THE LITEEATUEE 
 
 OF 
 
 THE GEOBGIAN EEA
 
 THE LITERATURE 
 
 OF 
 
 THE GEOBGIAN EEA 
 
 BY THE LATE 
 
 WILLIAM JMINTO, LL.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF LOGIC AND ENGLISH IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN 
 
 EDITED, WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION, BY 
 
 WILLIAM KNIGHT, LL.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF ST ANDREWS 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 
 
 EDINBUKGH AND LONDON 
 
 M D C C C X C I V 
 
 All Rights reserved
 
 PKEFACE. 
 
 THE following Lectures by Professor Minto on The 
 Literature of the Georgian Era were originally delivered, 
 not to the Arts students whom he addressed in the Uni- 
 versity class-room, but to a special audience brought to- 
 gether in the Music Hall of Aberdeen, under the auspices of 
 the Local Examination Committee of the Senatus Academ- 
 icus. This will explain why some points are treated in 
 greater detail than would have been necessary in addressing 
 advanced students. As explained in the " Introduction," 
 to Mr John H. Lobban belongs the credit as he had all 
 the labour of looking up and copying out the illustrative 
 extracts from the authors referred to, or criticised by his 
 master. 
 
 In addition to these Lectures, and as a cognate Supple- 
 ment, it has been thought expedient to publish three essays 
 by Professor Minto, which were ready for press before his 
 death, and were meant by him to be included in a work, 
 to be entitled Reconsiderations of some Current Conceptions 
 about Eminent Poets. Two of them are devoted to Pope, 
 the former being a criticism of Mr Courthope's Biography, 
 and the latter a noteworthy discussion on " The Supposed 
 Tyranny of Pope." These were contributed to Macmillan's
 
 vi PREFACE. 
 
 Magazine in January 1890 and September 1888, and the 
 right of reproducing them has been generously conceded 
 by the owners of the copyright. The other, on Burns, has 
 not been previously published. It was delivered as a lecture 
 to the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh. In refer- 
 ence to it as Mr Lobban tells us Professor Minto said 
 that it was " most distinctly the best thing " he had ever 
 written. The projected Reconsiderations would have in- 
 cluded, amongst others, an essay on John Donne, two papers 
 on Wordsworth, originally contributed to The Nineteenth 
 Century, and another on " Matthew Arnold's Meliorism." 
 As the last of these does not fall within the literature of 
 the era included in the " Lectures " which follow, and the 
 first belongs to a previous period, while Wordsworth has 
 been discussed in the course of this volume, these papers 
 are not included in the "Supplement." 
 
 W. K. 
 
 October 1894.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 LECTUEES. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE POSITION OF MEN OF LETTERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 Decline of royal patronage Why is the Georgian Era a distinct 
 literary period ? Condition of poetry during the century, and 
 views of its critics as to the meaning of nature ... 3 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 POPE. 
 
 Brief literary biography His poems fall into three periods Eclogues 
 and the discussion as to the merits of pastoral poetry Walsh 
 Connection between English pastorals and Allan Ramsay and 
 Burns Pope and Philips . . . . . .20 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 POPE continued. 
 
 "Essay on Criticism " Supposed tyranny of Pope Attitude of Pope, 
 Gray, &c., towards classical tradition Review of theories ac- 
 counting for the poetic sterility of the eighteenth century . 32
 
 Vlll CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 POPE con tinned. 
 
 Influence of ideas on poetry Spirit of the age Influence of society 
 
 on Pope Gay's ballads ...... 42 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 A GROUP OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 Thomson Early life Descriptive poetry generally " Winter "- 
 
 Thomson's position in poetry Dyer and Somerville . . 51 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 POPE continued. 
 
 As a satirist and moralist Failure in epic poetry ' The Dunciad ' 
 
 ' Essay on Man ' . . . . . .63 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 POETRY BEETWEN POPE AND COWPER. 
 Glover Johnson Collins The poet and the orator Gray . . 74 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 DECLINE OF POETRY THE NOVEL. 
 
 Walpole's criticism Why the want of poetry was not felt Diary of 
 a lady of quality Rise of the novel 'Pamela' Connection 
 with magazine literature Fielding Historical novels ' The 
 Castle of Otranto' ...... 85 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 THE NOVEL continued. 
 
 Influence of Percy's 'Reliques' and Ossian Miss Buruey and the 
 
 lady novelists . . . . . . .98
 
 CONTENTS. IX 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE NEW POETRY. 
 Cowper His alleged revolution of poetry . . ; .111 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 SCOTTISH POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 The elevation of a dialect into a literary language Influence of old 
 ballads Watson's collection Allan Ramsay The Easy Club 
 ' The Gentle Shepherd ' Song-writers Skinner, &c. Ferguson 
 Burns ........ 125 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 Connection with previous poetry Sketch of life Lyrical ballads . 140 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 WORDSWORTH continued. 
 
 "The Idiot Boy " Prose v. Poetry Coleridge on Wordsworth . 156 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 WORDSWORTH (continued) COLERIDGE SOUTHEY. 
 The " Ode to Duty " " The Solitary Reaper "The Lake School . 170 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 CAMPBELL MOORE. 
 
 Campbell " Pleasures of Hope " Thomas Moore The last of the 
 Joculators Moore's social environment His jocose and maudlin 
 veins ... ... 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 SCOTT. 
 Influence of old ballads Summary of life Poems . . . 200
 
 X CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 BYRON. 
 
 Summary of life Popular identification of the poet with his creatiors 
 
 " English Bards and Scotch Reviewers " . 215 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 NOVELISTS FROM MRS RADCUFFE TO BULWER LYTTON. 
 
 Sterne Miss Edgeworth Hannah More Jane Austen 'Waverley' 
 
 Miss Mitford Mrs Shelley' Vivian Grey ' ' Pelham ' . 234 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 SHELLEY AND KEATS. 
 
 Shelley Various conceptions of the poet Character Keats The 
 reviewers Characteristics of his poetry " Endymion " and 
 "Hyperion" ....... 249 
 
 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 i. MR COURTHOPE'S BIOGRAPHY OF POPE . . .265 
 
 II. THE SUPPOSED TYRANNY OF POPE . . .281 
 
 III. THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS . . 295 
 
 INDEX . 313
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Ix the year 1890, I asked Professor Minto to contribute a 
 volume on Logic, Inductive and Deductive, to the series of 
 " University Manuals " which I had organised some time 
 previously, and was then editing. It was not completed 
 till shortly before his death, but the proof had been revised 
 by himself in all its details ; and it seemed only loyal to his 
 memory to send it to the press, in the exact form in which 
 he left it. 
 
 It has now fallen to me to edit a volume of his Lectures, 
 on the Literature of the Georgian Period ; and, although 
 they would have been greatly altered and recast, had he 
 lived to see them through the press, it is now inex- 
 pedient to do more than correct clerical errors in tran- 
 scription. Mr Lobban who acted as Professor Minto's 
 assistant for some time, and whose estimate of his Master 
 will be found in a later page has been good enough to go 
 over these Lectures with the same end in view. 
 
 At the request of Mrs Minto, I agreed to edit this book, 
 and to write a brief introductory sketch of my late friend. 
 We differed on many points philosophical, literary, politi- 
 cal, artistic, and social but I never knew any man with 
 ' whom recognised differences counted for less, so far as per-
 
 Xli BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 sonal esteem was concerned. Indeed, our differences en- 
 hanced my regard for him every time we met. 
 
 He was not only the most chivalrous of intellectual 
 opponents, but the most appreciative; and he had the 
 rare gift of presenting to those who differed from him the 
 very doctrine from which they dissented, and the kernel 
 of the position from which they stood aloof, in a non- 
 controversial and attractive manner. 
 
 I have never known a more genial, generous, or upright 
 man than Professor Minto. He never alluded to the points 
 on which men differed from him in reference to ultimata, 
 as expressed in their published writings ; and, so far as 
 friendly intercourse was concerned, these differences were 
 as though they were not. He instinctively met every one 
 on his own level, sympathetically appreciating truth and 
 excellence wherever he found them. This characteristic 
 came out most notably in his comments on those who had 
 misconstrued, and even opposed him. I never heard him 
 say an unkind word of any opponent. 
 
 The first occasion on which we met was at a University 
 Extension Conference, which was being held in Glasgow, 
 and to which those representatives of the four Scottish 
 Universities who had interested themselves in the work, 
 as organisers or secretaries, &c., were invited. There 
 was one person in the room whom I did not know ; and 
 he seemed to know no one present from Edinburgh, Glas- 
 gow, or St Andrews. But observing this silent man, 
 with a noticeable countenance, sitting in the background 
 and in a corner of the room, I went up to him, and 
 asked him what University he represented. As soon as 
 he had introduced himself, he was asked to help in the 
 organisation of a comprehensive plan of University Ex- 
 tension for Scotland at large. Aberdeen had, up to that 
 time, taken no active part in the movement ; and Professor 
 Minto was the first to interest himself in it, which he did 
 with much ardour, offering many important suggestions.
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xiii 
 
 He came to St Andrews, to discuss that and other things 
 
 ' O 
 
 with me, and soon became an intimate friend. 
 
 I can never forget the days he spent at Edgecliffe, and my 
 repeated visits to him afterwards at Aberdeen, our talks on 
 Philosophy and Literature far beyond the summer night 
 and into early morning in his house at Westfield Terrace, 
 our golf-matches on the Links, and social intercourse with 
 friends at the Club, or in his most genial home. 
 
 As I was a friend of his later years, it seemed appropriate 
 to follow the plan which I pursued in the case of the late 
 Principal Shairp of St Andrews, and to place together a 
 series of photographic sketches taken from opposite points 
 of view of the character, genius, and career of a remark- 
 able man, by his earlier friends and more intimate pupils. 
 These tributes have been rendered spontaneously, and given 
 very cordially. 
 
 I do not feel it incumbent on me to characterise his 
 work in Philosophy, or his contributions to Literature, in 
 detail. It will suffice to record one or two things, which 
 were written before these admirable character - sketches 
 by others reached ine. 
 
 I consider it not the least merit in Professor Minto's 
 career that, while a man of letters par excellence and for 
 many years diverted from Philosophy to Literature by his 
 work as a Journalist, and a critic of men and public meas- 
 ures he succeeded, during his tenure of it, in making the 
 Aberdeen Chair, with its dual claims, quite as distinguished 
 in the department of Philosophy as in that of Literature. 
 All students bear witness to this. His book on Logic, 
 Inductive and Deductive, is as original and bright as that 
 of any writer on the subject in Great Britain, during the 
 last quarter of a century. In all probability his previous 
 life as a journalist not only confirmed that rare capacity 
 for work which distinguished him as an undergraduate, 
 but fitted him for popularising an abstruse subject, and 
 keeping his exposition of it free from the technicalities
 
 XIV BIOGRAPHICAL INTKODUCTION. 
 
 which have so often disfigured the treatment of Logic. 
 The fact that he had been no mean power in the literary 
 circles of the south gave a special weight to what he 
 said from his academic chair; arid while the bejants of 
 the north found that they had before them, in the English 
 Literature class, a Teacher, of whose achievements amongst 
 his contemporaries it might be truly said (although he 
 would never have said it, nor thought it) pars magna fui, 
 the students of Philosophy found that they were being 
 taught by an original mind, and not by a mere expositor 
 of school Logic. 
 
 A wonderful critic of his Logic has complained of its 
 " laxity of reference to Greek writers and to modern," and 
 has added that the editor should have supplied a biblio- 
 graphy, and index, and notes, and references, &c. He has 
 even doubted whether it should ever have had a place in 
 such a Series ! But the ways of reviewers are inscrutable. 
 To none of the authors whom I asked to co-operate in this 
 series of Manuals was it a greater satisfaction to me to 
 delegate work, than to hand over this volume to Professor 
 Minto ; and its success, both in this country and in America, 
 has been marked. It has a value of its own, which has 
 already made it useful in University and College class- 
 rooms, being one of the freshest and most stimulating books 
 which our British philosophical literature has received for 
 many years. 
 
 As a contribution to logical science, its Introduction will 
 probably be welcomed generations hence, by students of 
 the subject, when dry-as-dust logicians are forgotten. To 
 be taught how to escape from illusion and fallacy of every 
 kind, so as to get into the light of reality, is no small gain 
 to the student of evidence; and there can be little doubt 
 that Professor Minto's book while a reflection of the work 
 done by him, in the Logic class-room of Aberdeen, for thir- 
 teen years will be found one of the best handbooks, in- 
 troductory to the study of Philosophy, for those who cannot
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. XV 
 
 resort to a University, and for whose assistance these 
 Manuals were originally designed. 
 
 In Philosophy, Minto was singularly open to light from 
 every quarter. I often told him that he was more eclectic 
 than I was. When discussing the ideal and the real in 
 Philosophy or in Art, he always proved himself one of the 
 most fair-minded of men, a reconciler of differences, and 
 as ready to recognise merit from the most opposite quarters 
 as any disciple of the school of a priori thought. 
 
 The range of his knowledge and culture was almost 
 encyclopaedic, as was that of his friend and rival, Robertson 
 Smith ; so that, like the late Professor Trail of Edinburgh 
 editor of the seventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Bri- 
 tannica he was probably the only man in the University 
 who could have been trusted on an emergency to conduct 
 the class of any one of his colleagues who might be acci- 
 dentally laid aside from duty. 
 
 It is a noteworthy circumstance that, when it was 
 finally determined to separate the subjects of Logic and 
 Literature in the University of Aberdeen, a memorial was 
 addressed to Professor Minto, signed by 350 of his former 
 pupils, asking him to accept the Chalmers Chair of English 
 Literature. 
 
 The lectures published in this volume, which have been 
 printed from Professor Minto's own MSS., are a very in- 
 adequate index of the extent of his knowledge, or Ms 
 critical insight into the more delicate problems which arise 
 in the study of English Literature; but, as he meant to 
 recast them with a view to publication, they are sent 
 forth in the belief that they contain literary judgments 
 which he would himself have ratified, in any subsequent 
 work. At the same time, I believe that there are articles 
 of William Minto's, I should not say buried, but for 
 the mass of readers lost, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 
 The Nineteenth Century, and other magazines, which, in 
 their critical vision, their wise insight, and felicitous ap-
 
 XVI BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 praisal of authors little known (or at least little read), are 
 greatly superior to those put together in this volume for 
 the first time. There are papers on Wordsworth, and other 
 magnates in our great English hierarchy, which will be 
 found as valuable to posterity as the critical notices of 
 any of our modern reviewers. In addition, there are 
 numerous Introductory Lectures delivered to his class, 
 such as those on " The English Language," on " The Use- 
 fulness of Plodding," on " Industry " ; and others delivered 
 to Literary Societies in the north, that on " K., B., and Q.," 
 or three new novelists (they were Kipling, Barrie, and 
 Quiller-Couch), which would adorn another volume of his 
 remains. 
 
 As Minto's knowledge was not derived from secondary 
 sources, his criticism was invariably at first hand. I was 
 often struck with his knowledge of out-of-the-way authors. 
 He could quote The Day's Estival as readily as he showed 
 his knowledge of the writings of Thomas, ex Albiis. These 
 delightful days at Aberdeen, when after a round of the 
 Links we used to watch the fleet of boats going out from 
 the harbour to the herring fishing, and talk of Meta- 
 physics or of Literature, vividly recall to me how glad 
 Minto was to be ultimately relieved from what became 
 to a temperament like his the drudgery of editorship. I 
 nevertheless believe that his training in the editorial chair, 
 and his varied literary work in London, developed his 
 unique fitness for the work he did at the University. 
 It prevented him from ever being pedantic. It gave 
 simplicity, piquancy, and diversity to his style ; and to 
 it is greatly owing the fact that, in all his subsequent 
 expositions of the abstruser matters of Philosophy, he was 
 untechnical, and even vernacular. 
 
 In the following brief sketch of his life, I avail myself of 
 notes derived from several quarters. 
 
 William Minto was born at Nether Auchintoul, Alford, on 
 the loth of October 1845, the farm then occupied by his
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xvii 
 
 father. He was sent to Gallowhill school, near Alford, 
 which he left in May 1854, going for six months to the 
 parish school of Tough. In November 1854 his father 
 entered upon the tenancy of the farm of Littlemill, Aueh- 
 terless, and the son was sent to a private school at Bruck- 
 hills in the neighbourhood. Here he remained for two 
 years, after which he went for a year to the Episcopal 
 school at Fisherford, Culsalmond. In 1857 his parents 
 removed to Huntly, where William was taught in the 
 Gordon Schools, under a very able master, the Eev. John 
 Macdonald, who gave him a thorough training in classics, 
 as a preparation for the bursary competition at the Uni- 
 versity of Aberdeen. He cherished the memory of this 
 teacher to the last, entertaining for him the greatest ad- 
 miration and regard. 
 
 Before giving an outline of his College career, an ex- 
 planation of the constant race between him and the late 
 Eobertson Smith, the distinguished Professor of Arabic at 
 Cambridge, is desirable. He went to College in the winter 
 of 1861-62, at the age of sixteen, his means of preparation 
 being such as already indicated. Eobertson Smith was more 
 than a year his junior ; and, by his father's arrangement as 
 a matter of policy, was kept at home studying to the very 
 utmost under himself, he being one of the best teachers of 
 the day, accomplished both in mathematics and classics. 
 The consequence was, that Smith carried off the first bur- 
 sary with comparative ease, his Latin version being perfect, 
 sine errore, in every respect probably as good a version as 
 a classical master could have produced. Minto, with his 
 inferior advantages, was able to carry off the Moir bursary 
 of 15. The disparity in years and means of training 
 made the start of the two competitors necessarily unequal ; 
 and it was by an extraordinary strain of application that 
 Minto was able, in a very short time, to equal, and even 
 to surpass, Eobertson Smith, in some of the subjects. At 
 the end of the first year his work had been such that he took
 
 XV111 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 the 8th prize in Latin and the 2d in Greek. In English 
 he only attained a third place in the order of merit. 
 
 Professor Bain writes : " In the English class one inci- 
 dent occurred which constituted the first occasion of my 
 taking notice of his personality. I began in that year the 
 system of setting in writing two essays a-week, and engaged 
 an assistant to read them. The only person that I could 
 find as an assistant to begin with, before I got advanced 
 pupils of my own, was an assistant-librarian in the College. 
 The out-of-door essays I made him examine and value, and 
 also indicate errors, so that they might be returned. After 
 giving them back one day, Minto came up to me at the end 
 of the hour, and showed me his paper with some red ink 
 marks under portions of it, which was the mode of indi- 
 cating some error, or want of correctness. He asked me to 
 tell him what that meant. I looked at it, and I found that 
 there was really nothing to cbrrect in the matter at all; 
 and the incident showed me that the assistant was not to 
 be trusted with the function of indicating errors, so as to 
 enable me to return the essays ; and from that time forward 
 I ceased the practice." 
 
 In the Honours examinations Minto had a first in 
 Classics, a second in Mental Philosophy, and a second in 
 Mathematical Science a triple honour, never before or 
 since accomplished. As prizes, he carried off the Simpson 
 in Greek and the Boxhill in Mathematics : he also ob- 
 tained the Hutton prize (which was awarded for distinction 
 both in Classics and in Philosophy) the total money value 
 of the prizes being 110. 
 
 He graduated as Master of Arts in 1865, and afterwards 
 obtained the Ferguson scholarship in Classics, open to 
 graduates of all the Scottish Universities. , 
 
 In the session of 1865-66 he attended the Divinity Hall, 
 and in the summer of 1866 went to Merton College, Ox- 
 ford, where he obtained an exhibition of ;8o. 
 
 His experience at Oxford seemed to impress him with
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xix 
 
 the inexpediency of pursuing his studies there, and he 
 resolved to leave it at the end of the year, which he did, 
 without taking the Oxford degree. He seemed to think 
 that to wait for a Fellowship at Merton would not be so 
 advantageous to him as to go south to the metropolis, 
 or to return to Scotland. 
 
 In the autumn of 1867 he was undecided as to his 
 future; but, owing to his distinction in Science, as well 
 as in Classics and Philosophy, an offer was made to him 
 by Mr David Thomson, the Professor of Natural Phil- 
 osophy in Aberdeen, to become his endowed assistant, an 
 office to which a salary of 100 a-year was attached. The 
 engagement seemed to give satisfaction to both parties, and 
 he entered upon its duties in the following November. 
 The only thing doubtful was whether he had that sort of 
 handicraft skill required in an assistant who had to take 
 part in experimental work, and that of course remained 
 to be tested. The engagement, however, came to an abrupt 
 termination in December, the occasion being Minto's re- 
 fusal to take part in the experiment of subjecting himself 
 to an electric shock, so as to excite the laughter of the 
 students, which he considered derogatory to his position as 
 an assistant. It is unnecessary to discuss the details of 
 this unfortunate affair, further than to say that he objected, 
 and rightly, " to be made part and parcel of the class ap- 
 paratus." When released from this post he was appointed 
 temporarily by Professor Bain as his English class-assist- 
 ant, and to give various aid in connection with certain 
 books which he then had in hand. With this occupation 
 Minto began his volume on English Prose Composition, 
 which he wrote exclusively in Aberdeen, during the course 
 of the next three years, having the resources of the Univer- 
 sity library at his command for the purpose. The work 
 appeared in 1872. 
 
 During the four years which he now spent at Aberdeen, 
 Minto was active in a variety of ways, in connection with 
 
 b
 
 XX BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 the University, although not one of its recognised officials. 
 He took a noteworthy part in the work of the University 
 Literary Society, which was founded in 1871, and of which 
 he was elected president in 1872. He was also an active 
 organiser in rectorial contests, although he had not himself a 
 vote. The election which occurred during his stay in 
 Aberdeen resulted in the return of Mountstuart Grant 
 Duff for the second time in 1869. There was a close 
 contest. The majority was a very narrow one only 1 2 ; 
 indeed it was found that there was a tie of Nations, and the 
 Duke of Eichmond and Gordon gave the casting-vote in 
 favour of Sir William Maxwell, who, seeing there was dis- 
 satisfaction with the mode in which the election had been 
 made, magnanimously declined to accept office, and allowed 
 Mr Grant Duff to be elected. Minto's influence was very 
 marked and powerful, so much so that but for him Mr 
 Grant Duff would have failed. 
 
 In 1872 there was a vacancy in the representation of the 
 University Council in the Court, and it was again due to 
 his untiring energy that the Eev. John Christie, minister of 
 Kildrummy, was elected. 
 
 In 1872 the examinership in Mental Philosophy at 
 Aberdeen became vacant, and Minto became a candidate. 
 His friends in the Court were the Eector, the Hector's 
 Assessor, and the Assessor to the General Council, all of 
 whom may be said to have owed their standing to his exer- 
 tions in their behalf at the different elections. His secur- 
 ing the appointment as Examiner was an important step in 
 his future career, being the beginning of his systematic 
 studies in Philosophy, while his other work was more 
 exclusively in connection with English Literature. 
 
 In the following year (1873) he left Aberdeen, and went 
 up to London to engage in literary work. He obtained a 
 post on The Examiner newspaper, and in its columns he 
 wrote, with special force and clearness, on John Stuart Mill, 
 on the occasion of his death in May 1873. His article was
 
 BIOGKAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xxi 
 
 one of a series of character-sketches on Mill, to which Her- 
 bert Spencer, Mr Frederick Harrison, Professors Henry 
 Fawcett and Cairns also contributed. Later in that year 
 The Examiner was purchased by Mr Peter Taylor, the 
 Eadical member of Parliament for Leicester. Mr Minto 
 was selected as literary editor, and in 1874 as editor-in- 
 chief. The Examiner had been started by Leigh Hunt in 
 the earlier years of the present century. To it Charles 
 Lamb, Shelley, Hazlitt, Haydon, and John Forster had 
 contributed. It was edited for some time by M. Albany 
 Fonblanque ; but it had almost failed about the year 1 870, 
 when it was revived as the organ of philosophical Eadi- 
 calism. It was, however, a literary as well as a political 
 journal ; and Mr Minto had very able coadjutors in both 
 departments, such men as Mr John MacDonnell and Mr 
 William A. Hunter being amongst them. With all its 
 ability, however, The Examiner did not succeed. It had a 
 very formidable rival in the ablest of all the weekly papers 
 of Great Britain The Spectator. Mr Taylor sold the pro- 
 perty to Lord Eosebery, Mr Minto remaining co-editor 
 along with Mr Eobert Williams until 1878. When the 
 paper was finally discontinued in 1880, Minto turned to 
 purely political writing in The Daily News. He afterwards 
 wrote in The Pall Mall Gazette (under the editorship of Mr 
 John Morley), to which newspaper he was a regular con- 
 tributor until he left London. While living as a journalist 
 in London, Minto took a prominent part in political con- 
 troversy, especially in connection with England's relations 
 to the East, and the war in Afghanistan. He was one of 
 the first to use a term which soon became current coin in 
 political writing the term "jingo." As he once told his 
 students, " I am under the impression that I was the first to 
 give the currency of respectable print to the chorus of the 
 song, ' We don't want to fight, but by Jingo if we do,' and 
 so forth," which was first made use of in an editorial article 
 in TJie Daily Neivs.
 
 xxii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 During his seven years in the metropolis, his literary, 
 other than newspaper, work resulted in the publication of 
 Characteristics of English Poets, in 1874, and Defoe, in the 
 "English Men of Letters" Series, in 1879, besides mis- 
 cellaneous contributions to various periodicals, such as The 
 Nineteenth Century, The Fortnightly Review, Macmillan, 
 Blackwood, and The English Illustrated Magazine. It may 
 be noted that Mr Edmund Gosse was, for a time, the sub- 
 editor of The Examiner, and that Minto was the first to per- 
 suade Mr Theodore Watts to devote himself to literature. 
 
 He was early engaged by Professor Thomas Spenser 
 Baynes, the late editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to 
 contribute to its pages, and his contributions are to be 
 found in most of the volumes of that Encyclopaedia. In 
 alphabetical order they were as follows: Byron, Chaucer, 
 Dickens, Dryden, Fielding, Lytton, Mandeville, J. S. Mill, 
 Minstrel, Moore, Poe, Pope, Eeade, Scott, Sheridan, Sydney 
 Smith, Smollett, Spenser, Steele, Sterne, James Thomson, 
 Waller, Izaak Walton, Warton, and Wordsworth. 
 
 In 1880 Professor Bain retired from the Chair of Logic 
 and English Literature in the University of Aberdeen, and 
 Minto became his successor. In that year he married Miss 
 Cornelia Griffiths, daughter of the Rector of Swindon, in 
 Gloucestershire. When called to Aberdeen he devoted 
 himself with rare assiduity to both branches of his Chair, 
 although it was evident that the English section was what 
 he liked best, and what he most excelled in. During the 
 thirteen years that he held office in the University his 
 literary activity was great. He published three romances : 
 The Crack of Doom, which appeared first in Blackwood's 
 Magazine in 1886, and was republished in three volumes 
 in 1 886 ; The Mediation of fialph Hardelot, contributed to 
 The English Illustrated Magazine, and published in book- 
 form in 1888; and Was She Good or Bad? in 1889. In 
 1886 he brought out an admirable edition of Scott's Lay 
 of the Last Minstrel for the Clarendon Press, with notes,
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xxiii 
 
 and in 1891 an edition of The Lady of The Lake. In 1887 
 he edited a complete edition of Sir Walter's Poems for 
 Messrs A. & C. Black. During his later years in Aberdeen 
 he was also a frequent contributor to several of the London 
 literary weeklies, notably to The Bookman. The posthumous 
 volume on Logic, already referred to, contains the best part 
 of his teaching in the Philosophical class-room of the Uni- 
 versity of Aberdeen. 
 
 In the Preface to that work he wrote : 
 
 In this little treatise two things are attempted that at first 
 might appear incompatible. One of them is to put the study 
 of logical formulae on a historical basis. Strangely enough, the 
 scientific evolution of logical forms is a bit of history that still 
 awaits the zeal and genius of some great scholar. I have neither 
 ambition nor qualification for such a magnum opus, and my life is 
 already more than half spent ; but the gap in evolutionary research 
 is so obvious that doubtless some younger man is now at work in 
 the field unknown to me. All that I can hope to do is to act as a 
 humble pioneer according to my imperfect lights. Even the little 
 I have done represents work begun more than twenty years ago, 
 and continuously pursued for the last twelve years during a con- 
 siderable portion of my time. 
 
 The other aim, which might at first appear inconsistent with 
 this, is to increase the power of Logic as a practical discipline. 
 The main purpose of this practical science, or scientific art, is 
 conceived to be the organisation of reason against error, and error 
 in its various kinds is made the basis of the division of the subject. 
 To carry out this practical aim along with the historical one is not 
 hopeless, because throughout its long history Logic has been a 
 practical science ; and, as I have tried to show at some length in 
 introductory chapters, has concerned itself at different periods 
 with the risks of error peculiar to each. 
 
 An earlier work, issued the year before he died, the 
 Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott, is 
 a book of great value, as bearing on a wide circle of writers 
 in Literature and Art. The varied information there con- 
 tained as to such men as David Scott, Dante Piossetti,
 
 XXIV BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Samuel Brown, Holman Hunt, Thomas Woolner, Carlyle, 
 and others, is of the highest literary importance. 
 
 Minto's health was weakened before 1890. He often 
 suffered from asthma, and in 1891 he was induced to try 
 the effect of a sea-voyage in the Mediterranean, which 
 refreshed him for a time. His academic and literary 
 activity knew no intermission till he finally succumbed to 
 a complication of ailments on the ist of March 1893. Had 
 he survived to see, and to profit by, the changes introduced 
 by the University Commission into the curriculum of 
 study at Aberdeen, he would have found in the new Chair 
 of English a field for his energies, in which he would have 
 probably enriched the Literature of his country in many 
 ways. With a wide knowledge of philosophy, and a 
 thorough -going philosophic discipline behind, he might 
 have been expected to do as much as any of his contem- 
 poraries to advance the study of English in the land of 
 his birth, and in his own alma mater, while the northern 
 University would have felt his power in the consideration 
 of all matters of academic policy. 
 
 Minto's death, although not altogether unexpected, was a 
 shock, not only to the city of Aberdeen but to the country 
 at large. Every Professor in the University, on hearing of 
 it, made a sympathetic allusion to their common loss, and 
 dismissed his class for the day. I extract the following 
 account of his funeral from a local journal: 
 
 A more inspiring ceremonial, and one that brought from their 
 homes a more than usually large gathering of the public, of all 
 ranks, has not been witnessed in Aberdeen than that which at- 
 tended the funeral of Professor Minto yesterday. The obsequies 
 were of a public character, and among the varied representatives 
 that followed the mournful procession from Marischal College to 
 Allanvale Cemetery there was a very large number of the deceased 
 Professor's academical and other friends. The plate bore the in- 
 scription, 'William Minto, born Oct. loth, 1845, died March ist, 
 1893.' The coffin was carried to the grave on the shoulders of
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. XXV 
 
 four shore porters. Long before the procession started from Maris- 
 chal College, both sides of Union Street were densely lined with 
 the populace, who waited patiently for nearly an hour to catch a 
 last glimpse of the remains being carried to the grave. Funeral 
 service was conducted in the Upper and Lower Halls, the pro- 
 fessors, students, and varied University bodies assembling. The 
 shop and dwelling-house window-blinds along the streets through 
 which the procession passed were drawn down, and as the coffin 
 passed the hats of spectators were respectfully raised all along 
 the route. The weather was warm very un-March like and at 
 intervals a bright sun shone, revealing the early breath of spring. 
 As the cortege moved through the streets, the deep and solemn 
 note of Victoria pealed at regular intervals from the tower of St 
 Nicholas' steeple. 
 
 Dr W. Robertson Nicoll, the editor of The Bookman and 
 other publications, sends me the following most appreci- 
 ative paper: 
 
 Minto was one of the most brilliant and industrious students 
 Aberdeen University has ever known. He was one of three 
 concerning whom a Professor said that none of them would ever 
 see fifty. Their constitutions were not robust, and they were of 
 eager, unresting temperament. 
 
 The natural thing for Minto would have been to enter at an 
 English University, and he made the attempt. But it did not 
 suit him, and after a short trial he also gave up Divinity. It was 
 a bold step in these days to take up literature as a profession, but 
 having made up his mind, he prepared himself with business-like 
 thoroughness. He wrote articles and reviews in one of the Aber- 
 deen newspapers (The Herald}. Here, perhaps for the only 
 time in his life, he occasionally gave rein to his great powers of 
 sarcasm ; but, for the most part, his criticisms were genial. He 
 set himself to write books on literary history. In these he made 
 the simple but unusual preparation of reading the authors he was 
 to deal with. The result is that his Manual and his Character- 
 istics are perhaps the most thoroughly original works of their 
 kind. Minto did not, in the first instance, read criticisms of 
 authors ; he went to the fountainhead. In the case of some
 
 XXVI BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 authors notably De Quincey his research was of the most 
 elaborate kind. At the time when his volume was published, 
 Minto probably knew more of De Quincey's work than any other 
 critic. Another study he took pleasure in was that of Sir Roger 
 de Coverley. He contended and proved that all that is amiable in 
 the character belongs to Steele. 
 
 While diligently occupied at this work, Minto found time to- be 
 President of the University Literary Society a body composed of 
 graduates and other members of the University. As Vice-Presi- 
 dent, I had many opportunities of meeting him, and the association 
 ripened into intimacy. Like all who really knew Minto, I soon 
 came to estimate his character even above his abilities. I have 
 never known so equitable a mind. Though a man of strong con- 
 victions and warm feelings, he was pre-eminently just, patient, 
 and generous. He could make allowance for his bitterest oppo- 
 nents, and was quick to recognise the merits of those farthest 
 from him in opinion. Even if he depreciated any man, he soon 
 began to recall redeeming traits. This equitableness of temper 
 is what rises up and remains to me at every remembrance of 
 Minto. He had also much bonhomie, and was singularly cour- 
 teous to every one. In these gatherings of students he was seen at 
 his best, and it was his special delight to encourage and befriend 
 beginners. 
 
 When he went to edit The Examiner his old friends in Aber- 
 deen followed his work with warm interest. I am sure he has 
 never had justice done to his editorial ability. The Examiner 
 was in low water, and in these days new ideas in journalism were 
 not favoured. Possibly its politics were too advanced for readers 
 of the class it appealed to. But Minto was in his way a great 
 editor. He introduced the features which mark the new sixpenny 
 reviews signed articles, stories, sketches, and miscellaneous para- 
 graphs. For new writers he was always on the outlook, and Mr 
 Theodore Watts and Mr Edmund Gosse were among the young 
 critics he brought forward. Dr Garnett's exquisite criticism was 
 often to be recognised. For the work of woman he had a warm 
 welcome ; Mrs Augusta Webster was one of many lady con- 
 tributors. But the comparative failure of the paper from a com- 
 mercial standpoint discouraged him. He had great pleasure in 
 thinking of his literary associations and friendships ; but the
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. XXvii 
 
 work of editing was to him "a disagreeable business," and he 
 scarcely understood how any one could like it. 
 
 Of his career as a Professor others will speak. I believe he 
 bridged the- gulf which for long stretched so wide between Aber- 
 deen students and their teachers. It was easy to see that his 
 heart was in his work and with his pupils. 
 
 In later years I saw him frequently. Even when in delicate 
 health and worried by controversies not of his seeking, he was 
 what I had always known him unalterably true to his convictions, 
 generous in his judgment of opponents, unwearied in labour, and 
 eagerly interested in literature old and new. At our last meet- 
 ing he talked of the writers who had influenced Dickens. I 
 happened to say that John Poole, author of Little Pedlington, was 
 the only novelist to whom, so far as I could see, Dickens owed 
 anything. Minto replied that he believed he could trace marks of 
 Theodore Hook in Dickens. He spoke of the lines 
 
 In Vienna's fatal walls 
 God's finger touched him, and he slept 
 
 in connection with the remark that the word " fatal " is incon- 
 gruous with the sentiment that follows. He turned to his favourite 
 theme, the young writers of the day. Most of them he met on his 
 visits to London, and cheered them with his cordial praise. For 
 Mr Barrie, whom he first met under my roof, he had a warm 
 admiration, but I think he expected most from Mr Quiller-Couch. 
 I sent him Mr Couch's poems for review in The Bookman, and it 
 was, I believe, the last book read to him. 
 
 Minto's best work was done perhaps in literary history and 
 criticism, and had he lived he would have given us a monumental 
 book in this department. Nothing, however, could have increased 
 the estimate of his character formed by all who knew him. The 
 man himself was greater than any book he could have written. 
 
 Mr P. W. Clayden, the editor of The Daily News, sends 
 the following note of Minto's connection with that news- 
 paper : 
 
 I am a little surprised to find how short his connection with 
 us was. His first article appeared on the i4th of August 1878.
 
 XXV111 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 It was on Indian Finance. Here is the list of subjects on which 
 he wrote in the first fortnight : 
 
 Aug. 14. Indian Finance. Aug. 21. The Eastern Question. 
 
 M 15. Cyprus. M 22. Batoum. 
 
 ,, 1 6. The Eastern Question. ,, 23. The Eastern Question, 
 
 ii 17. India. 24. The Government. 
 
 M 20. The Eastern Question. ,, n Election News. 
 
 He continued to write, chiefly on these subjects, till 1880, and his 
 last article in The Daily News was on the 2oth of May 1880. He 
 also wrote some reviews, and occasional articles on literary subjects, 
 as well as articles on the smaller topics which arise in the regular 
 course of newspaper work. He acted during nearly the whole of 
 this year and nine months as an assistant editor, attending at 
 night twice a -week on evenings on which I was absent, and 
 being with me when I took the editorship in Mr Hill's absence. 
 My impression is that he never took quite kindly to the night- 
 work. He was not a rapid writer, but his articles were distin- 
 guished for the fulness and accuracy of the knowledge they 
 exhibited, and their forcible and clear argument. I always found 
 him a most pleasant and trustworthy colleague. One result of 
 that connection remains. We were wanting some one to write 
 leaders on legal subjects, and Minto brought with him one day Mr 
 Herbert Paul, now M.P. for South Edinburgh. Mr Paul showed 
 great aptitude and capacity for the work, and has been more and 
 more intimately associated with us ever since. During the time 
 of Minto's connection with the paper I was busy at home in 
 writing ' England under Lord Beaconsfield,' the notice of which in 
 The Daily Neivs was written by Minto. I find that my regular 
 attendance at the office at night was then three times a-week, 
 Minto being there on the other three nights. On any pressure 
 arising I went on extra nights, and it was only on such nights and 
 at the times when I was editing, that I was at the office at night 
 with him. After he suddenly left in May 1880, we expected that he 
 would come back again, as he had done on a previous occasion, but 
 he did not. His leaving was entirely his own doing, and we all 
 much regretted it. He was living then very near to me, and the 
 break at the office made no break in our friendship. He was at 
 once engaged on The Pall Mall Gazette, and I saw none the less
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. XXIX 
 
 of him. When he was sent to Aberdeen I greatly regretted his 
 removal for my own sake, but rejoiced in it for him. He always 
 came to see us down to the time of his last visit to London, and I 
 always felt, to the end, that warm friendship for him which I had 
 formed during the time we worked together at The Daily News. 
 I do not think he was in his proper element in newspaper 
 work. He was too fastidious as to style and treatment using 
 the word fastidious in its best sense and was not entirely 
 comfortable in the sort of rapid work which is required. His 
 writing was perhaps a little too reflective for a daily paper I 
 mean that it necessarily took rather more time to produce than 
 the more oratorical and dashing style of newspaper writing. It 
 was the literary man, the scholar, the thinker, who was writing, 
 rather than the busy politician. This literary character of his 
 style was much valued. It is part of the tradition of The Daily 
 Neivs to cultivate that style. In his political views he was in 
 hearty sympathy with the paper, though he always insisted on 
 dealing with any topic on which he wrote in his own way, very 
 often an original way. 
 
 The Rev. William L. Davidson of Bourtie, whose ac- 
 quaintance I had the pleasure of making at Minto's house, 
 and whose contributions to Philosophy and Literature are 
 well known, writes thus : 
 
 It is not easy to convey a correct impression of Professor 
 Minto to those who were not personally acquainted with him ; 
 and those who were fortunate enough to enjoy personal inter- 
 course with him need no picture of mine. To me, Minto was 
 a very choice friend. Our mutual acquaintance dates from the 
 time that I was assistant to Professor Bain in the English and 
 Logic classes at the University of Aberdeen, and Minto was asso- 
 ciated with Professor Bain also in various literary productions. 
 Minto's first work that on the English Prose Writers was then 
 in course of formation ; and I quite well remember the care and 
 energy that he expended on that book, and his intense desire to 
 render it worthy of the subject and of the distinguished master 
 under whose inspiration he wrote it. Meanwhile, although litera- 
 ture claimed his chief attention, politics had already begun to
 
 XXX BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 assert its hold over him. Even then, he was pronounced in his 
 opinions often dogmatic in asserting them in the presence of 
 formidable opposition and fast acquiring a firm grasp of those 
 principles that he was, by-and-by, to apply with vigour as editor 
 of The, Examiner. In University matters he took a keen interest ; 
 and, though himself a graduate, was a moving spirit in the 
 rectorial elections of those days. Socially, Minto was, at the date 
 of which I speak, one of the most genial and pleasant of com- 
 panions. He had then, and retained to the very close of his days, 
 a bonhomie that was remarkable ; and his intense enjoyment of 
 the society of kindred souls, together with his abundant wit and 
 humour, made him a universal favourite. I could record scenes 
 and incidents that took place in Aberdeen, either in his own 
 lodgings or in mine, in which he was a conspicuous figure, and 
 which foreshadowed in no unambiguous way the man as he was 
 soon to become. In particular, I recollect a striking reading and 
 analysis of part of one of Massinger's plays, in his own room, 
 which clearly disclosed the able and sympathetic critic that his 
 work on the English Poets, later on, proved him to be. But these 
 are sweet memories of the past, which are best kept to oneself. 
 
 For a number of years indeed, during his whole stay in 
 London, while he was attached to literature and journalism there 
 Minto's path and mine lay apart. Intercourse, however, was 
 heartily resumed when he returned to Aberdeen in 1880, as 
 Professor of Logic and English, in succession to Dr Bain, and 
 continued to the end of his life. 
 
 I can now speak of him from that date, mainly in his pro- 
 fessional and allied capacities. 
 
 The first thing that struck one in Minto, in his capacity of pro- 
 fessor, was his deep interest in his students. His first concern was 
 that, both in the English and in the Logic Class, each man should 
 derive from the prelections the highest possible benefit that he was 
 capable of receiving. As a consequence, he spared himself no pains 
 in the preparation of his class lectures. Again and again have I 
 found Minto, in his own house, busy over to-morrow's lecture try- 
 ing how best he could express, in vigorous phrase and with the apt 
 illustration that was always at his command, the point that was to 
 him perfectly clear, but which, he suspected, might present diffi- 
 culty to the student. Lucidity was, in his eyes, the supreme virtue.
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. XXxi 
 
 In this way he was ever ready to discuss with you obscure points in 
 philosophy or in rhetoric, and to adopt whatever fresh light you 
 might be able to throw upon the situation. He was particularly 
 pleased if he could either find or have suggested to him some fresh 
 historical aspect of the well-worn academic themes. Every year that 
 passed found him deeper in his conviction of the power of the his- 
 torical method in elucidating truth, and in bringing home its mean- 
 ing to the learner. And this applied to his teaching of English as 
 much as to his teaching of Psychology and Logic. I remember 
 one day finding him in high spirits over the discovery he had just 
 made, that the best way to make plain to his class the meaning of 
 Humour was by inweaving the history of the word into his tech- 
 nical analysis, and accompanying with copious examples from 
 literature. " Every man in his humour, you know," cried Minto, 
 jubilant ; "it was his humour to wear a coat with lappets," and 
 so on. Allied to this was his keen appreciation of luminous defi- 
 nitions or of subtle distinctions between synonymous terms. I 
 cannot forget the pleasure with which he received a little bit of 
 phrasing of my own, which struck him as felicitous. I had gone 
 to Aberdeen to address the youth of the city on Dr Murray's New 
 English Dictionary, and, while there, was Minto's guest. " What's 
 your subject 1 " he asked, on my arrival. I told him it was Dr 
 Murray's Dictionary, and that I had entitled the lecture "Romance 
 in Words." " Romance in Words ! " he exclaimed, with a bright 
 gleam of the eye, which never failed when his intellectual interest 
 was awakened, "capital! tJiat is the only proper definition of a 
 dictionary.'" The same appreciation of word-distinctions marked 
 his writings, and is one of the elements that makes his style so 
 admirable. 
 
 A chief ground of Minto's great success as a teacher, and of his 
 exceptional popularity with the students, lay in his juvenility of 
 spirit and his boundless sympathy with youth. He was supremely 
 fortunate in being able to put himself into the exact position of 
 his audience, and thereby to carry them along with him. It is 
 only another way of putting the same thing to say that, in teach- 
 ing, he never forgot his own difficulties in student days in grap- 
 pling with the subjects on hand ; and, in setting himself with all 
 his might to remove these, he was adopting the best plan of 
 removing the difficulties of his hearers also.
 
 XXX11 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Minto himself as a student, in his professorial days, is a theme 
 that might well be elaborated. Vividly the picture rises of the 
 Professor seated in his study, eagerly poring over some volume, 
 or busily penning some disquisition, in full enjoyment of his pipe 
 (for the harder he worked the harder he smoked) ; and then the 
 pause, the sparkle in the eye, and forthwith some subtle criticism, 
 or some apt Chaucerian quotation, or some comic remark, as the 
 case might be ; after that, relevant talk or discussion ; and then 
 resumption of the task. But Minto wrought too hard. Regard- 
 less of health, he sat, when not on College duty, almost day and 
 night at his desk (for he burned the midnight oil far too pro- 
 fusely) for a number of years, with the briefest of holidays 
 elaborating theories, producing brilliant literary essays, dashing 
 off critical reviews, writing novels, and shaping political speeches. 
 Not even the strongest physical constitution could have stood it. 
 But he laughed your warnings and advice to scorn, and waved 
 you off with such a comic gesture that you almost forgave him, 
 though you quite well saw that he was putting his resources to far 
 too great a strain. 
 
 As an examiner, Minto was the embodiment of fairness. 
 Scrupulous to a degree and painstaking, he never would allow 
 partialities or personal predilections to weigh with him. This 
 I can unreservedly testify, from my long association with him as 
 examiner in Philosophy and English. While wishful to act im- 
 partially, he was also desirous that the examinee himself should 
 feel that strict justice was being done to him. Hence his uniform 
 readiness to go over their papers with students who had the mis- 
 fortune to " go down " at an examination, and to show them 
 frankly where and why they had failed, and how they might 
 make up in the future. Many an unfortunate had reason to 
 thank him for this kindly office. 
 
 As a host, Minto excelled. To see him at his best, you had to 
 live with him under his own roof. Not only was his hospitality 
 abundant, but his welcome was ever hearty and sincere. The 
 stimulus, too, that you derived from discussion with him, and the 
 enjoyment produced by his racy stories, his pleasantries and 
 repartee, his sallies of genuine wit, were experiences never to be 
 forgotten. Whether at the breakfast-table or at dinner, alike in 
 the daytime and at the late hours of night, in his study, enveloped
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xxxiii 
 
 in a cloud of tobacco-smoke, Minto was always the same kind, 
 bright, genial entertainer, rejoicing in you, and making you rejoice 
 in him. 
 
 The last time I saw Minto was in my own house. He came to 
 pay me a visit, of a few days' duration, in the middle of September 
 1892. As there were two other distinguished thinkers living with 
 me at the same time, congenial spirits, he was in his best form 
 intellectually, and in the height of enjoyment, though, obviously, 
 in very indifferent health. His enfeebled condition was to us a 
 source of considerable anxiety ; but he himself made light of it 
 for he was always heroic. Into the amusements, as well as into 
 the discussions that went on, he entered heartily, and with no 
 lack of his wonted vivacity ; and it is a great satisfaction to me 
 to know that he pronounced his last visit here to be one of the 
 happiest moments of his life. Four months more, and he was 
 gone. The news of his death brought to friends everywhere the 
 sense of an irreparable loss ; and learning mourned the departure 
 of one who had done noble service for letters, and would have 
 done even greater things had longer life been given him. 
 
 The following notes are from Mr P. Chalmers Mitchell, a 
 student of Professor Minto's, and afterwards his friend : 
 
 In the year that Professor Minto received his appointment as 
 Professor, I joined the University of Aberdeen as a first year's 
 student. I saw him for the first time at his inaugural lecture in 
 the English class, which was then held later in the day than the 
 other classes attended by students of the first year. It is no 
 disrespect to the memory of the occupant of the Latin chair the 
 late Professor Black or to the present distinguished Principal, 
 who was then Professor of Greek, to say that I had left both their 
 classes, unpersuaded, either. by the bluff bonhomie of the one or 
 by the urbane dignity of the other, into regarding Latin and Greek 
 as anything but routine tasks. I entered the English class 
 singularly untouched by the glamour of learning, although in the 
 pleasant consciousness that a University was vastly better than 
 School, because its day was several hours shorter; but in that 
 English class-room I found a singularly pleasant man, not lecturing 
 to a class, but sometimes sitting back in his chair, sometimes
 
 XXXIV BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 leaning over his desk, and talking to a student, perched as I was 
 in a distant and disaffected back -row, about things that were 
 interesting. 
 
 Beforehand, I should have laughed at the suggestion that his 
 subject-matter could be made interesting. He was talking about 
 parsing, and analysis, and the derivations of words. In the matter 
 of parsing, it was obvious that any fool could do it ; derivations 
 of words one had hitherto got up from lists before prize examina- 
 tions ; and in analysis, a succession of masters had each had a 
 separate whim in nomenclature. But in Professor Minto's hands 
 the derivation of words was so treated that a Dictionary became a 
 pageant of History, showing here the Crusaders dusty from the 
 Holy Land, bringing with them some new idea, some strange 
 animal or plant ; or there, the prancing Normans introducing the 
 graces of chivalry or the subtleties of law. The parsing of words 
 was a tradition from the grammatical complexity of more primi- 
 tive conditions of the language. The terminology of analysis was 
 as you pleased ; the analysis itself was an anatomical display of 
 the vital organs, by which a sentence should convey its meaning. 
 I can see now that, in this first lecture, Professor Minto showed 
 the leading feature of his teaching. The information he gave he 
 did not offer for the direct acquisition of his pupils, as of intrinsic 
 value. What was given, was put before us as an illustration of 
 the vast interest of the field of knowledge, waiting for any of us 
 who cared to enter it. Incidentally we learned much, but chiefly 
 we learned how and why we were, for ourselves, to learn more. 
 In knowledge generally there were two special interests, the 
 picturesque and human interest of how our language, and our 
 Logic, came to be as they are ; and the practical interest clearly 
 separate from the other of how best to use our language, or our 
 reasoning, for the purposes of to-day. 
 
 The bent of Professor Minto's teaching was specially marked in 
 his lectures upon Logic. I do not think that the technical subtle- 
 ties of Formal Logic had much attraction for him. Certainly he 
 did not seek to stamp on the minds of his class the fantastic in- 
 genuities of ancient and modern schoolmen. His lectures upon 
 Formal Logic were lectures upon its evolution, and he sought to 
 show us how each stage in the development of Deductive Logic was 
 the abstract expression of an actual advance in man's power of
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. XXXV 
 
 reasoning ; and so we were spared the paradox which presents 
 itself to the modern beginner in Deductive Logic. Although many 
 processes of the " Science of Thought " seem but cumbrous methods 
 of expressing the obvious, each method as unfolded by him had 
 its explanation in the forgotten past. On the other hand, it was 
 the practical use of Inductive Logic that Professor Minto chiefly 
 insisted upon. In his exposition of this, he followed with rare 
 appreciative sympathy, considering the varied interests of his life, 
 the progress of the natural and physical sciences. As these notes 
 must, from their brevity, be discursive, let me say that afterwards, 
 when I knew him better, I was struck with his continued interest 
 in subjects so remote from his own work as advances in Compara- 
 tive Anatomy and Embryology. While on a visit to me at Oxford, 
 in the summer before he died, two of the things that interested 
 him most were some new preparations of fossil skulls in the Uni- 
 versity Museum, and a technical discussion on Weismann's views 
 on heredity. 
 
 English Literature had so small a place in the curriculum for the 
 degree of M. A., that Professor Minto could only give us twenty-five 
 lectures on it. But, in that brief space, he so introduced us to 
 the writers of our own tongue that their books became friends to 
 us for life. In my own case, and in that of many others, I know 
 that the most permanent impression we got at the University of 
 Aberdeen was the love of English books, not for purposes of 
 future analytic study, but simply as our friends throughout life. 
 Kecently, when we were talking about the proposed institution of 
 a final honours school of English Literature at Oxford, I told him 
 of what I had got from his own short course in Aberdeen. He 
 said, in reply what is specially worth remembering, now that so 
 many schools of English Literature are practically accomplished 
 facts " I agree with those who think that English Literature 
 might be made quite as severe an intellectual discipline as Greek 
 or as Eussian ; but the point most easily lost sight of when it is 
 turned into a discipline is that it is the readiest friend and the 
 greatest comfort to the many who get their discipline in other 
 subjects. You can get intellectual discipline from anything, but 
 most people don't get much pleasure out of the things that were 
 used to train their minds." 
 
 Not only was Professor Minto constantly accessible, and most
 
 XXXvi BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 ready to help and advise his students in every way ; but he kept 
 up friendly relations with many of them, and he was interested in 
 them all, in their subsequent careers. The warm admiration I 
 had for him, while I was a student, continued after I left the 
 University ; and I had the great good fortune to see him subse- 
 quently, on terms more intimate than are possible between teacher 
 and pupil. It is perhaps only given to poets adequately to me- 
 morialise their dead friends. Nature makes other mortals more 
 reticent, though reticence may be selfish ; but I wish to say two 
 tilings about Professor Minto. I wish to record the intense 
 friendliness of his character. I do not only mean that he was 
 the readiest of men to do good turns to others. All who knew 
 him know that. But he had the rare virtue of seeing and believ- 
 ing only the best of other people. " What continually impresses 
 me," he would say, "are what good fellows people are ! " I have 
 known no instance like him of the " charity that thinketh no evil." 
 It was really difficult for him to believe that any of his acquaint- 
 ances would do a mean thing, or an ill-natured thing, purposely. 
 Of one or two people who had obviously done him an ill turn, 
 I have heard him say, "Yes, I suppose he doesn't like me, but 
 you know he is really a good fellow at heart ; " and then he would 
 give some practical instance of conduct to his credit. 
 
 The last thing I wish to set down is this. In no case, while I was 
 a student, did I ever hear Professor Minto, in class or in private, 
 touch upon any theological topic. Afterwards, even in intimate 
 talk, he rarely spoke of ultimate questions of metaphysic, or belief. 
 He had not the Scottish habit of strengthening his convictions by 
 measuring them against those of others. But, in my rooms at 
 Oxford, the last evening he was with me, and the last time I saw 
 him, he took a book from my shelves and said, " One person I 
 have to make good viz., myself ; but my duty to my neighbour 
 is much more nearly expressed by saying, that I have to make him 
 happy, if I may." 
 
 Mr John H. Lobbau, who acted as Professor Minto's as- 
 sistant in his latest years at the University, has sent me an 
 appreciative estimate, which many Aberdeen students will 
 be glad to read :
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTKODUCTION. XXXvii 
 
 In Mill's rectorial address to the students of St Andrews there 
 is a passage which might, with great fitness, be applied to Pro- 
 fessor Minto's work at the University of Aberdeen. " There is 
 nothing," said Mill, " which spreads more contagiously from 
 teacher to pupil than elevation of sentiment : often and often 
 have students caught from the influence of a professor a contempt 
 for mean and selfish objects, and a noble ambition to leave the 
 world better than they found it, which they have carried with 
 them throughout life." The tributes already paid by students 
 are abundant evidence that Professor Minto exercised such an 
 influence ; but few students could have been fully aware of the 
 thoroughness and scrupulous fairness with which he performed his 
 duties as professor and examiner. 
 
 These qualities his assistants had necessarily excellent oppor- 
 tunities of observing, and I recollect how forcibly I was impressed 
 by them when I had first to examine university papers under his 
 supervision. In the case of one examination, where the time for 
 correction was so limited that he divided the papers with me, Pro- 
 fessor Minto had arranged a scheme of marking with such precision 
 that, after doing a number of papers together, the possibility of 
 a discrepancy between our respective estimates was reduced to a 
 minimum. It was only after having tested some of my results 
 that he felt justified, in fairness to the students, in leaving a num- 
 ber of papers entirely in my hands. One other instance of the 
 same desire for scrupulous fairness I may record. One of a num- 
 ber of essays that I had to value was so atrociously written and 
 marred by emendations that, actuated no doubt by a not unnatural 
 impatience, I had marked it rather hardly. Although one of more 
 than a hundred essays, it did not pass the Professor's eye; for when 
 soon after I went to discuss them with him, he asked me with char- 
 acteristic humour and courtesy if I would allow him to read an 
 essay to me. As read by him it certainly was more than an 
 average production, and as I saw the lesson he meant so court- 
 eously to convey I owned my error, and suggested a higher value, 
 which he agreed to. He then laughingly told me that he had 
 generally to impress his assistants with the moral that the matter 
 of a student's paper should not be taxed for any blemish in its 
 outward form. 
 
 As a lecturer, Professor Minto had a horror of "talking at large."
 
 XXXV111 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 When using his lecture notes I was struck with the endless erasures 
 and corrections in the manuscript. This was due to his passionate 
 desire for clear thinking and clear expression. He once told me 
 that, whenever he noticed any general inability on the part of his 
 class to follow him, he at once reconsidered the passage, and strove 
 with all his powers of language to put it in a way that would admit 
 of no dispute. This was the explanation of the countless erasures, 
 the explanation, too, I imagine, of the unique way in which he 
 could compel the unbroken interest of his students, no matter 
 what the subject on hand. He desired, he told me, that his 
 students should always get hold of something definite in every 
 lecture, but few who reaped the advantage of that simplicity and 
 clearness had any idea of the infinite pains and literary skill that 
 produced them. 
 
 Of the thoroughness that permeated all his work I may adduce 
 one example that fell under my notice. About a month before 
 the Christmas- vacation he had to deliver a historical lecture to a 
 country audience. As he was loaded with other work, and even 
 at that time far from strong, I suggested that he might save him- 
 self so much research by using some of his plentiful old material, 
 which I argued would have been quite as acceptable to his audience. 
 He humorously rebuked me for my base advice, saying that he 
 had " still some regard for his literary conscience," and that he 
 had become so interested in his subject that he had ceased to view 
 it as a task. This I found to be no idle assertion, for in a con- 
 versation some days later, when talking over the subject of his 
 lecture, he cited dates and quoted extensive passages from history 
 with such absolute ease that I am convinced that, though as yet 
 he had not put a word on paper, I got the bulk of the lecture, 
 delivered with as much accuracy and grace of expression as did 
 the audience that heard it read. 
 
 It is, however, of the period of his last illness that I can hope 
 to add anything of interest to what has been already said by 
 others. It seemed to me characteristic of Professor Minto that, 
 when he was suddenly prostrated and unable to conduct his two 
 classes, he did not bid me or even ask me to fill the breach. 
 When summoned by him to consider what was to be done in the 
 emergency, he suggested his proposal with the utmost delicacy; 
 and it was only after I had expressed my willingness to try the
 
 BIOGKAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xxxix 
 
 work that lie accepted as a favour, what he would obviously have 
 been justified in regarding as a privilege conferred. During the 
 whole of his illness it is no hyperbole to say that he exhibited an 
 extraordinary triumph of will. It was his express wish that he 
 should know exactly what I lectured on from day to day, and 
 though racked with pain he discussed the work of both classes 
 with all his usual ardour. It was sometimes hard for me to realise 
 the extent of his illness, while he impressed upon me the important 
 points of some development in literature which he desired me to 
 emphasise. His rare powers of memory never failed him, and I 
 recollect how, while propped up in bed, he would quote illustra- 
 tions for the English lectures from Chaucer or Pope, unravel one 
 of Marlowe's or Shakespeare's plots, or explain some far-fetched 
 conceit in Donne. It seemed to me infinitely pathetic to hear 
 him in broken words, but feigning something of that joyous ring 
 of voice with which his students will always associate their 
 memories of Chaucer, assuring me that John Donne deserved the 
 epitaph : 
 
 Here lies a king that ruled, as he thought fit, 
 The universal monarchy of wit. 
 
 It was, however, on the occasion of his attempt to resume work 
 for the second time that his mental heroism was most apparent. 
 He told me repeatedly that he felt it to be his only chance of re- 
 covery, and that if he could not lecture he might surrender all hope. 
 Doubtless this feeling was genuine, but I saw that he was prompted 
 also by the desire to relieve myself of at least half the work. I 
 was present in his anteroom, when he literally staggered into the 
 classroom to deliver his last lecture ; and I can conceive no greater 
 effort of will than that which enabled him to triumph over his pain, 
 and to deliver a brilliant lecture on the decline of the Elizabethan 
 drama. 
 
 Of the value of his own literary work he was ever dubious. On 
 more than one occasion during his illness he spoke hesitatingly of 
 what he had written as not " half good enough for publication," 
 and the only time I remember him speaking with confidence of his 
 unpublished work was, curiously enough, the last occasion on which 
 he spoke to me of literary matters. Asking me whether I saw my 
 way clear to the end of the session, he begged me to do all the
 
 xl BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 justice I could to the lecture on Burns, repeating, with unusual 
 emphasis, that his lecture on Burns, formerly delivered at Edin- 
 burgh, was " most distinctly the best thing " that he had ever 
 written. 
 
 It would be an injustice to Professor Minto's memory, and one 
 specially unpardonable for me to commit, were I not to record the 
 appreciation he had of the sympathy extended him by his students. 
 Tt will always be a pleasure for the English and Logic students of 
 1892-93 to know that Professor Minto repeatedly said that noth- 
 ing had ever touched him more deeply than the way in which the 
 students had reciprocated the feelings he had always entertained 
 for them. 
 
 During the past eighteen years it has fallen to my lot 
 to suggest many distinguished men for the St Andrews 
 honorary degree of Doctor of Laws ; but there is no one 
 whom I ever proposed with greater satisfaction than Pro- 
 fessor Minto. 
 
 The spontaneous tributes borne to him after his death in 
 the Aberdeen University Magazine Alma Mater alike by 
 students and professors, were more significant of the work 
 he did, and of the esteem in which he was held, than the 
 tributes recorded of any other Scottish teacher at the close 
 of this century. From Alma Mater of March i, 1893, the 
 following extracts may be made : 
 
 The first notice in In Memoriam is entitled " Vale ! " 
 In it the following occurs : 
 
 The highest tribute we can pay to Professor Minto's memory 
 is to say that he was the students' friend. With that disinter- 
 estedness and that perseverance which we must ever identify with 
 his life, he has often pleaded our cause when we least knew it ; and 
 in his contact with the members of his own classes, his genial 
 manner, his winning expression of face, and above all his kindly 
 word, stand out even more strongly than his more immediate teach- 
 ing. If there was ever a man who touched the heart of student- 
 dom, that man was William Minto. His life was a living emblem
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xli 
 
 of the power of sympathy. He felt for us and with us, and 
 naturally enough we came first to respect and then to love him. 
 In the words of Alfred Tennyson, he was "most a man," and, 
 while we reverenced his intellect and gloried in his fame, it was 
 for his manliness, his human nature, that we loved him. "His 
 students almost adored him," said a press writer, in commenting 
 on his death, and there is no exaggeration in the statement. To 
 the outside world he was known for the fame of his mental 
 powers, to us rather for his unfailing courtesy of manner, his rare 
 loveliness of spirit. It was no mere precept that he gave when 
 he told us to do our best to leave one small corner of earth the 
 better for our being in it, for was not this his own constant 
 endeavour ? Of his devotion to duty one can scarcely speak, 
 for had it been less, we cannot but feel that he might have been 
 with us to-day. When public spirit, kindliness of disposition, and 
 intellectual force unite to make a man and a teacher, who is 
 brought into contact with those whose characters have in great 
 measure to be formed, need we wonder that his removal should 
 leave a gap which it seems wellnigh impossible to fill, and make 
 the unspoken thought of every student in Aberdeen University 
 to-day, "Without you, William Minto, our world seems lone- 
 some " ! 
 
 Mr H. J. C. Grierson, Professor Minto's successor in the 
 Chair of English Literature, wrote : 
 
 " PAKMENIDES, MY MASTER PARMENIDES ! " 
 
 Professor Minto has passed away, and with him a gifted and 
 inspiring teacher. Some who have spoken of him have done so 
 from the position of those who knew his great predecessor, and 
 could compare the two. We knew only the one, and found in 
 him the one true teacher of our experience. 
 
 Perhaps it is for this reason that we cannot draw the usual 
 distinction between his teaching of literature and of philosophy. 
 It may be that in the former he had done more original and 
 valuable work, but it was in his Logic class that, for my own part, 
 I first felt his full power as an instructor, and caught the spirit 
 of his method. Dr W. L. Mackenzie has said justly that that 
 method was historic, but it was also dialectic in the Socratic
 
 xlii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 sense of the word. He realised to no small extent that the 
 truest function of the teacher was not to fill the mind with in- 
 formation from without, but to elicit its own latent thoughts and 
 faculties and interests. I have had occasion to compare his 
 method with that of other lecturers in Logic, and it has deepened 
 my sense of its value. He began with no abstract definitions, 
 and he uttered no dogmatic statements, but he led us easily, and 
 acquiescing with him at each step, from the simplest facts of our 
 everyday consciousness to a realisation of the great problems of 
 truth and reality. 
 
 In fact, the spirit of Professor Minto's philosophic teaching and 
 literary criticism recalls the spirit of the greatest of teachers and 
 critics, the Socrates that we know in Plato. It pursued the same 
 inquiring method, it subjected to the same searching criticism all 
 traditional dogmas, it glowed with the same enthusiasm for truth, 
 and the best expression of truth. 
 
 Nor in other respects was he unlike that great teacher. Like 
 him he loved young men, and met them with openness and 
 freedom from all assertion of superiority. When but Bajans we 
 were " gentlemen " to him, with opinions of our own, and minds 
 to be appealed to ; and when we came to know him personally we 
 found the same openness, and a close personal interest in our 
 lives and futures. He discussed with us, he planned with us, he 
 laughed with us and we loved him ; but now, like Socrates, he 
 is taken from us, when our esteem and affection were still grow- 
 ing, and we know not when we shall behold him again. " The 
 hour of departure is come : we go our ways I to die, you to live ; 
 but whose lot is the happier is hidden from all save God." 
 
 The following recollections are by his colleague, Professor 
 W. M. Eamsay : 
 
 It is not an easy task that the editors of Alma Mater have pro- 
 posed to me ; but I will try, at their request, to perform it, how- 
 ever inadequately and imperfectly. To describe on the moment 
 a character so marked, so powerful, so self-contained and complete, 
 so independent and individual, so true to his friends, so difficult 
 for his enemies, is beyond my poor powers. I can only try to 
 relate what I actually saw of William Minto, and the impression 
 he made on me in old times, and this may perhaps help to give
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xliii 
 
 some shadow of his personality. At this moment I should like, as 
 far as possible, to avoid anything that should rouse any feeling 
 except sympathy. 
 
 When I entered College, Minto was Assistant Professor of 
 Natural Philosophy, and it is a curious proof of the ignorance 
 of University business and University life that used to charac- 
 terise some Bajans, that I never, during that winter, heard a word 
 about the great controversy in which he was involved. It was 
 not till years had passed that I came to know what had occurred. 
 After more than twenty years had passed, I found out the facts 
 by consulting the files of the Aberdeen papers ; and then I learned 
 for the first time how splendidly the late Principal Pirie had 
 advocated his cause in the Court. My ignorance at the time will 
 therefore serve as an excuse for passing over the subject ; but no 
 one could refrain from alluding to the moral triumph which he 
 gained in the long-run over those who had defeated him so far 
 as worldly appearance went at the time. Few men in my time 
 have had such a hard trial as he had, when, at the conclusion 
 of a most brilliant University career, crowned with a Ferguson 
 Scholarship, his alma mater closed her gates against him for an 
 action which at the present time would be applauded and approved 
 by all. We should now look on it as a proof of innate delicacy 
 and gentlemanly spirit, if there could possibly arise an occasion to 
 provoke it which, with the tone that now rules in University 
 life, is, I believe, impossible. In truth, there has been a great 
 improvement in the standard of public feeling within the last 
 twenty-five years, and I hope we should now make better use of 
 his genius than of old. 
 
 It was not till the end of my fourth year at College that I first 
 knew Minto, and our acquaintance began in connection with the 
 recently founded Literary Society, to which, after a time, I had 
 the honour of proposing that he should be admitted as an honorary 
 member. His name was already familiar to me, for in the course 
 of my third year he had matriculated as a student, and had taken 
 an active part in the re-election of Sir M. E. Grant Duff as Lord 
 Rector. I was sometimes quoted as a sad example of the students 
 whom he had perverted to vote against the cause of Classics ; but, 
 in reality, I never to my knowledge saw him during that year, 
 much less listened to his alluring speeches in public or in private.
 
 xliv BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 " Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear " impelled me even then, 
 when I had only vague blind yearnings after ancient literature, to 
 vote as I have always done against the misdirection of classical 
 studies, debasing them to be fetters, instead of wings, for the free 
 modern spirit. It was our common study of modern literature 
 that first brought us together as lovers of the " romantic " side in 
 that literature, as believers that the aim and crown of all literary 
 education is to understand and appreciate the spirit of our own 
 age. We approached literature from quite opposite sides, and we 
 differed widely on many points of thought and life not points of 
 mere detail, but ideas which we believed with our whole heart to 
 be of infinite importance, and on behalf of which he at least was 
 ready to die yet our differences of view never interfered with our 
 friendship ; and when we met, after years of separation, the old 
 feelings remained as strong as ever. 
 
 Very soon after he joined the Literary Society, we elected him 
 to the office of President, which fell vacant opportunely ; and there 
 can be no doubt that the success of the young society was greatly 
 due to the skill and knowledge which he brought to our aid. 
 
 After seeing a great deal of him in 1871, I lost sight of him for 
 years, till we met accidentally on a London steamboat pier in 1879 ; 
 and we continued to meet during my occasional visits to London, 
 until I disappeared into the wilds of Asiatic Turkey in the spring 
 of 1880. Before I went out he offered to do his best to procure 
 the acceptance of letters from Turkey by the great London morn- 
 ing paper with which he was at the time connected. I fully in- 
 tended to avail myself of his advocacy, but time was too short and 
 life too busy for letter-writing, and only one or two brief notes 
 passed between us, until the spring of 1886, when I received a 
 letter from him telling that the Humanity Chair here would 
 shortly be vacant, and advising me to be a candidate. I am glad 
 now to say publicly, as I have often said to him, that I owe my 
 appointment to this letter, and to the timely information which it 
 gave me. But for his letter, I should have been ignorant, till it 
 was too late, about the impending vacancy, and about various other 
 facts which it was essential to know. 
 
 In the abundant opportunities I have since then had of observ- 
 ing Minto, the quality that most struck me was his thoroughness. 
 Everything I have ever seen him do was done with the same devo-
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xlv 
 
 tion : he brought his whole powers of mind, and often (as I saw 
 with alarm) his whole powers of body, to the work. The minute 
 estimate of the capacities and faults of all his students which I 
 have seen noted down in his books apparently as a regular prac- 
 tice astonished me : they resembled the sketches which profes- 
 sional readers of character are ready to supply to customers. He 
 did not merely estimate numerically the value of each examination 
 paper, he also estimated it qualitatively as an index of the candi- 
 date's moral and intellectual character. 
 
 That he persistently overworked himself I often observed, and 
 often remonstrated with him about it always to be met with the 
 laughing reply that I was myself a worse instance of the fault. 
 The chill which brought on the last illness was, I think, attri- 
 buted by him to a game at curling during the Christmas vacation; 
 but it seemed to me that quite as great mischief was done in 
 December at a meeting of Faculty in the icy Senatus-room, where 
 he sat for more than two hours at the head of the table, till he was 
 obviously chilled to the marrow. When the meeting was over, he 
 came to the fire saying, " I might as well go to my grave as do 
 this sort of thing again." I have often pitied the wretched candi- 
 dates for Honours and Scholarships who are compelled to shiver 
 for three hours at a time in that room, which is generally as cold 
 as a Roman Church on the Aventine in winter. By the time a 
 few more have suffered from it, a new Senatus-room may be ready 
 in Marischal College. 
 
 There is one quality which beyond all others rouses my admira- 
 tion, and that quality Minto had in a remarkable degree I mean 
 courage. I can worship even mere physical courage, which it is 
 nowadays the fashion to despise (especially among those who have 
 never needed or seen or felt it) ; but the splendid moral courage 
 which he showed seems to me almost the greatest quality in human 
 nature. He never flinched a hair's-breadth from the opinion he 
 believed in, however unpopular or even dangerous it might be : he 
 always supported a friend if the world was against him. 
 
 As a critic and scholar, he was only coming to full consciousness 
 of his powers and freedom in using them ; and there is good reason 
 to think that the future work, which (had fate been kinder to us) 
 he would have done as the first Professor of English in this 
 University, would have been his best work, and, I think, would
 
 xlvi BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 have taken permanent rank among the finest in its kind. His 
 genius matured slowly, partly from its natural character, partly 
 from the distractions and variations of occupation in which his life 
 had been spent. Truly, I think, the University might have gained 
 by wise treatment much more from him than it did. 
 
 The Faculty of Arts has lost him who was not merely the titular 
 head, but also by a combination of fine qualities the mainstay of 
 its reputation, both in Aberdeen and before the world. The Uni- 
 versity has lost its clearest-headed and ablest administrator : in 
 every question that emerged he recognised at a glance what was 
 the solution, and urged it with unhesitating energy. His quick 
 insight was due to the fact that he never was governed by a calcu- 
 lation of selfish or narrow advantages : in every case he judged 
 upon the same general principles. He lived and fought for an 
 ideal of freedom and honesty, in the ultimate triumph of which he 
 had the most unfaltering confidence. In this lay his strength and 
 the secret of his perfect frankness and freedom from affectation. 
 He worked, not for himself, not even for his family, but for his 
 cause. He had nothing to conceal, but rather gloried in openly 
 stating his real aims ; and many believe, as I do, that, had not 
 his policy been so often thwarted, our University would be to-day 
 far stronger than it is. 
 
 In The Bookman of April 1893 Mr A. T. Quiller-Couch 
 wrote : 
 
 Were I to confess how seldom we met and how slight was our 
 correspondence, your readers would think it highly presumptuous 
 of me to write about Professor Minto, and that to call him a friend 
 was almost indecent. Yet on one point, at any rate, they would 
 be wrong. It is a fact that we never wrote a line to each other ; 
 yet from time to time, and by every common friend, he sent mes- 
 sages that were valuable beyond telling to a young man just be- 
 ginning to write. But Minto's sympathies were always with the 
 young ; and, indeed, on the first occasion that we met this was 
 rather trying. In my father's house the talk might run on states- 
 men, divines, or men of science ; but men of letters were the great 
 men. Other callings were well enough, but writers were a class 
 apart, and to belong to it was the choicest of ambitions. I had
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xlvii 
 
 grown up in this habit of mind, and have not yet entirely out- 
 grown it ; so that the prospect of seeing Minto and listening to 
 him fluttered me, as no doubt it nutters a young curate to dine 
 with his bishop. He would not let me worship, however ; would 
 not even let me listen ; but seemed only anxious to hear about my 
 own endeavours and prospects. I think this forgetfulness of self 
 was native in him and incurable. Certainly, though I admired 
 him as much as ever, he had won a very much warmer feeling in 
 the inside of half an hour ; and from that time was constantly 
 adding to the load of kindness which now can only be repaid by 
 mourning his loss and remembering his wise counsel and encourage- 
 ment. No other critic has given me the tithe of that counsel or a 
 hundredth part of that encouragement. And when I say that all 
 this was bestowed at every opportunity from the date of our first 
 and only intimate conversation to the time of his death, that even 
 on his death-bed he tried to do me a last service in the old fashion, 
 it will be allowed that my burden of obligation is heavy indeed. 
 I cannot believe that the newspapers and reviews have done 
 justice to his memory. They praise him as a good man and a 
 sincere lover of letters ; but the quality of his work, and especially 
 of his critical work, has received too little attention. " For it was 
 of the rarest. Whatever his subject, Minto seemed to approach it 
 with a mind absolutely clear of prejudice ; to take it up with the 
 single desire of exploring it in his reader's company, and to handle 
 it with a modest self-effacement that may explain the slightly ne- 
 glectful attitude of a generation eager to be obtruded on by " strik- 
 ing personalities." In the same way, though he was one of the 
 few men left who could construct a long English sentence, and fit 
 it with well-proportioned members, and make it walk upon legs, 
 his style was so temperate and business-like, so admirable as a 
 means to an end, and so naked of ornamentation, that it too often 
 passed unnoticed. We must be " striking " in these times, or we 
 are naught ; but this writer never learned to use his theme as a 
 stalking-horse for his own wit. He had an insatiable interest in 
 literature ; but this interest was scientific as well as sympathetic ; 
 and he handled criticism scientifically. On the whole, his method 
 was that of Sainte-Beuve, and though there are many more showy, 
 a better has yet to be invented. The others may please for a while ; 
 but in the end we shall sigh for temperance, modesty, restraint, the
 
 xlvlii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 virtues that are above fashion, and never, never tire ; and where 
 temperance, modesty, and restraint are valued we may be confident 
 that Minto will not be forgotten. In a series to which all the best 
 critics of his generation contributed, his monograph on Defoe stands 
 out as a bright example of the way in which criticism should be 
 written ; and its excellence in comparison with the majority grows 
 clearer as time goes on a sure test. But whether in his writings 
 or his life, Minto was a man in whose company it was good to be, 
 and to remain. 
 
 The following appeared in The Westminster Gazette of 
 March 2, 1893 : 
 
 QUHAT SAY THEY? 
 
 IN MEMORIAM WILLIAM MINTO. OBIIT MARCH I. 
 
 It was his constant care to make his subject, whether literature or the 
 high and dry sands of metaphysics, as far as possible, a mirror of the life 
 we live. 
 
 The hand that led our pilgrim bands 
 
 These byegone years 
 To England's wondrous lettered lands, 
 
 Its kings and seers, 
 
 No more shall smooth the rugged way 
 'Tis cold this day. 
 
 In misty metaphysic maze 
 
 . He slied a light, 
 That cleared away the hanging haze 
 
 And darkening night. 
 But ne'er again shall he we weep 
 Our footsteps keep. 
 
 Was it with Chaucer's dukes and dames, 
 
 Or saintly Bede ? 
 Was it with Hamiltonian aims, 
 
 Or rigid lleid 1 
 
 The byegone age was lit with life, 
 Its flux and strife.
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 And still, he brought our restless times 
 
 Within his ken 
 A Barrie or a Kipling's rhymes 
 
 Would charm his pen. 
 The dainty genius of a " Q " 
 
 Was brought to view. 
 
 Then, oft indeed a budding bard, 
 
 As yet unknown, 
 Who found the way to glory hard, 
 
 He'd gladly own ; 
 
 The future way to fame was cleared 
 The tyro cheered. 
 
 The ravelled skein of logic-lore 
 
 We saw unwound ; 
 The trials of the path no more 
 
 The journey bound. 
 Ah, who again shall lift the thorn 
 As him we mourn ! 
 
 Can we, to-day immersed in gloom, 
 
 This guide forget, 
 Although by very Crack of Doom 
 
 We seem beset 
 A halting tribute this, that sings 
 Our king at King's. 
 
 In the same paper, The Westminster Gazette, of March 
 11, 1893, Minto's friend, Mr Kichard Le Gallienne, writes 
 as follows: 
 
 PROFESSOR MINTO. 
 
 Nature, that makes Professors all day long, 
 And, filling idle souls with idle song, 
 Turns out small Poets every other minute, 
 Made earth for men, but seldom puts men in it.
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Ah ! Minto, thou of that minority 
 Wert man of men ; we had deep need of thee ! 
 Had Heaven a deeper ? Did the heavenly Chair 
 Of earthly Love wait empty for thee there ? 
 
 I may perhaps be allowed to repeat, at the close of this 
 introductory and biographic sketch, that there is ample and 
 most valuable material for a sequel volume of Minto's work, 
 including his numerous Encyclopaedia Britannica articles, his 
 papers on John Donne, Wordsworth, and Matthew Arnold, 
 as well as those delightful lectures which he gave to literary 
 and other Societies in Scotland. 
 
 WILLIAM KNIGHT. 
 
 ST ANDREWS, June 1894.
 
 THE LITEKATUKE OF THE 
 GEORGIAN EEA
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE POSITION OF MEN OF LETTERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH 
 CENTUKY. 
 
 DECLINE OF ROYAL PATRONAGE WHY IS THE GEORGIAN ERA A DISTINCT 
 LITERARY PERIOD ICONDITION OF POETRY DURING THE CENTURY, AND 
 VIEWS OF ITS CRITICS AS TO THE MEANING OF NATURE. 
 
 THE combined reigns of the four Georges may possibly be thought 
 an arbitrary and artificial section of literary history to choose as a 
 subject for a course of lectures. What had the four Georges to 
 do with literature ? is a question that naturally occurs when they 
 are proposed as the figureheads of a literary period ; and the 
 answer must be that they had little or nothing to do with 
 literature, beyond occasionally furnishing in their illustrious 
 persons fairly good themes for the humorist and the satirist. 
 If you read Thackeray on the four Georges, you will see that 
 these reigns supplied ample materials both for the laughing 
 philosopher and the weeping philosopher. But neither of the 
 first two Georges cared for literature, or did anything directly to 
 encourage literature, and it was perhaps as well that they let it 
 alone. Matters mended a little under the second two. George IV. 
 had an interview with Dr Johnson, the record of which is one of 
 the best known passages in Boswell's 'Life.' But this was after 
 Dr Johnson's fame was fully established. The most conspicuous 
 instance of royal patronage of literature in these reigns patronage 
 that really helped a rising man occurred in the first year of this 
 century, when the Prince, who afterwards became George IV., 
 put down his name among the subscribers to Thomas Moore's 
 translation of Anacreon, and admitted the youthful poet to the
 
 4 POSITION OF MEN OF LETTERS IN EIGHTEENTH CENTHJY. 
 
 honour of personal acquaintance. Moore was overjoyed at this 
 piece of good fortune ; and well he might be, for it greatly helped 
 him in his career of fashionable popularity. In a sense it may be 
 said that literature owes the anacreontic lays of Tom Little to 
 royal favour ; and this is its only obligation to the favour of the 
 four Georges an obligation that cannot be thought of with 
 altogether unmingled gratitude. 
 
 The Georges did little or nothing for literature. But though 
 it looks like a paradox, this fact, so far from being a reason 
 against choosing their reigns as a literary period, is one of the 
 reasons why the accession of the dynasty constitutes a material 
 point of departure for a historical survey. There is a certain 
 interest in seeing how literature prospered when it was no longer 
 sunned by the royal countenance, and what new influences came 
 in to compensate the loss. Up to the time of the first George 
 every eminent man of letters had received direct encouragement 
 from the Court. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries litera- 
 ture was almost entirely dependent on royal favour, and there was 
 always some member of the royal family who took a warm interest 
 in letters. In the time of Edward III. Chaucer was patronised by 
 John of Gaunt, taken into the royal household, and rewarded with 
 lucrative public appointments. Gower undertook his most cele- 
 brated poem at the personal request of Richard II. One of the 
 first cares of Henry IV. when he usurped the Crown was to 
 remember and provide for the wants of his father's old favourite, 
 the poet of the 'Canterbury Tales.' The ladies of this royal 
 house connected their memories with all that was best in the 
 literature of the time. Lady Jane Beaufort, granddaughter of 
 John of Gaunt, inspired the author of the ' King's Quhair.' Her 
 niece, the Countess of Pembroke, mother of Henry VII., was the 
 principal promoter of learning in her generation. Margaret, the 
 sister of Edward IV., who married the Duke of Burgundy, en- 
 couraged Caxton in the literary enterprise which led to the intro- 
 duction of printing into England. Another Margaret, daughter 
 of Henry VII., by her marriage with James IV. of Scotland, gave 
 a new tone to the poetry of the Scottish Court. I need not give 
 examples of the influence of the Court in literature during the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The circle of education
 
 COURT INFLUENCE UPON LITERATURE. 5 
 
 began to widen very rapidly after the introduction of the printing- 
 press, and the creative faculty was brought within the reach of 
 many and diverse incitements to produce ; capitalists pressed 
 forward eager to divine and satisfy the new demands ; but among 
 the diverse influences on literary production, one was always con- 
 spicuous, the influence of the Court. Even when, as in the case 
 of the great Shakespearian dramatic literature, writers did not 
 receive their first impulse from the Court, the Court hastened to 
 put the seal of its approbation on the new product. It was an 
 entirely novel and unprecedented situation when the throne was 
 filled by a king who could hardly speak a word of English, and 
 who was entirely destitute of interest in English or any other 
 literature ; and it cannot but be interesting to examine what effect, 
 if any, this circumstance had on literary production. At an earlier 
 stage of literary history, in an earlier state of civilisation, the 
 withdrawal of royal patronage would have been like the with- 
 drawal of the sun from the solar system. Did it produce any 
 perceptible effect on the literature of the eighteenth century ? It 
 did not : the centre of literary life and heat had shifted ; where, 
 then, are we to look for this centre 1 
 
 The mere fact that the personal tastes of the king and his inti- 
 mate circle ceased to have any directing influence on literature, 
 would alone make the Hanoverian accession a notable literary 
 epoch. But this event affected literature much more profoundly 
 in another way namely, by putting an end to a long period of 
 political uncertainty. The settlement of the long-vexed question 
 of the succession to the Crown made a change in the position of 
 the man of letters that can only be described as a revolution. A 
 long explanation is required to enable you to understand the full 
 significance of this change, unless you happen to be versed in the 
 history of the period. First, you must take notice of the means 
 by which public opinion in those days was appealed to. There 
 was no reporting of political speeches ; there were no daily news- 
 papers with leading articles ; everything was done by means of 
 occasional pamphlets in prose or verse. Nowadays, if you wish to 
 know the minds of the leaders of opinion, you read the magazines 
 and the leading articles in the newspapers. But in the time of 
 Queen Anne, and for half a century before, the work of expressing
 
 6 POSITION OF MEN OF LETTERS IN EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY. 
 
 and enlightening opinion was carried on by means of pamphlets. 
 Whenever the public mind was excited on any question a war, 
 or a parliamentary election, or a great commercial enterprise, or a 
 disastrous calamity swarms of such pamphlets poured from the 
 press; and if the public excitement ran high and the pamphlet 
 was effectively written, it was sold in the shops and hawked about 
 the streets in thousands. Next, you must take notice of the 
 character of the great political question of the time, the succession 
 to the kingdom. From the Revolution of 1688 to the accession 
 of George I. the succession was uncertain. The nation was divided 
 into two great parties of Whig and Tory, the one eager to keep 
 out, the other to bring back, the exiled family of Stewarts. Cart- 
 loads of pamphlets were written to work on the public mind for 
 the one purpose or the other. It is difficult for us in these days 
 to understand the intense, absorbing, passionate character of the 
 political struggles that went on while the succession lay in dispute 
 and uncertainty. A few years ago there was not a little excite- 
 ment in this country over the Eastern Question. There were 
 public meetings and speeches and articles without end ; sides were 
 taken with considerable earnestness and warmth. But the heat of 
 a struggle is always in proportion to the importance for the com- 
 batants of the issue at stake ; and no issue raised then could come 
 home to the electors with one-tenth of the force of the momentous 
 question, who should be king of the country. The power of the 
 Crown was great in those days ; and the leaders in the dispute 
 about the succession fought with the fierce earnestness of men 
 whose whole fortunes are bound up with the issue. Their pro- 
 perties, and even their lives, were at stake as well as their political 
 power. If they took an active part on one side or the other, de- 
 gradation, impoverishment, exile, even death might follow upon 
 failure. Triumph meant honours, wealth, and power ; defeat 
 might mean forfeiture of their estates and banishment. Such 
 were the high stakes for which the leaders were playing ; and for 
 the common people also the political struggle was intensely excit- 
 ing. It was in great part a religious question with them; en- 
 couragement, toleration, persecution, awaited their doctrines and 
 forms of worship, according as a Protestant or a Papist filled the 
 throne ; and their feelings were thus profoundly interested. No
 
 LITERATURE LIBERALLY REWARDED. 7 
 
 such issues hang upon political struggles now, and the passion of 
 the conflict, however earnest and determined, can never reach the 
 same pitch of absorbing intensity. 
 
 This, then, being the state of things, the leading combatants 
 deeply in earnest, the public mind quick and susceptible, every 
 incident closely watched and sharply taken advantage of, and 
 pamphlets the recognised means of working on public opinion, 
 what was the effect on literature ? The political situation had a 
 direct and immediate effect on the position of men of letters. The 
 man who could write pamphlets, whether in prose or in verse, at 
 once became a person of importance. Men of letters were sought 
 after, caressed, rewarded we must not say bribed as they had 
 never been before by ambitious politicians and grasping Ministers. 
 Versifiers were in especial demand, and, of course, the patrons 
 were met half-way. Young gentlemen at the Universities, with 
 an elegant knack of versification, celebrated birthdays and battles, 
 and even party triumphs in Parliament, and sent their effusions to 
 the powerful, in the hope of being rewarded by solid appointments 
 in the public service, of course irrespective of special fitness. The 
 splendid successes of a few helped to crowd this avenue to fame 
 and fortune. You all know the story of Addison and his poem on 
 the battle of Blenheim : how the Lord Treasurer Godolphin com- 
 plained to Lord Halifax of the poor quality of the poems generally 
 written on such occasions, how Halifax said that he knew of a 
 young poet who could do better, how a nobleman was sent to 
 Addison 's garret in the Haymarket to solicit his services, and how 
 munificently the poet was recompensed with public appointments. 
 This story is familiar, but it is only the most striking one of scores 
 of a similar kind in Johnson's Lives of the Poets of that time. 
 Addison himself, earlier in his career, when he was fresh from the 
 University, was rewarded with a pension of ^300 for a poem on 
 the Peace of Eyswick. Lord Halifax, the patron who helped him 
 to the favour of the Crown, himself owed his first advancement to 
 literature. When plain Charles Montagu, he had co-operated with 
 Prior in writing the political satire of ' The Town Mouse and the 
 Country Mouse.' He was afterwards introduced to King William 
 with the words : " Sir, I have brought a mouse to wait on your 
 Majesty." " You do well to put me in the way of making a man
 
 8 POSITION OF MEN OF LETTERS IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 of him," the king is said to have replied, and forthwith ordered 
 him a pension of ^500. Montagu's collaborator, Prior, Avas made 
 secretary to an embassy. The political hits in his tragedy of 
 ' Tamerlane ' obtained for Howe an under-secretaryship in the 
 Treasury ; Hughes obtained a place in the office of Ordnance for 
 an ode on the Peace of Ryswick ; Dr Blackmore's indirect compli- 
 ments to the king in his ' Prince Arthur ' procured him a knight- 
 hood and the post of royal physician. And so on and so on 
 throughout the reigns of William and Anne. Places of all kinds 
 in the gift of the Ministers of the Crown were freely distributed 
 among men of letters, without the slightest regard to any qualifi- 
 cation except their power of making men and measures popular 
 by direct and indirect panegyric. 
 
 The effect of this extensive patronage on the cfiaracter of Queen 
 Anne poetry, on the poetry as poetry, we shall try to trace after- 
 wards ; meantime, I wish to make clear the position of men of 
 letters before the accession of George I., and how completely this 
 position was changed by the settlement of the disputed succession. 
 Observe that the patronage of literature was not disinterested. 
 The great office of the best literature is to elevate, strengthen, 
 gladden, and purify human life, to expand the soul, to quicken 
 the fancy, to enlarge the understanding, to lift the mind out of 
 the narrow round of personal concerns and enable it to command 
 a wider horizon. It was not to enable men of letters to fulfil 
 this mission that the Ministers of King William and of Queen 
 Anne lavished places and pensions on them. It was purely as 
 party writers that they were patronised, as brilliant political pam- 
 phleteers, useful rhetorical panegyrists and biting satirists; and 
 when the need for their services passed away, the fountains of 
 patronage were dried up. Very soon after George's accession, it 
 was apparent that the golden age was at an end. The batch of 
 Whig poets who had remained faithful during the Tory Ministry 
 of Queen Anne's last four years Addison, Steele, Rowe, Tate, 
 Tickell, and other minor celebrities were munificently provided 
 for in the first blush of the Whig triumph, but this was practically 
 the last of the system. When Sir Robert Walpole got the reins 
 of power firmly in his hands, and settled down into his policy of 
 establishing the dynasty by peaceful measures, he saw that the
 
 
 VENALITY OF NEWSPAPERS AND JOURNALISTS. 9 
 
 poets, powerful enough agents in a time of warlike excitement, 
 could be of little service to him, and he turned the golden stream 
 from the Royal Treasury in another direction. Another circum- 
 stance helped to destroy the influence of the brilliant occasional 
 writer, the rapid development of the periodical press, of newspapers 
 and political journals. This was almost coincident with the acces- 
 sion of George I. There had been newspapers in the land from 
 the time of the great Civil War, and 'regular political periodicals 
 were established in the reign of Queen Anne, the first being 
 Defoe's celebrated ' Review ' ; but the chronicling of news and 
 the expression of opinion were distinct functions, left to different 
 organs. Such sheets as the ' Flying Post ' and the ' Mercury ' gave 
 nothing but news ; the ' Tatler ' and the ' Spectator ' were con- 
 fined to social essays ; the ' Examiner ' and the ' Whig Examiner, 
 ' Mercator ' and the ' British Merchant ' were purely political jour- 
 nals. The newspapers strictly so-called were not impartial ; they 
 were in the pay of different parties, and their intelligence was 
 garbled in different interests ; but they expressed no opinions, and 
 it was only by the manipulation of news that they sought to in- 
 fluence the opinions of their readers. The "leading article," or 
 " letter introductory " as it was at first called,- a prefatory dis- 
 sertation intended to lead the readers to certain conclusions was 
 the invention of the acute genius of Defoe early in the reign of 
 George I. From that time various news-journals began to retain 
 a letter-writer, as the writer of leading articles was then called, 
 and journalism became a distinct occupation. Much of the public 
 money that had gone in the reign of Queen Anne to the occasional 
 pamphleteer now found its way to the pockets of the professional 
 journalist. It was a corrupt time, measured by our modern ideas 
 of literary independence. Walpole, a hard unsentimental man of 
 business, who believed in paying for services directly in solid cash, 
 is said to have paid ^5 0,600 in ten years to the literary supporters 
 of his Administration ; and one of them, Arnall, a journalist whose 
 name you will find in no history of literature, boasted that he had 
 received in three years no less a sum than ,10,997, 6s. Sd. When 
 we compare Walpole' s system of securing literary support for his 
 measures with that prevalent in the time of Queen Anne, we are 
 compelled to admit that the great political patrons of the earlier
 
 10 POSITION OF MEN OF LETTERS IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 period, Somers and Halifax, and Oxford and Bolingbroke, did 
 have some respect for literature as literature, and took a certain 
 pride in playing the role of Maecenas, altogether apart from their 
 sense of the political advantages of having men of letters on their 
 side. 
 
 The great change effected in the position of men of letters at 
 the accession of George I. is, then, a solid reason for beginning a 
 literary survey from that date. But the reign of the four Georges 
 really owes its completeness as a literary period to an accident. 
 It so happened that Pope's masterpiece, the 'Rape of the Lock,' 
 was published in its complete form in the first year of the first 
 George ; while the last year of the last George witnessed the 
 publication of his first volume of poems by our late Poet-Lau- 
 reate, Lord Tennyson. We thus find at the beginning of our 
 period the leader of one great school of poetry in the full blaze of 
 his reputation ; and at the end the dawn of another great luminary 
 and the foundation of a new school. What had poetry gained in 
 the interval an interval containing the splendid poetic achieve- 
 ments of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, with the 
 great names of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and Scott and Byron, 
 and Keats and Shelley ? At first sight it might seem as if there 
 had been only a full circle revolution of a fixed wheel, an oscilla- 
 tion of a pendulum to and fro, as if Poetry had only moved from 
 the elaborate artistic care of Pope to the freedom and spontaneity 
 of Wordsworth and Byron, and back to the elaborate art of 
 Tennyson. But there was a real progression. Tennyson em- 
 bodies new poetic ideals in his art, and these ideals were con- 
 ceived and shaped in the interval between him and Pope. The 
 age of Wordsworth and Byron was not only a season of great 
 creative energy, but also a season of vivid and searching criticism. 
 Not only were new masterpieces produced, but new life was given 
 to the discussion of the first principles of the art of Poetry. And 
 not only were the technicalities of poetry discussed publicly 
 discussed by some of the leading masters in the art, the prin- 
 ciples of diction, metre, imagery, and general construction, as had 
 been done by hundreds of writers on the art of Poetry from 
 Aristotle and Horace down to the Duke of Buckingham and 
 Mr Hayley, but new topics were introduced, and chief among
 
 MACAULAY'S CRITICISM OF POPE. 11 
 
 them the nature of the poetic faculty and the principles on which 
 rank should be assigned to poets in their various degrees as 
 spiritual benefactors of mankind. Wordsworth led the way both 
 in creation and in criticism. Wordsworth was by no means the 
 most popular poet in his generation ; he had by no means the 
 most powerful influence on the public, but he had unquestionably 
 of all men in his generation the greatest influence on men of letters, 
 on the producers of poetry. It is, to use the language of political 
 economy, among the manufacturers and not the consumers of 
 poetry that his influence is to be traced, and upon them it was 
 enormous. For us, as students of poetry, the most significant and 
 instructive fact in the reign of the four Georges is the gradual 
 rise of the reputation of Wordsworth, and the gradual fall of the 
 reputation of Pope. About the close of the reign of George IV. 
 the reputation of Wordsworth had reached its zenith ; the reputa- 
 tion of Pope, supreme and unchallenged throughout the eighteenth 
 century, had fallen to its nadir. We may fairly take Macaulay's 
 essay on Byron, published in 1831, as marking the triumph of 
 the Wordsworthian school. This essay, written with all the 
 energy of Macaulay's brilliant rhetoric, laid hold of what had 
 before been little more than an esoteric doctrine, and spread it 
 far and wide over the public mind. Macaulay danced a sort of 
 breakdown over the prostrate body of the great poet of the 
 eighteenth century. He concentrated and emphasised all that 
 had been said in disparagement of Pope. Pope had no imagina- 
 tion in the highest sense ; he had no correctness in the highest 
 sense ; he was a painstaking slave to artificial rules ; his poetry 
 was like a trimly kept garden, with smooth-shaven grass, flower- 
 beds in geometrical figures, symmetrical walks and terraces, and 
 pillars and urns and statues, and trees and hedges dipt into 
 unnatural shapes. Hundreds of writers since Macaulay have 
 repeated his comparison of Pope's poetry to a trim garden, and 
 have said after him that such poetry could be enjoyed only in an 
 age of hoops and periwigs. For the last fifty years Macaulay's 
 vigorous caricature has dominated the public opinion about Pope. 
 Pope's faults have been put in the foreground ; his merits have 
 been admitted grudgingly ; his admirers have been obliged to 
 adopt an apologetic tone.
 
 12 POSITION OF MEN OF LETTERS IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 Pope, then, was the hero of the first part of our period, and the 
 dethroned idol of its closing years, knocked from his pedestal and 
 rolled in the dust. Ought he to be set up again 1 Not all the 
 king's horses, nor all the king's men, could restore him to the place 
 that he once occupied in public estimation, side by side with the 
 greatest men in literature. But, on the other hand, there can be 
 no doubt that the reaction against him in public estimation was 
 carried much too far. His rank in public estimation I wish to 
 lay emphasis on that expression ; for, paradoxical as it may seem, 
 I believe that among the few who make poetry a serious study 
 and there were such men in the eighteenth century as well as in 
 the nineteenth (Macaulay cannot be included in the number) 
 there has been no substantial oscillation of opinion about the 
 merits of Pope. They have felt that his range of subjects was 
 limited, and that his power of expression was not of the very 
 highest, but that within his limits and the measure of his power, 
 his execution was of unrivalled brilliancy. Wordsworth and 
 Coleridge felt and acknowledged this, if not as heartily at least as 
 explicitly as Byron and Campbell. It is true that Wordsworth 
 and Coleridge and other disciples had not the same full sympathy 
 with Pope's subject-matter, and consequently were less hearty in 
 their acknowledgment of his excellences, and more disposed to 
 dwell upon his defects. Byron, who had tried his hand at satire, 
 was more forward to acknowledge the brilliant point and masterly 
 condensation of Pope's work. But they were in substantial agree- 
 ment intellectually. They knew equally well where Pope's strength 
 lay, and where his weakness lay. They knew the master's hand, 
 and they drew the line at its limitations. There was no such nice 
 discrimination, however, in the public estimation of the poet, based 
 upon the treatment of him by poetical and critical authorities. 
 The general easy-going reader who does not, in Wordsworth's 
 language, make poetry a study, knows no middle station between 
 good and bad, between admirable and the reverse. He either ad- 
 mires heartily or he is wholly uninterested and contemptuous. 
 And in so far as he is influenced by authority, he is apt to be 
 wholly led away by what is put in the foreground, to look at this 
 only, and neglect the qualifications ranged in the middle distance 
 and the background. Thus it happened that when Wordsworth's
 
 CRITICISM OP EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 13 
 
 school, who put Pope's defects and limitations in the foreground, 
 became the leaders of critical opinion, the hero of the eigh- 
 teenth century was thrown from his pedestal in public estima- 
 tion. It is a most difficult thing to gauge public opinion ; but a 
 very fair test of it, as regards either men or measures, is to be 
 found in the attitude of moderate advocates. If moderate advo- 
 cates are apologetic and conciliatory, the man or the measure, we 
 may be sure, does not stand high in the estimation of the public 
 addressed. Now, applying this principle in the case of Pope, we 
 find that in the eighteenth century, before his poetry had passed 
 through the crucible of the Wordsworthian school, such a moderate 
 critic as Joseph Warton had to be cautious in hinting at defects ; 
 whereas in recent years such temperate admirers as Mr Carruthers 
 or Mr Mark Pattison have to guard themselves carefully against 
 the charge of putting Pope's merits too high. Such incidents as 
 these are significant of Pope's changed position between the acces- 
 sion of the first George and the demise of the last. He had fallen 
 immeasurably in public estimation, and he was rated much below 
 his deserts. 
 
 Now, although it is impossible ever to restore Pope to the posi- 
 tion he once occupied, it is our business here to try to obtain just 
 ideas about poets, and to sweep away from our minds all artificial 
 impediments to the enjoyment of various kinds and degrees of ex- 
 cellence in poetry to clear our minds of prejudice and look at 
 poets fairly for ourselves. The disciples of Wordsworth and 
 Coleridge, in their wholesale condemnation of the poetry of the 
 eighteenth century, have fixed in the public mind a great many 
 erroneous conceptions. We shall endeavour to see for ourselves, 
 taking them one by one, what manner of men the eighteenth-cen- 
 tury poets were, what aspirations they had in their art, and how 
 their aspirations were limited by their personal character and cir- 
 cumstances, and by the circumstances of their times, especially by 
 the ruling traditions of poetry in their respective generations. 
 
 A very common impression about the poets of the eighteenth 
 century is that they lived in slavish subjection to a set of narrow 
 and exclusive rules of criticism ; that they had no love for nature, 
 either in scenery or in human affections or passions a finicking 
 race of artists, conventional and artificial, shuddering at Shake-
 
 14 POSITION OF MEN OF LETTERS IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 speare as a wild and irregular genius, or, as Voltaire called him, 
 an untutored savage. Now if, with these prepossessions in your 
 minds, you take up any eighteenth-century poet of rank, from Pope 
 down to Hayley, one of George III.'s laureates, who represents the 
 low-water mark of eighteenth-century poetry, and if you read the 
 language in which they speak of nature and of Shakespeare, you 
 will open your eyes in astonishment. Take, for example, the fol- 
 lowing passage : 
 
 " A tree is a nobler object than a prince in his coronation robes. Educa- 
 tion leads us from the admiration of beauty in natural objects to the ad- 
 miration of artificial or customary excellence. I do not doubt but that a 
 thorough-bred lady might admire the stars because they twinkle like so 
 many candles on a birthnight." 
 
 This is an extract not from Wordsworth, but from Spence's 
 record of the conversation of Pope, of the poet whose poetry is 
 compared to an artificial garden, and whose narrow and exclusive 
 authority stifled the imagination of the eighteenth century. The 
 irony of Macaulay's comparison of Pope's poetry to an artificial 
 garden lies in the fact that Pope had more to do than any one 
 else in destroying the fashion of artificial gardening in England, 
 not merely by his ridicule of it but by leading the new fashion of 
 landscape-gardening, in which a closer attempt is made to repro- 
 duce natural beauties. But, at least, it will be said, Pope spoke 
 disparagingly of Shakespeare. Head the preface to his edition of 
 Shakespeare, for he took some trouble in editing Shakespeare, and 
 you will see. It is true he once remarked to Spence that " it was 
 mighty simple in Eowe to write a play professedly in Shakespeare's 
 style that is, professedly in the style of a bad age." But we 
 must remember what it was in the style of Shakespeare's age that 
 he considered bad. The particulars that he specified as faults 
 were such as have universally been considered faults of style, and 
 such as no writer has ever tried to imitate without making himself 
 ridiculous. For example, Pope said that " Shakespeare generally 
 used to stiffen his style with high words and metaphors for the 
 speeches of kings and great men : he mistook it for a sign of great- 
 ness. This is strongest in his early plays : but in his very last, 
 his ' Othello,' what a forced language has he put into the mouth 
 of his Duke of Venice." Now it was probably not from mistaking
 
 POPE'S CRITICISM OF SHAKESPEARE'S STYLE. 15 
 
 it for a mark of greatness that Shakespeare stiffened his words in 
 the speeches of great men, but because his audience expected it, 
 because the stage demanded it ; still, whatever the reason, take 
 any great man's speech in Shakespeare where the situation is not 
 filled with passion, and I think you will agree with the eighteenth- 
 century critic that no style could be more intolerably bad. Do 
 you ever at the theatre now listen to such speeches as those of 
 the Duke of Venice, and what impression do they make upon 
 you ? 
 
 No : though Pope often heard his own age described as the 
 Augustan age of English poetry, in which the art had been carried 
 to a perfection unattained before, he was by no means insensible to 
 the greatness of his great predecessors, Chaucer, Spenser, Shake- 
 speare, and Milton. His conversations with Spence 1 afford abundant 
 evidence of his catholicity as well as of his delicacy of judgment ; 
 and if we pass from Pope to his successors in the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, we find that we cannot number disrespect for Shakespeare 
 among the causes of their poetic degeneracy, and that Nature was 
 often in their mouths, if not in their hearts, as the great original 
 from which the poet ought to draw. Their adoration of Shake- 
 speare is not exceeded by the most reverential and least critical 
 member of the New Shakespeare Society. Take Akcnside, for 
 example. When in 1749 a French company played by subscription 
 at Drury Lane, Akenside penned a most spirited remonstrance, 
 which he put in the mouth of Shakespeare. He imagined our 
 great poet insulted by this invasion of his domain. 
 
 " What though the footsteps of my devious Muse 
 The measured walks of Grecian art refuse, 
 Or though the frankness of my hardy style 
 Mock the nice touches of the critic's file ; 
 Yet what my age and climate held to view 
 Impartial I surveyed, and fearless drew. 
 And say, ye skilful in the human heart, 
 Who know to prize a poet's noblest part, 
 What age, what clime could e'er an ampler field, 
 For lofty thought, for daring fancy, yield ? 
 
 - 1 Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men. By the Rev. 
 Joseph Spence.
 
 16 POSITION OF MEN OF LETTERS IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 I'saw this England break the shameful bands 
 Forged for the souls of men by sacred hands ; 
 I saw each groaning realm her aid implore ; 
 Her sons the heroes of each warlike shore : 
 Her naval standard (the dire Spaniard's bane) 
 Obey'd through all the circuit of the main. 
 Then too great Commerce, for a late found world, 
 Around your coast her eager sails unfurled. 
 New hopes, new passions, thence the bosom fires, 
 New plans, new arts, the genius thence inspires ; 
 Thence every scene which private Fortune knows 
 In stronger life, with bolder spirit, rose." 
 
 Take next Gray, who is sometimes spoken of as the crowning 
 instance of the artificial poetry of the eighteenth century. How 
 far he was from being the victim of a narrow and exclusive taste 
 in literature we shall see afterwards. He was one of the pioneers 
 of the romantic movement ; he was a minute observer and an en- 
 thusiastic worshipper of nature ; and he carried his admiration of 
 artless poetry so far as to find beauties even in Lydgate, whom 
 few .of the admirers of early English poetry have even the patience 
 to read. For Shakespeare his enthusiasm was unbounded; the 
 poetry of his own age seemed poor and starved in comparison. 
 "But," he says in a metrical letter to his illustrator Bentley, in 
 which he sighs for the artist's grace, and strength, and quick 
 
 creation 
 
 '' But not to one in this benighted age 
 
 Is that diviner inspiration given, 
 That burns in Shakespeare's or in Milton's page, 
 The pomp and prodigality of heaven." 
 
 Gray visited Switzerland and Scotland, and the Lake District ; 
 and wrote enthusiastic descriptions of the scenery in letters to his 
 friends. He vied with Wordsworth in the sincerity of his passion 
 for the Cumberland Lakes ; with Scott in his love for the Scottish 
 Highlands. " I am," he wrote, " charmed with my expedition ; it 
 is of the Highlands I speak ; the Lowlands are worth seeing once, 
 but the mountains are ecstatic, and ought to be visited in pilgrim- 
 age once a year. None but these monstrous children of God know 
 how to join so much beauty with so much horror. A fig for your 
 poets, painters, gardeners, and clergymen, that have not been 
 among them ; their imagination can be made up of nothing but
 
 IIAYLEY'S DENUNCIATION OF THE CRITICS. 17 
 
 bowling-greens, flowering-shrubs, horse-ponds, Fleet ditches, shell- 
 grottoes, and Chinese rails." 
 
 I might multiply quotations to show that neither Shakespeare 
 nor Nature was undervalued by the poets of the generation after 
 Pope's. If their poetry was limited in amount and narrow in 
 quality, it was not for want of a taste for better things. Criticism, 
 in short, was busy preparing the way for the reception of a new 
 race of poets by augmenting dissatisfaction with the poetry of the 
 time, and creating a taste for something different. We see this 
 spirit two generations after Pope, even in the works of the weak 
 and amiable Hay ley. Hayley was not a self-satisfied driveller; 
 he was painfully conscious of his own weakness, feeling, as he said 
 
 himself 
 
 " Whene'er I touch the lyre 
 My talents sink below my proud desire." 
 
 We must not look upon him as a failure, owing to the benumbing 
 influence of narrow criticism. He repudiated critical authority in 
 most valiant words. He denounced the "Classic Bigot" and 
 " System's Haughty Son " as earnestly as the blindest disciple of 
 the Lakers : 
 
 " Thou wilt not hold me arrogant or vain, 
 If I advise the young poetic train 
 To deem infallible no Critic's word ; 
 Not even the dictates of thy Attic Hurd : 
 No ! not the Stagyrite's unquestioned page, 
 The Sire of critics, sanctified by age ! 
 
 How oft, my Romney, have I known thy vein 
 Swell with indignant heat and gen'rous pain, 
 To hear, in terms both arrogant and tame, 
 Some reas'ning Pedant on thy Art declaim ; 
 Its laws and limits when his sov'reign taste 
 With firm precision has minutely traced, 
 And in the close of a decisive speech 
 Pronounc'd some point beyond the Pencil's reach, 
 How has thy Genius, by one rapid stroke, 
 Refuted all the sapient things he spoke ! 
 Thy Canvas placing, in the clearest light, 
 His own Impossible before his sight ! 
 might the Bard who loves thy mental fire, 
 Who to thy fame attun'd his early lyre, 
 B
 
 IS POSITION OF MEN OF LETTERS IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 Learn from thy Genius, when dull Fops decide, 
 
 So to refute their systematic pride ! 
 
 Let him, at least, succeeding Poets warn 
 
 To view the Pedant's lore with doubt or scorn, 
 
 And e'en to question, with a spirit free, 
 
 Establish'd Critics of the first degree ! " 
 
 It was in the revival of the grand Epic that Hayley saw a pos- 
 sible future for Poetry, and Mason seemed to him the destined 
 hero of this regeneration. 
 
 " Ill-fated Poesy ! as human worth, 
 Prais'd, yet unaided, often sinks to earth ; 
 So sink thy powers ; not doom'd alone to know 
 Scorn, or neglect, from an unfeeling Foe, 
 But destin'd more oppressive wrong to feel 
 From the misguided Friend's perplexing zeal. 
 
 What ! is the Epic Muse, that lofty Fair, 
 Who makes the discipline of Earth her care ! 
 That mighty Minister, whom Virtue leads 
 To train the noblest minds to noblest deeds ! 
 Is she, in office great, in glory rich, 
 Degraded to a poor, pretended Witch, 
 Who rais'd her spells, and all her magic power, 
 But on the folly of the favouring hour ? 
 Whose dark, despised illusions melt away 
 At the clear dawn of Philosophic day ? " 
 
 He examines the received opinion that supernatural agency is neces- 
 sary to the Epic, and denounces and derides all systematic rules. 
 A great Epic might be achieved if the subject were taken from 
 British history. 
 
 " By some strange fate, which rul'd each Poet's tongue, 
 Her dearest Worthies yet remain unsung. 
 Critics there are, who, with a scornful smile, 
 Reject the annals of our martial Isle, 
 And, dead to patriot Passion, coldly deem 
 They yield for lofty Song no touching theme. 
 What ! can the British heart, humanely brave, 
 Feel for the Greek who lost his female slave ? 
 And shall it not with keener zeal embrace 
 Their brighter cause, who, born of British race, 
 With the strong cement of the blood they spilt, 
 The splendid fane of British Freedom built ? "
 
 HAYLEY APOSTROPHISES MASON. 19 
 
 Liberty, brooding over this neglect, invites Mason to undertake 
 the task. 
 
 " Justly on thee th' inspiring Goddess calls ; 
 Her mighty task each weaker Bard appalls ; 
 'Tis thine, Mason ! with unbaffled skill, 
 Each harder duty of our Art to fill ; 
 'Tis thine in robes of beauty to array, 
 And in bright Order's lucid blaze display 
 The forms that Fancy, to thy wishes kind, 
 Stamps on the tablet of thy clearer mind. 
 How softly sweet thy notes of pathos swell, 
 The tender accents of Elfrida tell ; 
 Caractacus proclaims, with Freedom's fire, 
 How rich the tone of thy sublimer Lyre ; 
 E'en in this hour, propitious to thy fame, 
 The rural Deities repeat thy name : 
 With festive joy I hear the sylvan throng 
 Hail the completion of their favourite Song. " 
 
 I think I have quoted enough to show you that the eighteenth- 
 century poets were not, on principle at least, enamoured of trim- 
 ness and primness in art, or insensible to the wild irregular 
 strength and beauty of nature. They did not of set choice and 
 with deliberate acquiescence confine themselves to a low range of 
 imagination, looking up from their comfortable artificial gardens 
 with supercilious or cynical contempt on the loftier flights of 
 poetry. If the age was comparatively barren of the higher poetry, 
 the explanation is not to be found in the predominance of narrow 
 and exclusive critical theories.
 
 20 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 POPE. 
 
 BRIEF LITERARY BIOGRAPHY HIS POEMS FALL INTO THREE PERIODS 
 ECLOGUES AND THE DISCUSSION AS TO THE MERITS OF PASTORAL POETRY 
 WALSH CONNECTION BETWEEN ENGLISH PASTORALS AND ALLAN 
 RAMSAY AND BURNS POPE AND PHILIPS. 
 
 IF you take a cursory glance at the list of Pope's works and their 
 subjects, you will see that they fall naturally into three divisions 
 or periods : (i.) The poems by which he acquired his reputation, 
 his "Pastorals," his "Windsor Forest," his "Essay on Criticism," 
 his " Eape of the Lock," all written during the reign of Queen 
 Anne ; (ii.) his translations of Homer, by which he enlarged his 
 reputation and his fortune, his principal occupation during the 
 reign of George I. ; (iii.) the satirical and moral poems, with 
 which he crowned his reputation, and seriously compromised his 
 character. This is an obvious division, apparent on the surface ; 
 and if you look deeper, you will find that there is more justifica- 
 tion for it than there generally is. There is often a disadvantage 
 in dividing the works of an artist into periods ; it is often mis- 
 leading. You are apt to imagine that at each period a complete 
 transformation has passed over the style or the spirit of the 
 man's work ; that he has become a new creation, working with 
 entirely different aims and powers ; and that the work of each 
 period is sharply marked off from that of every other. There is a 
 tendency in this way to break up and disperse the individuality of 
 the man, to confuse his identity. Now the artist is himself in all 
 periods ; in any period he is more like himself than like anybody
 
 MAIN EPOCHS IN POPE'S WRITINGS. 21 
 
 else ; any two periods of his work have more in common with each 
 other than they have with any period of another man's work, 
 supposing him to be a great artist, an artist of marked and mas- 
 terful individuality. It only happens that some men at certain 
 stages come under new influences from without, or new impulses 
 from within, the effect of which is distinctly traceable in their 
 work, though not to the extent of blurring their individuality. 
 This happens more or less to all men, but it is only when the 
 new influence becomes for the time paramount that there is any 
 advantage in separating tLe whole productions of a man's life- 
 time into periods. When the development has been slow and 
 equable, as in the case of Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or Gray, or 
 Wordsworth, or Tennyson, when the course of the poet's activity 
 has received no violent and sudden bent from new circumstances 
 or new impulses, there is no advantage in dividing his work into 
 periods. 
 
 In the case of Pope circumstances did interfere materially with 
 the direction of his poetic labours, and two important epochs or 
 turning-points can be distinctly specified. The first was when his 
 early successes transferred him from the influences of his father's 
 family and his home circle of acquaintances to the very different 
 world of London society, when boyish ambitions and enthusiasms 
 underwent a transformation. If these ambitions had been allowed 
 free play, he would not have translated Homer. This was a 
 money-making enterprise, instigated by the worldly spirit that 
 then passed into him from new and fashionable acquaintances. 
 The second epoch was when his independence had been secured 
 by the success of his translations, and he was free to follow the 
 guidance and stimulation of his friends Arbuthnot, Swift, and 
 Bolingbroke, and abandoned his powers to the service of personal 
 and party strife. 
 
 Pope was born in the year of the Revolution, 1688. His father, 
 who was a London merchant, retired from business in that year, 
 and went to live at Binfield in Windsor Forest. The most in- 
 fluential fact in Pope's family circumstances was the religion of 
 his father, who was a Roman Catholic. This probably influenced 
 the father in retiring from business when the Catholic James II. 
 was driven from the throne and the Protestant William took his
 
 22 POPE. 
 
 place. Further, it influenced the education of Pope in two ways. 
 The public schools were closed to him, and he received very little 
 regular education. He was taught to read by an aunt, the widow of 
 the portrait-painter Cooper, who left him at her death, when he was 
 five years old, all her " bookes, pictures, and medalls sett in gold 
 or otherwise." At the age of eight he was taught the rudiments 
 of Latin and Greek by the family priest ; then he was sent for a 
 time to a little school at Twyford, near Winchester, in Hampshire, 
 then for a time to another in Marylebone, then to a third at Hyde 
 Park Corner in London; then he read for a time under the care of 
 another priest ; but at the age of twelve he was left entirely to his 
 own resources. This desultory education, leaving him to read at 
 will, was probably an advantage for a studious boy, who could not 
 remember when he began to make verses of his own invention, who 
 compiled a play for his schoolfellows before he was twelve, and had 
 such a veneration for poets and poetry that as a small schoolboy he 
 ventured into Will's Coffee-house that he might have the pleasure 
 of seeing and hearing Dryden, the greatest English poet then liv- 
 ing. These little facts show how precocious Pope was, both in 
 poetic sensibility and in ambition. When his father, who was 
 probably anxious for his health, took him from school in London 
 to live at home in the Forest, he plunged with delight into a mis- 
 cellaneous course of reading in poetry, and he not only read but 
 imitated. His school education had been too scrappy to make him 
 expert in construing foreign languages ; he could barely construe 
 Tully's Offices, he says, when he left school ; but in the course of 
 the previous century all poets of note Greek, Latin, Italian, and 
 French had been translated into English verse, and with the help 
 of these translations the ardent student had no difficulty in master- 
 ing the sense. " Mr Pope," Spence says, " thought himself the 
 better in some respects for not having had a regular education. 
 He (as he observed in particular) read originally for the sense, 
 whereas we are taught for so many years to read only for words." 
 Nor, although the boy was left entirely free to read what he 
 pleased, was he left altogether without friendly guidance. Here, 
 again, the family Catholicism was serviceable to him ; it was an 
 advantage to belong to a proscribed sect. The members of such a
 
 PATRONAGE OF CATHOLIC FAMILIES. 23 
 
 sect always hold much more closely together without distinctions 
 of rank; distinctions of rank and station are levelled by their 
 common political disabilities. Hence it happened that Catholic 
 families in the neighbourhood, of good position and literary cul- 
 ture, who would probably not have visited the retired linen-draper 
 if he had belonged to the established religion, made the acquaint- 
 ance of him and of his precocious son, and helped the latter 
 with encouragement and advice in his reading and in the first 
 flights of his genius. In particular, Sir W. Trumbull, a retired 
 diplomatist, living at Easthampstead, within a few miles of Bin- 
 field, made a companion of the boy, and directed him to the 
 study of the French critics. Through another Catholic family, 
 the Blouuts of Mapledurham, one of whom, Mrs Martha Blount, 
 was his attached friend in his last years, Pope made the acquaint- 
 ance of Wycherley and Henry Cromwell, and through them of 
 Walsh and Granville, all poets and keen critics of literature. 
 
 Thus, while Pope's sensibilities were still fresh, and his whole 
 nature docile and pliable, he was guided into the very middle of 
 the literary current of his time, and left to paddle at his own 
 sweet will in backwaters and eddies. The eager and ambitious 
 boy was, in fact, stimulated to the very utmost of his powers, and 
 directed to strive with all his energies after what was then con- 
 sidered literary excellence by the highest authorities. We can see 
 in his early efforts traces of a clear-sighted purpose, while trying 
 to do what was then certain of winning applause, to choose sub- 
 jects that had not been already appropriated by great poets, and 
 in which success was still open to all comers. It was then a criti- 
 cal maxim that the highest work of which the human mind was 
 capable was a great epic, and many treatises had been written in 
 French and in English, in prose and in verse, on the principles of 
 epic poetry. Sir Richard Blackmore, while Pope was at school, 
 had attempted an epic on the subject of Arthur. It was a pon- 
 derous failure. Pope began an epic about the age of twelve. The 
 subject was mythological, the hero being Alcander, a prince of 
 Rhodes. It was, he told Spence, "about two years in hand." 
 In later life he considered that it was better planned than Black- 
 niore's, though equally slavish an imitation of the ancients ; but
 
 24 POPE. 
 
 he never published it, and it was finally burnt by the advice of 
 Atterbury. Even in his boyhood Pope had judgment enough to 
 understand that his powers were not yet sufficiently mature for 
 original composition, and he resolved to perfect them in the first 
 place by imitations of his predecessors. Walsh advised him that 
 there was one praise yet open to English poets, the praise of cor- 
 rectness. In Pope's boyhood, the most successful poetical publica- 
 tion had been Dryden's translation of Virgil. What Dryden had 
 translated, Pope did not presume to meddle with. Dryden was 
 his hero, his model, his great exemplar. But he proceeded to 
 take translations of classics by less eminent poets, and try to 
 improve upon them. With this ambition he translated the first 
 book of the ' Thebaid ' of Statius, whom he considered the most 
 eminent Latin epic poet next to Virgil, several of Ovid's ' Heroic 
 Epistles,' and a considerable part of the ' Metamorphoses,' besides 
 passages from Homer. It was one of Pope's vanities to try to give 
 the impression that his metrical skill was even more precocious 
 than it was; and we cannot accept his published versions of Statius 
 and Ovid as evidence of his proficiency at the age of fifteen or six- 
 teen, the date, according to his own assertion, of their composition, 
 though they were not published for several years afterwards. But 
 it is ascertained matter of fact that, by the time he was sixteen, his 
 skill in verse was such as to astonish veteran critics like Wycherley 
 and Walsh, and that his verses were handed about in manuscript, 
 and admired by men who were then in the foremost walks of 
 letters. 
 
 Pope spent eight or nine years in this arduous and enthusiastic 
 discipline, reading, studying, experimenting, poetry his only busi- 
 ness and idleness his only pleasure, before anything of his appeared 
 in print. In these preliminary studies he seems to have guided 
 himself by the maxim, formulated in a letter to Walsh, July 2, 
 1706, that "it seems not so much the perfection of sense to say 
 things that have never been said before, as to express those best 
 that have been said oftenest." l His first publication was his 
 " Pastorals." Jacob Tonson, the bookseller, had heard these pas- 
 torals highly spoken of, and he sent a polite note to Pope asking 
 
 1 " True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, 
 
 What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed."
 
 THE AIMS OF THE PASTORAL POET. 25 
 
 that lie might have them for one of his miscellanies. They ap- 
 peared, accordingly, in May 1 709, at the end of a volume contain- 
 ing contributions from Philips, Sheffield, Garth, and Howe. We 
 can see how Pope was induced to make his first essay in Pastorals. 
 Dryden's translation of Virgil's Eclogues had drawn attention to 
 this species of composition. Walsh had written a critical preface 
 to Dryden's translation, in which he laid down the rules of pastoral 
 poetry, and severely trounced M. Fontenelle, a fashionable French 
 writer of pastorals, for his violation of the rules. 
 
 This artificial species of poetry has been almost universally ridi- 
 culed as tedious and insipid from the time of Pope to the present 
 day. It is not worth while to waste much time over it ; but as it 
 is often condemned hastily, and in ignorance of what it proposed to 
 attempt, it is only justice to Pope, and it may be of some interest, 
 to consider what were the aims of the pastoral poet as conceived 
 by Pope and Walsh. They did not pretend to imitate any inci- 
 dents in the lives of actual shepherds. Theocritus did this, and 
 Allan Ramsay. But the shepherds of Pope and Walsh were avow- 
 edly the shepherds of the golden age, when the best of men were 
 employed in shepherding, men, as Walsh says, " of learning and 
 good-breeding." These shepherds were assumed to be men of the 
 most delicate and gentle feelings, living a life of simplicity and 
 calm tranquillity, never agitated by harsh and violent passions. 
 Any tender feeling that ruffled their lives was softened and sub- 
 dued by the steady repose and quiet placid beauty of their sur- 
 roundings, and the mute sympathy of nature with their woes. 
 Realise the still and tranquil beauty of this ancient pastoral world, 
 and you will admit that it was a fine conception. The poets of 
 this world did not trouble themselves to argue that such a world 
 ever really existed ; they admitted that it never existed except as 
 a beautiful fiction. Such was the conception of this species of 
 poetry held by a school of critics among whom Pope had personal 
 friends. You will find it set forth at length in Walsh's preface to 
 Dryden's translation of Virgil, in which minute rules are deduced 
 for bringing details into harmony with this general design. Now 
 this being the aim of the ideal pastoral, to give lyric expression to 
 the joys and the sorrows, the loves and the griefs, of imaginary 
 beings in imaginary circumstances, I think you will see that many
 
 26 POPE. 
 
 of the criticisms passed on Pope's " Pastorals " are beside the mark. 
 He has been censured for not doing what he could not have done 
 without being inconsistent with his original design. Mr Elwin, 
 for example, Pope's truculent editor, who has examined every line 
 in Pope with inveterate hostility, but apparently never lifted his 
 eyes from details to consider Pope's work as a whole, says : " Orig- 
 inality was impossible when Pope's only notion of legitimate pas- 
 toral was a slavish mimicry of classical remains. Had he drawn 
 his materials from the English landscape before his eyes, from the 
 English characters about his doors, and from the English usages 
 and moods of thought in his own day, he would have discovered a 
 thousand particulars in which he had not been anticipated by 
 Greeks and Eomans. He neglected this inexhaustible territory, 
 and bestowed so little attention upon the realities around him, 
 that, though his descriptions are confined to the barest generalities, 
 they are not unfrequently false." 
 
 If Pope had acted on this advice, no doubt he might have 
 written a much more generally interesting poem, with more of 
 flesh and blood and passion in it, but it would not have been the 
 kind of poem that he intended to write. Johnson's criticism is 
 more to the point when he says that the pastoral form of poetry 
 is " easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting ; whatever images it 
 can supply are long ago exhausted ; and its inherent improbability 
 always forces dissatisfaction on the mind." This is strong criticism, 
 but perfectly fair. Johnson was thinking more particularly of 
 elegiac pastoral poetry poems in which poets lamented the death 
 of friends under the fiction that they were shepherds; and he 
 condemned this kind of poetry as a whole, partly because it gave 
 an air of affectation to the poet's grief, and partly because there 
 was nothing new to be said. He fully recognised what the poet 
 intended to do, but held that it was not worth doing. The same 
 criticism had been passed on occasional pastoral elegies by Steele 
 in the 3oth number of the 'Guardian' (April 15, 1713). Steele 
 complained that they were too much on one plan : 
 
 " I must, in the first place, observe that our countrymen have so 
 good an opinion of the ancients, and think so modestly of them- 
 selves, that the generality of pastoral writers have either stolen all 
 from the Greeks and llonians, or so servilely imitated their man-
 
 STEELES CRITICISM OF PASTORAL ELEGIES. 27 
 
 ners and customs as makes them very ridiculous. In looking over 
 some English pastorals a few days ago, I perused at least fifty 
 lean flocks, and reckoned up an hundred left-handed ravens, 
 besides blasted oaks, withering meadows, and weeping deities. 
 Indeed, most of the occasional pastorals we have are built upon 
 one and the same plan. A shepherd asks his fellow, ' Why he is 
 so pale ? If his favourite sheep hath strayed ? If his pipe be 
 broken ? Or Phyllis unkind ? ' He answers, ' None of these mis- 
 fortunes have befallen him, but one much greater, for Damon (or 
 sometimes the god Pan) is dead.' This immediately causes the 
 other to make complaints, and call upon the lofty pines and 
 silver streams to join in the lamentation. While he goes on, his 
 friend interrupts him, and tells him that Damon lives, and shows 
 him a track of light in the skies to confirm it, then invites him 
 to chesnuts and cheese. Upon this scheme most of the noble 
 families in Great Britain have been comforted ; nor can I meet 
 with any right honourable shepherd that doth not die and live 
 again, after the manner of the aforesaid Damon." 
 
 There is not room for much variety in such poetry, the per- 
 sonages of which are simple people with few interests and few 
 cares. Undoubtedly Milton's "Lycidas," apropos of which John- 
 son made his sweeping condemnation, is an exception to the 
 general lameness of these pastoral elegies. The exquisitely sweet 
 and rich music of his verse would have redeemed the most trite 
 and easy of conceptions. But the pastoral elegy was so common 
 in the years between Milton and Johnson, that the critic might 
 have been pardoned a strong expression of his weariness of the 
 poem, though this criticism of Milton is one of the aberrations of 
 his generally sound judgment of poetry and generally true feeling 
 for poetic excellence. At least he must be allowed to have con- 
 fined his criticism to the kind of poetry which the author intended 
 to produce. He did not censure him because he had not done 
 what he could not have done without deviating into another kind 
 of poetry. To have put into the golden age the manners of country 
 folk as they were to be seen near his own doors, would not have 
 been an excellence. That the imaginary manners of a fanciful 
 golden age can never possess deep human interest, is of course 
 true enough, and Pope's "Pastorals" cannot claim a high rank as
 
 28 POPE. 
 
 poetry. Johnson's criticism of them shows his usual good sense 
 and sanity. " To charge these pastorals," he says, " with want of 
 invention is to require what was never intended. The imitations 
 are so ambitiously frequent, that the writer evidently means rather 
 to show his literature than his wit. It is surely sufficient for an 
 author of sixteen not only to be able to copy the poems of an- 
 tiquity with, judicious selection, but to have obtained sufficient 
 power of language and skill in metre to exhibit a series of versi- 
 fication which had in English poetry no precedent, nor has since 
 had an imitation." 
 
 Johnson remarks upon " the close thought " shown .in the com- 
 position of the " Pastorals " : " Pope's ' Pastorals ' are not, however, 
 composed but with close thought ; they have reference to the 
 times of the day, the seasons of the year, and the periods of 
 human life." "Windsor Forest" is more open than the "Four 
 Pastorals " to the charge of incongruously and incorrectly mixing 
 up heathen deities with modern circumstances, archaic conven- 
 tional fancies with modern realities. There is a cold artificiality 
 about such lines as these : 
 
 " See Pan with flocks, with fruits Pomona crown'd ; 
 Here blushing Flora paints th' enamel 'd ground ; 
 Here Ceres' gifts in waving prospect stand, 
 And nodding tempt the joyful reaper's hand." 
 
 Pan and Pomona, and Flora and Ceres have little life for their few 
 English readers. Still, after discounting such lines, arid the ex- 
 travagant praise of Granville, and the ludicrous comparison of 
 Queen Anne to Diana, there are many beautiful passages. Pope's 
 observation of nature was admitted by Wordsworth, and his micro- 
 scopic fidelity is remarked on by M. Taine. "Every aspect of 
 nature," says Taine, " was observed ; a sunrise, a landscape re- 
 flected in the water, a breeze amid the foliage, and so forth. Ask 
 Pope to paint in verse an eel, a perch, or a trout; he has the 
 exact phrase ready ; we might glean from him the contents of a 
 Gradus." 
 
 We may remark, as illustrating the close connection of one liter- 
 ary event with anothejr, and the way in which literary influences
 
 GREAT RESULT OF THE CRAZE FOR PASTORALS. 29 
 
 arc handed down, that the same craze for Pastorals which pro- 
 duced Pope's juvenile exercises, by one impulse after another, 
 sending out waves in all directions as from a centre of disturbance 
 in a pool, gave us the poetry of Burns. Kindled by the theories 
 and the practice of the English wits and poets, Allan Ramsay 
 wrote real pastoral poetry, exhibiting the customs, the dress, the 
 games, the domestic sorrows, the loves, and the lives of real shep- 
 herds. And the " Gentle Shepherd " awoke the genius of Burns. 
 This great result may excuse us for dwelling so long on Pastoral 
 poetry in the reign of Queen Anne. 
 
 Pope professed to have written both his " Pastorals " and 
 "Windsor Forest" in 1704 or 1705, at the age of sixteen, only 
 adding to the latter the passage about the Peace. Probably 
 he had retouched them, as they lay by him. It was part of his 
 vanity to pretend to have been even more precocious than he was, 
 a foible that has been severely commented on. 
 
 These " Pastorals " led to one of the first of Pope's celebrated 
 literary quarrels, which is often referred to as an example of his 
 irritable jealousy and subtle underhand proceedings. This has 
 been discussed at great length and in a spirit of bitter hostility 
 to Pope by Mr Elwin at great length, and yet with the omission 
 of important circumstances, if his object was to prove that Pope 
 was the aggressor. 
 
 In the volume of Tonson's Miscellanies in 1 709, in which Pope's 
 "Pastorals" appeared, the first place was occupied by a set of 
 Pastorals by Ambrose Philips " Namby Pamby " in every way 
 inferior to Pope's. Four years afterwards, on April 6, 1713, ap- 
 peared in the 'Guardian,' edited by Steele, the first of a series of 
 papers on Pastoral Poetry discussing pastoral poets from Theo- 
 critus downwards, and stating the principles of the art. Pieally 
 these papers were a covert puff of Philips. Modern pastoral poets 
 were ridiculed for introducing Greek rural deities, Greek flowers 
 and fruits (hyacinths and Paestan roses), Greek names of shep- 
 herds (Damon and Thyrsis, and so forth), Greek sports and cus- 
 toms, and religious rites. They ought to make use of English 
 rural mythology, hob-thrushes, fairies, goblins, and witches ; they 
 should give English names to their shepherds ; they should mention
 
 30 POPE. 
 
 flowers indigenous to English climate and soil ; and they should 
 introduce English proverbial sayings, dress, and customs. All 
 excellent principles, afterwards followed by Allan Ramsay. But 
 the ' Guardian ' proceeded to cite Philips as an English poet who 
 had fulfilled these conditions, and consequently established for 
 himself a place side by side with Theocritus, and Virgil, and 
 Spenser. Philips was the eldest born of Spenser. Pope was 
 never mentioned as a pastoral poet, though a few lines were 
 quoted from one of his imitations of Chaucer. 
 
 Now Pope was bitterly angry at this, and he took what Mr 
 Elwin considers a mean revenge. He sent to Steele a paper pro- 
 fessing to be a continuation of the papers on Pastoral Poetry, 
 reviewing the poems of Mr Pope by the light of these principles. 
 Ostensibly Pope was censured for breaking these rules, and Philips 
 Avas praised for observing them. It was a most cutting piece of 
 irony, passages being cited from Philips where he had complied 
 with all the precepts of the ' Guardian,' and yet had written the 
 most insipid commonplace. Pope himself, though ostensibly con- 
 demned, was really exalted, being described in one place as having 
 "deviated into downright poetry." 
 
 When the paper was sent to him, Steele, misled by the opening 
 sentences, was at first unwilling to publish a direct attack on Pope, 
 and asked Pope's leave to print it, which was graciously granted. 
 
 Elwin severely condemns this as a mean, spiteful, underhand 
 trick, and declares that Pope's vanity made him the aggressor. 
 I own to having some sympathy with the fun of the thing ; but, 
 apart from that, I don't think that Mr Elwin has made out that 
 Pope was the aggressor. In spite of his laboured argument, he 
 has omitted several cardinal circumstances, allowing, as is his 
 custom, a few points to carry him away, while he does not look at 
 the whole. 
 
 The papers in the ' Guardian ' were really a covert attack on 
 Pope. What were the circumstances? Pope's "Windsor Forest," 
 a pastoral, appeared in the beginning of March. It contained a 
 eulogy of the Peace of Utrecht, the great achievement of the Tory 
 Ministry, to which Steele and Addison and the Whig coterie were 
 far from friendly. A few weeks afterwards appeared a series of
 
 POPE RETALIATES ON STEELE. 31 
 
 papers on Pastoral Poetry, in which Pope was studiously ignored, 
 and a feeble poetaster, his rival in that kind of poetry, extrava- 
 gantly lauded. I should call that mean and underhand, and 
 Pope's method of retaliation strikes me as simply highly ingenious 
 and amusing, and not unfair. A magnanimous man would have 
 passed by the slight without notice ; but if a man did condescend 
 to notice it, as Pope did, his crime was not of a very black dye. 
 He only hoisted the enemy with their own petard.
 
 32 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 POPE continued. 
 
 "ESSAY ON CRITICISM" SUPPOSED TYRANNY OF POPE ATTITUDE OF 
 POPE, GRAY, ETC., TOWARDS CLASSICAL TRADITION REVIEW OF 
 THEORIES ACCOUNTING FOR THE POETIC STERILITY OF THE EIGH- 
 TEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 OUR starting-point to-day, the " Essay on Criticism," was published 
 in 1711, midway between the "Pastorals" and "Windsor Forest." 
 An excellent rule occurs at 1. 253 : 
 
 " Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, 
 Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be. 
 In ev'ry work regard the writer's end, 
 Since none can compass more than they intend." 
 
 What was Pope's end 1 He wrote the " Essay on Criticism " for 
 the entertainment of the cultivated people, men and women 
 of wit and learning in his time, who were greatly interested in 
 the art of poetry. It belongs to the class of poems called Didactic, 
 but the object of such poems is not instruction, even when they 
 state and illustrate rules of conduct. The object of poetry is to 
 give immediate pleasure. When Virgil wrote his 'Georgics,' his 
 object was not to lay down practical rules for the husbandman, 
 but to present a beautiful picture of country life. Darwin's 
 ' Botanic Garden ' was meant, not to serve the same purpose as 
 lectures on botany, but to give pretty pictures of plants and their 
 habits. So in Pope's " Essay on Man," his object is not to write 
 an ethical or theological treatise, but to give pointed and brilliant 
 expression to certain views of man's character, of his position in
 
 "ESSAY ON CRITICISM." 33 
 
 the universe, and of his destiny. This might be indirectly instruc- 
 tive, by furnishing people with striking and easily remembered 
 reflections as maxims of conduct, but the poet's primary purpose 
 was to charm and delight by the novelty of his expression. 
 
 In the " Essay on Criticism " his purpose is less lofty he did 
 not strive to lead his readers into the same lofty region of de- 
 lightful emotion. His purpose was simply to condense, methodise, 
 and give as perfect and novel expression as he could to floating 
 opinions about the poet's aims and methods, and the critic's 
 duties to 
 
 " What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." 
 
 He was keenly interested in the subject himself, as day by day 
 he read and meditated on it in his quiet home at Binfield ; and 
 so were his acquaintances. He took for granted that the town, 
 the coffee-houses, and the drawing-rooms would also be interested : 
 and he was not disappointed. The work excellently served its 
 primary purpose of giving pleasure to the town. 
 
 He expounded many commonplaces so admirably, so perfectly, 
 so happily, that ever since they have been quoted in the form 
 he gave them, e.g. : 
 
 "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." 1. 625. 
 
 " The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, 
 With loads of learned lumber in his head." 1. 612. 
 
 " Good-nature and good-sense must ever join. 
 
 To err is human ; to forgive, divine." 1. 525. 
 " True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, 
 
 As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance." 1. 362. 
 
 "Expression is the dress of thought." 1. 318. 
 " 'Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call, 
 
 But the joint force and full result of all." 1. 245. 
 "A little learning is a dang'rous thing." 1. 215. 
 " From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part, 
 
 And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art." 1. 152. 
 
 Now a writer who makes expressions by means of smart epigram, 
 startling instances, and brilliant illustration his chief aims, and 
 chooses topics of knowledge and opinion rather than feeling, is 
 not, strictly speaking, a poet, even if he writes in verse. We 
 
 c
 
 34 POPE. 
 
 
 do not call him a poet, but a rhetorician. We call a man a 
 
 poet who touches our feelings by means of words, as a painter 
 or a sculptor does by painted canvas or chiselled stone. But 
 rhetoricians in verse are capable of giving us much delight, 
 by presenting our beliefs in new and unexpected lights, and 
 this was what Pope did in his "Essay on Criticism." We do 
 not always find ourselves in agreement with the opinions ex- 
 pressed, but the expression is always vivid and often most 
 felicitous. 
 
 Johnson criticises Pope's precept regarding the use of " repre- 
 sentative metre," as stated in the lines : 
 
 " Tis not enough no harshness gives offence, 
 The sound should seem an echo to the sense. ' 
 
 " This notion," says Johnson, "has produced, in my opinion, many 
 wild conceits and imaginary beauties. All that can furnish this 
 representation are the sounds of the words considered singly, and 
 the time in which they are pronounced." 
 
 Here he makes the mistake of assuming that the rhythm is 
 determined solely by the number of accented and unaccented 
 syllables by the pauses and the syllables in and out of accent. 
 He quotes a passage in which the numbers are the same as in 
 Pope's translation of Homer's description of Sisyphus rolling the 
 stone up the hill. In the description of Sisyphus the sound 
 seems adapted to the sense, and yet here is another set of verses 
 in the same number, which do not convey the same feeling of 
 effort. Johnson argues that the reason must be, simply that the 
 subject is different ; the numbers are the same, but the meaning 
 being different, we estimate the sound by the meaning. "The 
 mind often governs the ear, and the sounds are estimated by their 
 meaning." Johnson forgets that the quantity of the vowels and 
 the difficulty of the consonants affect the rhythm. 
 
 If I am to spend so much time over Pope's early poems, how am 
 I to cover in twenty lectures the poetry of the four Georges ? I 
 can, of course, in such a short course, attempt only to give you 
 some idea of the leading artistic aims of poetry in that period, the 
 poetic ideals, what the poets tried to do, what we are to look for 
 in their poetry, and how they came to have these aims. And upon
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE ANCIENT POETS. 35 
 
 these inquiries we get much light from these early poems of Pope, 
 because they were written under the direct influence of the arbiters 
 of good taste in writing in his time. In the " Essay on Criticism " 
 he puts these standards of good taste into brilliant words, and so 
 helped to perpetuate their influence. But their influence was 
 exerted in many forms that could not be put into words, because 
 the men of the time were not conscious of them. 
 
 One of the favourite ways of accounting for the barrenness of 
 the eighteenth century is to say that the poets, influenced by Pope, 
 were subject to narrow and exclusive rules of criticism, that they 
 were slavishly subservient to the ancients, writing only according 
 to these precedents, and that, consequently, their poetry was dull 
 and artificial and wanting in nature. I believe this to be a shallow 
 theory, held in entire ignorance of the great forces that control and 
 shape the poetry of living generations of men. Reverence for the 
 ancients, more particularly for the Eoman ancients, Virgil and 
 Horace, was undoubtedly an influence in the time of Pope ; but it 
 was only a slight influence then, and in the subsequent generations 
 of the century it was not an influence at all. 
 
 Let us see what exactly was meant by this subservience to the 
 ancients. At first sight it would look as if Pope had no reverence 
 for the ancients, but proposed to himself quite an independent 
 standard namely, Nature : 
 
 " First follow Nature, and your judgment frame 
 By her just standard, which is still the same : 
 Unerring Nature still divinely bright, 
 One clear, unchang'd, and universal light, 
 Life, force, and beauty must to all impart, 
 At once the source, and end, and test of Art. 
 Art from that fund each just supply provides ; 
 Works without show, and without pomp presides." 
 
 But, if we read on, we come upon several passages that seem to 
 betray a slavish admiration for the ancients : 
 
 " You then whose judgment the right course would steer, 
 Know well each Ancient's proper character ; 
 His fable, subject, scope in ev'ry page ; 
 Religion, country, genius of his age ; 
 Without all these at once before your eyes, 
 Cavil you may, but never criticise.
 
 36 POPE. 
 
 Be Homer's works your study and delight, 
 
 Bead them by day, and meditate by night ; 
 
 Thence form your judgment, thence your maxims bring, 
 
 And trace the Muses upward to their spring. 
 
 Still with itself compar'd, his text peruse, 
 
 And let your comment be the Mantuan muse. 
 
 When first young Maro in his boundless mind 
 
 A work t' outlast immortal Rome designed, 
 
 Nature and Homer were, he found, the same. 
 Convinced, amaz'd, he checks the bold design ; 
 And rules as strict his labour'd work confine, 
 As if the Stagirite o'erlook'd each line. 
 Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem ; 
 To copy Nature is to copy them." 
 
 Again, in speaking of the breach of these rules, he declares : 
 
 " But though the ancients thus their rules invade 
 (As kings dispense with laws themselves have made), 
 Moderns, beware ! or if you must offend 
 Against the precept, ne'er transgress its end ; 
 Let it be seldom, and compell'd by need ; 
 And have, at least, their precedent to plead. 
 The critic else proceeds without remorse, 
 Seizes your fame, and puts his laws in force. " 
 
 The case now seems very strong for Pope's subservience to the 
 ancients. This is strengthened by looking at the general scope 
 of his works. He spent ten years in translating Homer; ten 
 more in professedly imitating Horace. 
 
 But look a little deeper, and you will see that Pope craftily 
 qualifies his subservience to the ancients. Their rules must be 
 observed, but then their rules are very vague and general ; there 
 is much in the poet's art that they cannot teach ; and even if they 
 are broken, success justifies the transgressor : 
 
 " Some beauties yet no precepts can declare, 
 For there's a happiness as well as care. 
 Music resembles poetry, in each 
 Are nameless graces which no methods teach, 
 And which a master-hand alone can reach. 
 If where the rules not far enough extend 
 (Since rules were made but to promote their end),
 
 A HIT AT MECHANICAL CRITICS. 37 
 
 Some lucky license answer to the full 
 
 Th' intent propos'd, that license is a rule. 
 
 Thus Pegasus, a nearer way to take, 
 
 May boldly deviate from the common track ; 
 
 From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part, 
 
 And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art." 
 
 This is surely a sufficient declaration of independence. Obey their 
 rules when it suits you. 
 
 But then Pope goes on to allow this license only to the ancients. 
 " Moderns, beware," he says, and for this interdict on the moderns 
 he is severely censured by Mr Elwin. If Mr Elwin had had a little 
 more nimbleness of spirit, and consequently been able to under- 
 stand the quick and subtle wit and sly humour of Pope, he might 
 have seen that Pope was here laughing in his sleeve at mechanical 
 
 critics : 
 
 " I know there are, to whose presumptuous thoughts 
 Those freer beauties, ev'u in them, seem faults. 
 
 Most critics, fond of some subservient art, 
 Still make the whole depend upon a part : 
 They talk of principles, but notions prize, 
 And all to one lov'd folly sacrifice. 
 
 Thus critics of less judgment than caprice, 
 Curious not knowing, not exact but nice, 
 Form short ideas ; and offend in arts 
 (As most in manners) by a love to parts." 
 
 Pope, then, left himself full liberty to depart from the ancients 
 when he chose and he took it. Even his translation of Homer 
 was a very free translation. " A very fine poem, Mr Pope, but it 
 is not Homer," was Bentley's remark. His imitations of Horace 
 are among his most original poems, according to Pattison; and 
 everybody will agree that they are most original. 
 
 Pope's submission to the ancient masters was not slavish or 
 subservient. He studied them as great masters ought to be studied 
 when they are not read simply for enjoyment. He studied them 
 with a mind open to receive impulse and suggestion from their 
 example. 
 
 Were Pope's eighteenth-century successors slavishly submissive 
 to the ancients ? Pope died in 1 744, when there was more than
 
 38 POPE. 
 
 half of the century to run. I will not weary you with quotations, 
 but I could quote many passages from Akenside, Gray, Churchill, 
 to show that Pope's successors exalted Shakespeare, who broke 
 many of Aristotle's rules, 
 
 " Above all Greek, above all Roman fame." 
 
 I have quoted already one passage from Hayley, late in the century, 
 feeblest of poets, to show how little they were repressed by the rules 
 of the ancients. Valiant protestation of contempt for rules is not 
 always a sign of strength, but I don't think it was the rules of the 
 ancients that kept down eighteenth-century poetry. A mechanical- 
 minded ecclesiastical place-hunter Mason tried to write tragedies 
 on the Greek model and failed. Was it wit ? An outrageous 
 admiration for brilliant expression, for highly polished epigram 1 
 Well, even Pope did not consider that wit was everything : 
 
 " Some to conceit alone their taste confine, 
 And glitt'ring thoughts struck out at ev'ry line ; 
 Pleas'd with a work where nothing's just or fit ; 
 One glaring chaos and wild heap of wit. 
 Poets, like painters, thus unskill'd to trace 
 The naked nature and the living grace, 
 With gold and jewels cover ev'ry part, 
 And hide with ornaments their want of art. 
 
 Others for language all their care express, 
 
 And value books, as women men, for dress : 
 
 Their praise is still, the style is excellent ; 
 
 The sense they humbly take upon content. 
 
 Words are like leaves ; and where they most abound, 
 
 Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found." 
 
 And after Pope we do not have much wit. There is nothing better 
 than the coarse vigour of Churchill and the ribald buffoonery of 
 Wolcot (Peter Pindar). 
 
 I don't think we can say that the eighteenth century failed in 
 poetry because the energies of its verse-makers were directed to 
 rhetorical brilliancy. Hayley and Mason and Darwin, the leading 
 poets in the boyhood of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Scott, 
 were not rhetorically brilliant ; their rhetoric was ineffective ; they 
 were simply dull ; and we can hardly say that they failed as poets
 
 ALLEGED MONOTONY OF HEROIC COUPLETS. 39 
 
 because they tried to be rhetoricians. They would probably have 
 been dull in any case. 
 
 Another way of accounting for the eighteenth-century barrenness 
 is to ascribe it to the monotony of the versification. Macaulay 
 speaks as if every aspiring poet thought couplets the only permis- 
 sible form. Pope used only the couplet, and, it is often said, 
 brought it to such mechanical perfection that any versifier after 
 him could turn out smooth, and finished, and melodious couplets, 
 with as much ease as a machine cuts wood into blocks of a given 
 size. Pope imposed restrictions upon himself ; such as that each 
 couplet must end with a break in the sense, that an extra syllable 
 must be admitted only in one place, and that the metrical pauses 
 must fall only in certain places. The eighteenth-century poets 
 followed him till the world became weary of heroic couplets. 
 
 This theory also will not bear examination. Couplets are not 
 necessarily monotonous, witness Chaucer's " Knight's Tale," Mar- 
 lowe's "Hero and Leander," Keats's "Endymion," Swinburne's 
 "Tristram and Iseult." Monotony in the case of the couplet does 
 not arise from the poet putting himself under strict conditions. 
 We do not find Pope's couplets monotonous, if we are interested in 
 the subject. He leaves himself room enough for variety within 
 his limits. 
 
 The poems of Hoole, and Hayley, and Mickle, and Mason, and 
 Darwin are monotonous in rhythm, not because they wrote 
 couplets, but because they wrote bad couplets, and would have 
 been equally monotonous if they had written in any other stanza. 
 No doubt writing in a strictly fettered rhythm imposes a greater 
 strain upon the poet; but if he has power to stir our feelings 
 profoundly, the regularity of the rhythm, keeping the passion of 
 his theme within bounds, gives him a stronger hold upon us. If 
 there is no intense life in what he has to say to us, there is of 
 course nothing to moderate ; and he will not interest us any the 
 more whatever gymnastic feats he performs in the way of rhythm, 
 any more than a musician can hold us spellbound by flourishes from 
 top to bottom of the scale. 
 
 Besides, the eighteenth-century poets did not, as a matter of 
 fact, enslave themselves to the couplet as the only permissible 
 form.
 
 40 TOPE. 
 
 It was not slavish submission to the ancients, nor to the heroic 
 couplet, nor to the demand for rhetorical brilliancy, that kept so 
 much of the poetry at a low level. We are only scratching on the 
 surface of an explanation when we adopt any such theory. Nor 
 will it do to say that the eighteenth century was an age of prose ; 
 that its mission was to form the prose style of English literature. 
 We wish to know why it was an age of prose why it adopted this 
 mission. Nor will it do to say that it held a false theory of poetic 
 diction. We wish to get at the feeling that made them satisfied 
 with their conventional diction as the right thing. 
 
 We must look away from such details if we are to understand the 
 eighteenth century, and look at poetic productions as wholes. 
 Take the works of the leaders of the great poetic revival of this 
 century Wordsworth, Scott, Byron. In what broad respects do 
 they differ from all the works of the eighteenth century 1 The 
 form of their poems, in a large sense of the word, is new, and 
 their vein of feeling is new. They treat new themes in a new 
 way, and with a new spirit. Above all, they give serious expres- 
 sion to their own personal emotions. Consider the new form of 
 the " Lay of the Last Minstrel," the first genuinely popular poem, 
 interesting to all classes, between the time of Queen Anne and the 
 nineteenth century a metrical romance regularly constructed, 
 with perfect unity of action, incidents all helping forward the 
 progress of the story through various complications to a denouement. 
 No such poem had ever been written before ; it was a new form 
 in poetry classical regularity of form, combined with romantic 
 freedom of accident. Then the spirit of the poem the serious 
 epic treatment of the necromancing lady of Branksome Hall, the 
 Goblin page, the wizard, and the bold moss-trooper. We have 
 nothing like this in the eighteenth century. In Pope's time such 
 personages would either have been burlesqued or treated with 
 affected respect, such as a grown-up person would use towards 
 fairies and hobgoblins in telling stories about them to a child. 
 Taken as a whole, in form and spirit, the " Lay " was a new thing 
 in literature. The same may be said of " Childe Harold." Here 
 also we find a new kind of epic, such as the general writers on 
 epic poetry had never contemplated, the hero of which is not a 
 mythical king like Prince Arthur, or a personified virtue moving
 
 DEFECTS OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY. 41 
 
 in Faerylancl like Spenser's Red Cross Knight, or Guyon, or Brito- 
 mart, but a modern man moving in modern scenes. Wordsworth 
 also is new in form as well as in spirit. No poet before him had 
 dared to shut himself up in the country and choose, as the subject 
 of his verse, his own personal emotions and reflections as aroused 
 by the moving spectacle of sky and mountain and glen, and the 
 homely life of ordinary rustics. He wrote a kind of pastoral 
 poetry that had not been legislated for by the technical lawgivers 
 of the art. 
 
 The serious expression in new forms of intense and generous 
 personal emotion is a broad characteristic of the nineteenth- 
 century revival. Now we can understand why the poets of the 
 eighteenth century failed in the artistic expression of serious and 
 generous feeling. The main defects of their poetry can be traced 
 to one source the character of the audience for whose judgment 
 they had respect, by whose ideals they were controlled, who were 
 to them the arbiters of taste. The standard of taste in the time 
 of Queen Anne, and till near the end of the century, was a self- 
 consciously aristocratic and refined society, self-conscious of their 
 superior manners and superior culture, and disposed to treat the 
 ways of the vulgar with amused contempt. This, I think, can be 
 shown to be at the root of the striving after wit and the respect 
 for established models, and the false theory of poetic diction in 
 serious poetry. Fear of being vulgar, fear of being singular, 
 these were the real nightmares that sat upon eighteenth-century 
 poetry.
 
 42 
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 POPE con tinued. 
 
 INFLUENCE OF IDEAS ON POETBY SPIRIT OF THE AGE INFLUENCE OF 
 SOCIETY ON POPE GAY'S BALLADS. 
 
 I AM not sure that you all followed what I said in my last lecture 
 about the influences that formed the poetic ideals of the eighteenth 
 century. By the poetic ideals of a generation I mean the ideas 
 prevalent among those interested in poetry as to what poetry 
 should be the sentiments that they wish to find in poetry, the 
 intellectual, or moral, or emotional cravings for which they seek 
 satisfaction in poetry. But, you may ask, How can this be said 
 to make poetry ? Is it not the poet who makes the poetry ? Yes ; 
 but he makes it in harmony with or, if he is a defiant man, in 
 antagonism to the poetic ideals of the men with whom he mixes 
 and for whom he writes. You have heard of the spirit of the age 
 an intangible something that sets its mark upon all the works of a 
 generation of men, their books, their architecture, their dress, their 
 commercial enterprises, their institutions. What I mean by the 
 poetic ideal is the working of this spirit upon poetry. I am in- 
 clined to think myself that people sometimes speak of this spirit 
 of the age in too unqualified terms, as if everything came under 
 its influence. Now many things escape its influence, as you recog- 
 nise when you speak of things or persons being behind the age ; 
 it is only the most distinctive products of the age that feel its shap- 
 ing, its generative force. And besides, there may be more than 
 one spirit in a generation, each with its own range of influence, 
 handed down, it may be, from past times, and kept alive by sym-
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE AGE ON POETRY. 43 
 
 pathy with them, or engendered by the peculiar circumstances of 
 the circle of people whom it pervades. Go into churches of 
 widely different sects, for example, and you seem to breathe differ- 
 ent atmospheres a different spirit pervades them ; the " full force 
 and joint result " of ornament and ritual and sermon is somehow 
 different. You might find it hard, if you fixed on details, to say 
 where the difference lies ; the same sermon that is preached in one 
 might have been preached in the other ; the same hymns might 
 have been sung; yet we feel under the influence of a different 
 spirit. And further, these various churches have probably less in 
 common with each other, though they mix in the same age, than 
 they have with the churches of past ages, each of them perpetuat- 
 ing a traditional spirit of its own, and perhaps making it a point 
 of honour to keep that unchanged. 
 
 The same holds in poetry. A poet writes under the influence of 
 a certain spirit, a certain social medium, which shapes and colours 
 what he writes. To discover this we must look not only at the 
 general character of his age, but also at the character of his imme- 
 diate audience, of the circle in which he moves. We must study 
 his relations with them, whether they are relations of harmony, as 
 in the case of Pope, or relations of antagonism, as in the case of 
 Byron. And we can't expect to get at this subtle spirit by study- 
 ing isolated details, and arguing about them. My object in last 
 lecture was to impress this fact upon you in the case of eighteenth- 
 century poetry. There is a something in the spirit of eighteenth- 
 century poetry which the critics of this century, broadly speaking, 
 do not like. They complain that the eighteenth century is barren 
 of true poetry. And they often set to work to account for this by 
 fastening on details of form, and diction, and imagery, and metre. 
 Some say the barrenness is due to subservience to ancient rules, 
 others to an exclusive ambition after witty expression, others to a 
 slavish attachment to one kind of metre. 
 
 Now, in the first place, I think they exaggerate the barrenness of 
 the century. It is often spoken of as if there were no good poetry 
 then, whereas it was only comparatively deficient in certain kinds. 
 And, in the second place, we do not satisfactorily account for the 
 deficiency in certain kinds, if we look at details by themselves. 
 We must look at them in connection with the spirit of the society
 
 44 POPE. 
 
 for which Pope wrote. The spirit of this society accounts not only 
 for much that was in Pope's poetry, but also for much that was in 
 the two following generations, because the traditions of this society 
 were maintained after Pope's time, its spirit was transmitted as the 
 dominant spirit in literature till the end of the century. There 
 were revolts against it in the poetry of Thomson and Dyer, and 
 Gray and Collins, and Burns and Cowper, but, on the whole, it 
 maintained its hold. Its supremacy was not, indeed, shaken till 
 Wordsworth and Byron raised the standard of rebellion, and the 
 majority at once in fact, and gradually in open avowal, went over 
 to them. 
 
 The society that imposed the laws of taste in poetry in Pope's 
 time was, as I said, an aristocratic society, self-consciously so, as it 
 could hardly fail to be when high and low, rich and poor, were 
 marked off from each other by such conspicuous differences of dress 
 and manners, as they moved about in their daily life. It was not 
 only self-consciously but superciliously aristocratic. Sympathy 
 with the simple feelings of unfashionable folk was rare in those 
 days. Now in such a society one ruling motive except, of course, 
 among persons of natural hardihood or assured position in it is 
 fear of vulgarity, resulting in a disposition to treat as vulgar what- 
 ever is done by people outside the pale of fashion. Many details 
 might be urged against this view, but I think it must be allowed 
 that this is a very prevalent motive. 
 
 Let us see, then, how this prevalent motive would operate on 
 poetry, supposing the poet to be under its influence. It would 
 affect both his choice of subjects and his manner of treating them. 
 Nature, Pope said, is "at once the source and test of art." But 
 Nature is a vague term, which each person interprets as meaning his 
 own nature, and that must always be interpenetrated by the spirit 
 of a man's social surroundings, the spirit prevalent among his com- 
 panions. The Nature from which Pope chose his themes was 
 either human nature, as he saw it in fashionable society, or human 
 nature so treated as not to offend their susceptibilities. Pope's 
 conception of Nature did not lead him to go, like Wordsworth, to 
 simple country-people for his subjects, and for his diction to " the 
 natural language of man in a state of intense emotion." " True 
 wit," he said by wit meaning poetic expression is " Nature to
 
 POETICAL BATHOS. 45 
 
 advantage dressed." This casual metaphor "in the "Essay on 
 Criticism " takes us nearer to the centre of Pope's ideal of poetic 
 expression, which was also the ideal of his age, than any other 
 single passage in his writings. 
 
 Let us take an example of what a refined contemporary of his, 
 writing in the ' Guardian ' about Philips's " Pastorals," considered 
 the dressing of Nature to advantage : 
 
 " I will yet add another mark, which may be observed very often 
 in the above-named poets, which is agreeable to the character of 
 shepherds, and nearly allied to superstition, I mean the use of 
 proverbial sayings. I take the common similitudes in pastoral to 
 be of the proverbial order, which are so frequent, that it is needless 
 and would be tiresome to quote them. I shall only take notice 
 upon this head, that it is a nice piece of art to raise a proverb 
 above the vulgar style, and still keep it easy and unaffected. Thus 
 the old wish, ' God rest his soul,' is finely turned 
 
 ' Then gentle Sidney liv'd, the shepherd's friend ; 
 Eternal blessings on his shade attend.' " 
 
 So easy a metamorphosis as this Pope would have despised, for 
 the poetic dress of nature is esteemed according to the poet's 
 originality and ingenuity in constructing it. Pope, on the con- 
 trary, would have required such an expression as only a man of 
 genius could devise after much toil. In a ' Treatise on the Art of 
 Sinking in Poetry ' one of the miscellanies published conjointly 
 by Pope, Swift, and Arbuthnot you will find that Pope ridicules 
 simple expressions and the raising of language above the vulgar 
 style, enforcing his opinion by specimens of bathos culled from the 
 poets of the time : e.g., " Who knocks at the door ? " becomes when 
 raised above tJie vulgar 
 
 " For whom thus rudely pleads my loud-tongued gate, 
 That he may enter ? " 
 
 or Theobald's elevation of " Open the letter " into the sounding 
 line, " Wax ! render up thy trust." 
 
 If you look at Pope's poetry closely, you find that though he 
 avoided easy elevations he did think it necessary to use language 
 which now seems affected and insincere. In this you see him in-
 
 46 POPE. 
 
 fluenced by the spirit of his age. In his " Messiah," published in 
 the 'Spectator' (May 14, 1712), and considered by critics of the 
 time to be a very fine poem and an improvement on Isaiah, whose 
 prophecy we think grand in its simplicity, we clearly see this in- 
 fluence at work. For example, in Isaiah (xli. 19) we have, "I 
 will set in the desert the fir tree, and the pine, and the box tree 
 together," while Pope describes the change as follows : 
 
 " Waste, sandy valleys, once perplex'd with thorn, 
 The spicy fir and shapely box adorn. " 
 
 For Isaiah's phrase " the sucking child " Pope has got " the smil- 
 ing infant," and the whole poem is full of similar examples. So, too, 
 we find many examples of bad taste in his translation of Homer, 
 for Pope considered it necessary through the whole of that work 
 to dress Homer to advantage for the fashionable society of Queen 
 Anne's time. 
 
 That society would have ridiculed Achilles weeping by the side 
 of Thetis, and accordingly Pope " elevates " the passage thus : 
 
 " Far in the deep recesses of the main, 
 Where aged Ocean holds his watery reign, 
 The goddess-mother heard. The waves divide ; 
 And, like a mist, she rose above the tide : 
 Beheld him mourning on the naked shores ; 
 And thus the sorrows of his soul explores." 
 
 Pope has not rendered the touching simplicity which Homer 
 achieves without infringing, to our modern ideas, on the dignity of 
 his heroic characters. In the case of minor poets of the time this 
 elevation of diction is not always achieved with the same taste 
 that Pope master of language showed. In the translation of 
 the 'Odyssey,' in which Pope was assisted by two coadjutors, the 
 magnifying of the incidents is less skilfully managed and the affec- 
 tation becomes more apparent. We may cite for this purpose that 
 passage in the sixth book of the ' Odyssey ' where Odysseus dis- 
 covers Nausicaa and her maidens at the stream. The affectation 
 in the poetical translation is apparent when we compare it with 
 the prose version by Butcher and Lang: "Then they took the 
 garments from the wain, in their hands, and bore them to the black
 
 PROSE AND POETICAL TRANSLATIONS COMPARED. 47 
 
 water, and briskly trod them down in the trenches, in busy rivalry. 
 Now when they had washed and cleansed all the stains, they spread 
 all out in order along the shore of the deep, even where the sea, in 
 beating on the coast, washed the pebbles clean. Then having 
 bathed, and anointed them well with olive oil, they took their mid- 
 day meal on the river's banks, waiting till the clothes should dry 
 in the brightness of the sun. Anon, when they were satisfied with 
 food, the maidens and the princess, they fell to playing at ball, 
 casting away their tires, and among them Nausicaa of the white 
 arms began the song." Very different this from the grandiloquent 
 version by Brome, which Pope approved by using it as his own : 
 
 " Then emulous, the royal robes they lave, 
 And plunge the vestures in the cleansing wave 
 (The vestures cleaus'd, o'erspread the shelly sand, 
 Their snowy lustre whitens all the strand !). 
 Then with a short repast relieve their toil, 
 And o'er their limbs diffuse ambrosial oil ; 
 And while the robes imbibe the solar ray, 
 O'er the green mead the sporting virgins play 
 (Their shining veils unbound). Along the skies, 
 Toss'd, and retoss'd, the ball incessant flies, 
 They sport, they feast ; Nausicaa lifts her voice, 
 And, warbling sweet, makes earth and heaven rejoice." 
 
 With the primitive enjoyment described by Homer the poet did 
 not evidently sympathise. The character either of the poet or of 
 his audience was at fault : either the poet was insensible to the 
 charms of such passages, or his audience would have considered 
 them coarse. When the Queen Anne poets wrote for the stage 
 which must appeal to the sympathies of a wider circle and not 
 for fashionable society, you find that the art of simple writing was 
 not lost. Half-consciously the poets wrote differently for different 
 audiences. True, Addison's " Cato " is a splendid example of the 
 stilted style of the period, but there are here and there decided 
 exceptions. 
 
 Gay's songs, in plays addressed, as plays must be to succeed, to 
 a wider circle than the fashionable society of the time, show that 
 the art of simple writing was not lost. In " 'Twas when the seas
 
 48 POPE. 
 
 were roaring" (from " What d'ye call It ? " 1715), and in " Black 
 Eyed Susan," occur such lines as these : 
 
 " Cease, cease, thou cruel ocean, 
 
 Aud let my lover rest. 
 Ah, what's thy troubled motion 
 To that within my breast ? " 
 
 " So the sweet lark, high poised in air, 
 
 Shuts close his pinions to his breast 
 (If chance his mate's shrill cry he hear), 
 And drops at once into her nest. " 
 
 Gay had more of a gift for simple, fluent, easy, melodious song 
 than any of his contemporaries. Yet, even in these, there is a 
 touch of burlesque, an accent of insincerity in the poet's assumed 
 sympathy with the simple feelings of simple folk. In his " Pas- 
 torals" Gay made broad fun out of the superstitious ignorance 
 and coarse sentiments of rustics : he had no eye, as Wordsworth 
 had, for their higher modes of feeling ; he saw only the rude de- 
 fects incident to the hardness and narrowness of their lives, and 
 these amused him. They amused fashionable people, and Gay, 
 a fat, good-natured, simple-hearted man, petted and caressed and 
 pensioned by great people all through his literary life, quite fell 
 in with their humour. 
 
 There is one kind of poetry, mock-heroic or heroic-comical, for 
 which the elevated Queen Anne style is peculiarly suited in 
 which its affectation and insincerity are not felt as faults, because 
 affectation and insincerity are part of the humour in which the 
 poet writes. Pope's poetic diction is seen in one of its happiest 
 applications in the "Rape of the Lock," where trivial incidents, 
 and little anxieties and interests, and pretty frivolities are pur- 
 posely treated as matters of vast moment. Here, also, he found 
 a theme well within the interests of his audience. I presume that 
 you have all read this charming poem, and have learnt from your 
 edition of it how it originated in a young lord's cutting off a 
 lock of a lady's hair ; how this led to a coolness between the two 
 families ; how Pope was asked to write a poem on the subject, to 
 smooth over the quarrel ; how the poem appeared in 1712, and was
 
 M. TAINE'S CRITICISM OF POPE. 49 
 
 expanded before 1714 to the form in which we have it. It is a 
 different sort of theme from the technical essays, and the transla- 
 tions and imitations of Virgil and Ovid and Chaucer, in which 
 Pope had hitherto exerted himself, a theme directly suggested by 
 the fashionable life of the time, by human nature as it lived and 
 moved in the society of Queen Anne's days. Pope had a model 
 in Boileau's " Lutrin," a model as regarded the form, but the sub- 
 ject was fresh and new ; it came to him from breathing life, and 
 was not laboriously sought. 
 
 Pope has been charged with gross impoliteness in writing such 
 a poem ; indeed, M. Taiue found in it a coarseness akin to Swift's. 
 "Pope," Avrote M. Taine, "dedicates his poem to Mrs Arabella 
 Fermor with every kind of compliment. The truth is, he is not 
 polite ; a Frenchwoman would have sent him back his book, and 
 advised him to learn manners; for one commendation of her 
 beauty she would find ten sarcasms upon her frivolity. ... In 
 England it was not found too rude. Mrs Arabella Fermor was so 
 pleased with the poem that she gave away copies of it. ... 
 But the strangest thing is, that this trifling is, for Frenchmen at 
 least, no badinage at all. It is not at all like lightness or gaiety. 
 Dorat, Gresset, would have been stupefied and shocked by it. 
 We remain cold under its most brilliant hits. Now and then at 
 most a crack of the whip arouses us, but not to laughter. These 
 caricatures seem strange to us, but do not amuse. The wit is 
 no wit : all is calculated, combined, artificially prepared ; we 
 expect flashes of lightning, but at the last moment they do not 
 descend. . . . We say to ourselves now that we are in China : 
 that so far from Paris and Voltaire we must be surprised at 
 nothing; that these folks have ears different from ours; and that 
 a Pekin mandarin vastly relishes kettle-music. Finally, we com- 
 prehend that even in this correct age and this artificial poetry, 
 the old style of imagination exists ; that it is nourished as before, 
 by oddities and contrasts ; and that taste, in spite of all culture, 
 will never become acclimatised ; that incongruities, far from shock- 
 ing, delight it ; that it is insensible to French sweetness and re- 
 finements ; that it needs a succession of expressive figures, unex- 
 pected and grinning, to pass before it ; that it prefers this coarse 
 carnival to delicate insinuations ; that Pope belongs to his country, 
 
 D
 
 50 POPE. 
 
 in spite of his classical polish and his studied elegancies ; and that 
 his unpleasant and vigorous fancy is akin to that of Swift." 
 
 This poem, which English critics of all schools agree in praising 
 as a masterpiece of light, airy, gay extravagance marum sal, as 
 Addison called it strikes M. Taine as a piece of harsh, scornful, 
 indelicate buffoonery. For him it is a mere succession of oddities 
 and contrasts, of expressive figures, unexpected and grinning, an 
 example of English insensibility to French sweetness and refine- 
 ment. What especially offends his delicate sense is the bearish- 
 ness of Pope's laughter at an elegant and beautiful woman of 
 fashion. Pope describes with a grin on his face all the particulars 
 of the elaborate toilet with which Belinda prepared her beauty 
 for conquest, and all the artificial airs and graces with which she 
 sought to bewitch the heart of susceptible man. The Frenchman 
 listens without sympathy, without appreciation, with the con- 
 temptuous wonder of a well-bred man at clownish buffoonery. 
 He sees nothing to laugh at in a woman's spending three hours 
 over her toilet. Is she not preparing a beautiful picture for him ? 
 She cannot do this without powders and washes and paint-pots. 
 What is there to laugh at in this ? It is a mere matter of fact. 
 The entire surrender of the female heart to little artifices for little 
 ends does not strike him as ludicrous. His delight in the finished 
 picture, the elegant graceful captivating woman, hallows every 
 ingredient used in the making of it. It is not polite to laugh at 
 a woman.
 
 51 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 A GROUP OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 THOMSON EARLY LIFE DESCRIPTIVE POETRY GENERALLY " WINTER "- 
 THOMSON'S POSITION IN POETRY DYER AND SOMERVILLE. 
 
 BETWEEN the end of Pope's second period and the beginning of 
 his third a new poet appeared, of a very different vein. 
 
 It was in the last year of the reign of George I. that this fresh 
 and powerful voice made itself heard in literature. A respectable 
 clergyman of literary tastes, Mr Whatley, chanced to take up 
 a volume of poems lying on the counter of Millan the publisher. 
 The poems had been published for some weeks, but had attracted 
 no attention. As he turned over the leaves Mr Whatley's at- 
 tention was roused; before he laid the book down attention 
 had developed into enthusiasm, and he rushed off to the coffee- 
 houses to proclaim the discovery of a new poet. 
 
 The new poet was James Thomson, a young man of twenty-six, 
 just as old as the century, who had been born and bred in very 
 different circumstances from Pope, and whose poetry consequently 
 derived its tone from very different influences. Consider the 
 life of Thomson up to the time when " Winter," the first of his 
 poems on the 'Seasons,' was published in 1726, and you will 
 see that a very different strain was to be expected from him. 
 His father was a minister in the Scotch Lowlands minister of the 
 parish of Southdean in Roxburghshire. The extraordinary death of 
 this gentleman, when his son was in his eighteenth year, is signifi- 
 cant both of the superstitious atmosphere in which the poet was edu-
 
 52 A GROUP OF EiaHTEENTII-CENTUEY POETS. 
 
 cated and of the sensitiveness of the organisation that he inherited. 
 There was a ghost in the parish of Southdean, and the minister 
 was sent for to lay it ; but no sooner had he begun his exorcism 
 than it seemed to him that he was struck on the head with a 
 ball of fire, and he never recovered from the shock. A man of 
 such susceptibility and overpowering vividness of imagination 
 was fitting father to a poet. He had literary neighbours also, 
 like Pope's father, who encouraged his boy in verse -making. 
 There was Mr Biccarton, minister of the neighbouring parish 
 of Hobkirk, who wrote a poem on Winter, and is shown by that 
 fact to have been likely to give the author of the ' Seasons ' an 
 early bias towards the vein of sentiment and reflection that 
 afterwards took possession of him. A neighbouring laird, Sir 
 W. Bennet of Chesters, also took notice of the schoolboy, invited 
 him to spend his summer holidays at his house, and being him- 
 self an amateur of poetry, encouraged him to compose verses. 
 Thomson's juvenile verses must have been very clumsy com- 
 pared with Pope's. We have a specimen of them, published in 
 the ' Edinburgh Miscellany ' in his twentieth year, when he 
 had completed his course of studies in Arts in the University 
 of Edinburgh, in which, while the language is rough, there is 
 a certain force and freshness of vision, an air of sincere delight 
 in country scenes, evidences of unaffected loving observations of 
 country sports. There is a story told of Thomson's unwillingness 
 to leave Tweedside for the University. He was sent to Edin- 
 burgh on horseback with a servant, but was back before the ser- 
 vant, saying he could study as well on the braes of Sou'dean 
 as in Edinburgh. 
 
 To Edinburgh, however, Thomson had to go, and the whole 
 family removed there on the father's sudden death. He was 
 a student in Divinity till 1724, and in October of that year 
 was severely reproved by the Professor for the exuberance of 
 his imagination in an exercise lecture on the iiQth Psalm. In 
 March 1725, armed with introductions from an aristocratic friend 
 of his mother's, the Lady Grizel Baillie, he went in quest of 
 Fortune to London, where a college friend of his, David Mallet, 
 was already settled as tutor in the family of the Duke of Mon- 
 trose. Thomson also obtained a tutorship in the family of
 
 THOMSON'S MOTIVE IN WRITING "WINTER/'' 53 
 
 Lord Binning, son-in-law of his Edinburgh patroness but held 
 it only for a few months. 
 
 It seems to have been in the neighbourhood of Lord Binning' s 
 house at Barnet that the idea of writing a poem on Winter first 
 took shape in Thomson's mind. The approach of winter in 
 1725 found him in circumstances in which he needed all the 
 consolations of a warm imagination. His mother had died a 
 few weeks after he parted from her at Leith, and he was 
 himself in pecuniary straits, with but little prospect of realising 
 the hopes with which he had come to the capital. Eead the 
 opening lines of "Winter" with this knowledge of the poet's 
 circumstances, and you will see how natural it was that such 
 thoughts should come into his mind, as he walked to and from 
 his country lodging, with eyes that had long been accustomed 
 to watch changes in the sky and on the face of the earth 
 turning to them now for relief from his own cheerless-looking 
 future. Very different this from the situation of the artist Pope, 
 for whom poetry was not a consolation for desperate circum- 
 stances, but a business pursued with ease and deliberation. 
 
 " See, Winter comes, to rule the varied year, 
 Sullen and sad, with all his rising train ; 
 Vapours, and clouds, and storms. Be these my theme. 
 These ! that exalt the soul to solemn thought 
 And heavenly musing. Welcome, kindred glooms, 
 Congenial horrors, hail ! with frequent foot, 
 Pleased have I, in my cheerful morn of life, 
 When nursed by careless Solitude I lived 
 And sung of Nature with unceasing joy, 
 Pleased have I wander'd through your rough domain ; 
 Trod the pure virgin-snows, myself as pure ; 
 Heard the winds roar, and the big torrent burst ; 
 Or seen the deep-fermenting tempest brew'd 
 In the grim evening sky. Thus pass'd the time, 
 Till through the lucid chambers of the south 
 Look'd out the joyous Spring, look'd out and smiled." 
 
 Descriptive poetry it seems to me i.e., poetry descriptive of 
 inanimate nature must always be more or less dull unless 
 we have some clue to the mood of the poet. The description 
 then lives for us as an expression of the writer's ruling emotion ;
 
 54 A GROUP OF EIGHTEENTH- CENTURY POETS. 
 
 it acquires human interest. Of course the human interest of 
 Thomson's descriptions is not always due to the colours thrown 
 upon them by his own hopes and fears for himself; it is only 
 passages here and there that have a direct biographical interest. 
 The gloomy notes of the opening of his poem on Winter are 
 only significant of the mood in which he began the poem ; once 
 fairly absorbed in his subject, he seems, as it were, to have been 
 carried on the wings of imagination far above and away from 
 the anxieties of his own life, up into sublime contemplation of 
 the great forces of Nature, and into warm sympathy with the 
 human hardships and enjoyments, horrors and amusements, pe- 
 culiar to the season. When Thomson is called a descriptive 
 poet, it must be remembered that he not merely describes 
 Nature with the minute fidelity of a landscape painter; it is 
 always Nature in its relation to man : the ways and the feelings 
 of man have even greater interest for him than the changing 
 appearances of sky and earth and sea. The secret of his extra- 
 ordinary popularity is that he describes in sonorous and dignified 
 verse not only what all men must see as long as the seasons 
 endure, but also what all men must feel as long as they are 
 affected by the changes of the seasons, and have hearts to feel 
 for one another's joys and pains. 
 
 The poem of "Winter," published in the spring of 1726, leapt 
 at once into popularity. Two editions were exhausted in a few 
 months. The freshness of the poem must have helped it greatly 
 with the fastidious coffee-house critics of the time. Nobody since 
 Milton had handled blank verse with such power. The subject 
 also was fresh ; no poet since Milton had lighted on such a theme 
 for sublimity of imagination and breadth of human interest. It 
 came to Thomson quite spontaneously ; from his own hardships 
 to the general hardships of all living things in winter, and the 
 efforts of man to make the most of the gloomy season, was a 
 natural transition ; and coming to him as a happy thought, the 
 subject was treated with genuine enthusiasm. And if we look at 
 the general structure of the poem, we see another thing that must 
 have struck the critics of the time as a novelty. It was an inno- 
 vation upon the classical structure. It does not follow any prede- 
 termined scheme or plan, beyond beginning with the storms of
 
 THOMSONS METHOD AND STYLE. 55 
 
 early winter, and ending with the thaw that heralds the approach 
 of spring. The poet leaves himself free to digress wherever casual 
 associations may lead him. 
 
 The best way of giving an idea of Thomson's method and style 
 will be to follow the course of this his first, freshest, and most 
 powerful poem. He begins, as I have said, after a short introduc- 
 tion, with a description of the black skies, heavy rains, and floods 
 of early winter : 
 
 " Then comes the father of the tempest forth, 
 Wrapt in black glooms. First joyless rains obscure 
 Drive through the mingling skies with vapour foul ; 
 Dash on the mountain's brow, and shake the woods, 
 That grumbling wave below. The unsightly plain 
 Lies a brown deluge ; as the low-bent clouds 
 Pour flood on flood, yet unexhausted still 
 Combine, and, deepening into night, shut up 
 The day's fair face. . . . 
 
 Wide o'er the brim, with many a torrent swelled, 
 And the mix'd ruin of its banks o'erspread, 
 At last the roused-up river pours along : 
 Resistless, roaring, dreadful, down it comes 
 From the rude mountain, and the mossy wild, 
 Tumbling through rocks abrupt, and sounding far ; 
 Then o'er the sanded valley floating spreads, 
 Calm, sluggish, silent ; till again, constrained 
 Between two meeting hills, it bursts away, 
 When rocks and woods o'erhang the turbid stream ; 
 There gathering triple force, rapid and deep, 
 It boils, and wheels, and foams, and thunders through." 
 
 Then follows the description of a storm, preceded by an invoca- 
 tion to the winds, in the style of personification npw obsolete. It 
 is obsolete ; not so the description of the storm itself. There is a 
 real picture before his mind's eye as he describes ; and he is intent 
 above everything in bodying forth this picture to his reader. 
 Heightening the effect at the end by the addition of superstitious 
 horrors may be said to be conventional : 
 
 " Ye too, ye winds ! that now begin to blow 
 With boisterous sweep, 1 raise my voice to you. 
 Where are your stores, ye powerful beings ! say, 
 Where your aerial magazines reserved, 
 To swell the brooding terrors of the storm ?
 
 56 A GROUP OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 In what far distant region of the sky, 
 
 Hush'd in deep silence, sleep you when 'tis calm ? 
 
 Red fiery streaks 
 
 Begin to flush around. The reeling clouds 
 Stagger with dizzy poise, as doubting yet 
 Which master to obey ; while rising slow, 
 Blank, in the leaden-colour'd east, the moon 
 Wears a wan circle round her blunted horns. 
 
 The cormorant on high 
 
 Wheels from the deep, and screams along the land. 
 Loud shrieks the soaring hern ; and with wild wing 
 The circling sea-fowl cleave the flaky clouds. 
 
 Meanwhile, the mountain billows, to the clouds 
 
 In dreadful tumult swell'd, surge above surge 
 
 Burst into chaos with tremendous roar, 
 
 And anchored navies from their station drive, 
 
 Wild as the winds across the howling waste 
 
 Of mighty waters. . . . 
 
 The whirling tempest raves along the plain ; 
 
 And on the cottage thatch 'd, or lordly roof, 
 
 Keen-fastening, shakes them to the solid base. 
 
 Sleep frighted flies ; and round the rocking dome, 
 
 For entrance eager, howls the savage blast. 
 
 Then too, they say, through all the burdened air, 
 
 Long groans are heard, shrill sounds, and distant sighs 
 
 That, utter'd by the demon of the night, 
 
 Warn the devoted wretch of woe and death." 
 
 Then he imagines the storm to subside at midnight, and gives 
 his midnight reflections : 
 
 " Nature's king, who oft 
 Amid tempestuous darkness dwells alone, 
 And on the wings of the careering wind 
 Walks dreadfully serene, commands a calm ; 
 Then straight, air, sea, and earth are hush'd at once. 
 
 Now, while the drowsy world lies lost in sleep, 
 Let me associate with the serious Night, 
 And Contemplation, her sedate compeer ; 
 Let me shake off the intrusive cares of day, 
 And lay the meddling senses all aside." 
 
 Next comes his famous description of a snow-storm, followed by 
 his touching narrative of the shepherd lost in the snow :
 
 DESCRIPTION OF A SNOW-STORM. 57 
 
 " As thus the snows arise ; and foul, and fierce, 
 All Winter drives along the darken'd air ; 
 In his own loose-revolving fields the swain 
 Disaster'd stands ; sees other hills ascend, 
 Of unknown, joyless brow ; and other scenes 
 Of horrid prospect shag the trackless plain. 
 Nor finds the river, nor the forest, hid 
 Beneath the formless wild ; but wanders on 
 From hill to dale, still more and more astray ; 
 Impatient flouncing through the drifted heaps, 
 Stung with the thoughts of home ; the thoughts of home 
 Rush on his nerves, and call their vigour forth 
 In many a vain attempt. 
 
 Down he sinks 
 
 Beneath the shelter of the shapeless drift, 
 Thinking o'er all the bitterness of death, 
 Mixed with the tender anguish Nature shoots 
 Through the wrung bosom of the dying man ; 
 His wife, his children, and his friends unseen. 
 In vain for him the officious wife prepares 
 The fire fair-blazing and the vestment warm ; 
 In vain his little children, peeping out 
 Into the mingling storm, demand their sire 
 With tears of artless innocence. Alas ! 
 Nor wife, nor children, more shall he behold, 
 Nor friends, nor sacred home. On every nerve 
 The deadly Winter seizes ; shuts up sense ; 
 And, o'er his inmost vitals creeping cold, 
 Lays him along the snows, a stiffened corse, 
 Stretched out, and bleaching in the northern blast. 
 
 And here can I forget the generous band, 
 
 Who, touched with human woe, redressive searched 
 
 Into the horrors of the gloomy jail ? 
 
 Ye sons of Mercy ! yet resume the search ; 
 Drag forth the legal monsters into light, 
 Wrench from their hands Oppression's iron rod, 
 And bid the cruel feel the pains they give." 
 
 The thought of this pathetic incident leads him to reflect on the 
 broad contrast between rich and poor ; and there next appears in 
 his poem the first notable reference in our literature to the great 
 humanitarian movement for reforming the horrors of prison life, 
 with which the name of Howard is associated. Winter scenes at
 
 58 A GROUP OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 home lead to winter scenes on the Alps, on the Pyrenees and the 
 Apennines, and he draws a thrilling picture of the bands of wolves 
 that prowl over the snowy wastes. Then he passes to his own 
 ideal of enjoyment in winter, in a retreat 
 
 "between the groaning forest and the shore," 
 
 with chosen books and chosen friends. Next he takes up winter 
 enjoyments in the village and in the city, pausing by the way to 
 denounce gaming, and eulogise Lord Chesterfield. From this he 
 returns to a description of Nature under frost, and games on the 
 ice; this leads him to winter in the Arctic regions, the life of 
 the Laplanders, the fate of Sir Hugh Willoughby the Arctic ex- 
 plorer, and the romantic career of Peter the Great. Then follows 
 the thaw, and the concluding reflections on human destiny. 
 
 The best of Thomson's 'Seasons' is undoubtedly "Winter," 
 though " Autumn " probably surpasses it in technical skill. He 
 wrote more slowly and laboriously after his first success ; and there 
 are more frequent traces in his other seasons of deliberate imita- 
 tion of Virgil's ' Georgics,' and deliberate search for good descrip- 
 tive topics. " Summer," the longest, appeared in 1727 ; " Spring" 
 in 1728; and "Autumn" in 1730. The 'Seasons,' as now 
 printed, contain many later revisions and additions, in some of 
 which he had the assistance of Pope. 
 
 The best way to read these poems is not to read them through, 
 but to take the argument and pick out any theme that strikes you 
 as interesting. You will thus best appreciate the " bold descrip- 
 tion and the manly thought " to which the poet laid claim. Avoid 
 " Spring," and his tedious description of the golden age, and the 
 influence of the season on birds and beasts, and fishes and men. 
 
 Between 1730 and 1748 Thomson produced little worthy of 
 remembrance. His song "Rule Britannia" appeared in 1740, in 
 a masque of " Alfred," written by him in conjunction with David 
 Mallet. The ' Castle of Indolence ' was published in the last year 
 of his life. 
 
 The ' Seasons ' remained Thomson's great achievement. It 
 was a striking but not inexplicable fact that contact with London 
 literary society, to which he was at once admitted on the success
 
 INFLUENCE OF LONDON LITERARY SOCIETY. 59 
 
 of " Winter," paralysed his poetic faculty, or at best robbed it of 
 half its strength. He had written with comparatively uncon- 
 scious freedom before, with the victorious joy of reaching and 
 even surpassing his brightest ideals of poetic achievement ; contact 
 with a more critical society, and more exacting standards of literary 
 finish, seems to have bred self-distrust. In compliance with the 
 taste of his new companions, he became more ambitious of dis- 
 playing his learning, and chose topics in which it was easier, than 
 in the description of the ' Seasons,' to show an acquaintance with 
 history and political philosophy. He used his metrical power also 
 in the service of politics. His first political venture, " Britannia," 
 published in 1729, when the nation was intensely excited over at- 
 tempts by Spain to challenge our then newly-won dominion of the 
 seas, was immensely popular. But it owed its success to its oppor- 
 tuneness, rather than to its power, though its strains were ardent 
 and vigorous enough. We are apt perhaps to underrate the force 
 of Thomson's patriotic verses, from forgetting that he did much to 
 foster the national sentiment, and was the original author of many 
 expressions that have since become the commonplace expressions 
 of that sentiment. Some lines sound like very hackneyed stump 
 declamation, but they had more heart and meaning in the mouth of 
 the poet of the first generation of British ascendancy, when Britain, 
 consolidated by the union of the Kingdoms, and by the Treaty of 
 Utrecht, acknowledged victor in the protracted struggle for the 
 empire of the seas and of the new worlds, was glowing with the 
 intoxication of newly-acquired power. But Thomson's next and 
 much longer political poem, "Liberty" (1734), in which he nar- 
 rated the career of this goddess, and described the glories that she 
 created in Greece and Rome before fixing her home in Britain, fell 
 flat, though the composition of it was his chief labour for three 
 years. This was the poem which Johnson owns he could not 
 finish ; and about which a contemporary wit remarked that the 
 poet " had taken a liberty which was not agreeable to Britannia 
 in any season." Thomson also wrote for the stage, but without 
 success, his one memorable triumph being the song of "Rule 
 Britannia." Although Thomson published sometimes by sub- 
 scription, he made but a poor income out of his poetry, and he 
 was unfortunate in his sinecures. Lord Chancellor Talbot, whose
 
 60 A GROUP OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 son he had accompanied as tutor to Italy, made him Secretary of 
 Briefs in the Court of Chancery, and he held this office for rather 
 more than three years (December 1733 to February 1737), losing 
 it on the death of his patron. The Prince of Wales gave him for 
 some years a pension of ^100, but withdrew it in a pet. From 
 1 744 till his death he held the sinecure office of one of the Com- 
 missioners for the Leeward Islands. 
 
 Thomson must be acknowledged to be one of the greatest of our 
 minor poets i.e., of those that are ranked next to the great names 
 of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Byron. 
 He holds this place in virtue of his vigour of imagination, his broad 
 manly sentiment, the individuality of his verse, and the distinc- 
 tion of his subject. These have given him a remarkable and en- 
 during popularity. And measured by his influence on succeeding 
 literature, his is by far the greatest figure among minor poets. 
 Both in his use of blank verse, and in the easy discursive general 
 structure of his poems on the Seasons, he had many imitators, the 
 most eminent of whom was the poet Cowper. And his influence 
 reached into our own century. It was most marked on Words- 
 worth ; and the fact, just put on record by Mrs Richmond Ritchie 
 (Miss Thackeray), that Thomson's ' Seasons ' was the first poetry 
 known to Tennyson in his boyhood, enables us to understand 
 whence our Laureate received the impulse to his minute observa- 
 tion of Nature and country life. 
 
 A word or two on another poet, also nourished by influences 
 outside Pope's circle, but, unlike Thomson, never brought within 
 that circle, John Dyer. He was the son of a Welsh solicitor, but 
 abandoned the law himself for painting and poetry, and in his 
 early manhood apparently wandered about South Wales as an 
 itinerant painter, rhyming as he went. He was born in the same 
 year with Thomson, and his first and best poem, "Grongar Hill," 
 appeared in Lewis's 'Miscellany' in 1726, in the same year with 
 Thomson's "Winter." It is a sweet little descriptive poem, in 
 the four-accent measure of Milton's "L' Allegro," as pure and fresh 
 and clear in its vision of natural objects as anything written by 
 any of the Lakers, and exquisitely musical in its numbers. It is 
 Wordsworthian also in its moralising :
 
 DYER'S "GRONGAR HILL." 61 
 
 " And see the rivers how they run 
 Through woods and meads, in shade and sun ! 
 Sometimes swift, sometimes slow, 
 Wave succeeding wave, they go 
 A various journey to the deep, 
 Like human life, to endless sleep ! 
 Thus is Nature's vesture wrought 
 To instruct our wandering thought ; 
 Thus she dresses green and gay, 
 To disperse our cares away. 
 Ever charming, ever new, 
 When will the landscape tire the view ! 
 The fountain's fall, the river's flow, 
 The woody valleys, warm and low ; 
 The windy summit, wild and high, 
 Roughly rushing on the sky ! 
 The pleasant seat, the ruin'd tower, 
 The naked rock, the shady bower ; 
 The town and village, dome and farm, 
 Each give each a double charm, 
 As pearls upon an ^Ethiop's arm. 
 
 See on the mountain's southern side, 
 Where the prospect opens wide, 
 Where the evening gilds the tide, 
 How close and small the hedges lie ! 
 What streaks of meadows cross the eye ! 
 A step, methiuks, may pass the stream 
 So little distant dangers seem : 
 So we mistake the picture's face, 
 Eyed through Hope's deluding glass ; 
 As yon summits soft and fair, 
 Clad in colours of the air, 
 Which, to those who journey near, 
 Barren, brown, and rough appear : 
 Still we tread the same coarse way ; 
 The present's still a cloudy day." 
 
 In the course of his wanderings as a painter, Dyer went to 
 Rome, and on his return in 1 740 published a poem called " The 
 Ruins of Rome." It is in blank verse, most musical in its rhythm, 
 and exquisitely delicate and precise in phrase and epithet ; but its 
 declamatory apostrophes and exclamations strike us now as some- 
 what antiquated ; and its moralising vein of melancholy sentiment 
 may be said to have been superseded for this century by Byron's 
 stanzas in " Childe Harold " on the ruins of Athens.
 
 62 A GROUP OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY TOETS. 
 
 The following lines on Modern Rome will sufficiently illustrate 
 his treatment of blank verse : 
 
 " Behold by Tiber's flood, where modern Rome 
 Couches beneath the ruins : there of old 
 With arms and trophies gleamed the field of Mars : 
 There to their daily sports the noble youth 
 Rush'd emulous ; to fling the pointed lance ; 
 To vault the steed ; or with the kindling wheel 
 In dusty whirlwinds sweep the trembling goal ; 
 Or wrestling, cope with adverse swelling breasts, 
 Strong grappling arms, close heads, and distant feet ; 
 Or clash the lifted gauntlets ; there they formed 
 Their ardent virtues ; in the bossy piles, 
 The proud triumphal arches ; all their wars, 
 Their conquests, honours, in the sculptures live. 
 And see from every gate those ancient roads, 
 With tombs high verg'd, the solemn paths of Fame ! 
 Deserve they not regard ? " 
 
 On his return to England Dyer entered the Church, and reappeared 
 seventeen years later with another poem, also in blank verse, 
 "The Fleece." The first lines will give you an idea of the 
 
 subject : 
 
 " The care of sheep, the labours of the loom, 
 And arts of trade, I sing." 
 
 This poem, and Somerville's " Chase," a didactic poem on hunting 
 (1735), ma y be numbered among the discursive didactic poems 
 called into being by the success of Thomson's ' Seasons.' Where 
 Dyer treats of soils, and pastures, and breeds of sheep, and pro- 
 hibitive legislation against the export of wool, and fulling, and 
 weaving, and dyeing, and the foreign trade in wool, he becomes 
 more technical than most readers of poetry are prepared for ; but 
 intermixed with these technicalities are some of the most exquisite 
 passages of description in the language. You can easily get at 
 them by means of the argument. If all the four books had been 
 like these, we could understand Akenside's saying " that he would 
 regulate his opinion of the reigning taste by Dyer's ' Fleece ' ; for 
 if that were ill-received, he should not think it any longer reason- 
 able to expect fame from excellence." 
 *
 
 63 
 
 CHAPTEE VI. 
 
 POPE continued. 
 
 AS A SATIRIST AND MORALIST FAILURE IN EPIC POETRY ' THE DUNCIAD ' 
 'ESSAY ON MAN.' 
 
 WE have to deal to-day with Pope as a satirist and a moralist. 
 His 'Dunciad' (1728), his 'Essay on Man' (1732-34), 'Moral 
 Essays' (1735), and his 'Imitations of Horace' (1733-37) were 
 the great literary events of the fifteen years after the publication 
 of Thomson's ' Seasons,' and showed the author in a new vein. 
 They were a series of surprises as far as Pope was concerned, 
 works that his previous performances had not prepared the public 
 to expect. 
 
 Pope's translation of Homer and his editions of Shakespeare 
 occupied him till 1725, when he had reached the age of thirty- 
 seven, and was in the maturity of his powers, with an indepen- 
 dence secured by the enormous profits of his Homer. Then began 
 the third period of his literary career. The works that he then pro- 
 duced, and which I have already enumerated, are his greatest works 
 in point of literary power. But why did he not then produce works 
 of more permanent and universal interest ? Why did he not then 
 return to his youthful scheme of writing a great epic ? The 
 critics of this century have refused Pope a place by the side of 
 Milton, because his subjects were of inferior quality, appealing to 
 a lower range of human emotion, and incapable from their very 
 nature, however excellent the treatment of them, of being made 
 the subjects of equally great poetic achievements. Now Pope, 
 as we have seen, was fully possessed of the idea that a great epic
 
 64 POPE. 
 
 was the greatest work that a poet could accomplish ; why, then, 
 when he was free to choose, did he not undertake such a work 1 
 
 To answer this, we have to look both to Pope's character and to 
 his circumstances. He toyed with the idea of writing a great epic. 
 He told Spence that he had it all in his head, and gave him a vague 
 sketch of the subject and plan of it, but he never put any of it on 
 paper. This indecision was partly due to his character and partly 
 to his circumstances. Partly he shrank from the labour, and partly 
 he was turned aside by circumstances to other labours which fully 
 occupied his energies. One reason why great epics are rare is that 
 the composition of them, in addition to imaginative genius and 
 genius for rhythmical expression, demands an intellectual staying 
 power and energy of will such as are rarely found in human beings 
 with or without the poet's special gifts. Reflect for a moment on 
 the intellectual force that a poet must exert in writing a tragedy. To 
 give moving expression to a single tragic situation ; to imagine and 
 body forth in language that all men feel to be true to nature the 
 changes of passion in the heart of one character in one of the scenes 
 in ' Macbeth,' or ' Hamlet,' or ' Othello,' so that not a line shall ring 
 false, requires no ordinary intellectual concentration ; but to exhibit 
 in a succession of scenes, each profoundly wrought out, a progres- 
 sion of events towards a tragic catastrophe, bringing many agencies 
 to bear, and assigning to each its right influence, giving voice to 
 many and various passionate emotions, sustaining at every moment 
 and gradually deepening the interest of the hearer, observing the 
 hundred conditions of tragic effect, this puts an immensely greater 
 strain on the strength of intellect and will. Unless the poet goes 
 right by a sort of instinct, borne along in a rapturous delight with 
 each triumphant step, he must collapse ; but instinct in this case 
 is only another name for intellect, one, however, that can hold 
 in its grasp at once and satisfy at once the conflicting claims of a 
 multitude of conditions which a weaker intellect can grasp only 
 one by one, and can never fully reconcile because it can never bring 
 them all together. It may be doubted whether the strain is 
 equally great in epic, because the difficulties do not occur with the 
 same cumulative importunity ; they admit of being vanquished, if 
 not singly at least in smaller detachments. Still even in epic the 
 strain is such as few men in the history of literature have proved
 
 A PROJECTED EPIC. 65 
 
 equal to, though multitudes have tried. Now Pope, as you know, 
 was not constitutionally a strong man. I am not here speaking 
 of muscular strength, but of constitutional strength. His life, as 
 he said, in the prologue to his 'Satires,' was one long disease. It 
 has always been a matter of wonder that, to use Mr Leslie Stephen's 
 phrase, he got as much work out of his frail body as he did. One 
 of the secrets of his endurance was that he worked in compara- 
 tive tranquillity. He avoided the stress and strain of complicated 
 designs, and applied himself to designs that could be accomplished 
 in detail, works of which the parts could be separately laboured 
 and put together with patient care, into which happy thoughts 
 could be fitted, struck out at odd moments, and in ordinary levels of 
 feeling. Even the work of translating the ' Iliad,' a very different 
 work from creating an epic, weighed very heavily on his spirits. 
 After he was fairly committed to it, he told Spence he was often 
 under great pain and apprehension. " I dreamt often," he said, 
 " of being engaged in a long journey, and that I should never get 
 to the end of it." 
 
 This shrinking from sustained intellectual strain, to be prolonged 
 day after day for weeks or months or years for a great epic can- 
 not be written in a day was probably one of the reasons why 
 Pope did not attempt an epic, though he liked to think over sub- 
 jects. The hero of the one that he had planned was the legendary 
 Brutus, the Trojan coloniser and name-father of Britain, the in- 
 vention of the fertile romances of the twelfth century. Pope pro- 
 posed to describe how he established civil and ecclesiastical order 
 in England a theme, you will observe, that could have been treated 
 in cold blood. We have probably not lost much from his never 
 having carried out this design. It may be doubted whether he 
 had the intellectual strength for a great epic, though in the 
 "Eloisa and Abelard" he showed himself capable of dealing 
 powerfully with a single tragical situation. 
 
 But now to consider the circumstances that diverted him from 
 attempting such an epic as he was capable of, and led him into 
 the walks of satire, in which for keenness and brilliancy of point 
 he has never been surpassed. Imitating the epic style, we must 
 ask our Muse of Literary History, " Tell me, O Muse, what dire 
 offence moved the great Pope to make war upon the little dunces.
 
 66 POPE. 
 
 Who were the dunces, and what had they done to provoke his ire, 
 so that he spent some years in composing an elaborate poem 
 designed to subject them to everlasting ridicule?" 
 
 " The history of the ' Dunciad,' " Johnson says in his ' Life of 
 Pope,' " is minutely related by Pope himself, in a dedication which 
 he wrote to Lord Middlesex in the name of Savage." According 
 to this account, the origin of the poem was very simple. Pope 
 and one or two of his intimate friends, notably Swift and Arbuth- 
 not, were great connoisseurs of good poetry, and one of their fav- 
 ourite amusements they had formed a little club for the purpose 
 in the reign of Anne, fifteen years before the publication of the 
 ' Dunciad ' was to make fun of bad poetry. With this view the 
 intimates had together composed a ' Treatise on Bathos, or the Art 
 of Sinking,' in which they collected and invented superlative speci- 
 mens of mixed metaphors, preposterous similes, and generally of 
 the bombast and extravagance and inanity of bad poetry, and clas- 
 sified bad poets according to their eminence in the various arts of 
 debasing instead of elevating their subjects. These specimens of 
 the bad they ascribed to various letters of the alphabet, most of 
 them taken at random. Well, no sooner was the treatise published 
 than the infatuated scribblers proceeded to take the letters to 
 themselves, and in revenge to fill the newspapers with the most 
 abusive falsehoods and scurrilities they could possibly devise. 
 " This gave Mr Pope the thought that he had now some opportun- 
 ity of doing good, by detecting and dragging into light these 
 common enemies of mankind," who for years had been anony- 
 mously aspersing almost all the great characters of the age. Their 
 persistent attacks upon himself had given him a peculiar right to 
 their names and so he wrote the ' Dunciad.' 
 
 It might seem, then, that the Muse of History had nothing to 
 tell; but she is an inquisitive Muse, and she has not remained satis- 
 fied with Mr Pope's account. If the letters of the alphabet were 
 distributed at random among imaginary bad poets, it is the most 
 singular chance on record that they happened so often to corres- 
 pond with the initials of poets and poetasters of the time. The 
 gods of the literary Olympus, playing at the Art of Sinking, were 
 not quite so innocent in their amusements as Pope pretended ; they 
 were rather like the little boys in the fable throwing stones at the
 
 MOTIVES FOR WHITING THE ' DUNCIAD.' 67 
 
 frogs, and they had no right to assume virtuous airs when the 
 frogs protested and retaliated. It is, besides, fatal to the strict 
 accuracy of Pope's account that the book of ' Miscellanies,' con- 
 taining the treatise on the Bathos, was published in 1727, while 
 Pope, from his letters to Swift, is known to have been engaged on 
 the ' Dunciad ' in 1726, and from internal evidence is conjectured 
 to have begun it several years earlier. In extreme opposition to 
 Pope's account is another history of the affair, adopted by those 
 who take the worst view of his character, and will have it that he 
 was essentially vindictive and malignant. This view is that Pope's 
 motives for writing the ' Dunciad ' were purely spiteful and per- 
 sonal ; that as soon as his hands were free from his translation of 
 Homer, and his independence secured by the profits of that work, 
 he proceeded to settle old scores with those who had not spoken 
 as favourably as he liked about his poetry. There is strong justi- 
 fication for this view in the fact that the most prominent persons 
 ridiculed in the ' Dunciad ' can be shown to have given him 
 offence. Theobald or Tibbald, the original hero of the poem, had 
 criticised his edition of Shakespeare, as he thought, insolently. 
 Gibber, in whose favour Tibbald was subsequently deposed, the 
 ' Dunciad ' received many alterations and additions after its first 
 issue, had ridiculed a play in which Pope in his earlier days had 
 some share, and had retaliated on the first mention of his name in 
 the ' Dunciad.' Dennis was an old enemy. Lintot, the publisher, 
 had accused him of unfair practices in the division of the profits of 
 the ' Odyssey,' which proved less successful than the 'Iliad.' And 
 so on. You will find the details in any edition of the ' Dunciad,' 
 most fully in the recent edition by Mr Courthope, who has suc- 
 ceeded Mr Elwin in the task begun by Croker. Indeed, it was 
 not denied by Pope that the men satirised had previously attacked 
 him ; it was openly avowed, and specimens of their attacks were 
 prefixed to his own complete edition : it was these attacks, he 
 said, that had given him a right to make use of the names of his 
 assailants. 
 
 Was it, then, personal spite, the vindictiveness of wounded 
 vanity, as some critics think, or was it, as he professed himself, 
 " the thought that he had now some opportunity of doing good," 
 that moved Pope to write the ' Dunciad ' ? The truth probably lies
 
 68 POPE. 
 
 between the two views. Both motives may have operated, as well 
 as a third not so obvious, an unscrupulous love of fun, and delight 
 in the creations of a humorous imagination. Certainly, to repre- 
 sent the ' Dunciad ' as the outcome of mere personal spite is to 
 give an exaggerated idea of the malignity of Pope's disposition, 
 and a wrong impression of his character. He was not a morose, 
 savage, indignant satirist, but airy and graceful in his malice, 
 writing more in fun than in anger, revengeful, perhaps, and exces- 
 sively sensitive, but restored to good-humour as he thought over 
 his wrongs by the ludicrous conceptions with which he invested his 
 adversaries. We do not feel the bitterness of wounded pride in his 
 writings, but the laughter with which that pride was consoled. 
 He loved his own comic fancies more than he hated his enemies. 
 His fun at the expense of his victims was so far cruel that he was 
 quite regardless of their sufferings, probably enjoyed them ; but it 
 was an impish and sprite-like cruelty, against which we cannot feel 
 any real indignation, because it is substantially harmless, while its 
 ingenious antics never fail to amuse. And in extenuation of the 
 cruelty, I see mo reason to reject Pope's own plea that he never 
 took the aggressive, although Mr Elwin has attempted at great 
 length to show that this could not be maintained. In the " Epistle 
 to Dr Arbuthnot," which is Pope's most elaborate defence of him- 
 self as a satirist, he pretends to greater magnanimity and lofty 
 tranquillity of mind than any merely human being can possess, 
 and which he himself was undoubtedly far from possessing, being 
 really extravagantly sensitive to criticism. Still, undue weight 
 may be given to stories illustrating how keenly Pope felt criticisms 
 when first they were communicated to him, and how long after an 
 offence had been committed he seized an opportunity of repaying 
 it. Granting the truth of these stories, I should still contend that 
 Pope soon recovered his equanimity after the first quick anger was 
 past, and that there was little or no bitterness in his heart when 
 he took his revenge, and that he reconciled this revenge with a 
 moral purpose the chastisement of men worthy of chastisement. 
 The Epistle to Arbuthnot, I believe, really represents his perma- 
 nent attitude of mind, the stable condition in which his mind rested 
 when it had recovered from any passing derangement of its 
 equilibrium.
 
 INCEPTION OF THE ' DUNCIAD.' 69 
 
 It has been said that to thoroughly enjoy the ' Dunciad,' one 
 would have to give as much time to the study of it as the author 
 gave to its composition. That, of course, is an exaggeration ; still, 
 to appreciate the full force of every hard hit and sly pinch, even 
 with the help of Mr Courthope's ample commentary, -would doubt- 
 less require long and laborious study. If you have leisure for 
 it, it might be worth while, because in the process you would get 
 an intimate knowledge of political and literary life in London in 
 Pope's time, and it is always interesting to know how people lived 
 in circumstances different from our own. This is one of the most 
 harmless ways of indulging that love of gossip which is deeply 
 rooted in most human beings. 
 
 But without mastering all the details, we may enjoy the ' Dunciad' 
 simply as a work of humorous imagination, the only drawback being 
 the tendency of the author's imagination to carry him into physi- 
 cally disgusting incidents. Pope's original design seems to have 
 been to describe the progress of Dulness from ancient times to his 
 own generation, ascribing all the disasters that happened to learn- 
 ing, such as the burning of the Library of Alexandria and the 
 irruption of the Goths into the Eoman empire, as due to the settled 
 and resolute hostility of this goddess, bent upon restoring the 
 dominion that she held while the intellectual world was still in 
 chaos. In this history he could find opportunities for ridiculing 
 the so-called dunces of his own time by describing them and their 
 works as instruments in the hands of the goddess Dulness for 
 accomplishing her purpose. This was probably the germ, the first 
 thought, of the poem ; so that the third book, from 1. 70 onwards, 
 was probably the first part thought of, if not actually the first 
 composed. But the germ grew in Pope's mind; and now this 
 history of the reign of Dulness upon earth appears only as a 
 prophecy made to the hero of the poem. Book I. describes the 
 abode and the surroundings of Dulness in mock-heroic style, but 
 with real splendour of imagination ; the goddess sits wreathed in 
 clouds in a certain part of the city of London, with her Prime 
 Ministers and all the products of her leaden inspiration round her. 
 Then the hero, Colley Gibber, is described offering prayers and 
 sacrifices to the goddess. She hears him and carries him off to 
 her sacred dome, and anoints and proclaims him King of the
 
 70 POPE. 
 
 Dunces. Book II. describes the games held in honour of his 
 coronation, a burlesque of the heroic custom. Much of this you 
 had better skip ; but towards the end there is an account of 
 a reading match among critics that is very amusing. Book III. 
 is chiefly occupied with a vision of the progress of Dulness. 
 After the games the king falls asleep in the lap of the goddess, 
 and visits in his dreams after the manner of Ulysses in the 
 1 Odyssey ' and ^Eneas in the ' ^Eneid ' the nether regions, 
 where he meets Settle, a dull poet of the previous generation. 
 Settle talks to him, and takes him to the top of a mountain, 
 whence he shows him the past triumphs of the empire of Dulness, 
 then the present, and lastly the future. Book IV. was added by 
 Pope many years afterwards (in 1742), and professes to be the 
 completion of the prophecies in Book III. The goddess sits in 
 state, surrounded by her flatterers and parasites; various public 
 bodies appear by deputation before her, and report progress. The 
 conclusion is intensely comical ; in the middle of a gracious speech 
 from the throne her majesty yawns, and the whole world follows 
 suit and sinks into slumber : 
 
 " More she had spoke, but yawn'd. All nature nods : 
 What mortal can resist the yawn of gods ? 
 Churches and chapels instantly it reached 
 
 (St James's first, for leaden G preached) ; 
 
 Then catch'd the schools ; the hall scarce kept awake ; 
 
 The convocation gap'd, but could not speak : 
 
 Lost was the nation's sense, nor could be found, 
 
 While the long solemn unison went round ; 
 
 Wide, and more wide, it spread o'er all the realm ; 
 
 Ev'n Palinurus nodded at the helm ; 
 
 The vapour mild o'er each committee crept ; 
 
 Unfinished treaties in each office slept ; 
 
 And chiefless armies dozed out the campaign ; 
 
 And navies yawned for orders on the main." 
 
 Apart from the mere personalities of the poem, most of the 
 Dunces satirised are types that reappear in every age. On this 
 ground some critics claim for the poem a universal utility, and 
 praise Pope for having rendered permanent service in the warfare 
 of true literature against counterfeit. This fantastic Pope showed 
 himself perfectly sensible that, in so far as concerned the annihila-
 
 TOPE'S NOTION OF THE DULL. 71 
 
 tion of Dunces, his work had been written in vain. Even of the 
 men ridiculed by name, Pope says : 
 
 " You think this cruel ? take it for a rule 
 No creature smarts so little as a fool. 
 Who shames a scribbler ? breaks one cobweb thro', 
 He spins the slight, self-pleasing thread anew : 
 
 Throned in the centre of his thin designs, 
 Proud of a vast extent of flimsy lines, 
 Whom have I hurt ? has Poet yet, or Peer,' 
 Lost the arch'd eyebrow, or Parnassian sneer ? " 
 
 And if this was true of the Dunces expressly ridiculed, who is 
 likely in after - generations to take their characters to himself? 
 Mr Courthope specifies three classes of Dunces in the poem : the 
 authors of personal scurrilities in the journals of the day, who 
 took great liberties with eminent names, in the same coarse vein 
 in which Pope replied to them ; the party journalists, whom Pope, 
 as a member of the Opposition, considered to be in ministerial 
 pay ; and pedantic scholars, antiquaries, and naturalists. In the 
 pursuit of ridicule, Pope was not particular about truth to nature, 
 and there are two men in particular whose place in the ' Dunciad ' 
 has generally been considered absurd, Gibber and Bentley, the 
 great classical scholar. Gibber was a popular actor, and he pro- 
 tested that his greatest enemy could not call him dull ; he was 
 nothing, if not lively. But Pope did not mean by dull the opposite 
 of lively. Dulness, he says in his lines about Gibber 
 
 " Dulness with transport eyed the lively dunce, 
 Remembering she herself was pertness once." 
 
 It is not indeed easy to say what he did mean by dull, except un- 
 interesting to himself. The story is told of him that he once fell 
 asleep at his own dinner-table when the Prince of Wales was talk- 
 ing to him about poetry. With such a man the Dull must have 
 been a very wide category. I am afraid he would have considered 
 the critical study of the 'Dunciad' insufferably dull, if it had 
 been written by anybody but himself. It would seem indeed 
 as if, in the end, he had come to much the same conclusion as 
 Thackeray in his ' Book of Snobs.' When Thackeray had carefully
 
 72 POPE. 
 
 studied all the varieties of snob, he could not resist the humorous 
 conclusion that he might after all be a snob himself. And some- 
 thing of the same humour seems to me to have crossed Pope's 
 mind before he had completed his 'Dunciad.' It is a dull world, 
 and we are all dunces more or less. 
 
 We have left little time for Pope's remaining works the 
 'Essay on Man,' the 'Moral Essays,' and the 'Satires' and 'Epis- 
 tles.' As regards the origin or suggestion of them, they are as 
 much due to the influence of Bolingbroke as the ' Dunciad ' was 
 to Swift and Arbuthnot. Then there are the theological and moral 
 controversies. One little circumstance that has not been remarked 
 probably contributed to set Pope at work in this new direction. 
 In the year in which he finished his ' Odyssey,' Young, afterwards 
 the author of 'Night Thoughts,' published a satire called 'The 
 Universal Passion, or The Love of Fame.' It is a very unequal 
 production, but it was immensely popular for a time. This may 
 have excited Pope's emulation, more particularly seeing that the 
 satirist Pope having then been engaged for ten years on Homer 
 asked, Why slumbers Pope 1 
 
 As regards the substance. If you wish to make a study of the 
 ' Essay on Man,' which professes to furnish in verse a system of 
 natural theology, I would recommend you to Mark Pattison's 
 edition. Moral maxims tend to become antiquated. Pope's are 
 old enough to be commonplace, but not old enough to be quaint. 
 In the ' Moral Essays ' the one you may perhaps find the most 
 interesting is that on " The Characters of Women." His stand- 
 point is stated with perfect candour in the opening lines : 
 
 " Nothing so true as what you once let fall, 
 ' Most women have no characters at all,' 
 Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear, 
 And best distinguished by black, brown, or fair." 
 
 And again in the lines : 
 
 " In men, we various ruling passions find ; 
 In women, two almost divide the kind ; 
 Those, only fix'd, they first or last obey, 
 The love of pleasure, and the love of sway." 
 
 In these statements Pope repeats a commonplace of his day, and 
 if objection be taken to them we must bear in mind that we are
 
 THEORY OF A. RULING PASSION. 73 
 
 not to look in satire for sober, strict truth, but rather for brilliant 
 paradoxes. The theory of a Ruling Passion is probably a correct 
 one, and it has been misunderstood by adverse critics. Macaulay, 
 in his essay on Mme. D'Arblay, calls it a silly notion, his own 
 theory being that each man is a compound of desires often at 
 war with one another, one having the ascendancy sometimes, and 
 sometimes another, each uppermost by turns like the spokes of a 
 running wheel, or the sails of a windmill, or balls playing in a 
 fountain. Where is Shylock's ruling passion 1 he asks. Or 
 Othello's ? or Henry V.'s ? 
 
 The theory is declared to be at variance with the diversity of 
 nature. Rightly understood, it was not so. Its advocates only 
 contended that, however various might be the passions of man- 
 kind, however often they might come in conflict, still there was 
 one before which, when it came to a fight, every other yielded. 
 Understanding the theory in this way, we should have no hesita- 
 tion in saying that Shylock had a ruling passion the hatred of a 
 persecuted race for its persecutors. Even his love of money gives 
 way before this, as his affection for his daughter gives way before 
 his love of money. The strength of his ruling passion is indeed 
 indicated by its triumph over the passion next to the throne when 
 the two come in conflict. He has few opportunities, only one 
 indeed in the course of the play, of obtaining substantial gratifica- 
 tion for it ; that one he eagerly and fiercely seizes on. 
 
 It cannot, of course, be said that such a passion is the key to all 
 the mysteries of a man's nature ; that is, of course, a rhetorical 
 expression. But a knowledge of it may be a clue to the secret of 
 a man's deviations from the rules of ordinary prudence or ordinary 
 good feeling. It is seldom that one overgrown propensity swal- 
 lows up all the rest. True ; but unless this is the case, the char- 
 acter attracts no interest, because it possesses no singularity, 
 nothing to distinguish it from the mass of mankind, whose ruling 
 passion is selfishness tempered by sympathetic impulse, and fear 
 of what people will say and do. That this is the right inter- 
 pretation of the theory, you can prove by taking Pope's examples. 
 It explains a man's singularities, gives unity to his peculiarities 
 as distinguished from others.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 POETRY BETWEEN POPE AND COWPER. 
 GLOVER JOHNSON COLLINS THE POET AND THE ORATOR GRAY. 
 
 I PROPOSE to -day to run rapidly over the poetry of the forty 
 years, roughly speaking, between Pope and Cowper, Crabbe and 
 Burns, dwelling more particularly on the poetry of Gray and 
 Collins. This period is generally and justly regarded as one of 
 the most barren in our literature. The poems that have any 
 interest, except for the antiquary, are few and far between. 
 Collins and Gray wrote very little, very much less than any poets 
 of equal rank in literature, the one dying young, and the other 
 composing at rare intervals. Small as their poetry is in amount, 
 it stands out above the level of the time, owing to its originality 
 and individuality : all the others may be roughly classed as 
 imitators either of Pope or of Thomson, or of both. 
 
 If we look at the works of the young poets who ventured to 
 publish during the last years of Pope's life, what principally 
 strikes us is that, with the exception of Gray and Collins, the 
 ablest of them were guided in their aims by the poetical ambitions 
 of Queen Anne society. One youth, a London merchant, Richard 
 Glover, was bold enough to attempt what Pope shrank from, the 
 composition of a great epic. The subject was taken from Greek 
 history, but the poet throughout had an allusive eye to contem- 
 porary politics. This reference to practical affairs was thoroughly 
 in the Queen Anne spirit, when the poets, as I explained to you, 
 being intimate companions of public men, took sides in party
 
 GLOVER'S 'LEONIDAS.' 75 
 
 conflicts, and kept in view the assistance of their friends at least 
 as much as the satisfaction of the poetical aspirations of their 
 readers. Glover's hero was Leonidas, the Spartan king who 
 sacrificed himself at Thermopylae to hold in check the Persian 
 invaders of Greece ; and the grasping tyrant Xerxes was the great 
 enemy against whom the hero had to contend. But Glover the 
 poet was an ally of the politicians opposed to Sir Robert Walpole, 
 and one of the accusations against this Minister, urged most per- 
 sistently by the Opposition to drive him from power, was that 
 he truckled to the power of Spain, meekly negotiating and 
 compromising British interests when a true patriot would have 
 had recourse to war. Hence when Glover wrote in denunciation 
 of the power of Persia, it was the power of Spain that he had 
 in his mind's eye; and when he eloquently expounded through 
 Spartan senators the true duty of a patriot, the readers were 
 expected to apply this as an argument against Sir Robert Walpole. 
 " The plan and purpose of ' Leonidas,' " it was said, " is to show 
 the superiority of freedom over slavery, and how much virtue, 
 public spirit, and liberty, are preferable both in their nature 
 and effects to riches, luxury, and the insolence of power." Inci- 
 dentally the poet found opportunity to discuss many of the burn- 
 ing questions treatment of the non-combatants in war, superiority 
 of a citizen army over mercenaries. ' Leonidas ' had thus great 
 temporary popularity. Viewed simply as an artistic production, 
 its great novelty was that, although professing to be a great epic, 
 it had no supernatural machinery. " Never was an epic poem," 
 Lord Lyttelton wrote, " which had so near a relation to common- 
 sense. He has neither fighting gods nor scolding goddesses; 
 neither miracles nor enchantments; neither monsters nor giants 
 in his work ; but whatever human nature can afford that is most 
 astonishing, marvellous, and sublime." The metre of the poem 
 was blank verse, modelled on Thomson's. But in the laboured 
 descriptions of scenery he is much less definite in his pictures than 
 Thomson ; in fact, Glover's descriptions show all the faults of the 
 conventional style. 
 
 " The plain beyond Thermopylae is girt 
 Half round by mountains, half by Neptune laved. 
 The arduous ridge is broken deep in clefts
 
 76 POETRY BETWEEN POPE AND COWPER. 
 
 Which open channels to pellucid streams 
 In rapid flow sonorous. Chief in fame, 
 Spercheos, boasting once his poplars tall, 
 Foams down a stony bed. Throughout the face 
 Of this broad champaign, numberless are pitched 
 Barbarian tents. Along the winding flood 
 To rich Thessalia's confines they extend. 
 They fill the vallies, late profusely blest 
 In Nature's vary'd beauties." 
 
 Then after enumerating the shrubs, flowerets, ivy, lawn, poplar- 
 groves torn up, cut down, trampled by the barbarian invaders, he 
 goes on : 
 
 " Yet unpolluted, is a part reserved 
 In this deep vale, a patrimonial spot 
 Of Aleuadian princes, who, allies 
 To Xerxes, reign'd in Thessaly. There glow 
 Inviolate the shrubs. There branch the trees, 
 Sons of the forest. Over downy moss, 
 Smooth walks and fragrant, lucid here and broad, 
 There clos'd in myrtle under woodbine roofs 
 Wind to retreats delectable, to grots, 
 To silvan structures, bow'rs, and cooling dells 
 Enliven'd all and musical, with birds 
 Of vocal sweetness, in relucent plumes 
 Innumerably various. Lulling falls 
 Of liquid crystal, from perennial founts 
 Attune their pebbled channels." 
 
 However long you study this description you will not be able to 
 realise any landscape that was definitely before the poet's vision 
 when he wrote : there is a certain vague framework of scenery, 
 but when the poet comes to details, he puts us off with conven- 
 tional oft-repeated phrases for natural grandeurs and beauties 
 the laving Neptune, arduous ridges, pellucid and sonorous streams, 
 winding floods, Natiire's varied beauties, downy moss, retreats 
 delectable, grots, silvan structure, bowers, and cooling dells. The 
 poet, in short, only gives us musical phrases for what the senses 
 find in nature, thus dressing these charms to advantage ; there is 
 nothing in his landscapes of the life that the human imagination 
 in moments of excitement is apt to ascribe to the face of Nature. 
 Read the Prologue to Act iv. of "Henry V." and you will under- 
 stand the difference.
 
 JOHNSON'S IMITATION OF JUVENAL. 77 
 
 There is one poem of Glover's "London, or the Progress 
 of Commerce" that illustrates the fashionable poetical style 
 of the Queen Anne time, the prevalent idea as to how Nature 
 was to be dressed to advantage. As a London merchant, Glover 
 no doubt felt his heart swell within him as he looked at the 
 bustle of many nations on the London wharves, and saw ships 
 from many distant regions crowding up the Thames. How did 
 he give expression to this exaltation of mind ? He could not 
 present the coarse and vulgar details of trade to a fine Queen 
 Anne gentleman ; he asks his reader to look at them through 
 a fine allegorical veil, transports us to the regions of mythology, 
 and gives a long narrative of a love affair between the sea-god 
 Neptune and the nymph named Phoenice, the guardian spirit 
 of the Phoenicians. The beautiful nymph Commerce was the 
 offspring of this Union. This is the poet's way of relating the 
 prosaic fact that the Phoenicians were the first great traders 
 by sea; and the events in the subsequent history of Commerce 
 are given as incidents in the life of the nymph Commerce, from 
 her cradle and her nursery till the time when she fixed her 
 abode in Great Britain. 
 
 Among the followers of Pope in Satire there is only one name 
 of distinction, Samuel Johnson, afterwards the great prose moralist, 
 critic, and lexicographer. The critic made his mark in literature 
 by a poem ; but he is one of the exceptions to the saying 
 that the critics are the men who have failed in literature, for 
 his imitation of Juvenal was a success. It was natural that 
 Johnson should choose Juvenal as his model while Pope adopted 
 the style of Horace. Horace was the gay light-hearted satirist 
 of the foibles of the literary and fashionable society of Home; 
 whereas Juvenal took a more stern and gloomy view of life, 
 lashed the vices of his age in a spirit of moral indignation, 
 contrasted the miseries of the poor with the ostentatious splendour 
 of the rich in Roman society, and denounced heartlessness, dis- 
 honesty, sycophancy, all the vices of a wealthy and showy 
 civilisation, with bitter and unsparing scorn. There was nearly 
 as much difference between them as between Tom Moore and 
 Carlyle. Pope, himself in easy circumstances, and the friend
 
 78 POETKY BETWEEN POPE AND COWPER. 
 
 of noblemen and statesmen, naturally had most sympathy with 
 Horace's view of life; while Johnson, then living in London, 
 as Carlyle describes him, on fourpence halfpenny a-day, and 
 earning a precarious livelihood as a bookseller's drudge, as natur- 
 ally thought of Juvenal as a model, and resolved to apply to 
 modern circumstances the sarcasms of this satirist on the lloman 
 
 metropolis. 
 
 "Slow rises worth by poverty depressed," 
 
 is one of the lines in Johnson's "London." He had fitter ex- 
 perience of the fact in the insolence and indifference of busy 
 employers, too closely occupied with other affairs to have time, 
 if they had had the insight, to detect his great talent. As far 
 as versification goes, Johnson proved himself an apt pupil of 
 Pope ; nobody since has equalled him in combining Pope's terse- 
 ness with Pope's smoothness. And in one respect Johnson even 
 might be said to have surpassed Pope, if Pope's object had 
 been merely to imitate the ancient Roman. Johnson is at more 
 pains to find exact modern parallels to the ancient situations, 
 and is always felicitous in the turn he gives to Juvenal's phrases. 
 But the truth is that he went to work rather as a scholar than as 
 a satirist. Indignation at the vices satirised was much less a 
 motive with him than the scholar's ambition to make a clever 
 adaptation of the original. Hence although his "London" at- 
 tracted some attention, and Pope, always generous as well as 
 right in his judgments of genuine literary merit, prophesied that 
 the author would not long remain unknown, there was little real 
 vitality in the poem. It was really an imitation, owing much 
 of its interest to the original, and often appearing destitute of 
 motive when not read in connection with the original. Pope's 
 so-called imitations, on the other hand, are equally interesting to 
 the reader whether or not he is acquainted with Horace; the 
 reader perhaps may get additional pleasure from observing the 
 cleverness of the parallel, but the satire has independent point 
 and relish. There is more of Johnson's genuine sentiment in 
 the " Vanity of Human Wishes," another imitation of Juvenal, 
 published ten years later. 
 
 For eminence in poetry, novelty and distinction are first requi-
 
 GRAY AND COLLINS. 79 
 
 sites; and during Pope's closing years the only poets that began 
 to show capability of poetic work that should be at once distinctive 
 in power or spirit and high in quality, were Gray and Collins. 
 The great novelty of their work as compared with Pope's was that 
 it was lyrical ; they wrote mostly in that form of poetry which is 
 called the Ode. 
 
 You are doubtless familiar with some, at least, of Gray's poems. 
 You all know the "Elegy." But the "Elegy" was not the work 
 on which he most prided himself, or upon which he would have 
 desired his rank as a poet to be adjudicated. It was instantan- 
 eously, and has always since been popular, but he considered that 
 the popularity was due to the subject as much as to the art of the 
 poet. The " Ode on the Distant Prospect of Eton College," the 
 "Hymn on Adversity," the "Progress of Poesy," and "The Bard," 
 were his masterpieces in point of artistic construction. It may in- 
 crease your interest in them if I point out a few respects in which 
 these lyrics differ from other lyric poetry in our language i.e., 
 poetry in which the poet gives expression directly to emotion, in- 
 stead of describing outward nature, or narrating events, or putting 
 words into the mouths of characters whose actions are represented 
 on the stage. 
 
 But, perhaps, I had better speak of Collins first, as he is less 
 known, and there is one poem of his which I can confidently re- 
 commend to you as certain to yield you the highest delight, if you 
 take the trouble to master its intricate harmonies. Of his life 
 there is little to be told, and that little is painful. Born in 1721, 
 and educated at Oxford, he went to London in 1744, the year of 
 Pope's death, as a literary adventurer, at a time when only one 
 man, and that Pope, had succeeded in making literature a profit- 
 able profession. He had not Johnson's endurance, or his practical 
 talents ; a youth strange phenomenon for those who take the 
 conventional view of the eighteenth century of fantastic imagina- 
 tion, with not a little of the temperament of Shelley, delighting, as 
 Johnson puts it, " to rove through the meanders of enchantment, 
 to gaze on the magnificence of golden palaces, to repose by the 
 waterfalls of Elysian gardens." Two years before he went up to 
 London he had published a volume of poems, ' Persian Eclogues,' 
 Persian Pastorals, reconciling, as you will observe, the taste of the
 
 80 POETRY BETWEEN POPE AND COWPER. 
 
 time for pastorals with the inclination of his own fancy towards 
 the gorgeous East. For such a man the booksellers had little em- 
 ployment ; and as he had but scanty means of subsistence except 
 by his pen, he gave way in the struggle for existence : he bore 
 up for a little against clouds that he felt to be gathering on his 
 reason, was confined for some time in a madhouse, and died at the 
 age of thirty-nine, in the year of Burns' birth, 1759. 
 
 Collins is best known by his Ode on " The Passions," but in- 
 comparably his finest and most distinctive work is the " Ode to 
 Evening." The superior popularity of " The Passions " is easily 
 explained. It might be recited at a penny reading, and every line 
 of its strenuous rhetoric would tell ; every touch would be at once 
 appreciated. But the beauties of the " Ode to Evening" are of a 
 much stronger kind, and the structure of it is infinitely more com- 
 plicated : 
 
 " If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song, 
 May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear, 
 Like thy own solemn springs, 
 Thy springs, and dying gales ; 
 
 Now air is hush'd, save where the weak-ey'd bat, 
 With short, shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, 
 
 Or when the beetle winds 
 
 His small but sullen horn, 
 
 As oft he rises 'midst the twilight path, 
 Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum : 
 
 Now teach me, maid compos'd, 
 
 To breathe some softened strain, 
 
 Whose numbers, stealing through thy darkening vale, 
 May not unseemly with its stillness suit, 
 
 As musing slow, I hail 
 
 Thy genial lov'd return ! 
 
 While Spring shall pour his showers, as oft he wont, 
 And bathe thy breathing tresses, meekest Eve ! 
 
 While Summer loves to sport 
 
 Beneath thy lingering light : 
 
 While sallow Autumn fills thy lap with leaves, 
 Or Winter, yelling through the troublous air, 
 
 Affrights thy shrinking train, 
 
 And rudely rends thy robes :
 
 COLLINS'S "ODE TO EVENING." 81 
 
 So long, regardful of thy quiet rule, 
 
 Shall Fancy, Friendship, Science, smiling Peace, 
 
 Thy gentlest influence own, 
 
 And love thy favourite name ! " 
 
 It gains nothing from being read aloud. It is a poem to be 
 taken into the mind slowly; you cannot take possession of it 
 without effort. Give a quiet evening to it ; return to it again and 
 again ; master the meaning of it deliberately part by part, and let 
 the whole sink into your mind softly and gradually, and you will 
 not regret the labour. You will find yourselves in possession of 
 a perpetual delight, of a music that will make the fall of evening 
 for ever charming to you. Difficulty is not necessarily a virtue in 
 a poem, but neither is it necessarily a defect. The poet who fixes 
 a rare and evanescent mood in harmonious rhythm and imagery, 
 thus making it a permanent possibility for the human race, cannot 
 always build his new and delightful home for the imagination out 
 of common materials, and the workmanship with which he adorns 
 it may be curious and intricate. Such a pleasure-house is often 
 built up by abstruse workings of the imagination, in regions far 
 above the prosaic level, and the spirit must shake off its natural 
 slothfulness before it can rise with the poet and enter into and take 
 possession of the home that he has made for it. 
 
 A distinction has been drawn between the poet and the orator. 
 The poet, it has been said, is essentially an egotist, expressing 
 what he feels without caring how it may affect others ; whereas 
 the orator is essentially a sympathetic man, always considering 
 the effect of his expression upon others, striving to look at what 
 he says from their point of view, or, as Mr Gladstone once put it, 
 receiving from his audience in a vapour what he gives back to 
 them in a flood. I confess that I don't attach much value to such 
 distinctions. They are always half-truths. Nearly everything 
 that has been said by poets in the way of general truth about 
 poetry is not even quarter-truth, because each puts his own prac- 
 tice as if it were a universal rule. All poets express their own 
 emotions, more or less, and all poets are more or less influenced by 
 their audience. Still the degree in which they are self-centred, or 
 liable to be disturbed by outside influence, constitutes a marked 
 difference in character, and, properly qualified, this distinction be-
 
 82 I'OETKY BETWEEN POPE AND COWPER. 
 
 tween the poet and the orator serves to illustrate the difference 
 between Collins and Gray. It is this difference that Mr Swinburne 
 has in his mind when he says that, " as a lyric poet, Gray is un- 
 worthy to sit at the feet of Collins," and that " there was but one 
 man in the time of Collins who had in him a note of pure lyric 
 song, a pulse of inborn music irresistible and indubitable" 
 namely, Collins himself. Comparatively speaking, Collins sang to 
 gratify his own feelings, beginning when the impulse was on him, 
 and leaving off when he was satisfied ; Gray considered in what 
 mood his song would find his audience, how he could seize their 
 attention, how sustain and increase it, and how leave them deeply 
 impressed at the end. Gray, in short, wrote with a deliberate eye 
 to the effect to be produced on his reader. 
 
 Even in the " Elegy," which reads like a spontaneous outburst 
 of feeling, this is apparent if you look at the construction of it. 
 You will find a regular symmetrical division in it, an arrangement 
 of facts such that the reader, though' he passes from one train of 
 thought to another, is not kept too long in one mood, not wearied 
 by reflections in the same vein. The variety is studied and care- 
 fully proportioned. Gray deliberately suppressed one stanza, be- 
 cause to have put it in would have made too long a parenthesis : 
 
 " There scattered oft, the earliest of the year, 
 
 By hands unseen are show'rs of violets found ; 
 The redbreast loves to build and warble there, 
 And little footsteps lightly print the ground." 
 
 The stanza is beautiful in itself, some have gone so far as to say 
 that it contains purer poetry than any of the stanzas that were 
 retained; but Gray decided that it would be out of proportion, 
 and sacrificed it. 
 
 In the "Eton College," again, the change from emotion to 
 emotion, the balance of the parts, the pathetic humour of the con- 
 clusion, which recalls and binds together and suffuses the whole, 
 must strike everybody who reflects for a moment on the construc- 
 tion of the poem. The effect of the whole, and of each part as 
 contributing to the whole, has been elaborately calculated elabo- 
 rately, and yet with such vividness of emotional insight that there 
 is no trace of labour. Stanza follows stanza as if by spontaneous
 
 JOHNSON CONTRASTED WITH GRAY. 83 
 
 growth, and the concluding reflection arises as if by irresistible 
 suggestion. 
 
 It has been made a point of distinction between Gray and the 
 lyric poets of this century, Wordsworth and Byron more particu- 
 larly, that in their lyrics they express purely personal emotion, 
 feelings peculiar to themselves. They take us into confidence, as 
 it were, about their own concerns, and invite our sympathy, which 
 we cannot give unless we sympathise with their characters. Gray, 
 on the other hand, suppresses himself, and strives to interpret 
 emotions that all men must feel in presence of the subject of his 
 verse. This is certainly true of the " Elegy " and the " Ode on 
 Eton College." These are not expressions of individual feeling, 
 like Byron's "Farewell to England," or some of Wordsworth's 
 "Solitary Reaper"; they express melancholy and humorous re- 
 flections common to all mankind, as common as the fact of death 
 and the heedless enjoyment of the present by the young. 
 
 But it is dangerous to generalise about poets. The emotions to 
 which lyrical expression is given in the " Progress of Poesy " and 
 the " Bard " are as purely individual as the most singular of Words- 
 worth's meditations on rustic life. Johnson's criticisms of these 
 wonderful wonders of wonders, as he called them, are sa-vage and 
 unsparing. Sometimes this is attributed to personal jealousy. It 
 is a superficial view, and unjust to the great critic. It is true that 
 Johnson manifests a good-humoured contempt for Gray's character. 
 We can easily understand this when we consider the circumstances 
 of the two men. Gray was a Fellow of a College in Cambridge, 
 precise, finicking, and reserved in manner. The dignified little 
 man had few intimates ; he was a great reader, a scholar of mar- 
 vellously wide range, reputed the most learned man in Europe. 
 But, as Johnson saw and said, he did very little with his learning. 
 Five or six poems was not a great result of so much reading. We 
 can easily understand that the indefatigable producer under diffi- 
 culties, the sturdy, strenuous, companionable giant of Bolt Court, 
 Fleet Street, a very different locality from Peterhouse, Cambridge, 
 would have little sympathy with such a man. Beneath Gray's 
 reserved exterior there was great depth of feeling ; and with all his 
 minute scholarship, he was a man of large and comprehensive 
 views. Constitutional melancholy and self-distrust seem to have
 
 84 POETRY BETWEEN POPE AND COWPER. 
 
 been the secrets of his small amount of production. But this was 
 not known fully to the world till after his death. He never spoke 
 out during his life. Any apparent injustice done him by Johnson 
 was due to a want of knowledge that was not possible to Johnson 
 when he wrote. And as regards the Odes, we can understand 
 Johnson's want of sympathy without ascribing any part of it to 
 personal jealousy. They appeal really to scholars and historians. 
 The Greek motto fixed to the "Progress of Poesy" signifies that 
 they are vocal only to the initiated. There is not a line that is 
 not charged with a historical allusion. So marvellous is the 
 rhythm that single stanzas may be read with delight ; but the 
 significance of the whole demands study. The substance of them 
 is a series of ecstatic visions of historical events, of the personal 
 emotions felt by a historian who was also a man of feeling and 
 imagination. The " Bard " is full of alliteration and personifica- 
 tion, and exemplifies the rhetoric of Gray. There is a quick 
 transition, when the Bard foretells the accession of the House of 
 Tudor and the glory of Elizabeth : 
 
 " ' But oh ! what solemn scenes on Snowdon's height 
 Descending slow their glitt'riug skirts unroll. 
 'Visions of glory, spare my aching sight, 
 Ye unborn Ages, crowd not on my soul ! 
 No more our long lost Arthur we bewail. 
 All hail, ye genuine Kings, Britannia's Issue, hail ! ' 
 ' In the midst a Form divine ; 
 Her lyon-port, her awe-commanding face, 
 Attempered sweet to virgin-grace. 
 What strings symphonious tremble in the air, 
 What strains of vocal transport round her play ! 
 Hear from the grave, great Taliessin, hear ; 
 They breathe a soul to animate thy clay. 
 Bright Rapture calls, and soaring, as she sings, 
 Waves in the eye of Heav'n her many-colour'd wing*.' "
 
 85 
 
 CHAPTEE VIII. 
 
 DECLINE OF POETRY THE NOVEL. 
 
 WALPOLE'S CRITICISM WHY THE WANT OF POETRY WAS NOT FELT DIARY 
 OF A LADY OF QUALITY RISE OF THE NOVEL ' PAMELA ' CONNECTION 
 WITH MAGAZINE LITERATURE FIELDING HISTORICAL NOVELS 'THE 
 CASTLE OF OTRANTO.' 
 
 I GAVE some account in my last lecture of the great poets of 
 the middle part of the eighteenth century. Why there was such 
 a scarcity of good poetry during that period is a question that 
 admits of great diversity of opinion : that there was a scarcity of 
 it is a matter of fact, and it was felt at the time. In this as in 
 most other social facts there were probably several causes at work. 
 One of these causes is very plainly hinted at in a contemporary 
 letter by a very shrewd observer, Horace Walpole, second son of 
 the great Prime Minister. Writing to his friend Sir Horace Mann 
 in 1 742, he said : " If you did amuse yourself with writing any- 
 thing in poetry, you know how pleased I should be to see it, but 
 for encouraging you to it, d'ye see, 'tis an age most unpoetical ! 
 Tis even a test of wit to dislike poetry ; and though Pope has 
 half-a-dozen old friends that he has preserved from the taste of last 
 century, yet I assure you the generality of readers are more 
 diverted with any paltry prose answer to old Marlborough's secret 
 history of Queen Mary's robes. I do not think an author would 
 be universally commended for any production in verse, unless it 
 were an ode to the Secret Committee, with rhymes of liberty and 
 property, nation and administration." 
 
 This is in effect to say that, in the opinion of Horace Walpole,
 
 86 DECLINE OF POETRY. 
 
 fashionable society was too much occupied with politics to have 
 any interest to spare for poetry. To understand how this was 
 possible, we must remember that political power was then confined 
 to a very narrow circle. It was not, as you are aware, till nearly 
 a century afterwards that the middle classes, the commercial 
 classes, obtained a share of political influence. The men who had 
 any chance of a voice in the management of the affairs of the 
 nation were the men whose wives and daughters constituted polite 
 society in the metropolis "the town," as they called themselves. 
 And intrigues were incessantly going on to keep Ministers on or 
 put Ministers out, in all which the wives and daughters took a 
 keen interest. The affairs of the State were the affairs of the 
 town, and had an exclusive absorbing and personal interest that 
 they no longer possess for any single section of the community 
 now. Hence the literature that had most direct interest for the 
 town was political, and a damaging attack on a Minister, a piece 
 of scandal or argument, whether in prose or in verse, was apt to 
 eclipse any production that depended for its effect on the interest 
 peculiar to poetry. 
 
 The absorbing interest in politics among those who were at the 
 time the chief patrons, promoters, and consumers of literature was 
 probably one of the causes of the poetic barrenness of the middle 
 of the eighteenth century. This political interest was fed and 
 nourished by the press, with a regular supply, weekly, bi-weekly, 
 and daily. 
 
 Among the other things that may be mentioned as taking the 
 place of poetry among the enjoyments of a life of leisure at this 
 time is the stage. Queen Anne and her Ministers exerted them- 
 selves to purify and reform the stage. Under Charles II. ladies 
 went to the theatre masked, and things were spoken that were not 
 very fit for them to hear. Queen Anne prohibited the wearing of 
 masks, and instituted a moral censorship of plays, insisting that 
 everything intended for public performance should first be sub- 
 mitted to the Lord Chamberlain. That official was not so par- 
 ticular as he is now, but there was a marked improvement in the 
 morality of plays. The theatre took a more important place among 
 fashionable amusements. It has not, I think, been remarked that 
 the dreariest period in the poetic annals of the eighteenth century
 
 DIARY OF A LADY OF QUALITY. 87 
 
 is almost exactly coincident with tlie career of David Garrick. 
 You will see how a powerful counter-attraction at the theatre, 
 such as would occupy the serious attention of intellectually dis- 
 posed people, would diminish the demand for poetry, and rob the 
 poet of that devoted sympathy in the absence of which he cannot 
 work with full power, if you consider for a little how people of 
 leisure at that time distributed their day. There is an amusing 
 paper in the 'Spectator,' No. 323, which professes to give the 
 diary of a lady of quality. It is of course a caricature, but it 
 gives us an idea of the arrangement of a fashionable day, of the 
 hours that were kept by fashionable people : 
 
 "From three to four. Dined. Mrs Kitty called upon me to go to the 
 Opera before I was risen from table. 
 
 "From dinner to six. Drank tea. Turned off a footman for being rude 
 to Veny. 
 
 "Six o'clock. Went to the Opera. I did not see Mr Froth till the be- 
 ginning of the second act. Mr Froth talked to a gentleman in a black wig. 
 Bowed to a lady in the front box. Mr Froth and his friend clapped Nicolini 
 in the third act. Mr Froth cried out Ancora. Mr Froth led me to my 
 chair. I think he squeezed my hand. 
 
 "Eleven at niyht. Went to bed. Melancholy dreams. Methought 
 Nicolini said he was Mr Froth." 
 
 The morning was spent in reading, if there was anything to 
 read, playing with pets, seeing to the dressmaker, shopping, 
 going to church, the mid-day service at St Paul's, where the 
 music was good, being especially fashionable. Half-past two 
 or three was the dinner-hour. After dinner was the time for 
 making calls or walking in the Mall ; and in the evening there 
 were public entertainments and private assemblies. There was 
 probably then a greater separation than exists now in the 
 social amusements of men and women : after dinner the men 
 went to the coffee-houses if they did not go to the play, and 
 the women went to tea-parties, where throughout the greater 
 part of the century card-playing was the chief alternative to 
 scandal and other small talk. The theatres opened at five o'clock, 
 and the entertainment lasted till nine. You will thus see that 
 the theatre filled an important gap in the day ; and that when it 
 was the rage, it was likely to absorb not a little of fashionable 
 interest. Under Garrick, revivals of Shakespearean plays were
 
 SS THE NOVEL. 
 
 the great theatrical events; earlier in the century, revivals of 
 Dryden. The morning was the chief time for reading. Addison's 
 lady of quality on two of her mornings read Dryden's " Aurungzebe, 
 or the Indian Emperor "; if she had lived thirty years later, she 
 would probably have spent the same time over Shakespeare. Can 
 you wonder that such solemn ponderosities as Johnson's " London " 
 or " Vanity of Human Wishes," or such intricate harmonies and 
 sublimities as Collins's " Ode to Evening " or Gray's " Progress of 
 Poesy," failed to arrest general attention when the vacant hours 
 of the morning could be spent in reading the thrilling scenes of 
 " Richard III." or " Othello," and the evening in seeing Shake- 
 speare's heroes impersonated by the most original modern actors ? 
 The town naturally yielded to the greatest attraction, and there 
 was no body of readers outside this fashionable society in whose 
 sympathy the poet might find nourishment. 
 
 Two kinds of literature, then, imperatively claimed a portion of 
 the hours available for reading in the reigns of the first Georges, 
 political journals and plays. People in society were bound to read 
 these, because they were talked about ; and not to know them or 
 appear to know them was to have nothing to say, or no grace in 
 listening. And there was a third kind which became prominent 
 in the second ten years of George II. 's reign, about the time when 
 Pope published the last of his Satires. This was the novel. New 
 forms of literature, as I have before said, always have the advan- 
 tage in freshness and force of interest over old forms. The novel 
 appeared in a new form with Richardson's ' Pamela ' in 1 740. 
 About the time when Horace Walpole wrote the letter from which 
 I quoted at the beginning of the lecture, ladies at Ranelagh Gar- 
 dens, then one of the fashionable resorts, were holding up to each 
 other their copies of ' Pamela,' to show that they had in their pos- 
 session the most popular book of the day. The industrious anti- 
 quarian has cast doubt upon the literal truth of this story, point- 
 ing out that Ranelagh Gardens were not opened to the public till 
 eighteen months after ' Pamela ' had begun to run through many 
 editions. Vauxhall, however, was open, if Ranelagh was not, and 
 the incident may have been observed there. At any rate, the fact 
 expressed by the story is true enough, that ' Pamela ' was at once 
 and universally popular. In January 1741, the editor of the
 
 RICHARDSON'S 'PAMELA.' 89 
 
 ' Gentleman's Magazine ' wrote as follows : " Several encomiums 
 on a series of Familiar Letters, published but last month, entitled 
 ' Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded,' came too late for this Magazine, 
 and we believe there will be little occasion for inserting them in 
 our next ; because a Second Edition will then come out to sup- 
 ply the Demands of the Country, it being judged in town as great 
 a sign of want of curiosity not to have read ' Pamela,' as not to 
 have seen the French and Italian Dancers." This testimony is 
 almost as quaint and significant as the story about Eanelagh Gar- 
 dens. Books must be new in form as well as in substance before 
 they create such a furore as that indicates. There has been 
 nothing like it in my time. The nearest approach I recollect is 
 J. R. Green's ' Short History of the English People.' Fashionable 
 ladies carried it about with them on their visits to country-houses. 
 
 Richardson has long received the honour of being regarded as 
 the founder of the English Novel, but of late it has been custo- 
 mary to go a little further back, and trace the beginnings of the 
 novel in the papers by Addison and Steele in the ' Tatler ' and the 
 ' Spectator.' The novel, it is said, was developed, not created, by 
 Richardson. Now this is hardly fair to the ingenious printer, if it 
 is meant to deny him the credit of having invented or stumbled 
 upon a new species of composition the novel of manners, stories 
 in which the characters are drawn from ordinary domestic life, and 
 of which the interest lies in picturing how they affect one another 
 and how they are affected by circumstances. It is true that the 
 novel was developed and not created ; but it is not more true of 
 Richardson's novel than of any other new species of composition, 
 such as Marlowe's tragedy, or Scott's romantic tale, or Byron's 
 personal epic. All alike are developed, not created, in the sense 
 of having many affinities with the kind of literature immediately 
 anterior to them. Thus in the novel of manners there are two 
 elements there is a description of ordinary character and there is 
 plot-interest i.e., there is a story. Both of these elements are 
 found in the generation before Richardson, but not in combination. 
 It was he who combined them in his novel of manners, and there- 
 fore is he entitled to the praise of having invented a new species 
 of composition. 
 
 You will find abundant descriptions of manners in the ' Specta-
 
 90 THE NOVEL. 
 
 tor,' and many delicate studies of character. Whoever wishes to 
 get a living knowledge of the Queen Anne time must give even- 
 ings to the ' Spectator,' and observe the incidents that are pictured 
 as occurring in the shops and the streets and the places of amuse- 
 ment, at balls and tea-tables and dinner-tables, and the private 
 sanctuaries where fine ladies issue adorned for conquest. The 
 quiet ' Spectator ' penetrated everywhere. Especially in the letters 
 from fictitious correspondents from Jenny Simper, Aurelia Care- 
 less, Betty Cross-stitch, Constantino Comb-brush, Florinda, Corinna 
 Jeraminta, Jack Courtly, Toby Rentfree, Will Cymon, Dick Love- 
 sick, and so forth you will find many happy studies of manner 
 and character, many of the touches of nature that make all the 
 world kin. But there is no story to weave the detached studies 
 together. We learn how Jenny Simper being, as she described 
 herself, a young woman with her fortune to make went to church, 
 and was much aggrieved because the clerk of the parish, an ex- 
 gardener, wreathed the pews so thickly with evergreens that she 
 could not make eyes at the desirable baronet during the service ; 
 but it had not occurred to anybody to make a heroine out of 
 Jenny Simper, or a hero out of the baronet, or a story out of in- 
 cidents within the probabilities of ordinary life. There were 
 stories to read in the days of Queen Anne; there have been 
 stories from the very beginning of literature ; but they were of a 
 different kind from the stories told in novels of manners. There 
 were, in the first place, the great long-winded romances, full of 
 amazing adventures, heroes of superhuman strength and courage 
 and generosity, and heroines of surpassing beauty and constancy. 
 The sceptical spirit had banished them from polite society in town, 
 but they still lingered in the country and in the less enlightened 
 strata of middle-class life, and, on the whole, perhaps did good 
 with all their unreality, through their high standard of ideal con- 
 duct. There were stories of another kind, stories of fashionable 
 intrigue, to which the name of novel was sometimes given stories 
 that served no good purpose. Finally though this was not in 
 the reign of Queen Anne, but in the reign of her successor 
 George L there came the novels of adventure and crime the 
 invention of Defoe.
 
 THE ORIGIN OF 'PAMELA.' 91 
 
 Richardson did not invent stories any more than he invented 
 the description of manners, but that does not in the least detract 
 from the originality of his invention of the domestic novel, a story 
 of incidents all within the area of possible occurrences in everyday 
 life. The idea of writing such a story came to him by accident. 
 He was an industrious and prosperous printer, a stout, rosy, vain, 
 prosy little man, not at all the sort of man that might be expected 
 to be a fashionable novelist. Of poor parentage, he had been 
 apprenticed to a London printer; had spent some years as a 
 press-reader or proof-corrector not a bad position for acquiring a 
 knowledge of literature ; had married his master's daughter, and 
 acquired an extensive business. When he was near the age of 
 fifty some bookseller friends of his, struck perhaps by his excel- 
 lence as a letter-writer, had suggested to him that he should com- 
 pose a " familiar letter-writer " " a little volume of letters in a 
 common style, on such subjects as might be of use to those 
 country readers who were unable to indite for themselves." In 
 his youth, as it happened, Richardson had had a singular ex- 
 perience in the way of writing letters for others. Three young 
 women who could not write had employed him, when he was a 
 boy of thirteen, to conduct their correspondence with their sweet- 
 hearts, which he did, he tells us, much to the satisfaction of his 
 employers, and without betraying their confidence. This may 
 have been known to the booksellers who suggested his writing a 
 volume of model correspondence. At any rate, he undertook the 
 task. But having a genius for story-telling, it occurred to him, 
 as he turned the project over in his mind, that he might tell a 
 story in a series of letters, which would serve equally well as 
 models for letter-writing, and at the same time cultivate the 
 principles of virtue and religion in the minds of the youth of both 
 sexes. Accordingly, he chose a country girl, Pamela, in the 
 service of a young squire, Mr B., and made her relate in letters 
 to her friends her experiences from day to day and week to week 
 in very trying circumstances. Friends write to advise Pamela in 
 her difficulties, and so the story is carried on with most circum- 
 stantial minuteness, Pamela describing with the most careful 
 exactness every particular of what happens to her, and adding
 
 92 THE NOVEL. 
 
 her own reflections, surmises, and appeals for approbation and 
 advice. The effect of this method is that, if you have any sym- 
 pathy with the heroine, you get intensely interested in her per- 
 plexities ; the very fulness of the details, and the close truth to 
 nature with which the novelist follows every turn in the girl's 
 thoughts, compel you to read on. No one can read over a few 
 scenes from Richardson without feeling that he is a master of 
 his art; but few people now, I imagine, read any of his novels 
 through. It was otherwise in his own generation, when readers 
 had more in common with the thoughts and sentiments of his 
 voluminous descriptive letter -writers. The fame of 'Pamela' 
 made Richardson a great personal favourite, especially with ladies. 
 Several ladies of quality made a pet of him, deluged him with 
 confidences, and urged him to write more ; and under their flatter- 
 ing encouragement he produced ' Clarissa Harlowe,' a model of 
 every virtue in higher life, and ' Sir Charles Grandison,' his ideal 
 of a perfect gentleman. 'Clarissa' is universally acknowledged 
 to be his masterpiece. An anecdote was given by Macaulay 
 which shows how entrancing the story may become to readers 
 once fairly caught by the current of it. He took the whole eight 
 volumes with him when he was in India to a hill-station during 
 the hot season, and lent the first volume to the Governor's wife. 
 She read it and lent it to the Governor's secretary, and went to 
 Macaulay for the second. Thus the whole eight volumes passed 
 from hand to hand, and for a week or more the whole station was 
 in a ferment over the fortunes of Clarissa, the readers anxiously 
 waiting their turn for the successive volumes. Richardson is 
 long-winded and prolix to a degree, but that, in spite of all his 
 faults of style, he had the art of interesting his own generation 
 was abundantly proved, and apparently his greatest novel is still 
 capable in favourable circumstances of exerting its spell. 
 
 A much more brilliant writer, though a less minute anatomist 
 of ebbs and flows and cross-currents of feeling, was Richardson's 
 great successor and caricaturist, Henry Fielding. Two men more 
 unlike than these two pioneers of the modern novel could not be 
 conceived. Richardson's experiences were all of business life and
 
 KICHARDSON AND FIELDING CONTEASTED. 93 
 
 quiet domestic life. In his voluminous correspondence with lady 
 friends after his sudden leap into fame, which seems not to have 
 disturbed in the least the even tenor of his habits, we have minute 
 pictures of the circumstances in which he wrote his books some- 
 times in his backshop in Fleet Street, sometimes in an arbour in 
 his garden at Hammersmith, reading what he had written to the 
 young ladies of his family, talking with them over his characters, 
 judging from their criticisms as the story went on whether he had 
 produced the effects intended. Fielding was a much less domes- 
 ticated character a high-spirited, mirth-loving roysterer, the son 
 of a younger son of a noble family, who, when his scanty allow- 
 ance ran short, or was not paid at all, tried to subsist by writing 
 for the stage and the journals, organised a company of his own, 
 started more than one journal of his own, married a wife and 
 spent her small fortune in a year or two, read for the bar, and 
 obtained an appointment as a police-magistrate, never contriving 
 to make both ends meet, yet never losing his cheerfulness or his 
 generous temper. With all his wit and keen powers of observa- 
 tion, Fielding was probably too much hurried and pressed with 
 the cares and enjoyments of his happy-go-lucky life from day to 
 day to be capable of striking out a new path in literature ; and it 
 was by an accident that he fell into the track of the humble 
 tradesmanlike printer, and then discovered a rich field for his 
 genius. When ' Pamela ' became the rage, there was much in the 
 sentiment of it that appealed to Fielding's sense of the ludicrous, 
 and he resolved to write a parody. Beginning in this spirit, he 
 wrote a few chapters, more eminent for wit than for delicacy, and 
 then practically abandoned the design of burlesquing Richardson, 
 and went on to describe life as he had seen it in the course of 
 his varied experience, and characters as they presented themselves 
 to his own mind and heart. The life that he described was not 
 always the highest in point of morality, and his characters were 
 not always spotless; but there is this to be said for him as a 
 moralist, that he threw no sentimental halo over vice, that he 
 honoured true worth in manhood and in womanhood, that his 
 Parson Adams, his Squire Allworthy, and his Amelia, are among 
 the most lovable characters in fiction, and that no satirist ever ex-
 
 94 THE NOVEL. 
 
 posed meanness, hypocrisy, and kindred vices with healthier scorn 
 and ridicule. Apart from the substance of his work, his method 
 was very different from llichardson's. He discarded the epistolary 
 way of telling his story. The comic epic was his model. Hence 
 Byron called him the "prose Homer of human nature." And he 
 does not leave his characters to reveal themselves, as the so-called 
 dramatic novelist does, as Dickens does, for example, in what 
 they do and say. He makes a running commentary on their 
 conduct as he goes along ; button-holing you, as Thackeray puts it, 
 while he conducts you through his picture-gallery, and discoursing 
 familiarly about the creatures of his imagination. 
 
 I cannot here enter upon an elaborate criticism of Richardson 
 and Fielding. I wish only to show you their places in literature 
 as the originators of a new species of composition, which, while it 
 was fresh and new, and practised by masters of their art, helped 
 to push poetry out of a foremost place in the minds of the reading 
 public. I would recommend you to read what is said about Field- 
 ing by Thackeray in his ' Lectures on the Humourists,' and by Mrs 
 Oliphant on Richardson. I will not dwell upon the immediate 
 successors of these pioneers, Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith, but 
 pass on to a novel of a new kind, produced twenty-five years after 
 Richardson's ' Pamela,' Horace Walpole's ' Castle of Otranto.' 
 
 It would almost seem as if, after twenty years of the new kind 
 of fiction inaugurated by Richardson, including the masterpieces 
 of Fielding and Smollett and Sterne, the literary appetite began 
 to pine for something new, and to hark back to the old fare of 
 supernatural romance. You must not suppose that the old- 
 fashioned stories were at once extinguished by the new style; 
 they were only pushed into the background, relegated, perhaps, 
 to a less fastidious class of reader. If you look at the lists of 
 published books in old numbers of the 'Gentleman's Magazine,' 
 you will see that publishers still found readers for scandalous 
 stories, for romances such as the ' Adventures of Telemachus,' and 
 for more or less fictitious biographies of eminent criminals. But 
 it was only novels of the new kind that made a conspicuous mark 
 among readers in the height of literary fashion till the ' Castle 
 of Otranto ' appeared, which was professedly an attempt to com-
 
 THE 'CASTLE OF OTEANTO.' 95 
 
 bine the supernatural incidents of the old romance with the truth 
 to nature in dialogue and character introduced by the new novel. 
 
 It was Horace Walpole's opinion that in the novels of everyday 
 life, Nature had cramped Imagination. There had been plenty of 
 invention, but it was invention of scenes such as might occur in 
 common life : the novelists had excluded themselves from the great 
 resources of fancy. He thought that, for the sake of greater variety, 
 the fancy should be left free to "roam through the boundless realms 
 of invention," and thus have an opportunity of creating more in- 
 teresting situations. But he freely admitted that it would never 
 do to go back to the condition of the old romances, in which every- 
 thing was unnatural, in Avhich not only the incidents were impro- 
 bable, but the conduct of the personages in the face of those 
 incidents fantastic, their language absurdly inflated, their senti- 
 ments preposterous. He proposed, therefore, a compromise be- 
 tween the two. He was to have liberty to defy the rules of 
 probability in the incidents, but he was to bind himself to adhere 
 to probability in what he made his characters feel and say and do 
 in the improbable emergencies. Their lot was to be cast in a land of 
 wonders, of strange apparitions, and miraculous occurrences, but 
 they were to comport themselves as human beings might be ex- 
 pected to do in the circumstances. 
 
 Constructed deliberately on this plan, the ' Castle of Otranto ' 
 founded a new school of fiction. It is called a Gothic Romance, 
 and the scene is laid in a Gothic castle, with a labyrinth of vaulted 
 passages beneath it, one of which, by a trap-door, communicates 
 with a church in the neighbourhood. Manfred, the Prince of 
 Otranto, is the central figure in the story, a bold and unscru- 
 pulous man, though not without redeeming traits in his character. 
 The title to the principality has been in his family for only two 
 generations before him, and the title of his grandfather was more 
 than doubtful. The last prince of the rightful line was Alfonso 
 the Good, who died in the Holy Land ; the Marquis of Vicenza 
 was the nearest heir, but Manfred's grandfather had forestalled him, 
 and was powerful enough to keep him out of his own. There was 
 a mysterious prophecy that Manfred's line would keep possession 
 till the house had become too small for its rightful owner. Now
 
 90 THE NOVEL. 
 
 naturally there was one point about which Manfred had a morbid 
 anxiety the preservation of his line. His wife Hippolyte had borne 
 him but two children, a boy and a girl. The boy was a puny sickly 
 child, but Manfred determined to marry him to the only daughter 
 of the rival claimant, the Marquis of Vicenza. He obtained this 
 Lady Isabella from her guardians during her father's absence in the 
 Holy Land, and the supernatural part of the story begins with the 
 preparations for the wedding. The wedding party is assembled in 
 the chapel of the castle, when, to Manfred's intense impatience, it 
 is discovered that the boy- bridegroom he was only fifteen is 
 missing. A servant is sent in haste to his apartments on the other 
 side of the court. The servant returns staring, speechless, and 
 foaming at the mouth. Manfred and his retainers rush into the 
 court, and find the poor boy mangled and bleeding, crushed to 
 death by a gigantic helmet of black steel with huge black plumes. 
 The helmet is a hundred times as big as any ever made for mortal 
 man, and the plumes are in proportion, and seemed to fill the 
 courtyard as with a black forest. Manfred is astounded, but, in 
 the depth of his grief and wonder, he has presence of mind enough 
 to say, "Take care of the Lady Isabella " for a purpose which ap- 
 pears presently. Nobody can tell where the helmet has come 
 from, but in the midst of their conjectures a young peasant re- 
 marks that it is exactly like in every respect but size to the helmet 
 on the head of the black marble statue of Alfonso the Good in the 
 church. Manfred flies into a passion. Some of his servants rush 
 to the church, and find that the helmet from Alfonso's statue is 
 gone. The cry is raised that the young peasant, who is a stranger 
 in the place, is a necromancer, and that it is he who, by his black 
 art, has compassed the death of the young prince. Manfred orders 
 him to be confined in the helmet, to starve to death unless his 
 familiars supply him with food. Then Manfred proceeds to carry 
 out a suddenly-formed resolution. The supernatural thwarting 
 of his purpose has maddened him. He will divorce his wife and 
 marry Isabella himself. He sends for Isabella and broaches his 
 design to her. She is horrified. He lays hands on her. Then 
 the plumes on the helmet outside in the courtyard are violently 
 agitated, and rustle against the window accompanied by a low
 
 THE 'CASTLE OF OTKANTO.' 97 
 
 hollow sound. "See," Isabella cries, "Heaven itself declares 
 against your wicked purpose ! " " Heaven nor Hell shall prevent 
 me ! " he says. At this instant one of the pictures on the wall, 
 the portrait of his grandfather, heaves a deep sigh, and presently 
 walks out of its frame on to the floor. 
 
 These examples will give you some idea of how Walpole effected 
 his proposed reconciliation of reality and romance. The only real 
 importance of his work is that it marks a new point of departure 
 from the novel as conceived by Richardson and Fielding.
 
 98 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE NOVEL continued. 
 
 INFLUENCE OF PERCY'S ' KELIQUES ' AND OSSIAN MISS BURNEY AND THE 
 LADY NOVELISTS. 
 
 AT the close of last lecture I mentioned that Walpole's ' Castle of 
 Otranto' founded a new school of novels, the novels of supernatural 
 incident. It was also the first to direct the attention of novelists 
 to the great wealth of materials for their craft that might be found 
 in feudal times, lawless turbulent characters, unbridled passions, 
 and picturesque costume and architecture. The very year after 
 the ' Castle of Otranto ' was published, there appeared what I take 
 to be our first Historical Romance, ' Longsword, Earl of Salisbury.' 
 I only know the work from the description of it in the ' Monthly 
 lleview ' of the time, I have never been able to get sight of the 
 book itself. It is never mentioned in our literary histories, as 
 far as I know. According to the ' Monthly Review,' it made an 
 attempt to follow historical truth ; " the truth of history was 
 artfully interwoven with entertaining fictions and interesting 
 episodes." This could not be said of the 'Castle of Otranto,' 
 which, although the scene was laid in feudal times, had no basis 
 in actual historical fact. ' Longsword,' then, seems to have been 
 the first anticipation in species, if not in quality, of Scott's his- 
 torical romances. 
 
 But, indeed, it would give a wrong impression of the way in 
 which the public mind is gradually prepared for the reception of 
 a writer of genius, and the atmosphere created in which he finds 
 vital sustenance, to ascribe the initiative in any new kind of
 
 INFLUENCE OF PERCY'S ' KELIQUES ' AND OSSIAN. 99 
 
 writing absolutely to one man or one work. I remarked in my 
 last lecture on the injustice of denying to Richardson the praise 
 of inventing the modern English novel of manners. I pointed 
 out at the same time how he had predecessors in one essential 
 feature of this new literary form. But it is possible that, owing 
 to the emphasis I was obliged to lay on his originality, I induced 
 you to think of him as standing out more prominently from his 
 compeers and predecessors, more sharply marked off from his age, 
 than he really was. The individual is great in literature, but he 
 does not create out of nothing ; the soil is prepared for him, and 
 the materials gradually accumulated which he seizes upon and 
 turns to new shapes. Individuals take new departures, take the 
 lead in new expeditions into the untried and unexplored ; but the 
 ways and means for the expeditions are first accumulated by the 
 co-operation of many. Thus the ' Castle of Otranto ' and ' Long- 
 sword ' were new departures ; but about the time when they were 
 made there was a general harking back to the customs and the 
 literature of the middle ages. A year after the publication 
 of Walpole's romance, 1765, Bishop Percy published his famous 
 'Reliques of Ancient English Poetry'; and, a few years before, 
 Macpherson had produced first his ' Fragments ' of ancient Gaelic 
 poetry, and then his pretended translation of the Ossianic epics, 
 'Fingal' and 'Temora.' The study of medieval antiquity was, in 
 fact, becoming a very general pursuit among the learned when 
 Walpole took the lead in introducing the sentiment of it into 
 prose fiction. 
 
 It was some years before Walpole had an eminent successor in 
 his own peculiar walk of romance, flavoured with supernatural or 
 quasi - supernatural incident. The next conspicuous romance of 
 this species was Mrs Radcliffe's ' Mysteries of Udolpho,' published 
 nearly thirty years later. Meantime, in 1778, a conspicuous mark 
 was made by a novel in the Richardson school of domestic fiction, 
 a novel that arrested and sustained universal attention in the 
 literary world amidst the crowd of writings that poured from the 
 press. This was Miss Burney's ' Evelina,' and it was the first of a 
 long series of triumphs for the sex in this branch of literature. 
 In the fifty - five years between Sterne's ' Tristram Shandy ' and 
 Scott's ' Waverley ' the chief honours in novel-writing were carried
 
 100 THE NOVEL. 
 
 off by women Miss Burney, Mrs Radcliffe, Miss Edgeworth, and 
 Miss Austen. The names that became classic during this interval 
 were all names of women. 
 
 Miss Burney was the first woman to achieve first-rate distinction 
 in the modern novel, thirty-eight years after Richardson had led 
 way into the new form. But you are not to suppose that dur- 
 ing that long period women had abstained from trying a kind 
 of writing for which women have such special qualifications in 
 their keen eye for manners, their quick sense of the ridiculous, and 
 sharp insight into character. Very soon after the invention of the 
 novel, circulating libraries were also invented ; novel-reading be- 
 came a passion, and novel-writing one of the few money-making 
 branches of literature. As early as 1752, the ' Monthly Review,' 
 a monthly organ of literary criticism started in 1748, complained 
 of the labour of reading the multitude of novels submitted to its 
 judgment. They spring up like mushrooms every year, every work 
 of merit producing a swarm of imitators. In 1755, a witty writer 
 in the ' Connoisseur ' proposed to establish a literary factory, and 
 of course the manufacture of novels was to be a prominent part of 
 the business, an eminent cutter-out being retained for the plot and 
 leading adventures, with numerous assistants competent to fill in de- 
 tails. To supply the eager needs of the circulating library, many 
 translations were also made from the French, the novels of Mari- 
 vaux and Mme. Riccoboni being special favourites. Such being 
 the demand for novels, as soon as this delightful form of literature 
 was invented, women were well to the front both as translators 
 and as original authors. There was Mrs Charlotte Lennox, for 
 example, a lady with a literary career of nearly half a century, 
 which began very prosperously but ended rather unhappily, the 
 old lady, who for so long had supported herself by miscellaneous 
 work with her pen, being under the necessity of writing after her 
 powers had fallen off. She was one of the great Johnson's favour- 
 ites, and the success of her first novel, 'Harriet Stuart,' in 1751, 
 was celebrated by a supper at the Devil Tavern, where the mighty 
 " llambler " crowned her with laurel. Her next work, the ' Female 
 Quixote,' in 1752, was a still greater success. It certainly is a 
 very amusing book. It describes the adventures of a beautiful 
 young lady, whose father, a powerful Minister, having retired from
 
 MRS LENNOX'S 'FEMALE QUIXOTE.' 101 
 
 the world in disgust at his fall from office, kept her in complete 
 seclusion in the country. Here the young lady, finding a com- 
 plete collection of the fantastic romances to which I have referred 
 as being fashionable in Queen Anne's time, accepts in all serious- 
 ness their ideals of heroism and love and the proper behaviour of 
 lovers, models her lonely life with her maids after the fashion of 
 the romantic heroines, and keeps her mind constantly occupied 
 with expectations of romantic adventures. Encountering a stranger 
 in one of her rides, she takes him for a desperate lover come to 
 carry her off by force, and behaves as romantic princesses do in 
 such circumstances, orders her servants to secure and disarm the 
 unfortunate man, and treats his protests as signs of villainous 
 duplicity. She takes one of her father's gardeners for a prince in 
 disguise, and is hardly disabused of her fancy when the young 
 man is cudgelled by the head gardener and dismissed, being 
 caught in the act of stealing carp from a fish-pond. Her father 
 wishes to marry her to a cousin, whom he invites to his castle to 
 make her acquaintance with this object ; but she is deeply offended 
 with the young man because he does not make love in the high- 
 flown manner of romantic chivalry, and instead of serving her 
 faithfully and humbly for several years before, with faltering voice 
 and devout reverence he begs the unutterable favour of kissing 
 her hand, and blurts out a declaration of love after a few weeks' 
 acquaintance. As you may suppose, many capital situations occur 
 before Arabella is enlightened as to the difference between the 
 ways of real life and the ways of seventeenth-century romance. 
 The story is rather wire-drawn, but full of humour. Johnson con- 
 tinued a friend to the authoress to the last, and wrote proposals 
 for printing a quarto edition of her works in 1775 ; and it would 
 seem that, with all her various literary industry, Mrs Lennox 
 needed such services as old age came upon her. She would seem 
 to have been not particularly amiable in private life, if we are to 
 believe Mrs Thrale's judgment (recorded in Mme. D'Arblay's 
 ' Diary '), that everybody admired Mrs Lennox, but nobody liked 
 her. Miss Fielding, the sister of the novelist, also wrote several 
 novels, and in the opinion of Richardson, who was not a little 
 jealous and spiteful towards his rival and caricaturist, showed a 
 more intimate knowledge of the human heart than her (gifted)
 
 102 THE NOVEL. 
 
 brother. This was not the general opinion, though an admirer 
 wrote of her that " Miss Fielding was one of those truly estimable 
 writers whose fame smells sweet, and will do so to late posterity, 
 one who never wrote 
 
 ' One line which dying she would wish to blot,' " 
 
 a compliment that could hardly be paid to Henry Fielding. 
 
 Another female novel-writer, whose fame has been kept green 
 by the fame of her children and great-grandchildren, was Mrs 
 Frances Sheridan, the authoress of ' Sydney Biddulph ' and ' Nour- 
 jahad,' and the mother of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. In the opin- 
 ion of Charles James Fox, ' Sydney Biddulph ' was the best of 
 modern novels, and Johnson wept over it, and complimented the 
 authoress by telling her that he doubted whether " on moral prin- 
 ciples she had a right to make her readers suffer so much." It is 
 a curious circumstance that precisely the same complaint of carry- 
 ing the sufferings of a heroine to an intensely painful pitch, harrow- 
 ing the reader with continuous and unrelieved and undeserved dis- 
 tresses, might be brought against more than one of the powerful 
 novels of her great-grandaughter, the Hon. Mrs Norton, especially 
 against ' Stuart of Dunleath.' The ' Memoirs of Sydney Bid- 
 dulph ' appeared in 1761, and Mrs Sheridan was undoubtedly the 
 most eminent female novelist before Miss Burney; although, 
 according to Mrs Barbauld, Mrs Brooke, another indefatigable 
 novelist and translator, whose ' Lady Julia Mandeville ' was repub- 
 lished in Mrs Barbauld's collection, was the " first female novel- 
 writer who attained a perfect purity and polish of style." 
 
 You will see, then, that women had not been idle in the new 
 field of literature before Miss Burney produced her 'Evelina,' 
 though this lady was the first to take rank with the masters of the 
 art. "She," says Macaulay, "first showed that a tale might be 
 written in which both the fashionable and vulgar life of London 
 might be exhibited with great force and with broad comic humour, 
 and which yet should not contain a single line inconsistent with 
 rigid morality, or even with virgin delicacy. She took away the 
 reproach which lay on a most useful and delightful species of com- 
 position. She vindicated the right of her sex to an equal share in 
 a fair and noble province of letters." This is true in the main, as
 
 MISS BURNEY'S 'EVELINA.' 103 
 
 is generally the case with Macaulay's broad and vigorous rhetoric, 
 only it is a trifle exaggerated. All the female novelists that I 
 have mentioned were unexceptionable in point of morality, as much 
 so as Miss Burney. Macaulay was probably thinking of the female 
 novelists of a much earlier period when he praised Miss Burney 
 for her delicacy of Mrs Behn and Mrs Manley and Mrs Haywood. 
 There was no lack of purity in the ' Female Quixote,' and ' Sydney 
 Biddulph ' would compare favourably in this respect with Victorian 
 novelists. And for more than thirty years before the appearance 
 of ' Evelina ' her sex had taken an equal share with men in novel- 
 writing, at least in point of quantity. It was the masterly natural 
 freshness of the character-drawing, the clear unencumbered vivacity 
 of the incidents, the frankness of the humour in a word, the 
 originality, the absence of literary artificiality, that signalised 
 ' Evelina ' as a work of genius, and set everybody talking about 
 the new writer. Miss Burney was not the first woman novelist, 
 but she was the first with a distinct vein of her own who wrote 
 with her eyes on the subject and not on any established model of 
 approved style. Macaulay is more exact when he speaks of the 
 great force and broad comic humour with which Miss Burney de- 
 picted vulgar as well as fashionable life. It was the picture of 
 vulgar life life in a would-be fashionable tradesman's family 
 that specially attracted notice in an age when the fashionable world 
 had been described to death in hundreds of periodical essays and 
 novels. We happen to have preserved for us a good deal of the 
 talk that went on about ' Evelina ' in the first months after its 
 appearance when it was all the rage. Miss Burney published it 
 anonymously, not even her own father knowing who was the 
 author ; and she recorded in her diary, which is almost as delightful 
 as her novels, what she heard people saying about the book and 
 its characters. It was the vulgar characters that were particularly 
 commented on and admired. The position of the heroine Evelina 
 was such as to bring her in contact with various classes. Her 
 origin was mysterious, but she had been brought up by a clergy- 
 man in the country, and when she was seventeen she was brought 
 out in London society by a lady who knew her mother's history. 
 Thus in the first part of the story we have descriptions of the 
 rustic beauty's experiences at a ball, an opera, a ridotto, a visit to
 
 104 THE NOVEL. 
 
 Ranelagh Gardens, a visit to the Pantheon. The girl's timidity, 
 the scrapes she falls into in consequence, and her encounters with 
 an empty fop, an enamoured but unscrupulous baronet, and an 
 accomplished, noble-minded, high-bred lord, who of course even- 
 tually marries the heroine, are described in a vein of the most 
 exquisite comedy. In Lord Orville Miss Burney succeeded in 
 drawing what Richardson attempted in Sir Charles Grandison a 
 perfect gentleman, who is at the same time not the least of a prig. 
 Evelina's ignorance and timidity get her into scrapes, but these 
 are nothing to the troubles caused by a terrible relation on the 
 mother's side, a vulgar Frenchwoman, her grandmother, Mme. 
 Duval, who very soon turns up. The scenes between this most 
 amusing harridan and her friend's husband, Captain Mirvan, a 
 salt of the oldest school, are boisterously farcical. The old tar 
 hates the French, and conceiving a violent animosity against Mme. 
 Duval, makes it his chief amusement to draw the old hag, as he 
 puts it, putting her into violent passions, insulting her in every 
 way imaginable, devising practical jokes at her expense. One of 
 these in which he and the baronet, who for interested reasons is 
 his ally, disguise themselves as highwaymen, drag her roughly 
 from her carriage, and leave her with her legs tied in a ditch, first 
 tearing off her false hair has uncomfortable consequences for 
 Evelina, for her grandmother insists upon taking possession of her, 
 and carries her off to the society of certain poor relations in the 
 city. The Braughton family and their lodger, Mr Smith, were the 
 great hit of the book. Mr Braughton, the father, was a silver- 
 smith in Snowhill, a close-fisted money-making tradesman, but his 
 girls were quite fine ladies, and their radiant vulgarities, their 
 squabbles with their rude brother Tom, their contempt for their 
 country cousin Evelina, their respect for the great Mr Smith, made 
 excellent sport for the fashionable readers of Miss Burney's novel. 
 It amused them vastly to see all the foibles and artificial distinc- 
 tions of polite society travestied by these lower animals. There 
 is Mr Smith, in particular, the first-floor lodger, a city clerk with 
 an immense conceit of superiority to the vulgar herd round him, a 
 sort of pinchbeck master, who patronised Evelina and introduced 
 her to all the glories of a Hampstead ball, where Mme. Duval, the
 
 CHAEACTER-DrxAWING IN 'EVELINA.' 105 
 
 French grandmother, danced a minuet to the grinning admiration 
 of all beholders. Mr Smith, in the fine tambour waistcoat of 
 which he was so self-conscious, was the delight of Miss Burney's 
 readers. " The Holborn beau for my money," laughed Dr John- 
 son to Miss Burney; "O you sly rogue, you character-monger." 
 The adventures of Evelina with the Braughtons are conceived in 
 the spirit of the liveliest farcical invention. When Miss Burney 
 comes to her third volume and the unravelling of her plot, which 
 contains not a few ingenious surprises, she becomes more conven- 
 tional and sentimental, but nothing could be better than the 
 freshness of incident and humorous character-drawing of the first 
 two volumes. It says something for the humanity of the time 
 that Captain Mirvan was generally considered to have gone too 
 far in his baiting of the old Frenchwoman Mme. Duval and the 
 silly fop Mr Lovel. This should be remembered when a certain 
 episode in the third volume is quoted as an example of the brutality 
 of manners among the upper classes. Two young men of the 
 period staying at a fashionable country house, in their passion for 
 betting, get up a race of a hundred yards between two poor old 
 women who can hardly walk ; and when one of the hobbling old 
 things falls and hurts herself so badly that she can do no more, 
 her backer swears at her and urges her on with unfeeling cruelty, 
 the whole company standing by to enjoy the fun. We should 
 bear in mind that such conduct was as abhorrent to the general 
 sentiment of Miss Burney's time as it is to the general sentiment 
 of our own time. It was not upon such incidents that the popu- 
 larity of Miss Burney's 'Evelina' was founded. 
 
 It was a matter of wonder to Miss Burney's contemporaries 
 how a writer who showed such an intimate knowledge of high 
 life could at the same time have acquired the knowledge of 
 vulgar middle-class life shown in her portraits of the Braughton 
 family. The explanation lay in the peculiar position of the 
 authoress's father. She was the daughter of Dr Burney, a man 
 of considerable celebrity in his time, an intimate of the Johnson 
 and Reynolds circle, author of a ' History of Music,' and the most 
 fashionable music-master of his generation. His high place in 
 his profession made him a man of note in Continental schools
 
 106 THE NOVEL. 
 
 of music, and foreign singers coming to England made a point 
 of coming with an introduction to Dr Burney. And while they 
 were negotiating an engagement in London, the strangers fre- 
 quently gave a taste of their quality in Dr Burney's drawing- 
 room. There is, besides, a sort of freemasonry among artists, 
 which makes them willing to render any little service they can 
 to the good-natured and popular in the brotherhood. Hence 
 all the world was eager to come to Dr Burney's musical parties, 
 where they could always hear the newest and most distinguished 
 things in music ; and on the evenings when Mrs Burney received, 
 the music-master's humble house in St Martin's Street was beset 
 with fashionable carriages. The quite demure little daughter, 
 who sat shy and silent in company while her brain was teeming 
 with comic fancies, and, as is often the way with shy demure 
 people, boiled over with comic reminiscences to her sisters when 
 the visitors were gone, had thus excellent opportunities of 
 studying the ways of the fashionable world. But Dr Burney 
 was not a proud man. He allowed his children to play with 
 the children of a wigmaker in the adjoining houses. And among 
 these humbler acquaintances, Miss Burney picked up that ac- 
 quaintance with life in a different plane of society which made 
 the fortune of her first novel. 
 
 Sometimes it is said now that 'Evelina' was overrated in its 
 day. It is impossible not to acknowledge that she painted 
 manners and habits with sprightliness and fidelity, but it is 
 said that "when she rises from manners and habits to paint 
 feelings, we see little but indecision on the one hand or exag- 
 geration on the other." This is all very true, and yet Miss 
 Burney was undoubtedly a novelist of the first rank. Undoubt- 
 edly she would be overrated if she were put on a level with 
 Richardson as an analyst of feeling, or Fielding as a humorist, 
 or George Eliot as a scientific investigator of cause and effect in 
 emotional changes, or any other novelist in the walk in which 
 his special strength lies. But there are varieties of excellence, 
 all equally admirable of their kind, and Miss Burney was pre- 
 eminent in her special kind, because she attempted only what 
 she was qualified to perform. In her first two novels, ' Evelina '
 
 THE 'MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO.' 107 
 
 and 'Cecilia,' there was nothing written against the grain, 
 simply because it was supposed to be the right thing for a 
 novel : she did not follow the fashion of her time in long-winded 
 sentimental reflections or fine-spun analysis of feeling. The 
 truth is that her writing, after her first four years of authorship, 
 was a failure, because in 'Evelina' and 'Cecilia' she had ex- 
 hausted all that was fresh in her observation of manners, and 
 assumed thereafter a point of view that was not natural to her. 
 The next pre-eminent work of fiction after Miss Burney's novels 
 was the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' published in 1794, and also 
 written by a woman. It was not a novel a story of real life and 
 character but a romance. In the preface, in which Horace Wai- 
 pole had acknowledged the authorship of the ' Castle of Otranto,' 
 while claiming the credit of having invented a new species of 
 romance, he modestly admitted that he was sensible of his own 
 inability to give full effect to his conception, and expressed a hope 
 that he had paved the way for "men of brighter talents," superior 
 to himself in the imagination and the exhibition of the passions. 
 This good wish was not fulfilled for nearly thirty years, and was 
 then fulfilled by a woman of brighter talents, Mrs Eadcliffe. She 
 adopted Walpole's idea of giving the imagination freer play in the 
 invention of incidents than the novelist could do if he kept to the 
 manners of modern life. But she adopted his idea with an im- 
 portant difference as regarded the licence of improbability that he 
 allowed himself. It is curious to note how the licence that Wai- 
 pole sought for the imagination was gradually abridged by those 
 who caught up his idea and followed in his track. The most 
 successful of his imitators before Mrs Radcliffe was another 
 woman, Clara Reeve, a very industrious authoress, who produced 
 what she called, after Walpole, a Gothic Romance, the 'Old 
 English Baron,' in 1777. But Mrs Reeve, though she owned him 
 as a master, declined to be led by him in one particular; she 
 thought that he went too far with his supernatural improba- 
 bilities. Statues that drop blood swords that take a hundred 
 men to lift pictures that groan and walk out of their frames 
 struck her as needlessly wild inventions, calculated to shake the 
 reader's faith in the story and give it a grotesque and ridiculous
 
 108 THE NOVEL. 
 
 air, such as a nursery tale has for a grown man. Accordingly Mrs 
 Reeve drew the line at ghosts. There is a haunted wing in the 
 castle of the old English baron, and there is an heir wrongfully 
 kept from his inheritance, and brought up as a peasant's son ; but 
 for the punishment of the wrongdoer and the restoration of the 
 defrauded youth to his own, the only supernatural machinery 
 employed is the ghost of a murdered man. Thus far Mrs Reeve 
 abridged the licence for the supernatural allowed by the authority 
 of Walpole, and Mrs Radcliffe imposed on herself a still stricter 
 self-denying ordinance. She abjured the supernatural altogether, 
 and yet contrived to keep her readers from first to last in an 
 atmosphere of mysterious excitement and superstitious dread. 
 There are no supernatural agents in her tales neither wizard nor 
 spectre; everything that happens is carefully explained as being 
 due to natural causes ; yet we are kept in a flutter and fever of 
 excitement as much as if evil spirits and good spirits were con- 
 stantly at work around us. The situations are eerie ; she puts us 
 in scenes where we are liable to the invasion of superstitious 
 panic, in dark forests and lonely castles, with long echoing cor- 
 ridors and secret passages and rooms shut up because they are 
 believed to be haunted ; she surrounds us with turbulent, desperate, 
 unscrupulous characters. Unaccountable sounds are heard when our 
 feelings are deeply interested in the fate of hero or heroine, voices 
 where no speaker is visible, strains of music in lonely places where 
 it seems all but impossible that any musician should be ; there are 
 unaccountable apparitions and marvellous disappearances. There 
 is generally some mystery afloat ; when one has been cleared up 
 we are not suffered long to breathe freely before we are caught in 
 the toils of another. Yet all the time only human agents are at 
 work ; there, is nothing improbable except the extraordinary com- 
 bination of circumstances, nothing supernatural except in the 
 superstitious imaginings of the personages of the story. Every- 
 thing that seemed as if it must be the work of spirits is carefully 
 and fully explained as the story goes on. Mrs Radcliffe has been 
 censured for these explanations, as if they were a mistake in point 
 of art, destroying the illusion and making us ashamed of ourselves 
 for having been imposed upon. This censure I can regard only as
 
 MRS RADCLIFFE DISCARDS THE SUPERNATURAL. 109 
 
 an affectation, unless when it comes from a convinced believer in 
 ghosts. Such persons might resent the explanation as casting 
 doubts upon their cherished belief. But for other people I can 
 see nothing that could be gained by leaving the mysterious in- 
 cidents unexplained, except by the authoress, who would un- 
 doubtedly have saved herself an immense deal of trouble if she 
 had made free use of ghosts and other supernatural properties, 
 whenever she required them, without taking any pains to explain 
 how the facts occurred. I read the story myself with a double 
 interest ; I enjoy the excitement of superstitious wonder and awe 
 while the illusion lasts, and when the mystery is cleared up, and 
 the excitement is gently subsiding, I am in a mood to get ad- 
 ditional enjoyment from reflecting on the ingenuity of the com- 
 plication that gave to the illusion for the moment the force of 
 truth. Yet it was no less a person than Sir Walter Scott that set 
 the fashion of objecting to Mrs Radcliffe's explanations. If we 
 were to inquire curiously into the objection, we should probably 
 find that the inquiry led us into one of the differences between 
 classical art and romantic art. Mrs Radcliffe, although in the 
 main a disciple in the school of romantic art, yet paid homage to 
 classical art in her efforts to explain the strangest occurrences by 
 accidents within the limits of human possibility ; and a thorough- 
 going romanticist like Sir Walter Scott might be inclined to re- 
 probate this concession. Yet one great leader of romantic art 
 in France, George Sand, followed Mrs Radcliffe's example, and 
 in her 'Consuelo' and 'Corntesse de Rudolstadt' accounted for 
 many strange and apparently supernatural occurrences by human 
 agency. 
 
 It was justly remarked by Mr George Moir, in his treatise on 
 Romance, that Mrs Radcliffe has in later times been most unjustly 
 made to bear the sins of her imitators. "The truth is," he says, 
 " that the sarcasms which have been directed against the puerile 
 horrors of Mrs Iladcliffe ought justly to have been confined to the 
 extravagances of her successors, who imitated her manner without 
 either her imagination or her judgment, and conceived that the 
 surest means of producing effect consisted in pressing the springs 
 of the terrible as far as they would go. In the hands of these
 
 110 THE NOVEL. 
 
 imitated imitators, the castles became twice as large and ten times 
 as perplexing in their architecture ; the heroine could not open 
 an empty drawer without stumbling on a mysterious manuscript 
 written by her father or her mother ; nor leave her room to take a 
 twilight walk, of which heroines are always strangely fond, with- 
 out stumbling on a nest of banditti ; the gleam of daggers grew 
 more incessant; the faces of the monks longer and more cada- 
 verous, and the visits of ghosts so commonplace that they came at 
 last to be viewed with the same indifference by the reader as they 
 were of old by honest Aubrey or less honest Dr Dee."
 
 Ill 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE NEW POETRY. 
 COWPER HIS ALLEGED REVOLUTION OF POETRY. 
 
 IN my last two lectures on the novels of the eighteenth century, I 
 tried to show you how much the public mind was occupied with 
 this new kind of literature. Poetry was for the time pushed aside. 
 You will now, I trust, understand that it is a very inadequate ex- 
 planation of the small amount of poetry that was written between 
 Pope and Wordsworth, and of the poorness in quality of much of 
 that small amount, to say that the poets of the period were ham- 
 pered by a slavish subservience to classical models. There is 
 abundance of evidence that would-be poets, on the contrary, 
 strained after originality. Even before Pope died, Matthew Green, 
 a poet of whimsical and dainty vein, who wrote with great spright- 
 liness of humour and lightness of touch, made it his boast that he 
 was no imitator : 
 
 " Nothing is stolen : my Muse, though mean, 
 Draws from the spring she finds within ; 
 Nor vainly buys what Gildon sells, 
 Poetic buckets for dry wells." 
 
 The truth is, that Pope's perfect success was not encouraging to 
 imitators ; there was no chance of fame except in a different kind, 
 and the mood of readers, delighted and fully occupied with prose 
 fiction, was such as to chill poetic genius by the most blighting of 
 all influences, indifference. The public was dancing to a different 
 tune, and the poet sat silent with a feeling that he must pipe in
 
 112 THE NEW POETRY. 
 
 vain. Now and again Poetry made a violent struggle to get a 
 hearing and a following, as when Churchill, the satirist, in the 
 sixties of the century, throwing all the refinements of Queen Anne 
 satire to the winds, laid about him with rude, furious, distempered 
 force. He made a noise in his time, but when interest in the 
 ephemeral subjects of his boisterous abuse and fierce invective had 
 passed away, his verse had not sufficient intrinsic merit to com- 
 mand readers. Churchill certainly was no bigot to classical rules, 
 no victim to smooth and easy couplets. The next poet to make a 
 popular and enduring mark gained his readers by accommodating 
 his verse to an easy, familiar, discursive prose style, with which 
 the great body of readers were for the time enchanted. 
 
 It is usual to speak of Cowper as a " reformer of poetry, who 
 called it back from conventionality to nature," and as the herald 
 of Wordsworth and Byron. Universally this new movement is 
 spoken of as a revolt against the authority of Pope ; and as it took 
 place simultaneously with the French Revolution, or nearly so, 
 this revolt is regarded as one of the signs of the revolutionary 
 temper of the time. Now, there can be little doubt that the in- 
 tense excitement and ferment produced by the French Revolution 
 and the career of Napoleon affected the poetry of the time. But 
 it gives an essentially wrong impression to speak as if the struggle 
 of the French people with a corrupt aristocracy and royalty stimu- 
 lated the poets of England to take up arms against their poetic 
 tyrant, and depose him with anger and contumely. We can hardly 
 speak of deposing a tyrant when there is no tyrant to depose. And 
 it is the merest fiction, the most unsubstantial shadow of a meta- 
 phor, to describe Pope as tyrannising over English poetry at the 
 close of the eighteenth century. A poet can tyrannise only as the 
 temporary vicegerent of the poetic spirit, and the poetic spirit 
 itself had no dominion over the affections of the English people at 
 this time. Pope's deposition had, in fact, been accomplished by 
 the coming to power of prose fiction. There had been a period of 
 anarchy in poetry; every poet had been doing that which was 
 right in his own eyes, struggling desperately after something 
 new, catching at straws like a drowning man, and there had been 
 no poet of sufficient eminence to establish a general empire. There 
 was nobody to revolt against when Wordsworth appeared ; the
 
 COWPER'S ALLEGED REFORM OF POETRY. 113 
 
 throne was vacant, open to any comer powerful enough to establish 
 his right by poetic might. 
 
 But Cowper, it is said, called poetry back from conventionality 
 to nature. He pioneered Wordsworth in discarding the poetic 
 diction sanctioned by the Queen Anne critics, their " heightened " 
 expression, their vain endeavours to dress nature to advantage. 
 That is to say, Cowper's diction is more like the language of prose. 
 But was this a revolt against the tyranny of Pope ? It seems to 
 me more accurate to describe it as a submission to the tyranny of 
 the novel-writers and pleasant discursive prose-essayists. Cowper 
 himself began his literary career as an essayist and writer of light 
 trifling verses in the style of Prior and Green ; and it was by ap- 
 plying this same style to more serious subjects that he made a 
 beginning in the so-called revolution. The worst of the revolution 
 explanation of the great movement that Cowper is said to have 
 heralded, an explanation so easy and simple and thought-saving, 
 is that it radically misrepresents the sources of the revolution, 
 and puts out of sight the real continuity of the literary history of 
 the eighteenth century. It would lead us to suppose that the 
 simpler diction, the discursive method, the prevalence of narrative 
 by which the new poetry was characterised, were adopted out of 
 antagonism to Pope ; whereas really the new poetry was enriched 
 by the prose-essayists and novelists, as these had themselves re- 
 ceived benefits from the Queen Anne poets. There had thus been 
 a substantial gain in literature from generation to generation, and 
 real progress, real development. It was not, as the revolution 
 explanation would import, that the Queen Anne style had been 
 discarded in the third or fourth generation as an entirely false 
 ideal, as a wasteful venture in a wrong direction, an unprofitable 
 divergence from the true paths of imaginative literature. The 
 prosemen of the middle forty years of the century were helped by 
 the brilliant epigrammatic poets of the Queen Anne time; and 
 the poets of the following generation received light and leading in 
 their turn from the prosemen of the generation before them. 
 Cowper, the herald of Wordsworth, may perhaps be described as a 
 reformer of poetry, but it is more significant of his historical posi- 
 tion to describe him as an essayist in verse. 
 
 In the numerous biographical and critical sketches of Cowper, 
 
 H
 
 114 THE NEW POETRY. 
 
 among which the latest, Mr Goldwin Smith's and Mrs Oliphant's, 
 may be mentioned as perhaps the best, sufficient attention has not 
 been paid to Cowper's literary work in his early manhood, before 
 his first madness and his conversion to Evangelical Christianity, 
 the events which are rightly regarded as the mainsprings of the 
 poetry now associated with his name, " Table Talk," " The Task," 
 and the " Occasional Poems." The work of his early manhood, 
 while he was still a buckish and briefless barrister, is generally 
 mentioned ; but it is slurred over as if it were of no consequence 
 in his history, as if it were a thing that had nothing in common 
 with the productions of his regenerate days. It can be shown, I 
 think, that, in so far as merely poetic qualities are concerned, this 
 early work was quite as revolutionary or unrevolutionary as the 
 poems of his pious old age. 
 
 With the main outlines of Cowper's life you are, I daresay, 
 familiar. He was the son of a country clergyman, the grandson 
 of a Justice of the Common Pleas, the grand-nephew of a Lord 
 Chancellor. After passing through Westminster School, he was 
 apprenticed to an attorney, and had as his fellow-apprentice the 
 famous lawyer who afterwards became Lord Thurlow. The 
 youths spent their time, he tells us, "in giggling and making 
 giggle," botli in the attorney's office and in the house of Cowper's 
 uncle, where dwelt a cousin with whom he was in love. Eman- 
 cipated from the attorney's office, and called to the bar, Cowper 
 took chambers in the Temple, and lived a gay and idle life, trust- 
 ing to family influence for a sinecure, and doing no sort of work 
 in his profession. It was during this period that he wrote the 
 poetry and prose which has, I think, been unduly neglected in 
 dissertations on his career. He belonged to a literary set. Two 
 of his Westminster school-fellows, Bonnell Thornton and Colman 
 the dramatist, conducted for two years (from January 175-4 to 
 September 1756) a very popular periodical in the style of the 
 'Spectator,' the 'Connoisseur.' Cowper was an occasional con- 
 tributor. The gaiety of these young Templars may be judged 
 from the fact that seven of the old Westminster boys formed a 
 coterie, to which they gave the name of the Nonsense Club, in 
 which the fun of giggling and making giggle was continued. 
 There Cowper lived till he reached the age of thirty-two, when
 
 CAUSES OF COWPER'S MADNESS. 115 
 
 a long-expected sinecure, in the gift of his kinsman Major Cowper, 
 was ready for his occupancy. This was the clerkship of the Jour- 
 nals of the House of Lords. ' There were two sinecures in Major 
 Cowper's gift, and it would seem that through some indecision or 
 change of purpose on the poet's part, suspicion was aroused about 
 the nominee, and it was resolved that he should be examined as to 
 his competency before the bar of the House of Lords. Cowper 
 was horror-struck at the prospect; fiddled excitedly for some 
 months with preparations for the ordeal ; then on the day before 
 attempted to commit suicide, and was found to be out of his mind. 
 It is idle to speculate upon the causes of this catastrophe. Mad- 
 ness is often puzzling to the most skilful doctors, making inquiry 
 at the time and in full possession of minute circumstances that we 
 desire in vain to know in a historical case. Mere fright at a pub- 
 lic examination would not have driven Cowper mad if he had had 
 no predisposition to madness. But a small circumstance may suffice 
 to upset a man of nervous, susceptible, irresolute temperament, 
 when his natural feebleness of will has been increased by want of 
 occupation, and his health deranged by want of exercise. The 
 only premonitory symptoms of Cowper's madness is found in a 
 poem, written nine years before the catastrophe (in 1754), in which 
 he speaks of being driven to poetry 
 
 " to divert a fierce banditti 
 (Sworn foes to everything that's witty) 
 That, with a black infernal train, 
 Make cruel inroads in my brain, 
 And daily threaten to drive thence 
 My little garrison of sense." 
 
 "The fierce banditti which I mean," he adds, "are gloomy thoughts 
 led on by spleen." The spleen in those days was the supposed 
 physical source of hypochondria; a melancholy and despondent 
 person was said to be suffering from the spleen. Matthew Green 
 wrote a poem on the spleen, and the banishment of its depressing 
 influence by wholesome laughter 
 
 " To cure the mind's wrong bias, Spleen, 
 Some recommend the bowling-green ; 
 Some hilly walks ; all exercise ; 
 Fling but a stone, the giant dies.
 
 116 THE NEW POETRY. 
 
 Laugh and be well. Monkeys have been 
 Extreme good doctors for the Spleen ; 
 And kitten, if the humour hit, 
 Has harlequin'd away the fit." 
 
 Unfortunately Cowper was too much frightened at the prospect 
 of appearing before the Lords to take the excellent advice of his 
 favourite poet. He was confined for eighteen months in a lunatic 
 asylum, where his reason was restored, it would seem, by such a 
 judicious regimen as might have averted the malady if it had been 
 employed in time. 
 
 Cowper returned to sanity, strange to say, in a blaze of religious 
 rapture. His physician, Dr Cotton, was a pious man, a writer of 
 hymns, and used to hold religious conversations with his patients 
 an ill-advised thing, as Mr Goldwin Smith remarks, if CoAvper's 
 madness had been religious mania. In the poet's case religion was 
 not the malady, but an element in the cure. One morning in the 
 summer of 1765, after a visit from his brother, he rose with a new 
 sense of health ; at breakfast on the bright summer morning felt 
 still better ; on a sudden impulse took up the Bible, from which 
 he had shrunk in dull despair during his illness, and all in a 
 moment was filled with an ecstatic conviction that he had made 
 his peace with God and was again in his right mind. In Cowper's 
 tender, sensitive, dependent spirit, with an imagination ever run- 
 ning swiftly towards intolerable horrors, and a will much too 
 feeble of its own strength to arrest this tendency, the doctrines 
 of Evangelical Christianity found a congenial subject. It was one 
 of those instantaneous conversions which Wesley and his disciples 
 believed to be a moment in the history of every true believer. The 
 doctor was at first suspicious of this sudden change in his patient, 
 but his doubts were soon removed. Cowper had really recovered, 
 and found in his ecstatic faith the stay and support that his de- 
 pendent spirit required. 
 
 It is doubtful whether the recovery would have been permanent 
 it was never permanent in the sense of being securely fixed 
 against accident, but it is doubtful whether it would have been 
 as permanent as it was had not a fortunate chance thrown him 
 in the way of the Unwin family when he was discharged from the 
 asylum. Airs Unwin was a woman born to be the support of such
 
 CHARACTER OF MRS UNWIN. 117 
 
 a man ; gentle in her ways, so as never to wound his tenderly fas- 
 tidious taste; unaffectedly pious, so as to comfort him in his doubts 
 and fears, and confirm his ecstasies with the sweetness of her sym- 
 pathy ; yet with all this of a cheerful temper, and always ready to 
 laugh with a hearty genuine ring at the sallies of his exuberant 
 humour. There never was a more perfect compatibility of temper. 
 Mr Unwin was alive when they first met, and the poet was ad- 
 mitted as a lodger into their parsonage ; but they continued to 
 live together at Olney after his death, Mrs Unwin tending him 
 and humouring him with unfailing gentleness and self-sacrifice. 
 There was no thought of marriage between them ; their love was 
 not the love of lovers. Much has been written, and not a little 
 insinuated, about the relationship between Cowper and Mrs Un- 
 win ; but I think Mrs Oliphant is right in her interpretation of 
 the poet's character, that he belonged to a class of men celibate 
 by nature, born to be dependent on the tender ministrations and 
 affectionate companionship of women, yet as near as may be de- 
 void of passion. Mrs Unwin was seven years older than the poet, 
 and neither her son, with whom he corresponded, nor his relatives, 
 who were greatly pleased with the happiness he had found, seem 
 ever to have dreamt of regarding the gentle rescued lunatic as a 
 dangerous lover. 
 
 Much less fortunate for Cowper was his relationship with an 
 overwhelming Evangelical enthusiast, Mr Newton, the vicar of 
 Olney, the converted captain of a slaver. It was at his instance 
 that Mrs Unwin and the poet settled at Olney, to be near him. 
 He took possession of them after Mr Unwin's death, and no 
 priest ever exercised authority with more arbitrary confidence. 
 Occupation was what Cowper wanted, and Mr Newton found him 
 occupation in regular spiritual exercises, in visiting the sick in 
 body and in mind, and in writing hymns. For some time Cowper 
 was happy in the vocation thus found for him, but the strain was 
 too much ; his mind again gave way, and for five years he remained 
 moody, dejected, and full of capricious insane fancies. Gentle 
 Mrs Unwin found for him during this period an occupation in 
 which he took a childish delight, making chairs and tables for her, 
 and cages, baskets, and hutches for his pets, of whom he collected 
 a great number about him, having at one time " five rabbits, three
 
 118 THE NEW POETRY. 
 
 hares, two guinea-pigs, a magpie, a jay, and a starling ; besides 
 two goldfinches, two canary birds, and two dogs." When the long 
 fit passed off, Mr Newton again set him to work upon hymns, and 
 the 'Olney Hymns' were published in 1779, fourteen years after 
 the poet's first recovery. 
 
 I mention this period to show you how long the poet was in 
 finding his true vocation the employment in which he enjoyed 
 a full measure of happiness. " I never received a little pleasure 
 in my life," he once said ; " if I am delighted, it is always in the 
 extreme." His letters show that under Newton's dictatorship lie 
 was often happy, but it was by fits and starts. It was a fortunate 
 thing for him when this strenuous spiritual director left Olney, 
 and could overawe him only by letter. Not long after his depar- 
 ture, Mrs Unwin, with her quiet penetrating insight, devised an 
 employment for him in which he found four years of unclouded 
 happiness. She had observed that he was never so completely 
 drawn away from himself as when he was writing, and in the 
 November of 1780 she suggested to him that he should attempt a 
 poem of some length, and gave him as a subject the " Progress of 
 Error." The poet was now in his native element, not perfectly 
 suited with a subject, but still more at liberty to indulge his quick 
 imagination than he could have been in the composition of hymns. 
 He set to his new employment with delight, and produced in 
 quick succession the "Progress of Error," "Table Talk," "Truth," 
 " Expostulation," " Hope," " Charity," " Conversation," and " Ke- 
 tirement." Mr Newton from a distance expressed doubts about 
 the new departure, but the poet pacified him with the idea that 
 his verses might be the means of attracting to the true faith some 
 whom the truth in its naked severity was apt to repel. Wesley 
 chose lively popular airs for his hymns, on the principle that it 
 was not well that the devil should have all the best tunes ; and 
 Newton apparently tolerated Cowper's moral satires, as he called 
 them, from a similar motive. 
 
 The "Moral Satires" were published in 1782, and were rather 
 coldly received by the critics. It was otherwise with his next 
 publication, a work begun under a different influence, an influence 
 that was like a renewing of the poet's youth. The casual reader 
 who has heard in a vague way of Cowper's relations with devoted
 
 LADY AUSTEN'S INFLUENCE ON COWPER. 119 
 
 women, generally couples Mrs Unwin and Lady Austen together 
 as two pious Methodist ladies who sacrificed themselves to cheer 
 the gentle poet's melancholy. But the two women were very 
 different in character, and the poet's acquaintance with the one 
 had a very different course from his acquaintance with the other. 
 The one by her patient, forbearing, sympathetic companionship did 
 most for his happiness ; the other in a brief angel's visit did most 
 for his reputation. Mrs Unwin was his household friend and 
 slave for more than thirty years ; Lady Austen was his gay and 
 sparkling playfellow for less than three. Lady Austen's settlement 
 in Olney was a bright interval in Cowper's long residence there, 
 which, with all his fitful Evangelical enthusiasm, he could not help 
 feeling to be a monotonous imprisonment when he remembered 
 the bustling variety of his ten years' life in the Temple. He spoke 
 of Olney, after she left, and after she awakened his memories of 
 other days, as a " moral Bastille." She was a woman of the world, 
 very different from the quiet Puritanic country clergyman's wife ; 
 the widow of a baronet, who had lived much in Paris, handsome, 
 vivacious, full of talk and high spirits. " She is a lively agreeable 
 woman," Cowper wrote to Newton immediately after his first 
 interview with her he had chanced to see her shopping in Olney 
 with her sister, one of Mrs Unwin's few intimates in the place, 
 and had requested Mrs Unwin to ask her to tea. " She has seen 
 much of the world, and accounts it a great simpleton, as it is. 
 She laughs and makes laugh, and keeps up a conversation without 
 seeming to labour at it." Lady Austen was charmed with the 
 poet, and the poet was charmed with Lady Austen. She brought 
 back to him breezy sketches of the world from which he had so 
 long been secluded. She romped with the playful old boy of fifty, 
 playing battledore and shuttlecock with him, whilst Mrs Unwin 
 played on the harpsichord. She told him diverting stories, among 
 others the adventure of John Gilpin, which kept him awake with 
 laughter for a whole night, and for which he rewarded her by 
 turning it into verse. But above all, his " Moral Satires " being 
 now completed and published, she suggested to him that he 
 should write a poem in blank verse, and when he asked her for 
 a subject, laughingly named the sofa on which she sat. This was 
 the origin of the series of poems called the "Task," composed
 
 120 THE NEW POETRY. 
 
 in a much gayer and more discursive mood than the " Moral 
 Satires." 
 
 It was the " Task " that made Cowper's reputation, and it was 
 inspired by a revival, under Lady Austen's companionship, of that 
 more mundane spirit to which he had long been a stranger. This 
 alone would make it worth while to look back and see what his 
 writing was like while he was still a young "buck," as the phrase 
 then went, living in chambers in the Temple, and giggling and mak- 
 ing giggle at his uncle's house in Southampton Row. We have 
 seen what the Methodist spirit did for him. It inspired the ' Olney 
 Hymns' and the "Moral Satires," and neither of these performances 
 made the great world outside the Evangelical circle feel that a 
 new poet had arisen! in England. This achievement was reserved 
 for the " Task," written during the temporary resuscitation of a 
 half-disused way of looking at the world, written in a gayer mood, 
 and therefore it is of interest to look at the tone and style of 
 Cowper's first writing, before he came under Methodist influence. 
 
 Cowper contributed three papers to the 'Connoisseur' in 
 March, April, and May 1756, Nos. in, 115, 119. If we did 
 not know that they were Cowper's, they would strike us as 
 extremely clever and idiomatically written imitations of Addison, 
 the great exemplar of periodical essayists at the time. Knowing 
 that they are Cowper's, and induced thereby to scrutinise them 
 more closely, we have no difficulty in detecting the peculiar note 
 of playfully extravagant humour with which we are familiar 
 in the " Task." The first of the papers is an absurd description 
 of "the delicate Billy Suckling, the contempt of the men, the 
 jest of the women, and the darling of his mamma," a picture 
 of an impossible young milksop who fancies himself a buck. 
 Neither then nor afterwards was Cowper capable of drawing 
 human character from life; his uncontrollable sense of fun 
 pushed him. into comic exaggerations that seem rather silly 
 to people less easily tickled. The fun of the second paper, a 
 .letter from an old bachelor, Christopher Ironside, describing 
 his persecution by young ladies, is equally extreme but not 
 so obvious; and may perhaps be taken as throwing some light 
 on the kind of romping that went on between Cowper and his 
 cousins in Southampton Row:
 
 LETTER FROM AN OLD BACHELOR. 121 
 
 " The female part of my acquaintance entertain an odd opinion that a 
 Bachelor is not in fact a rational creature at least, that he has not the 
 sense of feeling in common with the rest of mankind ; that a Bachelor 
 may be beaten like a stock-fish ; that you may thrust pins into his legs, 
 and wring him by the nose ; in short, that you cannot take too many 
 liberties with a Bachelor. I am at a loss to conceive on what foundation 
 these romping philosophers have grounded their hypothesis, though at the 
 same time I am a melancholy proof of its existence, as well as of its 
 absurdity. 
 
 "A friend of mine, whom I frequently visit, has a wife and three 
 daughters, the youngest of which has persecuted me these ten years. 
 These ingenious young ladies have not only found out the sole end and 
 purpose of my being themselves, but have likewise communicated their 
 discovery to all the girls in the neighbourhood ; so that if they happen 
 at any time to be apprised of my coming (which I take all possible care 
 to prevent) they immediately despatch half-a-dozen cards to their faithful 
 allies, to beg the favour of their company to drink coffee and help tease 
 Mr Ironside. Upon these occasions my entry into the room is sometimes 
 obstructed by a cord, fastened across the bottom of the door-case ; which, 
 as I am a little near-sighted, I seldom discover till it has brought me on 
 my knees before them. While I am employed in brushing the dust from 
 my black rollers, or chafing my broken shins, my wig is suddenly con- 
 veyed away." 
 
 In the last of these papers there are comic descriptions of the 
 behaviour of various characters when in possession of a secret 
 all in the same strain of simple childlike exaggeration. At 
 this period Cowper scribbled a great deal more than he printed. 
 These three papers in the ' Connoisseur ' are specimens of the early 
 practice by which he acquired the mastery of comic description 
 that appears occasionally in the "Task" the abundance of 
 detail, and the felicity of phrase. It was in writing prose essays 
 and prose letters that Cowper acquired the copious, easy, familiar 
 diction that entitles him to rank with poetic reformers. Cowper 
 is often referred to as an example of a man whose fancy and 
 imagination blossomed late in life, because he was fifty before 
 he acquired reputation as a poet. That a man much tried by 
 physical suffering should, in the evening of his days, take up 
 his pen and write poetry with a serious purpose, trying thereby 
 to catch trifles which could not be caught in any other way, 
 has a look as of inspiration. This no doubt has contributed 
 to perpetuate the delusion. But it will not bear examination.
 
 122 THE NEW POETRY. 
 
 Cowper not only wrote prose with exquisite grace and skill in 
 his youth, but his manner as a verse-writer was also fully formed 
 before he was thirty. At the age of seventeen he wrote some 
 work heroic blank verse in imitation of Philips's "Splendid 
 Shilling " that shows, even in the opinion of Southey, the same 
 character as the blank verse of the "Task," written when he 
 was more than fifty. That he read little poetry, in fact con- 
 fined his reading to Milton after his first attack of madness, is 
 unduly insisted on, if the meaning is to prove that his poetry 
 came fresh out of a mind unacquainted with what had been 
 done before, and consequently having no relation with preceding 
 literature. It must be remembered that Cowper was thirty-two 
 before madness first overtook him, and that all through his 
 early manhood he led a life of perfect leisure, his only employ- 
 ment being to read and write for his own amusement. 
 
 Very soon after the " Task " was completed, Cowper lost the 
 pleasant company of the " fair " who had " commanded " it. A 
 certain mystery hangs over the cause of Lady Austen's sudden de- 
 parture from Olney. There was obviously some disturbance in 
 the harmony of the happy family, and there has been much specu- 
 lation as to the cause. " What else was to be expected ? " many 
 people ask. Mrs Unwin naturally became jealous of Cowper's 
 attentions to her gay and fashionable rival, and he, having to choose 
 between them, was bound in honour to stand by his lifelong com- 
 panion and nurse. No other result was to be expected when two 
 women were attached to one man. This is the easiest explanation, 
 but it has the defect of not suiting what we know of the charac- 
 ters of the three persons concerned. Strange to say, or rather it 
 would be strange to say if we were not aware of the extent to which 
 men of reputation are idolised, nobody has thought of putting any 
 of the blame on the poet, if blame there was in the matter. The 
 rupture must have been brought about either by Lady Austen's 
 grasping eagerness to have more than her fair share of the poet's 
 attentions, or by Mrs Unwin's unreasonable jealousy. It seems to 
 me much more likely that the coolness which led to Lady Austen's 
 departure arose between Cowper and herself, and that the long- 
 suffering patient Mrs Unwin had nothing to do with it ; that it 
 was not strained relations between the two ladies, but strained
 
 LADY AUSTEN LEAVES OLNEY. 123 
 
 relations between one of them and the poet, that broke up the 
 alliance. Whether Lady Austen was in love with Cowper or 
 not, is a question we have no means of deciding. It is not un- 
 likely. Men incapable of feeling passion themselves may not be 
 incapable of inspiring passion in others. Lady Austen afterwards 
 married a Frenchman of letters, M. de Tardiff, and Cowper, 
 though much older than her, being fifty when she made his 
 acquaintance, besides being a poet, had a boyish playfulness of 
 temper and a quickness of wit not without their charm. Whether 
 in love with him or not, Lady Austen certainly sought his society, 
 though a great liking for the ministrations of Mr Scott, the curate, 
 was her ostensible reason for taking a house in Olney. Now 
 Cowper, though gentle, affectionate, and playful, would seem to 
 have had his full share of the invalid's fretful, exacting, and capri- 
 cious selfishness, and it is quite conceivable that Lady Austen, by 
 no means so patient and self-denying a woman as Mrs Unwin, may 
 simply have tired of his exactions and caprices. If we read be- 
 tween the lines of one of his letters to his cousin, Lady Hesketh, 
 this explanation is almost forced upon us. " On her first settle- 
 ment in our neighbourhood," Cowper writes, " I made it my own 
 particular business (for at that time I was not employed in writ- 
 ing, having published my first volume and not begun my second) 
 to pay my devoirs to her ladyship every morning at eleven. Cus- 
 toms very soon become laws. I began the ' Task,' for she was the 
 lady who gave me the Sofa for a subject. Being once engaged in 
 the work, I began to feel the inconvenience of my morning attend- 
 ance. We had seldom breakfasted ourselves till ten ; and the in- 
 tervening hour was all the time I could find in the whole day for 
 writing, and occasionally it would happen that the half of that 
 hour was all that I could secure for the purpose. But there was 
 no remedy. Long usage had made that which was at first optional 
 a point of good manners, and consequently of necessity, and I 
 was forced to neglect the ' Task ' to attend upon the Muse who 
 had inspired the subject. But she had ill-health, and before I had 
 quite finished the work was obliged to repair to Bristol." The 
 sprightly Muse, with all her stability of temper, sense of religion, 
 and seriousness of mind, must soon have become disagreeably con- 
 scious of the difference between the forced attendance of a wayward
 
 124 THE NEW POETRY. 
 
 and irritable invalid with his thoughts elsewhere, and the effusive 
 camaraderie with which he sought her company in the bright days 
 of their first companionship. 
 
 " Love ! it is a pleasant thing 
 A little time, while it is new." 
 
 Mrs Unwin might not have resented the change, but Lady Austen 
 was not Mrs Unwin, and she "repaired to Bristol" We might 
 have understood the cause of the separation better if the lady had 
 kept Cowper's letter of farewell, but she was so dissatisfied with it 
 that she threw it in the fire tempted, perhaps for once in her 
 life, to believe that Methodism was cant. Lady Austen was too 
 exacting, or Cowper was too exacting ; anyhow, they could not get 
 on together any explanation you please except that Mrs Unwin 
 was jealous. To entertain this explanation for a moment is to 
 commit the most senseless outrage on the memory of a gentle self- 
 denying woman, who bore with all the crazy poet's selfish whims 
 and caprices, and watched over him with more than a mother's 
 love till her own mind gave way under the strain.
 
 125 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 SCOTTISH POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 THE ELEVATION OF A DIALECT INTO A LITERARY LANGUAGE INFLUENCE 
 OF OLD BALLADS WATSON'S COLLECTION ALLAN RAMSAY THE EASY 
 CLUB 'THE GENTLE SHEPHERD' SONG-WRITERS SKINNER, ETC. 
 FERGUSON BURNS. 
 
 IF the eighteenth century was a comparatively barren period in 
 English poetry, it was otherwise in Scotch poetry. It witnessed 
 in Scotland an extraordinary phenomenon, the elevation of a dialect 
 by the genius of one man to a place among literary languages. 
 
 People have almost ceased wondering that a ploughman should 
 have proved himself capable of great work in literature, but it is 
 still customary to speak of Burns as an uneducated man. Now 
 we may lay it down as an axiom that, whenever a man does great 
 work of any kind, he has been specially educated for it, if not by 
 the deliberate care of parents or his own deliberate choice, by a still 
 greater schoolmaster, Accident. When we find any apparent ex- 
 ception to this rule, we may be sure that there is something wrong 
 with our conception of education. Burns is an apparent excep- 
 tion only when we take education to mean instruction in school 
 and college. But this course of instruction has never yet been in 
 our country a literary education, an education for the man of let- 
 ters. It has been at best but an education for certain professions 
 and for a scholarly career. Neither school nor college, as they 
 were in the days 01 Burns, could have contributed one iota to his 
 efficiency as a poet. For his work as a poet he had received from 
 early youth the best possible education. I mean as regards the
 
 126 SCOTTISH POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 purely technical or literary qualities of his verse. As regards the 
 feelings that he expressed, the character that is reflected in his 
 poetry, though the feelings are in the main healthy and the char- 
 acter in the main noble, we may think that circumstances might 
 have been a more perfect schoolmaster.' But his literary education 
 was as perfect as could be desired. What a poet above all needs 
 is an easy command of the language in which he writes, and 
 the early training of Burns was excellently fitted to give him 
 this. 
 
 For two generations before Burns wrote there had been through- 
 out Scotland an unbounded enthusiasm for song-writing in the 
 native dialect. The movement began early in the century among 
 a knot of idle lairds, younger sons, and Writers to the Signet in 
 Edinburgh ; but in the course of a very short time it became uni- 
 versal throughout the country. Men and women of all ranks took 
 part in it, from the bold, black-eyed, lucky Isabel Pagan, who 
 kept an alehouse in Ayrshire, to the accomplished Lady Anne 
 Lindsay, daughter of the Earl of Balcarres. Judges of the Court 
 of Session, scions of noble houses, ministers, farmers, gardeners, 
 shepherds, no one thought himself too high to condescend or too 
 humble to aspire. All were ambitious of trying their hand at a 
 rhyme in the vernacular. There is no example in history of a 
 literary movement so widely diffused, perhaps because up to that 
 time there had been no example of a whole people through all its 
 ranks educated to read and write. Miscellany after miscellany 
 poured from the press collecting the effusions of the wonderfully 
 miscellaneous herd of writers ; and these collections were conned in 
 moorland bothies and kitchen firesides as ardently as in libraries 
 and drawing-rooms. It was in this school that Burns received the 
 literary education that fitted him for his work in life. He was 
 nourished on two generations of poetry ; taught by its mistakes, 
 warned by its affectations, inspired by its enthusiasm, stimulated 
 by its successes. He had a large body of literature before him in 
 the same kind that he attempted ; in this he was steeped to the 
 lips. But how was the unlettered ploughman to distinguish be- 
 tween good and bad ? In this his own strong sense, clearness of 
 insight, and warm passionate nature kept him right. He applied 
 with merciless, unfaltering severity one touchstone commonplace
 
 REVIVAL OF SCOTTISH POETRY. 127 
 
 enough, in words at least, to the critics of the time truth to 
 nature. Pope's praise of Nature 
 
 " Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, 
 One clear, unchanged, and universal light, 
 Life, force, and beauty must to all impart 
 At once the source and end and test of Art " 
 
 a eulogy that Burns had by heart was accepted and applied by 
 him to the letter. And in applying this test of truth to Nature 
 to enable him to distinguish between good and bad, genuine and 
 affected, in the work of his predecessors, and to guide him in the 
 execution of his own, the peasant had a decided advantage over men 
 of higher social rank, because the nature that the Scotch poets of 
 the eighteenth century sought to interpret was rustic nature. It 
 was no wonder that a ploughman bore off the laurel crown from 
 all competitors in this keen race for poetic fame. Who but a real 
 country swain was to be expected to be supreme in pastoral lyrics ? 
 The songs of Burns would have been much more miraculous if he 
 had been anything but a ploughman. 
 
 Akin to the vulgar error of wondering at Burns as an un- 
 educated poet, is the error of regarding Scotch vernacular poetry 
 as purely indigenous, a growth out of the hearts of the people, 
 gradually perfecting itself and taking shape unaffected by any 
 influence from without. Between the reigns of James VI. and 
 Queen Anne there was no poetry of note written in Lowland 
 Scotch. It had its roll of distinguished names while the Jameses 
 reigned in Scotland the first James himself, Henry son, D unbar, 
 Lindsay, Montgomery; but it ceased to be a literary language 
 when the Court was removed from Holyrood. The poets went 
 with the Court ; the singing birds with the hands that caressed 
 and fed them, the hearts that were cheered and the fancies that 
 were humoured with their songs. For a hundred years the Muse 
 of Scotland was mute. Immediately after the union of the king- 
 doms there was a revival of poetry in the Lowland Scotch. That 
 this revival was fostered by the growing prosperity of the country, 
 and the rise of a new class of wealthy patrons, is highly probable ; 
 but it is a very common opinion that the new growth of fancy 
 and imagination which these men encouraged was entirely spon-
 
 128 SCOTTISH POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 taneous, uninfluenced either by the earlier Scotch poetry or by the 
 poetry of the southern centre of civilisation ; that it was the off- 
 spring of the teeming fancies of unsophisticated men, innocent of 
 any literature but the Bible and the Shorter Catechism. 
 
 The error is natural enough, if we think of the Scotch poetry of 
 the eighteenth century as peasant poetry, written by peasants for 
 peasants, artless jets of song, most of them rude, imperfect, dis- 
 figured by make- weight epithets and make-shift rhymes, an irregular 
 and uneven stretch of poetry, redeemed from ephemeral insig- 
 nificance only by the semi-miraculous genius of one of the peasant 
 poets. None the less is it an error to regard this poetry as of 
 entirely spontaneous generation. If it is worth writing about, it 
 is worth inquiring into ; and when we inquire closely into its 
 beginning, we see that, like all the literary growths, it had its 
 seed-time as well as its harvest. The seeds of the new poetic 
 vegetation which so rapidly overspread the country came from 
 the old Scotch poetry of the sixteenth century, and as it grew 
 slips were grafted on it from plants that were flourishing at the 
 time in the poetic gardens of England. In plain language, poetry 
 was revived in Scotland by reprints of the old Scotch poetry, and 
 the new Scotch poets studied the English poets and critics, and in 
 the first instance at least translated into their vernacular and 
 applied to their own circumstances the ideas that they found in 
 their approved masters. The truth is, that the peasant poetry of 
 Scotland, so far from being spontaneous in the sense of being un- 
 conditioned by previous literature, is one of the few unambiguous 
 and decided examples of the influence of critical ideas on creative 
 literature. 
 
 The leader of the poetic revival in Scotland was Allan Ramsay, 
 but the work that marks the beginning of better days was Watson's 
 ' Collection of Choice Scots Songs, Ancient and Modern,' published 
 in 1706, when Ramsay was a young man of twenty. He had been 
 bred in the country, or near Hopetoun Mines in Lanarkshire, of which 
 his father was manager ; but his father dying when he was a child, 
 and his mother marrying again, he had been sent to Edinburgh at 
 the age of fifteen, and apprenticed to a wigmaker. Watson's 
 Collection was the first poetry he read. He was charmed with it ; 
 took to repeating snatches of it; and from humming it over,
 
 RAMSAY AND THE EASY CLUB.! 129 
 
 began to feel an impulse to make verses himself. It was thus 
 that the ingenious wigmaker received his first impetus 
 
 " Then emulation did me pierce, 
 Whilk ne'er since ceased." 
 
 Soon after chance threw him in the way of more learned ama- 
 teurs, and brought him into the full stream of Queen Anne literary 
 influences. There were modern as well as ancient poems in 
 Watson's Collection. Among the ancient pieces were Dunbar's 
 " Thistle and Rose," and the humorous poem of which the author- 
 ship is disputed between James I. and James V., "Christ's Kirk 
 on the Green." Among the modern contributors was William 
 Hamilton of Gilbertfield, the " Willie " who, according to the 
 song, was a "wanton wag," a roystering young Jacobite lieu- 
 tenant, who formed himself apparently on the poetic ideal of 
 the Restoration, a Scotch Etherege or Rochester. The young 
 wigmaker made his acquaintance, probably in the way of business ; 
 but, on the basis of their common interest in poetry, the acquaint- 
 ance became more intimate, and Ramsay was admitted a member 
 of a club to which Hamilton belonged along with other choice 
 spirits of literary leanings and Jacobite political faith. The fact 
 that Ramsay, though his family had come down in the world, 
 could trace his descent from a younger son of an Earl of Dalhousie, 
 probably helped, along with his social and poetic gifts, to secure 
 him admission to this Easy Club, as it was called. That the Easy 
 Club, which was broken up by the Rebellion of 1715, had a literary 
 as well as a political basis, is shown by the circumstance that the 
 members of it assumed fancy literary names; and the bent of 
 Ramsay's literary homage at the time is indicated by his choice for 
 himself of the name of Isaac Bickerstaff, then famous as Steel's 
 pseudonym in the 'Tatler.' Ramsay made himself so popular in 
 the Easy Club that he was appointed its Poet-Laureate, and by a 
 formal minute adjudged "a gentleman." 
 
 Through these Jacobite gentlemen, Ramsay's friends and patrons 
 of the Easy Club, with leanings to the good old times of the 
 Stuarts and a disposition to scoff at Puritans as their natural and 
 hereditary enemies, the spirit of the Restoration passed into the 
 peasant poetry of Scotland to do battle with the austere spirit of 
 
 I
 
 130 SCOTTISH POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 the Kirk. It is a striking illustration of the vitality of ideas and 
 their directive power over conduct that the Cavalier ideal, trans- 
 mitted through Ramsay, took possession of the warm temperament 
 of Burns, and worked out in him the incontinent irregularities 
 that made shipwreck of his life. Ramsay himself was too cool of 
 temper to be made a victim in like manner: convivial, quick- 
 witted, libertine enough in theory, a welcome guest at the drinking 
 bouts then fashionable, ever ready to help in driving dull care 
 away with a jest or a song, he was yet sufficiently master of himself 
 to combine poetry with an eye to business. He prospered as a 
 wigmaker ; he set up as a bookseller ; he published two poetical 
 miscellanies by which he made some money. He had none of 
 Burns's over-scrupulous and fantastic objection to taking payment 
 for his songs ; he published them in broadsheets as he wrote them ; 
 and it is said to have been a custom with the good wives of 
 Edinburgh to send one of their children with a penny for Allan 
 Ramsay's latest. "Renowned Allan, canty callan," was described 
 by a sour critic as a " convivial buffoon " ; but though he ruined 
 himself late in life by building a theatre which the magistrates 
 would not allow him to open, he was, like his contemporary Pope, 
 a good man of business. Ramsay's own conduct was not mastered 
 by the ideal of reckless generosity and self-indulgence to which he 
 gave expression in his poems ; but none the less he had great 
 influence in connecting poetry with ostentatious and swaggering 
 profligacy in the minds of the peasant poets of Scotland. 
 
 The pleasure-loving side of Ramsay's temperament was en- 
 couraged and expanded by his connection with the Easy Club ; 
 and it was in this connection also that in all probability he received 
 the suggestion of the work that is his only enduring title to fame 
 the ' Gentle Shepherd.' We have no positive evidence that he 
 conceived fully the idea of writing such a work at this time, the 
 memoirs of his life are exceedingly scanty ; but it is all but certain 
 that he was at this time put on the road that led him to this 
 pastoral poem the first genuine pastoral poem that had appeared 
 in European literature between the time of Theocritus in the third 
 century B.C. to the eighteenth century. This conclusion is 
 irresistible when we look at the chief events in English literature 
 during the three years of Ramsay's membership of the Easy Club.
 
 SUCCESS OF THE 'GENTLE SHEPHERD.' 131 
 
 He was a member of the Club from 1712 to 1715. The kind of 
 poetry that was most in vogue at the time was pastoral poetry. 
 We have already seen how general had been the discussion of this 
 kind of poetry for some years. During the existence of the Easy 
 Club, interest in the topic had received a fresh stimulus from the 
 publication of Pope's 'Windsor Forest' and Ambrose Philips's 
 ' Pastorals.' For the purpose of puffing Philips and depreciating 
 Pope, there was a series of articles on Pastoral Poetry in the 
 ' Guardian,' which doubtless were read by Isaac Bickerstaff's double 
 in the Easy Club. Everybody who had any pretension to literary 
 fashion read Steele and Addison's periodicals, and the members of 
 the Easy Club were keen and ardent amateurs of poetry, not a 
 little self-conscious of poetic ambition. To puff Philips and de- 
 preciate Pope was the prime purpose of these articles in the 
 ' Guardian,' and this purpose was cleverly defeated by the strata- 
 gem of the poet whose reputation was in danger; but uninten- 
 tionally and by the way the articles served a more important 
 purpose namely, guiding Allan Ramsay into a kind of poetry 
 exactly suited to his talents. One of the papers in the ' Guardian ' 
 reads now like a recipe for Allan Ramsay's great pastoral ; 
 the ' Gentle Shepherd ' might be said to have been made from it 
 as from a prescription, so exactly in the scheme and accessories 
 does the poet follow the advice of the critic. " Paint the manners 
 of natural rustic life," said the critic to the poet, " not the man- 
 ners of artificial shepherds and shepherdesses in a fictitious golden 
 age ; use actual rustic dialect ; instead of satyrs and fauns and 
 nymphs, introduce the supernatural creatures of modern super- 
 stition." This was what the essayist in the 'Guardian' advised, 
 and what Ramsay with happily appropriate genius did. I know 
 no other instance in literature where a poet has carried out the 
 ideas of a critic so perfectly. Ramsay pottered for a little with 
 pastoral dialogues of the old artificial school, in which he made 
 Steele and Pope discourse in the character of shepherds about the 
 deaths of Addison and Prior, a fancy rendered all the more absurd 
 by his making these two shepherds discourse in the Scotch dialect. 
 But he soon abandoned these affectations, and produced his drama 
 of real rustic life in 1725. Its repute was instantaneous and wide- 
 spread. Edition after edition was produced ; it was said that the
 
 132 SCOTTISH POETIIY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 ' Gentle Shepherd ' was almost as common a book in the houses of 
 the Scotch peasantry as the Bible. Amateur companies were 
 organised in country parishes to act it. Even to this day, it is 
 said, such companies exist and perform occasionally in the south 
 of Scotland. The fame of the ' Gentle Shepherd ' spread beyond 
 Scotland. It probably furnished the hint of the ' Beggar's Opera ' 
 to Gay ; so that if Ramsay owed something to the critical ideas of 
 his English contemporaries, he may be said to have repaid the 
 debt. 
 
 The songs interspersed through the ' Gentle Shepherd,' which is 
 rather an operetta than a drama, are not the best part of it. I 
 cannot say that I think highly of llamsay's gifts as a song-writer. 
 His genius was not lyrical. His songs, even the best of them, 
 strike me as smirking and affected, entirely destitute of genuine 
 lyric rapture. We have only to place his " Auld Lang Syne," or 
 his " Nanny O," by the side of Burns's words to the same airs to 
 feel how empty they are of lyric sincerity and force, how artifi- 
 cially, mechanically, and laboriously they have been put together. 
 
 " How joyfully my spirits rise, 
 
 When dancing she moves finely ; 
 . I guess what heaven is by her eyes, 
 
 Which sparkle so divinely 0. 
 
 Attend my vow, ye gods, while I 
 
 Breathe in the bless'd Britannia, 
 
 None's happiness I shall envy, 
 
 As long's ye grant me Naimy 0." 
 
 RAMSAY. 
 
 " Her face is fair, her heart is true, 
 As spotless as she's bonny ; 
 The opening gowan, wat wi' dew, 
 Nae fairer is than Nannie 0. 
 Come weel, come woe, I care na by, 
 I'll tak' what Heaven will sen' me, ; 
 Nae ither care in life have I 
 But live and love my Nannie ! " 
 
 BURNS. 
 
 The inferiority of Hamsay is still more manifest when we look 
 at his "Auld Lang Syne." The opening lines have a ring of in- 
 sincerity that pervades the whole song :
 
 KAMSAY'S LACK OF THE LYRIC GIFT. 133 
 
 " Should auld acquaintance be forgot, 
 
 Tho' they return with scars ? 
 These are the noble hero's lot, 
 
 Obtained in glorious wars. 
 Welcome, my Varo, to my breast, 
 
 Thy arms about me twine, 
 And make me once again as blest 
 
 As I was lang syne." 
 
 There are two lines in Ramsay's "Farewell to Lochaber" that 
 seem to be conclusive against his claim to a respectable place 
 among song-writers. A soldier bidding farewell to his sweetheart 
 is a well-chosen lyrical theme ; Ramsay had abundance of poetical 
 intelligence, and is often happy in his choice of themes. And 
 the opening lines, when sung to the beautiful air, are undeniably 
 simple and touching : 
 
 " Fareweel to Lochaber, fareweel to my Jean, 
 Where heartsome wi' thee I hae mony days been." 
 
 But presently come the two lines which strike an absurdly false 
 note, and turn the plaintive soldier into a burlesque impostor : 
 
 " These tears that I shed they are a' for my dear, 
 And no' for the dangers attending on weir." 
 
 Fancy a departing soldier explaining that he weeps not because 
 he is afraid of the enemy, but because he is sorry to leave his 
 sweetheart ! Qui s' 'excuse, ^accuse. The girl, if she had a particle 
 of spirit, would have laughed, and set him down at once as a 
 transparent humbug. No man capable of writing a good song 
 with any deep sentiment or passion in it could have passed such 
 a preposterous insincerity as that. No ; " renowned Allan, canty 
 callan," had not the lyric gift. His strength lay in humorous 
 description and portraiture ; in arch, sly, " pawky " fun. The 
 portrait of him by his son is a speaking likeness of the poet as we 
 know him through his works ; it is a keen, slyly humorous face, 
 the face of a man with a quick sense of the ridiculous, and a firm 
 touch in the exhibition of what amuses him, but it is not the face 
 of a lyric poet. 
 
 If we except the songs, which, as I have said, are of rather un- 
 equal merit, we cannot but admire the manner in which Ramsay
 
 134 SCOTTISH POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 embodied the idea so casually suggested by the English critic. 
 As is usually the case in such matters, several places are claimants 
 for the honour of being the scene of the poem, but probably New- 
 hall in Peeblesshire conforms most to the poetic descriptions. The 
 plot is slender, but not more so than we should expect in such an 
 operetta, and the scenes are connected with no little dramatic 
 skill. The bulk of the story narrates the pastoral loves of Roger 
 and Jenny, and of Patie, the Gentle Shepherd, and Peggie, a shep- 
 herd's niece. Sir William Worthy, a somewhat priggish but not 
 unamiable knight, is the presiding genius ; in Patie he recognises 
 his son, and in Peggy his niece, and the faithful lovers receive his 
 blessing. Bauldy, Madge, and Mause supply what comic element 
 there is, but the humour is of a quiet, subdued order, never ap- 
 proaching the rollicking fun of Burns. The light, bantering con- 
 versation between Peggy and Jenny is admirably done, and the 
 spirited eulogy of Patie by his sweetheart is a good example of 
 the style of language that Ramsay considered most suited to a 
 Scottish pastoral: 
 
 " Sic coarse-spun thoughts as thae want pith to move 
 My settled mind, I'm o'er far gane in love. 
 Patie to me is dearer than my breath ; 
 But want of him I dread nae other skaith. 
 There's nane of a' the herds that tread the green 
 Has sic a smile, or sic twa glancing een. 
 And then he speaks with sic a taking art. 
 His words they thirle like musick thro' my heart. 
 How blythly can he sport, and gently rave, 
 And jest at feckless fears that fright the lave ! 
 Ilk day that he's alane upon the hill, 
 He reads fell books that teach him meikle skill. 
 He is but what need I say that or this ? 
 I'd spend a month to tell you what he is ! 
 In a' he says or does there's sic a gait, 
 The rest seem coofs compar'd to my dear Pate. 
 His better sense will lang his love secure ! 
 Ill nature heffs in sauls that's weak and poor." 
 
 In a prologue for the ' Gentle Shepherd ' on the occasion of one 
 of its presentations on the stage, the poet declared 
 
 " Tho' they're but Shepherds that we're now to act, 
 Yet, gentle audience, we'd not ha' ye mistake
 
 A GROUP OF SCOTTISH SONG-WRITERS. 135 
 
 And think your entertainment will be rude. 
 Most men and all the ladys think it good ; 
 Our Pastoral Author thinks so too, but fears . 
 The diction may offend some nicer ears. 
 This we regard not, therefore will proceed 
 To act the blithesome life that shepherds lead." 
 
 Now, it is just this fact, that Allan Ramsay did not "regard" 
 those " nicer ears," that constitutes his main literary importance. 
 He is worthy to be called the pioneer of Burns, because he had 
 the sense and ability to combat victoriously the theory of men 
 like Beattie, who held that the Scottish language was incapable of 
 being made the vehicle of literary expression. 
 
 Half a century elapsed between the publication of the ' Gentle 
 Shepherd ' and the boyhood of Burns, and meantime the impulse 
 given by Earn say and the ingenious gentlemen and ladies who 
 co-operated with him in his publications had diffused itself all 
 over the country. We had our group of singers here in the 
 North: George Halket, the author of " Logie o' Buchan"; 
 Alexander Ross, the author of the " Fortunate Shepherdess " ; 
 Priest Geddes, author of " Lewie Gordon " and the " Wee 
 Wifiekie " ; and greatest of them all, indeed one of the greatest 
 of Scotch song-writers, John Skinner, the author of " Tulloch- 
 gorum" and the "Ewie wi' the crookit Horn." In "Tulloch- 
 gorum," especially, there is a wonderful rapidity and spirit in its 
 music, an indefinable something that manifestly proclaims Skinner 
 to be the fellow-countryman of William Dunbar and Burns : 
 
 " What needs there be sae great a fraise 
 Wi' dringing dull Italian lays ? 
 I wadna gie our ain Strathspeys 
 
 For half a hunder score o' 'em. 
 They're dowf and dowie at the best ; 
 
 Dowf and dowie, dowf and dowie, 
 
 Dowf and dowie at the best, 
 
 Wi' a' their variorum ; 
 They're dowf and dowie at the best, 
 Their allegros and a' the rest ; 
 They canna please a Scottish taste, 
 
 Compar'd wi' Tullochgorum. " 
 
 These are lines that, both for their music and their sentiment, were 
 likely to appeal to Burns, and it is no surprise, therefore, to find
 
 136 SCOTTISH POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 Burns writing words so laudatory as these : " I regret, and while 
 I live I shall regret, that, when I was in the North, I had not the 
 pleasure of paying a younger brother's dutiful respect to the author 
 of the best Scotch song ever Scotland saw ' Tullochgorum's my 
 delight.' There is a certain something in the old Scotch songs, 
 a wild happiness of thought and expression, which peculiarly marks 
 them, not only from English songs, but also from the modern efforts 
 of song-wrights, in our native manner and language. The only 
 remains of this enchantment, these spells of the imagination, rest 
 with you." 
 
 It is remarkable that the Northern song -writers were all 
 educated men in the popular sense of the word educated 
 schoolmasters and clergymen. In the south of Scotland poetic 
 ambition was more universal. Then the middle years of the 
 eighteenth witnessed something like the palmy days of the 
 Troubadours of Provence in the thirteenth century, when every 
 hamlet had its laureate. We cannot wonder that the genius 
 of Burns should have been excited by such surroundings, and 
 that very early in life falling in love, and knowing of neigh- 
 bouring bards who addressed verses to the objects of their affec- 
 tions, he was moved by an ambition to show that he also was 
 a song-writer. Thousands of little bards at that time limited 
 their aspirations to fame within the parishes in which they were 
 born. That the ambition of Burns took a wider range was due 
 partly to the masterful strength of his nature that of course is 
 an indispensable condition of wide-reaching ambition ; but partly 
 also to peculiar circumstances in his life that fostered his ambition 
 and kept it from being quenched in his hard struggle for bare 
 existence as the son of a poor farmer. Where other young men 
 in his rank of life, like young men with a turn for versification in 
 higher ranks of life, were eager only to gain the admiration of the 
 women, and establish a reputation for cleverness with the men 
 among whom they were born, Burns from a very early period 
 aspired to make the streams of his native country as famous as the 
 classic Ilissus and the silver-winding Thames : 
 
 " E'en then a wish, I mind its power, 
 A^wish that to its latest hour 
 Shall strongly heave my breast ;
 
 POETICAL ASPIRATIONS OF BURNS. 137 
 
 That I for poor auld Scotland's sake, 
 Some useful plan or book could make, 
 Or sing a sang at least " ; 
 
 and again in a poem showing more definitely the latitude of his 
 ambition : 
 
 " Ramsay and famous Fergusson 
 Gied Forth and Tay a lift aboon ; 
 Yarrow and Tweed, to monie a tune, 
 
 Owre Scotland rings ; 
 While Irwin, Lugar, Ayr, and Boon, 
 Naebody sings. 
 
 Th' Ilissus, Tiber, Thames, and Seine, 
 Glide sweet in monie a tunefu' line ; 
 But, Willie, set your fit to mine, 
 
 And cock your crest ; 
 We'll gar our streams and burnies shine 
 
 Up wi' the best ! " 
 
 And the natural greatness of mind that prompted this ambition 
 was not without special influences to keep the flame alive. Had 
 Burns been educated as other local rhymers were, he might have 
 remained, like them, content with local fame, ignorant of the great 
 world outside, hungering for no applause beyond his own small 
 circle, because he was unaware of anything more to be desired. 
 But the education of Burns was different from that of other local 
 rhymers, and had carried him to spiritual altitudes, the views from 
 which were bounded by a much wider horizon. 
 
 In common with all the other young men of the time, rich and 
 poor, Burns had the advantage for a poet of living in a poetical 
 atmosphere ; but he had the further special advantage of coming 
 under personal influences that helped powerfully to give his work 
 the quality of greatness. His want of school and college instruc- 
 tion was fully compensated by the exceptional tastes, abilities, 
 and literary interests of his father and his schoolmaster. We 
 may truly say, I think, that for his special training as a poet for 
 the literary part of it, that is to say the happiest accident of his 
 life was his contact with Mr Murdoch, who, when a youth of 
 eighteen, was employed by William Burness, and one or two of 
 his neighbours, to teach their children. That this young school- 
 master was a man of no ordinary vigour, flexibility, and breadth
 
 138 SCOTTISH POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 of interest, was shown by his subsequent career. He went to 
 London, and made a living as a teacher of French, an extraordinary 
 feat for a young country Scotchman ; and gained such repute as a 
 teacher, though he ultimately ruined his prospects by intemperate 
 habits, that at one time he had as a pupil in English no less a 
 person than M. Talleyrand. We can hardly over-estimate the 
 lift above provincial commonplace that was given to the future 
 poet by his contact with a man of such activity and range of mind. 
 Mr Murdoch was greatly attracted by the character of William 
 Burness for so the father spelt his name ; and attracted also by 
 the character and abilities of the boys, he took a warm interest in 
 them, and gave an unusual turn to the reading of the family, 
 introducing them to authors not ordinarily within the knowledge 
 of a peasant's household. Robert Burns was but a small boy 
 when Murdoch was engaged as a teacher to the combined families ; 
 but when he was a youth of fifteen or sixteen the young man 
 chanced to be appointed English teacher in the Ayr Academy, and 
 the elder Burness, always eager to get education for his sons, sent 
 Robert for a short time to board with him. Charmed with the 
 aptness of his pupil, with his manly character, his enthusiasm for 
 knowledge, and his powerful grasp of intellect, Murdoch did his 
 utmost to give a bent to his studies. It was only for a short three 
 weeks that Burns could be spared from the work of the farm, 
 where he was already doing the work of a man ; but during that 
 time, so eager was the pupil to learn, and so willing was the 
 master to communicate, that, as Murdoch afterwards stated, he 
 and his boarder were hardly a moment silent the one inquiring, 
 the other answering and expounding. Among other things, 
 Murdoch gave him a start in learning French, to such effect that 
 Burns afterwards by himself acquired such a knowledge of the 
 language that he was able to read it with ease. He was rather 
 proud, in fact, of the accomplishment, and fond of airing scraps 
 of French in his correspondence. But this knowledge of French 
 was the least of the benefits Burns derived from this inspiring and 
 stimulating teacher. 
 
 Looking at his life till he was twenty-two or twenty-three, we 
 find, from a memorandum-book which he kept, the extent of his 
 reading, and we may safely say that there were very few young
 
 HOW BURNS PRODUCED HIS SONGS. 139 
 
 men at that time in any rank whose acquaintance with the poets 
 of the previous century was so great. He had read most of the 
 English poets, including Shakespeare, Pope, Shenstone, Allan 
 Ramsay, and collections of Scotch songs ; and he not only read 
 them, but pondered over them. His habit was always to carry a 
 book in his pocket, in which way he is said to have worn out two 
 copies of Mackenzie's ' Man of Feeling.' This gives us a clue to 
 his mode of mental application. He took a rigorously critical 
 attitude. We can imagine him reading over his songs, then turn- 
 ing the work over in his mind and judging with his perfect taste 
 whether it was true to nature. Burns was wont to take his own 
 songs to pieces ; word by word, line by line, stanza by stanza, all 
 passed under review, and were critically pronounced on by their 
 author. There could be no greater misconception than to regard 
 Burns as an uneducated poet. This idea has made shipwreck of 
 many a promising poet, or at least of many a youth capable of 
 becoming a pleasing versifier, for they get the idea that it is 
 derogatory to poetic genius to take intellectual labour over their 
 verses. They are under the idea that Burns produced songs with- 
 out considering whether they were good or bad. We may be sure 
 that no amount of genius will produce perfect art, unless the man 
 of genius will bestow intellectual labour on it. A perfect poem, 
 such as many of Burns' s lyric gems are, can no more be written 
 without labour than can a statue be carved out of stone.
 
 140 
 
 CHAPTEE XII. 
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 CONNECTION WITH PREVIOUS POETRY SKETCH OF LIFE LYRICAL BALLADS. 
 
 FROM the phrases that are generally used about nineteenth-century 
 poetry, one would expect to be conscious of a great and sudden 
 change in passing into it out of the poetry of the eighteenth 
 century. Were the new poets not inspired with the spirit of the 
 French Revolution ? Did they not rise in their might, glowing 
 with a noble spirit of independence, and fling the poetic traditions 
 of their fathers to the winds ? Pope with his mechanical couplets, 
 his passion for epigrammatic condensation, his fear of going 
 beyond classical example, was sitting on poetry like a nightmare 
 when the French Revolution broke out ; and the English Muse, 
 fired by this great modern example of insubordination, would 
 bear him no longer, cast off her Old Man of the Mountain, and 
 roamed greatly, daring wherever Fancy or Imagination tempted, 
 with all the fearless ardour of new-found liberty. Such is the 
 language in which the new movement is often spoken of, and 
 if we accept it literally, we should expect to find somewhere 
 between the old poetry and the new a sudden discontinuous 
 break : we should expect, as we followed the history of our 
 literature, to encounter all of a sudden the signs of a great and 
 complete transformation such as might be made on the face of 
 nature by an earthquake or a deluge. But no such catastrophic 
 spectacle is presented to the historic eye. A great change took 
 place, but it was an easy gradual transition, a quiet evolution
 
 GRADUAL REVOLUTION IN TASTE FOR POETRY. 141 
 
 of new things, not a fierce upheaval and sweeping away of old 
 things as worthless rubbish and a triumphant reconstruction 
 upon entirely new lines. We must not ignore the fact that there 
 was a change because we cannot put our finger upon the exact 
 moment when the change occurred ; but it is equally unhistoric 
 to be misled by the character of the tremendous political event 
 of the time into ascribing a similar character to the grand new 
 season of poetry that opened with the nineteenth century. 
 
 The hold of the Queen Anne style on literature, as we have 
 seen, relaxed gradually; the sentiments that it embodied grad- 
 ually palled from custom on the class for whom Pope wrote; 
 longings for new excitements gradually made themselves felt; 
 and gradually also the class whose taste had dominated Queen 
 Anne literature lost their supremacy in the world of art. The 
 prosemen of the last sixty years of the century were, as I have 
 already indicated, the chief literary agents of the transformation 
 that gradually evolved itself, year by year, ten years by ten 
 years, now moving quickly, now moving slowly. The novelists 
 and the romancers educated the taste of the public for new subjects 
 and for a new style, for subjects of more various human interest, 
 and a style less condensed and elaborate, more free and dis- 
 cursive. Pope's readers had little taste for romantic marvels 
 or for domestic pathos; the romancers and the novelists ac- 
 customed the public to such imaginative food, and so prepared 
 the way for Scott and Wordsworth. Even the Byronic spirit 
 had its prototype in prose. 
 
 Wordsworth's preface to his 'Lyrical Ballads' in 1798 is a 
 great landmark in the history of poetry, because it woke people 
 up to a consciousness of the change that had taken place, and 
 compelled critics to define their position in the face of that 
 change. This preface, and the volume with which it is connected, 
 we must consider at length; but in the first place let us look 
 at Wordsworth's early life, and at the poems written by him 
 before the ' Lyrical Ballads.' In these early poems we shall see 
 how gradual was his transition from the poetic style of his 
 predecessors, notwithstanding the revolutionary note of his famous 
 preface. 
 
 To some of Wordsworth's admirers it might appear a sort of
 
 142 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 sacrilege to try and trace the growth of his poetic style, because 
 he has himself in the " Prelude " written his poetic autobiography. 
 " The Growth of a Poet's Mind " is the sub-title of this wonderful 
 poem, in which flashes of poetic rapture are so strangely mixed 
 with prosy moralisings and pragmatic dogmas about education. 
 Seeing that the poet has given the history of his own mind, it 
 is to his worshippers as final as the Koran to a good Moham- 
 medan ; and any presumptuous attempt to add to it might be 
 treated by them as the books in the Alexandria Library were 
 treated by the Caliph Omar. They might say : If your essay 
 contains anything not to be found in the " Prelude," it is wrong ; 
 if it contains what is already to be found there, it is superfluous. 
 But it is possible to go beyond the revelation of the "Prelude" 
 without contradicting it, or merely bringing to light what is 
 useless and superfluous. It is the growth of his mind, of his 
 feelings, of his impassioned love for Nature, that is there re- 
 corded ; not the growth of his poetic art, of his aims and methods 
 as an artist: and these are interesting to us, if we wish to see him 
 in his right relations with his predecessors. His early poems 
 furnish more valuable clues for this inquiry than the " Prelude," 
 which is rather an imaginative interpretation of his youth than 
 a literal record. And we have other clues besides in his singularly 
 matter-of-fact prose notes on the circumstances in which he com- 
 posed his early poems. 
 
 The chief incidents in Wordsworth's early life were taken 
 down from his own dictation. He was the son of one of Sir 
 James Lowther's land-agents, whose headquarters were at Cocker- 
 mouth, and of the daughter of a mercer in Penrith. His early 
 boyhood till the age of nine was spent partly at Cockermouth 
 and partly at Penrith, both beautifully situated little towns in 
 Cumberland. From nine to seventeen he was at a boarding- 
 school in Hawkshead, another romantically situated little town 
 in the north of Lancashire. His mother died when he was seven 
 years old and his father when he was thirteen; but his uncle, 
 in whose guardianship he was left, although Lord Lonsdale had 
 borrowed all his father's money and refused to pay it back 
 the repayment not being made till the old lord's death many 
 years afterwards his uncle kept both him and his brother at
 
 NATUEE'S INFLUENCE ON WOKDSWORTH. 143 
 
 school, and sent them both to Cambridge, the poet entering in 1787, 
 his seventeenth year. Wordsworth took his degree in 1791, 
 travelled for some time in France and Italy, lived for a few 
 years in London, thought of the Church as a profession, thought 
 of journalism as a profession, but finally decided to retire to 
 his native valleys and live on his small inheritance, devoting 
 his days to "plain living and high thinking." He was nearly 
 thirty when he took this determination, and he persevered in it 
 to the end of his days in 1850, with the addition to his means 
 of plain living of a Commissionership of Stamps in 1813, and a 
 pension of ^300 in 1842. 
 
 Such is the bare outline of Wordsworth's life. What were the 
 ruling circumstances that co-operated with inborn genius to make 
 him the poet that he was ? Read the " Prelude " and you will 
 find that his own answer is simply Nature the mountains and the 
 mists, and the leaping sounding cataracts of the valleys where he 
 lived in youth. This is how he describes his feelings in his school- 
 days at Hawkshead : 
 
 " I would walk aloue 
 
 Under the quiet stars, and at that time 
 
 Have felt whate'er there is of power in sound 
 
 To breathe an elevated mood, by form 
 
 Or image uuprofaned ; and I would stand, 
 
 If the night blackened with a coming storm, 
 
 Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are 
 
 The ghostly language of the ancient earth, 
 
 Or make their dim abode in distant winds. 
 
 Thence did I drink the visionary power ; 
 
 And deem not profitless those fleeting moods 
 
 Of shadowy exultation ; not for this, 
 
 That they are kindred to our purer mind 
 
 And intellectual life ; but that the soul, 
 
 Remembering not, retains an obscure sense 
 
 Of possible sublimity, whereto 
 
 With growing faculties she doth aspire, 
 
 With faculties still growing, feeling still 
 
 That whatsoever point they gain, they yet 
 
 Have something to pursue." 
 
 And again : 
 
 " 'Twere long to tell 
 
 What spring and autumn, what the winter snows, 
 And what the summer shade, what day and night,
 
 1 44 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 Evening and morning, sleep and waking, thought 
 
 From sources inexhaustible, poured forth 
 
 To feed the spirit of religious love 
 
 In which I walked with Nature. But let this 
 
 Be not forgotten, that I still retained 
 
 My first creative sensibility ; 
 
 That by the regular action of the world 
 
 My soul was unsubdued. A plastic power 
 
 Abode with me ; a forming hand, at times 
 
 Rebellious, acting in a devious mood ; 
 
 A local spirit of his own, at war 
 
 With general tendency, but, for the most, 
 
 Subservient strictly to external things 
 
 With which it communed. An auxiliar light 
 
 Came from my mind, which on the setting sun 
 
 Bestowed new splendour ; the melodious birds, 
 
 The fluttering breezes, fountains that run on, 
 
 Murmuring so sweetly in themselves, obeyed 
 
 A like dominion, and the midnight storm 
 
 Grew darker in the presence of my eye : 
 
 Hence my obeisance, my devotion hence, 
 
 And hence my transport. 
 
 Nor should this, perchance, 
 Pass unrecorded, that I still had loved 
 The exercise and produce of a toil, 
 Than analytic industry to me 
 More pleasing, and whose character I deem 
 Is more poetic as resembling more 
 Creative agency. The song would speak 
 Of that interminable building reared 
 By observation of affinities 
 In objects where no brotherhood exists 
 To passive minds. My seventeenth year was come ! 
 And, whether from this habit rooted now 
 So deeply in my mind, or from excess 
 In the great social principle of life 
 Coercing all things into sympathy, 
 To inorganic natures were transferred 
 My own enjoyments ; or the power of truth 
 Coming in revelation did converse 
 With things that really are, I, at this time, 
 Saw blessings spread around me like a sea. 
 Thus while the days flew by, and years passed on, 
 From Nature and her overflowing soul 
 I had received so much, that all my thoughts 
 Were steeped in feeling : I was only then
 
 RESIDENCE AT CAMBRIDGE. 145 
 
 Contented, when with bliss ineffable 
 
 I felt the sentiment of Being spread 
 
 O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still ; 
 
 O'er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought 
 
 And human knowledge, to the human eye 
 
 Invisible, yet liveth to the heart ; 
 
 O'er all that leaps and runs, and shouts and sings, 
 
 Or beats the gladsome air ; o'er all that glides 
 
 Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself, 
 
 And mighty depth of waters." 
 
 At Cambridge he attended little to the studies of the place. 
 "He began residence at seventeen," says Mr Myers, "and his 
 northern nature was late to flower. There seems, in fact, to have 
 been even less of visible promise about him than we should have 
 expected; but rather something untamed and insubordinate, some- 
 thing heady and self-confident an independence that seemed only 
 rusticity, and an indolent ignorance which assumed too readily 
 the tones of scorn." But his mind was not idle : 
 
 " Oft when the dazzling show no longer new 
 Had ceased to dazzle, ofttimes did I quit 
 My comrades, leave the crowd, buildings and groves, 
 And as I paced alone the level fields 
 Far from those lovely sights and sounds sublime 
 With which I had been conversant, the mind 
 Drooped not ; but there into herself returning, 
 With prompt rebound seemed fresh as heretofore. 
 At least I more distinctly recognised 
 Her native instincts : let me dare to speak 
 A higher language, say that now I felt 
 What independent solaces were mine, 
 To mitigate the injurious sway of place 
 Or circumstance, how far soever changed 
 In youth, or to be changed in after years. 
 As if awakened, summoned, roused, constrained, 
 I looked for universal things ; perused 
 The common countenance of earth and sky : 
 Earth, nowhere un embellished by some trace 
 Of that first Paradise wlience man was driven ; 
 And sky, whose beauty and bounty are expressed 
 By the proud name she bears the name of Heaven. 
 I called on both to teach me what they might ; 
 Or, turning the mind in upon herself, 
 K
 
 146 WORDSWOKTH. 
 
 Pored, watched, expected, listened, spread my thoughts, 
 
 And spread them with a wider creeping ; felt 
 
 Incumbencies more awful, visitings 
 
 Of the Upholder of the tranquil soul, 
 
 That tolerates the indignities of Time, 
 
 And, from the centre of Eternity 
 
 All finite motions overruling, lives 
 
 In glory immutable. But peace ! enough 
 
 Here to record that I was mounting now 
 
 To such community with highest truth 
 
 A track pursuing, not untrod before, 
 
 From strict analogies by thought supplied, 
 
 Or consciousnesses not to be subdued. 
 
 To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower, 
 
 Even the loose stones that cover the highway, 
 
 I gave a moral life : I saw them feel, 
 
 Or linked them to some feeling : the great mass 
 
 Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all 
 
 That I beheld respired with inward meaning. 
 
 Add that whate'er of Terror or of Love 
 
 Or Beauty, Nature's daily face put on 
 
 From transitory passion, unto this 
 
 I was as sensitive as waters are 
 
 To the sky's influence in a kindred mood 
 
 Of passion ; was obedient as a lute 
 
 That waits upon the touches of the wind. 
 
 Unknown, unthought of, yet was I most rich 
 
 I had a world about me 'twas my own ; 
 
 I made it, for it only lived to me, 
 
 And to the God who sees into the heart." 
 
 Now how were the poet's sensibilities thus keenly awakened to 
 the glories and the beauties of Nature ? What first made him alive 
 to the joy of poring over every shade of colour, every minute 
 variation of form in natural things, and seeking in them, with 
 never-ending satisfaction, images of human life in its manifold 
 relations ? And what influences governed his expression of what 
 he saw and felt 1 The " Prelude " is silent on these points. It 
 merely chronicles the phases of his delight in looking and imagin- 
 ing. There Avas in Wordsworth to the last not a little of that 
 untamed rustic egotism which Shakespeare caricatured in Holo- 
 fernes and Sir Andrew Aguecheek ; the egotism which, owing to 
 slight contact with other human beings, is never tired of contem- 
 plating the strangeness of its own moods. " I am a fellow of the
 
 THE POET'S EARLY RESOLUTIONS. 147 
 
 strangest mind in the world," said Sir Andrew, and in these words 
 expressed an undying characteristic of the isolated man who seldom 
 makes comparison of his own mind with the minds of his fellow- 
 creatures. Wordsworth's distinction lay not in what he felt, but 
 in the play of his imagination on what he felt. He magnifies the 
 strangeness of his absorption in Nature by representing it as a 
 mysterious inexplicable feat, originating he knew not how, but 
 present with him from his earliest years, and gaining no strength 
 but from its own impetus. " The ' Prelude ' is a work of good 
 augury for human nature," Mr Myers says, in commenting on the 
 poem. " We felt in reading it as if the stock of mankind were 
 sound. The soul seems going on from strength to strength by 
 the mere development of her inborn power." The " Prelude " is a 
 noble poem, but this particular feature of it I should consider a 
 weakness and not a strength. No man can stand alone ; the 
 aspiration to do so is as inhuman as the achievement is impossible. 
 The soul that seeks to isolate itself from its fellows must infallibly 
 harden and wither. 
 
 When, however, we turn to his early poems and to his prosaic 
 notes and illustrations of them, we can see clearly enough the 
 continuity of his descent from the great poets who had written 
 before him. 
 
 The "Evening Walk" and the "Descriptive Sketches" were 
 published in 1793. Commenting many years afterwards on the 
 
 couplet 
 
 " And fronting the bright west, yon oak entwines 
 Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines," 
 
 he says : " This is feebly and imperfectly exprest ; but I recollect 
 distinctly the very spot where this first struck me. It was on the 
 way between Hawkshead and Ambleside, and gave me extreme 
 pleasure. The moment was important in my poetical history, for 
 I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural 
 appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or 
 country, so far as I was acquainted with them ; and I made a 
 resolution to supply in some degree the deficiency. I could not 
 at that time have been above fourteen years of age." There was 
 more then than mere disinterested delight in the poet's contempla- 
 tion of Nature ; mingled with that delight was a poet's ambition,
 
 148 WOKDSWOBTII. 
 
 and the joy of having found an untrodden track. And he did not 
 qualify himself for this self-imposed mission by mere indolent 
 gazing and dreamy pursuit of the thick-coming fancies that crowded 
 his mind, while his eye drank in what Nature presented to him. 
 If the " Prelude " had been intended as a plain historical narrative 
 of the growth of a poet's mind, it would have been strange that 
 he does not mention in the description of his Cambridge life an 
 incident that connects him with the poet Gray. He studied 
 Italian then, and his teacher was Gray's friend. It was not, how- 
 ever, from the Italian poets that he caught the rhythm of his 
 early style. You will have no difficulty in detecting his poetical 
 masters if I read you a passage or two from the " Evening Walk " 
 and the "Descriptive Sketches" : 
 
 " Sweet are the sounds that mingle from afar, 
 Heard by calm lakes, as peeps the folding star, 
 When the duck dabbles 'mid the rustling sedge, 
 And feeding pike starts from the water's edge, 
 Or the swan stirs the reeds, his neck and bill 
 Wetting, that drip upon the water still ; 
 And heron, as resounds the trodden shore, 
 Shoots upward, darting his long neck before. 
 Now, with religious awe, the farewell light 
 Blends with the solemn colouring of night ; 
 'Mid groves of clouds that crest the mountain's brow, 
 And round the west's proud lodge their shadows throw, 
 Like Una shining on her gloomy way, 
 The half-seen form of Twilight roams astray ; 
 Shedding, through paly loopholes mild and small, 
 Gleams that upon the lake's still bosom fall ; 
 Soft o'er the surface creep those lustres pale, 
 Tracking the motions of the fitful gale. 
 With restless interchange at once the bright 
 Wins on the shade, the shade upon the light. 
 No favoured eye was e'er allowed to gaze 
 On lovelier spectacle in faery days." 
 
 Or again : 
 
 " Once, Man entirely free, alone and wild, 
 Was blest as free for he was Nature's child. 
 He, all superior but his God disdained, 
 Walked none restraining, and by none restrained : 
 Confessed no law but what his reason taught, 
 Did all he wished, and wished but what he ought.
 
 THE 'LYRICAL BALLADS.' 149 
 
 As man in his primeval dower arrayed 
 The image of his glorious Sire displayed, 
 Even so, by faithful Nature guarded, here 
 The traces of primeval Man appear ; 
 The simple dignity no forms debase ; 
 The eye sublime, and surly lion-grace : 
 The slave of none, of beasts alone the lord, 
 His book he prizes, nor neglects his sword ; 
 Well taught by that to feel his rights, prepared 
 With this ' the blessings he enjoys to guard.' " 
 
 The former of these passages reminds one of Goldsmith as 
 forcibly as of Pope, but in the latter Pope alone is clearly the 
 model. There is an evident effort after balance and condensed 
 expression, but it is not executed with nearly the perfection and 
 terseness of the Popian couplet. The imitation is, however, suffi- 
 ciently apparent to be well worth noting as an interesting link 
 between the two poets. 
 
 Wordsworth's next publication was the ' Lyrical Ballads,' in 
 1798. The volume was published in conjunction with Coleridge. 
 Coleridge visited Wordsworth in the summer of 1797, when he 
 had resided with his sister at Racedown in Dorsetshire. By this 
 time Wordsworth had written his poem " Guilt and Sorrow " in 
 the Spenserian stanza; his tragedy of "The Borderers"; and the 
 description of the "Ruined Cottage." I mention these poems 
 because it is a significant fact that every poem written by Words- 
 worth up to the time of Coleridge's visit, while they show con- 
 siderable poetic power, gave little indication of distinctive indi- 
 vidual genius. This visit seems to have had a wonderfully quicken- 
 ing and awakening effect on Wordsworth's nature. The two young 
 men were charmed with one another, and Wordsworth removed to 
 Alfoxden in Somersetshire to enjoy his friend's companionship. 
 During the year that followed he produced much, and what he 
 produced bore a distinctive mark, as if the radiant restless vitality 
 of the more variously gifted man had stirred his more sluggish 
 northern nature to its depths, stimulated him to put forth his full 
 powers, and made him feel in the exercise of them a confident 
 sense of mastery. It may truly be said that Wordsworth hardly 
 knew what was in him till the companionship of Coleridge widened 
 the horizon of his aims.
 
 150 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 The volume published at Bristol in 1798 contained Coleridge's 
 " Ancient Mariner " ; the rest of the volume was by Wordsworth. 
 In the authorised edition of his works no chronological order is 
 followed ; they are classified according to subjects ; and it is im- 
 portant, if we would understand the controversy that has been 
 raised round Wordsworth's name, that we should pick out and 
 read together the poems that were published together in 1798. 
 " We are Seven " is now included among the " Poems referring to 
 the period of Childhood " (No. x.); " The Complaint " (21), " The 
 Last of the Flock " (22), "The Idiot Boy" (31), and " Her Eyes 
 are Wild" (37), among the " Poems Founded on the Affections " ; 
 "The Reverie of Poor Susan" (13), "The Thorn" (23), "Lines 
 above Tintern Abbey " (26), among " Poems of the Imagination " ; 
 " Expostulation and Reply" (i), " The Tables Turned " (2), " To 
 my Sister " (5), and " Simon Lee " (6), among " Poems of Senti- 
 ment and Reflection"; "Goody Blake and Harry Gill," among 
 " Miscellaneous Poems." 
 
 When these poems are read together, we begin to understand 
 why such a shout of derision was raised by the critics against the 
 ' Lyrical Ballads,' and why they impressed so deeply those who 
 were not repelled by their strangeness. The poet's personality 
 was powerfully expressed in them, and he was a markedly dif- 
 ferent kind of person from any that had before presented himself 
 as a poet. His humour was a strange kind of humour and his 
 seriousness ran in an unusual vein, and humour and seriousness 
 were strangely intermixed. The public found subjects that they 
 were accustomed to consider too vulgar and common for poetry 
 treated apparently with pathetic intention, but in so grotesque a 
 way as only to make them laugh at the attempt on their tender 
 feelings. There was, indeed, one poem in the volume, the " Lines 
 written above Tintern Abbey," in which a fresh theme was handled 
 with a power that nobody could be insensible to. If all had been 
 like this, the acknowledgment of Wordsworth's greatness would 
 not have been checked and held back by astonishment at the grot- 
 esque strangeness of the lyrical ballads, to which the title of the 
 volume challenged special attention. This was the poem in which 
 he first gave expression to his impassioned worship of Nature :
 
 "LINES WRITTEN ABOVE TINTEEN ABBEY." 151 
 
 " Five years heave past ; five summers, with the length 
 Of five long winters ! and again I hear 
 These waters, rolling from their mountain springs 
 With a soft inland murmur. Oiice again 
 Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, 
 That on a wild secluded scene impress 
 Thoughts of more deep seclusion ; and connect 
 The landscape with the quiet of the sky. 
 The day is come when I again repose 
 Here, under this dark sycamore, and view 
 These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, 
 Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, 
 Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves 
 'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see 
 These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines 
 Of sportive wood run wild ; these pastoral farms, 
 Green to the very door ; and wreaths of smoke 
 Sent up, in silence, from among the trees ! 
 With some uncertain notice, as might seem 
 Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, 
 Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire 
 The Hermit sits alone. 
 
 These beauteous forms, 
 
 Through a long absence, have not been to me 
 As is a landscape to a blind man's eye : 
 But oft in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din 
 Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, 
 In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, 
 Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart ; 
 And passing even into my purer mind, 
 With tranquil restoration : feelings too 
 Of unremembered pleasure : such, perhaps, 
 As have no slight or trivial influence 
 On that best portion of a good man's life, 
 His little, nameless, unremembered acts 
 Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, 
 To them I may have owed another gift, 
 Of aspect more sublime ; that blessed mood, 
 In which the burthen of the mystery, 
 In which the heavy and the weary weight 
 Of all this unintelligible world, 
 Is lightened : that serene and blessed mood, 
 In which the affections gently lead us on, 
 Until, the breath of this corporeal frame, 
 And even the motion of our human blood, 
 Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
 
 152 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 In body, and become a living soul : 
 While with an eye made quiet by the power 
 Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 
 We see into the life of things. If this 
 Be but a vain belief, yet, oh ! how oft 
 In darkness and amid the many shapes 
 Of joyless daylight ; when the fretful stir 
 Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, 
 Have hung upon the beatings of my heart 
 How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, 
 
 sylvan Wye ! thou wanderer thro' the woods, 
 How often has my spirit turned to thee ! 
 
 And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, 
 With many recognitions dim and faint, 
 And somewhat of a sad perplexity, 
 The picture of the mind revives again : 
 While here I stand, not only with the sense 
 Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts 
 That in this moment there is life and food 
 For future years. And so I dare to hope, 
 Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first 
 
 1 came among these hills ; when like a roe 
 I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides 
 Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, 
 Wherever Nature led : more like a man 
 Flying from something that he dreads, than one 
 Who sought the thing he loved. For Nature then 
 (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, 
 
 And their glad animal movements, all gone by) 
 To me was all in all ; I cannot paint 
 What then I was. The sounding cataract 
 Haunted me like a passion ; the tall rock, 
 The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
 Their colours and their forms, were then to me 
 An appetite ; a feeling and a love, 
 That had no need of a remoter charm, 
 By thought supplied, nor any interest 
 Unborrowed from the eye. That time is past, 
 And all its aching joys are now no more, 
 And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this 
 Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur ; other gifts 
 Have followed ; for such loss, I would believe, 
 Abundant recom pence. For I have learned 
 To look on Nature, not as in the hour 
 Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing oftentimes 
 The still, sad music of humanity,
 
 "LINES WRITTEN ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY." 153 
 
 Not harsh, nor grating, though of ample power 
 To chasten and subdue. And I have felt 
 A presence that disturbs me 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 ; 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still 
 A lover of the meadows and the woods, 
 And mountains, and of all that we behold 
 From this green earth ; of all the mighty world 
 Of eye, and ear, both what they half create, 
 And what perceive ; well pleased to recognise 
 In Nature and the language of the sense, 
 The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 
 The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
 Of all my moral being. 
 
 Nor perchance, 
 
 If I were not thus taught, should I the more 
 Suffer my genial spirits to decay : 
 For thou art with me here upon the banks 
 Of this fair river ; thou my dearest friend, 
 My dear, dear friend ; and in thy voice I catch 
 The language of my former heart, and read 
 My former pleasures in the shooting lights 
 Of thy wild eyes. Oh ! yet a little while 
 May I behold in thee what I was once, 
 My dear, dear Sister ! and this prayer I make, 
 Knowing that Nature never did betray 
 The heart that loved her ; 'tis her privilege 
 Through all the years of this our life, to lead 
 From joy to joy ; for she can so inform 
 The mind that is within us, so impress 
 With quietness and beauty, and so feed 
 With lofty thoughts, 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. Therefore let the moon 
 Shine on thee in thy solitary walk ; 
 And let the misty mountain-winds be free
 
 154 WOKDS WORTH. 
 
 To blow against thee : and, in after years, 
 
 When these wild ecstasies shall be matured 
 
 Into a sober pleasure ; when thy mind 
 
 Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, 
 
 Thy memory be as a dwelling-place 
 
 For all sweet sounds and harmonies ; oh ! then, 
 
 If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, 
 
 Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts 
 
 Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, 
 
 And these my exhortations ! Nor, perchance, 
 
 If I should be where I no more can hear 
 
 Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams 
 
 Of past existence wilt thou then forget 
 
 That on the banks of this delightful stream 
 
 We stood together ; and that I, so long 
 
 A worshipper of Nature, hither came 
 
 Unwearied in that service : rather say 
 
 With warmer love oh ! with far deeper zeal 
 
 Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget, 
 
 That after many wanderings, many years 
 
 Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, 
 
 And this green pastoral landscape, were to me 
 
 More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake ! " 
 
 This poem is characteristic of the loftiest side of Wordsworth's 
 genius. In it he struck for the first time the sublime note that 
 has drawn men after him as the prophet of a new delight, a full- 
 voiced speaker of things that all feel dimly and vaguely, but which 
 no poet before him had expressed with such force. But mark, as 
 confirming what I have said about the gradual character of transi- 
 tions in poetry, that both the rhythm of Wordsworth's lines and 
 the feeling expressed are developments from Cowper. The level 
 Ouse flowed through a flatter landscape than the Derwent, and 
 there was a fire and majesty in Wordsworth's stronger spirit that 
 we look for in vain in the gentle Cowper. But the direction of 
 their feelings was the same ; the rhythm of their verse had much 
 in common ; Wordsworth's torch was kindled at Cowper 's. " A 
 great poet creates the taste by which he is enjoyed," Wordsworth 
 said, and the saying is often repeated. But it is isolating him 
 too much to say that he created the taste that enjoyed his Nature 
 poetry. We can believe this only when we ignore all that hap- 
 pened in the half century between Pope's death and the appearance 
 of the ' Lyrical Ballads.'
 
 HOSTILE EECEPTION OF 'LYRICAL BALLADS.' 155 
 
 No : the current formula that Wordsworth created the taste by 
 which he is enjoyed is only a half or a quarter truth. The cur- 
 rency that the saying has obtained is due chiefly to a vague 
 impression, such as often arises when the facts of history are 
 mingled together and fancifully rearrangd in the popular memory, 
 a vague impression that all Wordsworth's poetry was received 
 with a howl of derision and ridicule when first submitted to the 
 public. There were three veins in one volume " Tintern Abbey 
 Lines," "Guilt and Sorrow," and the 'Lyrical Ballads.' Now 
 it was not against what is commonly understood by his Nature 
 poetry, such poetry as I have quoted, that the storm was directed, 
 but against some of his lyrical ballads, strictly so called, " The 
 Idiot Boy," "Goody Blake," and "The Thorn." And the storm 
 did not become loud and long till Wordsworth not only defended 
 these poems in his famous Preface, but with aggressive obstinacy 
 maintained that all true poetry must be composed on the same 
 principles. Further, though the storm against these poems has 
 long since subsided into a calm, the taste for them has not yet" 
 been created. Even Mr Myers admits that "The Thorn," "The 
 Idiot Boy," and " Goody Blake and Harry Gill," have been 
 "justly blamed for triviality." As I am one of the few who 
 do not agree with this verdict, having a natural taste for such 
 grotesque mixtures of pathos and rough humour, a taste not 
 created by Wordsworth, but more probably by a bucolic upbring- 
 ing, I am all the less likely to be biassed in the admission that 
 the taste is not general. 
 
 These lyrical ballads, which owed their origin to an accident, 
 are certainly strange and original, fully coloured by the poet's 
 individuality. The idea of writing them probably occurred to 
 Wordsworth when he was conversing with Coleridge over the 
 German imitations of Percy's old English ballads. The idea of 
 writing the " Ancient Mariner " occurred in the course of the 
 same companionship, and the difference between them and the 
 "Mariner" represents the difference in individual character be- 
 tween Wordsworth and Coleridge. The two friends began writing 
 the "Mariner" together, but their conceptions were so different 
 that Wordsworth left Coleridge to finish it.
 
 156 
 
 CHAPTEK XIII. 
 
 WOEDSWOKTH continued. 
 "THE IDIOT BOY" PROSE v. POETRY COLERIDGE ON WORDSWORTH. 
 
 IF you have read some of the lyrical ballads to which I directed 
 you, you will not, I think, be surprised that they appeared trivial, 
 absurd, and even repulsive to the generality of readers of poetry 
 when first they made their appearance. The wonder rather is, 
 that they found as many readers as they did ; for though many 
 mocked, a considerable number read them, as appears from the 
 fact that a second edition was called for in 1800. This could 
 hardly have been the case if the vein of sentiment had been alto- 
 gether new in literature. Sensibility to the joys and sorrows of 
 humble folk, a disposition never entirely absent from civilised 
 communities, we may well believe, had been deliberately culti- 
 vated during the latter part of the eighteenth century as an 
 artistic motive. A whole school of prose fiction ministered to 
 this sentiment, the most prominent examples of which are Sterne's 
 'Tristram Shandy' and 'Sentimental Journey,' where the senti- 
 ment appears casually, and Mackenzie's ' Man of Feeling,' where 
 it is the dominant feeling. Universal sympathy, tender interest 
 in everything that lives and moves, was the note of this school. 
 Burns wore out two copies of the ' Man of Feeling ' carrying it 
 about in his pocket ; and it doubtless helped to awaken and foster 
 in him the tenderness of heart that inspired his " Address to the 
 Mouse." Sensibility, in fact, pervaded literature during the last 
 forty years of the century; and the tender experiences of Betty Foy,
 
 HOW WORDSWORTH CAME TO WRITE BALLADS. 157 
 
 the mother of the Idiot Boy, would have commended themselves 
 from the mere force of literary custom to thousands of readers, 
 if dressed to advantage in the familiar sentimental prose style. 
 And although Wordsworth's style was not the familiar style, the 
 taste for the kind of subject at least had been cultivated before 
 his day. 
 
 The story of the accident that led Wordsworth to write ballads 
 on subjects taken from common life is well known, and was put 
 on record by himself in a note to " The Idiot Boy." In the spring 
 of 1798, when he and Coleridge were near neighbours and close 
 friends, they proposed making a walking tour together, and to 
 meet the expense it occurred to them to write together a ballad 
 by the way and send it to the ' New Monthly Magazine.' The 
 poem of the "Ancient Mariner" was the result. Wordsworth 
 made a few suggestions and contributed a few lines, but, as he 
 says, " as we endeavoured to proceed conjointly (I speak of the 
 same evening) our respective manners proved so different that it 
 would have been quite presumptuous in me to do anything but 
 separate from an undertaking upon which I could have been only 
 a clog." He proceeded instead to write independently lyrical 
 ballads " on natural subjects, taken from common life, but looked 
 at, as far as might be, through an imaginative medium." The 
 difference between the ' Lyrical Ballads ' and the " Ancient 
 Mariner " represents the difference in individual character and 
 history between Coleridge and Wordsworth. Ideas work them- 
 selves out differently according to the minds in which they take 
 root. 
 
 Wordsworth was country-bred, familiar only with the simple 
 folk of the Northern dales till he was seventeen ; and his experi- 
 ence of towns and townspeople did not evoke new sympathies to 
 supplant the old. It was not merely the face of inanimate nature 
 that had charms for him. He had the keenest sympathy with his 
 humble country neighbours. The simple incidents of their lives 
 interested him as much as they interested the humblest gossip in 
 the hamlet or in the hillside cottage, though in a different way. 
 His imagination fastened on these incidents, and transfigured them. 
 Consider, for example, the incidents of " The Idiot Boy " as they 
 would present themselves to an ordinary village gossip, and you
 
 158 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 will understand Wordsworth's theory about the creative function 
 
 of the poet : 
 
 " Imagination needs must stir; 
 
 Dear maid, this truth believe, 
 Minds that have little to confer 
 Find little to perceive." 
 
 Old Betty Foy, who lives in the same house with Susan (laic, has 
 an only child, Johnny, an idiot, whom she loves with all her heart. 
 Susan falls ill, and Betty mounts her poor boy on a pony and 
 sends him for the doctor. The boy does not return. Betty is 
 alarmed and goes in search of him ; finds him after a long search 
 in a vale staring at the stars and listening to the hooting of the 
 owls, perfectly delighted with them and himself. Susan mean- 
 time, left alone, gets anxious in her turn, ceases to feel her ail- 
 ments, gets up and hobbles after, and the two old women, de- 
 lighted with the recovery of Johnny, forget all about the illness, 
 and bring him home in merry triumph. That is all the story of 
 the Idiot Boy. To most people it must always appear trivial, yet 
 when Wordsworth heard of the incident it haunted his imagination. 
 He pictured to himself the Idiot Boy's delight when he was put 
 on horseback, the mother's pride that he could be of some use, the 
 fears that came over her as hour after hour passed and neither he 
 nor the doctor came, her growing impatience, her wild agitated 
 search in the moonlight, and her overflowing joy when at last she 
 found the truant. Every stanza in the poem is a vivid picture of 
 simple human feeling, delightful if you have any interest in the 
 motherly feelings of such a poor old woman as Betty Foy. But 
 we cannot be surprised that so few entered into the spirit of 
 Wordsworth's imagination. Even now, when his fame is estab- 
 lished, and it is customary to denounce the purblind critics who 
 ridiculed his first publication, we find " The Idiot Boy " generally 
 given up as a mistaken experiment. Wordsworth unintentionally 
 took a sweeping revenge on those early critics when he rearranged 
 his poems so that their chronological order cannot be followed 
 without some trouble ; for many people now loathe and detest and 
 reprobate their memory who entirely agree with them. Mrs Oli- 
 phant who, although she uses the now orthodox language against 
 the worthless critics who sneered at the ' Lyrical Ballads,' the
 
 MRS OLIPHANT'S CRITICISMS. 159 
 
 literary gladiators who fleshed their swords upon Wordsworth's 
 first efforts condemns without knowing it the very poems that 
 they condemned, and, in language equally strong, makes a com- 
 parison between " The Idiot Boy " and " John Gilpin," very much 
 to the disadvantage of the former. " The choice of such colloquial 
 familiarity of treatment," she says, " as suggests a jocular rather 
 than a serious meaning, the absolute insignificance of the incident, 
 and the absence of any attempt to give grace and dignity to the 
 story, balked its effect completely as an exposition of nature, while 
 the humour in it was too feeble, too diffuse, to give it a lively 
 comic interest. Cowper had ventured to be quite as colloquial 
 and realistic in ' John Gilpin,' with electrical effect." The com- 
 parison between " The Idiot Boy " and " John Gilpin " is not a 
 happy one, for the two poems are in very different keys of hu- 
 mour : we are expected by the poet in the one case to smile with 
 moist eyes and heart profoundly touched, and in the other to laugh 
 heartily. 
 
 Mrs Oliphant complains of " the absolute insignificance of the 
 incident," and " the absence of any attempt to give grace and dig- 
 nity to the story." While such complaints are made by professed 
 admirers of Wordsworth, who find no words too hard for the injus- 
 tice done him by the contemporary critics of the ' Lyrical Bal- 
 lads,' how can Wordsworth be said to have created the taste by 
 which he is enjoyed ? His admirers now repeat the same criti- 
 cisms of the same works. It was in defence of himself against 
 such complaints as are made by Mrs Oliphant and Mr Myers that 
 Wordsworth wrote his celebrated Preface. There are two passages 
 from this Preface that are very often repeated : one, that the lan- 
 guage used in poetry should be the language really used by men ; 
 and the other, that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful 
 feeling, that it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tran- 
 quillity. These two dicta have passed into literature as the quint- 
 essence of Wordsworth's poetical theory, and they fit in with the 
 current conception of Wordsworth as the leader of the revolution 
 against the poetical theories of the eighteenth century. But the 
 Preface, as you will see if you read the whole of it, was much more 
 limited in its purpose : it was apologetic and not constructive ; it 
 was really an elaborate justification of his own practice in the
 
 1GO WORDSWORTH. 
 
 case of the lyrical ballads, not the enunciation of a universally 
 binding poetic creed, although Wordsworth, not the meekest of 
 men, was inclined to take the aggressive against what his critics 
 considered good poetry. We must read the Preface along with 
 " The Idiot Boy," " The Thorn," " Goody Blake," " Peter Bell," 
 and other ballads of the same class, if we would understand its 
 purport. As the meaning of the theory that the language of 
 poetry should be the language really used by men a theory that 
 everybody has heard of that has ever heard of the name of Words- 
 worth as the meaning of this theory is not very generally under- 
 stood, it may be worth while to recall Avhat Wordsworth actually 
 did say. 
 
 "The principal object proposed in these poems [the ' Lyrical Ballads '] 
 was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate and 
 describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language 
 really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain col- 
 ouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the 
 mind in an unusual aspect ; and further, and above all, to make these inci- 
 dents and associations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not 
 ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature, chiefly as far as regards the 
 manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement." 
 
 It is commonly supposed that by the language really used by 
 men, Wordsworth meant colloquial language, above all, for poetic 
 purposes, the language of rustics ; and seeing that the vocabulary 
 of an ordinary peasant is extremely limited, the theory has been 
 laughed at as a preposterous limitation of poetry. But Words- 
 worth did not really propose anything so absurd as this. He did 
 indeed defend the choice for poetry of themes from rustic life and 
 language from rustic life, because "the essential passions of the 
 heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, 
 are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic 
 language"; and because peasants "hourly communicate with the 
 best objects from which the best part of language is originally 
 derived," and "from their rank in life, and the sameness and 
 narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of 
 social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and 
 unelaborated expressions." In this overstrained argument in his 
 own defence Wordsworth undoubtedly went too far, and exposed
 
 EUSTIC LANGUAGE IN POETRY. 161 
 
 himself to very obvious and easy ridicule. But even in this 
 passage he did not commit himself to the theory that all poetry 
 should be composed of such homely materials : he was only in 
 a spirit of defiant paradox playing for a little with the idea that 
 if a poet dealt only with the feelings of peasants, and used only 
 words known to them, his poetry was likely to be more per- 
 manently intelligible and intere'sting. The paradox is arguable, 
 but against it must be set the fact that the words of rustic 
 dialects, though very persistent, do become obsolete and acquire 
 new shades of meaning as much as the words of literature and 
 cultivated speech; and the further fact, that as civilisation ad- 
 vances, the relations among individuals and the feelings thence 
 arising become too complicated to be typified by the incidents of 
 life in a country parish. This part of Wordsworth's theory may 
 be dismissed as overstrained and fantastic. Only it must be re- 
 membered, to do him justice, that he did not propose to use bare 
 incidents without a colouring of imagination, and that the poet's 
 words were to be a selection and a metrical arrangement, the 
 selection dictated by the feeling to be expressed, and the feeling 
 by the poet's sensibility. 
 
 The opinion in favour of rustic language was, however, but 
 a part of Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction, a casual and 
 detachable incident. The main thesis of his preface, of his 
 apology for his own poetry, was that poetry has no special 
 language distinct from that of ordinary life or of prose that the 
 language of passion, of powerful feeling, is the same whether in 
 metre or not that it is possible to write poetry without using any 
 other words than such as are to be found in prose Avriting. 
 
 " If ill a poem there should be found a series of lines, or even a single 
 line, in which the language, though naturally arranged, and according to 
 the strict laws of metre, does not differ from that of prose, there is a 
 numerous class of critics who, when they stumble upon these prosaisms, as 
 they call them, imagine that they have made a notable discovery, and exult 
 over the poet as over a man ignorant of his own profession. Now these 
 men would establish a canon of criticism which the reader will conclude he 
 must utterly reject, if he wishes to be pleased with these volumes. And it 
 would be a most easy task to prove to him that not only the language of 
 a large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated character, 
 must necessarily, except with reference to the metre, in no respect differ 
 
 L
 
 162 WOKDSWOHTH. 
 
 from that of good prose, but likewise that some of the most interesting 
 parts of the best poems will be found to be strictly the language of prose, 
 when prose is well written." 
 
 And again : 
 
 " It may be safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, any cwittwl 
 difference between the language of prose and metrical composition." 
 
 This was the gist of Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction, that 
 in the best parts of the best poems no words are used that are 
 special and peculiar to poetry, that would not be found in 
 well-written prose. I might claim it, I think, as confirming the 
 view I have expressed to you as to the influence of the prose 
 literature of the eighteenth century in effecting the change that 
 took place in poetry soon after the French Revolution. But, you 
 may ask, was Wordsworth's theory correct 1 Surely, you will 
 say, the order of the words, the construction of the sentences, is 
 different in poetry 1 and the selection of the words is different ? 
 Coleridge, in his criticism of Wordsworth's theory in the ' Bio- 
 graphia Literaria,' perhaps the most suggestive and eloquent 
 piece of critical writing in our language, urges both of these 
 considerations as if Wordsworth had denied them. He will not 
 believe that Wordsworth could have meant only that the words 
 used in the best poetry must be such words as would excite no 
 surprise if they appeared in good prose, because, he says, nobody 
 who had enjoyed the slightest opportunity of understanding 
 Wordsworth's mind and character would suspect him of pro- 
 claiming a truism. Therefore it must have been Wordsworth's 
 intention to claim for the best poetry the same style as prose 
 in the ordinary sense of the word style, having reference to the 
 composition, the arrangement, or, as Coleridge says, the ordonnance 
 of the words, and not the mere words themselves. And inter- 
 preting Wordsworth in this way, his friendly critic has no diffi- 
 culty in showing that neither in his own poetry nor in any other 
 poetry is the style identical with that of prose. "The true 
 question must be, whether there are not modes of expression, 
 a construction, and an order of sentences, which are in their fit 
 and natural place in a serious prose composition, but would be 
 disproportionate and heterogeneous in metrical poetry ; and vice
 
 COLERIDGE ON WORDSWORTH. 163 
 
 versa, whether in the language of a serious poem there may not be 
 an arrangement both of words and of sentences, and a use and a 
 selection of (what are called) figures of speech, both as to their 
 kind, their frequency, and their occasions, which on a subject of 
 equal weight would be vicious and alien in correct and manly 
 prose. I contend that in both cases, the unfitness of each for the 
 place of the other frequently will and ought to exist." 
 
 Coleridge's interpretation of Wordsworth and his reply upon 
 this interpretation have both been universally accepted since the 
 ' Biographia Literaria ' was published, Coleridge's early intimacy 
 with Wordsworth lending authority to his interpretation, and 
 common-sense lending sanction to his reply to the theory as 
 interpreted. And yet it is impossible to read Wordsworth's 
 preface through with care enough to group and put together 
 his detached statements, concentration of dry thought not being 
 one of his virtues as a writer, without feeling that he never 
 meant to deny what Coleridge affirmed against him ; that he 
 abstained from insisting upon this difference between poetry 
 and prose in point of arrangement only because he regarded 
 it as a truism ; and that when he spoke of there being no 
 essential difference between the language of prose and metrical 
 composition, he was thinking of the mere words, if by words 
 we understand figurative words as well as plain literal words. 
 His language again and again implies that the distinction be- 
 tween poetry and prose emphasised by Coleridge was present to 
 his mind. He discusses at length and with great analytic skill how 
 and why it is that metre adds to the reader's pleasure, speaking 
 of the " continual and regular impulses of pleasurable surprise 
 from the metrical arrangement." He indicates, in fact, the very 
 theory of the origin and effect of metre that Coleridge develops 
 more fully and presents as a qualification of Wordsworth's 
 doctrine. It was no part of that doctrine that the poetic order 
 of words must necessarily be the prose order, though he con- 
 tended, in vindication of his own practice in the metrical ballads, 
 that it might be the prose order, without losing any of the 
 power peculiar to poetry. The point that Coleridge laboured 
 most against Wordsworth, and established most brilliantly, was 
 that there are figures of speech which, as regard kind, and
 
 164 WORDS WOllTH. 
 
 number, and occasion, would be in place in poetry and out of 
 place in correct and manly prose. But I don't think that 
 Wordsworth had overlooked even this, though he did not guard 
 himself with sufficient care against being supposed to have over- 
 looked it; for he says that "if the poet's subject be judiciously 
 chosen, it will naturally, and upon fit occasion, lead him to 
 passions the language of which, if selected truly and judiciously, 
 must necessarily be dignified and variegated, and alive with 
 metaphors and figures." What he objected to was the " poet's in- 
 tervening any foreign splendour of his own with that which the 
 passion naturally suggests." 
 
 That it was the words and the words only that Wordsworth 
 had in his mind when he maintained that the language of poetry 
 did not differ essentially from the language of prose, is further 
 shown by the example he quotes from Gray : 
 
 " In vain to me the smiling mornings shine, 
 And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire : 
 The birds in vain their amorous descant join, 
 Or cheerful fields resume their green attire. 
 These ears, alas ! for other notes repine ; 
 A different object do these eyes require ; 
 My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine ; 
 And in my breast the imperfect joys expire : 
 Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer, 
 And new-born pleasure brings to happier men ; 
 The fields to all their wonted tribute bear ; 
 To warm their little loves the birds complain. 
 I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear, 
 And weep the more because I weep in vain." 
 
 "It will easily be perceived," he goes on to say, "that the only 
 part of this sonnet which is of any value is the lines printed in 
 italics; it is equally obvious that, except in the rhyme, and in 
 the use of the single word ' fruitless ' for fruitlessly, which is so 
 far a defect, the language of these lines does in no respect differ 
 from that of prose." 
 
 If Wordsworth's plain statements had not been sufficiently 
 explicit, his comments on this passage would have been sufficient 
 to show that what he really objected to was the habitual em- 
 ployment by poets of certain conventional figures of speech that
 
 THE POET'S THEORY AND HIS PRACTICE. 165 
 
 had dropped out of the prose style, and had come to be regarded 
 as the exclusive colours of poetic diction. The expulsion of 
 these conventionalities was all the revolution that he proposed 
 in poetic style. The truth is, that in the heat of the moment, 
 with all the arrogance and obstinacy of his nature, roused by 
 the ridicule poured on his ballads, he exaggerated the difference 
 between his own poetry and that of his predecessors. He told 
 the public with lofty anger that the public taste was corrupt, 
 and that if they wished to enjoy his poems, which were deliber- 
 ately adapted to interest mankind permanently, they must give 
 up much of what was ordinarily enjoyed. All this was provoked 
 by the open contempt for his prosaisms. He carried the war 
 into the enemy's country with the angry retort: "Cleanse your- 
 selves of your gaudy, glossy, meaningless, conventional poeticisms, 
 and then you will be able to enjoy my prosaisms." His special 
 plea for the colloquial language of rustics was but a side-issue 
 in his general poetic theory, intended only for the special defence 
 of a few passages in the ' Lyrical Ballads,' in " The Thorn," for 
 example, and in "The Idiot Boy." A not uncommon impression 
 is that Wordsworth advocated this as the only fitting language 
 for poetry, and, upon this misunderstanding, readers naturally 
 charge the poet with gross inconsistency between his theory 
 and his practice ; for if you open a volume of Wordsworth's 
 poems anywhere, you will find abundance of words that are 
 never to be heard in the mouth of an ordinary rustic. But 
 you will not, I think, find many words that would be considered 
 inadmissible in prose style, supposing always, what was part 
 of his theory, that the prose -writer was in the same exalted 
 key of feeling with the poet. You may say, as Coleridge said, 
 that this is in fact an unreal and artificial supposition ; that 
 when feelings reach a certain pitch of intensity, they cannot as 
 a matter of fact be expressed in prose so as to command the 
 sympathy of the reader ; that metrical language is the customary 
 vehicle of intense feeling; that we expect to find a less im- 
 passioned strain in prose, and are consequently disposed to 
 ridicule, as out of place, figures of speech in harmony with the 
 strain, which from habit and association we regard as appro- 
 priate [in poetry. That Wordsworth would have admitted this,
 
 160 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 if it had been put to him, we have every reason to believe from 
 what he actually says, but when he wrote the Preface he was 
 in too aggressive a mood to be particular about stating his 
 doctrine with all the explicit qualifications needful to meet 
 obvious objections. He did not care to present it in such a way 
 as to win instant acceptance from common-sense. He was for 
 the moment wilfully, not to say arrogantly, paradoxical; and 
 while we recognise that he was misunderstood, we must admit 
 that he had himself to blame. 
 
 Another part of the poetic theory set forth in the preface has 
 received much less attention than his theory of poetic diction, 
 although it deserves more as a clue to Wordsworth's main point 
 of distinction from other poets. It concerns his choice of subjects 
 and his mode of constructing his poems. Perhaps evolving or de- 
 veloping is a better word to use than constructing, because on 
 principle the poet left his imagination more free than the artist 
 generally does to follow the impulses of the feelings aroused by 
 his subject. "Wordsworth's theory was put forward primarily to 
 defend himself against the charge of triviality and insignificance 
 in his choice of subjects and incidents, the charge that Mrs Oli- 
 phant repeats. But it has a much wider bearing, and it is worth 
 taking some pains to understand his meaning for two reasons. In 
 the first place, such poetry as Wordsworth's, as he himself pointed 
 out, cannot be thoroughly enjoyed unless you follow the course of 
 his imagination in composing it. Mere passive reading will not 
 do ; the reader's imagination must exert itself to accompany the 
 poet's. And in the second place, though this is an inferior motive, 
 there are several cant terms in contemporary criticism that have 
 grown out of Wordsworth's doctrine, and are often used some- 
 times intelligently and sometimes not, but in one way or the 
 other often. The fashionable word evolution, when rightly em- 
 ployed in poetic criticism, is employed in a sense defined by 
 Wordsworth's theory as to how a poet should proceed. 
 
 Accused of choosing trivial incidents in his lyrical ballads, 
 Wordsworth's reply was that " the feeling therein developed 
 gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action 
 and situation to the feeling." " Poetry is the spontaneous over- 
 flow of powerful feeling." The poet's business is to study " the
 
 THE POET'S DEFENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE. 167 
 
 manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement," and 
 in proportion as the succession of ideas in his poetry obeys these 
 natural laws of association, follows this course of evolution, his 
 poetry is real poetry and not a rhetorical imitation. Closely in- 
 terwoven with this doctrine, in Wordsworth's statement of it, was 
 another not strictly relevant, that people are too much accustomed 
 to the use of gross and violent stimulants in poetry ; that they 
 thirst for startling incidents, strange situations, violent passions, 
 the favourite objects of sensational and romantic fiction. This 
 charge against the public taste was part of Wordsworth's indig- 
 nant and defiant retort upon his critics, and not, as I have said, 
 strictly relevant to his theory as to the right mode of poetic evolu- 
 tion out of powerful feeling. Strictly speaking, of course, the 
 mode of evolution is independent of the origin of the intense feel- 
 ing that sets the imagination to work : we can only say that the 
 feeling must be there, no matter what the nature of the stimulant 
 that has given occasion to it. Still, this complaint about " the 
 degrading thirst for outrageous stimulation," as he calls it, has a 
 certain connection with Wordsworth's doctrine about the poet's 
 main business. For, the poet being bound to study " the manner 
 in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement," he can do 
 this only in his own mind ; he must study how his imagination is 
 affected by events within his own experience. Hence, while other 
 poets, as he pictured them, were ransacking history for good poeti- 
 cal subjects, such as were in their own nature extraordinary, and 
 might be tricked out by the fancy in such a way as to impress all 
 readers, he chose his subjects from incidents in familiar life that 
 had strongly impressed him and put his imagination in motion. 
 But there was another condition of good poetry. Not every image 
 that the excited mind conjures up is necessarily poetical. The poet 
 must select and modify for a particular purpose, that of giving im- 
 mediate pleasure. "Nor let this necessity of producing immediate 
 pleasure," he cries, " be considered as a degradation of the poet's 
 art. It is far otherwise. It is an acknowledgment of the beauty 
 of the universe, an acknowledgment the more sincere, because not 
 formal but indirect ; it is a task light and easy to him who looks 
 at the world in the spirit of love : further, it is a homage paid to 
 the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary
 
 1 G8 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 principle of pleasure, by which he knows and feels and lives and 
 moves." 
 
 The poet's choice of what his imagination evolves being thus re- 
 stricted, how should he proceed in choosing his subjects 1 When 
 any incident excites him to intense feeling, he should study how 
 his imagination works in raising that feeling to a higher pitch if 
 it is pleasurable ; or if it is painful, throwing a veil over it or 
 changing the light that falls upon it till it can be looked at with 
 pathetic resignation. In every person the imagination is more or 
 less active in this work of increase and consolation ; conjuring only 
 images that reconcile us to sorrow and give a lovelier complexion to 
 joy. The poet, with his keener sensibilities and more active im- 
 agination, does this more than other men. Wordsworth tried 
 deliberately to be true to nature as a poet by putting into metri- 
 cal language only the imagery that grew up in his mind under the 
 impulse of intense feeling. If you read "The Thorn," you can 
 trace how the imaginative structure was gradually reared that had 
 its origin in a feeling of keen pity for the poor, outcast, suspected 
 lunatic Martha Ray. The thought of this outcast, when he heard 
 her story or saw her sitting by her thorn, haunted him. The poem 
 really represents the fancies with which he soothed the disquiet of 
 his own spirit at the existence of such miseries in the world, just 
 as the poem of "The Idiot Boy" is composed of the fancies with 
 which he heightened his enjoyment of the touching incident that 
 was its foundation in fact. 
 
 It must further be added, and the fact explains the strength as 
 well as the imperfections of Wordsworth's poetry, that writing on 
 these principles, he wrote chiefly to please himself, " with his eye 
 on the object," as he said, and without much regard to the effect 
 to be produced on the reader. When the feelings stirred in him 
 by what he saw or heard or read were satisfied by the work of his 
 imagination, he had little solicitude about the best means of com- 
 municating the same satisfaction to his reader. The best means 
 were the means that gave satisfaction to himself. And as his own 
 life was peculiar, the life of a solitary student, or of a student mov- 
 ing within a narrow circle of interests, it was not to be expected 
 that what interested him would interest everybody. Of this he was 
 aware, but it did not influence his practice.
 
 DANGER OF TAKING ADVICE OF CRITICS. 169 
 
 ' : I am sensible," he wrote, " that my associations must have sometimes 
 been particular instead of general, and that, consequently, giving to things 
 a false importance, I may sometimes have written upon unworthy subjects ; 
 but I am less apprehensive on this account, than that my language may fre- 
 quently have suffered from those arbitrary connections of feelings and ideas 
 with particular words and phrases, from which no man can altogether pro- 
 tect himself. Hence I have no doubt that, in some instances, feelings even 
 of the ludicrous may be given to my readers by expressions which appeared 
 to me tender and pathetic. Such faulty expressions, were I convinced they 
 were faulty at present, and that they must necessarily continue to be so, I 
 would willingly take all reasonable pains to correct. But it is dangerous to 
 make these alterations on the simple authority of a few individuals, or even 
 of certain classes of men ; for where the understanding of an author is not 
 convinced, or his feelings altered, this cannot be done without great injury 
 to himself : for his own feelings are his stay and support, and if he set them 
 aside in one instance, he may be induced to repeat this act till his mind shall 
 lose all confidence in itself, and become utterly debilitated." 
 
 We need go no further to understand the antagonism that Words- 
 worth provoked. It was no personal malignity. Controversy 
 took a personal turn because he challenged comparison between 
 his own feelings and those of others. It is the merit of such 
 poetry that it is the expression of genuine feeling actually felt, 
 and not of what the poet supposed that the world in general 
 would feel in presence of certain objects.
 
 170 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 WORDSWORTH (continued) COLERIDGE SOUTHEY. 
 
 THE "ODE TO DUTY" "THE SOLITARY REAPER " THE LAKE SCHOOL. 
 
 You will be pleased to hear, I think, that I have abandoned the 
 idea of trying to lecture you into an admiration of Wordsworth. 
 I had intended to occupy this lecture with going over some of 
 Wordsworth's poems, and pointing out their distinctive charms; 
 but on mature consideration I have come to the conclusion that I 
 should only be wasting your time, because those of you who are 
 fitted by temperament to enjoy his poems will do so without any 
 prompting, and those of you who are not would probably remain 
 deaf to any rhetoric of mine in their favour. No poet is more un- 
 equal than Wordsworth, and I cannot forget the fact that when I 
 was young myself, I had too intolerant an aversion to his prosy 
 sermonising to have patience enough to approach in a sympathetic 
 spirit what I now read with delight. It was this, indeed, that at 
 first tempted me to think of picking out a few poems that might 
 serve as an introduction to a sympathetic understanding of the 
 man, but, on the whole, I think I had better leave that to the in- 
 fluence of time. It is characteristic of Wordsworth that his imag- 
 ination was always set in motion by personal feelings ; and unless 
 you sympathise with the initiatory feeling, which you are not 
 likely to do if you have not passed through something of the same 
 experience, you cannot be expected to follow his imagination in its 
 flight without an effort that is fatal to any real enjoyment of 
 poetry. You can always be sure of finding in Wordsworth a 
 genuine feeling of some kind, and if you have any delight in ex-
 
 THE EMOTIONAL MOTIVE IN POETRY. 171 
 
 ternal nature, you will find that he awakens you, as no other poet 
 can, to unsuspected aspects of familiar things, not merely fixing 
 the eye on striking features that had escaped your observation 
 but inspiring them with new suggestions. But preliminary sym- 
 pathy with the poet's attitude is indispensable, and something 
 more than a casual lecture is needed to give you that. 
 
 I shall content myself, therefore, in continuation and conclusion 
 of what I said the other day, with referring to a few poems that 
 may illustrate the relation between the imaginative structure and 
 the emotional motive in his poetry. You remember my quoting 
 his saying that true poetry has its origin in emotion : it is emotion 
 that sets the imagination, the creative constructive faculty, at 
 work ; the imagination exerts itself to multiply and modify this 
 initial feeling. You may call this, then, the emotional motive, 
 while the fabric reared at the bidding of this motive, and condi- 
 tioned through all its parts by the nature of this motive, may be 
 called the imaginative structure, the temple reared as a fitting 
 habitation for the feeling that commanded the poet's creative 
 faculty to build a home for it. Now Wordsworth, as you will 
 remember, held that poets generally worked under the influence 
 of too outrageous emotional stimulants ; their imaginations were 
 not quick enough, not spontaneous enough, not sufficiently de- 
 lighted with their own exercise, to be put in motion by slight and 
 ordinary impulses; they remained still, dull, inert, except when 
 visited by strong, violent, extraordinary excitements. His ima- 
 gination was more excitable, more ready to stir ; and besides, on 
 moral grounds, he deliberately trained it to respond to slight im- 
 pulses, and find its delight in its own exercise. 
 
 Hence arises what at first sight seems an anomaly in Words- 
 worth's poetry, as well as an apparent contradiction between his 
 practice and some parts of his theory. Search his poems through, 
 and you will find some that start from humbler, slighter themes 
 than those of any other poet of high rank. But his poetry is not 
 on that account simple. On the contrary, search his poems through, 
 and you will find some, such as the famous odes to " Duty " and 
 on the "Intimations of Immortality," that are as intricate, elabo- 
 rate, and abstruse, as remote from the ordinary paths of thought, 
 as ever poet's imagination created. The emotional motive is
 
 172 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 simple, the passion has almost always a simple origin, and often is 
 of no great intensity ; but the imaginative structure is generally 
 elaborate, and when the poet is at his best, supremely splendid 
 and gorgeous. No poet has built such magnificent palaces of 
 rare material for the ordinary everyday homely human affections. 
 And it is because he has invested our everyday principles of con- 
 duct, which are so apt to become threadbare, with such imper- 
 ishable robes of finest texture and richest design, that Words- 
 worth holds so high a place among the great moralists of his race. 
 Take the greatest of his poems, the "Ode to Duty." The 
 emotional motive to this is nothing more extraordinary than a 
 quiet resolution, formed in no tempestuous moment of repent- 
 ance, but in a placid stretch of even life, to make duty the rule of 
 his conduct. But with what a splendour his imagination invests 
 this ! to what heights of ecstasy does he lift this simple feeling ! 
 
 " Through no disturbance of my soul, 
 Or strong compunction in me wrought, 
 I supplicate for thy control ; 
 But in the quietness of thought : 
 Me this unchartered freedom tires ; 
 I feel the weight of chance-desires ; 
 My hopes no more must change their name, 
 T long for a repose that ever is the same. 
 
 Stern Lawgiver ! yet thou dost wear 
 The Godhead's most benignant grace ; 
 Nor know we anything so fair 
 As is the smile upon thy face : 
 Flowers laugh before thee on their beds, 
 And fragrance in thy footing treads ; 
 Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong ; 
 And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong. 
 
 To humbler functions, awful Power ! 
 I call thee : I myself commend 
 Unto thy guidance from this hour ; 
 Oh, let my weakness have an end ! 
 Give unto me, made lowly wise, 
 The spirit of self-sacrifice ; 
 The confidence of reason give ; 
 And in the light of truth thy Bondman let me live ! "
 
 "THE SOLITARY EEAPER." 173 
 
 So simple is the motive often, that unless the path taken by the 
 imagination is of itself delightful to you, unless you are caught 
 up with it and transported, you are left at the end with a feeling 
 as if there had been much ado about nothing. In illustration 
 of this I would cite " The Solitary Keaper " : 
 
 " Behold her, single in the field, 
 Yon solitary Highland lass ! 
 Heaping and singing by herself ; 
 Stop here, or gently pass ! 
 Alone she cuts and binds the grain, 
 And sings a melancholy strain ; 
 
 listen ! for the Vale profound 
 Is overflowing with the sound. 
 
 No Nightingale did ever chaunt 
 More welcome notes to weary bauds 
 Of travellers in some shady haunt, 
 Among Arabian sands : 
 A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard 
 In spriug-tinie from the Cuckoo-bird, 
 Breaking the silence of the seas 
 Among the farthest Hebrides. 
 
 Will no one tell me what she sings ? 
 
 Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow 
 
 For old, unhappy, far-off things, 
 
 And battles long ago : 
 
 Or is it some more humble lay, 
 
 Familiar matter of to-day ? 
 
 Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, 
 
 That has been, and may be again ! 
 
 Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang 
 As if her song could have no ending ; 
 
 1 saw her singing at her work, 
 And o'er the sickle bending ; 
 I listened, motionless and still ; 
 And, as I mounted up the lull, 
 The music in my heart I bore, 
 Long after it was heard no more." 
 
 Many of Wordsworth's imaginative flights, and these the most 
 prized by his admirers, take their start from his delight in dis-
 
 174 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 covering some new aspect of Nature, or in the sudden flash upon 
 his mind of some reflection that had never before inspired a poet. 
 Wordsworth is sometimes called a nature-worshipper, but it would 
 be more correct to call him a worshipper of the novelties of thought 
 that occurred to him in the minute observation of nature. The 
 mere delight of the eye, the glory of vision, had great charms for 
 him, but greater still was the charm of the imaginative exercise 
 to which new revelations inspired him. You remember the passage 
 in which he describes what first moved him, as early as in his 
 fourteenth year, to resolve to be a poet, the sudden conviction 
 flashing upon him that there were many things in nature that 
 poets had never observed ? From that moment he kept in view, 
 with the persistent obstinacy of will that was so marked a feature 
 in his character, a definite purpose to supply the deficiency. And 
 he carried out the purpose not merely by what might be irrever- 
 ently called simile-hunting in nature, which many of his admirers 
 in prose and verse have done to death, never allowing a leaf to 
 cross their path, or a bird to sing within their hearing, without 
 putting it on the rack to extract a moral from it, or treasuring it 
 up in their memories, to be dragged in as after occasion might 
 offer as a rhetorical embellishment. Wordsworth did, indeed, 
 labour after new images from nature, and sometimes, though not 
 often, used them as a rhetorician rather than a poet that is to 
 say, to tickle the fancy rather than touch the heart. But often 
 when a new aspect of nature touched him, he allowed his imagina- 
 tion to dwell upon it, and circle round it, and weave for it a metri- 
 cal body in which it might live among the permanent companions 
 of the human spirit. Once, for example, as he stood in the twi- 
 light among his favourite hills, when the gathering gloom had 
 covered over all traces of the handiwork of man, and even the 
 transient features of the vegetation were dim and indistinct, noth- 
 ing then being visible but the vague outlines of the valley, the soft 
 gleam of the lake, and the shadowy masses of the mountains, the 
 thought came to him that this was the spectacle that had met the 
 eyes of men in all ages, had remained constant to human vision 
 through all the changes that had passed over the face of nature. 
 It was -a solemn and affecting thought, and the poet's imagination
 
 SONNET TO TWILIGHT. 175 
 
 has provided for it a permanent dwelling-place in his sonnet to 
 
 Twilight : 
 
 " Hail, Twilight, sovereign of one peaceful hour ! 
 Not dull art thou as undiscerning Night ; 
 But studious only to remove from sight 
 Day's mutable distinctions. Ancient Power ! 
 Thus did the waters gleam, the mountains lower, 
 To the rude Briton, when in wolf -skin vest 
 Here roving wild, he laid him down to rest 
 On the bare rock, or through a leafy bower 
 Looked ere his eyes were closed. By him was seen 
 The self-same Vision which we now behold, 
 At thy meek bidding, Shadowy Power ! brought forth ; 
 These mighty barriers, and the gulf between ; 
 The flood, the stars, a spectacle as old 
 As the beginning of the heavens and earth." 
 
 And it was not only in the solitude of hill and valley that such 
 thoughts came to him. One of the best known of his sonnets is 
 that composed on Westminster Bridge. If Wordsworth was not 
 the first poet to attempt to express the fact that a more profound 
 feeling of stillness and calm is experienced in cities before the rush 
 and roar of the day has begun than in the loneliest of mountain 
 solitudes, he has given such perfect expression to the truth that 
 he is entitled to all the honour of the discovery. 
 
 It is a distinctive feature in Wordsworth's nature-worship, one 
 that marks him off from lovers of less robust and healthy senti- 
 ment, that his conception of nature was wide enough to include 
 the works of man. He held in theory that nothing was inharmoni- 
 ous in nature when seen through the right imaginative medium ; 
 and though, when the railway threatened his own Westmoreland 
 retreats, he hurled metrical thunderbolts at the invader, this was 
 in his later years, and before that time his imagination had been 
 able to reconcile the eye to what men of more confined range of 
 mental vision can only regard as discordant and unsightly. When 
 we read his sonnet on Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways, com- 
 posed during the tour of 1833, we feel convinced that, if he had not 
 been disturbed from his natural balance by the projected Kendal 
 and Windermere Railway, he might have found the right imagina- 
 tive medium through which to hear the whistle, and would not
 
 176 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 have called upon the startled mountains, vales, and floods to share 
 with him the passion of a just disdain. As this sonnet is not 
 generally known, you will pardon me for quoting it : 
 
 "Motions and Means, on land and sea at war 
 With old poetic feeling, not for this 
 Shall ye by Poets even be judged amiss ! 
 Nor shall your presence, howsoe'er it mar 
 The loveliness of Nature, prove a bar 
 To the Mind's gaining that prophetic sense 
 Of future change, that point of vision, whence 
 May be discovered what in soul ye are. 
 In spite of all that beauty may disown 
 In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace 
 Her lawful offspring in Man's art ; and Time, 
 Pleased with your triumphs o'er his brother Space, 
 Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown 
 Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime." 
 
 Before passing from Wordsworth, I would recommend those who 
 wish to give him a trial as a companion not to attempt " The 
 Prelude " or " The Excursion " at first, but to search about among 
 the shorter poems for some congenial spot in which sympathy and 
 admiration may take root and develop into intimate enjoyment. 
 Matthew Arnold made a selection from the poems, and wrote a 
 preface to them. He is the writer to put you in sympathy with 
 Wordsworth, if any human being can. It is a fashion to deride 
 the "This will never do" with which Jeffrey opened his review of 
 " The Excursion." But has it ever done ? I have never heard of 
 or seen anybody prepared to say that " The Excursion " can be 
 read with unflagging delight. It contains many splendid passages, 
 but the bulk of it many of Wordsworth's most ardent admirers 
 pass by with indifference, if not with actual repugnance. To take 
 the case of Dean Church, for example, there is a manifest incon- 
 sistency between what he says of Jeffrey and his own comments 
 on " The Excursion." At one place he tells us that the sneers of 
 the ' Edinburgh Review ' were in vain, and showed only that the 
 poem was in advance of the times ; while again, referring to the 
 poem itself, he admits that though many passages are majestic, we 
 cannot speak so highly of their contents, and that the poet is at 
 times both pompous and obscure. Jeffrey said nothing stronger
 
 THE LAKE POETS. 177 
 
 against " The Excursion " than this, and the truth is that most of 
 his criticism has been amply confirmed and justified. 
 
 And now for a short introduction to Coleridge and a shorter to 
 Southey. It was owing to an extraneous accident, and not on 
 the ground of any resemblance in their character or in their poetic 
 principles, that they were spoken of in their lifetime as forming 
 a school nicknamed the Lake Poets. Three men more dissimilar 
 could not have been found, Wordsworth absorbed in a definitely 
 conceived poetic mission, living solely for it, day after day and 
 year after year alternately opening his mind with wise passiveness 
 till an inspiration should seize it, and working with strenuous 
 vigour when the inspiration came; Coleridge, dreamy, speculative, 
 aimless, rich in poetic and philosophic projects, but poor in per- 
 severance, an inspired creator of splendid fragments, paving with 
 good resolutions the way to slender achievement ; Southey, a man 
 of immense intellectual energy and copious literary faculty, but 
 no distinctive genius, a ready and indefatigable writer, full of am- 
 bition and self-confidence writing epics for fame, reviewing articles 
 and books for a livelihood, a professional man of letters who cheer- 
 fully resigned his youthful ambitions to follow a life of regular 
 methodical production of such works as editors and booksellers 
 would contract to receive and pay for on delivery, putting fame 
 on one side except in so far as it was compatible with honest 
 labour for the support of his household. The lives of the three 
 ran in channels that diverged more and more as the streams 
 lengthened. They were too different in character ever to have 
 formed a school. Their poetic ideals were different. We may 
 doubt whether Southey could have ever understood Wordsworth's 
 conception of poetry as the imaginative embodiment of personal 
 emotion ; at any rate he went a very different way to work, rang- 
 ing through history for subjects likely in themselves to impress 
 his readers. It may have been that as a practical man, under the 
 imperious necessity of producing what would sell, he felt that he 
 could not afford to wait and watch for moments of inspiration, 
 but must go in search of subjects capable of impressive treatment. 
 This at least was what he did, and his poetry has not one quality 
 in common with Wordsworth's. Rebellion against the tyranny 
 
 M
 
 178 COLERIDGE. 
 
 of the couplet, it might be said, for Southey threw himself with 
 presumptuous energy into metrical experiments, and his epics 
 abound in irregular freaks of rhythm. But such vagaries were 
 no part of Wordsworth's system, although at the time there is no 
 doubt that, forming as they did the most superficially striking 
 feature of Southey's "Thalaba," they confirmed the impression 
 that he was leagued with Wordsworth and Coleridge in a con- 
 spiracy to propagate the heresies of the Preface to the ' Lyrical 
 Ballads.' 
 
 It was in fact in a review of " Thalaba " in the first number of 
 the 'Edinburgh Review ' in 1802, that the existence of the Lake 
 School was first proclaimed to the world. The reviewer had 
 probably heard that all three poets were domiciled in the Lake 
 country, and looking to the obtrusive irregularities of " Thalaba " 
 and the startling paradoxes of Wordsworth's poetic gospel, it was 
 natural perhaps that he should jump to the conclusion that this 
 band of brothers had retired from the world to work out in 
 secluded companionship the doctrines of the Preface. It was a cir- 
 cumstance in favour of a conclusion recommended by its dramatic 
 effectiveness that, some years before, Southey and Coleridge had 
 published a volume in conjunction, while Wordsworth and Cole- 
 ridge were the joint authors of the ' Lyrical Ballads.' The truth 
 was that Southey was not at the time a resident in the Lake 
 country, though Coleridge was established there for the sake of 
 Wordsworth's companionship, and Coleridge and Southey had 
 married sisters, and Mrs Southey had spent some months with 
 Mrs Coleridge while Southey, not yet settled down to his life-work 
 as a man of letters, was wandering about in vague prospect of 
 diplomatic employment. It was not till 1803 that Southey finally 
 resolved to look to literature for a livelihood, and fixed his resi- 
 dence at Greta Hall near Keswick ; and it was for domestic reasons 
 rather than for the sake of Wordsworth's society that he chose this 
 residence in the Lake country, his acquaintance with Wordsworth 
 being in fact slight, and his sympathy with Wordsworth's poetical 
 theories far from intimate. The ordinary cares of this world had 
 a paramount hold on Southey in those years, and his foremost 
 anxiety was to find the means of reconciling them with his poetic 
 ambition : far from his thoughts was any idea of sharing as a
 
 COLERIDGE'S INFLUENCE ON WORDSWORTH. 179 
 
 sworn confederate in another man's mission. It was chance, and 
 not community of aim or community of sentiment, that brought 
 the three poets together in their early manhood. There can be no 
 confederacy without a leader, and these three were too strong in 
 their energies and distinct in their individualities to submit one 
 to another's purposes in life. The links between them were slight 
 and transient, and had all been accidentally formed by Coleridge, 
 the man of many projects and quickly kindled generous sympathy 
 with the works of others, all the freer in its play that he had no 
 very definite work of his own. But the contemporary ' Edinburgh 
 Reviewer ' could not be aware of these details which have been 
 disclosed to posterity; and several superficial facts were in his 
 favour when he coined the nickname of the Lake School. 
 
 Of the three, Coleridge and Wordsworth, though as different as 
 possible in character, had most in common in their views of poetry. 
 The doctrines of the Preface most probably took shape in Words- 
 worth's mind during those long walks and talks with Coleridge in 
 the summer of 1797 to which I have before alluded. There can 
 be no doubt that his friendship with Coleridge in their early man- 
 hood was a most important influence in the development of 
 Wordsworth's mental and poetic life. There is a marked difference 
 between what he wrote before and after. I would even go so far, 
 arguing from the precision with which Wordsworth uses psycho- 
 logical terms in the Preface, that not a little of his theory was 
 consciously or unconsciously derived from Coleridge. And the 
 basis of my argument would be this Wordsworth was not a reader 
 of philosophy, and he professed to detest mental analysis ; yet the 
 analysis of the creative faculty in the Preface is at once profound 
 and clear. Coleridge, on the other hand, had a passion for philo- 
 sophy ; his quick and subtle intellect revelled in its intricacies ; 
 it was his delight before poetry even when he was a schoolboy, 
 and when he was an old man he could hardly be brought to con- 
 verse on any other subject. Only the year before he sought the 
 acquaintance of Wordsworth, the first son born to him, the ill- 
 starred Hartley Coleridge, had been named after the English 
 philosopher whose technical language is used throughout Words- 
 worth's Preface, not without the awkwardness and crabbedness 
 that comes from want of familiarity. Coleridge was saturated
 
 180 COLERIDGE. 
 
 with Hartley's psychology when he and Wordsworth first met ; and 
 when he was full of a subject his eloquence about it was un- 
 matchedly rich and full. A new Plato would find admirable 
 subjects for imaginary dialogues in these conversations between 
 Coleridge and Wordsworth when they met almost daily for a 
 whole year. Only Plato himself could hardly have done justice 
 to the abundance and eloquence, the wide discursiveness, of 
 Coleridge's talk. Carlyle saw and heard him in his old age, and 
 has left a description that is often quoted : 
 
 ' ' I have heard Coleridge talk with eager musical energy two stricken 
 hours, his face radiant and moist, and communicate no meaning whatsoever 
 to any individual of his hearers, certain of whom, I for one, still kept eagerly 
 listening in hope : the most had long before given up, and formed, if the 
 room was large enough, secondary humming groups of their own. . . . You 
 swam and fluttered in the mistiest, wide, unintelligible deluge of things, 
 for most part in a rather profitless uncomfortable manner. Glorious islets 
 too I have seen rise out of the haze, but they were few, and soon swallowed 
 in the general element again. Balmy sunny islets, islets of the blest, and 
 the intelligible ; on which occasions those secondary humming groups 
 would all cease humming and hang breathless upon the eloquent words, till 
 once your islet got wrapt in the mist again, and they would recommence 
 humming. Eloquent, artistically expensive words ; you had always ; piercing 
 radiances of a most subtle insight came at intervals." 
 
 Part of this uuintelligibility may have been due to the listener, 
 for Coleridge in his Highgate days spoke in what was to Carlyle 
 an unknown tongue the philosophical dialect of modern Germany. 
 Those who knew him in his youth heard him converse on more 
 intelligible subjects, and speak of his eloquence as a marvel. 
 And that his eloquence quickened Wordsworth's whole poetic 
 nature, and set him thinking with new energy about poetry, I 
 have not the least doubt ; and I think it highly probable that the 
 doctrines of the Preface shaped themselves in his mind as he 
 listened to Coleridge's ever-flowing talk. In restating some of 
 these doctrines in the ' Biographia Literaria,' with such fulness of 
 illustration and such explanations and verbal corrections that they 
 have became part of the critical creed, Coleridge was probably 
 only reclaiming what had once been his own. Why, then, you 
 may ask, did he not say so ? To answer this question is to recall 
 the character of the man. Absorbed in a subject one day, and
 
 THE POET'S LACK OF RESOLUTE WILL. 181 
 
 violently pouring out his thick - coming thoughts about it, 
 he would have not the slightest remembrance of what he had 
 said a short time afterwards, when another subject had taken 
 possession of him. A verbatim report of his conversation one 
 year might have been passed off on him next year as the pro- 
 duction of another mind. He has been accused, and we must 
 admit convicted, of extensive plagiarisms both in his poetry and 
 his philosophy : if anybody had plagiarised from himself, he would 
 never have detected the fact. He never paused to think what was 
 his and what was not, but gave all his powers of memory and 
 imagination to whatever was uppermost in his thoughts at the 
 time. I do not say that Wordsworth plagiarised from him, but 
 it seems to me impossible to overrate the quickening influence that 
 Wordsworth owed to his contact with this wonderful enthusiast. 
 
 The debt was not all on one side. It was during the memorable 
 year of his companionship with Wordsworth that Coleridge wrote 
 nearly everything that now remains as a measure of his wonderful 
 poetic gifts. " The Rime of the Ancient Mariner " and " Christa- 
 bel " were both written in that year, besides most of the short 
 poems that make up the small volume of his poetical works. The 
 presence by his side of the steady resolute will of the Westmore- 
 land dalesman seems to have for the time constrained his imagin- 
 ation from aimless wandering ; and the lofty unwavering self-con- 
 fidence of his friend inspired him with a similar energy. Away 
 from Wordsworth after that year, he lost himself in visions of work 
 to be done that always remained to be done. Coleridge had every 
 poetic gift but one the will for sustained and concentrated effort. 
 
 One cannot help lamenting that the gift of resolute will was 
 wanting in Coleridge. And if we make the lament for him, it is 
 well-founded, for all the second half of his life was made unhappy 
 by vainly renewed repentances for wasted opportunities. There 
 is not a more pathetic poem in the language, to those who know 
 the two men, than the poem written by Coleridge when his heart 
 was full after hearing Wordsworth recite to him " The Prelude "- 
 on the growth of a poet's mind. 
 
 " Ah, as I listened with a heart forlorn 
 The pulses of my being beat anew ; 
 And even as life returns upon the drown'd,
 
 182 SOUTHEY. 
 
 Life's joy rekindling roused a throng of pains 
 Keen pangs of love, awakening as a babe 
 Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart ; 
 And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope ; 
 And hope that scarce would know itself from fear ; 
 Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain ; 
 And genius given, and knowledge won in vain ; 
 And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild, 
 And all which patient toil had reared, and all, 
 Commune with thee had opened out but flowers 
 Strewed on my corse and borne upon my bier 
 In the same coffin, for the self -same grave ! 
 That way no more ! and ill beseems it me, 
 Who came a welcomer in herald's guise, 
 Singing of glory and futurity, 
 To wander back on such unhealthful road, 
 Plucking the poisons of self -harm ! And ill 
 Such intertwine beseems triumphal wreaths 
 Strewed before thy advancing ! 
 
 And when Friend ! my comforter and guide ! 
 
 Strong in thyself, and powerful to give strength, 
 
 Thy long-sustained song finally closed, 
 
 And thy deep voice had ceased yet thou thyself 
 
 Wert still before my eyes, and round us both 
 
 That happy vision of beloved faces 
 
 Scarce conscious, and yet conscious of its close 
 
 I sate, my being blended in one thought 
 
 (Thought was it ? or aspiration ? or resolve ?) 
 
 Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound 
 
 And when I rose, I found myself in prayer." 
 
 The charm of Coleridge's poetry is the special and inalienable 
 charm of the art, the delight of new and melodious combinations. 
 When the poetry is not emanative, the movement of the thought 
 is entirely governed by feeling. Christabel is a fragment of most 
 wonderful quality, and exhibits another singular feature of Cole- 
 ridge's poetry his marvellous power of touching the sense of the 
 supernatural. 
 
 It was through Coleridge that Wordsworth made the acquaint- 
 ance of Southey, a man who had very little intellectual sympathy 
 with either of the other two members of the supposed Triad of 
 Lake Poets. He was a young man of twenty at Balliol College in
 
 PANTISOCRACY. 183 
 
 Oxford, when Coleridge, always craving for the company of con- 
 genial comrades, introduced himself. Coleridge, two years older, 
 had just broken off a second period of keeping terms at Cambridge, 
 and had already had several characteristic adventures, the most 
 notable of which was the freak of enlisting as a dragoon. He had 
 contracted some debts at Cambridge, and this was his mode of 
 evading his responsibilities. He took the name of Silas Thompson 
 Cornberbatch, filling out his own initials S. T. C., and, according 
 to the most authentic form of the story, was discovered to be some- 
 thing more than he seemed by writing a Latin quotation on the 
 wall of the stable. When he was discovered his friends were 
 communicated with, and he obtained his discharge ; but he did not 
 take kindly to Cambridge afterwards, and when he called upon 
 Southey his head was full of a wild scheme for establishing a small 
 community under a new form of government in some remote part of 
 America, Pantisocracy was to be the name given to this new 
 model of a happy state, and the essence of the plan was that the 
 members of the small community, having purchased a tract of land, 
 should raise with their own hands the necessaries of life, while 
 their wives marriage was indispensable for a Pantisocrat should 
 look after the household and the children. All goods were to be 
 in common, and the plan differed from ordinary communism only 
 in this, that the men were all to devote a large part of their time 
 to the cultivation of literature. Half the day, Coleridge calcu- 
 lated, would suffice for the provision of simple food and clothes ; 
 the rest was to be given to high thinking and poetry. Though 
 Coleridge afterwards became the leading mind among the philo- 
 sophical Tories, and Southey a bitter and unscrupulous partisan on 
 the same side, both were then enthusiastically stirred by the French 
 Revolution. Such was the temper of the youth of the time, excited 
 to a degree that we can hardly understand now by this startling 
 event, that Coleridge and Southey together succeeded in beating 
 up no less than five other recruits. "We can imagine how Coleridge 
 luxuriated in picturing all the advantages of this scheme, the 
 heights to which poetry could be carried by minds rendered healthy 
 by open-air exercise and freed from all cares by the simplicity of 
 their wants ; we can imagine how, priding himself on being above 
 all things a practical man, he calculated in exact figures the yield
 
 184 SOUTHEY. 
 
 of an average man's labour per hour, discussed the allowance to be 
 made for the fertility of the virgin soil, compared the merits of 
 different regions of the great continent, cited facts from the books 
 of travellers, apportioned the duties of the different members of 
 the community, and with eloquent ingenuity argued away every 
 difficulty that could be started. But there was one difficulty that 
 could not be argued away the want of money. All the recruits 
 of Pantisocracy were poor in fact, absolutely impecunious. The 
 enthusiasts, however, were fertile in resources for providing the 
 necessary supply. They so impressed a Bristol bookseller, Cottle, 
 a good-hearted, generous man in spite of his name, that he gave 
 them money for their poems, and promised more. They gave 
 public lectures in Bristol on literature, history, and politics, which 
 drew crowded audiences, it is said, till one evening Coleridge failed 
 to put in an appearance. But with all their efforts and Cole- 
 ridge's were probably greater in planning than in executing, for 
 he had a rooted aversion to regular labour, with all their efforts, 
 the Pantisocrats never raised funds enough to give their system of 
 government a chance in practice. Three of them, indeed, took one 
 step towards realising it, by providing themselves with wives. 
 There was a family of pretty and amiable sisters in Bristol, of the 
 name of Fricker, and Lovell, Southey, and Coleridge married one 
 each. Then an uncle of Southey's intervened, and carried him off 
 to Portugal for a time. There the history of Pantisocracy ends. 
 Southey returned from Portugal with other aims, and Coleridge, 
 though angry at first at his desertion, soon drifted off contentedly 
 into other engrossing occupations for his fertile imagination. His 
 besetting sin of irresolution never left him, with the result that, 
 on his death in 1834, he left behind him a great reputation, but 
 only fragments to support it, fragments, however, which fully 
 justified the admiration of his contemporaries.
 
 185 
 
 CHAPTEE XV 
 
 CAMPBELL MOOKE. 
 
 CAMPBELL "PLEASURES OF HOPE" THOMAS MOORE THE LAST OF THE 
 JOCULATORS MOORE'S SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT HIS JOCOSE AND 
 MAUDLIN VEINS. 
 
 THE great poets who made the beginning of the nineteenth century 
 famous appeared above the horizon one after another in quick 
 succession. In the same year in which the volume of 'Lyrical 
 Ballads ' was issued by a Bristol publisher, a poem was published 
 in Edinburgh and received throughout the country with much less 
 mixed approbation. This was the " Pleasures of Hope," the work 
 of a still younger man than either Wordsworth or Coleridge, 
 Thomas Campbell, a youth of one-and-twenty, uncertain at the 
 time as to his career, and himself alternating so violently between 
 despair and hope when he thought of the future that his friends 
 were disposed at times to doubt his sanity. It is significant that 
 both these publications of the dawn of a new period came from 
 the provinces. In Campbell's work, which is known to every 
 schoolboy and schoolgirl in lines and extracts, but which nobody 
 reads now as a whole except under some other compulsion than 
 the fascination of the poetry, there were no signs of a disposition 
 to break with the past either in form or in choice of subject. 
 Akenside, fifty years before, had sung the " Pleasures of the Imag- 
 ination," and Samuel Rogers, following him, had in 1793 sung the 
 " Pleasures of Memory," and the happy thought occurred to young 
 Campbell, suggested apparently by a jocular passage in a friend's 
 letter, of continuing the series. Hope was in like manner person-
 
 186 CAMPBELL. 
 
 ified, and apostrophised, and glorified as a beneficent principle, 
 with illustrations drawn from savage life and from civilised life, 
 from the whole range of history and the whole circle of the arts 
 and the sciences. So far there was an intenser personal feeling at 
 the beginning of Campbell's poem, inasmuch as he had little 
 pleasure in life except the pleasure of hope when the subject 
 occurred to him ; but this feeling had but little shaping influence 
 on the composition. The successive incidents in the poem do not 
 follow in any natural train of excited, impassioned reflection ; they 
 might have been treated separately and fitted together by me- 
 chanical forces, the principle of arrangement being the rhetorical 
 principle of affording variety to the reader. The versification and 
 the diction imitated the most approved models of the eighteenth 
 century ; there are passages that recall Goldsmith, and passages 
 that recall Pope. Darwin, the author of the " Botanic Garden," 
 is generally regarded as having carried the style of Pope and 
 Goldsmith to ridiculous excess. There was sufficient freshness in 
 Campbell's work as a whole to save him from this reproach. The 
 whole work gives an impression of abundant intellectual power 
 and abundant poetic sensibility. Yet bits might be taken from 
 the " Botanic Garden " and bits from the " Pleasures of Hope," 
 and when they were put side by side a reader familiar with both 
 writers would find it difficult to decide which was Campbell's and 
 which was Darwin's. 
 
 Campbell afterwards did much better work than the " Pleasures 
 of Hope "; and there is a story told of his state of mind just before 
 its publication that illustrates better than volumes of commentary 
 how this most approved style in which he wrote was beginning 
 to pall even on those who could not see their way to a better. 
 While he was engaged in revising the proofs of it, he one evening 
 entered the rooms of a friend of his, who has recorded the circum- 
 stance, sat down before the fire with a face of angry discontent, 
 and without speaking a word took up the poker and began tracing 
 figures in the soot on the back of the chimney. Presently he 
 turned round and addressed his astonished friend in the most in- 
 sulting language. Not being answered according to his folly, 
 he turned after a time upon what proved to be the source of his 
 strange behaviour, his own poem. He had been reading the proofs
 
 THE POET'S EXCITABLE TEMPERAMENT. 187 
 
 of it all day, mending and polishing the lines till all meaning 
 seemed to have gone out of them, and the whole composition 
 struck him as trash. " There are days," he went on, " when I 
 can't abide to walk in the sunshine, and when I would almost 
 rather be shot than come within the sight of any man, to be spoken 
 to by any mortal. This has been one of those days. How heartily 
 I wished for night." He spent the evening with his friend, and 
 after some hours the fit of despondency was followed by a fit of 
 wild mirth, in which he proclaimed his assurance that the poem 
 would make him at once a great man, and gravely decided how 
 and where he should live when this greatness was achieved. 
 
 It would be easy to make too much of such violent fluctuations 
 of mood in a sensitive youth, unstrung and distempered by over- 
 work as Campbell then was. But we may well contrast this sensi- 
 tive uncertainty and the steady assured confidence with which 
 about the same time Wordsworth and Coleridge were putting in 
 execution their definitely conceived poetic ideals. One of them 
 at least, the one who did most solid work, had no alternations 
 between extravagant self-confidence and extravagant despair. 
 With all allowance for Campbell's temperament and circumstances, 
 I should be inclined to attribute a large part of his faltering and 
 misgiving and impatience with his own work to his perceiving by 
 fits and starts that this elaborately contrived fabric of finely orna- 
 mented shreds and patches embodied an artificial sentiment, and 
 did not express feelings to which he longed to give vent. He was 
 a man of quick and strong feelings, but in his expression of them 
 he was hampered by respect for the decayed gentility of literary 
 tradition. He was afraid to move freely in the dress of elevated 
 diction sanctioned by Pope's authority as de rigueur the poet's 
 raiment ; he was too self-conscious of it ; the thought of how his 
 feelings would look in it trammelled their natural movements. 
 
 The truth is, that beneath the smooth and glossy artificial 
 Popian crust of the " Pleasures of Hope " there was more in it of 
 the spirit of the French Revolution than we find either in Words- 
 worth or in Coleridge. The literary revolution, of which they 
 were recognised leaders, was a thing altogether apart from the 
 political revolution, not in any direct way inspired by it the 
 result of a quite independent chain of causes ; in fact, as I have
 
 188 CAMPBELL. 
 
 tried to show, not, strictly speaking, a revolution at all, but a natural 
 literary development, the roots of which lay chronologically behind 
 the political revolution. But Campbell was directly influenced in 
 the tone of the thoughts that he expressed in verse by the political 
 circumstances of his time. His restless ambitious spirit, by turns 
 discontented and sanguine, and at all times intensely sympathetic, 
 had more in common with the spirit then acting on public affairs 
 than either the hard self-contained Wordsworth or the dreamy and 
 speculative Coleridge of imagination and speculation all compact, 
 and comparatively indifferent to the material on which his faculties 
 worked. It is curious to trace the operation of two antagonistic 
 forces in Campbell's mind, the habit of elevated and elaborate 
 expression, formed at the University, in accordance with the 
 literary tradition of Pope, and the tempestuous energy of feel- 
 ing fostered by the disturbed state of public affairs. He was 
 quite a model student in the University of Glasgow, standing 
 high as a scholar in his classes, and winning prizes for English 
 verse with poems that were pronounced by the professors far 
 superior to anything ever submitted in such competitions. He 
 wrote an " Essay on the Origin of Evil " in the style of Pope's 
 " Essay on Man " that was considered an incomparable imitation 
 of the great original. But Campbell was also a leader in debating 
 societies outside the regular University course ; and there, as was 
 natural, the principles of the political revolution found many 
 enthusiastic supporters. You know, I daresay, that in the nineties 
 of last century attempts to apply the doctrines of liberty, equality, 
 and fraternity were suppressed in Scotland with extraordinary 
 severity. Three gentlemen Palmer, Gerald, and Muir in whose 
 memory a monument now stands in the Calton Burying-ground 
 at Edinburgh, were transported to Botany Bay for an offence in the 
 way of agitation which, under the English law, was punishable 
 only with a short term of imprisonment. Campbell, when a boy of 
 sixteen, walked all the way from Glasgow to hear one of these men, 
 Gerald, a man of remarkable eloquence, defend himself on his trial. 
 The speech and the subsequent conviction made a great impression 
 on the sensitive youth, so great an impression that his friends 
 thought it had unsettled his reason, such was the passion with 
 which he spoke against modern society and all its institutions.
 
 THE "PLEASURES OF HOPE." 189 
 
 Now underneath the smooth couplets and the dignified diction 
 and imagery of the "Pleasures of Hope," it is not difficult to 
 detect traces of this deep-seated passion, when we know the poet's 
 early history, disguised though it is by the conventional splendour 
 of the expression. There is, for example, the famous passage on 
 the Russian subjugation of Poland, and another, not so familiar, 
 at the close of Part I., where he denounces the plunder of India 
 by Warren Hastings : 
 
 " Rich in the gems of India's gaudy zone, 
 And plunder piled from kingdoms not their own, 
 Degenerate trade ! thy minions could despise 
 The heart-born anguish of a thousand cries ; 
 Could lock with impious hands their teeming store, 
 While famished nations died along the shore ; 
 Could mock the groans of fellow-men, and bear 
 The curse of kingdoms peopled with despair ; 
 Could stamp disgrace on man's polluted name, 
 And barter, with their gold, eternal shame ! " 
 
 Or, again, the following : 
 
 " Tyrants ! in vain ye trace the wizard ring ; 
 In vain ye limit mind's unwearied spring : 
 What ! can ye lull the winged winds asleep, 
 Arrest the rolling world, or chain the deep ? 
 No ! the wild wave contemns your sceptred hand ; 
 It rolled not back when Canute gave command." 
 
 The literary quality of such verses is not high : in aiming at 
 elevated diction, the young poet approaches perilously near to 
 turgid bombast. Yet in these verses the spirit of the French 
 Revolution speaks more plainly than in any of the productions of 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge. They were disenchanted, disillu- 
 sionised, before they wrote about the French Revolution. If we 
 could recover any of Coleridge's lectures on Pantisocracy, we might 
 find something like the above. Campbell, we must remember, was 
 only twenty-one when he wrote the "Pleasures of Hope"; and 
 though he pointed his moral specially against Russian tyranny in 
 Poland, there shines through his verse unmistakable evidence of 
 sympathy with the motives and aspirations of revolutionists else- 
 where. The dress was the dress of Pope, but the voice was the 
 voice of a later time.
 
 190 MOORE. 
 
 To the force of the habit of expression in which he had been 
 educated I should also be disposed to attribute Campbell's strange 
 distrust of the poems that have been universally recognised as 
 his best and most enduring work " Ye Mariners of England," 
 "Hohenlinden," " The Soldier's Dream," "The Battle of the Baltic," 
 and a few others. He contributed these poems to the ' Morning 
 Chronicle ' after he had made a reputation by the " Pleasures of 
 Hope," and before he settled in London to the more commonplace 
 literary labour in which he spent the rest of his life. So doubtful 
 was Campbell of the value of these lyrics, that he would not put 
 his name to them, for fear of compromising the reputation of the 
 author of the "Pleasures of Hope." Now I should say it was a 
 result of the ideas of literary dignity in which he had been brought 
 up that Campbell should have feared that "Hohenlinden " and "Ye 
 Mariners of England " would appear too trifling for a poet of the 
 rank that his first poem gave him. It was an example of the force 
 of the same restraint of habit that kept Gray from " speaking out." 
 Like Gray, Campbell lacked the courage of his imagination. The 
 incubus of literary tradition lay heavy on him. He had a distrustful 
 critic within, the creation of scholastic training, which clung to the 
 skirts of his imagination and impeded its freedom of movement 
 whenever it tried to burst away from the beaten track. His 
 diffidence about " Hohenlinden " is sometimes quoted as an 
 example of the saw that " genius is unconscious of its own 
 excellence." But against this must be set the fact that late in 
 life Campbell considered that "O'Connor's Child" was his best 
 poem, and that in this he has the support of most people who are 
 familiar with his poetry. It is unlike his popular lyrics in the 
 fact that it takes more tlian one reading to appreciate, but it is 
 worth the trouble of reading more than once. Some think that if 
 " Gertrude of Wyoming " had been published before the " Pleasures 
 of Hope," it might have ranked as his chief work, but the subject 
 is too remote to have achieved any great amount of popularity. 
 
 The year after the publication of the "Pleasures of Hope," 
 another young poetic adventurer, an Irishman, crossed St George's 
 Channel with his bundle of MSS. in search of a publisher and 
 subscribers in London. The MSS. in his case were only metrical
 
 THE SECEET OF MOORE'S POPULAEITY. 191 
 
 translations from a Greek poet, Anacreon, artificial verses in praise 
 of love and wine. Yet in a few months this adventurer, though 
 he was only just out of his teens, and his father was nothing more 
 eminent than a humble Dublin grocer in a small shop in a small 
 street, became one of the lions of London society, and numbered 
 the Prince of Wales among the subscribers to a sumptuous edition 
 of his translations. From that time forward he held a place 
 among the most popular poets of his generation. Publishers, whose 
 business it is to gauge the public estimation of writers, furnish a 
 sure test of popularity at least, however much that may be at 
 variance with critical verdict, in the prices that they are willing to 
 pay for poems. And even after Byron had appeared in the field, 
 when Mr Perry, of the ' Morning Chronicle,' was negotiating as a 
 friend with the Longmans the sale of a work by Thomas Moore, 
 he was in a position to stipulate that the price should be as high 
 as had ever been paid for a poem of the same length. The poem 
 was not then written or even planned, it was only understood 
 that the subject should be oriental ; and this was the rate of 
 remuneration for which Moore's friend bargained. For so many 
 lines, to be paid for on delivery, the poet was to receive ^3000. 
 Scott was paid this sum for ' Kokeby,' and Perry argued that 
 Moore could not take less. The publishers assented, thereby 
 showing that Moore at the time was, in their opinion, as popular 
 with the buyers of poetry as Scott. 
 
 If we were to look for the secret of Moore's popularity in his 
 poetry alone, we should be doing an injustice both to him and to 
 the taste of the generation with whom he was such a favourite. 
 He was personally popular ; he impressed society otherwise than 
 by his poems ; these were but a part of his claims to admiring 
 recognition. If we open a collection of his poems now, and read 
 his " Odes of Anacreon," to which the Prince of Wales and other 
 notabilities of rank subscribed, we desist after a time with some- 
 thing of the disgust we should feel at a profuse display of pretty, 
 sham jewellery. The ample brimming bowls and goblets of wine, 
 the wreaths and garlands of roses, the rich perfumes, the sparkling 
 eyes, the golden tresses, and the snowy necks, are well enough in 
 moderation, but some eighty odes of such materials pall for lack 
 of variety. Any variety that there is lies within the narrowest
 
 192 MOOKE. 
 
 limits : now it is a bowl and now it is a goblet, now we drink and 
 now we quaff, now it is a bud and now it is a full-blown rose, now 
 a garland and now a cluster, now ringlets and now tresses ; but it 
 is always wine and flower, with little variation of phrase. We are 
 soon surfeited with such sentiment, and disposed to laugh at its 
 artificiality. Moore's prettinesses, always expressed in soft and 
 melodious verse, were probably a pleasant surprise to a generation 
 weary of didactic poems ; but if we have a liking for such things 
 now, we can find more genuine articles of the same kind, com- 
 pounded with much higher art, in the poetry of the seventeenth 
 century, the volumes of Queen Henrietta's poets, Lovelace, and 
 Carew, and Suckling, and, above all, Herrick. 
 
 Nor were his original poems, published soon after under the 
 pseudonym of Tom Little, in the least of higher quality. They 
 were little poems, indeed, generally spun up to some glittering 
 conceit, as commonplace as it is glittering. No poet of the eigh- 
 teenth century, in the days when the great patrons of poetry were 
 connoisseurs of the art, would have dared to submit effusions so 
 very poor in thought and vulgar in sentiment. There is a poem 
 on Variety, for example. Variety is the great charm of nature. 
 
 ' ' Ask what prevailing, pleasing power, 
 Allures the sportive, wandering bee 
 To roam untired from flower to flower, 
 He'll tell you 'tis variety. 
 
 Look Nature round, her features trace, 
 
 Her seasons, all her changes see ; 
 And own, upon Creation's face, 
 
 The greatest charm's variety." 
 
 Therefore, following nature's law, the poet will seek variety. But 
 no: there is "the nymph he loves," this is "Patty"; he can 
 never be false to her. 
 
 " For me, ye gracious Powers above ! 
 
 Still let me roam, unfixed and free ; 
 In all things, but the nymph I love, 
 I'll change and taste variety. 
 
 But Patty, not a world of charms 
 
 Could e'er estrange my heart from thee ; 
 
 No, let me ever seek those arms : 
 There still I'll find variety."
 
 IMITATION OF LOVELACE'S "PARADOX." 193 
 
 What poor stuff is this, compared with Lovelace's " Paradox," of 
 which it is a Brummagem imitation : 
 
 " 'Tis true the beauteous star 
 
 To which I first did bow 
 Burnt quicker, brighter far, 
 Thau that which leads me now, 
 
 Which shines with more delight, 
 For gazing on that light 
 So long, near lost my sight. 
 
 Through foul, we follow fair. 
 
 For had the world one face, 
 And earth been bright as air, 
 We had known neither place. 
 Indians smell not their nest, 
 A Swiss or Finn tastes best 
 The spices of the East. 
 
 So from the glorious sun, 
 
 Who to his height hath got, 
 With what delight we run 
 To some black cave or grot. 
 
 And, heavenly Sidney, you 
 Twice read, had rather view 
 Some odd romance, so new. 
 
 The god that constant keeps 
 
 Unto his deities 
 Is poor in joys, and sleeps 
 Imprisoned in the skies. 
 
 This knew the wisest, who 
 From Juno stole below 
 To love a bear or cow. " 
 
 We have seen Moore in his jocosely sentimental vein ; see him 
 next in his maudlin love-sickness : 
 
 ' ' Have you not seen the timid tear 
 Steal trembling from mine eye 1 
 Have you not marked the flush of fear, 
 
 Or caught the murmured sigh ? 
 And can you think my love is chill, 
 
 Nor fixed on you alone ? 
 And can you rend by doubting still 
 A heart so much your own ? 
 N
 
 194 MOOEE. 
 
 To you my soul's affections move 
 
 Devoutly, warmly true ; 
 My life has beeu a task of love, 
 
 One long, long thought of you. 
 If all your tender faith be o'er, 
 
 If still iny truth you'll try ; 
 Alas ! I know but one proof more, 
 
 I'll bless your name and die." 
 
 Such are fair specimens of the poems of Tom Little, so famous 
 in their day ; and if we take them as they read, after making all 
 allowance for the novelty of the strain when they appeared, and 
 for the very slight interest in poetry and consequent want of 
 discrimination in London society at the time, we cannot but be 
 astonished that the author should have jumped at once into a 
 foremost place, even although Wordsworth and Coleridge had so 
 much against them as candidates for general favour, and Scott and 
 Byron had not yet appeared on the scene. But the truth is, that 
 it was as a writer of songs to be sung and not of poems to be read 
 that Moore established his hold on the public mind ; and he was 
 greatly helped by his personal popularity in the circles where the 
 fashion was set even in poetry. Many in those days would buy 
 and admire even a volume of poetry when the name of the Prince 
 of Wales appeared at the head of the list of subscribers. But 
 how did Moore, who was not born in a palace but in a back street 
 in Dublin, achieve such fashionable popularity that he secured the 
 Prince's name for his literary venture ? It was chiefly his ex- 
 quisite singing of his own songs that made him the rage. It is 
 hardly an exaggeration to describe Moore as the last of the 
 Troubadours, or, to be more precise, as the last of the Joglars, 
 of the men to whom Bishop Percy, by a slight historical error, 
 gave the name of Minstrels. These were, as I daresay you have 
 heard, a class of men in the middle ages who sometimes attached 
 themselves to a court, and sometimes wandered from one feudal 
 castle to another, welcome guests wherever they went on account 
 of their skill in making and reciting or singing poems, and other 
 entertaining qualities. When they were not gentlemen born and 
 rich enough to amuse themselves as well as their hosts in this 
 way, they owed their livelihood to the bounty of their patrons,
 
 THE LAST OP THE JOCULATOKS. 195 
 
 after receiving valuable presents. They were entitled to be called 
 Troubadours or Inventors, if their own poetry was excellent ; and 
 if they could only render the poetry of others, their professional 
 name was Joglar or Joculator. The joglar added other entertaining 
 resources to that of reciting poetry ; he carried gossip from castle 
 to castle, and sometimes was capable of amusing his audience 
 with sleight-of-hand tricks. Of course the joglar might also be a 
 troubadour. As civilisation developed and society became more 
 complex, there was a natural division of labour; the poet was 
 differentiated as such, and often received his reward and his 
 means of livelihood in pensions from the public exchequer and 
 sinecure posts in the public service. We see this differentiation 
 in full force in the time of Chaucer. Now Moore might be called 
 the last of the troubadours or the joglars in our country, partly 
 because he made a poetic reputation by singing his own songs in 
 fashionable drawing-rooms, and partly because he was the last 
 eminent English poet who looked to his poetry as an indirect 
 means of obtaining a provision for life through the public patron- 
 age of influential friends. In later life, when he wrote a fragment 
 of autobiography, he speaks of his pen as having been his sole 
 means of support throughout his life. It was his means of 
 support from necessity and not from choice ; it was so only after 
 he had been disappointed in his expectations from another source ; 
 and even then, it was so only partially. For the first twelve years 
 of his London life, Moore made comparatively little by his pen ; 
 indeed he wrote very little, only two small volumes of elegant 
 and sparkling trifles. His chief steady source of income was 
 an annuity of ,500, paid him by the publisher Power for supply- 
 ing words to Irish and other national melodies. Moore used 
 to sing them in the drawing-rooms of his fashionable friends 
 to give them a start. We must of course call the composition of 
 these literary work, although many of them seem poor enough 
 if they are read and not sung. Anyhow they were handsomely 
 paid for, the poet receiving his annuity for them for twenty-seven 
 years, pleasant contrast to the melancholy case of Burns, who 
 refused to take anything for a similar service to a Scotch publisher 
 the service, of course, not being really worth so much, seeing 
 that Burns's songs were not fashionable songs, expensively pub-
 
 196 MOOllE. 
 
 lished. But Moore had another source of income, in no way con- 
 nected with his pen a sinecure office in the Bermudas, which, after 
 the first year, he was able to discharge by a deputy. He received 
 this appointment in 1803, and though it afterwards proved a 
 source of embarrassment to him, owing to the rascality of a deputy, 
 for whose embezzlements he was held responsible, it brought him 
 ^400 a-year for eighteen years. For twelve years Moore upon 
 these resources lived in London the life of a diner-out in the 
 greatest request, in expectation of some appointment more lucra- 
 tive than his West India registrarship. These expectations, and 
 his chagrin at their repeated postponement, and ultimate ruin in 
 1812, are very frankly confessed in his Diary. Swift's saying 
 that great men never reward in a more substantial way those 
 whom they make the companions of their pleasures, was verified 
 in the case of Moore. One of his earliest patrons, on whom he all 
 along built his best hopes, was Lord Moira, a scholarly peer, 
 of generous but hesitating and irresolute temper, munificent almost 
 to the point of ostentation, and specially willing to befriend men 
 of genius and learning. He was in power in the Granville Ad- 
 ministration of 1806, and again in the Liverpool Administration 
 of 1812, under which he went out as Governor-General to India; 
 but on neither occasion was he able to do anything for the poet. 
 It is somewhat comical now to read Moore's complaints of his 
 hard lines in not being promoted to some lucrative post, without 
 the slightest qualification for filling it. He evidently regarded 
 himself as having been very badly used by his aristocratic friends, 
 and especially by Lord Moira, from whom he had expected better 
 things. He repeats bitterly Lord Moira's constant assurance when 
 he gave any hint of impatience "I am not oblivious of you. 
 Depend upon it, I am not oblivious of you." The fact seems to 
 have been that Moira hesitated between posts that he considered 
 not good enough to offer to Moore, and posts for which, though 
 they were good enough, he was obviously unfitted; and thus Moore 
 in the end got the allowance of poor Mother Hubbard's dog noth- 
 ing, and was obliged to fall back on literature for a livelihood. 
 
 " How it was," Mrs Oliphant says, " that the little Irishman 
 from Dublin, who came across the Channel with a few introduc- 
 tions and some translations from Anacreou in his pocket, scrambled
 
 INDEBTEDNESS TO HIS MOTHEE. 197 
 
 into good society, it is somewhat difficult to make out." It is dif- 
 ficult indeed, if we think only of the social interval between his 
 father's little shop in Dublin, which the poet euphemistically calls 
 a wine-store, and the fashionable drawing-rooms in which he so 
 quickly became a favourite. But his fragment of autobiography, 
 which ends with his introduction to London society, and looks as 
 if it had been written to explain the paradox, shows him to us in 
 intermediate stages, through which the transition was as easy and 
 natural as any other process of evolution. Young Moore and his 
 songs were the rage in the best society of Dublin before they were 
 the rage in the best society in London, and there were links be- 
 tween the two along which the modern troubadour slid in the 
 easiest manner possible, making good his footing in the new fields 
 of social conquest by the same agreeable entertaining qualities 
 that had served him in the city of his birth. " In anecdote, 
 small-talk, and especially in singing, he was supreme for many 
 years he had been the most brilliant man in his company," says 
 Henry Crabb Robinson of him in his famous London days. He 
 had shown the same supremacy, and asserted it with the same 
 good sense, modesty, and quiet dignity, before he left Dublin. 
 But how did he acquire the tone of polite metropolitan society in 
 anecdote, small-talk, and singing ? Irishmen, from their geniality, 
 frankness, love of fun, and general willingness to please and be 
 pleased, are naturally agreeable companions ; but what amuses in 
 the back-parlour of a Dublin wine-store could not reasonably be 
 expected to amuse a more fastidious audience with different in- 
 terests and different ways of life. The autobiography, however, 
 explains this puzzle also. Moore's mother was his presiding good 
 genius, and it is one of the finest traits in a character that has 
 many lovable features, that to the last he retained his affection for 
 her, and among all his fine friends never lost an opportunity of 
 making her life pleasant. "It was from the first," he says, "my 
 poor mother's ambition, though with no undue aspirings for her- 
 self, to secure for her children an early footing in the better walks 
 of society ; and to her constant attention to this object I owe both 
 my taste for good company and the facility I afterwards found in 
 adapting myself to that sphere." She was helped in this purpose 
 by the religion of the family. They were Roman Catholics, and as
 
 198 MOORE. 
 
 always happens with a proscribed sect, there was a close union be- 
 tween their various ranks. We have seen how the same circum- 
 stance operated in the life of Pope. It was easier for Mrs Moore 
 to get her children into the better walks of society than if she had 
 been a Protestant. The future poet was a lively and precocious 
 child, and social superiors began to covet his company at a very 
 early age. Decayed gentlewomen, punctiliously correct in man- 
 ners, yet gay and sprightly in conversation, as only Irish maiden 
 ladies can be, made much of him as an engaging prodigy, and in- 
 vited him to their tea-parties. He was sent to the best school in 
 Dublin ; and schoolfellows, whose fathers were richer than his 
 own, invited him to spend the vacations at their homes. Al- 
 though the conspiracy of the United Irishmen was being formed 
 at the time in the Irish capital, there was no outward sign of dis- 
 content; life went merrily with singing-parties, dancing-parties, 
 and supper-parties. There was a rage too at the time for private 
 theatricals ; and Moore's schoolmaster, as it happened, was a leader 
 in such entertainments, managing the stage, writing prologues and 
 epilogues, and giving lessons in elocution. In the art of recitation, 
 Moore was his show-boy, and when he was eleven years old was 
 selected to speak the epilogue in a performance of " Jane Shore " 
 at the private theatre of a Lady Borrowes the first of the many 
 women of title who figure in the story of the poet's life. Then, 
 fortunately for him, just as he was fourteen and ready for the 
 University, the prohibition against Catholics was removed, and 
 he was admitted to Trinity College. There he distinguished him- 
 self by his facility in writing English verse, and made more ac- 
 quaintances in "the better walks of society." By this time too 
 he had begun to write songs as well as to sing them ; and as he 
 always sang to his own accompaniment on the piano, and came, 
 as he says, to be dependent on it, he was saved thereby from the 
 solicitations of jolly good fellows to join companies where there 
 was no such instrument, while he was all the greater an acquisi- 
 tion in the "better walks." He had also the run of a large library, 
 where he acquired a great store of miscellaneous scholarship which 
 secured him the attention of the Provost of the College. " The 
 Provost's house," he says, "was the resort of the best society in 
 Dublin, and his wife and daughters were lovely, literary, and fond
 
 "LALLA ROOKH." 199 
 
 of music." Thus it happened that before he left Dublin, at the 
 age of nineteen, to enter at the Middle Temple in London and get 
 his Anacreon published, Moore, though only the son of the keeper 
 of a wine-store, had been expressly invited to dinner to meet no 
 less a person than Lord Clare, the Chancellor of the University. 
 He was coveted by the best society then, as afterwards, for his 
 own qualities as an agreeable well-bred companion. 
 
 Of all his writings it is still to the songs that we must go to 
 know him at his best. The oriental charms of " Lalla Kookh " 
 become tiresome as we get older, and as we begin to look criti- 
 cally at the art of the composition. The poem was not composed 
 in a poetic spirit, and there is very little poetry in it. It is rather 
 an artificial putting together of words and imagery than real 
 poetry, and it was felt as such by his contemporaries. They 
 enlarged on the wonderful fidelity of his pictures to life, and, like 
 Sir John Malcolm, could hardly believe that the poet had not been 
 in the East. This is not, however, a strictly poetical quality. 
 Moore deliberately set himself to read up his subject, and in the 
 poem he used imagery only that would be intelligible to an oriental. 
 Had he been writing poetry for orientals this would have been all 
 right, but it is all wrong for us, and Moore had to burden his poem 
 with explanatory notes. 
 
 The last years of his life were spent in writing a History of 
 Ireland, now quite unknown. He persisted in this work, and this 
 gives us a higher idea of his character. With all his apparent 
 affectation he was a genuine patriot, -an industrious worker, and 
 a most exemplary son and husband, and there is no doubt that it 
 was these qualities that helped to make him the darling of the 
 London drawing-rooms.
 
 200 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 SCOTT. 
 INFLUENCE OF OLD BALLADS SUMMARY OF LIFE POEMS. 
 
 ALTHOUGH the French Revolution, in my opinion, had no influ- 
 ence on our poets, beyond perhaps making them feel a certain 
 exaltation of energy as belonging to a time of great events, 
 an impulse that would carry nobody far except along a road 
 on which he was prepared otherwise to travel, it is worth 
 noticing that all the eminent poets of the time had personal 
 experience, more or less accidental, of the consequences of the 
 Revolution. The consequences, in fact, were so widespread 
 throughout the length and breadth of the country, that it was 
 difficult for anybody to avoid encountering them at one turn 
 or another. The adventure of Wordsworth and Coleridge was 
 the most curious ; but all were characteristic of the time of sus- 
 picion, espionage, conspiracy, prosecution, and preparation in 
 self-defence brought upon this country by fears of a similar 
 domestic revolution, and of invasion from our aggressive revol- 
 utionised neighbour. Coleridge had rendered himself a suspicious 
 character by his Pantisocracy and his ' Watchman ' ; and when he 
 and Wordsworth were living near each other in Somersetshire in 
 1797, without any ostensible occupation or means of livelihood, 
 a spy was sent to watch their movements, and dog them in their 
 walks on the Quantock Hills. This worthy, as might have been 
 expected, could make little of any conversation in which the 
 metaphysical Coleridge had the lead ; but one day, as the story
 
 SOURCE OF MARTIAL SPIRIT IN SCOTT'S POEMS. 201 
 
 goes, they were talking of Spinoza, and as the spy happened to 
 have a very red nose, and laughter sometimes accompanied the 
 mention of Spinoza's name, he thought they were poking fun 
 at him, and reported accordingly. Campbell, we have seen, came 
 across the consequences of the French Eevolution in the trial of 
 Gerard for trying to spread revolutionary principles in Scotland. 
 Moore had personal experience of other consequences, more than 
 one of his college friends in Dublin being concerned in the con- 
 spiracy of the United Irishmen, a direct result of the establish- 
 ment of the Republic in France. And Scott also felt the whiff 
 and wind of the world-shaking event, though in a different way. 
 In the year in which Wordsworth and Coleridge were holding 
 their memorable conversations on the Quantock Hills (in 1797), 
 Scott, a young Edinburgh lawyer, was enrolled as Quartermaster 
 of the Royal Mid - Lothian Regiment of Cavalry, a body of 
 volunteers raised to defend the country when the new Republic 
 began to give evidence of an aggressive disposition. At the very 
 time when the two Lake poets were discussing the principles of 
 ballad composition, and carrying them out each in his own way, 
 Scott was galloping on the sands at Musselburgh, also intent 
 on ballads, chanting fragments of old ballads to the rhythm of 
 his horse's motion, and making new ballads as he plunged through 
 the fresh sea -air, and re-enacting in imagination the feats of 
 ancient chivalry. 
 
 There is much martial spirit in Scott's poetry, and it is likely, 
 as he himself believed, that his battle-scenes owe something of 
 their freshness and force to his experience in the saddle of the 
 Mid-Lothian Yeomanry. When a glass of water is on the point 
 of freezing, a touch with a wire will transform it, as if by magic, 
 into a bundle of icy crystals; and it is possible that Scott was 
 shaken into poetry by the warlike excitement of galloping about 
 directing the manoeuvres of his volunteers. But just as the 
 crystallisation of the freezing water is determined by its previous 
 condition, so was the direction of Scott's poetry determined before 
 he had his interest in chivalry quickened by taking part in mili- 
 tary manoeuvres. It was this previous poetic education, in fact, 
 that made him take such a keen delight in the mimicry of war, 
 and amidst the bustle and galloping to and fro realise how the
 
 202 SCOTT. 
 
 ancient knight felt when pricking on the plain in search of 
 adventures, or spurring liis horse into the thick of a battle. 
 
 When we find men so very different in character and circum- 
 stances as Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and Scott, men reared in 
 London, in Westmoreland, in Edinburgh, all simultaneously in- 
 terested in one kind of composition, we may be sure that it is 
 somehow in the air. The interest in ballad literature in England 
 was first made acute by the publication of Bishop Percy's ' Reliquc.s.' 
 I have already mentioned the date of this publication, 1765. Such 
 things are the great events of literary history they are to it what 
 treaties and laws are to political history ; and their dates must be 
 remembered if we are to understand those great movements of 
 which they mark the beginnings. Scott first got hold of this 
 collection of ballads when he was a boy of thirteen, and he has 
 described the effect produced upon him. " The summer day," he 
 says, " sped onward so fast, that notwithstanding the sharp appetite 
 of thirteen I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, 
 and was still found entranced in my intellectual banquet." How 
 was the mental soil prepared for this enthusiastic reception ? It 
 is not every boy of thirteen that can become so absorbed in a book 
 as to forget his dinner. Scott, it is needless to say, was not an 
 ordinary boy. As a schoolboy he was not brilliant in the regular 
 task-work. He seems to have obstinately refused to learn Greek, 
 and, it is said, was nicknamed by an irritable master the Greek 
 dunce ; and his position in the Latin class is described by himself 
 as having been meteoric, varying rapidly between top and bottom. 
 It was not, indeed, till he reached the higher classes, where the 
 master, Dr Adams, the author of the well-known book on Roman 
 antiquities, taught something more than the mere syntax of the 
 language, that Scott ever moved far from the less honourable 
 position. He rose when questions were asked outside the prescribed 
 lessons, and fell slowly and surely when the course of questioning 
 returned to the grammar. The secret seems to have been that, 
 owing to bad health, he had been rather irregularly educated, and 
 at a very early age had formed habits of reading omnivorously for 
 himself, and was too much absorbed in his own reading to have 
 much interest or much memory to spare for the niceties of Latin
 
 THE CLAN SCOTT. 203 
 
 construction. About the time when Percy's ballads fell in his 
 way, he was confined to bed for several weeks by a serious illness, 
 and one of the doctor's prescriptions for him was that he should 
 be allowed to read as much as he liked, the consequence being that 
 he read through the greater part of a circulating library in the 
 neighbourhood, novels, romances, books of travel, histories. The 
 out-of-the-way knowledge got in this manner, and retained in a 
 memory that was always singularly powerful, enabled him to 
 occasionally delight the antiquarian rector of the High School, 
 and redeem the disgrace incurred by the inexactness of his know- 
 ledge of the classical languages. The future novelist was in fact 
 educating himself, unconsciously, but not the less assiduously and 
 effectively, for his work in life. His appetite for ballads had been 
 specially whetted before he fell to at Percy's ' Eeliques ' with such 
 eagerness. His ancestors came from the great ballad country, the 
 Borders ; and some of them had furnished themes for the ballad- 
 singer. His father was a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh, and 
 his mother the daughter of a Professor; but he was the lineal 
 descendant of a Border chief, " Wat or Walter Scott of Harden, 
 whose wife was celebrated in song as the Flower of Yarrow. She 
 was the lady who, according to tradition, was in the habit of 
 serving up at table, when provisions ran short, a dish of spurs, a 
 signal that he must take horse and borrow a few cattle and other 
 eatables from English neighbours on the other side of the Border. 
 The clan Scott occupied a prominent place in Border history, and 
 numbered in its various ranks not a few heroes of the persuasion 
 and calling of Robin Hood and Little John." One of Scott's 
 earliest and favourite books was a history of this " right honourable 
 clan," " gathered out of ancient chronicles, histories, and traditions 
 of our fathers," by another Walter Scott, Scott of Satchell, " an 
 old souldier," as he described himself, " and no scholler, and one 
 that can write names, but just the letters of his name." The 
 delicate boy's imagination had been fed on Border traditions, and 
 one of the first-fruits of his delight with Percy was a resolution to 
 collect such ballads as were to be found in circulation among the 
 peasantry of his own country. How far the Latin dunce was from 
 being a dunce at work within the range of his own interests, may
 
 204 SCOTT. 
 
 be judged from the fact that at the age of fifteen he wrote a poem, 
 which he modestly committed to the flames, on the Conquest of 
 Granada. 
 
 After leaving the High School, Scott attended some classes at 
 the University, but what they were is of no consequence. He 
 went on educating himself widely and energetically in his own 
 way and on his own lines, without any conscious purpose. In 
 1786, when he was fifteen years old he was just one year younger 
 than Wordsworth he abandoned a fancy for the military pro- 
 fession, and was entered as an apprentice in his father's office. 
 This circumstance was important in his education for two reasons. 
 It trained him to business habits, for which he was remarkable 
 throughout the whole of his busy life. He never neglected his 
 own profession, though an early appointment to moderately lucra- 
 tive posts withdrew him from practice at the bar ; and he carried 
 habits of regularity, method, and punctuality into his literary 
 work. His immense power of memory, which enabled him to 
 perform such wonders of rapid production in middle age, was 
 greatly helped by systematic ways of storing his promiscuously 
 acquired antiquarian and historical lore, his arrangement of books, 
 note-books, and references being always a model of precision. His 
 employment in his father's office was of important service to him 
 in another way. The collection of rents and other legal business 
 took him into various parts of the country, and gave him oppor- 
 tunities not only of collecting ballads, which he did deliberately 
 and of set purpose, but of observing and studying, which he did 
 unconsciously, the oddities, humours, and serious sentiments of 
 that society of which, in his novels, he afterwards drew so broad 
 and truthful a picture. 
 
 Another cardinal circumstance in his education requires to be 
 mentioned. It was a small circumstance in itself, but it had con- 
 siderable consequences. A lecture on German Literature, delivered 
 to the Edinburgh Philosophical Society by Henry Mackenzie, the 
 " Man of Feeling," in 1788, seems to have roused a great enthu- 
 siasm for the study of German among the young men of Edin- 
 burgh. Scott, then a youth of seventeen, joined with some others 
 in forming a class. According to his own account, he was told by
 
 INFLUENCE OF GERMAN LITERATURE. 205 
 
 their teacher that he would never learn the language, because he 
 would not take pains to lay a stable foundation by means of gram- 
 matical exercises ; but he learnt enough to be able to get at the 
 meaning, and his first publications were translations from Biirger 
 and Goethe in 1796 and 1799, a few romantic ballads, and a 
 chivalry-play. " How far," Carlyle says, " ' Goetz von Berlich- 
 ingen ' actually affected Scott's literary destination, and whether 
 Avithout it the rhymed romances, and then the prose romances of 
 the Author of ' Waverley,' would not have followed as they did, 
 must remain a very obscure question obscure and not important." 
 Carlyle probably rather suggests the German influence on Scott 
 when he speaks of Goetz as the parent of an innumerable progeny 
 of " chivalry plays, feudal delineations, and poetico-antiquarian 
 performances." What it probably did for him was to encourage 
 him to persevere in the road along Avhich he was already travel- 
 ling. Before coming in contact Avith the modern ballads and 
 feudal tales of Germany, he had exhausted everything of the kind 
 to be found in our own literature, and had even mastered old 
 French and Italian for the same purpose, reading through various 
 collections of medieval romances, besides Dante, Boiardo, and 
 Pulci, and "fastening like a tiger upon every collection of old 
 songs which chance threw in his way." German literature 
 attracted him as the first attempt in modern Europe to found a 
 neAV literature on the old, a literature inspired by an antiquarian 
 spirit, a loving regard for old times, and antagonistic both in its 
 mystical longings and in its literary forms to the clear precise 
 vision and careful elaborate style of the school of Racine and 
 Pope. Scott himself is reported to have said of Taylor's transla- 
 tion of " Leonore," " This was what made me a poet." He had 
 heard Dugald Stewart recite the lines 
 
 ' ' Tramp, trainp, across the land we go ; 
 Splash, splash ! across the sea." 
 
 " I had several times," he said, " attempted the more regular 
 kind of poetry without success ; but here was something that I 
 thought I could do." This was when he was a boy; and as soon 
 as he kneAV German, one of his first tasks Avas a translation of this
 
 206 SCOTT. 
 
 ballad under the title of " William and Helen." Now, although 
 Scott made the remark about the influence of Taylor's translation 
 to a friend of Taylor's and he was a man who liked to say com- 
 plimentary things at his own expense it is possible that the fresh 
 German literature gave him the first revelation of the natural bent 
 of his powers. But the impulse he received from German litera- 
 ture would probably have died out if it had not been reinforced 
 from other quarters. As Carlyle says, a question of the kind is 
 necessarily obscure, and not important ; only Scott's contact with 
 German literature deserves to be mentioned as an incident in the 
 story of his literary development. 
 
 At the time when he published his translations from the Ger- 
 man, although he had reached his twenty-eighth year, nobody 
 seems to have had a suspicion of the genius that was latent in him, 
 or of the direction that it would take. To the outside world he 
 appeared simply as a young lawyer likely to prosper in his profes- 
 sion, universally popular as a humorous boon companion, always 
 in high spirits, rather affecting idleness, yet never behindhand 
 with his work, with a certain reputation as a man of wide reading, 
 taking an interest in literature and antiquities, but not suspected 
 of any serious literary ambition. A casual stranger meeting Scott 
 at this time, and hearing of him from his companions, would never 
 have dreamt of regarding him as likely to become a more popular 
 poet than Wordsworth, or Coleridge, or Campbell, or Moore. 
 None of these young men thought of disguising their literary 
 aspirations ; they stood from the first in all men's eyes upon their 
 character as poets. Yet somehow, with all his real or assumed in- 
 difference, Scott even then seems to have received rather more 
 than the respect paid to the mere dilettante. When Campbell 
 was negotiating the publication of his " Pleasures of Hope," he 
 was somehow attracted to Scott, and in a letter that has been pre- 
 served, showed himself eminently pleased with the attention that 
 Scott paid to him. It is the custom to speak of Scott as having 
 stumbled, by accident as it were, into literary fame ; but there are 
 not wanting evidences that, although he did not allow literary 
 ambition to absorb his energies, and kept this, like all other 
 aspirations, under the control of a healthy practical will, he was 
 not quite so indifferent as he appeared. He was not a man who
 
 SCOTT'S GREAT INDUSTRY. 207 
 
 wore his heart upon his sleeve, and he liked to turn aside jestingly 
 any inquisition into his own serious feelings. In his farewell to 
 the Harp of the North, these lines occur : 
 
 " Much have I owed thy strains on life's loug way, 
 Through secret woes the world has never known, 
 When on the weary night dawned wearier day, 
 And bitterer was the grief devour'd alone. 
 That I o'eiiived such woes, Enchantress ! is thine own." 
 
 After they were published, when the conversation between him 
 and a friend turned upon them, he dismissed the subject with a 
 comical look and smile, remarking, " Yes, as Master Stephen says, 
 they are very melancholy and gentlemanlike." In like manner, 
 he made light of his literary studies, and affected the air of a 
 trifling outsider, while in his large and genial being he found room 
 for an amount of literary labour, and steady preparation for labour, 
 as great as was practised by any professional man of letters in his 
 time. " Every step that I have gained in the world," he once 
 said, " has been hard won ; " and it is a mistake to look upon Scott 
 as a careless, good-humoured genius, who stepped into the lists 
 and carried off the prize for which so many other men had been 
 laboriously contending. 
 
 From a very early age the ambition to " found a poetical char- 
 acter," as he himself expressed it, had been a powerful motive in 
 his life, though not overpowering and all-absorbing ; and he had 
 been steadily accumulating the materials of which he made such 
 rapid use when, at last, the accident he had been waiting for 
 pointed a finger in the right direction. He possessed his soul in 
 patience, and, without hasting or resting, with tranquil industry 
 accumulated till the opportunity declared itself. Even when he 
 was in the thick of his novel-writing, and producing more work 
 than any other man of letters in his time two or three novels a- 
 year he was apparently so much occupied with professional, and 
 social, and other literary engagements, that James Ballantyne, who 
 was in the secret, could afford to treat as absurd the idea that he 
 could be the mysterious author of the Waverley novels. How 
 could a man who had to be in his place every day during business 
 hours as Clerk to the Court of Session, who was to be met at
 
 208 SCOTT. 
 
 parties in the evening when he lived in town, who had his house 
 full of visitors when he lived in the country, who did so much 
 miscellaneous literary work in his own name how could such a 
 man possibly find time to write novels that were one of the won- 
 ders of the world. The reserve that he maintained about his 
 novels, with such plausibility he maintained equally well in his 
 earlier days, when he was gathering the materials that he after- 
 wards wove into shape. ' Waver ley,' the first of the long series of 
 his novels, was not published till 1814, but he did not then for the 
 first time conceive the idea of realising the daily life of people in 
 the old times. A dozen years before that, some remarks that he 
 made in a talk with Mr Gillies, whose ' Recollections of Sir Walter 
 Scott ' is one of the most instructive books that have been written 
 about the great man, show that his imagination was then busy 
 picturing the details of ancient life. They are looking at the 
 ruins of lloslin Castle, and speaking of the traditions of the place, 
 when Scott said : " I wish we knew more than we are ever likely to 
 do of the powerful family that once owned this castle and chapel. 
 Doubtless there were beautiful damsels as well as belted knights 
 that now ' sleep the sleep that knows no waking ' under these cold 
 stones. Anxious, of course, were the days and hours which they 
 spent within their castle walls ; intricate and hazardous the adven- 
 tures in which they were engaged. A chronicle of Roslin or of any 
 other old castle of consideration that is to say, a minute record 
 of the lives of its various inhabitants, how they fought and 
 caroused, loved and hated, worked and played would be worth 
 more than all the mere romances that ever were penned, as a fund 
 of amusement and instruction. But we have only vague outlines ; 
 imagination must do the rest." And he went on to say : " On the 
 whole, how little more do we learn from history than that Sir 
 William lived and ruled at one time, and Sir John at another, while 
 of the fair dames little or nothing is said ! We find their names 
 in long lists, it is true, and as having assisted in certain public 
 occasions of war or pageantry. But the poet must either discover 
 or invent more than this. He requires to know their individual 
 habits of life, their wants, wishes, and springs of action. In truth, 
 we know far more about Major Weir and his enchanted staff than 
 about any of the lloslin barons and baronesses ; and if I were ever
 
 CARLYLE ON KAPID WKITING. 209 
 
 to become a writer of prose romances, I think I would choose him, 
 if not for my hero, at least for an agent and leading one in my 
 production." 
 
 Carlyle overlooked such evidences of the zeal with which Scott 
 in his younger days kept his imagination busy in reconstructing 
 past life, and the thoroughness with which he ransacked history 
 for facts to guide his imagination, when he sneered in his own 
 contemptuous way at Scott's power of extempore writing, of pro- 
 ducing "impromptu novels to buy farms with." "A word here," 
 Carlyle says, "as to the extempore style of writing, which is get- 
 ting much celebrated in these days. Scott seems to have been a 
 high proficient in it. His rapidity was extreme ; and the matter 
 produced was excellent, considering that ; the circumstances under 
 Avhich some of his novels, when he could not himself write, were 
 dictated, are justly considered wonderful." But he goes on to 
 say, " In the way of writing, no great thing was ever, or will ever 
 be done with ease, but with difficulty. Let ready writers with any 
 faculty in them lay this to heart. Is it with ease, or not with ease, 
 that a man shall do his best in any shape ; above all, in this shape 
 justly named of 'soul's travail,' working in the deep fences of 
 thought, embodying the True out of the Obscure and Possible, 
 environed on all sides with the uncreated False ? Not so, now or 
 at any time. The experience of all men belies it ; the nature of 
 things contradicts it. Virgil and Tacitus, were they ready writers ? 
 The whole Prophecies of Isaiah are not equal in extent to this cob- 
 web ol a ' Review ' article. Shakespeare we may fancy wrote with 
 rapidity, but not till he had thought with intensity; long and 
 sore had this man thought, as the seeing eye may discern well, and 
 had dwelt and wrestled amid dark pains and throes though his 
 great soul is silent about all that. It was for him to write rapidly 
 at fit intervals, being ready to do it. And herein truly lies the 
 secret of the matter ; such surprises of mere writing, after due 
 energy of preparation, is doubtless the right method ; the hot 
 furnace having long worked and simmered, let the pure gold flow 
 out at one gush. It was Shakespeare's plan ; no easy writer he, or 
 he had never been Shakespeare. Neither was Milton one of the 
 mob of gentlemen who write with ease." 
 
 Sound doctrine this, no doubt, and particularly worthy to be kept
 
 210 SCOTT. 
 
 in remembrance by an audience like this who will exercise a para- 
 mount daily and hourly influence on a new generation, and who may 
 be tempted to encourage boys and young men in the silly conceit 
 that they can do great things without labour and by sheer force 
 of innate capacity. But sound as Carlyle is about the necessity of 
 work, he is most unjust in his application of the doctrine to the 
 case of Scott. His savage attack on Scott's impromptu manner of 
 writing is an example of his strange inability, with all his piercing 
 insight, to look fairly at the character of successful contemporaries. 
 Carlyle's admirers are wont now to pass over all criticisms of his 
 weak points, with the remark that it is the fashion now to run 
 him down ; but as I published twelve years ago the same opinion 
 of him that I hold still, I may claim to speak without prejudice 
 from recent revelations. His essay on Scott, though like all his 
 other writings the work of a man of great critical genius, is 
 throughout, whenever he refers to the main subject of it, preju- 
 diced and unfair. Scott's novels were not impromptu, though 
 ^written with unparalleled rapidity; in his case there had been great, 
 furious energy of preparation, though he was as studiously secretive 
 about the preparation as he was about the execution. He wrote 
 rapidly because he wrote out of a fully stored mind. To read 
 Carlyle's essay, one would suppose that Scott turned to prose 
 romance with careless facility when he found that his metrical 
 romances no longer sold, no longer commanded the ear of the 
 public, Byron having supplanted him in popular favour. This, 
 indeed, is a very common impression, encouraged by a sort of 
 vulgar wonder at Scott's versatility, that he easily turned his 
 energies to prose when he found that verse would no longer pay. 
 But, to use Carlyle's phrase, " the seeing eye may discern well," 
 if the seeing eye takes the facts of Scott's earlier life within the 
 range of its vision, that though he did not begin to write 
 romances in prose till he was past forty, a large part of his previous 
 life, so wide-ranging in its energies, had been a most studious and 
 even systematic preparation. The conversation which I have 
 quoted to you, showing a bent towards prose romance as an outlet 
 for the creations of his imagination, took place some years before 
 he had written any of his metrical romances, and while he was still 
 only known among his personal acquaintances as a moderately
 
 OKIGIN OF 'THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTKEL.' 211 
 
 prosperous lawyer and extremely pleasant companion. In fact, 
 viewing his life as a whole, we should say that his metrical 
 romances were but a passing diversion from the main direction of 
 his imaginative energies. And now to explain briefly how these 
 metrical romances came to be written. 
 
 ' The Lay of the Last Minstrel ' was the first of them. He was 
 engaged in preparing for the press his collection of Border 
 Minstrelsy, the fruits of his search for Border ballads, when the 
 subject and the form occurred to him. He was possessed at the 
 time, as he tells us, with the ambition of "founding a poetical 
 character," but both subject and form were suggested by accident. 
 The subject grew in a remote way out of his soldiering. As 
 Quartermaster of the Mid-Lothian Yeomanry, Scott made the 
 acquaintance of the Duke of Buccleuch, the great head of the clan 
 Scott. Feudal loyalty, such as a vassal was expected in medieval 
 times to feel for his lord, was a real sentiment with the poet from 
 his boyhood, and he would have considered it a duty to look upon 
 the Duke as his feudal superior with respect and reverence. 
 The duty was rendered a pleasure by the character of the man, 
 which was frank, hearty, and generous. Something as near an 
 intimacy as Avas possible in the circumstances sprang up between 
 the poet and the Buccleuch family. The young Countess of 
 Dalkeith, in particular, interested herself in his amusement and 
 business of ballad-collecting, and in a few original ballads which 
 he had composed himself for his forthcoming volume and for other 
 collections. One day this lady suggested to Scott what she con- 
 sidered an excellent subject for a ballad. It was a legend which 
 she had heard of as being current among the Border peasantry 
 concerning one Gilpin Homer a strange tricksy hobgoblin, which 
 used to turn up unexpectedly in the haunts of men in the shape 
 of an ugly little dwarf, and when excited was in the habit of 
 muttering, " Tint ! Tint! Tint." One sometimes hears the question 
 asked why the goblin page in ' The Lay of the Last Minstrel ' cries 
 "Lost! Lost! Lost!" What or who was lost 1 The goblin himself 
 it is that is lost, having strayed as it were from his supernatural 
 master into human society ; wandering off in a truant frolicsome 
 mood, and being unable to find his way back. It is a pretty fancy, 
 and Scott was delighted with it as a subject, as well as with the
 
 212 SCOTT. 
 
 compliment of a suggestion from such a quarter. This was exactly 
 what it ought to be, so like the good old times, when the gratified 
 bard received a theme from his feudal lady. He bowed at once to 
 the high command, and set to work to compose a ballad which 
 might find a place in his proposed Border Minstrelsy. It was 
 natural that he should think of connecting the goblin somehow 
 with the house of Scott, considering who had given him the 
 subject ; and it was natural also that, thinking of this noble house 
 in connection with such a subject, his thoughts should turn to a 
 renowned lady of Buccleuch in the sixteenth century Dame Janet 
 Bethune, a woman of a learned family, with a reputation for her 
 knowledge of magic, as well as for the vigour with which she had 
 managed the affairs of her house during a long widowhood. In 
 Scott's active imagination, the subject quickly took such dimen- 
 sions that he began to feel that here at last he had lighted on a 
 theme for a work of greater pretensions than a ballad, a theme 
 out of which might be developed a picture of Border manners 
 such as he had long been ambitious of executing. His ambi- 
 tion for some time had soared higher than the ballad; he had 
 become convinced' that a poetical character, such as he wished 
 to establish, could not be founded on so narrow a basis. Once 
 inspired with the thought that his opportunity had come at last, 
 he quickly elaborated a simple plot on which to weave his picture 
 of life on the Borders in the sixteenth century, of alert strongholds, 
 fighting clans, gallant chieftains, sturdy and fearless retainers, 
 elevating it into the regions of romance with a deal of love and 
 superstition. It is difficult for us to realise what an influence 
 Scott had in changing the current conception of the borderers. 
 They had long been looked upon as simply cattle-stealers, and yet 
 Scott, by the force of his genius, convinced people that his way of 
 looking on them was the right way. 
 
 From the time of Jeffrey till the ' Life of Scott ' in the " English 
 Men of Letters Series," it has been the custom to say that the plot 
 machinery in ' The Lay of the Last Minstrel ' is defective, and that 
 the Goblin is a mere excrescence. It is argued that Scott failed 
 to connect the superstitious machinery with the general course of 
 the story, and that everything done by the Goblin's action might 
 have been accomplished by natural means. That was the common
 
 THE GOBLIN'S PART IN THE PLOT. 213 
 
 criticism in Scott's time, and when it was mentioned to him he 
 characteristically made a jest of it. He said he had meant him 
 for a great personage, but he had slunk down to the kitchen. This 
 criticism was made under the false idea that Scott composed care- 
 lessly and in haste. The truth is that the Goblin at every turn of 
 the story has an influence on the action. Of course it is true 
 enough that different means might have been adopted, but then 
 the effect would have been different. 
 
 Jeffrey said that the young laird might have wandered into the 
 wood by himself, but the effect produced on us by the Goblin 
 enticing him out in a wicked frolic and eluding the sentinels by 
 an assumed disguise is very different. The plot is more complex 
 than this, and indeed is more compactly framed than is generally 
 stated in formal criticisms of the work.. The story opens with a 
 feast in Branksome Hall, where the knights are in readiness to 
 depart. While they are making merry the Lady retires to her 
 bower, and overhears the spirits of the mountain and of the flood 
 conversing about her daughter's fate. She hears them say that 
 Branksome will never prosper till the Lady's pride be quelled and 
 her daughter allowed to marry Lord Cranstoun, with whose family 
 they are at feud. The Lady determines to defy fate, and sends 
 William of Deloraine to Melrose Abbey for a mystical book that 
 had long been buried in the tomb of "the wondrous Michael 
 Scott." On returning with his treasure, William is attacked and 
 wounded by Cranstoun and left to the care of the Earl's goblin- 
 page. The Goblin sees the mystic book and sits down to unclasp 
 it, but has scarcely done so when thunder is heard and a flash of 
 lightning comes between him and the book not, however, till the 
 sprite has mastered certain magic spells. 
 
 By means of his newly acquired knowledge the Goblin conveys 
 Deloraine into the castle and decoys the young heir into the 
 woods, where the boy is caught by the English. Deloraine had 
 committed some outrage on the English border, and Percy had 
 entered Scotland to demand his surrender. The Lady will not give 
 him up, but says that he will appear himself to fight the man who 
 has brought the charge against him. But how can William do 
 this, since he is seriously wounded 1 Here conies the important 
 action of the Goblin. He uses the spell to bring Cranstoun into
 
 214 SCOTT. 
 
 Branksome, and Cranstoun dressed in Deloraine's armour proves 
 victorious. The Lady then admits that fate is too strong for her, 
 and allows him to marry her daughter. Thus the action of the 
 Goblin page is a very essential one, and Scott had a deeper mean- 
 ing in the story than appears on the surface. He further imitated 
 medieval stories in making the ' Lay ' a sort of allegory, in which 
 the struggle between supernatural and human powers portrays the 
 struggle between human will and fate. The means that the Lady 
 takes to prevent what is destined from coming to pass become in 
 the end the very means by which it happens. 
 
 As to the metre of the story, it is interesting to know that Scott 
 received an important hint from Coleridge's " Christabel." We 
 find the influence of Coleridge appearing everywhere in the early 
 part of the nineteenth century, despite the fact that he wrote so 
 little. "Christabel" was composed in 1797, although it was not 
 published till 1816, and it so happened that a friend at Malta to 
 whom he recited the poem had such a remarkable memory that he 
 was able afterwards to recite it in turn to Scott. It was thus 
 that Scott got the hint of a peculiar variety of the metre he used.
 
 215 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 BYKON. 
 
 SUMMARY OF LIFE POPULAR IDENTIFICATION OF THE POET WITH HIS 
 CREATIONS "ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS." 
 
 THE year of the publication of ' Childe Harold ' the work that 
 brought Byron's extraordinary personality before the world was 
 1812. The day even is worth remembering, because it had prob- 
 ably been chosen with a superstitious preference and a fancy for 
 singularity in the smallest things characteristic of the man. It 
 was the agth of February, a date in the calendar that comes only 
 once in four years. 
 
 Like Scott, Byron leapt at once into fame. While Wordsworth 
 and Coleridge and Southey and Campbell and Moore were known 
 only to small circles and isolated admirers, the fame of Scott and 
 Byron was European. ' The Lay of the Last Minstrel ' was sold 
 and read more widely than any poem ever had been before. It 
 was followed by ' Marmion ' and ' The Lady of the Lake,' and the 
 applause grew louder and more general with each publication. 
 ' The Vision of Don Roderick,' a slighter poem and in a different 
 stanza, was received somewhat more coldly ; but when ' Childe 
 Harold' was published, Scott was engaged on another metrical 
 romance, ' Rokeby,' for which he received a larger price than had 
 ever before been paid for a poem, a sign that, in the opinion of 
 publishers at least, his popularity was still on the increase. Then 
 Byron's turn came. ' Childe Harold' was received with an intense 
 excitement beside which the rage for Scott's poetry appeared in- 
 significant. Scott to this extent had prepared the way for Byron,
 
 216 BYRON. 
 
 that he had given an interest in poetry to thousands of readers to 
 whom verse in any shape had been a thing to be avoided as dull 
 and unintelligible. But no poet before Byron had commanded so 
 wide an audience ; the world had never seen so general a curiosity 
 about a poet's next work. 
 
 Writers about Byron, from Moore to Mrs Oliphant, have puzzled 
 themselves to account for the instantaneousness with which 'Childe 
 Harold ' took hold of the public mind, and have generally found 
 the solution in the fascinating strangeness and romantic interest 
 of the writer's character. This was part of the secret, no doubt, 
 a large part ; but it was not all. If each generation were not so 
 busy with the moods of the moment as to be incapable without 
 an effort of realising how people felt in the peculiar situations of 
 past history, the fitness of Byron's first great work to the time in 
 which it was produced could hardly have escaped observation. 
 When we turn to ' Childe Harold ' now, our interest is all in the 
 poet, and we skip with comparative indifference the stanza after 
 stanza of description and reflection to fasten on the autobiographi- 
 cal portions. But in the stanzas that we now skip, the readers of 
 the writer of 1812 found powerful expression given to thoughts 
 that were agitating their own minds, concerning scenes and events 
 that had for them an intensity of interest such as men rarely feel 
 except about their own personal concerns. Bear in mind the posi- 
 tion of England and the state of Europe at the time, read the first 
 two cantos of ' Childe Harold ' in that connection, and you will 
 find in stanza after stanza abundant evidence of one cause for the 
 excitement with which the poem was received. Napoleon was 
 then at the zenith of his career, master of Germany, and Austria, 
 and Italy, and half-master of Spain. It seemed as if he was on 
 the point of achieving his ambition of making the conquest of 
 Europe. He was engaged in preparing for that huge expedition 
 into Russia which proved his ruin, but there was no symptom of 
 ruin then. His arms had hardly received a check, except from 
 English troops in the Peninsula. Great Britain seemed the only 
 Power capable of checking his course, and there was an intensity 
 of excitement throughout our country such as had never been ex- 
 perienced before and has never been since. We were fighting for 
 our national existence, fighting as the champions and leaders of all
 
 SCOTT'S 'VISION OF DON RODERICK.' 217 
 
 the kingdoms of Christendom, pouring subsidies into the hands of 
 our Continental allies, raising armies by conscription. All eyes 
 were turned at the moment upon Spain, where our troops under 
 Wellington, after some doubtful victories, stood at bay within 
 the lines of Torres Vedras, facing four French armies that were 
 quartered in the Peninsula. 
 
 In the midst of this excitement, what were our poets doing to 
 put themselves in sympathy with the national mood ? Every 
 one of them was quietly pursuing his own predetermined line of 
 literary activity, inspired by no message to the troubled spirit of 
 the age of force and distinction enough to command attention. 
 Wordsworth had indeed issued from his Westmoreland retreat a 
 commonplace prose tract on the Convention of Cintra, and some 
 noble sonnets dedicated to Liberty and Independence. Some of 
 these sonnets are among his masterpieces in point of literary form 
 and loftiness of sentiment ; but they have not the fire and direct- 
 ness of popular verse. Coleridge, his brief fit of poetic activity 
 over, was lecturing on Shakespeare and expounding political philo- 
 sophy in a periodical called the ' Friend.' Southey was writing 
 review articles for the ' Quarterly,' and meditating a poem on the 
 last of the Goths, in execution of his scheme of poems based on 
 national mythologies. Moore was busy with a new number of 
 his Irish Melodies, and speculating on the chances of a change of 
 Government. Campbell, who had electrified the country twelve 
 years earlier with his national songs, had revived the Spenserian 
 stanza in "Gertrude of Wyoming," and was working hard at task- 
 work for the publishers. Scott had shown more inclination to 
 follow the direction of popular interest. He had appealed to the 
 spirits of the Mountains and the Torrents, who had inspired his 
 minstrelsy before, to vouchsafe him inspiration for a loftier theme, 
 the liberation of the Spaniards by Wellington ; and in ' The Vision 
 of Don Roderick ' had celebrated the triumphs of our soldiers in 
 the Peninsula with stirring martial ardour. There was much 
 spirit in the strain, and three of the stanzas describing the 
 soldiers of England, Scotland, and Ireland have become classical, 
 and are still dear to every schoolboy. As a prophet of the warlike 
 spirit of the time Scott was unmatched and unmatchable, but he 
 harped only on one string, and high and stubborn as was the reso-
 
 218 BYEON. 
 
 lution of the country at the moment, fixed as it was in its deter- 
 mination to fight, the national mind was crossed by other moods 
 in the pauses of the conflict, moods in which the equally tempered 
 Scott was incapable of giving expression. And these moods, nat- 
 ural in a time of great excitement and sustained suspense, found 
 an exponent of titanic force in the young poet who made his voice 
 heard in the pilgrimage of Childe Harold. Can it be matter for 
 astonishment that all ears were inclined to hear 1 
 
 The strain in which the new poet addressed the public was not 
 the most obviously opportune one of drum and trumpet ex- 
 hortation. It was full of irregular, almost capricious changes, 
 varying through many moods, from fierce delight in battle and 
 fiery enthusiasm for freedom to cynical mockery of ambition 
 and despondent meditation on the fleeting character of human 
 happiness and national greatness. It was the work of a dis- 
 tempered mind, and it spoke out with passionate sincerity what 
 was in that mind ; and so doing, as the age itself was moody 
 and distempered with prolonged and feverish excitement, it was 
 a revelation to thousands of readers of their own inmost thoughts. 
 Macaulay in a well-known passage describes Byron as having 
 interpreted Wordsworth to the multitude. Looking at this his 
 first production purely from the literary point of view, there is 
 much truth in this, for the pilgrimage of Childe Harold was 
 undoubtedly the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling; the 
 poem was evolved by the poet's imagination out of genuine 
 personal emotion ; the satisfaction of this emotion was the motive 
 that set the imagination at work. Byron's poetry came from 
 the heart. In this respect, and also in the matter of poetic 
 diction, he may truly be said to have interpreted Wordsworth's 
 theories to the multitude. But he did more than this : he 
 interpreted the multitude to themselves; he showed them as 
 in a glass what they had been on the point of thinking. 
 
 The first stage of Childe Harold's pilgrimage lay through 
 Spain, on which at that moment the trembling hopes of Europe 
 were fixed as the theatre where Napoleon's fate was to be 
 determined, where the last stake was being played for or against 
 him. The poet described the scenery where this thrilling drama 
 was in progress, and commented on the actors and the incidents.
 
 'CHILDE HAROLD.' 219 
 
 We must remember tins to understand the full force for his 
 contemporaries of such lines as : 
 
 " By Heaven, it is a splendid sight to see 
 
 (For one who hath no friend no brother there) 
 
 Their rival scarfs of mixed embroidery, 
 
 Their various arms that glitter in the air." 
 Or 
 
 " And must they fall ? the young, the proud, the brave, 
 
 To swell one bloated chief's unwholesome reign ? 
 
 No step between submission and a grave, 
 
 The rise of rapine and the fall of Spain ? " 
 Or 
 
 " No more beneath soft Eve's consenting star 
 
 Fandango twirls his jocund castanet : 
 
 Ah monarchs ! could ye taste the mirth ye mar, 
 
 Not in the toils of glory would ye fret ; 
 The hoarse dull drum would sleep, and man be happy yet ! " 
 
 Or the stanza with which he takes farewell of Spain 
 
 " Nor yet, alas ! the dreadful work is done ; 
 Fresh legions pour adown the Pyrenees : 
 It deepens still, the work is scarce begun, 
 Nor mortal eye the distant end foresees. 
 Fall'n natives gaze on Spain : if freed, she frees 
 More than her fell Pizarro once enchained." 
 
 In the second canto Byron conducted his pilgrim to Greece, to 
 scenes of departed greatness, and his meditations there also 
 struck a sympathetic chord in the hearts of a people who saw 
 historic grandeurs trembling all round them, and knew not 
 when the turn of their own empire would come. The half- 
 hearted mirth with which the pilgrim, with his assumption of 
 joyless cynicism and discontent produced by satiety, relieved the 
 monotony of his gloomy meditations, his sudden changes of 
 mood from ardent aspiration to bitter mockery, from impassioned 
 delight in nature's beauties to scorn of men's deformities, were 
 all in unison with the hysterical distracted state of the public 
 temper. We must live over again the anxieties of those troubled 
 years when the strain of resistance to Napoleon's ambition, sus- 
 tained year after year, was becoming intolerable, and the sternest 
 resolution was dashed at times by fears that the dreams of the
 
 220 BYRON. 
 
 man of destiny would be fulfilled, we must do this to under- 
 stand the instantaneous effect of 'Childe Harold.' The poet 
 spoke the words that were on everybody's lips, spoke them 
 with all the fire and intensity of genius. Intense susceptibility 
 to the impressions of the moment was always a striking feature 
 of Byron's character, and he " drew from his audience . in a 
 vapour," to use once more Mr Gladstone's famous simile, " what 
 he gave back to them in a flood." He professed indifference in 
 the opening of his poem; spoke with a languid air of his re- 
 luctance to awake the weary Nine for so lowly a lay as his ; 
 but the fire of most of the subsequent stanzas gave the lie to 
 this affectation. 
 
 This close harmony with the moods of the time is greatly left 
 out of sight in attempts to explain the rapidity with which Byron 
 gained the ear of his audience. Too much stress is laid in these 
 explanations on the romantic character of the hero, driven 
 into his pilgrimage by a strange unrest, satiated with pleasure, 
 rendered joyless by the excess of it, prematurely penetrated by 
 the conviction that all is vanity ; a wanderer, not because he hopes 
 for relief from change, but because change is an imperative 
 necessity to him. It was not the character of Childe Harold 
 that first drew attention to the poem ; it was the interest in 
 the poem that drew attention to the character of the poet, with 
 whom the public, in spite of his protests, persisted in identifying 
 him. We must not credit the readers of the first two cantos of 
 ' Childe Harold ' with knowing all that we can now learn about 
 Byron, from works of which this first effort, with all its revelation 
 power, was comparatively but a feeble and one-sided instalment. 
 Their interest was principally in the poem itself, which enthralled 
 them before they knew much or anything about the author ; and 
 if we try to look at it with their eyes, following its movement 
 with the interest they naturally had in its incidents, we find 
 abundant reason for their admiration in the impetuous vehemence 
 with which the poet hurries from theme to theme, fixing one 
 impression after another with a few powerful strokes, moving 
 with the ease of a giant in the fetters of a difficult stanza, 
 controlling the rhymes with a master's hand into the service 
 of his fervent feeling, instead of allowing them to direct and
 
 PUBLIC INTERPRETATION: OF THE POE'M. 221 
 
 check and hamper its flow as is the way with rhymesters of 
 less resource. The interest of the public, once kindled in the 
 poem, turned naturally to the poet, and they would have it 
 that in his strange hero, a new character in poetry, he had drawn 
 the picture of himself. Every striking publication sets the public 
 speculating about the author, and there were several superficial 
 circumstances that favoured this belief. Byron had himself 
 passed through the scenes through which he conducted his pil- 
 grim. True, he said in the preface that the pilgrim was only 
 " a fictitious character introduced for the sake of giving some 
 connection to the piece " ; but the very disclaimer encouraged 
 the public in the popular conviction. When they began inquiring 
 about the author, they found that he was a young lord in his 
 twenty-fifth year, who had for some time been his own master, 
 and had led rather a dissolute life : why, if he did not mean 
 to picture himself, should he choose so discreditable a fictitious 
 character as a prematurely jaded voluptuary, stalking in joyless 
 reverie through scenes in which all Europe at the time felt a 
 living interest ? 
 
 The mistake was natural perhaps, and yet none the less 
 it was a mistake. Childe Harold's moods were only the darker 
 moods of an intemperately sensitive and variable spirit, in 
 which heights of joyous mirth were quite as frequent as depths 
 of sombre melancholy. When Byron began the poem, his in- 
 tention was, as he says in his preface, following the words 
 of Dr Beattie, "to give full scope to his inclination, and be 
 either droll or pathetic, descriptive or sentimental, tender or 
 satirical, as the humour struck him." He had intended, in 
 fact, what he afterwards accomplished in ' Don Juan.' And in 
 his first drafts of the poem he had called the hero Childe 
 Burun, the ancient name of his family. But as he went on and 
 thought of making his pilgrim a fictitious character of certain 
 stamp, a character, as he tells us, modelled on Dr Moore's ' Zeluco,' 
 he altered the cast of the poem to correspond, and replaced more 
 than one mirthful passage by others of a melancholy description. 
 Thus only one side of his own character was represented in the 
 poem, and the shades even of that were very much deepened. 
 
 To make this clear, let us run rapidly over his life before the
 
 222 BYRON. 
 
 publication of ' Childe Harold.' We shall see that he had other 
 reasons for despondency and discontent than the fulness of satiety. 
 His life had been very different from that of most young members 
 of the peerage. He had succeeded to the title of Lord Byron at 
 the age of ten, by the death of an eccentric and violent grand- 
 uncle, who had never recognised his existence, or done anything 
 to help his mother in giving him an education suitable to his 
 future rank. The Byrons were one of the oldest families in 
 England, but for several generations before the birth of the poet 
 the family estates had been reduced and the family name disgraced 
 by turbulent, extravagant, and scandalous conduct. There were 
 honourable traditions in the family, but they belonged to a date 
 before its elevation to the peerage. Captain Byron, the poet's 
 father, was a profligate younger son, who added gaming to his 
 other vices. His first wife was the divorced wife of a peer, with 
 whom he had eloped, and who died soon after their marriage. 
 The Hon. Mrs Leigh, Byron's half-sister, was the only offspring of 
 this union. His second wife was Catherine Gordon, the heiress 
 of Gight. He married her for her money, and in less than two 
 years (1786-88) it was swallowed up in the payment of his debts. 
 Gight was sold, and she was left with only enough to yield her 
 the small pittance on which she educated her son. This son, the 
 poet, was born in London on 22d January 1788. Mrs Byron, 
 though passionately attached to her spendthrift husband, was a 
 woman of extremely violent temper ; and life with her husband 
 proving impossible, she withdrew with her young son to Aberdeen 
 in 1790, two years after his birth. The father contrived to extort 
 from her narrow means a sum sufficient to take him to France, 
 and died there in the following year. Mrs Byron remained in 
 Aberdeen, domiciled in one flat after another in Queen Street, 
 Virginia Street, and Broad Street, till the death of the fourth 
 Lord Byron in 1798, in the poet's eleventh year, opened the way 
 to his succession, and the family removed South. With such a 
 mother, a woman of naturally ungovernable temper, exasperated 
 by her being dragged down from affluence to poverty, sometimes 
 fondling her child with extravagant affection, sometimes storming 
 at him as " a lame brat," and hurling things at him the fire-irons
 
 THE POET'S UPBEINGING. 223 
 
 are said to have been her favourite weapons a proud, sensitive, 
 passionate child was not likely to learn self-control. Among 
 other things, she probably exaggerated that sensitiveness about 
 his lameness to which biographers and critics attach so much 
 importance. He seems to have had one or both feet clubbed ; and 
 one of the first uses that his mother made of her larger command 
 of money, when he became Lord Byron, was to consult physicians 
 and quacks about the cure of this defect, and on their advice to 
 apply painful remedies in vain. Her violent temper and capricious 
 affection harmed him quite as much after his accession as before, 
 for she kept incessantly interfering with himself and his teachers, 
 and quarrelled so outrageously with his guardian, Lord Carlisle, 
 and with everybody who came near her, that she was practically 
 excluded from the society of people of her own rank. Thus it 
 happened that when Byron came of age he had no friends except 
 such as he had made for himself at Harrow and Cambridge. 
 Brought up with very exalted ideas of his own rank, all the more 
 vivid that he had not been born in it, he had no knowledge of the 
 domestic life of families in that rank ; he had no social acquaint- 
 ance with them ; and when he was of age to take his seat in the 
 House of Lords, there was not a single member of that House 
 whom he could ask as a personal friend to introduce him. There 
 was some technical difficulty also about his taking his seat; at 
 the last moment an impediment was discovered which could not 
 be removed till a document had been hunted up somewhere in 
 Cornwall. When Byron set out in 1809 on the travels which he 
 has immortalised in Childe Harold's pilgrimage, he had no 
 pleasant home to take leave of, no pleasant relations to break off 
 with the class to which he belonged ; he had bitter memories 
 where other men have sweet and sad; and in his despondent 
 moods it required no strong effort of imagination to picture him- 
 self as a joyless outcast, a scornful hater of his kind. Perhaps 
 one reason for the readiness with which the public identified him 
 with his gloomy hero was that they could not understand how a 
 young lord could be unhappy from any other cause but a surfeit 
 of the pleasures of life; they did not know at what a distance 
 from the lap of luxury the titled author had spent his early years,
 
 224 BYRON. 
 
 otherwise the evidences of unhappiness and distemper of mind in 
 his poetry might have been more intelligible to them. 
 
 The real Byron at this period, however, though he had his 
 moods of passionate melancholy, was far from being habitually 
 joyless and misanthropic, consumed by a mysterious sadness. He 
 was prone to extremes, as might have been expected from the 
 descendant of such ancestry. He came of turbulent kin on both 
 sides. He was tempestuous in all his feelings, extreme in anger 
 and extreme in affection, in melancholy and in mirth, but the 
 pendulum swung as often to the one side as to the other. For 
 every height there is a hollow. We hear of his fits of ungovern- 
 able temper in his childhood, of his silent, sullen rages, of his 
 falling in love at the age of eight with such precocious intensity 
 that years afterwards the mention of the marriage of' the girl 
 nearly choked him with jealous fury. But there is a brighter side 
 to the picture, though that is not so often dwelt upon. Those 
 who were set in authority over him, from his nurse, Mary Gray, 
 to his tutor at Harrow, found him extremely sweet-tempered and 
 affectionate when they treated him with kindness. He was by 
 no means unruly when he was not crossed and thwarted and mis- 
 understood in his playful advances, though he was then resentful 
 enough. Like all people of extravagant sensibilities, he was 
 exacting in his claims for a return of affection, and quick to take 
 offence when the response was not as ardent as he thought he had 
 a right to expect from the warmth of his overtures. It is not a 
 good constitution of mind for happiness in this world, where 
 individuals are not always ready to reciprocate; but it is as far 
 removed as possible from the hard, sullen, misanthropic tempera- 
 ment that remains sealed up in its own moroseness, impervious to 
 any touch of kindness. Byron is often described as a morbid 
 egotist ; but his egotism, if such it is to be called, took the form of 
 an intense longing for sympathy : it was not, at least, a cold self- 
 contained egotism, or an egotism that demands more than it is 
 willing to give, but an intemperate craving for an interchange of 
 kindly offices, apt, only as such feelings are, to be chilled and 
 embittered when it meets with an irresponsive or hostile object. 
 When we read the record of his school and college friendships, of 
 which there are numerous and eloquent Memorials in his first
 
 'HOUKS OF IDLENESS.' 225 
 
 published poems, and compare this with the moods of Childe 
 Harold, who described his friends as 
 
 " The flatterers of the festal hour, 
 The heartless parasites of present cheer," 
 
 we can understand Byron's saying that he would not for all the 
 world that his character were like his hero's. Some of his critics 
 endeavour to give an unfavourable colour even to his friendship;?, 
 by representing that he chose his friends from a rank beneath his 
 own, boys and youths who might natter his vanity by their 
 gratitude for his patronage. But all his school and college friends 
 were not beneath him in rank. The critics forget this, and forget 
 also that owing to Byron's early training he was likely to feel 
 most at home with his poorer schoolfellows, and that from the 
 same cause he was more likely to feel sympathy with poverty and 
 be disposed to relieve it. 
 
 It was a necessary incident of Byron's high spirit and craving 
 for love and friendship and admiration that he should be inordin- 
 ately ambitious. If he had not been lame, he might, with his taste 
 for an active life and the traditions of his family before him, have 
 realised his boyish dream of raising and commanding a regiment. 
 Failing this, his ambition seems at first to have been towards the 
 distinction of an orator, and he was noted at school for his declam- 
 atory powers. He did not, in fact, abandon this ambition till 
 "he awoke one morning and found himself famous" as a poet. 
 Only two days before he had made his first speech in the House 
 of Lords, and had achieved a decided success in that fastidious 
 assemblage. But his school days fell in the time when one great 
 poet after another was rising into fame, and, always sensitive to 
 the influence of circumstances, he began to try his hand at verses. 
 The applause of friends induced him to appeal to a wider audience, 
 and in his nineteenth year he issued with memorable results a small 
 volume entitled ' Hours of Idleness.' The preface to this is very 
 characteristic. We can trace all through a curious struggle between 
 modesty and pride, a disposition to be conciliatory and estimate 
 his efforts modestly, crossed every now and then by a haughty 
 consciousness of real power. There are several expressions pecu- 
 liarly interesting in the light of his subsequent career. " I have
 
 226 BYRON. 
 
 hazarded my reputation and feelings in publishing this volume," 
 he said. "I have passed the Rubicon, and must stand or 
 fall by the cast of the die." This serious language, appro- 
 priate to an enterprise in the issue of which the writer was 
 deeply interested, is hardly in keeping with his protestations further 
 on of indifference, with his offer to submit without a murmur to 
 the verdict of the critics, or with the statements that poetry is not 
 his primary vocation, that he will be content with whatever credit 
 he may get from this volume, and that "it is highly improbable, 
 from his situation and pursuits hereafter, that he should obtrude 
 himself a second time upon the public." Upon one point he was 
 very explicit, that he wished no consideration at the hands of 
 critics on the ground of his rank : he " would rather incur the 
 bitterest censure of anonymous criticism than triumph in honours 
 granted merely to a title." There was, however, a somewhat un- 
 generous comparison suggested between himself and bards who 
 lived in elevated residences in the close air of towns, and made 
 money by their writings ; and this, combined with many refer- 
 ences to his rank and his youth and the seats of his ancestors in 
 the poems themselves, was seized upon by the ' Edinburgh Review ' 
 and made the theme of a very cutting article. " Whatever judg- 
 ment," said the reviewer, who is generally supposed to have been 
 Lord Brougham, " may be passed on the poems of this noble minor, 
 it seems we must take them as we find them, and be content ; for 
 they are the last we shall ever have from him. He is at best, he 
 says, but an intruder into the groves of Parnassus ; he never lived 
 in a garret, like thoroughbred poets ; and ' though he once roved a 
 careless mountaineer in the Highlands of Scotland,' he has not of 
 late enjoyed this advantage. Moreover, he expects no profit from 
 his publication ; and whether it succeeds or not ' it is highly im- 
 probable, from his situation and pursuits hereafter,' that he should 
 again condescend to become an author. Therefore, let us take 
 what we get, and be thankful. What right have we poor devils 
 to be nice 1 We are well off to have got so much from a man of 
 this lord's station ; who does not live in a garret, but has the sway 
 of Newstead Abbey. Again, we say, let us be thankful, and, with 
 honest Sancho, bid God bless the giver, nor look the gift-horse 
 in the mouth."
 
 'ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS.' 227 
 
 Byron writhed under this ridicule, all the more galling that it 
 was accompanied by a contemptuous judgment that his poetry 
 belonged to the class which neither gods nor men are said to 
 approve, and that his effusions were spread over a dead flat, and 
 could no more get above or below that level than if they were so 
 much stagnant water. We need not pause to consider whether 
 the criticism was just or unjust : the poems are of interest now 
 only as throwing light on his character ; and if they were medi- 
 ocre, and neither particularly good nor particularly bad, the same 
 fault could not be alleged against the productions to which this 
 criticism led. The poet greatly misjudged himself when he pro- 
 mised submission without a murmur. He resolved instantly upon 
 revenge. The common story ran, that immediately on reading the 
 review he drank two bottles of claret, conceived the plan of a 
 bitter satire on 'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,' and sat 
 down and wrote a hundred lines of it at a single sitting. It is pos- 
 sible that he did this ; but it would seem, from a passage in Moore's 
 Life, that long before the appearance of the article he had a satire 
 of the kind lying by him, and that the attack only gave him a 
 motive for remodelling and publishing it, and inspired some of the 
 more bitter passages. It was fourteen months after the article that 
 the satire in reply made its appearance, and it created a great 
 sensation, as well by its trenchant force as by the boldness and 
 gallantry of the youth in tackling the ' Edinburgh Review,' then 
 in the height of its formidable critical supremacy. It is possible 
 that during the year and more that elapsed, Byron's wrath might 
 have evaporated, and that he might have come to the conclusion, 
 which he afterwards expressed, that it was " a miserable record of 
 misplaced anger and indiscriminate acrimony," if the severity of 
 the ' Edinburgh Review ' had been counterbalanced by any warmth 
 of recognition and appreciation from other quarters. If any of the 
 poets of the time had protested against the injustice of the review, 
 if his volume had opened the doors of society to him as ' Childe 
 Harold ' afterwards did, if his relative and guardian, Lord Carlisle, 
 had given any recognition of his ability or shown any sympathy with 
 his aspirations, Byron, always prompt to respond to kindness and 
 affection, would certainly not have retaliated with indiscriminate 
 acrimony, bringing within the sweep of his anger not merely the
 
 228 BYRON. 
 
 Scotch reviewers who had attacked him, but the English bards who 
 had received his adventure with silent indifference. He would not 
 have had the same motive for making them disagreeably aware 
 of his existence and of his power. But as it was, no recognition 
 came to counteract the effect of the hostile criticism, and he made 
 the resolution to pay off his score against the whole world of 
 literature, and go abroad. The friendlessness of his position was, 
 as I have said, brought still more painfully home to him by the 
 circumstances attending his coming of age and his introduction to 
 the House of Lords. 
 
 The study of Byron's life before he began the pilgrimage of 
 Childe Harold thus shows us that he was a very different man 
 from the pilgrim, who is represented as a youth who had been 
 rendered misanthropic and scornfully indifferent to everything 
 that poor human life could yield by an unbroken course of syco- 
 phantic flattery and unbridled self-indulgence. Though Byron 
 took the incidents of the travels from his own experience, and put 
 his own reflections into the mouth of the pilgrim, he undoubtedly, 
 as he himself said, took the conception of the character from Dr 
 John Moore's 'Zeluco.' All the same, the identification of the 
 poet with his own creation laid firm hold of the public mind, and 
 helped to strengthen the impression produced by the poem. The 
 real Lord Byron, as we know him in Moore's Life, would have been 
 a much less romantic and interesting character to the generality of 
 readers. 
 
 From the winter of 1812 till his death in the spring of 1824, 
 Byron kept his position as the foremost poet, the greatest literary 
 force, of his generation, every year bringing some new revelation 
 of his amazing power and fertility. At first the poet's popularity 
 threatened to be fatal to the development of his genius. Society, 
 which had received the productions of his nonage with indifference, 
 and had applauded the spirit of his vindictive satire without 
 exhibiting much curiosity about the author, opened its arms im- 
 mediately to the powerful assault of the pilgrim. Congratulations 
 and invitations were showered upon him from a fashionable world 
 which had hitherto ignored the existence of the impoverished 
 lord of Newstead Abbey, too proud and shy to push any claim to 
 their acquaintance. He went everywhere as a lion, as the most
 
 THE POET'S UNCONQUERABLE SHYNESS. 229 
 
 interesting lion that had been on exhibition for many years, and 
 he accepted this change in his circumstances with all the impres- 
 sionable facility of his character. A certain contempt may have 
 mingled with his pleasure in the sweet taste of social homage, a 
 certain bitterness when he thought how he had been neglected 
 before ; but he had too much of the milk of human kindness in 
 him not to be delighted with his popularity. There was only one 
 drawback to his pleasure, an unconquerable shyness. He was 
 not at his ease in mixed society. He had never in his life been 
 accustomed to it, and his sudden introduction as an object of 
 universal attention was not calculated to put him at his ease. But 
 this constraint and embarrassment, which would probably have 
 worn off in time, did not prevent him from deriving much enjoy- 
 ment from his new position, and in the company of his familiars 
 he threw off his reserve and gave free rein to his high spirits, 
 while the public, deceived by an attitude due more to shyness 
 than to pride, gave him credit for all the inward gloom and 
 meditative joylessness of the hero of the pilgrimage. The idolising 
 of Byron lasted for four years, and if it had lasted longer, his 
 genius would probably have been stifled before it reached its 
 maturity. He produced his least important work in those four 
 years, as a result of accommodating himself to the spirit of the 
 society which lavished flattery and admiration on him. He be- 
 longed to the not uncommon class of men who cannot exert their 
 full powers without the stimulus of adversity and opposition. 
 There was a rage at the time for oriental tales. It was in the 
 year of Byron's entrance into fame and society, as you may re- 
 member, that Moore made his contract with the Longmans for a 
 poem on an oriental subject. Byron had been in the East, and 
 had been besides an omnivorous reader of Eastern history, and 
 he set himself to supply the same fashionable demand, producing 
 in marvellously quick succession ' The Giaour,' ' The Bride of 
 Abydos,' ' The Corsair,' ' Lara,' and ' The Siege of Corinth.' The 
 tales were full of life and colour, and their melodramatic heroes 
 and incidents fairly eclipsed in popular favour Scott's medieval 
 barons and nuns, Highland bandits and Lowland moss-troopers. 
 But they belong to a much lower range of artistic creation than 
 Byron's later work. Again the world paid him the equivocal
 
 230 BYRON. 
 
 compliment of identifying him with his gloomy, self - contained, 
 man-defying heroes, even circulating the myth that he had him- 
 self been a remorseless pirate during his wanderings in the East ; 
 and he was vain enough, mainly I believe to cover with romantic 
 mystery a reserved manner really due to shyness, to encourage 
 rather than discourage the belief. The Nemesis for this masquer- 
 ading soon overtook him, but we cannot regret it much, seeing that 
 if he had continued an admired member of fashionable society, 
 his work as a poet would never have reached the same depth and 
 grandeur. " Society," as he afterwards felt and said, " is fatal to all 
 great original undertakings ; " it is certainly fatal to undertakings 
 in the spirit of Byron's subsequent works. We have a measure of 
 what satisfied the society of the Prince Regent's Court in Moore's 
 ' Lalla Rookh ' and Byron's own metrical tales. 
 
 It was in the consequences of an unfortunate marriage that 
 Byron paid the penalty for the public conception of him as a 
 monstrous Childe Harold or a Lara. I need not dwell upon the 
 incidents of that brief union. He was married to Miss Milbanke 
 on the 2d January 1815. A daughter was born on the loth of 
 December. On the i3th of January next, Lady Byron left home 
 on a visit to her parents, and on the way wrote an affectionate 
 letter to her husband beginning "Dear Duck," and ending "Your 
 Pippin." A few days after, her father wrote to say that she could 
 not return to him, and proceedings were at once commenced for 
 a judicial separation. The reasons for this strange rupture must 
 always remain a mystery and a subject for dispute. " The 
 causes," Byron once said, " were too simple easily to be found out." 
 There certainly is not the slightest foundation "for the abominable 
 calumny published some eighteen years ago by Mrs Beecher Stowe 
 on Lady Byron's authority. As soon as that charge was made 
 public, indisputable proofs were forthcoming, in the shape of 
 affectionate letters, that Lady Byron remained on intimate terms 
 with Mrs Leigh, and if she then entertained the suspicion which 
 she afterwards communicated to Mrs Leigh, she deserves to go 
 down to posterity as one of the worst specimens of her sex. At 
 the time, with admirable self-control, she maintained impenetrable 
 silence as to her reasons for deserting her husband, with the result
 
 LADY BYRON LEAVES THE POET. 231 
 
 that the British public, regarding Lord Byron as a Childe Harold 
 or a Lara, imagined that the reasons must be too dreadful for pub- 
 lication, and made up for the lack of facts by the wildest creations 
 of fancy. If the case is looked at calmly, a simple explanation is 
 not difficult to find. A woman who could ask such a husband in 
 a voice of provoking sweetness " when he meant to give up his 
 bad habit of making verses," a woman who never lost her temper, 
 never gave up her point, and inflicted the most malignant stabs in 
 the tenderest places with angelic coolness, possessed the power of 
 goading a sensitive impetuous man to frenzy. She had a maid, for 
 example, to whom Byron entertained a violent aversion, because 
 he suspected her of poisoning his wife's mind against him. Lady 
 Byron listened to all his furious tirades with unruffled meekness, 
 but never consented to send the woman away. She was quite as 
 jealous of her dignity, quite as resentful of slights, real or sup- 
 posed, as himself ; and in their differences of opinion she had the 
 inestimable advantage of a temper perfectly under control, and a 
 command of all the sweet resignation of a martyr, combined with 
 the most skilful ingenuity of provoking retort. Byron with his 
 liability to fits of uncontrollable passion could never have been an 
 easy man to live with ; but if his wife had been a loving warm- 
 hearted woman, with the unconscious tact that such women have, 
 the result would probably have been very different. 
 
 For a few weeks after Lady Byron left her husband, society was 
 content with house-to-house rumour and comment ; but presently 
 the indiscretion of one of the poet's friends gave an opportunity 
 for public remarks on the case, and Byron's character being pre- 
 judiced by the identification with the worst heroes of his poetry, 
 that howl of indignation was set up which is so graphically de- 
 scribed by Macaulay. Byron, in a tender and remorseful fit, had 
 written a farewell to his wife. There was no reason to doubt the 
 sincerity of his feelings ; as we now know, the tears fell from his 
 eyes on the paper as he wrote the lines. A friend to whom he 
 showed this farewell, thinking that it might counteract the rumours 
 that were in circulation against him, sent it to a newspaper. But 
 the public regarded it as an attempt to prejudice them against the 
 wife by representing her as harsh and unforgiving, while he on his
 
 232 BYRON. 
 
 side was willing to be reconciled ; and when it was followed soon 
 after by the scathing sketch of Mrs Clermont, the maid whom 
 he suspected of poisoning Lady Byron's mind against him, the 
 outcry became loud and indignant, and the poet, burning under 
 a sense of injustice, but roused at last to return scorn for scorn, 
 went off once more on a pilgrimage from England, vowing never 
 to return. 
 
 Once more, after his four years of sunshine, in revolt against 
 society, distempered, 
 
 " Like sweet bells jangled, harsh and out of tune," 
 
 Byron became the exponent of the restlessness, the discontent, the 
 passionate longings of a time that was, like himself, "out of joint." 
 And the greatest of his works were written during the remaining 
 eight years of his life, before he perished in the Greek war of 
 independence, and the extent of these, quite apart from their 
 quality, is a standing sufficient answer to the exaggerated reports 
 that were circulated about him in the country from which he had 
 withdrawn. I am glad to see that Mrs Oliphant, in her recent 
 work on 'English Literature from 1790 to 1825,' written with 
 most admirable judgment, breadth of sympathy, and easy mastery 
 of her materials, does not incline to a very prevalent impression 
 that Byron's reputation is on the wane. In purely literary circles 
 no doubt it has been for a generation or more, because it is the 
 tendency now to judge poets mainly by their technical qualities, 
 and it is not in minute finish or exactly interpretative felicity that 
 Byron's strength lies. His feeling was too deep, his thought too 
 impetuous, to admit of his being a great verbal artist, like Tenny- 
 son or like Carlyle. We must take his achievement as a whole, if 
 we wish to give him his due rank in literature. His singular 
 sensitiveness to the impressions of his own immediate surroundings 
 is against the permanence of his fame, because living as he did in 
 a time of unrest and conflict, and reflecting these characters in 
 his poetry, he is apt to appear hysterical, affected, and unreal to 
 people who look at him out of a calmer atmosphere. On the other 
 hand, the superficial inconsistencies of his character must always 
 tempt critics who have a liking for difficult problems. He is like
 
 LIKENESS TO HAMLET. 233 
 
 Hamlet in this respect, as I have elsewhere said before. In the 
 desolation of his youth, in his moodiness, in his distempered 
 variation between the extremes of laughter and tears, in his 
 yearning for sympathy, his intensity of friendship, his fits of mis- 
 anthropy, his habit of brooding over the mysteries of life, Byron 
 unconsciously played the part of Hamlet with the world for his 
 stage, and left a kindred problem for the wonder of mankind and 
 the puzzled speculation of the curious in such matters.
 
 234 
 
 CHAPTEE XVIII. 
 
 NOVELISTS FROM MRS RADCLIFFE TO BULWER LYTTON. 
 
 STERNE MISS EDGEWORTH HANNAH MORE JANE AUSTEN 'WAVERLEY' 
 MISS MITFORB MRS SHELLEY 'VIVIAN GREY' 'PELHAM.' 
 
 I MENTIONED in a previous lecture on novelists that in the half- 
 century or more between Sterne the last of the great group of 
 novelists in the middle of the eighteenth century and Scott, 
 between ' Tristram Shandy ' and ' Waverley,' the chief honours of 
 novel-writing were carried off by women, Miss Burney, Mrs Rad- 
 cliffe, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss Austen. These four names stand 
 out above the crowd as being not imitators but writers of sufficient 
 original genius and sufficiently fortunate in the novelty of their 
 subjects to be ranked as leaders, as founders of schools or epochs 
 in a small way. I have already spoken of the first two, whose 
 triumphs lay within the eighteenth century ; I shall now say a few 
 words to indicate the historical position of Miss Edgeworth and 
 Miss Austen. 
 
 Miss Edgeworth was about four years older than Scott, being 
 born in 1767, but she had fourteen years the start of him in repu- 
 tation as a novelist. Her first notable production was 'Castle 
 Rackrent,' in the first year of the century, 1800, fourteen years 
 before ' Waverley.' It broke ground in a new field, afterwards 
 worked to excess by craftsmen and craftswomen of all degrees of 
 merit : it was a story of Irish life, a revelation to the English 
 novel-readers of a new condition of society, a new range of character 
 and emotion. Scott afterwards said of Miss Eclgeworth's Irish
 
 MISS EDGEWORTH'S 'CASTLE RACKRENT.' 235 
 
 tales that they had done more 'to bind Irishmen and Englishmen 
 together than the Union. She certainly elevated the character of 
 the Irish peasantry in the interest of the world ; showing the good 
 and amiable qualities that underlay the too obvious indolence and 
 thriftlessness and squalor the gaiety of heart, the readiness of 
 wit, the tenacious steadfastness of attachment, the helpful gen- 
 erosity in distress. Miss Edgeworth was a realist, and she did not 
 fail to put the unfavourable traits into her picture ; but she treated 
 the failings of the Irish tenderly, as if she loved them on the 
 whole. The Paddy of fiction and the stage is really her creation ; 
 she is the author of his existence in literature, of the sly, ready- 
 witted, fluent, faithful, and generous Paddy. Herself the daughter 
 of an Irish landowner, Edgeworth of Edgeworthstown, she had not 
 seen Ireland till she was sixteen, and was thus all the better fitted 
 to be impressed with peculiarities that might have escaped her 
 notice if she had lived among them from infancy. She was brought 
 very closely in contact with the poor people of Ireland as well as 
 with the landed families of various ranks, for her father, an en- 
 thusiastic man of progress, full of eighteenth-century philanthropic 
 and educational theories, and ever ready to make ingenious ex- 
 periments of his own, having resolved to reside on his Irish estates, 
 resolved also to get rid of middlemen as the curse of the land 
 system, and employed his daughter practically as his steward and 
 factor. For years of her life she had every day to grant interviews 
 to her father's tenants, hear excuses and grievances, settle disputes, 
 answer petitions : and on rent-days more particularly her hands 
 were full. Miss Edgeworth's knowledge of Irish life was thus 
 most intimate, and she had a keen eye for the humorous side of 
 it, while her observations were not permitted to degenerate into 
 aimless caricature or disguised satire by good sense and real 
 sympathy with the people. ' Castle Rackrent ' is the story of an 
 Irish landed family, put into the mouth of an old steward, who in 
 his time had served several landlords of the stock in succession, 
 Sir Patrick, Sir Murtagh, Sir Kit, and Sir Condey, men of different 
 character, but all agreeing in doing their best, whether by lavish 
 expenditure, gambling, or avaricious litigation, to help on the ruin 
 consummated by the last of the series. The faithful old retainer 
 admires them all with all their faults, and seen through his in-
 
 236 NOVELISTS FROM MRS RADCLIFFE TO BULWER LYTTON. 
 
 dulgent eyes their crimes and their follies, their freaks of wild 
 expenditure and their matter-of-course extortions from their 
 tenantry, their love-making, their hospitality, their family quarrels, 
 and the dealings all the time of the too-faithful steward with the 
 artful tenants, excite in the reader an extraordinary mixture of 
 laughter and pity. 
 
 Miss Edgeworth never surpassed this her first work of note, and 
 in some respects did not again come up to it. She had been en- 
 gaged before with her father in writing stories for children, stories 
 with a moral and educational purpose. It was the age when 
 Hannah More's tales, intended to counteract the influence of the 
 French Revolution, and teach the common people to rely upon the 
 virtues of content, sobriety, humility, industry, reverence for the 
 British Constitution, trust in God, and in the kindness of the 
 gentry, were circulating in thousands and hundreds of thousands. 
 It was natural that moralists, in a generation distinguished for its 
 philanthropic endeavour, all the more conspicuous that philanthropy 
 was a new passion among the upper classes it was natural that 
 in a generation which produced Wilberforce and Clarkson, the 
 agitation for the abolition of the slave-trade, and the impeachment 
 of Warren Hastings for the oppression of the Hindus, moralists 
 should try to press into their service the revived art of story- 
 telling, for the productions of which the reading public were so 
 clamorous. Miss Edgeworth is sometimes called the inventor of 
 the novel with a purpose ; but it was really the invention of the 
 age, and I don't think she can claim the merit of being the first in 
 the field. She was perhaps the first novelist with a purpose en- 
 titled to high rank on purely artistic grounds. It was her father 
 apparently, between whom and herself there was the closest confi- 
 dence, and who was from first to last her literary director, dictator, 
 and censor not wholly, it is supposed, to the advantage of her 
 art who insisted upon her devoting her talents to the purpose of 
 moral education. The fact certainly is in support of this preva- 
 lent belief, that ' Castle Rackrent ' was the only novel written by 
 her without his superintendence. She eluded her director in this, 
 and wrote it as a little surprise for him. And it is the only one 
 of her novels that has no obvious and obtruded lesson. There is 
 no harm even from the artistic point of view in writing novels
 
 NOVELS WRITTEN WITH A MORAL PURPOSE. 237 
 
 with a moral purpose. Novelists, whether they intend it or not, 
 by the very fact that they represent human beings in action, and 
 so furnish examples that readers, consciously or unconsciously, 
 imitate, just as they imitate their own companions in real life, 
 must influence conduct ; from the very nature of their art, they 
 cannot avoid influencing conduct ; and it is desirable that they 
 should endeavour to influence conduct for the better and not for 
 the worse. But they are apt to miss their aim as well as injure 
 their story by making the behaviour of their characters unnatural, 
 and the incidents that befall them impossible, if they allow the 
 deliberate enforcement of a moral to influence the probable evolu- 
 tion of a story out of given characters and given circumstances. 
 Miss Edgeworth fell into this error in several of her stories with a 
 purpose. In 'Belinda,' for example, one of her tales of fashion- 
 able life, one of the most brilliantly drawn characters in fiction, 
 Lady Delacour, is converted by the force of circumstances from a 
 gay, heartless, daringly cynical leader of fashion into a model 
 wife, and that too after years of outrageous frivolity. In another 
 story, ' Ennui,' Lord Glenthorne, a young nobleman so rich that he 
 has no interest in anything, and spends his time till he reaches 
 middle life in torpid vacuity and listless search for amusement, is 
 suddenly changed by the loss of his fortune into a model of in- 
 dustry, applying himself with indefatigable perseverance to the 
 most repulsive studies, and distancing every competitor in fields 
 to which they have given the application of all their lives and all 
 their abilities. Such sudden revolutions of habits in middle life 
 are not true to nature ; long-confirmed habits are not thrown off 
 by real human beings with such ease. The novelist represents 
 them as taking place, not in her function of a painter of manners, 
 but in pursuance of a moral purpose. Lady Delacour's conversion 
 is intended as an encouragement to ladies of fashion to abandon 
 heartless flirtation and vain display : they are supposed to be struck 
 with the greater happiness of the lady in her regenerate condition. 
 And Lord Glenthorne's conversion is intended as an incentive to 
 noble lords to discard unworthy amusement, and experience the 
 greater happiness of energies devoted to nobler pursuits. Such is 
 the novelist's obvious intention; but whether such pictures are 
 likely to do more harm than good is not so clear, for the ease with
 
 238 NOVELISTS FKOM MRS RADCLIFFE TO BULWER LYTTON. 
 
 which these interesting reprobates shake off their long-indulged 
 habits is apt to encourage would-be imitators of their ultimate 
 good conduct to defer the period of amendment till it is too late. I 
 admit, however, that from the moralist's point of view, quite apart 
 from strict adherence to human probabilities, there is something to 
 be said on the other side, and that the delight taken by the con- 
 verts in their altered course of conduct may be rendered more 
 potent as an example, by the fact that they are represented as 
 deriving no real pleasure from the pleasure-seeking of their unre- 
 generate days. It would, however, give an entirely wrong idea of 
 Miss Edgeworth's novels to lay much stress on their moral pur- 
 pose. Apart from their purpose, they are most brilliant pictures 
 of life. The moral is not constantly obtruded, as in Hannah More's 
 celebrated 'Coelebs in Search of a Wife,' published while Miss 
 Edgeworth was in the height of her popularity. The reader, espe- 
 cially the young lady reader, is preached at from beginning to end 
 of that excellent work ; the only incidents in Mr Coelebs's career 
 are his visits to various families in the course of his deliberate 
 search, the only surprises consist in the discovery of weak points in 
 superficially pleasing young ladies and sterling qualities in the 
 superficially unattractive. We are not led to feel the slightest in- 
 terest in the issue of Mr Coelebs's great enterprise ; there is nothing 
 shown in him to make us care whether he finds a woman worthy of 
 his fastidious choice or not. Yet Hannah More was far from being 
 a dull writer, and in the exposure of affectation and pretence and 
 shallowness she showed a very fine sense of humour. Only, her 
 book is not a story, but a string of journalistic social articles on 
 the minor and the higher morals. Now, Miss Edgeworth is not so 
 avowedly and obtrusively didactic as this. She is seldom so clear 
 and decided in her purpose as, for example, Mr Wilkie Collins in 
 ' Heart and Science,' or Mr Besant in ' All Sorts and Conditions 
 of Men.' She took an interest, either for herself or at her father's 
 instigation, in various social reforms, and did her best to advance 
 them incidentally, as Dickens did in ' Nicholas Nickleby ' or 
 'Dombey and Son.' The proportion of direct didactic in her 
 writings is really comparatively small, while her pictures of life, 
 as it was to be seen in fashionable society and on Irish estates, 
 were as faithful and complete as they were animated, sensible,
 
 MISS AUSTEN'S 'PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.' 239 
 
 and humorous. Miss Edgeworth must certainly be pronounced 
 to have gone out of fashion, seeing that Miss Broughton ran a tale 
 through one of the magazines with the title of 'Belinda,' without 
 anybody remarking, in print at least, that this was the title of 
 one of Miss Edgeworth's most famous novels. Whether Miss 
 Zimmern's pleasantly written biography in the " Eminent Women 
 of Letters Series " will do anything to restore her faded popularity 
 is doubtful ; and yet novel-readers who have exhausted the novels 
 of their own generation might do worse than give ' Belinda ' or 
 ' Castle Rackrent ' a trial. 
 
 If I were to judge from my own experience, I should not recom- 
 mend Miss Austen's ' Pride and Prejudice ' or ' Sense and Sensi- 
 bility,' still less ' Mansfield Park ' or ' Emma,' with the same con- 
 fidence to confirmed novel-readers of the present day. Nobody 
 can read any of Miss Austen's works without admiring her wonder- 
 ful closeness and keenness of humorous observation, the skill 
 with which she displays every turn in the motives of commonplace 
 character, and the exquisite quality of the ridicule with which her 
 fancy dances round and round them as she holds them up to our 
 inspection. If you once make the acquaintance of the Bennet 
 family in ' Pride and Prejudice ' you can never forget them, so 
 distinctly is each individual marked, and so keen and exquisite is 
 the revelation of their foibles. In mere art of humorous por- 
 traiture, in a quieter and less farcical style than Miss Burney's, 
 Miss Austen is an expert of classical finish. But somehow, 
 speaking for myself, I must confess to a certain want of interest 
 in the characters themselves. Unless one is really interested in 
 the subjects of such an elaborate art of portraiture, the gradual 
 revelation of them, touch after touch, is apt to become tedious, 
 however much one may enjoy for a time the quick and delicate 
 play of the writer's gently malicious humour. But this want of 
 interest in the characters of English middle-class provincial life is 
 of course a personal defect. You will find that Mrs Oliphant 
 writes with rapture about her great predecessor in fiction, and 
 I daresay you have read somewhere Sir Walter Scott's often- 
 quoted compliment to her. " Head again, and for the third time 
 at least, Miss Austen's very finely written 'Pride and Prejudice,'" 
 he entered in his Diary. " That young lady had a talent for
 
 240 NOVELISTS FROM MKS KADCLIFFE TO BUIAVER LYTTON. 
 
 describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary 
 life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big 
 Bow-wow strain I can do myself, like any now going ; but the 
 exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and 
 characters interesting from the truth of the description and the 
 sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature 
 died so early." Sir Walter also reviewed her novels in the 
 ' Quarterly,' and helped to bring them into notice. In one respect 
 she had a great and legitimate attraction for novel-readers of her 
 own time that she no longer possesses. Her field of manners- 
 painting was new : nobody before her had taken scenes and 
 characters from the life of the provinces, though Miss Burney had 
 had hosts of imitators in the description of fashionable life in the 
 metropolis. And she had another distinction also, not so striking 
 now, in the fact that when fiction was overrun with romantic 
 sentiment and improbable incident, workers in the hackneyed 
 paths having reached a despicable level when her first novel made 
 its appearence in 1811, she restricted herself to ordinary everyday 
 character, and never went beyond probability either in conduct or 
 in incident. Miss Austen was the daughter of the rector of 
 Steventon, a parish in Hampshire; and after her father's death, 
 and before publishing her novels, she lived for some years with 
 her mother at Southampton, and for some time at Bath. All thu 
 material of her novels is such as might have come within the 
 range of her own limited personal experience, and she treats her 
 characters, and comments on their conduct, very much as she and 
 her family were in the habit of looking at and criticising the life 
 of their own neighbourhood. Hence the vividness, the fresh air 
 of reality, that is one of the secrets of her power as a novelist : 
 her figures are not lay figures or creations of vacuous fancy, but 
 real men and women, represented not in accordance with any 
 merely conventional canons of art, but as such characters pre- 
 sented themselves to her in real life. 
 
 Another female novelist, who never took the classical rank 
 accorded to Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen, but who was a 
 very conspicuous and much-discussed personage in her day, also 
 achieved her first successes before the publication of ' Waverley.'
 
 LADY MORGAN AND HER AGE. 241 
 
 This was Miss Sydney Owenson, afterwards Lady Morgan. With 
 the usual longevity of women of letters, to which Miss Austen was 
 an exception, dying in 1817 at the comparatively early age of 
 forty-two, Lady Morgan lived and continued to write till 1859, 
 although she was an eminent author several years before Miss 
 Austen emerged from the obscurity of Hampshire. Where she 
 was born remained to the last a mystery, and her biographer, Mr 
 Hepworth Dixon, respected her wishes on the point, and either 
 did not attempt to discover, or if he did discover anything, kept 
 the secret. Tolerably early in her career a great point was 
 publicly made against her by one of her critics, Mr J. Wilson 
 Croker, because she pretended to be younger than she really was, 
 and this was probably the reason why she never would tell, and 
 was unwilling that the little fact should be known after her death. 
 Lady Morgan's age, brought into prominence by the ungallant 
 man of dates Croker, who did not like her politics Croker was 
 the original of Rigby in Disraeli's ' Coningsby ' was a disputed 
 point for nearly half a century. Writing to the ' Athenaeum ' in 
 1859 (January 22) apropos of some allusion to her age, the lively 
 old lady made the following rhyme : 
 
 " Then talk not to me of my age ; 
 
 I appeal from the phrase to the fact 
 That I'm told in your own brilliant page 
 I'm still young in fun, fancy, and tact." 
 
 She made her first appearance as a novelist in 1804 with 'St 
 Clair,' and followed this up with 'The Novice of St Dominic' and 
 'The Wild Irish Girl' in 1806. According to her own account, 
 she was still in her teens when she wrote ' The Wild Irish Girl,' 
 which made her reputation, but* the statistical Croker maintained 
 that she was born in 1770. There is documentary evidence that 
 she was at a boarding-school in Dublin in 1794, and at that time 
 considered herself too old to sit on her father's knee ; but certainly 
 twenty-four would be a mature age for a schoolgirl, so that Croker 
 was for once out in his dates, though he pretended to have con- 
 sulted a register. The lady, it is needless to say, paid the critic 
 out : she made him sit for the portrait of one of her most odious, 
 sycophantic, unscrupulous political adventurers, Con Crawley in 
 
 Q
 
 242 NOVELISTS FROM MRS RADCLIFFE TO BULWER LYTTON. 
 
 ' Florence M'Carthy.' Croker must have had a thick skin if he 
 felt none of the shafts that were levelled at him. Macaulay 
 ridiculed him heartily in his essay on Boswell's Johnson, and 
 Disraeli's Rigby is one of the most cutting of the satires of that 
 master of the art. The beginning of Croker's dislike to Lady 
 Morgan, whom he attacked with a virulent personality not un- 
 common at the time but long since out of fashion, was her politics. 
 She followed Miss Edge worth in choosing her subjects from her 
 native country of Ireland ; but she was herself a different type of 
 Irishwoman from that cool, sensible, impartially humorous lady 
 enthusiastic, romantic, inordinately fond of excitement and social 
 notoriety. She drew her ideal of her own character in ' The Wild 
 Irish Girl ' Glorvina. Two of her Irish novels ' Florence 
 M'Carthy' (1818) and 'The O'Briens and the O'Flahertys' 
 (1827) may still be read with interest. The character of Florence 
 M'Carthy is charming ; Phyllis French, in a recent novel by Frank 
 Lee Benedict, 'The Price she Paid,' is an evident copy of her. 
 Lady Morgan may have seen the original from which she drew in 
 the earlier part of her life, for she was the daughter of an Irish 
 actor, and had seen a good deal of Bohemian life before she 
 acquired distinction as an authoress and was taken up by the 
 Abercorn family, and married almost by stratagem to the family 
 physician, Sir Charles Morgan. 
 
 Another Irish novelist deserves a word of mention, if only for 
 the singularity of his career, the Rev. Charles Maturin, curate of 
 St Peter's in Dublin. Maturin had the curious fortune to attract 
 the attention of some of the greatest magnates of literature in his 
 time, who were struck by the power of his writing and his concep- 
 tion of situation and character, an'd believed one after another that 
 it was possible for him to cure himself of the wild rhapsodical ex- 
 travagance by which his productions were disfigured. He followed 
 up Lady Morgan's ' Wild Irish Girl ' with a ' Wild Irish Boy ' ; and 
 a romance of his, ' The Family of Montoria, or, The Fatal Revenge,' 
 fell into Scott's hands in 1810, and was reviewed by him in the 
 ' Quarterly.' Maturin professed himself entirely convinced by the 
 criticisms of his friends, acknowledged that his previous works 
 were failures, and undertook to keep himself within the bounds
 
 APPEAKANCE OF ' WAVERLEY.' 243 
 
 of probability in the novel of ' Women, or, Pour et Contre.' His 
 heroine Zaira was a great artist of unhappy domestic life, a study 
 of the same kind as Madame de StaeTs ' Corinne' or George Sand's 
 ' Consuelo.' It is not an uncommon type in recent fiction ; Miss 
 Bertha Thomas's 'Violin-Player' is a recent example. Maturin 
 had also a tragedy, 'Bertram,' produced at Drury Lane in 1818, 
 through the influence of Lord Byron, which had the honour of 
 being critically dissected by Coleridge. But he never overcame 
 his tendency to absurd extravagance of expression and wild 
 improbability, though we can understand why it was that the 
 great critics of the time continued to hope that he would tone 
 down. 
 
 Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, Miss Owenson, and the wild Irish 
 boy Maturin were in full swing when ' Waver ley ' appeared in 1814, 
 and was followed at short intervals by a series of novels received 
 with an excitement to which there is hardly a parallel in our litera- 
 ture no parallel at all, if we except the novels of Dickens. It 
 would be absurd to attempt any criticism on the Waverley Novels 
 in a fragment of a lecture, and the chief facts about the reception 
 of them and the life of the great novelist during their composition 
 are doubtless familiar to you all. I have already sketched for you 
 how he laid the foundation for his extraordinary rapidity of pro- 
 duction once he began to write novels. It was not, strictly speak- 
 ing, impromptu writing, as Carlyle tauntingly described it, not 
 impromptu in the sense of being writing without any previous 
 preparation ; it was rapid in virtue of great previous enthusiasm 
 and industry in the accumulation of materials. He could not in 
 so short a space of time have painted the costumes and manners 
 and characters of so many different periods, from the eleventh 
 century to the eighteenth, in Scotland, in England, on the Con- 
 tinent, if his mind had not been full of them before he began to 
 write, and that familiarity had been obtained by years of labour 
 in regions dry as dust to all but the enthusiastic antiquary. 
 Special students of the present day can point to a good many 
 errors of detail in Scott's medievalism, though chiefly on trifling 
 points ; but we must compare his romances with other so-called 
 historical romances before his time, if we are to do justice to the
 
 244 NOVELISTS FROM MRS RADCLIFFE TO BULWER LYTTON. 
 
 extraordinary range of his historical knowledge, quite apart from 
 his genius in reviving the life of the past. Miss Jane Porter's 
 ' Scottish Chiefs ' was one of the first historical novels produced 
 in this century, and the lady was always proud of having set the 
 example to Scott ; but there is very little real local colour in her 
 account of the adventures of Wallace and Bruce there is hardly 
 an attempt made to keep to historical probability. You will find 
 in the introductions which he wrote for his novels shortly before his 
 death an account of the actual incidents that suggested the various 
 plots ; but he would have had to go back over his life to his boy- 
 hood, when he devoured every history he could lay his hands on, 
 in order to trace the origin of the resources that enabled him to 
 clothe with such richness of costume and incident the bare skeleton 
 of story that served him as a starting-point. It would seem that 
 it was almost an accident that he did not begin writing prose 
 romances before his metrical tales ; and he humorously observes 
 in the introduction to 'Waverley' that if his readers were in- 
 clined to complain of his fertility in novel-writing, they had 
 reason to congratulate themselves that he was comparatively 
 advanced in life before he began. He did make two begin- 
 nings, one in 1800 and another in 1805, of which you will find 
 an account in the introduction to 'Waverley'; but he threw them 
 aside for one reason or another. It was the success of Miss Edge- 
 Avorth's Irish tales, he tells us, that finally determined him to try 
 to do for the people and scenery of Scotland what she had done 
 for Ireland. 
 
 You all know the great calamity of Scott's life, the heroic 
 courage with which he faced it, and the amazing power with 
 which he laboured cheerfully to retrieve his misfortune. You 
 know how he connected himself with the printing and publishing 
 business of the Ballantynes and Constable; how in 1826, after 
 earning unexampled sums by his novels, he found himself in- 
 volved in liabilities to the amount of ^170,000; and how he 
 set himself to clear off this enormous load, toiling from morning 
 till night till paralysis came upon him, and he broke down in the 
 struggle, not, however, till he had accomplished the object of his 
 honourable determination. His ambition had been very different
 
 CURIOUS STATISTICS ANENT NOVEL-WRITING. 245 
 
 in his prosperous days, to found another great territorial family of 
 Scotts ; but he laboured for the five years that his powers lasted 
 with even greater energy to redeem his name from the fancied dis- 
 grace of a debt that was not of his own contracting. You know 
 also that he did not avow the authorship of the Waverley Novels 
 till this misfortune overtook him. 
 
 At first he was afraid of his reputation as a poet, and afterwards 
 he kept up the disguise from no definite reason, but simply because 
 he liked it. He did not like to appear in society as a literary 
 lion, and he delighted in having a secret all to himself, and in 
 being the centre of a mystery. Carlyle's fierce criticism of the 
 novels was that they were not profitable for doctrine, for reproof, 
 for edification, for building up or elevating in any shape. Scott, 
 as Carlyle said, certainly gave by his novels immense pleasure to 
 indolent and languid readers, but he also brought all classes of 
 readers together by his sympathetic delineations of characters in 
 humble life. No novelist in any century has exercised a more 
 healthy and beneficial influence. 
 
 Professor Masson has collected some curious statistics showing 
 the enormous impulse given to novel-writing by the success of the 
 Waverley Novels. In 1820, when they were at the* height of their 
 popularity, the number published, or received at the British 
 Museum, was 26, an average of one every fortnight. Ten years 
 later, when the series was nearly finished, in 1830, the number 
 received was 101, nearly an average of two a-week. And it would 
 appear from the British Museum Catalogue that the average has 
 been pretty steadily maintained since. I doubt, however, whether 
 the authorities of the Museum have always been careful to avail 
 themselves of their rights, for in several cases, having occasion to 
 see if possible the first editions of various novels, I have found, 
 rather to my surprise, that a novel is represented there by an 
 edition issued years after its first publication. 
 
 Among the host of novel-writers who made their first appearance 
 in the ten years after the date of ' Waverley,' the three of most 
 marked originality and distinction were women, Miss Ferrier, 
 Mrs Shelley, and Miss Mitford. Even after Scott, Miss Ferrier 
 found something fresh in the humorous observation of Scottish
 
 246 NOVELISTS FROM MRS RADCLIFFE TO BULWEtt LYTTON. 
 
 character. We have seen how he compared his own bow-wow 
 style with the more realistic modern art of Miss Austen, and 
 envied her power of entering into the humour of ordinary respect- 
 able characters. Miss Terrier had the gift which he lacked, and 
 exercised it with great felicity in her novels of ' Marriage ' and 
 ' The Inheritance.' 
 
 Mrs Shelley, the daughter of William Godwin, himself a novelist 
 of considerable repute at the end of the eighteenth century, wrote 
 only one novel, but the conception was so original and unique 
 that it is not likely to be soon forgotton. This was ' Franken- 
 stein.' It appeared in 1818, and had the honour of being reviewed 
 by Scott, who found time for all sorts of miscellaneous literary 
 work even when his greatest novels were on the anvil. Mrs 
 Shelley boldly accepted Horace Walpole's idea of taking the 
 utmost licence as regarded probability of incident, concentrating 
 her power upon imagining how her hero felt and acted in his 
 supernatural circumstances. The hero was a German student who 
 had by unwearied vigils discovered the secret of imparting life to 
 inanimate matter; and who constructed a gigantic monster and 
 was terribly persecuted by his own creation. 
 
 Very different in character was the work of Miss Mitford, one 
 of the most delightful and natural and genially humorous writers 
 in the language. Her sketches of life in ' Our Village,' of the 
 "Talking Lady," the "Talking Gentleman," of poachers, seam- 
 stresses, domestic servants, young men and old men of local note, 
 remain, after half a century of imitations, as fresh as if they had 
 been written yesterday. No human being ever had a cheerier 
 or more sympathetic outlook on the world. Her sympathies, with 
 a certain waywardness, turned rather towards characters that the 
 respectable world frowns upon, with lawless good-hearted characters 
 and coquettish beauties. She liked to show the good side of such 
 beings to the world. Like Miss Edgeworth, she had a father, but 
 a very different father from the energetic, inventive, philanthropic, 
 restless squire of Edgeworthstown. Dr Mitford was an "awful 
 dad," a scapegrace who spent his wife's fortune in a few years, 
 ran rapidly through a lottery prize which his little girl had the 
 good fortune to draw, and in his old age subsisted on the small
 
 RISE OF THE FASHIONABLE NOVEL. 247 
 
 remnant of his fortune and the proceeds of his daughter's literary 
 industry. Yet his daughter adored him, and took infinite delight 
 in his "friskings," as she called his little eccentricities, living in a 
 small house that was a lesson in condensation, refusing all holiday 
 invitations from her wealthy relations, never stopping in her 
 literary work except to read the sporting newspaper to the grace- 
 less companion who called her his " mamma," and was the stay, 
 support, and admiration of all the loafers in the neighbourhood. 
 Miss Mitford's early ambition was to be " the greatest English 
 poetess," and when she was little more than twenty her metrical 
 tales were praised by Scott in the ' Quarterly,' while some years 
 later tragedies from her pen were highly successful at Covent 
 Garden. The short tales and sketches collected under the title of 
 ' Our Village ' were written originally for a magazine, purely for 
 the supply of the household, and yet they brought her more enduring 
 fame than her poetry. They had an influence on the early manner 
 of Dickens, and may almost be said to have founded a school of 
 periodical sketch-writing. 
 
 The natural result of the interest created in authorship by Scott 
 and Byron in fashionable society was the rise of a school of fashion- 
 able novelists. This was the chief literary phenomenon of the last 
 five years of the reign of George IV., the last five years of our 
 period. Of the fashionable novels then in fresh repute only two 
 are now much remembered, Disraeli's ' Vivian Grey ' and Bulwer 
 Lytton's 'Pelham.' But there was a large cluster of them, all 
 with something of the same character, and that something new. 
 The authors were men moving in the society which they attempted 
 to describe. Up to that time fashionable life had been described 
 by women ; now the young dandies sucking diplomatists, poli- 
 ticians, and statesmen seized upon the novel as a dramatic vehicle 
 for conveying their views on the manners of society and the affairs 
 of the State. It is an interesting thing for the historian to have 
 had the inner life of political society so copiously described before 
 the Reform Bill, which produced such a change in the political 
 power of the upper hundreds: we have vividly depicted in the 
 pages of these novels the old state of things, and we are brought
 
 248 NOVELISTS FROM MRS RADCLIFFE TO BULWER LYTTON. 
 
 into immediate contact with the ardent fiery spirit of the young 
 ambitions that were awakened by the prospect of change. ' Vivian 
 Grey ' and ' Pelham ' have been kept alive by the subsequent 
 reputation of their authors ; but there were three other authors 
 who fairly shared with them the applause of contemporaries. Mr 
 Plumer Ward's ' Tremaine, or, The Man of Refinement,' was the 
 first of the series ; then followed Mr Lister's ' Granby ' ; then side 
 by side Disraeli and Bulwer and Lord Normanby.
 
 249 
 
 CHAPTEE XIX. 
 
 SHELLEY AND KEATS. 
 
 SHELLEY VARIOUS CONCEPTIONS OF THE POET CHARACTER KEATS THE 
 REVIEWERS CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS POETRY " ENDYMION " AND 
 "HYPERION." 
 
 THE common judgment of Shelley, at least as expressed in literary 
 organs, lias undergone a complete revolution since he was a living 
 man. Nobody now would venture to publish an article about 
 Shelley without copious protestations of admiration for the poet, 
 whatever the opinion might be expressed about his conduct as a 
 man. To acknowledge indifference to his poetry would be to set 
 one's self against an overwhelming weight of authoritative opinion. 
 To deny him equal rank with any poet of his generation would be 
 heresy. Enjoyment of Shelley is often put forward as a test of 
 poetic sensibility : if Shelley does not delight you, you are set down 
 as not being capable of knowing what poetry is. He is now par 
 excellence the poet's poet. 
 
 But it was otherwise when his poems first appeared. He received 
 hardly a word of cordial recognition from any critical organ of 
 authority, except from his friend Leigh Hunt's journal the ' Ex- 
 aminer.' The potentates and powers of criticism the ' Quarterly,' 
 the ' Edinburgh Review,' ' Blackwood's,' and the ' Literary Gazette ' 
 were unanimous in derision and denunciation. That such stuff 
 as " Alastor " and " The Revolt of Islam " should pretend to be 
 poetry was hailed as one of the most ludicrous pretensions in 
 an age fertile in ludicrous literary pretensions. It was a mere 
 incoherent farce of meaningless imagery, a collection of lines
 
 250 SHELLEY AND KEATS. 
 
 pretty enough in themselves, but the most hollow of emptinesses ; 
 mere sound and fury, signifying nothing. In so far as any 
 meaning was discernible through the iridescent vapour of words, 
 the critics did not like it. The poet's designs, in so far 'as they 
 could be made out, were immoral, anarchic, atheistic ; whenever he 
 deviated into intelligibility, it was to rave against all law and 
 order, human and divine, to rave with fierce shrill hysterical 
 vituperation against all that other men held sacred. There were 
 reports also, which the critics did not fail to publicly notice, about 
 his private conduct, which accounted for his mad rebellion against 
 established order. It was said that he was a young man who had 
 been expelled from Oxford for an atheistic publication ; that he 
 had married a schoolgirl and deserted her, with the result that she 
 committed suicide ; and that he had persuaded another young girl 
 of sixteen to run away with him while his first wife was still alive. 
 In short, the poetry was effeminate, hysterical, and contemptible, 
 in so far as it was not dangerous and unsettling ; while the poet 
 himself was a disreputable profligate, against whom all respectable 
 persons should set their faces. 
 
 Such was the conception of Shelley which all readers of the lead- 
 ing organs of public opinion in his generation were invited to 
 entertain. As far as his poetry was concerned, not a little of the 
 animus against it was due to its strangeness, its novelty, its un- 
 likeness to anything that had been published before in verse. 
 Even if the circumstances had been favourable to its receiving a 
 fair judgment as poetry, we may well doubt whether on its first 
 appearance the critics would not have treated it as a flock of birds 
 might treat a new - comer in gorgeous but unfamiliar plumage. 
 We must remember, also, that Shelley's first noticeable works, 
 "Alastor" and "The Revolt of Islam," were deficient in many of 
 the great qualities of his later works, and were justly liable to the 
 reproach of incoherent copiousness and obscurity. But there were 
 accidental circumstances calculated to strengthen any prejudice 
 that might be against Shelley's poetry, based on its own intrinsic 
 defects and difficulties. The literary world was divided more 
 sharply than at any time before or since into hostile factions, and 
 provincial and political enmities were allowed to bias literary 
 judgments to a degree of flagrancy now almost incredible. There
 
 THE VARIOUS CLIQUES OF CRITICS. 251 
 
 was the ' Edinburgh Eeview ' clique under the banner of Jeffrey, 
 and the ' Blackwood ' clique under the banner of Wilson, and the 
 ' Quarterly' clique under the banner of Gifford, and the ' Examiner' 
 clique under the banner of Leigh Hunt. Men like Scott and 
 Byron, with their bold, direct, intelligible address to the great 
 body of readers, swept past these guardians of the gates of the 
 Temple of Fame straight to their destination. But if a poet 
 was not easily understood by the multitude, if he needed an in- 
 terpreter or a sponsor, or a kindly word of introduction, and had 
 not friends in more than one camp, praise from one quarter was 
 more than likely to awaken hostility in every other. There was a 
 jealousy between Edinburgh and London, of which any new as- 
 pirant might be made the victim. Hard things were said in the 
 London organs about the Scottish critics, and the Scottish critics, 
 proud of the renown of Modern Athens, asserted themselves in 
 violent denunciation of everything Cockney. No words were too 
 bitterly contemptuous for the Cockney school of poetry : they had 
 an ideal Cockney in their minds, compounded of vulgarity, bad 
 taste, effusive sentimentality, affected prettiness, and they poured 
 the vials of their scornful mockery upon every poem published in 
 London in which there was a suspicion of these qualities. Then 
 there was a political jealousy between Tory, Whig, and Radical, in 
 the interests of which a new poem was sharply scrutinised and 
 cordially welcomed or denounced according to the creed of the 
 reviewer. The ' Quarterly ' and ' Blackwood's,' the champions of 
 Toryism, and the ' Edinburgh,' the champion of Whiggery, had 
 an almost equally keen scent for a revolutionary. Any discontent 
 with the established order of things, beyond such discontent as 
 was recognised in the Whig programme, was sure to draw down 
 from the ' Quarterly ' and ' Blackwood's ' a charge of Jacobinism, 
 atheism, and infidelity, and to ensure that the ' Edinburgh ' should 
 either join in the cry or pass over in silence the work in which the 
 dangerous doctrines appeared. The situation was still further 
 complicated by purely literary factions, factions based on difference 
 of literary creed. By 1818, the reverence for the traditions of the 
 eighteenth century had been rudely shaken ; but there were still 
 among the critics a good many who shook their heads over modern 
 innovations and sighed for the good old style. The new edition of
 
 252 SHELLEY AND KEATS. 
 
 Pope had given an occasion for comparing the old with the new, 
 and Gifford of the ' Quarterly ' was a bigoted, hard, and vehement 
 supporter of Pope, ever ready to launch out with all his energy of 
 invective against unexpected novelties. Now Shelley had the mis- 
 fortune to concentrate on his person the lightnings of no less than 
 three great factions. Before he published " Alastor " he had con- 
 nected himself publicly with Leigh Hunt, the leader and founder 
 of the so-called Cockney school, so that Shelley, like Keats, who 
 made his first essay about the same time, was regarded as a new 
 development of Cockneyism. He spoke with daring disrespect 
 of venerable institutions, and so incurred the wrath of all the 
 literary organs of respectability. And in his method he departed 
 more widely than any previous poet from the concise epigrammatic 
 reasonable style of Pope, so that all who had leanings in that 
 direction were doubly scandalised by his extravagances. 
 
 The fullest expression of Shelley's character is to be found, of 
 course, in his poetry ; but if that puzzles you, there is much that 
 may be cleared up by a reference to his letters e.g., a selection of 
 them recently published by Garnett ; ' Essays and Letters from 
 Abroad,' by Mrs Shelley ; ' Memorials of Shelley,' by Lady Shel- 
 ley ; ' Records of Byron, Shelley, and his Contemporaries,' by 
 Trelawney. The letters are masterpieces of expression, frank, 
 candid, really letters, and yet so perfect in style that Mr Matthew 
 Arnold expects the reputation of them to be even more enduring 
 than his poetry. 
 
 The key-note of Shelley's character, his ruling motive, was an ex- 
 cessively sensitive hatred of everything in the shape of harshness, 
 tyranny, injustice, carried to extremes that to an ordinary mind 
 appears fantastic and insane. Such sensitiveness is not rare among 
 men when their own interests are touched, but Shelley's resent- 
 ment took a much wider range than a morbid instinct of self- 
 defence. He could not bear the thought of the existence of op- 
 pression anywhere under the sun; the thought of such a thing 
 maddened him, and kindled his energies to be up and doing at 
 once for its extinction. In his youthful vehemence, he was a 
 stranger to wise patience and slow deliberate calculation of ways 
 and means, and his action, consequently, was not always the best 
 action for the end in view ; but such was his motive, a violent,
 
 SENSITIVENESS OF SHELLEY. 253 
 
 furious dislike to wrong- doing. Himself one of the gentlest of 
 creatures, playful, affectionate, beloved by all who knew him, he 
 was capable, under this intolerable spur, of behaving with the fury 
 of a demon. Nothing could be further from the truth than repre- 
 senting Shelley as inspired by a blind hatred of all law and order, 
 a violent assailant of established institutions because they inter- 
 fered with the pleasure of following his own will, because they in- 
 terposed checks between him and the execution of wayward, capri- 
 cious, whimsical impulses. It was the excesses committed in the 
 name of law and order that he could not endure ; the cruelties 
 sanctioned by established institutions that drove him into revolt 
 against them. Law and order and established institutions offended 
 him, not by their spirit but by the delinquencies and transgres- 
 sions of their accredited ministers, many of whom, in the history 
 of the world, have not merely fallen short of ideal righteousness, 
 but, under the protection of sacred names, have in small things 
 and in great committed shameful offences against humanity. It 
 was the defect of Shelley's temperament that he was almost in- 
 sanely sensitive to harshness and cruelty of conduct, not with a 
 shrinking sensitiveness but with the sensitiveness that flamed 
 out in fiery indignation, the sensitiveness of a man who came of 
 the high-spirited chivalrous race of the Sidneys. This spirit 
 was the ruling principle of his conduct in small things as well as 
 in great, and led him into some eccentricities that appear merely 
 ludicrous to the ordinary mind, and into one eccentricity which, 
 viewed in the light of its tragic consequences, has the appearance 
 of a scandalous crime. For example, he would not drink tea with 
 his sugar, because sugar was the produce of slave-labour ; and he 
 ate nothing but vegetable food, because he believed that man had 
 no right to kill and eat the lower animals. When he was a boy 
 at Eton he rebelled against the system of fagging, which was much 
 abused by youthful bullies. To this he alludes in the often- 
 quoted stanzas in the dedication of his " Revolt of Islam " : 
 
 ' ' Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first 
 The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass. 
 I do remember well the hour which burst 
 My spirit's sleep : a fresh May-dawn it was, 
 When I walked forth upon the glittering grass,
 
 254 SIIELLEY AND KEATS. 
 
 And wept, I knew not why ; until there rose 
 From the near schoolroom, voices, that, alas ! 
 Were but an echo from the world of woes 
 The hard and grating strife of tyrants and of foes. 
 
 And then I clasped my hands and looked around 
 But none was near to mock my streaming eyes, 
 Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground 
 So without shame I spake, ' I will be wise, 
 And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies 
 Such power, for I grow weary to behold 
 The selfish and the strong still tyrannise 
 Without reproach or check. ' I then controlled 
 My tears ; my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold." 
 
 It is a common statement that Shelley was expelled from Ox- 
 ford to which he was transferred from Eton at the age of nine- 
 teen, in 1811 for publishing a tract in defence of Atheism. But 
 this would appear to be not strictly correct. What he did was to 
 issue a tract containing certain propositions maintained by Atheists, 
 and to invite the Heads of College in Oxford to answer them, 
 an invitation which they met, as De Quincey puts it, by " invit- 
 ing " the unpractical enthusiast to withdraw from the University. 
 Undoubtedly the great stain upon Shelley's life is his treatment of 
 his first wife, Harriet Westbrook. There are papers in the hands 
 of the Shelley family that have not yet been published, but which 
 are said to reconcile his behaviour with the high and honourable 
 spirit that he showed in all other circumstances. This much is 
 already clear, that it was his chivalrous generosity that first 
 connected him with the girl whose subsequent fate was so tragic. 
 
 Those who seek to defend Shelley's conduct to his wife on the 
 ground that he was an ethereal impulsive creature, a visionary 
 child too much wrapt up in his visions to be fit for ordinary human 
 duties or to be judged by any ordinary standard of right and 
 wrong, a being so good, so gentle, yet so fragile and so child- 
 ishly eccentric in his impulses, that the heart shrinks from holding 
 him responsible for the harmful consequences of impulses so devoid 
 of malicious intention, and judgment is suspended in wondering 
 pity such defenders do great injustice to the fundamental 
 strength of the poet's character, and interpose an obstacle to 
 the understanding of his greater poems. He was a visionary, in-
 
 SHELLEY'S VIEW OF LIFE. 255 
 
 deed, but not an aimless and drifting visionary ; the dreamer's eyes 
 were fixed steadily, constantly upon one vision, the struggle be- 
 tween good and evil in the world, the vicissitudes of this struggle, 
 and the final triumph of good. He read history; he observed 
 life ; but wherever he turned his eyes all the actions of mankind 
 presented themselves as moves in the terrible game between these 
 opposing principles. The centre of interest for him in the world- 
 drama was the protracted duel between good and evil. This view 
 of life was natural in a generation perplexed and disturbed by the 
 staggering events of the French Revolution and the world-wide 
 ambition of Napoleon. The great problems of human destiny were 
 forced upon all the reflective minds of the time, and Shelley's na- 
 ture was not merely profoundly meditative, but deeply interested 
 in the issue, and passionately eager for a solution. A knowledge 
 of his character and of his view of life is indispensable to the un- 
 derstanding of such poems as "Alastor," and "The Revolt of 
 Islam," and " Prometheus Unbound." Without this simple key 
 they must always appear meaningless rhapsodies, incoherent mazes 
 of sweet sound and beautiful imagery, without beginning, middle, 
 or end, capricious ethereal movements of fancy and imagination 
 leading nowhere. You cannot open their pages anywhere without 
 being enchanted with the wonderful melody and affluence of 
 imagery, of which critics labour in vain to give any idea, by piling 
 up all the epithets that belong to whatever is most charming in 
 poetic creation. But this wonderful procession of forms to the 
 music of most melodious verse is not so aimless as it appears at 
 first to the dazzled senses ; it has a meaning and a direction even 
 in its most seemingly capricious movements. The poet does not 
 address the senses but the understanding heart. Concerning " The 
 Revolt of Islam," Shelley himself said, in answer to a letter from 
 his friend Godwin censuring its exuberance : " The poem was pro-' 
 duced by a series of thoughts which filled my mind with un- 
 bounded and sustained enthusiasm. I felt the precariousness of 
 my life, and I resolved in this book to leave some records of my- 
 self. Much of what the volume contains was written with the 
 same feeling, as real though not so prophetic, as the communica- 
 tions of a dying man. ... I felt that it was in many respects a 
 genuine picture of my own mind. I felt that the sentiments were
 
 256 SHELLEY AND KEATS. 
 
 true, not assumed; and in this I have long believed that my 
 power consists in sympathy, and that part of imagination which 
 relates to sentiment and contemplation." 
 
 The lofty strain in which " Alastor " opens gives us an idea of 
 the intense passion with which he composed his poetry : 
 
 " Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood ! 
 If our great Mother has imbued my soul 
 With aught of natural piety to feel 
 Your love, and recompense the boon with mine ; 
 If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even, 
 With sunset and its gorgeous minsters, 
 And solemn midnight's tingling silentness ; 
 If autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood, 
 And winter robing with pure snow and crowns 
 Of starry ice the grey grass and bare boughs ; 
 If spring's voluptuous pantiugs when she breathes 
 Her first sweet kisses, have been dear to me ; 
 If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast 
 I consciously have injured, but still loved 
 And cherished these my kindred ; then forgive 
 This boast, beloved brethren, and withdraw 
 No portion of your wonted favour now ! " 
 
 The poem, in short, is an allegory. Like all intricate alle- 
 gories, it is difficult to interpret, and the difficulty is increased 
 by the fact that the allegory is not, as in the case of Spenser's 
 ' Faery Queen ' or Tennyson's Idylls, a separate stream of story, 
 complete and intelligible in itself, but a stream that is often inter- 
 posed with the realities that it is intended to represent. Its full 
 interpretation in every particular is perhaps impossible, because 
 the poet was intent only upon the expression of his own thought 
 and feeling, and to understand every turn of this we should have 
 to read the histories that he read, see the sights that he saw, and 
 track him through his study of the speculations of his time : but 
 the general drift of the allegory is obvious enough, if we only rec- 
 ognise it as a vision of the vicissitudes of the struggle between 
 good and evil, in which sometimes the apparent triumphs of good 
 become the most terrible instruments of evil, and sometimes the 
 triumphs of evil become beneficent instruments of good, while in 
 the end the principle of good is victorious. " Alastor," " The Re- 
 volt of Islam," and " Prometheus " are all poetic embodiments of
 
 "STANZAS WRITTEN IN DEJECTION." 257 
 
 the same view of the history of man and the same ardent hopes 
 for his future. I would remind you again of the Wordsworthian 
 theory of poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, 
 and of what I said as to the height and intricacy of the structure 
 that the imagination may raise at the original bidding of the 
 simplest of emotional motives. If Byron interpreted Wordsworth 
 to the multitude, Shelley may be said to have interpreted him to 
 those who make poetry a study. 
 
 Among his shorter poems you will find some of the most ex- 
 quisite poetry in the language, the " Ode to the West Wind," 
 for example, being held by many to be the finest English lyric. 
 The " Stanzas written in Dejection " might be cited as another 
 example, the concluding lines of which are exquisitely beautiful 
 and pathetic : 
 
 " Alas ! I have nor hope, nor health, 
 Nor peace within, nor calm around, 
 Nor that content, surpassing wealth, 
 The sage in meditation found, 
 And walked with inward glory crowned 
 Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure. 
 Others I see whom these surround 
 Smiling they live and call life pleasure ; 
 To me that cup has been dealt in another measure. 
 
 Yet now despair itself is mild, 
 Even as the winds and waters are ; 
 I could lie down like a tired child, 
 And weep away the life of care 
 Which I have borne and yet must bear, 
 Till death like sleep might steal on me, 
 And I might feel in the warm air 
 My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea 
 Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony. 
 
 Some might lament that I were cold, 
 As I, when this sweet clay is gone, 
 Which my lost heart, too soon grown old, 
 Insults with this untimely moan ; 
 They might lament for I am one 
 Whom men love not and yet regret, 
 Unlike this day, which, when the sun 
 Shall on its stainless glory set, 
 
 Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet." 
 R
 
 258 SHELLEY AND KEATS. 
 
 You need not be frightened by occasional passages in Shelley's 
 poetry of denunciation of things you admire. No true Christian 
 need fear to read Shelley. He did not denounce the spirit of 
 Christianity, but excesses committed in the course of the history 
 of the Church and its connection with political creeds. 
 
 Shelley died young, before he had completed his thirtieth year ; 
 but Keats, who was three years his junior, died before him. The 
 belief fixed in the public mind by Byron's line 
 
 " John Keats, who was cut off by one critique "- 
 
 is only a half-truth, if it is any portion of the truth at all. The 
 disease to which he succumbed, pulmonary consumption, would 
 probably have cut him off at an early age, whatever the reception 
 of his poetry had been. Unfriendly criticism at the utmost 
 only hastened his end. Certainly the criticism was very savage. 
 Keats suffered from the same accidents in the literary situation 
 as Shelley ; he was a friend of Hunt's, and a Cockney, and a 
 rebel against the traditions of Pope, and these facts intensified 
 the bitterness of the 'Quarterly' and 'Blackwood's.' And his 
 assailants had a taunt to level at him such as they could not 
 use against the son of a baronet, connected by blood with some 
 of the oldest noble families in England; "Johnny" Keats, as 
 ' Blackwood's ' delighted to call him, had been a surgeon's ap- 
 prentice, and was the son of a livery-stable keeper. Keats had 
 too much manliness in him to have been much affected by the 
 truculence of his critics, if he had been a self-satisfied poet. But 
 the effect was aggravated not only by ill-health and pecuniary 
 embarrassments, but by his profound dissatisfaction with his own 
 work. He said himself, and with every appearance of sincerity, 
 that a sense of his shortcomings from the high ideal that he 
 had set to himself gave him " pain without comparison beyond 
 what ' Blackwood ' or the ' Quarterly ' could possibly inflict." " I 
 have no cause to complain," he wrote. " I have no doubt that 
 if I had written ' Othello ' I should have been cheered. I shall 
 go on with patience. ... I know nothing ; I have read nothing ; 
 and I mean to follow Solomon's directions, 'get learning, get 
 understanding.' There is but one way for me. The road lies
 
 DIFFERENT AIMS OF THE TWO POETS. 259 
 
 through application, study, and thought. I will pursue it." 
 These were the words of a young man of a very different fibre 
 from the affected, mawkish, puling sentimentalist pictured by 
 the critics of the time as the author of "Endymion." Keats 
 had but a short lease of life before him when he wrote thus, 
 but to the last he pursued earnestly his ideals of excellence, 
 and the world has arrived at a very different measure of the 
 worth of his performance from that formed by himself on his 
 death-bed, when he told his friend Severn to put on his grave- 
 stone the inscription, "Here lies one whose name was writ in 
 water." 
 
 Keats is often coupled with Shelley as if they were poets of 
 kindred genius. But the connection between them was purely 
 accidental : beyond a certain profusion and fluency and richness 
 of imagery they had little in common, as little as any two poets 
 of the same generation. They both died young. They both 
 died in Italy, and their monuments stand in the same cemetery 
 at Rome. Both of them were cut off with much unfulfilled 
 promise of great things. When Shelley's body was recovered, 
 a copy of Keats's " Endymion " was found in his pocket. One 
 of Shelley's few popular poems is the lament for Keats under 
 the pastoral name of Adonais. These facts have associated the 
 two poets in the general memory. But their aims in art were 
 widely different. Keats had none of Shelley's fiery enthusiasm 
 for humanity ; and although he had an ample share of the poet's 
 peculiar gift of making new combinations, his combinations are 
 more sensuous they have not the subtle intellectual flavour of 
 Shelley's. A poet of high rank is always his own best critic, 
 and just as Shelley most truly characterised himself when he 
 said that " his power consisted in sympathy and that part of 
 imagination which relates to sentiment and contemplation," so 
 Keats most truly characterised himself when he said that his 
 ruling principle was "a yearning passion for the beautiful." "I 
 have loved the principle of beauty in all things," he wrote in 
 his last days. I am inclined to think that Mr Matthew Arnold, 
 a critic with whose judgments I rarely find myself in dissent, 
 makes a somewhat misleading remark when he insists that Keats's 
 master-passion was not the passion of the sensuous or sentimental
 
 260 SHELLEY AND KEATS. 
 
 poet, but was an intellectual or spiritual passion. If the words 
 sensuous and sentimental were intended in an opprobrious sense, 
 the remark might be useful ; but if they are used in the literal 
 meaning, and then contrasted with intellectual and spiritual, 
 their tendency is to withdraw the reader of Keats from the main 
 characteristic of his poetry. The beauty that Keats pursued, 
 whether or not we call that beauty "truth," was loveliness 
 
 " In shape and hue and colour and sweet sound," 
 
 to use the words of Shelley in the "Adonais." I imagine that 
 Mr Arnold's intention in drawing the distinction that I have 
 quoted was to lay stress on the fact that the loveliness on which 
 Keats' s heart was set was not a meretricious loveliness, but a 
 loveliness that was great and noble and pure. Still it was a 
 sensuous loveliness in this meaning, that more than any other 
 poet he aimed at and succeeded in depicting in words the beauty 
 that painters put on canvas and sculptors chisel in marble. It 
 is peculiarly easy to trace the main external influences that 
 moulded Keats's poetry, because all his work was done in youth, 
 when the enthusiastic admirations of the artist are most marked 
 in endeavours to emulate what he admires. And it is a marked 
 peculiarity of Keats's poetry that its most vital moulding in- 
 fluences came not from the work of previous poets but from the 
 sister arts of painting and sculpture. Impassioned admiration 
 of Greek sculpture gave a more potent turn to Keats's poetry 
 than any other external influence. Byron recognised this when 
 he spoke of him as having 
 
 " Without Greek 
 
 Contrived to talk about the gods of late 
 Much as they might have been supposed to speak." 
 
 We see this influence not merely in his famous " Ode on a 
 Grecian Urn," where he deliberately seeks to interpret in words 
 what the artist had sought to design in visible lines, but all 
 through his poems in "Endymion," in "Hyperion," in the "Eve 
 of St Agnes," in " Lamia," in " Isabella." If we wonder what the 
 surgeon's apprentice at Baling could have known about Greek 
 sculpture and ceramic art, we must remember that the Elgin
 
 "INFLUENCE OF THE ELGIN MAEBLES. 261 
 
 Marbles were brought to this country and deposited at the British 
 Museum when he was a boy. You know Byron's denunciation of 
 the nobleman, with heart cold as the crags that guard his native 
 coast, who had the shameless rapacity to plunder Athens of these 
 masterpieces ; but looking impartially at the act and its results, 
 we recognise that they have had a much more vital and suggestive 
 influence on the mind of Europe in London than they would have 
 had in Athens, and they have given us much of what is most 
 precious in the poetry of Keats. One of Keats's friends was the 
 painter Haydon, who records in his autobiography the intoxicating 
 effect produced on him by his first sight of Greek sculpture. 
 " Endymion " and " Hyperion " make it certain that Keats shared 
 his friend's enthusiasm. Let the meaning sink into the mind, and 
 you will see a succession of pictures executed in the spirit of 
 Greek plastic art. In " Endymion " Keats seems always to have 
 had a succession of pictures and sculptures before his mind's eye, 
 and his poetry seems to be the interpretation of the impression he 
 receives. The opening of "Hyperion" and also some of his 
 other poems, such as the " Ode to the Nightingale " and " The 
 Eve of St Agnes " is like the description of a statue, with the 
 repose and stillness of Greek sculpture, which is not a dead still- 
 ness but motion instantaneously arrested.
 
 SUPPLEMENT
 
 I. 
 
 IT is thirty-five years, as every reviewer has remarked, since the 
 edition undertaken by John Wilson Croker and now completed by 
 Mr Courthope was announced ; but the real beginning of the 
 work that Mr Courthope brings to a close may be said to date 
 from the papers by Mr Dilke, of which that announcement was 
 the text. Mr Dilke's discovery of the Caryll letters may be said 
 to have opened a new chapter in the history of Pope's reputation. 
 By this lucky find, followed up with amazing acuteness and 
 patience, Mr Dilke was able to clear up several incidents which 
 had baffled all previous biographers ; and his success and the 
 piquancy of his discoveries gave an immense stimulus to research 
 into the obscure particulars of Pope's life and the obscure allusions 
 in his poetry. Pope's marvellous intellectual activity and ingen- 
 uity, and his persistent habit of mystification in everything re- 
 lating to himself, made his life and works the best possible field 
 for the exercise of detective skill. By all this the edition now 
 completed has profited. But for Mr Dilke's researches, and the 
 impulse they gave to investigation, it could never have been what 
 it has become. Mr Elwin, Mr Courthope's predecessor, made the 
 most ample acknowledgment of his debt to this enthusiastic vol- 
 unteer from the outside ; and now one of the main interests of 
 the biography which it has fallen to Mr Courthope to execute is 
 to see how he views Pope's character under the fierce light that 
 has been thrown upon it. The new biographer is in the position
 
 266 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 of a judge hearing an important case reopened after the discovery 
 and production of a vast and intricate mass of fresh evidence. 
 
 The importance of Mr Courthope's decision is considerable. 
 The completeness of the new edition must make it the standard 
 for a good while to come, and the accompanying biography has 
 thus a position of great advantage for influencing the general 
 judgment of Pope's character. It is just as well that the bio- 
 graphy should have been delayed till the disturbing effects of the 
 new discoveries had passed away, and that the task of judicially 
 weighing and summing up should have fallen to one whose judg- 
 ment has not been biassed by the first shock of damaging revel- 
 ations, and whose temper has not been exasperated by the worry 
 of tracking the man of many mysteries through the perplexing 
 details of his subtle little plots and manoeuvres. It is just as well 
 that Mr Elwin's place was taken by Mr Courthope before the 
 stage of passing final judgment was reached. Mr Elwin had 
 great merits as a critic ; it would be most unjust not to acknow- 
 ledge the excellence of his editorial work. He spared no pains 
 in research ; he passed over no difficulty ; and he took as much 
 trouble to make his statements clear and concise as he did to 
 make his information accurate. In his notes and introductions 
 he gave a very fair and full representation of the commentaries of 
 previous authorities. His own judgments on critical points were 
 perhaps too uniformly hostile and unsympathetic ; but they could 
 never be accused of haste, and they were always backed by well 
 considered and closely expressed reasons. Perhaps an unfair im- 
 pression of his want of sympathy was given by his having to deal 
 chiefly with Pope's earlier and more imperfect work : when he did 
 admire, as in the case of " The Eape of the Lock," he expressed 
 his admiration ungrudgingly. But in all that concerned the 
 moral character of his subject Mr Elwin wrote too much as a 
 righteously indignant avenger, as one who had been disgusted by 
 the discoveries of Pope's double-dealings, and whose anger had 
 been kept alive by having to track his tortuous courses through 
 so many perplexing circumstances. Pope had endeavoured to 
 pass off a sophisticated correspondence as genuine, and the inter- 
 ests of truth demanded that the deception should be exposed. 
 "I do not pretend to think," Mr Elwin said, "that genius is an
 
 MR COURTHOPE'S BIOGRAPHY OF POPE. 267 
 
 extenuation of rascality ; " and it was as a rascal, a detected and 
 discredited impostor, a gentleman who had stooped to the arts of 
 a professional forger and swindler, that he pursued the poet 
 through all his dealings with friends and enemies, publications 
 and publishers. Pope cannot protest his goodwill to an acquaint- 
 ance in the exaggerated fashion of his time without drawing 
 down upon himself the comment, " At the age of twenty, when 
 frankness usually preponderates, Pope already abounded in the 
 ostentatious profession of sentiments he did not entertain." In 
 the same letter Pope professes indifference to fame a not un- 
 common profession, and one not often taken too seriously by the 
 discerning. "In spite of his boasted apathy," Mr Elwin com- 
 ments, " there cannot be found in the annals of the irritable race 
 a more anxious, jealous, intriguing candidate for fame." And 
 so on. One tires of it after a time, and begins to doubt 
 whether it is generous, or even just, or at all proportioned to 
 the offence. 
 
 No doubt when an intriguer is found out, it is well to make an 
 example of him pour encourager les autres. But Mr Elwin carries 
 it too far in the case of Pope. He strikes a note of excess, and a 
 misleading note, when he speaks of Pope as "an intriguing candi- 
 date for fame." The intrigues in which Pope has been detected 
 do not belong to the time when he can properly be said to h<a,ve 
 been a candidate for fame ; they were engaged in long after his 
 fame was established, partly to humiliate his enemies, and partly to 
 gain credit for a universal benevolence and lofty equanimity of soul 
 which he did not possess. He gained his fame originally by 
 honest means enough, purely on his merits, in spite of the consider- 
 able disadvantages of obscure parentage and unpopular religion. 
 Rascality and swindling are not excused by genius ; deception is 
 deception, and perfidy is perfidy. But what Mr Elwin seemed to 
 forget was that there are degrees of moral turpitude. One may 
 hold this without incurring any suspicion of Jesuitical ethics. 
 Our righteous indignation does not rise to the same height against 
 all offences that may be put in the same general category. False- 
 hood is falsehood, but there are degrees. A man who tries to 
 swindle the world out of its good opinion, to make people believe 
 him full of "the unclouded effulgence of universal benevolence
 
 268 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 and particular fondness," with no motive but sheer vanity and 
 inordinate love of applause, cannot without violence to common 
 sense be put on the same moral level with the professional forger. 
 Nine people out of ten who read the full narrative of Pope's frauds 
 are more disposed to laugh at the ingenuity and fatuity of his 
 tricks than to denounce them in angry reprobation. They are 
 inexcusable and disgraceful, but taken in all their circumstances, 
 as incidents in the life of a man otherwise memorable, they are 
 nearer peccadilloes than crimes. A year or two ago, in writing a 
 short sketch of Pope's life for an encyclopaedia, I hazarded the 
 opinion that when all the new revelations of Pope's intriguing 
 habits are fairly weighed, his character remains where Johnson 
 left it, neither better nor worse. " In all this," Johnson remarks 
 of one of Pope's manoeuvres about " The Dunciad," " there was 
 petulance and malignity enough, but I cannot think it very 
 criminal." The remark might be extended to most of the fresh 
 instances of double-dealing. In judging of them it is well to bear 
 in mind the maxim which the great moralist quoted as one " that 
 cannot be denied," that "moral obliquity is made more or less 
 excusable by the motives that produce it." It is satisfactory to 
 find that Mr Courthope approaches Pope in the spirit of Johnson 
 ratlier than of Mr Elwin. - 
 
 Mr Courthope does not try to extenuate or explain away Pope's 
 moral delinquencies, but to put them in their proper place as parts 
 of a very complex character. The result is that he brings us back 
 to a judgment of Pope's moral character not substantially different 
 from Johnson's. The space occupied by Mr Dilke and Mr Elwin 
 in tracing with so much acumen the poet's mysterious ways, and 
 the startling character of their revelations, have overloaded one 
 side of the portrait, and Mr Courthope has been at pains to restore 
 the right proportion. His judicial deliverance will carry none the 
 less weight that all the time he is adducing extenuating circum- 
 stances he protests that he has no intention of excusing or extenu- 
 ating Pope's misdoings, and that " from the moralist's point of 
 view the case must go undefended." The apparent inconsistency 
 is only superficial ; it is merely a nice question of naming. Mr 
 Courthope is quite right to say that he does not excuse or extenu- 
 ate or defend from a moral point of view, if he thinks that the use
 
 MR COURTHOPE'S BIOGRAPHY OF POPE. 269 
 
 of such expressions would imply that we ought to approve in 
 Pope's case of conduct mean and contemptible in itself and un- 
 worthy of his fame. We need not quarrel about words, if a 
 biographer observes just proportions in his general estimate of the 
 man's moral nature as a whole, and if he allows due weight to 
 considerations- that prevent us from classing Pope morally with 
 " professional swindlers " and " ' dirty animals ' like Joseph Sur- 
 face." This Mr Courthope does with great ability and fairness. 
 Throughout the biography he gives prominence to the ideal and 
 magnanimous strain in Pope's character as shown both in his 
 private life and in his writings. Since the recent discoveries 
 were made, Johnson has often been laughed at for speaking of 
 " the perpetual and unclouded effulgence of universal benevolence 
 and particular fondness" that shines out in Pope's letters. It 
 has been assumed that all this was mere hypocrisy and pretence, 
 because some of it was put in when he revised and redirected his 
 correspondence, and that there was no such element as benevolence 
 in the malign little poet's disposition. Mr Courthope corrects 
 this. His narrative gives fair prominence to the instances of 
 kindly generosity to dependents and affectionate attachment to 
 friends with which Pope's life abounds. The new letters in the 
 correspondence, the letters that were not prepared for the public 
 eye, are not all to Pope's discredit. Though he did alienate 
 Bolingbroke by an inexplicable trick it was, after all, a little 
 trick he kept the love of most of his friends, and Arbuthnot, a 
 shrewd judge of men, credited him with "a noble disdain and 
 abhorrence of vice." And whatever casuistry may be applied to 
 the incidents of his life, it is not to be denied that the moral 
 standard of his Satires as a whole is high. His praise of the Man 
 of Ross, of Bathurst, of Allen, and of Barnard the Quaker must 
 be set over against Sappho and Atossa, Sporus and Atticus ; there 
 is no good reason to suppose that his admiration of the one was 
 less sincere than his hatred of the other. Mr Courthope seems to 
 me to fairly establish his contention that Pope was naturally of an 
 ardent, generous, and romantic temper, and that this strain was 
 never wholly lost amidst the bitter quarrels in which his later life 
 was involved. 
 
 A generous warmth of temperament, craving for affection as
 
 270 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 well as admiration, craving for both intensely as necessities of a 
 very fragile constitution, and apt to intemperate vindictiveness 
 when they were withheld this was the basis of Pope's nature. 
 His moral delinquencies are not put in a fair light unless they are 
 viewed as the defects of such a temperament, launched out of a 
 quiet, secluded, bookish youth into a world of roughly intriguing 
 cliques and factions, " literature," as Mr Mark Pattison happily 
 puts it, "a mere arena of partisan warfare," and " the public 
 barbarised by the gladiatorial spectacle of politics." It was in 
 this school that Pope acquired his habit of plotting and double- 
 dealing. Mr Courthope suggests that he may have owed the 
 habit to his Roman Catholic training. Equivocation was regarded 
 by them as an excusable weapon against penal laws, and what is 
 allowed in particular cases may easily be extended till it becomes 
 a general rule of life. It may well be that Pope was helped by 
 the casuistry of his Church in justifying his crooked ways to his 
 own conscience. There is a trace of this self-deception in the 
 words of his letter to Martha Blount : "I have not told a lie 
 (which we both abominate), but I think I have equivocated pretty 
 genteelly." But, in truth, Pope did not need to go to his per- 
 secuted co-religionists for lessons in the art of genteel equivocation 
 or hardier forms of duplicity. His political friends and every 
 man about town was then a politician Jacobite and Hanoverian 
 alike, were as accomplished in the art and as unscrupulous in the 
 practice of it as any Roman Catholic priest. It was a fierce 
 struggle for existence in the political world when the succession 
 was uncertain and the throne insecure, and straightforward 
 morality was not in fashion. Statesmen were fighting with life 
 and all that made it worth having in peril, and were ready to use 
 any means to win, whether of force or fraud. It is really by their 
 intellectual qualities, their ingenuity, their far-reaching subtlety, 
 their niceness of calculation, that Pope's intrigues are distinguished 
 their intellectual qualities and the pettiness of their objects. 
 We must regard them as an imitation in his own private concerns 
 of the games for larger stakes that were going on round him in 
 the political field. There can be no doubt that Pope had great 
 natural gifts for intrigue, and that he took to it with great relish. 
 The pleasure of the sport, the employment that it offered to his
 
 ME COTJKTHOPE'S BIOGRAPHY OF POPE. 271 
 
 restless ingenuity, blinded him to its immorality, and the passion 
 grew upon him till he could do nothing directly, but " played the 
 politician about cabbages and turnips." The fact that a straight 
 line is the shortest distance between two points was with him a 
 reason for not taking it. It is impossible even now to follow him 
 through the steps of any of the intricate plots which recent inquiry 
 has unravelled with such patience without some motions of sym- 
 pathy with the artist's delight in his contrivances, so ingenious 
 were they, and out of all proportion to the advantage to be gained. 
 Ingenuity, of course, is no palliation of fraud ; but the amount of 
 our indignation cannot but be affected by the impostor's motives, 
 and the theory that finds in Pope's tortuous conduct nothing but 
 mean and cowardly hypocrisy is simply imperfect analysis. This 
 is just as indiscriminate as it is to find the animating spirit of his 
 Satires in arrogant malignity and cruelty. Mr Courthope does 
 good service in his chapter on " The War with the Dunces " in 
 tracing the history of the quarrel, and showing that the most 
 shady transactions of Pope's later years were really incidents in a 
 protracted war in which he was not the original aggressor. Not 
 to have struck the first blow in a quarrel which he conducted with 
 so many discreditable artifices and such relentless cruelty, is not, 
 perhaps, much to boast of. But wanton malignity is undoubtedly 
 a less respectable motive than vindictiveness, if we are to admit 
 degrees of wickedness and of moral reprobation ; and it is some- 
 thing to have it established by a careful judicial examination that 
 Pope was vindictive rather than malignant. 
 
 As a clear, well-arranged, and well-divided narrative of Pope's 
 life, pervaded by a moderate and judicial estimate of his character, 
 Mr Courthope's biography is admirable. But his large and 
 massive method of handling, which yields such excellent results in 
 the condensed narrative of intricate events, and the judicial 
 summing up of the complicated cases of conscience, is seen to 
 want flexibility and precision when applied to such a many-sided 
 question as Pope's place in literature. Perspicuity of manner is 
 gained at the expense of exactness of substance. Mr Courthope, 
 indeed, places Pope with every appearance of exactness, with a 
 bold geometrical simplicity, just at the point where lines repre- 
 senting Medievalism and the Classical Kevival intersect ; but he
 
 272 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 is not so successful in his attempts to justify this simple diagram 
 as corresponding to historical facts. 
 
 The defects of the massive method of handling are that it in- 
 volves the omission of connecting links, and the assumption of 
 large and definite masses common to the understanding of writer 
 and reader. If the latter condition does not exist, the writer is 
 tempted to take it for granted, and to refer to periods and ten- 
 dencies on the large scale as if their characters were matters of 
 clear and common knowledge, or at least established acceptation 
 among critics. The result is that statements severally distinct, 
 confident, and sonorous, give rise to a good deal of trouble when 
 we try to reduce them to consistency for ourselves, or when the 
 writer undertakes the office for us, and attempts to supply the 
 links of connection. Thus Mr Courthope opens his biography by 
 presenting the date of Pope's birth as a time of unsettlement and 
 confusion, distracted by " opposing forces, Catholic and Protestant, 
 Whig and Tory, Aristotelian and Baconian, Medievalist and 
 Classicist." Having thus boldly described the situation, he passes 
 at once to his hero, as " the poet who learned to harmonise all 
 those conflicting principles in a form of versification so clear and 
 precise that for fully a hundred years after he began to write it 
 was accepted as the established standard of metrical music." It 
 is a masterful and imposing introduction ; but when the dazzled 
 mind recovers, and asks in what sense Pope can be said to have 
 harmonised Catholicism and Protestantism, Whiggism and Tory- 
 ism, Aristotelianism and Baconianism, Medievalism and Classi- 
 cism, it is not so easy to find a clear answer. It is right to say at 
 once in fairness to Mr Courthope that this is only the opening 
 statement of his thesis, and that he does afterwards attempt, 
 partly at least, to make it good, and enable us to follow him in- 
 telligently in his bold transition from the general character of the 
 time to the personality of Pope and the distinctive character of 
 his work. But it is right also to say and it illustrates the de- 
 fects of the massive manner that the reader would go very far 
 astray who should take in its most obvious and literal sense 
 Pope's harmonising of these mighty opposites. To see how 
 Pope harmonised Catholicism and Protestantism, one's first 
 impulse would be to turn to the Essay on Man; but it cannot
 
 MR COURTIJOPE'S BIOGRAPHY OF POPE. 273 
 
 be there that the harmonisation of which Mr Courthope thinks 
 is effected, for he calls it not altogether justly "a farrago 
 of fallacies." So with Whiggism and Toryism. We recall the 
 lines 
 
 " For forms of government let fools contest ; 
 Whate'er is best administered is best." 
 
 This cannot be the reconciliation spoken of, calling both parties 
 equally fools. The truth, of course, is if I rightly understand 
 Mr Courthope that he uses the words Whiggism and Toryism, 
 Protestantism and Catholicism, &c., in a subtle sense to signify a 
 certain indefinite central idea or animating principle. The reader 
 who wishes to penetrate to his meaning must tackle two very 
 perplexing chapters, one on the " Essay on Criticism " and a 
 second on Pope's place in English Literature, where the same 
 topic is resumed. 
 
 These chapters are the least satisfactory part of the book. Per- 
 haps it is that Mr Courthope has tried to crowd too much into too 
 little space. Seeing that he attempts to formulate the leading 
 changes in the principles of poetic creation, from Aristotle to 
 Wordsworth, with the " Essay on Criticism," as a central and 
 turning point, this is likely enough. Perhaps it is that his ideas 
 took shape as he wrote, and that while he continued to make large 
 and definite statements, they were not originally so cast as to show 
 their coherency. At any rate the result is perplexing enough. 
 Mr Courthope at the end of the last chapter formulates certain 
 conclusions about Pope's place in literature that one can at least 
 understand, however much one may differ from some of them ; but 
 the discussion through which he reaches them is much less plain 
 sailing, and it is not easy to follow the connection between some 
 of the theories advanced in the course of it and the propositions to 
 which we are finally conducted. Further, though the drift of the 
 argument, so far as I can make it out, is paradoxical, it proceeds 
 often by statements which are among the commonplaces of criti- 
 cism, at least in words, and give it an air of plausibility till we see 
 that it compels us, if we accept it as sound, to give them a special 
 interpretation. The discussion would have been less intricate if 
 Mr Courthope had tried to establish Pope's position inductively by 
 an examination of his poetry and a comparison of it with what
 
 274 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 came before and after. It is, however, by way of abstract discus- 
 sion of his critical principles as laid down in the Essay that he 
 proceeds, and thus we are involved in a bewildering series of 
 definitions of what is meant by Nature, Wit, True Wit and False 
 Wit, Medieval Methods, and Classical Methods and Modern 
 Methods. Finally, although the gist of the argument seems to be 
 that the central artistic principle of Pope and his school is the 
 " direct imitation of Nature," and that the Essay, in virtue of its 
 distinct enunciation of this principle, occupies a more important 
 position in literature than is commonly assigned to it, I have 
 searched in vain for any attempt to define what is meant by that 
 very familiar but not very tangible phrase " imitation of Nature." 
 At least as much turns upon the meaning of that as on the meaning 
 of Nature, and the conceptions of Nature prevalent at different 
 times. But I will try to disengage his main positions, and examine 
 what they seem to me to imply. 
 
 The starting-point of Mr Courthope's dialectic, which has no lack 
 of freshness and vigour if it is somewhat intricate, is the " Essay on 
 Criticism," the place to be assigned to it in literature, and Mr Leslie 
 Stephen's disparaging description of it as a " coining of aphorisms 
 out of commonplace." This Mr Courthope challenges, and main- 
 tains in effect that its critical principles were not commonplace to 
 Pope's own generation, but that, on the contrary, when the Essay 
 is taken in relation to the course of literature from Aristotle down 
 through the Middle Ages to the time of Queen Anne, it is seen to 
 mark an epoch. And the main significance of this epoch is, as I 
 understand Mr Courthope, the return after a long interval to a 
 conception of the relations between Nature and Art identical with 
 Aristotle's. According to Aristotle, poetry is " a direct imitation 
 of Nature " ; and Pope brought Poetry back from Medievalism to 
 this conception when he counselled poets to 
 
 " First follow Nature, and your judgment frame 
 By her just standard, which is still the same." 
 
 Mr Stephen says that " Follow Nature " is a maxim " common 
 to all generations of critics." Against this Mr Courthope develops 
 a theory of the essence of Medievalism as consisting in the im- 
 position of subjective and metaphysical conceptions on Nature, and
 
 MR COURTHOPE'S BIOGRAPHY OF POPE. 275 
 
 contends that the significance of Pope's advice was the clear and 
 definite repudiation of this practice; that Pope in effect said, 
 " Imitate Nature directly," and that this is the distinctive feature in 
 his critical principles. He even seems to hold that it was in this 
 that Pope's much discussed "correctness consisted, and not in 
 stricter attention to the rules of metre and grammar and rhetoric. 
 
 All this is comparatively simple, whether or not we agree with 
 it. Perplexity arises when we begin to ask wherein Pope's 
 adherence to the standard of Nature distinguishes him from our 
 great poets before him and our great poets after him. We under- 
 stand at once that Mr Courthope's doctrine is opposed to the com- 
 mon habit in our century of speaking of Pope's poetry as 
 " artificial." So far I am, for one, in complete sympathy with him. 
 But does he mean that Pope was the first poet in our literature to 
 set up the just standard of Nature ? His exposition here and 
 there would seem to imply this, as well as the large importance 
 that he claims for the Essay ; but he expressly says that this is not 
 his meaning. He expressly mentions Chaucer and Shakespeare 
 among the poets who have imitated Nature directly. But if this 
 direct imitation of Nature is the distinctive feature of Pope's 
 principles, and the ground on which his school is called " classical," 
 why are not Chaucer and Shakespeare also called " classical " ? 
 When we ask this we find ourselves not far off from Mr Stephen's 
 position that the following of Nature is a common maxim. Mr 
 Courthope's paradox would seem then only to amount to saying 
 that great poets are all of one school. What, then, was distinctive 
 in Pope's following of Nature 1 
 
 Mr Courthope would answer this in effect by saying that in 
 Pope's mind Nature was opposed to the "false wit," the meta- 
 phors, conceits, fantastic allusions, and mystic symbolism of what 
 Johnson called the " Metaphysical School " of the seventeenth 
 century, Donne and Cowley, and the earlier work of Dryden. If 
 he had not gone beyond this, and his serviceable illustration of the 
 European prevalence of this false wit for more than a century, 
 everybody would have understood him and agreed with him. It 
 is tolerably obvious that abstinence from false wit in this sense is 
 one of the items of Pope's correctness ; he expressly particularises 
 it himself. Whether or not it is warrantable to describe Pope's
 
 276 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 method generally as a reaction against this false wit, as if it con- 
 stituted the whole of his correctness, is another question. But Mr 
 Courthope does not stop here. He goes on to connect false wit 
 with Medievalism generally, the subtleties of Scholastic Philos- 
 ophy, Thomas Aquinas, the Provencal poets, Dante and Petrarch, 
 and the allegorical and symbolical presentation of Nature. Here 
 again we admit the connection, anybody would : there is an ob- 
 vious affinity between the keen, far-reaching, beautifully ingenious 
 analogies of Donne and the analytic triumphs of the Schoolmen, 
 of whom indeed Donne was at one time a close student. We admit 
 the connection ; but we pause when we are asked to jump from 
 this admission to the conclusion that Pope's lines 
 
 " True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, 
 What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed " 
 
 were a formal renunciation not merely of the conceits of the poetry 
 of the seventeenth century, but of Medievalism generally, as false 
 wit, and a return to Aristotle and the standard of Nature. 
 
 It certainly is a most ingenious argument. If Mr Courthope 
 may claim to rank with Johnson as a judge of Pope's morality, he 
 may equally claim to rank with Warburton as an interpreter of 
 Pope's meaning. His interpretation of Pope's Classicism as op- 
 posed to Medievalism carries with it the relation of the Essay to 
 Whiggism and Toryism, Protestantism and Catholicism, Baconian- 
 ism and Aristotelianism. Up to the time of the Revolution, which 
 seated a Protestant on the throne, the Court had a leaning to 
 Catholicism, and thereby encouraged Medievalism, and the Tories 
 were the party of the Court. Thus, although Pope himself was 
 a Catholic and a personal friend of the leading Tories, the " Essay 
 on Criticism," in virtue of its protest against Medievalism in 
 poetry, falls into line with the anti-medieval spirit of Whiggism 
 and Protestantism. By Aristotelianism as opposed to Baconian- 
 ism Mr Courthope must mean the philosophy of Aristotle as 
 developed by the Schoolmen, for it is part of his theory that 
 Pope used the word Nature in the same sense as Bacon, and 
 consequently in the same sense as Aristotle. One is still left 
 wondering what exactly he meant by saying that Pope "har- 
 monised" all those opposing forces, seeing that the Essay is
 
 ME COUllTHOPE'S BIOGRAPHY OP POPE. 277 
 
 held to have signalised the final triumph of one class of them. 
 But it is a most ingenious theory, certainly "witty" according 
 to the definition of Avit that Mr Courthope quotes from Locke, 
 whether we are to reckon it as true wit or the opposite. 
 
 Mr Courthope's theory about the place of Pope's "Essay on 
 Criticism " is so far sound that it maintains, in a very abstract 
 and metaphysical manner, the tolerably plain fact that the Essay 
 was part of the general and gradual emancipation of the English 
 mind from medieval habits of thought. Beyond this he does 
 not seem to me to establish his case. Pope got less than his 
 deserts from the critics of the last two generations : the fashion 
 of taste had gone against him ; but we should go as far wrong in 
 the opposite direction if we argued that the advent of Pope in 
 poetry was an event comparable to the advent of Newton in 
 physical science, or to the advent of Locke in philosophy. Even 
 if we admit that " True wit is Nature to advantage dressed " did 
 mean in Pope's mind " True poetry is Nature directly imitated," 
 how can a method which Pope had in common with Chaucer and 
 Shakespeare, Ariosto and Cervantes, be said to be so distinctive 
 of a school as to warrant the title of " classical " 1 Personally I 
 do not think that the differentia of the so-called "classical" 
 school is to be found in formal critical principles ; it seems to me 
 to lie rather, as I have indicated before in this magazine, in 
 unconscious habits of expression. It has obtained the name 
 " classical " on more superficial grounds, namely, that translations 
 of Latin and Greek masterpieces and imitations of leading classical 
 forms were among its most conspicuous productions, and that its 
 critics, in the earlier period of the school, professed great defer- 
 ence for the ancient authorities. Certainly directness cannot 
 be said to have been a prominent feature of its imitations of 
 Nature, if direct imitation is the opposite of allusive, allegorical, 
 and abstract presentation. We may pass "The Rape of the 
 Lock" as direct, if we get a definition of Nature that includes 
 sylphs and gnomes ; but what shall we say of " The Dunciad " ? 
 And what shall we say of the countless odes to and descriptions 
 of personified Seasons, Passions, Institutions, Conditions, Facul- 
 ties, which held the field till the last years of the century? 
 These were at least as much indirect imitations as the " lioman
 
 278 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 de la Rose," the great medieval example of allegory, and yet 
 they form the bulk of the work of the " classical " school. 
 
 Mr Courthope has not proved his paradox about Pope's relation 
 to his predecessors, and he makes out a still less plausible case 
 for a still bolder paradox about Pope's relation to Wordsworth. 
 There is such a refreshing novelty about a theory which upholds 
 Pope as distinctively the poet of Nature, and Wordsworth as 
 a reactionary ally of " false wit," that one could wish it were not 
 so manifestly strained and perverse. It is to be regretted too 
 for another reason, that just as there is justice in Mr Courthope's 
 defence of Pope against the charge of being peculiarly artificial, 
 he does lay stress upon a feature in Wordsworth's theory of 
 poetry that is very often overlooked. Wordsworth, though he 
 is commonly called the poet of Nature, claims supremacy for the 
 imagination in poetic work : 
 
 " Imagination needs must stir. . . . 
 Minds that have nothing to confer 
 Find little to perceive." 
 
 Coleridge says the same thing in the familiar lines : 
 
 " Dear Lady, we receive but what we give, 
 And in our life alone does Nature live." 
 
 There is no antagonism between this and adherence to the just 
 standard of Nature, unless Nature is taken in a very limited 
 sense ; but it gives Mr Courthope an opening for connecting the 
 modern poets with the false wits whom Pope superseded, and 
 developing and pointing against them a new interpretation of 
 the line 
 
 " What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." 
 
 " Pope, the antagonist of the metaphysical school, had taught that the 
 essence of poetry was the presentation, in a perfect form, of imaginative 
 materials common to the poet and the reader 
 
 " What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." 
 
 Wordsworth maintained, on the contrary, that matter not in itself stimulat- 
 ing to the general imagination might become a proper subject for poetry if 
 glorified by the imagination of the poet. There is an obvious analogy 
 between this method of composition and the wit, or discordia concors, which 
 was the aim of the seventeenth century poet."
 
 MR COURTHOPE'S BIOGRAPHY OF POPE. 279 
 
 This would have been true enough if it had been part of 
 Wordsworth's theory that a poet's imagination may give poetic 
 value to anything a broomstick, for instance irrespective of 
 the ordinary laws of feeling. It is only by taking this as 
 Wordsworth's meaning that Mr Courthope is able to give a 
 semblance of plausibility to his case, and starting with a little 
 misunderstanding he goes on to enlarge this till we find him 
 taking it as a condition of poetic work on Wordsworth's theory 
 that the poet should "burn the bridge of connection between 
 himself and his readers;" that is, should consult only his own 
 feelings, and pay no regard to the manner in which other men 
 think and feel. In answer to this, it is sufficient to point out 
 that the opposite of this is repeatedly asserted to be a poet's 
 duty in the preface to the "Lyrical Ballads," a document to 
 which Mr Courthope refers as an " animated rhetorical treatise," 
 but which, judging from his extraordinary perversions of its 
 leading doctrines, he cannot have studied very attentively. How 
 can he reconcile the following extract from the preface with what 
 he says of Wordsworth's theory : 
 
 " The Poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater prompt- 
 ness to think and feel without immediate external excitement, a greater 
 power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him in 
 that manner. But these passions and thoughts and feelings are the general 
 passions and thoughts and feelings of men." 
 
 The truth is that Wordsworth's quarrel with artificial poetic 
 diction was that it was not intelligible to men in general as the 
 appropriate expression of the feelings described. "The poet 
 thinks and feels," he said, "in the spirit of human passions. 
 How then can his language differ from that of all other men who 
 feel vividly and see clearly ? " Wordsworth was very far indeed 
 from ignoring, even in theory, the need of " imaginative materials 
 common to the poet and the reader," and he was fully alive to 
 the danger of yielding to what he called "particular associations" 
 as distinguished from such as were general ; but, as he explains, 
 he was obliged to trust his own judgment as to what would be 
 intelligible to his readers. What other judgment than his own 
 would Mr Courthope suggest for the poet's guidance 1 How can 
 the poet reach the common heart or the common mind except
 
 L'SO SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 through his own heart and mind ? Where else can he find his 
 imaginative materials ? But it is not easy to make out what 
 function Mr Courthope assigns to the imagination in poetry. 
 " In every great epic or dramatic poem," he says, " the action or 
 fable, in every great lyric poem, the passion is not imagined and 
 discovered by the poet, but [what is the point of the antithesis ?] 
 is shared by the poet with his audience : the element contributed 
 by a poet singly is the conception and form of the poem." 
 " The imaginative materials are common to the poet and the 
 audience." Mr Courthope seems to mean that unless a poet 
 chooses subjects fables, situations, characters, passions that 
 are easily and widely intelligible, and intrinsically interesting, he 
 must be content with a limited audience. But why should this 
 be said in words which appear to deny the creative character of 
 the imagination, as if Shakespeare had not "imagined" the 
 passion of Hamlet and Othello, or Milton had not " imagined " 
 the bearing, the despair, and the defiant hatred of his rebel angels 
 in the fiery pit ? 
 
 On his title-page Mr Courtney quotes the saying of Horace, 
 " Difficile est proprie communia dicere." It is difficult; but one 
 often feels in reading his critical chapters that he has succeeded. 
 One could wish that his exposition of his paradoxes had been as 
 successful as his disguise of his endoxes, for it is a gallant and 
 vigorous attempt to give new life to an old controversy.
 
 281 
 
 II. 
 
 THE SUPPOSED TYRANNY OF POPE. 
 
 THERE is one notable change in Pope's position since the last cen- 
 tenary of his birth. His manner is now old enough to bear 
 revival. A clever writer of epigrammatic couplets, with some- 
 thing much less exquisite than Pope's mastery of his favourite 
 stave, and much less strong and keen than his wit, a passably 
 clever imitator, in short, would be certain now of a wide and 
 cordial welcome. Of course a certain discretion would have to 
 be shown in the line of imitation : not all the master's subjects 
 would serve equally well for the. modern disciple. We should 
 probably find little to admire in a new " Windsor Forest " ; even 
 a new " Essay on Man," with all our recent modern developments 
 in philosophy and religion thrown in, might not attract as wide 
 a circle of readers as ' Robert Elsmere ' ; but it may safely be 
 said that the time is ripe for new " Imitations of Horace " if only 
 the man were ready. As for a new " Dunciad," that is a more 
 delicate subject to hint at, as nobody knows what might happen, 
 and it would not be a comfortable experience to be hitched into 
 the rhyme if the new satirist had as sharp a tooth as his great 
 original. It is better to let sleeping cynics lie. But certainly it 
 is a wonder that in these days of " New " things New Lucians, 
 New Republics, New Plutarchs, and so forth nobody should have 
 essayed to give us a New Dunciad. Is it that in this age of 
 universal cleverness we have no Dunces, or that Pope's form is not 
 quite so easy to imitate as it was the fashion fifty years ago to say ?
 
 282 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 Or is it that we are all so very good-natured that the " airy malev- 
 olence " of the great satirist would not be tolerated ? 
 
 This much at least is certain that if we had material, and a 
 satirist, and if our satirist were dexterous enough to evade the 
 law of libel another barrier to the imitator of Pope the form 
 of epigrammatic couplets would now have all the charm of novelty, 
 whereas a hundred years ago the public ear was tired of them. 
 From the first of these propositions we imagine there will be no 
 dissent ; but as regards the second a very general impression to 
 the contrary prevails. In spite of the labours of such accurate 
 historians of literature as the late Mr Mark Pattison and Mr 
 Stopford Brooke, Pope's relations to the poetry of the latter half 
 of the eighteenth century are still very generally misunderstood. 
 If the average educated man, with some knowledge of the broad 
 outlines of literary history but no special interest in its details, 
 were asked as a question pertinent to the recent celebration, what 
 would have been the probable reception of a poem in Pope's man- 
 ner when last his centenary came round, he would probably 
 answer out of a vague impression that in the year 1788 a poem 
 in any other manner would have been promptly extinguished by 
 the critics. The general notion is that the authority of Pope 
 was supreme throughout the eighteenth century, and that it 
 remained unshaken till the advent of the new potentates, Words- 
 worth, Coleridge, Scott, and Byron. It is supposed that the 
 public taste was so devoted to Pope and what is called the 
 " classical school " that no departure from its principles of com- 
 position would have been received with patience; that even 
 Milton and the great Elizabethans were decried and neglected; 
 and that long and determined efforts were needed before the 
 public could be brought back to a higher standard of poetic 
 excellence. This indeed is commonly given as the explanation 
 of the utter decay of poetry in the eighteenth century, that 
 people lived in slavish subjection to narrow and exclusive rules 
 of art ; that all who felt an impulse to write in verse were inti- 
 midated into taking artificial standards as their guide rather 
 than Nature; that genius was stifled by timid and laborious 
 endeavour after correctness. And Pope's name was the bugbear 
 used to frighten unruly genius into submission.
 
 THE SUPPOSED TYRANNY OF POPE. 283 
 
 Such was the view of the poetry of the eighteenth century 
 proclaimed with authority some fifty years ago, and still, after 
 a good many years of sober contradiction, very extensively held. 
 An opinion backed by the confident and brilliant rhetoric of 
 Macaulay is not easily dislodged. The reaction against the criti- 
 cal school that set in with the great poetic expansion at the 
 beginning of this century was definitely established by Macaulay's 
 article on Moore's 'Life of Byron' in the 'Edinburgh Review.' 
 It gave articulate expression to the effect produced on the public 
 mind by the destructive criticism of which Wordsworth, Cole- 
 ridge, and Bowles were the leading exponents. Their tone of 
 course was much more judicial, but since they laid stress on the 
 defects of Pope, and the public had been accustomed for two or 
 three generations to hear chiefly of his merits, the general impres- 
 sion produced was that his poetry was essentially and radically 
 vicious; that he was, as it were, an impostor who had long de- 
 ceived the people, but had been detected and exposed at last. 
 This exaggerated condemnation was not the fault of the new 
 critics, but it was the natural result of their saying what they 
 said at the time when they said it. That happened in Pope's 
 case which happens in the progress of all conceptions towards 
 exact qualification. Thinking on any subject is generally done 
 by halves or by bits, each of which as it comes into prominence 
 fills the area of the whole truth. As long as the public mind 
 was dazzled by certain splendid qualities in Pope's verse, these 
 qualities virtually represented the sum of poetic excellence : he 
 was simply a poet : there was no question of defects or limita- 
 tions. There came a time when the defects were loudly insisted 
 upon, and the public mind was occupied in the same exclusive 
 manner with poetic excellence of a different type which had yet 
 to undergo its process of qualification. Pope was then simply 
 no poet : he was the complete antithesis of poetic excellence. 
 Pope's reputation followed the ordinary law in passing through 
 those two violent stages on its way towards a more fixed and 
 definite formation : it may safely be said to have now reached 
 a further stage in which merits and defects are no longer in 
 mutually destructive antagonism, and Pope is recognised as a 
 great poet, to be admired, enjoyed, and studied for what
 
 284 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 lie was, without being despised or neglected for what he was 
 not. 
 
 We speak of the conception of Pope's poetry in that vague but 
 none the less real receptacle of ideas, the general mind, to the 
 fluctuations and advances of which it is not easy to obtain a 
 definite index. Perhaps one of the most satisfactory gauges of 
 public opinion, whether of men or of measures, is to be found in 
 the attitude of moderate critics. If modern critics are apologetic 
 and conciliatory in hinting at blemishes, the man or the measure, 
 we may be sure, stands high in public estimation. In the case of 
 Pope, we find that in the eighteenth century, before his poetry 
 had passed through the crucible of the Wordsworthian school, 
 such a moderate critic as Joseph Warton had to be cautious in 
 pointing out Pope's limitations ; whereas thirty years ago such a 
 temperate admirer as Mr Carruthers had to guard himself care- 
 fully against the charge of putting Pope's merits too high. More 
 recently Mr Elwin's elaborate criticism of Pope has been received 
 with some impatience on account of its hostile and unsympathetic 
 tone ; and the remarks made about him within the last two 
 months have shown a disposition to make amends for the violence 
 of previous disparagement. 
 
 While there has been this oscillation concerning Pope's merits 
 in the general mind, following in its own way the movements of 
 critical dialectic, there has been comparatively little substantial 
 difference of opinion among the few who, in Wordsworth's lan- 
 guage, make "a serious study of poetry." Although critics of 
 the Wordsworthian school discredited Pope so much that it be- 
 came among their more foolish adherents a mark of corrupt taste 
 to find a word to say in favour of anything written in the eigh- 
 teenth century, the leaders themselves, especially Coleridge and 
 Bowles, were by no means insensible to Pope's unrivalled bril- 
 liancy within his own limits. On the other hand, it is a mistake 
 to suppose that the critics of the eighteenth century, even in the 
 generation immediately after Pope's own, were unconscious of 
 those limits, although they had more complete sympathy with 
 the poet's merits and were more ungrudging in their praise. Too 
 many of us still see even the criticism of the eighteenth century 
 through the spectacles of reactionaries who were in too violent a
 
 THE SUPPOSED TYRANNY OF POPE. 285 
 
 heat to see clearly. The admiration of Pope was not an unquali- 
 fied and unreasoning idolatry among the critics of the eighteenth 
 century. Even Bowles's main contention, over which there was 
 so much discussion at the beginning of this century, that satiric 
 and ethic poetry are necessarily from their subject-matter inferior 
 species, and cannot entitle a poet to the first rank however mas- 
 terly in execution, was put forward in substance by Joseph War- 
 ton as early as 1756. It was put forward in substance though 
 with a slight difference, Warton's exact position being that wit 
 and satire are transitory and perishable, while nature and passion 
 are eternal. And ten years earlier this same ambitious youth, 
 having just taken his degree at Oxford, issued a volume of odes, 
 in the preface to which he expressed a modest hope that they 
 " would be looked upon as an attempt to bring poetry back into 
 its right channel," his opinion being that " invention and imagin- 
 ation are the chief faculties of a poet," and that "the fashion of 
 moralising in verse had been carried too far." This was in 1746, 
 within three years of Pope's death, and the bold venture was so 
 far successful that a second edition was at once called for. The 
 Odes of Warton's schoolfellow and friend, Collins, who wrote in 
 the same independent spirit, but with infinitely greater genius, 
 were published at the same time : they had indeed intended at 
 first to publish together. The poetry of Collins was of a much 
 less simple, commonplace, and popular cast, and his volume of 
 Odes remained unsold; but it opened the door to an intimacy 
 with Thomson and Johnson, an evidence that such critical author- 
 ities were far from being disposed to stifle genius that did not 
 accommodate itself to the manner of Pope. But it may be said 
 that Warton's free criticism of Pope was only an impotent heresy, 
 an individual eccentricity serving only to make more marked the 
 general drift of opinion. Was it not the case that he kept back 
 the second part of his essay for more than a quarter of a century, 
 and that Johnson supposed the reason for this to be " disappoint- 
 ment at not having been able to persuade the world to be of his 
 opinion as to Pope " ? Yes ; but the " opinion " to which John- 
 son referred was the opinion that Pope's reputation in the future 
 would rest upon his " Windsor Forest," his " Eloisa to Abelard," 
 and his "Rape of the Lock," rather than upon his moral and
 
 286 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 satirical poems. Of Warton's essay itself or rather of the first 
 part, for the second part was not published till a year or two be- 
 fore his death the great critic repeatedly wrote and spoke in 
 terms of the highest praise. It was this essay that he described 
 as " a book which teaches how the brow of Criticism may be 
 smoothed, and how she may be enabled, with all her severity, to 
 attract and delight." No man was ever less disposed than Johnson 
 to suppress independent criticism, however paradoxical this may 
 seem to those who have been taught to regard him as the inflex- 
 ible administrator of narrow and arbitrary critical laws. He was 
 punctiliously conscientious in always giving a reason for his crit- 
 ical decisions. Lord Mansfield's famous advice to the judge who 
 knew no law would have been abhorrent to one who prided him- 
 self on his knowledge of critical law, and who held that all criti- 
 cal laws worthy of respect were founded in reason. "Reason 
 wants not Horace to support it," was one of his characteristic 
 maxims. That his reasons were always valid would be too much 
 to claim ; but they were always, except when thrown off in the 
 caprice of conversation, the result of profound and penetrating 
 thought, and he would be a very presumptuous critic that should 
 lightly set them aside. 
 
 " Temporary arrest of poetic expansion " would be a fairer de- 
 scription of what took place iji the eighteenth century than 
 "utter decay of poetry "; and to assign as the explanation of this 
 arrest the overbearing force of Pope's example, or the chilling 
 influence of Johnson's precepts, or slavish subservience to arbi- 
 trary rules, is, to put it soberly, not to give a sufficient explanation. 
 It is not quite fair to criticism to regard it as if its main function 
 were to direct and nourish its poetry of the period, and to argue 
 that it stands condemned as necessarily unsound if the contem- 
 porary poetical crop is poor and scanty. It has been too much 
 the habit of literary historians to look upon the poverty of the 
 poetry as the main literary phenomenon of the eighteenth century. 
 If the idea had occurred and it is at least worthy of examin- 
 ation that possibly the critical school of which Johnson was the 
 master helped to lay a foundation for the splendid outburst of 
 poetic production in a subsequent generation, the critical prin- 
 ciples of the eighteenth century would have had a fairer chance
 
 THE SUPPOSED TYRANNY OF POPE. 287 
 
 of being judged upon their merits. Johnson was certainly no 
 champion of narrow and exclusive tenets. There were certain 
 obvious and definite qualities in Pope, smooth melodious rhythm, 
 clear sense, elegance or refinement of phrase and idea, on which 
 he frequently dwelt as high poetic merits. "Here," he exclaimed 
 of Pope's " Eloisa," " is particularly observable the curiosafelicitas, 
 a fruitful soil and careful cultivation. Here is no crudeness of 
 sense, no asperity of language." But highly as he admired such 
 qualities, and although he probably did not feel with sufficient 
 force the danger of buying them at too great a sacrifice, the 
 absence of them did not blind him to other merits. He appreci- 
 ated the power of Collins, though he did find fault with his 
 occasional obscurity and his " harsh clusters of consonants." He 
 found harshness and barbarity in the diction of Milton, but that 
 did not prevent him from speaking of Milton as " that poet whose 
 works may possibly be read when every other monument of 
 British greatness is obliterated " ; or from saying that " such is 
 the power of his poetry that his call is obeyed without resistance, 
 the reader feels himself in captivity to a higher and a nobler 
 mind, and criticism sinks in admiration." With all his love for 
 Pope, he found passages in Dryden " drawn from a profundity 
 that Pope could never reach." He criticised Shakespeare, as he 
 said, "without curious malignity or superstitious veneration," but 
 whoever thinks that he measured Shakespeare by cold and formal 
 notions of correctness should read his noble preface. " The work 
 of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and 
 diligently planted, varied with shades and scented with flowers ; 
 the composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend 
 their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes 
 with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myr- 
 tles and roses ; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying 
 the mind with endless diversity." This is not the language of a 
 narrow and exclusive critic with a single eye to correctness of an 
 artificial kind. 
 
 The poetic barrenness certainly cannot be explained by the pre- 
 dominance of narrow and exclusive critical theories. Exclusive 
 admiration of Pope and the classical school, contented acquiescence 
 in its methods and subjects as the perfection of art, inability to
 
 288 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 feel and enjoy excellence of any other kind, cannot be charged 
 against the critics of the time. Pope himself was by no means 
 insensible to the greatness of his great predecessors, Chaucer, 
 Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. His conversations with Spence 
 afford abundant evidence of his catholicity as well as his delicacy 
 of judgment. And if we pass from Pope to his successors in the 
 eighteenth century, we find that we cannot number disrespect for 
 Shakespeare among the causes of their poetic incompetence, and 
 that Nature was often in their heads, if not in their hearts, as the 
 great original from which the poet ought to draw. The Winchester 
 schoolboys, Warton and Collins, were perhaps singular in their 
 enthusiasm for Spenser. But the cult of Shakespeare was uni- 
 versal. Edition followed edition, and commentary commentary, 
 while Garrick in Shakespearian parts was the delight of the town. 
 When Akenside, in the last year of Pope's life, extolled with much 
 applause "The Pleasures of the Imagination," he began by invok- 
 ing the aid of " Fancy," as the Spirit of Poetry 
 
 " From the fruitful banks 
 Of Avon, whence thy rosy fingers cull 
 Fresh flowers and dews to sprinkle on the turf 
 Where Shakespeare lies." 
 
 A few years later, in 1749, when a company of French players 
 acted by subscription at the Theatre-Royal, Akenside's enthusiasm 
 was such that he treated their visit as an insult to Shakespeare, 
 and put the following " Remonstrance " into the mouth of the 
 outraged dramatist : 
 
 " What though the footsteps of my devious Muse 
 The measured walks of Grecian art refuse ? 
 Or though the frankness of my hardy style 
 Mock the nice touches of the critic's file ? 
 Yet what my age and climate held to view 
 Impartial I surveyed and fearless drew. 
 And say, ye skilful in the human heart, 
 Who know to prize a poet's noblest part, 
 What age, what clime, could e'er an ampler field 
 For lofty thought, for daring fancy yield ? " 
 
 The same note was struck by Churchill in the first year of the 
 reign of George III. :
 
 THE SUPPOSED TYKANNY OF POPE. 289 
 
 " May not some great extensive genius raise 
 The name of Britain 'bove Athenian praise ? . . . 
 There may there hath and Shakespeare's muse aspires 
 Beyond the reach of Greece : with native fires 
 Mounting aloft, he wings his daring flight, 
 "Whilst Sophocles below stands trembling at his height. 
 Why should we then abroad for judges roam, 
 When abler judges we may find at home ? 
 Happy in tragic and in comic powers 
 Have we not Shakespeare ? is not Jonson ours ? " 
 
 We have quoted enough to show that the poets of the eighteenth 
 century, from beginning to end of what has been called the 
 darkest period of the century, were not, in principle at least, 
 enamoured of tameness and trimness in art, and that they did not 
 of set choice and with deliberate acquiescence confine themselves 
 to a low range of imaginative effort. Rather they seem to have 
 been striving and straining with turbulent ambition after higher 
 things after things too high for their powers. Gray, who had 
 more right to speak than any of those whom we have quoted, 
 seems to have been conscious of this impotence, this disproportion 
 between desire and achievement. 
 
 " But not to one in this benighted age 
 
 Is that diviner inspiration given 
 That burns in Shakespeare's and in Milton's page, 
 The pomp and prodigality of heaven." 
 
 The difficulty would be to find the critics whose authority 
 the minor poets resented and considered it necessary to abjure. 
 Rymer, who is sometimes referred to as if he had been a represen- 
 tative critic of the period, was at least as much laughed at in his 
 own generation as he has ever been since, and represented only a 
 perverse and splenetic opposition to the general strain. 
 
 The inability of the period to fulfil its aspirations after a larger 
 and bolder style of poetry, with more of life and passion in it, 
 would be almost pathetic if it were really required of every genera- 
 tion to be great in poetry, and it were to be held dishonour to 
 come short of greatness in the divine art. The tyrannical authority 
 of a critical school cannot be held responsible for this dishonour to 
 the generation after Pope, if dishonour it be. The only respect in 
 which criticism may have had a discouraging influence was this, 
 
 T
 
 290 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 that there was so much of it. Under the lead of Johnson, the 
 great aim of criticism was to discover how the heart was reached, 
 to detect by analysis of an impressive passage what helped and 
 what hindered the effect. " You must show how terror is im- 
 pressed on the human heart," he said, in speaking with his friends 
 of what a critic ought to do in considering the use made of a 
 ghost in a play : this was the only kind of criticism that he would 
 call real criticism, " showing the beauty of thought as formed on 
 the workings of the human heart." Now when an artist begins 
 to consider too curiously how an effect is produced, he is apt to be 
 hampered and, it may be, paralysed if he has not energy enough 
 to transcend the consciously or painfully analytic stage, or to per- 
 form his analysis with such swiftness and sureness of perception 
 that he proceeds at once and as if by instinct to the required 
 combination. The amount of poetic production in the generation 
 after Pope may have been lessened by excess of the critical spirit 
 and the multiplication of negative conditions, but this could have 
 affected only the minor poets or men of poetic talent, because the 
 man of poetic genius will not and needs not consider his ways and 
 means too curiously. 
 
 How are we to account for the arrest of poetry in the eighteenth 
 century, if it was not due to the chilling influence of critics imbued 
 with artificial principles 1 Burke's aphorism that " the march of 
 the human mind is slow," is a part of the explanation that should 
 not be lost sight of in the search for minute causes. Leaps and 
 bounds of poetic expansion are not to be expected in every genera- 
 tion. Slow progress is the normal law, and we need not torture 
 ourselves to discover reasons for a particular case of slow progress 
 as if it were something exceptional. After all, there was some 
 progress even in poetry itself, besides what may have been done in 
 the way of suggestion and collection of material for the poetry of 
 the future. Collins and Gray are great names, though not of the 
 first rank ; and even in the darkest period such minor bards as the 
 Wartons, Shenstone, and Beattie did not merely grind old tunes 
 but sounded a distinctive note, however humble. Collins, in 
 especial, added an ever-living branch to the tree of our literature : 
 his Odes are not mere dry twigs on that tree. Of the peculiar 
 form in which he expressed the rapture of learned meditation,
 
 THE SUPPOSED TYRANNY OF POPE. 291 
 
 gathering together the most moving incidents of human experience 
 under abstractions conceived as living forces, Collins is the one 
 great master. He is essentially a scholarly or academic poet, and 
 could never be popular in the wide sense, his subjects being his- 
 torical and his mode of expression such that he cannot be followed 
 without some intellectual effort ; but the effort is worth making, 
 because he had deep and genuine feeling to put into his verse, and 
 the power to transmit that feeling, whole and harmonious, to the 
 reader. One of Wordsworth's central qualities, his attitude to- 
 wards Nature, is a natural and easy transition from the spirit in 
 which Collins conceived the pageant of history. 
 
 Great bursts of poetic activity come but seldom. They are ex- 
 ceptional facts ; and those anxious rerum cognoscere causas should 
 first endeavour to determine the causes or leading conditions of 
 those departures from the normal law. It should be an easier task, 
 and should conduce to the understanding of the comparative inac- 
 tivity of other periods. If we take the works of the leaders of the 
 great poetic revival of this century Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron 
 we find that they differ in certain broad respects from all the 
 works of the eighteenth century. We find something like the 
 origination of new species or new varieties in poetry. The form, 
 in a large sense of the word, is new, and the vein of feeling is new. 
 New themes are treated in a new way, and with a new spirit. Con- 
 sider the mere form of the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel,' the first 
 genuinely popular poem, interesting to all classes, of the new era 
 a metrical romance regularly constructed, with perfect unity 
 of action, incidents all helping forward the progress of the story 
 through various complications to a catastrophe. No such poem 
 had ever been written before ; it was a new form in poetry classi- 
 cal regularity of form combined with romantic freedom of accident. 
 The precepts of the classical school, reiterating how an epic, the 
 vain ambition of the poets of the eighteenth century, ought to be 
 constructed, were not thrown away upon Scott, although he made 
 a free use of them. Then the spirit of the poem the serious epic 
 treatment of the necromancing Ladye of Branksome Hall, the Wiz- 
 ard, the Goblin Page, and the bold Mosstrooper. We have nothing 
 like this in the eighteenth century. In Pope's time such person- 
 ages would either have been burlesqued or treated with affected
 
 292 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 respect, such as a grown-up person would use towards fairies and 
 hobgoblins in telling stories about them to a child. They might 
 have figured in an Ode to Superstition, but an artist would hardly 
 have dared to narrate their doings with the air of a serious believer, 
 and without taking the polite reader into his confidence. Taken 
 altogether, in form and spirit, the 'Lay' was a new thing in litera- 
 ture, a new species of poem. The same may be said of " Childe 
 Harold." Here also we find a new species of epic, such as the 
 formal writers on epic poetry had never contemplated the hero 
 of which is not a mythical king like Arthur, or a personified Virtue 
 moving in Faeryland like Spenser's Red Cross Knight, or Guyon, 
 or Britomart, but a modern man moving in modern scenes. Words- 
 worth also is new in form as well as in spirit. No poet before him 
 had dared to shut himself up in the country and choose as the sub- 
 ject of his verse, without any reference to his fine friends in town, 
 his own personal feelings and reflections as aroused by the moving 
 spectacle of sky and hill and glen, and the homely life of rustic 
 neighbours. He wrote a species of pastoral poetry that had not 
 been legislated for by the technical lawgivers of the art, though 
 the want of it had been vaguely felt by Walsh when he wrote 
 wistfully of a Golden Age in which " the shepherds were men of 
 learning and refinement." 
 
 Whether or not these are the main characters of the new poetry, 
 the vital principles underlying smaller differences, it is in such 
 large new features that we must seek the secret of the great ex- 
 pansion rather than in little changes of artistic aim or conscious 
 repudiation of definite critical theories. The fetters that had to 
 be broken were nothing so palpable as formal rules of critical 
 authority. They were bonds from which emancipation is much 
 less easy, the restraints of unformulated, undogmatic, inarticulate 
 custom. It was habits of feeling that had to be changed, not rules 
 of art. And the reason of the comparative poverty of the poetry 
 of the eighteenth century was that no poet was born or bred with 
 sufficient force of personality to effect this change. Probably it 
 could not have been effected without the invention of forms of 
 poetry that had the broad characters of new species, so inveterately 
 were the old habits of feeling associated with the old forms, drama, 
 epic, descriptive poem, ode, elegy, and sonnet, each having its estab-
 
 THE SUPPOSED TYRANNY OF POPE. 293 
 
 lished unwritten standard of poetic elegance or refinement. It is 
 only when some distinctively new kind of thing is reached by 
 happy inspiration that creative energy is exalted to the pitch that 
 results in a great period of poetry. 
 
 The eighteenth century, possibly because the time was not ripe, 
 had not inventive energy enough in poetry to strike out new lines, 
 but it contributed in many ways to make expansion easier for those 
 that came after. Especially did the rich and varied development 
 of prose in essay and fiction prepare the way for the subsequent 
 emancipation. The influence of this prose as a solvent of estab- 
 lished poetic customs has not been sufficiently remarked. Fifty 
 years ago the popular conception of this revolution was that it was 
 a literary echo of the French Revolution ; that throughout the 
 eighteenth century poets had bent submissively under the yoke of 
 Pope and the classical school, but that catching the heat of the 
 political ferment they were emboldened to raise the standard of 
 rebellion and throw the rules of their tyrant to the winds. But 
 the example of freedom from traditional standards of dignity set 
 by prose works of imagination and prose comments on life had 
 much more to do with the poetic revolution than the contemporary 
 political excitement, though this also may have been a factor in 
 the result. The serious Muse sat in stiff and starched propriety 
 while her nimbler sister revelled in the enjoyment of freedom, but 
 she tired at last of nursing her dignity, and unbent. Prose writers 
 had familiarised the world with the subjects and sentiments of the 
 new poetry for a generation or two before they attained the inten- 
 sity that seeks expression in verse. The emancipating influence of 
 the prose literature becomes obvious when, disregarding their indi- 
 vidualities, we look at the general strain of the pioneers and the 
 leaders of the poetic revolution. Cowper might be described with 
 general truth as an essayist in verse. Wordsworth deliberately 
 and articulately claimed liberty to use in verse the same diction 
 that might be used for the expression of the same feelings in 
 prose ; and incidents such as he made the subjects of his lyrical 
 ballads had for long been considered admissible material for the 
 novelist. Characters and incidents similar in kind to those in 
 Scott's metrical romances had made their appearance before in 
 prose romance. Byron's " Childe Harold " was avowedly sug-
 
 294 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 gested by a character in prose fiction : he intended his hero, he 
 said, to be a kind of poetical Zeluco. Prose thus led the way to 
 greater freedom of subject and sentiment in poetry, and matured 
 the ideas to which poetry gave the higher artistic expression. 
 
 It is of some importance that we should understand the real 
 nature of the last poetic revival, and see that there was more in 
 it than a revolt against established poetic diction and artificial 
 critical rules. This opprobrious word artificial has been allowed 
 too long to create a false prejudice against the poetry of the 
 eighteenth century. It may be doubted whether in any import- 
 ant sense of the word the best poetry of the eighteenth century 
 was more artificial than the best poetry of the nineteenth. The 
 undiscriminating contempt that at one time sought to justify itself 
 by this vague term of reproach, and that was natural enough in 
 the exultation of a new movement, has now all but passed away, 
 and has given place to a feeling that after all the poets of the 
 eighteenth century may be worthy of study by those ambitious of 
 still further developments. And who knows but that in this once- 
 despised period inventive genius may yet find a hint and a starting- 
 point for fresh triumphs 1
 
 295 
 
 III. 
 
 THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS. 
 
 THE old conception of the Ayrshire ploughman-poet undoubtedly 
 was that his poetry had no historical connection ; that it stands 
 apart as a unique phenomenon, entirely unconnected with the 
 main stream of English poetry; that the peasant -poet owed 
 everything to nature, and nothing to books ; that he was a high- 
 priest of poetry, without literary father or mother, raised up by 
 nature herself ab initio amidst the most disadvantageous circum- 
 stances, as if to put to shame man's feeble calculations of means 
 to ends in literary culture. This was the old conception, people 
 finding it difficult to understand how a ploughman could have 
 trained himself to be a great poet. I do not know how far this 
 conception still prevails; but as something very like it is to be 
 found in the famous essay on Burns by another great Scotchman 
 of genius, Thomas Carlyle, and as it harmonises with our natural 
 desire to have an element of the miraculous in our saints and 
 heroes, it has probably survived all the plain facts set forth by 
 the poet's biographers. There is in the conception this much 
 obvious truth that Burns owed little to school and nothing to 
 college; but when it is said that nature, and nature only, was 
 his schoolmaster (unless the word is used in a sense sufficiently 
 wide to include the works of man, and among them that work of 
 man called literature), the theory does injustice to Burns as an 
 artist, and is at variance with the plain facts of his life. 
 
 Supreme excellence in poetry is never attained by a sudden
 
 296 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 leap up from the level of common ideas and common speech, 
 whether a man's everyday neighbours are rustics, or men and 
 women of art and fashion and culture. The world in which his 
 imagination moves is never entirely of his own creation. The 
 great poet must have had pioneers from whom he derived some 
 of the ideas and resources of his craft enough, at least, to feed 
 and stimulate and direct his own inborn energy. Burns, in truth, 
 was a self-taught genius only in the sense in which all great 
 artists are so ; those who see in the Ayrshire ploughman's mastery 
 of the poetic art any rarer miracle than this are those only who 
 attach an exaggerated importance to what schools and colleges 
 can do in furthering the highest efforts of human genius. Beyond 
 a certain point, as we all know, every man must be his own 
 schoolmaster ; in this sense, nature was the schoolmaster of Burns. 
 But, all the same, his poetry is not an isolated creation, entirely 
 disconnected from the main body of literature. It has its own 
 individuality, as the work of all great artists must have ; but it 
 had a literary origin, as much as the poetry of Chaucer or Shake- 
 speare, or even Pope. When nature has done her work, and the 
 unexpected has happened, it is generally easy to find something 
 very natural in the means she has used to bring the unexpected 
 to pass ; and the very circumstances that seemed at first sight to 
 be disadvantageous to Burns are now seen to have favoured him 
 in the fulfilment of his mission. 
 
 For a work of genius we require first of all a man of genius ; but 
 there are conditions that render the exercise of his genius possible, 
 and there are influences that modify the character and the direction 
 of his work. And, in the case of literary work, these conditions 
 and influences are generally found in antecedent literature, though 
 not necessarily in the literature of the language in which the artist 
 works literature having really an international unity. The course 
 of literature is mainly self-contained ; and, in reading its history, 
 the impulse to great work in one generation may often be traced 
 back to dimly-conceived aims and blind and imperfect perform- 
 ances in a previous generation. Nature begins her preparations 
 for the advent of a great man long before he makes his appear- 
 ance. 
 
 It is interesting, and it strengthens our sense of the unity of
 
 THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS. 297 
 
 literature from generation to generation, to trace back in this way 
 the movement that culminated in the poetry of Burns to a very 
 humble episode in the English poetry of Queen Anne's time a 
 passing fashion for writing what is called pastoral poetry, and a 
 quarrel on the subject among the more celebrated wits of the day. 
 The fashion had prevailed for some time before in France ; in Eng- 
 land the starting-point was Dryden's translation of Virgil's eclogues. 
 To this translation was prefixed an elegant discourse on pastoral 
 poetry in general by William Walsh, Esq., a gentleman of wit and 
 fashion, who wrote in a very neat and pointed style, subjected the 
 views of the Frenchman, Fontenelle, to delicate and polite ridicule, 
 and submitted to the public with great spirit and elegance his own 
 views of what pastoral poetry ought to be. Mr Walsh's ideal was 
 of the most artificial kind, his poetical shepherds being men of a 
 golden age, when grazing was the chief industry, and shepherds 
 were, as he put it, men of learning and refinement ; and his chief 
 rules being that an air of piety should pervade the pastoral poem, 
 that the characters should represent the ancient innocent and un- 
 practised plainness of the golden age, and that the scenery should 
 be truly pastoral a beautiful landscape, and shepherds, with their 
 flocks round them, piping under wide-spreading beech-trees. Pas- 
 toral poetry, as conceived by Mr Walsh, who spoke the taste of his 
 age, was a species of elegant trifling, something like the recent 
 fancy for old French forms of verse (ballades, rondeaus, villanelles, 
 and so forth), and nothing might have come of it ; but it so hap- 
 pened that Mr Walsh was the earliest literary friend and counsellor 
 of young Mr Pope, who was persuaded to make his first essay as a 
 poet in pastorals, written in strict accordance with Walsh's prin- 
 ciples, and of that came important consequences. Pope published 
 in 1709, in a miscellany of Dodsley's ; in the same volume appeared 
 also pastorals from the pen of Ambrose Philips. Philips, known as 
 "Namby Pamby," belonged to the coterie of Addison and Steele. 
 Between that coterie and Pope arose jealousy and strife ; hence, 
 when four years later Pope produced his " Windsor Forest," there 
 appeared in the 'Guardian,' the organ of the coterie (April 1713 
 is the date), a series of articles on pastoral poetry, in which Steele 
 incidentally gave a roll to the log of friend Namby Pamby, who 
 was named as the equal of Theocritus and Virgil, and ridiculed, by
 
 298 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 implication, in a polite Queen-Anne manner, the pastoral poems of 
 young Mr Pope, without mentioning his name. This at least was 
 the construction put upon the matter by Pope, who took a clever 
 and amusing revenge of a kind to cause a great deal of talk about 
 the 'Guardian' articles. It was an amusing literary quarrel; 
 but Steele's theory of pastoral poetry, thus occasionally produced, 
 had more fruitful results. The numbers of the ' Guardian ' really 
 set forth for the first time a fresh theory for that kind of com- 
 position, to the effect that in English pastoral poetry the characters 
 should be not classical shepherds and shepherdesses Corydon and 
 Phyllis, Tityrus and Amaryllis but real English rustics ; that the 
 scenery should be real English scenery ; and that the manners and 
 superstitions should be such as are to be found in English rural 
 life. 
 
 Nothing was done to realise this theory in England till the 
 time of Crabbe and Wordsworth (Gay merely burlesqued it in 
 his "Shepherd's Week"), but it so happened that it was taken 
 seriously in Scotland. At the time when the ' Guardian ' articles 
 appeared there was a social club in Edinburgh, named The Easy 
 Club, which followed the literary movements of London with 
 keen interest ; and of this club Allan Ramsay was poet-laureate. 
 Allan also wrote pastoral elegies a la mode, neither better nor 
 worse than the artificial stuff then in fashion ; but in a happy 
 hour he thought of trying his hand at the real pastoral, as con- 
 ceived by Steele, and produced ' The Gentle Shepherd.' Thus, 
 out of a passing literary fashion and a literary quarrel came the 
 original impulse to the composition of a work that must be 
 numbered among the conditions that made the poetry of Burns 
 possible. For no less honour than this can be claimed for 
 Ramsay's pastoral comedy. Carlyle says somewhere that a man 
 of genius is always impossible until he appears. This is quite 
 true, but it is only a half-truth ; and the other half is that a man 
 of genius must always be possible before he appears. Favourable 
 conditions for the exercise of his genius will not produce the man ; 
 but if the favourable conditions are not there when he appears, 
 his genius will be stifled, and he will remain mute and inglorious. 
 
 Ramsay's ' Gentle Shepherd ' became, in the generation before 
 Burns, one of the most popular books among the peasantry of
 
 THE HISTOEICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS. 299 
 
 Scotland, finding a place, it is said, beside the Bible in every 
 ploughman's cottage and shepherd's shieling ; and it may be said 
 to have created the atmosphere in which the genius of Burns 
 thrived and grew to such proportions. It did this by idealising 
 rural life in Scotland, by giving the ploughman a status in the 
 world of the imagination. It enabled him, as it were, to hold his 
 head higher among his fellow-creatures, and opened his eyes to 
 the elements of poetry in his hard, earth-stained, and weather- 
 beaten existence. "His rustic friend," Carlyle says, in speaking 
 of Burns and the boundless love that was in him, " his nut-brown 
 maiden, are no longer mean and homely, but a hero and a queen, 
 to be ranked with the paragons of earth." But it was Bamsay 
 who first threw the golden light of poetry on the peasant lads and 
 lasses of Scotland, and made heroes and heroines of Patie and 
 Roger and Jenny and Peggy, and who thus created the atmos- 
 phere through which Burns saw them. No more striking proof of 
 the power of literature to transform life can be given than the 
 fact that half a century before the advent of Burns he was pre- 
 ceded by an ideal prototype in the ' Gentle Shepherd.' Ramsay's 
 description of his hero might pass for a description of the real 
 Burns, only that nature asserted her supremacy by making the 
 reality more astonishing than anything that the imagination of 
 Ramsay, governed as it was by the genteel spirit of the time, had 
 dared to put into verse. 
 
 Burns owed much to Allan Ramsay, and something also to 
 another Scottish poet to whom he erected a memorial stone in 
 Canongate churchyard, Edinburgh the ill-fated Fergusson; but 
 to say, with Carlyle, that he had " for his only standard of beauty 
 the rhymes of Ramsay and Fergusson," is to miss altogether his 
 true relation to the main body of English literature. His only 
 standard of beauty ! This is indeed to underrate the extent of 
 the ploughman's self - education. I need hardly remind you of 
 the studious habits of the Burns family, upon which all his 
 biographers dwell; how their severe rule of bodily labour was 
 combined with a rule of mental labour, no less strictly and 
 strenuously observed because it was voluntary ; how they carried 
 books in their pockets to read whenever their hands were free 
 from farm-work ; how neighbours found them at their meals with
 
 300 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 spoon in one hand and book in the other. There is nothing, 
 indeed, that impresses us more with a sense of the gigantic force 
 of the personality of Burns and the breadth of his manhood than 
 the thought that with all the strength of his youthful passion for 
 reading, tending, as it did, to detach him from his unlettered 
 neighbours, it should not have converted him into a self-opinion- 
 ated prig or a snarling pedant. What saved him from this fate 
 was, that he absorbed books, and was not absorbed by them ; he 
 was saved, probably, by that craving for distinction, of which he 
 spoke more than once as his ruling passion, that thirst for admir- 
 ing sympathy of living men and living women which made him 
 appropriate and turn to his own uses what he found in books. 
 That, probably, saved him from having " loads of learned lumber 
 in his head." However this may be, the actual result was that 
 Burns in those early years of intense and devouring study, ranging 
 far beyond Ramsay and Fergusson, trained himself to be a great 
 artist by mastering and rendering to harmonious practice the best 
 critical ideas of his century. 
 
 The secret of Burns's enduring and still growing fame is, that 
 he was the greatest poetic artist of his century ; and I would sub- 
 mit the proposition that he was so, not because he stood outside 
 the main current of his century, and drew his inspiration solely 
 from nature, meaning by nature untutored impulse, but because 
 he took into his mind from books, and succeeded by the force of 
 his genius and the happy accident of his position in reconciling 
 two elementary principles of poetry that weaker intellects cannot 
 keep from drifting into antagonism and mutual injury. One of 
 these principles is that with which we are familiar in eighteenth- 
 century literature, under the name of "correctness," which is only 
 another name for perfection of expression, in so far as that can be 
 attained by laborious self-criticism. When Pope began to write, 
 he was advised by his friend Walsh, to whom I have already re- 
 ferred, to aim at correctness : the ancients had said everything, 
 and there was nothing left for the modern poet but to improve 
 upon their manner of saying it. In his "Essay on Criticism," 
 Pope embodied this idea in a couplet : 
 
 " True wit is nature to advantage dressed, 
 What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."
 
 THE HISTOKICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS. 301 
 
 This is one principle ; the other is that art must follow nature. 
 It is a common opinion that the eighteenth-century poets were 
 alive only to the first of these principles. But this will not bear 
 examination ; the sovereignty of nature was formally proclaimed 
 by Pope, as well as the artistic doctrine of dressing her to ad- 
 vantage : 
 
 " First follow nature, and your judgment frame 
 By her just standard, which is still the same : 
 Unerring nature, still divinely bright, 
 One clear, unchanged, and universal light, 
 Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart, 
 At once the source, and end, and test of art." 
 
 This was Pope's theory, and in the generation between Pope and 
 Burns the importance of following nature and the vanity of arti- 
 ficial rules were insisted on with untiring enthusiasm by poets 
 and critics alike. But till Burns arose, no poetic aspirant was 
 found, with the doubtful exception of Collins, capable of recon- 
 ciling the conflicting claims of nature and art in practice. Gray 
 was stifled by too fastidious a desire for correctness : Thomson, 
 Akenside, Shenstone, and the Wartons, had abundant enthusiasm 
 for nature, but insufficient art. It was not, indeed, their poetic 
 principles that undid the correct school, it was rather the artificial 
 taste, the fear of vulgarity, the liking for something elevated 
 above the vulgar style, among the audience for which they wrote ; 
 . and this led them into what was really a violation of Pope's prin- 
 ciple of aiming at what oft was thought, induced them to search 
 for what seldom was thought, and to avoid what was never ex- 
 pressed in polite society. Burns was more fortunate in his audi- 
 ence, although he worked on the same principles, and found both 
 warrant and guidance in Pope's " Essay on Criticism." 
 
 At first sight it might seem that Burns was all on the side of the 
 
 naturalists : 
 
 " Gie me ae touch o' nature's fire, 
 That's a' the learning I desire." 
 
 This aspiration is sometimes quoted as if it distinguished Burns 
 from his artificial eighteenth - century predecessors, and as if it 
 were the secret of his greatness; but really there is nothing 
 singular in it : it might be paralleled from every poet and poetaster 
 between Pope and himself. We are all willing to throw upon
 
 302 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 nature the labour that nature requires from us. It was not the 
 touch of nature's fire alone that made Burns the great artist he 
 was : it was the happy combination of this with an indomitable 
 effort after perfection of expression. That Burns had natural fire 
 there is no question ; everybody feels it in his poetry, and every- 
 body allows that the touch of nature's fire is indispensable. But 
 Burns had courage enough to recognise that the possession of 
 natural fire did not absolve him from the necessity of resolute 
 artistic discipline ; and his distinction lies in this, that he had 
 strength enough to undergo the discipline without losing his 
 hold on nature. How many of his songs fulfil in substance 
 Pope's ideal 
 
 " What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed " 
 
 "Auld Lang Syne," "Ye Banks and Braes," "Scots wha hae," 
 "John Anderson," "Tarn Glen," "Duncan Gray." And if we 
 either look at his poems in relation to the works of his prede- 
 cessors, or study his recorded habits of composition, it is easy to 
 see that it was not by trusting to natural impulse alone that he 
 attained this perfection of expression. " It is an excellent method 
 in a poet," he says in one of his letters, " and what I believe every 
 poet does, to place some favourite classic author, in his walks of 
 study and composition, before him as a model." This was obvi- 
 ously his own practice. For almost every one of his poems he 
 had a precedent in general form as well as in metre : for " The Twa 
 Dogs " and " Tarn o' Shanter," Allan Ramsay's fables, the " Twa 
 Books" and "The Three Bonnets"; for "Hallowe'en," Fergus- 
 son's " Hallow Fair " ; for " The Cottar's Saturday Night," Fer- 
 gusson's " Farmer's Ingle," and so on. Even for his interchange 
 of rhyming epistles with brother bards, which were dashed, as he 
 said, " clean aff loof," he had the precedent of Fergusson's corre- 
 spondence with J. S. It would almost seem as if he never wrote 
 except with some precedent in his eye, therein approving himself 
 the genuine child of the critical principles and practice of Pope. 
 Not, be it remembered, that he kept his precedent before him for 
 servile imitation : it was before his mind rather as a stimulating 
 rival, to be beaten on its own ground by superior natural force, 
 higher art, or happier choice of theme. There is no better way of
 
 THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS. 303 
 
 reviving our sense of the force of Burns's genius, if it should hap- 
 pen to get blunted by too prolonged familiarity, than putting his 
 work alongside the precedent with which it competes. He did 
 not waste his strength in searching for new types or strange 
 topics, he tried to improve upon the old. "I have no doubt," 
 he wrote to Dr Moore (in 1789), "but the knack, the aptitude, to 
 learn the Muses' trade, is a gift bestowed by Him ' who forms the 
 secret bias of the soul ' ; but I as firmly believe that excellence in 
 the profession is the fruit of industry, labour, attention, and pains." 
 And a description by himself of his habits at the age of sixteen 
 gives us some idea of the kind of pains that he took, from a very 
 early period, in his self -education to the office of poet : " A col- 
 lection of English songs was my vade mecum. I pored over them 
 driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, verse by 
 verse ; carefully noting the true, tender, or sublime, from affecta- 
 tion or fustian." There we see the artist at work, laboriously 
 building up for himself a standard of perfection in expression, and 
 boldly applying nature as the test of art. 
 
 Ten years later, at the age of twenty-six, in the winter of 1785, 
 stimulated by the intention of "appearing in the public char- 
 acter of an author," Burns poured forth poem after poem with 
 marvellous rapidity ; and seeing that much of his best work was 
 produced then, his easy impetuous speed has been contrasted 
 with the laborious care of his eighteenth-century predecessors, and 
 it has been supposed that this speed was the secret of his success. 
 But those who argue thus forget the long previous years of dis- 
 cipline to which the poet, with all his ardour of imagination, had 
 had the strength of will to subject himself. In the same way we 
 are apt to marvel at the ease and certainty of touch of a rapid 
 painter, and forget the pains that it took him to acquire such 
 mastery. There are few remains of Burns's apprentice work, be- 
 cause most of it was done in his head as he followed the plough 
 or walked beside his cart, or strolled or lay in his scanty leisure 
 on banks and braes. 
 
 But it is possible sometimes to trace a succession of tries with 
 a favourite idea, till at last he found a perfectly satisfactory set- 
 ting for it. The line 
 
 " But seas between us braid hae roared "
 
 304 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 is perfectly balanced in its place in " Auld Lang Syne " against 
 the companion line 
 
 " We twa hae paidl't in the burn." 
 
 But the ocean's roar had done duty in more than one of his ear- 
 lier and less perfect poems before it was happily settled in its 
 present connection. At that desperate crisis in his life when ho 
 proposed to expatriate himself, and took a passage to the West 
 Indies, he addressed the following lines to Jean Armour : 
 
 " Though mountains rise and deserts howl, 
 
 And oceans roar between, 
 Yet dearer than my deathless soul 
 Still will I love my Jean." 
 
 We find the same idea in another poem of the same date : 
 
 " Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary, 
 
 And leave auld Scotia's shore ? 
 Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary, 
 Across the Atlantic's roar ? " 
 
 The idea occurs in still another poem, also written about the same 
 
 time : 
 
 " From thee, Eliza, I must go, 
 
 And from my native shore ; 
 The cruel fates between us throw 
 A boundless ocean's roar ; 
 
 " But boundless oceans, roaring wide, 
 
 Between my love and me, 
 They never, never can divide 
 My heart and soul from thee." 
 
 I am afraid these quotations illustrate rather more than the 
 poet's artistic practice ; but they show at least that he was very 
 constant as an artist, if not as a man. 
 
 Burns not only studied his art in books, and measured himself 
 against established masters with resolute emulation and, we may 
 well believe, a glorious joy in his own powers, but, living as he 
 did in his youth from morning till night, day after day, in a world 
 of the imagination, with books for his constant companions, he 
 seems to have been influenced by books as few men have been in 
 his whole attitude towards life and his leading poetic themes.
 
 THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS. 305 
 
 He carried into liis daily intercourse with plain country-folk, who 
 were his neighbours under the real sky, ideals derived from this 
 artificial world : from it he drew his sustenance ; it was the source 
 of the strength that lay behind the outward man. Mr Robert 
 Louis Stevenson, in one of his " Familiar Studies of Men and 
 Books," draws an artistically harmonious and carefully finished 
 picture of Burns as Rab the Ranter, imagining him as a rustic 
 Don Juan or an Ayrshire Theophile Gautier. It is recorded that 
 the farmer's son of Lochlea had, when a youth of twenty-one, the 
 only tied hair in the parish of Tarbolton, and wore a plaid of a 
 particular colour, arranged in a particular manner round his 
 shoulders. This little peculiarity Mr Stevenson happily inter- 
 prets as a sign of the poet's kinship in temperament with the 
 self-reliant artist, who is not averse to public attention, but rather 
 wishes to force his personality on the world. The comparison 
 with Gautier is so far happy and suggestive that it puts proper 
 emphasis on the artistic side of the poet's nature; it keeps us 
 from forgetting that the Ayrshire ploughman was, above every- 
 thing, an artist, and, by force of artistic temperament and habit, 
 not a little of a poser. Mr Stevenson's diagnosis of the tied hair 
 and the particular plaid, as artistic symptoms, is good, and one 
 could wish, in his review of Burns's love affairs and love-letters, to 
 have had more of the same happy vein of interpretation to have 
 had more of the artist brought into prominence and less of the 
 professional Don Juan. But the truth is, that any comparison of 
 Burns to Don Juan or the magnificent leaders of the romantic 
 movement in France is anachronistic, and, so far, misleading. 
 Though these had something in common with Burns, they were 
 later developments, with marked modifications of race and circum- 
 stances ; and if we go further back we shall find not merely paral- 
 lels but prototypes, that had a direct influence in making Burns 
 what he was. Rab the Ranter, the " rantin' rovin' " boy that was 
 born of the poet's imagination in Kyle, and was the "worser spirit" 
 of his conduct, was the lineal descendant of the roaring boys of the 
 Elizabethan time and the swaggering wits and beaux of the days of 
 King Charles II. ; but his nearest relations are to be found in the 
 poetry and fiction that held the literary field when Burns was 
 young. Rab the Ranter is first cousin to Tom Jones and Roderick 
 
 TJ
 
 306 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 Eandom and Charles Surface, and was probably acquainted with 
 his relations ; his own immediate parent was, as I have already in- 
 dicated, the hero of Allan Ramsay's pastoral comedy, the ' Gentle 
 Shepherd ' Patie, a rattleskull, 
 
 " A very deil that aye maun hae his will," 
 
 'a king among his fellows by virtue of a natural air of superiority, 
 a rhymer and a singer, bold of address, glib of tongue, an adept in 
 chaffing the lasses, irresistible in his arts of courtship, but, with 
 all this, a student, "reading fell books that teach him meikle 
 skill," familiar with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, with poems, 
 histories, and plays "reading," as Ramsay says in his homely 
 
 phrase 
 
 " Reading such books as raise a peasant's mind 
 Above a lord's that is not so inclined." 
 
 All the roaring boys of eighteenth-century poetry and fiction are 
 distinguished by a certain goodness of heart, and an active scorn 
 of meanness and hypocrisy; they have strong natural affections; 
 they are full of compunction for the victims of their warm-blooded 
 recklessness. In short, they are all believers in "Rab's" ethical 
 
 creed : 
 
 " The heart aye's the part aye 
 That makes us richt or wrang." 
 
 In so far as the poet was a rantin' rovin' Robin, this was his 
 literary lineage and consanguinity. But the real Burns had a 
 strain in him that would not permit him to be a light-hearted 
 roaring boy. Rab the Ranter represented only one of his moods 
 a mood indulged rather in a spirit of defiance than with 
 thorough enjoyment, as in one to the manner born. Burns was 
 the son of the pious cottar whose Saturday night he celebrated, 
 and he could not remain long at ease in the Zion of the ranters, 
 however heartily he let himself go, and however splendid his 
 powers of expression were when he was in the vein. He was the 
 author of the addresses " To a Mouse " and " To a Mountain 
 Daisy," as well as of " Tarn o' Shanter " and " The Jolly Beggars"; 
 he was the "Man of Feeling," as well as "Rab the Ranter." 
 One of his most marked qualities is that which Carlyle expresses
 
 THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS. 307 
 
 with such eloquence of admiration, his large-hearted sensibility, 
 his boundless love of mankind, his warm and ready sympathy for 
 poor outcast defenceless creatures exposed to misfortune's bitter 
 blast, a sympathy generous enough to embrace and make allowance 
 for even the enemies of the well-conducted animal world the 
 prowling wolf and the devil himself. Herein, also, Burns was not 
 singular ; here, also, we find him the poet of 
 
 "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed" 
 
 in his time. When Burns wrote, sensibility or sentimentality 
 tenderness for the woes of the unfortunate, especially for sufferings 
 that could not be relieved, or for which no relief was possible but 
 a compassionate tear was, and had been for several years, a 
 ruling fashion in literature. Sensibility was a favourite virtue in 
 the heroines, and even in the heroes, of the romances of the time. 
 Sterne's ' Sentimental Journey,' and Mackenzie's ' Man of Feeling,' 
 still stand out among the numerous contemporary writings in the 
 same vein. " Dear sensibility ! " cries Sterne, " source inexhausted 
 of all that is precious in our joys or costly in our sorrows ! . . . 
 Thou givest a portion of it sometimes to the roughest peasant who 
 traverses the bleakest mountains. He finds the lacerated lamb of 
 another's flock. This moment I behold him, leaning with his head 
 against his crook, with piteous inclination, looking down upon it ! 
 ' Oh, had I come one moment sooner ! ' ' Sterne and Mackenzie 
 were favourite authors with Burns; he wore out two copies of 
 ' The Man of Feeling,' carrying it about in his pocket to read at 
 odd times. 
 
 But the reader may ask, Am I not reducing Burns, the child of 
 nature, the heaven - taught poet, to a mere creature of books 1 
 Would the lad that was born in Kyle not have been a " rantin' 
 rovin' " boy all the same if there had been no such character in 
 literature to catch his imagination and sway his conduct ? Would 
 he not have been a " man of feeling " if Sterne and Mackenzie had 
 never written a line ? Possibly ; all that I suggest is that, apart 
 from any question of what might have been, books did, as a 
 matter of fact, influence both his character and his choice of 
 poetical themes. The nature, of course, must have been there
 
 308 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 before he could have been thus influenced, the natural affinity 
 with what he absorbed from books, the germ that the " potency 
 of life " in them, to use Milton's phrase, quickened and expanded. 
 That Burns would have felt pity for the poor mouse whose 
 dwelling had been ruined by his fell ploughshare, even if he had 
 been absolutely illiterate, we can well believe ; but that he would 
 have written a poetic address to the mouse if he had not been 
 steeped in the literature of sensibility is open to question. I 
 merely afford an illustration of the truth expressed in Fletcher of 
 Saltoun's famous saying : " Let me make the ballads of a nation, 
 and I care not who makes its laws." Only Fletcher spoke of 
 popular music-hall songs, and the remark admits of a much wider 
 application an application as wide as Milton gave it in his 
 " Essay on the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing " : " For books are 
 not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in 
 them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are ; 
 nay, they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extrac- 
 tion of that living intellect that bred them. ... As good almost 
 kill a man as kill a good book." 
 
 I do not mean that Burns owed everything to books. In virtue 
 of his artistic temperament, he was peculiarly susceptible to in- 
 fluences of all kinds to ideas current in the minds of living men, 
 as well as to ideas preserved in books ; but books exercised a para- 
 mount influence upon him, because as a poet or artist in words he, 
 more than the generality of men, lived and moved and had his 
 being in the atmosphere of books. We have his own direct testi- 
 mony to this, even if it was not to be divined from his artistic 
 temperament, and the study of his works in relation to his con- 
 temporaries. 
 
 Take an example or two, We find him at a time when things 
 were not going well with him writing as follows to his friend, 
 Robert Ainslie : 
 
 " Let me quote you my two favourite passages, which, though I have re- 
 peated them ten thousand times, still they rouse my manhood and steel my 
 resolution like inspiration : 
 
 ' On Reason build resolve, 
 That column of true majesty in man.' 
 
 ( YOUNG.)
 
 THE HISTOPJCAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS. 309 
 
 ' Here, Alfred, hero of the State, 
 
 Thy genius heavens high will declare ; 
 The triumph of the truly great 
 Is never, never to despair ! 
 Is never to despair ! ' " 
 
 (THOMSON, " Masque of Alfred.") 
 
 For many men, most men, perhaps, such high-sounding phrases 
 are hollow and pointless, brass sounds and nothing more : for Burns 
 they obviously had " a potency of life." A letter to Murdoch 
 earlier in his career is still more significant of the support he re- 
 ceived from books, turning poetry to the use that the late Mr 
 Matthew Arnold was never weary of recommending : 
 
 " My favourite authors are of the sentimental kind, such as Shenstone, par- 
 ticularly his ' Elegies ' ; Thomson ; ' Man of Feeling,' a book I prize next to 
 the Bible ; ' Man of the World ' ; Sterne, especially his ' Sentimental Journey ' ; 
 Macpherson's ' Ossian,' &c. These are the glorious models after which I en- 
 deavour to form my conduct ; and 'tis incongruous, 'tis absurd to suppose that 
 the man whose mind glows with sentiments lighted up at their sacred flame 
 the man whose heart distends with benevolence to all the human race, he 
 ' who can soar above this little scene of things ' can he descend to mind the 
 paltry concerns about which the terrae-filial race fret and fume and vex them- 
 selves ! 0, how the glorious triumph swells my heart ! I forget that I am a 
 poor, insignificant devil, unnoticed and unknown, stalking up and down fairs 
 and markets, when I happen to be in them, reading a page or two of mankind, 
 and ' catching the manners living as they rise,' whilst the men of business 
 jostle me on every side as an idle incumbrance in their way." 
 
 Through that frank letter we can look as through an open 
 window into the heart of Burns, as it was at the age of twenty- 
 four, and it helps us to understand why he failed as a farmer and 
 why he succeeded as a poet, because it shows us how resolutely 
 his heart was set on one ambition and how entirely his mind was 
 occupied with the world of the imagination. At that date the 
 ranter strain in Burns's character was but very partially devel- 
 oped ; we can see that the " man of feeling " was then uppermost ; 
 and we can note, also, the working in his mind of another favour- 
 ite ideal of the time a favourite ideal among artists at all times 
 that of the spectator, the observer, who comes down from his 
 world of dreams and meditations to read in the great book of 
 mankind. 
 
 Anything that I have said would lead very far from my mean-
 
 310 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 ing if it conveyed the impression that Burns neglected to study 
 either man or nature from the life. My theory, if anything so 
 obvious can be dignified with the name of theory, only is, that it 
 was from literature that his genius received the original impulse 
 and bent to that study by which literature was so much enriched. 
 His poetry is not a mere freak of nature, a thing sui generis, but 
 an organic part of the body of English literature, with its attach- 
 ments or points of connection only slightly disguised by difference 
 of dialect. It drew its inspiration from literature, and it became 
 in its turn a fruitful source of inspiration to two great poets of 
 the next generation, Wordsworth and Byron. One main secret 
 of Byron's fascination was the frank sincerity with which he laid 
 bare his own personal feelings to the world, abandoning the timid 
 reserve, the polite reticence about self that had been the ruling 
 tradition of the eighteenth century ; and it may be doubted 
 whether, with all his impetuous strength and defiant pride, 
 Byron would have broken so completely with this tradition if 
 Burns had not led the way. It is with the " nobly pensive " side 
 of Burns, with Burns as the " man of feeling," that Wordsworth 
 connects himself ; and it may be doubted whether Wordsworth 
 would have reached the conviction which is the root and source 
 of so much of his best work, that 
 
 " Nature for all conditions wants not power 
 To consecrate, if we have eyes to see 
 The outside of her creatures, and to breathe 
 Grandeur upon the very humblest face 
 Of human life ; " 
 
 it may be doubted whether Wordsworth would have reached this 
 conviction as an inspiring principle of fresh poetic work if Burns 
 had not first taught him, to use his own words in acknowledging 
 the obligation, 
 
 " How verse may build a princely throne 
 On humble truth." 
 
 Carlyle, in his celebrated essay on Burns, in which, with all its 
 eloquence, he seems to me to speak far too disparagingly of 
 Burns's actual achievement as a poet, regrets that his father's 
 circumstances did not permit him to reach the university, and
 
 THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS. 311 
 
 conjectures that he might then have " come forth not as a rustic 
 wonder, but as a regular well-trained intellectual workman, and 
 changed the whole course of English literature." But after all, 
 as it was, Burns did something like this. I do not myself be- 
 lieve in the possibility of revolutionary changes in literature ; the 
 history of literature is the history of a gradual development, ad- 
 vancing often, no doubt, by leaps and bounds, but always by 
 natural transition from one stage to another. I doubt, therefore, 
 whether Burns would have " changed the whole course of English 
 literature " if he had gone to a university ; but, as it was, he ex- 
 ercised an important influence on that literature, and it is at least 
 probable that he would rather have been hindered with than 
 helped in that mission if his education had been different from 
 what it was. He might have been a happier man otherwise, but 
 it may be doubted whether he would have been a greater poet.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Addison, 7, 8, 9, 47, 87, 89, 90. 
 Age, spirit of the, 42, 43. 
 Akenside, 15, 16, 288, 301. 
 " Alastor," Shelley's, quoted, 256. 
 Anacreon, Moore's translation of, 3, 
 
 191. 
 Ancient classics, influence of, on Pope, 
 
 35, 37. 
 
 ' Anecdotes,' Spence's, 14, 15, 22, 65. 
 Arnold, Matthew, 176, 252, 259. 
 Articles, leading, 9. 
 Austen, Jane, 239, 240. 
 
 Ballads, influence of old, 125, 128, 202. 
 
 Lyrical, 141, 150, 155, 160. 
 "Bard, "Gray's, 84. 
 Beattie, 135, 221, 290. 
 ' Biographia Literaria,' 162, 163. 
 Boileau, 49. 
 Bowles, 283, 284. 
 Burney, Miss, 99, 100, 103-106. 
 Burns, 125, 126, 132, 135-139, 295-311. 
 
 Erroneous conceptions of, 125, 127, 
 295. 
 
 Education of, 138. 
 
 Connection of, with English critics, 
 298. 
 
 Obligation of, to books, 308, 309. 
 
 Quotations from, 132, 137, 301, 
 
 304, 306, 309. 
 Byron, 40, 215-233, 292. 
 
 ' Childe Harold,' 218-222. 
 
 Identification of Childe Harold 
 with Byron, 221. 
 
 ' Hours of Idleness,' 225. 
 
 Compared to Hamlet, 233. 
 
 Quotations from, 219, 225. 
 
 "Campaign," Addison's, 7-9. 
 Campbell, 185-190. 
 Carlyle, 180, 205, 209, 295, 310, 311. 
 Carruthers, 13, 284. 
 
 ' Castle of Otranto,' Walpole's, 95, 96. 
 
 'Childe Harold,' Byron's, quoted, 219. 
 
 Churchill, 112, 288. 
 
 Gibber, 67, 71. 
 
 Classical school of poetry, 277, 282. 
 
 Classics, influence of, on Pope, 35-37. 
 
 Coleridge, 163, 177-179, 182. 
 
 and Wordsworth, 149, 155, 157, 
 177, 181. 
 
 'Biographia Literaria,' 162, 163. 
 
 Carlyle on, 180. 
 
 Irresolution of, 181. 
 
 Quotations from, 162, 181. 
 Collins, 80, 285, 290, 291, 301. 
 Colman, 114. 
 
 ' Connoisseur,' the, 114, 120, 121. 
 Correctness, Walsh on, 24, 300. 
 Couplet, Pope's use of the, 39. 
 Courthope, 67, 69, 71, 265-280. 
 Cowper, 112-124, 154, 159. 
 
 Historical connection of, 113. 
 
 Outline of life of, 114-120, 122- 
 124. 
 
 Earlier writings of, 120-122. 
 
 Quotations from, 115, 116, 121. 
 Crabbe, 298. 
 
 Criticism, influence of, on eighteenth- 
 century poetry, 14. 
 
 Essay on, Pope's, 32-37. 
 Croker, 67, 241, 242, 245. 
 
 D'Arblay, Mme., see Burney, Miss. 
 
 Darwin, Erasmus, 39, 186. 
 
 Decay of poetrv in eighteenth century, 
 
 286. 
 
 Defoe, 9, 90. 
 
 Descriptive poetry, 53, 54. 
 Diary of a lady of quality, 87. 
 Diction, poetic, 1(50-169. 
 Dilke, discovery of Pope's letters by, 
 
 265. 
 Disraeli, 247.
 
 314 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 ' Diniciad,' 66-71, 281. 
 
 Duty, Wordsworth's Ode to, 172. 
 
 Dyer, 61, 62. 
 
 Edgeworth, Miss, 235-238. 
 'Edinburgh Review.' the, 176, 226. 227, 
 
 249, 251. 
 Eighteenth-century poetry, defects of, 
 
 Elwi'n, 26, 30, 67, 266, 267. 
 
 Emotion in Wordsworth's poetry, 170, 
 
 Epic, Pope's attempt at, 23, 63, 64. 
 "Essay on Criticism," Pope's, 32-37. 
 Essayists, Burns and the English, 298. 
 Evening, Collins's Ode to, 80. 
 
 Fergusson, 299. 
 Ferrier, Miss, 246. 
 Fielding, 93, 94. 
 Fielding, Sarah, 101. 
 French Revolution, influence of, on 
 literature, 112, 187, 200, 293. 
 
 Garrick, 87. 
 
 ' Guardian,' the, 27, 29, 45, 131, 297. 
 
 Gay, 48, 298. 
 
 "Gentle Shepherd," the, 29, 131-134, 
 
 298, 299. 
 
 Georges, the Four, and literature, 3. 
 Georgian Era, the, a literary epoch, 
 
 10. 
 
 Gifford, 251, 252. 
 Glover, 75-77. 
 Goldsmith, 94, 149, 186. 
 Gothic Romance, 95. 
 Gray, 16, 82-84, 164, 289. 
 Green, 111, 115. 
 "Grongar Hill," Dyer's, 61. 
 
 Halifax, Lord, 7. 
 Hayley, 17-19. 
 Historical Romances, 98. 
 Hunt, Leigh, 251. 
 
 Ideals, influence of, in poetry, 42. 
 Imagination and emotion, 170, 171. 
 
 Jeffrey, 176, 251. 
 
 Johnson, 26, 28, 77, 78, 83, 268, 285, 
 286, 290. 
 
 Keats, 258-261. 
 
 Lake Poets, the, 177, 178. 
 
 Leading articles, 9. 
 
 Lennox, Mrs, 101. 
 
 ' Leonidas,' Glover's, 75, 76. 
 
 Little, Thomas, 192. 
 
 Lovelace, 193. 
 
 " Lycidas," Milton's, 27. 
 
 ' Lyrical Ballads,' 141, 150, 155-160. 
 Lytton, 247. 
 
 Macaulay, 73, 102, 103, 218, 283. 
 
 Mackenzie, 156, 204, 307. 
 
 Macphersou (Ossiau), 99, 309. 
 
 Marivaux, 100. 
 
 Mason, 18, 38. 
 
 Maturin, 242. 
 
 Milton, 27. 
 
 Mitford, Miss, 246, 247. 
 
 Moore, 191-199. 
 
 Dr, 221, 294. 
 More, Hannah, 238. 
 Morgan, Lady, 241. 
 
 Nature, poetic treatment of, 16, 44, 45, 
 
 54, 275. 
 Novel, the, 88-110. 
 
 Supernatural and historical, 98. 
 
 Ode, Wordsworth's, to Duty, 172. 
 Ode, Collins's, to Evening, 80. 
 Oliphant, Mrs, 94, 159, 196, 232. 
 Ossian, 99, 309. 
 
 'Pamela,' Richardson's, 88-94. 
 
 Party writers, poets as, 8. 
 
 Passion, Pope's theory of a ruling, 73. 
 
 Pastorals, 25-31, 45, 297. 
 
 Patronage, decline of royal, 3. 
 
 Pattison, Mark, 13, 270. 
 
 Percy's ' Reliques,' 99, 202. 
 
 Periodicals, 9. 
 
 Philips, Ambrose, 29, 297. 
 
 " Pleasures of Hope," Campbell's, 
 
 quoted, 189. 
 
 Poetry, decay of, in eighteenth cen- 
 tury, 286. 
 
 Descriptive, 53, 54. 
 
 Diction proper to, 160-169. 
 
 Defects of Georgian, 41. 
 
 Influence of ideals in, 42. 
 
 Lake, 177, 178. 
 Politics, eighteenth-century literature 
 
 and, 5, 6. 
 Pope, criticism of, by Macaulay, 11. 
 
 Decline in popularity of, 13. 
 
 Classification of poems of, 20. 
 
 Education, 22. 
 
 " Essay on Criticism," 32-37. 
 
 Influence of classics on, 35. 
 
 Translations by, 46, 47. 
 
 " Rape of the Lock," 49. 
 
 Moral character of, 270. 
 
 Artificiality in verse of, 275. 
 
 'Dunciad,' 66-71, 281. 
 Porter, Jane, 244. 
 "Prelude," Wordsworth's, 142-147. 
 
 Radcliffe, Mrs, 99, 100, 107-110.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 315 
 
 Ramsay, Allan, 25, 29, 128-134, 298, 
 
 299. 
 
 "Rape of the Lock," the, 48-50. 
 Reeve, Clara, 107, 108. 
 "Revolt of Islam," Shelley's, quoted, 
 
 254. 
 
 Richardson, 88-94. 
 Rogers, 185. 
 Romance, supernatural, 95. 
 
 Historical, 98. 
 " Ruins of Rome," Dyer's, 62. 
 
 Scotch songs, 126, 127, 136. 
 Scott, 40, 201-218. 
 
 Martial spirit in poetry of, 201. 
 
 Influence of ballads on, 202. 
 
 German influence on, 204. 
 
 Carlyle's criticism of, 209, 243. 
 
 The ' Lay,' 211-214, 291. 
 
 'Waverley,' 243-245. 
 ' Seasons,' Thomson's, 55-62. 
 Shakespeare, Pope on, 14. 
 
 Gray on, 16. 
 Shelley, early criticisms of, 250. 
 
 Sensitiveness of, 253. 
 Shelley, Mrs, 246. 
 Sheridan, Frances, 102. 
 Skinner, 135. 
 Smollett, 94. 
 Society, character of, in Pope's time, 
 
 44. 
 
 " Solitary Reaper," Wordsworth's, 173. 
 Somerville, 62. 
 Songs, Scotch, 126, 127, 136. 
 Sonnet, Wordsworth's, to Twilight, 175. 
 
 To Steamboats, 176. 
 Southey, 177, 183, 184. 
 ' Spectator,' 9, 87, 89, 90. 
 Spence's anecdotes of Pope, 14, 15, 22, 
 65. 
 
 Spirit of the age, the, 42, 43. 
 Stage, influence of the, 86, 87. 
 Stanzas, Shelley's "Written in Dejec- 
 tion," quoted, 257. 
 Steele, 27, 29, 89, 298. 
 Sterne, 94, 156, 307. 
 Stevenson, R. L., 305. 
 
 Taine, M. , 28, 49. 
 'Tatler,' the, 9, 89. 
 Tennyson, 10, 60. 
 Thackeray, 3, 71, 72, 94. 
 Theatre, revival of the, 86, 87. 
 Theobald, 67. 
 Thomson, 51-60. 
 Troubadours, 194. 
 "Tullochgorum," 135, 136. 
 
 Walpole, 85, 95, 96, 99. 
 
 Walsh, 23, 24, 297, 300. 
 
 Warton, 284, 285. 
 
 Watson's Collection, 128. 
 
 "Windsor Forest," Pope's, 28. 
 
 "Winter," Thomson's, 55-58. 
 
 Wit, 38, 275. 
 
 Wordsworth, "Prelude," 143-147, 181. 
 
 Preface to 'Lyrical Ballads,' 141. 
 
 ' Lyrical Ballads,' 149, 150. 
 
 " Lines written above Tintern 
 Abbey," 154. 
 
 " The Idiot Boy," 157-159. 
 
 Poetic diction, 160-169. 
 
 Emotion and Imagination, 171- 
 173. 
 
 Coleridge's influence on, 178. 
 Wycherley, 23, 24. 
 
 Young, 72. 
 
 'Zeluco,' Moore's, 221, 294. 
 
 TUB END. 
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM BI.ACKWOOD AND SONS.
 
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