be married by a priest, Sir Roger, is partly in this 
 and partly in lyrics ; the fourth, Elinoure and Juga, the 
 alternating lament of two maidens over their lovers slain in 
 the wars, is in Chaucer's stanza. The story of William 
 Canynge is in a modification of it. The Parliament of 
 Sprites, called "a most merry interlude," is a series of 
 somewhat feeble poems spoken by various ghosts chiefly 
 of old real or imaginary Bristol heroes and chiefly in heroic 
 couplets. The World is a similar series of verses by 
 minstrels who stand each for some abstract quality or 
 allegorical personage. There are also a canto of "The 
 Unknown Knight or the Tournament ", a fragment of a 
 dialogue between two cockneys Philpot and Walworth, a 
 fragment of The Merry Tricks of Lamyngtown a Bristol 
 pirate, a Pindaric ode called Song to Aella, and one or two 
 Songs of saints ; these are marked neither by any original 
 power nor by any good poetic echoes. 
 
 6. Of his acknowledged poems the best are the satires 
 already mentioned and the African Eclogues manifestly 
 imitative of Collins's Persian Eclogues. There is less of 
 story in the eclogues ; but they are like their model in 
 adopting heroic couplet, in their love of the poetry of 
 foreign name, and in the attempt to introduce features 
 appropriate to the scene. Narva and Mored is the most 
 poetical ; it celebrates the suicide of two lovers who were 
 sworn to celibacy and the priesthood of a god ; there are 
 more felicities in it than in most of the Rowley poems, 
 though even these are echoes ; one will suffice ; a dance is 
 described ; 
 
 " Furious they twist around the gloomy trees 
 Like leaves in Autumn twirling with the breeze ". 
 
 Its similes and grandeur are largely Ossianesque. The 
 death of Nicou is a story of love, war, and vengeance. 
 Heccar and Gaira is in dialogue form and is a setting of a 
 story of the slave trade. These are perhaps the most real 
 and original of all his poems. They were written in London 
 
270 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 when the thought of suicide was clouding his mind ; two of 
 them end in suicide and all of them have an atmosphere of 
 tragic pathos. His burlettas, The Revenge, a musical 
 burlesque on the amours of Jupiter, Juno, and Bacchus, 
 somewhat coarse, though promising in its lyrics, and The 
 Woman of Spirit, are slight echoes of the musical farces ot 
 the day. His Elegies, especially that on Alderman Beckford 
 and that on his old schoolmaster Phillips, are to some 
 extent imitations of Gray's, at least in the melody; but they 
 are stiff and artificial. His lyrics and occasional verses are 
 but attitudinisings ; they are not equal to his mock-heroic 
 " February ", and his mock elegy on the death of a tabby 
 cat. 
 
 7. The promise of all his poems is much greater than 
 the performance. His ambition was as great as his pride and 
 forced him into innumerable experiments in order to catch 
 the ear of the public. There is little that is truly original in 
 him, though Mr. Theodore Watts claims that the deliberate 
 alternation of octosyllabics and anapaestic verse in The 
 Unknown Knight suggested the metre of Coleridge's 
 Christabel and therefore of Scott's poems, and that the 
 Ballad of Charity inspired the Eve of St. Agnes and other 
 poems of Keats. Hence it is that we seldom see any poem 
 of his in any modern selection or any quotation from him in 
 any writer. There are occasional epithets that show him to 
 have had poetic power, as for example, "massy-muscled 
 strength ", " hyacinthal star ", " self-sprighted fear ", 
 " the shadowy cell " of Remembrance, " hart-swift legs ", 
 the owl's "eve-speck't wing", " king-cupped meads ". But 
 the prosaic spirit of the eighteenth century more frequently 
 moulds his epithets, as for example, "the proto-slain man of 
 the field", "the chorded shell", "painted woe", "the 
 velvet-vested mead ". It is the romance of his life that has 
 fixed his name so indelibly on the page of English literature 
 and made us look for far more in his work than we could 
 expect from a boy of seventeen. If only he had been able 
 to control his ambition for fame and his injured pride at the 
 world's coldness till he had gained knowledge of himself 
 and his true powers, and sufficient wisdom to do more than 
 echo what he had read in his omnivorous study of literature ! 
 
THE POETRY 271 
 
 The chief faculty that is apparent in his work is a marvellous 
 power of imitation, even of the spirit of great, as well as of 
 little poets. 
 
 Section 26. 
 
 1. He stands quite alone in the history of English 
 literature, and by this isolation has gained posthumously 
 enough of that which in life he would have died to have. 
 But he is approached if not surpassed in English poetry by 
 another singular character as isolated and as close to 
 madness William Blake. He was only five years younger 
 than Chatterton and he was as precocious in his poetical 
 ambitions and achievements ; yet he lived on into the heart 
 of the succeeding age, till 1827. He is also contrasted with 
 "the marvellous boy that perished in his pride" by the 
 absence of receptivity and imitativeness even in his earliest 
 work. Chatterton's poetry varied with every new fashion of 
 the time, every new ambition of his restless mind, every 
 new poet or age that he studied. The new but rapidly 
 prevailing taste of his generation was for the sham-antique 
 and the part of his work by which he is best known was 
 written to gratify this. Blake had from the very first a note 
 and character of his own ; his Poetical Sketches published 
 in 1783 stand apart from the common currents of his time 
 though they unconsciously represent the best of them ; and 
 the isolation grew upon him until he lived at last in a world 
 that ordinary men called madness. He had never any 
 overpowering literary influence to struggle against in order 
 to reach his distinctive note, as most poets have. His only 
 marked tendencies are towards Elizabethan models in his 
 simpler and more lyrical poems, and towards Ossianesque 
 expression in his later and prophetic books. 
 
 2. Yet he is as true a symptom of the coming time, as 
 important a stage in the evolution of English poetry, as 
 Cowper. In simple themes, and simple, unconventional 
 treatment of themes and diction, he not only anticipates 
 Wordsworth, but transcends him by his revolt against what 
 was artificial and traditional from the Queen Anne age. 
 He is as open and clear in his early work as a child. He is 
 
272 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 as religious as Cowper, and represents the primitive 
 devotion and enthusiasm of the new audience. He has the 
 same keen sympathy as that poet with nature and especially 
 with animal life, and recognises the hand of God in every 
 feature of the world. He is as simple in his faith and is as 
 unaffected by the sceptical doubts or deistic rationalism so 
 fashionable with contemporary men of thought and culture. 
 He has the same enthusiasm for freedom and sensitiveness 
 to the revolutionary atmosphere of his day. He hates with 
 the same fervour the tyranny of laws and customs, and the 
 injustices that the conventions of man inflict upon man and 
 beast. And he looks with the same ardent passion, the 
 same Rousseau-like one-sidedness to an ideal intercourse 
 with nature, a primitive Eden stripped of human sophistica- 
 tion and free from the taint of sin. Even his method of 
 poetic art has something akin to Cowper's. Both felt the 
 demand on the part of the new audience for picture. 
 Cowper satisfied this by his satirical portraits of types, by 
 his landscapes especially winter landscapes and his pictures 
 of the interiors of the middle class dwelling and the cottage. 
 Blake gratified it by his pictorial ornamentation and 
 illustration of his verse ; it is this that explains the rarity of 
 the picturesque style in his earlier work and its vagueness in 
 his later. He was more inspired by the lyrical and allegorical 
 elements of the Bible and of the literature of the middle 
 classes. He therefore anticipates the passionately lyrical 
 mood of poetry that in the nineteenth century so deeply 
 affected Shelley and Tennyson. The inspiration of a pre- 
 revolutionary age pressed heavily upon him as it did upon 
 so many of the poets of his time ; the ideas and emotions of 
 such a period become at times too urgent for any articulate 
 form of expression that , it has ready for them ; and so 
 madness or approach to madness is singularly common 
 amongst the poets of the latter half of last century, 
 Collins, Cowper, Chatterton, Blake; it is only the sensitive 
 spirits that feel in the aching tissues of their system the 
 prognostics of the coming tempest ; and the pressure of the 
 conflicting thoughts and elements dams up the power of 
 clear utterance, disorders the mind, or impels to the 
 anodyne of death. After the Revolution the flood-gates of 
 expression are opened, and every phase of the new ideas 
 
THE POETRY 273 
 
 finds issue in passionate melody. Blake never got clear of 
 the obstruction; his power of utterance grew more and 
 more hazy both in picture and in verse till much of it seemed 
 delirium. His later poems and prose writings are 
 metaphysics and allegory gone mad. 
 
 3. Born in 1757 he did not print till 1783. He was too 
 poor to publish his Poetical Sketches ; but some friends, 
 including Flaxman, had them printed. He continued poor 
 through his whole life ; but as he was an engraver and 
 artist he wrote his poems upon plates and etched their 
 illustrations and thus issued his later volumes, his Songs of 
 Innocence in 1787, The Book of Thel in 1789, The 
 Marriage of Heaven and Hell in 1790, The Gates of 
 Paradise (For Children), and Visions of the Daughters of 
 Albion and America, a Prophecy, in 1793, Europe a 
 Prophecy, The Book of Urizen Part I , and Songs of 
 Experience, in 1794, The Song of Los (Africa and Asia, 
 Prophecies), and The Book of Ahania, in 1795, Jerusalem, 
 the Emanation of the Giant Albion, and Milton a poem in 
 Two Books, in 1804, and The Ghost of Abel in 1822. " The 
 French Revolution, a Poem in Seven Books : Book I. " he 
 published in 1791 ; but he never touched it again. He 
 continued to write in the nineteenth century " more than 
 Shakespeare and Milton combined " ; but he did not issue 
 these writings. Parts of them have found their way into 
 print through his various biographers and critics. The 
 Poetical Sketches, The Songs of Innocence, and The Songs 
 of Experience are the only portion of his writings that are 
 clear enough to be included in literature ; and many pieces 
 in the last are obscure enough to represent all his mystical 
 developments. 
 
 4. The Poetical Sketches are said in the Advertisement 
 to have been written between his twelfth and his twentieth 
 year, and show more originality than anything of 
 Chatterton's. The first piece is a dramatic fragment called 
 King Edward the Third depicting the feelings of the 
 English soldiers and leaders before the Battle of Cressy. It 
 is evidently inspired by study of Shakespeare's Henry the 
 Fourth, though it is far from being an echo or imitation 
 
 T 
 
274 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 like so many of Chatterton's. Some of the speeches are 
 strong enough and Elizabethan enough to have been written 
 by the best of Shakespeare's fellow-dramatists. The court 
 scene is the least powerful, noteworthy only for the assertion 
 by a Bishop of the superiority of the claims of industry and 
 commerce in England. In the camp scenes some of the 
 sayings of Dagworth, Manny, Chandos, the King, and the 
 Black Prince are quite Shakespearian in their power ; they 
 express the sentiments that are so often combined in 
 Cowper's Task, adoration of freedom, patriotism, and 
 sorrow over the woes of war. 
 
 " O Liberty, how glorious art thou ! 
 
 I see thee hovering o'er my army, with 
 
 Thy wide-stretched plumes." 
 " I see thee blow thy golden trumpet while 
 
 Thy sons shout the strong shout of victory ! " 
 " I'll fight and weep, 'tis in my country's cause ; 
 
 I'll weep and shout for glorious liberty." 
 " How terrible then is the field of death, 
 
 Where he doth rend the vault of heaven, 
 
 And shake the gates of hell ! " 
 
 The minstrel's song that closes the piece is unrhymed and 
 Ossianesque, like so many of his very earliest pieces and his 
 later mystical productions ; they might all be printed, as 
 some of them were, in prose, and lose none of their 
 rhythmic effect. The next two pieces are Prologues, one to 
 an unwritten drama of Edward the Fourth and one to King 
 John, both bewailing the devastations of tyranny and war 
 in Ossianic style. The six unrhymed pieces that follow 
 sometimes echo the Song of Solomon, but generally Ossian ; 
 they are To Spring, To Summer, to Autumn, to Winter, To 
 the Evening Star, To Morning ; they are more picturesque 
 than his later and are full of beautiful imagery. That To 
 Winter is the most vigorous, and that To the Evening Star 
 the most instinct with beauty, containing as it does many 
 lines like these ; 
 
 " Let thy west wind sleep on 
 
 The lake ; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes, 
 
 Andjwash the dusk with silver ". 
 
 Of the three other unrhymed pieces in the book there are a 
 ghastly ballad of death called Fair Eleanor and a poem 
 called Samson in the style and verse of Milton's Samson 
 
THE POETRY 275 
 
 Agonistes. Both show great power and fine imagination. 
 Two stanzas from the former will suffice ; 
 
 " My lord was like a star in highest heaven 
 Drawn down to earth by spells and wickedness; 
 My lord was like the opening eyes of Day, 
 When western winds creep softly o'er the flowers". 
 
 " She sat with dead cold limbs, stiffened to stone ; 
 She took the gory head up in her arms ; 
 She kissed the pale lips ; she had no tears to shed ; 
 She hugged it to her breast and groaned her last ". 
 
 The songs that follow this have caught the true lyrical spirit 
 of the Elizabethan age without approaching to imitation j a 
 stanza or two will show their quality ; one of Cupid ; 
 ' ' He loves to sit and hear me sing, 
 
 Then laughing, sports and plays with me ; 
 Then stretches out his golden wing, 
 
 And mocks my loss of liberty ". 
 
 Of an irresponsive lover ; 
 
 " His face is fair as heaven, 
 
 When springing buds unfold ; 
 Oh why to him was't given 
 
 Whose heart is wintry cold ? 
 His breast is love's all-worshipped tomb, 
 Where all love's pilgrims come ". 
 
 " Gwin, King of Norway " is a ballad fierce with revolt 
 against tyranny and with hatred of war ; it is simple and 
 vigorous as any of the border ballads ; 
 
 " The God of war is drunk with blood, 
 The earth doth faint and fail ; 
 The stench of blood makes sick the heavens, 
 Ghosts glut the throat of hell ". 
 
 This verse shows how his age has led him quite away from 
 the delight in bloodshed so often apparent in his models. 
 Against it is to be set an unrhymed lyric called " A War 
 Song, To Englishmen ", although it is clearly to be taken as 
 merely dramatic. " An imitation of Spenser " is as unlike 
 Spenser as a poem well could be ; it is full of Blake and his 
 age, and yet deals more in personified abstractions than any 
 other of his poems. " Blind-man's Buff" is an attempt to 
 be humorously descriptive in the style of Gay. 
 
 5. In the twenty brief lyrics of the Songs of Innocence 
 we have a complete anticipation of the style and themes of 
 
276 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 Wordsworth, with more evidence of a fine lyric ear. They 
 flow with all the spontaneity ascribed to them in the 
 Introduction ; 
 
 " Piping down the valleys wild, 
 
 Piping songs of pleasant glee ; 
 On a cloud I saw a child, 
 
 And he laughing said to me ; 
 ' Pipe a song about a lamb ! ' 
 
 So I piped with merry cheer ; 
 Piper, pipe that song again ; 
 
 So I piped ; he wept to hear." 
 "And I made a rural pen, 
 
 And I stained the water clear, 
 And I wrote my happy songs, 
 Every child may joy to hear." 
 
 They are all in the same simple diction and marked by the 
 same simple childlike spirit. The new enthusiasm of 
 worship, and the sense of the brotherhood of man and of 
 the kinship of all nature are through them all. The Little 
 Black Boy expresses the idealism that afterwards developed 
 into mysticism, and held material things but a dream, and 
 spirit the true reality ; 
 
 "And we are put on earth a little space 
 That we may learn to bear the beams of love ; 
 And these black bodies and their sunburnt face 
 Are but a cloud and like a shady grove. 
 For when our souls have learned the heat to bear, 
 The cloud will vanish, we shall hear his voice ". 
 
 The Lamb, A Cradle Song, The Divine Image, On 
 Another's Sorrow express the same idealist religion, the same 
 sense of the omnipresence of a loving God ; 
 
 " Think not thou canst sigh a sigh, 
 
 And thy Maker is not by ; 
 Think not thou canst weep a tear, 
 
 And thy Maker is not near ". 
 " Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell, 
 
 There God is dwelling too ". 
 
 The Echoing Green, The Chimney-sweeper, and The 
 Laughing Song are tinged with simple humour and cheer- 
 fulness. 
 
 6. Over the Songs of Experience (1794) the shadow of 
 his mysticism falls. He has begun to see visions and 
 dream dreams, and the meaning of them he makes no effort 
 to render clear. In his poetical Introduction he does not 
 
THE POETRY 277 
 
 speak or think with the simplicity of that to his first book 
 of Songs ; now it is the prophet and seer who sings ; 
 
 " Hear the voice of the Bard 
 Who present, past, and future sees ; 
 Whose ears have heard 
 The Holy Word, 
 That walked among the ancient trees ". 
 
 The voice calls " the lapsed soul ", the Earth, to return ; 
 
 " The starry floor, the watery shore 
 Are given thee till the break of day ". 
 
 4< Earth's Answer " follows. It is out of " darkness, dread, 
 and drear", "her locks covered with grey despair"; she 
 accuses " the father of the ancient men " of jealousy and 
 cruelty to her, of binding " free love with bondage ". A 
 number of the songs have the same themes and metre as 
 The Songs of Innocence ; but they are dim allegories and 
 not spontaneous outbursts of a child-like nature. In The 
 Clod and The Pebble, the clod " trodden with the cattle's 
 feet" sings of love's unselfishness building "a hell in heaven's 
 despair ", the inference being that those that suffer and are 
 lowly feel most the beauty of love and love most unselfishly. 
 Holy Thursday is a lament over the woes of children born 
 in poverty ; it is filled with the new revolutionism ; 
 
 , " For where'er the sun does shine, 
 
 And where'er the rain does fall, 
 Babes should never hunger there, 
 Nor poverty the mind appal ". 
 
 The Little Girl Lost and The Little Girl Found paint the 
 universal brotherhood of innocence, the lion watching over 
 and protecting the little child. The Chimney-sweeper is an 
 attack on the pharisaism that worships God and yet neglects 
 and oppresses His little ones ; 
 
 " And because I am happy and dance and sing, 
 They think they have done me no injury, 
 And are gone to praise God, and his priest and king, 
 Who make up a heaven of our misery ". 
 
 This is the cry of the little child against his parents who 
 have " clothed him in the clothes of death ". The Fly is an 
 allegory of the fate of human life ; 
 
 " For I dance and drink and sing, 
 
 Till some blind hand shall brush my wing '". 
 
278 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 The Tiger is a question as to the purpose of the creation of 
 such ravening power and beauty ; 
 
 " When the stars threw down their spears, 
 And watered heaven with their tears, 
 Did he smile his work to see ? 
 Did he who made the lamb make thee ?" 
 
 The Little Vagabond is a suggestion that the combination 
 of the alehouse and the church might make the poor 
 religious. "London" is a lament over the sins and sorrows 
 of the great city. The Human Abstract is an obscure 
 allegory of the evil that grows "in the human Brain". 
 Christian Forbearance, and A Little Boy Lost are as 
 mystical ; but seem to be attacks on the intolerant spirit of 
 Christian churches. A Little Girl Lost seems to allegorise 
 the terrorising effect of the common idea of God, as against 
 the beauty of love. A Divine Image is another attack on 
 the harsh ideas of most religions ; 
 
 " The human dress is forged iron, 
 
 The human form a fiery forge, 
 The human face a furnace sealed, 
 
 The human heart its hungry gorge ". 
 
 A Cradle Song has not the simple faith of its prototype ; it 
 ends in a pessimistic cry ; 
 
 " Oh the cunning wiles that creep 
 
 In thy little heart asleep ! 
 When the little heart doth wake, 
 
 Then the dreadful light shall break ". 
 
 The School-boy is an appeal for less school and more 
 intercourse with nature for children. To Tirzah is an 
 indignant cry of a child against the " mother of its mortal 
 part " imprisoning his soul " in senseless clay " and 
 " betraying " it to " mortal life ". 
 
 11 The death of Jesus set me free, 
 Then what have I to do with thee ? " 
 
 7. The book of Thel which had already been 
 published (1789) is the least obscure of all his mystical 
 writings, though it is, like the rest, in Ossianesque rhythm 
 and language, and has its meaning hidden in only half- 
 transparent allegory. It seems to be an expression of that 
 extreme idealism which grew upon him and many of his age, 
 like Shelley, and which bewails the mixed nature of man, 
 
THE POETRY 279 
 
 and his imprisonment in flesh, leading as this does to the 
 woes to be seen in human life. Thel is the youngest of the 
 daughters of the Seraphim and laments the destiny of her 
 loveliness; she must pass away "like a smile upon an 
 infant's face ". The lily of the valley chides her for her 
 complaint, and says " I love to dwell in lowly vales ", " Yet 
 I am visited from heaven ", and shall " flourish in eternal 
 vales ". The little cloud that fades away in an hour rejoices 
 in its immortality ; it fades " to ten-fold life, to love, to 
 peace and raptures holy ". Thel still mourns that she " only 
 lives to be at death the food of worms ". And the cloud 
 bids her rejoice ; 
 
 " If thou art the food of worms, O virgin of the skies, 
 How great thy use, how great thy blessing ! 
 Everything that lives 
 Lives not alone nor for itself". 
 
 The worm is called ; but the clod of clay answers for him, 
 " bowing over the weeping infant ", and " her life exhaling 
 in milky fondness ". " We live not for ourselves " \ 
 
 " My bosom of itself is cold and of itself is dark ; 
 
 But he that loves the lowly pours his oil upon my head, 
 
 And kisses me ". 
 
 "But how this is I know not and I cannot know " ; 
 " I live and love ". 
 
 The "matron clay" bids Thel enter her house and fear 
 nothing ; 
 
 " Thel entered in and saw the secrets of the land unknown ; 
 She saw the couches of the dead and where the fibrous root 
 Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists ; 
 A land of sorrows and of tears where never smile was seen ". 
 
 She came to her own " grave-plot ", and heard a voice asking 
 the various questions that trouble the thoughtful man, why 
 evil exists, and why the soul is wrapped with "a little 
 curtain of flesh ". Thel flees shrieking and the poem ends. 
 
 8. The strength of the new transcendentalism that was 
 to master English imaginative literature was never more 
 apparent than in Blake and his poetry. All matter is to 
 him a latent energy preparing a life beyond life. Only in 
 man, the meeting-point of the ethereal and the fleshly, does 
 it come into hostile relations with the higher element, spirit. 
 Divinity is everywhere, inspiring, guarding all that is, even 
 
280 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 the lowliest ; thus he anticipates the pantheism of 
 Wordsworth and of the nature-school of idealists. But divin- 
 ity exists most in the soul of man which has pre-natal exist- 
 ence ; thus he gives the fundamental thought of the Ode on 
 the Intimations of Immortality long before it was conceived 
 by the Lake poet. The soul is the true man, and to it all the 
 earthly, fleshly elements should yield their service : and it is 
 the breach of this duty of the universe that leads to the woes 
 so apparent in human life from birth to death. It is 
 earthliness that has given us tyrannies and cruelties, 
 universal oppression and war. It is materialism 
 that has engendered gross thought and life and all the curse 
 that lies upon mankind. He almost hates Bacon and Locke 
 and Newton for teaching it as a philosophy and resting all 
 knowledge on the senses. They are to him "the three 
 great teachers of atheism or Satan's doctrine ". Nothing is 
 to be gained by trusting to the senses but everlasting doubt, 
 the foe of that inner intuition, that power of vision and of 
 seeing the ethereal, which comes from God and belongs to 
 the divine in man. He could himself see, and he painted, 
 the spirits of the dead, even of dead animals. He was of 
 "imagination all compact", and it was only this "muddy 
 vesture of decay " that marred the vision in most men. He 
 came almost to live in the sphere of spirit and imagination, 
 and hence perhaps his later inability to embody his ideas 
 for the ordinary intelligence of men. His art, equally with 
 his literary expression, became more and more ethereal and 
 obscure. A dozen different interpretations might be attached 
 to any one of his later pictures and to any one of his later 
 poems. In fact he came to hate all sensuous expression. 
 Rubens and Correggio with their fleshly and effeminate 
 forms and colours were an abhorrence to him. It was 
 Raphael and Michael Angelo that were to him the divine 
 painters; they saw the spirit, as he saw it, shining through 
 its earthly vesture. 
 
 9. His horror of the sensuous grows in his poems. Only 
 the immortal essence of matter makes him endure it. 
 Through all nature breathes the divine spirit. Animal life 
 is sacred to him as to Cowper and Burns, as being from the 
 hand of the Divine. And only this materiality of man, the 
 
OFTHE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE POETRY 281 
 
 internecine war of his nature, makes him pursue and kill 
 animals, or see war amongst them. Still more keenly does 
 he feel the brotherhood of man that should exist over all 
 the world but for this clogging evil. In him this became a 
 passion, and he fell into the paradoxical habit of hating those 
 men who would not forgive. He had his own share of 
 quarrels and lifelong feuds ; yet he never ceased to preach 
 this duty of universal forgiveness, as the essence of true 
 religion, and the future purifier of human life. In his intro- 
 duction to The Gates of Paradise (1793) he expresses it 
 most clearly ; 
 
 " Mutual forgiveness of each vice, 
 
 Such are the gates of Paradise ". 
 "Jehovah's fingers wrote the Law ; 
 
 He wept ; then rose in zeal and awe, 
 
 And in the midst of Sinai's heat, 
 
 Hid it beneath his Mercy-seat. 
 
 O Christians ! Christians ! tell me why 
 
 You rear it on your altars high ". 
 
 This explains his continued objection to the Christian church 
 along with his lifelong adoration of its Founder ; it explains 
 the absence of this "God-intoxicated man" from all churches 
 during half a century. He believed that the essence of all 
 true religion, of Christ's religion, was love, forgiveness of all 
 sins, and not terror and vengeance and punishment. 
 Godwin's Political Justice states in cold formulae what he 
 wrote in fiery words in his poetry, and believed and practised 
 as far as the existing conditions of life would allow him. 
 He joined with the most advanced revolutionists in their 
 meetings, and sympathised with their republican doctrines 
 and sanguine hopes from the great French upheaval ; nay 
 he wore the red cap of the French Revolution openly, and 
 gave Tom Paine the hint that saved him from arrest for 
 publishing The Rights of Man. But he abhorred their 
 religious opinions. He was with them in their belief 
 in the brotherhood of man; but he would have 
 nothing to do with their atheism or even deism; 
 he believed still more in Christ, in the brotherhood 
 of spirit, in the divinity of man. Reason he distrusted, 
 and he curses it in many of his obscure and his prophetic 
 poems. It was inspiration, the inner sight, the divine 
 intuition in man, that was the only trustworthy guide. And 
 
282 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 this had vanished from all the churches ; hence they were 
 representatives of unforgiveness, of vengeance, of the great 
 avenger and hater, Satan. Thus he was the forerunner of 
 Shelley, who in his Prometheus Unbound, the most 
 comprehensive of all his poems, takes up all these positions, 
 which this seer of visions has somewhat dimly and somewhat 
 inconsistently expressed in his poems. He was, in every 
 respect, both in poetic idea and in poetic expression, the 
 most significant figure of the eighteenth century in the 
 development of modern English poetry. He did not act so 
 much as a cause in its progress ; he was a complete forecast 
 of all it was to be for nearly a century, with its revolutionism, 
 its transcendentalism, its socialistic tendencies, its passionate 
 sympathy with the oppressed, its tolerance of all phases of 
 humanity, its adoration of the spirit of love the true spirit 
 of Christianity its hatred of all pharisaism and cant and 
 sensuousness, its love of melody and simplicity of 
 expression, its lyricism. He was a forecast even of its 
 faults; some of his poems have the spirit, method, and music 
 of Browning's obscurest in them, and parts of them might be 
 quoted without detection as the oracular and mystic verses 
 of Emerson. 
 
 Section 27. 
 
 I. The young men, who were in the nineteenth century 
 to make this new spirit born of revolutionism take deep 
 root in English poetry, were already fired by literary 
 ambition, when Blake was uttering his dark sayings in verse 
 over the coming time. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, 
 and Landor were respectively twenty, eighteen, sixteen and 
 fifteen when the French Revolution blazed out on the 
 horizon of Europe. And their sensitive poetic natures at 
 once responded to the magnetism of hope in a new era that 
 tingled through the West. They became republicans, and 
 even sympathised with socialistic dreams. And though 
 three of them were gradually disillusioned before the 
 century closed, they never lost the impulse that the 
 Revolution gave them. For the movement was deeper than 
 mere political opinions ; it had, as has been shown from 
 previous poetry, its literary source far back in the century, 
 
THE POETRY 283 
 
 and it had grown in passion and force and breadth as the age 
 proceeded ; it was not confined to France and could not 
 have its issue merely in French politics or the reactionary 
 politics of England ; it had its currents flowing through the 
 hearts of the new audience of literature out of fountains 
 that had been once national, and then sectarian in the Civil 
 War, and were soon to grow national again. 
 
 2. Wordsworth as the older was the first to feel it as an 
 intellectual influence and to embody it in his poetry. At first 
 the outburst in France seemed the most natural thing in the 
 world to him. He had grown up amidst the middle class 
 tradition of democratic freedom, the ideal that the Puritans 
 and their allies had fought for in the century before; and during 
 his life at Cambridge his more self-complacent disposition 
 failed to discover anything but freedom and democratic 
 organization in society. To unbind the galling fetters 
 that the court and aristocracy of France had welded round 
 her people seemed to him nothing but the prompting of 
 nature. In his third long vacation he and another under- 
 graduate made a walking tour on the Continent, and he saw 
 without concern the symptoms and the first phases of the 
 great event. When he had taken his degree in 1791, he 
 spent six months in London and then passed over to France, 
 where he remained nearly a year. He lived chiefly at 
 Orleans and Blois and coming across one of the republican 
 generals began to feel the uncommon nature of all that was 
 occurring in the country and to understand the enthusiasm 
 of revolution. The September massacres did not disillusion 
 him ; the following month he went to Paris and was about 
 to join the Girondist party, when the stoppage of his allow- 
 ance compelled him to return. He had not lost the 
 patriotism that even in the most advanced section of the 
 English middle class accompanied the worship of freedom ; 
 and when war broke out between England and the new 
 republic in 1793 he felt cut to the heart as at the enmity of 
 two dear friends. He clung to his ideal of reason and its 
 embodiment in freedom in spite of this and of the atrocities 
 that soiled the cause in France. Yet was he downcast, and 
 he began to feel the disruption of his beliefs. 
 
284 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 3. But already had he touched the consolation of his 
 soul, already had he discovered his poetic power and the 
 peace that comes from the religion of nature. Even at 
 school he had shown how easily verse came to him and how 
 naturally it accompanied insight into the beauty of nature. 
 He givesinhiscollected worksafew lines from "the conclusion 
 of a poem composed in anticipation of leaving school ", and 
 a sonnet " written in very early youth " ; and both reveal his 
 sense of the responsive soul of the world around him. The 
 latter is the description of a calm evening and contains these 
 lines ; 
 
 " A slumber seems to steal 
 O'er vale and mountain and the starless sky. 
 Now, in this blank of things, a harmony, 
 Home-felt and home-created, comes to heal 
 That grief for which the senses still supply 
 Fresh food ; for only then, when memory 
 Is hushed, am I at rest ". 
 
 And early in 1793, before this sadness had come over him from 
 failing hope in the new era, he had published a volume 
 containing two poems, An Evening Walk, and Descriptive 
 Sketches. They are in the heroic couplet and even though, 
 as they stand in his works, they are largely altered from 
 their original form, they contain the clearest traces of their 
 inspiration by Goldsmith and Thomson. The Evening 
 Walk, " addressed to a young lady " , is much the more 
 interesting ; it shows almost fully developed the worship of 
 nature that made his name a watchword afterwards, though 
 written, according to his own dating, between 1787 and 1789, 
 that is, during his first two years at college. He pictures with 
 the most loving hand the features of the scenery and life of his 
 native Cumberland hills and lakes ; and there are phrases and 
 passages that reveal a keenness of observation new to 
 English poetry ; " the huddling rill " ; " echo dallies with its 
 various din " ; a cloud over the setting sun " breaks the 
 spreading of its golden tides " ; 
 
 " The solemn evening shadows sail 
 
 On slowly-waving pinions down the vale " ; 
 " Now, with religious awe, the farewell light 
 
 Blends with the solemn colouring of night " ; 
 " Like Una shining on her gloomy way, 
 
 The half-seen form of twilight roams astray " ; 
 " The rising moon " , 
 
THE POETRY 285 
 
 "With a hoary light she frosts the ground " ; 
 "darkness broods 
 
 O'er all its vanished dells, and lawns, and woods " ; 
 " The brook brawls along the public road, 
 
 Dark with bat-haunted ashes stretching broad " ; 
 " Unheeded night has overcome the vales : 
 
 On the dark earth the wearied vision fails : 
 
 The latest lingerer of the forest train 
 
 The lone black fir, forsakes the faded plain : 
 
 Last evening sight, the cottage smoke, no more, 
 
 Lost in the thickened darkness, glimmers hoar ; 
 
 And towering from the sullen dark-brown mere, 
 
 Like a black wall, the mountain steeps appear. 
 
 Now o'er the soothed accordant heart we feel 
 
 A sympathetic twilight slowly steal ". 
 " The song of mountain-streams, unheard by day, 
 
 Now hardly heard, beguiles my homeward way. 
 
 Air listens, like the sleeping water, still, 
 
 To catch the spiritual music of the hill, 
 
 Broke only by the slow clock tolling deep, 
 
 Or shout that wakes the ferryman from sleep ". 
 
 In spite of the heroic couplet and the echo it brings of 
 Queen Anne days, this has all the Wordsworthian flavour of 
 the new time. His sister afterwards complained that 
 "moveless" and "viewless" occurred too often and became 
 a mannerism ; this fault has evidently been polished away, 
 though mannerisms still remain; everything "twinkles", the 
 aspen, the stars, the waters, and even the tails of deer ; and 
 "swain" occurs oftener than it would out of reach of the 
 eighteenth century. But we have a living sympathy with 
 every aspect of the lakes and mountains, and often with the 
 human dwellers amongst them, the shepherd, the boatman, 
 the peasant with his superstitions, the smith, the quarryman ; 
 and there is one most pathetic picture of a beggar-woman 
 and her children dying of cold. He enters too, into the 
 pleasures and pains of animal life, the cattle, the deer, the 
 swans, the song-birds. And he prophesies a simple cottage 
 life for himself where he and his friend 
 
 " to happy days shall rise, 
 Till our small share of hardly- paining sighs, 
 (For sighs will ever trouble human breath) 
 Creep hushed into the tranquil breast of death ". 
 
 The other poem addressed to his travelling companion, the 
 Rev. Robert Jones, is much less penetrative in its sympathy 
 with nature and less Wordsworthian. Though it is a record 
 
286 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 of their tour across France, up Lake Como, over the Alps, 
 into the Orisons, through the Tell country and Chamounix, 
 it is manifestly modelled on Goldsmith's Traveller and has 
 many echoes of that poem. It is twice the length of his 
 earlier, and is marked as finished in 1792; but it has far 
 fewer insights and felicities. The sympathy he had with 
 the scenery of his native district fails him somewhat among 
 the more sublime sights of Switzerland and the Alps. Yet 
 there are notable passages, the description of the peace of 
 the Grande Chartreuse broken by the clang of arms, of the 
 old violin-player by Como, of the life and freedom of the 
 Swiss, of the chamois-hunter, of the gathering to arms as he 
 returns through France. The poem is so saturated with the 
 new revolutionism that it might be called a panegyric of 
 freedom ; he lingers in admiration over the spirit of the 
 Swiss, in sadness over the thraldom in which the Savoyards 
 were held, in sympathy over the rising of the French to 
 defend their new republican freedom against the tyrant 
 allies ; he apostrophises freedom in the manner so popular 
 amongst the poets of the latter half of the century, and 
 appeals to heaven to give aid to the "just cause", and 
 
 "preside 
 Over the mighty stream now spreading wide ". 
 
 He speaks of the Revolution as " a great and glorious 
 birth", "as if a new-made heaven were hailing a new 
 earth". In one passage he adopts Rousseau's teaching, 
 shows how man was in primeval times " blest as free, for 
 he was nature's child"; he "all superior but his God 
 disdained", had "simple dignity" without debasement, 
 " the eye sublime and surly lion-grace ". It is because the 
 Swiss is so primitive that he is so free ; he worships on his 
 battle-fields of freedom ; 
 
 ' ' For images of other worlds are there, 
 Awful the light and holy is the air ". 
 
 He holds communion with God, 
 
 "There where the 
 The sky-roofed 
 
 He hears the avalanche ; 
 
 " There where the peal of swelling torrents fills 
 The sky-roofed temple of the eternal hills ". 
 
 "Mock the dull ear 
 Of Time with deaf abortive sound ", 
 
THE POETRY 287 
 
 and sees 
 
 " A planet's pomp and steady light 
 In the least star of scarce-appearing night ". 
 
 4. The volume attracted the attention of few, even 
 though it had almost all the qualities that belong to the 
 Wordsworthian revolution in English poetry. He sojourned 
 in London for a time, uncertain what to do, but still writing 
 poetry. He passed a month in the Isle of Wight and saw 
 the fleet preparing to set out against the French. He 
 "left the place with melancholy forebodings " ; he remem- 
 bered the American War and he knew that this would be a 
 longer struggle and would bring only " distress and 
 misery ". He spent two days on Salisbury Plain. And the 
 product of this sadness and this visit was a new departure 
 in verse, his Spenserian effort called Guilt and Sorrow, 
 finished by the end of 1794, but only partially published in 
 1798. It consists of seventy-four Spenserian stanzas, and 
 tells in the plain photographic manner of so many of his 
 brief narratives the story of a marine and a soldier's widow, 
 who meet on Salisbury Plain. It is full of the miseries and 
 sorrows that came from the war and the pressgang, and is in 
 parts sensational and in parts pathetic. Yet its diction is 
 marred by learned elements unsuited to the speech of 
 peasants. 
 
 5. About the time of completing this poem, a friend, 
 Raisley Calvert, who had admired his work, died and left 
 him ^900 as a legacy. On this he and his sister retired 
 into Dorsetshire and lived for a time in a cottage at 
 Raced own. Here he came across Coleridge, who had 
 been one of the few to see the merit of his first volume ; 
 and in July 1797 they removed to Alfoxden in Somerset- 
 shire in order to be near their new friend who was living at 
 Netherstowey. It was during these two years that the 
 reaction against the Queen Anne conventionality and 
 against the separation of poetic diction from common 
 speech set in and established itself as a creed in his mind. 
 Here he wrote a tragedy called The Borderers which he did 
 not publish till 1842 ; he had attempted in vain to get it 
 acted. It was another Elizabethan echo but full of the life 
 of his own time. There are in it many passages of great 
 power that show the most careful study of Shakespeare ; and 
 
288 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 it grows in interest and in pregnant speech as it proceeds. 
 The scene is laid on the Borders of Scotland and in the 
 time of Henry the Third. The story and characters have 
 a strong analogy to Othello. Oswald is the lago, the 
 motiveless incarnation of evil, who leads on the noble 
 Marmaduke, the young chief of a band of free-booters, to 
 a crime he loathes, and then glories in the deed ; Marma- 
 duke is made jealous of Idonea whom he loves and is 
 drawn into the resolve to kill her blind father by the 
 histrionic speeches of the villain and his accomplice a 
 beggar-woman whom he compels to slander the old man ; 
 the haunting image and echo of his love in the face and 
 voice of the victim make him abandon his purpose ; he 
 leaves him to die on a heath ; and he has to tell his criminal 
 intent to Idonea who still loves him ; Oswald is slain by 
 the band, a triumphant fiend ; Marmaduke condemns 
 himself to everlasting exile and wandering. There are very 
 many passages like these ; 
 
 " Hush ! 'tis the feeble and earth-loving wind, 
 That creeps along the bells of the crisp heather ". 
 
 This is from the blind man abandoned on the moor. 
 Another passage afterwards used in the Dedication of the 
 White Doe of Rylstone is as follows : 
 ' ' Action is transitory a step, a blow 
 The motion of a muscle this way or that 
 'Tis done, and in the after-vacancy 
 We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed ; 
 Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, 
 And shares the nature of infinity ". 
 " Three sleepless nights I passed in sounding on, 
 Through words and things, a dim and perilous way ". 
 
 ' ' We are praised only as men in us 
 Do recognise some image of themselves, 
 An abject counterpart of what they are, 
 Or the empty thing that they would wish to be. 
 
 " Merit has no surer test 
 Than obloquy." 
 
 The play is far more dramatic and powerful than Tennyson's 
 Foresters ; but it failed. And he set aside the experiment. 
 
 6. Out of his intercourse with Coleridge came his final 
 decision in poetry. They started out one afternoon in the 
 autumn of 1797 on a short tour; and they determined to 
 pay the expenses by writing a poem together and sending it 
 
THE POETRY 289 
 
 to The New Monthly Magazine. As they walked they struck 
 on the idea of imitating the ballads. It was not new in 
 English poetry ; in fact ever since the publication of Percy's 
 Reliques the truer poets had been more and more receding 
 upon simple ballad language and manner ; Blake had been 
 the last experimenter. Coleridge brought up as a theme the 
 dream of a friend. Wordsworth suggested that the old sailor 
 of the dream should commit some crime that should occasion 
 " the spectral persecution ", and, having been reading of 
 albatrosses in Shelvocke's Voyages, that the crime should be 
 the killing of one of these birds ; he also suggested the 
 navigation of the ship by the dead men. They began The 
 Ancient Mariner together ; but their methods were so 
 different that Coleridge was left to write it, only a few lines 
 being contributed by his partner. The ballad became too 
 long for a magazine ; and they resolved to write a volume 
 of poems chiefly on supernatural subjects, taken from 
 common life, but looked at through an imaginative medium. 
 Such is, according to Wordsworth, the genesis of the famous 
 Lyrical Ballads published by Cottle at Bristol in the autumn 
 of 1798. The ballad metres were largely adopted and the 
 lyrical form ; and the simplest of language was used, chiefly 
 the language of daily life. 
 
 7. Wordsworth wrote the bulk of the volume ; and all 
 his contributions are representative of his various methods. 
 He runs his theory of plain diction and theme to death in 
 The Thorn, Goody Blake, The Idiot Boy, and Simon Lee; 
 and he rises to his noblest with the new metre which he had 
 learned from his dramatic experiment in Lines written 
 above Tintern Abbey. The first four well represent dozens 
 of pieces of bathos that he wrote from this time onwards. 
 They tell what was not worth the trouble of telling to any 
 but a friend or neighbour and then only in an idle mood 
 and in half-a-dozen words to raise his practical sympathy. 
 "The Idiot Boy" is the story of one Betty Foy who sends 
 off her witless son on a pony to bring the doctor to a sick 
 neighbour Susan Gale ; he does not return and she has to 
 seek him through the night and finds him by a waterfall. 
 "Simon Lee" describes a poor old huntsman who is too 
 weak to unearth a stump and is helped by the poet. 
 
 U 
 
2QO PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 " Goody Blake " tells how Harry Gill never gets warm 
 because he has been cursed by Goody Blake a poor old 
 woman for making her give up the firewood she had taken 
 from his hedge. ".The Thorn " narrates the story of a girl 
 who, deceived by her lover, has gone mad, and sits all 
 day by a withered thorn crying "Oh misery", because 
 is it supposed, she has killed and buried her infant 
 there. To put these incidents into long poems would be 
 bad enough ; the ballad-makers might probably have sung 
 half-a-dozen lyrical verses about the last; but to spend two 
 or three dozen stanzas of the most desultory type on 
 them was to invite parody, was indeed to write parody. 
 And he manages to tell the stories like a garrulous old man 
 without point and almost without the natural pathos that 
 briefly told they might have had. The ballads often dealt 
 with lowly life, but it was with the tragic or romantic 
 incidents of it ; their phrases were those of the people and 
 so were their methods ; but a fine artistic instinct made 
 selection amongst them. To inflict tedious and desultory 
 everyday talk of peasants on a reading public was offence 
 enough ; but to labour it into the appearance of poetry was 
 to produce bathos and excite laughter. Had Wordsworth 
 only read Blake's Songs of Innocence, he would have seen 
 what could be made of lowly themes and simple language 
 by means of selection and brevity. He felt the demand of 
 the new audience for simplicity and he took it to mean 
 commonness if not commonplaceness. 
 
 8. Two other pieces, Expostulation and Reply, and The 
 Tables Turned, that versify a conversation, are saved from 
 bathos partly by their brevity, but chiefly by a new and 
 noble thought put into fine verse. 
 
 "One impulse from a vernal wood 
 May teach you more of man, 
 Of moral evil and of good 
 Than all the sages can." 
 
 The Lines Written above Tintern Abbey would have 
 redeemed any volume from commonplace by their noble 
 statement of the new poetic creed. They are instinct with 
 the beauty of Nature that has a spirit in it. They give in 
 rapturous but philosophic blank verse all the articles of 
 trancendentalism. They contrast the thoughtless enjoyment 
 
THE POETRY 2QI 
 
 of nature by his boyhood with the tranquil worship with 
 which he now enters into its meaning. The remembrance 
 of l< these beauteous forms " has given him " in hours of 
 weariness, sensations sweet ", and feelings that mould 
 
 " That best portion of a good man's life, 
 His little, nameless, unremembered, acts 
 Of kind ness and of love". 
 
 It has lightened 
 
 " The weary weight 
 Of all this unintelligible world ", 
 
 and brought the serene mood, in which 
 
 " We are laid asleep 
 In body and become a living soul ", 
 
 and " see into the life of things ". Often, when u the fever 
 of the world " 
 
 " Has hung upon the beatings of his heart ", 
 
 has he turned back in spirit to the " sylvan Wye". And, as 
 he stands by its banks again, he feels that 
 
 " In this moment there is life and food 
 For future years." 
 
 Nature in his boyhood " to him was all in all " ; " the 
 sounding cataract haunted him like a passion ". That 
 " dizzy rapture " is past ; and he has learned to hear in 
 nature "the still, sad music of humanity", to feel 
 
 " A presence that disturbs him with the joy 
 Of elevated thoughts " ; 
 
 " a sense sublime 
 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean, and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ". 
 
 Therefore is he still a lover " of all the mighty world of eye 
 and ear ", " both what they half-create and what perceive ", 
 pleased to recognise in nature " the soul of all his moral 
 being ". In the joy of his sister, yet a girl, he sees his 
 former rapture, and he prays that it may continue yet a 
 
 while with her, 
 V 
 
 11 Knowing that nature never did betray 
 The heart that loved her". 
 
 . 
 
2Q2 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 Nature tranquilises and elevates the mind so that 
 
 " neither evil tongues, 
 
 Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, 
 Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 
 The dreary intercourse of daily life, 
 Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb 
 Our cheerful faith that all which we behold 
 Is full of blessings ". 
 
 In after years her memory shall thus 
 
 " Be as a dwelling-place 
 For all sweet sounds and harmonies ". 
 
 She will remember if they are separated that he, " so long a 
 worshipper of nature ", came hither " unwearied in her 
 service ", nay, " with far deeper zeal of holier love ". 
 
 p. This is the spirit that made Wordsworth's poetry a 
 new revelation to the nineteenth century, that gave form 
 and expression to the growing sense of the beauty of the 
 world, of the soul that informs it, and of the purifying 
 influence of intercourse with it. At last the true pastoralism 
 had been reached, that after which men, weary of the bustle 
 of cities and the artificiality and vice of civilization, had 
 been for centuries yearning. In this simple and worshipful 
 dwelling with nature was to be found the anodyne for 
 spirits weary of so much factitious life, the anodyne so long 
 sought for in the half-pretence of pastorals. In this 
 prayerful mood of intercourse with the divine element, that 
 made the heart of nature, was the true nirvana, the true 
 annihilation of the fretful, carking self. 
 
 10. The same spirit is more briefly, but as religiously, 
 expressed in a brief extract " from an unpublished poem ", 
 printed in Coleridge's journal, " The Friend ", and called 
 " Influence of Natural Objects in calling forth and 
 strengthening the imagination in boyhood and early youth ". 
 This passage was written in 1799, and is part of The 
 Prelude, his poetical and psychological autobiography, 
 already begun, but not published till 1805. He 
 apostrophises "the soul that is the eternity of thought", 
 that drew him from " the mean and vulgar works of man ", 
 and purified " the elements of feeling and of thought ", 
 until he recognised " a grandeur in the beatings of the 
 
THE POETRY 293 
 
 heart ". Then he passes into a description of the rapture 
 of fellowship with nature " in November days ", when 
 
 " All shod with steel, 
 We hissed along the polished ice ", 
 
 and "the shadowy banks" "came sweeping through the 
 darkness " and 
 
 "With the din 
 Smitten the precipices rang aloud ". 
 
 11. There is less of the spiritual insight in a fragment 
 he wrote at Goslar in Germany in the winter of 1799, 
 " Nutting " ; but there is a deep sense of the mind, the 
 personality, that is in nature. He describes a boyish 
 excursion to a hazel-grove for nuts ; he lay for a while, his 
 cheek on a mossy stone, drinking in the scene, hearing the 
 "fairy water-breaks" murmur on, and "breathing with such 
 suppression of the heart as joy delights in " ; then he set to 
 his task; but as he left, unless he confounds "present 
 feelings with the past", he felt as if he had polluted a 
 shrine, 
 
 " a sense of pain when he beheld 
 The silent trees, and saw the intruding sky " ; 
 
 " there is a spirit in the woods ". Here the long-petrified 
 poetry of nature by means of personification has given way 
 to life and passionate love. Another fragment of the same 
 period called " The Simplon Pass " shows the same almost 
 pantheistic recognition of the divinity in nature, but far 
 more intellectually. 
 
 12. "A Poet's Epitaph", also belonging to 1799, is, 
 though not in blank verse, but in his somewhat prosaic use 
 of the ballad metre, full of his new creed. It is a defence 
 of his poetic life that would seem so idle to the practical 
 man. He warns off from the poet's grave the various types 
 of men to be met in the busy world ; the statist is first to 
 "love one living man" before he thinks of the dead; the 
 lawyer, the doctor, the soldier must lay their profession with 
 its evil effects aside before they approach ; he has an 
 especial horror of the scientist, or philosopher, as he calls 
 him, " one all eyes ", " a fingering slave " ; 
 
 " One that would peep and botanise 
 Upon his mother's grave " ; 
 
' 
 
 294 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 he bids him, "wrapt in sensual fleece", take his "ever- 
 dwindling soul " away and let the poet " rest in peace " ; so 
 does he abhor "the moralist", "an intellectual all-in-all", 
 ' a reasoning self-sufficing thing ", " himself his world and 
 his own God " ; 
 
 " Sleep in thy intellectual crust ; 
 Nor lose ten tickings of thy watch 
 Near this unprofitable dust ". 
 
 Far different is the poet-mourner " clad in homely russet ", 
 "an idler in the land"; 
 
 " He murmurs near the running brooks 
 A music sweeter than their own " ; 
 
 he is a solitary, and in solitude he has had " impulses of 
 deeper birth ", and reaped " the harvest of a quiet eye " ; 
 
 'You must love him ere to you 
 He will seem worthy of your love ". 
 
 Two others in the ballad metre, written in 1798, Lines in 
 Early Spring, and To My Sister express two different phases 
 of his higher pantheism, his belief in the soul that lives and 
 moves in nature ; in the former he mourns over the thought 
 of " what man has made of man ", when he considers his 
 " human soul " is " linked " by nature " to her fair works " ; 
 it is his faith " that every flower enjoys the air it breathes " ; 
 in the latter he bids his sister come forth, and enjoy in 
 idleness the "blessing in the air", that seems to give "a 
 sense of joy " " to the bare trees and mountains bare " ; it is 
 the first of March and is the true beginning of the year ; 
 
 " Love, now a universal birth, 
 From heart to heart is stealing, 
 From earth to man, from man to earth : 
 It is the hour of feeling. 
 One moment now may give us more 
 Than years of toiling reason ". 
 
 13. Other poems of these last few years of the century 
 express " the still sad music of humanity ", and the pathos 
 of lowly human life, rather than the spirit that dwells in 
 nature ; and yet even in them the two seem to combine. 
 " The old Cumberland Beggar " tells in his peculiarly 
 musical and varied blank verse of the charity that is twice- 
 blest ; he upholds the superiority of the old system of 
 personal relation of beggar and helper to the new workhouse 
 
. 
 
 THE POETRY 295 
 
 system; he asserts that there is "a spirit and pulse of good" 
 "to every mode of being inseparably linked"; and he shows 
 how this blind old man keeps alive in the district the love 
 of benevolence, the joy of doing good, the sense of 
 " kindred with a world where want and sorrow are ". But 
 he prefers to put this sympathy with human sorrow, this 
 pathos of the lowliest human life into rhymed and generally 
 ballad stanzas ; "Her eyes are wild" (1798) is the lament 
 of a forsaken wife over her babe; Ruth (1799) the story of 
 a forsaken bride who, a child of nature, lives to old age out 
 in the open ; The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman 
 (1798) puts into pathetic verse the cry of one who has been 
 left by her tribe in the forest and is about to die ; all three 
 have the simple pathos of nature and of human injustice in 
 them. The Danish Boy (1799), the picture of a "spirit of 
 noonday " that haunts a lovely dell, gives the brighter side 
 of rustic superstition. " We are seven " (i 798), To a Sexton, 
 Matthew, and The Two April Mornings, all written in 1799, 
 express the living kinship with the dead in the churchyard 
 that rustics feel. Lucy Gray (1/99), in telling the story of 
 a child lost in the snow, embodies the same sentiment, but 
 goes further ; it ends with the rustic belief, that Lucy " is a 
 living child " and wanders singing over the heath where she 
 died. The same pathos of kinship with the dead he several 
 times puts into melodious verse about another dead Lucy ; 
 "Three years she grew in sun and shower " is the longest ; 
 nature counts the child as hers, and resolves to take her ; 
 
 " The stars of midnight shall be dear 
 To her ; and she shall lean her ear 
 In many a secret place, 
 Where rivulets dance their wayward round, 
 And beauty born of murmuring sound 
 Shall pass into her face." 
 
 " A slumber did my spirit steal ", " I travelled among 
 unknown men", "Strange fits of passion have I known", 
 and " She dwelt among the untrodden ways ", all written in 
 1799, are brief dirges over this child Lucy ; the last is the 
 most beautiful ; 
 
 " A violet by a mossy stone, 
 Half hidden from the eye ! 
 Fair as a star, when only one 
 Is shining in the sky. 
 
296 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 She lived unknown, and few could know 
 
 When Lucy ceased to be ; 
 
 But she is in her grave, and, oh, 
 
 The difference to me ! " 
 
 But his didacticism and his reaction against grandiose and 
 conventional language led him too often into the common- 
 place when using the ballad form and stanza. In The Last 
 of the Flock (i 798), a story of struggle with growing poverty, 
 and The Reverie of Poor Susan, a dream in London of a 
 youth passed among the scenes of nature, the pathos almost 
 overcomes the tendency to bathos. In the Anecdote for 
 Fathers (1798), and The Fountain A Conversation (1799), 
 the higher element that idealises common life succumbs to 
 the commonplace. Most of those poems dated 1799 were 
 written at Goslar in Germany during a severe winter ; and 
 into one or two of them there enters a longing for England 
 as his home. He returned and finally settled at Grasmere 
 in his beloved Lake district. 
 
 14. The first edition of the Lyrical Ballads was met 
 with a storm of criticism and jeering; and when in 1800 he 
 republished them with most of the poems already noticed 
 added in a second volume, he began a prose defence of his 
 poetic attitude in his famous Essay on Poetry. This, as 
 the manifesto of the new poets and the creed of the coming 
 literature, is epoch-making, and naturally forms the boundary- 
 line between the period of preparation and the period of 
 fulfilment, the eighteenth century and the nineteenth. 
 Round it surged a sea of controversy for many years ; but 
 its teaching was destined to win ; for it gathered up all that 
 the best poets of the close of last century were striving after 
 or were impelled by their new audience and atmosphere 
 towards. He seems to feel that he is standing alone as the 
 pioneer of poetic truth to nature, the first poet to protest 
 against the artificialities that had separated eighteenth 
 century poetry from reality. He is quite unconscious of the 
 fact that he is only part of a movement, and by no means 
 the leader of it ; there is scarcely a poet of any note of the 
 last quarter of last century, nay of the latter half of it, but 
 reveals some anticipation of the new poetry. And Cowper, 
 one of whose poems, his ballad of Alexander Selkirk, he 
 
THE POETRY 297 
 
 criticises and discounts as untrue in language, approached 
 very close to The Excursion in his Task ; it was only the 
 satiric element and his coming before the Revolution that 
 kept him from occupying the same position in poetic evolu- 
 tion as Wordsworth. Still more does Blake fulfil all the 
 conditions that Wordsworth contends- for as his own ; he 
 goes to lowly life and nature ; he takes the simplest language 
 of the people ; he elevates the theme by giving it spiritual 
 meaning; he is idealistic to mysticism like Wordsworth 
 himself; he sees God in all things; he feels the human 
 kinship of the universe around; he is pre-eminently a teacher; 
 in short he anticipates in every respect the idea of a poet as 
 given in the Essay. Wordsworth, indeed, was but the 
 culmination of a movement that had its source, not in an 
 individual poet, but in the new audience and in the new 
 time. It was the critics he had to fight ; for criticism ever 
 affiliates to the established rules, customs, and culture of a 
 time ; its only chance of having authority is to cling to what 
 the vanishing age has used as the fundamental principles of 
 of its art ; its essence is to analyse new products, and to 
 compare them with what seemed fixed standards; it is, 
 therefore, rarely sympathetic, or imaginative, and almost 
 never originative. There was enough of the old in Gray, 
 Collins, Goldsmith, Chatterton, Burns, and Cowper, to 
 satisfy it. Blake it ignored. Wordsworth deliberately 
 rejected the cues and standards of the passing age, and 
 accepted everything that the coming time and the new 
 audience demanded. Hence the long and fierce conflict. 
 
 15. The central doctrine of the Preface to the Lyrical 
 Ballads is that the poet should use " a selection of the real 
 language of men in a state of vivid sensation ". And Words- 
 worth felt that this would separate his readers into scornful 
 critics and devoted worshippers, the effect of every new 
 method or gospel. " They, who have been accustomed to 
 the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers", 
 " will look round for poetry and will be induced to inquire by 
 what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to 
 assume that title ". The principal object proposed in them 
 was to " choose incidents and situations from common life ", 
 to put them in "language really used by men", "to throw 
 
29 8 
 
 over them a certain colouring of imagination " ; and to trace 
 in them " the primary laws of our nature ". " Humble and 
 rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition 
 the essential passions of the heart find a better soil", "are 
 less under restraint and speak a plainer and more emphatic 
 language " ; there " the elementary feelings co-exist in a 
 state of greater simplicity ", and the " manners of rural life 
 germinate from those elementary feelings ", and " are more 
 easily comprehended and more durable " ; there too " the 
 passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and 
 permanent forms of nature," whilst the language is purer 
 and more fundamental, simpler and less conventional, 
 "more permanent", and " far more philosophical ", "than 
 that which is frequently substituted for it by poets ". 
 Nothing could state so well the qualities of the literature 
 the cpming audience had been familiar with through its 
 long period of submergence, the Authorised Version of the 
 Bible and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress ; nothing could 
 describe so well the ideal of Cowper and Burns and Blake, 
 or the achievement of the two latter ; nothing could sound 
 so like a prophecy of the coming literature. The writer 
 was only the mouthpiece of the new movement. In 
 practice his very deliberateness and sense of his own 
 purpose and theory often led him into such obtrusion of it 
 as to make his poems prosaic in treatment and barren in 
 diction; he forgot the "colouring of imagination", in the 
 eagerness to pourtray common life, and the " selection ", in 
 his eagerness to give the " language really used by men '' ; 
 it was chiefly in his philosophical blank verse that his theory 
 and his art amalgamated. 
 
 16. He has heard the " outcry against the triviality and 
 meanness " of some of the contemporary verse-writers. But 
 he claims that each poem of his is distinguished from theirs 
 by having " a worthy purpose " ; for good poetry though 
 "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", must be 
 produced by one who " has thought long and deeply ", and 
 has a noble character. And further, in his poems, the 
 feeling " gives importance to the action and situation ", and 
 not the reverse, as in " the popular poetry of the day *'- 
 evidently the poetry of the Dellacruscan school. He 
 
8i 
 
 THE POETRY 299 
 
 protests against the "application of gross and violent 
 stimulants" to the human mind, "frantic novels, sickly and 
 stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant 
 stories in verse", and thinks that the "thirst after outrageous 
 stimulation " has arisen from " the great national events 
 which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumula- 
 tion of men in cities, where the uniformity of their 
 occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, 
 which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly 
 gratifies ". Here Wordsworth has well-nigh struck on the 
 essential source of all the new movements in literature, not 
 merely those which he condemns, but those which he claims 
 to represent the disturbance of established habits of the 
 population by the industrial current, causing as it did the 
 migration to cities and the upheaval of the submerged 
 classes with their ideas, tastes, and demands. The 
 eagerness for " outrageous stimulation ", the yearning for 
 simpler themes and language were both from the same 
 source. Wordsworth stood by the tastes that had their 
 roots in far back national life, and fought against those that 
 came from the requirements of a passionate city life. It 
 was the industrial revolution that caused the re-emergence 
 of the one set, and the appearance of the other. 
 
 17. It was really the renaissance of old national feeling 
 and art in the resurrection of the middle classes, that made 
 him reject " what is usually called poetic diction ", the 
 product of the severance of literature from the nation by 
 Queen Anne culture, and of the eighteenth century spirit that 
 flowed from it. He deliberately struggles against this 
 artificiality of expression and rejects all "personifications of 
 abstract ideas ", wherever they are a " mechanical device of 
 style " and not " prompted by passion ". He tries to keep 
 his reader "in the company of flesh and blood", and 
 "endeavours to look steadily at his subject", to avoid 
 " falsehood of description ", disproportionate treatment, and 
 hackneyed language, however well it may sound, in short 
 trusts an essential of all good poetry, "good sense". Truth 
 in all things is what he aims at, even though he should be 
 charged with " prosaisms ". 
 
300 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 18. And here again he strikes upon a principle that was 
 not understood by him in its full sense, and is not yet 
 appreciated ; it is that the language of good poetry, " except 
 with reference to the metre, in no respect differs from good 
 prose", that "the most interesting parts of the best poems 
 will be found to be strictly the language of prose, when 
 prose is well written ". He illustrates by the analysis of a 
 sonnet of Gray's, and insists that the true antithesis is not 
 poetry and prose, but poetry and "matter of fact or science". 
 " There neither is nor can be any essential difference 
 between the language of prose and metrical composition ". 
 " Selection ", " made with true taste and feeling ", is all he 
 can point out as differentiating the two. But a little 
 thought might have shown him that selection can be as 
 active in writing good prose as in writing good poetry. His 
 fundamental distinction is metre: "the co-presence of 
 something regular, something to which the mind has been 
 accustomed in various moods and in a less excited state, 
 cannot but have preat efficacy in tempering and restraining 
 the passion by an intertexture of ordinary feeling " ; " more 
 pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which have 
 a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be 
 endured in metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than 
 in prose " ; we are reluctant to reperuse "the distressful parts 
 of Clarissa Harlowe " ; " while Shakespeare's writings, in the 
 most pathetic scenes, never act upon us as pathetic beyond 
 the bounds of pleasure " ; this, he holds, is due to the 
 metrical arrangement. It would be easy to find a more 
 substantial reason in the superficial insight and 
 sentimentalism of Richardson and in the deep thought that 
 inspires and inheres in Shakespeare's most tragic passages, 
 making the mind of the reader think as well as feel. The 
 chief discovery he made was that the greatest imaginative 
 prose and the greatest poetry have no essential difference ; 
 hence it was that, in his noblest and most philosophical 
 moods, he resorted, like Shakespeare and Milton before 
 him, to very varied blank verse ; and hence it is that the 
 most impassioned pieces of prose in our century have a 
 rhythm that reminds of blank verse, but carefully avoids its 
 monotony. The time is not far distant when the larger 
 harmonies of the best prose will be as much enjoyed by 
 
THE POETRY 301 
 
 the cultivated ear as the delights of verse, and imaginative 
 writers will seek musical prose as the more natural medium 
 of their greater creations and thoughts ; the recurrent decay 
 of the taste for poetry, and the steady yet rapid advance in 
 imaginative prose, point in the same direction. 
 
 19. In the latter half of the essay comes the description 
 of the poet's art, as penetrative, as glowing, and as 
 melodious as the best parts of his Prelude and Excursion. 
 It is not a mere " matter of amusement and idle pleasure " ; 
 its "object is truth", "carried alive into the heart by 
 passion"; "poetry is the image of man and nature", "an 
 acknowledgement of the beauty of the universe ", and the 
 poet must "look at the world in the spirit of love"; "he 
 considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each 
 other and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the 
 fairest and most interesting properties of nature " ; " poetry 
 is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge " ; " it is the 
 impassioned expression that is in the countenance of all 
 science " ; " poetry is the first and last of all knowledge ; it 
 is as immortal as the heart of man " ; the poet " looks 
 before and after ", " carrying everywhere with him relation- 
 ship and love " ; " if the time should ever come when what is 
 now called science, familiarised to man, shall be ready to 
 put on as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet will 
 lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will 
 welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine 
 inmate of the household of man ". Here again he , strikes 
 on one of the deeper principles in the evolution of 
 literature ; the material, the ideas, the figures, and the 
 symbols, that an imaginative work makes use of, must have 
 become familiar to the audience addressed, to their feelings 
 and passions ; hence the failure of Blake when he came to 
 use a symbolism and a circle of ideas, that were mystical 
 and remote from the life of the new audience ; and hence 
 the fact that new discoveries have to wait almost a genera- 
 tion before they are ready for use in poetry. Thus the 
 speculations of Newton came in as true poetic material at 
 the close of last century, whilst the geological and physio- 
 logical speculations of the close of last century had to wait 
 for Byron and Shelley, Browning and Tennyson, and 
 
302 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 Darwin's ideas are only now ready for a new type of poetry 
 and imaginative prose. 
 
 20. What is deepest and best in Wordsworth is scarcely 
 touched by his theory ; it is the spiritual power of rising 
 above the common and the commonplace, and giving it 
 such philosophical meaning, as to make it almost sublime ; 
 it is the interfusion of philosophy and poetry ; it is still more 
 the lofty moral attitude he takes, idealising and giving deep 
 significance to the most trivial detail. One of the finest 
 instances of this, " Lines left upon a seat in a yew tree " 
 was written as early as 1795 ; and that it is in his own free 
 but musical blank verse shows how early his ear told him 
 what was the appropriate medium of such impassioned 
 philosophy; he begins by bidding the traveller rest in tru- 
 solitude ; 
 
 " the curling waves 
 
 That break against the shore shall lull thy mind 
 
 By one soft impulse saved from vacancy ". 
 
 He describes the man, who built the seat and enjoyed it, a 
 solitary driven from the world by neglect, to nurse his soul 
 in indignation and pride. He loved the beauty of the 
 scene, yet would his "fancy feed" on "visionary views", 
 " till his eyes streamed with tears". " In this deep vale he 
 died". It is the lesson from this life that contains the 
 poet's lofty moral attitude; he warns the stranger that 
 " pride is littleness ", that 
 
 " he, who feels contempt 
 For any living thing, hath faculties, 
 Which he has never used ; that thought with him 
 Is in its infancy", " O be wiser, thou ! 
 Instructed that true knowledge leads to love ". 
 
 This is the inner secret of Wordsworth's power over the 
 higher spirits of our century. 
 
 Section 28. 
 
 I. Coleridge had the same sense of superiority to all 
 that is mean and all that is contemptuous, the same 
 idealistic philosophy that insisted on the nobler elements of 
 life and the necessity of love for the poetic interpretation of 
 the world. And in his Biographia Literaria (1817), a 
 
 or \ i/ 
 
 . 
 
THE POETRY 303 
 
 philosophical analysis and defence of true poetry, he pointed 
 out the spiritual charm of Wordsworth's best poetry, whilst 
 at the same time showing his dissent from the theory as 
 stated in the preface and its variance from the poet's own 
 practice even in his most commonplace ballads like The 
 Thorn. In the same apology for his poetical career he 
 gives an account of the inception of the Lyrical Ballads 
 practically in consonance with that given by Wordsworth; he 
 shows that his contribution was to be from the supernatural, 
 making it as human and as interesting as his fellow-poet was to 
 make his scenes from common and lowly life ; he wrote The 
 Ancient Mariner for it, and " was preparing among other 
 poems The Dark Ladie and the Christabel, in which he 
 should have more nearly realised his ideal than he had done 
 in his first attempt ". He never finished these and did not 
 publish them in the volume, nor does he seem from the 
 existing fragments to have approached The Ancient Mariner 
 in giving human interest to the supernatural. Besides his 
 ballad his contribution consisted of two scenes called The 
 Dungeon, from Osorio, an unpublished drama, a Words- 
 worthian piece of blank verse, " The Nightingale, a Conver 
 sation Poem ", and the ballad-lyric from the proposed Dark 
 Ladie called " Love ". '1 he last has only one stanza that 
 can be said to refer in any way to the supernatural ; the 
 knight, whose story the poet sings to Genevieve in order to 
 subdue her love, saw " an 'angel beautiful and bright " look 
 in his face and knew that " it was a fiend ". The piece is 
 quite in the spirit of the sentimentalism that entered so 
 lavishly into the romances of the time and shows that 
 Coleridge was in the eighteenth century greatly influenced 
 by the two movements, the romantic and the sentimental, 
 so much scorned by Wordsworth ; it also shows how much 
 more susceptible he was to the true ballad atmosphere than 
 his friend. It is very musical and repeats words and 
 refrains like the ballads ; but it is the first stanza, containing 
 as it does one of the central doctrines of the new poetic 
 creed, that is best known ;- 
 
 11 All thoughts, all passions, all delights, 
 Whatever stirs this mortal frame, 
 All are but ministers of Love, 
 
 And feed his sacred flame. 
 
 
304 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 2. It is however only The Ancient Mariner, that fulfils 
 his idea of creating human interest in the supernatural, and 
 completely succeeds in adapting the ballad style to modern 
 tastes. The earlier form of this poem, as it appeared in 
 Lyrical Ballads is closely modelled on the ballad as seen in 
 Percy's Reliques. The later form has got clear of innu- 
 merable archaisms like " ne " for " nor ", drouth " for 
 " drought ", " withouten ", " pheer ", " sterte ", " eldritch ", 
 " beforne ", " een ", " ee ", " n'old ", " aventure ", " what 
 manner man " ; it has retained only as many as to give a 
 quaint flavour without needing a commentary to make them 
 understood. With its running commentary, it is more 
 connected and intelligible, and it has abandoned many 
 verses and lines and expressions that have the cruder 
 features and repetitions of the old ballad. It is the 
 first version that is more instructive as to Coleridge's 
 connection with the eighteenth century, and is most worth 
 analysing as an evidence of the mingling of the two periods 
 after the Revolution. There is in it a little of that stucco 
 Gothic which was made so much of in The Castle of 
 Otranto and other attempts in fiction to return to the 
 mediaeval world and its chivalry and its supernaturalisms ; 
 there are the old belief in the efficacy of the sign of the 
 cross against evil spirits, and in a spell brought on by a 
 curse, the appeal to " Mary queen of heaven ", the presence 
 of holy hermits who shrive great sinners, the idea of 
 perpetual wandering from land to land and repetition of 
 some act as penance for some great sin, as in the legend of 
 the Wandering Jew, the ubiquity of spirits evil and good 
 through all elements, the conflict of evil and good spirits for 
 souls, and the power of sinning and goodness, of spirits and 
 demons over the sun, moon, and stars, and the elements. 
 Beside these are set pictures from Holbein's Dance of 
 Death, the dead rising and doing the common labours of 
 men, the seraphs standing over corpses, and Death and his 
 paramour dicing for human lives ; two stanzas that give the 
 most unearthly description of death, quite in the style of 
 Holbein, are omitted from the later version, 
 
 " His bones were black with many a crack, 
 
 All black and bare I ween ; 
 Jet black and bare, save where with rust 
 Of mouldy damps and charnel crust, 
 They're patched with purple and green ". 
 
THE POETRY 30$ 
 
 " A gust of wind sterte up behind, 
 
 And whistled thro' his bones : 
 Thro* the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth 
 Half-whistles and half-groans ". 
 
 There are elements from a still later age, from the 
 Elizabethan ; the spectral ship is out of the legend of The 
 Flying Dutchman, which was born of the sea-adventures of 
 the time of English and Dutch rivalry and the floating 
 mediaeval superstitions ; whilst the sweet sounds in the air 
 and all round the ship in the fifth part after the partial 
 undoing of the curse are clearly from The Tempest and the 
 music of Ariel. Thus the ages are mingled quite in the 
 style of the Gothic romances of the time. 
 
 3. And interfused with this amalgam of various olden times 
 are unmistakable traces of the modern spirit, and even of the 
 new spirit that was coming over literature as the century 
 closed. We have the Protestant phases of Christianity in 
 the congregation in the " kirk ", where " each to his great 
 father bends ", " old men and babes ", the appeals to Christ; 
 and the great emphasis laid upon the prayer of the worshipper 
 and its efficacy ; in the later version he gets clear of one of 
 these by substituting 
 
 " And never a saint took pity on 
 Me in my agony ", 
 
 for 
 
 " And Christ would take no pity on &c ". 
 
 The passionate love of country and home, so strongly 
 expressed at the end of the ballad, is to a large extent 
 modern, a growth of that emigrative faculty which arose 
 again in Western man with the expansion of commerce and 
 adventure. So the nautical atmosphere that is around the 
 whole poem belonged to the two preceding centuries ; it 
 came from the Voyages that Wordsworth and he had been 
 reading and from the love of " bursting " first " into silent 
 seas " that still lingered from Elizabethan times along the 
 coast of Devonshire ; both Arctic and tropical adventures 
 are drawn upon. There is even in the use of older language 
 a mark of the new archaeology and philology; we have 
 nothing of the artificial jumble of glossaries that clogs the 
 poetry of Chatterton ; the old idioms and words are on the 
 whole accurately used, and the archaic colours are no 
 
 V 
 
306 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 on " with a trowel ". Yet even in this true work of art we 
 have the incongruity of modernisms ; " an it dodged a 
 water-sprite " is a strangely prosaic medley of new and old ; 
 so too is " with heavy thump, a lifeless lump " ; " the garden- 
 bower", "the skiff-boat neared", "the rotted old oak-stump", 
 " for a charnel dungeon fitter", "as soft as honey-dew", " a 
 hundred fire-flags' sheen " have a modern ring in them ; the 
 " seraph-band " that waved their hands over the corses to 
 signal the approach of the ship to the harbour belongs to the 
 eighteenth century hymnology. The poet became conscious 
 of some of the incongruities, and for " The Marineres gave 
 it biscuit worms " substituted " It ate the food it ne'er had 
 eat " ; but some of his substitutions are not improvements ; 
 e.g. " I heard the skylark sing " for " I heard the lavrock 
 sing", "the star-dogged moon " for "the horned moon": 
 and of the sun setting, 
 
 " Still hid in mist and on the left 
 Went down into the sea ", 
 
 is less poetical than 
 
 " And broad as a weft upon the left 
 Went down into the sea ". 
 
 The greatest improvement in the second version is a new 
 stanza in the third part ; 
 
 " The* sun's rim dips ; the stars rush out ; 
 
 At one stride comes the dark ; 
 With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea, 
 Off shot the spectre-bark." 
 
 The picture-similes and metaphors belong rather to the new 
 poetry than to the old ballads ; the moon mocked the sea 
 "like morning frosts yspread"; when the water-snakes 
 reared, " the elfish light fell off in hoary flakes ", and " every 
 track was a flash of golden fire " ; the spectre-sails " glance 
 in the sun like restless gossamers " ; " idle as a painted 
 ship, Upon a painted ocean"; the wind " fanned my cheek, 
 Like a meadow-gale in spring " ; the sails seem to the 
 hermit like "the skeletons of leaves that lag My forest 
 brook along". These and other descriptions of nature 
 form indeed one of the chief marks of the kinship of the 
 poem to the Lake school; there is not the mere picturesque- 
 ness that had grown in poetry all through the latter part of 
 the eighteenth century, fostered by landscape painting ; but 
 
THE POETRY 307 
 
 there are flashes of insight into the living spirit of nature. 
 Another mark of the new poetry and time is the insistence on 
 reverence for life, even animal life ; this is the moral of the 
 poem ; the killing of the albatross 
 
 " that loved the man, 
 Who shot him with his bow ", 
 
 is the cause of all the woe and agony so painfully depicted ; 
 and this is closely connected with the new idealisation of 
 Christianity, that made love the primary and universal duty 
 to "all things both great and small", and appeared in 
 Cowper and Blake before it appeared in Wordsworth ; it is 
 this that supplies the pivot of the story ; .when the curse of 
 the slain albatross has brought death into the spectre ship 
 to the "four fifty times living men" of the crew, (an 
 extraordinary number even in a modern ship), and death's 
 41 pheer ", " Life in Death ", as the later version calls her, 
 has chosen the violator of the kinship of nature for her 
 prey, whilst prayer will not come but only "a wicked whisper" 
 that makes the " heart dry as dust ", it is a sudden impulse 
 of delight in the beautiful water-snakes, " a spring of love 
 from his heart", that undoes the horror of the curse ; "the 
 albatross falls off" his neck, and sinks into the sea ; and 
 sleep comes upon him ; the dead crew navigate the ship, 
 and a spirit " from the land of mist and snow " under the 
 keel, the spirit that loved the albatross, hurries it north to 
 his native land that he may live always and fulfil the curse 
 by telling his story and its moral, love for all and through 
 all, to every traveller whom his instinct selects ; 
 "He prayeth well who loveth well 
 
 Both man and bird and beast " ; 
 " For the dear God, who loveth us, 
 
 He made and loveth all ". 
 
 This is a conclusion that could never have occurred to any 
 age before Coleridge's ; in mediaeval story it is the 
 horror and ghastliness of the curse that clings to the victim ; 
 here his penance is to become an itinerant preacher and 
 reformer such as the poet was at the time he wrote this, 
 such as so many of Wordsworth's heroes are. But, 
 interwoven with this love of humanity and all living things, 
 there is a strange contradiction of it ; two hundred innocent 
 men have to lose their lives for the one albatross that was 
 
308 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 shot ; this comes from the old primitive creeds, from the 
 Old Testament and mediaeval idea of a God of vengeance. 
 This religious element had drifted down through the Puritan 
 love of the Old Testament, that the fierceness of the Civil 
 War developed, into the evangelical movement that 
 appeared with the emergence of the middle classes. The 
 contradiction lay in the struggle of two eras that met at the 
 turning of the centuries. Cowper reveals it most plainly ; 
 we have almost side by side in his poetry the belief in the 
 love that pervades or should pervade all nature and the 
 belief in the ultimateand everlasting punishment of the bulk of 
 the human race for the fault of one and for their own ignorance 
 of the remedy. Burns has it in him, though all his 
 sympathies were with the new time and the new creed of 
 universal love. Wordsworth, the prophet of the new faith, 
 unconsciously falls into its conventional opposite. It is 
 only Blake that turns his face completely to the coming 
 time and will have no part or lot in the old vindictive creed, 
 no conditioning of the belief in universal forgiveness, all- 
 pervading love ; but he lived, though always a dweller in 
 London, more like a seer, apart from the world, in an ideal 
 sphere of his own, than any man of modern times. 
 
 4. And his name suggests another striking quality in 
 this ballad its dreamy atmosphere. None of the critics of 
 Ossian ever failed to point out this feature of it that at once 
 established its modernity ; none of the epics or ballads of 
 the olden times but have their figures and incidents and 
 story in the clearest relief ; there is no mistaking what the 
 narrator means to tell. It was one of the most distinctive 
 tricks of the new art to throw a diaphanous veil over its 
 theme, half to conceal and half to reveal. The result in the 
 hands of inferior artists was blurred edges, indistinctness 
 of outline, and unintelligibility, with stronger natures greater 
 sublimity and a certain mystic ideality ; Macpherson's 
 medley and Horace Walpole's romance are excellent 
 instances of the one, and the Ancient Mariner and many of 
 Turner's pictures of the other. It is difficult to make out a 
 clear current of story in this ballad especially in the older 
 version, where the " pheer " or paramour of Death is left 
 unnamed, and where a number of stanzas in the seventh part, 
 
 i 
 
THE POETRY 309 
 
 omitted afterwards, repeat in the manner of the old ballads 
 the supernatural appearance of the seraph-signallers and 
 make the dead bodies without apparent reason stand 
 up as torch-bearers. The spirits too are of the mistiest 
 type ; they have no definiteness in their purpose or habits, 
 such as the ghosts and demons in previous literature had ; 
 they serve only as a kind of gossamer machinery for the 
 evolution of the curse and the penance. 
 
 5. Yet, with all this strange mingling of the old and the 
 new, the mediaeval and the modern, the poem has the unity 
 of effect of a true work of art ; it is one of the most striking 
 productions of the new spirit of the close of the eighteenth 
 century ; it has all the witchery of the old tales of super- 
 naturalism and all the attractiveness and idealism of the 
 coming creed. The medley of the romantic movement has 
 usually been condemned as leading to false art ; but this 
 poem shows how the most heterogeneous materials like 
 those of the "new Gothic" of the eighteenth century 
 might under the transforming power of true imagination 
 become as real art as that of the most self-consistent 
 ages. 
 
 6. The same dreamy, only half-transparent art gave 
 birth to Christabel, which was begun in 1797 in Somerset- 
 shire for Lyrical Ballads, continued at Keswick in 1800, 
 and, though published in 1816, never finished. It is a far 
 less interesting attempt at the romantic and supernatural; 
 its metre, the accentual, non-syllabic, connects it, as it 
 connects The Ancient Mariner, with the ballads ; but it is 
 more irregular in its length of line and size of stanza and in 
 the number of syllables between the accents and attains a 
 melody that is sweeter and yet more varied. The materials 
 are not so heterogeneous or derived from so many ages. 
 And the unity is therefore more easily managed. It 
 adheres in fact to a story that is all mediaeval, and there is 
 a certain monotony in the result. The First Part tells how 
 Christabel, the daughter of the rich baron Sir Leoline, goes 
 out at midnight from the castle into the forest to pray and 
 is there startled by the appearance of 
 
 "A damsel bright, 
 Dressed in a silken robe of white, 
 That shadowy in the moonlight shone " ; 
 
310 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 she is told by the " lady strange " a story of abduction by 
 five knights ; she leads home the fair Geraldine (such is the 
 name she gives) ; she speaks of her mother's death to the 
 stranger, who cries out, as if she had seen an apparition, 
 " Off, woman, off ! this hour is mine " ; 
 
 it was the dead mother come to guard the purity of her child ; 
 she dreams of her whom she had never seen : but she also 
 dreams as she lies by Geraldine dreams of horror and 
 shame. The Second Part fixes the scene at Langdale in 
 the Lake district and introduces many local names ; it tells 
 how next morning she rises with a sense of fear and shame 
 and "sins unknown", and leads the stranger to her father, 
 who grows pale when he hears that Geraldine is the 
 daughter of his old friend "Lord Roland de Vaux of 
 Tryermaine ", from whom he had been parted in youth by 
 " whispering tongues that poison truth " ; he is furious 
 against the abductors, and will " dislodge their reptile souls 
 from their bodies " ; he embraces the maiden who is but a 
 serpent in human form ; and at the sight his own daughter 
 " shrinks and shudders ", and " draws in her breath with a 
 hissing sound " ; she is under the spell of the demon, and 
 grows like her in nature ; Geraldine prays to be sent home ; 
 but the Baron summons his bard Bracy and bids him go 
 for her father ; the minstrel tells a dream he has had, that 
 " will not pass away ", a dream of a snake and a dove ; 
 
 " She looks askance at Christabel ; 
 Jesu Maria, shield her well ! " 
 
 her eyes are shrunk up into a serpent's, " with somewhat of 
 malice and more of dread"; Christabel drinks in these 
 looks "of dull and treacherous hate"; and, feeling the 
 power of the spell, prays her father, " by my mother's soul 
 this woman send away " ; Sir Leoline is enraged at this 
 suggested breach of hospitality; and he sends off Bracy. 
 The "Conclusion to Part Second" is somewhat enigmatic; 
 but seems to give a mystic interpretation of the story, and 
 to excuse a father's wild words to his innocent, happy child. 
 There were to have been two other cantos, taking the 
 minstrel to the castle of De Vaux only to find it swept away, 
 and bringing him back to Langdale Hall; Geraldine was 
 then to assume the form of Christabel's absent lover and to 
 
THE POETRY 311 
 
 be about to marry her in spite of her loathing, when the 
 true lover returns and the demon vanishes. The famous 
 lines on sundered friendship are the finest in the poem 
 and contain most of the modern feeling in it. Yet its 
 picturesque qualities and its touches of nature bring it into 
 relationship to the Lake school. The meaning is shadowy, 
 and doubtless evaded even the poet, as it does the reader. 
 But it was most natural that the writer of such poetry 
 should, when the mood and fire of youth were gone, turn 
 into a metaphysician of the mystic type. 
 
 7. The fragment of "The Ballad of the Dark Ladie", 
 that he wrote, promised a far nearer approach to the true 
 ballad story and style, although touched with the passion of 
 a time of revolution ; the dark ladie meets her lover Lord 
 Falkland by the brook in the birch wood and pleads with 
 him to fulfil his promise ; he offers her one of his nine fair 
 castles ; but she will have none of it without his hand. It 
 has the definiteness and the lyric passion of the ballads. 
 
 8. Another fragment, "Kubla Khan or a Vision in a 
 Dream", written in 1797 at a lonely farm-house on Exmoor, 
 shows the culmination of his sensuous dreaminess. In 
 publishing it in 1816 he explained its genesis. He had 
 been reading Purchas's Pilgrimage, and at the sentence that 
 described the building of a great palace by Khan Kubla 
 and the enclosure of ten miles of a garden, an anodyne he 
 had taken overcame him, and he dreamt and composed in 
 his dream from two to three hundred lines of a poem. 
 When he wakened he began to write it down ; but a long 
 interruption broke the thread and he could not recover it ; 
 the fragment he had written down consisted of only fifty- 
 four lines. It is a by no means sequent account of the 
 palace and garden ; 
 
 " It was a miracle of rare device, 
 A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice." 
 
 In the garden was a wonderful chasm ; 
 " A savage place as holy and enchanted 
 
 As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted 
 
 By woman wailing for her demon lover. 
 
 And from this chasm with ceaseless turmoil seething 
 
 As if this earth in fast, thick pants were breathing, 
 
 A mighty fountain momently was forced ". 
 
312 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 Could he revive within him " the symphony and song " he 
 once in a vision heard an Abyssinian maid sing, then would 
 he " build that dome in air ", " that sunny dome, those 
 caves of ice " ; 
 
 " And all should cry, Beware ! Beware ! 
 
 His flashing eyes, his floating hair ! " 
 " For he on honey-dew hath fed, 
 
 And drunk the milk of Paradise ". 
 
 Thus the fragment closes. There was opiate in the senses 
 and mind that moulded all these dreams, and it is useless to 
 search for definite purpose or form in them. Yet they are 
 the finest fruit of his poetic genius. 
 
 9. There is none of this mistiness in the drama, which 
 he had written in 1797, and from which extracts were 
 published in Lyrical Ballads. He changed its name to 
 " Remorse ", and the name of the remorseful villain from 
 Osorio to Ordonio ; and through Byron's influence it was 
 accepted by the Drury Lane management and produced in 
 1813, some fifteen years after Sheridan had rejected it for 
 the same theatre. It was a great success, and had a run of 
 twenty nights, putting some ten thousand pounds into the 
 treasury of the theatre. Byron said of it ; " we have had 
 nothing to be mentioned in the same breath with Remorse 
 for very many years ". Its chief faults are a tendency to 
 melodrama and too sudden a conversion of the villain into 
 the repentant. But once this is said, the rest is all praise ; 
 and it shows the degeneracy of the dramatic taste that two 
 such tragedies as the Borderers and Remorse should have 
 had so little encouragement. The plot of Coleridge's is 
 old ; two brothers, sons of a Spanish Marquis, Valdez, in 
 the reign of Philip the Second, at the close of the civil wars 
 with the Moors, Alvar and Ordonio, love Teresa the orphan 
 ward of their father ; and she is devoted to the elder who 
 has disappeared and is reported to have been captured by 
 Moorish pirates and been slain. The scene opens with his 
 reappearance in Moorish disguise, resolved to unmask the 
 villainy of his brother Ordonio, who had sent assassins to 
 slay him ; but he is reluctant for Teresa's sake, who, he 
 thinks, has married his brother. Isidore, one of the Moors 
 who had been sent to assassinate him and relented, is 
 freed from the clutches of the Inquisitor Monviedro by 
 
THE POETRY 313 
 
 Ordonio, who fears confession of his guilt on the rack, and 
 who tries to get him to induce Teresa by sorcery to marry 
 him ; the Moor recommends Alvar for the task, and the hero 
 meets his brother in a cavern, finds from the interview that his 
 fiancee has been faithful, and agrees to use pretended 
 incantations to persuade her that her lover is dead. In the 
 necromantic scene, Alvar stirs the conscience of his brother; 
 but the Inquisitors burst in and carry him off to the 
 dungeon below the castle. Ordonio meets Isidore his old 
 accomplice in a cavern and kills him ; and Alhadra, the widow 
 of the Moor, resolves to avenge the slaughter. Teresa gets 
 the key of the dungeon and enters to consult him whom she 
 thinks a Moorish sorcerer about her Alvar's death. He reveals 
 himself just as his brother enters to slay him. Concealing 
 his bride, he reveals himself to Ordonio too, and awakening 
 remorse in his. breast turns by reminiscences of their 
 boyhood his murderous purpose. Alhadra and her Moors 
 burst in and slay the repentant. And the play closes with 
 the sound of prospective wedding-bells. There are scenes 
 and passages of great power in the tragedy; some of Teresa's, 
 Alvar's, and Alhadra's speeches are full of Coleridge's 
 imaginative poetry. One sentence from the soliloquy of 
 Alhadra's in the fourth act will show how subtly he could 
 realise the intricacies of human feeling ; 
 
 " I need the sympathy of human faces, 
 To beat away this deep contempt for all things, 
 Which quenches my revenge ". 
 
 The last act is full of the new creed of the power of love 
 and forgiveness ; Alvar in his dungeon attacks the theory 
 that punishment will cure vice and crime ; 
 
 " There is the process of our love and wisdom 
 
 To each poor brother who offends against us ". 
 " Is this the only cure ? Merciful God ! " 
 J ' With other ministration thou, O Nature ! 
 
 Healest thy wandering and distempered child ". 
 
 We have in fact in this play much of the revolutionism that 
 affected Coleridge for a time, his revolt against laws and 
 conventions, and his belief that force was about to give 
 way to love in the government of the world. Alvar is full 
 of this. 
 
314 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 " O let me reconcile him to himself, 
 Open the sacred source of penitent tears, 
 And be once more his own beloved Alvar ". 
 
 10. There is not merely the moral phase of revolutionism 
 in the play, but also the political ; through it runs the 
 subdued cry of freedom in revolt against tyranny, bursting 
 out at the close into the wild speech of Alhadra to the 
 Moors ; 
 
 " I thank thee, Heaven ! thou hast ordained it wisely 
 That still extremes bring their own cure. That point 
 In misery which makes the oppressed man 
 Regardless of his own life, makes him too 
 Lord of the oppressors. Knew I a hundred men 
 Despairing, but not palsied by despair, 
 This arm should shake the kingdoms of the world ". 
 
 There is too all through the play a fierce anger against all 
 attempts like the Inquisition to muzzle freedom. The same 
 vehement worship of liberty in the form of revolution 
 appears more vehemently expressed in a play written by 
 Coleridge and Southey, and published by Coleridge as his, 
 when he was at Jesus College, Cambridge, in September 
 1794; it is The Fall of Robespierre. The two fiery 
 worshippers of revolt and the Revolution had met in June 
 at Oxford, and again in August at Bristol. Along with a 
 friend Robert Lovell they formed, in their enthusiasm for 
 the new ideas, a scheme for ridding themselves of all old- 
 world conventions and modes of life ; they resolved to 
 establish what they called a Pantisocracy, or government of 
 all by all, in America, on the banks of the Susquehanna. 
 They also determined one night to write a tragedy as a 
 first attempt at partnership by the next night. Robespierre 
 had just been guillotined, and these adorers of freedom, 
 looking with eyes too near to the event to have perspective, 
 thought that his fall was the destruction of the final barrier 
 to the fulfilment of their dreams of liberty, that now the 
 French republic would show an example of all that was 
 noble to the rest of the world. They chose the event as the 
 theme of their drama of freedom ; next day Southey and 
 Lovell had written their instalment, the second and third 
 acts ; Coleridge had only partially written his, the first ; 
 Lovell's part was inharmonious with the rest, and Southey 
 rewrote it whilst Coleridge finished his. And next month 
 
THE POKTRY 31$ 
 
 the result was issued from the press. In the prose dedica- 
 tion to "H. Martin Esq., Jesus College," " yours fraternally, 
 S. T. Coleridge," says ; " It has been my sole aim to imitate 
 the passionate and highly figurative language of the French 
 orators, and to develop the characters of the chief actors on 
 a vast stage of horrors ". To be of mixed authorship, the 
 style of the play is singularly even all through ; it is marked 
 by melodramatic eloquence and forced metaphors and 
 similes ; perhaps, if anything, Coleridge's contribution sins 
 most in this respect ; it is here we find passages like these 
 most frequent ; 
 
 ' ' the howl of maniac uproar 
 Lulls to sad sleep the memory of himself " ; 
 ;< The giant Victories, my counsels formed, 
 Shall stalk around me with sun-glittering plumes, 
 Bidding the darts of calumny fall pointless " ; 
 ' ' Even now the vital air 
 Of Liberty, condensed a while, is bursting 
 To shatter the arch-chemist in the explosion ". 
 
 Southey's two acts are smoother in their rhetorical flow of 
 eloquence, less broken up by fireworks of simile, more 
 allusive to Roman precedent, and marred by phrases like 
 these ; " this fire-fraught ' tube of Justice " (for a pistol), 
 "Guilt's iron fangs engrasp his shrinking soul", " Henriot's 
 boughten succours ", and " stained with the deep dye of 
 nobility ". Taken as a whole, it is an accumulation of stagy 
 speeches rising at times into the scream of a hoarse melo- 
 dramatic actor. There is practically no plot ; it is merely a 
 series of scenes exhibiting the conflict between Robespierre's 
 party and Tallien's. 
 
 10. What is of importance is the light it throws on the 
 passion of the two young poets for liberty and their attitude 
 to the Revolution. Robespierre, they thought, was only an 
 obstacle to the fulfilment of the republican dream, and not a 
 forerunner of the ultimate master of the Revolution. Both 
 of them had already their instinct of revolt stirred ; Southey 
 had been expelled from school for an attack on flagellation ; 
 Coleridge had been chastised and repressed for his 
 coquettings with scepticism and had left Cambridge in 
 1793, enlisted in a regiment of dragoons, and been 
 discharged. Both of them were soon to leave their 
 respective universities without degrees and in disgrace for 
 their violently republican and socialistic opinions. 
 
316 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 II. Next year (1795) they were both in Bristol engaged 
 to two sisters called Fricker and wedded to their pantiso- 
 cratic dream. To supply funds for its fulfilment, Coleridge 
 delivered a series of lectures on politics and religion, 
 published immediately afterwards under the name of 
 Conciones ad Populum. They were marked by the same 
 violence of style and thought as the drama ; in politics they 
 denounced Pitt and all his legislation, and adored liberty ; 
 in religion they were Unitarian. In October of the same 
 year he married Sara Fricker, and passed three months of 
 honeymoon in a cottage at Clevedon. Here he wrote a 
 number of his early poems and revised others. And by 
 April 1797 he had the collection in sufficient order to 
 publish it through Cottle in Bristol as Poems on Various 
 Subjects, by S. T. Coleridge, late of Jesus College, 
 Cambridge It contains most of what he had written 
 between his seventeenth and twenty-fifth years. The poems 
 may be divided into political, religious, philosophical, and 
 descriptive of nature ; but there is a tinge of the political, 
 the philosophical, and the worship of nature in most of 
 them. One of the longest of them, in fact one of the 
 longest poems he ever wrote, was called " Religious Musings, 
 a Desultory Poem", completed on Christmas Eve 1794. 
 It shows manifest traces of the close study of Paradise 
 Lost ; for it is in Miltonic blank verse, often in Miltonic 
 phraseology, and it is full of apostrophes and invocations. 
 But it is also deeply tinged with the metaphysical tendencies 
 and the mysticism which after his visit to Germany made 
 him a philosophic monologist instead of a poet. This 
 mystic quality appears especially in the passages that, 
 written long before he had met Wordsworth, identify 
 God and Nature, and find all-pervading love the true spirit 
 of the universe ; 
 
 " 'tis God, 
 Diffused through all, that doth make all one whole " ; 
 
 " 'tis the sublime of man " " to know ourselves " " parts and 
 proportions of one wondrous whole"; "this fraternises 
 man, this constitutes our charities " : " blest are they " who 
 adore " Him, nature's essence, mind, and energy " " nor 
 contempt embosom, nor revenge ". He soon launches into 
 fierce tirades against all who help to obstruct this love by 
 
THE POETRY 317 
 
 superstition, or trade, which " loud laughing packs his bales 
 of human anguish ", or war, and especially against the allied 
 enemies of the new French Republic, Catherine of Russia 
 " that foul woman of the North ", Austria, and 
 
 " Each petty German princeling nursed in gore". 
 He curses Britain for professing "Thee to defend, meek 
 Galilean " ; 
 
 " O blasphemy ! to mingle fiendish deeds 
 With blessedness ". 
 
 He gives a long philosophical account of the origin of 
 society, such as he saw it, based on property, " twy- 
 streaming fount whence vice and virtue flow ", and 
 exhibiting " foul oppression's ruffian gluttony ", and number- 
 less poor and famished. He curses the press-gang, and 
 prophesies " the day of retribution nigh " ; " even now the 
 storm begins ", the French Revolution ; the " abhorred 
 forms " of tyranny and superstition, " mitred atheism ", have 
 " met the horrible judgment " ; the kingdoms of the world 
 belong now to " pure faith " and " much piety " ; 
 
 " each heart 
 
 Self-governed, the vast family of Love, 
 Raised from the common earth by common toil, 
 Enjoy the equal produce ". 
 
 He apostrophises Milton, Newton, Priestley, pictures 
 the last day, and closes with an anticipation of his joinirfg 
 the " mystic choir " of " contemplant spirits " ; meanwhile 
 he sings " heart-stirring song " and feels that here is 
 mystery ; 
 
 " Life is a vision shadowy of Truth ; 
 
 And vice and anguish and the wormy grave, 
 
 Shapes of a dream ". 
 
 A still longer poem "The Destiny of Nations, a Vision", 
 written also in 1794, is even more Miltonic in its blank 
 verse, phraseology, apostrophes, and aspirations, and is 
 much more obscure ; and it is all the worse that it is, like 
 so many of his poems, a fragment. It is a half-allegorical 
 picture of the spirit of freedom. It is Platonist, if not Neo- 
 platonist, and introduces from The Republic the simile of 
 the cave in which men sit, their " backs to bright reality ". 
 He finds a spirit in all things, and approves in this respect 
 even the most primitive religions. " Such perhaps the 
 
318 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 spirit ", that communed with Joan of Arc. This spirit 
 dwelt among the Swiss, and tried to protect them from war ; 
 and at the sight of her the " Protoplast ", Night, and chaos 
 fled. She watched over the martyrs. And now in 
 England she asks Peace why this island takes to war ; the 
 answer is because " the appetites of kings " are sated with 
 " the low flattery of their reptile lords ", and " must have 
 keener condiment ". The spirit sees Revolution appear, 
 and raises a hymn to God. There are more " prosaisms " 
 in this poem and also more felicities than in the previous ; 
 these are instances of the latter ; 
 
 " The snowy blast drifts arrowy by " ; 
 
 " had watched 
 The alien shine of unconcerning stars " ; 
 
 " The night was fanged with frost" : 
 
 " Ghastly as broad-eyed Slumber ". 
 
 " The Aeolian Harp " was another blank-verse poem of this 
 early period, written during the happy months at Clevedon 
 in 1796. It is an elaborate analogy between the wind-harp 
 and the human soul ; and is filled with the nature- 
 transcendentalism that connects him with the Lake school. 
 
 " O the one life within us and abroad ". 
 
 " Methinks it should have been impossible 
 Not to love all things in a world so filled." 
 
 And animated things are perhaps but " organic harps ", 
 
 " That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps, 
 Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, 
 At once the soul of each and God of all ". 
 
 Two pieces of somewhat the same type and written in 
 blank verse were connected with the visit of his old school- 
 fellow Charles Lamb and his sister to him in Somersetshire. 
 One was " To a Friend who had declared his intention of 
 writing no more poetry" and was written in 1796; the other 
 and finer " This Lime-tree Bower my Prison " was written 
 in June 1797 during the visit. In this last he gives beautiful 
 expression to his sense of the brotherhood of nature; 
 " Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure "; it also expresses 
 the delight of friendship with his "gentle-hearted Charles", 
 to whom " no sound is dissonant which tells of Life ". 
 
 13. His volume of Poems contained a series of Sonnets 
 on Eminent Characters, which he called Effusions in order 
 
THE POETRY 319 
 
 to avoid any appearance of rivalry with his sonneteering 
 inspirer W. L. Bowles. They cannot be said to be great 
 successes, having no natural climax. One is on Burke, 
 another on Pitt, a third on Kosciusko, a fourth to Earl 
 Stanhope the sympathiser with the French Revolution. 
 They are full of the revolutionary spirit and were evidently 
 written at the same time as The Destiny of Nations. He 
 describes Pitt, for example, as " yon dark scowler ", " who 
 with proud words of dear-loved Freedom came", "and 
 kissed his country with Iscariot rnouth ", and " Ah ! foul 
 apostate from his father's fame", "fixed her on the cross of 
 deep distress ". Stanhope he addresses as " Friend of the 
 human race", "Champion of freedom and her God". One 
 " To the Autumnal Moon " is the nearest approach he 
 makes to smypathy with nature ; he spoils it by drawing out 
 an analogy between hope and the moon, " mother of wildly- 
 working visions". Another "To the Author of The 
 Robbers " gives a very different impression of this represent- 
 ative of the Storm-and-Stress movement on the German 
 stage from his Critique on Bertram in his Biographia 
 Literaria ; it adopts the over-drawn and unnatural sentiment 
 of Schiller's youthful play ; " Ah ! Bard tremendous in 
 sublimity ! "; if he met him " beneath some vast old tempest- 
 swinging wood ", he " would brood " " with mute awe ", and 
 " then weep aloud in a wild ecstasy ". 
 
 14. A third type of poem in the volume is represented 
 by the Monody on the Death of Chatterton, consisting of 
 irregular lines and stanzas like the ode which he afterwards 
 cultivated. This is not a very philosophical or suggestive 
 poem and one of its best stanzas is taken without 
 acknowledgement from a Sonnet by an old Christ's Hospital 
 school-fellow and a prospective pantisocrat, Favell. It is, 
 like many of these poems, full of the old eighteenth century 
 trick of personifying abstract ideas, Care, Want, Scorn, 
 Despair. He did not abandon the artificiality till he met 
 Wordsworth ; for it was natural to his metaphysical turn of 
 mind. The best line in it is this ; 
 
 " Youth of tumultous soul and haggard eye ". 
 The interest of the poem lies in the autobiographic close. 
 He gives up the theme, "lest kindred woes persuade a 
 
320 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 kindred doom "; for he too has had " big gall-drops shook 
 from Folly's wing "; he will seek a " cottaged dell " " o'er 
 the ocean swell " ; had Chatterton lived, he would have joined 
 them in their pantisocratic expedition, and driven "the 
 twinkling team", "o'er peaceful Freedom's undivided dale"; 
 yet will he " love to follow the sweet dream ", " where 
 Susquehanna pours his untainted stream "; and " raise a 
 solemn cenotaph to thee ", " Sweet harper of time-shrouded 
 Minstrelsy ". 
 
 15. There is another relic of the Queen Anne period in 
 his one poem in heroic couplet, "To a young ass, its 
 mother being tethered near it ". It belongs to December 
 1794, three years before he came across Wordsworth; yet it 
 has in it all that simple, almost commonplace, sympathy with 
 the lowliest phases of animal life which reached its climax in 
 " Peter Bell ". He pities " the little foal of an oppressed 
 race " ; "I love the languid patience of thy face " ; and he 
 pities the ass too with its circle of grass all eaten, "pity, 
 best taught by fellowship of woe " ; " half famished in a land 
 of luxury"; he would take the young one with him as a 
 pantisocrat ; 
 
 " I hail thee brother, spite of the fool's scorn " ; 
 " And fain would take thee with me, in the dell 
 Of peace and mild equality to dwell ". 
 
 Lewti or The Circassian Love-Chaunt is dated by him 1795, 
 although it did not appear till the last years of the century. 
 It has little likeness to his early poems, and belongs rather 
 to the dreamily sensuous series, that includes Christabel 
 and Kubla Khan ; although it has syllabic metre, it has the 
 octosyllabic line and the irregularly lyrical stanza ; these are 
 amongst the best lines ; 
 
 " It is a breezy jasmine-bower, 
 The nightingale sings o'er her head ; 
 Voice of the night ! Had I the power 
 That leafy labyrinth to thread, 
 And creep, like thee, with soundless tread, 
 I then might view her bosom white, 
 Heaving lovely to my sight ". 
 
 16. Early in 1797 with Charles Lloyd, a new friend, he 
 removed to Nether Stowey in Somersetshire, into a cottage 
 given by an old friend and patron, Thomas Poole. Here 
 
THE POETRY. 321 
 
 he prepared a second edition of his poems, omitting 
 nineteen and adding twelve. The best of these additions 
 was the Ode to the Departing Year, written in December 
 
 1796, and already published in the Cambridge Intelligencer 
 and in pamphlet. It is in the regular Pindaric form 
 adopted by Gray with ode and epode, strophe and 
 antistrophe. It apostrophises the " spirit who sweepest the 
 wild harp of Time ", and " divinest Liberty " ; and he 
 attacks the allied enemies of France again with fierce 
 invective ; he calls upon an avenger for " Afric's wrongs " ; 
 he mourns over Albion "not yet enslaved, not wholly vile "; 
 his heart warms to his " mother isle " ; yet he tells her, " the 
 nations curse thee " and " thy predestined ruins rise " ; he 
 must give up this "loud lament", and "recentre his 
 immortal mind", "in the deep sabbath of meek self- 
 content". In its barren eloquence it is a great contrast to 
 the rich fervour of "France, an Ode", dated February 
 
 1797, but really belonging to 1798, when it appeared in The 
 Morning Post under the title of " Recantation ". In it he 
 showed that within two years he had reversed his attitude to 
 France, and was as violent against her as he had been 
 passionate in her cause. It was the beginning of his 
 recession into the hardest conservatism both in politics and 
 religion. He had been the most vehement of the young 
 revolutionary poets; he suffered the quickest and most 
 complete apostacy. The immediate cause of the change 
 was the attack made by the French Directory on the 
 freedom of the Swiss republic at the close of 1797. The 
 ode is truly Miltonic in its apostrophes to Freedom ; the 
 opening piece is the finest ; he appeals to the clouds "whose 
 pathless march no mortal can control ", to the ocean waves 
 that " yield homage only to eternal laws ", to the woods " that 
 listen to the night-birds singing", to the "rising sun", to the 
 11 blue rejoicing sky ", to witness 
 
 " With what deep worship I have still adored 
 The spirit of divinest Liberty ". 
 
 At the French Revolution he "sang unawed" his "lofty 
 gratulation ", "amid a slavish band", and when Britain 
 joined its foes, in spite of the friendships and loves that 
 " flung a magic light o'er all her hills and groves ", he sang 
 defeat and wept for his country; he cared not for the 
 
 W 
 
322 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 atheistic blasphemy of the revolutionists ; he loved liberty ; 
 but now that France attacks freedom and a patriot race, he 
 will curse her ; his dream is broken ; he must seek liberty 
 "on the sea cliff's verge" ; there as he stands and shoots his 
 
 " being through earth, sea, and air, 
 Possessing all things with intensest love " , 
 
 his spirit feels freedom. He has reached his most majestic 
 power of expression in this ode. 
 
 17. Two of the finest of his blank-verse pieces are also 
 dated 1798. Fears in Solitude, and Frost at Midnight. The 
 former was written during the alarm of an invasion, and 
 mourns over the wrongs and sins his country has committed, 
 
 " Bartering freedom and the poor man's life for gold " , 
 making "the book of life" "a superstitious instrument " on 
 which " we gabble o'er the oaths we mean to break " ; he 
 laments the clamour for war and bloodshed, the " dainty 
 terms for fratricide", and he prophesies evil days; but, 
 echoing the prayer of Henry the Fifth in Shakespeare's play, 
 he begs Heaven to " spare us yet awhile " , and repel " an 
 impious foe, impious and false, a light yet cruel race ". He 
 has spoken, and yet speaks, bitter truth to his brethren, 
 and he closes with a fervid burst of patriotism, and a return 
 to the religion of nature, with which he opened ; as he looks 
 over the scene, 
 
 " all my heart 
 
 Is softened, and made worthy to indulge 
 Love, and the thoughts that yearn for human kind". 
 For he has found "religious meanings in the forms of 
 nature ". In the other poem he ponders over the flickering 
 fire and the " numberless goings on of life inaudible as 
 dreams"; he thinks of his l{ sweet birth-place and the old 
 church tower " ; and, addressing his babe " that sleepest 
 cradled by my side " , he tells it of his rearing in the great 
 city, where he " saw nought lovely but the sky and stars " ; 
 " But thou, my babe, shalt wander like a breeze 
 By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags 
 Of ancient mountains, and beneath the clouds " ; 
 there to learn " that eternal language which thy " God 
 utters " ; " there all seasons shall be sweet to thee ". He 
 had evidently resolved to give up pantisocracy and retire to 
 the Lake district with Wordsworth. 
 
THE POETRY 323 
 
 18. But meanwhile he went to Germany and learned 
 German and German metaphysics. His "Lines written in the 
 Hartz Forest " on the Brocken, though touched with his 
 insight into the spirit of nature, is ominous of the decline of 
 his poetic power, it is so forced and so unfelicitous in its 
 blank verse. When he returned to England in 1799 he 
 began to contribute to The Morning Post again ; and the 
 humorous poem The Devil's Thoughts, and the War Eclogue 
 " Fire, Famine and Slaughter " denouncing Pitt again, show 
 what a low ebb his imagination could reach. The best 
 work he did in the last year of the century was to translate 
 two parts of Schiller's Wallenstein, The Piccolomini, and The 
 Death of Wallenstein. He inaugurated the era of a new 
 and more elevated Germanism in English literature. 
 
 Ip. Thus all the best of Coleridge's poetry was produced 
 before 1800. His poetic impulse sprang from the Revolu- 
 tion, and, as antagonism to it grew upon him, died out. 
 His imagination had that sensitive tenuity which must have 
 an atmosphere exactly adapted to it. Great passion was 
 alone capable of keeping it from domination by the intellect. 
 For he was by nature as much critical as creative. Had his 
 youth fallen in any other decade than the last of last century, 
 we should never have known him as a poet. At no other 
 time did idealism and passion coalesce and rise to unaccus- 
 tomed heights. It is well too that he belonged to the 
 resurgent middle class, the new audience, and felt the 
 warm influence of its finest ideals. Had he been born to 
 Toryism and opposition to the revolutionary currents of the 
 time, he might have been a satirist or a political orator for 
 a time ; but he would never have been a romantic poet or a 
 poet of nature and love and ideality. It is generally 
 supposed that the opium habit killed the poet in him and 
 developed the metaphysician ; after a full analysis of his 
 poetry it seems more likely that the change was due to the 
 evanescence of so great a revolutionary passion as he 
 experienced ; only such intensity could have overcome his 
 constitutional lethargy and fired his nature to such a glow 
 that his active intellect with its bent towards abstract thought 
 became suffused with passion and was willing to work in the 
 mould that passion and the new spirit and the new audience 
 
324 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 gave. Each of his finest poems came from an imaginative 
 mood worked to a white heat till it had most of the 
 characteristics of a dream. However heterogeneous the 
 reading and instincts and materials that appear in it, it is all 
 unified by this passionate dream-faculty. His time and his 
 class and audience were the soil out of which he grew ; only 
 the tropical noon of the revolutionary passion could ever 
 have brought his lethargic, metaphysical imagination to such 
 exotic bloom as The Ancient Mariner and his finer poems. 
 
 Section 29. 
 
 1. Southey's nature lay under the same wealth of 
 revolutionary sunshine and felt its effect ; but it was more 
 methodic, active, and intellectual ; it was incapable of great 
 inspirations and could work without the appropriate 
 atmosphere or the great passion. He was therefore more 
 versatile, and unfailingly industrious, but seldom rose above 
 the even level of his powers. Without the revolutionary 
 fervour he would have been a Grub Street hack of the 
 commonest kind. With it he was able to become a poet ; 
 but when his sympathy passed into antagonism he naturally 
 preferred prose as his medium of thought. His great poetic 
 period was practically over by the end of the century just as 
 Coleridge's was. He wrote his best epic after that, 
 " Roderic, the Last of the Goths ", and, what he considered 
 the best epic since Paradise Lost, Madoc ; but it was prose 
 into which he put his best thoughts and powers ; and his 
 Conservative reaction had begun by the beginning of our 
 century and completed itself by 1807, when he accepted a 
 government pension. 
 
 2. He had the misfortune to catch early in life the 
 eighteenth century passion for long narrative or didactic 
 poems, chiefly in blank verse, and the still greater 
 misfortune to be capable and desirous of the encyclopedic 
 ambitions of the new learning. The two have practically 
 buried him under his huge epics and countless volumes. 
 And yet great bonfires of manuscript had punctuated the 
 history of his boyhood and youth. Like Wordsworth's, his 
 poems need ruthless sifting, and in the productions of the 
 
 
THE POETRY 325 
 
 last decade of last century will be found far the most 
 interesting and the most illustrative of the period. 
 
 3. Of his longer poems, his Joan of Arc was his first. In 
 
 1792 he had been expelled from Westminster School for 
 attributing the invention of flogging to the devil, and in 
 
 1793 he was at Balliol College, Oxford, when he conceived 
 the idea of an epic about the French heroine ; in that year 
 he went to stay with an old schoolfellow at Brixton, and he 
 carried out the conception in six weeks. Cottle of Bristol 
 offered to publish it, and it appeared in 1796, but completely 
 rewritten ; he took six months to revise what he hj.d written 
 in six weeks. It was the product of his revolutionary 
 fervour, which had been roused into great activity by the 
 alliance against the young republic, and by the accession of 
 England tc the ranks of her enemies. A French subject like 
 this was the opportunity he required; and in the early editions 
 of the poem there were passages that he felt it necessary to 
 expunge when he became the pensioner of the government ; 
 but even in its emasculated form it bears many traces of his 
 republican ardour, and the new spirit of benevolence. The 
 heroine is ever crying out against the miseries and cruelties 
 of war, and again and again restrains the troops she leads, 
 when they would follow up victory. She is especially 
 indignant against England and Henry the Fifth for the 
 curse they have brought upon France by their ambition. 
 And this is not the only poem in which Southey expresses 
 his condemnation of that much-praised monarch. "God 
 shall hear the widow's groan ", " woe to the mighty ones 
 that send abroad their ministers of death ", " a little while " 
 shall the lowly "endure the proud man's contumely"; 
 expressions like these run all through the poem. And into 
 the texture of it is woven one of the injustices of the French 
 King Charles ; one of the bravest of the warriors, Conrade, 
 has had his betrothed Agnes Sorel drawn from him and 
 made the royal paramour ; early in the story he comes to 
 court to express his wild indignation ; Joan pities him, and 
 the two fight side by side, protecting each other ; and at the 
 close she reads a lesson to the king on his duties, not to 
 tear his people from their homes to slaughter, not to let 
 avarice grind the poor. One of Conrade's speeches, in 
 
326 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 the seventh book, gives full expression to the teaching of 
 Rousseau, and paints the primitive age of happiness, when 
 " all the family of man freely enjoyed their goodly heritage ". 
 Joan expresses Southey's Unitarian stage of religious 
 development ; she is inspired by God and continually 
 appeals to heaven, but she will have nothing to do with the 
 ceremonies of the church ; when the Bastard Orleans has 
 brought her to the king at Chinon, and she has explained 
 her divine message before him and the assembled "prelates 
 and priests and doctors " of the church, they ask her 
 whether she has been "a duteous child of holy church", 
 confessed, and sought absolution ; she answers that in 
 childhood it was only "artificial awe" she felt for "the 
 forms of worship", "a cold damp" chilled her on the 
 threshold of a church ; it was only " a God of Terrors " 
 made her tremble before the crucifix ; but in riper years she 
 saw "the eternal energy pervade the boundless range of 
 nature and felt love through the whole world"; she fled 
 " the house of prayer ", and " made the lonely grove her 
 temple " 
 
 " or laid me down 
 
 Beside the rivulet, whose murmuring 
 Was silence to my soul, and marked the swarm 
 Whose light-edg'd shadows on the bedded sand 
 Mirror'd their mazy sports the insect hum, 
 The flow of waters, and the song of birds 
 Making a holy music to mine ear ". 
 
 It was for "such intense delight of quiet adoration" she 
 forsook " the house of worship " ; she had " no thought of 
 sin and did not need forgiveness ". The priests are horror- 
 struck and propose that her divine mission should be tested 
 by the ordeal of being plunged into a pool to see if she will 
 float and of walking over red-hot plough-shares. The 
 bastard will not hear of such a thing, and resolves that they 
 try the "noblest ordeal" of victory over the English host; 
 a pale blue flame from a "trophied tomb" beside, and "a 
 sound of arms " within it, back up her champion. Southey, 
 in fact, many years before he had met Wordsworth, was a 
 nature-worshipper, and makes his heroine the same ; she 
 thinks that the birds 
 
 "did warble forth 
 Sweeter thanksgiving to Religion's ear, 
 
THE POETRY 327 
 
 In their wild melody of happiness, 
 
 Than ever rung along the high-arched roof 
 
 Of man." 
 
 "It is not nature that doth lead to sin ; 
 
 Nature is all benevolence, all love ". 
 
 There is no vice, no misery in "the greenwood's quiet 
 shade", no wretched mother "famine-fallen", whose wan 
 look "shall one day with damning eloquence against the 
 oppressor plead ". " Nature teach sin ! " " Oh blasphemy 
 against the holy One who made us all for happiness and 
 love ". Scattered over the poem there are pictures of 
 nature such as might have come from him during his later 
 residence amongst the Lakes. But the pictures of battle 
 and slaughter necessarily predominate ; for he had the 
 Iliad in his mind, and the later epics modelled on it ; he 
 had read translations of it, and of Tasso's Jerusalem Freed, 
 Camoens' Lusiad, and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso ; he had 
 likewise read The Faery Queen. There had been 
 published posthumously Glover's huge unread epic, The 
 Athenaid, when he was a boy at school ; this and the 
 Leonidas of the same poet had a great influence over his 
 young imagination, stirring him to raptures for liberty, and 
 to ambition to write similar long epics. Before he left 
 school he had also read Goethe's Werther and the novels of 
 Rousseau. And thus was he completely ready for his task. 
 The fighting scenes in the siege of Orleans that he lengthens 
 out and so monotonously repeats are evidently modelled on 
 the Iliad and its imitations. But through them runs a 
 suppressed romance ; the old lover of Joan, Theodore, 
 follows her to the war ; he is bidden return home ; but he 
 remains and fights in disguise ; he kills the English leader 
 Salisbury, and is slain ; Joan then discovers him, and she 
 and Conrade bear him to his burial in a neighbouring 
 abbey ; the monks try to persuade her to remain, now that 
 her task of driving out the English is past ; but she 
 indignantly refuses even though she has seen in vision her 
 ultimate fate, her auto da fe as a witch. The poem goes 
 no farther than the raising of the siege of Orleans, the 
 pursuit of the English, and the crowning of Charles at 
 Rheims. 
 
328 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 4. In the original draft of the poem there had been 
 interwoven with it a thread of allegory, with a tendency to 
 eighteenth century personifications. From the ultimate 
 form this disappeared, and then a vision of Joan's in the 
 ninth book became an excrescence ; it was taken out of its 
 setting and made into a separate poem called The Vision of 
 the Maid of Orleans. Whilst asleep after her work of 
 freeing the beleaguered city she seems to be led by Despair 
 into the dwelling of the dead and to be shown all the 
 horrors of death ; the personified abstraction ever and anon 
 offers her a dagger to destroy herself with ; she steadily 
 refuses ; in the Second Book the fiend vanishes, and the 
 angel form of her dead Theodore takes his place ; and he 
 leads her to see the punishments of the various vices and 
 offences ; Care sleeplessly toils in a forge ; the wealthy sit 
 in cells " brilliant with gem-born light " over the useless 
 treasures ; gluttons have all they wish on earth and are 
 sick of it ; here are seducers, hypocrites, the malicious, the 
 cruel to animals, slave-traffickers, cardinals, "the servants of 
 the servants of the Lord '', the writers of " lascivious lays " 
 alive yet " loathly corpses ", monarchs " the murderers of 
 mankind", "each bearing on his brow a crown of fire", 
 and worst of all " the hero-conquerer of Agincourt, Henry 
 of England" who tells her of all the atrocities he had 
 perpetrated ; here they are to remain in the house of 
 Penitence, 
 
 " till the whole human race, 
 Equalling in bliss the aggregate we caused 
 Of wretchedness, shall form one brotherhood, 
 One universal family of love ". 
 
 In the Third Book they go to the cavern of Futurity ; she 
 refuses " to read the book of fate " ; but at her own request 
 she sees the cottage of her old uncle Claude where she was 
 brought up, and she meets her dead friend Madelon, who 
 had with her so often gazed 
 
 " Into the dark, deep sky, till the baffled soul, 
 Lost in the infinite return'd, and felt 
 The burthen of her bodily load, and yearned 
 For freedom ". 
 
 And with this spirit as guide they see the happy vale wherein those 
 "who nurse on earth their nature's gentlest feelings " dwell ; 
 and Theodore descants on the growth of oppression and 
 
THE POETRY 329 
 
 poverty, and depicts the time when " Earth shall once again 
 be Paradise ", where " Virtue and Equality " shall " preserve 
 the reign of Love." There is a reminiscence in this of the 
 Divine Comedy of Dante, as well as much of the artificial- 
 ities of the eighteenth century, and much of the romanticism 
 of the new era with its love of sentiment .and of supernatural 
 horrors. 
 
 5. But there was in both these poems an ominous 
 fluency that meant the absence of deep or penetrative 
 thought, creative imagination, or close-wrought art. He 
 was but twenty-two when his Joan of Arc was published ; 
 and yet he had sketched out many epics, a series, for 
 example, on the religions of the world ; one of these he was 
 busy with before the century closed ; it was Thalaba The 
 Destroyer, which did not appear till 1801 ; it embodied the 
 spirit of Arabian worship, and tells in irregular but often 
 very musical unrhymed lines the quest of a young hero 
 Thalaba for the slayer of his father and his destruction of 
 the Dorndaniel, the hall of sorcerers underneath the ocean ; 
 it contains many brilliant and striking pictures of nature. 
 He had already finished Madoc, a narrative poem in blank 
 verse on the adventures of a Welsh hero who was supposed 
 to have emigrated to America in the i2th century and 
 established the Christian religion in Missouri driving out 
 the Aztecs into Mexico. By midsummer 1799 he had 
 " reached the penultimate book " of his work which he 
 would not call by " the degraded title of epic " ; but he did 
 not publish it till 1805. He had begun it at Bath in the 
 autumn of 1794; he thought it would "probably be the 
 greatest poem he should ever produce " ; and so he kept it 
 by him for revision. It is in two parts ; in the first, Madoc 
 in Wales, the Welsh hero has returned from America to his 
 native land, and has to encounter the trail of the Saxon over 
 it ; he leaves in disgust ; in the second part, Madoc in 
 Aztlan, he fights with the Aztecs and defeats them, and 
 they, warned by the outburst of their sacred volcano at the 
 close of the century, leave their country and emigrate to 
 Mexico. Southey tells us that the poem was much 
 influenced by Landor's Gebir ; it is still more deeply tinged 
 with Ossian. though the sentences are much longer ; there 
 
330 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 is the same imitation sublimity, the same love of sounding 
 names, and something of the same seeming definiteness, but 
 real vagueness, in the conception of the scenes. 
 
 6. He had also read with great delight in boyhood 
 Shakespeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher ; and his first 
 literary achievement was in the dramatic form; in 1794, 
 when twenty years of age, he put into Wat Tyler all his 
 revolutionary ardour and all the new socialistic ideas. To 
 shame him, when he had become a hard and fast Tory, it 
 was surreptitiously published in 1817. He therefore 
 included it in the complete edition of his works in 1837, in 
 order that it might not be supposed <f that he was more 
 ashamed of having been a republican than of having been a 
 boy ". The drama consists of three acts and represents 
 Wat Tyler, Jack Straw, and John Ball as patriots and 
 martyrs. The wild tirades against over-taxation were well- 
 timed considering how much Pitt was trying to extract from 
 the country. In the first scene Wat is mournful at the door 
 of his forge and Hob Carter talks with him ; Tyler says " I 
 have only six groats in the world and they must soon by law 
 be taken from me ". Hob bursts out " Curse on these 
 taxes one succeeds another " ; " our ministers " " force 
 away our boys " to " feed the crows of France ". Tyler is 
 very sad over the prospects of his daughter Alice and her 
 betrothed Piers ; the tax-gatherers enter and one of them 
 lays hold of the girl ; Wat brains him ; and a mob gathers 
 crying " Liberty, No poll tax, No war." In the second act 
 the people are massed on Blackheath and sing their 
 socialistic song of revolt ; the priest John Ball addresses 
 them, and tells them of "The Son of God " "humble in 
 mien, lowly in heart ", preaching woe to the rich ; 
 
 " Ye are all equal, nature made ye so ; 
 Equality is your birthright ". 
 
 But they are to remember mercy; and show their oppressors 
 that they " excel them in humanity ". In its third scene at 
 Smithfield Tyler speaks up boldly to the king (Richard the 
 Second), and is stabbed from behind by Walworth, Mayor of 
 London. The third act depicts the ruthless and dastardly 
 cruelty of the revenge for the rising. Tyler and Ball are 
 painted as the most manly, upright, and independent 
 
THE POETRY 331 
 
 characters in the play. There seems in fact far less 
 departure from historical truth than in Shakespeare's Jack 
 Cade scenes in Henry the Sixth. Why Southey should 
 have been ashamed of this attempt to represent history 
 faithfully it is difficult to say ; the extremes to which leaders 
 of popular revolt are forced in their speeches are well and 
 dramatically put by him ; and why should he regret having 
 also given one or two of them humane sentiments ? These 
 belong naturally to the more enlightened of the oppressed, 
 whilst oppressors take fierce revenge on their revolted 
 subjects as we know from history they did in this case. 
 
 7. His " English Eclogues " contain far more candid 
 statement and picture of the woes of the poor and the sins 
 of the rich than this much-blamed dramatic sketch, whilst 
 their dates spread from 1797 to 1803, and yet they are 
 included in his works without one word of explanation or 
 apology. They are true products of the new demand for 
 simplicity of theme, treatment, and diction that brought into 
 existence the Lake school. In his 1799 preface to some 
 of them he says that he was induced to. write them by the 
 description of the German idylls given him by William 
 Taylor of Norwich ; they bear " no resemblance to any 
 poems in our language " ; they are, in fact, an attempt to 
 strip the pastoral of its unreality. In their eagerness 01 
 reaction they fall, like so many of Wordsworth's ballads of 
 humble life, into the opposite extreme of commonplaceness 
 that comes close on bathos. Most of them are in the form 
 of dialogue. And it was one of these "The Sailor's Mother" 
 that Canning was chiefly thinking of in his famous parody 
 of Southey's Sapphics " The Friend of Humanity and the 
 Knife-grinder ". A " Traveller " and a " Woman " have a 
 talk over the fate of her boy, who for trapping hares had 
 been sent into the navy and was now returning maimed 
 and blinded by some explosive missile in an engagement 
 with the French ; she is querulous and will not be 
 comforted ; he pleads the generosity of the country ; it ends 
 with her despairing prayer for rest in death. With its plain 
 language and unadorned style it gives a painful impression 
 of the miseries of the poor. The others are also pessimistic over 
 the state of the poor, especially Hannah, and The Ruined 
 
332 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 Cottage, two stories of seduction, and The Wedding, a 
 doleful conversation between a " Woman " and a 
 " Traveller " over the struggle and misery that wedding 
 amongst the lowly meant, an eclogue full of Malthusianism. 
 " The Witch " vividly depicts the cruelty to the old induced 
 amongst the farmers and artisans by superstition. The Old 
 Mansion House and The Last of the Family show the 
 changing relationships between the land-owners and their 
 retainers. The Alderman's Funeral is a keen satire on the 
 ostentation of charity by wealth and its real harshness. 
 
 8. He had appeared as an author before his Joan of Arc 
 was published ; a little volume of poems by Robert Lovell 
 and himself had come out at Bath at the close of 1794. 
 Another volume of minor poems came out at Bristol in 1797, 
 and a third volume at Bristol in 1799. Joan of Arc mean- 
 time went through three editions ; the later poems passed 
 into a second edition. He had also begun to send short 
 poems to The Morning Post, and in 1799 and 1800 he 
 edited an Annual Anthology to which he contributed some 
 of his best ballads. In 1805 he collected these ballads and 
 poems in a volume called " Metrical Tales and other 
 poems." 
 
 9. It was the necessity of brevity and vividness in 
 contributions to journals that drove him into the best and 
 most popular poetic work that he ever did. He had studied 
 Percy's Reliques with great enthusiasm and he adapted the 
 ballad style to the tastes of his day almost as well as 
 Coleridge and with far more success than Wordsworth. It 
 is by his ballads that his name will live. The best known 
 are Mary the Maid of the Inn, a tale of horror at the 
 discovery of her lover as a murderer, The Inchcape Rock, 
 describing the wreck and punishment of a sea-rover for the 
 removal of a warning bell from the rock, and The Battle of 
 Blenheim, a Wordsworthian study of rustic irony over the 
 cruelty and futility of war. Next to these in success come 
 the Well of St. Keyne, a piece of comedy about the struggle 
 for mastery between husband and wife, and God's Judgment 
 on a Wicked Bishop, a venion of the tale of the niggardly 
 Bishop Hatto and the rats that ate him. His Spanish 
 Ballads are all but The Lover's Rock in irregular stanzas ; 
 
THE POETRY 333 
 
 the best are Garci, Ferrandez, and King Ramiro, tales of 
 fierce revenge for breaches of the marriage bond. But like 
 Coleridge it was with the supernatural that he could deal 
 best in ballad form, sometimes in tragic, sometimes in 
 humorous mood. Of the latter the best are The Pious 
 Painter a story of the revenge of Beelzebub on a painter for 
 a truthful though somewhat repulsive portrait of " the 
 Wicked One " painted by him above the church door, 
 Cornelius Agrippa the story of a young man who would 
 meddle with his master's unlawful books, King Charlemain 
 the story of the effect of a charm in attaching the affections 
 of the emperor first to a harlot and next to a wizened old 
 archbishop, St. Romuald the story of a holy and dirty 
 hermit who left his cave because the people of the locality 
 wished to strangle him and so hurry on and make sure of his 
 saintship, The Old Woman of Berkeley a tale of the devil 
 securing her corpse in spite of all her precautions to prevent 
 him, and The Surgeon's Warning a modern version of the 
 same story with resurrectionists instead of Satan. But his 
 most effective are his serious ballads of the supernatural, 
 Rudiger a version of the story of Lohengrin, a knight who 
 came drawn by a swan and after many years of domestic 
 happiness vanished drawn by the same swan, Lord William 
 a story of the vengeance brought on a murderer by the ghost 
 of his drowned victim, and Donica a story of a 
 maiden possessed by a demon and kept alive by it till at the 
 altar about to be wedded it fled and she fell into dust. 
 
 10. Other sections of his early poems were Sonnets 
 concerning the Slave Trade, Botany-Bay Eclogues dealing 
 in dramatic dialogue with the sad romance of convict life 
 and the trivial crimes that led to it, Monodramas (Sappho, 
 Ximalpoca, The Wife of Fergus, Lucretia, and La Caba) 
 giving in monologue the emotions of heroes and heroines 
 before committing suicide, and anticipating the method of 
 Browning's dramatic lyrics, The Amatory Poems of Abel 
 Shufflebottom, consisting of sonnets and love elegies that 
 parody the amorous trifles of the time, Songs of the American 
 Indians in irregular lines and stanzas like Thalaba, Occasional 
 Pieces and Nondescripts chiefly short poems in blank verse 
 written on some special occasion. The Retrospect, in 
 
334 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 rhymed couplets and a clear imitation of Goldsmith and 
 Gray's Elegy, and the Hymn to the Penates, a blank verse 
 effort on the love of home and hearth in the style of Aken- 
 side, were the longest poems of his first volume of 1794. 
 His Inscriptions, short blank verse poems of from a dozen 
 to a score of lines, contain some good nature-poetry, and in 
 the earlier ones some fine sympathy with patriots and lovers of 
 freedom and some fine invective against " the wicked rulers 
 of mankind"; but they are marred like so many of his 
 poems by his didacticism, his irrepressible passion for 
 drawing a moral. This moralising spirit rises to a climax in 
 the section which he calls Lyric Poems. Some of them are 
 addressed to abstractions, Horror, Contemplation (this full 
 of beautiful pictures of nature), and Remembrance, in the 
 style of Collins. Others like The Soldier's Wife, The 
 Widow, To Hymen, To Recovery, are in unrhymed stanzas 
 of four lines suggested by Collins's Ode to Evening, and by 
 the choruses in " Dramatic Sketches of Modern Mythology " 
 by a Dr. Sayers of Norwich. Another set of them, To a 
 Friend, The Chapel Bell, The Holly Tree, are evidently 
 studies of Gray and though concrete in method have their 
 moral inserted. The Chapel Bell, and Written on Sunday 
 Morning, are filled with the spirit of revolt against the 
 religious ceremonies of Oxford. 
 
 *' Better to lie and dose than gape amain, 
 Hearing still mumbled o'er the same eternal strain ". 
 
 He loves " the bell that calls the poor to prayer" , and " the 
 minster curfew's sullen voice"; but this "memorial of 
 monastic gall " he hates, and " the prayer that trembles on 
 a yawn to heaven " and 
 
 "The snuffling, snaffling Fellow's nasal tone, 
 
 And Romish rites retained, though Romish faith be flown " ; 
 " Go thou and seek the House of Prayer ! 
 I to the woodlands wend, and there 
 In lovely Nature see the God of Love. 
 The swelling organ's peal 
 Wakes not my soul to zeal 
 Like the sweet music of the vernal grove ". 
 
 It is in this section that the Wordsworthian dialogue between 
 Father William and the young man so open to parody 
 occurs ; it is called The Old Man's Comforts. That he was 
 by no means unconscious of the bathos on whose verge he 
 
THE POETRY 335 
 
 and the Lake school so often ventured is clear from such 
 poems as " Gooseberry Pie, A Pindaric Ode " and " To a 
 Spider". 
 
 11. But he had nothing of that concentrated power of 
 passion and melody which produces the true lyric ; he was 
 altogether too fluent both in rhyme and without it to 
 produce anything that could appeal to the emotions of all 
 ages. He had too much learning to think of sacrificing it 
 to single brief touches of imagination. He could not rest 
 long enough on any thought or any sensuous impression or 
 vigorous emotion to give it the form that might be final for 
 many centuries. At best he was a master of simple clear 
 narrative whether in the longer form of epic or in the briefer 
 form of ballad. There were no such melodious felicities in 
 his expressions as to make him a better writer of poetry 
 than of prose. He had ever elevating ideals ; but he was 
 too anxious to impress them upon his readers to be other 
 than a preacher or moralist. He had the Lake school's 
 revolutionism ; but when it vanished it left his poetic faculty 
 barren and unillumined. He had their sympathy with the 
 lowly and with the oppressed ; but it had too little passion and 
 too little humour to keep it long as an idealising, sublimating 
 principle. He had their love of nature and of the spirit that 
 lived in it ; but with him it never became a faith that opened 
 vistas into the spiritual world beyond ; his insights are not 
 glances into the Infinite. He . at last settled into the 
 conviction that prose was his mission as well as his trade. 
 
 12. The same slow transference of the imagination from 
 poetry to prose by the evanescence of revolutionary passion 
 took place in one whose influence he acknowledged 
 Walter Savage Landor. Born in 1775, with an ebullient 
 nature that is not very much exaggerated by Dickens in 
 Boythorn in his Bleak House, it was natural that the 
 contagion of the French Revolution should seize him. 
 The most receptive period and the period most inclined to 
 revolt against the past, the exit from boyhood, in his life 
 was contemporaneous with its ferment. And both in his 
 home and at school his passionate independence brought 
 him into much trouble. Washington became one of his 
 boyish heroes, and the American struggle for independence 
 
336 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 drew his warmest sympathies. He represented to his 
 friends with the explosive candour that ever distinguished 
 him his full approval of the excesses in Paris and his 
 longing for the guillotine in London for George the Third 
 and the dignitaries of the church. At Rugby his rebellious 
 spirit brought him into conflict with his master over a false 
 quantity, and he had to leave the school at sixteen and 
 went into the house of a private tutor. At eighteen he 
 entered Trinity College, Oxford, and at once got the name 
 of the "mad Jacobin". He had not been long there 
 before his defiance of authorities led to his rustication. 
 Going home, he quarrelled with his father over his 
 conduct in this affair, and he shook the dust of his home in 
 Warwick off his feet. He settled in London in 1794, and 
 by the intervention of friends had the quarrel patched up 
 and an allowance of ^150 made him. With this he 
 returned to Wales where he spent the next three years. 
 During the last years of the century he shifted about from 
 place to place, now in Wales, again at Bath, sometimes in 
 Warwick, sometimes in London. He was never and could 
 never be at rest. 
 
 13. Republicanism and verse were the first instinct of 
 such a temperament, and, though he never wholly 
 abandoned either, he came soon to hate and scorn the 
 French, and he failed to achieve anything in the latter. 
 Bold and passionate as his revolutionism was, it never 
 amalgamated with his poetic spirit. In his first publication 
 "The Poems of Walter Savage Landor, London, 1795" 
 there are some evidences of his opinions, an Ode to 
 Washington, and a piece called French Villagers, and his 
 second also belonging to that year was an anonymous satire 
 against Pitt ; but the new spirit has little to do with the 
 atmosphere of his verse taken as a whole. His 
 literary faculty was long dominated by the eighteenth 
 century, and by his classicism, which he substituted for its 
 pseudo-classicism. It was Dryden, Pope, Gray, that were 
 his models in his earlier poems, when he did not prefer 
 Latin to English. In his first volume most of the pieces 
 are in the heroic couplet, and the themes are evidently 
 inspired by the Queen Anne age, The Birth of Poesie, An 
 
THE POETRY 337 
 
 Apology for Satire, Pyramus and Thisbe, An Epistle from 
 Abelard to Eloisa. His contemporary themes have a more 
 modern dress ; his Ode to Washington is in the manner of 
 Gray, and his French Villagers is in a four-lined stanza. 
 But his anonymous satire, A Moral Epistle, is a manifest 
 imitation of Pope. There were also in his earlier volume a 
 large number of Latin pieces of verse and a Latin piece of 
 prose defending the continued use of the classical tongue as 
 a medium of expression. The English Epigrams in the 
 book were partly inspired by Martial, partly by the Queen 
 Anne age. 
 
 14. Afterwards he changed his allegiance. " My 
 prejudices in favour of ancient literature began to wear 
 away on reading Paradise Lost ". Blank verse drove out 
 his love of the heroic couplet and the ode, and his poetry 
 became thereafter more epic on the one hand and more 
 lyrical on the other. Yet even to his last days he 
 occasionally used the favourite verse of Pope, and the octo- 
 syllabic verse of Swift was not unusual with, him. His 
 greatest effort and longest poem, Gebir, the product of his 
 Welsh period, is in blank verse. It was printed and 
 published in Warwick in 1798, the year of the appearance 
 of the first volume of Lyrical Ballads. He had also been 
 strongly stirred in Wales by three different passions, one for 
 Rose Aylmer whom he names in some of his brief lyrics, 
 another for a Miss Jones whose name appears in his lyrics 
 as lone, and a more lasting one for a Miss Sophia Jane 
 Swift afterwards Countess of Molande and later Duchess of 
 Luxembourg; the second name of this lady he poetised into 
 lanthe, and this word is liberally sprinkled over his amorous 
 and fanciful lyrics. For. the ever-varying metres and styles 
 of the third decade of his life it is evident that he studied 
 Elizabethan songs; yet none of them have that spontaneous 
 melody or that natural grace which belongs . to the best of 
 these only half-artificial bursts of music ; his zigzagging 
 passions lead him into abrupt changes of thought and 
 expression ; the warmth of his feeling is more apparent than 
 its naturalness; placed beside any one of Burns's or Shelley's, 
 these, two of the best, appear artificial and spasmodic, if 
 not prosaic ; 
 
338 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 " Thou hast not raised, lanthe, such desire 
 In any breast as thou hast raised in mine. 
 No wandering meteor now, no marshy fire, 
 Leads on my steps, but lofty, but divine. 
 And if thou chillest me as chill thou dost, 
 When I approach too near, too boldly gaze, 
 So chills the blushing morn, so chills the host 
 < >f vernal stars, with light more chaste than day'.-." 
 
 " Soon as lanthe's lip I prest, 
 
 Thither my spirit winged its way ; 
 Ah, there the wanton would not rest ! 
 Ah, there the wanderer could not stay ! 
 
 He was, in fact, too imitative to give his feelings new and 
 natural expression. His latest studies always guided his 
 somewhat reluctant utterance. Towards the close of the 
 century he had come across the translations of Sir William 
 Jones and Dr. Nott from the Arabic and the Persian, and 
 in 1800 he published in pamphlet " Poems from the Arabic 
 and the Persian " ; they are not translations but imitations 
 of translations. His great admiration for Pindar similarly 
 affected the volume of poetry which he issued in 1802, 
 containing Chrysaor and The Phocaeans, two blank verse 
 narrative poems, as it had already tinged the Miltonism of 
 his Gebir with abruptness and obscurity ; the volume also 
 contained some of his love lyrics. In 1804 he read 
 Herbert's translations from the Icelandic, and immediately 
 he issued his Gunlaug, a narrative of the loves of the hero 
 and Helga, in octosyllabic couplets. It is the least obscure 
 of all his longer poems, and tells the story more in the 
 manner of Scott, though it was published the year before 
 the first of Scott's poems, The Lay of the Last Minstrel. 
 After betrothal the hero goes off on a three years' war 
 expedition ; the father of the heroine forces her to marry 
 Rafen the friend of Gunlaug on the very day of his return ; 
 the two fight a duel and in spite of the treachery of Rafen 
 he is slain by the true-hearted warrior and lover. There is 
 in this poem Lander's closest approach to the nature-school 
 of poets ; there is sympathetic insight into nature and the 
 hero loves all living things ; even the dormouse is dear to 
 him, "tamest of hearts that beat on wilds ", " docile the day 
 it's caught ". 
 
THE POETRY 339 
 
 " All living things are ministers 
 To him, whose hand attunes the spheres 
 And guides a thousand worlds, and binds 
 (Work for ten godheads) female minds ! " 
 
 15. But it was Gebir by which he seems to have desired 
 to be known as a poet. For he wrote it with the greatest 
 care, passages of it first in Latin and then in English ; and 
 in 1802 he revised it with as great care, and along with his 
 brother added in a new edition of it elaborate notes ; nay, 
 he made a Latin translation of it in order to recommend it 
 to the scholarly audience of London critics and parliament 
 men. And before he first published it he had reduced it to 
 half its size, striving after condensation of narrative. He 
 had found the story in a collection of tales by Clara Reeve 
 and was attracted by its Eastern atmosphere and the 
 opportunity of painting a hero. Gebir, Moorish prince of 
 Spain, makes war upon Charoba Queen of Egypt ; but 
 Dalica her nurse, a sorceress, advises her to go to him and 
 get him to rebuild the city in Egypt once built by his 
 ancestor ; the interview touches the hearts of both ; his eyes 
 
 " Showed if they had not, that they might have lov'd ; 
 For there was pity in them at that hour ". 
 
 He went to consult his shepherd brother Tamar, and, 
 finding that he had fallen in love with a nymph, pities him, 
 and yet tells of his own love ; he determines, therefore, to 
 accept the challenge and rebuild the city. But when the 
 army has worked six days at the restoration, all their work is 
 undone again by some magic. Gebir, therefore, disguises 
 himself as his brother Tamar and meeting the nymph 
 defeats her in a wrestling bout ; she tells him the rites by 
 which he will be able to overcome the magic. He performs 
 them ; and at the conclusion a black abyss opens, and the 
 spirit of his ancestor, Aroar, leads him down into the world 
 below ; he sees his ancestors afar ; one of them, strange to 
 say, in the likeness of George the Third, "a wretch " "with 
 eyebrows white and slanting brow ", and another in that of 
 the beheaded king of France who, " bound down supine ", 
 "shrinks yelling from sword there engine-hung", and a 
 third in that of Charles the Second " who sold his people to 
 a rival king ", to " the harp's gay simpering air ". His own 
 father's spirit regrets that he had exacted a vow from him to 
 
340 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 avenge him on Egypt. Aroar tells him of the punishment 
 of those "who tortured law to silence or to speech as 
 pleased themselves ", and those " who lov'd their country 
 for the spoils it gave ". Then the hero returns to earth. 
 But Dalica knows all, and, thinking to protect her country 
 from the foreigner, gets a poisoned robe from her sister, and, 
 when the nuptials between her mistress and Gebir are being 
 performed, presents him with it. He dies of the venom in 
 the arms of Charoba. Tamar and his nymph are wedded 
 and journey far along the Mediterranean. 
 
 16. There is no attempt made to render the story easy 
 for the reader; the transitions are abrupt, the purpose of 
 each episode or incident far from clear ; he seems often to 
 be emulating Pindar in his obscurity and his love of the 
 poetry of sounding names ; perhaps too, he is following 
 Shakespeare in the concentrated energy of his later diction ; 
 for in the third book he says he "drank of Avon", "a 
 dangerous draught that roused within the feverish thirst of 
 song". In this book too he is thinking of Dante and his 
 Inferno, as he describes Gebir's descent into Hades ; he 
 begins to long for the spirit of that 
 
 "matchless man, 
 
 Whom Nature led throughout her whole domain, 
 While he embodied breath'd ethereal air ". 
 
 Many of his references are most obscure and his neologisms 
 are not always happy or even necessary ; the " laminous 
 length "of the pavement, "her scient hand", "with libant 
 lip", "steps once warm with frequentation ", " disregardful 
 of the sympathies " are excrescences ; so too are many of his 
 forced classical constructions, his double epithets like "that 
 fierce frightful man " and " extravagant enormous apertures", 
 and his alliterative lines like " rose from a river rolling in its 
 bed", and " Phlegethon formed a fiery firmament"; and 
 some of his similes and metaphors are strained and 
 unnatural, as "touching the very eye-ball of the heart". 
 But there is genuine poetry throughout numberless passages 
 and some of the phrases and lines reveal almost Shake- 
 spearean power of expression ; humility " a tattered cloak 
 that pride wears when deform'd " ; Charoba was " wretched 
 up to royalty '' ; 
 
THE POETRY 341 
 
 *' When on the pausing theatre of earth 
 
 Eve's shadowy curtain falls, can any man 
 
 Bring back the far-off intercepted hills ! " 
 "The brave 
 
 When they no longer doubt, no longer fear " ; 
 " Compassion can be but where passions are " ; 
 " Grief favours all who bring the gift of tears " ; 
 "The heron, 
 
 Rising with hurried croak and throat outstretch 't, 
 
 Ploughs up the silvering surface of her plain " ; 
 " There is no world to those that grieve and love " ; 
 " In the too tender and once tortured heart 
 
 Doubts gather strength from habit, like disease ; 
 
 Fears, like the needle verging to the pole, 
 
 Tremble and tremble into certainty " ; 
 " From our own wisdom less is to be reapt 
 
 Than from the barest folly of our friend " ; 
 " Above rose Ithaca 
 
 Like a blue bubble floating in the bay " ; 
 " Twilight broods here, lull'd by no nightingale, 
 
 Nor waken'd by the shrill lark dewy-wing'd " ; 
 " Love's column ros 
 
 Marmoreal, trophied round with golden hair " ; 
 " Who unclosed 
 
 Those faded eyes and fill'd them from the stars ? '' 
 
 Dalica describes Charoba's childhood in language of great 
 beauty and power ; " she thought the crown a play-thing to 
 amuse, Herself, and not the people ", and when she 
 "watcht grave elders look with awe On such a bauble", 
 " She was afraid her parents should suspect 
 They had caught childhood from her in a kiss " ; 
 
 she had great courage and high thought, and, when she saw 
 the ocean first, she cried, 
 
 " Is this the mighty ocean ! Is this all ! " ; 
 she had lost this wondrous soul, 
 
 " Soul discontented with capacity ". 
 
 17. Landor's passionate revolutionism seldom breaks 
 through the cold sculpturesque outlines of the poem. The 
 third book with its visit to hell gives clearest expression to 
 it; he pictures monarchs and statesmen as tortured ; in the 
 other books only an occasional touch shows this phase of 
 his beliefs, the portrait of Charoba in childhood toying with 
 the sceptre and crown, mere baubles to the eye of truth, the 
 taunt in the second book t:> "mighty men" to "invade far 
 cities " and get as the treasure for their heirs only serpents, 
 
342 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 and the beginning of the seventh book with its references to 
 mortal's "trampled by tyranny or scoff't by scorn", its 
 warning " man, spare thy kind " , and its allusion to 
 Rousseau's dream of a golden age ; 
 
 " Many still bend their beauteous heads unblest, 
 And sigh aloud for elemental man ". 
 
 But there is little evidence of the strength of his opinions in 
 the frame-work of the poem. One of the peculiarities of 
 Landor is that his revolutionism and his wild indignation 
 against despotism instead of passing away with the French 
 Revolution grow more pronounced and appear more clearly 
 in his productions as he grows older. In Chrysaor, written 
 in 1801, and afterwards included in his Hellenics, he speaks 
 out with fierceness against the " peace-embracing, war- 
 inciting king" of "fair Hesperia, " evidently George the 
 Third, and against all kings and superstitions " the pest of 
 men below and curse of gods above " , " Religion's helm 
 assuming ". 
 
 " Hers are the last worst tortures, they inflict 
 On all who bend to any king but them ". 
 
 The piece that follows this in the Hellenics, originally called 
 Regeneration and written some thirty years after, is bolder 
 still in its adoration of freedom. He addresses England ; 
 
 " Thou recreant slave, 
 That sittest afar oft" and helpest not, 
 O thou degenerate Albion ! with what shame 
 Do I survey thee, pushing forth the sponge 
 At thy spear's length in mockery at the thirst 
 Of holy Freedom in his agony, 
 And prompt and keen to pierce the wounded side ! " 
 
 With Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth the wild passion, 
 that came to them from the very atmosphere of the last 
 decade of last century, turned round into its opposite, as 
 strong conservatism ; Landor had it by nature rather than 
 from his surroundings ; he was born a rebel and worshipper 
 of freedom. 
 
 18. This perhaps may account partly for the statuesque 
 coldness of his poetry, and especially his early poetry ; the 
 ferment without seemed to him nothing exceptional, but a 
 part of that which was within him. These other poets, by 
 nature conservative, felt in their first youth as if the world 
 
THE POETRY 343 
 
 was getting upheaved and some great age was about to be 
 born. The defeat of their hopes, the fall of the Girondins, 
 and the rise of the Napoleonic tyranny threw them back 
 upon themselves, and all seemed commonplace again. 
 Landor felt the dull, sullen atmosphere of revolution and 
 freedom and hope suppressed to be what was unnatural, 
 and his true inspiration came when his fiery disposition 
 chafed against the re-soldered fetters. He threw off his 
 chastely classical poetic form and adopted prose dialogue as 
 best suited to the quick interchange of mood and thought 
 that was his nature. He abandoned the epic for the 
 dramatic ; the abrupt transitions of his mind marred his 
 narrative ; the give and take of dialogue was what his 
 temperament demanded. He passed from poem to dramatic 
 scene in blank verse, and thence into the prose of his 
 Imaginary Conversations, the work by which he will live. 
 This transition was not merely the development of his own 
 genius ; it was a part of the evolution of English literature. 
 The literary drama took strong hold of English poets 
 during the first half of our century; and by degrees it passed 
 into the poetic novel and gave way to it. This natural 
 bond between drama and fiction was the outcome of the 
 conditions of the earlier period, that of preparation, the 
 latter half of last century. 
 
 19. Thus fifty years of poetical experiment had prepared 
 the way, not only for a new outburst of poetry, but for a 
 nobler and more varied prose. It seemed as though the 
 prosaic spirit of Queen Anne prose had mastered verse ; but 
 a new era dawned for both in the renaissance of the people, 
 and the resurgence of national feeling. Many poets still 
 found their model in Pope ; but they had to clothe him in 
 "worsted stockings", or recreate him with the breath of a 
 new sentiment. Others attempted to revive the sublimities 
 of Paradise Lost ; but the intellectualism of the time killed 
 the blank verse. Some sought the Elizabethan age, and 
 thought that the archaistic style of Spenser was needed; 
 they found it but a passing fashion. So did those who went 
 still farther back to Chaucer and his predecessors in their 
 attempt to clothe the new passion for the old in the 
 garments of the dead. It was the ballad simplicity of 
 
344 PERIOD OF PREPARATION 
 
 Percy's Reliques that pointed the true way ; the people had 
 brought with them through the period of obscuration their 
 taste for this ; and Blake and Burns, Wordsworth and 
 Coleridge adapted it to the new ideas and the new times. 
 It was the Biblical splendours and the poetic prose of 
 Ossian that pointed still more surely to the coming time. 
 The people had acquired in their march through the night 
 a strong taste for such prose as is to be found in the 
 Authorised Version. And Macpherson had secularised it and 
 given it a modern and British tinge, that fascinated the new 
 audience, in spite of the Celtic tinsel with which he 
 bespangled it. And imagination finds a wider field and 
 audience in prose fiction than in poetry. The lyric is 
 the only form that seems strong enough to assert its 
 superiority and naturalness ; for it has an invincible ally in 
 music. Epic, idyll, drama, satire, have an almost artificial 
 air now, when put into verse. Thus both for poetry and 
 prose did its poetry make the latter half of last century a 
 period of preparation. 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX. 
 
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350 
 
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 Compilations, pamphlets, revisions, pre- 
 faces, abridgments, translations, for 
 Newbery the publisher. 
 The Life of Richard Nash, -Esq. 
 History of England in a series of letters 
 from a nobleman to his son. 
 
 The Traveller ; or a Prospect of Society : 
 a poem. The Captivity in Babylon ; an 
 oratorio. Edwin and Angelina a 
 
 ballad. 
 Essays a selection. A Survey of Experi- 
 mental Philosophy. A Short English 
 Grammar. History of Philosophy, from 
 
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 BIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX 
 
 WRITINGS. 
 
 the French. Poems for Young Ladies 
 a collection. Beauties of English Poetry 
 a collection. Goody Two-Shoes (?) 
 The Vicar of Wakefield ; a Tale : 
 supposed to be written by himself. 
 The Good Natured Man comedy 
 produced. Contributions to The Gentle- 
 man's Magazine and to The Westminster 
 Magazine. 
 Roman History. 
 Life of Parnell. Life of Bolingbroke. 
 The History of the Earth and Animated 
 Nature, begun. The 1 'eserted Village 
 
 a poem. 
 A History of England. The Haunch of 
 Venison ; A Poetical Epistle to Lord Clare 
 
 written. 
 An abridgment of the Roman History. 
 Threnodia Augustalis 
 A History of Greece begun. Translation 
 of Scarron's Comic Romance. She 
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 357 
 
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362 
 
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 363 
 
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 365 
 
 
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370 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX 
 
 WRITINGS. 
 
 Speeches 
 
 Poems in the Miscellanies published by 
 A. M. Williams. 
 
 Prose and Verse with Merry, Greathead, 
 and Parsons, the founders of the Della- 
 cruscan school of English poetry, in The 
 Florentine Miscellany. Anecdotes of 
 the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., during 
 the last twenty years of his life. 
 Letters to and from Dr. Samuel Johnson, 
 to which are added some poems. 
 Observations and Reflections made in the 
 course of a journey through France, Italy 
 and Germany. 
 British Synonymy. 
 Retrospection a review of the last 
 eighteen hundred years. 
 
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BIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX 40! 
 
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 403 
 
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 BIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX 
 
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 405 
 
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 BIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX 
 
 S 13 
 
 u 
 
INDEX TO BIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX. 
 
 Akenside ... 
 
 ... 357 
 
 Home 
 
 ... 405 
 
 Anstey 
 Armstrong 
 
 ... 366 
 ... 361 
 
 Jenyns 
 Johnson, S. 
 
 ... 373 / 
 ... 346' 
 
 Barnard ... 
 
 .- 383 
 
 Jones 
 
 ... 405 
 
 Beattie 
 
 ... 379 
 
 Landor 
 
 400 
 
 Blacklock 
 
 ... 385 
 
 Lloyd, Charles ... 
 
 ... 403 
 
 Blair 
 
 359 
 
 Lloyd, Robert 
 
 403 
 
 --Blake 
 
 .. 392 
 
 Lyttelton .. 
 
 ... 374 
 
 Blamire 
 
 .. 405 
 
 Macneill ... 
 
 ... 386 
 
 Bloomfield 
 
 - 355 
 
 Macpherson 
 
 ... 382 
 
 'Burns 
 
 ... 386 
 
 Mallet 
 
 - 373 
 
 Canning ... 
 
 ... 369 
 
 Mason 
 
 ... 381 
 
 Campbell 
 
 ... 354 
 
 Merry ... ... 
 
 ... 37i 
 
 Carter 
 
 405 
 
 Mickle 
 
 - 377 
 
 Chatterton 
 
 ... 364 
 
 Montague 
 
 ... 372 
 
 Churchill 
 
 - 363 
 
 Moore 
 
 404 
 
 Coleridge ... 
 
 ... 396 
 
 More 
 
 ... 388 
 
 --Collins 
 
 ... 380 
 
 Parsons 
 
 ... 37i 
 
 Cottle, Joseph 
 
 ... 403 
 
 Percy 
 
 ... 383- 
 
 Cottle, Amos 
 
 ... 403 
 
 Pinkerton ... 
 
 - 384 
 
 Cowley 
 
 ... 372 
 
 Piozzi 
 
 ... 370 
 
 Cowper 
 
 ... 389 
 
 Pye 
 
 ... 403 
 
 Crabbe 
 
 352 
 
 Rogers 
 
 - 356 
 
 Darwin 
 
 362 
 
 Rolliad, The 
 
 ... 367 
 
 Day 
 
 ... 363 
 
 Ross 
 
 .. 383 
 
 Duck 
 
 ... 406 
 
 Seward 
 
 ... 362 
 
 Dyer 
 
 ... 360 
 
 Shenstone 
 
 ... 377 
 
 Ellis 
 
 .- 367 
 
 Southey ... 
 
 397 
 
 Falconer ... ... 
 
 ... 361 
 
 Thomson ... 
 
 ... 378 
 
 Fergusson 
 
 ... 386 
 
 Walpole ... 
 
 ... 375 
 
 Frere 
 
 368 Warton, Joseph ... 
 
 -. 39i 
 
 Giftord 
 
 368 Warton, Thomas 
 
 - 39i 
 
 Glover 
 
 ... 360 West 
 
 404 
 
 ..Goldsmith 
 
 350 White 
 
 402 
 
 Grainger ... 
 
 ... 361 
 
 Whitefoord 
 
 ... 375 
 
 -Gray 
 
 ...' 380 
 
 Whitehead, Paul... 
 
 374 
 
 Greathead 
 
 ... 371 
 
 Whitehead, William 
 
 ... 375 
 
 Hawkins 
 
 ... 367 
 
 Wolcot 
 
 ... 365 
 
 Hayley 
 
 ... 390 
 
 Wordsworth 
 
 394 
 
 Hogg 
 
 402 
 
 Young 
 
 ... 358 
 
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