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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/15447-8.txt b/15447-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0653ec0 --- /dev/null +++ b/15447-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,14430 @@ +The Project Gutenberg eBook, A History of English Romanticism in the +Eighteenth Century, by Henry A. Beers + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century + + +Author: Henry A. Beers + +Release Date: March 24, 2005 [eBook #15447] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM +IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY*** + + +E-text prepared by Jeanette Hayward and Al Haines. Dedicated to the memory +of James Hayward. + + + +A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY + +by + +HENRY A. BEERS + +Author of _A Suburban Pastoral_, _The Ways of Vale_, etc. + + + + + + + +"Was unsterblich im Gesang soll leben Muss im Leben untergehen." + --Schiller + + + + +PREFACE + +Historians of French and German literature are accustomed to set off a +period, or a division of their subject, and entitle it "Romanticism" or +"the Romantic School." Writers of English literary history, while +recognizing the importance of England's share in this great movement in +European letters, have not generally accorded it a place by itself in the +arrangement of their subject-matter, but have treated it cursively, as a +tendency present in the work of individual authors; and have maintained a +simple chronological division of eras into the "Georgian,", the +"Victorian," etc. The reason of this is perhaps to be found in the fact +that, although Romanticism began earlier in England than on the Continent +and lent quite as much as it borrowed in the international exchange of +literary commodities, the native movement was more gradual and scattered. +It never reached so compact a shape, or came so definitely to a head, as +in Germany or France. There never was precisely a "romantic school" or +an all-pervading romantic fashion in England. + +There is, therefore, nothing in English corresponding to Heine's +fascinating sketch "Die Romantische Schule," or to Théophile Gautier's +almost equally fascinating and far more sympathetic "Histoire du +Romantisme." If we can imagine a composite personality of Byron and De +Quincey, putting on record his half affectionate and half satirical +reminiscences of the contemporary literary movement, we might have +something nearly equivalent. For Byron, like Heine, was a repentant +romanticist, with "radical notions under his cap," and a critical theory +at odds with his practice; while De Quincey was an early disciple of +Wordsworth and Coleridge,--as Gautier was of Victor Hugo,--and at the +same time a clever and slightly mischievous sketcher of personal traits. + +The present volume consists, in substance, of a series of lectures given +in elective courses in Yale College. In revising it for publication I +have striven to rid it of the air of the lecture room, but a few +repetitions and didacticisms of manner may have inadvertently been left +in. Some of the methods and results of these studies have already been +given to the public in "The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement," +by my present associate and former scholar, Professor William Lyon +Phelps. Professor Phelps' little book (originally a doctorate thesis) +follows, in the main, the selection and arrangement of topics in my +lectures. _En revanche_ I have had the advantage of availing myself of +his independent researches on points which I have touched but slightly; +and particularly of his very full treatment of the Spenserian imitations. + +I had at first intended to entitle the book "Chapters toward a History of +English Romanticism, etc."; for, though fairly complete in treatment, it +makes no claim to being exhaustive. By no means every eighteenth-century +writer whose work exhibits romantic motives is here passed in review. +That very singular genius William Blake, _e.g._, in whom the influence of +"Ossian," among other things, is so strongly apparent, I leave untouched; +because his writings--partly by reason of their strange manner of +publication--were without effect upon their generation and do not form a +link in the chain of literary tendency. + +If this volume should be favorably received, I hope before very long to +publish a companion study of English romanticism in the nineteenth +century. + + H.A.B. + + +_October, 1898._ + + + + +CONTENTS + +Chapter + + I. The Subject Defined + + II. The Augustans + + III. The Spenserians + + IV. The Landscape Poets + + V. The Miltonic Group + + VI. The School of Warton + + VII. The Gothic Revival + + VIII. Percy and the Ballads + + IX. Ossian + + X. Thomas Chatterton + + XI. The German Tributary + + + + +A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM + + +CHAPTER I. + +The Subject Defined + +To attempt at the outset a rigid definition of the word _romanticism_ +would be to anticipate the substance of this volume. To furnish an +answer to the question--What is, or was, romanticism? or, at least, What +is, or was English romanticism?--is one of my main purposes herein, and +the reader will be invited to examine a good many literary documents, and +to do a certain amount of thinking, before he can form for himself any +full and clear notion of the thing. Even then he will hardly find +himself prepared to give a dictionary definition or romanticism. There +are words which connote so much, which take up into themselves so much of +the history of the human mind, that any compendious explanation of their +meaning--any definition which is not, at the same time, a rather extended +description--must serve little other end than to supply a convenient mark +of identification. How can we define in a sentence words like +renaissance, philistine, sentimentalism, transcendental, Bohemia, +pre-Raphaelite, impressionist, realistic? _Definitio est negatio_. It +may be possible to hit upon a form of words which will mark romanticism +off from everything else--tell in a clause what it is _not_; but to add a +positive content to the definition--to tell what romanticism _is_, will +require a very different and more gradual process.[1] + +Nevertheless a rough, working definition may be useful to start with. +Romanticism, then, in the sense in which I shall commonly employ the +word, means the reproduction in modern art or literature of the life and +thought of the Middle Ages. Some other elements will have to be added to +this definition, and some modifications of it will suggest themselves +from time to time. It is provisional, tentative, classic, but will serve +our turn till we are ready to substitute a better. It is the definition +which Heine gives in his brilliant little book on the Romantic School in +Germany.[2] "All the poetry of the Middle Ages," he adds, "has a certain +definite character, through which it differs from the poetry of the +Greeks and Romans. In reference to this difference, the former is called +Romantic, the latter Classic. These names, however, are misleading, and +have hitherto caused the most vexatious confusion."[3] + +Some of the sources of this confusion will be considered presently. +Meanwhile the passage recalls the fact that _romantic_, when used as a +term in literary nomenclature, is not an independent, but a referential +word. It implies its opposite, the classic; and the ingenuity of critics +has been taxed to its uttermost to explain and develop the numerous +points of contrast. To form a thorough conception of the romantic, +therefore, we must also form some conception of the classic. Now there +is an obvious unlikeness between the thought and art of the nations of +pagan antiquity and the thought and art of the peoples of Christian, +feudal Europe. Everyone will agree to call the Parthenon, the "Diana" of +the Louvre, the "Oedipus" of Sophocles, the orations of Demosthenes +classical; and to call the cathedral of Chartres, the walls of +Nuremberg--_die Perle des Mittelalters_--the "Legenda Aurea" of Jacobus +de Voragine, the "Tristan und Isolde" of Gottfried of Strasburg, and the +illuminations in a Catholic missal of the thirteenth century romantic. + +The same unlikeness is found between modern works conceived in the +spirit, or executed in direct imitation, of ancient and medieval art +respectively. It is easy to decide that Flaxman's outline drawings in +illustration of Homer are classic; that Alfieri's tragedies, Goethe's +"Iphigenie auf Tauris" Landor's "Hellenics," Gibson's statues, David's +paintings, and the church of the Madeleine in Paris are classical, at +least in intentions and in the models which they follow; while Victor +Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris," Scott's "Ivanhoe," Fouqué's "Der +Zauberring," and Rossetti's painting, "The Girlhood of Mary," are no less +certainly romantic in their inspiration. + +But critics have given a wider extension than this to the terms classic +and romantic. They have discerned, or imagined, certain qualities, +attitudes of mind, ways of thinking and feeling, traits of style which +distinguish classic from romantic art; and they have applied the words +accordingly to work which is not necessarily either antique or medieval +in subject. Thus it is assumed, for example, that the productions of +Greek and Roman genius were characterized by clearness, simplicity, +restraint, unity of design, subordination of the part to the whole; and +therefore modern works which make this impression of noble plainness and +severity, of harmony in construction, economy of means and clear, +definite outline, are often spoken of as classical, quite irrespective of +the historical period which they have to do with. In this sense, it is +usual to say that Wordsworth's "Michael" is classical, or that Goethe's +"Hermann and Dorothea" is classical; though Wordsworth may be celebrating +the virtues of a Westmoreland shepherd, and Goethe telling the story of +two rustic lovers on the German border at the time of the Napoleonic wars. + +On the other hand, it is asserted that the work of mediaeval poets and +artists is marked by an excess of sentiment, by over-lavish decoration, a +strong sense of color and a feeble sense of form, an attention to detail, +at the cost of the main impression, and a consequent tendency to run into +the exaggerated, the fantastic, and the grotesque. It is not uncommon, +therefore, to find poets like Byron and Shelly classified as +romanticists, by virtue of their possession of these, or similar, +characteristics, although no one could be more remote from medieval +habits of thought than the author of "Don Juan" or the author of "The +Revolt of Islam." + +But the extension of these opposing terms to the work of writers who have +so little in common with either the antique or the medieval as +Wordsworth, on the one hand, and Byron, on the other, does not stop here. +It is one of the embarrassments of the literary historian that nearly +every word which he uses has two meanings, a critical and a popular +meaning. In common speech, classic has come to signify almost anything +that is good. If we look in our dictionaries we find it defined somewhat +in this way: "Conforming to the best authority in literature and art; +pure; chaste; refined; originally and chiefly used of the best Greek and +Roman writers, but also applied to the best modern authors, or their +works." "Classic, _n._ A work of acknowledged excellence and authority." +In this sense of the word, "Robinson Crusoe" is a classic; the "Pilgrim's +Progress" is a classic; every piece of literature which is customarily +recommended as a safe pattern for young writers to form their style upon +is a classic.[4] + +Contrariwise the word _romantic_, as popularly employed, expresses a +shade of disapprobation. The dictionaries make it a synonym for +_sentimental, fanciful_, _wild_, _extravagant_, _chimerical_, all evident +derivatives from their more critical definition, "pertaining or +appropriate to the style of the Christian and popular literature of the +Middle Ages, as opposed to the classical antique." The etymology of +_romance_ is familiar. The various dialects which sprang from the +corruption of the Latin were called by the common name of _romans_. The +name was then applied to any piece of literature composed in this +vernacular instead of in the ancient classical Latin. And as the +favorite kind of writing in Provençal, Old French, and Spanish was the +tale of chivalrous adventure that was called _par excellence_, _a roman_, +_romans_, or_ romance_. The adjective _romantic_ is much later, +implying, as it does, a certain degree of critical attention to the +species of fiction which it describes in order to a generalizing of its +peculiarities. It first came into general use in the latter half of the +seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth; and naturally, +was marked from birth with that shade of disapproval which has been +noticed in popular usage. + +The feature that struck the critics most in the romances of the Middle +Ages, and in that very different variety of romance which was cultivated +during the seventeenth century--the prolix, sentimental fictions of La +Calprenède, Scudéri, Gomberville, and D'Urfé--was the fantastic +improbability of their adventures. Hence the common acceptation of the +word _romantic_ in such phrases as "a romantic notion," "a romantic +elopement," "an act of romantic generosity." The application of the +adjective to scenery was somewhat later,[5] and the abstract +_romanticism_ was, of course, very much later; as the literary movement, +or the revolution in taste, which it entitles, was not enough developed +to call for a name until the opening of the nineteenth century. Indeed, +it was never so compact, conscious, and definite a movement in England as +in Germany and France; and its baptism doubtless came from abroad, from +the polemical literature which attended the career of the German +_romanticismus _and the French _romantisme_. + +While accepting provisionally Heine's definition, it will be useful to +examine some of the wider meanings that have been attached to the words +_classic_ and _romantic_, and some of the analyses that have been +attempted of the qualities that make one work of art classical and +another romantic. Walter Pater took them to indicate opposite tendencies +or elements which are present in varying proportions in all good art. It +is the essential function of classical art and literature, he thought, to +take care of the qualities of measure, purity, temperance. "What is +classical comes to us out of the cool and quiet of other times, as a +measure of what a long experience has shown us will, at least, never +displease us. And in the classical literature of Greece and Rome, as in +the classics of the last century, the essentially classical element is +that quality of order in beauty which they possess, indeed, in a +pre-eminent degree."[6] "The charm, then, of what is classical in art or +literature is that of the well-known tale, to which we can nevertheless +listen over and over again, because it is told so well. To the absolute +beauty of its form is added the accidental, tranquil charm of +familiarity." + +On the other hand, he defines the romantic characteristics in art as +consisting in "the addition of strangeness to beauty"--a definition which +recalls Bacon's saying, "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some +strangeness in the proportion." "The desire of beauty," continues Pater, +"being a fixed element in every artistic organization, it is the addition +of curiosity to this desire of beauty that constitutes the romantic +temper." This critic, then, would not confine the terms _classic_ and +_classicism_ to the literature of Greece and Rome and to modern works +conceived in the same spirit, although he acknowledges that there are +certain ages of the world in which the classical tradition predominates, +_i.e._, in which the respect for authority, the love of order and +decorum, the disposition to follow rules and models, the acceptance of +academic and conventional standards overbalance the desire for +strangeness and novelty. Such epochs are, _e.g._, the Augustan age of +Rome, the _Siècle de Louis XIV_, in France, the times of Pope and Johnson +in England--indeed, the whole of the eighteenth century in all parts of +Europe. + +Neither would he limit the word _romantic_ to work conceived in the +spirit of the Middle Ages. "The essential elements," he says, "of the +romantic spirit are curiosity and the love of beauty; and it is as the +accidental effect of these qualities only, that it seeks the Middle Ages; +because in the overcharged atmosphere of the Middle Age there are +unworked sources of romantic effect, of a strange beauty to be won by +strong imagination out of things unlikely or remote." "The sense in +which Scott is to be called a romantic writer is chiefly that, in +opposition to the literary tradition of the last century, he loved +strange adventure and sought it in the Middle Age." + +Here again the essayist is careful to explain that there are certain +epochs which are predominately romantic. "Outbreaks of this spirit come +naturally with particular periods: times when . . . men come to art and +poetry with a deep thirst for intellectual excitement, after a long +_ennui_." He instances, as periods naturally romantic, the time of the +early Provençal troubadour poetry: the years following the Bourbon +Restoration in France (say, 1815-30); and "the later Middle Age; so that +the medieval poetry, centering in Dante, is often opposed to Greek or +Roman poetry, as romantic to classical poetry." + +In Pater's use of the terms, then, classic and romantic do not describe +particular literature, or particular periods in literary history, so much +as certain counterbalancing qualities and tendencies which run through +the literatures of all times and countries. There were romantic writings +among the Greeks and Romans; there were classical writings in the Middle +Ages; nay, there are classical and romantic traits in the same author. +If there is any poet who may safely be described as a classic, it is +Sophocles; and yet Pater declares that the "Philoctetes" of Sophocles, if +issued to-day, would be called romantic. And he points out--what indeed +has been often pointed out--that the "Odyssey"[7] is more romantic than +the "Iliad:" is, in fact, rather a romance than a hero-epic. The +adventures of the wandering Ulysses, the visit to the land of the +lotus-eaters, the encounter with the Laestrygonians, the experiences in +the cave of Polyphemus, if allowance be made for the difference in +sentiments and manners, remind the reader constantly of the medieval +_romans d'aventure_. Pater quotes De Stendhal's saying that all good art +was romantic in its day. "Romanticism," says De Stendhal, "is the art of +presenting to the nations the literary works which, in the actual state +of their habits and beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest +possible pleasure: classicism, on the contrary, presents them with what +gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great grand-fathers"--a +definition which is epigrammatic, if not convincing.[8] De Stendhal +(Henri Beyle) was a pioneer and a special pleader in the cause of French +romanticism, and, in his use of the terms, romanticism stands for +progress, liberty, originality, and the spirit of the future; classicism, +for conservatism, authority, imitation, the spirit of the past. +According to him, every good piece of romantic art is a classic in the +making. Decried by the classicists of to-day, for its failure to observe +traditions, it will be used by the classicists of the future as a pattern +to which new artists must conform. + +It may be worth while to round out the conception of the term by +considering a few other definitions of _romantic_ which have been +proposed. Dr. F. H. Hedge, in an article in the _Atlantic Monthly_[9] +for March, 1886, inquired, "What do we mean by romantic?" Goethe, he +says, characterized the difference between classic and romantic "as +equivalent to [that between] healthy and morbid. Schiller proposed +'naïve and sentimental.'[10] The greater part [of the German critics] +regarded it as identical with the difference between ancient and modern, +which was partly true, but explained nothing. None of the definitions +given could be accepted as quite satisfactory."[11] + +Dr. Hedge himself finds the origin of romantic feeling in wonder and the +sense of mystery. "The essence of romance," he writes, "is mystery"; and +he enforces the point by noting the application of the word to scenery. +"The woody dell, the leafy glen, the forest path which leads, one knows +not whither, are romantic: the public highway is not." "The winding +secret brook . . . is romantic, as compared with the broad river." +"Moonlight is romantic, as contrasted with daylight." Dr. Hedge +attributes this fondness for the mysterious to "the influence of the +Christian religion, which deepened immensely the mystery of life, +suggesting something beyond and behind the world of sense." + +This charm of wonder or mystery is perhaps only another name for that +"strangeness added to beauty" which Pater takes to be the distinguishing +feature of romantic art. Later in the same article, Dr. Hedge asserts +that "the essence of romanticism is aspiration." Much might be said in +defense of this position. It has often been pointed out, _e.g._, that a +Gothic cathedral expresses aspiration, and a Greek temple satisfied +completeness. Indeed if we agree that, in a general way, the classic is +equivalent to the antique, and the romantic to the medieval, it will be +strange if we do not discover many differences between the two that can +hardly be covered by any single phrase. Dr. Hedge himself enumerates +several qualities of romantic art which it would be difficult to bring +under his essential and defining category of wonder or aspiration. Thus +he announces that "the peculiarity of the classic style is reserve, +self-suppression of the writer"; while "the romantic is self-reflecting." +"Clear, unimpassioned, impartial presentation of the subject . . . is the +prominent feature of the classic style. The modern writer gives you not +so much the things themselves as his impression of them." Here then is +the familiar critical distinction between the objective and subjective +methods--Schiller's _naiv and sentimentalisch_--applied as a criterion of +classic and romantic style. This contrast the essayist develops at some +length, dwelling upon "the cold reserve and colorless simplicity of the +classic style, where the medium is lost in the object"; and "on the other +hand, the inwardness, the sentimental intensity, the subjective coloring +of the romantic style." + +A further distinguishing mark of the romantic spirit, mentioned by Dr. +Hedge in common with many other critics, is the indefiniteness or +incompleteness of its creations. This is a consequence, of course, of +its sense of mystery and aspiration. Schopenbauer said that music was +the characteristic modern art, because of its subjective, indefinite +character. Pursuing this line of thought, Dr. Hedge affirms that +"romantic relates to classic somewhat as music relates to plastic +art. . . It [music] presents no finished ideal, but suggests ideals +beyond the capacity of canvas or stone. Plastic art acts on the +intellect, music on the feelings; the one affects us by what it presents, +the other by what it suggests. This, it seems to me, is essentially the +difference between classic and romantic poetry"; and he names Homer and +Milton as examples of the former, and Scott and Shelley of the latter +school. + +Here then we have a third criterion proposed for determining the +essential _differentia_ of romantic art. First it was mystery, then +aspiration; now it is the appeal to the emotions by the method of +suggestion. And yet there is, perhaps, no inconsistency on the critic's +part in this continual shifting of his ground. He is apparently +presenting different facets of the same truth; he means one thing by this +mystery, aspiration, indefiniteness, incompleteness, emotion +suggestiveness: that quality or effect which we all feel to be present in +romantic and absent from classic work, but which we find it hard to +describe by any single term. It is open to any analyst of our critical +vocabulary to draw out the fullest meanings that he can, from such pairs +of related words as classic and romantic, fancy and imagination, wit and +humor, reason and understanding, passion and sentiment. Let us, for +instance, develop briefly this proposition that the ideal of classic art +is completeness[12] and the ideal of romantic art indefiniteness, or +suggestiveness. + +A.W. Schlegel[13] had already made use of two of the arts of design, to +illustrate the distinction between classic and romantic, just as Dr. +Hedge uses plastic art and music. I refer to Schlegel's famous saying +that the genius of the antique drama was statuesque, and that of the +romantic drama picturesque. A Greek temple, statue, or poem has no +imperfection and offers no further promise, indicates nothing beyond what +it expresses. It fills the sense, it leaves nothing to the imagination. +It stands correct, symmetric, sharp in outline, in the clear light of +day. There is nothing more to be done to it; there is no concealment +about it. But in romantic art there is seldom this completeness. The +workman lingers, he would fain add another touch, his ideal eludes him. +Is a Gothic cathedral ever really finished? Is "Faust" finished? Is +"Hamlet" explained? The modern spirit is mystical; its architecture, +painting, poetry employ shadow to produce their highest effects: shadow +and color rather than contour. On the Greek heroic stage there were a +few figures, two or three at most, grouped like statuary and thrown out +in bold relief at the apex of the scene: in Greek architecture a few +clean, simple lines: in Greek poetry clear conceptions easily expressible +in language and mostly describable in sensuous images. + +The modern theater is crowded with figures and colors, and the distance +recedes in the middle of the scene. This love of perspective is repeated +in cathedral aisles,[14] the love of color in cathedral windows, and +obscurity hovers in the shadows of the vault. In our poetry, in our +religion these twilight thoughts prevail. We seek no completeness here. +What is beyond, what is inexpressible attracts us. Hence the greater +spirituality of romantic literature, its deeper emotion, its more +passionate tenderness. But hence likewise its sentimentality, its +melancholy and, in particular, the morbid fascination which the thought +of death has had for the Gothic mind. The classic nations concentrated +their attention on life and light, and spent few thoughts upon darkness +and the tomb. Death was to them neither sacred nor beautiful. Their +decent rites of sepulture or cremation seem designed to hide its +deformities rather than to prolong its reminders. The presence of the +corpse was pollution. No Greek could have conceived such a book as the +"Hydriotaphia" or the "Anatomy of Melancholy." + +It is observable that Dr. Hedge is at one with Pater, in desiring some +more philosophical statement of the difference between classic and +romantic than the common one which makes it simply the difference between +the antique and the medieval. He says: "It must not be supposed that +ancient and classic, on one side, and modern and romantic, on the other, +are inseparably one; so that nothing approaching to romantic shall be +found in any Greek or Roman author, nor any classic page in the +literature of modern Europe. . . The literary line of demarcation is not +identical with the chronological one." And just as Pater says that the +Odyssey is more romantic than the Iliad, so Dr. Hedge says that "the +story of Cupid and Psyche,[15] in the 'Golden Ass' of Apuleius, is as +much a romance as any composition of the seventeenth or eighteenth +century." Medievalism he regards as merely an accident of romance: +Scott, as most romantic in his themes, but Byron, in his mood. + +So, too, Mr. Sidney Colvin[16] denies that "a predilection for classic +subjects . . . can make a writer that which we understand by the word +classical as distinguished from that which we understand by the word +romantic. The distinction lies deeper, and is a distinction much less of +subject than of treatment. . . In classical writing every idea is called +up to the mind as nakedly as possible, and at the same time as +distinctly; it is exhibited in white light, and left to produce its +effect by its own unaided power.[17] In romantic writing, on the other +hand, all objects are exhibited, as it were, through a colored and +iridescent atmosphere. Round about every central idea the romantic +writer summons up a cloud of accessory and subordinate ideas for the sake +of enhancing its effect, if at the risk of confusing its outlines. The +temper, again, of the romantic writer is one of excitement, while the +temper of the classical writer is one of self-possession. . . On the one +hand there is calm, on the other hand enthusiasm. The virtues of the one +style are strength of grasp, with clearness and justice of presentment; +the virtues of the other style are glow of the spirit, with magic and +richness of suggestion." Mr. Colvin then goes on to enforce and +illustrate this contrast between the "accurate and firm definition of +things" in classical writers and the "thrilling vagueness and +uncertainty," the tremulous, coruscating, vibrating or colored light--the +"halo"--with which the romantic writer invests his theme. "The romantic +manner, . . . with its thrilling uncertainties and its rich suggestions, +may be more attractive than the classic manner, with its composed and +measured preciseness of statement. . . But on the other hand the +romantic manner lends itself, as the true classical does not, to inferior +work. Second-rate conceptions excitedly and approximately put into words +derive from it an illusive attraction which may make them for a time, and +with all but the coolest judges, pass as first-rate. Whereas about true +classical writing there can be no illusion. It presents to us +conceptions calmly realized in words that exactly define them, +conceptions depending for their attraction, not on their halo, but on +themselves." + +As examples of these contrasting styles, Mr. Colvin puts side by side +passages from "The Ancient Mariner" and Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," +with passages, treating similar themes, from Landor's "Gebir" and +"Imaginary Conversations." The contrast might be even more clearly +established by a study of such a piece as Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," +where the romantic form is applied to classical content; or by a +comparison of Tennyson's "Ulysses" and "The Lotus Eaters," in which +Homeric subjects are treated respectively in the classic and the romantic +manner. + +Alfred de Musset, himself in early life a prominent figure among the +French romanticists, wrote some capital satire upon the baffling and +contradictory definitions of the word _romantisme_ that were current in +the third and fourth decades of this century.[18] Two worthy provincials +write from the little town of La Ferté-sous-Jouarre to the editor of the +"Revue des Deux Mondes," appealing to him to tell them what romanticism +means. For two years Dupuis and his friend Cotonet had supposed that the +term applied only to the theater, and signified the disregard of the +unities. "Shakspere, for example makes people travel from Rome to +London, and from Athens to Alexandria in a quarter of an hour. His +heroes live ten or twenty years between two acts. His heroines, angels +of virtue during a whole scene, have only to pass into the _coulisses_, +to reappear as wives, adulteresses, widows, and grandmothers. There, we +said to ourselves, is the romantic. Contrariwise, Sophocles makes +Oedipus sit on a rock, even at the cost of great personal inconvenience, +from the very beginning of his tragedy. All the characters come there to +find him, one after the other. Perhaps he stands up occasionally, though +I doubt it; unless, it may be, out of respect for Theseus, who, during +the entire play, obligingly walks on the high-way, coming in or going out +continually. . . There, we said to ourselves, is the classic." + +But about 1828, continues the letter, "we learned that there were +romantic poetry and classical poetry, romantic novels and classical +novels, romantic odes and classical odes; nay, a single line, my dear +sir, a sole and solitary line of verse might be romantic or classic, +according as the humor took it. When we received this intelligence, we +could not close our eyes all night. Two years of peaceful conviction had +vanished like a dream. All our ideas were turned topsy-turvy; for it the +rules of Aristotle were no longer the line of demarcation which separated +the literary camps, where was one to find himself, and what was he to +depend upon? How was one to know, in reading a book, which school it +belonged to? . . . Luckily in the same year there appeared a famous +preface, which we devoured straightway[19]. . . This said very +distinctly that romanticism was nothing else than the alliance of the +playful and the serious, of the grotesque and the terrible, of the jocose +and the horrible, or in other words, if you prefer, of comedy and +tragedy." + +This definition the anxious inquirers accepted for the space of a year, +until it was borne in upon them that Aristophanes--not to speak of other +ancients--had mixed tragedy and comedy in his drama. Once again the +friends were plunged in darkness, and their perplexity was deepened when +they were taking a walk one evening and overheard a remark made by the +niece of the _sous-prefet_. This young lady had fallen in love with +English ways, as was--somewhat strangely--evidenced by her wearing a +green veil, orange-colored gloves, and silver-rimmed spectacles. As she +passed the promenaders, she turned to look at a water-mill near the ford, +where there were bags of grain, geese, and an ox in harness, and she +exclaimed to her governess, "_Voilà un site romantique_." + +This mysterious sentence roused the flagging curiosity of MM. Dupuis and +Contonet, and they renewed their investigations. A passage in a +newspaper led them to believe for a time that romanticism was the +imitation of the Germans, with, perhaps, the addition of the English and +Spanish. Then they were tempted to fancy that it might be merely a +matter of literary form, possibly this _vers brisé_ (run-over lines, +_enjambement_) that they are making so much noise about. "From 1830 to +1831 we were persuaded that romanticism was the historic style (_genre +historique_) or, if you please, this mania which has lately seized our +authors for calling the characters of their novels and melodramas +Charlemagne, Francis I., or Henry IV., instead of Amadis, Oronte, or +saint-Albin. . . From 1831 to the year following we thought it was the +_genre intime,_ about which there was much talk. But with all the pains +that we took we never could discover what the _genre intime_ was. The +'intimate' novels are just like the others. They are in two volume +octavo, with a great deal of margin. . . They have yellow covers and +they cost fifteen francs." From 1832 to 1833 they conjectured that +romanticism might be a system of philosophy and political economy. From +1833 to 1834 they believed that it consisted in not shaving one's self, +and in wearing a waistcoat with wide facings very much starched. + +At last they bethink themselves of a certain lawyer's clerk, who had +first imported these literary disputes into the village, in 1824. To +him, they expose their difficulties and ask for an answer to the +question, What is romanticism? After a long conversation, they receive +this final definition. "Romanticism, my dear sir! No, of a surety, it +is neither the disregard of the unities, nor the alliance of the comic +and tragic, nor anything in the world expressible by words. In vain you +grasp the butterfly's wing; the dust which gives it its color is left +upon your fingers. Romanticism is the star that weeps, it is the wind +that wails, it is the night that shudders, the bird that flies and the +flower that breathes perfume: it is the sudden gush, the ecstasy grown +faint, the cistern beneath the palms, rosy hope with her thousand loves, +the angel and the pearl, the white robe of the willows. It is the +infinite and the starry," etc., etc. + +Then M. Ducoudray, a magistrate of the department, gives his theory of +romanticism, which he considers to be an effect of the religious and +political reaction under the restored Bourbon monarchy of Louis XVIII, +and Charles X. "The mania for ballads, arriving from Germany, met the +legitimist poetry one fine day at Ladvocat's bookshop; and the two of +them, pickax in hand, went at nightfall to a churchyard, to dig up the +Middle Ages." The taste for medievalism, M. Ducoudray adds, has survived +the revolution of 1830, and romanticism has even entered into the service +of liberty and progress, where it is a manifest anachronism, "employing +the style of Ronsard to celebrate railroads, and imitating Dante when it +chants the praises of Washington and Lafayette." Dupuis was tempted to +embrace M. Ducoudray's explanation, but Cotonet was not satisfied. He +shut himself in, for four months, at the end of which he announced his +discovery that the true and only difference between the classic and the +romantic is that the latter uses a good many adjectives. He illustrates +his principle by giving passages from "Paul and Virginia" and the +"Portuguese Letters," written in the romantic style. + +Thus Musset pricks a critical bubble with the point of his satire; and +yet the bubble declines to vanish. There must really be some more +substantial difference than this between classic and romantic, for the +terms persist and are found useful. It may be true that the romantic +temper, being subjective and excited, tends to an excess in adjectives; +the adjective being that part of speech which attributes qualities, and +is therefore most freely used by emotional persons. Still it would be +possible to cut out all the adjectives, not strictly necessary, from one +of Tieck's _Märchen_ without in the slightest degree disturbing its +romantic character. + +It remains to add that romanticism is a word which faces in two +directions. It is now opposed to realism, as it was once opposed to +classicism. As, in one way, its freedom and lawlessness, its love of +novelty, experiment, "strangeness added to beauty," contrast with the +classical respect for rules, models, formulae, precedents, conventions; +so, in another way, its discontent with things as they are, its idealism, +aspiration, mysticism contrast with the realist's conscientious adherence +to fact. "Ivanhoe" is one kind of romance; "The Marble Faun" is +another.[20] + + +[1] Les définitions ne se posent pas _a priori_, si ce n'est peutêtre en +mathématiques. En histoire, c'est de l'étude patiente de is la réalité +qu'elles se dégagent insensiblement. Si M. Deschanel ne nous a pas donné +du _romantisme_ la définition que nous réclamions tout à l'heure, c'est, +à vrai dire, que son enseignement a pour objet de préparer cette +définition même. Nous la trouverons où elle doit être, à la fin du cours +et non pas à début.--_F. Brunetière: "Classiques et Romantiques, Études +Critiques," _Tome III, p. 296. + +[2] Was war aber dis romantische Schule in Deutschland? Sie war nichts +anders als die Wiedererweckung der Poesie des Mittelalters, wie sie sich +in dessen Liedern, Bild- und Bauwerken, in Kunst und Leben, manifestiert +hatte.--_Die romanticsche Schule (Cotta edition)_, p. 158. + +[3] "The Romantic School" (Fleishman's translation), p. 13. + +[4] Un classique est tout artiste à l'ecole de qui nous pouvons nous +mettre sans craindre que ses leçons on ses exemples nous fourvoient. Ou +encore, c'est celui qui possède . . . des qualités dont l'imitation, si +elle ne peut pas faire de bien, ne peut pas non plus faire de mal.--_F. +Brunetière, "Études Critiques,"_ Tome III, p. 300. + +[5] Mr. Perry thinks that one of the first instances of the use of the +word _romantic _is by the diarist Evelyn in 1654: "There is also, on the +side of this horrid alp, a very romantic seat."--_English Literature in +the Eighteenth Century, by Thomas Sergeant Perry, _p. 148, _note_. + +[6] "Romanticism," _Macmillan's Magazine_, Vol. XXXV. + +[7] The Odyssey has been explained throughout in an allegorical sense. +The episode of Circe, at least, lends itself obviously to such +interpretation. Circe's cup has become a metaphor for sensual +intoxication, transforming men into beasts; Milton, in "Comus," regards +himself as Homer's continuator, enforcing a lesson of temperance in +Puritan times hardly more consciously than the old Ionian Greek in times +which have no other record than his poem. + +[8] "Racine et Shakespeare, Études en Romantisme" (1823), p. 32, ed. of +Michel Lévy Frères, 1954. Such would also seem to be the view maintained +by M. Émile Deschanel, whose book "Le Romantisme des Classiques" (Paris, +1883) is reviewed by M. Brunetière in an article already several times +quoted. "Tous les classiques," according to M. Deschanel--at least, so +says his reviewer--"ont jadis commencé par être des romantiques." And +again: "Un _romantique_ seraut tout simplement un classique en route pour +parvenir; et, réciproquement, un classique ne serait de plus qu'un +romantique arrivé." + +[9] "Classic and Romantic," Vol. LVII. + +[10] See Schiller's "Ueber naive and sentimentalische Dichtung." + +[11] Le mot de romantisme, après cinquante ans et plus de discussions +passionnées, ne laisse pas d'être encore aujourd'hui bien vague et bien +flottant.--_Brunetière, ibid._ + +[12] Ce qui constitue proprement un classique, c'est l'équilibre en lui de +toutes les facultés qui concourent à la perfection de l'oeuvre +d'art.--_Brunetière, ibid._ + +[13] "Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur." + +[14] Far to the west the long, long vale withdrawn, + Where twilight loves to linger for a while. + --_Beattie's "Minstrel."_ + +[15] The modernness of this "latest born of the myths" resides partly in +its spiritual, almost Christian conception of love, partly in its +allegorical theme, the soul's attainment of immortality through love. +The Catholic idea of penance is suggested, too, in Psyche's "wandering +labors long." This apologue has been a favorite with platonizing poets, +like Spenser and Milton. See "The Faïrie Queene," book iii. canto vi. +stanza 1., and "Comus," lines 1002-11 + +[16] "Selections from Walter Savage Landor," Preface, p. vii. + +[17] See also Walter Bagehot's essay on "Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art," +"Literary Studies, Works" (Hartford, 1889), Vol I. p. 200. + +[18] Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet (1836), "Oeuvres Complètes" (Charpentier +edition, 1881), Tome IX. p. 194. + +[19] Preface to Victor Hugo's "Cromwell," dated October, 1827. The play +was printed, but not acted, in 1828. + +[20] In modern times romanticism, typifying a permanent tendency of the +human mind, has been placed in opposition to what is called realism. . . +[But] there is, as it appears to us, but one fundamental note which all +romanticism . . . has in common, and that is a deep disgust with the +world as it is and a desire to depict in literature something that is +claimed to be nobler and better.--_Essays on German Literature, by H. H. +Boyesen_, pp. 358 and 356. + + + + +CHAPTER II. + +The Augustans + +The Romantic Movement in England was a part of the general European +reaction against the spirit of the eighteenth century. This began +somewhat earlier in England than in Germany, and very much earlier than +in France, where literacy conservatism went strangely hand in hand with +political radicalism. In England the reaction was at first gradual, +timid, and unconscious. It did not reach importance until the seventh +decade of the century, and culminated only in the early years of the +nineteenth century. The medieval revival was only an incident--though a +leading incident--of this movement; but it is the side of it with which +the present work will mainly deal. Thus I shall have a great deal to say +about Scott; very little about Byron, intensely romantic as he was in +many meanings of the word. This will not preclude me from glancing +occasionally at other elements besides medievalism which enter into the +concept of the term "romantic." + +Reverting then to our tentative definition--Heine's definition--of +romanticism, as the reproduction in modern art and literature of the life +of the Middle Ages, it should be explained that the expression, "Middle +Ages," is to be taken here in a liberal sense. Contributions to romantic +literature such as Macpherson's "Ossian," Collins' "Ode on the +Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands," and Gray's translations form +the Welsh and the Norse, relate to periods which antedate that era of +Christian chivalry and feudalism, extending roughly from the eleventh +century to the fifteenth, to which the term, "Middle Ages," more strictly +applies. The same thing is true of the ground-work, at least, of ancient +hero-epics like "Beowulf" and the "Nibelungen Lied," of the Icelandic +"Sagas," and of similar products of old heathen Europe which have come +down in the shape of mythologies, popular superstitions, usages, rites, +songs, and traditions. These began to fall under the notice of scholars +about the middle of the last century and made a deep impression upon +contemporary letters. + +Again, the influence of the Middle Age proper prolonged itself beyond the +exact close of the medieval period, which it is customary to date from +the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The great romantic poets of Italy, +Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, wrote in the full flush of the pagan revival and +made free use of the Greek and Roman mythologies and the fables of Homer, +Vergil, and Ovid; and yet their work is hardly to be described as +classical. Nor is the work of their English disciples, Spenser and +Sidney; while the entire Spanish and English drama of the sixteenth and +seventeenth centuries (down to 1640, and with an occasional exception, +like Ben Jonson) is romantic. Calderon is romantic; Shakspere and +Fletcher are romantic. If we agree to regard medieval literature, then, +as comprising all the early literature of Europe which drew its +inspiration from other than Greek-Latin sources, we shall do no great +violence to the usual critical employment of the word. I say _early_ +literature, in order to exclude such writings as are wholly modern, like +"Robinson Crusoe," or "Gulliver's Travels," or Fielding's novels, which +are neither classic nor romantic, but are the original creation of our +own time. With works like these, though they are perhaps the most +characteristic output of the eighteenth century, our inquiries are not +concerned. + +It hardly needs to be said that the reproduction, or imitation, of +mediaeval life by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romanticists, +contains a large admixture of modern thought and feeling. The brilliant +pictures of feudal society in the romances of Scott and Fouqué give no +faithful image of that society, even when they are carefully correct in +all ascertainable historical details.[1] They give rather the impression +left upon an alien mind by the quaint, picturesque features of a way of +life which seemed neither quaint nor picturesque to the men who lived it, +but only to the man who turns to it for relief form the prosaic, or at +least familiar, conditions of the modern world. The offspring of the +modern imagination, acting upon medieval material, may be a perfectly +legitimate, though not an original, form of art. It may even have a +novel charm of its own, unlike either parent, but like Euphorion, child +of Faust by Helen of Troy, a blend of Hellas and the Middle Age. Scott's +verse tales are better poetry than the English metrical romances of the +thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Tennyson has given a more perfect +shape to the Arthurian legends than Sir Thomas Malory, their compiler, or +Walter Map and Chrestien de Troyes, their possible inventors. But, of +course, to study the Middle Ages, as it really was, one must go not to +Tennyson and Scott, but to the "Chanson de Roland," and the "Divine +Comedy," and the "Romaunt of the Rose," and the chronicles of +Villehardouin, Joinville, and Froissart. + +And the farther such study is carried, the more evident it becomes that +"mediaeval" and "romantic" are not synonymous. The Middle Ages was not, +at all points, romantic: it is the modern romanticist who makes, or +finds, it so. He sees its strange, vivid peculiarities under the glamour +of distance. Chaucer's temper, for instance, was by no means romantic. +This "good sense" which Dryden mentions as his prominent trait; that "low +tone" which Lowell praises in him, and which keeps him close to the +common ground of experience, pervade his greatest work, the "Canterbury +Tales," with an insistent realism. It is true that Chaucer shared the +beliefs and influences of his time and was a follower of its literary +fashions. In his version of the "Romaunt of the Rose," his imitations of +Machault, and his early work in general he used the mediaeval machinery +of allegory and dreams. In "Troilus and Cresseide" and the tale of +"Palamon and Arcite," he carries romantic love and knightly honor to a +higher pitch than his model, Boccaccio. But the shrewdly practical +Pandarus of the former poem--a character almost wholly of Chaucer's +creation--is the very embodiment of the anti-romantic attitude, and a +remarkable anticipation of Sancho Panza; while the "Rime of Sir Thopas" +is a distinct burlesque of the fantastic chivalry romances.[2] Chaucer's +pages are picturesque with tournament, hunting parties, baronial feasts, +miracles of saints, feats of magic; but they are solid, as well, with the +everyday life of fourteenth-century England. They have the _naïveté_ and +garrulity which are marks of mediaeval work, but not the quaintness and +grotesquerie which are held to be marks of romantic work. Not archaic +speech, but a certain mental twist constitutes quaintness. Herbert and +Fuller are quaint; Blake is grotesque; Donne and Charles Lamb are +willfully quaint, subtle, and paradoxical. But Chaucer is always +straight-grained, broad, and natural. + +Even Dante, the poet of the Catholic Middle Ages; Dante, the mystic, the +idealist, with his intense spirituality and his passion for symbolism, +has been sometimes called classic, by virtue of the powerful construction +of his great poem, and his scholastic rigidity of method. + +The relation between modern romanticizing literature and the real +literature of the Middle Ages, is something like that between the +literature of the renaissance and the ancient literatures of Greece and +Rome. But there is this difference, that, while the renaissance writers +fell short of their pattern, the modern schools of romance have outgone +their masters--not perhaps in the intellectual--but certainly in the +artistic value of their product. Mediaeval literature, wonderful and +stimulating as a whole and beautiful here and there in details of +execution, affords few models of technical perfection. The civilization +which it reflected, though higher in its possibilities than the classic +civilization, had not yet arrived at an equal grade of development, was +inferior in intelligence and the natured results of long culture. The +epithets of Gothic ignorance, rudeness, and barbarism, which the +eighteenth-century critics applied so freely to all the issue of the +so-called dark ages, were not entirely without justification. Dante is +almost the only strictly mediaeval poet in whose work the form seems +adequate to the content; for Boccaccio and Petrarca stand already on the +sill of the renaissance. + +In the arts of design the case was partly reversed. If the artists of +the renaissance did not equal the Greeks in sculpture and architecture, +they probably excelled them in painting. On the other hand, the +restorers of Gothic have never quite learned the secret of the mediaeval +builders. However, if the analogy is not pushed too far, the romantic +revival may be regarded as a faint counterpart, the fragments of a +half-forgotten civilization were pieced together; Greek manuscripts +sought out, cleaned, edited, and printed: statues, coins, vases dug up +and ranged in museums: debris cleared away from temples, amphitheaters, +basilicas; till gradually the complete image of the antique world grew +forth in august beauty, kindling an excitement of mind to which there are +few parallels in history; so, in the eighteenth century, the despised +ages of monkery, feudalism, and superstition began to reassert their +claims upon the imagination. Ruined castles and abbeys, coats of mail, +illuminated missals, manuscript romances, black-letter ballads, old +tapestries, and wood carvings acquired a new value. Antiquaries and +virtuosos first, and then poets and romancers, reconstructed in turn an +image of medieval society. + +True, the later movement was much the weaker of the two. No such fissure +yawned between modern times and the Middle Ages as had been opened +between the ancient world and the Middle Ages by the ruin of the Roman +state and by the barbarian migrations. Nor had ten centuries of rubbish +accumulated over the remains of mediaeval culture. In 1700 the Middle +Ages were not yet so very remote. The nations and languages of Europe +continued in nearly the same limits which had bounded them two centuries +before. The progress in the sciences and mechanic arts, the discovery +and colonizing of America, the invention of printing and gunpowder, and +the Protestant reformation had indeed drawn deep lines between modern and +mediaeval life. Christianity, however, formed a connecting link, though, +in Protestant countries, the continuity between the earlier and later +forms of the religion had been interrupted. One has but to compare the +list of the pilgrims whom Chaucer met at the Tabard, with the company +that Captain Sentry or Peregrine Pickle would be likely to encounter at a +suburban inn, to see how the face of English society had changed between +1400 and 1700. What has become of the knight, the prioress, the sumner, +the monk, pardoner, squire, alchemist, friar; and where can they or their +equivalents be found in all England? + +The limitations of my subject will oblige me to treat the English +romantic movement as a chapter in literary history, even at the risk of +seeming to adopt a narrow method. Yet it would be unphilosophical to +consider it as a merely aesthetic affair, and to lose sight altogether of +its deeper springs in the religious and ethical currents of the time. +For it was, in part, a return of warmth and color into English letters; +and that was only a symptom of the return of warmth and color--that is, +of emotion and imagination--into English life and thought: into the +Church, into politics, into philosophy. Romanticism, which sought to +evoke from the past a beauty that it found wanting in the present, was +but one phase of that revolt against the coldness and spiritual deadness +of the first half of the eighteenth century which had other sides in the +idealism of Berkeley, in the Methodist and Evangelical revival led by +Wesley and Whitefield, and in the sentimentalism which manifested itself +in the writings of Richardson and Sterne. Corresponding to these on the +Continent were German pietism, the transcendental philosophy of Kant and +his continuators, and the emotional excesses of works like Rousseau's +"Nouvelle Héloise" and Goethe's "Sorrows of Werther." + +Romanticism was something more, then, than a new literary mode; a taste +cultivated by dilettante virtuosos, like Horace Walpole, college recluses +like Gray, and antiquarian scholars like Joseph and Thomas Warton. It +was the effort of the poetic imagination to create for itself a richer +environment; but it was also, in its deeper significance, a reaching out +of the human spirit after a more ideal type of religion and ethics than +it could find in the official churchmanship and the formal morality of +the time. Mr. Leslie Stephen[3] points out the connection between the +three currents of tendency known as sentimentalism, romanticism, and +naturalism. He explains, to be sure, that the first English +sentimentalists, such as Richardson and Sterne, were anything but +romantic. "A more modern sentimentalist would probably express his +feelings[4] by describing some past state of society. He would paint +some ideal society in mediaeval times and revive the holy monk and the +humble nun for our edification." He attributes the subsequent interest +in the Middle Ages to the progress made in historical inquiries during +the last half of the eighteenth century, and to the consequent growth of +antiquarianism. "Men like Malone and Stevens were beginning those +painful researches which have accumulated a whole literature upon the +scanty records of our early dramatists. Gray, the most learned of poets, +had vaguely designed a history of English poetry, and the design was +executed with great industry by Thomas Warton. His brother Joseph +ventured to uphold the then paradoxical thesis that Spenser was as great +a man as Pope. Everywhere a new interest was awakening in the minuter +details of the past." At first, Mr. Stephen says, the result of these +inquiries was "an unreasonable contempt for the past. The modern +philosopher, who could spin all knowledge out of his own brain; the +skeptic, who had exploded the ancient dogma; or the free-thinker of any +shade, who rejoiced in the destruction of ecclesiastical tyranny, gloried +in his conscious superiority to his forefathers. Whatever was old was +absurd; and Gothic--an epithet applied to all medieval art, philosophy, +or social order--became a simple term of contempt." But an antiquarian +is naturally a conservative, and men soon began to love the times whose +peculiarities they were so diligently studying. Men of imaginative minds +promptly made the discovery that a new source of pleasure might be +derived from these dry records. . . The 'return to nature' expresses a +sentiment which underlies . . . both the sentimental and romantic +movements. . . To return to nature is, in one sense, to find a new +expression for emotions which have been repressed by existing +conventions; or, in another, to return to some simpler social order which +had not yet suffered from those conventions. The artificiality +attributed to the eighteenth century seems to mean that men were content +to regulate their thoughts and lives by rules not traceable to first +principles, but dependent upon a set of special and exceptional +conditions. . . To get out of the ruts, or cast off the obsolete +shackles, two methods might be adopted. The intellectual horizon might +be widened by including a greater number of ages and countries; or men +might try to fall back upon the thoughts and emotions common to all +races, and so cast off the superficial incrustation. The first method, +that of the romanticists, aims at increasing our knowledge: the second, +that of the naturalistic school, at basing our philosophy on deeper +principles.[5] + +The classic, or pseudo-classic, period of English literature lasted from +the middle of the seventeenth till the end of the eighteenth century. +Inasmuch as the romantic revival was a protest against this reigning +mode, it becomes necessary to inquire a little more closely what we mean +when we say that the time of Queen Anne and the first two Georges was our +Augustan or classical age. In what sense was it classical? And was it +any more classical than the time of Milton, for example, or the time of +Landor? If the "Dunciad," and the "Essay on Man," are classical, what is +Keats' "Hyperion"? And with what propriety can we bring under a common +rubric things so far asunder as Prior's "Carmen Seculare" and Tennyson's +"Ulysses," or as Gay's "Trivia" and Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon"? +Evidently the Queen Anne writers took hold of the antique by a different +side from our nineteenth-century poets. Their classicism was of a +special type. It was, as has been often pointed out, more Latin than +Greek, and more French than Latin.[6] It was, as has likewise been said, +"a classicism in red heels and a periwig." Victor Hugo speaks of "cette +poésie fardée, mouchetée, poudrée, du dix-huitième siècle, cette +litèrature à paniers, à pompons et à falbalas."[7] The costumes of +Watteau contrast with the simple folds of Greek drapery very much as the +"Rape of the Lock," contrasts with the Iliad, or one of Pope's pastorals +with an idyl of Theocritus. The times were artificial in poetry as in +dress-- + + "Tea-cup times of hood and hoop, + And when the patch was worn." + +Gentlemen wore powdered wigs instead of their own hair, and the power and +the wig both got into their writing. _Perruque_ was the nickname applied +to the classicists by the French romanticists of Hugo's generation, who +wore their hair long and flowing--_cheveaux mérovigiennes_--and affected +an _outré_ freedom in the cut and color of their clothes. Similarly the +Byronic collar became, all over Europe, the symbol of daring independence +in matters of taste and opinion. Its careless roll, which left the +throat exposed, seemed to assist the liberty of nature against cramping +conventions. + +The leading Queen Anne writers are so well known that a somewhat general +description of the literary situation in England at the time of Pope's +death (1744) will serve as an answer to the question, how was the +eighteenth century classical. It was remarked by Thomas Warton[8] that, +at the first revival of letters in the sixteenth century, our authors +were more struck by the marvelous fables and inventions of ancient poets +than by the justness of their conceptions and the purity of their style. +In other words, the men of the renaissance apprehended the ancient +literature as poets: the men of the _Éclaircissement_ apprehended them as +critics. In Elizabeth's day the new learning stimulated English genius +to creative activity. In royal progresses, court masques, Lord Mayors' +shows, and public pageants of all kinds, mythology ran mad. "Every +procession was a pantheon." But the poets were not careful to keep the +two worlds of pagan antiquity and mediaeval Christianity distinct. The +art of the renaissance was the flower of a double root, and the artists +used their complex stuff naïvely. The "Faërie Queene" is the typical +work of the English renaissance; there hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods +mingle unblushingly with knights, dragons, sorcerers, hermits, and +personified vices and virtues. The "machinery" of Homer and Vergil--the +"machinery" of the "Seven Champions of Christendom" and the "Roman de la +Rose"! This was not shocking to Spenser's contemporaries, but it seemed +quite shocking to classical critics a century later. Even Milton, the +greatest scholar among English poets, but whose imagination was a strong +agent, holding strange elements in solution, incurred their censure for +bringing Saint Peter and the sea-nymphs into dangerous juxtaposition in +"Lycidas." + +But by the middle of the seventeenth century the renaissance schools of +poetry had become effete in all European countries. They had run into +extravagances of style, into a vicious manner known in Spain as +Gongorism, in Italy as Marinism, and in England best exhibited in the +verse of Donne and Cowley and the rest of the group whom Dr. Johnson +called the metaphysical poets, and whose Gothicism of taste Addison +ridiculed in his _Spectator_ papers on true and false wit. It was France +that led the reform against this fashion. Malherbe and Boileau insisted +upon the need of discarding tawdry ornaments of style and cultivating +simplicity, clearness, propriety, decorum, moderation; above all, good +sense. The new Academy, founded to guard the purity of the French +language, lent its weight to the precepts of the critics, who applied the +rules of Aristotle, as commented by Longinus and Horace, to modern +conditions. The appearance of a number of admirable writers--Corneille, +Molière, Racine, Bossuet, La Fontaine, La Bruyère--simultaneously with +this critical movement, gave an authority to the new French literature +which enabled it to impose its principles upon England and Germany for +over a century. For the creative literature of France conformed its +practice, in the main, to the theory of French criticism; though not, in +the case of Regnier, without open defiance. This authority was +re-enforced by the political glories and social _éclat_ of the _siècle de +Louis Quatorze_ + +It happened that at this time the Stuart court was in exile, and in the +train of Henrietta Maria at Paris, or scattered elsewhere through France, +were many royalist men of letters, Etherege, Waller, Cowley, and others, +who brought back with them to England in 1660 an acquaintance with this +new French literature and a belief in its aesthetic code. That French +influence would have spread into England without the aid of these +political accidents is doubtless true, as it is also true that a reform +of English versification and poetic style would have worked itself out +upon native lines independent of foreign example, and even had there been +so such thing as French literature. Mr. Gosse has pointed out couplets +of Waller, written as early as 1623, which have the formal precision of +Pope's; and the famous passage about the Thames in Denham's "Cooper's +Hill" (1642) anticipates the best performance of Augustan verse: + + "O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream + My great example, as it is my theme! + Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, + Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full." + +However, as to the general fact of the powerful impact of French upon +English literary fashions, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, +there can be no dispute.[9] + +This change of style was symptomatic of a corresponding change in the +national temper. It was the mission of the eighteenth century to assert +the universality of law and, at the same time, the sufficiency of the +reason to discover the laws, which govern in every province: a service +which we now, perhaps, undervalue in our impatience with the formalism +which was its outward sign. Hence its dislike of irregularity in art and +irrationality in religion. England, in particular, was tired of +unchartered freedom, of spiritual as well as of literary anarchy. The +religious tension of the Commonwealth period had relaxed--men cannot be +always at the heroic pitch--and theological disputes had issued in +indifference and a skepticism which took the form of deism, or "natural +religion." But the deists were felt to be a nuisance. They were +unsettling opinions and disturbing that decent conformity with generally +received beliefs which it is the part of a good citizen to maintain. +Addison instructs his readers that, in the absence of certainty, it is +the part of a prudent man to choose the safe side and make friends with +God. The freethinking Chesterfield[10] tells his son that the profession +of atheism is ill-bred. De Foe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Johnson all +attack infidelity. "Conform! Conform!" said in effect the most +authoritative writers of the century. "Be sensible: go to church: pay +your rates: don't be a vulgar deist--a fellow like Toland who is poor and +has no social position. But, on the other hand, you need not be a +fanatic or superstitious, or an enthusiast. Above all, _pas de zèle!_" + +"Theology," says Leslie Stephen, "was, for the most part, almost as +deistical as the deists. A hatred for enthusiasm was as strongly +impressed upon the whole character of contemporary thought as a hatred of +skepticism. . . A good common-sense religion should be taken for granted +and no questions asked. . . With Shakspere, or Sir Thomas Browne, or +Jeremy Taylor, or Milton, man is contemplated in his relations to the +universe; he is in presence of eternity and infinity; life is a brief +drama; heaven and hell are behind the veil of phenomena; at every step +our friends vanish into the abyss of ever present mystery. To all such +thoughts the writers of the eighteenth century seemed to close their eyes +as resolutely as possible. . . The absence of any deeper speculative +ground makes the immediate practical questions of life all the more +interesting. We know not what we are, nor whither we are going, nor +whence we come; but we can, by the help of common sense, discover a +sufficient share of moral maxims for our guidance in life. . . Knowledge +of human nature, as it actually presented itself in the shifting scene +before them, and a vivid appreciation of the importance of the moral law, +are the staple of the best literature of the time."[11] + +The God of the deists was, in truth, hardly more impersonal than the +abstraction worshiped by the orthodox--the "Great Being" of Addison's +essays, the "Great First Cause" of Pope's "Universal Prayer," invoked +indifferently as "Jehovah, Jove, or Lord." Dryden and Pope were +professed Catholics, but there is nothing to distinguish their so-called +sacred poetry from that of their Protestant contemporaries. Contrast the +mere polemics of "The Hind and the Panther" with really Catholic poems +like Southwell's "Burning Babe" and Crashaw's "Flaming Heart," or even +with Newman's "Dream of Gerontius." In his "Essay on Man," Pope +versified, without well understanding, the optimistic deism of Leibnitz, +as expounded by Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke. The Anglican Church itself +was in a strange condition, when Jonathan Swift, a dean and would-be +bishop, came to its defense with his "Tale of a Tub" and his ironical +"Argument against the Abolition of Christianity." Among the Queen Anne +wits Addison was the man of most genuine religious feeling. He is always +reverent, and "the feeling infinite" stirs faintly in one or two of his +hymns. But, in general, his religion is of the rationalizing type, a +religion of common sense, a belief resting upon logical deductions, a +system of ethics in which the supernatural is reduced to the lowest +terms, and from which the glooms and fervors of a deep spiritual +experience are almost entirely absent. This "parson in a tie-wig" is +constantly preaching against zeal, enthusiasm, superstition, mysticism, +and recommending a moderate, cheerful, and reason religion.[12] It is +instructive to contrast his amused contempt for popular beliefs in +ghosts, witches, dreams, prognostications, and the like, with the +reawakened interest in folk lore evidenced by such a book as Scott's +"Demonology and Witchcraft." + +Queen Anne literature was classical, then, in its lack of those elements +of mystery and aspiration which we have found described as of the essence +of romanticism. It was emphatically a literature of this world. It +ignored all vague emotion, the phenomena of subconsciousness, "the +electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound," the shadow that rounds +man's little life, and fixed its attention only upon what it could +thoroughly comprehend.[13] Thereby it escaped obscurity. The writings +of the Augustans in both verse and prose are distinguished by a perfect +clearness, but it is a clearness without subtlety or depth. They never +try to express a thought, or to utter a feeling, that is not easily +intelligible. The mysticism of Wordsworth, the incoherence of Shelley, +the darkness of Browning--to take only modern instances--proceed, +however, not from inferior art, but from the greater difficulty of +finding expression for a very different order of ideas. + +Again the literature of the Restoration and Queen Anne periods--which may +be regarded as one, for present purposes--was classical, or at least +unromantic, in its self-restraint, its objectivity, and its lack of +curiosity; or, as a hostile criticism would put it, in its coldness of +feeling, the tameness of its imagination, and its narrow and imperfect +sense of beauty. It was a literature not simply of this world, but of +_the_ world, of the _beau monde_, high life, fashion, society, the court +and the town, the salons, clubs, coffee-houses, assemblies, +ombre-parties. It was social, urban, gregarious, intensely though not +broadly human. It cared little for the country or outward nature, and +nothing for the life of remote times and places. Its interest was +centered upon civilization and upon that peculiarly artificial type of +civilization which it found prevailing. It was as indifferent to Venice, +Switzerland, the Alhambra, the Nile, the American forests, and the +islands of the South Sea as it was to the Middle Ages and the manners of +Scotch Highlanders. The sensitiveness to the picturesque, the liking for +local color and for whatever is striking, characteristic, and peculiarly +national in foreign ways is a romantic note. The eighteenth century +disliked "strangeness added to beauty"; it disapproved of anything +original, exotic, tropical, bizarre for the same reason that it +disapproved of mountains and Gothic architecture. + +Professor Gates says that the work of English literature during the first +quarter of the present century was "the rediscovery and vindication of +the concrete. The special task of the eighteenth century had been to +order, and to systematize, and to name; its favorite methods had been +analysis and generalization. It asked for no new experience. . . The +abstract, the typical, the general--these were everywhere exalted at the +expense of the image, the specific experience, the vital fact."[14] +Classical tragedy, _e.g._, undertook to present only the universal, +abstract, permanent truths of human character and passion.[15] The +impression of the mysterious East upon modern travelers and poets like +Byron, Southey, De Quincey, Moore, Hugo,[16] Ruckert, and Gérard de +Nerval, has no counterpart in the eighteenth century. The Oriental +allegory or moral apologue, as practiced by Addison in such papers as +"The Vision of Mirza," and by Johnson in "Rasselas," is rather faintly +colored and gets what color it has from the Old Testament. It is +significant that the romantic Collins endeavored to give a novel turn to +the decayed pastoral by writing a number of "Oriental Eclogues," in which +dervishes and camel-drivers took the place of shepherds, but the +experiment was not a lucky one. Milton had more of the East in his +imagination than any of his successors. His "vulture on Imaus bred, +whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds"; his "plain of Sericana where +Chinese drive their cany wagons light"; his "utmost Indian isle +Taprobane," are touches of the picturesque which anticipate a more modern +mood than Addison's. + +"The difference," says Matthew Arnold, "between genuine poetry and the +poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school is briefly this: their +poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is +conceived and composed in the soul." The representative minds of the +eighteenth century were such as Voltaire, the master of persiflage, +destroying superstition with his _souriere hideux_; Gibbon, "the lord of +irony," "sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer"; and Hume, with his +thorough-going philosophic skepticism, his dry Toryism, and cool contempt +for "zeal" of any kind. The characteristic products of the era were +satire, burlesque, and travesty: "Hudibras," "Absalom and Achitophel," +"The Way of the World," "Gulliver's Travels" and "The Rape of the Lock." +There is a whole literature of mockery: parodies like Prior's "Ballad on +the Taking of Namur" and "The Country Mouse and the City Mouse"; +Buckingham's "Rehearsal" and Swift's "Meditation on a Broomstick"; +mock-heroics, like the "Dunciad" and "MacFlecknoe" and Garth's +"Dispensary," and John Phillips' "Splendid Shilling" and Addison's +"Machinae Gesticulantes"; Prior's "Alma," a burlesque of philosophy; +Gay's "Trivia" and "The Shepherd's Week," and "The Beggars' Opera"-a +"Newgate pastoral"; "Town Eclogues" by Swift and Lady Montague and +others. Literature was a polished mirror in which the gay world saw its +own grinning face. It threw back a most brilliant picture of the surface +of society, showed manners but not the elementary passions of human +nature. As a whole, it leaves an impression of hardness, shallowness, +and levity. The polite cynicism of Congreve, the ferocious cynicism of +Swift, the malice of Pope, the pleasantry of Addison, the early +worldliness of Prior and Gay are seldom relieved by any touch of the +ideal. The prose of the time was excellent, but the poetry was merely +rhymed prose. The recent Queen Anne revival in architecture, dress, and +bric-a-brac, the recrudescence of society verse in Dobson and others, is +perhaps symptomatic of the fact that the present generation has entered +upon a prosaic reaction against romantic excesses and we are finding our +picturesque in that era of artifice which seemed so picturesque to our +forerunners. The sedan chair, the blue china, the fan, farthingale, and +powdered head dress have now got the "rime of age" and are seen in +fascinating perspective, even as the mailed courser, the buff jerkin, the +cowl, and the cloth-yard shaft were seen by the men of Scott's generation. + +Once more, the eighteenth century was classical in its respect for +authority. It desired to put itself under discipline, to follow the +rules, to discover a formula of correctness in all the arts, to set up a +tribunal of taste and establish canons of composition, to maintain +standards, copy models and patterns, comply with conventions, and +chastise lawlessness. In a word, its spirit was academic. Horace was +its favorite master--not Horace of the Odes, but Horace of the Satires +and Epistles, and especially Horace as interpreted by Boileau.[17] The +"Ars Poetica" had been englished by the Earl of Roscommon, and imitated +by Boileau in his "L'Art Poetique," which became the parent of a numerous +progeny in England; among others as "Essay on Satire" and an "Essay on +Poetry," by the Earl of Mulgrave;[18] an "Essay on Translated Verse" by +the Earl of Roscommon, who, says Addison, "makes even rules a noble +poetry";[19] and Pope's well-known "Essay on Criticism." + +The doctrine of Pope's essay is, in brief, follow Nature, and in order +that you may follow nature, observe the rules, which are only "Nature +methodized," and also imitate the ancients. + + "Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem; + To copy nature is to copy them." + +Thus Vergil when he started to compose the Aeneid may have seemed above +the critic's law, but when he came to study Homer, he found that Nature +and Homer were the same. Accordingly, + + "he checks the bold design, + And rules as strict his labor'd work confine." + +Not to stimulate, but to check, to confine, to regulate, is the unfailing +precept of this whole critical school. Literature, in the state in which +they found it, appeared to them to need the curb more than the spur. + +Addison's scholarship was almost exclusively Latin, though it was +Vergilian rather than Horatian. Macaulay[20] says of Addison's "Remarks +on Italy"; "To the best of our remembrance, Addison does not mention +Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bolardo, Berni, Lorenzo de' Medici, or +Machiavelli. He coldly tells us that at Ferrara he saw the tomb of +Ariosto, and that at Venice he heard the gondoliers sing verses of Tasso. +But for Tasso and Ariosto he cared far less than for Valerius Flaccus and +Sidonius Apollinaris. The gentle flow of the Ticino brings a line of +Silius to his mind. The sulphurous stream of Albula suggests to him +several passages of Martial. But he has not a word to say of the +illustrious dead of Santa Croce; he crosses the wood of Ravenna[21] +without recollecting the specter huntsman, and wanders up and down Rimini +without one thought of Francesca. At Paris he had eagerly sought an +introduction to Boileau; but he seems not to have been at all aware that +at Florence he was in the vicinity of a poet with whom Boileau could not +sustain a comparison: of the greatest lyric poet of modern times [!] +Vincenzio Filicaja. . . The truth is that Addison knew little and cared +less about the literature of modern Italy. His favorite models were +Latin. His favorite critics were French. Half the Tuscan poetry that he +had read seemed to him monstrous and the other half tawdry."[22] + +There was no academy in England, but there was a critical tradition that +was almost as influential. French critical gave the law: Boileau, +Dacier, LeBossu, Rapin, Bouhours; English critics promulgated it: Dennis, +Langbaine, Rymer, Gildon, and others now little read. Three writers of +high authority in three successive generations--Dryden, Addison, and +Johnson--consolidated a body of literary opinion which may be described, +in the main, as classical, and as consenting, though with minor +variations. Thus it was agreed on all hands that it was a writer's duty +to be "correct." It was well indeed to be "bold," but bold with +discretion. Dryden thought Shakspere a great poet than Jonson, but an +inferior artist. He was to be admired, but not approved. Homer, again, +it was generally conceded, was not so correct as Vergil, though he had +more "fire." Chesterfield preferred Vergil to Homer, and both of them to +Tasso. But of all epics the one he read with most pleasure was the +"Henriade." As for "Paradise Lost," he could not read it through. +William Walsh, "the muses' judge and friend," advised the youthful Pope +that "there was one way still left open for him, by which he might excel +any of his predecessors, which was by correctness; that though indeed we +had several great poets, we as yet could boast of none that were +perfectly correct; and that therefore he advised him to make this quality +his particular study." "The best of the moderns in all language," he +wrote to Pope, "are those that have the nearest copied the ancients." +Pope was thankful for the counsel and mentions its giver in the "Essay on +Criticism" as one who had + + "taught his muse to sing, + Prescribed her heights and pruned her tender wing." + +But what was correct? In the drama, _e.g._, the observance of the +unities was almost universally recommended, but by no means universally +practiced. Johnson, himself a sturdy disciple of Dryden and Pope, +exposed the fallacy of that stage illusion, on the supposed necessity of +which the unities of time and place were defended. Yet Johnson, in his +own tragedy "Irene," conformed to the rules of Aristotle. He pronounced +"Cato" "unquestionably the noblest production of Addison's genius," but +acknowledge that its success had "introduced, or confirmed among us, the +use of dialogue too declamatory, of unaffecting elegance and chill +philosophy." On the other hand Addison had small regard for poetic +justice, which Johnson thought ought to be observed. Addison praised old +English ballads, which Johnson thought mean and foolish; and he guardedly +commends[23] "the fairy way of writing," a romantic foppery that Johnson +despised.[24] + +Critical opinion was pronounced in favor of separating tragedy and +comedy, and Addison wrote one sentence which condemns half the plays of +Shakspere and Fletcher: "The tragi-comedy, which is the product of the +English theater, is one the most monstrous inventions that ever entered +into a poet's thought."[25] Dryden made some experiments in +tragi-comedy, but, in general, classical comedy was pure comedy--the +prose comedy of manners--and classical tragedy admitted no comic +intermixture. Whether tragedy should be in rhyme, after the French +manner, or in blank verse, after the precedent of the old English stage, +was a moot point. Dryden at first argued for rhyme and used it in his +"heroic plays"; and it is significant that he defended its use on the +ground that it would act as a check upon the poet's fancy. But afterward +he grew "weary of his much-loved mistress, rhyme," and went back to blank +verse in his later plays. + +As to poetry other than dramatic, the Restoration critics were at one in +judging blank verse too "low" for a poem of heroic dimensions; and though +Addison gave it the preference in epic poetry, Johnson was its persistent +foe, and regarded it as little short of immoral. But for that matter, +Gray could endure no blank verse outside of Milton. This is curious, +that rhyme, a mediaeval invention, should have been associated in the +last century with the classical school of poetry; while blank verse, the +nearest English equivalent of the language of Attic tragedy, was a +shibboleth of romanticizing poets, like Thomson and Akenside. The reason +was twofold: rhyme came stamped with the authority of the French tragic +alexandrine; and, secondly, it meant constraint where blank verse meant +freedom, "ancient liberty, recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome +and modern bondage of rhyming."[26] Pope, among his many thousand rhymed +couplets, has left no blank verse except the few lines contributed to +Thomson's "Seasons." Even the heroic couplet as written by earlier poets +was felt to have been too loose in structure. "The excellence and +dignity of it," says Dryden, "were never fully known till Mr. Waller +taught it; he first made writing easily an art; first showed us how to +conclude the sense most commonly in distichs, which, in the verse of +those before him, runs on for so many lines together, that the reader is +out of breath to overtake it."[27] All through the classical period the +tradition is constant that Waller was the first modern English poet, the +first correct versifier. Pope is praised by Johnson because he employed +but sparingly the triplets and alexandrines by which Dryden sought to +vary the monotony of the couplet; and he is censured by Cowper because, +by force of his example, he "made poetry a mere mechanic art." +Henceforth the distich was treated as a unit: the first line was balanced +against the second, and frequently the first half of the line against the +second half. + + "To err is human, to forgive divine." + "And so obliging, that he ne'er obliged." + "Charms strike the eye, but merit wins the soul," etc., etc. + +This type of verse, which Pope brought to perfection, and to which he +gave all the energy and variety of which it was capable, so prevailed in +our poetry for a century or more that one almost loses sight of the fact +that any other form was employed. The sonnet, for instance, disappeared +entirely, until revived by Gray, Stillingfleet, Edwards, and Thomas +Warton, about the middle of the eighteenth century.[28] When the poets +wished to be daring and irregular, they were apt to give vent in that +species of pseudo-Pindaric ode which Cowley had introduced--a literary +disease which, Dr. Johnson complained, infected the British muse with the +notion that "he who could do nothing else could write like Pindar." + +Sir Charles Eastlake in his "History of the Gothic Revival" testifies to +this formal spirit from the point of view of another art than literature. +"The age in which Batty Langley lived was an age in which it was +customary to refer all matters of taste to rule and method. There was +one standard of excellence in poetry--a standard that had its origin in +the smooth distichs of heroic verse which Pope was the first to perfect, +and which hundreds of later rhymers who lacked his nobler powers soon +learned to imitate. In pictorial art, it was the grand school which +exercised despotic sway over the efforts of genius and limited the +painter's inventions to the field of Pagan mythology. In architecture, +Vitruvius was the great authority. The graceful majesty of the +Parthenon--the noble proportions of the temple of Theseus--the chaste +enrichment which adorns the Choragic monument of Lysicrates, were +ascribed less to the fertile imagination and refined perceptions of the +ancient Greek, than to the dry and formal precepts which were invented +centuries after their erection. Little was said of the magnificent +sculpture which filled the metopes of the temple of the Minerva; but the +exact height and breadth of the triglyphs between them were considered of +the greatest importance. The exquisite drapery of caryatids and +canephorae, no English artist, a hundred years ago, thought fit to +imitate; but the cornices which they supposed were measured inch by inch +with the utmost nicety. Ingenious devices were invented for enabling the +artificer to reproduce, by a series of complicated curves, the profile of +a Doric capital, which probably owed its form to the steady hand and +uncontrolled taste of the designer. To put faith in many of the theories +propounded by architectural authorities in the last century, would be to +believe that some of the grandest monuments which the world has ever seen +raised, owe their chief beauty to an accurate knowledge of arithmetic. +The diameter of the column was divided into modules: the modules were +divided into minutes; the minutes into fractions of themselves. A +certain height was allotted to the shaft, another to the entablature. . . +Sometimes the learned discussed how far apart the columns of a portico +might be."[29] + +This kind of mensuration reminds one of the disputes between French +critics as to whether the unity of time meant thirty hours, or +twenty-four, or twelve, or the actual time that it took to act the play; +or of the geometric method of the "Saturday papers" in the _Spectator_. +Addison tries "Paradise Lost" by Aristotle's rules for the composition of +an epic. Is it the narrative of a single great action? Does it begin +_in medias res_, as is proper, or _ab ovo Ledae_, as Horace has said that +an epic ought not? Does it bring in the introductory matter by way of +episode, after the approved recipe of Homer and Vergil? Has it +allegorical characters, contrary to the practice of the ancients? Does +the poet intrude personally into his poem, thus mixing the lyric and epic +styles? etc. Not a word as to Milton's puritanism, or his +_Weltanschauung_, or the relation of his work to its environment. +Nothing of that historical and sympathetic method--that endeavor to put +the reader at the poet's point of view--by which modern critics, from +Lessing to Sainte-Beuve, have revolutionized their art. Addison looks at +"Paradise Lost" as something quite distinct from Milton: as a +manufactured article to be tested by comparing it with standard fabrics +by recognized makers, like the authors of the Iliad and Aeneid. + +When the Queen Anne poetry took a serious turn, the generalizing spirit +of the age led it almost always into the paths of ethical and didactic +verse. "It stooped to truth and moralized its song," finding its +favorite occupation in the sententious expression of platitudes--the +epigram in satire, the maxim in serious work. It became a poetry of +aphorisms, instruction us with Pope that + + "Virtue alone is happiness below;" + +or, with Young, that + + "Procrastination is the thief of time;" + +or, with Johnson, that + + "Slow rises worth by poverty depressed." + +When it attempted to deal concretely with the passions, it found itself +impotent. Pope's "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard" rings hollow: it is +rhetoric, not poetry. The closing lines of "The Dunciad"--so strangely +overpraised by Thackeray--with their metallic clank and grandiose +verbiage, are not truly imaginative. The poet is simply working himself +up to a climax of the false sublime, as an orator deliberately attaches a +sounding peroration to his speech. Pope is always "heard," never +"overheard." + +The poverty of the classical period in lyrical verse is particularly +significant, because the song is the most primitive and spontaneous kind +of poetry, and the most direct utterance of personal feeling. Whatever +else the poets of Pope's time could do, they could not sing. They are +the despair of the anthologists.[30] Here and there among the brilliant +reasoners, _raconteurs_, and satirists in verse, occurs a clever +epigrammatist like Prior, or a ballad writer like Henry Carey, whose +"Sally in Our Alley" shows the singing, and not talking, voice, but +hardly the lyric cry. Gay's "Blackeyed Susan" has genuine quality, +though its _rococo_ graces are more than half artificial. Sweet William +is very much such an opera sailor-man as Bumkinet or Grubbinol is a +shepherd, and his wooing is beribboned with conceits like these: + + "If to fair India's coast we sail, + Thy eyes are seen in diamonds bright, + Thy breath is Afric's spicy gale, + Thy skin is ivory so white. + Thus every beauteous prospect that I view, + Wakes in my soul some charm of lovely Sue." + +It was the same with the poetry of outward nature as with the poetry of +human passion.[31] In Addison's "Letter from Italy," in Pope's +"Pastorals," and "Windsor Forest," the imagery, when not actually false, +is vague and conventional, and the language abounds in classical +insipidities, epithets that describe nothing, and generalities at second +hand from older poets, who may once, perhaps, have written with their +"eyes upon the object." Blushing Flora paints the enameled ground; +cheerful murmurs fluctuate on the gale; Eridanus through flowery meadows +strays; gay gilded[32] scenes and shining prospects rise; while +everywhere are balmy zephyrs, sylvan shades, winding vales, vocal shores, +silver floods, crystal springs, feathered quires, and Phoebus and +Philomel and Ceres' gifts assist the purple year. It was after this +fashion that Pope rendered the famous moonlight passage in his +translation of the Iliad: + + "Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise, + A flood of glory bursts from all the skies," etc. + +"Strange to think of an enthusiast," says Wordsworth, "reciting these +verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having his raptures in +the least disturbed by a suspicion of their absurdity." The poetic +diction against which Wordsworth protested was an outward sign of the +classical preference for the general over the concrete. The vocabulary +was Latinized because, in English, the _mot propre_ is commonly a Saxon +word, while its Latin synonym has a convenient indefiniteness that keeps +the subject at arm's length. Of a similar tendency was the favorite +rhetorical figure of personification, which gave a false air of life to +abstractions by the easy process of spelling them with a capital letter. +Thus: + + "From bard to bard the frigid caution crept, + Till Declamation roared whilst Passion slept; + Yet still did Virtue deign the stage to tread, + Philosophy remained though Nature fled,. . . + Exulting Folly hailed the joyful day, + And Pantomime and Song confirmed her sway."[33] + +Everything was personified; Britannia, Justice, Liberty, Science, +Melancholy, Night. Even vaccination for the smallpox was invoked as a +goddess, + + "Inoculation, heavenly maid, descend!"[34] + +But circumstances or periphrasis was the capital means by which the +Augustan poet avoided precision and attained nobility of style. It +enabled him to speak of a woman as a "nymph," or a "fair"; of sheep as +"the fleecy care"; of fishes as "the scaly tribe"; and of a picket fence +as a "spiculated paling." Lowell says of Pope's followers: "As the +master had made it an axiom to avoid what was mean or low, so the +disciples endeavored to escape from what was common. This they contrived +by the ready expedient of the periphrasis. They called everything +something else. A boot with them was + + "'The shining leather that encased the limb.' + +"Coffee became + + "'The fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown.'"[35] + +"For the direct appeal to Nature, and the naming of specific objects," +says Mr. Gosse,[36] "they substituted generalities and second-hand +allusions. They no longer mentioned the gillyflower and the daffodil, +but permitted themselves a general reference to Flora's vernal wreath. +It was vulgar to say that the moon was rising; the gentlemanly expression +was, 'Cynthia is lifting her silver horn!' Women became nymphs in this +new phraseology, fruits became 'the treasures of Pomona,' a horse became +'the impatient courser.' The result of coining these conventional +counters for groups of ideas was that the personal, the exact, was lost +in literature. Apples were the treasures of Pomona, but so were +cherries, too, and if one wished to allude to peaches, they also were the +treasures of Pomona. This decline from particular to general language +was regarded as a great gain in elegance. It was supposed that to use +one of these genteel counters, which passed for coin of poetic language, +brought the speaker closer to the grace of Latinity. It was thought that +the old direct manner of speaking was crude and futile; that a romantic +poet who wished to allude to caterpillars could do so without any +exercise of his ingenuity by simply introducing the word 'caterpillars,' +whereas the classical poet had to prove that he was a scholar and a +gentleman by inventing some circumlocution, such as 'the crawling scourge +that smites the leafy plain.'. . . In the generation that succeeded Pope +really clever writers spoke of a 'gelid cistern,' when they meant a cold +bath, and 'the loud hunter-crew' when they meant a pack of foxhounds." + +It would be a mistake to suppose that the men of Pope's generation, +including Pope himself, were altogether wanting in romantic feeling. +There is a marked romantic accent in the Countess of Winchelsea's ode "To +the Nightingale"; in her "Nocturnal Reverie"; in Parnell's "Night Piece +on Death," and in the work of several Scotch poets, like Allan Ramsay and +Hamilton of Bangour, whose ballad, "The Braces of Yarrow," is certainly a +strange poem to come out of the heart of the eighteenth century. But +these are eddies and back currents in the stream of literary tendency. +We are always in danger of forgetting that the literature of an age does +not express its entire, but only its prevailing, spirit. There is +commonly a latent, silent body of thought and feeling underneath which +remains inarticulate, or nearly so. It is this prevailing spirit and +fashion which I have endeavored to describe in the present chapter. If +the picture seems to lack relief, or to be in any way exaggerated, the +reader should consult the chapters on "Classicism" and "The +Pseudo-Classicists" in M. Pellisier's "Literary Movement in France," +already several times referred to. They describe a literary situation +which had a very exact counterpart in England. + + +[1] As another notable weakness of the age is its habit of looking, to the +past ages--not understanding them all the while . . . so Scott gives up +nearly the half of his intellectual power to a fond yet purposeless +dreaming over the past; and spends half his literary labors in endeavors +to revive it, not in reality, but on the stage of fiction: endeavors +which were the best of the kind that modernism made, but still successful +only so far as Scott put under the old armor the everlasting human nature +which he knew; and totally unsuccessful so far as concerned the painting +of the armor itself, which he knew _not_. . . His romance and +antiquarianism, his knighthood and monkery, are all false, and he knows +them to be false.--_Ruskin, "Modern Painters,"_ Vol. III. p. 279 (First +American Edition, 1860). + +[2] See also the sly hit at popular fiction in the _Nonnë Prestës Tale_: + + "This story is also trewe, I undertake, + As is the book of Launcelot de Lake, + That women hold in ful gret reverence." + +[3] "History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century," Vol. II. chap +xii, section vii. + +[4] Sentimentalism approaches its subject through the feelings; +romanticism through the imagination. + +[5] Ruskin, too indicates the common element in romanticism and +naturalism--a desire to escape from the Augustan formalism. I condense +the passage slightly: "To powder the hair, to patch the cheek, to hoop +the body, to buckle the foot, were all part and parcel of the same system +which reduced streets to brick walls and pictures to brown stains. +Reaction from this state was inevitable, and accordingly men steal out to +the fields and mountains; and, finding among these color and liberty and +variety and power, rejoice in all the wildest shattering of the mountain +side, as an opposition to Gower Street. It is not, however, only to +existing inanimate nature that our want of beauty in person and dress has +driven us. The imagination of it, as it was seen in our ancestors, +haunts us continually. We look fondly back to the manners of the age +sought in the centuries which we profess to have surpassed in +everything. . . This romantic love of beauty, forced to seek in history +and in external nature the satisfaction it cannot find in ordinary +life."--_Modern Painters_, Vol. III. p. 260. + +[6] Although devout in their admiration for antiquity, the writers of the +seventeenth century have by no means always clearly grasped the object of +their cult. Though they may understand Latin tradition, they have +certainly never entered into the freer, more original spirit of Greek +art. They have but an incomplete, superficial conception of +Hellenism. . . Boileau celebrates but does not understand Pindar. . . +The seventeenth century comprehended Homer no better than Pindar. What +we miss in them is exactly what we like best in his epopee--the vast +living picture of semi-barbarous civilization. . . No society could be +less fitted than that of the seventeenth century to feel and understand +the spirit of primitive antiquity. In order to appreciate Homer, it was +thought necessary to civilize the barbarian, make him a scrupulous +writer, and convince him that the word "ass" is a "very noble" expression +in Greek--_Pellisier: "The Literary Movement in France" (Brinton's +translation, _1897), pp. 8-10. So Addison apologizes for Homer's failure +to observe those qualities of nicety, correctness, and what the French +call _bienséance_ (decorum,) the necessity of which had only been found +out in later times. See _The Spectator_, No. 160. + +[7] Preface to "Cromwell." + +[8] "History of English Poetry," section lxi. Vol III. p. 398 (edition of +1840). + +[9] See, for a fuller discussion of this subject, "From Shakspere to Pope: +An Inquiry into the Causes and Phenomena of the Rise of Classical Poetry +in England," by Edmund Gosse, 1885. + +[10] The cold-hearted, polished Chesterfield is a very representative +figure. Johnson, who was really devout, angrily affirmed that his +celebrated letters taught: "the morality of a whore with the manners of a +dancing-master." + +[11] "History of English Thought in the Eighteen Century," Vol. II. chap. +xii. Section iv. See also "Selections from Newman," by Lewis E. Gates, +Introduction, pp. xlvii-xlviii. (1895). + +[12] See especially _Spectator_, Nos. 185, 186, 201, 381, and 494. + +[13] The classical Landor's impatience of mysticism explains his dislike +of Plato, the mystic among Greeks. Diogenes says to Plato: "I meddle not +at present with infinity or eternity: when I can comprehend them, I will +talk about them," "Imaginary Conversations," 2d series, Conversation XV. +Landor's contempt for German literature is significant. + +[14] "Selections from Newman," Introduction, pp. xlvii-xlviii. + +[15] Racine observes that good sense and reason are the same in all ages. +What is the result of this generalization? Heroes can be transported +from epoch to epoch, from country to country, without causing surprise. +Their Achilles is no more a Greek than is Porus an Indian; Andromache +feels and talks like a seventeenth-century princess: Phaedra experiences +the remorse of a Christian.--_Pellissier, "Literary Movement in France,"_ +p. 18. + +In substituting men of concrete, individual lives for the ideal figures +of tragic art, romanticism was forced to determine their physiognomy by a +host of local, casual details. In the name of universal truth the +classicists rejected the coloring of time and place; and this is +precisely what the romanticists seek under the name of particular +reality.--_Ibid._ p. 220. Similarly Montezuma's Mexicans in Dryden's +"Indian Emperor" have no more national individuality than the Spanish +Moors in his "Conquest of Granada." The only attempt at local color in +"Aurungzebe"--an heroic play founded on the history of a contemporary +East Indian potentate who died seven years after the author--is the +introduction of the _suttee_, and one or two mentions of elephants. + +[16] See "Les Orientales" (Hugo) and Nerval's "Les Nuits de Rhamadan" and +"La Légende du Calife Hakem." + +[17] The rules a nation, born to serve, obeys; + And Boileau still in right of Horace sways. + --_Pope, "Essay on Criticism,"_ + +[18] These critical verse essays seem to have been particularly affected +by this order of the peerage; for, somewhat later, we have one, "On +Unnatural Flights in Poetry," by the Earl of Lansdowne--"Granville the +polite." + +[19] "Epistle to Sacheverel." + +[20] "Essay on Addison." + +[21] Sweet hour of twilight!--in the solitude + Of the pine forest, and the silent shore + Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood, + Rooted where once the Adrian wave flowed o'er, + To where the last Caesarian fortress stood, + Evergreen forest! which Boccaccio's lore + And Dryden's lay made haunted ground to me, + How have I loved the twilight hour and thee! + --_Don Juan_ + +[22] I must entirely agree with Monsieur Boileau, that one verse of Vergil +is worth all the _clinquant _or tinsel of Tasso.--_Spectator_, No. 5. + +[23] _Spectator_, No. 419. + +[24] See his "Life of Collins." + +[25] _Spectator_, No. 40. + +[26] "The Verse": Preface to "Paradise Lost." + + +[27] Dedicatory epistle to "The Rival Ladies." + +[28] Mr. Gosse says that a sonnet by Pope's friend Walsh is the only one +"written in English between Milton's in 1658, and Warton's about 1750," +Ward's "English Poets," Vol. III, p. 7. The statement would have been +more precise if he had said published instead of _written_. + +[29] "History of the Gothic Revival," pp. 49-50 (edition of 1872). + +[30] Palgrave says that the poetry of passion was deformed, after 1660, by +"levity and an artificial time"; and that it lay "almost dormant for the +hundred years between the days of Wither and Suckling and the days of +Burns and Cowper," "Golden Treasury" (Sever and Francis edition, 1866). +pp. 379-80. + +[31] Excepting the "Nocturnal Reverie" of Lady Winchelsea, and a passage +or two in the "Windsor Forest" of Pope, the poetry of the period +intervening between the publication of the "Paradise Lost" and the +"Seasons" [1667-1726] does not contain a single new image of external +nature.--_Wordsworth. Appendix to Lyrical Ballads_, (1815). + +[32] _Gild_ is a perfect earmark of eighteenth-century descriptive verse: +the shore is gilded and so are groves, clouds, etc. Contentment gilds +the scene, and the stars gild the gloomy night (Parnell) or the glowing +pole (Pope). + +[33] Johnson, "Prologue at the Opening of Drury Lane," 1747. + +[34] See Coleridge, "Biographia Literaria," chap. Xviii + +[35] Essay on Pope, in "My Study Windows." + +[36] "From Shakespere to Pope," pp. 9-11. + + + + +CHAPTER III. + +The Spenserians + +Dissatisfaction with a prevalent mood or fashion in literature is apt to +express itself either in a fresh and independent criticism of life, or in +a reversion to older types. But, as original creative genius is not +always forthcoming, a literary revolution commonly begins with imitation. +It seeks inspiration in the past, and substitutes a new set of models as +different as possible from those which it finds currently followed. In +every country of Europe the classical tradition had hidden whatever was +most national, most individual, in its earlier culture, under a smooth, +uniform veneer. To break away from modern convention, England and +Germany, and afterward France, went back to ancient springs of national +life; not always, at first, wisely, but in obedience to a true instinct. + +How far did any knowledge or love of the old romantic literature of +England survive among the contemporaries of Dryden and Pope? It is not +hard to furnish an answer to this question. The prefaces of Dryden, the +critical treatises of Dennis, Winstanley, Oldmixon, Rymer, Langbaine, +Gildon, Shaftesbury, and many others, together with hundreds of passages +in prologues and epilogues to plays; in periodical essays like the +_Tatler_ and _Spectator_; in verse essays like Roscommon's, Mulgrave's +and Pope's; in prefaces to various editions of Shakspere and Spenser; in +letters, memoirs, etc., supply a mass of testimony to the fact that +neglect and contempt had, with a few exceptions, overtaken all English +writers who wrote before the middle of the seventeenth century. The +exceptions, of course, were those supreme masters whose genius prevailed +against every change of taste: Shakspere and Milton, and, in a less +degree, Chaucer and Spenser. Of authors strictly mediaeval, Chaucer +still had readers, and there were reprints of his works in 1687, 1721, +and 1737,[1] although no critical edition appeared until Tyrwhitt's in +1775-78. It is probable, however, that the general reader, if he read +Chaucer at all, read him in such modernized versions as Dryden's "Fables" +and Pope's "January and May." Dryden's preface has some admirable +criticism of Chaucer, although it is evident, from what he says about the +old poet's versification, that the secret of Middle English scansion and +pronunciation had already been lost. Prior and Pope, who seem to have +been attracted chiefly to the looser among the "Canterbury Tales," made +each a not very successful experiment at burlesque imitation of +Chaucerian language. + +Outside of Chaucer, and except among antiquarians and professional +scholars, there was no remembrance of the whole _corpus poetarum_ of the +English Middle Age: none of the metrical romances, rhymed chronicles, +saints' legends, miracle plays, minstrel ballads, verse homilies, manuals +of devotion, animal fables, courtly or popular allegories and love songs +of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Nor was there +any knowledge or care about the masterpieces of medieval literature in +other languages than English; about such representative works as the +"Nibelungenlied," the "Chanson de Roland," the "Roman de la Rose," the +"Parzival" of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the "Tristan" of Gottfried of +Strasburg, the "Arme Heinrich" of Harmann von Aue, the chronicles of +Villehardouin, Joinville, and Froissart, the "Morte Artus," the "Dies +Irae," the lyrics of the troubadour Bernart de Ventadour, and of the +minnesinger Walter von der Vogelweide, the Spanish Romancero, the poems +of the Elder Edda, the romances of "Amis et Amile" and "Aucassin et +Nicolete," the writings of Villon, the "De Imitatione Christi" ascribed +to Thomas à Kempis. Dante was a great name and fame, but he was virtually +unread. + +There is nothing strange about this; many of these things were still in +manuscript and in unknown tongues, Old Norse, Old French, Middle High +German, Middle English, Mediaeval Latin. It would be hazardous to assert +that the general reader, or even the educated reader, of to-day has much +more acquaintance with them at first hand than his ancestor of the +eighteenth century; or much more acquaintance than he has with +Aeschuylus, Thucydides, and Lucretius, at first hand. But it may be +confidently asserted that he knows much more _about_ them; that he thinks +them worth knowing about; and that through modern, popular versions of +them--through poems, historical romances, literary histories, essays and +what not--he has in his mind's eye a picture of the Middle Age, perhaps +as definite and fascinating as the picture of classical antiquity. That +he has so is owing to the romantic movement. For the significant +circumstance about the attitude of the last century toward the whole +medieval period was, not its ignorance, but its incuriosity. It did not +want to hear anything about it.[2] Now and then, hints Pope, an +antiquarian pedant, a university don, might affect an admiration for some +obsolete author: + + "Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learned by rote, + And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote: + One likes no language but the 'Faery Queen'; + A Scot will fight for 'Christ's Kirk o' the Green.'"[3] + +But, furthermore, the great body of Elizabethan and Stuart literature was +already obsolescent. Dramatists of the rank of Marlowe and Webster, +poets like George Herbert and Robert Herrick--favorites with our own +generation--prose authors like Sir Thomas Browne--from whom Coleridge and +Emerson drew inspiration--had fallen into "the portion of weeds and +outworn faces." Even writers of such recent, almost contemporary, repute +as Donne, whom Carew had styled + + "--a king who ruled, as he thought fit, + The universal monarch of wit": + +Or as Cowley, whom Dryden called the darling of his youth, and who was +esteemed in his own lifetime a better poet than Milton; even Donne and +Cowley had no longer a following. Pope "versified" some of Donne's +rugged satires, and Johnson quoted passages from him as examples of the +bad taste of the metaphysical poets. This in the "Life of Cowley," with +which Johnson began his "Lives of the Poets," as though Cowley was the +first of the moderns. But, + + "Who now reads Cowley?" + +asks Pope in 1737.[4] The year of the Restoration (1660) draws a sharp +line of demarcation between the old and the new. In 1675, the year after +Milton's death, his nephew, Edward Philips, published "Theatrum +Poetarum," a sort of biographical dictionary of ancient and modern +authors. In the preface, he says: "As for the antiquated and fallen into +obscurity from their former credit and reputation, they are, for the most +part, those that have written beyond the verge of the present age; for +let us look back as far as about thirty or forty years, and we shall find +a profound silence of the poets beyond that time, except of some few +dramatics." + +This testimony is the more convincing, since Philips was something of a +_laudator temporis acti_. He praises several old English poets and +sneers at several new ones, such as Cleaveland and Davenant, who were +high in favor with the royal party. He complains that nothing now +"relishes so well as what is written in the smooth style of our present +language, taken to be of late so much refined"; that "we should be so +compliant with the French custom, as to follow set fashions"; that the +imitation of Corneille has corrupted the English state; and that Dryden, +"complying with the modified and gallantish humour of the time," has, in +his heroic plays, "indulged a little too much to the French way of +continual rime." One passage, at least, in Philips' preface has been +thought to be an echo of Milton's own judgment on the pretensions of the +new school of poetry. "Wit, ingenuity, and learning in verse; even +elegancy itself, though that comes nearest, are one thing. True native +poetry is another; in which there is a certain air and spirit which +perhaps the most learned and judicious in other arts do not perfectly +apprehend, much less is it attainable by any study or industry. Nay, +though all the laws of heroic poem, all the laws of tragedy were exactly +observed, yet still this _tour entrejeant_--this poetic energy, if I may +so call it, would be required to give life to all the rest; which shines +through the roughest, most unpolished, and antiquated language, and may +haply be wanting in the most polite and reformed. Let us observe +Spenser, with all his rusty, obsolete words, with all his rough-hewn +clouterly verses; yet take him throughout, and we shall find in him a +graceful and poetic majesty. In like manner, Shakspere in spite of all +his unfiled expressions, his rambling and indigested fancies--the +laughter of the critical--yet must be confessed a poet above many that go +beyond him to literature[5] some degrees." + +The laughter of the critical! Let us pause upon the phrase, for it is a +key to the whole attitude of the Augustan mind toward "our old tragick +poet." Shakspere was already a national possession. Indeed it is only +after the Restoration that we find any clear recognition of him, as one +of the greatest--as perhaps himself the very greatest--of the dramatists +of all time. For it is only after the Restoration that criticism begins. +"Dryden," says Dr. Johnson, "may be properly considered as the father of +English criticism, as the writer who first taught us to determine, upon +principles, the merit of composition. . . Dryden's 'Essay of Dramatic +Poesy' [1667] was the first regular and valuable treatise on the art of +writing."[6] The old theater was dead and Shakspere now emerged from +amid its ruins, as the one unquestioned legacy of the Elizabethan age to +the world's literature. He was not only the favorite of the people, but +in a critical time, and a time whole canons of dramatic art were opposed +to his practice, he united the suffrages of all the authoritative leader +of literacy opinion. Pope's lines are conclusive as to the veneration in +which Shakspere's memory was held a century after his death. + + "On Avon's banks, where flowers eternal blow, + If I but ask, if any weed can grow; + One tragic sentence if I dare deride + Which Betterton's grave action dignified . . . + How will our fathers rise up in a rage, + And swear, all shame is lost in George's age."[7] + +The Shaksperian tradition is unbroken in the history of English +literature and of the English theater. His plays, in one form or +another, have always kept the stage even in the most degenerate condition +of public taste.[8] Few handsomer tributes have been paid to Shakspere's +genius than were paid in prose and verse, by the critics of our classical +age, from Dryden to Johnson. "To begin then with Shakspere," says the +former, in his "Essay of Dramatic Poesy," "he was the man who, of all +modern and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive +soul." And, in the prologue to his adaptation of "The Tempest," he +acknowledges that + + "Shakspere's magic could not copied be: + Within that circle none durst walk but he." + +"The poet of whose works I have undertaken the revision," writes Dr. +Johnson, "may now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient, and claim +the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration."[9] + + "Each change of many-colored life he drew, + Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new."[10] + +Yet Dryden made many petulant, and Johnson many fatuous mistakes about +Shakspere; while such minor criticasters as Thomas Rymer[11] and Mrs. +Charlotte Lenox[12] uttered inanities of blasphemy about the finest +touches in "Macbeth" and "Othello." For if we look closer, we notice +that everyone who bore witness to Shakspere's greatness qualified his +praise by an emphatic disapproval of his methods. He was a prodigious +genius, but a most defective artist. He was the supremest of dramatic +poets, but he did not know his business. It did not apparently occur to +anyone--except, in some degree, to Johnson--that there was an absurdity +in this contradiction; and that the real fault was not in Shakspere, but +in the standards by which he was tried. Here are the tests which +technical criticism has always been seeking to impose, and they are not +confined to the classical period only. They are used by Sidney, who took +the measure of the English buskin before Shakspere had begun to write; by +Jonson, who measured socks with him in his own day; by Matthew Arnold, +who wanted an English Academy, but in whom the academic vaccine, after so +long a transmission, worked but mildly. Shakspere violated the unities; +his plays were neither right comedies nor right tragedies; he had small +Latin and less Greek; he wanted art and sometimes sense, committing +anachronisms and Bohemian shipwrecks; wrote hastily, did not blot enough, +and failed of the grand style. He was "untaught, unpractised in a +barbarous age"; a wild, irregular child of nature, ignorant of the rules, +unacquainted with ancient models, succeeding--when he did succeed--by +happy accident and the sheer force of genius; his plays were +"roughdrawn," his plots lame, his speeches bombastic; he was guilty on +every page of "some solecism or some notorious flaw in sense."[13] + +Langbaine, to be sure, defends him against Dryden's censure. But Dennis +regrets his ignorance of poetic art and the disadvantages under which he +lay from not being conversant with the ancients. If he had known his +Sallust, he would have drawn a juster picture of Caesar; and if he had +read Horace "Ad Pisones," he would have made a better Achilles. He +complains that he makes the good and the bad perish promiscuously; and +that in "Coriolanus"--a play which Dennis "improved" for the new +stage--he represents Menenius as a buffoon and introduces the rabble in a +most undignified fashion.[14] Gildon, again, says that Shakspere must +have read Sidney's "Defence of Posey" and therefore, ought to have known +the rules and that his neglect of them was owing to laziness. "Money +seems to have been his aim more than reputation, and therefore he was +always in a hurry . . . and he thought it time thrown away, to study +regularity and order, when any confused stuff that came into his head +would do his business and fill his house."[15] + +It would be easy, but it would be tedious, to multiply proofs of this +patronizing attitude toward Shakspere. Perhaps Pope voices the general +sentiment of his school, as fairly as anyone, in the last words of his +preface.[16] "I will conclude by saying of Shakspere that, with all his +faults and with all the irregularity of his _drama_, one may look upon +his works, in comparison of those that are more finished and regular, as +upon an ancient, majestic piece of Gothic architecture compared with a +neat, modern building. The latter is more elegant and glaring, but the +former is more strong and solemn. . . It has much the greater variety, +and much the nobler apartments, though we are often conducted to them by +dark, odd and uncouth passages. Nor does the whole fail to strike us +with greater reverence, though many of the parts are childish, ill-placed +and unequal to its grandeur." This view of Shakspere continued to be the +rule until Coleridge and Schlegel taught the new century that this child +of fancy was, in reality, a profound and subtle artist, but that the +principles of his art--as is always the case with creative genius working +freely and instinctively--were learned by practice, in the concrete, +instead of being consciously thrown out by the workman himself into an +abstract _theoria_; so that they have to be discovered by a reverent +study of his work and lie deeper than the rules of French criticism. +Schlegel, whose lectures on dramatic art were translated into English in +1815, speaks with indignation of the current English misunderstanding of +Shakspere. "That foreigners, and Frenchmen in particular, who frequently +speak in the strangest language about antiquity and the Middle Age, as if +cannibalism had been first put an end in Europe by Louis XIV., should +entertain this opinion of Shakspere might be pardonable. But that +Englishmen should adopt such a calumniation . . . is to me +incomprehensible."[17] + +The beginnings of the romantic movement in England were uncertain. There +was a vague dissent from current literary estimates, a vague discontent +with reigning literary modes, especially with the merely intellectual +poetry then in vogue, which did not feed the soul. But there was, at +first, no conscious, concerted effort toward something of creative +activity. The new group of poets, partly contemporaries of Pope, partly +successors to him--Thomson, Shenstone, Dyer, Akenside, Gray, Collins, and +the Warton brothers--found their point of departure in the loving study +and revival of old authors. From what has been said of the survival of +Shakspere's influence it might be expected that his would have been the +name paramount among the pioneers of English romanticism. There are +several reasons why this was not the case. + +In the first place, the genius of the new poets was lyrical or +descriptive, rather than dramatic. The divorce between literature and +the stage had not yet, indeed, become total; and, in obedience to the +expectation that every man of letters should try his hand at +play-writing, Thomson, at least, as well as his friend and disciple +Mallet, composed a number of dramas. But these were little better than +failures even at the time; and while "The Seasons" has outlived all +changes of taste, and "The Castle of Indolence" has never wanted +admirers, tragedies like "Agamemnon" and "Sophonisba" have been long +forgotten. An imitation of Shakspere to any effective purpose must +obviously have take the shape of a play; and neither Gray nor Collins nor +Akenside, nor any of the group, was capable of a play. Inspiration of a +kind, these early romanticists did draw from Shakspere. Verbal +reminiscences of him abound in Gray. Collins was a diligent student of +his works. His "Dirge in Cymbeline" is an exquisite variation on a +Shaksperian theme. In the delirium of his last sickness, he told Warton +that he had found in an Italian novel the long-sought original of the +plot of "The Tempest." It is noteworthy, by the way, that the +romanticists were attracted to the poetic, as distinguished from the +dramatic, aspect of Shakspere's genius; to those of his plays in which +fairy lore and supernatural machinery occur, such as "The Tempest" and "A +Midsummer Night's Dream." + +Again, the stage has a history of its own, and, in so far as it was now +making progress of any kind, it was not in the direction of a more poetic +or romantic drama, but rather toward prose tragedy and the sentimental +comedy of domestic life, what the French call _la tragédie bourgeoise_ +and _la comédie larmoyante_. In truth the theater was now dying; and +though, in the comedies of Goldsmith and Sheridan, it sent up one bright, +expiring gleam, the really dramatic talent of the century had already +sought other channels in the novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. + +After all, a good enough reason why the romantic movement did not begin +with imitation of Shakspere is the fact that Shakspere is inimitable. He +has no one manner that can be caught, but a hundred manners; is not the +poet of romance, but of humanity; nor medieval, but perpetually modern +and contemporaneous in his universality. The very familiarity of his +plays, and their continuous performance, although in mangled forms, was a +reason why they could take little part in a literary revival; for what +has never been forgotten cannot be revived. To Germany and France, at a +later date, Shakspere came with the shock of a discovery and begot +Schiller and Victor Hugo. In the England of the eighteenth century he +begot only Ireland's forgeries. + +The name inscribed in large letters on the standard of the new school was +not Shakspere but Spenser. If there is any poet who is _par excellence_ +the poet of romance, whose art is the antithesis of Pope's, it is the +poet of the "Faërie Queene." To ears that had heard from childhood the +tinkle of the couplet, with its monotonously recurring rhyme, its +inevitable caesura, its narrow imprisonment of the sense, it must have +been a relief to turn to the amplitude of Spencer's stanza, "the full +strong sail of his great verse." To a generation surfeited with Pope's +rhetorical devices--antithesis, climax, anticlimax--and fatigued with the +unrelaxing brilliancy and compression of his language; the escape from +epigrams and point (snap after snap, like a pack of fire-crackers), from +a style which has made his every other line a proverb or current +quotation--the escape from all this into Spenser's serene, leisurely +manner, copious Homeric similes, and lingering detail must have seemed +most restful. To go from Pope to Spenser was to exchange platitudes, +packed away with great verbal cunning in neat formulas readily portable +by the memory, for a wealth of concrete images: to exchange saws like, + + "A little learning is a dangerous thing," + +for a succession of richly colored pictures by the greatest painter among +English poets. It was to exchange the most prosaic of our poets--a poet +about whom question has arisen whether he is a poet at all--for the most +purely poetic of our poets, "the poet's poet." And finally, it was to +exchange the world of everyday manners and artificial society for an +imaginary kingdom of enchantment, "out of space, out of time." + +English poetry has oscillated between the poles of Spenser and Pope. The +poets who have been accepted by the race as most truly national, poets +like Shakspere, Milton, and Byron, have stood midway. Neither Spenser +nor Pope satisfies long. We weary, in time, of the absence of passion +and intensity in Spenser, his lack of dramatic power, the want of +actuality in his picture of life, the want of brief energy and nerve in +his style; just as we weary of Pope's inadequate sense of beauty. But at +a time when English poetry had abandoned its true function--the +refreshment and elevation of the soul through the imagination--Spenser's +poetry, the poetry of ideal beauty, formed the most natural corrective. +Whatever its deficiencies, it was not, at any rate, "conceived and +composed in his wits." + +Spenser had not fared so well as Shakspere under the change which came +over public taste after the Restoration. The age of Elizabeth had no +literary reviews or book notices, and its critical remains are of the +scantiest. But the complimentary verses by many hands published with the +"Faërie Queene" and the numerous references to Spenser in the whole +poetic literature of the time, leave no doubt as to the fact that his +contemporaries accorded him the foremost place among English poets. The +tradition of his supremacy lasted certainly to the middle of the +seventeenth century, if not beyond. His influence is visible not only in +the work of professed disciples like Giles and Phineas Fletcher, the +pastoral poet William Browne, and Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, +but in the verse of Jonson, Fletcher, Milton, and many others. Milton +confessed to Dryden that Spenser was his "poetical father." Dryden +himself and Cowley, whose practice is so remote from Spenser's, +acknowledged their debt to him. The passage from Cowley's essay "On +Myself" is familiar: "I remember when I began to read, and to take some +pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I know not +by what accident, for she herself never read any book but of +devotion--but there was wont to lie) Spenser's works. This I happened to +fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights +and giants and monsters and brave houses which I found everywhere there +(thought my understanding had little to do with all this), and, by +degrees, with the tinkling of the rime and dance of the numbers; so that +I think I had read him all over before I was twelve years old, and was +thus made a poet as irremediably as a child is made an eunuch." It is a +commonplace that Spenser has made more poets than any other one writer. +Even Pope, whose empire he came back from Fairyland to overthrow, assured +Spence that he had read the "Faërie Queene" with delight when he was a +boy, and re-read it with equal pleasure in his last years. Indeed, it is +too readily assumed that writers are insensible to the beauties of an +opposite school. Pope was quite incapable of appreciating it. He took a +great liking to Allan Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd"; he admired "The +Seasons," and did Thomson the honor to insert a few lines of his own in +"Summer." Among his youthful parodies of old English poets is one piece +entitled "The Alley," a not over clever burlesque of the famous +description of the Bower of Bliss.[18] + +As for Dryden, his reverence for Spenser is qualified by the same sort of +critical disapprobation which we noticed in his eulogies of Shakspere. +He says that the "Faërie Queene" has no uniformity: the language is not +so obsolete as is commonly supposed, and is intelligible after some +practice; but the choice of stanza is unfortunate, though in spite of it, +Spenser's verse is more melodious than any other English poet's except +Mr. Waller's.[19] Ambrose Philips--Namby Pamby Philips--whom Thackeray +calls "a dreary idyllic cockney," appealed to "The Shepherd's Calendar" +as his model, in the introduction to his insipid "Pastorals," 1709. +Steele, in No. 540 of the _Spectator_ (November 19, 1712), printed some +mildly commendatory remarks about Spenser. Altogether it is clear that +Spenser's greatness was accepted, rather upon trust, throughout the +classical period, but that this belief was coupled with a general +indifference to his writings. Addison's lines in his "Epistle to +Sacheverel; an Account of the Greatest English Poets," 1694, probably +represent accurately enough the opinion of the majority of readers: + + "Old Spenser next, warmed with poetic rage, + In ancient tales amused a barbarous age; + An age that, yet uncultivated and rude, + Wher'er the poet's fancy led, pursued, + Through pathless fields and unfrequented floods, + To dens of dragons and enchanted woods. + But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore, + Can charm an understanding age no more. + The long-spun allegories fulsome grow, + While the dull moral lies too plain below, + We view well pleased at distance all the sights + Of arms and palfreys, battles, fields and fights, + And damsels in distress and courteous knights, + But when we look too near, the shades decay + And all the pleasing landscape fades away." + +Addison acknowledged to Spence that, when he wrote this passage, he had +never read Spenser! As late as 1754 Thomas Warton speaks of him as "this +admired but neglected poet,"[20] and Mr. Kitchin asserts that "between +1650 and 1750 there are but few notices of him, and a very few editions +of his works."[21] There was a reprint of Spenser's works--being the +third folio of the "Faërie Queene"--in 1679, but no critical edition till +1715. Meanwhile the title of a book issued in 1687 shows that Spenser +did not escape that process of "improvement" which we have seen applied +to Shakspere: "Spenser Redivivus; containing the First Book of the 'Faëry +Queene.' His Essential Design Preserved, but his Obsolete Language and +Manner of Verse totally laid aside. Delivered in Heroic Numbers by a +Person of Quality." The preface praises Spenser, but declares that "his +style seems no less unintelligible at this day than the obsoletest of our +English or Saxon dialect." One instance of this deliverance into heroic +numbers must suffice: + + "By this the northern wagoner had set + His sevenfold team behind the steadfast star + That was in ocean waves yet never wet, + But firm is fixed, and sendeth light from far + To all that in the wide deep wandering are." + --_Spenser_.[22] + +In 1715 John Hughes published his edition of Spenser's works in six +volumes. This was the first attempt at a critical text of the poet, and +was accompanied with a biography, a glossary, an essay on allegorical +poetry, and some remarks on the "Faërie Queene." It is curious to find +in the engravings, from designs by Du Guernier, which illustrate Hughes' +volumes, that Spenser's knights wore the helmets and body armor of the +Roman legionaries, over which is occasionally thrown something that looks +very much like a toga. The lists in which they run a tilt have the +façade of a Greek temple for a background. The house of Busyrane is +Louis Quatorze architecture, and Amoret is chained to a renaissance +column with Corinthian capital and classical draperies. Hughes' glossary +of obsolete terms includes words which are in daily use by modern +writers: aghast, baleful, behest, bootless, carol, craven, dreary, +forlorn, foray, guerdon, plight, welkin, yore. If words like these, and +like many which Warton annotates in his "Observations," really needed +explanation, it is a striking proof, not only of the degree in which our +older poets had been forgotten, but also of the poverty to which the +vocabulary of English poetry had been reduced by 1700. + +In his prefatory remarks to the "Faërie Queene," the editor expresses the +customary regrets that the poet should have chosen so defective a stanza, +"so romantick a story," and a model, or framework for the whole, which +appears so monstrous when "examined by the rules of epick poetry"; makes +the hackneyed comparison between Spenser's work and Gothic architecture, +and apologizes for his author, on the ground that, at the time when he +wrote, "the remains of the old Gothick chivalry were not quite +abolished." "He did not much revive the curiosity of the public," says +Johnson, in his life of Hughes; "for near thirty years elapsed before his +edition was reprinted." Editions of the "Faërie Queene" came thick and +fast about the middle of the century. One (by Birch) was issued in 1751, +and three in 1758; including the important edition by Upton, who, of all +Spenser's commentators, has entered most elaborately into the +interpretation of the allegory. + +In the interval had appeared, in gradually increasing numbers, that +series of Spenserian imitations which forms an interesting department of +eighteenth-century verse. The series was begun by a most unlikely +person, Matthew Prior, whose "Ode to the Queen," 1706, was in a ten-lined +modification of Spenser's stanza and employed a few archaisms like _weet_ +and _ween_, but was very unspenserian in manner. As early as the second +decade of the century, the horns of Elfland may be heard faintly blowing +in the poems of the Rev. Samuel Croxall, the translator of Aesop's +"Fables." Mr. Gosse[23] quotes Croxall's own description of his poetry, +as designed "to set off the dry and insipid stuff" of the age with "a +whole piece of rich and glowing scarlet." His two pieces "The Vision," +1715, and "The Fair Circassian," 1720, though written in the couplet, +exhibit a rosiness of color and a luxuriance of imagery manifestly +learned from Spenser. In 1713 he had published under the pseudonym of +Nestor Ironside, "An Original Canto of Spenser," and in 1714 "Another +Original Canto," both, of course, in the stanza of the "Faërie Queene." +The example thus set was followed before the end of the century by scores +of poets, including many well-known names, like Akenside, Thomson, +Shenstone, and Thomas Warton, as well as many second-rate and third-rate +versifiers.[24] + +It is noteworthy that many, if not most, of the imitations were at first +undertaken in a spirit of burlesque; as is plain not only from the poems +themselves, but from the correspondence of Shenstone and others.[25] The +antiquated speech of an old author is in itself a challenge to the +parodist: _teste_ our modern ballad imitations. There is something +ludicrous about the very look of antique spelling, and in the sound of +words like _eftsoones_ and _perdy_; while the sign _Ye Olde Booke Store_, +in Old English text over a bookseller's door, strikes the public +invariably as a most merry conceited jest; especially if the first letter +be pronounced as a _y_, instead of, what it really is, a mere +abbreviation of _th_. But in order that this may be so, the language +travestied should not be too old. There would be nothing amusing, for +example, in a burlesque imitation of Beowulf, because the Anglo-Saxon of +the original is utterly strange to the modern reader. It is conceivable +that quick-witted Athenians of the time of Aristophanes might find +something quaint in Homer's Ionic dialect, akin to that quaintness which +we find in Chaucer; but a Grecian of to-day would need to be very Attic +indeed, to detect any provocation to mirth in the use of the genitive +in-oio, in place of the genitive in-ou. Again, as one becomes familiar +with an old author, he ceases to be conscious of his archaism: the final +_e_ in Chaucer no longer strikes him as funny, nor even the circumstance +that he speaks of little birds as _smalë fowlës_. And so it happened, +that poets in the eighteenth century who began with burlesque imitation +of the "Faërie Queen" soon fell in love with its serious beauties. + +The only poems in this series that have gained permanent footing in the +literature are Shenstone's "Schoolmistress" and Thomson's "Cast of +Indolence." But a brief review of several other members of the group +will be advisable. Two of them were written at Oxford in honor of the +marriage of Frederick, Prince of Wales in 1736: one by Richard Owen +Cambridge;[26] the other by William Thompson, then bachelor of arts and +afterward fellow of Queen's College. Prince Fred, it will be remembered, +was a somewhat flamboyant figure in the literary and personal gossip of +his day. He quarreled with his father, George II, who "hated boetry and +bainting," and who was ironically fed with soft dedication by Pope in his +"Epistle to Augustus"; also with his father's prime minister, Sir Robert +Walpole, "Bob, the poet's foe." He left the court in dudgeon and set up +an opposition court of his own where he rallied about him men of letters, +who had fallen into a neglect that contrasted strangely with their former +importance in the reign of Queen Anne. Frederick's chief ally in this +policy was his secretary, George Lord Lyttelton, the elegant if somewhat +amateurish author of "Dialogues of the Dead" and other works; the friend +of Fielding, the neighbor of Shenstone at Hagley, and the patron of +Thomson, for whom he obtained the sinecure post of Surveyor of the +Leeward Islands. + +Cambridge's spousal verses were in a ten-lined stanza. His "Archimage," +written in the strict Spenserian stanza, illustrates the frequent +employment of this form in occasional pieces of a humorous intention. It +describes a domestic boating party on the Thames, one of the oarsmen +being a family servant and barber-surgeon, who used to dress the +chaplain's hair: + + "Als would the blood of ancient beadsman spill, + Whose hairy scalps he hanged in a row + Around his cave, sad sight to Christian eyes, I trow." + +Thompson's experiments, on the contrary, were quite serious. He had +genuine poetic feeling, but little talent. In trying to reproduce +Spenser's richness of imagery and the soft modulation of his verse, he +succeeds only in becoming tediously ornate. His stanzas are nerveless, +though not unmusical. His college exercise, "The Nativity," 1736, is a +Christmas vision which comes to the shepherd boy Thomalin, as he is +piping on the banks of Isis. It employs the pastoral machinery, includes +a masque of virtues,--Faith, Hope, Mercy, etc.,--and closes with a +compliment to Pope's "Messiah." The preface to his "Hymn to May," has +some bearing upon our inquiries: "As Spenser is the most descriptive and +florid of all our English writers, I attempted to imitate his manner in +the following vernal poem. I have been very sparing of the antiquated +words which are too frequent in most of the imitations of this +author. . . His lines are most musically sweet, and his descriptions +most delicately abundant, even to a wantonness of painting, but still it +is the music and painting of nature. We find no ambitious ornaments or +epigrammatical turns in his writings, but a beautiful simplicity which +pleases far above the glitter of pointed wit." The "Hymn to May" is in +the seven-lined stanza of Phineas Fletcher's "Purple Island"; a poem, +says Thompson, "scarce heard of in this age, yet the best in the +allegorical way (next to 'The Fairy Queen') in the English language." + +William Wilkie, a Scotch minister and professor, of eccentric habits and +untidy appearance, published, in 1759, "A Dream: in the Manner of +Spenser," which may be mentioned here not for its own sake, but for the +evidence that it affords of a growing impatience of classical restraints. +The piece was a pendant to Wilkie's epic, the "Epigoniad." Walking by +the Tweed, the poet falls asleep and has a vision of Homer, who +reproaches him with the bareness of style in his "Epigoniad." The +dreamer puts the blame upon the critics, + + "Who tie the muses to such rigid laws + That all their songs are frivolous and poor." + +Shakspere, indeed, + + "Broke all the cobweb limits fixed by fools"; + +but the only reward of his boldness + + "Is that our dull, degenerate age of lead + Says that he wrote by chance, and that he scare could read." + +One of the earlier Spenserians was Gilbert West, the translator of +Pindar, who published, in 1739, "On the Abuse of Travelling: A Canto in +Imitation of Spenser."[27] Another imitation, "Education," appeared in +1751. West was a very tame poet, and the only quality of Spenser's which +he succeeded in catching was his prolixity. He used the allegorical +machinery of the "Faërie Queene" for moral and mildly satirical ends. +Thus, in "The Abuse of Traveling," the Red Cross Knight is induced by +Archimago to embark in a painted boat steered by Curiosity, which wafts +him over to a foreign shore where he is entertained by a bevy of light +damsels whose leader "hight Politessa," and whose blandishments the +knight resists. Thence he is conducted to a stately castle (the court of +Louis XV. whose minister--perhaps Cardinal Fleury?--is "an old and +rankled mage"); and finally to Rome, where a lady yclept Vertù holds +court in the ruins of the Colosseum, among mimes, fiddlers, pipers, +eunuchs, painters, and _ciceroni_. + +Similarly the canto on "Education" narrates how a fairy knight, while +conducting his young son to the house of Paidia, encounters the giant +Custom and worsts him in single combat. There is some humor in the +description of the stream of science into which the crowd of infant +learners are unwillingly plunged, and upon whose margin stands + + "A _birchen_ grove that, waving from the shore, + Aye cast upon the tide its falling bud + And with its bitter juice empoisoned all the flood." + +The piece is a tedious arraignment of the pedantic methods of instruction +in English schools and colleges. A passage satirizing the artificial +style of gardening will be cited later. West had a country-house at +Wickham, in Kent, where, says Johnson,[28] "he was very often visited by +Lyttelton and Pitt; who, when they were weary of faction and debates, +used at Wickham to find books and quiet, a decent table and literary +conversation. There is at Wickham, a walk made by Pitt." Like many +contemporary poets, West interested himself in landscape gardening, and +some of his shorter pieces belong to that literature of inscriptions to +which Lyttelton, Akenside, Shenstone, Mason, and others contributed so +profusely. It may be said for his Spenserian imitations that their +archaisms are unusually correct[29]--if that be any praise--a feature +which perhaps recommended them to Gray, whose scholarship in this, as in +all points, was nicely accurate. The obligation to be properly +"obsolete" in vocabulary was one that rested heavily on the consciences +of most of these Spenserian imitators. "The Squire of Dames," for +instance, by the wealthy Jew, Moses Mendez, fairly bristles with +seld-seen costly words, like _benty_, _frannion_, etc., which it would +have puzzled Spenser himself to explain. + +One of the pleasantest outcomes of this literary fashion was William +Shenstone's "Schoolmistress," published in an unfinished shape in 1737 +and, as finally completed, in 1742. This is an affectionate +half-humorous description of the little dame-school of Shenstone's--and +of everybody's--native village, and has the true idyllic touch. +Goldsmith evidently had it in memory when he drew the picture of the +school in his "Deserted Village."[30] The application to so humble a +theme of Spenser's stately verse and grave, ancient words gives a very +quaint effect. The humor of "The Schoolmistress" is genuine, not +dependent on the more burlesque, as in Pope's and Cambridge's +experiments; and it is warmed with a certain tenderness, as in the +incident of the hen with her brood of chickens, entering the open door of +the schoolhouse in search of crumbs, and of the grief of the little +sister who witnesses her brother's flogging, and of the tremors of the +urchins who have been playing in the dame's absence: + + "Forewarned, if little bird their pranks behold, + 'Twill whisper in her ear and all the scene unfold." + +But the only one among the professed scholars of Spenser who caught the +glow and splendor of the master was James Thomson. It is the privilege +of genius to be original even in its imitations. Thomson took shape and +hue from Spenser, but added something of his own, and the result has a +value quite independent of its success as a reproduction. "The Castle of +Indolence," 1748,[31] is a fine poem; at least the first part of it is, +for the second book is tiresomely allegorical, and somewhat involved in +plot. There is a magic art in the description of the "land of +drowsy-head," with its "listless climate" always "atween June and +May,"[32] its "stockdove's plaint amid the forest deep," its hillside +woods of solemn pines, its gay castles in the summer clouds, and its +murmur of the distance main. The nucleus of Thomson's conception is to +be found in Spenser's House of Morpheus ("Faërie Queene," book i. canto +i. 41), and his Country of Idlesse is itself an anticipation of +Tennyson's Lotus Land, but verse like this was something new in the +poetry of the eighteenth century: + + "Was nought around but images of rest: + Sleep-soothing groves and quiet lawns between; + And flowery beds that slumberous influence kest, + From poppies breathed; and beds of pleasant green, + Where never yet was creeping creatures seen. + + "Meantime unnumbered glittering streamlets played + And hurlëd everywhere their waters sheen; + That, as they bickered through the sunny glade, + Though restless still themselves, a lulling murmur made." + +"The Castle of Indolence" had the romantic iridescence, the "atmosphere" +which is lacking to the sharp contours of Augustan verse. That is to +say, it produces an effect which cannot be wholly accounted for by what +the poet says; an effect which is wrought by subtle sensations awakened +by the sound and indefinite associations evoked by the words. The secret +of this art the poet himself cannot communicate. But poetry of this kind +cannot be translated into prose--as Pope's can--any more than music can +be translated into speech, without losing its essential character. Like +Spenser, Thomson was an exquisite colorist and his art was largely +pictorial. But he has touches of an imagination which is rarer, if not +higher in kind, than anything in Spenser. The fairyland of Spenser is an +unreal, but hardly an unearthly region. He seldom startles by glimpses +behind the curtain which hangs between nature and the supernatural, as in +Milton's + + "Airy tongues that syllable men's names + On sands and shores and desert wildernesses." + +There is something of this power in one stanza, at least, of "The Castle +of Indolence:" + + "As when a shepherd of the Hebrid Isles, + Placed far amid the melancholy main + (Whether it be lone fancy him beguiles, + Or that aerial beings sometimes deign + To stand embodied to our sense plain), + The whilst in ocean Phoebus dips his wain, + A vast assembly moving to and fro, + Then all at once in air dissolves the wondrous show." + +It may be guessed that Johnson and Boswell, in their tour to the Hebrides +or Western Islands, saw nothing of the "spectral puppet play" hinted at +in this passage--the most imaginative in any of Spenser's school till we +get to Keats' + + "Magic casements opening on the foam + Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn." + +William Julius Mickle, the translator of the "Lusiad," was a more +considerable poet than any of the Spenserian imitators thus far reviewed, +with the exception of Thomson and the possible exception of Shenstone. +He wrote at least two poems that are likely to be remembered. One of +these was the ballad of "Cumnor Hall" which suggested Scott's +"Kenilworth," and came near giving its name to the novel. The other was +the dialect song of "The Mariner's Wife," which Burns admired so greatly: + + "Sae true his heart, sae smooth his speech, + His breath like caller air, + His very foot has music in't, + As he comes up the stair, + For there's nae luck about the house, + There is nae luck at a', + There's little pleasure in the house + When our gudeman's awa',"[33] + +Mickle, like Thomson, was a Scotchman who came to London to push his +literary fortunes. He received some encouragement from Lyttelton, but +was disappointed in his hopes of any substantial aid from the British +Maecenas. His biographer informs us that "about his thirteenth year, on +Spenser's 'Faërie Queene' falling accidentally in his way, he was +immediately struck with the picturesque descriptions of that much admired +ancient bard and powerfully incited to imitate his style and manner."[34] +In 1767 Mickle published "The Concubine," a Spenserian poem in two +cantos. In the preface to his second edition, 1778, in which the title +was changed to "Syr Martyn," he said that: "The fullness and wantonness +of description, the quaint simplicity, and, above all, the ludicrous, of +which the antique phraseology and manner of Spenser are so happily and +peculiarly susceptible, inclined him to esteem it not solely as the best, +but the only mode of composition adapted to his subject." + +"Syr Martyn" is a narrative poem not devoid of animation, especially +where the author forgets his Spenser. But in the second canto he feels +compelled to introduce an absurd allegory, in which the nymph Dissipation +and her henchman Self-Imposition conduct the hero to the cave of +Discontent. This is how Mickle writes when he is thinking of the "Faërie +Queene": + + + "Eke should he, freed from fous enchanter's spell, + Escape his false Duessa's magic charms, + And folly quaid, yclept an hydra fell + Receive a beauteous lady to his arms; + While bards and minstrels chaunt the soft alarms + Of gentle love, unlike his former thrall: + Eke should I sing, in courtly cunning terms, + The gallant feast, served up by seneschal, + To knights and ladies gent in painted bower or hall." + +And this is how he writes when he drops his pattern: + + "Awake, ye west winds, through the lonely dale, + And, Fancy, to thy faerie bower betake! + Even now, with balmy freshness, breathes the gale, + Dimpling with downy wing the stilly lake; + Through the pale willows faltering whispers wake, + And evening comes with locks bedropt with dew; + On Desmond's moldering turrets slowly shake + The trembling rye-grass and the harebell blue, + And ever and anon fair Mulla's plaints renew." + +A reader would be guilty of no very bad guess who should assign this +stanza--which Scott greatly admired--to one of he Spenserian passages +that prelude the "Lady of the Lake." + +But it is needless to extend this catalogue any farther. By the middle +of the century Spenserian had become so much the fashion as to provoke a +rebuke from Dr. Johnson, who prowled up and down before the temple of the +British Muses like a sort of classical watch-dog. "The imitation of +Spenser," said the _Rambler_ of May 14, 1751, "by the influence of some +men of learning and genius, seems likely to gain upon the age. . . To +imitate the fictions and sentiments of Spenser can incur no reproach, for +allegory is perhaps one of the most pleasing vehicles of instruction. +But I am very far from extending the same respect to his diction or his +stanza. His style was, in his own words and peculiarities of phrase, and +so remote from common use that Jonson boldly pronounces him _to have +written no language_. His stanza is at once difficult and unpleasing: +tiresome to the ear by its uniformity, and to the attention by its +length. . . Life is surely given us for other purposes than to gather +what our ancestors have wisely thrown away and to learn what is of no +value but because it has been forgotten."[35] In his "Life of West," +Johnson says of West's imitations of Spenser, "Such compositions are not +to be reckoned among the great achievements of intellect, because their +effect is local and temporary: they appeal not to reason or passion, but +to memory, and presuppose an accidental or artificial state of mind. An +imitation of Spenser is nothing to a reader, however acute, by whom +Spenser has never been perused." + +The critic is partly right. The nice points of a parody are lost upon a +reader unacquainted with the thing parodied. And as for serious +imitations, the more cleverly a copyist follows his copy, the less value +his work will have. The eighteenth-century Spenserians, like West, +Cambridge, and Lloyd, who stuck most closely to their pattern, oblivion +has covered. Their real service was done in reviving a taste for a +better kind of poetry than the kind in vogue, and particularly in +restoring to English verse a stanza form, which became so noble an +instrument in the hands of later poets, who used it with as much freedom +and vigor as if they had never seen the "Faërie Queene." One is seldom +reminded of Spenser while reading "Childe Harold"[36] or "Adonais" or +"The Eve of Saint Agnes"; but in reading West or Cambridge, or even in +reading Shenstone and Thomson, one is reminded of him at every turn. Yet +if it was necessary to imitate anyone, it might be answered to Dr. +Johnson that it was better to imitate Spenser than Pope. In the +imitation of Spenser lay, at least, a future, a development; while the +imitation of Pope was conducting steadily toward Darwin's "Botanic +Garden." + +It remains to notice one more document in the history of this Spenserian +revival, Thomas Warton's "Observations on the Faërie Queen," 1754. +Warton wrote with a genuine delight in his subject. His tastes were +frankly romantic. But the apologetic air which antiquarian scholars +assumed, when venturing to recommend their favorite studies to the +attention of a classically minded public, is not absent from Warton's +commentary. He writes as if he felt the pressure of an unsympathetic +atmosphere all about him. "We who live in the days of writing by rule +are apt to try every composition by those laws which we have been taught +to think the sole criterion of excellence. Critical taste is universally +diffused, and we require the same order and design which every modern +performance is expected to have, in poems where they never were regarded +or intended. . . If there be any poem whose graces please because they +are situated beyond the reach of art[37] . . . it is this. In reading +Spenser, if the critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is transported." +"In analyzing the plan and conduct of this poem, I have so far tried it +by epic rules, as to demonstrate the inconveniences and incongruities +which the poet might have avoided, had he been more studious of design +and uniformity. It is true that his romantic materials claim great +liberties; but no materials exclude order and perspicacity." Warton +assures the reader that Spenser's language is not "so difficult and +obsolete as it is generally supposed to be;" and defends him against +Hume's censure,[38] that "Homer copied true natural manners . . . but the +pencil of the English poet was employed in drawing the affectations and +conceits and fopperies of chivalry." + +Yet he began his commentary with the stock denunciations of "Gothic +ignorance and barbarity." "At the renaissance it might have been +expected that, instead of the romantic manner of poetical +composition . . . a new and more legitimate taste of writing would have +succeeded. . . But it was a long time before such a change was effected. +We find Ariosto, many years after the revival of letters, rejecting truth +for magic, and preferring the ridiculous and incoherent excursions of +Boiardo to the propriety and uniformity of the Grecian and Roman models. +Nor did the restoration of ancient learning produce any effectual or +immediate improvement in the state of criticism. Beni, one of the most +celebrated critics of the sixteenth century, was still so infatuated with +a fondness for the old Provençal vein, that he ventured to write a +regular dissertation, in which he compares Ariosto with Homer." Warton +says again, of Ariosto and the Italian renaissance poets whom Spenser +followed, "I have found no fault in general with their use of magical +machinery; notwithstanding I have so far conformed to the reigning maxims +of modern criticism as to recommend classical propriety." +Notwithstanding this prudent determination to conform, the author takes +heart in his second volume to speak out as follows about the +pseudo-classic poetry of his own age: "A poetry succeeded in which +imagination gave way to correctness, sublimity of description to delicacy +of sentiment, and majestic imagery to conceit and epigram. Poets began +now to be more attentive to words than to things and objects. The nicer +beauties of happy expression were preferred to the daring strokes of +great conception. Satire, that bane of the sublime, was imported from +France. The muses were debauched at court; and polite life and familiar +manners became their only themes." + +By the time these words were written Spenser had done his work. Color, +music, fragrance were stealing back again into English song, and +"golden-tongued romance with serene lute" stood at the door of the new +age, waiting for it to open. + + +[1] A small portion of "The Canterbury Tales." Edited by Morell. + +[2] The sixteenth [_sic. Quaere_, seventeenth?] century had an instinctive +repugnance for the crude literature of the Middle Ages, the product of so +strange and incoherent a civilization. Here classicism finds nothing but +grossness and barbarism, never suspecting that it might contain germs, +which, with time and genius, might develop into a poetical growth, +doubtless less pure, but certainly more complex in its harmonies, and of +a more expressive form of beauty. The history of our ancient poetry, +traced in a few lines by Boileau, clearly shows to what degree he either +ignored or misrepresented it. The singular, confused architecture of +Gothic cathedrals gave those who saw beauty in symmetry of line and +purity of form but further evidence of the clumsiness and perverted taste +of our ancestors. All remembrances of the great poetic works of the +Middle Ages is completely effaced. No one supposes in those barbarous +times the existence of ages classical also in their way; no one imagines +either their heroic songs or romances of adventure, either the rich +bounty of lyrical styles or the naïve, touching crudity of the Christian +drama. The seventeenth century turned disdainfully away from the +monuments of national genius discovered by it; finding them sometimes +shocking in their rudeness, sometimes puerile in their refinements. +These unfortunate exhumations, indeed, only serve to strengthen its cult +for a simple, correct beauty, the models of which are found in Greece and +Rome. Why dream of penetrating the darkness of our origin? Contemporary +society is far too self-satisfied to seek distraction in the study of a +past which it does not comprehend. The subjects and heroes of domestic +history are also prohibited. Corneille is Latin, Racine is Greek; the +very name of Childebrande suffices to cover an epopee with +ridicule.--_Pellissier_, pp. 7-8. + +[3] "Epistle to Augustus." + +[4] "Epistle of Augustus." + +[5] _I.e._, learning. + +[6] "Life of Dryden." + +[7] "Epistle to Augustus." + +[8] The tradition as to Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton is almost equally +continuous. A course of what Lowell calls "penitential reading," in +Restoration criticism, will convince anyone that these four names already +stood out distinctly, as those of the four greatest English poets. See +especially Winstanley, "Lives of the English Poets," 1687; Langbaine, "An +Account of the English Dramatic Poets," 1691; Dennis, "Essay on the +Genius and Writings of Shakspere," 1712; Gildon, "The Complete Art of +Poetry," 1718. The fact mentioned by Macaulay, that Sir Wm. Temple's +"Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning" names none of the four, is without +importance. Temple refers by name to only three English "wits," Sidney, +Bacon, and Selden. This very superficial performance of Temple's was a +contribution to the futile controversy over the relative merits of the +ancients and moderns, which is now only of interest as having given +occasion to Bentley to display his great scholarship in his "Dissertation +on the Epistles of Phalaris," (1698), and to Swift to show his powers of +irony in "The Battle of the Books" (1704). + +[9] Preface to the "Plays of Shakspere," 1765. + + +[10] Prologue, spoken by Garrick at the opening of Drury Lane Theater, +1747. + +[11] "The Tragedies of the Last Age Considered and Examined," 1678. + +[12] "Shakspere Illustrated," 1753. + +[13] See Dryden's "Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy" and "Defence of the +Epilogue to the Conquest of Granada." + +[14] "Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakspere," 1712. + +[15] "The Art of Poetry," pp. 63 and 99. _Cf_. Pope, "Epistle to +Augustus": + + "Shakspere (whom you and every play-house bill + Style the divine, the matchless, what you will) + For gain, not glory, winged his roving flight, + And grew immortal in his own despite." + +[16] Pope's "Shakspere," 1725. + +[17] For a fuller discussion of this subject, consult "A History of +Opinion on the Writings of Shakspere," in the supplemental volume of +Knight's Pictorial Edition. Editions of Shakspere issued within a +century following the Restoration were the third Folio, 1664; the fourth +Folio, 1685; Rowe's (the first critical edition, with a Life, etc.) 1709 +(second edition, 1714); Pope's, 1725 (second edition, 1728); Theobald's, +1733; Hanmer's 1744; Warburton-Pope's, 1747; and Johnson's 1765. +Meanwhile, though Shakspere's plays continued to be acted, it was mostly +in doctored versions. Tate changed "Lear" to a comedy. Davenant and +Dryden made over "The Tempest" into "The Enchanted Island," turning blank +verse into rhyme and introducing new characters, while Shadwell altered +it into an opera. Dryden rewrote "Troilus and Cressida"; Davenant, +"Macbeth." Davenant patched together a thing which he called "The Law +against Lovers," from "Measure for Measure" and "Much Ado about Nothing." +Dennis remodeled the "Merry Wives of Windsor" as "The Comical Gallant"; +Tate, "Richard II." as "The Sicilian Usurper"; and Otway, "Romeo and +Juliet," as "Caius Marius." Lord Lansdowne converted "The Merchant of +Venice" into "The Jew of Venice," wherein Shylock was played as a comic +character down to the time of Macklin and Kean. Durfey tinkered +"Cymbeline." Cibber metamorphosed "King John" into "Papal Tyranny," and +his version was acted till Macready's time. Cibber's stage version of +"Richard III." is played still. Cumberland "engrafted" new features upon +"Timon of Athens" for Garrick's theater, about 1775. In his life of Mrs. +Siddons, Campbell says that "Coriolanus" "was never acted genuinely from +the year 1660 till the year 1820" (Phillimore's "Life of Lyttelton," Vol. +I. p. 315). He mentions a revision by Tate, another by Dennis ("The +Invader of his Country"), and a third brought out by the elder Sheridan +in 1764, at Covent Garden, and put together from Shakspere's tragedy and +an independent play of the same name by Thomson. "Then in 1789 came the +Kemble edition in which . . . much of Thomson's absurdity is still +preserved." + +[18] "Faërie Queene," II. xii. 71 + +[19] "Essay on Satire." Philips says a good word for the Spenserian +stanza: "How much more stately and majestic in epic poems, especially of +heroic argument, Spenser's stanza . . . is above the way either of +couplet or alternation of four verses only, I am persuaded, were it +revived, would soon be acknowledged."--_Theatrum Poetatarum_, Preface, +pp. 3-4. + +[20] "Observations on the Faëry Queene," Vol. II. p. 317. + +[21] "The Faëry Queene," Book I., Oxford, 1869. Introduction, p. xx. + +[22] "Canto" ii. stanza i. + + "Now had Bootes' team far passed behind + The northern star, when hours of night declined." + --_Person of Quality_ + +[23] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 139. + +[24] For a full discussion of this subject the reader should consult +Phelps' "Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement," chap. iv., "The +Spenserian Revival." A partial list of Spenserian imitations is given in +Todd's edition of Spenser, Vol. I. But the list in Prof. Phelps' +Appendix, if not exhaustive, is certainly the most complete yet published +and may be here reproduced. 1706: Prior: "Ode to the Queen." 1713-21: +Prior(?): "Colin's Mistakes." 1713 Croxall: "An Original Canto of +Spenser." 1714: Croxall: "Another Original Canto." 1730 (_circa_): +Whitehead: "Vision of Solomon," "Ode to the Honorable Charles Townsend," +"Ode to the Same." 1736: Thompson: "Epithalamium." 1736: Cambridge: +"Marriage of Frederick." 1736-37: Boyse: "The Olive," "Psalm XLII." +1737: Akenside: "The Virtuoso." 1739: West: "Abuse of Traveling." 1739: +Anon.: "A New Canto of Spenser's Fairy Queen." 1740: Boyse: "Ode to the +Marquis of Tavistock." 1741 (_circa_): Boyse: "Vision of Patience." +1742: Shenstone: "The Schoolmistress." 1742-50: Cambridge: "Archimage." +1742: Dodsley: "Pain and Patience." 1743: Anon.: "Albion's Triumph." +1744 (_circa_): Dodsley: "Death of Mr. Pope." 1744: Akenside: "Ode to +Curio." 1746: Blacklock: "Hymn to Divine Love," "Philantheus." 1747: +Mason: Stanzas in "Musaeus." 1747: Ridley: "Psyche." 1747: Lowth: +"Choice of Hercules." 1747: Upton: "A New Canto of Spenser's Fairy +Queen." 1747: Bedingfield: "Education of Achilles." 1747: Pitt: "The +Jordan." 1748: T. Warton, Sr.: "Philander." 1748: Thomson: "The Castle +of Indolence." 1749: Potter: "A Farewell Hymn to the Country." 1750: T. +Warton: "Morning." 1751: West: "Education." 1751: T. Warton: "Elegy on +the Death of Prince Frederick." 1751: Mendes: "The Seasons," 1751: +Lloyd: "Progress of Envy." 1751: Akenside: "Ode." 1751: Smith: +"Thales." 1753: T. Warton: "A Pastoral in the Manner of Spenser." 1754: +Denton: "Immortality." 1755: Arnold: "The Mirror." 1748-58: Mendez: +"Squire of Dames." 1756: Smart: "Hymn to the Supreme Being." 1757: +Thompson: "The Nativity," "Hymn to May." 1758: Akenside: "To Country +Gentlemen of England." 1759: Wilkie: "A Dream" 1759: Poem in "Ralph's +Miscellany." 1762: Denton: "House of Superstition." 1767: Mickle: "The +Concubine." 1768: Downman: "Land of the Muses." 1771-74: Beattie: "The +Ministrel." 1775: Anon.: "Land of Liberty." 1775: Mickle: Stanzas from +"Introduction to the Lusiad." + +[25] See Phelps, pp. 66-68. + +[26] See the sumptuous edition of Cambridge's "Works," issued by his son +in 1803. + +[27] "Mr. Walpole and I have frequently wondered you should never mention +a certain imitation of Spenser, published last year by a namesake of +yours, with which we are all enraptured and enmarvelled."--_Letter form +Gray to Richard West_, Florence, July 16, 1740. There was no +relationship between Gilbert West and Gray's Eton friend, though it seems +that the former was also an Etonian, and was afterwards at Oxford, +"whence he was seduced to a more airy mode of life," says Dr. Johnson, +"by a commission in a troop of horse, procured him by his uncle." +Cambridge, however, was an acquaintance of Gray, Walpole, and Richard +West, at Eton. Gray's solitary sonnet was composed upon the death of +Richard West in 1742; and it is worth noting that the introduction to +Cambridge's works are a number of sonnets by his friend Thomas Edwards, +himself a Spenser lover, whose "sugared sonnets among his private +friends" begin about 1750 and reach the number of fifty. + +[28] "Life of West." + +[29] Lloyd, in "The Progress of Envy," defines _wimpled_ as "hung down"; +and Akenside, in "The Virtuoso," employs the ending _en_ for the singular +verb! + +[30] Cf. "And as they looked, they found their horror grew." + --Shenstone. + + "And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew." + --Goldsmith. + + "The noises intermixed, which thence resound, + Do learning's little tenement betray." + --Shenstone. + + "There in his noisy mansion, skilled to rule." etc. + --Goldsmith. + +[31] The poem was projected, and perhaps partly written, fourteen or +fifteen years earlier. + +[32] _Cf_. Tennyson's "land in which it seemed always afternoon."--_The +Lotus Eaters_. + +[33] Mickle's authorship of this song has been disputed in favor of one +Jean Adams, a poor Scotch school-mistress, whose poems were printed at +Glasgow in 1734. + +[34] Rev. John Sim's "Life of Mickle" in "Mickle's Poetical Works," 1806, +p. xi. + +[35] _Cf._ Joseph Warton's "Essay on Pope," Vol. II. p. 35. "It has been +fashionable of late to imitate Spenser; but the likeness of most of these +copies hath consisted rather in using a few of his ancient expressions +than in catching his real manner. Some, however, have been executed with +happiness, and with attention to that simplicity, that tenderness of +sentiment and those little touches of nature that constitute Spenser's +character. I have a peculiar pleasure in mentioning two of them, 'The +Schoolmistress' by Mr. Shenstone, and 'The Education of Achilles' by Mr. +Bedingfield. And also, Dr. Beattie's charming 'Minstrel.' To these must +be added that exquisite piece of wild and romantic imagery, Thomson's +'Castle of Indolence.'" + +[36] Byron, to be sure, began his first canto with conscious Spenserian. +He called his poem a "romaunt," and his valet, poor Fletcher, a "stanch +yeomán," and peppered his stanzas thinly with _sooths_ and _wights_ and_ +whiloms_, but he gave over this affectation in the later cantos and made +no further excursions into the Middle Ages. + +[37] Pope's, "Snatch a grace beyond the reach of art." + --_Essay on Criticism_. + +[38] "History of England," Vol. II. p. 739. + + + + +CHAPTER IV. + +The Landscape Poets + +There is nothing necessarily romantic in literature that concerns itself +with rural life or natural scenery. Yet we may accept, with some +qualification, the truth of Professor McClintock's statement, that the +"beginning and presence of a creative, romantic movement is almost always +shown by the love, study, and interpretation of physical nature."[1] Why +this should be true, at all events of the romantic movement that began in +the eighteenth century, is obvious enough. Ruskin and Leslie Stephen +have already been quoted, as witnesses to the fact that naturalism and +romanticism had a common root: the desire, namely, to escape into the +fresh air and into freer conditions, from a literature which dealt, in a +strictly regulated way, with the indoor life of a highly artificial +society. The pastoral had ceased to furnish any relief. Professing to +chant the praises of innocence and simplicity, it had become itself +utterly unreal and conventional, in the hands of cockneys like Philips +and Pope. When the romantic spirit took possession of the poetry of +nature, it manifested itself in a passion for wildness, grandeur, +solitude. Of this there was as yet comparatively little even in the +verse of Thomson, Shenstone, Akenside, and Dyer. + +Still the work of these pioneers in the "return to nature" represents the +transition, and must be taken into account in any complete history of the +romantic movement. The first two, as we have seen, were among the +earliest Spenserians: Dyer was a landscape painter, as well as a poet; +and Shenstone was one of the best of landscape gardeners. But it is the +beginnings that are important. It will be needless to pursue the history +of nature poetry into its later developments; needless to review the +writings of Cowper and Crabbe, for example,--neither of whom was romantic +in any sense,--or even of Wordsworth, the spirit of whose art, as a +whole, was far from romantic. + +Before taking up the writers above named, one by one, it will be well to +notice the general change in the forms of verse, which was an outward +sign of the revolution in poetic feeling. The imitation of Spenser was +only one instance of a readiness to lay aside the heroic couplet in favor +of other kinds which it had displaced, and in the interests of greater +variety. "During the twenty-five years," says Mr. Goss, "from the +publication of Thomson's 'Spring' ['Winter'] in 1726, to that of Gray's +'Elegy' in 1751, the nine or ten leading poems or collections of verse +which appeared were all of a new type; somber, as a rule, certainly +stately, romantic in tone to the extreme, prepared to return, ignorantly +indeed, but with respect, to what was 'Gothic' in manners, architecture, +and language; all showing a more or less vague aspiration towards the +nature, and not one composed in the heroic couplet hitherto so vigorously +imposed on serious verse. 'The Seasons,' 'Night Thoughts' and 'The +Grave' are written in blank verse: 'The Castle of Indolence' and 'The +Schoolmistress' in Spenserian stanza; 'The Spleen' and 'Grongar Hill' in +octosyllabics, while the early odes of Gray and those of Collins are +composed in a great variety of simple but novel lyric measures."[2] + +The only important writer who had employed blank verse in undramatic +poetry between the publication of "Paradise Regained" in 1672, and +Thomson's "Winter" in 1726, was John Philips. In the brief prefatory +note to "Paradise Lost," the poet of "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," +forgetting or disdaining the graces of his youthful muse, had spoken of +rhyme as "the invention of a barbarous age," as "a thing trivial and of +no true musical delight." Milton's example, of course, could not fail to +give dignity and authority to the majestic rhythm that he had used; and +Philips' mock-heroic "The Splendid Shilling" (1701), his occasional +piece, "Blenheim" (1705), and his Georgic "Cyder" (1706), were all avowed +imitation of Milton. But the well-nigh solitary character of Philips' +experiments was recognized by Thomson, in his allusion to the last-named +poem: + + "Philips, Pomona's bard, the second thou + Who nobly durst, in rime-unfettered verse, + With British freedom sing the British song."[3] + +In speaking of Philips' imitations of Milton, Johnson said that if the +latter "had written after the improvements made by Dryden, it is +reasonable to believe he would have admitted a more pleasing modulation +of numbers into his work."[4] Johnson hated Adam Smith, but when Boswell +mentioned that Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow University, +had given the preference to rhyme over blank verse, the doctor exclaimed, +"Sir, I was once in company with Smith and we did not take to each other; +but had I known that he loved rhyme as much as you tell me he does, I +should have hugged him." + +In 1725 James Thomson, a young Scotchman, came to London to push his +literary fortunes. His countryman, David Malloch,--or Mallet, as he +called himself in England,--at that time private tutor in the family of +the Duke of Montrose, procured Thomson introductions into titled society, +and helped him to bring out "Winter," the first installment of "The +Seasons," which was published in 1726. Thomson's friend and biographer +(1762) the Rev. Patrick Murdoch, says that the poem was "no sooner read +than universally admired; those only excepted who had not been used to +feel, or to look for anything in poetry beyond a _point_ of satirical or +epigrammatic wit, a smart antithesis richly trimmed with rhyme." This is +a palpable hit at the stronger contrast than between Thomson and Pope, +not alone in subject and feeling, but in diction and verse. Thomson's +style is florid and luxuriant, his numbers flowing and diffuse, while +Pope had wonted the English ear to the extreme of compression in both +language and meter. Pope is among the most quotable of poets, while +Thomson's long poem, in spite of its enduring popularity, has contributed +but a single phrase to the stock of current quotation: + + "To teach the young idea how to shoot." + +"Winter" was followed by "Summer" in 1727, "Spring" in 1728, and the +completed "Seasons" in 1730. Thomson made many changes and additions in +subsequent editions. The original "Seasons" contained only 3902 lines +(exclusive of the "Hymn"), while the author's final revision of 1746 gave +5413. One proof that "The Seasons" was the work of a fresh and +independent genius is afforded by the many imitations to which it soon +gave birth. In Germany, a passage from Brockes' translation (1745) was +set to music by Haydn. J. P. Uz (1742) and Wieland each produced a +"Frühling," in Thomson's manner; but the most distinguished of his German +disciples was Ewald Christian von Kleist, whose "Fruhling" (1749) was a +description of a country walk in spring, in 460 hexameter lines, +accompanied, as in Thomson's "Hymn," with a kind of "Gloria in excelsis," +to the creator of nature. "The Seasons" was translated into French by +Madame Bontemps in 1759, and called forth, among other imitations, "Les +Saisons" of Saint Lambert, 1769 (revised and extended in 1771.) In +England, Thomson's influence naturally manifested itself less in direct +imitations of the scheme of his poem than in the contagion of his manner, +which pervades the work of many succeeding poets, such as Akenside, +Armstrong, Dyer, Somerville and Mallet. "There was hardly one verse +writer of any eminence," says Gosse,[5] "from 1725-50, who was not in +some manner guided or biased by Thomson, whose genius is to this day +fertile in English literature." + +We have grown so accustomed to a more intimate treatment and a more +spiritual interpretation of nature, that we are perhaps too apt to +undervalue Thomson's simple descriptive or pictorial method. Compared +with Wordsworth's mysticism, with Shelley's passionate pantheism, with +Byron's romantic gloom in presence of the mountains and the sea, with +Keats' joyous re-creation of mythology, with Thoreau's Indian-like +approach to the innermost arcana--with a dozen other moods familiar to +the modern mind--it seems to us unimaginative. Thomson has been likened, +as a colorist, to Rubens; and possibly the glow, the breadth, and the +vital energy of his best passages, as of Rubens' great canvases, leave +our finer perceptions untouched, and we ask for something more esoteric, +more intense. Still there are permanent and solid qualities in Thomson's +landscape art, which can give delight even now to an unspoiled taste. To +a reader of his own generation, "The Seasons" must have come as the +revelation of a fresh world of beauty. Such passages as those which +describe the first spring showers, the thunderstorm in summer, the +trout-fishing, the sheep-washing, and the terrors of the winter night, +were not only strange to the public of that day, but were new in English +poetry. + +That the poet was something of a naturalist, who wrote lovingly and with +his "eye upon the object," is evident from a hundred touches, like +"auriculas with shining meal"; + + "The yellow wall-flower stained with iron brown;" + +or, + + "The bittern knows his time, with bill engulfed, + To shake the sounding marsh."[6] + +Thomson's scenery was genuine. His images of external nature are never +false and seldom vague, like Pope's. In a letter to Lyttelton,[7] he +speaks of "the Muses of the great simple country, not the little +fine-lady Muses of Richmond Hill." His delineations, if less sharp and +finished in detail than Cowper's, have greater breadth. Coleridge's +comparison of the two poets is well known: "The love of nature seems to +have led Thomson to a cheerful religion, and a gloomy religion to have +led Cowper to a love of nature. . . In chastity of diction and the +harmony of blank verse, Cowper leaves Thomson immeasurably below him; yet +I still feel the latter to have been the born poet." + +The geologist Hugh Miller, who visited Lyttelton's country seat at Hagley +in 1845, describes the famous landscape which Thomson had painted in +"Spring": + + "Meantime you gain the height from whose fair brow + The bursting prospect spreads immense around, + And, snatched o'er hill and dale and wood and lawn, + And verdant field and darkening heath between, + And villages embosomed soft in trees, + And spiry town, by surging columns marked + Of household smoke, your eye extensive roams. . . + To where the broken landscape, by degrees + Ascending, roughens into rigid hills, + O'er which the Cambrian mountains, like far clouds, + That skirt the blue horizon, dusky rise." + +"That entire prospect," says Miller,[8]--"one of the finest in England, +and eminently characteristic of what is best in English scenery--enabled +me to understand what I had used to deem a peculiarity--in some measure a +defect--in the landscapes of the poet Thomson. It must have often struck +the Scotch reader that, in dealing with very extended prospects, he +rather enumerates than describes. His pictures are often mere +catalogues, in which single words stand for classes of objects, and in +which the entire poetry seems to consist in an overmastering sense of +vast extent, occupied by amazing multiplicity. . . Now the prospect from +the hill at Hagley furnished me with the true explanation of this +enumerative style. Measured along the horizon, it must, on the lowest +estimate, be at least fifty miles in longitudinal extent; measured +laterally, from the spectator forwards, at least twenty. . . The real +area must rather exceed than fall short of a thousand square miles: the +fields into which it is laid out are small, scarcely averaging a square +furlong in superficies. . . With these there are commixed innumerable +cottages, manor-houses, villages, towns. Here the surface is dimpled by +unreckoned hollows; there fretted by uncounted mounds; all is amazing, +overpowering multiplicity--a multiplicity which neither the pen nor the +pencil can adequately express; and so description, in even the hands of a +master, sinks into mere enumeration. The picture becomes a catalogue." + +Wordsworth[9] pronounced "The Seasons" "a work of inspiration," and said +that much of it was "written from himself, and nobly from himself," but +complained that the style was vicious. Thomson's diction is, in truth, +not always worthy of his poetic feeling and panoramic power over +landscape. It is academic and often tumid and wordy, abounding in +Latinisms like _effusive_, _precipitant_, _irriguous_, _horrific_, +_turgent_, _amusive_. The lover who hides by the stream where his +mistress is bathing--that celebrated "serio-comic bathing"--is described +as "the latent Damon"; and when the poet advises against the use of worms +for trout bait, he puts it thus: + + "But let not on your hook the tortured worm + Convulsive writhe in agonizing folds," etc. + +The poets had now begun to withdraw from town and go out into the +country, but in their retirement to the sylvan shades they were +accompanied sometimes, indeed, by Milton's "mountain nymph, sweet +Liberty," but quite as frequently by Shenstone's nymph, "coy Elegance," +who kept reminding them of Vergil. + +Thomson's blank verse, although, as Coleridge says, inferior to Cowper's, +is often richly musical and with an energy unborrowed of Milton--as +Cowper's is too apt to be, at least in his translation of Homer.[10] Mr. +Saintsbury[11] detects a mannerism in the verse of "The Seasons," which +he illustrates by citing three lines with which the poet "caps the climax +of three several descriptive passages, all within the compass of half a +dozen pages," viz.: + + "And Egypt joys beneath the spreading wave." + "And Mecca saddens at the long delay." + "And Thule bellows through her utmost isles." + +It would be easy to add many other instances of this type of climacteric +line, _e.g. _("Summer," 859), + + "And Ocean trembles for his green domain." + +For the blank verse of "The Seasons" is a blank verse which has been +passed through the strainer of the heroic couplet. Though Thomson, in +the flow and continuity of his measure, offers, as has been said, the +greatest contrast to Pope's system of versification; yet wherever he +seeks to be nervous, his modulation reminds one more of Pope's +antithetical trick than of Shakspere's or Milton's freer structure. For +instance ("Spring," 1015): + + "Fills every sense and pants in every vein." + +or (_Ibid._ 1104): + + "Flames through the nerves and boils along the veins." + +To relieve the monotony of a descriptive poem, the author introduced +moralizing digressions: advice to the husbandman and the shepherd after +the manner of the "Georgics"; compliments to his patrons, like Lyttelton, +Bubb Dodington, and the Countess of Hertford; and sentimental narrative +episodes, such as the stories of Damon and Musidora,[12] and Celadon and +Amelia in "Summer," and of Lavinia and Palemon[13] in "Autumn"; while +ever and anon his eye extensive roamed over the phenomena of nature in +foreign climes, the arctic night, the tropic summer, etc. Wordsworth +asserts that these sentimental passages "are the parts of the work which +were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general +notice."[14] They strike us now as insipid enough. But many coming +attitudes cast their shadows before across the page of "The Seasons." +Thomson's denunciation of the slave trade, and of cruelty to animals, +especially the caging of birds and the coursing of hares; his preference +of country to town; his rhapsodies on domestic love and the innocence of +the Golden Age; his contrast between the misery of the poor and the +heartless luxury of the rich; all these features of the poem foretoken +the sentimentalism of Sterne and Goldsmith, and the humanitarianism of +Cowper and Burns. They anticipate, in particular, that half affected +itch of simplicity which titillated the sensibilities of a corrupt and +artificial society in the writings of Rousseau and the idyllic pictures +of Bernardin de St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia." Thomson went so far in +this vein as to decry the use of animal food in a passage which recalls +Goldsmith's stanza:[15] + + "No flocks that range the valley free + To slaughter I condemn: + Taught by the power that pities me, + I learn to pity them." + +This sort of thing was in the air. Pope was not a sentimental person, +yet even Pope had written + + "The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, + Had he thy reason, would he skip and play? + Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food. + And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood."[16] + +It does not appear that Thomson was personally averse to a leg of mutton. +His denunciations of luxury, and his praise of early rising[17] and cold +bathing[18] sound rather hollow from the lips of a bard--"more fat than +bard beseems"-who used to lie abed till noon, and who, as Savage told +Johnson, "was perhaps never in cold water in his life." Johnson reports, +not without some spice of malice, that the Countess of Hertford, "whose +practice it was to invite every summer some poet into the country, to +hear her verses and assist her studies," extended this courtesy to +Thomson, "who took more delight in carousing with Lord Hertford and his +friends than assisting her ladyship's poetical operations, and therefore +never received another summons."[19] + +The romantic note is not absent from "The Seasons," but it is not +prominent. Thomson's theme was the changes of the year as they affect +the English landscape, a soft, cultivated landscape of lawns, gardens, +fields, orchards, sheep-walks, and forest preserves. Only now and then +that attraction toward the savage, the awful, the mysterious, the +primitive, which marks the romantic mood in naturalistic poetry, shows +itself in touches like these. + + "High from the summit of a craggy cliff, + Hung o'er the deep, such as amazing frowns + On utmost Kilda's shore, whose lonely race + Reigns the setting sun to Indian worlds."[20] + + "Or where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls, + Boils round the naked, melancholy isles + Of farthest Thule, and the Atlantic surge + Pours in among the stormy Hebrides."[21] + +Compare also the description of the thunderstorm in the mountains +("Summer," 1156-68), closing with the lines: + + "Far seen the heights of heathy Cheviot blaze, + And Thule bellows through her utmost isles." + +The Western Islands appear to have had a peculiar fascination for +Thomson. The passages above quoted, and the stanza from "The Castle of +Indolence," cited on page 94, gave Collins the clew for his "Ode on the +Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands," which contained, says Lowell, +the whole romantic school in the germ. Thomason had perhaps found the +embryon atom in Milton's "stormy Hebrides," in "Lycidas," whose echo is +prolonged in Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper"-- + + "Breaking the silence of the seas + Among the farthest Hebrides." + +Even Pope--he had a soul--was not unsensitive to this, as witness his + + "Loud as the wolves, on Orcas' stormy steep, + Howl to the roarings of the Northern deep."[22] + +The melancholy which Victor Hugo pronounces a distinguishing badge of +romantic art, and which we shall see gaining more and more upon English +poetry as the century advanced, is also discernible in "The Seasons" in a +passage like the following: + + "O bear me then to vast embowering shades, + To twilight groves and visionary vales, + To weeping grottos and prophetic glooms; + Where angel-forms athwart the solemn dusk + Tremendous sweep, or seem to sweep along; + And voices more than human, through the void, + Deep-sounding, seize the enthusiastic ear;"[23] + +or this, which recalls "Il Penseroso": + + "Now all amid the rigors of the year, + In the wild depth of winter, while without + The ceaseless winds blow ice, be my retreat + Between the groaning forest and the shore, + Beat by the boundless multitude of waves, + A rural, sheltered, solitary scene; + Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join + To cheer the gloom. There studious let me sit + And hold high converse with the mighty dead."[24] + +The revival again, of the preternatural and of popular superstitions as +literary material, after a rationalizing and skeptical age, is signalized +by such a passage as this: + + "Onward they pass, o'er many a panting height, + And valley sunk and unfrequented, where + At fall of eve the fairy people throng, + In various game and revelry to pass + The summer night, as village stories tell. + But far around they wander from the grave + Of him whom his ungentle fortune urged + Against his own sad breast to life the hand + Of impious violence. The lonely tower + Is also shunned, whose mournful chambers hold, + So night-struck fancy dreams, the yelling ghost." + +It may not be uninstructive to note the occurrence of the word _romantic_ +at several points in the poem: + + "glimmering shades and sympathetic glooms, + Where the dim umbrage o'er the falling stream + Romantic hangs."[25] + +This is from a passage in which romantic love once more comes back into +poetry, after its long eclipse; and in which the lover is depicted as +wandering abroad at "pensive dusk," or by moonlight, through groves and +along brooksides.[26] The word is applied likewise to clouds, "rolled +into romantic shapes, the dream of waking fancy"; and to the scenery of +Scotland--"Caledonia in romantic view." In a subtler way, the feeling of +such lines as these is romantic: + + "Breathe your still song into the reaper's heart, + As home he goes beneath the joyous moon;" + +or these, of the comparative lightness of the summer night: + + "A faint, erroneous ray, + Glanced from the imperfect surfaces of things, + Flings half an image on the straining eye." + +In a letter to Stonehewer (June 29, 1760), Gray comments thus upon a +passage from Ossian: + + "'Ghosts ride on the tempest to-night: + Sweet is their voice between the gusts of wind: + _Their songs are of other worlds._' + +"Did you never observe (_while rocking winds are piping loud_) that pause, +as the gust is re-collecting itself, and rising upon the ear in a shrill +and plaintive note, like the soul of an Aeolian harp? I do assure you, +there is nothing in the world so like the voice of a spirit. Thomson had +an ear sometimes; he was not deaf to this, and has described it +gloriously, but given it another, different turn, and of more horror. I +cannot repeat the lines: it is in his 'Winter.'" The lines that Gray had +in mind were probably these (191-94): + + "Then, too, they say, through all the burdened air, + Long groans are heard, shrill sounds and distant sighs + That, uttered by the demon of the night, + Warn the devoted wretch of woe and death." + +Thomson appears to have been a sweet-tempered, indolent man, constant in +friendship and much loved by his friends. He had a little house and +grounds in Kew Lane where he used to compose poetry on autumn nights and +loved to listen to the nightingales in Richmond Garden; and where, sang +Collins, in his ode on the poet's death (1748), + + "Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore, + When Thames in summer wreaths is drest, + And oft suspend the dashing oar + To bid his gentle spirit rest." + +Collins had been attracted to Richmond by Thomson's residence there, and +forsook the neighborhood after his friend's death. + +Joseph Warton, in his "Essay on Pope" (1756), testified that "The +Seasons" had been "very instrumental in diffusing a taste for the +beauties of nature and landscape." One evidence of this diffused taste +was the rise of the new or natural school of landscape gardening. This +was a purely English art, and Gray, writing in 1763,[27] says "It is not +forty years since the art was born among us; and it is sure that there +was nothing in Europe like it": he adds that "our skill in gardening and +laying out grounds" is "the only taste we can call our own, the only +proof of our original talent in matter of pleasure." "Neither Italy nor +France have ever had the least notion of it, nor yet do at all comprehend +it, when they see it."[28] Gray's "not forty years" carries us back with +sufficient precision to the date of "The Seasons" (1726-30), and it is +not perhaps giving undue credit to Thomson, to acknowledge him as, in a +great measure, the father of the national school of landscape gardening. +That this has always been recognized upon the Continent as an art of +English invention, is evidenced by the names _Englische Garten_, _jardin +Anglais_, still given in Germany and France to pleasure grounds laid out +in the natural taste.[29] Schopenhauer gives the philosophy of the +opposing styles as follows: "The great distinction between the English +and the old French garden rests, in the last analysis, upon this, viz., +that the former are laid out in the objective, the latter in the +subjective sense, that is to say, in the former the will of Nature, as it +manifests (_objektivirt_) itself in tree, mountain, and water, is brought +to the purest possible expression of its ideas, _i.e._, of its own being. +In the French gardens, on the other hand, there is reflected only the +will of the owner who has subdued Nature, so that, instead of her own +ideas, she wears as tokens of her slavery, the forms which he has forced +upon her-clipped hedges, trees cut into all manner of shapes, straight +alleys, arched walks, etc." + +It would be unfair to hold the false taste of Pope's generation +responsible for that formal style of gardening which prevailed when "The +Seasons" was written. The old-fashioned Italian or French or Dutch +garden--as it was variously called--antedated the Augustan era, which +simply inherited it from the seventeenth century. In Bacon's essay on +gardens, as well as in the essays on the same subject by Cowley and Sir +William Temple, the ideal pleasure ground is very much like that which Le +Notre realized so brilliantly at Versailles.[30] Addison, in fact, in +the _Spectator_ (No. 414) and Pope himself in the _Guardian_ (No. 173) +ridiculed the excesses of the reigning mode, and Pope attacked them again +in his description of Timon's Villa in the "Epistle to the Earl of +Burlington" (1731), which was thought to be meant for Canons, the seat of +the Duke of Chandos. + + "His gardens next your admiration call, + On every side you look, behold the wall! + No pleasing intricacies intervene, + No artful wildness to perplex the scene; + Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother, + And half the platform just reflects the other. + The suffering eye inverted nature sees, + Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees; + With here a fountain, never to be played; + And there a summer house, that knows no shade; + Here Amphitrite sails through myrtle bowers; + There gladiators fight, or die in flowers; + Unwatered see the drooping sea-horse mourn, + And swallows roost in Nilus' dusty urn." + +Still the criticism is not merely fanciful which discovers an analogy +between the French garden, with its trim regularity and artificial +smoothness, and the couplets which Pope wrote: just such an analogy as +exists between the whole classical school of poetry and the Italian +architecture copied from Palladio and introduced in England by Inigo +Jones and Christopher Wren. Grounds were laid out in rectangular plots, +bordered by straight alleys, sometimes paved with vari-colored sand, and +edged with formal hedges of box and holly. The turf was inlaid with +parterres cut in geometric shapes and set, at even distances, with yew +trees clipped into cubes, cones, pyramids, spheres, sometimes into +figures of giants, birds, animals, and ships--called "topiary work" +(_opus topiarium_). Terraces, fountains, bowling-greens (Fr. +_boulingrin_) statues, arcades, quincunxes, espallers, and artificial +mazes or labyrinths loaded the scene. The whole was inclosed by a wall, +which shut the garden off from the surrounding country. + +"When a Frenchman reads of the Garden of Eden," says Horace Walpole, in +his essay "On Modern Gardening" (written in 1770, published in 1785), "I +do not doubt but he concludes it was something approaching to that of +Versailles, with clipped hedges, _berceaux_ and trellis work. . . The +measured walk, the quincunx and the _étoile_ imposed their unsatisfying +sameness on every royal and noble garden. . . Many French groves seem +green chests set upon poles. . . In the garden of Marshal de Biron at +Paris, consisting of fourteen acres, every walk is buttoned on each side +by lines of flower-pots, which succeed in their seasons. When I saw it, +there were nine thousand pots of asters, or _la reine Marguerite_. . . +At Lady Orford's, at Piddletown, in Dorsetshire, there was, when my +brother married, a double enclosure of thirteen gardens, each I suppose +not much above a hundred yards square, with an enfilade of correspondent +gates; and before you arrived at these, you passed a narrow gut between +two stone terraces that rose above your head, and which were crowned by a +line of pyradmidal yews. A bowling green was all the lawn admitted in +those times: a circular lake the extent of magnificence."[31] + +Walpole names Theobalds and Nonsuch as famous examples of the old formal +style of garden; Stourhead, Hagley, and Stowe--the country seat of +Lyttelton's brother-in-law, Lord Cobham--of the new. He says that +mottoes and coats of arms were sometimes cut in yew, box, and holly. He +refers with respect to a recent work by the Rev. Thomas Whately, or +Wheatley, "Observations on Modern Gardening," 1770; and to a poem, then +and still in manuscript, but passages of which are given by Amherst,[32] +entitled "The Rise and Progress of the Present Taste in Planting Parks, +Pleasure Grounds, Gardens, etc. In a poetic epistle to Lord Viscount +Irwin," 1767. + +Gray's friend and editor, the Rev. William Mason, in his poem "The +English Garden," 1757, speaks of the French garden as already a thing of +the past. + + "O how unlike the scene my fancy forms, + Did Folly, heretofore, with Wealth conspire + To plant that formal, dull disjointed scene + Which once was called a garden! Britain still + Bears on her breast full many a hideous wound + Given by the cruel pair, when, borrowing aid + From geometric skill, they vainly strove + By line, by plummet and unfeeling shears + To form with verdure what the builder formed + With stone. . . + Hence the sidelong walls + Of shaven yew; the holly's prickly arms + Trimmed into high arcades; the tonsile box, + Wove in mosaic mode of many a curl + Around the figured carpet of the lawn. . . + The terrace mound uplifted; the long line + Deep delved of flat canal."[33] + +But now, continues the poet, Taste "exalts her voice" and + + "At the awful sound + The terrace sinks spontaneous; on the green, + Broidered with crispëd knots, the tonsile yews + Wither and fall; the fountain dares no more + To fling its wasted crystal through the sky, + But pours salubrious o'er the parchëd lawn." + +The new school had the intolerance of reformers. The ruthless Capability +Brown and his myrmidons laid waste many a prim but lovely old garden, +with its avenues, terraces, and sun dials, the loss of which is deeply +deplored, now that the Queen Anne revival has taught us to relish the +_rococo_ beauties which Brown's imitation landscapes displaced. + +We may pause for a little upon this "English Garden" of Mason's, as an +example of that brood of didactic blank-poems, begotten of Phillips' +"Cyder" and Thomson's "Seasons," which includes Mallet's "Excursion" +(1728), Somerville's "Chase" (1734), Akenside's "Pleasures of +Imagination" (1742-44), Armstrong's "Art of Preserving Health" (1744), +Dyer's "Fleece" (1757) and Grainger's "Sugar Cane" (1764). Mason's blank +verse, like Mallet's, is closely imitative of Thomson's and the influence +of Thomson's inflated diction is here seen at its worst. The whole poem +is an object lesson on the absurdity of didactic poetry. Especially +harrowing are the author's struggles to be poetic while describing the +various kinds of fences designed to keep sheep out of his inclosures. + + "Ingrateful sure, + When such the theme, becomes the poet's task: + Yet must he try by modulation meet + Of varied cadence and selected phrase + Exact yet free, without inflation bold, + To dignify that theme." + +Accordingly he dignified his theme by speaking of a net as the +"sportsman's hempen toils," and of a gun as the + + "--fell tube + Whose iron entrails hide the sulphurous blast + Satanic engine!" + +When he names an ice-house, it is under a form of conundrum: + + "--the structure rude where Winter pounds, + In conic pit his congelations hoar, + That Summer may his tepid beverage cool + With the chill luxury." + +This species of verbiage is the earmark of all eighteenth-century poetry +and poets; not only of those who used the classic couplet, but equally of +the romanticizing group who adopted blank verse. The best of them are +not free from it, not even Gray, not even Collins; and it pervades +Wordsworth's earliest verses, his "Descriptive Sketches" and "Evening +Walk" published in 1793. But perhaps the very worst instance of it is in +Dr. Armstrong's "Economy of Love," where the ludicrous contrast between +the impropriety of the subject and the solemn pomp of the diction amounts +almost to _bouffe_. + +In emulation of "The Seasons" Mason introduced a sentimental love +story--Alcander and Nerina--into his third book. He informs his readers +(book II. 34-78) that, in the reaction against straight alleys, many +gardeners had gone to an extreme in the use of zigzag meanders; and he +recommends them to follow the natural curves of the footpaths which the +milkmaid wears across the pastures "from stile to stile," or which + + --"the scudding hare + Draws to her dew-sprent seat o'er thymy heaths." + +The prose commentary on Mason's poem, by W. Burgh,[34] asserts that the +formal style of garden had begun to give way about the commencement of +the eighteenth century, though the new fashion had but very lately +attained to its perfection. Mason mentions Pope as a champion of the +true taste,[35] but the descriptions of his famous villa at Twickenham, +with its grotto, thickets, and artificial mounds, hardly suggest to the +modern reader a very successful attempt to reproduce nature. To be sure, +Pope had only five acres to experiment with, and that parklike scenery +which distinguishes the English landscape garden requires a good deal of +room. The art is the natural growth of a country where primogeniture has +kept large estates in the hands of the nobility and landed gentry, and in +which a passion for sport has kept the nobility and gentry in the country +a great share of the year. Even Shenstone--whose place is commended by +Mason--Shenstone at the Leasowes, with his three hundred acres, felt his +little pleasance rather awkwardly dwarfed by the neighborhood of +Lyttelton's big park at Hagley. + +The general principle of the new or English school was to imitate nature; +to let trees keep their own shapes, to substitute winding walks for +straight alleys, and natural waterfalls or rapids for _jets d'eau_ in +marble basins. The plan upon which Shenstone worked is explained in his +"Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening"[36] (1764), a few sentences from +which will indicate the direction of the reform: "Landscape should +contain variety enough to form a picture upon canvas; and this is no bad +test, as I think the landscape painter is the gardener's best designer. +The eye requires a sort of balance here; but not so as to encroach upon +probable nature. A wood or hill may balance a house or obelisk; for +exactness would be displeasing. . . It is not easy to account for the +fondness of former times for straight-lined avenues to their houses; +straight-lined walks through their woods; and, in short, every kind of +straight line, where the foot has to travel over what the eye has done +before. . . To stand still and survey such avenues may afford some +slender satisfaction, through the change derived from perspective; but to +move on continually and find no change of scene in the least attendant on +our change of place, must give actual pain to a person of taste. . . I +conceived some idea of the sensation he must feel from walking but a few +minutes, immured between Lord D----'s high shorn yew hedges, which run +exactly parallel at the distance of about ten feet, and are contrived +perfectly to exclude all kind of objects whatsoever. . . The side trees +in vistas should be so circumstanced as to afford a probability that they +grew by nature. . . The shape of ground, the disposition of trees and +the figure of water must be sacred to nature; and no forms must be +allowed that make a discovery of art. . . The taste of the citizen and +of the mere peasant are in all respects the same: the former gilds his +balls, paints his stonework and statues white, plants his trees in lines +or circles, cuts his yew-trees, four-square or conic, or gives them what +he can of the resemblance of birds or bears or men; squirts up his +rivulets in _jets d'eau_; in short, admires no part of nature but her +ductility; exhibits everything that is glaring, that implies expense, or +that effects a surprise because it is unnatural. The peasant is his +admirer. . . Water should ever appear as an irregular lake or winding +stream. . . Hedges, appearing as such, are universally bad. They +discover art in nature's province." + +There is surely a correspondence between this new taste for picturesque +gardening which preferred freedom, variety, irregularity, and naturalness +to rule, monotony, uniformity, and artifice, and that new taste in +literature which discarded the couplet for blank verse, or for various +stanza forms, which left the world of society for the solitudes of +nature, and ultimately went, in search of fresh stimulus, to the remains +of the Gothic ages and the rude fragments of Norse and Celtic antiquity. + +Both Walpole and Mason speak of William Kent, the architect and landscape +painter, as influential in introducing a purer taste in the gardener's +art. Kent was a friend of Pope and a _protégé_ of Lord Burlington to +whom Pope inscribed his "Epistle on the Use of Riches," already quoted +(see _ante_ p. 121), and who gave Kent a home at his country house. Kent +is said to have acknowledged that he caught his taste in gardening from +the descriptive passages in Spenser, whose poems he illustrated. Walpole +and Mason also unite in contrasting with the artificial gardening of +Milton's time the picture of Eden in "Paradise Lost:" + + "--where not nice art in curious knots, + But nature boon poured forth on hill and dale + Flowers worthy of Paradise; while all around + Umbrageous grots, and caves of cool recess, + And murmuring waters, down the slope dispersed, + Or held by fringëd banks in crystal lakes. + Compose a rural seat of various hue." + +But it is worth noting that in "L'Allegro" "retired leisure," takes his +pleasure in "_trim_ gardens," while in Collins, + + "Ease and health retire + To breezy lawn or forest deep." + +Walpole says that Kent's "ruling principle was that nature abhors a +straight line." Kent "leaped the fence and saw that all nature was a +garden. He felt the delicious contrast of hill and valley, changing +imperceptibly into each other. . . and remarked how loose groves crowned +an easy eminence with happy ornament. . . The great principles on which +he worked were perspective and light and shade. . . But of all the +beauties he added to the face of this beautiful country, none surpassed +his management of water. Adieu to canals, circular basins, and cascades +tumbling down marble steps. . . The gentle stream was taught to +serpentine seemingly at its pleasure."[37] The treatment of the garden +as a part of the landscape in general was commonly accomplished by the +removal of walls, hedges, and other inclosures, and the substitution of +the ha-ha or sunken fence. It is odd that Walpole, though he speaks of +Capability Brown, makes no mention of the Leasowes, whose proprietor, +William Shenstone, the author of "The School-mistress," is one of the +most interesting of amateur gardeners. "England," says Hugh Miller, "has +produced many greater poets than Shenstone, but she never produced a +greater landscape gardener." + +At Oxford, Shenstone had signalized his natural tastes by wearing his own +hair instead of the wig then (1732) universally the fashion.[38] On +coming of age, he inherited a Shropshire farm, called the Leasowes, in +the parish of Hales Owen and an annuity of some three hundred pounds. He +was of an indolent, retiring, and somewhat melancholy temperament; and, +instead of pursuing a professional career, he settled down upon his +property and, about the year 1745, began to turn it into a _fermé ornée_. +There he wooed the rustic muse in elegy, ode, and pastoral ballad, +sounding upon the vocal reed the beauties of simplicity and the vanity of +ambition, and mingling with these strains complaints of Delia's cruelty +and of the shortness of his own purse, which hampered him seriously in +his gardening designs. Mr. Saintsbury has described Shenstone as a +master of "the artificial-natural style of poetry."[39] His pastoral +insipidities about pipes and crooks and kids, Damon and Delia, Strephon +and Chloe, excited the scorn of Dr. Johnson, who was also at no pains to +conceal his contempt for the poet's horticultural pursuits. "Whether to +plant a walk in undulating curves and to place a bench at every turn +where there is an object to catch the view; to make water run where it +will be seen; to leave intervals where the eye will be pleased, and to +thicken the plantation where there is something to be hidden, demands any +great powers of mind, I will not enquire." The doctor reports that +Lyttelton was jealous of the fame which the Leasowes soon acquired, and +that when visitors to Hagley asked to see Shenstone's place, their host +would adroitly conduct them to inconvenient points of view--introducing +them, _e.g._, at the wrong end of a walk, so as to detect a deception in +perspective, "injuries of which Shenstone would heavily complain."[40] +Graves, however, denies that any rivalry was in question between the +great domain of Hagley and the poet's little estate. "The truth of the +case," he writes, "was that the Lyttelton family went so frequently with +their company to the Leasowes, that they were unwilling to break in upon +Mr. Shenstone's retirement on every occasion, and therefore often went to +the principal points of view, without waiting for anyone to conduct them +regularly through the whole walks. Of this Mr. Shenstone would sometimes +peevishly complain." + +Shenstone describes in his "Thoughts on Gardening," several artifices +that he put in practice for increasing the apparent distance of objects, +or for lengthening the perspective of an avenue by widening it in the +foreground and planting it there with dark-foliaged trees, like yews and +firs, "then with trees more and more fady, till they end in the +almond-willow or silver osier." To have Lord Lyttelton bring in a party +at the small, or willow end of such a walk, and thereby spoil the whole +trick, must indeed have been provoking. Johnson asserts that Shenstone's +house was ruinous and that "nothing raised his indignation more than to +ask if there were any fishes in his water." "In time," continues the +doctor, "his expenses brought clamors about him that overpowered the +lamb's bleat and the linnet's song; and his groves were haunted by beings +very different from fawns and fairies;" to wit, bailiffs; but Graves +denies this. + +The fame of the Leasowes attracted visitors from all parts of the +country--literary men like Spence, Home, and Dodsley; picturesque +tourists, who came out of curiosity; and titled persons, who came, or +sent their gardeners, to obtain hints for laying out their grounds. +Lyttelton brought William Pitt, who was so much interested that he +offered to contribute two hundred pounds toward improvements, an offer +that Shenstone, however, declined. Pitt had himself some skill in +landscape gardening, which he exercised at Enfield Chase and afterward at +Hayes.[41] Thomson, who was Lyttelton's guest at Hagley every summer +during the last three or four years of his life, was naturally familiar +with the Leasowes. There are many references to the "sweet descriptive +bard," in Shenstone's poems[42] and a seat was inscribed to his memory in +a part of the grounds known as Vergil's Grove. "This seat," says +Dodsley, "is placed upon a steep bank on the edge of the valley, from +which the eye is here drawn down into the flat below by the light that +glimmers in front and by the sound of various cascades, by which the +winding stream is agreeably broken. Opposite to this seat the ground +rises again in an easy concave to a kind of dripping fountain, where a +small rill trickles down a rude niche of rock work through fern, +liverwort, and aquatic weeds. . . The whole scene is opaque and +gloomy."[43] + +English landscape gardening is a noble art. Its principles are sound and +of perpetual application. Yet we have advanced so much farther in the +passion for nature than the men of Shenstone's day that we are apt to be +impatient of the degree of artifice present in even the most skillful +counterfeit of the natural landscape. The poet no longer writes odes on +"Rural Elegance," nor sings + + "The transport, most allied to song, + In some fair valley's peaceful bound + To catch soft hints from Nature's tongue, + And bid Arcadia bloom around; + Whether we fringe the sloping hill, + Or smooth below the verdant mead; + Or in the horrid brambles' room + Bid careless groups of roses bloom; + Or let some sheltered lake serene + Reflect flowers, woods and spires, and brighten all the scene." + +If we cannot have the mountains, the primeval forest, or the shore of the +wild sea, we can at least have Thomson's "great simple country," subdued +to man's use but not to his pleasure. The modern mood prefers a lane to +a winding avenue, and an old orchard or stony pasture to a lawn decorated +with coppices. "I do confess," says Howitt, "that in the 'Leasowes' I +have always found so much ado about nothing; such a parade of miniature +cascades, lakes, streams conveyed hither and thither; surprises in the +disposition of woods and the turn of walks. . . that I have heartily +wished myself out upon a good rough heath." + +For the "artificial-natural" was a trait of Shenstone's gardening no less +than of his poetry. He closed every vista and emphasized every opening +in his shrubberies and every spot that commanded a prospect with come +object which was as an exclamation point on the beauty of the scene: a +rustic bench, a root-house, a Gothic alcove, a grotto, a hermitage, a +memorial urn or obelisk dedicated to Lyttelton, Thomson, Somerville,[44] +Dodsley, or some other friend. He supplied these with inscriptions +expressive of the sentiments appropriate to the spot, passages from +Vergil, or English or Latin verses of his own composition. Walpole says +that Kent went so far in his imitation of natural scenery as to plant +_dead_ trees in Kensington Garden. Walpole himself seems to approve of +such devices as artificial ruins, "a feigned steeple of a distant church +or an unreal bridge to disguise the termination of water." Shenstone was +not above these little effects: he constructed a "ruinated priory" and a +temple of Pan out of rough, unhewn stone; he put up a statue of a piping +faun, and another of the Venus dei Medici beside a vase of gold fishes. + +Some of Shenstone's inscriptions have escaped the tooth of time. The +motto, for instance, cut upon the urn consecrated to the memory of his +cousin, Miss Dolman, was prefixed by Byron to his "Elegy upon Thyrza": +"Heu quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse!" The +habit of inscription prevailed down to the time of Wordsworth, who +composed a number for the grounds of Sir George Beaumont at Coleorton. +One of Akenside's best pieces is his "Inscription for a Grotto," which is +not unworthy of Landor. Matthew Green, the author of "The Spleen," wrote +a poem of some 250 lines upon Queen Caroline's celebrated grotto in +Richmond Garden. "A grotto," says Johnson, apropos of that still more +celebrated one at Pope's Twickenham villa, "is not often the wish or +pleasure of an Englishman, who has more frequent need to solicit than +exclude the sun"; but the increasing prominence of the mossy cave and +hermit's cell, both in descriptive verse and in gardening, was +symptomatic. It was a note of the coming romanticism, and of that +pensive, elegiac strain which we shall encounter in the work of Gray, +Collins, and the Wartons. It marked the withdrawal of the muse from the +world's high places into the cool sequestered vale of life. All through +the literature of the mid-century, the high-strung ear may catch the +drip-drip of spring water down the rocky walls of the grot. + +At Hagley, halfway up the hillside, Miller saw a semi-octagonal temple +dedicated to the genius of Thomson. It stood in a grassy hollow which +commanded a vast, open prospect and was a favorite resting place of the +poet of "The Seasons." In a shady, secluded ravine he found a white +pedestal, topped by an urn which Lyttelton had inscribed to the memory of +Shenstone. This contrast of situation seemed to the tourist emblematic. +Shenstone, he says, was an egotist, and his recess, true to his +character, excludes the distant landscape. Gray, who pronounced "The +Schoolmistress" a masterpiece in its kind, made a rather slighting +mention of its author.[45] "I have read an 8vo volume of Shenstone's +letters; poor man! He was always wishing for money, for fame and other +distinctions; and his whole philosophy consisted in living, against his +will, in retirement and in a place which his taste had adorned, but which +he only enjoyed when people of note came to see and commend it." Gray +unquestionably profited by a reading of Shenstone's "Elegies," which +antedate his own "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751). He +adopted Shenstone's stanza, which Shenstone had borrowed from the love +elegies of a now forgotten poet, James Hammond, equerry to Prince +Frederick and a friend of Cobham, Lyttelton, and Chesterfield. "Why +Hammond or other writers," says Johnson, "have thought the quatrain of +ten syllables elegiac, it is difficult to tell. The character of the +elegy is gentleness and tenuity, but this stanza has been pronounced by +Dryden. . .to be the most magnificent of all the measures which our +language affords."[46] + +Next after "The Schoolmistress," the most engaging of Shenstone's poems +is his "Pastoral Ballad," written in 1743 in four parts and in a tripping +anapestic measure. Familiar to most readers is the stanza beginning: + + "I have found out a gift for my fair, + I have found where the wood-pigeons breed." + +Dr. Johnson acknowledged the prettiness of the conceit: + + "So sweetly she bade me adieu, + I thought that she bade me return;" + +and he used to quote and commend the well-known lines "Written at an Inn +at Henley: + + "Whoe'er has travell'd life's dull round, + Where'er his stages may have been, + May sigh to think he still has found + The warmest welcome at an inn." + +As to Shenstone's blank verse--of which there is not much--the doctor +says: "His blank verses, those that can read them may probably find to be +like the blank verses of his neighbors." Shenstone encouraged Percy to +publish his "Reliques." The plans for the grounds at Abbotsford were +somewhat influenced by Didsley's description of the Leasowes, which Scott +studied with great interest. + +In 1744 Mark Akenside, a north country man and educated partly in +Scotland, published his "Pleasures of Imagination," afterwards rewritten +as "The Pleasures of the Imagination" and spoiled in the process. The +title and something of the course of thought in the poem were taken from +Addison's series of papers on the subject (_Spectator_, Nos. 411-421). +Akenside was a man of learning and a physician of distinction. His poem, +printed when he was only twenty-three, enjoyed a popularity now rather +hard to account for. Gray complained of its obscurity and said it was +issued nine years too early, but admitted that now and then it rose "even +to the best, particularly in description." Akenside was harsh, formal, +and dogmatic, as a man. Smollett caricatured him in "Peregrine Pickle." +Johnson hated his Whig principles and represents him, when settled at +Northampton, as "having deafened the place with clamors for liberty."[47] +He furthermore disliked the class of poetry to which Akenside's work +belonged, and he told Boswell that he couldn't read it. Still he speaks +of him with a certain cautious respect, which seems rather a concession +to contemporary opinion than an appreciation of the critic's own. He +even acknowledges that Akenside has "few artifices of disgust than most +of his brethren of the blank song." Lowell says that the very title of +Akenside's poem pointed "away from the level highway of commonplace to +mountain paths and less dogmatic prospects. The poem was stiff and +unwilling, but in its loins lay the seed of nobler births. Without it, +the 'Lines Written at Tintern Abbey' might never have been." + +One cannot read "The Pleasures of Imagination" without becoming sensible +that the writer was possessed of poetic feeling, and feeling of a kind +that we generally agree to call romantic. His doctrine at least, if not +his practice, was in harmony with the fresh impulse which was coming into +English poetry. Thus he celebrates heaven-born genius and the +inspiration of nature, and decries "the critic-verse" and the effort to +scale Parnassus "by dull obedience." He invokes the peculiar muse of the +new school: + + "Indulgent _Fancy_, from the fruitful banks + Of Avon, whence thy rosy fingers cull + Fresh flowers and dews to sprinkle on the turf + Where Shakspere lies." + +But Akenside is too abstract. In place of images, he presents the reader +with dissertations. A poem which takes imagination as its subject rather +than its method will inevitably remain, not poetry but a lecture on +poetry--a theory of beauty, not an example of it. Akenside might have +chosen for his motto Milton's lines: + + "How charming is divine philosophy! + Not harsh and crabbëd, as dull fools suppose, + But musical as is Apollo's lute." + +Yet he might have remembered, too, what Milton said about the duty of +poetry to be simple, sensuous, and passionate. Akenside's is nothing of +these; it is, on the contrary obscure, metaphysical, and, as a +consequence, frigid. Following Addison, he names greatness and novelty, +_i.e._, the sublime and the wonderful, as, equally with beauty, the chief +sources of imaginative pleasure, and the whole poem is a plea for what we +are now accustomed to call the ideal. In the first book there is a +passage which is fine in spirit and--though in a less degree--in +expression: + + "Who that from Alpine heights his laboring eye + Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey + Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave + Through mountains, plains, through empires black with shade. + And continents of sand, will turn his gaze + To mark the windings of a scanty rill + That murmurs at his feet? The high-born soul + Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing + Beneath its native quarry. Tired of earth + And this diurnal scene, she springs aloft + Through fields of air; pursues the flying storm; + Rides on the vollied lightning through the heavens; + Or, yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast, + Sweeps the long trace of day." + +The hint for this passage was furnished by a paragraph in Addison's +second paper (_Spectator_, 412) and the emotion is the same to which +Goethe gives utterance in the well-known lines of "Faust"; + + "Doch jedem ist es eingeboren + Dass sein Gefühl hinauf und vorwärts dringt," etc. + +But how greatly superior in sharpness of detail, richness of invention, +energy of movement is the German to the English poet! + +Akenside ranks among the earlier Spenserians by virtue of his "Virtuoso" +(1737) and of several odes composed in a ten-lined variation on Spenser's +stanza. A collection of his "Odes" appeared in 1745--the year before +Collins' and Joseph Warton's-and a second in 1760. They are of little +value, but show here and there traces of Milton's minor poetry and that +elegiac sentiment, common to the lyrical verse of the time, noticeable +particularly in a passage on the nightingale in Ode XV, book i;, "To the +Evening Star." "The Pleasures of Imagination" was the parent of a +numerous offspring of similarly entitled pieces, among which are Joseph +Warton's "Pleasures of Melancholy," Campbell's "Pleasures of Hope," and +Rogers' "Pleasures of Memory." + +In the same year with Thomson's "Winter" (1726) there were published in +two poetical miscellanies a pair of little descriptive pieces, "Grongar +Hill" and "The Country Walk," written by John Dyer, a young Welshman, in +the octosyllabic couplet of Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Pensoroso." +("Grongar Hill," as first printed was a sort of irregular ode with +alternate rhyming; but it was much improvised in later editions, and +rewritten throughout in couplets.) + +Dyer was a landscape painter who had been educated at Westminster school, +studied under Richardson at London, and spent some time wandering about +the mountains of Wales in the practice of his art. "Grongar Hill" is, in +fact, a pictorial poem, a sketch of the landscape seen from the top of +his favorite summit in South Wales. It is a slight piece of work, +careless and even slovenly in execution, but with an ease and lightness +of touch that contrast pleasantly with Thomson's and Akenside's +ponderosity. When Dyer wrote blank verse he slipped into the Thomsonian +diction, "cumbent sheep" and "purple groves pomaceous." But in "Grongar +Hill"--although he does call the sun Phoebus--the shorter measure seems +to bring shorter words, and he has lines of Wordsworthian simplicity-- + + "The woody valleys warm and low, + The windy summit, wild and high." + +or the closing passage, which Wordsworth alludes to in his sonnet on +Dyer--"Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill": + + "Grass and flowers Quiet treads + On the meads and mountain heads. . . + And often, by the murmuring rill, + Hears the thrush while all is still, + Within the groves of Grongar Hill." + +Wordsworth was attracted by Dyer's love of "mountain turf" and "spacious +airy downs" and "naked Snowdon's wide, aerial waste." The "power of +hills" was on him. Like Wordsworth, too, he moralized his song. In +"Grongar Hill," the ruined tower suggests the transience of human life: +the rivers running down to the sea are likened to man's career from birth +to death; and Campbell's couplet, + + "'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view + And robes the mountain in its azure hue,"[48] + +is thought to owe something to Dyer's + + "As yon summits soft and fair, + Clad in colors 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." + +Dyer went to Rome to pursue his art studies and, on his return in 1740, +published his "Ruins of Rome" in blank verse. He was not very successful +as a painter, and finally took orders, married, and settled down as a +country parson. In 1757 he published his most ambitious work, "The +Fleece," a poem in blank verse and in four books, descriptive of English +wool-growing. "The subject of 'The Fleece,' sir," pronounced Johnson, +"cannot be made poetical. How can a man write poetically of serges and +druggets?" Didactic poetry, in truth, leads too often to ludicrous +descents. Such precepts as "beware the rot," "enclose, enclose, ye +swains," and + + "-the utility of salt + Teach thy slow swains"; + +with prescriptions for the scab, and advice as to divers kinds of wool +combs, are fatal. A poem of this class has to be _made_ poetical, by +dragging in episodes and digressions which do not inhere in the subject +itself but are artificially associated with it. Of such a nature is the +loving mention--quoted in Wordsworth's sonnet--of the poet's native +Carmarthenshire + + "-that soft tract + Of Cambria, deep embayed, Dimetian land, + By green hills fenced, by Ocean's murmur lulled." + +Lowell admired the line about the Siberian exiles, met + + "On the dark level of adversity." + +Miltonic reminiscences are frequent in Dyer. Sabrina is borrowed from +"Comus"; "bosky bourn" and "soothest shepherd" from the same; "the light +fantastic toe" from "L'Allegro"; "level brine" and "nor taint-worm shall +infect the yearning herds," from "Lycidas"; "audience pure be thy +delight, though few," from "Paradise Lost." + +"Mr. Dyer," wrote Gray to Horace Walpole in 1751, "has more of poetry in +his imagination than almost any of our number; but rough and +injudicious." Akenside, who helped Dyer polish the manuscript of "The +Fleece," said that "he would regulate his opinion of the reigning taste +by the fate of Dyer's 'Fleece'; for if that were ill received, he should +not think it any longer reasonable to expect fame from excellence." The +romantic element in Dyer's imagination appears principally in his love of +the mountains and of ancient ruins. Johnson cites with approval a +sentence in "The Ruins of Rome": + + "At dead of night, + The hermit oft, midst his orisons, hears + Aghast the voice of Time disparting towers."[49] + +These were classic ruins. Perhaps the doctor's sympathy would not have +been so quickly extended to the picture of the moldering Gothic tower in +"Grongar Hill," or of "solitary Stonehenge gray with moss," in "The +Fleece." + + +[1] W. D. McClintock, "The Romantic and Classical in English Literature," +_Chautauquan_, Vol. XIV, p. 187. + +[2] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 207. + +[3] "Autumn," lines 645-47. + +[4] "Life of Philips." + +[5] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 221 + +[6] _Cf_. Chaucer: "And as a bitoure bumbleth in the mire." + --_Wyf of Bathes Tale_. + +[7] Phillimore's "Life of Lyttelton," Vol. I, p. 286. + +[8] "First Impression of England," p. 135. + +[9] Appendix to Preface to the Second Edition of "Lyrical Ballads," + +[10] There are, of course, Miltonic reminiscences in "The Seasons." The +moon's "spotted disk" ("Autumn," 1091) is Milton's "spotty globe." The +apostrophe to light ("Spring" 90-96) borrows its "efflux divine" from +Milton's "bright effluence of bright essence increate" ("Paradise Lost," +III. 1-12) And _cf._ "Autumn," 783-84: + + "--from Imaus stretcht + Athwart the roving Tartar's sullen bounds," + +with P.L., III, 431-32; and "Winter," 1005-08. + + "--moors + Beneath the shelter of an icy isle, + While night o'erwhelms the sea." + +with P.L., I. 207-208. + +[11] "Ward's English Poets," Vol. III. p. 171. + +[12] There were originally _three_ damsels in the bathing scene! + +[13] It was to this episode that Pope supplied the lines (207-14) + +"Thoughtless of beauty, she was beauty's self," etc., + +which form his solitary essay in blank verse. Thomson told Collins that +he took the first hint of "The Seasons" from the names of the +divisions--Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter--in Pope's "Pastorals." + +[14] Appendix to Preface to Second Edition of "Lyrical Ballads." + +[15] "The Hermit." + +[16] "Essay on Man," Epistle I. + +[17] "Falsely luxurious, will not man awake?" etc. + --_Summer_, 67. + +[18] "Nor, when cold winter keens the brightening flood, + Would I, weak shivering, linger on the brink." + --_Ibid._ 1259-60. + +[19] "Life of Thomson." + +[20] "Spring," 755-58. + +[21] "Autumn," 862-65. + +[22] "Epistle of Augustus." + +[23] "Autumn," 1030-37. _Cf._ Cowper's + + "O for a lodge in some vast wilderness, + Some boundless contiguity of shade!" + +[24] "Winter," 424-32. + +[25] "Spring," 1026-28. + +[26] Shakspere's "broom groves whose shade the dismist bachelor loves;" + +Fletcher's + + "Fountain heads and pathless groves, + Places which pale passion loves," + +and his + + "Moonlight walks when all the fowls + Are safely housed, save bats and owls." + +[27] Letter to Howe, September 10. + +[28] Letter to Howe, November, 1763. + +[29] Alicia Amherst ("History of Gardening in England," 1896, p. 283) +mentions a French and an Italian work, entitled respectively "Plan de +Jardins dans le gout Anglais," Copenhagen, 1798; and "Del Arte dei +Giardini Inglesi," Milan, 1801. "This passion for the imitation of +nature," says the same authority, "was part of the general reaction which +was taking place, not only in gardening but in the world of literature +and of fashion. The extremely artificial French taste had long taken the +lead in civilized Europe, and now there was an attempt to shake off the +shackles of its exaggerated formalism. The poets of the age were also +pioneers of this school of nature. Dyer, in his poem of 'Grongar Hill,' +and Thomson, in his 'Seasons,' called up pictures which the gardeners and +architects of the day strove to imitate." See in this work, for good +examples of the formal garden, the plan of Belton House, Lincoln, p. 245; +of Brome Hall, Suffolk; of the orangery and canal at Euston, p. 201; and +the scroll work patterns of turf and parterres on pp. 217-18. + +[30] In Temple's gardens at Moor Park, Hertfordshire, _e.g._, there were +terraces covered with lead. Charles II. imported some of Le Notre's +pupils and assistants, who laid out the grounds at Hampton Court in the +French taste. The maze at Hampton Court still existed in Walpole's time +(1770). + +[31] It is worth noticing that Batty Langley, the abortive restorer of +Gothic, also recommended the natural style of landscape gardening as +early as 1728 in his "New Principles of Gardening." + +[32] "History of Gardening in England." + +[33] I. 384-404. + +[34] "The Works of William Mason," in 4 vols., London, 1811. + +[35] See Pope's paper in the _Guardian_ (173) for some rather elaborate +foolery about topiary work. "All art," he maintains, "consists in the +imitation and study of nature." "We seem to make it our study to recede +from nature, not only in the various tonsure of greens into the most +regular and formal shapes, but," etc., etc. Addison, too, _Spectator_ +414, June 25, 1712, upholds "the rough, careless strokes of nature" +against "the nice touches and embellishments of art," and complains that +"our British gardeners, instead of humoring nature, love to deviate from +it as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, globes, and pyramids. +We see the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush. I do not +know whether I am singular in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs +and branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical +figure." See also _Spectator_, 477, for a pretty scheme of a garden laid +out with "the beautiful wildness of nature." Gilbert West's Spenserian +poem "Education," 1751 (see _ante_, p. 90) contains an attack, in six +stanzas, upon the geometric garden, from which I give a single stanza. + + "Alse other wonders of the sportive shears, + Fair nature mis-adorning, there were found: + Globes, spiral columns, pyramids, and piers, + With sprouting urns and budding statues crowned; + And horizontal dials on the ground, + In living box by cunning artists traced; + And gallies trim, on no long voyage bound + But by their roots there ever anchored fast, + All were their bellying sails out-spread to every blast." + +[36] "Essays on Men and Manners," Shenstone's Works, Vol. II. Dodsley's +edition. + +[37] "On Modern Gardening," Works of the Earl of Orford, London, 1798, +Vol. II. + +[38] Graves, "Recollections of Shenstone," 1788. + +[39] "Ward's English Poets," Vol. III. 271. + +[40] "Life of Shenstone." + +[41] See _ante_, p. 90, for his visits to Gilbert West at Wickham. + +[42] See especially "A Pastoral Ode," and "Verses Written toward the Close +of the Year 1748." + +[43] "A Description of the Leasowes by R. Dodsley," Shenstone's Works, +Vol. II, pp. 287-320 (3d ed.) This description is accompanied with a +map. For other descriptions consult Graves' "Recollections," Hugh +Miller's "First Impressions of England," and Wm. Howitt's "Homes of the +Poets" (1846), Vol. I. pp. 258-63. The last gives an engraving of the +house and grounds. Miller, who was at Hagley--"The British Tempe"-and +the Leasowes just a century after Shenstone began to embellish his +paternal acres, says that the Leasowes was the poet's most elaborate +poem, "the singularly ingenious composition, inscribed on an English +hillside, which employed for twenty long years the taste and genius of +Shenstone." + +[44] See "Lady Luxborough's Letters to Shenstone," 1775, for a long +correspondence about an urn which _she_ was erecting to Somerville's +memory. She was a sister of Bolingbroke, had a seat at Barrels, and +exchanged visits with Shenstone. + +[45] "Letter to Nichols," June 24, 1769. + +[46] Dryden's "Annus Mirabilis," Davenant's "Gondibert," and Sir John +Davies' "Nosce Teipsum" were written in this stanza, but the universal +currency of Gray's poem associated it for many years almost exclusively +with elegiac poetry. Shenstone's collected poems were not published till +1764, though some of them had been printed in Dodsley's "Miscellanies." +Only a few of his elegies are dated in the collected editions (Elegy +VIII, 1745; XIX, 1743; XXI, 1746), but Graves says that they were all +written before Gray's. The following lines will recall to every reader +corresponding passages in Gray's "Churchyard": + + "O foolish muses, that with zeal aspire + To deck the cold insensate shrine with bays! + + "When the free spirit quits her humble frame + To tread the skies, with radiant garlands crowned; + + "Say, will she hear the distant voice of Fame, + Or hearing, fancy sweetness in the sound?" + --_Elegy II_. + + "I saw his bier ignobly cross the plain." + --_Elegy III_. + + "No wild ambition fired their spotless breast." + --_Elegy XV_. + + "Through the dim veil of evening's dusky shade + Near some lone fane or yew's funereal green," etc. + --_Elegy IV_. + + "The glimmering twilight and the doubtful dawn + Shall see your step to these sad scenes return, + Constant as crystal dews impearl the lawn," etc. + --_Ibid_. + +[47] "Life of Akenside." + +[48] "Pleasures of Hope." + +[49] _cf._ Wordsworth's + + "Some casual shout that broke the silent air, + Or the unimaginable touch of time." + --_Mutability: Ecclesiastical Sonnets_, XXXIV. + + + + +CHAPTER V. + +The Miltonic Group + +That the influence of Milton, in the romantic revival of the eighteenth +century, should have been hardly second in importance to Spenser's is a +confirmation of our remark that Augustan literature was "classical" in a +way of its own. It is another example of that curiously topsy-turvy +condition of things in which rhyme was a mark of the classic, and blank +verse of the romantic. For Milton is the most truly classical of English +poets; and yet, from the angle of observation at which the eighteenth +century viewed him, he appeared a romantic. It was upon his romantic +side, at all events, that the new school of poets apprehended and +appropriated him. + +This side was present in Milton in a fuller measure than his completed +works would show. It is well known that he, at one time, had projected +an Arthuriad, a design which, if carried out, might have anticipated +Tennyson and so deprived us of "The Idyls of the King." "I betook me," +he writes, "among those lofty fables and romances which recount in solemn +cantos the deeds of knighthood."[1] And in the "Epitaphium Damonis" he +thus apprised the reader of his purpose: + + "Ipse ego Dardanais Rutupina per aequora puppes, + Dicam, et Pandrasidos regnum vetus Inogeniae, + Brennumque Arviragunque duces, priscumque Belinum, + Et tandem Armoricos Britonum sub lege colonos; + Tum gravidam Arturo fatali fraude Iörgernen; + Mendaces vultus, assumptaque Gorlöis arma, + Merlini dolus."[2] + +The "matter of Britain" never quite lost the fascination which it had +exercised over his youthful imagination, as appears from passages in +"Paradise Lost"[3] and even in "Paradise Regained."[4] But with his +increasing austerity, both religious and literary, Milton gravitated +finally to Hebraic themes and Hellenic art forms. He wrote Homeric epics +and Aeschylean tragedies, instead of masques and sonnets, of rhymed +pieces on the Italian model, like "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," and of +stanzaic poems, like the "Nativity Ode," touched with Elizabethan +conceits. He relied more and more upon sheer construction and weight of +thought and less upon decorative richness of detail. His diction became +naked and severe, and he employed rhyme but sparingly, even in the choral +parts of "Samson Agonistes." In short, like Goethe, he grew classical as +he grew old. It has been mentioned that "Paradise Lost" did much to keep +alive the tradition of English blank verse through a period remarkable +for its bigoted devotion to rhyme, and especially to the heroic couplet. +Yet it was, after all, Milton's early poetry, in which rhyme is +used--though used so differently from the way in which Pope used it--that +counted for most in the history of the romantic movement. Professor +Masson contradicts the common assertion, that "Paradise Lost" was first +written into popularity by Addison's Saturday papers. While that series +was running, Tonson brought out (1711-13) an ediction of Milton's +poetical works which was "the ninth of 'Paradise Lost,' the eight of +'Paradise Regained,' the seventh of 'Samson Agonistes' and the sixth of +the minor poems." The previous issues of the minor poems had been in +1645, 1673, 1695, 1705, and 1707. Six editions in sixty-eight years is +certainly no very great showing. After 1713 editions of Milton +multiplied rapidly; by 1763 "Paradise Lost" was in its forty-sixth, and +the minor poems in their thirtieth.[5] + +Addison selected an occasional passage from Milton's juvenile poems, in +the _Spectator_; but from all obtainable evidence, it seems not doubtful +that they had been comparatively neglected, and that, although reissued +from time to time in complete editions of Milton's poetry, they were +regarded merely as pendents to "Paradise Lost" and floated by its +reputation. "Whatever causes," says Dryden, "Milton alleges for the +abolishing of rime . . . his own particular reason is plainly this, that +rime was not his talent: he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the +graces of it: which is manifest in his 'Juvenilia' or verses written in +his youth; where his rime is always constrained and forced and comes +hardly from him." + +Joseph Warton, writing in 1756,[6] after quoting copiously from the +"Nativity Ode," which, he says, is "not sufficiently read nor admired," +continues as follows: "I have dwelt chiefly on this ode as much less +celebrated than 'L'Allegro' and "Il Penseroso,"[7] which are now +universally known,; but which, by a strange fatality, lay in a sort of +obscurity, the private enjoyment of a few curious readers, till they were +set to admirable music by Mr. Handel. And indeed this volume of Milton's +miscellaneous poems has not till very lately met with suitable regard. +Shall I offend any rational admirer of Pope, by remarking that these +juvenile descriptive poems of Milton, as well as his Latin elegies, are +of a strain far more exalted than any the former author can boast?" + +The first critical edition of the minor poems was published in 1785, by +Thomas Warton, whose annotations have been of great service to all later +editors. As late as 1779, Dr. Johnson spoke of these same poems with an +absence of appreciation that now seems utterly astounding. "Those who +admire the beauties of this great poem sometimes force their own judgment +into false admiration of his little pieces, and prevail upon themselves +to think that admirable which is only singular." Of Lycidas he says: "In +this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for +there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and +therefore disgusting. . . Surely no man could have fancied that he read +'Lycidas' with pleasure, had he not known its author." He acknowledges +that "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" are "noble efforts of imagination"; +and that, "as a series of lines," "Comus" "may be considered as worthy of +all the admiration with which the votaries have received it." But he +makes peevish objections to its dramatic probability, finds its dialogues +and soliloquies tedious, and unmindful of the fate of Midas, solemnly +pronounces the songs--"Sweet Echo" and "Sabrina fair"--"harsh in their +diction and not very musical in their numbers"! Of the sonnets he says: +"They deserve not any particular criticism; for of the best it can only +be said that they are not bad."[8] Boswell reports that, Hannah More +having expressed her "wonder that the poet who had written 'Paradise +Lost' should write such poor sonnets," Johnson replied: "Milton, madam, +was a genius that could cut a colossus from a rock, but could not carve +heads upon cherry stones." + +The influence of Milton's minor poetry first becomes noticeable in the +fifth decade of the century, and in the work of a new group of lyrical +poets: Collins, Gray, Mason, and the brothers Joseph and Thomas Warton. +To all of these Milton was master. But just as Thomson and Shenstone got +original effects from Spenser's stanza, while West and Cambridge and +Lloyd were nothing but echoes; so Collins and Gray--immortal names--drew +fresh music from Milton's organ pipes, while for the others he set the +tune. The Wartons, indeed, though imitative always in their verse, have +an independent and not inconsiderable position in criticism and literary +scholarship, and I shall return to them later in that connection. Mason, +whose "English Garden" has been reviewed in chapter iv, was a small poet +and a somewhat absurd person. He aped, first Milton and afterward Gray, +so closely that his work often seems like parody. In general the +Miltonic revival made itself manifest in a more dispersed and indirect +fashion than the Spenserian; but there was no lack of formal imitations, +also, and it will be advisable to notice a few of these here in the order +of their dates. + +In 1740 Joseph Warton, then an Oxford undergraduate, wrote his +blank-verse poem "The Enthusiast, or the Lover of Nature." The work of a +boy of eighteen, it had that instinct of the future, of the set of the +literary current, not uncommon in youthful artists, of which Chatterton's +precocious verses are a remarkable instance. Composed only ten years +later than the completed "Seasons," and five years before Shenstone began +to lay out his miniature wilderness at the Leasowes, it is more +distinctly modern and romantic in its preference of wild nature to +cultivated landscape, and of the literature of fancy to the literature of +reasons. + + "What are the lays of artful Addison, + Coldly correct, to Shakspere's warblings wild?" + +asks the young enthusiast, in Milton's own phrase. And again + + "Can Kent design like Nature?. . . + Though he, by rules unfettered, boldly scorns + Formality and method, round and square + Disdaining, plans irregularly great?. . . + + "Versailles + May boast a thousand fountains that can cast + The tortured waters to the distant heavens; + Yet let me choose some pine-topped precipice + Abrupt and shaggy, whence a foamy stream, + Like Anio, tumbling roars; or some black heath + Where straggling stands the mournful juniper, + Or yew tree scathed." + +The enthusiast haunts "dark forests" and loves to listen to "hollow winds +and ever-beating waves" and "sea-mew's clang." Milton appears at every +turn, not only in single epithets like "Lydian airs," "the level brine," +"low-thoughted cares," "the light fantastic dance," but in the entire +spirit, imagery, and diction of the poem. A few lines illustrate this +better than any description. + + "Ye green-robed Dryads, oft at dusky eve + By wondering shepherds seen; to forest brown, + To unfrequented meads and pathless wilds + Lead me from gardens decked with art's vain pomp. . . + But let me never fall in cloudless night, + When silent Cynthia in her silver car + Through the blue concave slides,. . . + To seek some level mead, and there invoke + Old midnight's sister, contemplation sage + (Queen of the rugged brow and stern-fixed eye), + To lift my soul above this little earth, + This folly-fettered world: to purge my ears, + That I may hear the rolling planet's song + And tuneful turning spheres." + +Mason's Miltonic imitations, "Musaeus," "Il Bellicoso" and "Il Pacifico" +were written in 1744--according to the statement of their author, whose +statements, however, are not always to be relied upon. The first was +published in 1747; the second "surreptitiously printed in a magazine and +afterward inserted in Pearch's miscellany," finally revised and published +by the author in 1797; the third first printed in 1748 in the Cambridge +verses on the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. These pieces follow copy in +every particular. "Il Bellicoso," _e.g._, opens with the invocation. + + "Hence, dull lethargic Peace, + Born in some hoary beadsman's cell obscure!" + +The genealogies of Peace and War are recited, and contrasted pictures of +peaceful and warlike pleasures presented in an order which corresponds as +precisely as possible to Milton's in "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso." + + "Then, to unbend my mind, I'll roam + Amid the cloister's silent gloom; + Or, where ranged oaks their shades diffuse, + Hold dalliance with my darling Muse, + Recalling oft some heaven-born strain + That warbled in Augustan reign; + Or turn, well pleased, the Grecian page, + If sweet Theocritus engage, + Or blithe Anacreon, mirthful wight, + Carol his easy love-lay light. . . + And joys like these, if Peace inspire + Peace, with thee I string the lyre."[9] + +"Musaeus" was a monody on the death of Pope, employing the pastoral +machinery and the varied irregular measure of "Lycidas." Chaucer, +Spenser, and Milton, under the names of Tityrus, Colin Clout, and +Thyrsis, are introduced as mourners, like Camus and St. Peter in the +original. Tityrus is made to lament the dead shepherd in very incorrect +Middle English. Colin Clout speaks two stanzas of the form used in the +first eclogue of "The Shepherd's Calendar," and three stanzas of the form +used in "The Faërie Queene." Thyrsis speaks in blank verse and is +answered by the shade of Musaeus (Pope) in heroic couplets. Verbal +travesties of "Lycidas" abound--"laureate hearse," "forego each vain +excuse," "without the loan of some poetic woe," etc.; and the closing +passage is reworded thus: + + "Thus the fond swain his Doric oat essayed, + Manhood's prime honors rising on his cheek: + Trembling he strove to court the tuneful Maid, + With stripling arts and dalliance all too weak, + Unseen, unheard beneath an hawthorn shade. + But now dun clouds the welkin 'gan to streak; + And now down dropt the larks and ceased their strain: + They ceased, and with them ceased the shepherd swain." + +In 1746 appeared a small volume of odes, fourteen in number, by Joseph +Warton, and another by William Collins.[10] The event is thus noticed by +Gray in a letter to Thomas Wharton: "Have you seen the works of two young +authors, a Mr. Warton and a Mr. Collins, both writers of odes? It is odd +enough, but each is the half of a considerable man, and one the +counterpart of the other. The first has but little invention, very +poetical choice of expression and a good ear. The second, a fine fancy, +modeled upon the antique, a bad ear, a great variety of words and images +with no choice at all. They both deserve to last some years, but will +not." Gray's critical acuteness is not altogether at fault in this +judgment, but half of his prophecy has failed, and his mention of Collins +is singularly inappreciative. The names of Collins and Gray are now +closely associated in literary history, but in life the two men were in +no way connected. Collins and the Wartons, on the other hand, were +personal friends. Joseph Warton and Collins had been schoolfellows at +Winchester, and it was at first intended that their odes, which were +issued in the same month (December), should be published in a volume +together. Warton's collection was immediately successful; but Collins' +was a failure, and the author, in his disappointment, burned the unsold +copies. + +The odes of Warton which most nearly resemble Milton are "To Fancy," "To +Solitude," and "To the Nightingale," all in the eight-syllabled couplet. +A single passage will serve as a specimen of their quality: + + "Me, Goddess, by the right hand lead + Sometimes through the yellow mead, + Where Joy and white-robed Peace resort + And Venus keeps her festive court: + Where Mirth and Youth each evening meet, + And lightly trip with nimble feet, + Nodding their lily-crowned heads; + Where Laughter rose-lip'd Hebe leads," etc.[11] + +Collins' "Ode to Simplicity" is in the stanza of the "Nativity Ode," and +his beautiful "Ode to Evening," in the unrhymed Sapphics which Milton had +employed in his translation of Horace's "Ode to Pyrrha." There are +Miltonic reminiscences like "folding-star," "religious gleams," "play +with the tangles of her hair," and in the closing couplet of the "Ode to +Fear," + + "His cypress wreath my meed decree, + And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee." + +But, in general, Collins is much less slavish than Warton in his +imitation. + +Joseph Warton's younger brother, Thomas, wrote in 1745, and published in +1747, "The Pleasures of Melancholy," a blank-verse poem of three hundred +and fifteen lines, made up, in nearly equal parts, of Milton and +Akenside, with frequent touches of Thomson, Spenser, and Pope's "Epistle +of Eloisa to Abelard." Warton was a lad of seventeen when his poem was +written: it was published anonymously and was by some attributed to +Akenside, whose "Pleasures of Imagination" (1744) had, of course, +suggested the title. A single extract will suffice to show how well the +young poet knew his Milton: + + "O lead me, queen sublime, to solemn glooms + Congenial with my soul; to cheerless shades, + To ruined seats, to twilight cells and bowers, + Where thoughtful Melancholy loves to muse, + Her favorite midnight haunts. . . + Beneath yon ruined abbey's moss-grown piles + Oft let me sit, at twilight hour of eve, + When through some western window the pale moon + _Pours her long-levelled rule streaming light:_ + While sullen sacred silence reigns around, + Save the lone screech-owl's note, who build his bower + Amid the moldering caverns dark and damp;[12] + Or the calm breeze, that rustles in the leaves + Of flaunting ivy, that with mantle green + Invests some wasted tower. . . + Then when the sullen shades of evening close + Where _through the room_ a blindly-glimmering gloom + The _dying embers_ scatter, far remote + From Mirth's mad shouts, that through the illumined roof + Resound with festive echo, let me sit + Blessed with the lowly cricket's drowsy dirge. . . + This sober hour of silence will unmask + False Folly's smile, that like the dazzling spells + Of wily Comus cheat the unweeting eye + With _blear illusion,_ and persuade to drink + That charmëd cup which _Reason's mintage fair_ +_ Unmoulds_, and stamps the monster on the man." + +I italicize the most direct borrowings, but both the Wartons had so +saturated themselves with Milton's language, verse, and imagery that they +ooze out of them at every pore. Thomas Warton's poems, issued separately +from time to time, were first published collectively in 1777. They are +all imitative, and most of them imitative of Milton. His two best odes, +"On the First of April" and "On the Approach of Summer," are in the +familiar octosyllabics. + + "Haste thee, Nymph! and hand in hand, + With thee lead a buxom band; + Bring fantastic-footed joy, + With Sport, that yellow-tressëd boy," etc.[13] + +In Gray and Collins, though one can hardly read a page without being +reminded of Milton, it is commonly in subtler ways than this. Gray, for +example, has been careful to point out in his notes his verbal +obligations to Milton, as well as to Shakspere, Cowley, Dryden, Pindar, +Vergil, Dante, and others; but what he could not well point out, because +it was probably unconscious, was the impulse which Milton frequently gave +to the whole exercise of his imagination. It is not often that Gray +treads so closely in Milton's footsteps as he does in the latest of his +poems, the ode written for music, and performed at Cambridge in 1769 on +the installation of the Duke of Grafton as Chancellor; in which Milton is +made to sing a stanza in the meter of the "Nativity Ode"; + + "Ye brown o'er-arching groves + That Contemplation loves, + Where willowy Camus lingers with delight; + Oft at the blush of dawn + I trod your level lawn, + Oft wooed the gleam of Cynthia, silver bright, + In cloisters dim, far from the haunts of Folly, + With Freedom by my side, and soft-eyed Melancholy." + +Not only the poets who have been named, but many obscure versifiers are +witnesses to this Miltonic revival. It is usually, indeed, the minor +poetry of an age which keeps most distinctly the "cicatrice and capable +impressure" of a passing literary fashion. If we look through Dodsley's +collection,[14] we find a _mélange_ of satires in the manner of Pope, +humorous fables in the manner of Prior, didactic blank-verse pieces after +the fashion of Thomson and Akenside, elegiac quatrains on the model of +Shenstone and Gray, Pindaric odes _ad nauseam_, with imitations of +Spenser and Milton.[15] + +To the increasing popularity of Milton's minor poetry is due the revival +of the sonnet. Gray's solitary sonnet, on the death of his friend +Richard West, was composed in 1742 but not printed till 1775, after the +author's death. This was the sonnet selected by Wordsworth, to +illustrate his strictures on the spurious poetic diction of the +eighteenth century, in the appendix to the preface to the second edition +of "Lyrical Ballads." The style is noble, though somewhat artificial: +the order of the rhymes conforms neither to the Shaksperian nor the +Miltonic model. Mason wrote fourteen sonnets at various times between +1748 and 1797; the earlier date is attached, in his collected works, to +"Sonnet I. Sent to a Young Lady with Dodsley's Miscellanies." They are +of the strict Italian or Miltonic form, and abound in Miltonic allusions +and wordings. All but four of Thomas Edwards' fifty sonnets, 1750-65, +are on Milton's model. Thirteen of them were printed in Dodsley's second +volume. They have little value, nor have those of Benjamin +Stillingfleet, some of which appear to have been written before 1750. Of +much greater interest are the sonnets of Thomas Warton, nine in number +and all Miltonic in form. Warton's collected poems were not published +till 1777, and his sonnets are undated, but some of them seem to have +been written as early as 1750. They are graceful in expression and +reflect their author's antiquarian tastes. They were praised by Hazlitt, +Coleridge, and Lamb; and one of them, "To the River Lodon," has been +thought to have suggested Coleridge's "To the River Otter--" + + "Dear native stream, wild streamlet of the west--" + +as well, perhaps, more remotely Wordsworth's series, "On the River +Duddon." + +The poem of Milton which made the deepest impression upon the new school +of poets was "Il Penseroso." This little masterpiece, which sums up in +imagery of "Attic choice" the pleasures that Burton and Fletcher and many +others had found in the indulgence of the atrabilious humor, fell in with +a current of tendency. Pope had died in 1744, Swift in 1745, the last +important survivors of the Queen Anne wits; and already the reaction +against gayety had set in, in the deliberate and exaggerated solemnity +which took possession of all departments of verse, and even invaded the +theater; where Melpomene gradually crowded Thalia off the boards, until +sentimental comedy--_la comedie larmoyante_--was in turn expelled by the +ridicule of Garrick, Goldsmith, and Sheridan. That elegiac mood, that +love of retirement and seclusion, which have been remarked in Shenstone, +became now the dominant note in English poetry. The imaginative +literature of the years 1740-60 was largely the literature of low +spirits. The generation was persuaded, with Fletcher, that + + "Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy." + +But the muse of their inspiration was not the tragic Titaness of Dürer's +painting: + + "The Melencolia that transcends all wit."[16] + +rather the "mild Miltonic maid," Pensive Meditation. + +There were various shades of somberness, from the delicate gray of the +Wartons to the funereal sable to Young's "Night Thoughts" (1742-44) and +Blair's "Grave" (1743). Goss speaks of Young as a "connecting link +between this group of poets and their predecessors of the Augustan age." +His poem does, indeed, exhibit much of the wit, rhetorical glitter, and +straining after point familiar in Queen Anne verse, in strange +combination with a "rich note of romantic despair."[17] Mr. Perry, too, +describes Young's language as "adorned with much of the crude ore of +romanticism. . . At this period the properties of the poet were but few: +the tomb, an occasional raven or screech-owl, and the pale moon, with +skeletons and grinning ghosts. . . One thing that the poets were never +tired of, was the tomb. . . It was the dramatic--can one say the +melodramatic?--view of the grave, as an inspirer of pleasing gloom, that +was preparing readers for the romantic outbreak."[18] + +It was, of course, in Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" +(1751), that this elegiac feeling found its most perfect expression. +Collins, too has "more hearse-like airs than carols," and two of his most +heartfelt lyrics are the "Dirge in Cymbeline" and the "Ode on the Death +of Mr. Thomson." And the Wartons were perpetually recommending such +themes, both by precept and example.[19] Blair and Young, however, are +scarcely to be reckoned among the romanticists. They were heavy +didactic-moral poets, for the most part, though they touched the string +which, in the Gothic imagination, vibrates with a musical shiver to the +thought of death. There is something that accords with the spirit of +Gothic ecclesiastical architecture, with Gray's "ivy-mantled tower"--his +"long-drawn aisle and fretted vault"--in the paraphernalia of the tomb +which they accumulate so laboriously; the cypress and the yew, the owl +and the midnight bell, the dust of the charnel-house, the nettles that +fringe the grave-stones, the dim sepulchral lamp and gliding specters. + + "The wind is up. Hark! how it howls! Methinks + Till now I never heard a sound so dreary, + Doors creak and windows clap, and night's foul bird, + Rocked in the spire, screams loud: the gloomy aisles, + Black-plastered and hung 'round with shreds of scutcheons + And tattered coats-of-arms, send back the sound, + Laden with heavier airs, from the low vaults, + The mansions of the dead."[20] + +Blair's mortuary verse has a certain impressiveness, in its gloomy +monotony, not unlike that of Quarles' "Divine Emblems." Like the +"Emblems," too, "The Grave," has been kept from oblivion by the art of +the illustrator, the well-known series of engravings by Schiavonetti from +designs by Wm. Blake. + +But the thoughtful scholarly fancy of the more purely romantic poets +haunted the dusk rather than the ebon blackness of midnight, and listened +more to the nightingale than to the screech-owl. They were quietists, +and their imagery was crepuscular. They loved the twilight, with its +beetle and bat, solitude, shade, the "darkening vale," the mossy +hermitage, the ruined abbey moldering in its moonlit glade, grots, +caverns, brooksides, ivied nooks, firelight rooms, the curfew bell and +the sigh of the Aeolian harp.[21] All this is exquisitely put in +Collins' "Ode to Evening." Joseph Warton also wrote an "Ode to Evening," +as well as one "To the Nightingale." Both Wartons wrote odes "To +Solitude." Dodsley's "Miscellanies" are full of odes to Evening, +Solitude, Silence, Retirement, Contentment, Fancy, Melancholy, Innocence, +Simplicity, Sleep; of Pleasures of Contemplation (Miss Whately, Vol. IX. +p. 120) Triumphs of Melancholy (James Beattie, Vol. X. p. 77), and +similar matter. Collins introduced a personified figure of Melancholy in +his ode, "The Passions." + + "With eyes upraised, as one inspired, + Pale Melancholy sat retired; + And from her wild, sequestered seat, + In notes by distance made more sweet, + Poured through the mellow horn her pensive soul; + And dashing soft from rocks around, + Bubbling runnels joined the sound; + Through glades and glooms the mingled measure stole, + Or o'er some haunted stream, with fond delay, + Round a holy calm diffusing + Love of peace and lonely musing, + In hollow murmurs died away." + +Collins was himself afflicted with a melancholia which finally developed +into madness. Gray, a shy, fastidious scholar, suffered from inherited +gout and a lasting depression of spirits. He passed his life as a +college recluse in the cloistered retirement of Cambridge, residing at +one time in Pembroke, and at another in Peterhouse College. He held the +chair of modern history in the university, but never gave a lecture. He +declined the laureateship after Cibber's death. He had great learning, +and a taste most delicately correct; but the sources of creative impulse +dried up in him more and more under the desiccating air of academic study +and the increasing hold upon him of his constitutional malady. +"Melancholy marked him for her own." There is a significant passage in +one of his early letters to Horace. Walpole (1737): "I have, at the +distance of half a mile, through a green lane, a forest (vulgar call it a +common) all my own, at least as good as so, for I spy no human thing in +it but myself. It is a little chaos of mountains and precipices. . . +Both vale and hill are covered with most venerable beeches and other very +reverend vegetables that, like most other ancient people, are always +dreaming out their old stories to the winds. . . At the foot of one of +these, squats ME, I, (il penseroso) and there grow to the trunk for a +whole morning."[22] To Richard West he wrote, in the same year, "Low +spirits are my true and faithful companions"; and, in 1742, "Mine is a +white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy, for the most part . . . but there +is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt." + +When Gray sees the Eton schoolboys at their sports, he is sadly reminded: + + "--how all around them wait + The ministers of human fate + And black Misfortune's baleful train."[23] + +"Wisdom in sable garb," and "Melancholy, silent maid" attend the +footsteps of Adversity;[24] and to Contemplation's sober eye, the race of +man resembles the insect race: + + "Brushed by the hand of rough mischance, + Or chilled by age, their airy dance + They leave, in dust to rest."[25] + +Will it be thought too trifling an observation that the poets of this +group were mostly bachelors and _quo ad hoc_, solitaries? Thomson, +Akenside, Shenstone, Collins, Gray, and Thomas Warton never married. +Dyer, Mason, and Joseph Warton, were beneficed clergymen, and took unto +themselves wives. The Wartons, to be sure, were men of cheerful and even +convivial habits. The melancholy which these good fellows affected was +manifestly a mere literary fashion. They were sad "only for wantonness," +like the young gentlemen in France. "And so you have a garden of your +own," wrote Gray to his young friend Nicholls, in 1769, "and you plant +and transplant, and are dirty and amused; are you not ashamed of +yourself? Why, I have no such thing, you monster; nor ever shall be +either dirty or amused as long as I live." Gray never was; but the +Wartons were easily amused, and Thomas, by all accounts, not unfrequently +dirty, or at least slovenly in his dress, and careless and unpolished in +his manners, and rather inclined to broad humor and low society. + +Romantically speaking, the work of these Miltonic lyrists marks an +advance upon that of the descriptive and elegiac poets, Thomson, +Akenside, Dyer, and Shenstone. Collins is among the choicest of English +lyrical poets. There is a flute-like music in his best odes--such as the +one "To Evening," and the one written in 1746--"How sleep the brave," +which are sweeter, more natural, and more spontaneous than Gray's. "The +Muse gave birth to Collins," says Swinburne; "she did but give suck to +Gray." Collins "was a solitary song-bird among many more or less +excellent pipers and pianists. He could put more spirit of color into a +single stroke, more breath of music into a single note, than could all +the rest of the generation into all the labors of their lives."[26] +Collins, like Gray, was a Greek scholar, and had projected a history of +the revival letters. There is a classical quality in his verse--not +classical in the eighteenth-century sense--but truly Hellenic; a union, +as in Keats, of Attic form with romantic sensibility; though in Collins, +more than in Keats, the warmth seems to comes from without; the statue of +a nymph flushed with sunrise. "Collins," says Gosse, "has the touch of a +sculptor; his verse is clearly cut and direct: it is marble pure, but +also marble cold."[27] Lowell, however, thinks that Collins "was the +first to bring back into poetry something of the antique flavor, and +found again the long-lost secret of being classically elegant without +being pedantically cold."[28] + +These estimates are given for what they are worth. The coldness which is +felt--or fancied--in some of Collins' poetry comes partly from the +abstractness of his subjects and the artificial style which he inherited, +in common with all his generation. Many of his odes are addressed to +Fear, Pity, Mercy, Liberty, and similar abstractions. The +pseudo-Pindaric ode, is, in itself, an exotic; and, as an art form, is +responsible for some of the most tumid compositions in the history of +English verse. Collins' most current ode, though by no means his best +one, "The Passions," abounds in those personifications which, as has been +said, constituted, in eighteenth century poetry, a sort of feeble +mythology: "wan Despair," "dejected Pity," "brown Exercise," and "Music +sphere-descended maid." It was probably the allegorical figures in +Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," "Sport that wrinkled care +derides," "spare Fast that oft with gods doth diet," etc., that gave a +new lease of life to this obsolescent machinery which the romanticists +ought to have abandoned to the Augustan schools. + +The most interesting of Collins' poems, from the point of view of these +inquiries, is his "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of +Scotland." This was written in 1749, but as it remained in manuscript +till 1788, it was of course without influence on the minds of its +author's contemporaries. It had been left unfinished, and some of the +printed editions contained interpolated stanzas which have since been +weeded away. Inscribed to Mr. John Home, the author of "Douglas," its +purpose was to recommend to him the Scottish fairy lore as a fit subject +for poetry. Collins justifies the selection of such "false themes" by +the example of Spenser, of Shakspere, (in "Macbeth"), and of Tasso + + "--whose undoubting mind + Believed the magic wonders which he sung." + +He mentions, as instances of popular beliefs that have poetic +capabilities, the kelpie, the will-o'-the-wisp, and second sight. He +alludes to the ballad of "Willie Drowned in Yarrow," and doubtless with a +line of "The Seasons" running in his head,[29] conjures Home to "forget +not Kilda's race," who live on the eggs of the solan goose, whose only +prospect is the wintry main, and among whose cliffs the bee is never +heard to murmur. Perhaps the most imaginative stanza is the ninth, +referring to the Hebrides, the chapel of St. Flannan and the graves of +the Scottish, Irish, and Norwegian kings in Icolmkill: + + "Unbounded is thy range; with varied skill + Thy muse may, like those feathery tribes which spring + From their rude rocks, extend her skirting wing, + Round the moist marge of each cold Hebrid isle, + To that hoar pile which still its ruins shows; + In whose small vaults a pygmy folk is found, + Whose bones the delver with his spade upthrows, + And culls them, wondering, from the hallowed ground; + Or thither, where, beneath the showery west, + The mighty kings of three fair realms are laid; + Once foes, perhaps, together now they rest, + No slaves revere them and no wars invade. + Yet frequent now at midnight's solemn hour, + The rifted mounds their yawning cells unfold, + And forth the monarchs stalk with sovereign power, + In pageant robes, and wreathed with sheeny gold, + And on their twilight tombs aerial council hold." + +Collins' work was all done by 1749; for though he survived ten years +longer, his mind was in eclipse. He was a lover and student of +Shakspere, and when the Wartons paid him a last visit at the time of his +residence with his sister in the cloisters of Chichester Cathedral, he +told Thomas that he had discovered the source of the "Tempest," in a +novel called "Aurelio and Isabella," printed in 1588 in Spanish, Italian, +French, and English. No such novel has been found, and it was seemingly +a figment of Collins' disordered fancy. During a lucid interval in the +course of this visit, he read to the Wartons, from the manuscript, his +"Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands"; and also a poem +which is lost, entitled, "The Bell of Arragon," founded on the legend of +the great bell of Saragossa that tolled of its own accord whenever a king +of Spain was dying. + +Johnson was also a friend of Collins, and spoke of him kindly in his +"Lives of the Poets," though he valued his writings little. "He had +employed his mind chiefly upon works of fiction and subjects of fancy; +and by indulging some peculiar habits of thought, was eminently delighted +with those flights of imagination which pass the bounds of nature, and to +which the mind is reconciled only by a passive acquiescence in popular +traditions. He loved fairies, genii, giants, and monsters; he delighted +to rove through the meanders of enchantment, to gaze on the magnificence +of golden palaces, to repose by the water-falls of Elysian gardens. This +was, however, the character rather of his inclination than his genius; +the grandeur of wildness and the novelty of extravagance were always +desired by him, but were not always attained."[30] + +Thomas Gray is a much more important figure than Collins in the +intellectual history of his generations; but this superior importance +does not rest entirely upon his verse, which is hardly more abundant than +Collins', though of a higher finish. His letters, journals, and other +prose remains, posthumously published, first showed how long an arc his +mind had subtended on the circle of art and thought. He was sensitive to +all fine influences that were in the literary air. One of the greatest +scholars among English poets, his taste was equal to his acquisitions. +He was a sound critic of poetry, music, architecture, and painting. His +mind and character both had distinction; and if there was something a +trifle finical and old-maidish about his personality--which led the young +Cantabs on one occasion to take a rather brutal advantage of his nervous +dread of fire--there was also that nice reserve which gave to Milton, +when _he_ was at Cambridge, the nickname of the "lady of Christ's." + +A few of Gray's simpler odes, the "Ode on the Spring," the "Hymn to +Adversity" and the Eton College ode, were written in 1742 and printed in +Dodsley's collection in 1748. The "Elegy" was published in 1751; the two +"sister odes," "The Progress of Poesy" and "The Bard," were struck off +from Horace Walpole's private press at Strawberry Hill in 1757. Gray's +popular fame rests, and will always rest, upon his immortal "Elegy." He +himself denied somewhat impatiently that it was his best poem, and +thought that its popularity was owing to its subject. There are not +wanting critics of authority, such as Lowell and Matthew Arnold, who have +pronounced Gray's odes higher poetry than his "Elegy." "'The Progress of +Poesy,'" says Lowell, "overflies all other English lyrics like an +eagle. . . It was the prevailing blast of Gray's trumpet that, more than +anything else, called men back to the legitimate standard."[31] With all +deference to such distinguished judges, I venture to think that the +popular instinct on this point is right, and even that Dr. Johnson is not +so wrong as usual. Johnson disliked Gray and spoke of him with surly +injustice. Gray, in turn, could not abide Johnson, whom he called _Ursa +major_. Johnson said that Gray's odes were forced plants, raised in a +hot-house, and poor plants at that. "Sir, I do not think Gray a +first-rate poet. He has not a bold imagination, nor much command of +words. The obscurity in which he has involved himself will not persuade +us that he is sublime. His 'Elegy in a Churchyard' has a happy selection +of images, but I don't like what are called his great things." "He +attacked Gray, calling him a 'dull fellow.' Boswell: 'I understand he +was reserved, and might appear dull in company; but surely he was not +dull in poetry.' Johnson: 'Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his +closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way and that made many +people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.' He then repeated +some ludicrous lines, which have escaped my memory, and said, 'Is not +that GREAT, like his odes?'. . . 'No, sir, there are but two good +stanzas in Gray's poetry, which are in his "Elegy in a Country +Churchyard." He then repeated the stanza-- + + "'For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,'" etc. + +"In all Gray's odes," wrote Johnson, "there is a kind of cumbrous +splendor which we wish away. . . These odes are marked by glittering +accumulations of ungraceful ornaments; they strike rather than please; +the images are magnified by affectation; the language is labored into +harshness. The mind of the writer seems to work with unnatural +violence. . . His art and his struggle are too visible and there is too +little appearance of ease and nature. . . In the character of his +'Elegy,' I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common +sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the +refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally +decided all claims to poetical honors. The 'Churchyard' abounds with +images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which +every bosom returns an echo." + +There are noble lines in Gray's more elaborate odes, but they do make as +a whole that mechanical, artificial impression of which Johnson +complains. They have the same rhetorical ring, the worked-up fervor in +place of genuine passion, which was noted in Collins' ode "On the +Passions." Collins and Gray were perpetually writing about the passions; +but they treated them as abstractions and were quite incapable of +exhibiting them in action. Neither of them could have written a ballad, +a play, or a romance. Their odes were bookish, literary, impersonal, +retrospective. They had too much of the ichor of fancy and too little +red blood in them. + +But the "Elegy" is the masterpiece of this whole "Il Penseroso" school, +and has summed up for all English readers, for all time, the poetry of +the tomb. Like the "Essay on Man," and "Night Thoughts" and "The Grave," +it is a poem of the moral-didactic order, but very different in result +from these. Its moral is suffused with emotion and expressed concretely. +Instead of general reflections upon the shortness of life, the vanity of +ambition, the leveling power of death, and similar commonplaces, we have +the picture of the solitary poet, lingering among the graves at twilight +(_hora datur quieti_), till the place and the hour conspire to work their +effect upon the mind and prepare it for the strain of meditation that +follows. The universal appeal of its subject and the perfection of its +style have made the "Elegy" known by heart to more readers than any other +poem in the language. Parody is one proof of celebrity, if not of +popularity, and the "sister odes" were presently parodied by Lloyd and +Colman in an "Ode to Obscurity" and an "Ode to Oblivion." But the +"Elegy" was more than celebrated and more than popular; it was the most +admired and influential poem of the generation. The imitations and +translations of it are innumerable, and it met with a response as +immediate as it was general.[32] One effect of this was to consecrate +the ten-syllabled quatrain to elegiac uses. Mason altered the sub-title +of his "Isis" (written in 1748) from "An Elegy" to "A Monologue," because +it was "not written in alternate rimes, which since Mr. Gray's exquisite +'Elegy in the Country Church-yard' has generally obtained, and seems to +be more suited to that species of poem."[33] Mason's "Elegy written in a +Church-yard in South Wales" (1787) is, of course, in Gray's stanza and, +equally of course, introduces a tribute to the master: + + "Yes, had he paced this church-way path along, + Or leaned like me against this ivied wall, + How sadly sweet had flowed his Dorian song, + Then sweetest when it flowed at Nature's call."[34] + +It became almost _de rigueur_ for a young poet to try his hand at a +churchyard piece. Thus Richard Cumberland, the dramatist, in his +"Memoirs," records the fact that when he was an undergraduate at +Cambridge in 1752 he made his "first small offering to the press, +following the steps of Gray with another church-yard elegy, written on +St. Mark's Eve, when, according to rural tradition, the ghost of those +who are to die within the year ensuing are seen to walk at midnight +across the churchyard."[35] Goldsmith testifies to the prevalence of the +fashion when, in his "Life of Parnell," he says of that poet's "Night +Piece on Death"[36] that, "with very little amendment," it "might be made +to surpass all those night-pieces and church-yard scenes that have since +appeared." But in this opinion Johnson, who says that Parnell's poem "is +indirectly preferred by Goldsmith to Gray's 'Churchyard,'" does not +agree; nor did the public.[37] + +Gray's correspondence affords a record of the progress of romantic +taste for an entire generation. He set out with classical +prepossessions--forming his verse, as he declared, after Dryden--and +ended with translations from Welsh and Norse hero-legends, and with an +admiration for Ossian and Scotch ballads. In 1739 he went to France and +Italy with Horace Walpole. He was abroad three years, though in 1741 he +quarreled with Walpole at Florence, separated from him and made his way +home alone in a leisurely manner. Gray is one of the first of modern +travelers to speak appreciatively of Gothic architecture, and of the +scenery of the Alps, and to note those strange and characteristic aspects +of foreign life which we now call picturesque, and to which every +itinerary and guidebook draws attention. Addison, who was on his travels +forty years before, was quite blind to such matters. Not that he was +without the feeling of the sublime: he finds, _e.g._, an "agreeable +horror" in the prospect of a storm at sea.[38] But he wrote of his +passage through Switzerland as a disagreeable and even frightful +experience; "a very troublesome journey over the Alps. My head is still +giddy with mountains and precipices; and you can't imagine how much I am +pleased with the sight of a plain." + +"Let any one reflect," says the _Spectator_,[39] "on the disposition of +mind he finds in himself at his first entrance into the Pantheon at Rome, +and how his imagination is filled with something great and amazing; and, +at the same time, consider how little, in proportion, he is affected with +the inside of a Gothic cathedral, though it be five times larger than the +other; which can arise from nothing else but the greatness of the manner +in the one, the meanness in the other."[40] + +Gray describes the cathedral at Rheims as "a vast Gothic building of a +surprising beauty and lightness, all covered over with a profusion of +little statues and other ornaments"; and the cathedral at Siena, which +Addison had characterized as "barbarous," and as an instance of "false +beauties and affected ornaments," Gray commends as "labored with a Gothic +niceness and delicacy in the old-fashioned way." It must be acknowledged +that these are rather cold praises, but Gray was continually advancing in +his knowledge of Gothic and his liking for it. Later in life he became +something of an antiquarian and virtuoso. He corresponded with Rev. +Thomas Wharton, about stained glass and paper hangings, which Wharton, +who was refitting his house in the Gothic taste, had commissioned Gray to +buy for him of London dealers. He describes, for Wharton's benefit, +Walpole's new bedroom at Strawberry Hill as "in the best taste of +anything he has yet done, and in your own Gothic way"; and he advises his +correspondent as to the selection of patterns for staircases and arcade +work. There was evidently a great stir of curiosity concerning +Strawberry Hill in Gray's coterie, and a determination to be Gothic at +all hazards; and the poet felt obliged to warn his friends that zeal +should not outrun discretion. He writes to Wharton in 1754: "I rejoice +to find you at last settled to your heart's content, and delight to hear +you talk of giving your house some _Gothic ornaments_ already. If you +project anything, I hope it will be entirely within doors; and don't let +me (when I come gaping into Coleman Street) be directed to the gentlemen +at the ten pinnacles, or with the church porch at his door." Again, to +the same (1761): "It is mere pedantry in Gothicism to stick to nothing +but altars and tombs, and there is no end to it, if we are to sit upon +nothing but coronation chairs, nor drink out of nothing but chalices or +flagons." Writing to Mason in 1758 about certain incongruities in one of +the latter's odes, he gives the following Doresque illustration of his +point. "If you should lead me into a superb Gothic building, with a +thousand clustered pillars, each of them half a mile high, the walls all +covered with fret-work, and the windows full of red and blue saints that +had neither head nor tail, and I should find the Venus de Medici in +person perked up in a long niche over the high altar, as naked as she was +born, do you think it would raise or damp my devotions?"[41] He made it +a favorite occupation to visit and take drawings from celebrated ruins +and the great English cathedrals, particularly those in the Cambridge +fens, Ely and Peterboro'. These studies he utilized in a short essay on +Norman architecture, first published by Mitford in 1814, and incorrectly +entitled "Architectura Gothica." + +Reverting to his early letters from abroad one is struck by the +anticipation of the modern attitude, in his description of a visit to the +Grande Chartreuse, which he calls "one of the most solemn, the most +romantic, and the most astonishing scenes."[42] "I do not remember to +have gone ten paces without an exclamation that there was no restraining. +Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with +religion and poetry. . . One need not have a very fantastic imagination +to see spirits there at noonday."[43] Walpole's letter of about the same +date, also to West,[44] is equally ecstatic. It is written "from a +hamlet among the mountains of Savoy. . . Here we are, the lonely lords +of glorious desolate prospects. . . But the road, West, the road! +Winding round a prodigious mountain, surrounded with others, all shagged +with hanging woods, obscured with pines, or lost in clouds! Below a +torrent breaking through cliffs, and tumbling through fragments of +rocks!. . . Now and then an old foot bridge, with a broken rail, a +leaning cross, a cottage or the ruin of an hermitage! This sounds too +bombast and too romantic to one that has not seen it, too cold for one +that has." Or contrast with Addison's Italian letters passages like +these, which foretoken Rogers and Byron. We get nothing so sympathetic +till at least a half century later. "It is the most beautiful of Italian +nights. . . There is a moon! There are starts for you! Do not you hear +the fountain? Do not you smell the orange flowers? That building yonder +is the convent of St. Isidore; and that eminence with the cypress-trees +and pines upon it, the top of Mt. Quirinal."[45] "The Neapolitans work +till evening: then take their lute or guitar and walk about the city, or +upon the sea shore with it, to enjoy the _fresco_. One sees their little +brown children jumping about stark naked and the bigger ones dancing with +castanets, while others play on the cymbal to them."[46] "Kennst dud as +Land," then already? The + + "small voices and an old guitar, + Winning their way to an unguarded heart"? + +And then, for a prophecy of Scott, read the description of Netley +Abbey,[47] in a letter to Nicholls in 1764. "My ferryman," writes Gray +in a letter to Brown about the same ruin, "assured me that he would not +go near it in the night time for all the world, though he knew much money +had been found there. The sun was all too glaring and too full of gauds +for such a scene, which ought to be visited only in the dusk of the +evening." + + "If thou woulds't view fair Melrose aright + Go visit it by the pale moonlight, + For the gay beams of lightsome day + Gild, but to flout, the ruins, Gray." + +In 1765, Gray visited the Scotch Highlands and sent enthusiastic +histories of his trip to Wharton and Mason. "Since I saw the Alps, I +have seen nothing sublime till now." "The Lowlands are worth seeing +once, but the mountains are ecstatic, and ought to be visited in +pilgrimage once a year. None but those monstrous creatures 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." + +Again in 1770, the year before his death, he spent six weeks on a ramble +through the western counties, descending the Wye in a boat for forty +miles, and visiting among other spots which the muse had then, or has +since, made illustrious, Hagley and the Leasowes, the Malvern Hills and +Tintern Abby. But the most significant of Gray's "Lilliputian travels," +was his tour of the Lake Country in 1769. Here he was on ground that has +since become classic; and the lover of Wordsworth encounters with a +singular interest, in Gray's "Journal in the Lakes," written nearly +thirty years before the "Lyrical Ballads," names like Grasmere, Winander, +Skiddaw, Helvellyn, Derwentwater, Borrowdale, and Lodore. What +distinguishes the entries in this journal from contemporary writing of +the descriptive kind is a certain intimacy of comprehension, a depth of +tone which makes them seem like nineteenth-century work. To Gray the +landscape was no longer a picture. It had sentiment, character, meaning, +almost personality. Different weathers and different hours of the day +lent it expressions subtler than the poets had hitherto recognized in the +broad, general changes of storm and calm, light and darkness, and the +successions of the seasons. He heard Nature when she whispered, as well +as when she spoke out loud. Thomson could not have written thus, nor +Shenstone, nor even, perhaps, Collins. But almost any man of cultivation +and sensibility can write so now; or, if not so well, yet with the same +accent. A passage or two will make my meaning clearer. + +"To this second turning I pursued my way about four miles along its +borders [Ulswater], beyond a village scattered among trees and called +Water Mallock, in a pleasant, grave day, perfectly calm and warm, but +without a gleam of sunshine. Then, the sky seeming to thicken, the +valley to grown more desolate, and evening drawing on, I returned by the +way I came to Penrith. . . While I was here, a little shower fell, red +clouds came marching up the hills from the east, and part of a bright +rainbow seemed to rise along the side of Castle Hill. . . The calmness +and brightness of the evening, the roar of the waters, and the thumping +of huge hammers at an iron forge not far distant, made it a singular +walk. . . In the evening walked alone down to the lake after sunset and +saw the solemn coloring of night draw on, the last gleam of sunshine +fading away on the hilltops, the deep serene of the waters, and the long +shadows of the mountains thrown across them till they nearly touched the +hithermost shore. At distance heard the murmur of many waterfalls not +audible in the day-time.[48] Wished for the moon, but she was dark to me +and silent, hid in her vacant inter-lunar cave."[49] + +"It is only within a few years," wrote Joseph Warton in 1782, "that the +picturesque scenes of our own country, our lakes, mountains, cascades, +caverns, and castles, have been visited and described."[50] It was in +this very year that William Gilpin published his "Observations on the +River Wye," from notes taken upon a tour in 1770. This was the same year +when Gray made his tour of the Wye, and hearing that Gilpin had prepared +a description of the region, he borrowed and read his manuscript in June, +1771, a few weeks before his own death. These "Observations" were the +first of a series of volumes by Gilpin on the scenery of Great Britain, +composed in a poetic and somewhat over-luxuriant style, illustrated by +drawings in aquatinta, and all described on the title page as "Relative +chiefly to Picturesque Beauty." They had great success, and several of +them were translated into German and French.[51] + + +[1] "An Apology for Smectymnuus." + +[2] Lines 162-168. See also "Mansus," 80-84. + +[3] "What resounds + In fable or romance of Uther's son, + Begirt with British and Armoric knights; + And all who since, baptized or infidel, + Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban, + Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond, + Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore + When Charlemain with all his peerage fell + By Fontarabbia." + --_Book I_, 579-587. + +[4] "Faery damsels met in forest wide + By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, + Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore." + --_Book II_, 359-361. + +[5] "Masson's Life of Milton," Vol. VI. P. 789 + +[6] "Essay on Pope," Vol. I. pp. 36-38 (5th edition). In the dedication +to Young, Warton says: "The Epistles (Pope's) on the Characters of Men +and Women, and your sprightly Satires, my good friend, are more +frequently perused and quoted than 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' of +Milton." + + +[7] The Rev. Francis Peck, in his "New Memoirs of the Life and Poetical +Works of Mr. John Milton," in 1740, says that these two poems are justly +admired by foreigners as well as Englishmen, and have therefore been +translated into all the modern languages. This volume contains, among +other things, "An Examination of Milton's Style"; "Explanatory and +Critical Notes on Divers Passages of Milton and Shakspere"; "The +Resurrection," a blank verse imitation of "Lycidas," "Comus," "L'Allegro" +and "Il Penserosa," and the "Nativity Ode." Peck defends Milton's rhymed +poems against Dryden's strictures. "He was both a perfect master of rime +and could also express something by it which nobody else ever thought +of." He compares the verse paragraphs of "Lycidas" to musical bars and +pronounces its system of "dispersed rimes" admirable and unique. + +[8] "Life of Milton." + +[9] "Il Pacifico: Works of William Mason," London, 1811, Vol. I. p. 166. + +[10] "Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects." + +[11] "To Fancy." + +[12] _Cf_. Gray's "Elegy," first printed in 1751: + + "Save that, from yonder ivy-mantled tower, + The moping owl does to the moon complain + Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, + Molest her ancient, solitary reign." + +[13] "On the Approach of Summer." The "wattled cotes," "sweet-briar +hedges," "woodnotes wild," "tanned haycock in the mead," and "valleys +where mild whispers use," are transferred bodily into this ode from +"L'Allegro." + +[14] Three volumes appeared in 1748; a second edition, with Vol. IV. added +in 1749, Vols. V. and VI. in 1758. There were new editions in 1765, +1770, 1775, and 1782. Pearch's continuations were published in 1768 +(Vols. VII. and VIII.) and 1770 (Vols. IX. and X.); Mendez's independent +collection in 1767; and Bell's "Fugitive Poetry," in 18 volumes, in +1790-97. + +[15] The reader who may wish to pursue this inquiry farther will find the +following list of Miltonic imitations useful: Dodsley's "Miscellany," I. +164, Pre-existence: "A Poem in Imitation of Milton," by Dr. Evans. This +is in blank verse, and Gray, in a letter to Walpole, calls it "nonsense." +II. 109. "The Institution of the Order of the Garter," by Gilbert West. +This is a dramatic poem, with a chorus of British bards, which is several +times quoted and commended in Joseph Warton's "Essay on Pope." West's +"Monody on the Death of Queen Caroline," is a "Lycidas" imitation. III. +214, "Lament for Melpomene and Calliope," by J. G. Cooper; also a +"Lycidas" poem. IV. 50, "Penshurst," by Mr. F. Coventry: a very close +imitation of "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso." IV. 181, "Ode to Fancy," by +the Rev. Mr. Merrick: octosyllables. IV. 229, "Solitude, an Ode," by Dr. +Grainger: octosyllables. V. 283, "Prologue to Comus," performed at Bath, +1756. VI. 148, "Vacation," by----, Esq.: "L'Allegro," very close-- + + "These delights, Vacation, give, + And I with thee will choose to live." + +IX. (Pearch) 199, "Ode to Health," by J. H. B., Esq.: "L'Allegro." X. 5, +"The Valetudinarian," by Dr. Marriott; "L'Allegro," very close. X. 97, +"To the Moon," by Robert Lloyd: "Il Penseroso," close. Parody is one of +the surest testimonies to the prevalence of a literary fashion, and in +Vol X. p 269 of Pearch, occurs a humorous "Ode to Horror," burlesquing +"The Enthusiast" and "The Pleasures of Melancholy," "in the allegoric, +descriptive, alliterative, epithetical, hyperbolical, and diabolical +style of our modern ode wrights and monody-mongers," form which I extract +a passage: + + "O haste thee, mild Miltonic maid, + From yonder yew's sequestered shade. . . + O thou whom wandering Warton saw, + Amazed with more than youthful awe, + As by the pale moon's glimmering gleam + He mused his melancholy theme. + O Curfew-loving goddess, haste! + O waft me to some Scythian waste, + Where, in Gothic solitude, + Mid prospects most sublimely rude, + Beneath a rough rock's gloomy chasm, + Thy sister sits, Enthusiasm." + +"Bell's Fugitive Poetry," Vol. XI, (1791), has a section devoted to +"poems in the manner of Milton," by Evans, Mason, T. Warton and a Mr. P. +(L'Amoroso). + +[16] See James Thomson's "City of Dreadful Night," xxi. Also the +frontispiece to Mr. E. Stedman's "Nature of Poetry" (1892) and pp. 140-41 +of the same. + +[17] "Eighteenth Century Literature," pp. 209, 212. + +[18] "English Literature in the Eighteenth Century," pp. 375, 379. + +[19] Joseph mentions as one of Spenser's characteristics, "a certain +pleasing melancholy in his sentiments, the constant companion of an +elegant taste, that casts a delicacy and grace over all his composition," +"Essay on Pope," Vol. II. p. 29. In his review of Pope's "Epistle of +Eloisa to Abelard," he says: "the effect and influence of Melancholy, who +is beautifully personified, on every object that occurs and on every part +of the convent, cannot be too much applauded, or too often read, as it is +founded on nature and experience. That temper of mind casts a gloom on +all things. + + "'But o'er the twilight grows and dusky caves,' etc." + --_Ibid_, Vol. I. p. 314. + +[20] "The Grave," by Robert Blair. + +[21] The aeolian harp was a favorite property of romantic poets for a +hundred years. See Mason's "Ode to an Aeolus's Harp" (Works, Vol. I. p. +51). First invented by the Jesuit, Kircher, about 1650, and described in +his "Musurgia Universalis," Mason says that it was forgotten for upwards +of a century and "accidentally rediscovered" in England by a Mr. Oswald. +It is mentioned in "The Castle of Indolence" (i. xl) as a novelty: + + "A certain music never known before + Here lulled the pensive melancholy mind"-- + +a passage to which Collins alludes in his verses on Thomson's death-- + + "In yon deep bed of whispering reeds + His airy harp shall now be laid." + +See "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" I. 341-42 (1805) + + "Like that wild harp whose magic tone + Is wakened by the winds alone." + +And Arthur Cleveland Coxe's (_Christian Ballads_, 1840) + + "It was a wind-harp's magic strong, + Touched by the breeze in dreamy song," + +And the poetry of the Annuals _passim_. + +[22] _Cf._ the "Elegy": + + "There at the foot of yonder nodding beech," etc. + +[23] "On a Distant Prospect of Eton College." + +[24] "Hymn to Adversity" + +[25] "Ode on the Spring." + +[26] "Ward's English Poets," Vol. III. pp. 278-82. + +[27] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 233. + +[28] "Essay on Pope." + +[29] See _ante_, p. 114. + +[30] "Life of Collins." + +[31] Essay on "Pope." + +[32] Mr. Perry enumerates, among English imitators, Falconer, T. Warton, +James Graeme, Wm. Whitehead, John Scott, Henry Headly, John Henry Moore, +and Robert Lovell, "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 391. Among +foreign imitations Lamartine's "Le Lac" is perhaps the most famous. + +[33] "Mason's Works," Vol. I. p. 179. + +[34] _Ibid._, Vol. I. p. 114. + +[35] _Cf_. Keats' unfinished poem, "The Eve of St. Mark," + +[36] Parnell's collected poems were published in 1722. + +[37] Not the least interesting among the progeny of Gray's "Elegy" was +"The Indian Burying Ground" of the American poet, Philip Freneau +(1752-1832). Gray's touch is seen elsewhere in Freneau, _e.g._, in "The +Deserted Farm-house." + + "Once in the bounds of this sequestered room + Perhaps some swain nocturnal courtship made: + Perhaps some Sherlock mused amid the gloom, + Since Love and Death forever seek the shade." + +[38] _Spectator_, No. 489. + +[39] No. 415. + +[40] John Hill Burton, in his "Reign of Queen Anne" give a passage from a +letter of one Captain Burt, superintendent of certain road-making +operations in the Scotch Highlands, by way of showing how very modern a +person Carlyle's picturesque tourist is. The captain describes the +romantic scenery of the glens as "horrid prospects." It was considerably +later in the century that Dr. Johnson said, in answer to Boswell's timid +suggestion that Scotland had a great many noble wild prospects, "I +believe, sir, you have a great many, Norway, too, has noble wild +prospects, and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. +But, sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever +sees is the high-road that leads him to England." + +[41] See also Gray's letter to Rev. James Brown (1763) inclosing a +drawing, in reference to a small ruined chapel at York Minster; and a +letter (about 1765) to Jas. Bentham, Prebendary of Ely whose "Essay on +Gothic Architecture" has been wrongly attributed to Gray. + +[42] To Mrs. Dorothy Gray, 1739. + +[43] To Richard West, 1739. + +[44] Gray, Walpole, and West had been schoolfellows and intimates at Eton. + +[45] To West, 1740. + +[46] To Mrs. Dorothy Gray, 1740. + +[47] "Pearch's Collection" (VII. 138) gives an elegiac quatrain poem on +"The Ruins of Netley Abbey," by a poet with the suggestive name of George +Keate; and "The Alps," in heavy Thomsonian blank verse (VII. 107) by the +same hand. + +[48] "A soft and lulling sound is heard + Of streams inaudible by day." + _The White Doe of Rylstone, Wordsworth_. + +[49] "Samson Agonistes." + +[50] "Essay on Pope" (5th ed.), Vol. II. p. 180. + +[51] These were, in order of publication: "The Mountains and Lakes of +Cumberland and Westmoreland" (2 vols.), 1789; "The Highlands of +Scotland," 1789; "Remarks on Forest Scenery," 1791; "The Western Parts of +England and the Isle of Wight," 1798; "The Coasts of Hampshire," etc., +1804; "Cambridge, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex," etc., 1809. The last two +were posthumously published. Gilpin, who was a prebendary of Salisbury, +died in 1804. Pearch's "Collection" (VII. 23) has "A Descriptive Poem," +on the Lake Country, in octosyllabic couplets, introducing Keswick, +Borrowdale, Dovedale, Lodore, Derwentwater, and other familiar localities. + + + + +CHAPTER VI. + +The School of Warton + +In the progress of our inquiries, hitherto, we have met with little that +can be called romantic in the narrowest sense. Though the literary +movement had already begun to take a retrospective turn, few distinctly +mediaeval elements were yet in evidence. Neither the literature of the +monk nor the literature of the knight had suffered resurrection. It was +not until about 1760 that writers began to gravitate decidedly toward the +Middle Ages. The first peculiarly mediaeval type that contrived to +secure a foothold in eighteenth-century literature was the hermit, a +figure which seems to have had a natural attraction, not only for +romanticizing poets like Shenstone and Collins, but for the whole +generation of verse writers from Parnell to Goldsmith, Percy and +Beattie--each of whom composed a "Hermit"--and even for the authors of +"Rasselas" and "Tom Jones," in whose fictions he becomes a stock +character, as a fountain of wisdom and of moral precepts.[1] + +A literary movement which reverts to the past for its inspiration is +necessarily also a learned movement. Antiquarian scholarship must lead +the way. The picture of an extinct society has to be pieced together +from the fragments at hand, and this involves special research. So long +as this special knowledge remains the exclusive possession of +professional antiquaries like Gough, Hearne, Bentham, Perry, Grose,[2] it +bears no fruit in creative literature. It produces only local histories, +surveys of cathedrals and of sepulchral monuments, books about Druidic +remains, Roman walls and coins, etc., etc. It was only when men of +imagination and of elegant tastes were enlisted in such pursuits that the +dry stick of antiquarianism put forth blossoms. The poets, of course, +had to make studies of their own, to decipher manuscripts, learn Old +English, visit ruins, collect ballads and ancient armor, familiarize +themselves with terms of heraldry, architecture, chivalry, ecclesiology +and feudal law, and in other such ways inform and stimulate their +imaginations. It was many years before the joint labors of scholars and +poets had reconstructed an image of medieval society, sharp enough in +outline and brilliant enough in color to impress itself upon the general +public. Scott, indeed, was the first to popularize romance; mainly, no +doubt, because of the greater power and fervor of his imagination; but +also, in part, because an ampler store of materials had been already +accumulated when he began work. He had fed on Percy's "Reliques" in +boyhood; through Coleridge, his verse derives from Chatterton; and the +line of Gothic romances which starts with "The Castle of Otranto" is +remotely responsible for "Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." But Scott too +was, like Percy and Walpole, a virtuoso and collector; and the vast +apparatus of notes and introductory matter in his metrical tales, and in +the Waverley novels, shows how necessary it was for the romantic poet to +be his own antiquary. + +As was to be expected, the zeal of the first romanticists was not always +a zeal according to knowledge, and the picture of the Middle Age which +they painted was more of a caricature than a portrait. A large share of +medieval literature was inaccessible to the general reader. Much of it +was still in manuscript. Much more of it was in old and rare printed +copies, broadsides and black-letter folios, the treasure of great +libraries and of jealously hoarded private collections. Much was in +dialects little understood-forgotten forms of speech-Old French, Middle +High German, Old Norse, medieval Latin, the ancient Erse and Cymric +tongues, Anglo-Saxon. There was an almost total lack of apparatus for +the study of this literature. Helps were needed in the shape of modern +reprints of scarce texts, bibliographies, critical editions, +translations, literary histories and manuals, glossaries of archaic +words, dictionaries and grammars of obsolete languages. These were +gradually supplied by working specialists in different fields of +investigation. Every side of medieval life has received illustration in +its turn. Works like Tyrwhitt's edition of Chaucer (1775-78); the +collections of mediaeval romances by Ellis (1805), Ritson (1802), and +Weber (1810); Nares' and Halliwell's "Archaic Glossary" (1822-46), +Carter's "Specimens of Ancient Sculpture and Paintings" (1780-94), +Scott's "Demonology and Witchcraft" (1830), Hallam's "Middle Ages" +(1818), Meyrick's "Ancient Armour" (1824), Lady Guest's "Mabinogion" +(1838), the publications of numberless individual scholars and of learned +societies like the Camden, the Spenser, the Percy, the Chaucer, the Early +English Text, the Roxburgh Club,--to mention only English examples, taken +at random and separated from each other by wide intervals of time,--are +instances of the labors by which mediaeval life has been made familiar to +all who might choose to make acquaintance with it. + +The history of romanticism, after the impulse had once been given, is +little else than a record or the steps by which, one after another, new +features of that vast and complicated scheme of things which we loosely +call the Middle Ages were brought to light and made available as literary +material. The picture was constantly having fresh details added to it, +nor is there any reason to believe that it is finished yet. Some of the +finest pieces of mediaeval work have only within the last few years been +brought to the attention of the general reader; _e.g._, the charming old +French story in prose and verse, "Aucassin et Nicolete," and the +fourteenth-century English poem, "The Perle." The future holds still +other phases of romanticism in reserve; the Middle Age seems likely to be +as inexhaustible in novel sources of inspiration as classical antiquity +has already proved to be. The past belongs to the poet no less than the +present, and a great part of the literature of every generation will +always be retrospective. The tastes and preferences of the individual +artist will continue to find a wide field for selection in the rich +quarry of Christian and feudal Europe. + +It is not a little odd that the book which first aroused, in modern +Europe, an interest in Norse mythology should have been written by a +Frenchman. This was the "Introduction à l'Histoire de Dannemarc," +published in 1755 by Paul Henri Mallet, a native of Geneva and sometime +professor of Belles Lettres in the Royal University at Copenhagen. The +work included also a translation of the first part of the Younger Edda, +with an abstract of the second part and of the Elder Edda, and versions +of several Runic poems. It was translated into English, in 1770, by +Thomas Percy, the editor of the "Reliques," under the title, "Northern +Antiquities; or a Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion, and Laws +of the ancient Danes." A German translation had appeared a few years +earlier and had inspired the Schleswig-Holsteiner, Heinrich Wilhem von +Gerstenberg, to compose his "Gedicht eines Skalden," which introduced the +old Icelandic mythology into German poetry in 1766. Percy had published +independently in 1763 "Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, translated from the +Icelandic Language." + +Gray did not wait for the English translation of Mallet's book. In a +letter to Mason, dated in 1758, and inclosing some criticisims on the +latter's "Caractacus" (then in MS.), he wrote, "I am pleased with the +Gothic Elysium. Do you think I am ignorant about either that, or the +_hell_ before, or the _twilight_.[3] I have been there and have seen it +all in Mallet's 'Introduction to the History of Denmark' (it is in +French), and many other places." It is a far cry from Mallet's "System +of Runic Mythology" to William Morris' "Sigurd the Volsung" (1877), but +to Mallet belongs the credit of first exciting that interest in +Scandinavian antiquity which has enriched the prose and poetry not only +of England but of Europe in general. Gray refers to him in his notes on +"The Descent of Odin," and his work continued to be popular authority on +its subject for at least half a century. Scott cites it in his +annotations on "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805). + + +Gray's studies in Runic literature took shape in "The Fatal Sisters" and +"The Descent of Odin," written in 1761, published in 1768. These were +paraphrases of two poems which Gray found in the "De Causis Contemnendae +Mortis" (Copenhagen, 1689) of Thomas Bartholin, a Danish physician of the +seventeenth century. The first of them describes the Valkyrie weaving +the fates of the Danish and Irish warriors in the battle of Clontarf, +fought in the eleventh century between Sigurd, Earl of Orkney, and Brian, +King of Dublin; the second narrates the descent of Odin to Niflheimer, to +inquire of Hela concerning the doom of Balder.[4] Gray had designed +these for the introductory chapter of his projected history of English +poetry. He calls them imitations, which in fact they are, rather than +literal renderings. In spite of a tinge of eighteenth-century diction, +and of one or two Shaksperian and Miltonic phrases, the translator +succeeded fairly well in reproducing the wild air of his originals. His +biographer, Mr. Gosse, promises that "the student will not fail . . . in +the Gothic picturesqueness of 'The Descent of Odin,' to detect notes and +phrases of a more delicate originality than are to be found even in his +more famous writings; and will dwell with peculiar pleasure on those +passages in which Gray freed himself of the trammels of an artificial and +conventional taste, and prophesied of the new romantic age that was +coming." + +Celtic antiquity shared with Gothic in this newly around interest. Here +too, as in the phrase about "the stormy Hebrides," "Lycidas" seems to +have furnished the spark that kindled the imaginations of the poets. + + "Where were ye, nymphs, when the remorseless deep + Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas? + For neither were ye playing on the steep + Where your old bards, the famous Druids lie, + Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high, + Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream." + +Joseph Warton quotes this passage twice in his "Essay on Pope" (Vol I., +pp. 7 and 356, 5th ed.), once to assert its superiority to a passage in +Pope's "Pastorals": "The mention of places remarkably romantic, the +supposed habitation of Druids, bards and wizards, is far more pleasing to +the imagination, than the obvious introduction of Cam and Isis." Another +time, to illustrate the following suggestion: "I have frequently wondered +that our modern writers have made so little use of the druidical times +and the traditions of the old bards. . . Milton, we see, was sensible of +the force of such imagery, as we may gather from this short but exquisite +passage." As further illustrations of the poetic capabilities of similar +themes, Warton gives a stanza from Gray's "Bard" and some lines from +Gilbert West's "Institution of the Order of the Garter" which describe +the ghosts of the Druids hovering about their ruined altars at Stonehenge: + + "--Mysterious rows + Of rude enormous obelisks, that rise + Orb within orb, stupendous monuments + Of artless architecture, such as now + Oft-times amaze the wandering traveler, + By the pale moon discerned on Sarum's plain." + +He then inserts two stanzas, in the Latin of Hickes' "Thesaurus," of an +old Runic ode preserved by Olaus Wormius (Ole Worm) and adds an +observation upon the Scandinavian heroes and their contempt of death. +Druids and bards now begin to abound. Collins' "Ode on the Death of Mr. +Thomson," _e.g._, commences with the line + + "In yonder grave a Druid lies." + +In his "Ode to Liberty," he alludes to the tradition that Mona, the +druidic stronghold, was long covered with an enchantment of mist--work of +an angry mermaid: + + "Mona, once hid from those who search the main, + Where thousand elfin shapes abide." + +In Thomas Warton's "Pleasures of Melancholy," Contemplation is fabled to +have been discovered, when a babe, by a Druid + + "Far in a hollow glade of Mona's woods," + +and borne by him to his oaken bower, where she + + "--loved to lie + Oft deeply listening to the rapid roar + Of wood-hung Menai, stream of druids old." + +Mason's "Caractacus" (1759) was a dramatic poem on the Greek model, with +a chorus of British bards, and a principal Druid for choragus. The scene +is the sacred grove in Mona. Mason got up with much care the description +of druidic rites, such as the preparation of the adder-stone and the +cutting of the mistletoe with a gold sickle, from Latin authorities like +Pliny, Tacitus, Lucan, Strabo, and Suetonius. Joseph Warton commends +highly the chorus on "Death" in this piece, as well as the chorus of +bards at the end of West's "Institution of the Garter." For the +materials of his "Bard" Gray had to go no farther than historians and +chroniclers such as Camden, Higden, and Matthew of Westminster, to all of +whom he refers. Following a now discredited tradition, he represents the +last survivor of the Welsh poetic guild, seated, harp in hand, upon a +crag on the side of Snowdon, and denouncing judgment on Edward I, for the +murder of his brothers in song. + +But in 1764 Gray was incited, by the publication of Dr. Evans' +"Specimens,"[5] to attempt a few translations from the Welsh. The most +considerable of these was "The Triumphs of Owen," published among Gray's +collected poems in 1768. This celebrates the victory over the +confederate fleets of Ireland, Denmark, and Normandy, won about 1160 by a +prince of North Wales, Owen Ap Griffin, "the dragon son on Mona." The +other fragments are brief but spirited versions of bardic songs in praise +of fallen heroes: "Caràdoc," "Conan," and "The Death of Hoel." They were +printed posthumously, though doubtless composed in 1764. + +The scholarship of the day was not always accurate in discriminating +between ancient systems of religion, and Gray, in his letters to Mason in +1758, when "Caractacus" was still in the works, takes him to task for +mixing the Gothic and Celtic mythologies. He instructs him that Woden +and his Valhalla belong to "the doctrine of the Scalds, not of the +Bards"; but admits that, "in that scarcity of Celtic ideas we labor +under," it might be permissible to borrow from the Edda, "dropping, +however, all mention of Woden and his Valkyrian virgins," and "without +entering too minutely on particulars"; or "still better, to graft any +wild picturesque fable, absolutely of one's own invention, upon the Druid +stock." But Gray had not scrupled to mix mythologies in "The Bard," +thereby incurring Dr. Johnson's censure. "The weaving of the winding +sheet he borrowed, as he owns, from the northern bards; but their +texture, however, was very properly the work of female powers, as the art +of spinning the thread of life in another mythology. Theft is always +dangerous: Gray has made weavers of the slaughtered bards, by a fiction +outrageous and incongruous."[6] Indeed Mallet himself had a very +confused notion of the relation of the Celtic to the Teutonic race. He +speaks constantly of the old Scandinavians as Celts. Percy points out +the difference, in the preface to his translation, and makes the +necessary correction in the text, where the word Celtic occurs--usually +by substituting "Gothic and Celtic" for the "Celtic" of the original. +Mason made his contribution to Runic literature, "Song of Harold the +Valiant," a rather insipid versification of a passage from the "Knytlinga +Saga," which had been rendered by Bartholin into Latin, from him into +French by Mallet, and from Mallet into English prose by Percy. Mason +designed it for insertion in the introduction to Gray's abortive history +of English poetry. + +The true pioneers of the mediaeval revival were the Warton brothers. +"The school of Warton" was a term employed, not without disparaging +implications, by critics who had no liking for antique minstrelsy. +Joseph and Thomas Warton were the sons of Thomas Warton, vicar of +Basingstoke, who had been a fellow of Magdalen and Professor of Poetry at +Oxford; which latter position was afterward filled by the younger of his +two sons. It is interesting to note that a volume of verse by Thomas +Warton, Sr., posthumously printed in 1748, includes a Spenserian +imitation and translations of two passages from the "Song of Ragner +Lodbrog," an eleventh-century Viking, after the Latin version quoted by +Sir Wm. Temple in his essay "Of Heroic Virtue";[7] so that the romantic +leanings of the Warton brothers seem to be an instance of heredity. +Joseph was educated at Winchester,--where Collins was his +schoolfellow--and both of the brothers at Oxford. Joseph afterward +became headmaster of Winchester, and lived till 1800, surviving his +younger brother ten years. Thomas was always identified with Oxford, +where he resided for forty-seven years. He was appointed, in 1785, +Camden Professor of History in the university, but gave no lectures. In +the same year he was chosen to succeed Whitehead, as Poet Laureate. Both +brothers were men of a genial, social temper. Joseph was a man of some +elegance; he was fond of the company of young ladies, went into general +society, and had a certain renown as a drawing-room wit and diner-out. +He used to spend his Christmas vacations in London, where he was a member +of Johnson's literary club. Thomas, on the contrary, who waxed fat and +indolent in college cloisters, until Johnson compared him to a turkey +cock, was careless in his personal habits and averse to polite society. +He was the life of a common room at Oxford, romped with the schoolboys +when he visited Dr. Warton at Winchester, and was said to have a +hankering after pipes and ale and the broad mirth of the taproom. Both +Wartons had an odd passion for military parades; and Thomas--who was a +believer in ghosts--used secretly to attend hangings. They were also +remarkably harmonious in their tastes and intellectual pursuits, eager +students of old English poetry, Gothic architecture, and British +antiquities. So far as enthusiasm, fine critical taste, and elegant +scholarship can make men poets, the Wartons were poets. But their work +was quite unoriginal. Many of their poems can be taken to pieces and +assigned, almost line by line and phrase by phrase, to Milton, Thomson, +Spenser, Shakspere, Gray. They had all of our romantic poet Longfellow's +dangerous gifts of sympathy and receptivity, without a tenth part of his +technical skill, or any of his real originality as an artist. Like +Longfellow, they loved the rich and mellow atmosphere of the historic +past: + + "Tales that have the rime of age, + And chronicles of eld." + +The closing lines of Thomas Warton's sonnet "Written in a Blank Leaf of +Dugdale's Monasticon"[8]--a favorite with Charles Lamb--might have been +written by Longfellow: + + "Nor rough nor barren are the winding ways + Of hoar Antiquity, but strewn with flowers." + +Joseph Warton's pretensions, as a poet, are much less than his younger +brother's. Much of Thomas Warton's poetry, such as his _facetiae_ in the +"Oxford Sausage" and his "Triumph of Isis," had an academic flavor. +These we may pass over, as foreign to our present inquiries. So, too, +with most of his annual laureate odes, "On his Majesty's Birthday," etc. +Yet even these official and rather perfunctory performances testify to +his fondness for what Scott calls "the memorials of our forefathers' +piety or splendor." Thus, in the birthday odes for 1787-88, and the New +Year ode for 1787, he pays a tribute to the ancient minstrels and to +early laureates like Chaucer and Spenser, and celebrates "the Druid harp" +sounding "through the gloom profound of forests hoar"; the fanes and +castles built by the Normans; and the + + "--bright hall where Odin's Gothic throne + With the broad blaze of brandished falchions shone." + +But the most purely romantic of Thomas Warton's poems are "The Crusade" +and "The Grave of King Arthur." The former is the song which + + "The lion heart Plantagenet + Sang, looking through his prison-bars," + +when the minstrel Blondel came wandering in search of his captive king. +The latter describes how Henry II., on his way to Ireland, was feasted at +Cilgarran Castle, where the Welsh bards sang to him of the death of +Arthur and his burial in Glastonbury Abbey. The following passage +anticipates Scott: + + "Illumining the vaulted roof, + A thousand torches flamed aloof; + From many cups, with golden gleam, + Sparkled the red metheglin's stream: + To grace the gorgeous festival, + Along the lofty-windowed hall + The storied tapestry was hung; + With minstrelsy the rafters rung + Of harps that with reflected light + From the proud gallery glittered bright: + While gifted bards, a rival throng, + From distant Mona, nurse of song, + From Teivi fringed with umbrage brown, + From Elvy's vale and Cader's crown, + From many a shaggy precipice + That shades Ierne's hoarse abyss, + And many a sunless solitude + Of Radnor's inmost mountains rude, + To crown the banquet's solemn close + Themes of British glory chose." + +Here is much of Scott's skill in the poetic manipulation of place-names, +_e.g._, + + "Day set on Norham's castled steep, + And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep, + And Cheviot's mountains lone"-- + +names which leave a far-resounding romantic rumble behind them. Another +passage in Warton's poem brings us a long way on toward Tennyson's "Wild +Tintagel by the Cornish sea" and his "island valley of Avilion." + + "O'er Cornwall's cliffs the tempest roared: + High the screaming sea-mew soared: + In Tintaggel's topmost tower + Darkness fell the sleety shower: + Round the rough castle shrilly sung + The whirling blast, and wildly flung + On each tall rampart's thundering side + The surges of the tumbling tide, + When Arthur ranged his red-cross ranks + On conscious Camlan's crimsoned banks: + By Mordred's faithless guile decreed + Beneath a Saxon spear to bleed. + Yet in vain a Paynim foe + Armed with fate the mightly blow; + For when he fell, an elfin queen, + All in secret and unseen, + O'er the fainting hero threw + Her mantle of ambrosial blue, + And bade her spirits bear him far, + In Merlin's agate-axled car, + To her green isle's enameled steep + Far in the navel of the deep." + +Other poems of Thomas Warton touching upon his favorite studies are the +"Ode Sent to Mr. Upton, on his Edition of the Faery Queene," the "Monody +Written near Stratford-upon-Avon," the sonnets, "Written at Stonehenge," +"To Mr. Gray," and "On King Arthur's Round Table," and the humorous +epistle which he attributes to Thomas Hearne, the antiquary, denouncing +the bishops for their recent order that fast-prayers should be printed in +modern type instead of black letter, and pronouncing a curse upon the +author of "The Companion to the Oxford Guide Book" for his disrespectful +remarks about antiquaries. + + "May'st thou pore in vain + For dubious doorways! May revengeful moths + Thy ledgers eat! May chronologic spouts + Retain no cipher legible! May crypts + Lurk undiscovered! Nor may'st thou spell the names + Of saints in storied windows, nor the dates + Of bells discover, nor the genuine site + Of abbots' pantries!" + +Warton was a classical scholar and, like most of the forerunners of the +romantic school, was a trifle shame-faced over his Gothic heresies. Sir +Joshua Reynolds had supplied a painted window of classical design for New +College, Oxford; and Warton, in some complimentary verses, professes that +those "portraitures of Attic art" have won him back to the true taste;[9] +and prophesies that henceforth angels, apostles, saints, miracles, +martyrdoms, and tales of legendary lore shall-- + + "No more the sacred window's round disgrace, + But yield to Grecian groups the shining space. . . + Thy powerful hand has broke the Gothic chain, + And brought my bosom back to truth again. . . + For long, enamoured of a barbarous age, + A faithless truant to the classic page-- + Long have I loved to catch the simple chime + Of minstrel harps, and spell the fabling rime; + To view the festive rites, the knightly play, + That decked heroic Albion's elder day; + To mark the mouldering halls of barons bold, + And the rough castle, cast in giant mould; + With Gothic manners, Gothic arts explore, + And muse on the magnificence of yore. + But chief, enraptured have I loved to roam, + A lingering votary, the vaulted dome, + Where the tall shafts, that mount in massy pride, + Their mingling branches shoot from side to side; + Where elfin sculptors, with fantastic clew, + O'er the long roof their wild embroidery drew; + Where Superstition, with capricious hand, + In many a maze, the wreathëd window planned, + With hues romantic tinged the gorgeous pane, + To fill with holy light the wondrous fane."[10] + +The application of the word "romantic," in this passage, to the mediaeval +art of glass-staining is significant. The revival of the art in our own +day is due to the influence of the latest English school of romantic +poetry and painting, and especially to William Morris. Warton's +biographers track his passion for antiquity to the impression left upon +his mind by a visit to Windsor Castle, when he was a boy. He used to +spend his summers in wandering through abbeys and cathedrals. He kept +notes of his observations and is known to have begun a work on Gothic +architecture, no trace of which, however, was found among his +manuscripts. The Bodleian Library was one of his haunts, and he was +frequently seen "surveying with quiet and rapt earnestness the ancient +gateway of Magdalen College." He delighted in illuminated manuscripts +and black-letter folios. In his "Observations on the Faëry Queene"[11] +he introduces a digression of twenty pages on Gothic architecture, and +speaks lovingly of a "very curious and beautiful folio manuscript of the +history of Arthur and his knights in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, +written on vellum, with illuminated initials and head-pieces, in which we +see the fashion of ancient armour, building, manner of tilting and other +particulars." + +Another very characteristic poem of Warton's is the "Ode Written at +Vale-Royal Abbey in Cheshire," a monastery of Cistercian monks, founded +by Edward I. This piece is saturated with romantic feeling and written +in the stanza and manner of Gray's "Elegy," as will appear from a pair of +stanzas, taken at random: + + "By the slow clock, in stately-measured chime, + That from the messy tower tremendous tolled, + No more the plowman counts the tedious time, + Nor distant shepherd pens the twilight fold. + + "High o'er the trackless heath at midnight seen, + No more the windows, ranged in array + (Where the tall shaft and fretted nook between + Thick ivy twines), the tapered rites betray." + +It is a note of Warton's period that, though Fancy and the Muse survey +the ruins of the abbey with pensive regret, "severer Reason"--the real +eighteenth-century divinity--"scans the scene with philosophic ken," +and--being a Protestant--reflects that, after all, the monastic houses +were "Superstition's shrine" and their demolition was a good thing for +Science and Religion. + +The greatest service, however, that Thomas Warton rendered to the studies +that he loved was his "History of English Poetry from the Twelfth to the +Close of the Sixteenth Century." This was in three volumes, published +respectively in 1774, 1777, and 1781. The fragment of a fourth volume +was issued in 1790. A revised edition in four volumes was published in +1824, under the editorship of Richard Price, corrected, augmented, and +annotated by Ritson, Douce, Park, Ashby, and the editor himself. In 1871 +appeared a new revision (also in four volumes) edited by W. Carew +Hazlitt, with many additions, by the editor and by well-known English +scholars like Madden, Skeat, Furnivall, Morris, and Thomas and Aldis +Wright. It should never be forgotten, in estimating the value of +Warton's work, that he was a forerunner in this field. Much of his +learning is out of date, and the modern editors of his history--Price and +Hazlitt--seem to the discouraged reader to be chiefly engaged, in their +footnotes and bracketed interpellations, in taking back statements that +Warton had made in the text. The leading position, _e.g._, of his +preliminary dissertation, "Of the Origin of Romantic Fiction in +Europe"--deriving it from the Spanish Arabs--has long since been +discredited. But Warton's learning was wide, if not exact; and it was +not dry learning, but quickened by the spirit of a genuine man of +letters. Therefore, in spite of its obsoleteness in matters of fact, his +history remains readable, as a body of descriptive criticism, or a +continuous literary essay. The best way to read it is to read it as it +was written--in the original edition--disregarding the apparatus of +notes, which modern scholars have accumulated about it, but remembering +that it is no longer an authority and probably needs correcting on every +page. Read thus, it is a thoroughly delightful book, "a classic in its +way," as Lowell has said. Southey, too, affirmed that its publication +formed an epoch in literary history; and that, with Percy's "Reliques," +it had promoted, beyond any other work, the "growth of a better taste +than had prevailed for the hundred years preceding." + +Gray had schemed a history of English poetry, but relinquished the design +to Warton, to whom he communicated an outline of his own plan. The +"Observations on English Metre" and the essay on the poet Lydgate, among +Gray's prose remains, are apparently portions of this projected work. + +Lowell, furthermore, pronounces Joseph Warton's "Essay on the Genius and +Writings of Pope" (1756) "the earliest public official declaration of war +against the reigning mode." The new school had its critics, as well as +its poets, and the Wartons were more effective in the former capacity. +The war thus opened was by no means as internecine as that waged by the +French classicists and romanticists of 1830. It has never been possible +to get up a very serious conflict in England, upon merely aesthetic +grounds. Yet the same opposition existed. Warton's biographer tells us +that the strictures made upon his essay were "powerful enough to damp the +ardor of the essayist, who left his work in an imperfect state for the +long space of twenty-six years," _i.e._, till 1782, when he published the +second volume. + +Both Wartons were personal friends of Dr. Johnson; they were members of +the Literary Club and contributors to the _Idler_ and the _Adventurer_. +Thomas interested himself to get Johnson the Master's degree from Oxford, +where the doctor made him a visit. Some correspondence between them is +given in Boswell. Johnson maintained in public a respectful attitude +toward the critical and historical work of the Wartons; but he had no +sympathy with their antiquarian enthusiasm or their liking for old +English poetry. In private he ridiculed Thomas' verses, and summed them +up in the manner ensuing: + + "Whereso'er I turn my view, + All is strange yet nothing new; + Endless labor all along, + Endless labor to be wrong; + Phrase that time has flung away, + Uncouth words in disarray, + Tricked in antique ruff and bonnet, + Ode and elegy and sonnet." + +And although he added, "Remember that I love the fellow dearly, for all I +laugh at him," this saving clause failed to soothe the poet's indignant +breast, when he heard that the doctor had ridiculed his lines. An +estrangement resulted which Johnson is said to have spoken of even with +tears, saying "that Tom Warton was the only man of genius he ever knew +who wanted a heart." + +Goldsmith, too, belonged to the conservative party, though Mr. Perry[12] +detects romantic touches in "The Deserted Village," such as the line, + + "Where wild Altama murmurs to their woe," + +or + + "On Torno's cliffs or Pambamarca's side." + +In his "Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning" (1759) +Goldsmith pronounces the age one of literary decay; he deplores the vogue +of blank verse--which he calls an "erroneous innovation"--and the +"disgusting solemnity of manner" that it has brought into fashion. He +complains of the revival of old plays upon the stage. "Old pieces are +revived, and scarcely any new ones admitted. . . The public are again +obliged to ruminate over those ashes of absurdity which were disgusting +to our ancestors even in an age of ignorance. . . What must be done? +Only sit down contented, cry up all that comes before us and advance even +the absurdities of Shakspere. Let the reader suspend his censure; I +admire the beauties of this great father of our stage as much as they +deserve, but could wish, for the honor of our country, and for his own +too, that many of his scenes were forgotten. A man blind of one eye +should always be painted in profile. Let the spectator who assists at +any of these new revived pieces only ask himself whether he would approve +such a performance, if written by a modern poet. I fear he will find +that much of his applause proceeds merely from the sound of a name and an +empty veneration for antiquity. In fact, the revival of those _pieces of +forced humor, far-fetched conceit and unnatural hyperbole which have been +ascribed to Shakspere_, is rather gibbeting than raising a statue to his +memory." + +The words that I have italicized make it evident that what Goldsmith was +really finding fault with was the restoration of the original text of +Shakspere's plays, in place of the garbled versions that had hitherto +been acted. This restoration was largely due to Garrick, but Goldsmith's +language implies that the reform was demanded by public opinion and by +the increasing "veneration for antiquity." The next passage shows that +the new school had its _claque_, which rallied to the support of the old +British drama as the French romanticists did, nearly a century later, to +the support of Victor Hugo's _melodrames_.[13] + +"What strange vamped comedies, farcical tragedies, or what shall I call +them--speaking pantomimes have we not of late seen?. . . The piece +pleases our critics because it talks Old English; and it pleases the +galleries because it has ribaldry. . . A prologue generally precedes the +piece, to inform us that it was composed by Shakspere or old Ben, or +somebody else who took them for his model. A face of iron could not have +the assurance to avow dislike; the theater has its partisans who +understand the force of combinations trained up to vociferation, clapping +of hands and clattering of sticks; and though a man might have strength +sufficient to overcome a lion in single combat, he may run the risk of +being devoured by an army of ants." + +Goldsmith returned to the charge in "The Vicar of Wakefield" (1766), +where Dr. Primrose, inquiring of the two London dames, "who were the +present theatrical writers in vogue, who were the Drydens and Otways of +the day," is surprised to learn that Dryden and Rowe are quite out of +fashion, that taste has gone back a whole century, and that "Fletcher, +Ben Jonson and all the plays of Shakspere are the only things that go +down." "How," cries the good vicar, "is it possible the present age can +be pleased with that antiquated dialect, that obsolete humor, those +overcharged characters which abound in the works you mention?" +Goldsmith's disgust with this affectation finds further vent in his "Life +of Parnell" (1770). "He [Parnell] appears to me to be the last of that +great school that had modeled itself upon the ancients, and taught +English poetry to resemble what the generality of mankind have allowed to +excel. . . His productions bear no resemblance to those tawdry things +which it has, for some time, been the fashion to admire. . . His +poetical language is not less correct than his subjects are pleasing. He +found it at that period in which it was brought to its highest pitch of +refinement; and ever since his time, it has been gradually debasing. It +is, indeed, amazing, after what has been done by Dryden, Addison, and +Pope, to improve and harmonize our native tongue, that their successors +should have taken so much pains to involve it into pristine barbarity. +These misguided innovators have not been content with restoring +antiquated words and phrases, but have indulged themselves in the most +licentious transpositions and the harshest constructions; vainly +imagining that, the more their writings are unlike prose, the more they +resemble poetry. They have adopted a language of their own, and call +upon mankind for admiration. All those who do not understand them are +silent; and those who make out their meaning are willing to praise, to +show they understand." This last sentence is a hit at the alleged +obscurity of Gray's and Mason's odes. + +To illustrate the growth of a retrospective habit in literature Mr. +Perry[14] quotes at length from an essay "On the Prevailing Taste for the +Old English Poets," by Vicesimus Knox, sometimes master of Tunbridge +school, editor of "Elegant Extracts" and honorary doctor of the +University of Pennsylvania. Knox's essays were written while he was an +Oxford undergraduate, and published collectively in 1777. By this time +the romantic movement was in full swing. "The Castle of Otranto" and +Percy's "Reliques" had been out more than ten years; many of the Rowley +poems were in print; and in this very year, Tyrwhitt issued a complete +edition of them, and Warton published the second volume of his "History +of English Poetry." Chatterton and Percy are both mentioned by Knox. + +"The antiquarian spirit," he writes, "which was once confined to +inquiries concerning the manners, the buildings, the records, and the +coins of the ages that preceded us, has now extended itself to those +poetical compositions which were popular among our forefathers, but which +have gradually sunk into oblivion through the decay of language and the +prevalence of a correct and polished taste. Books printed in the black +letter are sought for with the same avidity with which the English +antiquary peruses a monumental inscription, or treasures up a Saxon piece +of money. The popular ballad, composed by some illiterate minstrel, and +which has been handed down by tradition for several centuries, is rescued +from the hands of the vulgar, to obtain a place in the collection of the +man of taste. Verses which, a few years past, were thought worthy the +attention of children only, or of the lowest and rudest orders, are now +admired for that artless simplicity which once obtained the name of +coarseness and vulgarity." Early English poetry, continues the essayist, +"has had its day, and the antiquary must not despise us if we cannot +peruse it with patience. He who delights in all such reading as is never +read, may derive some pleasure from the singularity of his taste, but he +ought still to respect the judgment of mankind, which has consigned to +oblivion the works which he admires. While he pores unmolested on +Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Occleve, let him not censure our obstinacy +in adhering to Homer, Virgil, Milton, and Pope. . . Notwithstanding the +incontrovertible merit of many of our ancient relics of poetry, I believe +it may be doubted whether any one of them would be tolerated as the +production of a modern poet. As a good imitation of the ancient manner, +it would find its admirers; but, considered independently, as an +original, it would be thought a careless, vulgar, inartificial +composition. There are few who do not read Dr. Percy's own pieces, and +those of other late writers, with more pleasure than the oldest ballad in +the collection of that ingenious writer." Mr. Percy quotes another paper +of Knox in which he divides the admirers of English poetry into two +parties: "On one side are the lovers and imitators of Spenser and Milton; +and on the other, those of Dryden, Boileau, and Pope"; in modern phrase, +the romanticists and the classicists. + +Joseph Warton's "Essay on Pope" was an attempt to fix its subject's rank +among English poets. Following the discursive method of Thomas Warton's +"Observations on the Faerie Queen," it was likewise an elaborate +commentary on all of Pope's poems _seriatim_. Every point was +illustrated with abundant learning, and there were digressions amounting +to independent essays on collateral topics: one, _e.g._, on Chaucer, one +on early French Metrical romances; another on Gothic architecture: +another on the new school of landscape gardening, in which Walpole's +essay and Mason's poem are quoted with approval, and mention is made of +the Leasowes. The book was dedicated to Young; and when the second +volume was published in 1782, the first was reissued in a revised form +and introduced by a letter to the author from Tyrwhitt, who writes that, +under the shelter of Warton's authority, "one may perhaps venture to avow +an opinion that poetry is not confined to rhyming couplets, and that its +greatest powers are not displayed in prologues and epilogues." + +The modern reader will be apt to think Warton's estimate of Pope quite +high enough. He places him, to be sure, in the second rank of poets, +below Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton, yet next to Milton and above +Dryden; and he calls the reign of Queen Anne the great age of English +poetry. Yet if it be recollected that the essay was published only +twelve years after Pope's death, and at a time when he was still commonly +held to be, if not the greatest poet, at least the greatest artist in +verse, that England had ever produced, it will be seen that Warton's +opinions might well be thought revolutionary, and his challenge to the +critics a bold one. These opinions can be best exhibited by quoting a +few passages from his book, not consecutive, but taken here and there as +best suits the purpose. + +"The sublime and the pathetic are the two chief nerves of all genuine +poesy. What is there transcendently sublime or pathetic in Pope?. . . +He early left the more poetical provinces of his art, to become a moral, +didactic, and satiric poet. . . And because I am, perhaps, unwilling to +speak out in plain English, I will adopt the following passage of +Voltaire, which, in my opinion, as exactly characteristizes Pope as it +does his model, Boileau, for whom it was originally designed. 'Incapable +peut-être du sublime qui élève l'áme, et du sentiment qui l'attendrit, +mais fait pour éclairer ceux à qui la nature accorda l'un et l'autre; +laborieux, sévère, précis, pur, harmonieux, il devint enfin le poëte de +la Raison.'. . . A clear head and acute understanding are not sufficient +alone to make a poet; the most solid observations on human life, +expressed with the utmost elegance and brevity, are morality and not +poetry. . . It is a creative and glowing imagination, _acer spiritus ac +vis_, and that alone, that can stamp a writer with this exalted and very +uncommon character." + +Warton believes that Pope's projected epic on Brutus, the legendary found +of Britain, "would have more resembled the 'Henriade' than the 'Iliad,' +or even the 'Gierusalemme Liberata'; that it would have appeared (if this +scheme had been executed) how much, and for what reasons, the man that is +skillful in painting modern life, and the most secret foibles and follies +of his contemporaries, is, THEREFORE, disqualified for representing the +ages of heroism, and that simple life which alone epic poetry can +gracefully describe. . . Wit and satire are transitory and perishable, +but nature and passion are eternal." The largest portion of Pope's work, +says the author's closing summary, "is of the didactic, moral, and +satiric kind; and consequently not of the most poetic species of poetry; +when it is manifest that good sense and judgment were his +characteristical excellencies, rather than fancy and invention. . . He +stuck to describing modern manners; but those manners, because they are +familiar, uniform, artificial, and polished, are in their very nature, +unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse. He gradually became one of the +most correct, even, and exact poets that ever wrote. . . Whatever +poetical enthusiasm he actually possessed, he withheld and stifled. The +perusal of him affects not our minds with such strong emotions as we feel +from Homer and Milton; so that no man of a true poetical spirit is master +of himself while he reads them. . . He who would think the 'Faerie +Queene,' 'Palamon and Arcite,' the 'Tempest' or 'Comus,' childish and +romantic might relish Pope. Surely it is no narrow and niggardly +encomium to say, he is the great poet of Reason, the first of ethical +authors in verse." + +To illustrate Pope's inferiority in the poetry of nature and passion, +Warton quotes freely by way of contrast, not only from Spenser and +Milton, but from such contemporaries of his own as Thomson, Akenside, +Gray, Collins, Dyer, Mason, West, Shenstone, and Bedingfield. He +complains that Pope's "Pastorals" contains no new image of nature, and +his "Windsor Forest" no local color; while "the scenes of Thomson are +frequently as wild and romantic as those of Salvator Rosa, varied with +precipices and torrents and 'castled cliffs' and deep valleys, with piny +mountains and the gloomiest caverns." "When Gray published his exquisite +ode on Eton College . . . little notice was taken of it; but I suppose no +critic can be found that will not place it far above Pope's 'Pastorals.'" + +A few additional passages will serve to show that this critic's literary +principles, in general, were consciously and polemically romantic. Thus +he pleads for the _mot précis_--that shibboleth of the nineteenth-century +romanticists--for "_natural, little_ circumstances" against "those who +are fond of _generalities_"; for the "lively painting of Spenser and +Shakspere," as contrasted with the lack of picturesqueness and imagery in +Voltaire's "Henriade." He praises "the fashion that has lately obtained, +in all the nations of Europe, of republishing and illustrating their old +poets."[15] Again, commenting upon Pope's well-known triplet, + + "Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join + The varying verse, the full-resounding line, + The long majestic march and energy divine!" + +he exclaims: "What! Did Milton contribute nothing to the harmony and +extent of our language?. . . Surely his verses vary and resound as much, +and display as much majesty and energy, as any that can be found in +Dryden. And we will venture to say that he that studies Milton +attentively, will gain a truer taste for genuine poetry than he that +forms himself on French writers and their followers." Elsewhere he +expresses a preference for blank verse over rhyme, in long poems on +subjects of a dignified kind.[16] + +"It is perpetually the nauseous cant of the French critics, and of their +advocates and pupils, that the English writers are generally incorrect. +If correctness implies an absence of petty faults, this perhaps may be +granted; if it means that, because their tragedians have avoided the +irregularities of Shakspere, and have observed a juster economy in their +fables, therefore the 'Athalia,' for instance, is preferable to 'Lear,' +the notion is groundless and absurd. Though the 'Henriade' should be +allowed to be free from any very gross absurdities, yet who will dare to +rank it with the 'Paradise Lost'?. . . In our own country the rules of +the drama were never more completely understood than at present; yet what +uninteresting, though faultless, tragedies have we lately seen!. . . +Whether or no the natural powers be not confined and debilitated by that +timidity and caution which is occasioned by a rigid regard to the +dictates of art; or whether that philosophical, that geometrical and +systematical spirit so much in vogue, which has spread itself from the +sciences even into polite literature, by consulting only reason, has not +diminished and destroyed sentiment, and made our poets write from and to +the head rather than the heart; or whether, lastly, when just models, +from which the rules have necessarily been drawn, have once appeared, +succeeding writers, by vainly and ambitiously striving to surpass +those . . . do not become stiff and forced." One of these uninteresting, +though faultless tragedies was "Cato," which Warton pronounces a +"sententious and declamatory drama" filled with "pompous Roman +sentiments," but wanting action and pathos. He censures the tameness of +Addison's "Letter from Italy."[17] "With what flatness and unfeelingness +has he spoken of statuary and painting! Raphael never received a more +phlegmatic eulogy." He refers on the other hand to Gray's account of his +journey to the Grande Chartreuse,[18] as worthy of comparison with one of +the finest passages in the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard." + +This mention of Addison recalls a very instructive letter of Gray on the +subject of poetic style.[19] The romanticists loved a rich diction, and +the passage might be taken as an anticipatory defense of himself against +Wordsworth's strictures in the preface to the "Lyrical Ballads." "The +language of the age," wrote Gray, "is never the language of poetry, +except among the French, whose verse . . . differs in nothing from prose. +Our poetry has a language peculiar to itself; to which almost everyone +that has written has added something, by enriching it with foreign idioms +and derivatives; nay, sometimes words of their own composition or +invention. Shakspere and Milton have been great creators in this +way . . . our language has an undoubted right to words of an hundred +years old, provided antiquity have not rendered them unintelligible. In +truth Shakspere's language is one of his principal beauties; and he has +no less advantage over your Addisons and Rowes in this, than in those +other great excellencies you mention. Every word in him is a picture." +He then quotes a passage from "Richard III.," and continues, "Pray put me +the following lines into the tongue of our modern dramatics. To me they +appear untranslatable, and if this be the case, our language is greatly +degenerated." + +Warton further protests against the view which ascribed the introduction +of true taste in literature to the French. "Shakspere and Milton +imitated the Italians and not the French." He recommends also the +reintroduction of the preternatural into poetry. There are some, he +says, who think that poetry has suffered by becoming too rational, +deserting fairyland, and laying aside "descriptions of magic and +enchantment," and he quotes, _à propos_ of this the famous stanza about +the Hebrides in "The Castle of Indolence."[20] The false refinement of +the French has made them incapable of enjoying "the terrible graces of +our irregular Shakspere, especially in his scenes of magic and +incantations. These _Gothic_ charms are in truth more striking to the +imagination than the classical. The magicians of Ariosto, Tasso, and +Spenser have more powerful spells than those of Apollonius, Seneca, and +Lucan. The enchanted forest of Ismeni is more awfully and tremendously +poetical than even the grove which Caesar orders to be cut down in Lucan +(i. iii. 400), which was so full of terrors that, at noonday or midnight, +the priest himself dared not approach it-- + + "'Dreading the demon of the grove to meet.' + +"Who that sees the sable plumes waving on the prodigious helmet in the +Castle of Otranto, and the gigantic arm on the top of the great +staircase, is not more affected than with the paintings of Ovid and +Apuleius? What a group of dreadful images do we meet with in the Edda! +The Runic poetry abounds in them. Such is Gray's thrilling Ode on the +'Descent of Odin.'" + +Warton predicts that Pope's fame as a poet will ultimately rest on his +"Windsor Forest," his "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard," and "The Rape of +the Lock." To this prophecy time has already, in part, given the lie. +Warton preferred "Windsor Forest" and "Eloisa" to the "Moral Essays" +because they belonged to a higher kind of poetry. Posterity likes the +"Moral Essays" better because they are better of their kind. They were +the natural fruit of Pope's genius and of his time, while the others were +artificial. We can go to Wordsworth for nature, to Byron for passion, +and to a score of poets for both, but Pope remains unrivaled in his +peculiar field. In other words, we value what is characteristic in the +artist; the one thing which he does best, the precise thing which he can +do and no one else can. But Warton's mistake is significant of the +changing literary standards of his age; and his essay is one proof out of +many that the English romantic movement was not entirely without +self-conscious aims, but had its critical formulas and its programme, +just as Queen Anne classicism had. + + +[1] Dr. Johnson had his laugh at this popular person: + + "'Hermit hoar, in solemn cell + Wearing out life's evening gray, + Strike thy bosom, sage, and tell + What is bliss, and which the way?' + + "Thus I spoke, and speaking sighed, + Scarce suppressed the starting tear: + When the hoary sage replied, + '_Come, my lad, and drink some beer._'" + +[2] "Grose's Antiquities of Scotland" was published in 1791, and Burns +wrote "Tam o'Shanter" to accompany the picture of Kirk Alloway in this +work. See his poem, "On the late Captain Grose's Peregrinations through +Scotland." + +[3] "Ragnarök," or "Götterdämmerung," the twilight of the Gods + +[4] For a full discussion of Gray's sources and of his knowledge of Old +Norse, the reader should consult the appendix by Professor G. L. +Kittredge to Professor W. L. Phelps' "Selections from Gray" (1894, pp. +xl-1.) Professor Kittredge concludes that Gray had but a slight +knowledge of Norse, that he followed the Latin of Bartholin in his +renderings; and that he probably also made use of such authorities as +Torfaeus' "Orcades" (1697), Ole Worm's "Literatura Runica" (Copenhagen, +1636), Dr. George Hickes' monumental "Thesaurus" (Oxford, 1705), and +Robert Sheringham's "De Anglorum Gentis Origine Disceptatio" (1716). +Dryden's "Miscellany Poems" (1716) has a verse translation, "The Waking +of Angantyr," from the English prose of Hickes, of a portion of the +"Hervarar Saga." Professor Kittredge refers to Sir William Temple's +essays "Of Poetry" and "Of Heroic Virtue." "Nichols' Anecdotes" (I. 116) +mentions, as published in 1715, "The Rudiments of Grammar for the English +Saxon Tongue; with an Apology for the study of Northern Antiquities." +This was by Mrs. Elizabeth Elstob, and was addressed to Hickes, the +compiler of the "Thesaurus." + +[5] "Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards, translated +into English," by Rev. Evan Evans, 1764. The specimens were ten in +number. The translations were in English prose. The originals were +printed from a copy which Davies, the author of the Welsh dictionary, had +made of an ancient vellum MS. thought to be of the time of Edward II, +Edward III, and Henry V. The book included a Latin "Dissertatio de +Bardis," together with notes, appendices, etc. The preface makes mention +of Macpherson's recently published Ossianic poems. + +[6] "Life of Gray." + +[7] See Phelps' "English Romantic Movement," pp. 73, 141-42. + +[8] Wm Dugdale published his "Monasticon Anglicanum," a history of English +religious houses, in three parts, in 1655-62-73. It was accompanied with +illustrations of the costumes worn by the ancient religious orders, and +with architectural views. The latter, says Eastlake, were rude and +unsatisfactory, but interesting to modern students, as "preserving +representations of buildings, or portions of buildings, no longer in +existence; as, for instance, the _campanile_, or detached belfry of +Salisbury, since removed, and the spire of Lincoln, destroyed in 1547." + +[9] "Verses on Sir Joshua Reynolds' Painted Window." _Cf._ Poe, "To +Helen": + + "On desperate seas long wont to roam + Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, + Thy Naiad airs have brought me home + To the glory that was Greece, + And the grandeur that was Rome." + +[10] This apology should be compared with Scott's verse epistle to Wm +Ereskine, prefixed to the third canto of "Marmion." + + "For me, thus nurtured, dost thou ask + The classic poet's well-conned task?" etc. + +Scott spoke of himself in Warton's exact language, as a "truant to the +classic page." + +[11] See _ante_, pp. 99-101_._ + +[12] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 397. + +[13] Lowell mentions the publication of Dodsley's "Old Plays," (1744) as, +like Percy's "Reliques," a symptom of the return of the past. Essay on +"Gray." + +[14] "Eighteenth Century Literature," pp. 401-03. + +[15] It is curious, however, to find Warton describing Villon as "a pert +and insipid ballad-monger, whose thoughts and diction were as low and +illiberal as his life," Vol. II. p. 338 (Fifth Edition, 1806). + +[16] Warton quotes the follow bathetic opening of a "Poem in Praise of +Blank Verse" by Aaron Hill, "one of the very first persons who took +notice of Thomson, on the publication of 'Winter'": + + "Up from Rhyme's poppied vale! And ride the storm + That thunders in blank verse!" + --Vol. II. p. 186. + +[17] See _ante_, p. 57. + +[18] See _ante_, p. 181. + +[19] To Richard West, April, 1742. + +[20] See _ante_, p. 94. + + + + +CHAPTER VII. + +The Gothic Revival. + +One of Thomas Warton's sonnets was addressed to Richard Hurd, afterward +Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, and later of Worcester. Hurd was a +friend of Gray and Mason, and his "Letters on Chivalry and Romance" +(1762) helped to initiate the romantic movement. They perhaps owed their +inspiration, in part, to Sainte Palaye's "Mémoires sur l'ancienne +Chevalerie," the first volume of which was issued in 1759, though the +third and concluding volume appeared only in 1781. This was a monumental +work and, as a standard authority, bears much the same relation to the +literature of its subject that Mallet's "Histoire de Dannemarc" bears to +all the writing on Runic mythology that was done in Europe during the +eighteenth-century. Jean Baptiste de la Curne de Sainte Palaye was a +scholar of wide learning, not only in the history of mediaeval +institutions but in old French dialects. He went to the south of France +to familiarize himself with Provençal: collected a large library of +Provençal books and manuscripts, and published in 1774 his "Histoire de +Troubadours." Among his other works are a "Dictionary of French +Antiquities," a glossary of Old French, and an edition of "Aucassin et +Nicolete." Mrs. Susannah Dobson, who wrote "Historical Anecdotes of +Heraldry and Chivalry" (1795), made an English translation of Sainte +Palaye's "History of the Troubadours" in 1779, and of his "Memoirs of +Ancient Chivalry" in 1784. + +The purpose of Hurd's letters was to prove "the pre-eminence of the +Gothic manners and fictions, as adapted to the ends of poetry, above the +classic." "The greatest geniuses of our own and foreign countries," he +affirms, "such as Ariosto and Tasso in Italy, and Spenser and Milton in +England, were seduced by these barbarities of their forefathers; were +even charmed by the Gothic romances. Was this caprice and absurdity in +them? Or may there not be something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly +suited to the view of a genius and to the ends of poetry? And may not +the philosophic moderns have gone too far in their perpetual ridicule and +contempt of it?" After a preliminary discussion of the origin of +chivalry and knight-errantry and of the ideal knightly characteristics, +"Prowess, Generosity, Gallantry, and Religion," which he derives from the +military necessities of the feudal system, he proceeds to establish a +"remarkable correspondency between the manners of the old heroic times, +as painted by their romancer, Homer, and those which are represented to +us in the books of modern knight-errantry." He compares, _e.g._, the +Laestrygonians, Cyclopes_, _Circes, and Calypsos of Homer, with the +giants, paynims, sorceresses encountered by the champions of romance; the +Greek aoixoi with the minstrels; the Olympian games with tournaments; and +the exploits of Hercules and Theseus, in quelling dragons and other +monsters, with the similar enterprises of Lancelot and Amadis de Gaul. +The critic is daring enough to give the Gothic manners the preference +over the heroic. Homer, he says, if he could have known both, would have +chosen the former by reason of "the improved gallantry of the feudal +times, and the superior solemnity of their superstitions. The gallantry +which inspirited the feudal times was of a nature to furnish the poet +with finer scenes and subjects of description, in every view, than the +simple and uncontrolled barbarity of the Grecian. . . There was a +dignity, a magnificence, a variety in the feudal, which the other wanted." + +An equal advantage, thinks Hurd, the romancers enjoyed over the pagan +poets in the point of supernatural machinery. "For the more solemn +fancies of witchcraft and incantation, the horrors of the Gothic were +above measure striking and terrible. The mummeries of the pagan priests +were childish, but the Gothic enchanters shook and alarmed all +nature. . . You would not compare the Canidia of Horace with the witches +in 'Macbeth.' And what are Virgil's myrtles, dropping blood, to Tasso's +enchanted forest?. . . The fancies of our modern bards are not only more +gallant, but . . . more sublime, more terrible, more alarming than those +of the classic fables. In a word, you will find that the manners they +paint, and the superstitions they adopt, are the more poetical for being +Gothic." + +Evidently the despised "Gothick" of Addison--as Mr. Howells puts it--was +fast becoming the admired "Gothic" of Scott. This pronunciamento of very +advanced romantic doctrine came out several years before Percy's +"Reliques" and "The Castle of Otranto." It was only a few years later +than Thomas Warton's "Observations on the Faërie Queene" and Joseph's +"Essay on Pope," but its views were much more radical. Neither of the +Wartons would have ventured to pronounce the Gothic manners superior to +the Homeric, as materials for poetry, whatever, in his secret heart, he +might have thought.[1] To Johnson such an opinion must have seemed flat +blasphemy. Hurd accounts for the contempt into which the Gothic had +fallen on the ground that the feudal ages had never had the good fortune +to possess a great poet, like Homer, capable of giving adequate artistic +expression to their life and ideals. _Carent vate sacro_. Spenser and +Tasso, he thinks, "came too late, and it was impossible for them to paint +truly and perfectly what was no longer seen or believed. . . As it is, +we may take a guess of what the subject was capable of affording to real +genius from the rude sketches we have of it in the old romancers. . . +The ablest writers of Greece ennobled the system of heroic manners, while +it was fresh and flourishing; and their works being masterpieces of +composition, so fixed the credit of it in the opinion of the world, that +no revolution of time and taste could afterward shake it. Whereas the +Gothic, having been disgraced in their infancy by bad writers, and a new +set of manners springing up before there were any better to do them +justice, they could never be brought into vogue by the attempts of later +poets." Moreover, "the Gothic manners of chivalry, as springing out of +the feudal system, were as singular as that system itself; so that when +that political constitution vanished out of Europe, the manners that +belonged to it were no longer seen or understood. There was no example +of any such manners remaining on the face of the earth. And as they +never did subsist but once, and are never likely to subsist again, people +would be led of course to think and speak of them as romantic and +unnatural." + +Even so, he thinks that the Renaissance poets, Ariosto and Spenser, owe +their finest effects not to their tinge of classical culture but to their +romantic materials. Shakspere "is greater when he uses Gothic manners +and machinery, than when he employs classical." Tasso, to be sure, tried +to trim between the two, by giving an epic form to his romantic +subject-matter, but Hurd pronounces his imitations of the ancients "faint +and cold and almost insipid, when compared with his original +fictions. . . If it was not for these _lies_ [_magnanima mensogna_] of +Gothic invention, I should scarcely be disposed to give the 'Gierusalemme +Liberata' a second reading." Nay, Milton himself, though finally +choosing the classic model, did so only after long hesitation. "His +favorite subject was Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. On this +he had fixed for the greater part of his life. What led him to change +his mind was partly, as I suppose, his growing fanaticism; partly his +ambition to take a different route from Spenser; but chiefly, perhaps, +the discredit into which the stories of chivalry had now fallen by the +immortal satire of Cervantes. Yet we see through all his poetry, where +his enthusiasm flames out most, a certain predilection for the legends of +chivalry before the fables of Greece." Hurd says that, if the "Faërie +Queene" be regarded as a Gothic poem, it will be seen to have unity of +design, a merit which even the Wartons had denied it. "When an architect +examines a Gothic structure by the Grecian rules he finds nothing but +deformity. But the Gothic architecture has its own rules by which; when +it comes to be examined, it is seen to have its merit, as well as the +Grecian." + +The essayist complains that the Gothic fables fell into contempt through +the influence of French critics who ridiculed and disparaged the Italian +romancers, Ariosto and Tasso. The English critics of the +Restoration--Davenant, Hobbes, Shaftesbury--took their cue from the +French, till these pseudo-classical principles "grew into a sort of a +cant, with which Rymer and the rest of that school filled their flimsy +essays and rumbling prefaces. . . The exact but cold Boileau happened to +say something about the _clinquant_ of Tasso," and "Mr. Addison,[2] who +gave the law in taste here, took it up and sent it about," so that "it +became a sort of watchword among the critics." "What we have gotten," +concludes the final letter of the series, "by this revolution, is a great +deal of good sense. What we have lost is a world of fine fabling, the +illusion of which is so grateful to the _charméd spirit_ that, in spite +of philosophy and fashion 'Faery' Spenser still ranks highest among the +poets; I mean with all those who are earlier come of that house, or have +any kindness for it." + +We have seen that, during the classical period, "Gothic," as a term in +literary criticism, was synonymous with barbarous, lawless, and tawdry. +Addison instructs his public that "the taste of most of our English +poets, as well as readers, is extremely Gothic."[3] After commending the +French critics, Bouhours and Boileau, for their insistence upon good +sense, justness of thought, simplicity, and naturalness he goes on as +follows: "Poets who want this strength of genius, to give that majestic +simplicity to nature which we so much admire in the works of the +ancients, are forced to hunt after foreign ornaments, and not to let any +piece of wit, of what kind soever, escape them. I look upon these +writers as Goths in poetry, who, like those in architecture, not being +able to come up to the beautiful simplicity of the old Greeks and Romans, +have endeavored to supply its place with all the extravagances of an +irregular fancy." In the following paper (No. 63), an "allegorical +vision of the encounter of True and False Wit," he discovers, "in a very +dark grove, a monstrous fabric, built after the Gothic manner and covered +with innumerable devices in that barbarous kind of sculpture." This +temple is consecrated to the God of Dullness, who is "dressed in the +habit of a monk." In his essay "On Taste" (No. 409) he says, "I have +endeavored, in several of my speculations, to banish this Gothic taste +which has taken possession among us." + +The particular literary vice which Addison strove to correct in these +papers was that conceited style which infected a certain school of +seventeenth-century poetry, running sometimes into such puerilities as +anagrams, acrostics, echo-songs, rebuses, and verses in the shape of +eggs, wings, hour-glasses, etc. He names, as special representatives of +this affectation, Herbert, Cowley, and Sylvester. But it is significant +that Addison should have described this fashion as Gothic. It has in +reality nothing in common with the sincere and loving art of the old +builders. He might just as well have called it classic; for, as he +acknowledges, devices of the kind are to be found in the Greek anthology, +and Ovid was a poet given to conceits. Addison was a writer of pure +taste, but the coldness and timidity of his imagination, and the maxims +of the critical school to which he belonged, made him mistake for +spurious decoration the efflorescence of that warm, creative fancy which +ran riot in Gothic art. The grotesque, which was one expression of this +sappy vigor, was abhorrent to Addison. The art and poetry of his time +were tame, where Gothic art was wild; dead where Gothic was alive. He +could not sympathize with it, nor understand it. "Vous ne pouvez pas le +comprendre; vous avez toujours haï la vie." + +I have quoted Vicesimus Knox's complaint that the antiquarian spirit was +spreading from architecture and numismatics into literature.[4] We meet +with satire upon antiquaries many years before this; in Pope, in +Akenside's Spenserian poem "The Virtuoso" (1737); in Richard Owen +Cambridge's "Scribleriad" (1751): + + "See how her sons with generous ardor strive, + Bid every long-lost Gothic art revive,. . . + Each Celtic character explain, or show + How Britons ate a thousand years ago; + On laws of jousts and tournaments declaim, + Or shine, the rivals of the herald's fame. + But chief that Saxon wisdom be your care, + Preserve their idols and their fanes repair; + And may their deep mythology be shown + By Seater's wheel and Thor's tremendous throne."[5] + +The most notable instance that we encounter of virtuosity invading the +neighboring realm of literature is in the case of Strawberry Hill and +"The Castle of Otranto." Horace Walpole, the son of the great prime +minister, Robert Walpole, was a person of varied accomplishments and +undoubted cleverness. He was a man of fashion, a man of taste, and a man +of letters; though, in the first of these characters, he entertained or +affected a contempt for the last, not uncommon in dilettante authors and +dandy artists, who belong to the _beau monde_ or are otherwise socially +of high place, _teste_ Congreve, and even Byron, that "rhyming peer." +Walpole, as we have seen, had been an Eton friend of Gray and had +traveled--and quarreled--with him upon the Continent. Returning home, he +got a seat in Parliament, the entrée at court, and various lucrative +sinecures through his father's influence. He was an assiduous courtier, +a keen and spiteful observer, a busy gossip and retailer of social +tattle. His feminine turn of mind made him a capital letter-writer; and +his correspondence, particularly with Sir Horace Mann, English ambassador +at Florence, is a running history of backstairs diplomacy, court +intrigue, subterranean politics, and fashionable scandal during the +reigns of the second and third Georges. He also figures as an historian +of an amateurish sort, by virtue of his "Catalogue of Royal and Noble +Authors," "Anecdotes of Painting," and "Historic Doubts on Richard III." +Our present concern with him, however, lies quite outside of these. + +It was about 1750 that Walpole, who had bought a villa at Strawberry +Hill, on the Thames near Windsor, which had formerly belonged to Mrs. +Chenevix, the fashionable London toy-woman, began to turn his house into +a miniature Gothic castle, in which he is said to have "outlived three +sets of his own battlements." These architectural experiments went on +for some twenty years. They excited great interest and attracted many +visitors, and Walpole may be regarded as having given a real impetus to +the revival of pointed architecture. He spoke of Strawberry Hill as a +castle, but it was, in fact, an odd blend of ecclesiastical and +castellated Gothic applied to domestic uses. He had a cloister, a +chapel, a round tower, a gallery, a "refectory," a stair-turret with +Gothic balustrade, stained windows, mural scutcheons, and Gothic +paper-hangings. Walpole's mock-gothic became something of a +laughing-stock, after the true principles of medieval architecture were +better understood. Since the time when Inigo Jones, court architect to +James I., came back from Italy, where he had studied the works of +Palladio; and especially since the time when his successor, Sir +Christopher Wren, had rebuilt St. Paul's in the Italian Renaissance +style, after the great fire of London in 1664, Gothic had fallen more and +more into disuse. "If in the history of British art," says Eastlake, +"there is one period more distinguished than another for the neglect of +Gothic, it was certainly the middle of the eighteenth century." But +architecture had this advantage over other arts, it had left memorials +more obvious and imposing. Medieval literature was known only to the +curious, to collectors of manuscript romances and black-letter ballads. +The study of medieval arts like tempera painting, illuminating, +glass-staining, wood-carving, tapestry embroidery; of the science of +blazonry, of the details of ancient armor and costumes, was the pursuit +of specialists. But Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, Salisbury +Cathedral, and York Minster, ruins such as Melrose and Fountain Abbeys, +Crichton Castle, and a hundred others were impressive witnesses for the +civilization that had built them and must, sooner or later, demand +respectful attention. Hence it is not strange that the Gothic revival +went hand in hand with the romantic movement in literature, if indeed it +did not give it its original impulse. + +"It is impossible," says Eastlake,[6] speaking of Walpole, "to peruse +either the letters or the romances of this remarkable man, without being +struck by the unmistakable evidence which they contain of his medieval +predilections. His 'Castle of Otranto' was perhaps the first modern work +of fiction which depended for its interest on the incidents of a +chivalrous age, and it thus became the prototype of that class of novel +which was afterward imitated by Mrs. Radcliffe and perfected by Sir +Walter Scott. The feudal tyrant, the venerable ecclesiastic, the forlorn +but virtuous damsel, the castle itself with its moats and drawbridge, its +gloomy dungeons and solemn corridors, are all derived from a mine of +interest which has since been worked more efficiently and to better +profit. But to Walpole must be awarded the credit of its discovery and +first employment." + +Walpole's complete works[7] contain elaborate illustrations and ground +plans of Strawberry Hill. Eastlake give a somewhat technical account of +its constructive features, its gables, buttresses, finials, lath and +plaster parapets, wooden pinnacles and, what its proprietor himself +describes as his "lean windows fattened with rich saints." From this I +extract only the description of the interior, which was "just what one +might expect from a man who possessed a vague admiration for Gothic +without the knowledge necessary for a proper adaptation of its features. +Ceilings, screens, niches, etc., are all copied, or rather parodied, from +existing examples, but with utter disregard for the original purpose of +the design. To Lord Orford, Gothic was Gothic, and that sufficed. He +would have turned an altar-slab into a hall-table, or made a cupboard of +a piscine, with the greatest complacency, if it only served his purpose. +Thus we find that in the north bed-chamber, when he wanted a model for +his chimney-piece, he thought he could not do better than adopt the form +of Bishop Dudley's tomb in Westminster Abbey. He found a pattern for the +piers of his garden gate in the choir of Ely Cathedral." The ceiling of +the gallery borrowed a design from Henry VII.'s Chapel; the entrance to +the same apartment from the north door of St. Alban's; and one side of +the room from Archbishop Bourchier's tomb at Canterbury. Eastlake's +conclusion is that Walpole's Gothic, "though far from reflecting the +beauties of a former age, or anticipating those which were destined to +proceed from a re-development of the style, still holds a position in the +history of English art which commands our respect, for it served to +sustain a cause which had otherwise been well-nigh forsaken." + +James Fergusson, in his "History of the Modern Styles of Architecture," +says of Walpole's structures: "We now know that these are very +indifferent specimens of the true Gothic art, and are at a loss to +understand how either their author or his contemporaries could ever fancy +that these very queer carvings were actual reproductions of the details +of York Minster, or other equally celebrated buildings, from which they +were supposed to have been copied." Fergusson adds that the fashion set +by Walpole soon found many followers both in church and house +architecture, "and it is surprising what a number of castles were built +which had nothing castellated about them except a nicked parapet and an +occasional window in the form of a cross." That school of bastard Gothic +illustrated by the buildings of Batty Langley, and other early restorers +of the style, bears an analogy with the imitations of old English poetry +in the last century. There was the same prematurity in both, the same +defective knowledge, crudity, uncertainty, incorrectness, feebleness of +invention, mixture of ancient and modern manners. It was not until the +time of Pugin[8] that the details of the medieval building art were well +enough understood to enable the architect to work in the spirit of that +art, yet not as a servile copyist, but with freedom and originality. +Meanwhile, one service that Walpole and his followers did, by reviving +public interest in Gothic, was to arrest the process of dilapidation and +save the crumbling remains of many a half-ruinous abbey, castle, or +baronial hall. Thus, "when about a hundred years since, Rhyddlan Castle, +in North Wales, fell into the possession of Dr. Shipley, Dean of St. +Asaph, the massive walls had been prescriptively used as stone quarries, +to which any neighboring occupier who wanted building materials might +resort; and they are honey-combed all round as high as a pick-ax could +reach."[9] "Walpole," writes Leslie Stephen, "is almost the first modern +Englishman who found out that our old cathedrals were really beautiful. +He discovered that a most charming toy might be made of medievalism. +Strawberry Hill, with all its gimcracks, its pasteboard battlements and +stained-paper carvings, was the lineal ancestor of the new law-courts. +The restorers of churches, the manufacturers of stained glass, the modern +decorators and architects of all varieties, the Ritualists and the High +Church party, should think of him with kindness. . . That he was quite +conscious of the necessity for more serious study, appears in his +letters; in one of which, _e.g._, he proposes a systematic history of +Gothic architecture such as has since been often executed."[10] Mr. +Stephen adds that Walpole's friend Gray "shared his Gothic tastes, with +greatly superior knowledge." + +Walpole did not arrive at his Gothicism by the gate of literature. It +was merely a specialized development of his tastes as a virtuoso and +collector. The museum of curiosities which he got together at Strawberry +Hill included not only suits of armor, stained glass, and illuminated +missals, but a miscellaneous treasure of china ware, enamels, faïence, +bronzes, paintings, engravings, books, coins, bric-a-brac, and +memorabilia such as Cardinal Wolsey's hat, Queen Elizabeth's glove, and +the spur that William III. wore at the Battle of the Boyne. Walpole's +romanticism was a thin veneering; underneath it, he was a man of the +eighteenth century. His opinions on all subjects were, if not +inconsistent, at any rate notoriously whimsical and ill-assorted. Thus +in spite of his admiration for Gray and his--temporary--interest in +Ossian, Chatterton, and Percy's ballads, he ridiculed Mallet's and Gray's +Runic experiments, spoke contemptuously of Spenser, Thomson, and +Akenside, compared Dante to "a Methodist parson in bedlam," and +pronounced "A Midsummer Night's Dream" "forty times more nonsensical than +the worst translation of any Italian opera-books."[11] He said that +poetry died with Pope, whose measure and manner he employed in his own +verses. It has been observed that, in all his correspondence, he makes +but a single mention of Froissart's "Chronicle," and that a sneer at Lady +Pomfret for translating it. + +Accordingly we find, on turning to "The Castle of Otranto," that, just as +Walpole's Gothicism was an accidental "sport" from his general +virtuosity; so his romanticism was a casual outgrowth of his +architectural amusements. Strawberry Hill begat "The Castle of Otranto," +whose title is fitly chosen, since it is the castle itself that is the +hero of the book. The human characters are naught. "Shall I even +confess to you," he writes to the Rev. William Cole (March 9, 1765), +"what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning in the +beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, +that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for +a head filled, like mine, with Gothic story), and that, on the uppermost +banister of a great staircase, I saw a gigantic hand in armor. In the +evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what +I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands. . . In short, I +was so engrossed with my tale, which I completed in less than two months, +that one evening I wrote from the time I had drunk my tea, about six +o'clock, till half an hour after one in the morning." + +"The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story," was published in 1765.[12] +According to the title page, it was translated from the original Italian +of Onuphrio Muralto--a sort of half-pun on the author's surname--by W. +Marshall, Gent. This mystification was kept up in the preface, which +pretended that the book had been printed at Naples in black-letter in +1529, and was found in the library of an old Catholic family in the north +of England. In the preface to his second edition Walpole described the +work as "an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and +the modern": declared that, in introducing humorous dialogues among the +servants of the castle, he had taken nature and Shakspere for his models; +and fell foul of Voltaire for censuring the mixture of buffoonery and +solemnity in Shakspere's tragedies. Walpole's claim to having created a +new species of romance has been generally allowed. "His initiative in +literature," says Mr. Stephen, "has been as fruitful as his initiative in +art. 'The Castle of Otranto,' and the 'Mysterious Mother,' were the +progenitors of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances, and probably had a strong +influence upon the author of 'Ivanhoe.' Frowning castles and gloomy +monasteries, knights in armor and ladies in distress, and monks, and +nuns, and hermits; all the scenery and characters that have peopled the +imagination of the romantic school, may be said to have had their origin +on the night when Walpole lay down to sleep, his head crammed full of +Wardour Street curiosities, and dreamed that he saw a gigantic hand in +armor resting on the banisters of his staircase." + +It is impossible at this day to take "The Castle of Otranto" seriously, +and hard to explain the respect with which it was once mentioned by +writers of authority. Warburton called it "a master-piece in the Fable, +and a new species likewise. . . The scene is laid in Gothic chivalry; +where a beautiful imagination, supported by strength of judgment, has +enabled the reader to go beyond his subject and effect the full purpose +of the ancient tragedy; _i.e._, to purge the passions by pity and terror, +in coloring as great and harmonious as in any of the best dramatic +writers." Byron called Walpole the author of the last tragedy[13] and +the first romance in the language. Scott wrote of "The Castle of +Otranto": "This romance has been justly considered, not only as the +original and model of a peculiar species of composition attempted and +successfully executed by a man of great genius, but as one of the +standard works of our lighter literature." Gray in a letter to Walpole +(December 30, 1764), acknowledging the receipt of his copy, says: "It +makes some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o' +nights." Walpole's masterpiece can no longer make anyone cry even a +little; and instead of keeping us out of bed, it sends us there--or +would, if it were a trifle longer. For the only thing that is tolerable +about the book is its brevity, and a certain rapidity in the action. +Macaulay, who confesses its absurdity and insipidity, says that no +reader, probably, ever thought it dull. "The story, whatever its value +may be, never flags for a single moment. There are no digressions, or +unreasonable descriptions, or long speeches. Every sentence carries the +action forward. The excitement is constantly renewed." Excitement is +too strong a word to describe any emotion which "The Castle of Otranto" +is now capable of arousing. But the same cleverness which makes +Walpole's correspondence always readable saves his romance from the +unpardonable sin--in literature--of tediousness. It does go along and +may still be read without a too painful effort. + +There is nothing very new in the plot, which has all the stock properties +of romantic fiction, as common in the days of Sidney's "Arcadia" as in +those of Sylvanus Cobb. Alfonso, the former lord of Otranto, had been +poisoned in Palestine by his chamberlain Ricardo, who forged a will +making himself Alfonso's heir. To make his peace with God, the usurper +founded a church and two convents in honor of St. Nicholas, who "appeared +to him in a dream and promised that Ricardo's posterity should reign in +Otranto until the rightful owner should be grown too large to inhabit the +castle." When the story opens, this prophecy is about to be fulfilled. +The tyrant Manfred, grandson of the usurper, is on the point of +celebrating the marriage of his only son, when the youth is crushed to +death by a colossal helmet that drops, from nobody knows where, into the +courtyard of the castle. Gigantic armor haunts the castle piecemeal: a +monstrous gauntlet is laid upon the banister of the great staircase; a +mailed foot appears in one apartment; a sword is brought into the +courtyard on the shoulders of a hundred men. And finally the proprietor +of these fragmentary apparitions, in "the form of Alfonso, dilated to an +immense magnitude," throws down the walls of the castle, pronounces the +words "Behold in Theodore the true heir of Alfonso," and with a clap of +thunder ascends to heaven. Theodore is, of course, the young peasant, +grandson of the crusader by a fair Sicilian secretly espoused _en route_ +for the Holy Land; and he is identified by the strawberry mark of old +romance, in this instance the figure of a bloody arrow impressed upon his +shoulder. There are other supernatural portents, such as a skeleton with +a cowl and a hollow voice, a portrait which descends from its panel, and +a statue that bleeds at the nose. + +The novel feature in the "Castle of Otranto" was its Gothic setting; the +"wind whistling through the battlements"; the secret trap-door, with iron +ring, by which Isabella sought to make her escape. "An awful silence +reigned throughout those subterraneous regions, except now and then some +blasts of wind that shook the doors she had passed, and which, grating on +the rusty hinges, were re-echoed through that long labyrinth of darkness. +The wind extinguished her candle, but an imperfect ray of clouded +moonshine gleamed through a cranny in the roof of the vault and fell +directly on the spring of the trap-door." But Walpole's medievalism was +very thin. He took some pains with the description of the feudal +cavalcade entering the castle gate with the great sword, but the passage +is incorrect and poor in detail compared with similar things in Scott. +The book was not an historical romance, and the manners, sentiments, +language, all were modern. Walpole knew little about the Middle Ages and +was not in touch with their spirit. At bottom he was a trifler, a +fribble; and his incurable superficiality, dilettantism, and want of +seriousness, made all his real cleverness of no avail when applied to +such a subject as "The Castle of Otranto."[14] + +Walpole's tragedy, "The Mysterious Mother," has not even that degree of +importance which secures his romance a niche in literary history. The +subject was too unnatural to admit of stage presentation. Incest, when +treated in the manner of Sophocles (Walpole justified himself by the +example of "Oedipus"), or even of Ford, or of Shelley, may possibly claim +a place among the themes which art is not quite forbidden to touch; but +when handled in the prurient and crudely melodramatic fashion of this +particular artist, it is merely offensive. "The Mysterious Mother," +indeed, is even more absurd than horrible. Gothic machinery is present, +but it is of the slightest. The scene of the action is a castle at +Narbonne and the _châtelaine_ is the heroine of the play. The other +characters are knights, friars, orphaned damsels, and feudal retainers; +there is mention of cloisters, drawbridges, the Vaudois heretics, and the +assassination of Henri III. and Henri IV.; and the author's Whig and +Protestant leanings are oddly evidenced in his exposure of priestly +intrigues. + +"The Castle of Otranto" was not long in finding imitators. One of the +first of these was Clara Reeve's "Champion of Virtue" (1777), styled on +its title-page "A Gothic Story," and reprinted the following year as "The +Old English Baron." Under this latter title it has since gone through +thirteen editions, the latest of which, in 1883, gave a portrait of the +author. Miss Reeve had previously published (1772) "The Phoenix," a +translation of "Argenis," "a romance written in Latin about the beginning +of the seventeenth century, by John Barclay, a Scotchman, and supposed to +contain an allegorical account of the civil wars of France during the +reign of Henry III."[15] "Pray," inquires the author of "The Champion of +Virtue" in her address to the reader, "did you ever read a book called, +'The Castle of Otranto'? If you have, you will willingly enter with me +into a review of it. But perhaps you have not read it? However, you +have heard that it is an attempt to blend together the most attractive +and interesting circumstances of the ancient romance and modern +novel. . . The conduct of the story is artful and judicious; and the +characters are admirably drawn and supported; the diction polished and +elegant; yet with all these brilliant advantages, it palls upon the +mind. . . The reason is obvious; the machinery is so violent that it +destroys the effect it is intended to excite. Had the story been kept +within the utmost _verge_ of probability, the effect had been +preserved. . . For instance, we can conceive and allow of the appearance +of a ghost; we can even dispense with an enchanted sword and helmet, but +then they must keep within certain limits of credibility. A sword so +large as to require a hundred men to lift it, a helmet that by its own +weight forces a passage through a court-yard into an arched +vault . . . when your expectation is wound up to the highest pitch, these +circumstances take it down with a witness, destroy the work of +imagination, and, instead of attention, excite laughter. . . In the +course of my observations upon this singular book, it seemed to me that +it was possible to compose a work upon the same plan, wherein these +defects might be avoided." + +Accordingly Miss Reeve undertook to admit only a rather mild dose of the +marvelous in her romance. Like Walpole she professed to be simply the +editor of the story, which she said that she had transcribed or +translated from a manuscript in the Old English language, a now somewhat +threadbare device. The period was the fifteenth century, in the reign of +Henry VI., and the scene England. But, in spite of the implication of +its sub-title, the fiction is much less "Gothic" than its model, and its +modernness of sentiment and manners is hardly covered with even the +faintest wash of mediaevalism. As in Walpole's book, there are a murder +and a usurpation, a rightful heir defrauded of his inheritance and reared +as a peasant. There are a haunted chamber, unearthly midnight groans, a +ghost in armor, and a secret closet with its skeleton. The tale is +infinitely tiresome, and is full of that edifying morality, fine +sentiment and stilted dialogue--that "old perfumed, powdered D'Arblay +conversation," as Thackeray called it--which abound in "Evelina," +"Thaddeus of Warsaw," and almost all the fiction of the last quarter of +the last century. Still it was a little unkind in Walpole to pronounce +his disciple's performance tedious and insipid, as he did. + +This same lady published, in 1785, a work in two volumes entitled "The +Progress of Romance," a sort of symposium on the history of fiction in a +series of evening conversations. Her purpose was to claim for the prose +romance an honorable place in literature; a place beside the verse epic. +She discusses the definitions of romance given in the current +dictionaries, such as Ainsworth's and Littleton's _Narratio +ficta--Scriptum eroticum--Splendida fabula_; and Johnson's "A military +fable of the Middle Ages--A tale of wild adventures of war and love." +She herself defines it as "An heroic fable," or "An epic in prose." She +affirms that Homer is the father of romance and thinks it astonishing +that men of sense "should despise and ridicule romances, as the most +contemptible of all kinds of writing, and yet expatiate in raptures on +the beauties of the fables of the old classic poets--on stories far more +wild and extravagant and infinitely more incredible." After reviewing +the Greek romances, like Heliodorus' "Theagenes and Chariclea," she +passes on to the chivalry tales of the Middle Ages, which, she maintains, +"were by no means so contemptible as they have been represented by later +writers." Our poetry, she thinks, owes more than is imagined to the +spirit of romance. "Chaucer and all our old writers abound with it. +Spenser owes perhaps his immortality to it; it is the Gothic imagery that +gives the principal graces to his work. . . Spenser has made more poets +than any other writer of our country." Milton, too, had a hankering +after the romances; and Cervantes, though he laughed Spain's chivalry +away, loved the thing he laughed at and preferred his serious romance +"Persiles and Sigismonda" to all his other works. + + +She gives a list, with conjectural dates, of many medieval romances in +French and English, verse and prose; but the greater part of the book is +occupied with contemporary fiction, the novels of Richardson, Fielding, +Smollett, Crébillon, Marivaux, Rousseau, etc. She commends Thomas +Leland's historical romance "Longsword, Earl of Salisbury" (1762), as "a +romance in reality, and not a novel:--a story like those of the Middle +Ages, composed of chivalry, love, and religion." To her second volume +she appended the "History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt," englished from the +French of Vattier, professor of Arabic to Louis XIV., who had translated +it from a history of ancient Egypt written in Arabic. This was the +source of Landor's poem, "Gebir." When Landor was in Wales in 1797, Rose +Aylmer-- + + "Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes, + May weep but never see"-- + +lent him a copy of Miss Reeve's "Progress of Romance," borrowed from a +circulating library at Swansea. And so the poor forgotten thing retains +a vicarious immortality, as the prompter of some of the noblest passages +in modern English blank verse and as associated with one of the tenderest +passages in Landor's life. + +Miss Reeve quotes frequently from Percy's "Essay on the Ancient +Minstrels," mentions Ossian and Chatterton and refers to Hurd, Warton, +and other authorities. "It was not till I had completed my design," she +writes in her preface, "that I read either Dr. Beattie's 'Dissertation on +Fable and Romance' or Mr. Warton's 'History of English Poetry.'" The +former of these was an essay of somewhat more than a hundred pages by the +author of "The Minstrel." It is of no great importance and follows +pretty closely the lines of Hurd's "Letters on Chivalry and Romance," to +which Beattie repeatedly refers in his footnotes. The author pursues the +beaten track in inquiries of the kind: discusses the character of the +Gothic tribes, the nature of the feudal system, and the institutions of +chivalry and knight-errantry. Romance, it seems, was "one of the +consequences of chivalry. The first writers in this way exhibited a +species of fable different from all that had hitherto appeared. They +undertook to describe the adventures of those heroes who professed +knight-errantry. The world was then ignorant and credulous and +passionately fond of wonderful adventures and deeds of valor. They +believed in giants, dwarfs, dragons, enchanted castles, and every +imaginable species of necromancy. These form the materials of the old +romance. The knight-errant was described as courteous, religious, +valiant, adventurous, and temperate. Some enchanters befriended and +others opposed him. To do his mistress honor, and to prove himself +worthy of her, he was made to encounter the warrior, hew down the giant, +cut the dragon in pieces, break the spell of the necromancer, demolish +the enchanted castle, fly through the air on wooden or winged horses, or, +with some magician for his guide, to descend unhurt through the opening +earth and traverse the caves in the bottom of the ocean. He detected and +punished the false knight, overthrew or converted the infidel, restored +the exiled monarch to his dominions and the captive damsel to her +parents; he fought at the tournament, feasted in the hall, and bore a +part in the warlike processions." + +There is nothing very startling in these conclusions. Scholars like +Percy, Tyrwhitt, and Ritson, who, as collectors and editors, rescued the +fragments of ancient ministrelsy and gave the public access to concrete +specimens of mediaeval poetry, performed a more useful service than mild +clerical essayists, such as Beattie and Hurd, who amused their leisure +with general speculations about the origin of romance and whether it came +in the first instance from the troubadours or the Saracens or the +Norsemen. One more passage, however, may be transcribed from Beattie's +"Dissertation," because it seems clearly a suggestion from "The Castle of +Otranto." "The castles of the greater barons, reared in a rude but grand +style of architecture, full of dark and winding passages, of secret +apartments, of long uninhabited galleries, and of chambers supposed to be +haunted with spirits, and undermined by subterraneous labyrinths as +places of retreat in extreme danger; the howling of winds through the +crevices of old walls and other dreary vacuities; the grating of heavy +doors on rusty hinges of iron; the shrieking of bats and the screaming of +owls and other creatures that resort to desolate or half-inhabited +buildings; these and the like circumstances in the domestic life of the +people I speak of, would multiply their superstitions and increase their +credulity; and among warriors who set all danger at defiance, would +encourage a passion for wild adventure and difficult enterprise." + +One of the books reviewed by Miss Reeve is worth mentioning, not for its +intrinsic importance, but for its early date. "Longsword, Earl of +Salisbury, An Historical Romance," in two volumes, and published two +years before "The Castle of Otranto," is probably the first fiction of +the kind in English literature. Its author was Thomas Leland, an Irish +historian and doctor of divinity.[16] "The outlines of the following +story," begins the advertisement, "and some of the incidents and more +minute circumstances, are to be found in some of the ancient English +histories." The period of the action is the reign of Henry III. The +king is introduced in person, and when we hear him swearing "by my +Halidome," we rub our eyes and ask, "Can this be Scott?" But we are soon +disabused, for the romance, in spite of the words of the advertisement, +is very little historical, and the fashion of it is thinly wordy and +sentimental. The hero is the son of Henry II. and Fair Rosamond, but his +speech is Grandisonian. The adventures are of the usual kind: the +_dramatis personae_ include gallant knights who go a-tilting with their +ladies' gloves upon their casques, usurpers, villains, pirates, a wicked +monk who tries to poison the hero, an oppressed countess, a distressed +damsel disguised as a page, a hermit who has a cave in a mountain side, +etc. The Gothic properties are few; though the frontispiece to the first +volume represents a cowled monk raising from the ground the figure of a +swooning knight in complete armor, in front of an abbey church with an +image of the Virgin and Child sculptured in a niche above the door; and +the building is thus described in the text: "Its windows crowded with the +foliage of their ornaments, and dimmed by the hand of the painter; its +numerous spires towering above the roof, and the Christian ensign on its +front, declared it a residence of devotion and charity." An episode in +the story narrates the death of a father by the hand of his son in the +Barons' War of Henry III. But no farther advantage is taken of the +historic background afforded by this civil conflict, nor is Simon de +Montfort so much as named in the whole course of the book. + +Clara Reeve was the daughter of a clergyman. She lived and died at +Ipswich (1725-1803). Walter Scott contributed a memoir of her to +"Ballantyne's Novelists' Library," in which he defended Walpole's frank +use of the supernatural against her criticisms, quoted above, and gave +the preference to Walpole's method.[17] She acknowledged that her +romance was a "literary descendant of 'Otranto';" but the author of the +latter, evidently nettled by her strictures, described "The Old English +Baron," as "Otranto reduced to reason and probability," and declared that +any murder trial at the Old Bailey would have made a more interesting +story. Such as it is, it bridges the interval between its model and the +novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, Lewis' "Monk" (1795), and Maturin's "Fatal +Revenge, or the Family of Montorio" (1807).[18] + +Anne Radcliffe--born Ward in 1764, the year of "Otranto"--was the wife of +an editor, who was necessarily absent from home much of the time until +late at night. A large part of her writing was done to amuse her +loneliness in the still hours of evening; and the wildness of her +imagination, and the romantic love of night and solitude which pervades +her books, are sometimes accounted for in this way. In 1809 it was +currently reported and believed that Mrs. Radcliffe was dead. Another +form of the rumor was that she had been insane by continually poring over +visions of horror and mystery. Neither report was true; she lived till +1823, in full possession of her faculties, although she published nothing +after 1797. The circulation of such stories shows how retired, and even +obscure, a life this very popular writer contrived to lead. + +It would be tedious to give here an analysis of these once famous +fictions _seriatim_.[19] They were very long, very much alike, and very +much overloaded with sentiment and description. The plots were +complicated and abounded in the wildest improbabilities and in those +incidents which were once the commonplaces of romantic fiction and which +realism has now turned out of doors: concealments, assassinations, duels, +disguises, kidnappings, escapes, elopements, intrigues, forged documents, +discoveries of old crimes, and identifications of lost heirs. The +characters, too, were of the conventional kind. There were dark-browed, +crime-stained villains--forerunners, perhaps of Manfred and Lara, for the +critics think that Mrs. Radcliffe's stories were not without important +influence on Byron.[20] There were high-born, penitent dames who retired +to convents in expiation of sins which are not explained until the +general raveling of clews in the final chapter. There were bravoes, +banditti, feudal tyrants, monks, inquisitors, soubrettes, and simple +domestics _a la_ Bianca, in Walpole's romance. The lover was of the type +adored by our great-grandmothers, handsome, melancholy, passionate, +respectful but desperate, a user of most choice English; with large black +eyes, smooth white forehead, and jetty curls, now sunk, Mr. Perry says, +to the covers of prune boxes. The heroine, too, was sensitive and +melancholy. When alone upon the seashore or in the mountains, at sunset +or twilight, or under the midnight moon, or when the wind is blowing, she +overflows into stanza or sonnet, "To Autumn," "To Sunset," "To the Bat," +"To the Nightingale," "To the Winds," "To Melancholy," "Song of the +Evening Hour." We have heard this pensive music drawing near in the +strains of the Miltonic school, but in Mrs. Radcliffe the romantic gloom +is profound and all-pervading. In what pastures she had fed is manifest +from the verse captions that head her chapters, taken mainly from Blair, +Thomson, Warton, Gray, Collins, Beattie, Mason, and Walpole's "Mysterious +Mother." Here are a few stanzas from her ode "To Melancholy": + + "Spirit of love and sorrow, hail! + Thy solemn voice from far I hear, + Mingling with evening's dying gale: + Hail, with thy sadly pleasing tear! + + "O at this still, this lonely hour-- + Thine own sweet hour of closing day-- + Awake thy lute, whose charmful power + Shall call up fancy to obey: + + "To paint the wild, romantic dream + That meets the poet's closing eye, + As on the bank of shadowy stream + He breathes to her the fervid sigh. + + "O lonely spirit, let thy song + Lead me through all thy sacred haunt, + The minster's moonlight aisles along + Where specters raise the midnight chant." + +In Mrs. Radcliffe's romances we find a tone that is absent from +Walpole's: romanticism plus sentimentalism. This last element had begun +to infuse itself into general literature about the middle of the century, +as a protest and reaction against the emotional coldness of the classical +age. It announced itself in Richardson, Rousseau, and the youthful +Goethe; in the _comédie larmoyante_, both French and English; found its +cleverest expression in Sterne, and then, becoming a universal vogue, +deluged fiction with productions like Mackenzie's "Man of Feeling," Miss +Burney's "Evelina," and the novels of Jane Porter and Mrs. Opie. +Thackeray said that there was more crying in "Thaddeus of Warsaw" than in +any novel he ever remembered to have read.[21] Emily, in the "Mysteries +of Udolpho" cannot see the moon, or hear a guitar or an organ or the +murmur of the pines, without weeping. Every page is bedewed with the +tear of sensibility; the whole volume is damp with it, and ever and anon +a chorus of sobs goes up from the entire company. Mrs. Radcliffe's +heroines are all descendents of Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, but under +more romantic circumstances. They are beset with a thousand +difficulties; carried off by masked ruffians, immured in convents, held +captive in robber castles, encompassed with horrors natural and +supernatural, persecuted, threatened with murder and with rape. But +though perpetually sighing, blushing, trembling, weeping, fainting, they +have at bottom a kind of toughness that endures through all. They rebuke +the wicked in stately language, full of noble sentiments and moral +truths. They preserve the most delicate feelings of propriety in +situations the most discouraging. Emily, imprisoned in the gloomy castle +of Udolpho, in the power of ruffians whose brawls and orgies fill night +and day with horror, in hourly fear for her virtue and her life, sends +for the lord of the castle,--whom she believes to have murdered her +aunt,--and reminds him that, as her protectress is now dead, it would not +be proper for her to stay any longer under his roof thus unchaperoned, +and will he please, therefore, send her home? + +Mrs. Radcliffe's fictions are romantic, but not usually mediaeval in +subject. In the "Mysteries of Udolpho," the period of the action is the +end of the sixteenth century; in the "Romance of the Forest," 1658; in +"The Italian," about 1760. But her machinery is prevailingly Gothic and +the real hero of the story is commonly, as in Walpole, some haunted +building. In the "Mysteries of Udolpho" it is a castle in the Apennines; +in the "Romance of the Forest," a deserted abbey in the depth of the +woods; in "The Italian," the cloister of the Black Penitents. The +moldering battlements, the worm-eaten tapestries, the turret staircases, +secret chambers, underground passages, long, dark corridors where the +wind howls dismally, and distant doors which slam at midnight all derive +from "Otranto." So do the supernatural fears which haunt these abodes of +desolation; the strains of mysterious music, the apparitions which glide +through the shadowy apartments, the hollow voices that warn the tyrant to +beware. But her method here is quite different from Walpole's; she tacks +a natural explanation to every unearthly sight or sound. The hollow +voices turn out to be ventriloquism; the figure of a putrefying corpse +which Emily sees behind the black curtain in the ghost chamber at Udolpho +is only a wax figure, contrived as a _memento mori_ for a former +penitent. After the reader has once learned this trick he refuses to be +imposed upon again, and, whenever he encounters a spirit, feels sure that +a future chapter will embody it back into flesh and blood. + +There is plenty of testimony to the popularity of these romances. +Thackeray says that a lady of his acquaintance, an inveterate novel +reader, names Valancourt as one of the favorite heroes of her youth. +"'Valancourt? And who was he?' cry the young people. Valancourt, my +dears, was the hero of one of the most famous romances which ever was +published in this country. The beauty and elegance of Valancourt made +your young grandmamma's' gentle hearts to beat with respectful sympathy. +He and his glory have passed away. . . Enquire at Mudie's or the London +Library, who asks for the 'Mysteries of Udolpho' now."[22] Hazlitt said +that he owed to Mrs. Radcliffe his love of moonlight nights, autumn +leaves and decaying ruins. It was, indeed, in the melodramatic +manipulation of landscape that this artist was most original. "The +scenes that savage Rosa dashed" seemed to have been her model, and +critics who were fond of analogy called her the Salvator Rosa of fiction. +It is here that her influence on Byron and Chateaubriand is most +apparent.[23] Mrs. Radcliffe's scenery is not quite to our modern taste, +any more than are Salvator's paintings. Her Venice by moonlight, her +mountain gorges with their black pines and foaming torrents, are not +precisely the Venice and the Alps of Ruskin; rather of the operatic +stage. Still they are impressive in their way, and in this department +she possessed genuine poetic feels and a real mastery of the art of +painting in distemper. Witness the picture of the castle of Udolpho, on +Emily's first sight of it, and the hardly less striking description, in +the "Romance of the Forest," of the ruined abbey in which the La Motte +family take refuge: "He approached and perceived the Gothic remains of an +abbey: it stood on a kind of rude lawn, overshadowed by high and +spreading trees, which seemed coeval with the building, and diffused a +romantic gloom around. The greater part of the pile appeared to be +sinking into ruins, and that which had withstood the ravages of time +showed the remaining features of the fabric more awful in decay. The +lofty battlements, thickly enwreathed with ivy, were half demolished and +become the residence of birds of prey. Huge fragments of the eastern +tower, which was almost demolished, lay scattered amid the high grass, +that waved slowly in the breeze. 'The thistle shook its lonely head: the +moss whistled to the wind.'[24] A Gothic gate, richly ornamented with +fretwork, which opened into the main body of the edifice, but which was +now obstructed with brushwood, remained entire. Above the vast and +magnificent portal of this gate arose a window of the same order, whose +pointed arches still exhibited fragments of stained glass, once the pride +of monkish devotion. La Motte, thinking it possible it might yet shelter +some human being, advanced to the gate and lifted a massy knocker. The +hollow sounds rung through the emptiness of the place. After waiting a +few minutes, he forced back the gate, which was heavy with iron-work, and +creaked harshly on its hinges. . . From this chapel he passed into the +nave of the great church, of which one window, more perfect than the +rest, opened upon a long vista of the forest, through which was seen the +rich coloring of evening, melting by imperceptible gradations into the +solemn gray of upper air." + +Mrs. Radcliffe never was in Italy or Switzerland or the south of France; +she divined the scenery of her romances from pictures and descriptions at +second hand. But she accompanied her husband in excursions to the Lakes +and other parts of England, and in 1794 made the tour of the Rhine.[25] +The passages in her diary, recording these travels, are much superior in +the truthfulness and local color of their nature sketching to anything in +her novels. Mrs. Radcliffe is furthermore to be credited with a certain +skill in producing terror, by the use of that favorite weapon in the +armory of the romanticists, mystery. If she did not invent a new +shudder, as Hugo said of Baudelaire, she gave at least a new turn to the +old-fashioned ghost story. She creates in her readers a feeling of +impending danger, suspense, foreboding. There is a sense of unearthly +presences in these vast, empty rooms; the silence itself is ominous; +echoes sound like footfalls, ghostly shadows lurk in dark corners, +whispers come from behind the arras, as it stirs in the gusts of +wind.[26] The heroine is afraid to look in the glass lest she should see +another face there beside her own; her lamp expires and leaves her in the +dark just as she is coming to the critical point in the manuscript which +she has found in an old chest, etc., etc., But the tale loses its +impressiveness as soon as it strays beyond the shade of the battlements. +The Gothic castle or priory is still, as in Walpole, the nucleus of the +story. + +Two of these romances, the earliest and the latest, though they are the +weakest of the series, have a special interest for us as affording points +of comparison with the Waverly novels. "The Castles of Athlin and +Dunbayne" is the narrative of a feud between two Highland clans, and its +scene is the northeastern coast of Scotland, "in the most romantic part +of the Highlands," where the castle of Athlin--like Uhland's "Schloss am +Meer"--stood "on the summit of a rock whose base was in the sea." This +was a fine place for storms. "The winds burst in sudden squalls over the +deep and dashed the foaming waves against the rocks with inconceivable +fury. The spray, notwithstanding the high situation of the castle, flew +up with violence against the windows. . . The moon shone faintly by +intervals, through broken clouds, upon the waters, illumining the white +foam which burst around. . . The surges broke on the distant shores in +deep resounding murmurs, and the solemn pauses between the stormy gusts +filled the mind with enthusiastic awe." Perhaps the description slightly +reminds of the picture, in "Marmion," of Tantallon Castle, the hold of +the Red Douglases on the German Ocean, a little north of Berwick, whose +frowning towers have recently done duty again in Stevenson's "David +Balfour." The period of the action is but vaguely indicated; but, as the +weapons used in the attack on the castle are bows and arrows, we may +regard the book as mediaeval in intention. Scott says that the scene of +the romance was Scotland in the dark ages, and complains that the author +evidently knew nothing of Scottish life or scenery. This is true; her +castles might have stood anywhere. There is no mention of the pipes or +the plaid. Her rival chiefs are not Gaelic caterans, but just plain +feudal lords. Her baron of Dunbayne is like any other baron; or rather, +he is unlike any baron that ever was on sea or land or anywhere else +except in the pages of a Gothic romance. + +"Gaston de Blondville" was begun in 1802 and published posthumously in +1826, edited by Sergeant Talfourd. Its inspiring cause was a visit which +the author made in the autumn of 1802 to Warwick Castle and the ruins of +Kenilworth. The introduction has the usual fiction of an old manuscript +found in an oaken chest dug up from the foundation of a chapel of Black +Canons at Kenilworth: a manuscript richly illuminated with designs at the +head of each chapter--which are all duly described--and containing a +"trew chronique of what passed at Killingworth, in Ardenn, when our +Soveren Lord the Kynge kept ther his Fest of Seynt Michel: with ye +marveylous accident that there befell at the solempnissacion of the +marriage of Gaston de Blondeville. With divers things curious to be +known thereunto purtayning. With an account of the grete Turney there +held in the year MCCLVI. Changed out of the Norman tongue by Grymbald, +Monk of Senct Marie Priori in Killingworth." Chatterton's forgeries had +by this time familiarized the public with imitations of early English. +The finder of this manuscript pretends to publish a modernized version of +it, while endeavoring "to preserve somewhat of the air of the old style." +This he does by a poor reproduction, not of thirteenth-century, but of +sixteenth-century English, consisting chiefly in inversions of phrase and +the occasional use of a _certes_ or _naithless_. Two words in particular +seem to have struck Mrs. Radcliffe as most excellent archaisms: _ychon_ +and _his-self_, which she introduces at every turn. + +"Gaston de Blondville," then, is a tale of the time of Henry III. The +king himself is a leading figure and so is Prince Edward. Other +historical personages are brought in, such as Simon de Montfort and Marie +de France, but little use is made of them. The book is not indeed, in +any sense, an historical novel like Scott's "Kenilworth," the scene of +which is the same, and which was published in 1821, five years before +Mrs. Radcliffe's. The story is entirely fictitious. What differences it +from her other romances is the conscious attempt to portray feudal +manners. There are elaborate descriptions of costumes, upholstery, +architecture, heraldic bearings, ancient military array, a tournament, a +royal hunt, a feast in the great hall at Kenilworth, a visit of state to +Warwick Castle, and the session of a baronial court. The ceremony of the +"voide," when the king took his spiced cup, is rehearsed with a painful +accumulation of particulars. For all this she consulted Leland's +"Collectanea," Warton's "History of English Poetry," the "Household Book +of Edward IV.," Pegge's "Dissertation on the Obsolete Office of Esquire +of the King's Body," the publications of the Society of Antiquaries and +similar authorities, with results that are infinitely tedious. Walter +Scott's archaeology is not always correct, nor his learning always +lightly borne; but, upon the whole, he had the art to make his cumbrous +materials contributory to his story rather than obstructive of it. + +In these two novels we meet again all the familiar apparatus of secret +trap-doors, sliding panels, spiral staircases in the thickness of the +walls, subterranean vaults conducting to a neighboring priory or a cavern +in the forest, ranges of deserted apartments where the moon looks in +through mullioned casements, ruinous turrets around which the night winds +moan and howl. Here, too, once more are the wicked uncle who seizes upon +the estates of his deceased brother's wife, and keeps her and her +daughter shut up in his dungeon for the somewhat long period of eighteen +years; the heroine who touches her lute and sings in pensive mood, till +the notes steal to the ear of the young earl imprisoned in the adjacent +tower; the maiden who is carried off on horseback by bandits, till her +shrieks bring ready aid; the peasant lad who turns out to be the baron's +heir. "His surprise was great when the baroness, reviving, fixed her +eyes mournfully upon him and asked him to uncover his arm." Alas! the +surprise is not shared by the reader, when "'I have indeed found my +long-lost child: that strawberry,'"[27] etc., etc. "Gaston de +Blondville" has a ghost--not explained away in the end according to Mrs. +Radcliffe's custom. It is the spirit of Reginald de Folville, Knight +Hospitaller of St. John, murdered in the Forest of Arden by Gaston de +Blondville and the prior of St. Mary's. He is a most robust apparition, +and is by no means content with revisiting the glimpses of the moon, but +goes in and out at all hours of the day, and so often as to become +somewhat of a bore. He ultimately destroys both first and second +murderer: one in his cell, the other in open tournament, where his +exploits as a mysterious knight in black armor may have given Scott a +hint for his black knight at the lists of Ashby-de-la-Zouche in "Ivanhoe" +(1819). His final appearance is in the chamber of the king, with whom he +holds quite a long conversation. "The worm is my sister," he says: "the +mist of death is on me. My bed is in darkness. The prisoner is +innocent. The prior of St. Mary's is gone to his account. Be warned." +It is not explained why Mrs. Radcliffe refrained from publishing this +last romance of hers. Perhaps she recognized that it was belated and +that the time for that sort of thing had gone by. By 1802 Lewis' "Monk" +was in print, as well as several translations from German romances; +Scott's early ballads were out, and Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." That +very year saw the publication of the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border." +By 1826 the Waverley novels had made all previous fiction of the Gothic +type hopelessly obsolete. In 1834 two volumes of her poems were given to +the world, including a verse romance in eight cantos, "St. Alban's +Abbey," and the verses scattered through her novels. By this time Scott +and Coleridge were dead; Byron, Shelley, and Keats had been dead for +years, and Mrs. Radcliffe's poesies fell upon the unheeding ears of a new +generation. A sneer in "Waverley" (1814) at the "Mysteries of Udolpho" +had hurt her feelings;[28] but Scott made amends in the handsome things +which he said of her in his "Lives of the Novelists." It is interesting +to note that when the "Mysteries" was issued, the venerable Joseph Warton +was so much entranced that he sat up the greater part of the night to +finish it. + +The warfare between realism and romance, which went on in the days of +Cervantes, as it does in the days of Zola and Howells, had its skirmished +also in Mrs. Radcliffe's time. Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey," written +in 1803 but published only in 1817, is gently satirical of Gothic +fiction. The heroine is devoted to the "Mysteries of Udolpho," which she +discusses with her bosom friend. "While I have 'Udolpho' to read, I feel +as if nobody could make me miserable. O the dreadful black veil! My +dear Isabella, I am sure there must be Laurentina's skeleton behind it." + +"When you have finished 'Udolpho,'" replies Isabella, "we will read 'The +Italian' together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of +the same kind for you. . . I will read you their names directly. Here +they are in my pocket-book. 'Castle of Wolfenbach,' 'Clermont,' +'Mysterious Warnings,' 'Necromancer of the Black Forest,' 'Midnight +Bell,' 'Orphan of the Rhine,' and 'Horrid Mysteries.'" + +When introduced to her friend's brother, Miss Morland asks him at once, +"Have you ever read 'Udolpho,' Mr. Thorpe?" But Mr. Thorpe, who is not a +literary man, but much given to dogs and horses, assures her that he +never reads novels; they are "full of nonsense and stuff; there has not +been a tolerably decent one come out since 'Tom Jones,' except the +'Monk.'" The scenery about Bath reminds Miss Morland of the south of +France and "the country that Emily and her father traveled through in the +'Mysteries of Udolpho.'" She is enchanted at the prospect of a drive to +Blaize Castle, where she hopes to have "the happiness of being stopped in +their way along narrow, winding vaults by a low, grated door; or even of +having their lamp--their only lamp--extinguished by a sudden gust of wind +and of being left in total darkness." She visits her friends, the +Tilneys, at their country seat, Northanger Abbey, in Glouchestershire; +and, on the way thither, young Mr. Tilney teases her with a fancy sketch +of the Gothic horrors which she will unearth there: the "sliding panels +and tapestry"; the remote and gloomy guest chamber, which will be +assigned her, with its ponderous chest and its portrait of a knight in +armor: the secret door, with massy bars and padlocks, that she will +discover behind the arras, leading to a "small vaulted room," and +eventually to a "subterraneous communication between your apartment and +the chapel of St. Anthony scarcely two miles off." Arrived at the abbey, +she is disappointed at the modern appearance of her room, but contrives +to find a secret drawer in an ancient ebony cabinet, and in this a roll +of yellow manuscript which, on being deciphered, proves to be a washing +bill. She is convinced, notwithstanding, that a mysterious door at the +end of a certain gallery conducts to a series of isolated chambers where +General Tilney, who is supposed to be a widower, is keeping his unhappy +wife immured and fed on bread and water. When she finally gains +admission to this Bluebeard's chamber and finds it nothing but a suite of +modern rooms, "the visions of romance were over. . . Charming as were +all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and charming even as were the works of all +her imitators, it was not in them, perhaps, that human nature, at least +in the midland counties of England was to be looked for." + + +[1] But compare the passage last quoted with the one from Warton's essay +_ante_, p. 219. + +[2] See _ante_, p. 49. + +[3] _Spectator_, No. 62. + +[4] See _ante_, p. 211. + +[5] "Works of Richard Owen Cambridge," pp. 198-99. Cambridge was one of +the Spenserian imitators. See _ante_, p. 89, _note_. In Lady +Luxborough's correspondence with Shenstone there is much mention of a Mr. +Miller, a neighboring proprietor, who was devoted to Gothic. On the +appearance of "The Scribleriad," she writes (January 28, 1751), "I +imagine this poem is not calculated to please Mr. Miller and the rest of +the Gothic gentlemen; for this Mr. Cambridge expresses a dislike to the +introducing or reviving tastes and fashions that are inferior to the +modern taste of our country." + +[6] "History of the Gothic Revival," p. 43. + +[7] "Works of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford," in five volumes, 1798. "A +Description of Strawberry Hill," Vol. II. pp. 395-516. + +[8] Pugin's "True Principles of Gothic Architecture" was published in 1841. + +[9] "Sketches of Eminent Statesmen and Writers," A. Hayward (1880). In a +note to "Marmion" (1808) Scott said that the ruins of Crichton Castle, +remarkable for the richness and elegance of its stone carvings, were then +used as a cattle-pen and a sheep-fold. + +[10] "Hours in a Library," Second Series: article, "Horace Walpole." + +[11] Letter to Bentley, February 23, 1755. + +[12] Five hundred copies, says Walpole, were struck off December 24, 1764. + +[13] "The Mysterious Mother," begun 1766, finished 1768. + +[14] "The Castle of Otranto" was dramatized by Robert Jephson, under the +title "The Count of Narbonne," put on at Covent Garden Theater in 1781, +and afterward printed, with a dedication to Walpole. + +[15] James Beattie, "Dissertation on Fable and Romance." "Argenius," was +printed in 1621. + +[16] "The Dictionary of National Biography" miscalls it "Earl of +Canterbury," and attributes it, though with a query, to _John_ Leland. + +[17] See also, for a notice of this writer, Julia Kavanagh's "English +Women of Letters." + +[18] Maturin's "Melmoth the Wanderer" (1820) had some influence on the +French romantic school and was utilized, in some particulars, by Balzac. + +[19] Following is a list of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances: "The Castles of +Athlin and Dunbayne" (1789); "Sicilian Romance" (1790); "Romance of the +Forest" (1791); "Mysteries of Udolpho" (1794); "The Italian" (1797); +"Gaston de Blondville" (1826). Collections of her poems were published +in 1816, 1834, and 1845. + +[20] See "Childe Harold," canto iv, xviii. + +[21] "Roundabout Papers," "A Peal of Bells." "Monk" Lewis wrote at +sixteen a burlesque novel, "Effusions of Sensibility," which remained in +MS. + +[22] "O Radcliffe, thou once wert the charmer + Of girls who sat reading all night: + They heroes were striplings in armor, + Thy heroines, damsels in white." + --_Songs, Ballads and Other Poems_. + +By Thos. Haynes Bayly, London, 1857, p. 141. + + "A novel now is nothing more + Than an old castle and a creaking door, + A distant hovel, + Clanking of chains, a gallery, a light, + Old armor and a phantom all in white, + And there's a novel." + --_George Colman, "The Will."_ + +[23] Several of her romances were dramatized and translated into French. +It is curious, by the way, to find that Goethe was not unaware of +Walpole's story. See his quatrain "Die Burg von Otranto," first printed +in 1837. + + "Sind die Zimmer sämmtlich besetzt der Burg von Otranto: + Kommt, voll innigen Grimmes, der erste Riesenbesitzer + Stuckweis an, and verdrängt die neuen falschen Bewohner. + Wehe! den Fliehenden, weh! den Bleibenden also geschiet es." + +[24] Ossian. + +[25] See her "Journey through Holland," etc. (1795) + +[26] _cf._ Keats, "The Eve of Saint Agnes": + + "The arras rich with hunt and horse and hound + Flattered in the besieging wind's uproar, + And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor." + +[27] "Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne." + +[28] See Julia Kavanagh's "English Women of Letters." + + + + +CHAPTER VIII. + +Percy and the Ballads. + +The regeneration of English poetic style at the close of the last century +came from an unexpected quarter. What scholars and professional men of +letters had sought to do by their imitations of Spenser and Milton, and +their domestication of the Gothic and the Celtic muse, was much more +effectually done by Percy and the ballad collectors. What they had +sought to do was to recall British poetry to the walks of imagination and +to older and better models than Dryden and Pope. But they could not jump +off their own shadows: the eighteenth century was too much for them. +While they anxiously cultivated wildness and simplicity, their diction +remained polished, literary, academic to a degree. It is not, indeed, +until we reach the boundaries of a new century that we encounter a Gulf +Stream of emotional, creative impulse strong enough and hot enough to +thaw the classical icebergs till not a floating spiculum of them is left. + +Meanwhile, however, there occurred a revivifying contact with one +department, at least, of early verse literature, which did much to clear +the way for Scott and Coleridge and Keats. The decade from 1760 to 1770 +is important in the history of English romanticism, and its most +important title is Thomas Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: +Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of our Earlier +Poets," published in three volumes in 1765. It made a less immediate and +exciting impression upon contemporary Europe than MacPherson's "Poems of +Ossian," but it was more fruitful in enduring results. The Germans make +a convenient classification of poetry into _Kunstpoesie_ and +_Volkspoesie_, terms which may be imperfectly translated as literary +poetry and popular poetry. The English _Kunstpoesie_ of the Middle Ages +lay buried under many superincumbent layers of literary fashion. +Oblivion had overtaken Gower and Occleve, and Lydgate and Stephen Hawes, +and Skelton, and Henryson and James I. of Scotland, and well-nigh Chaucer +himself--all the mediaeval poetry of the schools, in short. But it was +known to the curious that there was still extant a large body of popular +poetry in the shape of narrative ballads, which had been handed down +chiefly by oral transmission, and still lived in the memories and upon +the lips of the common people. Many of these went back in their original +shapes to the Middle Ages, or to an even remoter antiquity, and belonged +to that great store of folk-lore which was the common inheritance of the +Aryan race. Analogues and variants of favorite English and Scottish +ballads have been traced through almost all the tongues of modern Europe. +Danish literature is especially rich in ballads and affords valuable +illustrations of our native ministrelsy.[1] It was, perhaps, due in part +to the Danish settlements in Northumbria and to the large Scandinavian +admixture in the Northumbrian blood and dialect, that "the north +countrie" became _par excellence_ the ballad land: Lowland +Scotland--particularly the Lothians--and the English bordering counties, +Northumberland, Westmoreland, and Cumberland; with Yorkshire and +Nottinghamshire, in which were Barndale and Sherwood Forests, Robin +Hood's haunts. It is not possible to assign exact dates to these songs. +They were seldom reduced to writing till many years after they were +composed. In the Middle Ages they were sung to the harp by wandering +minstrels. In later times they were chanted or recited by ballad-singers +at fairs, markets, ale-houses, street-corners, sometimes to the +accompaniment of a fiddle or crowd. They were learned by ancient dames, +who repeated them in chimney corners to children and grandchildren. In +this way some of them were preserved in an unwritten state, even to the +present day, in the tenacious memory of the people, always at bottom +conservative and, under a hundred changes of fashion in the literary +poetry which passes over their heads, clinging obstinately to old songs +and beliefs learned in childhood, and handing them on to posterity. +Walter Scott got much of the material for his "Ministrelsy of the Border" +from the oral recitation of pipers, shepherds, and old women in Ettrick +Forest. Professor Child's--the latest and fullest ballad +collection--contains pieces never before given in print or manuscript, +some of them obtained in America![2] + +Leading this subterranean existence, and generally thought unworthy the +notice of educated people, they naturally underwent repeated changes; so +that we have numerous versions of the same story, and incidents, +descriptions, and entire stanzas are borrowed and lent freely among the +different ballads. The circumstance, _e.g._, of the birk and the briar +springing from the graves of true lovers and intertwisting their branches +occurs in the ballads of "Fair Margaret and Sweet William," "Lord Thomas +and Fair Annet," "Lord Lovel," "Fair Janet," and many others. The knight +who was carried to fairyland through an entrance in a green hillside, and +abode seven years with the queen of fairy, recurs in "Tam Lin," "Thomas +Rymer,"[3] etc. Like all folk-songs, these ballads are anonymous and may +be regarded not as the composition of any one poet, but as the property, +and in a sense the work, of the people as a whole. Coming out of an +uncertain past, based on some dark legend of heart-break or blood-shed, +they bear no author's name, but are _ferae naturae_ and have the flavor +of wild game. They were common stock, like the national speech; everyone +could contribute toward them: generations of nameless poets, minstrels, +ballad-singers modernized their language to suit new times, altered their +dialect to suit new places, accommodated their details to different +audiences, English or Scotch, and in every way that they thought fit +added, retrenched, corrupted, improved, and passed them on. + +Folk-poetry is conventional; it seems to be the production of a guild, +and to have certain well understood and commonly expected tricks of style +and verse. Freshness and sincerity are almost always attributes of the +poetry of heroic ages, but individuality belongs to a high civilization +and an advanced literary culture. Whether the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" +are the work of one poet or of a cycle of poets, doubtless the rhetorical +peculiarities of the Homeric epics, such as the recurrent phrase and the +conventional epithet (the rosy-fingered dawn, the well-greaved Greeks, +the swift-footed Achilles, the much-enduring Odysseus, etc.) are due to +this communal or associative character of ancient heroic song. As in the +companies of architects who built the mediaeval cathedrals, or in the +schools of early Italian painters, masters and disciples, the manner of +the individual artist was subdued to the tradition of his craft. + + +The English and Scottish popular ballads are in various simple stanza +forms, the commonest of all being the old _septenarius_ or "fourteener," +arranged in a four-lined stanza of alternate eights and sixes, thus: + + "Up then crew the red, red cock, + And up and crew the gray; + The eldest to the youngest said + ''Tis time we were away.'"[4] + +This is the stanza usually employed by modern ballad imitators, like +Coleridge in "The Ancient Mariner," Scott in "Jock o' Hazeldean," +Longfellow in "The Wreck of the Hesperus," Macaulay in the "Lays of +Ancient Rome," Aytoun in the "Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers." Many of +the stylistic and metrical peculiarities of the ballads arose from the +fact that they were made to be sung or recited from memory. Such are +perhaps the division of the longer ones into fits, to rest the voice of +the singer; and the use of the burden or refrain for the same purpose, as +also to give the listeners and bystanders a chance to take up the chorus, +which they probably accompanied with a few dancing steps.[5] Sometimes +the burden has no meaning in itself and serves only to mark time with a +_Hey derry down_ or an _O lilly lally_ and the like. Sometimes it has +more or less reference to the story, as in "The Two Sisters": + + "He has ta'en three locks o' her yellow hair-- + Binnorie, O Binnorie-- + And wi' them strung his harp sae rare-- + By the bonnie mill-dams of Binnorie." + +Again it has no discoverable relation to the context, as in "Riddles +Wisely Expounded"-- + + "There was a knicht riding frae the east-- + _Jennifer gentle and rosemarie_-- + Who had been wooing at monie a place-- + _As the dew flies over the mulberry tree._" + +Both kinds of refrain have been liberally employed by modern balladists. +Thus Tennyson in "The Sisters": + + "We were two sisters of one race, + _The wind is howling in turret and tree;_ +_ _She was the fairer in the face, + _O the earl was fair to see."_ + +While Rossetti and Jean Ingelow and others have rather favored the +inconsequential burden, an affectation travestied by the late Mr. C. S. +Calverley: + + "The auld wife sat at her ivied door, + (Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese) + A thing she had frequently done before; + And her spectacles lay on her aproned knees. + + "The farmer's daughter hath soft brown hair + (Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese), + And I met with a ballad, I can't say where, + Which wholly consisted of lines like these."[6] + +A musical or mnemonic device akin to the refrain was that sing-song +species of repetend so familiar in ballad language: + + "She had na pu'd a double rose, + a rose but only twa." + + "They had na sailed a league, a league, + A league but barely three. + + "How will I come up? How can I come up? + How can I come to thee?" + +An answer is usually returned in the identical words of the question; and +as in Homer, a formula of narration or a commonplace of description does +duty again and again. Iteration in the ballads is not merely for +economy, but stands in lieu of the metaphor and other figures of literary +poetry: + + "'O Marie, put on your robes o' black, + Or else your robes o' brown, + For ye maun gang wi' me the night, + To see fair Edinbro town.' + + "'I winna put on my robes o' black, + Nor yet my robes o' brown; + But I'll put on my robes o' white, + To shine through Edinbro town.'" + +Another mark of the genuine ballad manner, as of Homer and _Volkspoesie_ +in general, is the conventional epithet. Macaulay noted that the gold is +always red in the ballads, the ladies always gay, and Robin Hood's men +are always his merry men. Doughty Douglas, bold Robin Hood, merry +Carlisle, the good greenwood, the gray goose wing, and the wan water are +other inseparables of the kind. Still another mark is the frequent +retention of the Middle English accent on the final syllable in words +like contrié, barón, dinére, felàwe, abbày, rivére, monéy, and its +assumption by words which never properly had it, such as ladý, harpér, +weddíng, watér, etc.[7] Indeed, as Percy pointed out in his +introduction, there were "many phrases and idioms which the minstrels +seem to have appropriated to themselves, . . . a cast of style and +measure very different from that of contemporary poets of a higher class." + +Not everything that is called a ballad belongs to the class of poetry +that we are here considering. In its looser employment the word has +signified almost any kind of song: "a woeful ballad made to his mistress' +eyebrow," for example. "Ballade" was also the name of a somewhat +intricate French stanza form, employed by Gower and Chaucer, and recently +reintroduced into English verse by Dobson, Lang, Goose, and others, along +with the virelay, rondeau, triolet, etc. There is also a numerous class +of popular ballads--in the sense of something made _for_ the people, +though not _by_ the people--are without relation to our subject. These +are the street ballads, which were and still are hawked about by +ballad-mongers, and which have no literary character whatever. There are +satirical and political ballads, ballads versifying passages in Scripture +or chronicle, ballads relating to current events, or giving the history +of famous murders and other crimes, of prodigies, providences, and all +sorts of happenings that teach a lesson in morals: about George Barnwell +and the "Babes in the Wood," and "Whittington and his Cat," etc.: ballads +like Shenstone's "Jemmy Dawson" and Gay's "Black-eyed Susan." Thousands +of such are included in manuscript collections like the "Pepysian," or +printed in the publications of the Roxburghe Club and the Ballad Society. +But whether entirely modern, or extant in black-letter broadsides, they +are nothing to our purpose. We have to do here with the folk-song, the +_traditional_ ballad, product of the people at a time when the people was +homogeneous and the separation between the lettered and unlettered +classes had not yet taken place: the true minstrel ballad of the Middle +Ages, or of that state of society which in rude and primitive +neighborhoods, like the Scottish border, prolonged mediaeval conditions +beyond the strictly mediaeval period. + +In the form in which they are preserved, a few of our ballads are older +than the seventeenth or the latter part of the sixteenth century, though +in their origin many of them are much older. Manuscript versions of +"Robin Hood and the Monk" and "Robin Hood and the Potter" exist, which +are referred to the last years of the fifteenth century. The "Lytel +Geste of Robyn Hode" was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1489. The +"Not-Brown Maid" was printed in "Arnold's Chronicle" in 1502. "The +Hunting of the Cheviot"--the elder version of "Chevy Chase"--was +mentioned by Philip Sidney in his "Defence of Poesie" in 1850.[8] The +ballad is a narrative song, naïve, impersonal, spontaneous, objective. +The singer is lost in the song, the teller in the tale. That is its +essence, but sometimes the story is told by the lyrical, sometimes by the +dramatic method. In "Helen of Kirkconnell" it is the bereaved lover who +is himself the speaker: in "Waly Waly," the forsaken maid. These are +monologues; for a purely dialogue ballad it will be sufficient to mention +the power and impressive piece in the "Reliques" entitled "Edward." +Herder translated this into German; it is very old, with Danish, Swedish, +and Finnish analogues. It is a story of parricide, and is narrated in a +series of questions by the mother and answers by the son. The commonest +form, however, was a mixture of epic and dramatic, or direct relation +with dialogue. A frequent feature is the abruptness of the opening and +the translations. The ballad-maker observes unconsciously Aristotle's +rule for the epic poet, to begin _in medias res_. Johnson noticed this +in the instance of "Johnny Armstrong," but a stronger example is found in +"The Banks of Yarrow:" + + "Late at e'en, drinking the wine, + And ere they paid the lawing, + They set a combat them between, + To fight it in the dawing." + +With this, an indirect, allusive way of telling the story, which Goethe +mentions in his prefatory note to "Des Sängers Fluch," as a constant note +of the "Volkslied." The old ballad-maker does not vouchsafe explanations +about persons and motives; often he gives the history, not expressly nor +fully, but by hints and glimpses, leaving the rest to conjecture; +throwing up its salient points into a strong, lurid light against a +background of shadows. The knight rides out a-hunting, and by and by his +riderless horse comes home, and that is all: + + "Toom[9] hame cam the saddle + But never cam he." + +Or the knight himself comes home and lies down to die, reluctantly +confessing, under his mother's questioning, that he dined with his +true-love and is poisoned.[10] And again that is all. Or + + "--In behint yon auld fail[11] dyke, + I wot there lies a new-slain knight; + And naebody kens that he lies there, + But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair. + + "His hound is to the hunting game, + His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame, + His lady's ta'en another mate, + So we may mak our dinner sweet." + +A whole unuttered tragedy of love, treachery, and murder lies back of +these stanzas. This method of narration may be partly accounted for by +the fact that the story treated was commonly some local country-side +legend of family feud or unhappy passion, whose incidents were familiar +to the ballad-singer's audience and were readily supplied by memory. One +theory holds that the story was partly told and partly sung, and that the +links and expositions were given in prose. However this may be, the +artless art of these popular poets evidently included a knowledge of the +uses of mystery and suggestion. They knew that, for the imagination, the +part is sometimes greater than the whole. Gray wrote to Mason in 1757, +"I have got the old Scotch ballad [Gil Maurice] on which 'Douglas' +[Home's tragedy, first played at Edinburgh in 1756] was founded. It is +divine. . . Aristotle's best rules are observed in it in a manner which +shews the author never had heard of Aristotle. It begins in the fifth +act of the play. You may read it two-thirds through without guessing +what it is about; and yet, when you come to the end, it is impossible not +to understand the whole story." + +It is not possible to recover the conditions under which these folk-songs +"made themselves,"[12] as it were, or grew under the shaping hands of +generations of nameless bards. Their naïve, primitive quality cannot be +acquired: the secret is lost. But Walter Scott, who was steeped to the +lips in balladry, and whose temper had much of the healthy objectivity of +an earlier age, has succeeded as well as any modern. Some of his ballads +are more perfect artistically than his long metrical romances; those of +them especially which are built up from a burden or fragment of old +minstrel song, like "Jock o' Hazeldean"[13] and the song in "Rokeby": + + "He turned his charger as he spake + Upon the river shore, + He gave the bride-reins a shake, + Said 'Adieu for evermore, + My love! + And adieu for evermore!'" + +Here Scott catches the very air of popular poetry, and the dovetailing is +done with most happy skill. "Proud Maisie is in the Wood" is a fine +example of the ballad manner of story-telling by implication.[14] + +As regards their subject-matter, the ballads admit of a rough +classification into the historical, or _quasi_-historical, and the purely +legendary or romantic. Of the former class were the "riding-ballad" of +the Scottish border, where the forays of moss-troopers, the lifting of +blackmail, the raids and private warfare of the Lords of the Marches, +supplied many traditions of heroism and adventure like those recorded in +"The Battle of Otterburn," "The Hunting of the Cheviot," "Johnnie +Armstrong," "Kinmont Willie," "The Rising in the North" and +"Northumberland Betrayed by Douglas." Of the fictitious class, some were +shortened, popularized, and generally degraded versions of the chivalry +romances, which were passing out of favor among educated readers in the +sixteenth century and fell into the hands of the ballad-makers. Such, to +name only a few included in the "Reliques," were "Sir Lancelot du Lake," +"The Legend of Sir Guy," "King Arthur's Death" and "The Marriage of Sir +Gawaine." But the substance of these was not of the genuine popular +stuff, and their personages were simply the old heroes of court poetry in +reduced circumstances. Much more impressive are the original folk-songs, +which strike their roots deep into the ancient world of legend and even +of myth. + +In this true ballad world there is a strange commingling of paganism and +Catholic Christianity. It abounds in the supernatural and the marvelous. +Robin Hood is a pious outlaw. He robs the fat-headed monks, but will not +die unhouseled and has great devotion to Our Blessed Lady; who appears +also to Brown Robyn, when he is cast overboard, hears his confession and +takes his soul to Heaven.[15] When mass has been sung and the bells of +merry Lincoln have rung, Lady Maisry goes seeking her little Hugh, who +has been killed by the Jew's daughter and thrown into Our Lady's +draw-well fifty fathom deep, and the boy answers his mother miraculously +from the well.[16] Birds carry messages for lovers[17] and dying +men,[18] or show the place where the body lies buried and the +corpse-candles shine.[19] The harper strings his harp with three golden +hairs of the drowned maiden, and the tune that he plays upon them reveals +the secret of her death.[20] The ghosts of the sons that have perished +at sea come home to take farewell of their mother.[21] The spirit of the +forsaken maid visits her false lover at midnight;[22] or "the dead comes +for the quick,"[23] as in Burger's weird poem. There are witches, +fairies, and mermaidens[24] in the ballads: omens, dreams, spells,[25] +enchantments, transformations,[26] magic rings and charms, "gramarye"[27] +of many sorts; and all these things are more effective here than in poets +like Spenser and Collins, because they are matters of belief and not of +make-believe. + +The ballads are prevailingly tragical in theme, and the tragic passions +of pity and fear find an elementary force of utterance. Love is strong +as death, jealousy cruel as the grave. Hate, shame, grief, despair speak +here with their native accent: + + "There are seven forsters at Pickeram Side, + At Pickeram where they dwell, + And for a drop of thy heart's bluid + They wad ride the fords of hell."[28] + + "O little did my mother think, + The day she cradled me, + What lands I was to travel through, + What death I was to dee."[29] + +The maiden asks her buried lover: + + "Is there any room at your head, Sanders? + Is there any room at your feet? + Or any room at your twa sides, + Where fain, fain would I sleep?"[30] + + "O waly, waly, but love be bonny + A little time while it is new;[31] + But when 'tis auld it waxeth cauld + And fades awa' like morning dew. . . + + "And O! if my young babe were born, + And set upon the nurse's knee, + And I mysel' were dead and gane, + And the green grass growing over me!" + +Manners in this world are of a primitive savagery. There are treachery, +violence, cruelty, revenge; but there are also honor, courage, fidelity, +and devotion that endureth to the end. "Child Waters" and "Fair Annie" do +not suffer on a comparison with Tennyson's "Enid" and Chaucer's story of +patient Griselda ("The Clerkes Tale") with which they have a common +theme. It is the medieval world. Marauders, pilgrims, and wandering +gleemen go about in it. The knight stands at his garden pale, the lady +sits at her bower window, and the little foot page carries messages over +moss and moor. Marchmen are riding through the Bateable Land "by the hie +light o' the moon." Monks are chanting in St. Mary's Kirk, trumpets are +blowing in Carlisle town, castles are burning; down in the glen there is +an ambush and swords are flashing; bows are twanging in the greenwood; +four and twenty ladies are playing at the ball, and four and twenty +milk-white calves are in the woods of Glentanner--all ready to be stolen. +About Yule the round tables begin; the queen looks over the castle-wall, +the palmer returns from the Holy Land, Young Waters lies deep in Stirling +dungeon, but Child Maurice is in the silver wood, combing his yellow +locks with a silver comb. + +There is an almost epic coherence about the ballads of the Robin Hood +cycle. This good robber, who with his merry men haunted the forests of +Sherwood and Barnsdale, was the real ballad hero and the darling of the +popular fancy which created him. For though the names of his confessor, +Friar Tuck; his mistress, Maid Marian; and his companions, Little John, +Scathelock, and Much the miller's son, have an air of reality,--and +though the tradition has associated itself with definite +localities,--there is nothing historical about Robin Hood. Langland, in +the fourteenth century, mentions "rhymes of Robin Hood"; and efforts have +been made to identify him with one of the dispossessed followers of Simon +de Montfort, in "the Barons' War," or with some still earlier +free-booter, of Hereward's time, who had taken to the woods and lived by +plundering the Normans. Myth as he is, he is a thoroughly national +conception. He had the English love of fair play; the English readiness +to shake hands and make up when worsted in a square fight. He killed the +King's venison, but was a loyal subject. He took from the rich and gave +to the poor, executing thus a kind of wild justice. He defied legal +authority in the person of the proud sheriff of Nottingham, thereby +appealing to that secret sympathy with lawlessness which marks a +vigorous, free yeomanry.[32] He had the knightly virtues of courtesy and +hospitality, and the yeomanly virtues of good temper and friendliness. +And finally, he was a mighty archer with the national weapons, the +long-bow and the cloth-yard shaft; and so appealed to the national love +of sport in his free and careless life under the greenwood tree. The +forest scenery give a poetic background to his exploits, and though the +ballads, like folk-poetry in general, seldom linger over natural +descriptions, there is everywhere a consciousness of this background and +a wholesome, outdoor feeling: + + "In somer, when the shawes be sheyne, + And leves be large and long, + Hit is full mery in feyre foreste + To here the foulys song: + + "To se the dere draw to the dale, + And leve the hillis hee, + And shadow hem in the levës grene, + Under the grene-wode tre."[33] + +Although a few favorite ballads such as "Johnnie Armstrong," "Chevy +Chase," "The Children in the Wood," and some of the Robin Hood ones had +long been widely, nay almost universally familiar, they had hardly been +regarded as literature worthy of serious attention. They were looked +upon as nursery tales, or at best as the amusement of peasants and +unlettered folk, who used to paste them up on the walls of inns, +cottages, and ale-houses. Here and there an educated man had had a +sneaking fondness for collecting old ballads--much as people nowadays +collect postage stamps. Samuel Pepys, the diarist, made such a +collection, and so did John Selden, the great legal antiquary and scholar +of Milton's time. "I have heard," wrote Addison, "that the late Lord +Dorset, who had the greatest wit tempered with the greatest candor, and +was one of the finest critics as well as the best poets of his age, had a +numerous collection of old English ballads, and a particular pleasure in +the reading of them. I can affirm the same of Mr. Dryden." Dryden's +"Miscellany Poems" (1684) gave "Gilderoy," "Johnnie Armstrong," "Chevy +Chase," "The Miller and the King's Daughter," and "Little Musgrave and +the Lady Barnard." The last named, as well as "Lady Anne Bothwell's +Lament" and "Fair Margaret and Sweet William,"[34] was quoted in Beaumont +and Fletcher's "Knight of the Burning Pestle," (1611). Scraps of them +are sung by one of the _dramatis personae_, old Merrythought, whose +speciality is a damnable iteration of ballad fragments. References to +old ballads are numerous in the Elizabethan plays. Percy devoted the +second book of his first series to "Ballads that Illustrate Shakspere." +In the seventeenth century a few ballads were printed entire in poetic +miscellanies entitled "Garlands," higgledy-piggledy with pieces of all +kinds. Professor Child enumerates nine ballad collections before +Percy's. The only ones of any importance among these were "A Collection +of Old Ballads" (Vols I. and II. in 1723, Vol III. In 1725), ascribed to +Ambrose Philips; and the Scotch poet, Allan Ramsay's, "Tea Table +Miscellany," (in 4 vols., 1714-40) and "Evergreen" (2 vols., 1724). The +first of these collections was illustrated with copperplate engravings +and supplied with introductions which were humorous in intention. The +editor treated his ballads as trifles, though he described them as +"corrected from the best and most ancient copies extant"; and said that +Homer himself was nothing more than a blind ballad-singer, whose songs +had been subsequently joined together and formed into an epic poem. +Ramsay's ballads were taken in part from a manuscript collection of some +eight hundred pages, made by George Bannatyne about 1570 and still +preserved in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh. + +In Nos. 70, 74, and 85, of the _Spectator_, Addison had praised the +naturalness and simplicity of the popular ballads, selecting for special +mention "Chevy Chase"--the later version--"which," he wrote, "is the +favorite ballad of the common people of England; and Ben Jonson used to +say he had rather have been the author of it than of all his works"; and +"the 'Two Children in the Wood,' which is one of the darling songs of the +common people, and has been the delight of most Englishmen in some part +of their age." Addison justifies his liking for these humble poems by +classical precedents. "The greatest modern critics have laid it down as +a rule that an heroic poem should be founded upon some important precept +of morality adapted to the constitution of the country in which the poet +writes. Homer and Virgil have formed their plans in this view." +Accordingly he thinks that the author of "Chevy Chase" meant to point a +moral as to the mischiefs of private war. As if it were not precisely +the _gaudium certaminis_ that inspired the old border ballad-maker! As +if he did not glory in the fight! The passage where Earl Percy took the +dead Douglas by the hand and lamented his fallen foe reminds Addison of +Aeneas' behavior toward Lausus. The robin red-breast covering the +children with leaves recalls to his mind a similar touch in one of +Horace's odes. But it was much that Addison, whose own verse was so +artificial, should have had a taste for the wild graces of folk-song. He +was severely ridiculed by his contemporaries for these concessions. "He +descended now and then to lower disquisitions," wrote Dr. Johnson," and +by a serious display of the beauties of 'Chevy Chase,' exposed himself to +the ridicule of Wagstaff, who bestowed a like pompous character on 'Tom +Thumb'; and to the contempt of Dennis, who, considering the fundamental +position of his criticism, that 'Chevy Chase' pleases and ought to please +because it is natural, observes that 'there is a way of deviating from +nature . . . by imbecility, which degrades nature by faintness and +diminution'. . . In 'Chevy Chase' . . . there is a chill and lifeless +imbecility. The story cannot possibly be told in a manner that shall +make less impression on the mind."[35] + +Nicholas Rowe, the dramatist and Shakspere editor, had said a good word +for ballads in the prologue to "Jane Shore" (1713): + + "Let no nice taste despise the hapless dame + Because recording ballads chant her name. + Those venerable ancient song enditers + Soared many a pitch above our modern writers. . . + Our numbers may be more refined than those, + But what we've gained in verse, we've lost in prose. + Their words no shuffling double meaning knew: + Their speech was homely, but their hearts were true. . . + With rough, majestic force they moved the heart, + And strength and nature made amends for art." + +Ballad forgery had begun early. To say nothing of appropriations, like +Mallet's, of "William and Margaret," Lady Wardlaw put forth her +"Hardyknut" in 1719 as a genuine old ballad, and it was reprinted as such +in Ramsay's "Evergreen." Gray wrote to Walpole in 1760, "I have been +often told that the poem called 'Hardicanute' (which I always admired and +still admire) was the work of somebody that lived a few years ago. This +I do not at all believe, though it has evidently been retouched by some +modern hand." Before Percy no concerted or intelligent effort had been +made toward collecting, preserving, and editing the _corpus poetarum_ of +English minstrelsy. The great mass of ancient ballads, so far as they +were in print at all, existed in "stall copies," _i.e._, single sheets of +broadsides, struck off for sale by balladmongers and the keepers of +book-stalls. + +Thomas Percy, the compiler of the "Reliques," was a parish clergyman, +settled at the retired hamlet of Easton Maudit, Northamptonshire. For +years he had amused his leisure by collecting ballads. He numbered among +his acquaintances men of letters like Johnson, Goldsmith, Garrick, +Grainger, Farmer, and Shenstone. It was the last who suggested the plan +of the "Reliques" and who was to have helped in its execution, had not +his illness and death prevented. Johnson spent a part of the summer of +1764 on a visit to the vicarage of Easton Maudit, on which occasion Percy +reports that his guest "chose for his regular reading the old Spanish +romance of 'Felixmarte of Hircania,' in folio, which he read quite +through." He adds, what one would not readily suspect, that the doctor, +when a boy, "was immoderately fond of reading romances of chivalry, and +he retained his fondness for them through life. . . I have heard him +attribute to these extravagant fictions that unsettled turn of mind which +prevented his ever fixing in any profession." Percy talked over his +project with Johnson, who would seem to have given his approval, and even +to have added his persuasions to Shenstone's. For in the preface to the +first edition of the "Reliques," the editor declared that "he could +refuse nothing to such judges as the author of the _Rambler_ and the late +Mr. Shenstone"; and that "to the friendship of Mr. Johnson he owes many +valuable hints for the conduct of his work." And after Ritson had +questioned the existence of the famous "folio manuscript," Percy's nephew +in the advertisement to the fourth edition (1794), cited "the appeal +publicly made to Dr. Johnson . . . so long since as in the year 1765, and +never once contradicted by him." + +In spite of these amenities, the doctor had a low opinion of ballads and +ballad collectors. In the _Rambler_ (No. 177) he made merry over one +Cantilenus, who "turned all his thoughts upon old ballads, for he +considered them as the genuine records of the natural taste. He offered +to show me a copy of 'The Children in the Wood,' which he firmly believed +to be of the first edition, and by the help of which the text might be +freed from several corruptions, if this age of barbarity had any claim to +such favors from him." "The conversation," says Boswell, "having turned +on modern imitations of ancient ballads, and someone having praised their +simplicity, he treated them with that ridicule which he always displayed +when that subject was mentioned." Johnson wrote several stanzas in +parody of the ballads; _e.g._, + + "The tender infant, meek and mild, + Fell down upon a stone: + The nurse took up the squealing child, + But still the child squealed on." + +And again: + + "I put my hat upon my head + And walked into the Strand; + And there I met another man + Whose hat was in his hand." + +This is quoted by Wordsworth,[36] who compares it with a stanza from "The +Children in the Wood": + + "Those pretty babes, with hand in hand, + Went wandering up and down; + But never more they saw the man + Approaching from the town." + +He says that in both of these stanzas the language is that of familiar +conversation, yet one stanza is admirable and the other contemptible, +because the _matter_ of it is contemptible. In the essay supplementary +to his preface, Wordsworth asserts that the "Reliques" was "ill suited to +the then existing taste of city society, and Dr. Johnson . . . was not +sparing in his exertions to make it an object of contempt": and that "Dr. +Percy was so abashed by the ridicule flung upon his labors . . . that, +though while he was writing under a mask he had not wanted resolution to +follow his genius into the regions of true simplicity and genuine pathos +(as is evinced by the exquisite ballad of 'Sir Cauline' and by many other +pieces), yet when he appeared in his own person and character as a +poetical writer, he adopted, as in the tale of 'The Hermit of Warkworth,' +a diction scarcely distinguishable from the vague, the glossy and +unfeeling language of his day." Wordsworth adds that he esteems the +genius of Dr. Percy in this kind of writing superior to that of any other +modern writer; and that even Bürger had not Percy's fine sensibility. He +quotes, in support of this opinion, two stanzas from "The Child of Elle" +in the "Reliques," and contrasts them with the diluted and tricked-out +version of the same in Bürger's German. + +Mr. Hales does not agree in this high estimate of Percy as a ballad +composer. Of this same "Child of Elle" he says: "The present fragment of +a version may be fairly said to be now printed for the first time, as in +the 'Reliques' it is buried in a heap of 'polished' verses composed by +Percy. That worthy prelate, touched by the beauty of it--he had a +soul--was unhappily moved to try his hand at its completion. A +wax-doll-maker might as well try to restore Milo's Venus. There are +thirty-nine lines here. There are two hundred in the thing called the +'Child of Elle' in the 'Reliques.' But in those two hundred lines all +the thirty-nine originals do not appear. . . On the whole, the union of +the genuine and the false--of the old ballad with Percy's tawdry +feebleness--makes about as objectionable a _mésalliance_ as in the story +itself is in the eyes of the father."[37] The modern ballad scholars, in +their zeal for the purity of the text, are almost as hard upon Percy as +Ritson himself was. They say that he polished "The Heir of Linne" till +he could see his own face in it; and swelled out its 126 lines to 216--"a +fine flood of ballad and water."[38] The result of this piecing and +tinkering in "Sir Cauline"--which Wordsworth thought exquisite--they +regard as a heap of tinsel, though they acknowledge that "these +additional stanzas show, indeed, an extensive acquaintance with old +balladry and a considerable talent of imitation." + +From the critical or scholarly point of view, these strictures are +doubtless deserved. It is an editor's duty to give his text as he finds +it, without interpolations or restorations; and it is unquestionable that +Percy's additions to fragmentary pieces are full of sentimentalism, +affectation, and the spurious poetic diction of his age. An experienced +ballad amateur can readily separate, in most cases, the genuine portions +from the insertions. But it is unfair to try Percy by modern editorial +canons. That sacredness which is now imputed to the _ipsissima verba_ of +an ancient piece of popular literature would have been unintelligible to +men of that generation, who regarded such things as trifles at best, and +mostly as barbarous trifles--something like wampum belts, or nose-rings, +or antique ornaments in the _goût barbare et charmant des bijoux goths_. +Percy's readers did not want torsos and scraps; to present them with +acephalous or bobtailed ballads--with _cetera desunt_ and constellations +of asterisks--like the manuscript in Prior's poem, the conclusion of +which was eaten by the rats--would have been mere pedantry. Percy knew +his public, and he knew how to make his work attractive to it. The +readers of that generation enjoyed their ballad with a large infusion of +Percy. If the scholars of this generation prefer to take theirs without, +they know where to get it. + +The materials for the "Reliques" were drawn partly from the Pepys +collection at Magdalen College, Cambridge; from Anthony Wood's, made in +1676, in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford; from manuscript and printed +ballads in the Bodleian, the British Museum, the archives of the +Antiquarian Society, and private collections. Sir David Dalrymple sent a +number of Scotch ballads, and the editor acknowledged obligations to +Thomas Warton and many others. But the nucleus of the whole was a +certain folio manuscript in a handwriting of Charles I.'s time, +containing 191 songs and ballads, which Percy had begged, then still very +young, from his friend Humphrey Pitt, of Prior's-Lee in Shropshire. When +he first saw this precious document, it was torn, unbound, and mutilated, +"lying dirty on the floor under a bureau in the parlor, being used by the +maids to light the fire." The first and last leaves were wanting, and +"of 54 pages near the beginning, half of every leaf hath been torn +away."[39] Percy had it bound, but the binders trimmed off the top and +bottom lines in the process. From this manuscript he professed to have +taken "the greater part" of the pieces in the "Reliques." In truth he +took only 45 of the 176 poems in his first edition from this source. + +Percy made no secret of the fact that he filled _lacunae_ in his +originals with stanzas, and, in some cases, with nearly entire poems of +his own composition. But the extent of the liberties that he took with +the text, although suspected, was not certainly known until Mr. Furnivall +finally got leave to have the folio manuscript copied and printed.[40] +Before this time it had been jealously guarded by the Percy family, and +access to it had been denied to scholars. "Since Percy and his nephew +printed their fourth edition of the 'Reliques' from the manuscript in +1794," writes Mr. Furnivall in his "Forewords," "no one has printed any +piece from it except Robert Jamieson--to whom Percy supplied a copy of +'Child Maurice' and 'Robin Hood and the Old Man' for his 'Popular Ballads +and Songs' (1806)--and Sir Frederic Madden, who was allowed--by one of +Percy's daughters--to print 'The Grene Knight,' 'The Carle of Carlisle' +and 'The Turk and Gawin' in his 'Syr Gawaine' for the Bannatyne Club, +1839." Percy was furiously assailed by Joseph Ritson for manipulating +his texts; and in the 1794 edition he made some concessions to the +latter's demand for a literal rescript, by taking off a few of the +ornaments in which he had tricked them. Ritson was a thoroughly +critical, conscientious student of poetic antiquities and held the right +theory of an editor's functions. In his own collection of early English +poetry he rendered a valuable service to all later inquiries. These +included "Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry," 1791; "Ancient Songs," 1792; +"Scottish Songs," 1794; "Robin Hood," 1795; besides editions of Laurence +Minot's poems, and of "Gammer Gurton's Needle," as well as other titles. +He was an ill-tempered and eccentric man: a vegetarian, a free-thinker, a +spelling reformer,[41] and latterly a Jacobin. He attacked Warton as +well as Percy, and used to describe any clerical antagonist as a +"stinking priest." He died insane in 1803. Ritson took issue with the +theory maintained in Percy's introductory "Essay on the Ancient +Minstrels," viz.: that the minstrels were not only the singers, but +likewise the authors of the ballads. But Ritson went so far in his rage +against Percy as to deny the existence of the sacred Folio Manuscript, +until convinced by abundant testimony that there was such a thing. It +was an age of forgeries, and Ritson was not altogether without +justification in supposing that the author of "The Hermit of Warkworth" +belonged in the same category with Chatterton, Ireland, and MacPherson. + +Percy, like Warton, took an apologetic tone toward his public. "In a +polished age, like the present," he wrote, "I am sensible that many of +these reliques of antiquity will require great allowances to be made for +them. Yet have they, for the most part, a pleasing simplicity and many +artless graces, which, in the opinion of no mean critics, have been +thought to compensate for the want of higher beauties." Indeed how +should it have been otherwise? The old ballads were everything which the +eighteenth century was not. They were rough and wild, where that was +smooth and tame; they dealt, with fierce sincerity, in the elementary +passions of human nature. They did not moralize, or philosophize, or +sentimentalize; were never subtle, intellectual, or abstract. They were +plain English, without finery or elegance. They had certain popular +mannerisms, but none of the conventional figures of speech or rhetorical +artifices like personifications, periphrasis, antithesis, and climax so +dear to the Augustan heart. They were intent on the story--not on the +style--and they just told it and let it go for what it was worth. + +Moreover, there are ballads and ballads. The best of them are noble in +expression as well as feeling, unequaled by anything in our medieval +poetry outside of Chaucer; unequaled by Chaucer himself in point of +intensity, in occasional phrases of a piercing beauty: + + "The swans-fethers that his arrowe bar + With his hart-blood they were wet."[42] + + "O cocks are crowing a merry mid-larf, + A wat the wild fule boded day; + The salms of Heaven will be sung, + And ere now I'll be missed away."[43] + + "If my love were an earthly knight, + As he's an elfin gray, + A wad na gie my sin true love + For no lord that ye hae."[44] + + "She hang ae napkin at the door, + Another in the ha, + And a' to wipe the trickling tears, + Sae fast as they did fa."[45] + + "And all is with one chyld of yours, + I feel stir at my side: + My gowne of green, it is too strait: + Before it was too wide."[46] + +Verse of this quality needs no apology. But of many of the ballads, +Dennis' taunt, repeated by Dr. Johnson, is true; they are not merely +rude, but weak and creeping in style. Percy knew that the best of them +would savor better to the palates of his contemporaries if he dressed +them with modern sauces. Yet he must have loved them, himself, in their +native simplicity, and it seems almost incredible that he could have +spoken as he did about Prior's insipid paraphrase of the "Nut Brown +Maid." "If it had no other merit," he says of that most lovely ballad, +"than the having afforded the ground-work to Prior's 'Henry and Emma,' +this ought to preserve it from oblivion." Prior was a charming writer of +epigram, society verse, and the humorous _conte_ in the manner of La +Fontaine; but to see how incapable he was of the depth and sweetness of +romantic poetry, compare a few lines of the original with the "hubbub of +words" in his modernized version, in heroic couplets: + + "O Lord, what is this worldes blisse + That changeth as the mone! + The somer's day in lusty May + Is derked before the none. + I hear you say farewel. Nay, nay, + We departe not so soon: + Why say ye so? Wheder wyle ye goo? + Alas! what have ye done? + Alle my welfare to sorrow and care + Shulde change if ye were gon; + For in my minde, of all mankynde, + I love but you alone." + +Now hear Prior, with his Venus and flames and god of love: + + "What is our bliss that changeth with the moon, + And day of life that darkens ere 'tis noon? + What is true passion, if unblest it dies? + And where is Emma's joy, if Henry flies? + If love, alas! be pain, the pain I bear + No thought can figure and no tongue declare. + Ne'er faithful woman felt, nor false one feigned + The flames which long have in my bosom reigned. + The god of love himself inhabits there + With all his rage and dread and grief and care, + His complement of stores and total war, + O cease then coldly to suspect my love + And let my deed at least my faith approve. + Alas! no youth shall my endearments share + Nor day nor night shall interrupt my care; + No future story shall with truth upbraid + The cold indifference of the nut-brown maid; + Nor to hard banishment shall Henry run + While careless Emma sleeps on beds of down. + View me resolved, where'er thou lead'st, to go: + Friend to thy pain and partner of thy woe; + For I attest fair Venus and her son + That I, of all mankind, will love but thee alone." + +There could be no more striking object lesson than this of the plethora +from which English poetic diction was suffering, and of the sanative +value of a book like the "Reliques." + +"To atone for the rudeness of the more obsolete poems," and "to take off +from the tediousness of the longer narratives," Percy interspersed a few +modern ballads and a large number of "little elegant pieces of the lyric +kind" by Skelton, Hawes, Gascoigne, Raleigh, Marlowe, Shakspere, Jonson, +Warner, Carew, Daniel, Lovelace, Suckling, Drayton, Beaumont and +Fletcher, Wotton, and other well-known poets. Of the modern ballads the +only one with any resemblance to folk-poetry was "The Braes o' Yarrow" by +William Hamilton of Bangour, a Scotch gentleman who was "out in the +forty-five." The famous border stream had watered an ancient land of +song and story, and Hamilton's ballad, with its "strange, fugitive +melody," was not unworthy of its traditions. Hamilton belongs to the +Milton imitators by virtue of his octosyllabics "Contemplation."[47] His +"Braes o' Yarrow" had been given already in Ramsey's "Tea Table +Miscellany," The opening lines-- + + "Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny bride, + Busk ye, busk ye, my winsome marrow"-- + +are quoted in Wordsworth's "Yarrow Unvisited," as well as a line of the +following stanza: + + "Sweet smells the birk, green grows, green grows the grass, + Yellow on Yarrow's bank the gowan: + Fair hangs the apple frae the rock, + Sweet the wave of Yarrow flowin'." + +The first edition of the "Reliques" included one acknowledged child of +Percy's muse, "The Friar of Orders Grey," a short, narrative ballad made +up of song snatches from Shakspere's plays. Later editions afforded his +longer poem, "The Hermit of Warkworth," first published independently in +1771. + +With all its imperfections--perhaps partly in consequence of its +imperfections--the "Reliques" was an epoch-making book. The nature of +its service to English letters is thus stated by Macaulay, in the +introduction to his "Lays of Ancient Rome": "We cannot wonder that the +ballads of Rome should have altogether disappeared, when we remember how +very narrowly, in spite of the invention of printing, those of our own +country and those of Spain escaped the same fate. There is, indeed, +little doubt that oblivion covers many English songs equal to any that +were published by Bishop Percy; and many Spanish songs as good as the +best of those which have been so happily translated by Mr. Lockhart. +Eighty years ago England possessed only one tattered copy of 'Child +Waters' and 'Sir Cauline,' and Spain only one tattered copy of the noble +poem of the 'Cid.' The snuff of a candle, or a mischievous dog, might in +a moment have deprived the world forever of any of those fine +compositions. Sir Walter Scott, who united to the fire of a great poet +the minute curiosity and patient diligence of a great antiquary, was but +just in time to save the precious reliques of the Minstrelsy of the +Border." + +But Percy not only rescued, himself, a number of ballads from +forgetfulness; what was equally important, his book prompted others to +hunt out and publish similar relics before it was too late. It was the +occasion of collections like Herd's (1769), Scott's (1802-03), and +Motherwell's (1827), and many more, resting on purer texts and edited on +more scrupulous principles than his own. Futhermore, his ballads helped +to bring about a reform in literary taste and to inspire men of original +genius. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Scott, all acknowledged the +greatest obligations to them. Wordsworth said that English poetry had +been "absolutely redeemed" by them. "I do not think there is a writer in +verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his +obligations to the 'Reliques.' I know that it is so with my friends; +and, for myself, I am happy that it is so with my friends; and, for +myself, I am happy in this occasion to make a public avowal of my +own."[48] Without the "Reliques," "The Ancient Mariner," "The Lady of +the Lake," "La Belle Dame sans Merci," "Stratton Water," and "The +Haystack in the Floods" might never have been. Perhaps even the "Lyrical +Ballads" might never have been, or might have been something quite unlike +what they are. Wordsworth, to be sure, scarcely ranks among romantics, +and he expressly renounces the romantic machinery: + + "The dragon's wing, + The magic ring, + I shall not covet for my dower."[49] + +What he learned from the popular ballad was the power of sincerity and of +direct and homely speech. + +As for Scott, he has recorded in an oft-quoted passage the impression +that Percy's volumes made upon him in his school-days: "I remember well +the spot where I read these volumes for the first time. It was beneath a +huge plantain tree in the ruins of what had been intended for an +old-fashioned arbor in the garden I have mentioned. The summer day 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. To read and to remember was, +in this instance, the same thing; and henceforth I overwhelmed my +school-fellows, and all who would hearken to me, with tragical +recitations from the ballads of Bishop Percy. The first time, too, I +could scrape a few shillings together, I bought unto myself a copy of +these beloved volumes; nor do I believe I ever read a book so frequently, +or with half the enthusiasm." + +The "Reliques" worked powerfully in Germany, too. It was received in +Lessing's circle with universal enthusiasm,[50] and fell in with that +newly aroused interest in "Volkslieder" which prompted Herder's "Stimmen +der Völker" (1778-79).[51] Gottfried August Bürger, in particular, was a +poet who may be said to have been made by the English ballad literature, +of which he was an ardent student. His poems were published in 1778, and +included five translations from Percy: "The Child of Elle" ("Die +Entführung"), "The Friar of Orders Grey" ("Graurock"), "The Wanton Wife +of Bath" ("Frau Schnips"), "King John and the Abbot of Canterbury" ("Der +Kaiser und der Abt"), and "Child Waters" ("Graf Walter"). A. W. Schlegel +says that Burger did not select the more ancient and genuine pieces in +the "Reliques"; and, moreover, that he spoiled the simplicity of the +originals in his translations. It was doubtless in part the success of +the "Reliques" that is answerable for many collections of old English +poetry put forth in the last years of the century. Tyrwhitt's "Chaucer" +and Ritson's publications have been already mentioned. George Ellis, a +friend and correspondent of Walter Scott, and a fellow of the Society of +Antiquaries, who was sometimes called "the Sainte Palaye of England," +issued his "Specimens of Early English Poets" in 1790; edited in 1796 G. +L. Way's translations from French _fabliaux_ of the twelfth and +thirteenth centuries; and printed in 1805 three volumes of "Early English +Metrical Romances." + +It is pleasant to record that Percy's labors brought him public +recognition and the patronage of those whom Dr. Johnson used to call "the +great." He had dedicated the "Reliques" to Elizabeth Percy, Countess of +Northumberland. Himself the son of a grocer, he liked to think that he +was connected by blood with the great northern house whose exploits had +been sung by the ancient minstrels that he loved. He became chaplain to +the Duke of Northumberland, and to King George III.; and, in 1782, Bishop +of Dromore in Ireland, in which see he died in 1811. + +This may be as fit a place as any to introduce some mention of "The +Minstrel, or the Progress of Genius," by James Beattie; a poem once +widely popular, in which several strands of romantic influence are seen +twisted together. The first book was published in 1771, the second in +1774, and the work was never completed. It was in the Spenserian stanza, +was tinged with the enthusiastic melancholy of the Wartons, followed the +landscape manner of Thomson, had elegiac echoes of Gray, and was perhaps +not unaffected, in its love of mountain scenery, by MacPherson's +"Ossian." But it took its title and its theme from a hint in Percy's +"Essay on the Ancient Minstrels."[52] Beattie was Professor of Moral +Philosophy in the University of Aberdeen. He was an amiable, sensitive, +deeply religious man. He was fond of music and of nature, and was easily +moved to rears; had "a young girl's nerves," says Taine, "and an old +maid's hobbies." Gray, who met him in 1765, when on a visit to the Earl +of Strathmore at Glammis Castle, esteemed him highly. So did Dr. +Johnson, partly because of his "Essay on Truth" (1770), a shallow +invective against Hume, which gained its author an interview with George +III. and a pension of two hundred pounds a year. Beattie visited London +in 1771, and figured there as a champion of orthodoxy and a +heaven-inspired bard. Mrs. Montagu patronized him extensively. Sir +Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait, with his "Essay on Truth" under his +arm, and Truth itself in the background, an allegoric angel holding the +balances in one hand, and thrusting away with the other the figures of +Prejudice, Skepticism, and Folly. Old Lord Lyttelton had the poet out to +Hagley, and declared that he was Thomson come back to earth, to sing of +virtue and of the beauties of nature. Oxford made him an LL.D.: he was +urged to take orders in the Church of England; and Edinburgh offered him +the chair of Moral Philosophy. Beattie's head was slightly turned by all +this success, and he became something of a tuft-hunter. But he stuck +faithfully to Aberdeen, whose romantic neighborhood had first inspired +his muse. The biographers tell a pretty story of his teaching his little +boy to look for the hand of God in the universe, by sowing cress in a +garden plot in the shape of the child's initials and leading him by this +gently persuasive analogy to read design in the works of nature. + +The design of "The Minstrel" is to "trace the progress of a Poetical +Genius, born in a rude age," a youthful shepherd who "lived in Gothic +days." But nothing less truly Gothic or medieval could easily be +imagined than the actual process of this young poet's education. Instead +of being taught to carve and ride and play the flute, like Chaucer's +squire who + + "Cowde songes make and wel endite, + Juste and eek daunce, and wel purtraye and write," + +Edwin wanders alone upon the mountains and in solitary places and is +instructed in history, philosophy, and science--and even in Vergil--by an +aged hermit, who sits on a mossy rock, with his harp beside him, and +delivers lectures. The subject of the poem, indeed, is properly the +education of nature; and in a way it anticipates Wordsworth's "Prelude," +as this hoary sage does the "Solitary" of "The Excursion." Beattie +justifies his use of Spenser's stanza on the ground that it "seems, from +its Gothic structure and original, to bear some relation to the subject +and spirit of the poem." He makes no attempt, however, to follow +Spenser's "antique expressions." The following passage will illustrate +as well as any the romantic character of the whole: + + "When the long-sounding curfew from afar + Loaded with loud lament the lonely gale, + Young Edwin, lighted by the evening star, + Lingering and listening, wandered down the vale. + There would he dream of graves and corses pale, + And ghosts that to the charnel-dungeon throng, + And drag a length of clanking chain, and wail, + Till silenced by the owl's terrific song, + Or blast that shrieks by fits the shuddering aisles along. + + "Or when the settling moon, in crimson dyed, + Hung o'er the dark and melancholy deep, + To haunted stream, remote from man, he hied, + Where fays of yore their revels wont to keep; + And there let Fancy rove at large, till sleep + A vision brought to his entrancëd sight. + And first a wildly murmuring wind gan creep + Shrill to his ringing ear; then tapers bright, + With instantaneous gleam, illumed the vault of night. + + "Anon in view a portal's blazing arch + Arose; the trumpet bids the valves unfold; + And forth a host of little warriors march, + Grasping the diamond lance and targe of gold. + Their look was gentle, their demeanor bold, + And green their helms, and green their silk attire; + And here and there, right venerably old, + The long-robed minstrels wake the warbling wire, + And some with mellow breath the martial pipe inspire."[53] + +The influence of Thomson is clearly perceptible in these stanzas. "The +Minstrel," like "The Seasons," abounds in insipid morality, the +commonplaces of denunciation against luxury and ambition, and the praise +of simplicity and innocence. The titles alone of Beattie's minor poems +are enough to show in what school he was a scholar: "The Hermit," "Ode to +Peace," "The Triumph of Melancholy," "Retirement," etc., etc. "The +Minstrel" ran through four editions before the publication of its second +book in 1774. + + +[1] Svend Grundtvig's great collection, "Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser," was +published in five volumes in 1853-90. + +[2] Francis James Child's "English and Scottish Popular Ballads," issued +in ten parts in 1882-98 is one of the glories of American scholarship. + +[3] _Cf._ The Tannhäuser legend and the Venusberg. + +[4] "The Wife of Usher's Well." + +[5] It should never be forgotten that the ballad (derived from +_ballare--to dance)_ was originally not a written poem, but a song and +dance. Many of the old tunes are preserved. A number are given in +Chappell's "Popular Music of the Olden Time," and in the appendix to +Motherwell's "Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern" (1827). + +[6] "A Ballad." One theory explains these meaningless refrains as +remembered fragments of older ballads. + +[7] Reproduced by Rossetti and other moderns. See them parodied in Robert +Buchanan's "Fleshly School of Poets": + + "When seas do roar and skies do pour, + Hard is the lot of the sailór + Who scarcely, as he reels, can tell + The sidelights from the binnacle." + +[8] "I never heard the old song of Percie and Douglas that I found not my +heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some +blind crouder, with no rougher voice than rude style; which being so evil +apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, what would it +work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar!" + +[9] Empty: "Bonnie George Campbell." + +[10] "Lord Randall." + +[11] Turf: "The Twa Corbies." + +[12] I use this phrase without any polemic purpose. The question of +origins is not here under discussion. Of course at some stage in the +history of any ballad the poet, the individual artist, is present, though +the precise ration of his agency to the communal element in the work is +obscure. For an acute and learned view of this topic, see the +Introduction to "Old English Ballads," by Professor Francis B. Gummere +(Atheneum Press Series), Boston, 1894. + +[13] From "Jock o' Hazel Green." "Young Lochinvar" is derived from +"Katherine Janfarie" in the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border." + +[14] "Scott has given us nothing more complete and lovely than this little +song, which unites simplicity and dramatic power to a wildwood music of +the rarest quality. No moral is drawn, far less any conscious analysis +of feeling attempted: the pathetic meaning is left to be suggested by the +mere presentment of the situation. Inexperienced critics have often +named this, which may be called the Homeric manner, superficial from its +apparent simple facility."--_Palgrave: "Golden Treasury"_ (Edition of +1866), p. 392. + +[15] "Brown Robyn's Confession." Robin Hood risks his life to take the +sacrament. "Robin Hood and the Monk." + +[16] "Sir Hugh." _Cf._ Chaucer's "Prioresse Tale." + +[17] "The Gay Goshawk." + +[18] "Johnnie Cock." + +[19] "Young Hunting." + +[20] "The Twa Sisters." + +[21] "The Wife of Usher's Well." + +[22] "Fair Margaret and Sweet William." + +[23] "Sweet William's Ghost." + +[24] "Clerk Colven." + +[25] "Willie's Lady." + +[26] "Kemp Owyne" and "Tam Lin." + +[27] "King Estmere." + +[28] "Johnnie Cock." + +[29] "Mary Hamilton." + +[30] "Sweet William's Ghost." + +[31] "The Forsaken Bride." _Cf._ Chaucer: + + "Love is noght old as when that it is newe." + --_Clerkes Tale._ + +[32] What character so popular as a wild prince--like Prince Hal--who +breaks his own laws, and the heads of his own people, in a democratic way? + +[33] "Robin Hood and the Monk." + +[34] For a complete exposure of David Mallet's impudent claim to the +authorship of this ballad, see Appendix II. to Professor Phelps' "English +Romantic Movement." + +[35] "Life of Addison." + +[36] Preface to second edition of the "Lyrical Ballads." + +[37] "Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript" (1867), Vol. II. Introductory +Essay by J. W. Hales on "The Revival of Ballad Poetry in the Eighteenth +Century." + +[38] _Ibid._ + +[39] "Advertisement to the Fourth Edition." + +[40] In four volumes, 1867-68. + +[41] Spelling reform has been a favorite field for cranks to disport +themselves upon. Ritson's particular vanity was the past participle of +verbs ending in _e; e.g., perceiveed._ _Cf._ Landor's notions of a +similar kind. + +[42] "The Hunting of the Cheviot." + +[43] "Sweet William's Ghost." + +[44] "Tam Lin." + +[45] "Fair Annie." + +[46] "Child Waters." + +[47] See Phelps' "English Romantic Movement," pp. 33-35. + +[48] Appendix to the Preface to the 2nd edition of "Lyrical Ballads." + +[49] "Peter Bell." + +[50] Scherer: "Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur," p. 445. + +[51] In his third book Herder gave translations of over twenty pieces in +the "Reliques," besides a number from Ramsay's and other collections. +His selections from Percy included "Chevy Chase," "Edward," "The Boy and +the Mantle," "King Estmere," "Waly, Waly," "Sir Patric Spens," "Young +Waters," "The Bonny Earl of Murray," "Fair Margaret and Sweet William," +"Sweet William's Ghost," "The Nut-Brown Maid," "The Jew's Daughter," +etc., etc.; but none of the Robin Hood ballads. Herder's preface +testifies that the "Reliques" was the starting-point and the kernel of +his whole undertaking. "Der Anblick dieser Sammlung giebts offenbar dass +ich eigentlich von _Englishchen_ Volksliedern ausging und auf sie +zurückkomme. Als vor zehn und mehr Jahren die 'Reliques of Ancient +Poetry' mir in die Hände fielen, freuten mich einzelne Stücke so sehr, +dass ich sie zu übersetzen versuchte."--_Vorrede zu den Volksliedern. +Herder's Sämmtlichee Werke_, Achter Theil, s. 89 (Carlsruhe, 1821). + +[52] Stanzas 44-46, book i. bring in references to ballad literature in +general and to "The Nut-Brown Maid" and "The Children in the Wood" in +particular. + +[53] Book I. stanzas 32-34. + + + + +CHAPTER IX. + +Ossian + +In 1760 appeared the first installment of MacPherson's "Ossian."[1] +Among those who received it with the greatest curiosity and delight was +Gray, who had recently been helping Mason with criticisms on his +"Caractacus," published in 1759. From a letter to Walpole (June 1760) it +would seem that the latter had sent Gray two manuscript bits of the as +yet unprinted "Fragments," communicated to Walpole by Sir David +Dalrymple, who furnished Scotch ballads to Percy. "I am so charmed," +wrote Gray, "with the two specimens of Erse poetry, that I cannot help +giving you the trouble to inquire a little farther about them; and should +wish to see a few lines of the original, that I may form some slight idea +of the language, the measures and the rhythm. Is there anything known of +the author or authors; and of what antiquity are they supposed to be? Is +there any more to be had of equal beauty, or at all approaching it?" + +In a letter to Shonehewer (June 29,) he writes: "I have received another +Scotch packet with a third specimen . . . full of nature and noble wild +imagination."[2] And in the month following he writes to Wharton: "If +you have seen Stonehewer, he has probably told you of my old Scotch +(rather Irish) poetry. I am gone mad about them. They are said to be +translations (literal and in prose) from the _Erse_ tongue, done by one +MacPherson, a young clergyman in the Highlands. He means to publish a +collection he has of these specimens of antiquity, if it be antiquity; +but what plagues me, is, I cannot come at any certainty on that head. I +was so struck, so _extasié_ with their infinite beauty, that I writ into +Scotland to make a thousand enquiries." This is strong language for a +man of Gray's coolly critical temper; but all his correspondence of about +this date is filled with references to Ossian which enable the modern +reader to understand in part the excitement that the book created among +Gray's contemporaries. The letters that he got from MacPherson were +unconvincing, "ill-wrote, ill-reasoned, calculated to deceive, and yet +not cunning enough to do it cleverly." The external evidence disposed +him to believe the poems counterfeit; but the impression which they made +was such that he was "resolved to believe them genuine, spite of the +Devil and the Kirk. It is impossible to convince me that they were +invented by the same man that writes me these letters. On the other +hand, it is almost as hard to suppose, if they are original, that he +should be able to translate them so admirably." + +On August 7 he writes to Mason that the Erse fragments have been +published five weeks ago in Scotland, though he had not received his copy +till the last week. "I continue to think them genuine, though my reasons +for believing the contrary are rather stronger than ever." David Hume, +who afterward became skeptical as to their authenticity, wrote to Gray, +assuring him that these poems were in everybody's mouth in the Highlands, +and had been handed down from father to son, from an age beyond all +memory and tradition. Gray's final conclusion is very much the same with +that of the general public, to which the Ossianic question is even yet a +puzzle. "I remain still in doubt about the authenticity of these poems, +tho' inclining rather to believe them genuine in spite of the world. +Whether they are the inventions of antiquity, or of a modern Scotchman, +either case is to me alike unaccountable. _Je m'y perds._" + +We are more concerned here with the impression which MacPherson's books, +taking them just as they stand, made upon their contemporary Europe, than +with the history of the controversy to which they gave rise, and which is +still unsettled after more than a century and a quarter of discussion. +Nevertheless, as this controversy began immediately upon their +publication, and had reference not only to the authenticity of the +Ossianic poems, but also to their literary value; it cannot be altogether +ignored in this account. The principal facts upon which it turned may be +given in a nut-shell. In 1759 Mr. John Home, author of the tragedy of +"Douglas," who had become interested in the subject of Gaelic poetry, met +in Dumfriesshire a young Scotchman, named James MacPherson, who was +traveling as private tutor to Mr. Graham of Balgowan. MacPherson had in +his possession a number of manuscripts which, he said, were transcripts +of Gaelic poems taken down from the recital of old people in the +Highlands. He translated two of these for Home, who was so much struck +with them that he sent or showed copies to Dr. Hugh Blair, Professor of +Rhetoric in the University of Edinburgh. At the solicitation of Dr. +Blair and Mr. Home, MacPherson was prevailed upon to make further +translations from the materials in his hands; and these, to the number of +sixteen, were published in the "Fragments" already mentioned, with a +preface of eight pages by Blair. They attracted so much attention in +Edinburgh that a subscription was started, to send the compiler through +the Highlands in search of more Gaelic poetry. + +The result of the researches was "Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six +Books: Together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of +Fingal. Translated from the Gaelic language by James MacPherson," +London, 1762; together with "Temora, an Ancient Epic Poem in Eight +Books," etc., etc., London, 1763. MacPherson asserted that he had made +his versions from Gaelic poems ascribed to Ossian or Oisin, the son of +Fingal or Finn MacCumhail, a chief renowned in Irish and Scottish song +and popular legend. Fingal was the king of Morven, a district of the +western Highlands, and head of the ancient warlike clan or race of the +Feinne or Fenians. Tradition placed him in the third century and +connected him with the battle of Gabhra, fought in 281. His son, +Ossian, the warrior-bard, survived all his kindred. Blind and old, +seated in his empty hall, or the cave of the rock; alone save for the +white-armed Malvina, bride of his dead son, Oscar, he struck the harp and +sang the memories of his youth: "a tale of the times of old." + +MacPherson translated--or composed--his "Ossian" in an exclamatory, +abrupt, rhapsodical prose, resembling somewhat the English of Isaiah and +others of the books of the prophets. The manners described were heroic, +the state of society primitive. The properties were few and simple; the +cars of the heroes, their spears, helmets, and blue shields; the harp, +the shells from which they drank in the hall, etc. Conventional compound +epithets abound, as in Homer: the "dark-bosomed" ships, the "car-borne" +heroes, the "white-armed" maids, the "long-bounding" dogs of the chase. +The scenery is that of the western Highlands; and the solemn monotonous +rhythm of MacPherson's style accorded well with the tone of his +descriptions, filling the mind with images of vague sublimity and +desolation: the mountain torrent, the dark rock in the ocean, the mist on +the hills, the ghosts of heroes half seen by the setting moon, the +thistle in the ruined courts of chieftains, the grass whistling on the +windy heath, the blue stream of Lutha, and the cliffs of sea-surrounded +Gormal. It was noticed that there was no mention of the wolf, common in +ancient Caledonia; nor of the thrush or lark or any singing bird; nor of +the salmon of the sealochs, so often referred to in modern Gaelic poetry. +But the deer, the swan, the boar, eagle, and raven occur repeatedly. + +But a passage or two will exhibit the language and imagery of the whole +better than pages of description. "I have seen the walls of Balclutha, +but they were desolate. The fire had resounded in the halls, and the +voice of the people is heard no more. The stream of Clutha was removed +from its place by the fall of the walls. The thistle shook there its +lonely head; the moss whistled to the wind. The fox looked out from the +windows, the rank grass of the wall waved round its head. Desolate is +the dwelling of Moina, silence is in the house of her fathers. Raise the +song of mourning, O bards, over the land of strangers. They have but +fallen before us; for, one day, we must fall. Why dost thou build the +hall, son of the winged days? Thou lookest from thy towers to-day; yet a +few years, and the blast of the desert comes; it howls in thy empty +court, and whistles round thy half-worn shield."[3] "They rose rustling +like a flock of sea-fowl when the waves expel them from the shore. Their +sound was like a thousand streams that meet in Cona's vale, when, after a +stormy night, they turn their dark eddies beneath the pale light of the +morn. As the dark shades of autumn fly over hills of grass; so, gloomy, +dark, successive came the chiefs of Lochlin's[4] echoing woods. Tall as +the stag of Morven, moved stately before them the King.[5] His shining +shield is on his side, like a flame on the heath at night; when the world +is silent and dark, and the traveler sees some ghost sporting in the +beam. Dimly gleam the hills around, and show indistinctly their oaks. A +blast from the troubled ocean removed the settled mist. The sons of Erin +appear, like a ridge of rocks on the coast; when mariners, on shores +unknown are trembling at veering winds."[6] + +The authenticity of the "Fragments" of 1760 had not passed without +question; but MacPherson brought forward entire epics which, he asserted, +were composed by a Highland bard of the third century, handed down +through ages by oral tradition, and finally committed--at least in +part--to writing and now extant in manuscripts in his possession, there +ensued at once a very emphatic expression of incredulity. Among the most +truculent of the disbelievers was Dr. Johnson. He had little liking for +Scotland, still less for the poetry of barbarism. In his tour of the +Western Islands with Boswell in 1773, he showed an insensibility, and +even a kind of hostility, to the wild beauties of Highland scenery, which +gradually affects the reader with a sense of the ludicrous as he watches +his sturdy figure rolling along on a small Highland pony by sequestered +Loch Ness, with its fringe of birch trees, or between the prodigious +mountains that frown above Glensheal; or seated in a boat off the Mull of +Cantyre, listening to the Erse songs of the rowers: + + "Breaking the silence of the seas + Among the farthest Hebrides." + +"Dr. Johnson," says Boswell, "owned he was now in a scene of as wild +nature as he could see; but he corrected me sometimes in my inaccurate +observations. 'There,' said I, 'is a mountain like a cone.' Johnson: +'No, sir. It would be called so in a book, but when a man comes to look +at it, he sees it is not so. It is indeed pointed at the top, but one +side of it is larger than the other.' Another mountain I called immense. +Johnson: 'No; it is no more than a considerable protuberance.'" + +Johnson not only disputed the antiquity of MacPherson's "Ossian," but he +denied it any poetic merit. Dr. Blair having asked him whether he +thought any man of a modern age could have written such poems, he +answered: "Yes, sir: many men, many women and many children." "Sir," he +exclaimed to Reynolds, "a man might write such stuff forever, if he would +_abandon_ his mind to it." To Mr. MacQueen, one of his Highland hosts, +he said: "I look upon MacPherson's 'Fingal' to be as gross an imposition +as ever the world was troubled with." Johnson's arguments were mostly _a +priori_. He asserted that the ancient Gael were a barbarous people, +incapable of producing poetry of the kind. Long epics, such as "Fingal" +and "Temora," could not be preserved in memory and handed down by word of +mouth. As to ancient manuscripts which MacPherson pretended to have, +there was not a Gaelic manuscript in existence a hundred years old. + +It is now quite well established that Dr. Johnson was wrong on all these +points. To say nothing of the Homeric poems, the ancient Finns, +Scandinavians, and Germans were as barbarous as the Gael; yet they +produced the Kalewala, the Edda, and the Nibelungen Lied. The Kalewala, +a poem of 22, 793 lines--as long as the Iliad--was transmitted orally +from a remote antiquity and first printed in 1849. As to Gaelic +manuscripts, there are over sixty in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh, +varying in age from three hundred to five hundred years.[7] There is, +_e.g._, the "Glenmasan Manuscript" of the year 1238, containing the story +of "Darthula,"[8] which is the groundwork of the same story in +MacPherson's "Ossian." There is the important "Dean of Lismore's Book," +a manuscript collection made by Dean MacGregory of Lismore, Argyleshire, +between 1512 and 1529, containing 11,000 lines of Gaelic poetry, some of +which is attributed to Ossian or Oisin. One of the poems is identical in +substance with the first book of MacPherson's "Temora;" although Mr. +Campbell says, "There is not one line in the Dean's book that I can +identify with any line in MacPherson's Gaelic."[9] + +Other objections to the authenticity of MacPherson's translations rested +upon internal evidence, upon their characteristics of thought and style. +It was alleged that the "peculiar tone of sentimental grandeur and +melancholy" which distinguishes them, is false to the spirit of all known +early poetry, and is a modern note. In particular, it was argued, +MacPherson's heroes are too sensitive to the wild and sublime in nature. +Professor William R. Sullivan, a high authority on Celtic literature, +says that in the genuine and undoubted remains of old Irish poetry +belonging to the Leinster or Finnian Cycle and ascribed to Oisin, there +is much detail in descriptions of arms, accouterments, and articles of +indoor use and ornament, but very little in descriptions of outward +nature.[10] On the other hand, the late Principal Shairp regards this +"sadness of tone in describing nature" as a strong proof of authenticity. +"Two facts," he says, "are enough to convince me of the genuineness of +the ancient Gaelic poetry. The truthfulness with which it reflects the +melancholy aspects of Highland scenery, the equal truthfulness with which +it expresses the prevailing sentiment of the Gael, and his sad sense of +his people's destiny. I need no other proofs that the Ossianic poetry is +a native formation, and comes from the primeval heart of the Gaelic +race."[11] And he quotes, in support of his view, a well-known passage +from Matthew Arnold's "Study of Celtic Literature": "The Celts are the +prime authors of this vein of piercing regret and passion, of this +Titanism in poetry. A famous book, MacPherson's 'Ossian,' carried, in +the last century, this vein like a flood of lava through Europe. I am +not going to criticise MacPherson's 'Ossian' here. Make the part of what +is forged, modern, tawdry, spurious in the book as large as you please; +strip Scotland, if you like, of every feather of borrowed plumes which, +on the strength of MacPherson's 'Ossian,' she may have stolen from that +_vetus et major Scotia_--Ireland; I make no objection. But there will +still be left in the book a residue with the very soul of the Celtic +genius in it; and which has the proud distinction of having brought this +soul of the Celtic genius into contact with the nations of modern Europe, +and enriched all our poetry by it. Woody Morven, and echoing Lora, and +Selma with its silent halls! We all owe them a debt of gratitude, and +when we are unjust enough to forget it, may the Muse forget us! Choose +any one of the better passages in MacPherson's 'Ossian,' and you can see, +even at this time of day, what an apparition of newness and of power such +a strain must have been in the eighteenth century." + +But from this same kind of internal evidence, Wordsworth draws just the +opposite conclusion. "The phantom was begotten by the snug embrace of an +impudent Highlander upon a cloud of tradition. It traveled southward, +where it was greeted with acclamation, and the thin consistence took its +course through Europe upon the breath of popular applause.[12]. . . Open +this far-famed book! I have done so at random, and the beginning of the +epic poem 'Temora,' in eight books, presents itself. 'The blue waves of +Ullin roll in light. The green hills are covered with day. Trees shake +their dusky heads in the breeze. Gray torrents pour their noisy streams. +Two green hills with aged oaks surround a narrow plain. The blue course +of a stream is there. On its banks stood Cairbar of Atha. His spear +supports the king: the red eyes of his fear are sad. Cormac rises on his +soul with all his ghastly wounds. . .' Having had the good fortune to be +born and reared in a mountainous country, from my very childhood I have +felt the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon the world under +the name of Ossian. From what I saw with my own eyes, I knew that the +imagery was spurious. In nature everything is distinct, yet nothing +defined into absolute, independent singleness. In MacPherson's work it +is exactly the reverse: everything (that is not stolen) is in this manner +defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened, yet nothing distinct. It will +always be so when words are substituted for things. To say that the +characters never could exist; that the manners are impossible; and that a +dream has more substance than the whole state of society, as there +depicted, is doing nothing more than pronouncing a censure which +MacPherson defied. . . Yet, much as these pretended treasures of +antiquity have been admired, they have been wholly uninfluential upon the +literature of the country. No succeeding writer appears to have caught +from them a ray of inspiration; no author in the least distinguished has +ventured formally to imitate them, except the boy Chatterton, on their +first appearance. . . This incapability to amalgamate with the +literature of the Island is, in my estimation, a decisive proof that the +book is essentially unnatural; nor should I require any other to +demonstrate it to be a forgery, audacious as worthless. Contrast, in +this respect, the effect of MacPherson's publication with the 'Reliques' +of Percy, so unassuming, so modest in their pretensions." + +Other critics have pointed out a similar indistinctness in the human +actors, no less than in the landscape features of "Fingal" and "Temora." +They have no dramatic individuality, but are all alike, and all extremely +shadowy. "Poor, moaning, monotonous MacPherson" is Carlyle's +alliterative description of the translator of "Ossian"; and it must be +confessed that, in spite of the deep poetic feeling which pervades these +writings, and the undeniable beauty of single passages, they have +damnable iteration. The burden of their song is a burden in every sense. +Mr. Malcolm Laing, one of MacPherson's most persistent adversaries, who +published "Notes and Illustrations to Ossian" in 1805, essayed to show, +by a minute analysis of the language, that the whole thing was a +fabrication, made up from Homer, Milton, the English Bible, and other +sources. Thus he compared MacPherson's "Like the darkened moon when she +moves, a dim circle, through heaven, and dreadful change is expected by +men," with Milton's + + "Or from behind the moon, + In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds + On half the nations, and with fear of change + Perplexes monarchs." + +Laing's method proves too much and might be applied with like results to +almost any literary work. And, in general, it is hazardous to draw hard +and fast conclusions from internal evidence of the sort just reviewed. +Taken altogether, these objections do leave a strong bias upon the mind, +and were one to pronounce upon the genuineness of MacPherson's "Ossian," +as a whole, from impressions of tone and style, it might be guessed that +whatever element of true ancient poetry it contains, it had been +thoroughly steeped in modern sentiment before it was put before the +public. But remembering Beowulf and the Norse mythology, one might +hesitate to say that the songs of primitive, heroic ages are always +insensible to the sublime in nature; or to admit that melancholy is a +Celtic monopoly. + +The most damaging feature of MacPherson's case was his refusal or neglect +to produce his originals. The testimony of those who helped him in +collecting and translating leaves little doubt that he had materials of +some kind; and that these consisted partly of old Gaelic manuscripts, and +partly of transcriptions taken down in Gaelic from the recitation of aged +persons in the Highlands. These testimonies may be read in the "Report +of the Committee of the Highland Society," Edinburgh, 1805.[13] It is +too voluminous to examine here, and it leaves unsettled the point as to +the precise use which MacPherson made of his materials, whether, _i.e._, +he gave literal renderings of them, as he professed to do; or whether he +manipulated them--and to what extent--by piecing fragments together, +lopping, dove-tailing, smoothing, interpolating, modernizing, as Percy +did with his ballads. He was challenged to show his Gaelic manuscripts, +and Mr. Clerk says that he accepted the challenge. "He deposited the +manuscripts at his publishers', Beckett and De Hondt, Strand, London. He +advertised in the newspapers that he had done so; offered to publish them +if a sufficient number of subscribers came forward; and in the _Literary +Journal_ of the year 1784, Beckett certifies that the manuscripts had +lain in his shop for the space of a whole year."[14] + +But this was more than twenty years after. Mr. Clerk does not show that +Johnson or Laing or Shaw or Pinkerton, or any of MacPherson's numerous +critics, ever saw any such advertisement, or knew where the manuscripts +were to be seen; or that--being ignorant of Gaelic--it would have helped +them if they had known; and he admits that "MacPherson's subsequent +conduct, in postponing from time to time the publication, when urged to +it by friends who had liberally furnished him with means for the +purpose . . . is indefensible." In 1773 and 1775, _e.g._, Dr. Johnson +was calling loudly for the production of the manuscripts. "The state of +the question," he wrote to Boswell, February 7, 1775, "is this. He and +Dr. Blair, whom I consider as deceived, say that he copied the poem from +old manuscripts. His copies, if he had them--and I believe him to have +none--are nothing. Where are thee manuscripts? They can be shown if +they exist, but they were never shown. _De non existentibus et non +apparentibus eadem est ratio._" And during his Scotch trip in 1773, at a +dinner at Sir Alexander Gordon's, Johnson said: "If the poems were really +translated, they were certainly first written down. Let Mr. MacPherson +deposit the manuscripts in one of the colleges at Aberdeen, where there +are people who can judge; and if the professors certify their +authenticity, then there will be an end of the controversy. If he +does not take this obvious and easy method, he gives the best reason to +doubt." + +Indeed the subsequent history of these alleged manuscripts casts the +gravest suspicion on MacPherson's good faith. A thousand pounds were +finally subscribed to pay for the publication of the Gaelic texts. But +these MacPherson never published. He sent the manuscripts which were +ultimately published in 1807 to his executor, Mr. John Mackenzie; and he +left one thousand pounds by his will to defray the expense of printing +them. After MacPherson's death in 1796, Mr. Mackenzie "delayed the +publication from day to day, and at last handed over the manuscripts to +the Highland Society,"[15] which had them printed in 1807, nearly a half +century after the first appearance of the English Ossian.[16] These, +however, were not the identical manuscripts which MacPherson had found, +or said that he had found, in his tour of exploration through the +Highlands. They were all in his own handwriting or in that of his +amanuenses. Moreover the Rev. Thomas Ross was employed by the society to +transcribe them and conform the spelling to that of the Gaelic Bible, +which is modern. The printed text of 1807, therefore, does not represent +accurately even MacPherson's Gaelic. Whether the transcriber took any +further liberties than simply modernizing the spelling cannot be known, +for the same mysterious fate that overtook MacPherson's original +collections followed his own manuscript. This, after being at one time +in the Advocates' Library, has now utterly disappeared. Mr. Campbell +thinks that under this double process of distillation--a copy by +MacPherson and then a copy by Ross--"the ancient form of the language, if +it was ancient, could hardly survive."[17] "What would become of +Chaucer," he asks, "so maltreated and finally spelt according to modern +rules of grammar and orthography? I have found by experience that an +alteration in 'spelling' may mean an entire change of construction and +meaning, and a substitution of whole words." + +But the Gaelic text of 1807 was attacked in more vital points than its +spelling. It was freely charged with being an out-and-out fabrication, a +translation of MacPherson's English prose into modern Gaelic. This +question is one which must be settled by Gaelic scholars, and these still +disagree. In 1862 Mr. Campbell wrote: "When the Gaelic 'Fingal,' +published in 1807, is compared with any one of the translations which +purport to have been made from it, it seems to me incomparably superior. +It is far simpler in diction. It has a peculiar rhythm and assonance +which seem to repel the notion of a mere translation from English, as +something almost absurd. It is impossible that it can be a translation +from MacPherson's English, unless there was some clever Gaelic poet[18] +then alive, able and willing to write what Eton schoolboys call +'full-sense verses.'" The general testimony is that MacPherson's own +knowledge of Gaelic was imperfect. Mr. Campbell's summary of the whole +matter--in 1862--is as follows: "My theory then is, that about the +beginning of the eighteenth century, or the end of the seventeenth, or +earlier, Highland bards may have fused floating popular traditions into +more complete forms, engrafting their own ideas on what they found; and +that MacPherson found their works, translated and altered them; published +the translation in 1760;[19] made the Gaelic ready for the press; +published some of it in 1763,[20] and made away with the evidence of what +he had done, when he found that his conduct was blamed. I can see no +other way out of the maze of testimony." But by 1872 Mr. Campbell had +come to a conclusion much less favorable to the claims of the Gaelic +text. He now considers that the English was first composed by MacPherson +and that "he and other translators afterward worked at it and made a +Gaelic equivalent whose merit varies according to the translator's skill +and knowledge of Gaelic."[21] On the other hand, Mr. W. F. Skene and Mr. +Archibald Clerk, are confident that the Gaelic is the original and the +English the translation. Mr. Clerk, who reprinted the Highland Society's +text in 1870,[22] with a literal translation of his own on alternate +pages and MacPherson's English at the foot of the page, believes +implicitly in the antiquity and genuineness of the Gaelic originals. +"MacPherson," he writes, "got much from manuscripts and much from oral +recitation. It is most probable that he has given the minor poems +exactly as he found them. He may have made considerable changes in the +larger ones in giving them their present form; although I do not believe +that he, or any of his assistants, added much even in the way of +connecting links between the various episodes." + +To a reader unacquainted with Gaelic, comparing MacPherson's English with +Mr. Clerk's, it certainly looks unlikely that the Gaelic can be merely a +translation from the former. The reflection in a mirror cannot be more +distinct than the object it reflects; and if Mr. Clerk's version can be +trusted (it appears to be more literal though less rhetorical than +MacPherson's) the Gaelic is often concrete and sharp where MacPherson is +general; often plain where he is figurative or ornate; and sometimes of a +meaning quite different from his rendering. Take, _e.g._, the closing +passage of the second "Duan," or book, of "Fingal." + +"An arrow found his manly breast. He sleeps with his loved Galbina at +the noise of the sounding surge. Their green tombs are seen by the +mariner, when he bounds on the waves of the north."--_MacPherson_. + + "A ruthless arrow found his breast. + His sleep is by thy side, Galbina, + Where wrestles the wind with ocean. + The sailor sees their graves as one, + When rising on the ridge of the waves." + --_Clerk_ + +But again Mr. Archibald Sinclair, a Glasgow publisher, a letter from whom +is given by Mr. Campbell in his "Tales of the West Highlands," has "no +hesitation in affirming that a considerable portion of the Gaelic which +is published as the original of his [MacPherson's] translation, is +actually translated back from the English." And Professor Sullivan says: +"The so-called originals are a very curious kind of mosaic, constructed +evidently with great labor afterward, in which sentences or parts of +sentences of genuine poems are cemented together in a very inferior +word-paste of MacPherson's own."[23] + +It is of course no longer possible to maintain what Mr. Campbell says is +the commonest English opinion, viz., that MacPherson invented the +characters and incidents of his "Ossian," and that the poems had no +previous existence in any shape. The evidence is overwhelming that there +existed, both in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands traditions, tales, +and poems popularly attributed to Oisin, the son of Finn MacCumhail. But +no poem has been found which corresponds exactly to any single piece in +MacPherson; and Sullivan cites, as one proof of the modern and spurious +character of these versions, the fact that they mingle names from the +ancient hero-cycle, like Darthula, Cuthullin, and Conlach, with names +belonging to the Finnian cycle, as is never the case in the authentic and +undoubted remains of Celtic poetry. Between 1760, the date of +MacPherson's "Fragments," and 1807, the date of the Highland Society's +text, there had been published independently nine hundred lines of +Ossianic verse in Gaelic in Gillie's collection, 1786, and Stewart's, +1804. In 1780 Dr. Smith had published his "Ancient Lays," a free +translation from Gaelic fragments, which he subsequently printed (1787) +under the title "Sean Dàna," Smith frankly took liberties with his +originals, such as we may suppose that MacPherson took with his; but he +made no secret of this and, by giving the Gaelic on which his paraphrase +rested, he enabled the public to see how far his "Ancient Lays," were +really ancient, and how far they were built up into poetic wholes by his +own editorial labors.[24] + +Wordsworth's assertion of the failure of MacPherson's "Ossian" to +"amalgamate with the literature of this island" needs some +qualifications. That it did not enter into English literature in a +formative way, as Percy's ballads did, is true enough, and is easy of +explanation. In the first place, it was professedly a prose translation +from poetry in another tongue, and could hardly, therefore, influence the +verse and diction of English poetry directly. It could not even work +upon them as directly as many foreign literatures have worked; as the +ancient classical literatures, _e.g._, have always worked; or as Italian +and French and German have at various times worked; for the Gaelic was +practically inaccessible to all but a few special scholars. Whatever its +beauty or expressiveness, it was in worse case than a dead language, for +it was marked with the stigma of barbarism. In its palmiest days it had +never been what the Germans called a _Kultursprache_; and now it was the +idiom of a few thousand peasants and mountaineers, and was rapidly +becoming extinct even in its native fastnesses. + +Whatever effect was to be wrought by the Ossianic poems upon the English +mind, was to be wrought in the dress which MacPherson had given them. +And perhaps, after all, the tumid and rhetorical cast of MacPherson's +prose had a great deal to do with producing the extraordinary enthusiasm +with which his "wild paraphrases," as Mr. Campbell calls them, were +received by the public. The age was tired of polish, of wit, of +over-civilization; it was groping toward the rude, the primitive, the +heroic; had begun to steep itself in melancholy sentiment and to feel a +dawning admiration of mountain solitudes and the hoary past. Suddenly +here was what it had been waiting for--"a tale of the times of old"; and +the solemn, dirge-like chant of MacPherson's sentences, with the peculiar +manner of his narrative, its repetitions, its want of transitions, suited +well with his matter. "Men had been talking under their breath, and in a +mincing dialect so long," says Leslie Stephen, "that they were easily +gratified and easily imposed upon by an affectation of vigorous and +natural sentiment." + +The impression was temporary, but it was immediate and powerful. +Wordsworth was wrong when he said that no author of distinction except +Chatterton had ventured formally to imitate Ossian. A generation after +the appearance of the "Fragments" we find the youthful Coleridge alluding +to "Ossian" in the preface[25] to his first collection of poems (1793), +which contains two verse imitations of the same, as _ecce signum_: + + "How long will ye round me be swelling, + O ye blue-tumbling waves of the sea? + Not always in caves was my dwelling, + Nor beneath the cold blast of the tree," etc., etc.[26] + +In Byron's "House of Idleness" (1807), published when he was a Cambridge +undergraduate, is a piece of prose founded on the episode of Nisus and +Euryalus in the "Aeneid" and entitled "The Death of Calmar and Orla--An +Imitation of MacPherson's Ossian." "What form rises on the roar of +clouds? Whose dark ghost gleams in the red stream of tempests? His +voice rolls on the thunder. 'Tis Orla, the brown chief of Orthona. . . +Lovely wast thou, son of blue-eyed Morla," etc. After reading several +pages of such stuff, one comes to feel that Byron could do this sort of +thing about as well as MacPherson himself; and indeed, that Johnson was +not so very far wrong when he said that anyone could do it if he would +abandon his mind to it. Chatterton applied the Ossianic verbiage in a +number of pieces which he pretended to have translated from the Saxon: +"Ethelgar," "Kenrick," "Cerdick," and "Gorthmund"; as well as in a +composition which he called "Godred Crovan," from the Manx dialect, and +one from the ancient British, which he entitled "The Heilas." He did not +catch the trick quite so successfully as Byron, as a passage or two from +"Kenrick" will show: "Awake, son of Eldulph! Thou that sleepest on the +white mountain, with the fairest of women; no more pursue the dark brown +wolf: arise from the mossy bank of the falling waters: let thy garments +be stained in blood, and the streams of life discolor thy girdle. . . +Cealwulf of the high mountain, who viewed the first rays of the morning +star, swift as the flying deer, strong as a young oak, fiery as an +evening wolf, drew his sword; glittering like the blue vapors in the +valley of Horso; terrible as the red lightning bursting from the +dark-brown clouds, his swift bark rode over the foaming waves like the +wind in the tempest." + +In a note on his Ossianic imitation, Byron said that Mr. Laing had proved +Ossian an impostor, but that the merit of MacPherson's work remained, +although in parts his diction was turgid and bombastic.[27] A poem in +the "Hours of Idleness," upon the Scotch mountain "Lachin Y Gair," has +two Ossianic lines in quotation points-- + + "Shades of the dead! have I not heard your voices + Rise on the night-rolling breath of the gale?" + +Byron attributed much importance to his early recollections of Highland +scenery, which he said had prepared him to love the Alps and "blue +Friuli's mountains," and "the Acroceraunian mountains of old name." But +the influence of Ossian upon Byron and his older contemporaries was +manifested in subtler ways than in formal imitations. It fell in with +that current of feeling which Carlyle called "Wertherism," and helped to +swell it. It chimed with the tone that sounds through the German _Sturm +und Drang_ period; that impatience of restraint, that longing to give +full swing to the claims of the elementary passions, and that desperation +when these are checked by the arrangements of modern society, which we +encounter in Rousseau and the young Goethe. Hence the romantic gloom, +the Byronic _Zerrissenheit_, to use Heine's word, which drove the poet +from the rubs of social life to waste places of nature and sometimes to +suicide. In such a mood the mind recurred to the language of Ossian, as +the fit expression of its own indefinite and stormy griefs. + +"Homer," writes Werther, "has been superseded in my heart by the divine +Ossian. Through what a world does this angelic bard carry me! With him +I wander over barren wastes and frightful wilds; surrounded by whirlwinds +and hurricanes, trace by the feeble light of the moon the shades of our +noble ancestors; hear from the mountainous heights, intermingled with the +roaring of waves and cataracts, their plaintive tones stealing from +cavernous recesses; while the pensive monody of some love-stricken +maiden, who heaves her departing sighs over the moss-clad grave of the +warrior by whom she was adored, makes up the inarticulate concert. I +trace this bard, with his silver locks, as he wanders in the valley and +explores the footsteps of his fathers. Alas! no vestige remains but +their tombs. His thought then hangs on the silver moon, as her sinking +beams play upon the rippling main; and the remembrance of deeds past and +gone recurs to the hero's mind--deeds of times when he gloried in the +approach of danger, and emulation nerved his whole frame; when the pale +orb shone upon his bark, laden with the spoils of his enemy, and +illuminated his triumphant return. When I see depicted on his +countenance a bosom full of woe; when I behold his heroic greatness +sinking into the grave, and he exclaims, as he throws a glance at the +cold sod which is to lie upon him: 'Hither will the traveler who is +sensible of my worth bend his weary steps, and seek the soul-enlivening +bard, the illustrious son of Fingal; his foot will tread upon my tomb, +but his eyes shall never behold me'; at this time it is, my dear friend, +that, like some renowned and chivalrous knight, I could instantly draw my +sword; rescue my prince from a long, irksome existence of languor and +pain; and then finish by plunging the weapon into my own breast, that I +might accompany the demi-god whom my hand had emancipated."[28] + +In his last interview with Charlotte, Werther, who had already determined +upon suicide, reads aloud to her, from "The Songs of Selma," "that tender +passage wherein Armin deplores the loss of his beloved daughter. 'Alone +on the sea-beat rocks, my daughter was heard to complain. Frequent and +loud were her cries. What could her father do? All night I stood on the +shore. I saw her by the faint beam of the moon,'" etc. The reading is +interrupted by a mutual flood of tears. "They traced the similitude of +their own misfortune in this unhappy tale. . . The pointed allusion of +those words to the situation of Werther rushed with all the electric +rapidity of lightning to the inmost recesses of his soul." + +It is significant that one of Ossian's most fervent admirers was +Chateaubriand, who has been called the inventor of modern melancholy and +of the primeval forest. Here is a passage from his "Génie du +Christianisme":[29] "Under a cloudy sky, on the coast of that sea whose +tempests were sung by Ossian, their Gothic architecture has something +grand and somber. Seated on a shattered altar in the Orkneys, the +traveler is astonished at the dreariness of those places: sudden fogs, +vales where rises the sepulchral stone, streams flowing through wild +heaths, a few reddish pine trees, scattered over a naked desert studded +with patches of snow; such are the only objects which present themselves +to his view. The wind circulates among the ruins, and their innumerable +crevices become so many tubes, which heave a thousand sighs. Long +grasses wave in the apertures of the domes, and beyond these apertures +you behold the flitting clouds and the soaring sea-eagle. . . Long will +those four stones which mark the tombs of heroes on the moors of +Caledonia, long will they continue to attract the contemplative traveler. +Oscar and Malvina are gone, but nothing is changed in their solitary +country. 'Tis no longer the hand of the bard himself that sweeps the +harp; the tones we hear are the slight trembling of the strings, produced +by the touch of a spirit, when announcing at night, in a lonely chamber, +the death of a hero. . . So when he sits in the silence of noon in the +valley of his breezes is the murmur of the mountain to Ossian's ear: the +gale drowns it often in its course, but the pleasant sound returns again." + +In Byron's passion for night and tempest, for the wilderness, the +mountains, and the sea, it is of course impossible to say how large a +share is attributable directly to MacPherson's "Ossian," or more +remotely, through Chateaubriand and other inheritors of the Ossianic +mood. The influence of any particular book becomes dispersed and blended +with a hundred currents that are in the air. But I think one has often a +consciousness of Ossian in reading such passages as the famous apostrophe +to the ocean in "Childe Harold"-- + + "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!"-- + +Which recalls the address to the sun in Carthous--"O thou that rollest +above, round as the shield of my fathers,"--perhaps the most hackneyed +_locus classicus_ in the entire work; or as the lines beginning, + + "O that the desert were my dwelling place;"[30] + +or the description of the storm in the Jura: + + "And this is in the night: Most glorious night! + Thou wert not sent for slumber. Let me be + A sharer in thy fierce and far delight + A portion of the tempest and of thee."[30] + +Walter Scott, while yet a lad, made acquaintance with Ossian through Dr. +Blacklock, and was at first delighted; but "the tawdry repetitions of the +Ossianic phraseology," he confesses, "disgusted me rather sooner than +might have been expected from my age." He afterward contributed an essay +on the authenticity of the poems to the proceedings of the Speculative +Club of Edinburgh. In one sense of the word Scott was the most romantic +of romanticists; but in another sense he was very little romantic, and +there was not much in his sane, cheerful, and robust nature upon which +such poetry as Ossian could fasten.[31] It is just at this point, +indeed, that definitions diverge and the two streams of romantic tendency +part company. These Carlyle has called "Wertherism" and "Götzism"[32] +_i.e._ sentimentalism and mediaevalism, though so mild a word as +sentimentalism fails to express adequately the morbid despair to which +"Werther" gave utterance, and has associations with works of a very +different kind, such as the fictions of Richardson and Sterne. In +England, Scott became the foremost representative of "Götzism," and Byron +of "Wertherism." The pessimistic, sardonic heroes of "Manfred," "Childe +Harold," and "The Corsair" were the latest results of the "Il Penseroso" +literature, and their melodramatic excesses already foretokened a +reaction. + +Among other testimonies to Ossian's popularity in England are the +numerous experiments at versifying MacPherson's prose. These were not +over-successful and only a few of them require mention here. The Rev. +John Wodrow, a Scotch minister, "attempted" "Carthon," "The Death of +Cuthullin" and "Darthula" in heroic couplets, in 1769; and "Fingal" in +1771. In the preface to his "Fingal," he maintained that there was no +reasonable doubt of the antiquity and authenticity of MacPherson's +"Ossian." "Fingal"--which seems to have been the favorite--was again +turned into heroic couplets by Ewen Cameron, in 1776, prefaced by the +attestations of a number of Highland gentlemen to the genuineness of the +originals; and by an argumentative introduction, in which the author +quotes Dr. Blair's _dictum_ that Ossian was the equal of Homer and Vergil +"in strength of imagination, in grandeur of sentiment, and in native +majesty of passion." National pride enlisted most of the Scotch scholars +on the affirmative side of the question, and made the authenticity of +Ossian almost an article of belief. Wodrow's heroics were merely +respectable. The quality of Cameron's may be guessed from a half dozen +lines: + + "When Moran, one commissioned to explore + The distant seas, came running from the shore + And thus exclaimed--'Cuthullin, rise! The ships + Of snowy Lochlin hide the rolling deeps. + Innumerable foes the land invade, + And Swaran seems determined to succeed.'" + +Whatever impressiveness belonged to MacPherson's cadenced prose was lost +in these metrical versions, which furnish a perfect _reductio ad +absurdum_ of the critical folly that compared Ossian with Homer. Homer +could not be put in any dress through which the beauty and interest of +the original would not appear. Still again, in 1786, "Fingal" was done +into heroics by a Mr. R. Hole, who varied his measures with occasional +ballad stanzas, thus: + + "But many a fair shall melt with woe + At thy soft strain in future days, + And many a manly bosom glow, + Congenial to thy lofty lays." + +These versions were all emitted in Scotland. But as late as 1814 +"Fingal" appeared once more in verse, this time in London, and in a +variety of meters by Mr. George Harvey; who, in his preface, expressed +the hope that Walter Scott would feel moved to cast "Ossian" into the +form of a metrical romance, like "Marmion" or "The Lay of the Last +Minstrel." The best English poem constructed from MacPherson is "The Six +Bards of Ossian Versified," by Sir Egerton Brydges (dated in 1784).[33] +The passage selected was the one which Gray so greatly admired,[34] from +a note to "Croma," in the original "Fragments." Six bards who have met +at the hall of a chieftain, on an October night, go out one after another +to observe the weather, and return to report their observations, each +ending with the refrain "Receive me from the night, my friends." The +whole episode is singularly arresting, and carries a conviction of +reality too often wanting in the epic portions of MacPherson's collection. + +Walpole, at first, was nearly as much charmed by the "Fragments" as Gray +had been. He wrote to Dalrymple that they were real poetry, natural +poetry, like the poetry of the East. He liked particularly the synonym +for an echo--"son of the rock"; and in a later letter he said that all +doubts which he might once have entertained as to their genuineness had +disappeared. But Walpole's literary judgments were notoriously +capricious. In his subsequent correspondence with Mason and others, he +became very contemptuous of MacPherson's "cold skeleton of an epic poem, +that is more insipid than 'Leonidas.'" "Ossian," he tells Mason, in a +letter dated March, 1783, has become quite incredible to him; but Mrs. +Montagu--the founder of the Blue Stocking Club--still "holds her feast of +shells in her feather dressing-room." + +The Celtic Homer met with an even warmer welcome abroad than at home. He +was rendered into French,[35] German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, +and possibly other languages. Bonaparte was a great lover of Ossian, and +carried about with him a copy of Cesarotti's Italian version. A +resemblance has been fancied between MacPherson's manner and the +grandiloquent style of Bonaparte's bulletins and dispatches.[36] In +Germany Ossian naturally took most strongly. He was translated into +hexameters by a Vienna Jesuit named Michael Denis[37] and produced many +imitations. Herder gave three translations from "Ossian" in his "Stimmen +der Völker" (1778-79) and prefixed to the whole collection an essay +"Ueber Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker" written in 1773. Schiller was +one of the converts; Klopstock and his circle called themselves "bards"; +and an exclamatory and violent mannerism came into vogue, known in German +literary history as _Bardengebrüll_. MacPherson's personal history need +not be followed here in detail. In 1764 he went to Pensacola as +secretary to Governor Johnston. He was afterward a government +pamphleteer, writing against Junius and in favor of taxing the American +colonies. He was appointed agent to the Nabob of Arcot; sat in +Parliament for the borough of Camelford, and built a handsome Italian +villa in his native parish; died in 1796, leaving a large fortune, and +was buried in Westminster Abbey. In 1773 he was ill-advised enough to +render the "Iliad" into Ossianic prose. The translation was overwhelmed +with ridicule, and probably did much to increase the growing disbelief in +the genuineness of "Fingal" and "Temora." + + +[1] "Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland, +and translated from the Gaelic or Erse language." Edinburgh, MDCCLX. 70 +pp. + +[2] This was sent him by MacPherson and was a passage not given in the +"Fragments." + +[3] From "Carthon." + +[4] Scandinavia + +[5] An unconscious hexameter. + +[6] From "Fingal" book ii. + +[7] See the dissertation by Rev. Archibald Clerk in his "Poems of Ossian +in the Original Gaelic, with a literal translation into English." 2 +vols., Edinburgh, 1870. + +[8] This story as been retold, from Irish sources, in Dr. R. D. Joyce's +poem of "Deirdrè," Boston, 1876. + +[9] See "Leabhar na Feinne, Heroic Gaelic Ballads, Collected in Scotland, +chiefly from 1512 to 1871. Arranged by J. F. Campbell," London, 1872. +Selections from "The Dean of Lismore's Book" were edited and published at +Edinburgh in 1862, by Rev. Thomas MacLauchlan, with a learned +introduction by Mr. W. F. Skene. + +[10] Article on "Celtic Literature" in the "Encyclopedia Britannica." + +[11] "Aspects of Poetry," by J. C. Shairp, 1872, pp. 244-45 (American +Edition). + +[12] Appendix to the Preface to the Second Edition of "Lyrical Ballads." +Taine says that Ossian "with Oscar, Malvina, and his whole troop, made +the tour of Europe; and, about 1830, ended by furnishing baptismal names +for French _grisettes_ and _perruquiers_."--_English Literature_, Vol. +II. p. 220 (American Edition). + +[13] The Committee found that Gaelic poems, and fragments of poems, which +they had been able to obtain, contained often the substance, and +sometimes the "literal expression (the _ipsissima verba_)" of passages +given by MacPherson. "But," continues the "Report," "the Committee has +not been able to obtain any one poem the same in title and tenor with the +poems published by him. It is inclined to believe that he was in use to +supply chasms and to give connection, by inserting passages which he did +not find; and to add what he conceived to be dignity and delicacy to the +original composition, by striking out passages, by softening incidents, +by refining the language: in short, by changing what he considered as too +simple or too rude for a modern ear." + +[14] "Dissertation on the Authenticity of the Poems." See _ante_, p. 313. + +[15] Clerk. + +[16] "The Poems of Ossian in the Original Gaelic, with a Literal +Translation into Latin by the late Robert Macfarland, etc., Published +under the Sanction of the Highland Society of London," 3 vols., London, +1807. The work included dissertations on the authenticity of the poems +by Sir Jno. Sinclair, and the Abbé Cesarotti (translated). Four hundred +and twenty-three lines of Gaelic, being the alleged original of the +seventh book of "Temora," had been published with that epic in 1763. + +[17] "Popular Tales of the West Highlands," J. F. Campbell, Edinburgh, +1862. Vol. IV. P. 156. + +[18] He suggests Lachlan MacPherson of Strathmashie, one of MacPherson's +helpers. "Popular Tales of the West Highlands." + +[19] "Fragments," etc. + +[20] Seventh book of "Temora." See _ante_, p. 321. + +[21] "Leabhar Na Feinne," p. xii. + +[22] See _ante_, p. 313, note. + +[23] "Encyclopaedia Britannica": "Celtic Literature." + +[24] For a further account of the state of the "authenticity" question, +see Archibald McNeil's "Notes on the Authenticity of Ossian's Poems," +1868; and an article on "Ossian" in _Macmillan's Magazine_, XXIV. 113-25. + +[25] "The sweet voice of Cona never sounds so sweetly as when it speaks of +itself." + +[26] "The Complaint of Ninathoma." + +[27] For some MS. Notes of Byron in a copy of "Ossian," see Phelps' +"English Romantic Movement," pp. 153-54. + +[28] "Sorrows of Werther," Letter lxviii. + +[29] "Caledonia, or Ancient Scotland," book ii. chapter vii. part iv. + +[30] "Childe Harold," canto iii. + +[31] The same is true of Burns, though references to Cuthullin's dog +Luath, in "The Twa Dogs"; to "Caric-thura" in "The Whistle"; and to +"Cath-Loda" in the notes on "The Vision," show that Burns knew his Ossian. + +[32] From Goethe's "Götz von Berlichingen." + +[33] See "Poems by Saml. Egerton Brydges," 4th ed., London, 1807. pp. +87-96. + +[34] See _ante_, p. 117. + +[35] There were French translations by Letourneur in 1777 and 1810: by +Lacaussade in 1842; and an imitation by Baour-Lormian in 1801. + +[36] See Perry's "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 417. + +[37] One suspects this translator to have been of Irish descent. He was +born at Schärding, Bavaria, in 1729. + + + + +CHAPTER X. + +Thomas Chatterton. + +The history of English romanticism has its tragedy: the life and death of +Thomas Chatterton-- + + "The marvelous boy, + The sleepless soul that perished in his pride."[1] + +The story has been often told, but it may be told again here; for, aside +from its dramatic interest, and leaving out of question the absolute +value of the Rowley poems, it is most instructive as to the conditions +which brought about the romantic revival. It shows by what process +antiquarianism became poetry. + +The scene of the story was the ancient city of Bristol--old Saxon +_Bricgestowe_, "place of the bridge"--bridge, namely, over the Avon +stream, not far above its confluence with the Severn. Here Chatterton +was born in 1752, the posthumous son of a dissipated schoolmaster, whose +ancestors for a hundred and fifty years had been, in unbroken succession, +sextons to the church of St. Mary Redcliffe. Perhaps it may be more than +an idle fancy to attribute to heredity the bent which Chatterton's genius +took spontaneously and almost from infancy; to guess that some mysterious +ante-natal influence--"striking the electric chain wherewith we are +darkly bound"--may have set vibrating links of unconscious association +running back through the centuries. Be this as it may, Chatterton was +the child of Redcliffe Church. St. Mary stood by his cradle and rocked +it; and if he did not inherit with his blood, or draw in with his +mother's milk a veneration for her ancient pile; at least the waters of +her baptismal font[2] seemed to have signed him with the token of her +service. Just as truly as "The Castle of Otranto" was sprung from +Strawberry Hill, the Rowley poems were born of St. Mary's Church. + +Chatterton's father had not succeeded to the sextonship, but he was a +sub-chanter in Bristol Cathedral, and his house and school in Pile Street +were only a few yards from Redcliffe Church. In this house Chatterton +was born, under the eaves almost of the sanctuary; and when his mother +removed soon after to another house, where she maintained herself by +keeping a little dame's school and doing needle work, it was still on +Redcliffe Hill and in close neighborhood to St. Mary's. The church +itself--"the pride of Bristowe and the western land"--is described as +"one of the finest parish churches in England,"[3] a rich specimen of +late Gothic or "decorated" style; its building or restoration dating from +the middle of the fifteenth century. Chatterton's uncle by marriage, +Richard Phillips, had become sexton in 1748, and the boy had the run of +the aisles and transepts. The stone effigies of knights, priests, +magistrates, and other ancient civic worthies stirred into life under his +intense and brooding imagination; his mind took color from the red and +blue patterns thrown on the pavement by the stained glass of the windows; +and he may well have spelled out much of the little Latin that he knew +from "the knightly brasses of the tombs" and "cold _hic jacets_ of the +dead." + +It is curious how early his education was self-determined to its peculiar +ends. A dreamy, silent, solitary child, given to fits of moodiness, he +was accounted dull and even stupid. He would not, or could not, learn +his letters until, in his seventh year, his eye was caught by the +illuminated capitals in an old music folio. From these his mother taught +him the alphabet, and a little later he learned to read from a +black-letter Bible. "Paint me an angel with wings and a trumpet," he +answered, when asked what device he would choose for the little +earthenware bowl that had been promised him as a gift.[4] Colston's +Hospital, where he was put to school, was built on the site of a +demolished monastery of Carmelite Friars; the scholars wore blue coats, +with metal plates on their breasts stamped with the image of a dolphin, +the armorial crest of the founder, and had their hair cropped short in +imitation of the monkish tonsure. As the boy grew into a youth, there +were numbered among his near acquaintances, along with the vintners, +sugar-bakers, pipe-makers, apothecaries, and other tradesmen of the +Bristol _bourgeoisie_, two church organists, a miniature painter, and an +engraver of coats-of-arms--figures quaintly suggestive of that mingling +of municipal life and ecclesiastical-mediaeval art which is reproduced in +the Rowley poems. + +"Chatterton," testifies one of his early acquaintances, "was fond of +walking in the fields, particularly in Redcliffe meadows, and of talking +of his manuscripts, and sometimes reading them there. There was one spot +in particular, full in view of the church, in which he seemed to take a +peculiar delight. He would frequently lay himself down, fix his eyes +upon the church, and seem as if he were in a kind of trance. Then on a +sudden he would tell me: 'That steeple was burnt down by lightning: that +was the place where they formerly acted plays.'" "Among his early +studies," we are told, "antiquities, and especially the surroundings of +medieval life, were the favorite subjects; heraldry seems especially to +have had a fascination for him. He supplied himself with charcoal, +black-lead, ochre, and other colors; and with these it was his delight to +delineate, in rough and quaint figures, churches, castles, tombs of +mailed warriors, heraldic emblazonments, and other like belongings of the +old world."[5] + +Is there not a breath of the cloister in all this, reminding one of the +child martyr in Chaucer's "Prioresse Tale," the "litel clergeon, seven +yeer of age"? + + "This litel child his litel book lerninge, + As he sat in the scole at his prymer, + He 'Alma redemptoris' herde singe, + As children lerned hir antiphoner." + +A choir boy bred in cathedral closes, catching his glimpses of the sky +not through green boughs, but through the treetops of the Episcopal +gardens discolored by the lancet windows of the clear-stories; dreaming +in the organ loft in the pauses of the music, when + + "The choristers, sitting with faces aslant, + Feel the silence to consecrate more than the chant." + +Thus Chatterton's sensitive genius was taking the impress of its +environment. As he pored upon the antiquities of his native city, the +idea of its life did sweetly creep into his study of imagination; and he +gradually constructed for himself a picture of fifteenth-century Bristol, +including a group of figures, partly historical and partly fabulous, all +centering about Master William Canynge. Canynge was the rich Bristol +merchant who founded or restored St. Mary Redcliffe's; was several times +mayor of the city in the reigns of Henry VI. and Edward IV., and once +represented the borough in Parliament. Chatterton found or fabled that +he at length took holy orders and became dean of Westbury College. About +Canynge Chatterton arranged a number of _dramatis personae_, some of +whose names he discovered in old records and documents, such as +Carpenter, Bishop of Worcester, and Sir Theobald Gorges, a knight of +Wraxhall, near Bristol; together with others entirely of his own +invention--as John a Iscam, whom he represents to have been a canon of +St. Augustine's Abbey in Bristol; and especially one Thomas Rowley, +parish priest of St. John's, employed by Canynge to collect manuscripts +and antiquities. He was his poet laureate and father confessor, and to +him Chatterton ascribed most of the verses which pass under the general +name of the Rowley poems. But Iscam was also a poet and Master Canynge +himself sometimes burst into song. Samples of the Iscam and the Canynge +muse diversify the collection. The great Bristol merchant was a +mediaeval Maecenas, and at his house, "nempned the Red Lodge," were +played interludes--"Aella," "Goddwyn," and "The Parliament of +Sprites"--composed by Rowley, or by Rowley and Iscam collaborating. +Canynge sometimes wrote the prologues; and Rowley fed his patron with +soft dedication and complimentary verses: "On Our Lady's Church," "Letter +to the dygne Master Canynge," "The Account of W. Canynges Feast," etc. +The well-known fifteenth-century poet Lydgate is also introduced into +this literary _cénacle_, as John Ladgate, and made to exchange verse +epistles with Rowley in eighteenth-century fashion. Such is the +remarkable fiction which the marvelous boy erected, as a scaffolding for +the fabric of sham-antique poetry and prose, which he build up during the +years 1767 to 1770, _i.e._, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth year of +his age. + +There is a wide distance between the achievements of this untaught lad of +humble birth and narrow opportunities, and the works of the great Sir +Walter, with his matured powers and his stores of solid antiquarian lore. +But the impulse that conducted them to their not dissimilar tasks was the +same. In "Yarrow Revisited," Wordsworth uses, _à propos_ of Scott, the +expression "localized romance." It was, indeed, the absorbing local +feeling of Scott, his patriotism, his family pride, his attachment to the +soil, that brought passion and poetry into his historical pursuits. With +Chatterton, too, this absorption in the past derived its intensity from +his love of place. Bristol was his world; in "The Battle of Hastings," +he did not forget to introduce a Bristowan contingent, led by a certain +fabulous Alfwold, and performing prodigies of valor upon the Normans. +The image of mediaeval life which he succeeded in creating was, of +course, a poor, faint _simulacrum_, compared with Scott's. He lacked +knowledge, leisure, friends, long life--everything that was needed to +give his work solidity. All that he had was a creative, though +undisciplined imagination, together with an astonishing industry, +persistence, and secretiveness. Yet with all his disadvantages, his +work, with all its imperfections, is far more striking than the imitative +verse of the Wartons, or the thin, diffused medievalism of Walpole and +Clara Reeve. It is the product of a more original mind and a more +intense conception. + +In the muniment room over the north porch of St. Mary Redcliffe's were +several old chests filled with parchments: architectural memoranda, +church-wardens' accounts, inventories of vestments, and similar parish +documents. One of these chests, known as Master Canynge's coffer, had +been broken open some years before, and whatever was of value among its +contents removed to a place of safety. The remainder of the parchments +had been left scattered about, and Chatterton's father had carried a +number of them home and used them to cover copy-books. The boy's eye was +attracted by these yellow sheep-skins, with their antique script; he +appropriated them and kept them locked up in his room. + +How early he conceived the idea of making this treasure-trove responsible +for the Rowley myth, which was beginning to take shape in his mind, is +uncertain. According to the testimony of a schoolfellow, by name +Thistlethwaite, Chatterton told him in the summer of 1764 that he had a +number of old manuscripts, found in a chest in Redcliffe Church, and that +he had lent one of them to Thomas Philips, an usher in Colston's +Hospital. Thistlethwaite says that Philips showed him this manuscript, a +piece of vellum pared close around the edge, on which was traced in pale +and yellow writing, as if faded with age, a poem which he thinks +identical with "Elinoure and Juga," afterward published by Chatterton in +the _Town and Country Magazine_ for May, 1769. One is inclined to +distrust this evidence. "The Castle of Otranto" was first published in +December, 1764, and the "Reliques," only in the year following. The +latter was certainly known to Chatterton; many of the Rowley poems, "The +Bristowe Tragedie," _e.g._, and the ministrel songs in "Aella," show +ballad influence[6]; while it seems not unlikely that Chatterton was +moved to take a hint from the disguise--slight as it was--assumed by +Walpole in the preface to his romance.[7] But perhaps this was not +needed to suggest to Chatterton that the surest way to win attention to +his poems would be to ascribe them to some fictitious bard of the Middle +Ages. It was the day of literary forgery; the Ossian controversy was +raging, and the tide of popular favor set strongly toward the antique. A +series of avowed imitations of old English poetry, however clever, would +have had small success. But the discovery of a hitherto unknown +fifteen-century poet was an announcement sure to interest the learned and +perhaps a large part of the reading public. Besides, instances are not +rare where a writer has done his best work under a mask. The poems +composed by Chatterton in the disguise of Rowley--a dramatically imagined +_persona_ behind which he lost his own identity--are full of a curious +attractiveness; while his acknowledged pieces are naught. It is not +worth while to bear down very heavily on the moral aspects of this kind +of deception. The question is one of literary methods rather than of +ethics. If the writer succeeds by the skill of his imitations, and the +ingenuity of the evidence that he brings to support them, in actually +imposing upon the public for a time, the success justifies the attempt. +The artist's purpose is to create a certain impression, and the choice of +means must be left to himself. + +In the summer of 1764 Chatterton was barely twelve, and wonderful as his +precocity was, it is doubtful whether he had got so far in the evolution +of the Rowley legend as Thistlethwaite's story would imply. But it is +certain that three years later, in the spring of 1767, Chatterton gave +Mr. Henry Burgum, a worthy pewterer of Bristol, a parchment emblazoned +with the "de Bergham," coat-of-arms, which he pretended to have found in +St. Mary's Church, furnishing him also with two copy-books, in which were +transcribed the "de Bergham," pedigree, together with three poems in +pseudo-antique spelling. One of these, "The Tournament," described a +joust in which figured one Sir Johan de Berghamme, a presumable ancestor +of the gratified pewterer. Another of them, "The Romaunte of the +Cnyghte," purported to be the work of this hero of the tilt-yard, "who +spent his whole life in tilting," but notwithstanding found time to write +several books and translate "some part of the Iliad under the title +'Romance of Troy.'" + +All this stuff was greedily swallowed by Burgum, and the marvelous boy +next proceeded to befool Mr. William Barrett, a surgeon and antiquary who +was engaged in writing a history of Bristol. To him he supplied copies +of supposed documents in the muniment room of Redcliffe Church: "Of the +Auntiaunte Forme of Monies," and the like: deeds, bills, letters, +inscriptions, proclamations, accounts of churches and other buildings, +collected by Rowley for his patron, Canynge: many of which this +singularly uncritical historian incorporated in his "History of Bristol," +published some twenty years later. He also imparted to Barrett two +Rowleian poems, "The Parliament of Sprites," and "The Battle of Hastings" +(in two quite different versions). In September, 1768, a new bridge was +opened at Bristol over the Avon; and Chatterton, who had now been +apprenticed to an attorney, took advantage of the occasion to send +anonymously to the printer of _Farley's Bristol Journal_ a description of +the mayor's first passing over the old bridge in the reign of Henry II. +This was composed in obsolete language and alleged to have been copied +from a contemporary manuscript. It was the first published of +Chatterton's fabrications. In the years 1768-69 he produced and gave to +Mr. George Catcott the long tragical interude "Aella," "The Bristowe +Tragedie," and other shorter pieces, all of which he declared to be +transcripts from manuscripts in Canynge's chest, and the work of Thomas +Rowley, a secular priest of Bristol, who flourished about 1460. Catcott +was a local book-collector and the partner of Mr. Burgum. He was +subsequently nicknamed "Rowley's midwife." + +In December, 1768, Chatterton opened a correspondence with James Dodsley, +the London publisher, saying that several ancient poems had fallen into +his hands, copies of which he offered to supply him, if he would send a +guinea to cover expenses. He inclosed a specimen of "Aella." "The +motive that actuates me to do this," he wrote, "is to convince the world +that the monks (of whom some have so despicable an opinion) were not such +blockheads as generally thought, and that good poetry might be wrote in +the dark days of superstition, as well as in these more enlightened +ages." Dodsley took no notice of the letters, and the owner of the +Rowley manuscripts next turned to Horace Walpole, whose tastes as a +virtuoso, a lover of Gothic, and a romancer might be counted on to enlist +his curiosity in Chatterton's find. The document which he prepared for +Walpole was a prose paper entitled "The Ryse of Peyncteynge yn Englande, +wroten by T. Rowleie, 1469, for Mastre Canynge," and containing _inter +alia_, the following extraordinary "anecdote of painting" about Afflem, +an Anglo-Saxon glass-stainer of Edmond's reign who was taken prisoner by +the Danes. "Inkarde, a soldyer of the Danes, was to slea hym; onne the +Nete before the Feeste of Deathe hee founde Afflem to bee hys Broder +Affrighte chanynede uppe hys soule. Gastnesse dwelled yn his Breaste. +Oscarre, the greate Dane, gave hest hee shulde bee forslagene with the +commeynge Sunne: no tears colde availe; the morne cladde yn roabes of +ghastness was come, whan the Danique Kynge behested Oscarre to arraie hys +Knyghtes eftsoones for Warre. Afflem was put yn theyre flyeynge +Battailes, sawe his Countrie ensconced wyth Foemen, hadde hys Wyfe ande +Chyldrenne brogten Capteeves to hys Shyppe, ande was deieynge wythe +Soorowe, whanne the loude blautaunte Wynde hurled the battayle agaynste +an Heck. Forfraughte wythe embolleynge waves, he sawe hys Broder, Wyfe +and Chyldrenne synke to Deathe: himself was throwen onne a Banke ynne the +Isle of Wyghte, to lyve hys lyfe forgard to all Emmoise: thus moche for +Afflem."[8] + +This paper was accompanied with notes explaining queer words and giving +short biographical sketches of Canynge, Rowley, and other imaginary +characters, such as John, second abbot of St. Austin's Minster, who was +the first English painter in oils and also the greatest poet of his age. +"Take a specimen of his poetry, 'On King Richard I.': + + "'Harte of Lyone! Shake thie Sworde, + Bare this mortheynge steinede honde,' etc." + +The whole was inclosed in a short note to Walpole, which ran thus: + +"Sir, Being versed a little in antiquitys, I have met with several +curious manuscripts, among which the following may be of Service to you, +in any future Edition of your truly entertaining Anecdotes of +Painting.[9] In correcting the mistakes (if any) in the Notes, you will +greatly oblige + Your most humble Servant, + Thomas Chatterton." + +Walpole replied civilly, thanking his correspondent for what he had sent +and for his offer of communicating his manuscripts, but disclaiming any +ability to correct Chatterton's notes. "I have not the happiness of +understanding the Saxon language, and, without your learned notes, should +not have been able to comprehend Rowley's text." He asks where Rowley's +poems are to be found, offers to print them, and pronounces the Abbot +John's verses "wonderful for their harmony and spirit." This +encouragement called out a second letter from Chatterton, with another +and longer extract from the "Historie of Peyncteynge yn Englande," +including translations into the Rowley dialect of passages from a pair of +mythical Saxon poets: Ecca, Bishop of Hereford, and Elmar, Bishop of +Selseie, "fetyve yn Workes of ghastlienesse," as _ecce signum_: + + "Nowe maie alle Helle open to golpe thee downe," etc. + +But by this time Walpole had begun to suspect imposture. He had been +lately bitten in the Ossian business and had grown wary in consequence. +Moreover, Chatterton had been incautious enough to show his hand in his +second letter (March 30). "He informed me," said Walpole, in his history +of the affair, "that he was the son of a poor widow . . . that he was +clerk or apprentice to an attorney, but had a taste and turn for more +elegant studies; and hinted a wish that I would assist him with my +interest in emerging out of so dull a profession, by procuring him +someplace." Meanwhile, distrusting his own scholarship, Walpole had +shown the manuscripts to his friends Gray and Mason, who promptly +pronounced them modern fabrications and recommended him to return them +without further notice. But Walpole, good-naturedly considering that it +was no "grave crime in a young bard to have forged false notes of hand +that were to pass current only in the parish of Parnassus," wrote his +ingenious correspondent a letter of well-meant advice, counseling him to +stick to his profession, and saying that he "had communicated his +transcripts to much better judges, and that they were by no means +satisfied with the authenticity of his supposed manuscripts." Chatterton +then wrote for his manuscripts, and after some delay--Walpole having been +absent in Parish for several months--they were returned to him. + +In 1769 Chatterton had begun contributing miscellaneous articles, in +prose and verse, to the _Town and Country Magazine_, a London periodical. +Among these appeared the eclogue of "Elinoure and Juga,"[10] the only one +of the Rowley poems printed during its author's lifetime. He had now +turned his pen to the service of politics, espousing the side of Wilkes +and liberty. In April, 1770, he left Bristol for London, and cast +himself upon the hazardous fortunes of a literary career. Most tragical +is the story of the poor, unfriended lad's struggle against fate for the +next few months. He scribbled incessantly for the papers, receiving +little or no pay. Starvation confronted him; he was too proud to ask +help, and on August 24 he took poison and died, at the age of seventeen +years and nine months. + +With Chatterton's acknowledged writings we have nothing here to do; they +include satires in the manner of Churchill, political letters in the +manner of Junius, squibs, lampoons, verse epistles, elegies, "African +eclogues," a comic burletta, "The Revenge"--played at Marylebone Gardens +shortly after his death--with essays and sketches in the style that the +_Spectator_ and _Rambler_ had made familiar: "The Adventures of a Star," +"The Memoirs of a Sad Dog," and the like. They exhibit a precocious +cleverness, but have no value and no interest today. One gets from +Chatterton's letters and miscellanies an unpleasant impression of his +character. There is not only the hectic quality of too early ripeness +which one detects in Keats' correspondence; and the defiant swagger, the +affectation of wickedness and knowingness that one encounters in the +youthful Byron, and that is apt to attend the stormy burst of irregular +genius upon the world; but there are things that imply a more radical +unscrupulousness. But it would be harsh to urge any such impressions +against one who was no more than a boy when he perished, and whose brief +career had struggled through cold obstruction to its bitter end. The +best traits in Chatterton's character appear to have been his proud +spirit of independence and his warm family affections. + +The death of an obscure penny-a-liner, like young Chatterton, made little +noise at first. But gradually it became rumored about in London literary +coteries that manuscripts of an interesting kind existed at Bristol, +purporting to be transcripts from old English poems; and that the finder, +or fabricator, of the same was the unhappy lad who had taken arsenic the +other day, to anticipate a slower death from hunger. It was in April, +1771, that Walpole first heard of the fate of his would-be _protégé_. +"Dining," he says, "at the Royal Academy, Dr. Goldsmith drew the +attention of the company with an account of a marvelous treasure of +ancient poems lately discovered at Bristol, and expressed enthusiastic +belief in them; for which he was laughed at by Dr. Johnson, who was +present. I soon found this was the _trouvaille_ of my friend Chatterton, +and I told Dr. Goldsmith that this novelty was known to me, who might, if +I had pleased, have had the honor of ushering the great discovery to the +learned world. You may imagine, sir, we did not all agree in the measure +of our faith; but though his credulity diverted me, my mirth was soon +dashed; for, on asking about Chatterton, he told me he had been in London +and had destroyed himself." + +With the exception of "Elinour and Juga," already mentioned, the Rowley +poems were still unprinted. The manuscripts, in Chatterton's +handwriting, were mostly in the possession of Barrett and Catcott. They +purported to be copies of Rowley's originals; but of these alleged +originals, the only specimens brought forward by Chatterton were a few +scraps of parchment containing, in one instance, the first thirty-four +lines of the poem entitled "The Storie of William Canynge"; in another a +prose account of one "Symonne de Byrtonne," and, in still others, the +whole of the short-verse pieces, "Songe to Aella" and "The Accounte of W. +Canynge's Feast." These scraps of vellum are described as about six +inches square, smeared with glue or brown varnish, or stained with ochre, +to give them an appearance of age. Thomas Warton had seen one of them, +and pronounced it a clumsy forgery; the script not of the fifteenth +century, but unmistakably modern. Southey describes another as written, +for the most part, in an attorney's regular engrossing hand. Mr. Skeat +"cannot find the slightest indication that Chatterton had ever seen a MS. +of early date; on the contrary, he never uses the common contractions, +and he was singularly addicted to the use of capitals, which in old MSS. +are rather scarce." + +Boswell tells how he and Johnson went down to Bristol in April, 1776, +"where I was entertained with seeing him inquire upon the spot into the +authenticity of Rowley's poetry, as I had seen him inquire upon the spot +into the authenticity of Ossian's poetry. Johnson said of Chatterton, +'This is the most extraordinary young man that has encountered my +knowledge. It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things.'" + +In 1777, seven years after Chatterton's death, his Rowley poems were +first collected and published by Thomas Tyrwhitt, the Chaucerian editor, +who gave, in an appendix, his reasons for believing that Chatterton was +their real author, and Rowley a myth.[11] These reasons are convincing +to any modern scholar. Tyrwhitt's opinion was shared at the time by all +competent authorities--Gray, Thomas Warton, and Malone, the editor of the +_variorum_ Shakspere, among others. Nevertheless, a controversy sprang +up over Rowley, only less lively than the dispute about Ossian, which had +been going on since 1760. Rowley's most prominent champions were the +Rev. Dr. Symmes, who wrote in the _London Review_; the Rev. Dr. Sherwin, +in the _Gentleman's Magazine_; Dr. Jacob Bryant,[12] and Jeremiah Milles, +D.D., Dean of Exeter, who published a sumptuous quarto edition of the +poems in 1782.[13] These asserters of Rowley belonged to the class of +amateur scholars whom Edgar Poe used to speak of as "cultivated old +clergymen." They had the usual classical training of Oxford and +Cambridge graduates, but no precise knowledge of old English literature. +They had the benevolent curiosity of Mr. Pickwick, and the +gullibility--the large, easy swallow--which seems to go with the +clerico-antiquarian habit of mind. + +Nothing is so extinct as an extinct controversy; and, unlike the Ossian +puzzle, which was a harder nut to crack, this Rowley controversy was +really settled from the start. It is not essential to our purpose to +give any extended history of it. The evidence relied upon by the +supporters of Rowley was mainly of the external kind: personal +testimony, and especially the antecedent unlikeliness that a boy of +Chatterton's age and imperfect education could have reared such an +elaborate structure of deceit; together with the inferiority of his +acknowledged writings to the poems that he ascribed to Rowley. But +Tyrwhitt was a scholar of unusual thoroughness and acuteness; and, having +a special acquaintance with early English, he was able to bring to the +decision of the question evidence of an internal nature which became more +convincing in proportion as the knowledge necessary to understand his +argument increased; _i.e._, as the number of readers increased, who knew +something about old English poetry. Indeed, it was nothing but the +general ignorance of the spelling, flexions, vocabulary, and scansion of +Middle English verse, that made the controversy possible. + +Tyrwhitt pointed out that the Rowleian dialect was not English of the +fifteenth century, nor of any century, but a grotesque jumble of archaic +words of very different periods and dialects. The orthography and +grammatical forms were such as occurred in no old English poet known to +the student of literature. The fact that Rowley used constantly the +possessive pronominal form _itts_, instead of _his_; or the other fact +that he used the termination _en_ in the singular of the verb, was alone +enough to stamp the poems as spurious. Tyrwhitt also showed that the +syntax, diction, idioms, and stanza forms were modern; that if modern +words were substituted throughout for the antique, and the spelling +modernized, the verse would read like eighteenth-century work. "If +anyone," says Scott, in his review of the Southey and Cottle edition, +"resists the internal evidence of the style of Rowley's poems, we make +him welcome to the rest of the argument; to his belief that the Saxons +imported heraldry and gave armorial bearings (which were not known till +the time of the Crusades); that Mr. Robert [_sic_] Canynge, in the reign +of Edward IV., encouraged drawing and had private theatricals." In this +article Scott points out a curious blunder of Chatterton's which has +become historic, though it is only one of a thousand. In the description +of the cook in the General Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales," Chaucer +had written: + + "But gret harm was it, as it thoughte me, + That on his schyne a mormal hadde he, + For blankmanger he made with the beste." + +_Mormal_, in this passage, means a cancerous sore, and _blankmanger_ is a +certain dish or confection--the modern _blancmange_. But a confused +recollection of the whole was in Chatterton's mind, when among the +fragments of paper and parchment which he covered with imitations of +ancient script, and which are now in the British Museum,--"The Yellow +Roll," "The Purple Roll," etc.,--he inserted the following title in "The +Rolls of St. Bartholomew's Priory," purporting to be old medical +prescriptions; "The cure of mormalles and the waterie leprosie; the rolle +of the blacke mainger"; turning Chaucer's innocent _blankmanger_ into +some kind of imaginary _black mange_. + +Skeat believes that Chatterton had read very little of Chaucer, probably +only a small portion of the Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales." "If he +had really taken pains," he thinks, "To _read_ and _study_ Chaucer of +Lydgate or any old author earlier than the age of Spenser, the Rowley +poems would have been very different. They would then have borne some +resemblance to the language of the fifteenth century, whereas they are +rather less like the language of that period than of any other. The +spelling of the words is frequently too late, or too bizarre, whilst many +of the words themselves are too archaic or too uncommon."[14] But this +internal evidence, which was so satisfactory to Scott, was so little +convincing to Chatterton's contemporaries that Tyrwhitt felt called upon +to publish in 1782 a "Vindication" of his appendix; and Thomas Warton put +forth in the same year an "Enquiry," in which he reached practically the +same conclusions with Tyrwhitt. And yet Warton had devoted the +twenty-sixth section of the second volume of his "History of English +Poetry" (1778,) to a review of the Rowley poems, on the ground that "as +they are held to be real by many respectable critics, it was his duty to +give them a place in this series": a curious testimony to the uncertainty +of the public mind on the question, and a half admission that the poems +might possibly turn out to be genuine.[15] + +Tyrwhitt proved clearly enough that Chatterton wrote the Rowley poems, +but it was reserved for Mr. Skeat to show just _how_ he wrote them. The +_modus operandi_ was about as follows: Chatterton first made, for his +private use, a manuscript glossary, by copying out the words in the +glossary to Speght's edition of Chaucer, and those marked as old in +Bailey's and Kersey's English Dictionaries. Next he wrote his poem in +modern English, and finally rewrote it, substituting the archaic words +for their modern equivalents, and altering the spelling throughout into +an exaggerated imitation of the antique spelling in Speght's Chaucer. +The mistakes that the he made are instructive, as showing how closely he +followed his authorities, and how little independent knowledge he had of +genuine old English. Thus, to give a few typical examples of the many in +Mr. Skeat's notes: in Kersey's dictionary occurs the word _gare_, defined +as "cause." This is the verb _gar_, familiar to all readers of +Burns,[16] and meaning to cause, to make; but Chatterton, taking it for +the _noun_, cause, employs it with grotesque incorrectness in such +connections as these: + + "Perchance in Virtue's gare rhyme might be then": + "If in this battle luck deserts our gare." + +Again the Middle English _howten_ (Modern English, _hoot_) is defined by +Speght as "hallow," _i.e._, halloo. But Kersey and Bailey misprint this +"hollow"; and Chatterton, entering it so in his manuscript list of old +words, evidently takes it to be the _adjective_ "hollow" and uses it thus +in the line: + + "Houten are wordes for to telle his doe," _i.e._, + Hollow are words to tell his doings. + +Still again, in a passage already quoted,[17] it is told how the "Wynde +hurled the Battayle"--Rowleian for a small boat--"agaynste an Heck." +_Heck_ in this and other passages was a puzzle. From the context it +obviously meant "rock," but where did Chatterton get it? Mr. Skeat +explains this. _Heck_ is a provincial word signifying "rack," i.e., +"hay-rack"; but Kersey misprinted it "rock," and Chatterton followed him. +A typical instance of the kind of error that Chatterton was perpetually +committing was his understanding the "Listed, bounded," _i.e., edged_ (as +in the "list" or selvage of cloth) for "bounded" in the sense of +_jumped,_ and so coining from it the verb "to liss"=to jump: + + "The headed javelin lisseth here and there." + +Every page in the Rowley poems abounds in forms which would have been as +strange to an Englishman of the fifteenth as they are to one of the +nineteenth century. Adjectives are used for nouns, nouns for verbs, past +participles for present infinitives; and derivatives and variants are +employed which never had any existence, such as _hopelen_=hopelessness, +and _anere_=another. Skeat says, that "an analysis of the glossary in +Milles's edition shows that the genuine old English words correctly used, +occurring in the Rowleian dialect, amount to only about _seven_ per cent, +of all the old words employed." It is probable that, by constant use of +his manuscript glossary, the words became fixed in Chatterton's memory +and he acquired some facility in composing at first hand in this odd +jargon. Thus he uses the archaic words quite freely as rhyme words, +which he would not have been likely to do unless he had formed the habit +of thinking to some degree, in Rowleian. + +The question now occurs, apart from the tragic interest of Chatterton's +career, from the mystery connected with the incubation and hatching of +the Rowley poems, and from their value as records of a very unusual +precocity--what independent worth have they as poetry, and what has been +the extent of their literary influence? The dust of controversy has long +since settled, and what has its subsidence made visible? My own belief +is that the Rowley poems are interesting principally as literary +curiosities--the work of an infant phenomenon--and that they have little +importance in themselves, or as models and inspirations to later poets. +I cannot help thinking that, upon this subject, many critics have lost +their heads. Malone, _e.g._, pronounced Chatterton the greatest genius +that England had produced since Shakspere. Professor Masson permits +himself to say: "The antique poems of Chatterton are perhaps as worthy of +being read consecutively as many portions of the poetry of Byron, +Shelley, or Keats. There are passages in them, at least, quite equal to +any to be found in these poets."[18] Mr. Gosse seems to me much nearer +the truth: "Our estimate of the complete originality of the Rowley poems +must be tempered by a recollection of the existence of 'The Castle of +Otranto' and 'The Schoolmistress,' of the popularity of Percy's +'Reliques' and the 'Odes' of Gray, and of the revival of a taste for +Gothic literature and art which dates from Chatterton's infancy. Hence +the claim which has been made for Chatterton as the father of the +romantic school, and as having influenced the actual style of Coleridge +and Keats, though supported with great ability, appears to be +overcharged. So also the positive praise given to the Rowley poems, as +artistic productions full of rich color and romantic melody, may be +deprecated without any refusal to recognize these qualities in measure. +There are frequent flashes of brilliancy in Chatterton, and one or two +very perfectly sustained pieces; but the main part of his work, if +rigorously isolated from the melodramatic romance of his career, is +surely found to be rather poor reading, the work of a child of exalted +genius, no doubt, yet manifestly the work of a child all through."[19] + +Let us get a little closer to the Rowley poems, as they stand in Mr. +Skeat's edition, stripped of their sham-antique spelling and with their +language modernized wherever possible; and we shall find, I think, that +tried by an absolute standard, they are markedly inferior not only to +true mediaeval work like Chaucer's poems and the English and Scottish +ballads, but also to the best modern work conceived in the same spirit: +to "Christabel" and "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "Jock o'Hazeldean" and +"Sister Helen," and "The Haystack in the Flood." The longest of the +Rowley poems is "Aella," "a tragycal enterlude or discoorseynge tragedie" +in 147 stanzas, and generally regarded as Chatterton's masterpiece.[20] +The scene of this tragedy is Bristol and the neighboring Watchet Mead; +the period, during the Danish invasions. The hero is the warden of +Bristol Castle.[21] While he is absent on a victorious campaign against +the Danes, his bride, Bertha, is decoyed from home by his treacherous +lieutenant, Celmond, who is about to ravish her in the forest, when he is +surprised and killed by a band of marauders. Meanwhile Aella has +returned home, and finding that his wife has fled, stabs himself +mortally. Bertha arrives in time to hear his dying speech and make the +necessary explanations, and then dies herself on the body of her lord. +It will be seen that the plot is sufficiently melodramatic; the +sentiments and dialogue are entirely modern, when translated out of +Rowleian into English. The verse is a modified form of the Spenserian, a +ten-line stanza which Mr. Skeat says is an invention of Chatterton and a +striking instance of his originality.[22] It answers very well in +descriptive passages and soliloquies; not so well in the "discoorseynge" +parts. As this is Chatterton's favorite stanza, in which "The Battle of +Hastings," "Goddwyn," "English Metamorphosis" and others of the Rowley +series are written, an example of it may be cited here, from "Aella." + + _Scene_, Bristol. Celmond, _alone_. + The world is dark with night; the winds are still, + Faintly the moon her pallid light makes gleam; + The risen sprites the silent churchyard fill, + With elfin fairies joining in the dream; + The forest shineth with the silver leme; + Now may my love be sated in its treat; + Upon the brink of some swift running stream, + At the sweet banquet I will sweetly eat. + This is the house; quickly, ye hinds, appear. + + _Enter_ a servant. + + _Cel._ Go tell to Bertha straight, a stranger waiteth here. + +The Rowley poems include, among other things, a number of dramatic or +quasi-dramatic pieces, "Goddwyn," "The Tournament," "The Parliament of +Sprites"; the narrative poem of "The Battle of Hastings," and a +collection of "eclogues." These are all in long-stanza forms, mostly in +the ten-lined stanza. "English Metamorphosis" is an imitation of a +passage in "The Faërie Queene," (book ii. canto x. stanzas 5-19). "The +Parliament of Sprites" is an interlude played by Carmelite friars at +William Canynge's house on the occasion of the dedication of St. Mary +Redcliffe's. One after another the _antichi spiriti dolenti_ rise up and +salute the new edifice: Nimrod and the Assyrians, Anglo-Saxon ealdormen +and Norman knights templars, and citizens of ancient Bristol. Among +others, "Elle's sprite speaks": + + "Were I once more cast in a mortal frame, + To hear the chantry-song sound in mine ear, + To hear the masses to our holy dame, + To view the cross-aisles and the arches fair! + Through the half-hidden silver-twinkling glare + Of yon bright moon in foggy mantles dressed, + I must content this building to aspere,[23] + Whilst broken clouds the holy sight arrest; + Till, as the nights grow old, I fly the light. + Oh! were I man again, to see the sight!" + +Perhaps the most engaging of the Rowley poems are "An Excelente Balade of +Charitie," written in the rhyme royal; and "The Bristowe Tragedie," in +the common ballad stanza, and said by Tyrwhitt to be founded on an +historical fact: the excecution at Bristol, in 1461, of Sir Baldwin +Fulford, who fought on the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses. +The best quality in Chatterton's verse is its unexpectedness,--sudden +epithets or whole lines, of a wild and artless sweetness,--which goes far +to explain the fascination that he exercised over Coleridge and Keats. I +mean such touches as these: + + + "Once as I dozing in the witch-hour lay." + + "Brown as the filbert dropping from the shell." + + "My gorme emblanchèd with the comfreie plant." + + "Where thou may'st here the sweetè night-lark chant, + Or with some mocking brooklet sweetly glide." + + "Upon his bloody carnage-house he lay, + Whilst his long shield did gleam with the sun's rising ray." + + "The red y-painted oars from the black tide, + Carved with devices rare, do shimmering rise." + + "As elfin fairies, when the moon shines bright, + In little circles dance upon the green; + All living creatures fly far from their sight, + Nor by the race of destiny be seen; + For what he be that elfin fairies strike, + Their souls will wander to King Offa's dyke." + + +The charming wildness of Chatterton's imagination--which attracted the +notice of that strange, visionary genius William Blake[24]--is perhaps +seen at its best in one of the minstrel songs in "Aella." This is +obviously an echo of Ophelia's song in "Hamlet," but Chatterton gives it +a weird turn of his own: + + "Hark! the raven flaps his wing + In the briared dell below; + Hark! the death owl loud doth sing + To the nightmares, as they go. + My love is dead. + Gone to his death-bed + All under the willow tree. + + "See the white moon shines on high,[25] + Whiter is my true-love's shroud, + Whiter than the morning sky, + Whiter than the evening cloud. + My love is dead," etc. + +It remains to consider briefly the influence of Chatterton's life and +writings upon his contemporaries and successors in the field of romantic +poetry. The dramatic features of his personal career drew, naturally, +quite as much if not more attention than his literary legacy to +posterity. It was about nine years after his death that a clerical +gentleman, Sir Herbert Croft, went to Bristol to gather materials for a +biography. He talked with Barrett and Catcott, and with many of the +poet's schoolmates and fellow-townsmen, and visited his mother and +sister, who told him anecdotes of the marvelous boy's childhood and gave +him some of his letters. Croft also traced Chatterton's footsteps in +London, where he interviewed, among others, the coroner who had presided +at the inquest over the suicide's body. The result of these inquiries he +gave to the world in a book entitled "Love and Madness" (1780).[26] +Southey thought that Croft had treated Mrs. Chatterton shabbily, in +making her no pecuniary return from the profits of his book; and +arraigned him publicly for this in the edition of Chatterton's works +which he and Joseph Cottle--both native Bristowans--published in three +volumes in 1803. This was at first designed to be a subscription edition +for the benefit of Chatterton's mother and sister, but, the subscriptions +not being numerous enough, it was issued in the usual way, through "the +trade." + +It was in 1795, just a quarter of a century after Chatterton's death, +that Southey and Coleridge were married in St. Mary Redcliffe's Church to +the Misses Edith and Sara Fricker. Coleridge was greatly interested in +Chatterton. In his "Lines on Observing a Blossom on the First of +February, 1796," he compares the flower to + + "Bristowa's bard, the wondrous boy, + An amaranth which earth seemed scarce to own, + Blooming 'mid poverty's drear wintry waste." + +And a little earlier than this, when meditating his pantisocracy scheme +with Southey and Lovell, he had addressed the dead poet in his indignant +"Monody on the Death of Chatterton," associating him in imagination with +the abortive community on the Susquehannah: + + "O Chatterton, that thou wert yet alive! + Sure thou would'st spread thy canvas to the gale, + And love with us the tinkling team to drive + O'er peaceful freedom's undivided dale; + And we at sober eve would round thee throng, + Hanging enraptured on thy stately song, + And greet with smiles the young-eyed poesy + All deftly masked as hoar antiquity. . . + Yet will I love to follow the sweet dream + Where Susquehannah pours his untamed stream; + And on some hill, whose forest-frowning side + Waves o'er the murmurs of his calmer tide, + Will raise a solemn cenotaph to thee, + Sweet harper of time-shrouded ministrelsy." + +It might be hard to prove that the Rowley poems had very much to do with +giving shape to Coleridge's own poetic output. Doubtless, without them, +"Christabel," and "The Ancient Mariner," and "The Darke Ladye" would +still have been; and yet it is possible that they might not have been +just what they are. In "The Ancient Mariner" there is the ballad strain +of the "Reliques," but _plus_ something of Chatterton's. In such lines +as these: + + "The bride hath paced into the hall + Red as a rose is she: + Nodding their heads before her, goes + The merry minstrelsy;" + +or as these: + + "The wedding guest here beat his breast + For he heard the loud bassoon:" + +one catches a far-away reverberation from certain stanzas of "The +Bristowe Tragedie:" this, _e.g._, + + "Before him went the council-men + In scarlet robes and gold, + And tassels spangling in the sun, + Much glorious to behold;" + +and this: + + "In different parts a godly psalm + Most sweetly they did chant: + Behind their backs six minstrels came, + Who tuned the strung bataunt."[27] + +Among all the young poets of the generation that succeeded Chatterton, +there was a tender feeling of comradeship with the proud and passionate +boy, and a longing to admit him of their crew. Byron, indeed, said that +he was insane; but Shelley, in "Adonais," classes him with Keats among +"the inheritors of unfulfilled renown." Lord Houghton testifies that +Keats had a prescient sympathy with Chatterton in his early death. He +dedicated "Endymion" to his memory. In his epistle "To George Felton +Mathew," he asks him to help him find a place + + "Where we may soft humanity put on, + And sit, and rhyme, and think on Chatterton."[28] + +Keats said that he always associated the season of autumn with the memory +of Chatterton. He asserted, somewhat oddly, that he was the purest +writer in the English language and used "no French idiom or particles, +like Chaucer." In a letter from Jane Porter to Keats about the reviews +of his "Endymion," she wrote: "Had Chatterton possessed sufficient +manliness of mind to know the magnanimity of patience, and been aware +that great talents have a commission from Heaven, he would not have +deserted his post, and his name might have been paged with Milton." + +Keats was the poetic child of Spenser, but some traits of manner--hard to +define, though not to feel--he inherited from Chatterton. In his +unfinished poem, "The Eve of St. Mark," there is a Rowleian accent in the +passage imitative of early English, and in the loving description of the +old volume of saints' legends whence it is taken, with its + + "--pious poesies + Written in smallest crow-quill size + Beneath the text." + +And we cannot but think of the shadow of St. Mary Redcliffe falling +across another young life, as we read how + + "Bertha was a maiden fair + Dwelling in th' old Minster-square; + From her fireside she could see, + Sidelong, its rich antiquity, + Far as the Bishop's garden-wall"; + +and of the footfalls that pass the echoing minster-gate, and of the +clamorous daws that fall asleep in the ancient belfry to the sound of the +drowsy chimes. Rossetti, in so many ways a continuator of Keats' +artistry, devoted to Chatterton the first of his sonnet-group, "Five +English Poets,"[29] of which the sestet runs thus: + + "Thy nested home-loves, noble Chatterton; + The angel-trodden stair thy soul could trace + Up Redcliffe's spire; and in the world's armed space + Thy gallant sword-play:--these to many an one + Are sweet for ever; as thy grave unknown + And love-dream of thine unrecorded face." + +The story of Chatterton's life found its way into fiction and upon the +stage. Afred de Vigny, one of the French romanticists, translator of +"Othello" and "The Merchant of Venice," introduced it as an episode into +his romance, "Stello ou les Diables Bleus," afterward dramatized as +"Chatterton," and first played at Paris on February 12, 1835, with great +success. De Vigny made a love tragedy out of it, inventing a sweetheart +for his hero, in the person of Kitty Bell, a role which became one of +Madame Dorval's chief triumphs. On the occasion of the revival of De +Vigny's drama in December, 1857, Théophile Gautier gave, in the +_Moniteur_,[30] some reminiscences of its first performance, twenty-two +years before. + +"The parterre before which Chatterton declaimed was full of pale, +long-haired youths, who firmly believed that there was no other worthy +occupation on earth but the making of verses or of pictures--art, as they +called it; and who looked upon the bourgeois with a disdain to which the +disdain of the Heidelberg or Jena 'fox' for the 'philistine' hardly +approaches. . . As to money, no one thought of it. More than one, as in +that assembly of impossible professions which Theodore de Banville +describes with so resigned an irony, could have cried without falsehood +'I am a lyric poet and I live by my profession.' One who has not passed +through that mad, ardent, over-excited but generous epoch, cannot imagine +to what a forgetfulness of material existence the intoxication, or, if +you prefer, infatuation of art pushed the obscure and fragile victims who +would rather have died than renounce their dream. One actually heard in +the night the crack of solitary pistols. Judge of the effect produced in +such an environment by M. Afred Vigney's 'Chatterton'; to which, if you +would comprehend it, you must restore the contemporary atmosphere."[31] + + +[1] Wordsworth, "Resolution and Independence." + +[2] January 1, 1753. + +[3] "The Poetical Works of Thos. Chatterton. With an Essay on the Rowley +Poems by the Rev. Walter W. Skeat and a Memoir by Edward Bell"; in two +volumes. London, 1871, Vol. I. p. xv. + +[4] Willcox's edition of "Chatterton's Poetical Works," Cambridge, 1842, +Vol. I. p. xxi. + +[5] "Memoir by Edward Bell," p. xxiv. + +[6] _Cf._ ("Battle of Hastings," i. xx) + + "The grey-goose pinion, that theron was set, + Eftsoons with smoking crimson blood was wet" + +With the lines from "Chevy Chase" (_ante_, p. 295). To be sure the +ballad was widely current before the publication of the "Reliques." + +[7] See _ante_, p. 237. + +[8] Walter Scott quotes this passage in his review of Southey and Cottle's +edition of Chatterton in the Edinburgh _Review_ for April, 1804, and +comments as follows: "While Chatterton wrote plain narrative, he imitated +with considerable success the dry, concise style of an antique annalist; +but when anything required a more dignified or sentimental style, he +mounted the fatal and easily recognized car of the son of Fingal." + +[9] Publication begun 1761: 2d edition 1768. Chatterton's letter was +dated March 25 [1769]. + +[10] See _ante_, p. 346. + +[11] "Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and +others in the fifteenth century. The greatest part now first published +from the most authentic copies, with engraved specimens of one of the +MSS. To which are added a preface, an introductory account of the +several pieces, and a glossary. London: Printed for T. Payne & Son at +the Mews Gate. MDCCLXXVII." + +[12] "Observations upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley," 2 vols. 1781. + +[13] Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol in the fifteenth +century by Thomas Rowley, Priest, etc. With a commentary in which the +antiquity of them is considered and defended. + +[14] "Essay on the Rowley Poems:" Skeat's edition of "Chatterton's +Poetical Works," Vol. II. p. xxvii. + +[15] For a bibliography of the Rowley controversy, consult the article on +Chatterton in the "Dictionary of National Biography." + +[16] "Ah, gentle dames! It gars me greet." + --_Tam o'Shanter_ + +[17] _Ante_, p. 350. + +[18] "Chatterton. A Story of the Year 1770," by David Masson London, 1874. + +[19] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 334. + +[20] A recent critic, the Hon. Roden Noel ("Essays on Poetry and Poets," +London, 1886), thinks that "'Aella' is a drama worthy of the +Elizabethans" (p. 44). "As to the Rowley series," as a whole, he does +"not hesitate to say that they contain some of the finest poetry in our +language" (p. 39). The Choric "Ode to Freedom" in "Goddwyn" appears to +Mr. Noel to be the original of a much admired passage in "Childe Harold," +in which war is personified, "and at any rate is finer"! + +[21] See in Wm. Howitt's "Homes of the Poets," Vol. I. pp. 264-307, the +description of a drawing of this building in 1138, done by Chatterton and +inserted in Barrett's "History." + +[22] For some remarks on Chatterton's metrical originality, see "Ward's +English Poets," Vol. III, pp. 400-403. + +[23] Look at. + +[24] Blake was an early adherent of the "Gothic artists who built the +Cathedrals in the so-called Dark Ages . . . of whom the world was not +worthy." Mr. Rossetti has pointed out his obligations to Ossian and +possibly to "The Castle of Otranto." See Blake's poems "Fair Eleanor" +and "Gwin, King of Norway." + +[25] Chatterton's sister testifies that he had the romantic habit of +sitting up all night and writing by moonlight. Cambridge Ed. p. lxi. + +[26] Other standard lives of Chatterton are those by Gregory, 1789, +(reprinted and prefixed to the Southey and Cottle edition): Dix, 1837; +and Wilson, 1869. + +[27] Rowleian: there is no such instrument known unto men. The romantic +love of _color_ is observable in this poem, and is strong everywhere in +Chatterton. + +[28] See also the sonnet: "O Chatterton, how very sad thy fate"--Given in +Lord Houghton's memoir. "Life and Letters of John Keats": By R. Monckton +Milnes, p. 20 (American Edition, New York, 1848). + +[29] Chatterton, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley. "The absolutely +miraculous Chatterton," Rossetti elsewhere styles him. + +[30] "Historie du Romantisme," pp. 153-54. + +[31] "Chatterton," a drama by Jones and Herman, was played at the +Princess' Theater, London, May 22, 1884. + + + + +CHAPTER XI. + +The German Tributary + +Up to the last decade of the eighteenth century the romantic movement in +Great Britain had been self-developed and independent of foreign +influence, except for such stimulus as it had found, once and again, in +the writings of continental scholars like Sainte Palaye and Mallet. But +now the English literary current began to receive a tributary stream from +abroad. A change had taken place in the attitude of the German mind +which corresponds quite closely to that whose successive steps we have +been following. In Germany, French classicism had got an even firmer +hold than in England. It is well-known that Frederick the Great +(1740-86) regarded his mother-tongue as a barbarous dialect, hardly fit +for literary use. In his own writings, prose and verse, he invariably +employed French; and he boasted to Gottsched that from his youth up he +had not read a German book.[1] + +But already before the middle of the century, and just about the time of +the publication of Thomason's "Seasons," the so-called Swiss school, +under the leadership of the Züricher, Johann Jacob Bodmer, had begun a +national movement and an attack upon Gallic influences. Bodmer fought +under Milton's banner, and in the preface to his prose translation of +"Paradise Lost" (1732), he praised Shakspere as the English Sophocles. +In his "Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren" ("Treatise on the Marvelous," +1740) he asserted the claims of freedom, nature, and the inspired +imagination against the rules of French critics, very much as the Wartons +and Bishop Hurd did a few years later in England. _Deutscheit, +Volkspoesie_, the German past, the old Teutonic hero-age, with the +_Kaiserzeit_ and the Middle Ages in general, soon came into fashion. "As +early as 1748 Bodmer had published specimens from the Minnesingers, in +1757 he had brought out a part of the Nibelungenlied, in 1758 and 1759 a +more complete collection of the Minnesingers, and till 1781, till just +before his death, he continued to produce editions of the Middle +High-German poems. Another Swiss writer, Christian Heinrich Myller, a +pupil of Bodmer's . . . published in 1784 and 1785 the whole of the +Nibelungenlied and the most important of the chivalrous epics. Lessing, +in his preface to Gleim's 'War-songs,' called attention to the Middle +High German poets, of whom he continued to be throughout his life an +ardent admirer. Justus Möser took great interest in the Minnesingers. +About the time when 'Götz' appeared, this enthusiasm for early German +poetry was at its strongest, and Bürger, Voss, Miller, and Höltz wrote +Minnesongs, in which they imitated the old German lyric poets. In 1773 +Gleim published 'Poems after the Minnesingers,' and in 1779 'Poems after +Walther von der Vogelweide.' Some enthusiasts had already hailed the +Nibelungenlied as the German Iliad, and Bürger, who vied hard with the +rest, but without much success, in turning Homer into German, insisted on +dressing up the Greek heroes a little in the Nibelungen style. He and a +few other poets loved to give their ballads a chivalrous character. +Fritz Stolberg wrote the beautiful song of a German boy, beginning, 'Mein +Arm wird stark und gross mein Muth, gib, Vater, mir ein Schwert'; and the +song of the old Swabian knight--'Sohn, da hast du meinen Speer; meinem +Arm wird er zu schwer.' Lessing's 'Nathan,' too, appealed to this +enthusiasm for the times of chivalry, and must have strengthened the +feeling. An historian like the Swiss, Johannes Müller, began to show the +Middle Ages in a fairer light, and even to ascribe great merits to the +Papacy. But in doing so, Johannes Müller was only following in Herder's +steps. Herder . . . had written against the self-conceit of his age, its +pride in its enlightenment and achievements. He found in the Middle Ages +the realization of his aesthetic ideas, namely, strong emotion, stirring +life and action, everything guided by feeling and instinct, not by morbid +thought: religious ardor and chivalrous honor, boldness in love and +strong patriotic feeling."[2] + +When the founders of a truly national literature in Germany cut loose +from French moorings, they had an English pilot aboard; and in the +translations from German romances, dramas, and ballads that were made by +Scott, Coleridge, Taylor, Lewis, and others, English literature was +merely taking back with usury what it had lent its younger sister. +Mention has already been made of Bürger's and Herder's renderings from +Percy's "Reliques,"[3] an edition of which was published at Göttingen in +1767; as well as of the strong excitement aroused in Germany by +MacPherson's "Ossian."[4] This last found--besides the Viennese +Denis--another translator in Fritz Stolberg, who carried his medievalism +so far as to join the Roman Catholic Church in 1800. Klopstock's +"Kriegslied," written as early as 1749, was in the meter of "Chevy +Chase," which Klopstock knew through Addison's _Spectator_ papers. +Through Mallet, the Eddaic literature made an impression in Germany as in +England; and Gerstenberg's "Gedicht eines Skalden" (1766), one of the +first-fruits of the German translation of the "Historire de Dannemarc," +preceded by two years the publication--though not the composition--of +Gray's poems from the Norse. + +But the spirit which wrought most mightily upon the new German literature +was Shakspere's. During the period of French culture there had been +practically no knowledge of Shakspere in Germany. In 1741 Christian von +Borck, Prussian ambassador to London, had translated "Julius Caesar." +This was followed, a few years later, by a version of "Romeo and Juliet." +In 1762-66 Wieland translated, in whole or in part, twenty-two +Shakspere's plays. His translation was in prose and has been long +superseded by the Tieck-Schlegel translation (1797-1801-1810). Goethe +first made acquaintance with Shakspere, when a student at Leipsic, +through the detached passages given in "Dodd's Beauties of Shakspere."[5] +He afterward got hold of Wieland's translation, and when he went to +Strassburg he fell under the influence of Herder, who inspired him with +his own enthusiasm for "Ossian," and the _Volkslieder_, and led him to +study Shakspere in the original. + +Young Germany fastened upon and appropriated the great English dramatist +with passionate conviction. He became an object of worship, an article +of faith. The Shakspere _cultus_ dominated the whole _Sturm- und +Drangperoide_. The stage domesticated him: the poets imitated him: the +critics exalted him into the type and representative (_Urbild_) of +Germanic art, as opposed to and distinguished from the art of the Latin +races, founded upon a false reproduction of the antique.[6] It was a +recognition of the essential kinships between the two separated branches +of the great Teutonic stock. The enthusiastic young patriots of the +Göttinger _Hain_,--who hated everything French and called each other by +the names of ancient bards,--accustomed themselves to the use of +Shaksperian phrases in conversation; and on one occasion celebrated the +dramatist's birthday so uproariously that they were pounced upon by the +police and spent the night in the lockup. In Goethe's circle at +Strassburg, which numbered, among others, Lenz, Klinger, and H. L. +Wagner, this Shakspere mania was _de rigueur_. Lenz, particularly, who +translated "Love's Labour's Lost," excelled in whimsical imitations of +"such conceits as clownage keeps in pay."[7] Upon his return to +Frankfort, Goethe gave a feast in Shakspere's honor at his father's house +(October 14, 1771), in which healths were drunk to the "Will of all +Wills," and the youthful host delivered an extravagant eulogy. "The +first page of Shakspere's that I read," runs a sentence of this oration, +"made me his own for life, and when I was through with the first play, I +stood like a man born blind, to whom sight has been given by an instant's +miracle. I had a most living perception of the fact that my being had +been expanded a whole infinitude. Everything was new and strange; my +eyes ached with the unwonted light."[8] + +Lessing, in his onslaught upon the French theater in his "Hamburgische +Dramaturgie" (1767-69), maintained that there was a much closer agreement +between Sophocles and Shakspere in the essentials of dramatic art than +between Sophocles and Racine or Voltaire in their mechanical copies of +the antique. In their own plays, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller all took +Shakspere as their model. But while beginning with imitation, they came +in time to work freely in the spirit of Shakspere rather than in his +manner. Thus the first draught of Goethe's "Götz von Berlichingen" +conforms in all externals to the pattern of a Shaksperian "history." The +unity of action went overboard along with those of time and place; the +scene was shifted for a monologue of three lines or a dialogue of six; +tragic and comic were interwoven; the stage was thronged with a motley +variety of figures, humors, and conditions--knights, citizens, soldiers, +horse-boys, peasants; there was a court-jester; songs and lyric passages +were interspersed; there were puns, broad jokes, rant, Elizabethan +metaphors, and swollen trunk-hose hyperboles, with innumerable +Shakesperian reminiscences in detail. But the advice of Herder, to whom +he sent his manuscript, and the example of Lessing, whose "Emilia +Galotti" had just appeared, persuaded Goethe to recast the piece and give +it a more independent form. + +Scherer[9] says that the pronunciamento of the new national movement in +German letters was the "small, badly printed anonymous book" entitled +"Von Deutscher Art und Kunst, einige fliegende Blätter" ("Some Loose +Leaves about German Style and Art"), which appeared in 1773 and contained +essays by Justus Möser, who "upheld the liberty of the ancient Germans as +a vanished ideal"; by Johann Gottfried Herder, who "celebrated the merits +of popular song, advocated a collection of the German _Volkslieder_, +extolled the greatness of Shakspere, and prophesied the advent of a +German Shakspere"; and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who praised the Strassburg +Minster and Gothic architecture[10] in general, and "asserted that art, +to be true, must be characteristic. The reform, or revolution, which +this little volume announced was connected with hostility to France, and +with a friendly attitude toward England. . . This great movement was, in +fact, a revulsion from the spirit of Voltaire to that of Rousseau, from +the artificiality of society to the simplicity of nature, from doubt and +rationalism to feeling and faith, from _a priori_ notions[11] to history, +from hard and fast aesthetic rules to the freedom of genius. Goethe's +'Götz' was the first revolutionary symptom which really attracted much +attention, but the 'Fly-sheets on German Style and Art' preceded the +publication of 'Götz,' as a kind of programme or manifesto." Even +Wieland, the mocking and French-minded, the man of consummate +talent but shallow genius, the representative of the _Aufklärung_ +(_Éclaircissement_, Illumination) was carried away by this new stream of +tendency, and saddled his hoppogriff for a ride _ins alte romantische +Land_. He availed himself of the new "Library of Romance" which Count +Tressan began publishing in France in 1775, studied Hans Sachs and +Hartmann von Aue, experiments with Old German meters, and enriched his +vocabulary from Old German sources. He poetized popular fairy tales, +chivalry stories, and motives from the Arthurian epos, such as "Gandalin" +and "Geron der Adeliche" ("Gyron le Courteois"). But his best and +best-known work in this temper was "Oberon" (1780) a rich composite of +materials from Chaucer, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and the French +romance of "Huon of Bordeaux."[12] + +From this outline--necessarily very imperfect and largely at second +hand--of the course of the German romantic movement in the eighteenth +century, it will nevertheless appear that it ran parallel to the English +most of the way. In both countries the reaction was against the +_Aufklärung_, _i.e._, against the rationalistic, prosaic, skeptical, +common-sense spirit of the age, represented in England by deistical +writers like Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Bolingbroke, and Tindal in the +department of religious and moral philosophy; and by writers like +Addison, Swift, Prior, and Pope in polite letters; and represented most +brilliantly in the literatures of Europe by Voltaire. In opposition to +this spirit, an effort was now made to hark back to the ages of faith; to +recover the point of view which created mythology, fairy lore, and +popular superstitions; to _believe_, at all hazards, not only in God and +the immortal soul of man, but in the old-time corollaries of these +beliefs, in ghosts, elves, demons, and witches. + +In both countries, too, the revolution, as it concerned form, was a break +with French classicism and with that part of the native literature which +had followed academic traditions. Here the insurrection was far more +violent in Germany than in England,[13] partly because Gallic influence +had tyrannized there more completely and almost to the supplanting of the +vernacular by the foreign idiom, for literary uses; and partly because +Germany had nothing to compare with the shining and solid achievements of +the Queen Anne classics in England. It was easy for the new school of +German poets and critics to brush aside _perruques_ like Opitz, +Gottsched, and Gellert--authors of the fourth and fifth class. But Swift +and Congreve, and Pope and Fielding, were not thus to be disposed of. We +have noted the cautious, respectful manner in which such innovators as +Warton and Percy ventured to question Pope's supremacy and to recommend +older English poets to the attention of a polite age; and we have seen +that Horace Walpole's Gothic enthusiasms were not inconsistent with +literary prejudices more conservation than radical, upon the whole. In +England, again, the movement began with imitations of Spenser and Milton, +and, gradually only, arrived at the resuscitation of Chaucer and medieval +poetry and the translation of Bardic and Scaldic remains. But in Germany +there was no Elizabethan literature to mediate between the modern mind +and the Middle Age, and so the Germans resorted to England and Shakspere +for this. + +In Germany, as in England, though for different reasons, the romantic +revival did not culminate until the nineteenth century, until the +appearance of the _Romantische Schule_ in the stricter sense--of Tieck, +Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Wackenroder, Fouqué, Von Arnim, Brentano, +and Uhland. In England this was owing less to arrested development than +to the absence of genius. There the forerunners of Scott, Coleridge, and +Keats were writers of a distinctly inferior order: Akenside, Shenstone, +Dyer, the Wartons, Percy, Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, "Monk" Lewis, the boy +Chatterton. If a few rise above this level, like Thomason, Collins, and +Gray, the slenderness of their performance, and the somewhat casual +nature of their participation in the movement, diminish their relative +importance. Gray's purely romantic work belongs to the last years of his +life. Collins' derangement and early death stopped the unfolding of many +buds of promise in this rarely endowed lyrist. Thomson, perhaps, came +too early to reach any more advanced stage of evolution than Spenserism. +In Germany, on the contrary, the pioneers were men of the highest +intellectual stature, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller. But there the +movement was checked for a time by counter-currents, or lost in broader +tides of literary life. English romanticism was but one among many +contemporary tendencies: sentimentalism, naturalism, realism. German +romanticism was simply an incident of the _sturm- und Drangperiode_, +which was itself but a temporary phase of the swift and many-sided +unfolding of the German mind in the latter half of the last century; one +element in the great intellectual ferment which threw off, among other +products, the Kantian philosophy, the "Laocoön," "Faust," and "Wilhelm +Meister"; Winckelmann's "Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums" and +Schiller's "Wallenstein" and "Wilhelm Tell." Men like Goethe and +Schiller were too broad in their culture, too versatile in their talents, +too multifarious in their mental activities and sympathies to be +classified with a school. The temper which engendered "Götz" and "Die +Räuber" was only a moment in the history of their _Entwickelung_; they +passed on presently into other regions of thought and art. + +In Goethe especially there ensued, after the time of his _Italienische +Reise_, a reversion to the classic; not the exploded pseudo-classic of +the eighteenth-century brand, but the true Hellenic spirit which +expressed itself in such work as "Iphigenie auf Tauris," "Hermann und +Dorothea," and the "Schöne Helena" and "Classische Walpurgis-Nacht" +episodes in the second part of "Faust." "In his youth," says Scherer, "a +love for the historical past of Germany had seized on the minds of many. +Imaginative writers filled the old Teutonic forests with Bards and Druids +and cherished an enthusiastic admiration for Gothic cathedrals and for +the knights of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century. . . In +Goethe's mature years, on the contrary, the interest in classical +antiquity dwarfed all other aesthetic interests, and Germany and Europe +were flooded by the classical fashion for which Winckelmann had given the +first strong impulse. The churches became ancient temples, the +mechanical arts strove after classical forms, and ladies affected the +dress and manners of Greek women. The leaders of German poetry, Goethe +and Schiller, both attained the summit of their art in the imitation of +classical models."[14] Still the ground recovered from the Middle Age +was never again entirely lost; and in spite of this classical +prepossession, Goethe and Schiller, even in the last years of the +century, vied with one another in the composition of romantic ballads, +like the former's "Der Erlkonig," "Der Fischer," "Der Todtentanz," and +"Der Zauberlehrling," and the latter's "Ritter Toggenburg," "Der Kampf +mit dem Drachen," and "Der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer." + +On comparing the works of a romantic temper produced in England and in +Germany during the last century, one soon becomes aware that, though the +original impulse was communicated from England, the continental movement +had greater momentum. The _Gründlichkeit_, the depth and thoroughness of +the German mind, impels it to base itself in the fine arts, as in +politics and religion, on foundation principles; to construct for its +practice a theoria, an _aesthetik_. In the later history of German +romanticism, the medieval revival in letters and art was carried out with +a philosophic consistency into other domains of thought and made +accessory to reactionary statecraft and theology, to Junkerism and +Catholicism. Meanwhile, though the literary movement in Germany in the +eighteenth century did not quite come to a head, it was more critical, +learned, and conscious of its own purposes and methods than the kindred +movement in England. The English mind, in the act of creation, works +practically and instinctively. It seldom seeks to bring questions of +taste or art under the domain of scientific laws. During the classical +period it had accepted its standards of taste from France, and when it +broke away from these, it did so upon impulse and gave either no reasons, +or very superficial ones, for its new departure. The elegant +dissertations of Hurd and Percy, and the Wartons, seem very dilettantish +when set beside the imposing systems of aesthetics propounded by Kant, +Fichte, and Schelling; or beside thorough-going _Abhandlungen_ like the +"Laocoön," the "Hamburgische Dramaturgie," Schiller's treatise "Ueber +naïve and sentimentalische Dichtung," or the analysis of Hamlet's +character in "Wilhelm Meister." There was no criticism of this kind in +England before Coleridge; no Shakspere criticism, in particular, to +compare with the papers on that subject by Lessing, Herder, Gerstenberg, +Lenz, Goethe, and many other Germans. The only eighteenth-century +Englishman who would have been capable of such was Gray. He had the +requisite taste and scholarship, but even he wanted the philosophic +breadth and depth for a fundamental and _eingehend_ treatment of +underlying principles. + +Yet even in this critical department, German literary historians credit +England with the initiative. Hettner[15] mentions three English critics, +in particular, as predecessors of Herder in awakening interest in popular +poetry. These were Edward Young, the author of "Night Thoughts," whose +"Conjectures on Original Composition" was published in 1759: Robert Wood, +whose "Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer" (1768) was +translated into German, French, Spanish, and Italian; and Robert Lowth, +Bishop of Oxford, who was Professor of Poetry at Oxford delivered there +in 1753 his "Praelectiones de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum," translated into +English and German in 1793. The significance of Young's brilliant little +essay, which was in form a letter addressed to the author of "Sir Charles +Grandison," lay in its assertion of the superiority of genius to learning +and of the right of genius to be free from rules and authorities. It was +a sort of literary declaration of independence; and it asked, in +substance, the question asked in Emerson's "Nature": "Why should not we +also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" Pope had said, in his +"Essay on Criticism,"[16] "follow Nature," and in order to follow Nature, +learn the rules and study the ancients, particularly Homer. "Nature and +Homer were the same." Contrariwise, Young says: "The less we copy the +renowned ancients, we shall resemble them the more. . . +Learning . . . is a great lover of rules and boaster of famed +examples . . . and sets rigid bounds to that liberty to which genius +often owes its supreme glory. . . Born _originals_, how comes it to pass +that we die _copies_?. . . Let not great examples or authorities +browbeat thy reason into too great a diffidence of thyself. . . While +the true genius is crossing all public roads into fresh untrodden ground; +he [the imitative writer], up to the knees in antiquity, is treading the +sacred footsteps of great examples with the blind veneration of a bigot +saluting the sacred toe." Young asserts that Shakspere is equal in +greatness to the ancients: regrets that Pope did not employ blank verse +in his translation of Homer, and calls Addison's "Cato" "a piece of +statuary." + +Robert Wood, who visited and described the ruins of Balbec and Palmrya, +took his Iliad to the Troad and read it on the spot. He sailed in the +track of Menelaus and the wandering Ulysses; and his acquaintance with +Eastern scenery and life helped to substitute a fresher apprehension of +Homer for the somewhat conventional conception that had prevailed through +the classical period. What most forcibly struck Herder and Goethe in +Wood's essay was the emphasis laid upon the simple, unlettered, and even +barbaric state of society in the heroic age: and upon the primitive and +popular character (_Ursprünglichkeit, Volksthümlichkeit_) of the Homeric +poems.[17] This view of Homer, as essentially a minstrel or +ballad-maker, has been carried so far in Professor Newman's translations +as to provoke remonstrance from Matthew Arnold, who insists upon Homer's +"nobility" and "grand style."[18] But with whatever exaggeration it may +have latterly been held, it was wholesomely corrective and stimulating +when propounded in 1768. + +Though the final arrival of German romanticism, in its fullness, was +postponed too late to modify the English movement, before the latter had +spent its first strength, yet the prelude was heard in England and found +an echo there. In 1792 Walter Scott was a young lawyer at Edinburgh and +had just attained his majority. + + "Romance who loves to nod and sing + With drowsy head and folded wing, + To _him_ a painted paroquet + Had been--a most familiar bird-- + Taught _him_ his alphabet to say, + To lisp his very earliest word."[19] + +He had lain from infancy "in the lap of legends old," and was already +learned in the antiquities of the Border. For years he had been making +his collection of _memorabilia_; claymores, suits of mail, Jedburgh axes, +border horns, etc. He had begun his annual raids into Liddesdale, in +search of ballads and folk lore, and was filling notebooks with passages +from the Edda, records of old Scotch law-cases, copies of early English +poems, notes on the "Morte Darthur," on the second sight, on fairies and +witches; extracts from Scottish chronicles, from the Books of Adjournal, +from Aubrey, and old Glanvil of superstitious memory; tables of the +Moeso-Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, and Runic alphabets and transcripts relating +to the history of the Stuarts. In the autumn or early winter of that +year, a class of six or seven young men was formed at Edinburgh for the +study of German, and Scott joined it. In his own account of the matter +he says that interest in German literature was first aroused in Scotland +by a paper read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in April, 1788, by +Henry Mackenzie, the "Addison of the North," and author of that most +sentimental fictions, "The Man of Feeling." "The literary persons of +Edinburgh were then first made aware of the existence of works of genius +in a language cognate with the English, and possessed of the same manly +force of expressions; they learned at the same time that the taste which +dictated the German compositions was of a kind as nearly allied to the +English as their language; those who were from their youth accustomed to +admire Shakspere and Milton became acquainted for the first time with a +race of poets who had the same lofty ambition to spurn the flaming +boundaries of the universe and investigate the realms of Chaos and old +Night; and of dramatists who, disclaiming the pedantry of the unities, +sought, at the expense of occasional improbabilities and extravagance, to +present life on the stage in its scenes of wildest contrast, and in all +its boundless variety of character. . . Their fictitious narratives, +their ballad poetry, and other branches of their literature which are +particularly apt to bear the stamp of the extravagant and the +supernatural, began also to occupy the attention of the British +literati." Scott's German studies were much assisted by Alexander Frazer +Tytler, whose version of Schiller's "Robbers" was one of the earliest +English translations from the German theater.[20] + +In the autumn of 1794 Miss Aikin, afterward Mrs. Barbauld, entertained a +party at Dugald Stewart's by reading a translation of Bürger's ghastly +ballad "Lenore." The translation was by William Taylor of Norwich; it +had not yet been published, and Miss Aikin read it from a manuscript +copy. Scott was not present, but his friend Mr. Cranstoun described the +performance to him; and he was so much impressed by his description that +he borrowed a volume of Burger's poems from his young kinswoman by +marriage, Mrs. Scott of Harden, a daughter of Count Brühl of Martkirchen, +formerly Saxon ambassador at London, who had a Scotchwoman for his second +wife, the dowager Countess of Egremont. Scott set to work in 1795 to +make a translation of the ballad for himself, and succeeded so well in +pleasing his friends that he had a few copies struck off for private +circulation in the spring of 1796. In the autumn of the same year he +published his version under the title "William and Helen," together with +"The Chase," a translation of Bürger's "Der Wilde Jäger." The two poems +made a thin quarto volume. It was printed at Edinburgh, was anonymous, +and was Walter Scott's first published book. Meanwhile Taylor had given +his rendering to the public in the March number of the _Monthly +Magazine_, introducing it with a notice of Burger's poems; and the very +same year witnessed the appearance of three other translations, one by J. +T. Stanley (with copperplate engravings), one by Henry James Pye, the +poet laureate, and one by the Hon. William Robert Spencer,--author of +"Beth Gelert." "Too Late I Stayed," etc.,--with designs by Lady Diana +Beauclerc. (A copy of this last, says Allibone, in folio, on vellum, +sold at Christie's in 1804 for L25 4s.) A sixth translation, by the Rev. +James Beresford, who had lived some time in Berlin, came out about 1800; +and Schlegel and Brandl unite in pronouncing this the most faithful, if +not the best, English version of the ballad.[21] + +The poem of which England had taken such manifold possession, under the +varied titles "Lenore," "Leonore," "Leonora," "Lenora," "Ellenore," +"Helen," etc., was indeed a noteworthy one. In the original, it remains +Bürger's masterpiece, and in its various English dresses it gained +perhaps as many graces as it lost. It was first printed at Göttingen in +Boie's "Musen Almanach" in 1773. It was an uncanny tale of a soldier of +Frederick the Great, who had perished in the Seven Years' War, and who +came at midnight on a spectral steed to claim his ladylove and carry her +off a thousand miles to the bridal bed. She mounts behind him and they +ride through the phantasms of the night till, at cock-crow, they come to +a churchyard. The charger vanishes in smoke, the lover's armor drops +from him, green with the damps of the grave, revealing a skeleton within, +and the maiden finds that her nuptial chamber is the charnel vault, and +her bridegroom is Death. "This poem," says Scherer, "leaves on us, to +some degree, the impression of an unsolved mystery; all the details are +clear, but at the end we have to ask ourselves what has really happened; +was it a dream of the girl, a dream in which she died, or did the ghost +really appear and carry her away?"[22] The story is managed, indeed, +with much of that subtle art which Coleridge used in "The Ancient +Mariner" and "Christabel"; so that the boundary between the earthly and +the unearthly becomes indefinite, and the doubt continually occurs +whether we are listening to a veritable ghost-story, or to some finer +form of allegory. "Lenore" drew for its materials upon ballad motives +common to many literatures. It will be sufficient to mention "Sweet +William's Ghost," as an English example of the class. + +Scott's friends assured him that his translation was superior to +Taylor's, and Taylor himself wrote to him: "The ghost nowhere makes his +appearance so well as with you, or his exit so well as with Mr. Spencer." +But Lewis was right in preferring Taylor's version, which has a wildness +and quaintness not found in Scott's more literal and more polished +rendering, and is wonderfully successful in catching the _Grobheit_, the +rude, rough manner of popular poetry. A few stanzas from each will +illustrate the difference: + + [From Scott's "William and Helen."] + + "Dost fear? dost fear? The moon shines clear:-- + Dost fear to ride with me? + Hurrah! Hurrah! the dead can ride"-- + "O William, let them be!" + + "See there! see there! What yonder swings + And creaks 'mid whistling rain?" + "Gibbet and steel, the accursed wheel; + A murd'rer in his chain. + + "Halloa! Thou felon, follow here: + To bridal bed we ride; + And thou shalt prance a fetter dance + Before me and my bride." + + And hurry! hurry! clash, clash, clash! + The wasted form descends,[23] + And fleet as wind through hazel bush + The wild career attends.[23] + + Tramp, tramp! along the land they rode, + Splash, splash! along the sea: + The scourge is red, the spur drops blood, + The flashing pebbles flee. + + [From Taylor's "Lenora."] + + Look up, look up, an airy crewe + In roundel dances reele. + The moone is bryghte and blue the night, + May'st dimly see them wheel.[24] + + "Come to, come to, ye ghostlie crewe, + Come to and follow me. + And daunce for us the wedding daunce + When we in bed shall be." + + And brush, brush, brush, the ghostlie crew + Come wheeling o'er their heads, + All rustling like the withered leaves + That wyde the whirlwind spreads. + + Halloo! halloo! Away they goe + Unheeding wet or drye, + And horse and rider snort and blowe, + And sparkling pebbles flye. + + And all that in the moonshine lay + Behynde them fled afar; + And backward scudded overhead + The skye and every star. + + Tramp, tramp across the land they speede, + Splash, splash across the sea: + "Hurrah! the dead can ride apace, + Dost fear to ride with me?" + +It was this stanza which fascinated Scott, as repeated from memory by Mr. +Cranstoun; and he retained it without much change in his version. There +is no mention of the sea in Bürger, whose hero is killed in the battle of +Prague and travels only by land. But Taylor nationalized and +individualized the theme by making his William a knight of Richard the +Lion Heart's, who had fallen in Holy Land. Scott followed him and made +his a crusader in the army of Frederic Barbarossa. Bürger's poem was +written in an eight-lined stanza, but Taylor and Scott both chose the +common English ballad verse, with its folkloreish associations, as the +best vehicle for reproducing the grewsome substance of the story; and +Taylor gave an archaic cast to his diction, still further to heighten the +effect. Lewis considered his version a masterpiece of translation, and, +indeed, "far superior, both in spirit and in harmony, to the German." +Taylor showed almost equal skill in his rendering of Bürger's next most +popular ballad, "Des Pfarrer's Tochter von Taubenhain," first printed in +the _Monthly Magazine_ for April, 1796, under the somewhat odd title of +"The Lass of Fair Wone." + +Taylor of Norwich did more than any man of his generation, by his +translations and critical papers in the _Monthly Magazine_ and _Monthly +Review_, to spread a knowledge of the new German literature in England. +When a lad of sixteen he had been sent to study at Detmold, Westphalia, +and had spent more than a year (1781-82) in Germany, calling upon Goethe +at Weimar, with a letter of introduction, on his way home to England. +"When his acquaintance with this literature began," wrote Lucy Aikin, +"there was probably no English translation of any German author but +through the medium of the French, and he is very likely to have been the +first Englishman of letters to read Goethe, Wieland, Lessing, and Bürger +in the originals."[25] Some years before the publication of his "Lenora" +he had printed for private distribution translations of Lessing's "Nathan +der Weise" (1791) and Goethe's "Iphigenie auf Tauris" (1793). In 1829-30 +he gathered up his numerous contributions to periodicals and put them +together in a three-volume "Historic Survey of German Poetry," which was +rather roughly, though not disrespectfully, handled by Carlyle in the +_Edinburgh Review_. Taylor's tastes were one-sided, not to say +eccentric; he had not kept up with the later movement of German thought; +his critical opinions were out of date, and his book was sadly wanting in +unity and a proper perspective. Carlyle was especially scandalized by +the slight space accorded to Goethe.[26] But Taylor's really brilliant +talent in translation, and his important service as an introducer and +interpreter of German poetry to his own countrymen, deserve always to be +gratefully remembered. "You have made me hunger and thirst after German +poetry," wrote Southey to him, February 24, 1799.[27] + +The year 1796, then, marks the confluence of the English and German +romantic movements. It seems a little strange that so healthy a genius +as Walter Scott should have made his _dèbut_ in an exhibition of the +horrible. Lockhart reports him, on the authority of Sir Alexander Wood, +as reading his "William and Helen" over to that gentleman "in a very slow +and solemn tone," and then looking at the fire in silence and presently +exclaiming. "I wish to Heaven I could get a skull and two crossbones." +Whereupon Sir Alexander accompanied him to the house of John Bell, +surgeon, where the desired articles were obtained and mounted upon the +poet's bookcase. During the next few years, Scott continued to make +translations of German ballads, romances, and chivalry dramas. These +remained for the present in manuscript; and some of them, indeed, such as +his versions of Babo's "Otto von Wittelsbach" (1796-97) and Meier's +"Wolfred von Dromberg" (1797) were never permitted to see the light. His +second publication (February, 1799) was a free translation of Goethe's +tragedy, "Götz von Berlichingen mit der Eisernen Hand." The original was +a most influential work in Germany. It had been already twenty-six years +before the public and had produced countless imitations, with some of +which Scott had been busy before he encountered this, the fountain head +of the whole flood of _Ritterschauspiele_.[28] Götz was an historical +character, a robber knight of Franconia in the fifteenth century, who had +championed the rights of the free knights to carry on private warfare and +had been put under the ban of the empire for engaging in feuds. "It +would be difficult," wrote Carlyle, "to name two books which have +exercised a deeper influence on the subsequent literature of +Europe"--than "The Sorrows of Werther" and "Gotz." "The fortune of +'Berlichingen with the Iron Hand,' though less sudden"--than +Werther's--"was by no means less exalted. In his own country 'Götz,' +though he now stands solitary and childless, became the parent of an +innumerable progeny of chivalry plays, feudal delineations, and +poetico-antiquarian performances; which, though long ago deceased, made +noise enough in their day and generation; and with ourselves his +influence has been perhaps still more remarkable. Sir Walter Scott's +first literary enterprise was a translation of 'Götz von Berlichingen'; +and if genius could be communicated, like instruction, we might call this +work of Goethe's the prime cause of 'Marmion' and 'The Lady of the Lake,' +with all that has since followed from the same creative hand. . . How +far 'Götz von Berlichingen' actually affected Scott's literary +destination, and whether without it the rhymed romances, and then the +prose romances of the author of Waverly, would not have followed as they +did, must remain a very obscure question; obscure and not important. Of +the fact, however, there is no doubt, that these two tendencies, which +may be named Götzism and Wertherism, of the former of which Scott was +representative with us, have made and are still in some quarters making +the tour of all Europe. In Germany, too, there was this affectionate, +half-regretful looking-back into the past: Germany had its buff-belted, +watch-tower period in literature, and had even got done with it before +Scott began."[29] + +Elsewhere Carlyle protests against the common English notion that German +literature dwells "with peculiar complacency among wizards and ruined +towers, with mailed knights, secret tribunals, monks, specters, and +banditti. . . If any man will insist on taking Heinse's 'Ardinghello' +and Miller's 'Siegwart,' the works of Veit Weber the Younger, and above +all the everlasting Kotzebue,[30] as his specimens of German literature, +he may establish many things. Black Forests and the glories of +Lubberland, sensuality and horror, the specter nun and the charmed +moonshine shall not be wanting. Boisterous outlaws also, with huge +whiskers and the most cat-o'-mountain aspect; tear-stained +sentimentalists, the grimmest man-haters, ghosts and the like suspicious +characters will be found in abundance. We are little read in this +bowl-and-dagger department; but we do understand it to have been at one +time rather diligently cultivated; though at present it seems to be +mostly relinquished. . . What should we think of a German critic that +selected his specimens of British literature from 'The Castle Specter,' +Mr. Lewis' 'Monk,' or the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' and 'Frankenstein, or +the Modern Prometheus'?. . . 'Faust,' for instance, passes with many of +us for a mere tale of sorcery and art magic. It would scarcely be more +unwise to consider 'Hamlet' as depending for its main interest on the +ghost that walks in it."[31] + +Now for the works here named, as for the whole class of melodramas and +melodramatic romances which swarmed in Germany during the last quarter of +the century and made their way into English theaters and circulating +libraries, in the shape of translations, adaptations, imitations, two +plays were remotely responsible: Goethe's "Götz" (1773), with its robber +knights, secret tribunal, imperialist troopers, gypsies, and insurgent +peasants; and Schiller's "Die Räuber" (1781), with its still more violent +situations and more formidable _dramatis personae_. True, this spawn of +the _Sturm- und Drangzeit_, with its dealings in banditti, monks, +inquisitors, confessionals, torture and poison, dungeon and rack, the +haunted tower, the yelling ghost, and the solitary cell, had been +anticipated in England by Walpole's "Castle of Otranto" and "Mysterious +Mother"; but this slender native stream was now quite overwhelmed in the +turbid flood of sensational matter from the Black Forest and the Rhine. +Mrs. Radcliffe herself had drunk from foreign sources. In 1794 she made +the tour of the Rhine and published a narrative of her journey in the +year following. The knightly river had not yet become hackneyed; +Brentano had not invented nor Heine sung the seductive charms of the +Lürlei; nor Byron mused upon "the castled crag of Drachenfels." The +French armies were not far off, and there were alarums and excursions all +along the border. But the fair traveler paused upon many a spot already +sacred to legend and song: the Mouse Tower and Rolandseck and the Seven +Mountains. She noted the peasants, in their picturesque costumes, +carrying baskets of soil to the steep vineyard terraces: the ruined keeps +of robber barons on the heights, and the dark sweep of the romantic +valleys, bringing in their tributary streams from north and south. + +Lockhart says that Scott's translations of "Götz" should have been +published ten years sooner to have had its full effect. For the English +public had already become sated with the melodramas and romances of +Kotzebue and the other German _Kraftmänner_; and the clever parody of +"The Robbers," under the title of "The Rovers," which Canning and Ellis +had published in the _Anti-Jacobin_, had covered the entire species with +ridicule. The vogue of this class of fiction, the chivalry romance, the +feudal drama, the robber play and robber novel, the monkish tale and the +ghost story (_Ritterstück, Ritteroman, Räuberstuck, Räuberroman, +Klostergeschichte, Gespensterlied_) both in Germany and England, +satisfied, however crudely, the longing of the time for freedom, +adventure, strong action, and emotion. As Lowell said of the +transcendental movement in New England, it was a breaking of windows to +get at the fresh air. Laughable as many of them seem today, with their +improbable plots and exaggerated characters, they met a need which had +not been met either by the rationalizing wits of the Augustan age or by +the romanticizing poets who followed them with their elegiac refinement, +and their unimpassioned strain of reflection and description. They +appeared, for the moment, to be the new avatar of the tragic muse whereof +Akenside and Collins and Warton had prophesied, the answer to their +demand for something wild and primitive, for the return into poetry of +the _Naturton_, and the long-absent power of exciting the tragic +emotions, pity and terror. This spirit infected not merely the +department of the chivalry play and the Gothic romance, but prose fiction +in general. It is responsible for morbid and fantastic creations like +Beckford's "Vathek," Godwin's "St. Leon" and "Caleb Williams," Mrs. +Shelley's "Frankenstein," Shelley's "Zastrozzi" and "St. Irvine the +Rosicrucian," and the American Charles Brockden Brown's "Ormond" and +"Wieland," forerunners of Hawthorne and Poe; tales of sleep-walkers and +ventriloquists, of persons who are in pursuit of the _elixir vitae_, or +who have committed the unpardonable sin, or who manufacture monsters in +their laboratories, or who walk about in the Halls of Eblis, carrying +their burning hearts in their hands. + +Lockhart, however, denies that "Götz von Berlichingen" had anything in +common with the absurdities which Canning made fun of in the +_Anti-Jacobin_. He says that it was a "broad, bold, free, and most +picturesque delineation of real characters, manners, and events." He +thinks that in the robber barons of the Rhine, with "their forays upon +each other's domains, the besieged castles, the plundered herds, the +captive knights, the brow-beaten bishop and the baffled liege-lord," +Scott found a likeness to the old life of the Scotch border, with its +moss-troopers, cattle raids, and private warfare; and that, as Percy's +"Reliques" prompted the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," so "Götz" +prompted the "Lay of the Last Minstrel" and "Marmion." He quotes the +passage from "Götz" where Selbiss is borne in, wounded, by two troopers +who ascend a watch-tower and describe to their leader the further +progress of the battle; and he asks "who does not recognize in Goethe's +drama the true original of the death scene in 'Marmion' and the storm in +'Ivanhoe'?" + +A singular figure now comes upon our stage, Matthew Gregory Lewis, +commonly nicknamed "Monk" Lewis, from the title of his famous romance. +It is a part of the irony of things that so robust a muse as Walter +Scott's should have been nursed in infancy by a little creature like +Lewis. His "Monk" had been published in 1795, when the author was only +twenty. In 1798 Scott's friend William Erskine meet Lewis in London. +The latter was collecting materials for his "Tales of Wonder," and when +Erskine showed him Scott's "William and Helen" and "The Wild Huntsman," +and told him that he had other things of the kind in manuscript, Lewis +begged that Scott would contribute to his collection. Erskine +accordingly put him in communication with Scott, who felt highly +flattered by the Monk's request, and wrote to him that his ballads were +quite at his service. Lewis replied, thanking him for the offer. "A +ghost or a witch," he wrote, "is a _sine qua non_ ingredient in all the +dishes of which I mean to compose my hobgoblin repast." Later in the +same year Lewis came to Edinburgh and was introduced to Scott, who found +him an odd contrast to the grewsome horrors of his books, being a +cheerful, foppish, round-faced little man, a follower of fashion and an +assiduous tuft-hunter. "Mat had queerish eyes," writes his _protégé_: +"they projected like those of some insects, and were flattish on the +orbit. His person was extremely small and boyish--he was indeed the +least man I ever saw, to be strictly well and neatly made. . . This +boyishness went through life with him. He was a child and a spoiled +child, but a child of high imagination; and so he wasted himself on ghost +stories and German romances. He had the finest ear for rhythm I ever met +with--finer than Byron's." + +Byron, by the way, had always a kindly feeling for Lewis, though he +laughed at him in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers": + + "O wonder-working Lewis, Monk or Bard, + Who fain would'st make Parnassus a churchyard; + Lo! wreaths of yew, not laurel, bind thy brow; + Thy muse a sprite, Apollo's sexton thou; + Whether on ancient tombs thou tak'st thy stand, + By gibbering specters hailed, thy kindred band, + Or tracest chaste descriptions on thy page, + To please the females of our modest age-- + All hail, M. P.,[32] from whose infernal brain + Thin-sheeted phantoms glide, a grisly train; + At whose command grim women thron in crowds, + And kings of fire, of water and of clouds, + With 'small gray men,' wild yagers and what not, + To crown with honor thee and Walter Scott!" + +In 1816, while on his way to Italy, Lewis sojourned for a space with +Byron and Shelley in their Swiss retreat and set the whole company +composing goblin stories. The most remarkable outcome of this queer +symposium was Mrs. Shelley's abnormal romance, "Frankenstein." The +signatures of Byron and Shelley are affixed, as witnesses, to a codicil +to Lewis' will, which he drew at this time and dated at Maison Diodati, +Geneva; a somewhat rhetorical document in which he provided for the +protection of the slaves on his Jamaica plantations. It was two years +after this, and on his return voyage from a visit to these West Indian +estates, that Lewis died of yellow fever and was buried at sea. Byron +made this note of it in his diary: + + "I'd give the lands of Deloraine + Dark Musgrave were alive again," + +that is, + + "I would give many a sugar cane + Monk Lewis were alive again." + +Scott's modesty led him to depreciate his own verses as compared with +Lewis', some of which he recited to Ballantyne, in 1799, speaking of +their author, says Lockhart, "with rapture." But however fine an ear for +rhythm Lewis may have had, his verse is for the most part execrable; and +his jaunty, jiggling anapaests and pragmatic manner are ludicrously out +of keeping with the horrors of his tale, increasing the air of bathos +which distinguishes his poetry: + + "A toad still alive in the liquor she threw, + And loud shrieked the toad as in pieces it flew: + And ever, the cauldron as over she bent, + She muttered strange words of mysterious intent:" + +or this from the same ballad:[33] + + "Wild laughing, the Fiend caught the hand from the floor, + Releasing the babe, kissed the wound, drank the gore; + A little jet ring from her finger then drew, + Thrice shrieked a loud shriek and was borne from their view." + +Lewis would appear to have inherited his romantic turn from his mother, a +sentimental little dame whose youthful looks caused her often to be taken +for Mat's sister, and whose reading was chiefly confined to novels. The +poor lady was something of a blue-stocking and aspired, herself, to +literary honors. Lewis' devotion to her is very charming, and the +elder-brotherly tone of his letters to her highly amusing. But he had a +dislike of "female authorship": and the rumor having reached his ear that +his mother had written a novel and a tragedy and was preparing to print +them, he wrote to her in alarm, begging her to stay her hand. "I hold +that a woman has no business to be a public character, and that, in +proportion as she acquires notoriety, she loses delicacy. I always +consider a female author as a sort of half-man." He was also, quite +properly, shocked at some gossip which attributed "The Monk," to his +mother instead of to his mother's son. + +We read in the "Life and Correspondence of Matthew Gregory Lewis" (2 +vols., London, 1839), that one of Mrs. Lewis' favorite books was "Glanvil +on Witches." Glanvil was the seventeenth-century writer whose "Vanity of +Dogmatizing,"[34] and "Sadduceismus Triumphatus" rebuked the doubter and +furnished arguments for Cotton Mather's "Wonders of the Invisible World" +(1693), an apology for his share in the Salem witchcraft trials; and +whose description of a ghostly drum, that was heard to beat every night +in a Wiltshire country house, gave Addison the hint for his comedy of +"The Drummer." Young Lewis gloated with a pleasing horror over Glanvil's +pages and the wonderful copperplates which embellished them; particularly +the one which represents the devil beating his airy tympanum over Mr. +Mompesson's house. In the ancient mansion of Stanstead Hall, belonging +to a kinsman of his father, where the boy spent a part of his childhood, +there was a haunted chamber known as the cedar room. "In maturer years," +says his biographer, "Lewis has frequently been heard to declare that at +night, when he was conducted past that gloomy chamber, on the way to his +dormitory, he would cast a glance of terror over his shoulder, expecting +to see the huge and strangely carved folding doors fly open and disclose +some of those fearful shapes that afterward resolved themselves into the +ghastly machinery of his works." + +Lewis' first and most celebrated publication was "Ambrosio, or the Monk" +(1795), a three-volume romance of the Gothic type, and a lineal +descendant of Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe. He began it at Oxford in 1792, +describing it in a letter to his mother as "a romance in the style of +'The Castle of Otranto.'" But in the summer of the same year he went to +Germany and took up his residence at Weimar, where he was introduced to +Goethe and made eager acquaintance with the bizarre productions of the +_Sturm- und Drangperiode_. For years Lewis was one of the most active +intermediaries between the German purveyors of the terrible and the +English literary market. He fed the stage with melodramas and operas, +and stuffed the closet reader with ballads and prose romances.[35] +Meanwhile, being at The Hague in the summer of 1794, he resumed and +finished his "Monk," in ten weeks. "I was induced to go on with it," he +wrote to his mother, "by reading the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' which is, in +my opinion, one of the most interesting books that has ever been +published. . . When you read it, tell me whether you think there is any +resemblance between the character given of Montoni . . . and my own. I +confess that it struck me." This innocent vanity of fancying a likeness +between Anne Radcliffe's dark-browed villain and his own cherubic +personality recalls Scott's story about the picture of Lewis, by +Saunders, which was handed round at Dalkeith House. "The artist had +ingeniously flung a dark folding-mantle around the form, under which was +half-hid a dagger, a dark lantern, or some cut-throat appurtenance; with +all this, the features were preserved and ennobled. It passed from hand +to hand into that of Henry, Duke of Buccleuch, who, hearing the general +voice affirm that it was very like, said aloud, 'Like Mat Lewis! Why, +that picture's like a man.'" "The Monk" used, and abused, the now +familiar apparatus of Gothic romance. It had Spanish grandees, heroines +of dazzling beauty, bravoes and forest banditti, foolish duennas and +gabbling domestics, monks, nuns, inquisitors, magic mirrors, enchanted +wands, midnight incantations, sorcerers, ghosts, demons; haunted +chambers, wainscoated in dark oak; moonlit castles with ruined towers and +ivied battlements, whose galleries rang with the shrieks and blasphemies +of guilty spirits, and from whose portals issued, when the castle clock +tolled one, the specter of a bleeding nun, with dagger and lamp in hand. +There were poisonings, stabbings, and ministrations of sleeping potions; +beauties who masqueraded as pages, and pages who masqueraded as wandering +harpers; secret springs that gave admittance to winding stairs leading +down into the charnel vaults of convents, where erring sisters were +immured by cruel prioresses and fed on bread and water among the +loathsome relics of the dead. + +With all this, "The Monk" is a not wholly contemptible work. There is a +certain narrative power about it which puts it much above the level of +"The Castle of Otranto." And though it partakes of the stilted dialogue +and false conception of character that abound in Mrs. Radcliffe's +romances, it has neither the excess of scenery nor of sentiment which +distinguishes that very prolix narrator. There is nothing strictly +mediaeval about it. The knight in armor cuts no figure and the +historical period is not precisely indicated. But the ecclesiastical +features lend it a semblance of mediaevalism; and one is reminded, though +but faintly, by the imprisonment of the offending sister in the sepulcher +of the convent, of the scene in "Marmion" where Constance is immured in +the vaults of Lindisfarne--a frank anachronism, of course, on Scott's +part, since Lindisfarne had been in ruins centuries before the battle of +Flodden. The motto from Horace on the title page of "The Monk" sums up +its contents, and indeed the contents of most of its author's writings, +prose and verse-- + + "Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas, + Nocturnos lemures portentaque." + +The hero Ambrosio is the abbot of St. Francis' Capuchin monastery in +Madrid; a man of rigid austerity, whose spiritual pride makes him an easy +prey to the temptations of a female demon, who leads him by degrees +through a series of crimes, including incest and parricide, until he +finally sells his soul to the devil to escape from the dungeons of the +Inquisition and the _auto da fe_, subscribing the agreement, in approved +fashion, upon a parchment scroll with an iron pen dipped in blood from +his own veins. The fiend, who enters with thunder and lightning, over +whose shoulders "waved two enormous sable wings," and whose hair "was +supplied by living snakes," then snatches up his victim and soars with +him to a peak of the Sierra Morena, where in a Salvator Rosa landscape of +torrents, cliffs, caverns, and pine forests, by the light of an opera +moon, and to the sound of the night wind sighing hoarsely and "the shrill +cry of mountain eagles," he drops him over a precipice and makes an end +of him. + +A passage from the episode of Agnes de Medina, the incarcerated nun, will +illustrate Lewis' wonder-working arts: "A faint glimmering of light +which strained through the bars permitted me to distinguish the +surrounding horrors. I was oppressed by a noisome, suffocating smell; +and perceiving that the grated door was unfastened, I thought that I +might possibly effect my escape. As I raised myself with this design, my +hand rested upon something soft. I grasped it and advanced it toward the +light. Almighty God! what was my disgust! my consternation! In spite of +its putridity and the worms which preyed upon it, I perceived a corrupted +human head, and recognized the features of a nun who had died some months +before. . . A sepulchral lamp was suspended from the roof by an iron +chain and shed a gloomy light through the dungeon. Emblems of death were +seen on every side; skills, shoulder-blades, thigh-bones and other relics +of mortality were scattered upon the dewy ground. . . As I shrunk from +the cutting wind which howled through my subterraneous dwelling, the +change seemed so striking, so abrupt, that I doubted its reality. . . +Sometimes I felt the bloated toad, hideous and pampered with the +poisonous vapors of the dungeon, dragging his loathsome length along my +bosom; sometimes the quick, cold lizard roused me, leaving his slimy +track upon my face, and entangling itself in the tresses of my wild and +matted hair. Often have I, at waking, found my fingers ringed with the +long worms which bred in the corrupted flesh of my infant." + +"The Monk" won for its author an immediate and wide celebrity, assisted +no doubt by the outcry against its immorality. Lewis tried to defend +himself by pleading that the outline and moral of his story were borrowed +from "The History of Santon Barsisa" in the _Guardian_ (No. 148). But +the voluptuous nature of some of the descriptions induced the Attorney +General to enjoin the sale of the book, and Lewis bowed to public opinion +so far as to suppress the objectionable passages in later editions. +Lewis' melodrama "The Castle Specter" was first performed December 14, +1797, at Drury Lane, ran sixty nights and "continued popular as an acting +play," says the biographer, "up to a very recent period."[36] This is +strong testimony to the contemporary appetite for nightmare, for the play +is a trumpery affair. Sheridan, who had a poor opinion of it, advised +the dramatist to keep the specter out of the last scene. "It had been +said," explains Lewis in his preface, "that if Mr. Sheridan had not +advised me to content myself with a single specter, I meant to have +exhibited a whole regiment of ghosts." The prologue, spoken by Mr. +Wroughton, invokes "the fair enchantress, Romance": + + "The moonstruck child of genius and of woe," + +who + + "--Loathes the sun or blazing taper's light: + The moonbeamed landscape and tempestuous night + Alone she loves; and oft with glimmering lamp + Near graves new opened, or midst dungeons damp, + Drear forests, ruined aisles and haunted towers, + Forlorn she roves and raves away the hours." + +The scene of the drama is Conway Castle in Wales, where abides Earl +Osmond, a feudal tyrant of the "Otranto" type, who is planning an +incestuous marriage with his own niece, concerning which he thus +soliloquizes: "What though she prefer a basilisk's kiss to mine? Because +my short-lived joy may cause her eternal sorrow, shall I reject those +pleasures sought so long, desired so earnestly? That will I not, by +Heaven! Mine she is, and mine she shall be, though Reginald's bleeding +ghost flit before me and thunder in my ear 'Hold! Hold!'--Peace, stormy +heart, she comes." Reginald's ghost does not flit, because Reginald is +still in the flesh, though not in very much flesh. He is Osmond's +brother and Angela's father, and the wicked Earl thought that he had +murdered him. It turns out, however, that, though left for dead, he had +recovered of his hurts and has been kept unbeknown in solitary +confinement, in a dungeon vault under the castle, for the somewhat long +period of sixteen years. He is discovered in Act V., "emaciated, in +coarse garments, his hair hanging wildly about his face, and a chain +bound round his body." + +Reginald's ghost does not flit, but Evelina's does. Evelina is +Reginald's murdered wife, and her specter in "white and flowing garments, +spotted with blood," appears to Angela in the oratory communicating with +the cedar room, which is furnished with an antique bedstead and the +portrait of a lady on a sliding panel. In truth, the castle is +uncommonly well supplied with apparitions. Earl Herbert rides around it +every night on a white horse; Lady Bertha haunts the west pinnacle of the +chapel tower; and Lord Hildebrand may be seen any midnight in the great +hall, playing football with his own head. So says Motley the jester, who +affords the comedy element of the play, with the help of a fat friar who +guzzles sack and stuffs venison pasties, and a soubrette after the +"Otranto" pattern. + +A few poems were scattered through the pages of "The Monk," including a +ballad from the Danish, and another from the Spanish. But the most +famous of these was "Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene," original +with Lewis, though evidently suggested by "Lenore." It tells how a lover +who had gone to Palestine presented himself at the bridal feast of his +faithless fair one, just as the clock struck one and the lights burned +blue. At the request of the company, the strange knight raises his visor +and discloses a skeleton head: + + "All present then uttered a terrified shout; + All turned with disgust from the scene; + The worms they crept in and the worms they crept out, + And sported his eyes and his temples about + While the spectre addressed Imogene." + +He winds his arms about her and sinks with his prey through the yawning +ground; and + + "At midnight four times in each year does her sprite, + When mortals in slumber are bound. + Arrayed in her bridal apparel of white, + Appear in the hall with a skeleton knight + And shriek as he whirls her around. + + "While they drink out of skulls newly torn from the grave, + Dancing round them pale spectres are seen. + Their liquor is blood, and this horrible stave + They how: 'To the health of Alonzo the Brave + And his consort, the Fair Imogene!'" + +Lewis' own contributions to his "Tales of Terror" and "Tales of Wonder," +were of his same raw-head and bloody-bones variety. His imagination +rioted in physical horrors. There are demons who gnash with iron fangs +and brandish gore-fed scorpions; maidens are carried off by the Winter +King, the Water King, the Cloud King, and the Sprite of the Glen; they +are poisoned or otherwise done to death, and their wraiths revisit their +guilty lovers in their shrouds at midnight's dark hour and imprint clammy +kisses upon them with livid lips; gray friars and black canons abound; +requiem and death knell sound through the gloom of the cloisters; echo +roars through high Gothic arches; the anchorite mutters in his mossy +cell; tapers burn dim, torches cast a red glare on vaulted roofs; the +night wind blows through dark aisles; the owl hoots in the turret, and +dying groans are heard in the lonely house upon the heath, where the +black and tattered arras molders on the wall. + +The "Tales of Wonder" included translations by Lewis from Goethe's +"Fisher" and "Erl-King," and from German versions of Runic ballads in +Herder's "Stimmen der Völker." Scott's "Wild Huntsman," from Bürger, was +here reprinted, and he contributed, in addition, "Frederick and Alice," +paraphrased from a romance-fragment in Goethe's opera "Claudina von Villa +Bella"; and three striking ballads of his own, "The Fire King," a story +of the Crusades, and "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of St. John," Scottish +tales of "gramarye." There were two or three old English ballads in the +collection, such as "Clerk Colvin" and "Tam Lin"; a contribution from +George Colman, Jr., the dramatist, and one from Scott's eccentric friend +Leyden; and the volume concluded with Taylor's "Lenora."[37] + +It is comical to read that the Monk gave Scott lectures in the art of +versification and corrected the Scotticisms and false rhymes in his +translations from Bürger; and that Scott respectfully deferred to his +advice. For nothing can be in finer contrast with Lewis' penny dreadful, +than the martial ring of the verse and the manly vigor of the style in +Scott's part of the book. This is how Lewis writes anapaests, _e.g._: + + "All shrouded she was in the garb of the tomb, + Her lips they were livid, her face it was wan; + A death the most horrid had rifled her bloom + And each charm of beauty was faded and gone." + +And this is how Scott writes them: + + "He clenched his set teeth and his gauntleted hand, + He stretched with one buffet that page on the sand. . . + For down came the Templars like Cedron in flood, + And dyed their long lances in Saracen blood." + +It is no more possible to take Monk Lewis seriously than to take Horace +Walpole seriously. They are both like children telling ghost-stories in +the dark and trying to make themselves shudder. Lewis was even frivolous +enough to compose paradies on his own ballads. A number of these +_facetiae_--"The Mud King," "Giles Jollup the Grave and Brown Sally +Green," etc.--diversify his "Tales of Wonder." + +Scott soon found better work for his hands to do than translating German +ballads and melodramas; but in later years he occasionally went back to +these early sources of romantic inspiration. Thus his poem "The Noble +Moringer" was taken from a "Sammlung Deutscher Volkslieder" published at +Berlin in 1807 by Busching and Von der Hagen. In 1799 he had made a +_rifacimento_ of a melodrama entitles "Der Heilige Vehme" in Veit Weber's +"Sagen der Vorzeit." This he found among his papers thirty years after +(1829) and printed in "The Keepsake," under the title of "The House of +Aspen." Its most telling feature is the description of the Vehm-Gericht +or Secret Tribunal, but it has little importance. In his "Historic +Survey," Taylor said that "Götz von Berlichingen" was "translated into +English in 1799 at Edinburgh, by Wm. Scott, Advocate; no doubt the same +person who, under the poetical but assumed name of Walter, had since +become the most extensively popular of the British writers"! This +amazing statement is explained by a blunder on the title-page of Scott's +"Götz," where the translator's name is given as _William_ Scott. But it +led to a slightly acrimonious correspondence between Sir Walter and the +Norwich reviewer.[38] + +The tide of German romance had begun to ebb before the close of the +century. It rose again a few years later, and left perhaps more lasting +tokens this second time; but the ripple-marks of its first invasion are +still discernible in English poetry and prose. Southey was clearly in +error when he wrote to Taylor, September 5, 1798: "Coleridge's ballad, +'The Ancient Mariner' is, I think, the clumsiest attempt at German +sublimity I ever saw."[39] The "Mariner" is not in the least German, and +when he wrote it, Coleridge had not been in Germany and did not know the +language. He had read "Die Rauber," to be sure, some years before in +Tytler's translation. He was at Cambridge at the time, and one night in +winter, on leaving the room of a college friend, carelessly picked up and +took away with him a copy of the tragedy, the very name of which he had +never heard before. "A winter midnight, the wind high and 'The Robbers' +for the first time. The readers of Schiller will conceive what I felt." +He recorded, in the sonnet "To Schiller" (written December, 1794, or +January, 1795), the terrific impression left upon his imagination by + + --"The famished father's cry + From the dark dungeon of the tower time-rent," + +and wish that he might behold the bard himself, wandering at eve-- + + "Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood." + +Coleridge was destined to make the standard translation of "Wallenstein"; +and there are motives borrowed from "The Robbers" and "The Ghost-Seer" in +his own very rubbishy dramas, "Zapolya"--of which Scott made some use in +"Peveril of the Peak"--and "Osorio" (1797). The latter was rewritten as +"Remorse," put on at Drury Lane January 23, 1813, and ran twenty nights. +It had been rejected by Sheridan, who expressed a very proper contempt +for it as an acting play. The Rev. W. L. Bowles and Byron, who had read +it in manuscript and strangely overvalued it, both made interest with the +manager to have it tried on the stage. "Remorse" also took some hints +from Lewis' "Monk." + +But Coleridge came in time to hold in low esteem, if not precisely "The +Robbers" itself, yet that school of German melodrama of which it was the +grand exemplar. In the twenty-third chapter of the "Biographia +Literaria" (1817) he reviewed with severity the Rev. Charles Robert +Maturin's tragedy "Bertram, or the Castle of St. Aldobrand,"[40] and +incidentally gave the genesis of that whole theatric species "which it +has been the fashion, of late years, at once to abuse and to enjoy under +the name of the German Drama. Of this latter Schiller's 'Robbers' was +the earliest specimen, the first-fruits of his youth. . . Only as _such_ +did the maturer judgment of the author tolerate the play." Coleridge +avows that "The Robbers" and its countless imitations were due to the +popularity in Germany of the translations of Young's "Night Thoughts," +Hervey's "Meditations," and Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe." "Add the +ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap-doors, the skeletons, the +flesh-and-blood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine of a modern +author[41] (themselves the literary brood of the 'Castle of Otranto,' the +translations of which, with the imitations and improvements aforesaid, +were about that time beginning to make as much noise in Germany as their +originals were making in England), and, as the compound of these +ingredients duly mixed, you will recognize the so-called _German_ Drama," +which "is English in its origin, English in its materials, and English by +readoption; and till we can prove that Kotzebue, or any of the whole +breed of Kotzebues, whether dramatists or romantic writers or writers of +romantic dramas, were ever admitted to any other shelf in the libraries +of well-educated Germans than were occupied by their originals . . . in +their mother country, we should submit to carry our own brat on our own +shoulders." + +Germany, rather than Italy or Spain, became under these influences for a +time the favored country of romance. English tale-writers chose its +forests and dismantled castles as the scenes of their stories of +brigandage and assassination. One of the best of a bad class of +fictions, _e.g._, was Harriet Lee's "The German's Tale: Kruitzner," in +the series of "Canterbury Tales" written in conjunction with her sister +Sophia (1797-1805). Byron read it when he was fourteen, was profoundly +impressed by it, and made it the basis of "Werner," the only drama of his +which had any stage success. "Kruitzner" is conceived with some power, +but monotonously and ponderously written. The historic period is the +close of the Thirty Years' War. It does not depend mainly for its effect +upon the time-honored "Gothic" machinery, though it makes a moderate use +of the sliding panel and secret passage once again. + +We are come to the gate of the new century, to the date of the "Lyrical +Ballads" (1798) and within sight of the Waverly novels. Looking back +over the years elapsed since Thomson put forth his "Winter," in 1726, we +ask ourselves what the romantic movement in England had done for +literature; if indeed that deserves to be called a "movement" which had +no leader, no programme, no organ, no theory of art, and very little +coherence. True, as we have learned from the critical writings of the +time, the movement, such as it was, was not all unconscious of its own +aims and directions. The phrase "School of Warton" implies a certain +solidarity, and there was much interchange of views and some personal +contact between men who were in literary sympathy; some skirmishing, too, +between opposing camps. Gray, Walpole, and Mason constitute a group, +encouraging each other's studies in their correspondence and occasional +meetings. Shenstone was interested in Percy's ballad collections, and +Gray in Warton's "History of English Poetry." Akenside read Dyer's +"Fleece," and Gray read Beattie's "Minstrel" in MS. The Wartons were +friends of Collins; Collins a friend and neighbor of Thomson; and Thomson +a frequent visitor at Hagley and the Leasowes. Chatterton sought to put +Rowley under Walpole's protection, and had his verses examined by Mason +and Gray. Still, upon the whole, the English romanticists had little +community; they worked individually and were scattered and isolated as to +their residence, occupations, and social affiliation. It does not appear +that Gray ever met Collins, or the Wartons, or Shenstone or Akenside; nor +that MacPherson, Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Chatterton ever saw +each other or any of those first mentioned. There was none of that +united purpose and that eager partisanship which distinguished the +Parisian _cénacle Romantische Schule_ whose members have been so +brilliantly sketched by Heine. + +But call it a movement, or simply a drift, a trend; what had it done for +literature? In the way of stimulus and preparation, a good deal. It had +relaxed the classical bandages, widened the range of sympathy, roused a +curiosity as to novel and diverse forms of art, and brought the literary +mind into a receptive, expectant attitude favorable to original creative +activity. There never was a generation more romantic in temper than that +which stepped upon the stage at the close of the eighteenth century: a +generation fed upon "Ossian" and Rousseau and "The Sorrows of Werther" +and Percy's "Reliques" and Mrs. Radcliffe's romances. Again, in the +department of literary and antiquarian scholarship much had been +accomplished. Books like Tyrwhitt's "Chaucer" and Warton's "History of +English Poetry" had a real importance, while the collection and +preservation of old English poetry, before it was too late, by scholars +like Percy, Ritson, Ellis, and others was a pious labor. + +But if we inquire what positive additions had been made to the modern +literature of England, the reply is disappointing. No one will maintain +that the Rowley poems, "Caractacus," "The Monk," "The Grave of King +Arthur," "The Friar of Orders Gray," "The Castle of Otranto," and "The +Mysteries of Udolpho" are things of permanent value: or even that "The +Bard," "The Castle of Indolence," and the "Poems of Ossian" take rank +with the work done in the same spirit by Coleridge, Scott, Keats, +Rossetti, and William Morris. The two leading British poets of the _fin +du siècle_, Cowper and Burns, were not among the romanticists. It was +left for the nineteenth century to perform the work of which the +eighteenth only prophesied. + + +[1] Scherer's "History of German Literature," Conybeare's Translation, +Vol. II, p. 26. + +[2] Scherer, Vol. II. pp. 123-24. + +[3] See _ante_, pp. 300-301. + +[4] See _ante_, pp. 337-38. + +[5] "The Beauties of Shakspere. Regularly selected from each Play. With +a general index. Digesting them under proper heads." By the Rev. Wm. +Dodd, 1752. + +[6] "Es war nicht blos die Tiefe der Poesie, welche sie zu Shakespeare +zog, es war ebenso sehr das sichere Gefühl, das hier germanische Art und +Kunst sei."--_Hettner's Geschichte der deutschen Literatur_, 3.3.1. s. +51. "Ist zu sagen, dass die Abwendung von den Franzosen zu den +stammverwandten Engländern . . . in ihrem geschichtlichen Ursprung und +Wachsthum wesentlich die Auflehnung des erstarkten germanischen +Volksnaturells gegen die erdrückende Uebermacht der romanischen +Formenwelt war," etc.--_Ibid._ s. 47. See also, ss. 389-95, for a review +of the interpretation of the great Shaksperian roles by German actors +like Schröder and Fleck. + +[7] "Wir hören einen Nachklang jener fröhlichen Unterhaltungen, in denen +die Freunde sich ganz und gar in Shakepear'schen Wendungen und Wortwitzen +ergingen, in seiner Uebersetzung von Shakespeare's 'Love's Labour's +Lost'"--_Hettner_, s. 244. + +[8] See the whole oration (in Hettner, s. 120,) which gives a most vivid +expression of the impact of Shakspere upon the newly aroused mind of +Germany. + +[9] "German Literature," Vol. II. pp. 82-83 + +[10] "Unter allen Menschen des Achtzehnten Jahrhunderts war Geothe wieder +der Erste, weicher die lang verachtete Herrlichkeit der gothischen +Baukunst empfand und erfasste."--_Hettner_, 3.3.1., s. 120. + +[11] _Construirtes Ideal_. + +[12] Scherer, II. 129-31. "Oberon" was englished by William Sotheby in +1798. + +[13] "Vor den classischen Dichtarten fängt mich bald an zu ekeln," wrote +Bürger in 1775. "Charakteristiken": von Erich Schmidt (Berlin, 1886) s. +205. "O, das verwünschte Wort: Klassisch!" exclaims Herder. "Dieses +Wort war es, das alle wahre Bildung nach den Alten als noch lebenden +Mustern verdrangte. . . Dies Wort hat manches Genie unter einen Schutt +von Worten vergraben. . . Es hat dem Vaterland blühende Fruchtbäume +entzogen!"--_Hettner_ 3.3.1. s. 50. + +[14] "German Literature," Vol. II. p. 230. + +[15] "Literaturegeschichte," 3.3.1. s. 30-31. + +[16] See _ante_, p. 48. + +[17] "Our polite neighbors the French seem to be most offended at certain +pictures of primitive simplicity, so unlike those refined modes of modern +life in which they have taken the lead; and to this we may partly impute +the rough treatment which our poet received from them"--_Essay on Homer_ +(Dublin Edition, 1776), p. 127. + +[18] See Francis W. Newman's "Iliad" (1856) and Arnold's "Lectures on +Translating Homer" (1861). + +[19] "Romance," Edgar Poe. + +[20] "Lockhart's Life of Scott," Vol. I. p. 163. + +[21] For full titles and descriptions of these translations, as well as +for the influence of Bürger's poems in England, see Alois Brandl: "Lenore +in England," in "Charakteristiken," by Erich Schmidt (Berlin, 1886) ss. +244-48. Taylor said in 1830 that no German poem had been so often +translated: "eight different versions are lying on my table and I have +read others." He claimed his to be the earliest, as written in 1790, +though not printed till 1796. "Lenore" won at once the honors of +parody--surest proof of popularity. Brandl mentions two--"Miss Kitty," +Edinburgh, 1797, and "The Hussar of Magdeburg, or the Midnight Phaeton," +Edinburgh, 1800, and quotes Mathias' satirical description of the piece +("Pursuits of Literature," 1794-97) as "diablerie tudesque" and a "'Blue +Beard' story for the nursery." The bibliographies mention a new +translation in 1846 by Julia M. Cameron, with illustrations by Maclise; +and I find a notice in Allibone of "The Ballad of Lenore: a Variorum +Monograph," 4to, containing thirty metrical versions in English, +announced as about to be published at Philadelphia in 1866 by Charles +Lukens. _Quaere_ whether this be the same as Henry Clay Lukens ("Erratic +Enrico"), who published "Lean 'Nora" (Philadelphia, 1870; New York, +1878), a title suggestive of a humorous intention, but a book which I +have not seen. + +[22] "History of German Literature," Vol. II. p. 123. + +[23] These are book phrases, not true ballad diction. + +[24] _Cf_. The "Ancient Mariner": + + "The feast is set, the guests are met, + May'st hear the merry din." + +[25] "Memoir of Wm. Taylor of Norwich," by J. W. Robberds (1843), Vol. II. +p. 573. + +[26] For Taylor's opinion of Carlyle's papers on Goethe in the _Foreign +Review_, see "Historic Survey," Vol. III. pp. 378-79. + +[27] "Memoir of Taylor," Vol. I. p. 255. + +[28] Among the most notable of these was "Maler" (Friedrich) Müller's +"Golo und Genoveva" (written 1781; published 1811); Count Törring's +"Agnes Bernauerin" (1780); and Jacob Meyer's "Sturm von Borberg" (1778), +and "Fust von Stromberg" (1782). Several of these were very successful +on the stage. + +[29] "Essay on Walter Scott." + +[30] Kotzebue's "The Stranger" ("Menschenhass und Reue") still keeps the +English stage. Sheridan's "Pizarro"--a version of Katzebue's "Spaniards +in Peru"-was long a favorite; and "Monk" Lewis made another translation +of the same in 1799, entitled "Rolla," which, however, was never acted. + +[31] "State of German Literature." + +[32] Lewis sat in Parliament for Hindon, Wilts, succeeding Beckford of +"Vathek" and Fonthill Abbey fame. + +[33] "The Grim White Woman," in "Tales of Wonder." + +[34] Matthew Arnold's lovely "Scholar Gypsy" was suggested by a passage in +this. + +[35] The following is a list of his principal translations: "The Minister" +(1797), from Schiller's "Kabale and Liebe"; played at Covent Garden in +1803, as "The Harper's Daughter." "Rolla" (1799), from Kotzebue's +"Spaniards in Peru." "Adelmorn, or the Outlaw" (1800), played at Drury +Lane, 1801. "Tales of Terror" (1801) and "Tales of Wonder" (1801). +(There seems to be some doubt as to the existence of the alleged Kelso +editions of these in 1799 and 1800, respectively. See article on Lewis +in the "Dict. Nat. Biog.") "The Bravo of Venice" (1804), a prose +romance, dramatized and played at Covent Garden, as "Rugantino," in 1805. +"Feudal Tyrants" (1807), a four-volume romance. "Romantic Tales" (1808), +4 vols. From German and French. + +[36] The printed play had reached its eleventh edition in 1803. + +[37] The "Tales of Terror," and "Tales of Wonder" are reprinted in a +single volume of "Morley's Universal Library," 1887. + +[38] See "Memoir of Wm. Taylor," Vol. II. Pp. 533-38. + +[39] "Memoir of Taylor," Vol. I. p. 223. + +[40] This was one of the latest successes of the kind. It was played at +Drury Lane in 1816 for twenty-two nights, bringing the author 1000 +pounds, and the printed play reached the seventh edition within the year. +Among Maturin's other works were "The Fatal Revenge" (1807), "Manuel" +(Drury Lane, 1817) "Fredolfo" (Covent Garden, 1817), and his once famous +romance, "Melmoth the Wanderer" (1820), see _ante_, p. 249. + +[41] Mrs. Radcliffe. + + + + +BIBLIOGRAPHY + +[This bibliography is intended to give practical aid to any reader who +may wish to follow up the history of the subject for himself. It by no +means includes all the books and authors referred to in the text; still +less, all that have been read or consulted in the preparation of the +work.] + + Addison, Joseph. Works. New York, 1856. 6 vols. + Akenside, Mark. Poetical Works. Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1837. + Amherst, Alicia. "History of Gardening in England." London, 1896. + Arnold, Matthew. "The Study of Celtic Literature," and "Lectures on + Translating Homer." London, 1893. + Austen, Jane. "Northanger Abbey," London, 1857. + + Bagehot, Walter. "Literary Studies." London, 1879. 2 vols. + Beattie, James. Poetical Works. Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1854. + Beckford, William. "History of the Caliph Vathek." New York, 1869. + Bell, John. "Classical Arrangement of Fugitive Poetry." London, + 1790-97. 18 vols. + Blair, Robert. Poetical works. Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1854. + Boswell, James. "Life of Samuel Johnson." Fitzgerald's ed. London, + 1874. 3 vols. + Boswell, James. "Life of Samuel Johnson." Abridged ed. New York, 1878. + Boyesen, H.H. "Essays on German Literature." New York, 1892. + Brandl, Alois. "Lenore in England," in "Characteristiken," by Erich + Schmidt. Berlin, 1886. + Brunetière, Ferdinand. "Études Critiques." Troisième Série. Tome III. + Paris, 1890. + Bryant, Jacob. "Observations upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley." London, + 1781. 2 vols. + Brydges, Samuel Egerton. Poems. 4th ed. London, 1807. + Bürger, Gottfriend August. "Sämmtliche Werke." Gottingen, 1844. 4 vols. + Byron, Geo. Gordon Noel. Works. London, 1832-33. 15 vols. + + Cambridge, Richard Owen. Works. London, 1803. + Cameron, Ewen. "The Fingal of Ossian, rendered into Heroic Verse," + Warrington, 1776. + Campbell, J. F. "Leabhar na Feinne." London, 1872. + Campbell, J. F. "Popular Tales of the West Highlands." Edinburgh, 1862. + 4 vols. + Canning, George, Ellis, and Frere. "The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin." + London, 1890. (Carisbrooke Library, Vol. VI.) + Carlyle, Thomas. Works. London, 1869-72. 31 vols. + Chateaubriand, F. A. R. de. "The Beauties of Christianity." Translation + of F. Shoberl. Philadelphia, 1815. + Chatterton, Thomas. Poetical Works. Skeat's ed. London, 1871. 2 vols. + Chatterton, Thomas. "The Rowley Poems." Tyrwhitt's ed. London, 1777. + Chatterton, Thomas. "The Rowley Poems." Mille's ed. London, 1782. + Chatterton, Thomas. "A Story of the Year 1770." By David Masson. + London, 1874. + Chatterton, Thomas. Article in "Dictionary of National Biography." + Chatterton, Thomas. "A Biographical Study." By D. Wilson. London, 1869. + Chaucer, Geoffrey. "The Canterbury Tales." Tyrwhitt's ed. Oxford, + 1798. 2 vols. 2d. ed. + Child, F. J. "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads." Boston and + New York, 1882-98. 5 vols. + Coleridge, S. T. Works. New York, 1884. 7 vols. + Collins, William. Poetical Works. Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1854. + Colvin, Sidney. "Preface to Selections from Landor." London, 1882. + Croft, Sir Herbert. "Love and Madness." London, 1786. New ed. + Cumberland, Richard. Memoirs. Philadelphia, 1856. + + Dennis, John. "Essay on Shakspere." London, 1712. + Dodsley, Robert. "A Collection of Poems by Several Hands." London, + 1766-68. 6 vols. + Dodsley, Robert. "A Select Collection of Old Plays." Hazlitt's 4th ed. + London, 1874-76. 15 vols. + Dryden, John. Works. Saintsbury-Scott ed. Edinburgh, 1882-93. + 18 vols. + Dyer, John. Poetical Works. Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1858. + + Eastlake, Sir Charles L. "A History of the Gothic Revival." London, + 1872. + Edwards, Thomas. Sonnets in "Canons of Criticism." London, 1765. + Ellis, George. "Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances." London, + 1811. 2d ed. 3 vols. + Ellis, George. "Specimens of the Early English Poets." London, 1803. + 3d ed. 3 vols. + Evans, Evan. "Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards." + London, 1764. + + Fergusson, James. "History of Architecture." London, 1865-76. 4 vols. + + Gates, Lewis E. "Introduction to Selections from Newman." New York, + 1895. + Gautier, Théophile. "Historie due Romantisme." Paris, 1884. + Gildon, Charles. "The Complete Art of Poetry." London, 1718. 2 vols. + Gilpin, William. "The Highlands of Scotland." London, 1808. 3d ed. + 2 vols. + Gilpin, William. "The Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and + Westmoreland." London, 1808. 3d ed. 2 vols. + Gilpin, William. "Remarks on Forest Scenery." London, 1808. 3d ed. + 2 vols. + Goethe, J. W. von. "Sorrows of Werter." (Trans.) London, 1784. + 2 vols. + Goethe, J. W. von. "Götz von Berlichingen" (trans.) in Walter Scott's + Poetical Works. Vol. IX. Boston, 1871. + Goldsmith, Oliver. Miscellaneous Works. Globe ed. London, 1869. + Goldsmith, Oliver. Poetical Works. Dobson-Mitford ed. London, 1869. + Gosse, Edmund. "From Shakspere to Pope." London, 1885. + Gosse, Edmund. "History of Eighteenth Century Literature," London, 1889 + Graves, Richard. "Recollections of Shenstone." London, 1788. + Gray, Thomas. Works. Gosse's ed. New York, 1885. 4 vols. + Grundtvig, Svend. "Danmark's Gamle Folkeviser." Kjöbenhavn, 1853-90. + 5 vols. + + Harvey, George. "Ossian's Fingal Rendered into English Verse." + London, 1814. + Hedge, F. H. "Classic and Romantic." _Atlantic Monthly_, Vol. LVII. + Heine, Heinrich. "The Romanic School." (Trans.) New York, 1882. + + Herder, J. G. von. "Stimmen der Völker," in Vol. II. Werke. Stuttgart, + 1894. ("Deutsche National Litteratur"). + Hettner, Hermann J. T. "Litteraturgeschichte." Theil III. + Braunschweig, 1872. + Hickes, George. "Thesaurus Linguarum Vett. Septentrionalium." Oxford, + 1703-05. 3 vols. Folio. + Highland Society. "Report on the Poems of Ossian." Edinburgh, 1805. + Hole, R. "Fingal Rendered into Verse." London, 1786. + Howitt, William. "Homes of the Poets." New York, 1846. 2 vols. + Hugo, Victor Marie. "Preface to Cromwell" in Vol. I., "Oeuvres + Complètes." Paris, 1863. + Hurd, Richard. Works. London, 1811. 8 vols. + + Johnson, Samuel. "Lives of the Poets." Hale's ed. London, 1890. + 3 vols. + Johnson, Samuel. "Lives of Milton, Dryden, Swift, Addison, Pope, and + Gray." Arnold's ed. New York, 1878. + Johnson, Samuel. "Preface to Shakspere," in vol. II., Works. Murphy's + ed. London, 1816. + + Kavanagh, Julia. "English Women of Letters." London, 1863. 2 vols. + Keats, John. "Life and Letters." By R. Monckton Milnes. New York, + 1848. + Keats, John. "Poetical Works." Rossetti's ed. London. 1876. + Knight, Charles. "Pictorial Shakspere." London, 1867. 2d ed. 8 vols. + Knox, V. "Essays." London, 1803. 15th ed. 3 vols. + Kotzebue, A. F. F. von. "The Stranger," in "Sargent's Modern Standard + Drama." New York, 1847. 2 vols. + + Laing, Malcolm. "Dissertation on Ossian's Poems." Appendix to "History + of Scotland." London, 1804. 2d ed. 4 vols. + Langbaine, Gerard. "An Account of the English Dramatic Poets." Oxford, + 1691. + Lee, Harriet. "Canterbury Tales." New York, 1857. 2 vols. + Leland, Thomas. "Longsword, Earl of Salisbury." London, 1762. 2 vols. + Lennox, Charlotte. "Shakspere Illustrated." London, 1753-54. 3 vols. + Lessing, G. E. "Sämmtliche Schriften." Berlin, 1838-44. 13 vols. + Lewis, M. G. Poems. London, 1812. + Lewis, M. G. "Tales of Terror and Wonder." Morley's Universal Library. + London, 1887. + Lewis, M. G. "The Monk." London, 1796. 3 vols. + Lockhart, J. G. "Life of Scott." Boston and Philadelphia, 1837-38. + 7 vols. + Lowell, J. R. "My Study Windows." Boston, 1871. + Lowth, Robert. "De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum." Oxford, 1775. 3d ed. + Lyttelton, George. Works. London, 1776. 3d ed. 3 vols. + + McClintock, W. D. "The Romantic and Classic in English Literature." + _Chautauquan_, Vol. XIV. + MacPherson, James. "Poems of Ossian." Clerk's ed. Edinburgh, 1870. + 2 vols. + Mallet, P. H. "Northern Antiquities." (Percey's trans.) London, 1770. + 2 vols. + Mason, William. Works. London, 1811. 4 vols. + Masson, David. "Chatterton." London, 1874. + Maturin, Chas. R. "Bertram," in "Sargent's Standard Drama." New York, + 1847. + Mendez, Moses. "A Collection of the Most Esteemed Pieces of Poetry." + London, 1767. + Mickle, Wm. J. Poetical Works, in "Chalmer's Poets," Vol. XVII. + London, 1810. + Miller, Hugh. "First Impressions of England." Boston, 1851. + Milton, John. "Poems upon Several Occasions." Warton's ed. London, + 1785. + Musset, L. C. A. de. "Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet," in Vol. IX., + "Oeuvres Complètes." Paris, 1881. + + Neol, Roden. "Essays on Poetry and Poets." London, 1886. + + Ossian in the Original Gaelic. Clerk's ed. (See MacPherson.) + Ossian in the Original Gaelic. Highland Society's ed. London, 1807. + 3 vols. + Ossian. Article in _Macmillan's Magazines_, Vol. XXIV. + + Pater, Walter. "Romanticism." _Macmillan's Magazine_. Vol. XXXV. + Pearch, George. "A Collection of Poems by Several Hands." London, 1783. + New ed. 4 vols. + Peck, Francis. "New Memoirs of the Life and Poetical Works of Milton." + London, 1740. + Pellissier, Georges. "The Literary Movement in France." (Brinton's + trans.) New York, 1897. + Percy, Thomas. "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry." Gilfillan's ed. + Edinburgh, 1858. 3 vols. + Percy, Thos. S. "English Literature in the Eighteenth Century." + New York, 1883. + Phelps, W. L. "English Romantic Movement." Boston, 1893. + Philips, Edward. "Theatrum Poetarum." London, 1675. 2 vols. + Phillips, John. Poems in "Johnson's Poets." + Phillimore, Robert. "Memoirs and Correspondence of Geo. Lord Lyttelton." + London, 1845. 2 vols. + Pope, Alexander. Works. Courthope-Elwin ed. London, 1871-86. 10 vols. + Prior, Matthew. Poetical Works. Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1858. + + Radcliffe, Anne. Novels in Vol. X. of Ballantyne's "Novelists' Library." + London, 1824. + Radcliffe, Anne. "Journey through Holland." London, 1795. + Radcliffe, Anne. Poetical Works--"St Alban's Abbey," etc. London, 1834. + 2 vols. + Reeve, Clara. "The Old English Baron." London, 1778. + Reeve, Clara. "The Progress of Romance." London, 1785. 2 vols. + Ritson, Joseph. "Ancient English Metrical Romances." London, 1802. + 3 vols. + Ritson, Joseph. "Ancient Songs." London, 1792. + Ritson, Joseph. "English Anthology." London, 1792-94. 3 vols. + Ritson, Joseph. "Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry." London, 1833. + 2d ed. + Ritson, Joseph. "Robin Hood." London, 1832. 2d ed. 2 vols. + Robberds, J. W. "Memoir of Wm. Taylor of Norwich." London, 1843. + 2 vols. + + Ruskin, John. "Modern Painters." New York, 1857-60. 5 vols. + Rymer, Thomas. "The Tragedies of the Last Age Considered and Examined." + London, 1692. 2d ed. + + Sainte Palaye, J. B. de la Curne de. "Mémoires sur 'Ancienne + Chevalerie." Paris, 1759. 3 vols. + Scherer, Wilhelm. "History of German Literature." (Conybeare's trans.) + New York, 1886. 2 vols. + Schiller, Friedrich. "Die Räuber," in Vol. II., Sämmtliche Werke. + Stuttgart and Täbingen, 1838. + Schiller, Friedrich. "Uber naïve und sentimentale Dichtung," Vol. XII., + Sämmtliche Werke. + Schlegel, A. W. von. "Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature." + (Black's trans.) London, 1846. + Scott, Walter. "Critical and Miscellaneous Essays." Philadelphia, 1841. + 3 vols. + Scott, Walter. Poetical Works. Dennis' ed. London, 1892. 5 vols. + Shairp, J. C. "Aspects of Poetry." Boston, 1882. + Shelley, Mary. "Frankenstein." Philadelphia, 1833. + Sheridan, R. B. "Pizarro." Works. London, 1873. + Shenstone, William. Poetical Works. Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1854. + Stendhal, de (Marie Henri Beyle). "Racine et Shakespere." Paris, 1854. + New ed. + Stephen, Leslie. "History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century." + New York, 1876. 2 vols. + Stephen, Leslie. "Hours in a Library." 2d Series. London, 1876. + Stillingfleet, Benjamin. "Literary Life and Select Works." London, + 1811. 2 vols. + Sullivan, Wm. R. Article on Celtic Literature in "Encyclopedia + Britannica." + + Taylor, William. "Historical Survey of German Poetry." London, 1830. + 3 vols. + Thompson, William. "Poems on Several Occasions." Oxford, 1757. + Thomson, James. Poetical Works. Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1853. + + Vigny, Alfred de. "Stello," Vol. IV. Oeuvres. Paris, 1836. 3d ed. + + Walpole, Horace. "The Castle of Otranto." Philadelphia, 1840. + Walpole, Horace. Works. London, 1798. 5 vols. + Ward, T. H. "The English Poets." London, 1880-81. 4 vols. + Warton, Joseph. "Essay on Pope." London, 1806. 5th ed. 2 vols. + Warton. Joseph. Poems, in "Chalmers' Poets," Vol. XVIII. 1810 + Warton, Thomas, Sr. "Poems on Several Occasions." London, 1748. + Warton, Thomas, Jr. "History of English Poetry." Ed. Hazlitt. + London, 1871. 4 vols. + Warton, Thomas. "Observations on the Faëry Queene." London, 1870. + 2 vols. New ed. + Weber, H. W. "English Metrical Romances." Edinburgh, 1810. 3 vols. + West, Gilbert. Poetical Works in "Chalmers' Poets," Vol. XIII. 1810. + Wilkie, William. Poetical Works in "Chalmers' Poets," Vol. XVI., 1810. + Winstanley, William. "Lives of the English Poets." London, 1687. + Wodrow, John. "Carthon, etc. Attempted in English Verse." Edinburgh, + 1769. + Wodrow, John. "Fingal Translated into English Heroic Rhyme." Edinburgh, + 1771. 2 vols. + Wood, Robert. "Essay on Homer." Dublin, 1776. + Wordsworth, William. Poetical Words. Centenary ed. London, 1870. + 6 vols. + + Young, Edward. "The Complaint; or, Night Thoughts." Gilfillan's ed. + Edinburgh, 1853. + Young, Edward. Works in Prose. London, 1765. + + + + + INDEX. + + Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren, 374 + Abuse of Traveling, The, 84, 89 + Account of the English Dramatic Poets, An, 69 + Account of the Greatest English Poets, An, 80 + Account of Wm. Canynge's Feast, 344, 355 + Adams, Jean, 95 + Addison, Joseph, 35, 37, 40-42, 45, 46, 49-52, 55-57, 80, 120, + 126, 139, 141, 148, 152, 178, 179, 181, 210, 218, 219, 223, + 226-28, 283-85, 377, 382, 388, 408 + Adelmorn, 409 + Adonais, 98, 370 + Adventurer, The, 207 + Adventures of a Star, 353 + Aella, 344, 346, 349, 363-65, 367 + Aeneid, The, 56, 328 + Aesop's Fables, 84 + Agamemnon, 75 + Agnes Bernauerin, 399 + Aiken, Lucy, 391, 397 + Akenside, Mark, 52, 75, 84, 85, 91, 102, 106, 124, 136, 139-42, + 145, 157, 159, 168, 215, 228, 235, 403, 422, 423 + Albion's Triumph, 85 + Alfieri, Vittorio, 3 + Alley, The, 80 + Allibone's Dictionary of Authors, 392, 393 + Alonzo the Brave, 415 + Alps, The, 182 + Ambrosio, see the Monk. + Amherst, Alicia, 119, 123 + Amis et Amile, 64 + Ancient Armor, 189 + Ancient Lays, 326 + Ancient Mariner, The, 18, 262, 269, 299, 369, 394, 419 + Ancient Songs, 293 + Anecdotes of Painting, 230, 351 + Annus Mirabilis, 137 + Another Original Canto, 84 + Anti-Jacobin, The, 402, 403 + Antiquities of Scotland, 187 + Apology for Smectymnuus, 146 + Apuleius, Lucius, 16, 220 + Arcadia, The Countess of Pembroke's, 239 + Archimage, 84 + Architectura Gothica, 181 + Ardinghello, 400 + Argenis, 241, 242 + Argument against Abolishing Christianity, 42 + Ariosto, Lodovico, 25, 100, 219, 222, 225, 226 + Aristotle, 19, 38, 51, 55, 274, 276 + Arme Heinrich, Der, 64 + Armstrong, Jno., 106, 124 + Arnold's Chronicle, 274 + Arnold, Matthew, 71, 173, 315, 389, 408 + Ars Poetica, 47 + Art of Preserving Health, 124 + Art Poétique, L', 47 + Aspects of Poetry, 315 + Atalanta in Calydon, 35 + Athalie, 217 + Atlantic Monthly, The, 11 + Aucassin et Nicolete, 64, 189, 221 + Austen, Jane, 263 + Aytoun, Wm. E., 269 + + Babes in the Wood, see Children in the Wood. + Babo, Joseph M., 398 + Bacon, Francis, 8, 120 + Bagehot, Walter, 17 + Bailey's Dictionary, 360 + Ballads that Illustrate Shakspere, 284 + Ballantyne's Novelist's Library, 249 + Balzac, Honoré de, 249 + Banks of Yarrow, The, 274 + Bannatyne, Geo., 284 + Banville, Théodore F. de, 373 + Baour-Lormian, P. M. F. L., 337 + Barbauld, Anna L., 391 + Barclay, Jno., 241 + Bard, The, 173, 193, 194, 196, 424 + Barrett, Wm., 348, 354, 364, 367 + Bartholin, Thos., 191, 196 + Battle of Hastings, The, 345, 346, 348, 364, 365 + Battle of Otterburn, The, 278 + Bayly, T. H., 254 + Beattie, Jas., 85, 97, 166, l86, 242, 245-47, 251, 302-05, 422 + Beaumont and Fletcher, 284 + Beauties of Shakspere, The, 377 + Beckford, Wm., 403, 405 + Bedingfield, Thos., 85, 97, 215 + Bell, Edward, 340, 342 + Bell of Arragon, The, 172 + Belle Dame sans Merci, La, 299 + Bell's Fugitive Poetry, 159, 161 + Bentham, Jas, 180 + Beowulf, 25, 318 + Beresford, Jas., 391 + Berkeley, Geo., 31 + Bernart de Ventadour, 64 + Bertram, 420 + Both Gélert, 391 + Biographia Literaria, 59, 420 + Black-eyed Susan, 57, 273 + Blacklock, Thos., 85, 333 + Blair, Hugh, 309, 313, 320. 335 + Blair, Robert, 163, 164, 251 + Blake, Wm., 28, 164, 365, 366, 372 + Blenheim, 104 + Boccaccio, Giovanni, 28, 29, 49 + Bodmer, J. J., 374, 375 + Boiardo, M. M., 25, 100 + Boileau-Despreaux, N., 35, 38, 47, 49, 65, 212, 214, 226, 227 + Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount, 41, 135, 382 + Bonny Earl of Murray, The, 300 + Bonny George Campbell, 275 + Borck, C. von, 377 + Bossuet, J. B., 38 + Boswell, Jas., 94, 105, 139, 150, 174, 288, 312, 320, 355 + Botanic Garden, The, 99 + Bouhours, Dominique, 49, 227 + Bowles, W. L., 420 + Boy and the Mantle, The, 300 + Boyesen, H. H., 23 + Braes of Yarrow, The, 61, 297 + Brandl, Alois, 391-93 + Bravo of Venice, The, 409 + Brentano, Clemens, 384, 402 + Bristowe Tragedy, The, 346, 349, 366, 370 + Brockes, B. H., 106 + Brown, "Capability," 124, 130 + Brown, Chas. B., 403 + Brown Robyn's Confession, 278 + Browne, Sir Thos., 40, 66 + Browne, Wm., 79 + Browning, Robert, 43 + Brunetière, Ferdinand, 2, 5, 11, 14 + Bryant, Jacob, 356 + Brydges, Saml. Egerton, 336 + Buchanan, Robt., 272 + Bürger, G. A., 279, 289, 301, 375, 376, 382, 389-97, 416, 417 + Burney, Francis, 252 + Burning Babe, The, 41 + Burns, Robt., 57, 95. 112, 187, 334, 360, 424 + Burton, J. H., 178 + Burton, Robt., 162 + Byron, Geo. Gordon, Lord, 5, 16, 24, 36, 49, 78, 98, 107, 135, + 181, 222, 229, 238, 250, 255, 262, 328-30, 333, 353, 362, 370, + 402, 405, 406, 420, 421 + + Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 25 + Caleb Williams, 403 + Calverley. C. S., 270 + Cambridge, R. O., 84, 89, 92, 98, 151, 228, 229 + Cameron, Ewen, 335 + Cameron, Julia M., 393 + Campbell, Thos., 142, 143 + Campbell, J. F., 314, 322, 323, 325, 327 + Canning, Geo., 402, 403 + Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 27, 63, 358, 359 + Canterbury Tales (Lee), 421 + Caractacus, 190, 194, 195, 306, 424 + Carádoc, 195 + Carew, Thos., 66 + Carey, Henry, 57 + Caric-thura, 334 + Carle of Carlisle, The, 293 + Carlyle, Thos., 317, 330, 334, 397-400 + Carmen Seculare, 35 + Carter, Jno., 189 + Carthon, 311, 333, 335 + Castle of Indolence, the, 75, 85, 92-94, 97, 104, 114, 165, + 219, 424 + Castle of Otranto, The, 188, 211, 215, 223, 129, 231, 236-43, + 247, 249, 253, 255, 340, 346, 362, 367, 401, 409, 411, + 414, 415, 421, 424 + Castle Spectre, The, 401, 413-15 + Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, The, 250, 258, 261 + Cath-Loda, 334 + Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors, 230 + Cato, 51, 218, 388 + Celtic Literature (Sullivan), 315, 325 + Celtic Literature, on the Study of (Arnold), 315 + Cerdick, 329 + Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 244 + Cesarotti, M., 321, 337 + Champion of Virtue, The, 241-43 + Chanson de Roland, The, 27, 64 + Chappell, Wm., 270 + Charakteristiken, 382, 391 + Chase, The (Scott), 391 + Chase, The (Somerville), 124 + Chateaubriand, F. A. de., 255, 332, 333 + Chatterton (Jones and Herman), 373 + Chatterton (Masson), 362 + Chatterton (Vigny), 372, 373 + Chatterton, Thos., 152, 188, 211, 235, 245, 294, 317, 328, + 339-73, 384, 422, 423 + Chaucer, Geoffrey, 27, 28, 30, 63, 66, 69, 108, 154, 188, 199, + 212, 213, 244, 266, 272, 279, 280, 294, 301, 304, 322, 342, + 358-60, 363, 371, 382, 383, 433 + Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of, 40, 50, 137 + Chevy Chase, 274, 283-86, 300, 346, 377 + Child, F. J., 267, 284 + Child Maurice, 292 + Child of Elle, The, 289, 290, 301 + Child Waters, 281, 295, 298, 301 + Childe Harold, 98, 250, 333, 334, 364 + Children in the Wood, The, 273, 283, 285, 288, 302 + Choice of Hercules, The, 85 + Chrestien de Troyes, 27 + Christabel, 363, 369, 394 + Christian Ballads, 165 + Christ's Kirk o' the Green, 66 + Churchill, Chas., 353 + Cibber, Colley, 74, 176 + Cid, The, 298 + City of Dreadful Night, The, 162 + Clarissa Harlowe, 352, 421 + Classic and Romantic, 11 + Classiques et Romantiques, 2 + Classische Walpurgisnacht, 385 + Claudina von Villa Bella, 417 + Clerk, Archibald, 313, 320, 321, 323, 324 + Clerk Colvin, 279, 417 + Clerkes Tale, The, 280, 281 + Coleridge, S. T., 59, 66, 73, 108, 110, 161, 188, 262, 265, + 269, 299, 328, 363, 366, 368, 369, 372, 376, 387, 388, 394, + 419-21, 424 + Colin's Mistakes, 84 + Collins, Wm., 25, 75, 104, 110, 112, 114, 118, 129, 136, 142, + 151, 155, 156, 158, 163, 165, 166, 168-72, 175, 184, 186, 193, + 197, 215, 251, 279, 281, 384, 403, 422, 423 + Collection of Old Ballads, A., 284 + Colman, Geo., Jr., 176, 254, 417 + Colvin, Sidney, 16-18 + Companion to the Oxford Guide Book, 202 + Complaint of Ninathoma, The, 328 + Complete Art of Poetry, The, 69, 72 + Comus, 16, 144, 149, 150, 215 + Conan, 195 + Concubine, The, 85, 95 + Conjectures on Original Composition, 387 + Conquest of Granada, The, 44 + Contemplation, 297 + Cooper's Hill, 39 + Coriolanus, 72, 74 + Corneille, Pierre, 38, 65, 67 + Corsair, The, 334 + Cottle, Joseph, 350, 358, 368 + Count of Narbonne, The, 240 + Country Walk, The, 142 + Cowley, Abraham, 37, 38, 53, 66, 79, 120, 228 + Cowper, Wm., 53, 57, 103, 108, 110, 112, 115, 424 + Coxe, A. C., 165 + Crabbe, Geo., 103 + Crashaw, Richard, 41 + Croft. Herbert, 367, 368 + Croma, 336 + Cromwell, 19, 35 + Croxall, Saml., 84 + Crusade, The, 199 + Cumberland, Richard, 74, 177 + Cumnor Hall, 94 + Cyder, 104, 124 + + Dacier, Anne L., 49 + Dalrymple, Sir David, 291, 306, 336 + Danmarks Gamie Folkeviser, 266 + Dante Alighieri, 22, 28, 29, 64, 235 + Darke Ladye, The, 369 + Darthula, 314, 335 + Darwin, Erasmus, 99 + Davenant, Wm., 67, 74, 137, 226 + David Balfour, 258 + Davies, John, 137 + De Anglorum Gentis Origine, 192 + De Causis Contemnendae Mortis, 191 + De Imitatione Christi, 64 + Dean of Lismore's Book, The, 314 + Death of Calmar and Orla, The, 328 + Death of Cuthullen, The, 335 + Death of Hoel, The, 195 + Death of Mr. Pope, 85 + Defence of Poesy, 72, 274 + Defence of the Epilogue to the Conquest of Granada, 71 + De Foe, Daniel, 40 + Demonology and Witchcraft, 42, 189 + Demosthenes, 3 + Deirdrè, 314 + Denham, Sir Jno., 39 + Denis, Michael, 337, 377 + Dennis, Jno., 49, 62, 69, 72, 74, 285 + Descent of Odin, The, 191, 192, 220 + Deschanel, Émile, 2 + Description of the Leasowes, 133, 139 + Descriptive Poem, A, 185 + Deserted Farm-house, The, 177 + Deserted Village, The, 91, 207 + Deutscher Art und Kunst, Einige Fliegende Blätter, von, 380, 381 + Dictionary of French Antiquities, 221 + Dictionary of National Biography, 359 + Dies Irae, 64 + Dirge in Cymbeline, The, 75, 163 + Dissertatio de Bardis, 195 + Dissertation on Fable and Romance, 242, 245-47 + Dissertation on the Authenticity of Ossian, 320 + Divine Comedy, The, 27 + Divine Emblems, 164 + Dobson, Austin, 272 + Dobson, Susannah,221 + Dodd, Wm., 377 + Doddington, Geo. Bubb, 111 + Dodsley, Jas., 349 + Dodsley, Robert, 84, 85, 132, 133, 135, 139, 209 + Dodsley's Miscellany, 137, 159, 165 + Don Juan, 5, 49 + Donne, Jno., 28, 37, 66 + Dorset, Chas. Sackville, Earl of, 283 + Douglas, 170, 276, 308 + Dream, A, 85 + Dream of Gerontius, The, 41 + Drummer, The, 408 + Dryden, Jno., 27, 41, 44, 49, 50-53, 62, 63, 66-68, 70, 71, 74, + 79, 80, 104, 137, 148, 149, 177, 192, 209, 210, 212, 213, 216, + 265, 283 + Dugdale, Wm., 198 + Dunciad, The, 34, 56 + Dürer, Albrecht, 162 + D'Urfey, Thos., 74 + Dyer, Jno., 75, 102, 103, 106, 119, 124, 142-45, 168, 215, 422 + + Early English Metrical Romances, 301 + Eastlake, Sir Chas., 54, 55, 199, 231-33 + Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 145 + Edda, The, 64, 190, 196, 220, 313, 390 + Edinburgh Review, The, 350, 397 + Education, 85, 89, 90, 126 + Education of Achilles, The, 85, 97 + Edward, 274, 300 + Edwards, Thos., 53, 89, 161 + Effusions of Sensibility, 250 + Eighteenth Century Literature (Gosse), 84, 104, 106, 163, + l69, 362 + Elegant Extracts, 211 + Elegies (Shenstone's), 137, 138 + Elegy on the Death of Prince Frederick, 85 + Elegy to Thyrza, 135 + Elegy Written in a Churchyard in South Wales, 176 + Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 103, 137, 157, + 163, 167, 173-77, 204 + Elinoure and Juga, 346, 352, 354 + Ellis, Geo., 188, 301, 402, 423 + Elstob, Elizabeth, 192 + Emerson, R, W., 66, 388 + Emilia Galotti, 380 + Endymion, 370 + English and Scottish Popular Ballads, The, 267 + English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 405 + English Garden, The, 123-27, 151 + English Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Perry), 7, 163, + 307, 211, 337 + English Metamorphosis, 364, 365 + English Romantic Movement, The (Phelps), 84, 85, l97, + 283, 297, 329 + English Women of Letters, 249, 262 + Enid, 281 + Enquiry into the Authenticity of the Rowley Poems, 359 + Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning, 208 + Enthusiast, The, 151-53, 160 + Epigoniad, the, 89 + Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard, 56, 157, 163, 218, 220 + Epistle to Augustus, 66, 69, 72, 115 + Epistle to Mathew, 370 + Epistle to Sacheverel, 80 + Epistle to the Earl of Burlington, 120, 129 + Epitaphium Damonis, 146 + Epithalamium, 84 + Erl-King, The, 386, 416 + Erskine, Wm., 203, 404 + Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 68, 70 + Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning, 69 + Essay on Criticism, 47, 50, 388 + Essay on Gothic Architecture, 180 + Essay on Gray (Lowell), 209 + Essay on Homer, 387, 389 + Essay on Man, 34, 41, 113, 175 + Essay on Poetry, 47 + Essay on Pope (Lowell), 60, 169, 173 + Essay on Pope (Warton), 97, 118, 149, 160, 163, 185, 193, + 206, 212-20, 224 + Essay on Satire, 47, 80 + Essay on Scott, 400 + Essay on Shakspere, 69, 72 + Essay on the Ancient Minstrels, 245, 293, 302 + Essay on the Rowley Poems, 359 + Essay on Truth, 303 + Essays on German Literature, 23 + Essays on Men and Manners, 127 + Essays on Poetry and Poets, 363 + Ethelgar, 328 + Etherege, Geo., 38 + Evans, Evan, 195 + Eve of St. Agnes, The, 98, 257, 363 + Eve of St. John, The, 417 + Eve of St. Mark, The, 177, 371 + Evelina, 243, 252 + Evelyn, Jno., 7 + Evergreen, The, 284, 286 + Excellente Ballade of Charitie, An, 366 + Excursion, The (Mallet), 134 + Excursion, The (Wordsworth), 304 + + Fables, (Aesop), 84 + Fables (Dryden), 63 + Faërie Queene, The, 16, 37, 66, 77-101, 154, 215, 225, 365 + Fair Annie, 281, 295 + Fair Circassian, The, 84 + Fair Eleanor, 367 + Fair Janet, 268 + Fair Margaret and Sweet William, 268, 279, 283, 286, 300 + Farewell Hymn to the Country, A, 85 + Fatal Revenge, The, 249, 420 + Fatal Sisters, The, 191 + Faust, 27, 141, 384, 385, 401 + Fergusson, Jas., 233 + Feudal Tyrants, 409 + Fichte, J. G., 387 + Fielding, Henry, 26, 40, 76, 383 + Filicaja, Vincenzio, 49 + Fingal, 309, 311, 313, 317, 322, 324, 335, 336, 338 + Fire King, The, 417 + First Impressions of England, 109, 133 + Fischer, Der, 386 + Fisher, The, 416 + Five English Poets, 372 + Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, 190 + Flaming Heart, The, 41 + Fleece, The, 124, 144, 145, 422 + Fleshly School of Poets, The, 272 + Fletcher, Giles, 78 + Fletcher, Jno., 25, 51, 79, 117, 162, 210 + Fletcher, Phineas, 78 + Ford, Jno., 241 + Foreign Review, The, 398 + Forsaken Bride, The, 280 + Fouqué, F. de la M., 4, 26, 384 + Fragments of Ancient Poetry, 306, 307, 309, 311, 323, 326, + 328, 336 + Frankenstein, 401, 403, 406 + Frederick and Alice, 416 + Frederick, Prince of Wales, 84, 137 + Fredolfo, 420 + Freneau, Philip, 177 + Friar of Orders Grey, The, 298, 301, 424 + Froissart, Jean, 27, 64, 236 + From Shakspere to Pope, 39, 60 + Frühling, Der, 106 + Fuller, Thos., 28 + Furnivall, F. J.,292 + Fust von Stromberg, 399 + + Gammer Gurton's Needle, 293 + Gandalin, 381 + Gang nach dem Eisenhammer, Der, 386 + "Garlands," The, 284 + Garrick, David, 162, 209, 287 + Gaston de Blondville, 250, 259-62 + Gates, L. E., 41, 44 + Gautier, Théophile, 372, 423 + Gay Goshawk, The, 279 + Gay, Jno., 35, 57, 273 + Gebir, 18, 245 + Gedicht eines Skalden, 190, 377 + Génie du Christianisme, Le, 332 + Gentle Shepherd, The, 79 + Georgics, The, 111 + German's Tale, The, 421 + Geron der Adeliche, 381 + Gerstenberg, H. W. von, 190, 377, 387 + Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur (Hettner) 300, 378, 387 + Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, 384 + Ghost-Seer, The, 419 + Gierusalemme Liberata, 214, 225 + Gilderoy, 283 + Gildon, Chas., 49, 62, 69, 72 + Giles Jollop, 418 + Gil Maurice, 276 + Gilpin, Wm., 185 + Glanvil, Joseph, 390, 408 + Gleim, J. W. L., 375 + Glenfinlas, 417 + Goddwyn, 344, 363-65 + Godred Crovan, 329 + Godwin, Wm., 403 + Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 3, 4, 11, 31, 141, 252, 255, 275, + 330, 334, 377-81, 384-87, 389, 397-99, 404, 409, 416, 417 + "Göttinger Hain," The, 378 + Gotz von Berlichingen, 334, 375, 380, 381, 385, 398-404, 418 + Golden Ass, The, 16 + Golden Treasury, The, 57, 277 + Golo und Genoveva, 399 + Goldsmith, Oliver, 76, 91, 112, 113, 162, 177, 186, 207-11, + 287, 354 + Gondibert, 137 + Gorthmund, 329 + Gosse, Edmund, 39, 53, 60, 84, 103, 106, 163, 169, 192, 272, 362 + Gottfried of Strassburg, 3, 64 + Gottsched, J. C., 374, 383 + Gower, Jno., 266, 272 + Grainger, James, 124, 287 + Granville, Geo., 47 + Grave, The, 104, 163, 164, 175 + Grave of King Arthur, The, 199-201, 424 + Graves, Richard, 130-33, 137 + Gray, Thos., 25, 32, 52, 53, 75, 89, 103, 117-19, 123, 136, + 137, 139, 145, 151, 155, 157-60, 163, 164, 166-69, 172-85, + 190-206, 199, 201, 204, 206, 209, 211, 215, 2l6, 2l8, 220, + 221, 229, 235, 238, 251, 276, 286, 302, 306-08, 336, 352, + 356, 362, 377, 384, 387, 422, 423 + Green, Matthew, 136 + Grene Knight, The, 293 + Grim White Woman, The, 407 + Grongar Hill, 104, 119, 142, 143, 145 + Grose, Francis, 187 + Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy, The, 71 + Grundtvig, Svend, 266 + Guardian, The, 120, 126, 413 + Guest, Lady Charlotte, 189 + Gulliver's Travels, 26 + Gummere, F. B., 276 + Gwin, King of Norway, 367 + + Hagley, 108, 109, 122, 127, 131, 133, 136, 183, 303, 422 + Hales, J. W., 289, 290 + Hallam, Henry, 189 + Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 379, 387 + Hamilton, Wm., 61, 279 + Hamlet, 387, 401 + Hammond, Jas., 137 + Hardyknut, 286 + Harper's Daughters, The, 409 + Hartmann von Aue, 64, 381 + Harvey, Geo., 336 + Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 403 + Haystack in the Flood, The, 299, 363 + Hayward, A., 234 + Hazlitt, Wm., 161, 254 + Hazlitt, W. C., 205 + Hearne, Thos., 201 + Hedge, F. H., 11, 14, 16 + Heilas, The, 329 + Heilige Vehm, Der, 418 + Heine, Heinrich, 2, 24, 330, 409, 423 + Heir of Lynne, The, 290 + Helen of Kirkconnell, 274 + Heliodorus, 244 + Hellenics, 3 + Henriade, The, 50, 214, 216, 217 + Henry and Emma, 295, 296 + Herbert, Geo., 28, 66, 228 + Herd, David, 299 + Herder, J. G. von, 274, 300, 301, 337, 376, 378, 380, 384, + 387, 389, 416 + Hermann und Dorothea, 4, 385 + Hermit of Warkworth, The, 186, 289, 294, 298 + Hermit, The (Beattie), 186, 305 + Hermit, The (Goldsmith), 113, 186 + Hermit, The (Parnell), 186 + Herrick, Robert, 66 + Hervarer Saga, The, 192 + Hervey, Jas., 421 + Hettner, H. J. T., 378, 379, 38l, 383, 387 + Hicks, Geo., 192, 193 + Hill, Aaron, 217 + Hind and the Panther, The, 41 + Histoire de Dannemarc, 190, 221, 377 + Histoire des Troubadours, 221, 222 + Histoire du Romantisme, 372 + Historical Anecdotes of Heraldry, and Chivalry, 221 + Historic Doubts, 230 + Historic Survey of German Poetry, 397, 398, 418 + Historic of Peyncteynge in England, 351 + History of Architecture, 233 + History of Bristol, 348, 364 + History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt, 245 + History of England (Hume), 100 + History of English Literature (Taine), 316 + History of English Poetry (Warton), 36, 205, 206, 211, 245, + 260, 359, 422, 423 + History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 32, 41 + History of Gardening, 119, 123 + History of German Literature (Scherer), 374, 380, 382, 385, 394 + History of Opinion on the Writings of Shakspere, 74 + History of Santon Barsisa, 413 + History of the Gothic Revival, 54, 55, 231 + Hobbes, Thos., 226 + Hölty, L. H. C., 375 + Hole, R., 336 + Home, Jno., 132, 170, 276, 308, 309 + Homer, 3, 25, 35, 37, 50, 55, 100, 110, 215, 222-24, 271, 284, + 285, 310, 313, 318, 330, 335, 376, 387-89 + Homes of the Poets, 133, 364 + Horace, 38, 47, 55, 72, 156, 223, 285, 411 + Houghton, J. Monckton Milnes, Lord, 370 + Hours in a Library, 235 + Hours of Idleness, 329 + House of Aspen, The, 418 + House of Superstition, The, 85 + "How Sleep the Brave," 168 + Howitt, Wm., 133, 134, 364 + Hugo, Victor Marie, 3, 19, 35, 36, 77, 115, 209 + Hume, Robert, 100, 303, 308 + Hunting of the Cheviot, The, 274, 278.295 + Huon of Bordeaux, 382 + Hurd, Richard, 221-26, 245, 246, 375, 387 + Hussar of Magdeburg, The, 393 + Hymn (Thomson), 106 + Hymn to Adversity, 167, 173 + Hymn to Divine Love, 85 + Hymn to May, 85 + Hymn to the Supreme Being, 85 + Hypenon, 35 + + Idler, The, 207 + Idyls of the King, The, 146 + Il Bellicoso, 153 + Il Pacifico, 153, 154 + Il Penseroso, 104, 115, 142, 147, 149, 150, 154, 162, 170, + 175, 334 + Iliad, The, 16, 36, 56, 58, 214, 269, 313, 338, 388, 389 + Imaginary Conversations, 18, 43 + Immortality, 85 + Indian Burying Ground, The, 177 + Indian Emperor, The, 44 + Ingelow, Jean, 270 + Inscription for a Grotto, 136 + Institution of the Order of the Garter, 159, 193, 194 + Introduction to the Lusiad, 85 + Iphigenie auf Tauris, 3, 385, 397 + Ireland, Wm. H., 77, 294 + Irene, 51 + Isis, 176 + Italian, The, 250, 252, 263 + Italienische Reise, 385 + Ivanhoe, 4, 23, 188, 237, 262, 404 + + Jamieson, Robert, 292 + Jane Shore, 286 + January and May, 63 + Jemmy Dawson, 273 + Jephson, Robert, 240 + Jew's Daughter, The, 300 + Jock o' Hazeldean, 269, 277, 363 + Johnnie Armstrong, 274, 278, 283 + Johnnie Cock, 279, 280 + Johnson, Saml., 37, 40, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56, 59, 66, 68, 70, 71, + 89, 90, 94, 97, 99, 104, 105, 113, 131, 132, 136-39, 144, 145, + 150, 151, 172-75, 177, 179, 186, 196-98, 207, 224, 243, 274, + 285, 287-89, 295, 302, 303, 312, 313, 320, 328, 354, 355 + Joinville, Jean Sire de, 27, 64 + Jones, Inigo, 121, 230 + Jonson, Ben, 25, 50, 71, 79, 97, 210, 285 + Jordan, The, 85 + Journal in the Lakes, 183, 184 + Journey through Holland, 257 + Joyce, R. D., 314 + Julius Caesar, 377 + Junius, Letters of, 353 + + Kabale mid Liebe, 409 + Kalewala, The, 313 + Kampf mit dem Drachen, Der, 386 + Kant, Immanuel, 31, 387 + Katharine Janfarie, 277 + Kavanagh, Julia, 249, 262 + Keate, Geo., 182 + Keats. Jno., 18, 35, 94, 107, 169, 177, 257, 263, 265, 353, 362, + 363, 370-72, 434 + Keepsake, The, 418 + Kemp Owen, 279 + Kenilworth, 94, 260 + Kenrick, 329 + Kent, Wm., 129, 135, 152 + Kersey's Dictionary, 360, 361 + King Arthur's Death, 278 + King Estmere, 279, 300 + King John and the Abbot, 301 + Kinmont Willie, 278 + Kittridge, G. L., 191, 192 + Kleist, E. C. von, 106 + Klinger, F. M., 379 + Klopstock, P. G., 338, 377 + Knight, Chas., 74 + Knight of the Burning Pestle, The, 284 + Knox, V., 211, 212, 228 + Knythinga Saga, The, 196 + Kotzebue, A. F. F. von, 400, 409, 421 + Kriegslied, 377 + Kruitzner, 421, 423 + + La Bruyère, Jean de, 138 + La Calprenède, G. de C. Chevalier de, 6 + Lachin Y Gair, 329 + Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament, 283 + Lady of the Lake, The, 96, 299, 399 + La Fontaine, Jean de, 38 + Laing, Malcolm, 318, 320, 329 + L'Allegro, 104, 129, 142, 144, 147, 149, 150, 154, 158, 170 + Lamartine, A. M. L. de, 176 + Lamb, Chas., 28, 161, 199 + Land of Liberty, 85 + Land of the Muses, The, 85 + Landor, W. S., 3, 18, 34, 42, 136, 245, 293 + Lang, Andrew, 272 + Langbaine, Gerard, 49, 62, 69, 71 + Langley, Batty, 54, 121, 233 + Lansdowne, Geo. Granville, Earl of, 47, 74 + Laocoön, 384, 387 + Lass of Fair Wone, The, 397 + Lay of the Last Minstrel, The, 165, 191, 336, 404 + Lays of Ancient Rome, 269, 298 + Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, 269 + Leabhar na Feinne, 314, 323 + Lear, 217 + Leasowes, The, 127, 130-37, 139, 152, 183, 213, 422 + Le Bossu, René, 49 + Lectures on Translating Homer, 389 + Legend of Sir Guy, 278 + Legenda Aurea, 3 + Lee, Harriet and Sophia, 421 + Le Lac, 176 + Leiand, Thos., 244, 247 + Leland's Collectanea, 260 + Lenora, 391-97, 415, 417 + Lenox, Charlotte, 70 + Lenz, J. M. R., 379, 387 + Leonidas, 337 + Lessing, G. E., 56, 300, 375, 376, 379, 380, 384, 387, 397 + Letourneur, Pierre, 337 + Letter from Italy, 57, 218 + Letter to Master Canynge, 344 + Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 221-26, 245 + Letters to Shenstone, Lady Luxborough's, 135, 229 + Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet, 18-22 + Lewis, M. G., 249, 252, 262, 376, + 394, 396, 400, 401, 404-18, 420 + Leyden, Jno., 417 + Library of Romance, 381 + Life of Lyttelton (Phillimore), 74, 108 + Lines on Observing a Blossom, 368 + Lines Written at Tintern Abbey, 140 + Literary Movement in France, The, 35, 44, 61 + Literatura Runica, 191 + Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, 283 + Lives of the English Poets (Winstanley), 69 + Lives of the Novelists (Scott), 262 + Lives of the Poets (Johnson), 51, 68, 90, 97, 105, 114, 131, + 139, 150, 172, 196, 286 + Lloyd, Robert, 85, 91, 98, 151, 176 + Lockhart, J. G., 298, 391, 398, 402, 403, 406 + Longfellow, H. W., 198, 199, 269 + Longinus, 38 + Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, 244, 247, 248 + Lord Lovel, 268 + Lord Randall, 275 + Lord Thomas and Fair Annet, 268 + Lotus Eaters, The, 18, 92 + Love and Madness, 368 + Love's Labour's Lost, 379 + Lowell, J. R., 27, 59, 114, 139, 144, 169, 173, 206, 209, 403 + Lowth, Robert, 85, 387 + Lürlei, Die, 402 + Lukens, Chas., 393 + Lusiad, The, 85, 94 + Lycidas, 37, 115, 145, 149, 150, l54, 192 + Lydgate, Jno., 206, 266, 344, 359 + Lyrical Ballads, 58, 109, 112, 160, 183, 218, 288, 299, 316, 422 + Lytel Geste of Robyn Hode, The, 274 + Lyttelton, Geo. Lord, 90, 91, 95, 108, 111, 121, 127, 131, 132, + 135-37, 303 + + Mabinogion, The, 189 + Macaulay, T. B., 69, 238, 269, 272, 298 + Macbeth, 223 + McClintock, W. D., 102 + Mackenzie, Henry, 252, 390 + Mackenzie. Jno., 321 + McLauchlan, Thos., 314 + Macmillan's Magazine, 326 + McNeil, Archibald, 326 + MacPherson, Jas., 24, 195, 294, 302, 306-38, 377, 423 + Madden, Sir Frederick, 292 + Malherbe, François de, 38 + Mallet, David, 75, 105, 106, 124, 235, 283, 286 + Mallet, P. H., 190, 191, 196, 221, 374, 377 + Malone, Edmond, 32, 356, 362 + Malory, Sir Thos., 27 + Manfred, 334 + Man of Feeling, The, 352, 390 + Mansus, 146 + Manuel, 420 + Map, Walter, 27 + Marbie Faun, The, 23 + Mariner's Wife, The, 95 + Marlowe, Christopher, 66 + Marmion, 203, 234, 258, 336, 399, 404, 411 + Marriage of Frederick, 84 + Marriage of Gawaine, The, 278 + Mary Hamilton, 280 + Mason, Wm., 85, 91, 123-27, 129, 151, 153-55, 160, 165, 167, + 176, 180, 183, 190, 194-96, 211, 213, 215, 221, 251, 276, 306, + 307, 337, 352, 422, 423 + Masson, David, 148, 362 + Mather, Cotton, 408 + Mathias, Thos. J., 393 + Maturin, Chas. Robert, 249, 420 + Meditations (Harvey), 421 + Melmoth the Wanderer, 249, 420 + Mémoires sur l'ancienne Chevalerie, 221, 222 + Memoirs of a Sad Dog, 353 + Mendez, Moses, 85, 91, 159 + Menschenhass und Reue, 400 + + Merchant of Venice, The, 372 + Meyrick, Sir Saml. R., 189 + Michael, 4 + Mickle, Wm. J., 85, 94-96 + Middle Ages, The (Hallam) 189 + Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 76, 235, 382 + Miller and the King's Daughter, The, 283 + Miller, Johann M., 375, 400 + Miller, Hugh, 108, 109, 130, 133, 136 + Milles, Jeremiah, 356, 361 + Milnes, R. Monckton, 370 + Milton, Jno., 16, 34, 37, 40, 52, 53, 55, 56, 63, 66, 69,78, + 79, 94, 104, 110, 111, 115, 129, 140, 142, 144, 146-62, 170, + + 173, 193, 199, 212, 213, 215, 216, 218, 219, 222, 225, 244, + 265, 283, 297, 318, 371, 374, 391 + Miltonic Imitations in Dodsley, List of, 159-61 + Minister, The, 409 + Minnesingers, The, 375 + Minot, Lawrence, 293 + Minstrel, The, 85, 97, 345, 302-05, 422. + Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern, 270 + Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 262, 267, 377, 299, 404. + Mirror, The, 85 + Miscellany Poems (Dryden), 192, 283 + Miss Kitty, 393 + Modern Painters, 26, 34 + Möser, Justus, 375, 380 + Molière, J. B. P., 38 + Monasticon, Anglicanum, 198 + Monk, The, 249, 262, 263, 401, 404, 407-13, 420, 424 + Monody on the Death of Chatterton, 368 + Monody Written near Stratford-upon-Avon, 201 + Monologue, A, 176 + Montagu, Elizabeth R., 303, 337 + Monthly Magazine, The, 391, 392 + Monthly Review, The, 397 + Moral Essays, 220 + More, Hannah, 151 + Morning, 85 + Morris, Wm., 191, 203, 424 + Morte Artus, 64, 390 + Motherwell, Wm., 270, 299 + Mud King, The, 418 + Mütler, Friedrich, 399 + Müller, Johannes, 376 + Mulgrave, Jno. Sheffield, Earl of, 47, 63 + Murdoch, Patrick, 105 + Musaeus, 85, 153-55 + Musen Almanach, 393 + Musset, Alfred de, 18-22 + Myller, C. H., 375 + Mysterious Mother, The, 237, 238, 241, 251, 253, 401, 409 + Mysteries of Udolpho, The, 250, 252-55, 262, 263, 401, 424 + + Nares' and Halliwell's Glossary, 189 + Nathan der Weise, 376, 397 + Nativity, The, 85 + Nature, 388 + Nature of Poetry, The, 162 + New Canto of Spenser's Fairy Queen, A, 84, 85 + Newman, F. W., 389 + Newman, J. H., 41 + New Memoirs of Milton, 149 + New Principles of Gardening, 121 + Nibelungen Lied, The, 25, 64, 313, 375, 376 + Nichols' Anecdotes, 192 + Night Piece on Death, 61, 177 + Night Thoughts, 104, 163, l75, 387, 421 + Noble Moringer, The, 418 + Nocturnal Reverie, 57, 61 + Noel, Roden. 363 + Nonnë Prestës Tale, The, 28 + Northanger Abbey, 263, 264 + Northern Antiquities, 190 + Northumberland Betrayed by Douglas, 278 + Nosce Teipsum, 137 + Not-brown Maid, The, 274, 295, 296, 300, 302 + Notes and Illustrations to Ossian, 318 + Notes on the Authenticity of Ossian's Poems, 326 + Nôtre Dame de Paris, 3 + Nouvelle Héloise, La, 31 + Novalis, 384 + + Oberon, 382 + Observations on English Meter, 206 + Observations on Modern Gardening (Whately), 123 + Observations on The Faëry Queene, 99-101, 204, 213, 223 + Observations on The Scenery of Great Britain, 185 + Observations upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley, 356 + Odes, (Akenside's), 142 + Odes, (Collins'), 142, 155, 156 + Odes, (Gray's), 362 + Odes, (J. Warton's), 142, 155, 156 + Odes, For the New Year, 199. On a Distant Prospect of Eton + College, 167, 173, 216. On His Majesty's Birthday, 199. + On the Approach of Summer, 158. On the Death of Thomson, 163, + 165, 194. On the First of April, 158. On the Installation of + the Duke of Grafton, 159. On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, + 147, 149, 150, 156. On the Passions, 166, 169, 175. On the + Spring, 167, 173. On the Superstitions of the Scottish + Highlands, 25, 114, 170-72. Sent to Mr. Upton, 201. To a + Grecian Urn, 18. To a Nightingale (Keats) 18. To an Aeolus + Harp, 165. To Curio, 85. To Evening (Collins), 156, 165, 168. + To Evening (Warton), 165. To Fear, 156. To Freedom, 363. + To Liberty, 194. To Oblivion, 176. To Obscurity, 176. To + Peace, 305. To Pyrrha, 156. To Simplicity, 156. To Solitude, + 165. To the Hon. Charles Townsend, 84. To the Marquis of + Tavistock, 84. To the Nightingale (Warton), 165. To the + Queen, 84. Written at Vale Royal Abbey, 204 + Odyssey, The, 16, 269 + Oedipus Rex, 3, 19, 241 + Of Heroic Virtue, 192, 197 + Of Poetry, 192 + Old English Ballads, 276 + Old English Baron, The, 241-43, 249 + Oldmixon, Jno., 62 + Old Plays (Dodsley) 209 + + Olive, The, 84 + On King Arthur's Round Table, 201 + On Modern Gardening (Walpole), 123, 130 + On Myself, 79 + On Our Lady's Church, 344 + On the Prevailing Taste for the Old English Poets, 211 + On the River Duddon, 162 + On Witches (Glanvil), 408 + Opie, Amelia, 252 + Orcades, 191 + Origin of Romantic Fiction, The, 205 + Original Canto of Spenser, An, 84 + Ormond, 403 + Osorio, 420 + Ossian (MacPherson's), 25, 117, 178, 195, 235, 245, 256, 302, + 306-38, 355, 356, 377, 378, 423, 424 + Ossian, Poems of, in the Original Gaelic (Clerk), 313 + Ossian, Poems of, in the Original Gaelic (In Gillie's + Collection), 326 + Ossian, Poems of, in the Original Gaelic (Highland Society's + Text), 321, 324, 326 + Ossian, Poems of, in the Original Gaelic (In Stewart's + Collection), 326 + Othello, 372 + Otto von Wittelsbach, 398 + Otway, Thos., 74, 210 + Ovid, 25 + Oxford Sausage, The, 199 + + Pain and Patience, 84 + Palamon and Arcite, 28, 215 + Palgrave. F. T., 57, 277 + Pamela, 252 + Paradise Lost, 50, 52, 55-57, 104, 110, 129, 145, 147, 148, + 151, 217, 375 + Paradise Regained, 147, 148 + Parliament of Sprites, The, 344, 365 + Parnell, Thos., 58, 61, 177, 186, 210 + Parzival, 64 + Pastoral Ballad, A., 138 + Pastoral in the Manner of Spenser, A., 85 + Pastoral Ode, A., 133 + Pastorals (Philips'), 80 + Pastorals (Pope's), 57, 112, 193, 215, 216 + Pater, Walter, 7, 8, 16 + Paul and Virginia, 22, 112 + Pearch's Collection, 159, i82, 185 + Peck, F., 149 + Pellissier, George, 35, 44, 61, 65 + Pepys, Saml., 283, 291 + Percy Folio MS., The, 288, 290-93 + Percy, Thos., 186, 196, 212, 235, 246, 272, 284, 306, 319, + 326, 383, 387, 422. See also Reliques. + Perigrine Pickle, 139 + Perle, The, 189 + Perry, T. S., 7, 163, 176, 211, 212, 251, 337 + Persiles and Sigismonda, 244 + Peter Bell, 299 + Petrarca, Francesco, 29 + Peveril of the Peak, 420 + Pfarrers Tochter, Des, 396 + Phelps, W. L., 84, 85, 191, 197, 283, 297, 329 + Philander, 85 + Philantheus, 85 + Philips, Ambrose, 80, 102, 284 + Philips, Edward, 67, 80 + Philips, Jno., 104, 124 + Phillimore's Life of Lyttelton, 74, 108 + Phoenix, The, 241 + Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry, 293 + Pilgrim's Progress, The, 5 + Pindar, 35, 54, 89 + Pitt, Christopher, 85 + Pitt, Wm., 90, 132, 133 + Pizarro, 400 + Plato, 42, 47 + Pleasures of Hope, The, 142, 143 + Pleasures of Imagination, The, 124, 139-42, 157 + Pleasures of Melancholy, The, 142, 156-58, 160, 161, 194 + Pleasures of Memory, The, 142 + Poe, Edgar A., 202, 356, 390, 403 + Poem in Praise of Blank Verse, 217 + Poems after the Minnesingers, 375 + Poems after Walther von der Vogelweide, 375 + Pope, Alexander, 33, 36, 39, 41, 47, 50-54, 56-59, 61, 63, 65, + 66, 69, 72, 75, 77-79, 92, 93, 99, 102, 105, 108, 111-13, 115, + 120, 121, 126, 129, 136, 149, 150, 154, 157, 159, 162, 163, + 193, 210, 212-20, 228, 235, 265, 382, 383, 388 + Popular Ballads and Songs (Jamieson), 292 + Popular Tales of the West Highlands, 322, 323, 325 + Porter, Jane, 252, 371 + Portuguese Letters, The, 22 + Praelectiones de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum, 387 + Preface to Johnson's Shakspere, 70 + Preface to Pope's Shakspere, 72 + Prelude, The, 304 + Price, Richard, 205 + Prior, Matthew, 35, 57, 63, 84, 159, 291, 295, 296, 382 + Prioresse Tale, The, 279, 342 + Progress of Envy, The, 85, 91 + Progress of Poesy, The, 173 + Progress of Romance, The, 243-45 + Prologue at the Opening of Drury Lane, 59, 70 + Proud Maisie, 277 + Psalm XLII., 84 + Psyche,85 + Pugin, A. N. W., 234 + Pure, Ornate and Grotesque Art, 17 + Pursuits of Literature, 393 + Pye, H. J., 392 + + Quarles, Francis, 164 + + Racine, J. B., 38, 44, 65, 379 + Radcliffe, Anne, 232, 237, 249-64, 402, 408, 409, 411, 421, 423 + Rambler, The, 97, 287, 288, 353 + Ramsay, Allan, 61, 79, 284, 286, 297, 300 + Rape of the Lock, The, 36, 220 + Rapin, René, 49 + Rasselas, 186 + Räuber, Die. See Robbers. + Reeve, Clara, 241-45, 247, 249-64, 423 + Regnier, Mathurin, 38 + Reliques of Ancient English + Poetry, 139, 188, 190, 206, 209, 211, 223, 265, 274, 278, + 287-302, 317, 346, 362, 369, 376, 423 + Remorse, 420 + Report of the Committee of the Highland Society on Ossian, 319 + Resolution and Independence, 339 + Retirement, 305 + Revenge, The, 353 + Revival of Ballad Poetry in the Eighteenth Century, 290 + Revolt of Islam, The, 5 + Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 202, 303 + Richardson, Saml., 31, 32, 40, 76, 252, 421 + Riddles Wisely Expounded, 270 + Ridley, G., 85 + Rime of Sir Thopas, The, 28 + Rising in the North, The, 278 + Ritson, Joseph, 188, 205, 246, 287, 290, 293, 294, 301, 423 + Ritter Toggenburg, 386 + Robbers, The, 385, 391, 402, 417, 418, 420 + Robin Hood and the Monk, 273, 278, 283 + Robin Hood and the Old Man, 292 + Robin Hood and the Potter, 273 + Robin Hood Ballads, The, 281-83, 301 + Robin Hood (Ritson's), 292 + Robinson Crusoe, 5, 26 + Rogers, Saml., 142, 181 + Rokeby, 277 + Rolla, 400, 409 + Rolls of St. Bartholomew's Priory, The, 358 + Roman de la Rose, The, 37, 64 + Romance, 390 + Romance of the Forest, The, 250, 253, 255, 256 + Romancero, The, 64 + Romantic and Classical in English Literature, The, 102 + Romantic Tales, 409 + Romanticism (Pater), 7 + Romantische Schule, Die, 2, 423 + Romaunt of the Rose, The, 27 + Romaunte of the Cnyghte, The, 348 + Romeo and Juliet, 377 + Ronsard, Pierre de, 22 + Roscommon, W. Dillon, Earl of, 47 + Ross, Thos., 321, 333 + Rossetti, D. G., 4, 270, 272, 367, 372, 424 + Roundabout Papers, 252 + Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 31, 112, 252, 330, 381, 423 + Rovers, The, 402 + Rowe, Nicholas, 210, 219, 286 + Rowley Poems, The, 211, 339-67, 424 + Rudiments of Anglo-Saxon Grammar, 192 + Rugantino, 409 + Ruins of Netley Abbey, The, 182 + Ruins of Rome, The, 144, 145 + Ruskin, Jno., 26, 34, 102, 255 + Rymer, Thos., 49, 62, 70 + Reyse of Peyncteynge yn Englande, The, 349 + + Sachs, Hans, 381 + Sadduceismus Triumphatus, 408 + Sagen der Vorzeit, 418 + Sängers Fluch, Der, 275 + Saint Alban's Abbey, 262 + Sainte-Beuve, C. A, 56 + Sainte Palaye, J. B. de la C., 221, 222, 374 + St. Irvine the Rosicrucian, 403 + Saint Lambert, C. F., 106 + St. Leon, 403 + St. Pierre, J. H. B. de, 112 + Saintsbury, Geo., 111, 131 + Saisons, Les, 106 + Sally in our Alley, 57 + Salvator Rosa, 255 + Sammlung Deutscher Volkslieder, 418 + Samson Agonistes, 148, 184 + "Saturday Papers," Addison's, 148 + Schelling, F. W. J. von, 387 + Scherer, Wilhelm, 300, 374, 376, 380, 382, 394 + Schiller, J. C. F. von, 11, 76, 379, 384-87, 391, 401, 409, + 419, 420 + Schlegel, A. W. von, 14, 73, 301, 377, 384, 392 + Schmidt, Erich, 382, 392 + Schöne Helena, Die, 385 + Scholar Gypsy, The, 408 + Schoolmistress, The, 84, 91, 92, 97, 104, 130, 136, 138, 362 + Schopenhauer, Arthur, 119 + Scott, Sir Walter, 3, 16, 24, 26, 27, 42, 94, 96, 139, 187-89, + 191, 200, 203, 223, 232, 234, 238, 248, 249, 258, 260, 262, + 267, 269, 277, 298-301, 333, 334, 344, 350, 358, 359, 376, + 389-96, 398-400, 402, 404-06, 410, 411, 416-18, 420, 424 + Scottish Songs (Ritson's), 293 + Scribleriad, The, 228, 229 + Scudéry, Madeleine de, 6 + Sean Dàna, 326 + Seasons, The (Mendez), 85 + Seasons, The (Thomson), 52, 75, 79, 103, 105-20, 124, 170, 152, + 305, 374 + Selden, John, 283 + Selections from Gray (Phelps), 191 + Selections from Newman (Gates), 41, 44 + Seven Champions of Christendom, The, 37 + Shadwell, Thos., 74 + Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of, 41, 62, 226, 382 + Shairp, J. C., 315 + Shakspere Alterations, List of, 74 + Shakspere Editions, List of, 74 + + Shakspere Illustrated, 70 + Shakspere, Wm., 18, 25, 40, 50, 51, 63, 68-78, 89, 111, 117, + 140, 170, 171, 198, 208-10, 213, 216-19, 225, 237, 298, 362, + 375, 377-80, 383, 391 + Shelley, Mary, 403, 406 + Shelley, P. B., 5, 43, 107, 241, 362, 370, 372, 403, 406 + Shenstone, Wm., 75, 84, 91, 97, 98, 102, 103, 110, 127, 130-39, + 151, 152, 159, 162, 168, 184, 186, 215, 229, 273, 287, 422, 423 + Shepherd's Calendar, The, 154 + Sheridan, R. B., 76, 162, 400, 413, 420 + Sheridan, Thos., 74 + Sheringham, Robert, 192 + Sicilian Romance, The, 250, 253 + Sidney, Sir Philip, 25, 71, 72, 239, 274 + Siegwart, 400 + Sigurd the Volsung, 191 + Sim, Jno., 94 + Sinclair, Archibald, 325 + Sinclair. Sir Jno., 321 + + Sir Cauline, 289, 200, 298 + Sir Charles Grandison, 388 + Sir Hugh, 279 + Sir Lancelot du Lake, 278 + Sir Patrick Spens, 300 + Sister Helen, 363 + Sisters, The, 270 + Six Bards of Ossian Versified, The, 336 + Skeat, W. W., 340, 355, 358-61, 364 + Skene, W. F., 314, 323 + Sketches of Eminent Statesmen, 234 + Smart, Christopher, 85 + Smith, Adam, 105 + Smollett, Tobias, 76, 139 + Solitary Reaper, The, 115 + Somerville, Wm., 106, 124, 135 + Song of Harold the Valiant, 196 + Song of Ragner Lodbrog, 197 + Song to Aella, 355 + Songs of Selma, The, 331 + Sonnet to Chatterton, 370 + Sonnet to Mr. Gray, 201 + Sonnet to Schiller, 419 + Sonnet to the River Lodon, 161 + Sophocles, 3, 19, 241, 379 + Sophonisba, 75 + Sorrows of Werther, The, 31, 330-32, 399, 423 + Sotheby, Wm., 382 + Southey, Robert, 206, 299, 350, 355, 358, 368, 398, 419 + Southwell, Robert, 41 + Spaniards in Peru, The, 400, 409 + Specimens of Ancient Sculpture, 189 + Specimens of Early English Poets, 301 + Specimens of the Welsh Bards, 195 + Spectator, The, 35, 37, 42, 49, 51, 55, 62, 120, 126, 139, + 141, 148, 178, 227, 284, 353, 377 + Speght's Chaucer, 360 + Spence, Joseph, 132 + Spencer, W. R., 392, 394 + Spenser, Edmund, 16, 25, 33, 37, 63, 68, 69, 77-101, 129, 151, + 154, 157, 159, 163, 170, 198, 199, 212, 213, 216, 219, 222, + 224-26, 235, 244, 265, 279, 304, 359, 371 + Spleen, The, 104, 136 + Splendid Shilling, The, 104 + Squire of Dames, The, 85, 91 + Stanley, J. T., 392 + State of German Literature, The, 401 + Stedman, E. C., 162 + Steevens, Geo., 32 + Stello, 372 + Stephen, Leslie, 32-34, 40, 102, 234, 237, 327 + Sterne, Lawrence, 31, 32, 252 + Stevenson, R, L., 258 + Stillingfleet, Benjamin, 53, 161 + Stimmen der Völker, 300, 337, 416 + Stolberg, Friedrich Leopold, Count, 376, 377 + Storie of William Canynge, The, 355 + Stranger, The, 400 + Stratton Water, 299 + Strawberry Hill, 173, 179, 229, 230, 232, 234, 236, 340 + Sturm von Borberg, 399 + Suckling, Sir Jno., 57 + Sugar Cane, The, 124 + Sullivan, Wm. R., 314, 325 + Sweet William's Ghost, 279, 280, 295, 300, 394 + Swift, Jonathan, 40, 42, 162, 382 + Swinburne, A. C., 35, 168 + Syr Gawaine, 293 + Syr Martyn, 95, 96 + System of Runic Mythology, 191 + + Taine, H. A., 302, 316 + Tale of a Tub, 42 + Tales of Terror, 409, 417 + Tales of Wonder, 404, 409, 416-18 + Talisman, The, 188 + Tam Lin, 268, 279, 295, 417 + Tam o'Shanter, 187, 360 + Tannhäuser, 268 + Tasso, Torquato, 25, 49, 50, 170, 319, 222-26 + Tate, Nahum, 74 + Tatler, The, 62 + Taylor, Jeremy, 40 + Taylor, Wm., 376, 391-98, 417-18 + Tea Table Miscellany, The, 284, 297 + Temora, 309, 313, 314, 316, 321, 323, 338 + Tempest, The, 70, 76, 171, 215 + Temple, Sir Wm., 69, 120, 192, 197 + Tennyson, Alfred, 18, 27, 35, 92, 93, 146, 200, 270, 28l + Thackeray, W. M., 56, 80, 252, 254 + Thaddeus of Warsaw, 243, 252 + Thales, 85 + Theagenes and Chariclea, 244 + Theatrum Poetarum, 67, 81 + Theocritus, 36 + Thesaurus (Hicks'), 192, 193 + Thomas à Kempis, 64 + Thomas Rymer, 268 + Thompson, Wm., 84 + Thomson, Jas., 52, 74, 75, 79, 84, 85, 92-95, 97, 98, 102-19, + 124, 133-36, 142, 151, 157, 159, 168, 184, 198, 215, 235, 251, + 302, 303, 305, 374, 384, 422 + Thomson, Jas. (2d), 162 + Thoreau, H. D., 107 + Tieck, Ludwig, 22, 377, 384 + To Country Gentlemen of England, 85 + Todtentanz, Der, 386 + To Helen, 202 + To Melancholy, 251 + Tom Jones, 186, 263 + Tom Thumb, 285 + "Too Late I Stayed," 392 + Torfaeus Thormodus, 191 + To the Nightingale (Lady Winchelsea), 61 + To the Nightingale (Mrs. Radcliffe), 251 + To the Nightingale. See Odes. + To the River Otter, 161 + Tournament, The, 348, 365 + Town and Country Magazine, The, 346, 352 + Tragedies of the Last Age Considered, The, 70 + Tressan, L. E. de L., Comte de, 381 + Triumph of Isis, The, 199 + Triumph of Melancholy, The, 305 + Triumphs of Owen, The, 195 + Tristan und Isolde, 3, 64 + Trivia, 35 + Troilus and Cresseide, 28 + True Principles of Gothic Architecture, 234 + Turk and Gawin, The, 293 + Twa Corbies, The, 275 + Two Sisters, The, 270, 279 + Tyrwhitt, Thos., 63, 188, 211, 213, 246, 30l, 355-57, 359, 423 + Tytler, Sir A. F., 391, 419 + + Ueber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, 11, 387 + Ueber Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker, 338 + Uhland, Ludwig, 384 + Ulysses, 18, 35 + Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening, 127, 132 + Universal Prayer, The, 41 + Unnatural Flights in Poetry, 47 + Upton, John, 85 + Uz, J. P., 106 + + + Vanity of Dogmatizing, The, 408 + Vathek, 403, 405 + Vergil, 25, 37, 49, 50, 55, 110, 223, 285, 335 + Verses to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 202 + Verses Written in 1748, 133 + Vicar of Wakefield, The, 209 + Vigny, Alfred Victor, Comte de, 372, 373 + Villehardouin, Geoffrey de, 27, 64 + Villon, Francois, 64, 216 + Vindication (Tyrwhitt's), 359 + Virtuoso, The, 84, 91, 141, 228 + Vision, The (Burns), 334 + Vision, The (Croxall), 84 + Vision of Patience, The, 84 + Vision of Solomon, The, 84 + Voltaire, F. M. A. de, 214, 216, 237, 379, 381, 382 + Von Arnim, Achim (L. J.), 384 + Voragine, Jacobus de, 3 + Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, 14 + Voss, J. H., 375 + + Wackenroder, W. H., 384 + Wagner, H. L., 379 + Waking of Angantyr, The, 192 + Wallenstein, 385, 419 + Waller, Edmund, 38, 39, 52, 53, 80, 216 + Walpole, Horace, 32, 89, 120, 122, 129, 130, 135, 145, 159, + 166, 173, 178, 179, 181, 229-43, 249-55, 258, 286, 306, 336, + 337, 349-52, 354, 383, 401, 408, 417, 422 + Walsh, Wm., 50, 53 + Walther von der Vogelweide, 64 + "Waly, Waly," 374, 300 + Wanton Wife of Bath, The, 301 + Warburton, Wm., 237 + Wardlaw, Lady, 286 + Ward's English Poets, 53, 111, 131, 169, 364 + Warton, Joseph, 32, 75, 118, 142, 149, 151-53, 155, 156, l60, + 163, 168, 171, 185, 193, 197-99, 206, 207, 212-20, 223, 226, + 262, 302, 355, 375, 383, 387, 422, 423 + Warton, Thos., Jr., 32, 36, 53, 75, 84, 85, 99-101, 150, 151, + 156-58, 161, 163, 168, 171, 194, 197-207, 211, 213, 221, + 224, 226, 245, 251, 260, 291, 293, 294, 302, 356, 359, 375, + 387, 403, 422, 423 + Warton, Thos., Sr., 85, 197 + Waverley Novels, The, 188, 258, 262, 400, 422 + Way, G. L., 301 + Weber's Metrical Romances, 188 + Weber, Veit, 400, 418 + Webster, Jno., 66 + Werner, 421 + Wesley, Jno., 31 + West, Gilbert, 84, 85, 89-91, 98, 126, 133, 151, 160, 193, 194 + Whately, Thos., 122 + Whistle, The, 334 + White Doe of Rylstone, The, 184 + Whitefield, Geo., 31 + Whitehead, Wm., 84, 197 + Whittington and his Cat, 273 + Wieland, 403 + Wieland, C. M., 106, 377, 378, 381, 397 + Wife of Usher's Well, The, 269, 279 + Wilde Jäger, Der, 391 + Wild Huntsman, The, 404, 416 + Wilkie, Wm., 85 + Wilhelm Meister, 384, 387 + Wilhelm Tell, 385 + William and Helen, 391, 398, 404 + Willie Drowned in Yarrow, 170 + Willie's Lady, 279 + Wilson's Life of Chatterton, 368 + Winchelsea, Anne Finch, Countess of, 57, 61 + Winckelmann, J. J., 384, 385 + Windsor Forest, 57, 58, 2l5, 220 + Winstanley, William, 62, 69 + Winter, 103-106, 142, 422 + Wither, Geo., 57 + Wodrow, Jno., 334, 335 + Wolfram von Eschenbach, 64 + Wolfred von Dromberg, 398 + Wonders of the Invisible World, 408 + Wood, Anthony, 291 + Wood, Robert, 387-89 + Worde, Wynkyn de, 274 + Wordsworth, Wm., 4, 5, 43, 58, 103, 107, 109, 112, 115, 135, + 143-45, 160, 162, 183, 184, 218, 220, 288-90, 298, 299, 304, + 316, 326, 328, 339, 344 + Worm, Ole, 191, 193 + Wreck of the Hesperus, The, 269 + Wren, Sir Christopher, 121, 230 + Written at an Inn at Henley, 138 + Written at Stonhenge, 201 + Written in Dugdale's Monasticon, 198 + + Yarrow Revisited, 344 + Yarrow Unvisited, 298 + Young, Edward, 56, 149, 163, 213, 387, 388, 421 + Young Hunting, 279 + Young Lochinvar, 277 + Young Waters, 300 + + Zapolya, 420 + Zastrozzi, 403 + Zauberlehrling, Der, 386 + Zauberring, Der, 4 + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM IN +THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY*** + + +******* This file should be named 15447-8.txt or 15447-8.zip ******* + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/4/4/15447 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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Thus, we do not necessarily +keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition. + +Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility: + + https://www.gutenberg.org + +This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, +including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary +Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to +subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. + diff --git a/15447-8.zip b/15447-8.zip Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..f3aa2b0 --- /dev/null +++ b/15447-8.zip diff --git a/15447.txt b/15447.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..57e7884 --- /dev/null +++ b/15447.txt @@ -0,0 +1,14431 @@ +The Project Gutenberg eBook, A History of English Romanticism in the +Eighteenth Century, by Henry A. Beers + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century + + +Author: Henry A. Beers + +Release Date: March 24, 2005 [eBook #15447] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM +IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY*** + + +E-text prepared by Jeanette Hayward and Al Haines. Dedicated to the memory +of James Hayward. + + + +A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY + +by + +HENRY A. BEERS + +Author of _A Suburban Pastoral_, _The Ways of Vale_, etc. + + + + + + + +"Was unsterblich im Gesang soll leben Muss im Leben untergehen." + --Schiller + + + + +PREFACE + +Historians of French and German literature are accustomed to set off a +period, or a division of their subject, and entitle it "Romanticism" or +"the Romantic School." Writers of English literary history, while +recognizing the importance of England's share in this great movement in +European letters, have not generally accorded it a place by itself in the +arrangement of their subject-matter, but have treated it cursively, as a +tendency present in the work of individual authors; and have maintained a +simple chronological division of eras into the "Georgian,", the +"Victorian," etc. The reason of this is perhaps to be found in the fact +that, although Romanticism began earlier in England than on the Continent +and lent quite as much as it borrowed in the international exchange of +literary commodities, the native movement was more gradual and scattered. +It never reached so compact a shape, or came so definitely to a head, as +in Germany or France. There never was precisely a "romantic school" or +an all-pervading romantic fashion in England. + +There is, therefore, nothing in English corresponding to Heine's +fascinating sketch "Die Romantische Schule," or to Theophile Gautier's +almost equally fascinating and far more sympathetic "Histoire du +Romantisme." If we can imagine a composite personality of Byron and De +Quincey, putting on record his half affectionate and half satirical +reminiscences of the contemporary literary movement, we might have +something nearly equivalent. For Byron, like Heine, was a repentant +romanticist, with "radical notions under his cap," and a critical theory +at odds with his practice; while De Quincey was an early disciple of +Wordsworth and Coleridge,--as Gautier was of Victor Hugo,--and at the +same time a clever and slightly mischievous sketcher of personal traits. + +The present volume consists, in substance, of a series of lectures given +in elective courses in Yale College. In revising it for publication I +have striven to rid it of the air of the lecture room, but a few +repetitions and didacticisms of manner may have inadvertently been left +in. Some of the methods and results of these studies have already been +given to the public in "The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement," +by my present associate and former scholar, Professor William Lyon +Phelps. Professor Phelps' little book (originally a doctorate thesis) +follows, in the main, the selection and arrangement of topics in my +lectures. _En revanche_ I have had the advantage of availing myself of +his independent researches on points which I have touched but slightly; +and particularly of his very full treatment of the Spenserian imitations. + +I had at first intended to entitle the book "Chapters toward a History of +English Romanticism, etc."; for, though fairly complete in treatment, it +makes no claim to being exhaustive. By no means every eighteenth-century +writer whose work exhibits romantic motives is here passed in review. +That very singular genius William Blake, _e.g._, in whom the influence of +"Ossian," among other things, is so strongly apparent, I leave untouched; +because his writings--partly by reason of their strange manner of +publication--were without effect upon their generation and do not form a +link in the chain of literary tendency. + +If this volume should be favorably received, I hope before very long to +publish a companion study of English romanticism in the nineteenth +century. + + H.A.B. + + +_October, 1898._ + + + + +CONTENTS + +Chapter + + I. The Subject Defined + + II. The Augustans + + III. The Spenserians + + IV. The Landscape Poets + + V. The Miltonic Group + + VI. The School of Warton + + VII. The Gothic Revival + + VIII. Percy and the Ballads + + IX. Ossian + + X. Thomas Chatterton + + XI. The German Tributary + + + + +A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM + + +CHAPTER I. + +The Subject Defined + +To attempt at the outset a rigid definition of the word _romanticism_ +would be to anticipate the substance of this volume. To furnish an +answer to the question--What is, or was, romanticism? or, at least, What +is, or was English romanticism?--is one of my main purposes herein, and +the reader will be invited to examine a good many literary documents, and +to do a certain amount of thinking, before he can form for himself any +full and clear notion of the thing. Even then he will hardly find +himself prepared to give a dictionary definition or romanticism. There +are words which connote so much, which take up into themselves so much of +the history of the human mind, that any compendious explanation of their +meaning--any definition which is not, at the same time, a rather extended +description--must serve little other end than to supply a convenient mark +of identification. How can we define in a sentence words like +renaissance, philistine, sentimentalism, transcendental, Bohemia, +pre-Raphaelite, impressionist, realistic? _Definitio est negatio_. It +may be possible to hit upon a form of words which will mark romanticism +off from everything else--tell in a clause what it is _not_; but to add a +positive content to the definition--to tell what romanticism _is_, will +require a very different and more gradual process.[1] + +Nevertheless a rough, working definition may be useful to start with. +Romanticism, then, in the sense in which I shall commonly employ the +word, means the reproduction in modern art or literature of the life and +thought of the Middle Ages. Some other elements will have to be added to +this definition, and some modifications of it will suggest themselves +from time to time. It is provisional, tentative, classic, but will serve +our turn till we are ready to substitute a better. It is the definition +which Heine gives in his brilliant little book on the Romantic School in +Germany.[2] "All the poetry of the Middle Ages," he adds, "has a certain +definite character, through which it differs from the poetry of the +Greeks and Romans. In reference to this difference, the former is called +Romantic, the latter Classic. These names, however, are misleading, and +have hitherto caused the most vexatious confusion."[3] + +Some of the sources of this confusion will be considered presently. +Meanwhile the passage recalls the fact that _romantic_, when used as a +term in literary nomenclature, is not an independent, but a referential +word. It implies its opposite, the classic; and the ingenuity of critics +has been taxed to its uttermost to explain and develop the numerous +points of contrast. To form a thorough conception of the romantic, +therefore, we must also form some conception of the classic. Now there +is an obvious unlikeness between the thought and art of the nations of +pagan antiquity and the thought and art of the peoples of Christian, +feudal Europe. Everyone will agree to call the Parthenon, the "Diana" of +the Louvre, the "Oedipus" of Sophocles, the orations of Demosthenes +classical; and to call the cathedral of Chartres, the walls of +Nuremberg--_die Perle des Mittelalters_--the "Legenda Aurea" of Jacobus +de Voragine, the "Tristan und Isolde" of Gottfried of Strasburg, and the +illuminations in a Catholic missal of the thirteenth century romantic. + +The same unlikeness is found between modern works conceived in the +spirit, or executed in direct imitation, of ancient and medieval art +respectively. It is easy to decide that Flaxman's outline drawings in +illustration of Homer are classic; that Alfieri's tragedies, Goethe's +"Iphigenie auf Tauris" Landor's "Hellenics," Gibson's statues, David's +paintings, and the church of the Madeleine in Paris are classical, at +least in intentions and in the models which they follow; while Victor +Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris," Scott's "Ivanhoe," Fouque's "Der +Zauberring," and Rossetti's painting, "The Girlhood of Mary," are no less +certainly romantic in their inspiration. + +But critics have given a wider extension than this to the terms classic +and romantic. They have discerned, or imagined, certain qualities, +attitudes of mind, ways of thinking and feeling, traits of style which +distinguish classic from romantic art; and they have applied the words +accordingly to work which is not necessarily either antique or medieval +in subject. Thus it is assumed, for example, that the productions of +Greek and Roman genius were characterized by clearness, simplicity, +restraint, unity of design, subordination of the part to the whole; and +therefore modern works which make this impression of noble plainness and +severity, of harmony in construction, economy of means and clear, +definite outline, are often spoken of as classical, quite irrespective of +the historical period which they have to do with. In this sense, it is +usual to say that Wordsworth's "Michael" is classical, or that Goethe's +"Hermann and Dorothea" is classical; though Wordsworth may be celebrating +the virtues of a Westmoreland shepherd, and Goethe telling the story of +two rustic lovers on the German border at the time of the Napoleonic wars. + +On the other hand, it is asserted that the work of mediaeval poets and +artists is marked by an excess of sentiment, by over-lavish decoration, a +strong sense of color and a feeble sense of form, an attention to detail, +at the cost of the main impression, and a consequent tendency to run into +the exaggerated, the fantastic, and the grotesque. It is not uncommon, +therefore, to find poets like Byron and Shelly classified as +romanticists, by virtue of their possession of these, or similar, +characteristics, although no one could be more remote from medieval +habits of thought than the author of "Don Juan" or the author of "The +Revolt of Islam." + +But the extension of these opposing terms to the work of writers who have +so little in common with either the antique or the medieval as +Wordsworth, on the one hand, and Byron, on the other, does not stop here. +It is one of the embarrassments of the literary historian that nearly +every word which he uses has two meanings, a critical and a popular +meaning. In common speech, classic has come to signify almost anything +that is good. If we look in our dictionaries we find it defined somewhat +in this way: "Conforming to the best authority in literature and art; +pure; chaste; refined; originally and chiefly used of the best Greek and +Roman writers, but also applied to the best modern authors, or their +works." "Classic, _n._ A work of acknowledged excellence and authority." +In this sense of the word, "Robinson Crusoe" is a classic; the "Pilgrim's +Progress" is a classic; every piece of literature which is customarily +recommended as a safe pattern for young writers to form their style upon +is a classic.[4] + +Contrariwise the word _romantic_, as popularly employed, expresses a +shade of disapprobation. The dictionaries make it a synonym for +_sentimental, fanciful_, _wild_, _extravagant_, _chimerical_, all evident +derivatives from their more critical definition, "pertaining or +appropriate to the style of the Christian and popular literature of the +Middle Ages, as opposed to the classical antique." The etymology of +_romance_ is familiar. The various dialects which sprang from the +corruption of the Latin were called by the common name of _romans_. The +name was then applied to any piece of literature composed in this +vernacular instead of in the ancient classical Latin. And as the +favorite kind of writing in Provencal, Old French, and Spanish was the +tale of chivalrous adventure that was called _par excellence_, _a roman_, +_romans_, or_ romance_. The adjective _romantic_ is much later, +implying, as it does, a certain degree of critical attention to the +species of fiction which it describes in order to a generalizing of its +peculiarities. It first came into general use in the latter half of the +seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth; and naturally, +was marked from birth with that shade of disapproval which has been +noticed in popular usage. + +The feature that struck the critics most in the romances of the Middle +Ages, and in that very different variety of romance which was cultivated +during the seventeenth century--the prolix, sentimental fictions of La +Calprenede, Scuderi, Gomberville, and D'Urfe--was the fantastic +improbability of their adventures. Hence the common acceptation of the +word _romantic_ in such phrases as "a romantic notion," "a romantic +elopement," "an act of romantic generosity." The application of the +adjective to scenery was somewhat later,[5] and the abstract +_romanticism_ was, of course, very much later; as the literary movement, +or the revolution in taste, which it entitles, was not enough developed +to call for a name until the opening of the nineteenth century. Indeed, +it was never so compact, conscious, and definite a movement in England as +in Germany and France; and its baptism doubtless came from abroad, from +the polemical literature which attended the career of the German +_romanticismus _and the French _romantisme_. + +While accepting provisionally Heine's definition, it will be useful to +examine some of the wider meanings that have been attached to the words +_classic_ and _romantic_, and some of the analyses that have been +attempted of the qualities that make one work of art classical and +another romantic. Walter Pater took them to indicate opposite tendencies +or elements which are present in varying proportions in all good art. It +is the essential function of classical art and literature, he thought, to +take care of the qualities of measure, purity, temperance. "What is +classical comes to us out of the cool and quiet of other times, as a +measure of what a long experience has shown us will, at least, never +displease us. And in the classical literature of Greece and Rome, as in +the classics of the last century, the essentially classical element is +that quality of order in beauty which they possess, indeed, in a +pre-eminent degree."[6] "The charm, then, of what is classical in art or +literature is that of the well-known tale, to which we can nevertheless +listen over and over again, because it is told so well. To the absolute +beauty of its form is added the accidental, tranquil charm of +familiarity." + +On the other hand, he defines the romantic characteristics in art as +consisting in "the addition of strangeness to beauty"--a definition which +recalls Bacon's saying, "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some +strangeness in the proportion." "The desire of beauty," continues Pater, +"being a fixed element in every artistic organization, it is the addition +of curiosity to this desire of beauty that constitutes the romantic +temper." This critic, then, would not confine the terms _classic_ and +_classicism_ to the literature of Greece and Rome and to modern works +conceived in the same spirit, although he acknowledges that there are +certain ages of the world in which the classical tradition predominates, +_i.e._, in which the respect for authority, the love of order and +decorum, the disposition to follow rules and models, the acceptance of +academic and conventional standards overbalance the desire for +strangeness and novelty. Such epochs are, _e.g._, the Augustan age of +Rome, the _Siecle de Louis XIV_, in France, the times of Pope and Johnson +in England--indeed, the whole of the eighteenth century in all parts of +Europe. + +Neither would he limit the word _romantic_ to work conceived in the +spirit of the Middle Ages. "The essential elements," he says, "of the +romantic spirit are curiosity and the love of beauty; and it is as the +accidental effect of these qualities only, that it seeks the Middle Ages; +because in the overcharged atmosphere of the Middle Age there are +unworked sources of romantic effect, of a strange beauty to be won by +strong imagination out of things unlikely or remote." "The sense in +which Scott is to be called a romantic writer is chiefly that, in +opposition to the literary tradition of the last century, he loved +strange adventure and sought it in the Middle Age." + +Here again the essayist is careful to explain that there are certain +epochs which are predominately romantic. "Outbreaks of this spirit come +naturally with particular periods: times when . . . men come to art and +poetry with a deep thirst for intellectual excitement, after a long +_ennui_." He instances, as periods naturally romantic, the time of the +early Provencal troubadour poetry: the years following the Bourbon +Restoration in France (say, 1815-30); and "the later Middle Age; so that +the medieval poetry, centering in Dante, is often opposed to Greek or +Roman poetry, as romantic to classical poetry." + +In Pater's use of the terms, then, classic and romantic do not describe +particular literature, or particular periods in literary history, so much +as certain counterbalancing qualities and tendencies which run through +the literatures of all times and countries. There were romantic writings +among the Greeks and Romans; there were classical writings in the Middle +Ages; nay, there are classical and romantic traits in the same author. +If there is any poet who may safely be described as a classic, it is +Sophocles; and yet Pater declares that the "Philoctetes" of Sophocles, if +issued to-day, would be called romantic. And he points out--what indeed +has been often pointed out--that the "Odyssey"[7] is more romantic than +the "Iliad:" is, in fact, rather a romance than a hero-epic. The +adventures of the wandering Ulysses, the visit to the land of the +lotus-eaters, the encounter with the Laestrygonians, the experiences in +the cave of Polyphemus, if allowance be made for the difference in +sentiments and manners, remind the reader constantly of the medieval +_romans d'aventure_. Pater quotes De Stendhal's saying that all good art +was romantic in its day. "Romanticism," says De Stendhal, "is the art of +presenting to the nations the literary works which, in the actual state +of their habits and beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest +possible pleasure: classicism, on the contrary, presents them with what +gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great grand-fathers"--a +definition which is epigrammatic, if not convincing.[8] De Stendhal +(Henri Beyle) was a pioneer and a special pleader in the cause of French +romanticism, and, in his use of the terms, romanticism stands for +progress, liberty, originality, and the spirit of the future; classicism, +for conservatism, authority, imitation, the spirit of the past. +According to him, every good piece of romantic art is a classic in the +making. Decried by the classicists of to-day, for its failure to observe +traditions, it will be used by the classicists of the future as a pattern +to which new artists must conform. + +It may be worth while to round out the conception of the term by +considering a few other definitions of _romantic_ which have been +proposed. Dr. F. H. Hedge, in an article in the _Atlantic Monthly_[9] +for March, 1886, inquired, "What do we mean by romantic?" Goethe, he +says, characterized the difference between classic and romantic "as +equivalent to [that between] healthy and morbid. Schiller proposed +'naive and sentimental.'[10] The greater part [of the German critics] +regarded it as identical with the difference between ancient and modern, +which was partly true, but explained nothing. None of the definitions +given could be accepted as quite satisfactory."[11] + +Dr. Hedge himself finds the origin of romantic feeling in wonder and the +sense of mystery. "The essence of romance," he writes, "is mystery"; and +he enforces the point by noting the application of the word to scenery. +"The woody dell, the leafy glen, the forest path which leads, one knows +not whither, are romantic: the public highway is not." "The winding +secret brook . . . is romantic, as compared with the broad river." +"Moonlight is romantic, as contrasted with daylight." Dr. Hedge +attributes this fondness for the mysterious to "the influence of the +Christian religion, which deepened immensely the mystery of life, +suggesting something beyond and behind the world of sense." + +This charm of wonder or mystery is perhaps only another name for that +"strangeness added to beauty" which Pater takes to be the distinguishing +feature of romantic art. Later in the same article, Dr. Hedge asserts +that "the essence of romanticism is aspiration." Much might be said in +defense of this position. It has often been pointed out, _e.g._, that a +Gothic cathedral expresses aspiration, and a Greek temple satisfied +completeness. Indeed if we agree that, in a general way, the classic is +equivalent to the antique, and the romantic to the medieval, it will be +strange if we do not discover many differences between the two that can +hardly be covered by any single phrase. Dr. Hedge himself enumerates +several qualities of romantic art which it would be difficult to bring +under his essential and defining category of wonder or aspiration. Thus +he announces that "the peculiarity of the classic style is reserve, +self-suppression of the writer"; while "the romantic is self-reflecting." +"Clear, unimpassioned, impartial presentation of the subject . . . is the +prominent feature of the classic style. The modern writer gives you not +so much the things themselves as his impression of them." Here then is +the familiar critical distinction between the objective and subjective +methods--Schiller's _naiv and sentimentalisch_--applied as a criterion of +classic and romantic style. This contrast the essayist develops at some +length, dwelling upon "the cold reserve and colorless simplicity of the +classic style, where the medium is lost in the object"; and "on the other +hand, the inwardness, the sentimental intensity, the subjective coloring +of the romantic style." + +A further distinguishing mark of the romantic spirit, mentioned by Dr. +Hedge in common with many other critics, is the indefiniteness or +incompleteness of its creations. This is a consequence, of course, of +its sense of mystery and aspiration. Schopenbauer said that music was +the characteristic modern art, because of its subjective, indefinite +character. Pursuing this line of thought, Dr. Hedge affirms that +"romantic relates to classic somewhat as music relates to plastic +art. . . It [music] presents no finished ideal, but suggests ideals +beyond the capacity of canvas or stone. Plastic art acts on the +intellect, music on the feelings; the one affects us by what it presents, +the other by what it suggests. This, it seems to me, is essentially the +difference between classic and romantic poetry"; and he names Homer and +Milton as examples of the former, and Scott and Shelley of the latter +school. + +Here then we have a third criterion proposed for determining the +essential _differentia_ of romantic art. First it was mystery, then +aspiration; now it is the appeal to the emotions by the method of +suggestion. And yet there is, perhaps, no inconsistency on the critic's +part in this continual shifting of his ground. He is apparently +presenting different facets of the same truth; he means one thing by this +mystery, aspiration, indefiniteness, incompleteness, emotion +suggestiveness: that quality or effect which we all feel to be present in +romantic and absent from classic work, but which we find it hard to +describe by any single term. It is open to any analyst of our critical +vocabulary to draw out the fullest meanings that he can, from such pairs +of related words as classic and romantic, fancy and imagination, wit and +humor, reason and understanding, passion and sentiment. Let us, for +instance, develop briefly this proposition that the ideal of classic art +is completeness[12] and the ideal of romantic art indefiniteness, or +suggestiveness. + +A.W. Schlegel[13] had already made use of two of the arts of design, to +illustrate the distinction between classic and romantic, just as Dr. +Hedge uses plastic art and music. I refer to Schlegel's famous saying +that the genius of the antique drama was statuesque, and that of the +romantic drama picturesque. A Greek temple, statue, or poem has no +imperfection and offers no further promise, indicates nothing beyond what +it expresses. It fills the sense, it leaves nothing to the imagination. +It stands correct, symmetric, sharp in outline, in the clear light of +day. There is nothing more to be done to it; there is no concealment +about it. But in romantic art there is seldom this completeness. The +workman lingers, he would fain add another touch, his ideal eludes him. +Is a Gothic cathedral ever really finished? Is "Faust" finished? Is +"Hamlet" explained? The modern spirit is mystical; its architecture, +painting, poetry employ shadow to produce their highest effects: shadow +and color rather than contour. On the Greek heroic stage there were a +few figures, two or three at most, grouped like statuary and thrown out +in bold relief at the apex of the scene: in Greek architecture a few +clean, simple lines: in Greek poetry clear conceptions easily expressible +in language and mostly describable in sensuous images. + +The modern theater is crowded with figures and colors, and the distance +recedes in the middle of the scene. This love of perspective is repeated +in cathedral aisles,[14] the love of color in cathedral windows, and +obscurity hovers in the shadows of the vault. In our poetry, in our +religion these twilight thoughts prevail. We seek no completeness here. +What is beyond, what is inexpressible attracts us. Hence the greater +spirituality of romantic literature, its deeper emotion, its more +passionate tenderness. But hence likewise its sentimentality, its +melancholy and, in particular, the morbid fascination which the thought +of death has had for the Gothic mind. The classic nations concentrated +their attention on life and light, and spent few thoughts upon darkness +and the tomb. Death was to them neither sacred nor beautiful. Their +decent rites of sepulture or cremation seem designed to hide its +deformities rather than to prolong its reminders. The presence of the +corpse was pollution. No Greek could have conceived such a book as the +"Hydriotaphia" or the "Anatomy of Melancholy." + +It is observable that Dr. Hedge is at one with Pater, in desiring some +more philosophical statement of the difference between classic and +romantic than the common one which makes it simply the difference between +the antique and the medieval. He says: "It must not be supposed that +ancient and classic, on one side, and modern and romantic, on the other, +are inseparably one; so that nothing approaching to romantic shall be +found in any Greek or Roman author, nor any classic page in the +literature of modern Europe. . . The literary line of demarcation is not +identical with the chronological one." And just as Pater says that the +Odyssey is more romantic than the Iliad, so Dr. Hedge says that "the +story of Cupid and Psyche,[15] in the 'Golden Ass' of Apuleius, is as +much a romance as any composition of the seventeenth or eighteenth +century." Medievalism he regards as merely an accident of romance: +Scott, as most romantic in his themes, but Byron, in his mood. + +So, too, Mr. Sidney Colvin[16] denies that "a predilection for classic +subjects . . . can make a writer that which we understand by the word +classical as distinguished from that which we understand by the word +romantic. The distinction lies deeper, and is a distinction much less of +subject than of treatment. . . In classical writing every idea is called +up to the mind as nakedly as possible, and at the same time as +distinctly; it is exhibited in white light, and left to produce its +effect by its own unaided power.[17] In romantic writing, on the other +hand, all objects are exhibited, as it were, through a colored and +iridescent atmosphere. Round about every central idea the romantic +writer summons up a cloud of accessory and subordinate ideas for the sake +of enhancing its effect, if at the risk of confusing its outlines. The +temper, again, of the romantic writer is one of excitement, while the +temper of the classical writer is one of self-possession. . . On the one +hand there is calm, on the other hand enthusiasm. The virtues of the one +style are strength of grasp, with clearness and justice of presentment; +the virtues of the other style are glow of the spirit, with magic and +richness of suggestion." Mr. Colvin then goes on to enforce and +illustrate this contrast between the "accurate and firm definition of +things" in classical writers and the "thrilling vagueness and +uncertainty," the tremulous, coruscating, vibrating or colored light--the +"halo"--with which the romantic writer invests his theme. "The romantic +manner, . . . with its thrilling uncertainties and its rich suggestions, +may be more attractive than the classic manner, with its composed and +measured preciseness of statement. . . But on the other hand the +romantic manner lends itself, as the true classical does not, to inferior +work. Second-rate conceptions excitedly and approximately put into words +derive from it an illusive attraction which may make them for a time, and +with all but the coolest judges, pass as first-rate. Whereas about true +classical writing there can be no illusion. It presents to us +conceptions calmly realized in words that exactly define them, +conceptions depending for their attraction, not on their halo, but on +themselves." + +As examples of these contrasting styles, Mr. Colvin puts side by side +passages from "The Ancient Mariner" and Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," +with passages, treating similar themes, from Landor's "Gebir" and +"Imaginary Conversations." The contrast might be even more clearly +established by a study of such a piece as Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," +where the romantic form is applied to classical content; or by a +comparison of Tennyson's "Ulysses" and "The Lotus Eaters," in which +Homeric subjects are treated respectively in the classic and the romantic +manner. + +Alfred de Musset, himself in early life a prominent figure among the +French romanticists, wrote some capital satire upon the baffling and +contradictory definitions of the word _romantisme_ that were current in +the third and fourth decades of this century.[18] Two worthy provincials +write from the little town of La Ferte-sous-Jouarre to the editor of the +"Revue des Deux Mondes," appealing to him to tell them what romanticism +means. For two years Dupuis and his friend Cotonet had supposed that the +term applied only to the theater, and signified the disregard of the +unities. "Shakspere, for example makes people travel from Rome to +London, and from Athens to Alexandria in a quarter of an hour. His +heroes live ten or twenty years between two acts. His heroines, angels +of virtue during a whole scene, have only to pass into the _coulisses_, +to reappear as wives, adulteresses, widows, and grandmothers. There, we +said to ourselves, is the romantic. Contrariwise, Sophocles makes +Oedipus sit on a rock, even at the cost of great personal inconvenience, +from the very beginning of his tragedy. All the characters come there to +find him, one after the other. Perhaps he stands up occasionally, though +I doubt it; unless, it may be, out of respect for Theseus, who, during +the entire play, obligingly walks on the high-way, coming in or going out +continually. . . There, we said to ourselves, is the classic." + +But about 1828, continues the letter, "we learned that there were +romantic poetry and classical poetry, romantic novels and classical +novels, romantic odes and classical odes; nay, a single line, my dear +sir, a sole and solitary line of verse might be romantic or classic, +according as the humor took it. When we received this intelligence, we +could not close our eyes all night. Two years of peaceful conviction had +vanished like a dream. All our ideas were turned topsy-turvy; for it the +rules of Aristotle were no longer the line of demarcation which separated +the literary camps, where was one to find himself, and what was he to +depend upon? How was one to know, in reading a book, which school it +belonged to? . . . Luckily in the same year there appeared a famous +preface, which we devoured straightway[19]. . . This said very +distinctly that romanticism was nothing else than the alliance of the +playful and the serious, of the grotesque and the terrible, of the jocose +and the horrible, or in other words, if you prefer, of comedy and +tragedy." + +This definition the anxious inquirers accepted for the space of a year, +until it was borne in upon them that Aristophanes--not to speak of other +ancients--had mixed tragedy and comedy in his drama. Once again the +friends were plunged in darkness, and their perplexity was deepened when +they were taking a walk one evening and overheard a remark made by the +niece of the _sous-prefet_. This young lady had fallen in love with +English ways, as was--somewhat strangely--evidenced by her wearing a +green veil, orange-colored gloves, and silver-rimmed spectacles. As she +passed the promenaders, she turned to look at a water-mill near the ford, +where there were bags of grain, geese, and an ox in harness, and she +exclaimed to her governess, "_Voila un site romantique_." + +This mysterious sentence roused the flagging curiosity of MM. Dupuis and +Contonet, and they renewed their investigations. A passage in a +newspaper led them to believe for a time that romanticism was the +imitation of the Germans, with, perhaps, the addition of the English and +Spanish. Then they were tempted to fancy that it might be merely a +matter of literary form, possibly this _vers brise_ (run-over lines, +_enjambement_) that they are making so much noise about. "From 1830 to +1831 we were persuaded that romanticism was the historic style (_genre +historique_) or, if you please, this mania which has lately seized our +authors for calling the characters of their novels and melodramas +Charlemagne, Francis I., or Henry IV., instead of Amadis, Oronte, or +saint-Albin. . . From 1831 to the year following we thought it was the +_genre intime,_ about which there was much talk. But with all the pains +that we took we never could discover what the _genre intime_ was. The +'intimate' novels are just like the others. They are in two volume +octavo, with a great deal of margin. . . They have yellow covers and +they cost fifteen francs." From 1832 to 1833 they conjectured that +romanticism might be a system of philosophy and political economy. From +1833 to 1834 they believed that it consisted in not shaving one's self, +and in wearing a waistcoat with wide facings very much starched. + +At last they bethink themselves of a certain lawyer's clerk, who had +first imported these literary disputes into the village, in 1824. To +him, they expose their difficulties and ask for an answer to the +question, What is romanticism? After a long conversation, they receive +this final definition. "Romanticism, my dear sir! No, of a surety, it +is neither the disregard of the unities, nor the alliance of the comic +and tragic, nor anything in the world expressible by words. In vain you +grasp the butterfly's wing; the dust which gives it its color is left +upon your fingers. Romanticism is the star that weeps, it is the wind +that wails, it is the night that shudders, the bird that flies and the +flower that breathes perfume: it is the sudden gush, the ecstasy grown +faint, the cistern beneath the palms, rosy hope with her thousand loves, +the angel and the pearl, the white robe of the willows. It is the +infinite and the starry," etc., etc. + +Then M. Ducoudray, a magistrate of the department, gives his theory of +romanticism, which he considers to be an effect of the religious and +political reaction under the restored Bourbon monarchy of Louis XVIII, +and Charles X. "The mania for ballads, arriving from Germany, met the +legitimist poetry one fine day at Ladvocat's bookshop; and the two of +them, pickax in hand, went at nightfall to a churchyard, to dig up the +Middle Ages." The taste for medievalism, M. Ducoudray adds, has survived +the revolution of 1830, and romanticism has even entered into the service +of liberty and progress, where it is a manifest anachronism, "employing +the style of Ronsard to celebrate railroads, and imitating Dante when it +chants the praises of Washington and Lafayette." Dupuis was tempted to +embrace M. Ducoudray's explanation, but Cotonet was not satisfied. He +shut himself in, for four months, at the end of which he announced his +discovery that the true and only difference between the classic and the +romantic is that the latter uses a good many adjectives. He illustrates +his principle by giving passages from "Paul and Virginia" and the +"Portuguese Letters," written in the romantic style. + +Thus Musset pricks a critical bubble with the point of his satire; and +yet the bubble declines to vanish. There must really be some more +substantial difference than this between classic and romantic, for the +terms persist and are found useful. It may be true that the romantic +temper, being subjective and excited, tends to an excess in adjectives; +the adjective being that part of speech which attributes qualities, and +is therefore most freely used by emotional persons. Still it would be +possible to cut out all the adjectives, not strictly necessary, from one +of Tieck's _Maerchen_ without in the slightest degree disturbing its +romantic character. + +It remains to add that romanticism is a word which faces in two +directions. It is now opposed to realism, as it was once opposed to +classicism. As, in one way, its freedom and lawlessness, its love of +novelty, experiment, "strangeness added to beauty," contrast with the +classical respect for rules, models, formulae, precedents, conventions; +so, in another way, its discontent with things as they are, its idealism, +aspiration, mysticism contrast with the realist's conscientious adherence +to fact. "Ivanhoe" is one kind of romance; "The Marble Faun" is +another.[20] + + +[1] Les definitions ne se posent pas _a priori_, si ce n'est peutetre en +mathematiques. En histoire, c'est de l'etude patiente de is la realite +qu'elles se degagent insensiblement. Si M. Deschanel ne nous a pas donne +du _romantisme_ la definition que nous reclamions tout a l'heure, c'est, +a vrai dire, que son enseignement a pour objet de preparer cette +definition meme. Nous la trouverons ou elle doit etre, a la fin du cours +et non pas a debut.--_F. Brunetiere: "Classiques et Romantiques, Etudes +Critiques," _Tome III, p. 296. + +[2] Was war aber dis romantische Schule in Deutschland? Sie war nichts +anders als die Wiedererweckung der Poesie des Mittelalters, wie sie sich +in dessen Liedern, Bild- und Bauwerken, in Kunst und Leben, manifestiert +hatte.--_Die romanticsche Schule (Cotta edition)_, p. 158. + +[3] "The Romantic School" (Fleishman's translation), p. 13. + +[4] Un classique est tout artiste a l'ecole de qui nous pouvons nous +mettre sans craindre que ses lecons on ses exemples nous fourvoient. Ou +encore, c'est celui qui possede . . . des qualites dont l'imitation, si +elle ne peut pas faire de bien, ne peut pas non plus faire de mal.--_F. +Brunetiere, "Etudes Critiques,"_ Tome III, p. 300. + +[5] Mr. Perry thinks that one of the first instances of the use of the +word _romantic _is by the diarist Evelyn in 1654: "There is also, on the +side of this horrid alp, a very romantic seat."--_English Literature in +the Eighteenth Century, by Thomas Sergeant Perry, _p. 148, _note_. + +[6] "Romanticism," _Macmillan's Magazine_, Vol. XXXV. + +[7] The Odyssey has been explained throughout in an allegorical sense. +The episode of Circe, at least, lends itself obviously to such +interpretation. Circe's cup has become a metaphor for sensual +intoxication, transforming men into beasts; Milton, in "Comus," regards +himself as Homer's continuator, enforcing a lesson of temperance in +Puritan times hardly more consciously than the old Ionian Greek in times +which have no other record than his poem. + +[8] "Racine et Shakespeare, Etudes en Romantisme" (1823), p. 32, ed. of +Michel Levy Freres, 1954. Such would also seem to be the view maintained +by M. Emile Deschanel, whose book "Le Romantisme des Classiques" (Paris, +1883) is reviewed by M. Brunetiere in an article already several times +quoted. "Tous les classiques," according to M. Deschanel--at least, so +says his reviewer--"ont jadis commence par etre des romantiques." And +again: "Un _romantique_ seraut tout simplement un classique en route pour +parvenir; et, reciproquement, un classique ne serait de plus qu'un +romantique arrive." + +[9] "Classic and Romantic," Vol. LVII. + +[10] See Schiller's "Ueber naive and sentimentalische Dichtung." + +[11] Le mot de romantisme, apres cinquante ans et plus de discussions +passionnees, ne laisse pas d'etre encore aujourd'hui bien vague et bien +flottant.--_Brunetiere, ibid._ + +[12] Ce qui constitue proprement un classique, c'est l'equilibre en lui de +toutes les facultes qui concourent a la perfection de l'oeuvre +d'art.--_Brunetiere, ibid._ + +[13] "Vorlesungen ueber dramatische Kunst und Litteratur." + +[14] Far to the west the long, long vale withdrawn, + Where twilight loves to linger for a while. + --_Beattie's "Minstrel."_ + +[15] The modernness of this "latest born of the myths" resides partly in +its spiritual, almost Christian conception of love, partly in its +allegorical theme, the soul's attainment of immortality through love. +The Catholic idea of penance is suggested, too, in Psyche's "wandering +labors long." This apologue has been a favorite with platonizing poets, +like Spenser and Milton. See "The Fairie Queene," book iii. canto vi. +stanza 1., and "Comus," lines 1002-11 + +[16] "Selections from Walter Savage Landor," Preface, p. vii. + +[17] See also Walter Bagehot's essay on "Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art," +"Literary Studies, Works" (Hartford, 1889), Vol I. p. 200. + +[18] Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet (1836), "Oeuvres Completes" (Charpentier +edition, 1881), Tome IX. p. 194. + +[19] Preface to Victor Hugo's "Cromwell," dated October, 1827. The play +was printed, but not acted, in 1828. + +[20] In modern times romanticism, typifying a permanent tendency of the +human mind, has been placed in opposition to what is called realism. . . +[But] there is, as it appears to us, but one fundamental note which all +romanticism . . . has in common, and that is a deep disgust with the +world as it is and a desire to depict in literature something that is +claimed to be nobler and better.--_Essays on German Literature, by H. H. +Boyesen_, pp. 358 and 356. + + + + +CHAPTER II. + +The Augustans + +The Romantic Movement in England was a part of the general European +reaction against the spirit of the eighteenth century. This began +somewhat earlier in England than in Germany, and very much earlier than +in France, where literacy conservatism went strangely hand in hand with +political radicalism. In England the reaction was at first gradual, +timid, and unconscious. It did not reach importance until the seventh +decade of the century, and culminated only in the early years of the +nineteenth century. The medieval revival was only an incident--though a +leading incident--of this movement; but it is the side of it with which +the present work will mainly deal. Thus I shall have a great deal to say +about Scott; very little about Byron, intensely romantic as he was in +many meanings of the word. This will not preclude me from glancing +occasionally at other elements besides medievalism which enter into the +concept of the term "romantic." + +Reverting then to our tentative definition--Heine's definition--of +romanticism, as the reproduction in modern art and literature of the life +of the Middle Ages, it should be explained that the expression, "Middle +Ages," is to be taken here in a liberal sense. Contributions to romantic +literature such as Macpherson's "Ossian," Collins' "Ode on the +Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands," and Gray's translations form +the Welsh and the Norse, relate to periods which antedate that era of +Christian chivalry and feudalism, extending roughly from the eleventh +century to the fifteenth, to which the term, "Middle Ages," more strictly +applies. The same thing is true of the ground-work, at least, of ancient +hero-epics like "Beowulf" and the "Nibelungen Lied," of the Icelandic +"Sagas," and of similar products of old heathen Europe which have come +down in the shape of mythologies, popular superstitions, usages, rites, +songs, and traditions. These began to fall under the notice of scholars +about the middle of the last century and made a deep impression upon +contemporary letters. + +Again, the influence of the Middle Age proper prolonged itself beyond the +exact close of the medieval period, which it is customary to date from +the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The great romantic poets of Italy, +Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, wrote in the full flush of the pagan revival and +made free use of the Greek and Roman mythologies and the fables of Homer, +Vergil, and Ovid; and yet their work is hardly to be described as +classical. Nor is the work of their English disciples, Spenser and +Sidney; while the entire Spanish and English drama of the sixteenth and +seventeenth centuries (down to 1640, and with an occasional exception, +like Ben Jonson) is romantic. Calderon is romantic; Shakspere and +Fletcher are romantic. If we agree to regard medieval literature, then, +as comprising all the early literature of Europe which drew its +inspiration from other than Greek-Latin sources, we shall do no great +violence to the usual critical employment of the word. I say _early_ +literature, in order to exclude such writings as are wholly modern, like +"Robinson Crusoe," or "Gulliver's Travels," or Fielding's novels, which +are neither classic nor romantic, but are the original creation of our +own time. With works like these, though they are perhaps the most +characteristic output of the eighteenth century, our inquiries are not +concerned. + +It hardly needs to be said that the reproduction, or imitation, of +mediaeval life by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romanticists, +contains a large admixture of modern thought and feeling. The brilliant +pictures of feudal society in the romances of Scott and Fouque give no +faithful image of that society, even when they are carefully correct in +all ascertainable historical details.[1] They give rather the impression +left upon an alien mind by the quaint, picturesque features of a way of +life which seemed neither quaint nor picturesque to the men who lived it, +but only to the man who turns to it for relief form the prosaic, or at +least familiar, conditions of the modern world. The offspring of the +modern imagination, acting upon medieval material, may be a perfectly +legitimate, though not an original, form of art. It may even have a +novel charm of its own, unlike either parent, but like Euphorion, child +of Faust by Helen of Troy, a blend of Hellas and the Middle Age. Scott's +verse tales are better poetry than the English metrical romances of the +thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Tennyson has given a more perfect +shape to the Arthurian legends than Sir Thomas Malory, their compiler, or +Walter Map and Chrestien de Troyes, their possible inventors. But, of +course, to study the Middle Ages, as it really was, one must go not to +Tennyson and Scott, but to the "Chanson de Roland," and the "Divine +Comedy," and the "Romaunt of the Rose," and the chronicles of +Villehardouin, Joinville, and Froissart. + +And the farther such study is carried, the more evident it becomes that +"mediaeval" and "romantic" are not synonymous. The Middle Ages was not, +at all points, romantic: it is the modern romanticist who makes, or +finds, it so. He sees its strange, vivid peculiarities under the glamour +of distance. Chaucer's temper, for instance, was by no means romantic. +This "good sense" which Dryden mentions as his prominent trait; that "low +tone" which Lowell praises in him, and which keeps him close to the +common ground of experience, pervade his greatest work, the "Canterbury +Tales," with an insistent realism. It is true that Chaucer shared the +beliefs and influences of his time and was a follower of its literary +fashions. In his version of the "Romaunt of the Rose," his imitations of +Machault, and his early work in general he used the mediaeval machinery +of allegory and dreams. In "Troilus and Cresseide" and the tale of +"Palamon and Arcite," he carries romantic love and knightly honor to a +higher pitch than his model, Boccaccio. But the shrewdly practical +Pandarus of the former poem--a character almost wholly of Chaucer's +creation--is the very embodiment of the anti-romantic attitude, and a +remarkable anticipation of Sancho Panza; while the "Rime of Sir Thopas" +is a distinct burlesque of the fantastic chivalry romances.[2] Chaucer's +pages are picturesque with tournament, hunting parties, baronial feasts, +miracles of saints, feats of magic; but they are solid, as well, with the +everyday life of fourteenth-century England. They have the _naivete_ and +garrulity which are marks of mediaeval work, but not the quaintness and +grotesquerie which are held to be marks of romantic work. Not archaic +speech, but a certain mental twist constitutes quaintness. Herbert and +Fuller are quaint; Blake is grotesque; Donne and Charles Lamb are +willfully quaint, subtle, and paradoxical. But Chaucer is always +straight-grained, broad, and natural. + +Even Dante, the poet of the Catholic Middle Ages; Dante, the mystic, the +idealist, with his intense spirituality and his passion for symbolism, +has been sometimes called classic, by virtue of the powerful construction +of his great poem, and his scholastic rigidity of method. + +The relation between modern romanticizing literature and the real +literature of the Middle Ages, is something like that between the +literature of the renaissance and the ancient literatures of Greece and +Rome. But there is this difference, that, while the renaissance writers +fell short of their pattern, the modern schools of romance have outgone +their masters--not perhaps in the intellectual--but certainly in the +artistic value of their product. Mediaeval literature, wonderful and +stimulating as a whole and beautiful here and there in details of +execution, affords few models of technical perfection. The civilization +which it reflected, though higher in its possibilities than the classic +civilization, had not yet arrived at an equal grade of development, was +inferior in intelligence and the natured results of long culture. The +epithets of Gothic ignorance, rudeness, and barbarism, which the +eighteenth-century critics applied so freely to all the issue of the +so-called dark ages, were not entirely without justification. Dante is +almost the only strictly mediaeval poet in whose work the form seems +adequate to the content; for Boccaccio and Petrarca stand already on the +sill of the renaissance. + +In the arts of design the case was partly reversed. If the artists of +the renaissance did not equal the Greeks in sculpture and architecture, +they probably excelled them in painting. On the other hand, the +restorers of Gothic have never quite learned the secret of the mediaeval +builders. However, if the analogy is not pushed too far, the romantic +revival may be regarded as a faint counterpart, the fragments of a +half-forgotten civilization were pieced together; Greek manuscripts +sought out, cleaned, edited, and printed: statues, coins, vases dug up +and ranged in museums: debris cleared away from temples, amphitheaters, +basilicas; till gradually the complete image of the antique world grew +forth in august beauty, kindling an excitement of mind to which there are +few parallels in history; so, in the eighteenth century, the despised +ages of monkery, feudalism, and superstition began to reassert their +claims upon the imagination. Ruined castles and abbeys, coats of mail, +illuminated missals, manuscript romances, black-letter ballads, old +tapestries, and wood carvings acquired a new value. Antiquaries and +virtuosos first, and then poets and romancers, reconstructed in turn an +image of medieval society. + +True, the later movement was much the weaker of the two. No such fissure +yawned between modern times and the Middle Ages as had been opened +between the ancient world and the Middle Ages by the ruin of the Roman +state and by the barbarian migrations. Nor had ten centuries of rubbish +accumulated over the remains of mediaeval culture. In 1700 the Middle +Ages were not yet so very remote. The nations and languages of Europe +continued in nearly the same limits which had bounded them two centuries +before. The progress in the sciences and mechanic arts, the discovery +and colonizing of America, the invention of printing and gunpowder, and +the Protestant reformation had indeed drawn deep lines between modern and +mediaeval life. Christianity, however, formed a connecting link, though, +in Protestant countries, the continuity between the earlier and later +forms of the religion had been interrupted. One has but to compare the +list of the pilgrims whom Chaucer met at the Tabard, with the company +that Captain Sentry or Peregrine Pickle would be likely to encounter at a +suburban inn, to see how the face of English society had changed between +1400 and 1700. What has become of the knight, the prioress, the sumner, +the monk, pardoner, squire, alchemist, friar; and where can they or their +equivalents be found in all England? + +The limitations of my subject will oblige me to treat the English +romantic movement as a chapter in literary history, even at the risk of +seeming to adopt a narrow method. Yet it would be unphilosophical to +consider it as a merely aesthetic affair, and to lose sight altogether of +its deeper springs in the religious and ethical currents of the time. +For it was, in part, a return of warmth and color into English letters; +and that was only a symptom of the return of warmth and color--that is, +of emotion and imagination--into English life and thought: into the +Church, into politics, into philosophy. Romanticism, which sought to +evoke from the past a beauty that it found wanting in the present, was +but one phase of that revolt against the coldness and spiritual deadness +of the first half of the eighteenth century which had other sides in the +idealism of Berkeley, in the Methodist and Evangelical revival led by +Wesley and Whitefield, and in the sentimentalism which manifested itself +in the writings of Richardson and Sterne. Corresponding to these on the +Continent were German pietism, the transcendental philosophy of Kant and +his continuators, and the emotional excesses of works like Rousseau's +"Nouvelle Heloise" and Goethe's "Sorrows of Werther." + +Romanticism was something more, then, than a new literary mode; a taste +cultivated by dilettante virtuosos, like Horace Walpole, college recluses +like Gray, and antiquarian scholars like Joseph and Thomas Warton. It +was the effort of the poetic imagination to create for itself a richer +environment; but it was also, in its deeper significance, a reaching out +of the human spirit after a more ideal type of religion and ethics than +it could find in the official churchmanship and the formal morality of +the time. Mr. Leslie Stephen[3] points out the connection between the +three currents of tendency known as sentimentalism, romanticism, and +naturalism. He explains, to be sure, that the first English +sentimentalists, such as Richardson and Sterne, were anything but +romantic. "A more modern sentimentalist would probably express his +feelings[4] by describing some past state of society. He would paint +some ideal society in mediaeval times and revive the holy monk and the +humble nun for our edification." He attributes the subsequent interest +in the Middle Ages to the progress made in historical inquiries during +the last half of the eighteenth century, and to the consequent growth of +antiquarianism. "Men like Malone and Stevens were beginning those +painful researches which have accumulated a whole literature upon the +scanty records of our early dramatists. Gray, the most learned of poets, +had vaguely designed a history of English poetry, and the design was +executed with great industry by Thomas Warton. His brother Joseph +ventured to uphold the then paradoxical thesis that Spenser was as great +a man as Pope. Everywhere a new interest was awakening in the minuter +details of the past." At first, Mr. Stephen says, the result of these +inquiries was "an unreasonable contempt for the past. The modern +philosopher, who could spin all knowledge out of his own brain; the +skeptic, who had exploded the ancient dogma; or the free-thinker of any +shade, who rejoiced in the destruction of ecclesiastical tyranny, gloried +in his conscious superiority to his forefathers. Whatever was old was +absurd; and Gothic--an epithet applied to all medieval art, philosophy, +or social order--became a simple term of contempt." But an antiquarian +is naturally a conservative, and men soon began to love the times whose +peculiarities they were so diligently studying. Men of imaginative minds +promptly made the discovery that a new source of pleasure might be +derived from these dry records. . . The 'return to nature' expresses a +sentiment which underlies . . . both the sentimental and romantic +movements. . . To return to nature is, in one sense, to find a new +expression for emotions which have been repressed by existing +conventions; or, in another, to return to some simpler social order which +had not yet suffered from those conventions. The artificiality +attributed to the eighteenth century seems to mean that men were content +to regulate their thoughts and lives by rules not traceable to first +principles, but dependent upon a set of special and exceptional +conditions. . . To get out of the ruts, or cast off the obsolete +shackles, two methods might be adopted. The intellectual horizon might +be widened by including a greater number of ages and countries; or men +might try to fall back upon the thoughts and emotions common to all +races, and so cast off the superficial incrustation. The first method, +that of the romanticists, aims at increasing our knowledge: the second, +that of the naturalistic school, at basing our philosophy on deeper +principles.[5] + +The classic, or pseudo-classic, period of English literature lasted from +the middle of the seventeenth till the end of the eighteenth century. +Inasmuch as the romantic revival was a protest against this reigning +mode, it becomes necessary to inquire a little more closely what we mean +when we say that the time of Queen Anne and the first two Georges was our +Augustan or classical age. In what sense was it classical? And was it +any more classical than the time of Milton, for example, or the time of +Landor? If the "Dunciad," and the "Essay on Man," are classical, what is +Keats' "Hyperion"? And with what propriety can we bring under a common +rubric things so far asunder as Prior's "Carmen Seculare" and Tennyson's +"Ulysses," or as Gay's "Trivia" and Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon"? +Evidently the Queen Anne writers took hold of the antique by a different +side from our nineteenth-century poets. Their classicism was of a +special type. It was, as has been often pointed out, more Latin than +Greek, and more French than Latin.[6] It was, as has likewise been said, +"a classicism in red heels and a periwig." Victor Hugo speaks of "cette +poesie fardee, mouchetee, poudree, du dix-huitieme siecle, cette +literature a paniers, a pompons et a falbalas."[7] The costumes of +Watteau contrast with the simple folds of Greek drapery very much as the +"Rape of the Lock," contrasts with the Iliad, or one of Pope's pastorals +with an idyl of Theocritus. The times were artificial in poetry as in +dress-- + + "Tea-cup times of hood and hoop, + And when the patch was worn." + +Gentlemen wore powdered wigs instead of their own hair, and the power and +the wig both got into their writing. _Perruque_ was the nickname applied +to the classicists by the French romanticists of Hugo's generation, who +wore their hair long and flowing--_cheveaux merovigiennes_--and affected +an _outre_ freedom in the cut and color of their clothes. Similarly the +Byronic collar became, all over Europe, the symbol of daring independence +in matters of taste and opinion. Its careless roll, which left the +throat exposed, seemed to assist the liberty of nature against cramping +conventions. + +The leading Queen Anne writers are so well known that a somewhat general +description of the literary situation in England at the time of Pope's +death (1744) will serve as an answer to the question, how was the +eighteenth century classical. It was remarked by Thomas Warton[8] that, +at the first revival of letters in the sixteenth century, our authors +were more struck by the marvelous fables and inventions of ancient poets +than by the justness of their conceptions and the purity of their style. +In other words, the men of the renaissance apprehended the ancient +literature as poets: the men of the _Eclaircissement_ apprehended them as +critics. In Elizabeth's day the new learning stimulated English genius +to creative activity. In royal progresses, court masques, Lord Mayors' +shows, and public pageants of all kinds, mythology ran mad. "Every +procession was a pantheon." But the poets were not careful to keep the +two worlds of pagan antiquity and mediaeval Christianity distinct. The +art of the renaissance was the flower of a double root, and the artists +used their complex stuff naively. The "Faerie Queene" is the typical +work of the English renaissance; there hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods +mingle unblushingly with knights, dragons, sorcerers, hermits, and +personified vices and virtues. The "machinery" of Homer and Vergil--the +"machinery" of the "Seven Champions of Christendom" and the "Roman de la +Rose"! This was not shocking to Spenser's contemporaries, but it seemed +quite shocking to classical critics a century later. Even Milton, the +greatest scholar among English poets, but whose imagination was a strong +agent, holding strange elements in solution, incurred their censure for +bringing Saint Peter and the sea-nymphs into dangerous juxtaposition in +"Lycidas." + +But by the middle of the seventeenth century the renaissance schools of +poetry had become effete in all European countries. They had run into +extravagances of style, into a vicious manner known in Spain as +Gongorism, in Italy as Marinism, and in England best exhibited in the +verse of Donne and Cowley and the rest of the group whom Dr. Johnson +called the metaphysical poets, and whose Gothicism of taste Addison +ridiculed in his _Spectator_ papers on true and false wit. It was France +that led the reform against this fashion. Malherbe and Boileau insisted +upon the need of discarding tawdry ornaments of style and cultivating +simplicity, clearness, propriety, decorum, moderation; above all, good +sense. The new Academy, founded to guard the purity of the French +language, lent its weight to the precepts of the critics, who applied the +rules of Aristotle, as commented by Longinus and Horace, to modern +conditions. The appearance of a number of admirable writers--Corneille, +Moliere, Racine, Bossuet, La Fontaine, La Bruyere--simultaneously with +this critical movement, gave an authority to the new French literature +which enabled it to impose its principles upon England and Germany for +over a century. For the creative literature of France conformed its +practice, in the main, to the theory of French criticism; though not, in +the case of Regnier, without open defiance. This authority was +re-enforced by the political glories and social _eclat_ of the _siecle de +Louis Quatorze_ + +It happened that at this time the Stuart court was in exile, and in the +train of Henrietta Maria at Paris, or scattered elsewhere through France, +were many royalist men of letters, Etherege, Waller, Cowley, and others, +who brought back with them to England in 1660 an acquaintance with this +new French literature and a belief in its aesthetic code. That French +influence would have spread into England without the aid of these +political accidents is doubtless true, as it is also true that a reform +of English versification and poetic style would have worked itself out +upon native lines independent of foreign example, and even had there been +so such thing as French literature. Mr. Gosse has pointed out couplets +of Waller, written as early as 1623, which have the formal precision of +Pope's; and the famous passage about the Thames in Denham's "Cooper's +Hill" (1642) anticipates the best performance of Augustan verse: + + "O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream + My great example, as it is my theme! + Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, + Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full." + +However, as to the general fact of the powerful impact of French upon +English literary fashions, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, +there can be no dispute.[9] + +This change of style was symptomatic of a corresponding change in the +national temper. It was the mission of the eighteenth century to assert +the universality of law and, at the same time, the sufficiency of the +reason to discover the laws, which govern in every province: a service +which we now, perhaps, undervalue in our impatience with the formalism +which was its outward sign. Hence its dislike of irregularity in art and +irrationality in religion. England, in particular, was tired of +unchartered freedom, of spiritual as well as of literary anarchy. The +religious tension of the Commonwealth period had relaxed--men cannot be +always at the heroic pitch--and theological disputes had issued in +indifference and a skepticism which took the form of deism, or "natural +religion." But the deists were felt to be a nuisance. They were +unsettling opinions and disturbing that decent conformity with generally +received beliefs which it is the part of a good citizen to maintain. +Addison instructs his readers that, in the absence of certainty, it is +the part of a prudent man to choose the safe side and make friends with +God. The freethinking Chesterfield[10] tells his son that the profession +of atheism is ill-bred. De Foe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Johnson all +attack infidelity. "Conform! Conform!" said in effect the most +authoritative writers of the century. "Be sensible: go to church: pay +your rates: don't be a vulgar deist--a fellow like Toland who is poor and +has no social position. But, on the other hand, you need not be a +fanatic or superstitious, or an enthusiast. Above all, _pas de zele!_" + +"Theology," says Leslie Stephen, "was, for the most part, almost as +deistical as the deists. A hatred for enthusiasm was as strongly +impressed upon the whole character of contemporary thought as a hatred of +skepticism. . . A good common-sense religion should be taken for granted +and no questions asked. . . With Shakspere, or Sir Thomas Browne, or +Jeremy Taylor, or Milton, man is contemplated in his relations to the +universe; he is in presence of eternity and infinity; life is a brief +drama; heaven and hell are behind the veil of phenomena; at every step +our friends vanish into the abyss of ever present mystery. To all such +thoughts the writers of the eighteenth century seemed to close their eyes +as resolutely as possible. . . The absence of any deeper speculative +ground makes the immediate practical questions of life all the more +interesting. We know not what we are, nor whither we are going, nor +whence we come; but we can, by the help of common sense, discover a +sufficient share of moral maxims for our guidance in life. . . Knowledge +of human nature, as it actually presented itself in the shifting scene +before them, and a vivid appreciation of the importance of the moral law, +are the staple of the best literature of the time."[11] + +The God of the deists was, in truth, hardly more impersonal than the +abstraction worshiped by the orthodox--the "Great Being" of Addison's +essays, the "Great First Cause" of Pope's "Universal Prayer," invoked +indifferently as "Jehovah, Jove, or Lord." Dryden and Pope were +professed Catholics, but there is nothing to distinguish their so-called +sacred poetry from that of their Protestant contemporaries. Contrast the +mere polemics of "The Hind and the Panther" with really Catholic poems +like Southwell's "Burning Babe" and Crashaw's "Flaming Heart," or even +with Newman's "Dream of Gerontius." In his "Essay on Man," Pope +versified, without well understanding, the optimistic deism of Leibnitz, +as expounded by Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke. The Anglican Church itself +was in a strange condition, when Jonathan Swift, a dean and would-be +bishop, came to its defense with his "Tale of a Tub" and his ironical +"Argument against the Abolition of Christianity." Among the Queen Anne +wits Addison was the man of most genuine religious feeling. He is always +reverent, and "the feeling infinite" stirs faintly in one or two of his +hymns. But, in general, his religion is of the rationalizing type, a +religion of common sense, a belief resting upon logical deductions, a +system of ethics in which the supernatural is reduced to the lowest +terms, and from which the glooms and fervors of a deep spiritual +experience are almost entirely absent. This "parson in a tie-wig" is +constantly preaching against zeal, enthusiasm, superstition, mysticism, +and recommending a moderate, cheerful, and reason religion.[12] It is +instructive to contrast his amused contempt for popular beliefs in +ghosts, witches, dreams, prognostications, and the like, with the +reawakened interest in folk lore evidenced by such a book as Scott's +"Demonology and Witchcraft." + +Queen Anne literature was classical, then, in its lack of those elements +of mystery and aspiration which we have found described as of the essence +of romanticism. It was emphatically a literature of this world. It +ignored all vague emotion, the phenomena of subconsciousness, "the +electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound," the shadow that rounds +man's little life, and fixed its attention only upon what it could +thoroughly comprehend.[13] Thereby it escaped obscurity. The writings +of the Augustans in both verse and prose are distinguished by a perfect +clearness, but it is a clearness without subtlety or depth. They never +try to express a thought, or to utter a feeling, that is not easily +intelligible. The mysticism of Wordsworth, the incoherence of Shelley, +the darkness of Browning--to take only modern instances--proceed, +however, not from inferior art, but from the greater difficulty of +finding expression for a very different order of ideas. + +Again the literature of the Restoration and Queen Anne periods--which may +be regarded as one, for present purposes--was classical, or at least +unromantic, in its self-restraint, its objectivity, and its lack of +curiosity; or, as a hostile criticism would put it, in its coldness of +feeling, the tameness of its imagination, and its narrow and imperfect +sense of beauty. It was a literature not simply of this world, but of +_the_ world, of the _beau monde_, high life, fashion, society, the court +and the town, the salons, clubs, coffee-houses, assemblies, +ombre-parties. It was social, urban, gregarious, intensely though not +broadly human. It cared little for the country or outward nature, and +nothing for the life of remote times and places. Its interest was +centered upon civilization and upon that peculiarly artificial type of +civilization which it found prevailing. It was as indifferent to Venice, +Switzerland, the Alhambra, the Nile, the American forests, and the +islands of the South Sea as it was to the Middle Ages and the manners of +Scotch Highlanders. The sensitiveness to the picturesque, the liking for +local color and for whatever is striking, characteristic, and peculiarly +national in foreign ways is a romantic note. The eighteenth century +disliked "strangeness added to beauty"; it disapproved of anything +original, exotic, tropical, bizarre for the same reason that it +disapproved of mountains and Gothic architecture. + +Professor Gates says that the work of English literature during the first +quarter of the present century was "the rediscovery and vindication of +the concrete. The special task of the eighteenth century had been to +order, and to systematize, and to name; its favorite methods had been +analysis and generalization. It asked for no new experience. . . The +abstract, the typical, the general--these were everywhere exalted at the +expense of the image, the specific experience, the vital fact."[14] +Classical tragedy, _e.g._, undertook to present only the universal, +abstract, permanent truths of human character and passion.[15] The +impression of the mysterious East upon modern travelers and poets like +Byron, Southey, De Quincey, Moore, Hugo,[16] Ruckert, and Gerard de +Nerval, has no counterpart in the eighteenth century. The Oriental +allegory or moral apologue, as practiced by Addison in such papers as +"The Vision of Mirza," and by Johnson in "Rasselas," is rather faintly +colored and gets what color it has from the Old Testament. It is +significant that the romantic Collins endeavored to give a novel turn to +the decayed pastoral by writing a number of "Oriental Eclogues," in which +dervishes and camel-drivers took the place of shepherds, but the +experiment was not a lucky one. Milton had more of the East in his +imagination than any of his successors. His "vulture on Imaus bred, +whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds"; his "plain of Sericana where +Chinese drive their cany wagons light"; his "utmost Indian isle +Taprobane," are touches of the picturesque which anticipate a more modern +mood than Addison's. + +"The difference," says Matthew Arnold, "between genuine poetry and the +poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school is briefly this: their +poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is +conceived and composed in the soul." The representative minds of the +eighteenth century were such as Voltaire, the master of persiflage, +destroying superstition with his _souriere hideux_; Gibbon, "the lord of +irony," "sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer"; and Hume, with his +thorough-going philosophic skepticism, his dry Toryism, and cool contempt +for "zeal" of any kind. The characteristic products of the era were +satire, burlesque, and travesty: "Hudibras," "Absalom and Achitophel," +"The Way of the World," "Gulliver's Travels" and "The Rape of the Lock." +There is a whole literature of mockery: parodies like Prior's "Ballad on +the Taking of Namur" and "The Country Mouse and the City Mouse"; +Buckingham's "Rehearsal" and Swift's "Meditation on a Broomstick"; +mock-heroics, like the "Dunciad" and "MacFlecknoe" and Garth's +"Dispensary," and John Phillips' "Splendid Shilling" and Addison's +"Machinae Gesticulantes"; Prior's "Alma," a burlesque of philosophy; +Gay's "Trivia" and "The Shepherd's Week," and "The Beggars' Opera"-a +"Newgate pastoral"; "Town Eclogues" by Swift and Lady Montague and +others. Literature was a polished mirror in which the gay world saw its +own grinning face. It threw back a most brilliant picture of the surface +of society, showed manners but not the elementary passions of human +nature. As a whole, it leaves an impression of hardness, shallowness, +and levity. The polite cynicism of Congreve, the ferocious cynicism of +Swift, the malice of Pope, the pleasantry of Addison, the early +worldliness of Prior and Gay are seldom relieved by any touch of the +ideal. The prose of the time was excellent, but the poetry was merely +rhymed prose. The recent Queen Anne revival in architecture, dress, and +bric-a-brac, the recrudescence of society verse in Dobson and others, is +perhaps symptomatic of the fact that the present generation has entered +upon a prosaic reaction against romantic excesses and we are finding our +picturesque in that era of artifice which seemed so picturesque to our +forerunners. The sedan chair, the blue china, the fan, farthingale, and +powdered head dress have now got the "rime of age" and are seen in +fascinating perspective, even as the mailed courser, the buff jerkin, the +cowl, and the cloth-yard shaft were seen by the men of Scott's generation. + +Once more, the eighteenth century was classical in its respect for +authority. It desired to put itself under discipline, to follow the +rules, to discover a formula of correctness in all the arts, to set up a +tribunal of taste and establish canons of composition, to maintain +standards, copy models and patterns, comply with conventions, and +chastise lawlessness. In a word, its spirit was academic. Horace was +its favorite master--not Horace of the Odes, but Horace of the Satires +and Epistles, and especially Horace as interpreted by Boileau.[17] The +"Ars Poetica" had been englished by the Earl of Roscommon, and imitated +by Boileau in his "L'Art Poetique," which became the parent of a numerous +progeny in England; among others as "Essay on Satire" and an "Essay on +Poetry," by the Earl of Mulgrave;[18] an "Essay on Translated Verse" by +the Earl of Roscommon, who, says Addison, "makes even rules a noble +poetry";[19] and Pope's well-known "Essay on Criticism." + +The doctrine of Pope's essay is, in brief, follow Nature, and in order +that you may follow nature, observe the rules, which are only "Nature +methodized," and also imitate the ancients. + + "Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem; + To copy nature is to copy them." + +Thus Vergil when he started to compose the Aeneid may have seemed above +the critic's law, but when he came to study Homer, he found that Nature +and Homer were the same. Accordingly, + + "he checks the bold design, + And rules as strict his labor'd work confine." + +Not to stimulate, but to check, to confine, to regulate, is the unfailing +precept of this whole critical school. Literature, in the state in which +they found it, appeared to them to need the curb more than the spur. + +Addison's scholarship was almost exclusively Latin, though it was +Vergilian rather than Horatian. Macaulay[20] says of Addison's "Remarks +on Italy"; "To the best of our remembrance, Addison does not mention +Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bolardo, Berni, Lorenzo de' Medici, or +Machiavelli. He coldly tells us that at Ferrara he saw the tomb of +Ariosto, and that at Venice he heard the gondoliers sing verses of Tasso. +But for Tasso and Ariosto he cared far less than for Valerius Flaccus and +Sidonius Apollinaris. The gentle flow of the Ticino brings a line of +Silius to his mind. The sulphurous stream of Albula suggests to him +several passages of Martial. But he has not a word to say of the +illustrious dead of Santa Croce; he crosses the wood of Ravenna[21] +without recollecting the specter huntsman, and wanders up and down Rimini +without one thought of Francesca. At Paris he had eagerly sought an +introduction to Boileau; but he seems not to have been at all aware that +at Florence he was in the vicinity of a poet with whom Boileau could not +sustain a comparison: of the greatest lyric poet of modern times [!] +Vincenzio Filicaja. . . The truth is that Addison knew little and cared +less about the literature of modern Italy. His favorite models were +Latin. His favorite critics were French. Half the Tuscan poetry that he +had read seemed to him monstrous and the other half tawdry."[22] + +There was no academy in England, but there was a critical tradition that +was almost as influential. French critical gave the law: Boileau, +Dacier, LeBossu, Rapin, Bouhours; English critics promulgated it: Dennis, +Langbaine, Rymer, Gildon, and others now little read. Three writers of +high authority in three successive generations--Dryden, Addison, and +Johnson--consolidated a body of literary opinion which may be described, +in the main, as classical, and as consenting, though with minor +variations. Thus it was agreed on all hands that it was a writer's duty +to be "correct." It was well indeed to be "bold," but bold with +discretion. Dryden thought Shakspere a great poet than Jonson, but an +inferior artist. He was to be admired, but not approved. Homer, again, +it was generally conceded, was not so correct as Vergil, though he had +more "fire." Chesterfield preferred Vergil to Homer, and both of them to +Tasso. But of all epics the one he read with most pleasure was the +"Henriade." As for "Paradise Lost," he could not read it through. +William Walsh, "the muses' judge and friend," advised the youthful Pope +that "there was one way still left open for him, by which he might excel +any of his predecessors, which was by correctness; that though indeed we +had several great poets, we as yet could boast of none that were +perfectly correct; and that therefore he advised him to make this quality +his particular study." "The best of the moderns in all language," he +wrote to Pope, "are those that have the nearest copied the ancients." +Pope was thankful for the counsel and mentions its giver in the "Essay on +Criticism" as one who had + + "taught his muse to sing, + Prescribed her heights and pruned her tender wing." + +But what was correct? In the drama, _e.g._, the observance of the +unities was almost universally recommended, but by no means universally +practiced. Johnson, himself a sturdy disciple of Dryden and Pope, +exposed the fallacy of that stage illusion, on the supposed necessity of +which the unities of time and place were defended. Yet Johnson, in his +own tragedy "Irene," conformed to the rules of Aristotle. He pronounced +"Cato" "unquestionably the noblest production of Addison's genius," but +acknowledge that its success had "introduced, or confirmed among us, the +use of dialogue too declamatory, of unaffecting elegance and chill +philosophy." On the other hand Addison had small regard for poetic +justice, which Johnson thought ought to be observed. Addison praised old +English ballads, which Johnson thought mean and foolish; and he guardedly +commends[23] "the fairy way of writing," a romantic foppery that Johnson +despised.[24] + +Critical opinion was pronounced in favor of separating tragedy and +comedy, and Addison wrote one sentence which condemns half the plays of +Shakspere and Fletcher: "The tragi-comedy, which is the product of the +English theater, is one the most monstrous inventions that ever entered +into a poet's thought."[25] Dryden made some experiments in +tragi-comedy, but, in general, classical comedy was pure comedy--the +prose comedy of manners--and classical tragedy admitted no comic +intermixture. Whether tragedy should be in rhyme, after the French +manner, or in blank verse, after the precedent of the old English stage, +was a moot point. Dryden at first argued for rhyme and used it in his +"heroic plays"; and it is significant that he defended its use on the +ground that it would act as a check upon the poet's fancy. But afterward +he grew "weary of his much-loved mistress, rhyme," and went back to blank +verse in his later plays. + +As to poetry other than dramatic, the Restoration critics were at one in +judging blank verse too "low" for a poem of heroic dimensions; and though +Addison gave it the preference in epic poetry, Johnson was its persistent +foe, and regarded it as little short of immoral. But for that matter, +Gray could endure no blank verse outside of Milton. This is curious, +that rhyme, a mediaeval invention, should have been associated in the +last century with the classical school of poetry; while blank verse, the +nearest English equivalent of the language of Attic tragedy, was a +shibboleth of romanticizing poets, like Thomson and Akenside. The reason +was twofold: rhyme came stamped with the authority of the French tragic +alexandrine; and, secondly, it meant constraint where blank verse meant +freedom, "ancient liberty, recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome +and modern bondage of rhyming."[26] Pope, among his many thousand rhymed +couplets, has left no blank verse except the few lines contributed to +Thomson's "Seasons." Even the heroic couplet as written by earlier poets +was felt to have been too loose in structure. "The excellence and +dignity of it," says Dryden, "were never fully known till Mr. Waller +taught it; he first made writing easily an art; first showed us how to +conclude the sense most commonly in distichs, which, in the verse of +those before him, runs on for so many lines together, that the reader is +out of breath to overtake it."[27] All through the classical period the +tradition is constant that Waller was the first modern English poet, the +first correct versifier. Pope is praised by Johnson because he employed +but sparingly the triplets and alexandrines by which Dryden sought to +vary the monotony of the couplet; and he is censured by Cowper because, +by force of his example, he "made poetry a mere mechanic art." +Henceforth the distich was treated as a unit: the first line was balanced +against the second, and frequently the first half of the line against the +second half. + + "To err is human, to forgive divine." + "And so obliging, that he ne'er obliged." + "Charms strike the eye, but merit wins the soul," etc., etc. + +This type of verse, which Pope brought to perfection, and to which he +gave all the energy and variety of which it was capable, so prevailed in +our poetry for a century or more that one almost loses sight of the fact +that any other form was employed. The sonnet, for instance, disappeared +entirely, until revived by Gray, Stillingfleet, Edwards, and Thomas +Warton, about the middle of the eighteenth century.[28] When the poets +wished to be daring and irregular, they were apt to give vent in that +species of pseudo-Pindaric ode which Cowley had introduced--a literary +disease which, Dr. Johnson complained, infected the British muse with the +notion that "he who could do nothing else could write like Pindar." + +Sir Charles Eastlake in his "History of the Gothic Revival" testifies to +this formal spirit from the point of view of another art than literature. +"The age in which Batty Langley lived was an age in which it was +customary to refer all matters of taste to rule and method. There was +one standard of excellence in poetry--a standard that had its origin in +the smooth distichs of heroic verse which Pope was the first to perfect, +and which hundreds of later rhymers who lacked his nobler powers soon +learned to imitate. In pictorial art, it was the grand school which +exercised despotic sway over the efforts of genius and limited the +painter's inventions to the field of Pagan mythology. In architecture, +Vitruvius was the great authority. The graceful majesty of the +Parthenon--the noble proportions of the temple of Theseus--the chaste +enrichment which adorns the Choragic monument of Lysicrates, were +ascribed less to the fertile imagination and refined perceptions of the +ancient Greek, than to the dry and formal precepts which were invented +centuries after their erection. Little was said of the magnificent +sculpture which filled the metopes of the temple of the Minerva; but the +exact height and breadth of the triglyphs between them were considered of +the greatest importance. The exquisite drapery of caryatids and +canephorae, no English artist, a hundred years ago, thought fit to +imitate; but the cornices which they supposed were measured inch by inch +with the utmost nicety. Ingenious devices were invented for enabling the +artificer to reproduce, by a series of complicated curves, the profile of +a Doric capital, which probably owed its form to the steady hand and +uncontrolled taste of the designer. To put faith in many of the theories +propounded by architectural authorities in the last century, would be to +believe that some of the grandest monuments which the world has ever seen +raised, owe their chief beauty to an accurate knowledge of arithmetic. +The diameter of the column was divided into modules: the modules were +divided into minutes; the minutes into fractions of themselves. A +certain height was allotted to the shaft, another to the entablature. . . +Sometimes the learned discussed how far apart the columns of a portico +might be."[29] + +This kind of mensuration reminds one of the disputes between French +critics as to whether the unity of time meant thirty hours, or +twenty-four, or twelve, or the actual time that it took to act the play; +or of the geometric method of the "Saturday papers" in the _Spectator_. +Addison tries "Paradise Lost" by Aristotle's rules for the composition of +an epic. Is it the narrative of a single great action? Does it begin +_in medias res_, as is proper, or _ab ovo Ledae_, as Horace has said that +an epic ought not? Does it bring in the introductory matter by way of +episode, after the approved recipe of Homer and Vergil? Has it +allegorical characters, contrary to the practice of the ancients? Does +the poet intrude personally into his poem, thus mixing the lyric and epic +styles? etc. Not a word as to Milton's puritanism, or his +_Weltanschauung_, or the relation of his work to its environment. +Nothing of that historical and sympathetic method--that endeavor to put +the reader at the poet's point of view--by which modern critics, from +Lessing to Sainte-Beuve, have revolutionized their art. Addison looks at +"Paradise Lost" as something quite distinct from Milton: as a +manufactured article to be tested by comparing it with standard fabrics +by recognized makers, like the authors of the Iliad and Aeneid. + +When the Queen Anne poetry took a serious turn, the generalizing spirit +of the age led it almost always into the paths of ethical and didactic +verse. "It stooped to truth and moralized its song," finding its +favorite occupation in the sententious expression of platitudes--the +epigram in satire, the maxim in serious work. It became a poetry of +aphorisms, instruction us with Pope that + + "Virtue alone is happiness below;" + +or, with Young, that + + "Procrastination is the thief of time;" + +or, with Johnson, that + + "Slow rises worth by poverty depressed." + +When it attempted to deal concretely with the passions, it found itself +impotent. Pope's "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard" rings hollow: it is +rhetoric, not poetry. The closing lines of "The Dunciad"--so strangely +overpraised by Thackeray--with their metallic clank and grandiose +verbiage, are not truly imaginative. The poet is simply working himself +up to a climax of the false sublime, as an orator deliberately attaches a +sounding peroration to his speech. Pope is always "heard," never +"overheard." + +The poverty of the classical period in lyrical verse is particularly +significant, because the song is the most primitive and spontaneous kind +of poetry, and the most direct utterance of personal feeling. Whatever +else the poets of Pope's time could do, they could not sing. They are +the despair of the anthologists.[30] Here and there among the brilliant +reasoners, _raconteurs_, and satirists in verse, occurs a clever +epigrammatist like Prior, or a ballad writer like Henry Carey, whose +"Sally in Our Alley" shows the singing, and not talking, voice, but +hardly the lyric cry. Gay's "Blackeyed Susan" has genuine quality, +though its _rococo_ graces are more than half artificial. Sweet William +is very much such an opera sailor-man as Bumkinet or Grubbinol is a +shepherd, and his wooing is beribboned with conceits like these: + + "If to fair India's coast we sail, + Thy eyes are seen in diamonds bright, + Thy breath is Afric's spicy gale, + Thy skin is ivory so white. + Thus every beauteous prospect that I view, + Wakes in my soul some charm of lovely Sue." + +It was the same with the poetry of outward nature as with the poetry of +human passion.[31] In Addison's "Letter from Italy," in Pope's +"Pastorals," and "Windsor Forest," the imagery, when not actually false, +is vague and conventional, and the language abounds in classical +insipidities, epithets that describe nothing, and generalities at second +hand from older poets, who may once, perhaps, have written with their +"eyes upon the object." Blushing Flora paints the enameled ground; +cheerful murmurs fluctuate on the gale; Eridanus through flowery meadows +strays; gay gilded[32] scenes and shining prospects rise; while +everywhere are balmy zephyrs, sylvan shades, winding vales, vocal shores, +silver floods, crystal springs, feathered quires, and Phoebus and +Philomel and Ceres' gifts assist the purple year. It was after this +fashion that Pope rendered the famous moonlight passage in his +translation of the Iliad: + + "Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise, + A flood of glory bursts from all the skies," etc. + +"Strange to think of an enthusiast," says Wordsworth, "reciting these +verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having his raptures in +the least disturbed by a suspicion of their absurdity." The poetic +diction against which Wordsworth protested was an outward sign of the +classical preference for the general over the concrete. The vocabulary +was Latinized because, in English, the _mot propre_ is commonly a Saxon +word, while its Latin synonym has a convenient indefiniteness that keeps +the subject at arm's length. Of a similar tendency was the favorite +rhetorical figure of personification, which gave a false air of life to +abstractions by the easy process of spelling them with a capital letter. +Thus: + + "From bard to bard the frigid caution crept, + Till Declamation roared whilst Passion slept; + Yet still did Virtue deign the stage to tread, + Philosophy remained though Nature fled,. . . + Exulting Folly hailed the joyful day, + And Pantomime and Song confirmed her sway."[33] + +Everything was personified; Britannia, Justice, Liberty, Science, +Melancholy, Night. Even vaccination for the smallpox was invoked as a +goddess, + + "Inoculation, heavenly maid, descend!"[34] + +But circumstances or periphrasis was the capital means by which the +Augustan poet avoided precision and attained nobility of style. It +enabled him to speak of a woman as a "nymph," or a "fair"; of sheep as +"the fleecy care"; of fishes as "the scaly tribe"; and of a picket fence +as a "spiculated paling." Lowell says of Pope's followers: "As the +master had made it an axiom to avoid what was mean or low, so the +disciples endeavored to escape from what was common. This they contrived +by the ready expedient of the periphrasis. They called everything +something else. A boot with them was + + "'The shining leather that encased the limb.' + +"Coffee became + + "'The fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown.'"[35] + +"For the direct appeal to Nature, and the naming of specific objects," +says Mr. Gosse,[36] "they substituted generalities and second-hand +allusions. They no longer mentioned the gillyflower and the daffodil, +but permitted themselves a general reference to Flora's vernal wreath. +It was vulgar to say that the moon was rising; the gentlemanly expression +was, 'Cynthia is lifting her silver horn!' Women became nymphs in this +new phraseology, fruits became 'the treasures of Pomona,' a horse became +'the impatient courser.' The result of coining these conventional +counters for groups of ideas was that the personal, the exact, was lost +in literature. Apples were the treasures of Pomona, but so were +cherries, too, and if one wished to allude to peaches, they also were the +treasures of Pomona. This decline from particular to general language +was regarded as a great gain in elegance. It was supposed that to use +one of these genteel counters, which passed for coin of poetic language, +brought the speaker closer to the grace of Latinity. It was thought that +the old direct manner of speaking was crude and futile; that a romantic +poet who wished to allude to caterpillars could do so without any +exercise of his ingenuity by simply introducing the word 'caterpillars,' +whereas the classical poet had to prove that he was a scholar and a +gentleman by inventing some circumlocution, such as 'the crawling scourge +that smites the leafy plain.'. . . In the generation that succeeded Pope +really clever writers spoke of a 'gelid cistern,' when they meant a cold +bath, and 'the loud hunter-crew' when they meant a pack of foxhounds." + +It would be a mistake to suppose that the men of Pope's generation, +including Pope himself, were altogether wanting in romantic feeling. +There is a marked romantic accent in the Countess of Winchelsea's ode "To +the Nightingale"; in her "Nocturnal Reverie"; in Parnell's "Night Piece +on Death," and in the work of several Scotch poets, like Allan Ramsay and +Hamilton of Bangour, whose ballad, "The Braces of Yarrow," is certainly a +strange poem to come out of the heart of the eighteenth century. But +these are eddies and back currents in the stream of literary tendency. +We are always in danger of forgetting that the literature of an age does +not express its entire, but only its prevailing, spirit. There is +commonly a latent, silent body of thought and feeling underneath which +remains inarticulate, or nearly so. It is this prevailing spirit and +fashion which I have endeavored to describe in the present chapter. If +the picture seems to lack relief, or to be in any way exaggerated, the +reader should consult the chapters on "Classicism" and "The +Pseudo-Classicists" in M. Pellisier's "Literary Movement in France," +already several times referred to. They describe a literary situation +which had a very exact counterpart in England. + + +[1] As another notable weakness of the age is its habit of looking, to the +past ages--not understanding them all the while . . . so Scott gives up +nearly the half of his intellectual power to a fond yet purposeless +dreaming over the past; and spends half his literary labors in endeavors +to revive it, not in reality, but on the stage of fiction: endeavors +which were the best of the kind that modernism made, but still successful +only so far as Scott put under the old armor the everlasting human nature +which he knew; and totally unsuccessful so far as concerned the painting +of the armor itself, which he knew _not_. . . His romance and +antiquarianism, his knighthood and monkery, are all false, and he knows +them to be false.--_Ruskin, "Modern Painters,"_ Vol. III. p. 279 (First +American Edition, 1860). + +[2] See also the sly hit at popular fiction in the _Nonne Prestes Tale_: + + "This story is also trewe, I undertake, + As is the book of Launcelot de Lake, + That women hold in ful gret reverence." + +[3] "History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century," Vol. II. chap +xii, section vii. + +[4] Sentimentalism approaches its subject through the feelings; +romanticism through the imagination. + +[5] Ruskin, too indicates the common element in romanticism and +naturalism--a desire to escape from the Augustan formalism. I condense +the passage slightly: "To powder the hair, to patch the cheek, to hoop +the body, to buckle the foot, were all part and parcel of the same system +which reduced streets to brick walls and pictures to brown stains. +Reaction from this state was inevitable, and accordingly men steal out to +the fields and mountains; and, finding among these color and liberty and +variety and power, rejoice in all the wildest shattering of the mountain +side, as an opposition to Gower Street. It is not, however, only to +existing inanimate nature that our want of beauty in person and dress has +driven us. The imagination of it, as it was seen in our ancestors, +haunts us continually. We look fondly back to the manners of the age +sought in the centuries which we profess to have surpassed in +everything. . . This romantic love of beauty, forced to seek in history +and in external nature the satisfaction it cannot find in ordinary +life."--_Modern Painters_, Vol. III. p. 260. + +[6] Although devout in their admiration for antiquity, the writers of the +seventeenth century have by no means always clearly grasped the object of +their cult. Though they may understand Latin tradition, they have +certainly never entered into the freer, more original spirit of Greek +art. They have but an incomplete, superficial conception of +Hellenism. . . Boileau celebrates but does not understand Pindar. . . +The seventeenth century comprehended Homer no better than Pindar. What +we miss in them is exactly what we like best in his epopee--the vast +living picture of semi-barbarous civilization. . . No society could be +less fitted than that of the seventeenth century to feel and understand +the spirit of primitive antiquity. In order to appreciate Homer, it was +thought necessary to civilize the barbarian, make him a scrupulous +writer, and convince him that the word "ass" is a "very noble" expression +in Greek--_Pellisier: "The Literary Movement in France" (Brinton's +translation, _1897), pp. 8-10. So Addison apologizes for Homer's failure +to observe those qualities of nicety, correctness, and what the French +call _bienseance_ (decorum,) the necessity of which had only been found +out in later times. See _The Spectator_, No. 160. + +[7] Preface to "Cromwell." + +[8] "History of English Poetry," section lxi. Vol III. p. 398 (edition of +1840). + +[9] See, for a fuller discussion of this subject, "From Shakspere to Pope: +An Inquiry into the Causes and Phenomena of the Rise of Classical Poetry +in England," by Edmund Gosse, 1885. + +[10] The cold-hearted, polished Chesterfield is a very representative +figure. Johnson, who was really devout, angrily affirmed that his +celebrated letters taught: "the morality of a whore with the manners of a +dancing-master." + +[11] "History of English Thought in the Eighteen Century," Vol. II. chap. +xii. Section iv. See also "Selections from Newman," by Lewis E. Gates, +Introduction, pp. xlvii-xlviii. (1895). + +[12] See especially _Spectator_, Nos. 185, 186, 201, 381, and 494. + +[13] The classical Landor's impatience of mysticism explains his dislike +of Plato, the mystic among Greeks. Diogenes says to Plato: "I meddle not +at present with infinity or eternity: when I can comprehend them, I will +talk about them," "Imaginary Conversations," 2d series, Conversation XV. +Landor's contempt for German literature is significant. + +[14] "Selections from Newman," Introduction, pp. xlvii-xlviii. + +[15] Racine observes that good sense and reason are the same in all ages. +What is the result of this generalization? Heroes can be transported +from epoch to epoch, from country to country, without causing surprise. +Their Achilles is no more a Greek than is Porus an Indian; Andromache +feels and talks like a seventeenth-century princess: Phaedra experiences +the remorse of a Christian.--_Pellissier, "Literary Movement in France,"_ +p. 18. + +In substituting men of concrete, individual lives for the ideal figures +of tragic art, romanticism was forced to determine their physiognomy by a +host of local, casual details. In the name of universal truth the +classicists rejected the coloring of time and place; and this is +precisely what the romanticists seek under the name of particular +reality.--_Ibid._ p. 220. Similarly Montezuma's Mexicans in Dryden's +"Indian Emperor" have no more national individuality than the Spanish +Moors in his "Conquest of Granada." The only attempt at local color in +"Aurungzebe"--an heroic play founded on the history of a contemporary +East Indian potentate who died seven years after the author--is the +introduction of the _suttee_, and one or two mentions of elephants. + +[16] See "Les Orientales" (Hugo) and Nerval's "Les Nuits de Rhamadan" and +"La Legende du Calife Hakem." + +[17] The rules a nation, born to serve, obeys; + And Boileau still in right of Horace sways. + --_Pope, "Essay on Criticism,"_ + +[18] These critical verse essays seem to have been particularly affected +by this order of the peerage; for, somewhat later, we have one, "On +Unnatural Flights in Poetry," by the Earl of Lansdowne--"Granville the +polite." + +[19] "Epistle to Sacheverel." + +[20] "Essay on Addison." + +[21] Sweet hour of twilight!--in the solitude + Of the pine forest, and the silent shore + Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood, + Rooted where once the Adrian wave flowed o'er, + To where the last Caesarian fortress stood, + Evergreen forest! which Boccaccio's lore + And Dryden's lay made haunted ground to me, + How have I loved the twilight hour and thee! + --_Don Juan_ + +[22] I must entirely agree with Monsieur Boileau, that one verse of Vergil +is worth all the _clinquant _or tinsel of Tasso.--_Spectator_, No. 5. + +[23] _Spectator_, No. 419. + +[24] See his "Life of Collins." + +[25] _Spectator_, No. 40. + +[26] "The Verse": Preface to "Paradise Lost." + + +[27] Dedicatory epistle to "The Rival Ladies." + +[28] Mr. Gosse says that a sonnet by Pope's friend Walsh is the only one +"written in English between Milton's in 1658, and Warton's about 1750," +Ward's "English Poets," Vol. III, p. 7. The statement would have been +more precise if he had said published instead of _written_. + +[29] "History of the Gothic Revival," pp. 49-50 (edition of 1872). + +[30] Palgrave says that the poetry of passion was deformed, after 1660, by +"levity and an artificial time"; and that it lay "almost dormant for the +hundred years between the days of Wither and Suckling and the days of +Burns and Cowper," "Golden Treasury" (Sever and Francis edition, 1866). +pp. 379-80. + +[31] Excepting the "Nocturnal Reverie" of Lady Winchelsea, and a passage +or two in the "Windsor Forest" of Pope, the poetry of the period +intervening between the publication of the "Paradise Lost" and the +"Seasons" [1667-1726] does not contain a single new image of external +nature.--_Wordsworth. Appendix to Lyrical Ballads_, (1815). + +[32] _Gild_ is a perfect earmark of eighteenth-century descriptive verse: +the shore is gilded and so are groves, clouds, etc. Contentment gilds +the scene, and the stars gild the gloomy night (Parnell) or the glowing +pole (Pope). + +[33] Johnson, "Prologue at the Opening of Drury Lane," 1747. + +[34] See Coleridge, "Biographia Literaria," chap. Xviii + +[35] Essay on Pope, in "My Study Windows." + +[36] "From Shakespere to Pope," pp. 9-11. + + + + +CHAPTER III. + +The Spenserians + +Dissatisfaction with a prevalent mood or fashion in literature is apt to +express itself either in a fresh and independent criticism of life, or in +a reversion to older types. But, as original creative genius is not +always forthcoming, a literary revolution commonly begins with imitation. +It seeks inspiration in the past, and substitutes a new set of models as +different as possible from those which it finds currently followed. In +every country of Europe the classical tradition had hidden whatever was +most national, most individual, in its earlier culture, under a smooth, +uniform veneer. To break away from modern convention, England and +Germany, and afterward France, went back to ancient springs of national +life; not always, at first, wisely, but in obedience to a true instinct. + +How far did any knowledge or love of the old romantic literature of +England survive among the contemporaries of Dryden and Pope? It is not +hard to furnish an answer to this question. The prefaces of Dryden, the +critical treatises of Dennis, Winstanley, Oldmixon, Rymer, Langbaine, +Gildon, Shaftesbury, and many others, together with hundreds of passages +in prologues and epilogues to plays; in periodical essays like the +_Tatler_ and _Spectator_; in verse essays like Roscommon's, Mulgrave's +and Pope's; in prefaces to various editions of Shakspere and Spenser; in +letters, memoirs, etc., supply a mass of testimony to the fact that +neglect and contempt had, with a few exceptions, overtaken all English +writers who wrote before the middle of the seventeenth century. The +exceptions, of course, were those supreme masters whose genius prevailed +against every change of taste: Shakspere and Milton, and, in a less +degree, Chaucer and Spenser. Of authors strictly mediaeval, Chaucer +still had readers, and there were reprints of his works in 1687, 1721, +and 1737,[1] although no critical edition appeared until Tyrwhitt's in +1775-78. It is probable, however, that the general reader, if he read +Chaucer at all, read him in such modernized versions as Dryden's "Fables" +and Pope's "January and May." Dryden's preface has some admirable +criticism of Chaucer, although it is evident, from what he says about the +old poet's versification, that the secret of Middle English scansion and +pronunciation had already been lost. Prior and Pope, who seem to have +been attracted chiefly to the looser among the "Canterbury Tales," made +each a not very successful experiment at burlesque imitation of +Chaucerian language. + +Outside of Chaucer, and except among antiquarians and professional +scholars, there was no remembrance of the whole _corpus poetarum_ of the +English Middle Age: none of the metrical romances, rhymed chronicles, +saints' legends, miracle plays, minstrel ballads, verse homilies, manuals +of devotion, animal fables, courtly or popular allegories and love songs +of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Nor was there +any knowledge or care about the masterpieces of medieval literature in +other languages than English; about such representative works as the +"Nibelungenlied," the "Chanson de Roland," the "Roman de la Rose," the +"Parzival" of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the "Tristan" of Gottfried of +Strasburg, the "Arme Heinrich" of Harmann von Aue, the chronicles of +Villehardouin, Joinville, and Froissart, the "Morte Artus," the "Dies +Irae," the lyrics of the troubadour Bernart de Ventadour, and of the +minnesinger Walter von der Vogelweide, the Spanish Romancero, the poems +of the Elder Edda, the romances of "Amis et Amile" and "Aucassin et +Nicolete," the writings of Villon, the "De Imitatione Christi" ascribed +to Thomas a Kempis. Dante was a great name and fame, but he was virtually +unread. + +There is nothing strange about this; many of these things were still in +manuscript and in unknown tongues, Old Norse, Old French, Middle High +German, Middle English, Mediaeval Latin. It would be hazardous to assert +that the general reader, or even the educated reader, of to-day has much +more acquaintance with them at first hand than his ancestor of the +eighteenth century; or much more acquaintance than he has with +Aeschuylus, Thucydides, and Lucretius, at first hand. But it may be +confidently asserted that he knows much more _about_ them; that he thinks +them worth knowing about; and that through modern, popular versions of +them--through poems, historical romances, literary histories, essays and +what not--he has in his mind's eye a picture of the Middle Age, perhaps +as definite and fascinating as the picture of classical antiquity. That +he has so is owing to the romantic movement. For the significant +circumstance about the attitude of the last century toward the whole +medieval period was, not its ignorance, but its incuriosity. It did not +want to hear anything about it.[2] Now and then, hints Pope, an +antiquarian pedant, a university don, might affect an admiration for some +obsolete author: + + "Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learned by rote, + And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote: + One likes no language but the 'Faery Queen'; + A Scot will fight for 'Christ's Kirk o' the Green.'"[3] + +But, furthermore, the great body of Elizabethan and Stuart literature was +already obsolescent. Dramatists of the rank of Marlowe and Webster, +poets like George Herbert and Robert Herrick--favorites with our own +generation--prose authors like Sir Thomas Browne--from whom Coleridge and +Emerson drew inspiration--had fallen into "the portion of weeds and +outworn faces." Even writers of such recent, almost contemporary, repute +as Donne, whom Carew had styled + + "--a king who ruled, as he thought fit, + The universal monarch of wit": + +Or as Cowley, whom Dryden called the darling of his youth, and who was +esteemed in his own lifetime a better poet than Milton; even Donne and +Cowley had no longer a following. Pope "versified" some of Donne's +rugged satires, and Johnson quoted passages from him as examples of the +bad taste of the metaphysical poets. This in the "Life of Cowley," with +which Johnson began his "Lives of the Poets," as though Cowley was the +first of the moderns. But, + + "Who now reads Cowley?" + +asks Pope in 1737.[4] The year of the Restoration (1660) draws a sharp +line of demarcation between the old and the new. In 1675, the year after +Milton's death, his nephew, Edward Philips, published "Theatrum +Poetarum," a sort of biographical dictionary of ancient and modern +authors. In the preface, he says: "As for the antiquated and fallen into +obscurity from their former credit and reputation, they are, for the most +part, those that have written beyond the verge of the present age; for +let us look back as far as about thirty or forty years, and we shall find +a profound silence of the poets beyond that time, except of some few +dramatics." + +This testimony is the more convincing, since Philips was something of a +_laudator temporis acti_. He praises several old English poets and +sneers at several new ones, such as Cleaveland and Davenant, who were +high in favor with the royal party. He complains that nothing now +"relishes so well as what is written in the smooth style of our present +language, taken to be of late so much refined"; that "we should be so +compliant with the French custom, as to follow set fashions"; that the +imitation of Corneille has corrupted the English state; and that Dryden, +"complying with the modified and gallantish humour of the time," has, in +his heroic plays, "indulged a little too much to the French way of +continual rime." One passage, at least, in Philips' preface has been +thought to be an echo of Milton's own judgment on the pretensions of the +new school of poetry. "Wit, ingenuity, and learning in verse; even +elegancy itself, though that comes nearest, are one thing. True native +poetry is another; in which there is a certain air and spirit which +perhaps the most learned and judicious in other arts do not perfectly +apprehend, much less is it attainable by any study or industry. Nay, +though all the laws of heroic poem, all the laws of tragedy were exactly +observed, yet still this _tour entrejeant_--this poetic energy, if I may +so call it, would be required to give life to all the rest; which shines +through the roughest, most unpolished, and antiquated language, and may +haply be wanting in the most polite and reformed. Let us observe +Spenser, with all his rusty, obsolete words, with all his rough-hewn +clouterly verses; yet take him throughout, and we shall find in him a +graceful and poetic majesty. In like manner, Shakspere in spite of all +his unfiled expressions, his rambling and indigested fancies--the +laughter of the critical--yet must be confessed a poet above many that go +beyond him to literature[5] some degrees." + +The laughter of the critical! Let us pause upon the phrase, for it is a +key to the whole attitude of the Augustan mind toward "our old tragick +poet." Shakspere was already a national possession. Indeed it is only +after the Restoration that we find any clear recognition of him, as one +of the greatest--as perhaps himself the very greatest--of the dramatists +of all time. For it is only after the Restoration that criticism begins. +"Dryden," says Dr. Johnson, "may be properly considered as the father of +English criticism, as the writer who first taught us to determine, upon +principles, the merit of composition. . . Dryden's 'Essay of Dramatic +Poesy' [1667] was the first regular and valuable treatise on the art of +writing."[6] The old theater was dead and Shakspere now emerged from +amid its ruins, as the one unquestioned legacy of the Elizabethan age to +the world's literature. He was not only the favorite of the people, but +in a critical time, and a time whole canons of dramatic art were opposed +to his practice, he united the suffrages of all the authoritative leader +of literacy opinion. Pope's lines are conclusive as to the veneration in +which Shakspere's memory was held a century after his death. + + "On Avon's banks, where flowers eternal blow, + If I but ask, if any weed can grow; + One tragic sentence if I dare deride + Which Betterton's grave action dignified . . . + How will our fathers rise up in a rage, + And swear, all shame is lost in George's age."[7] + +The Shaksperian tradition is unbroken in the history of English +literature and of the English theater. His plays, in one form or +another, have always kept the stage even in the most degenerate condition +of public taste.[8] Few handsomer tributes have been paid to Shakspere's +genius than were paid in prose and verse, by the critics of our classical +age, from Dryden to Johnson. "To begin then with Shakspere," says the +former, in his "Essay of Dramatic Poesy," "he was the man who, of all +modern and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive +soul." And, in the prologue to his adaptation of "The Tempest," he +acknowledges that + + "Shakspere's magic could not copied be: + Within that circle none durst walk but he." + +"The poet of whose works I have undertaken the revision," writes Dr. +Johnson, "may now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient, and claim +the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration."[9] + + "Each change of many-colored life he drew, + Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new."[10] + +Yet Dryden made many petulant, and Johnson many fatuous mistakes about +Shakspere; while such minor criticasters as Thomas Rymer[11] and Mrs. +Charlotte Lenox[12] uttered inanities of blasphemy about the finest +touches in "Macbeth" and "Othello." For if we look closer, we notice +that everyone who bore witness to Shakspere's greatness qualified his +praise by an emphatic disapproval of his methods. He was a prodigious +genius, but a most defective artist. He was the supremest of dramatic +poets, but he did not know his business. It did not apparently occur to +anyone--except, in some degree, to Johnson--that there was an absurdity +in this contradiction; and that the real fault was not in Shakspere, but +in the standards by which he was tried. Here are the tests which +technical criticism has always been seeking to impose, and they are not +confined to the classical period only. They are used by Sidney, who took +the measure of the English buskin before Shakspere had begun to write; by +Jonson, who measured socks with him in his own day; by Matthew Arnold, +who wanted an English Academy, but in whom the academic vaccine, after so +long a transmission, worked but mildly. Shakspere violated the unities; +his plays were neither right comedies nor right tragedies; he had small +Latin and less Greek; he wanted art and sometimes sense, committing +anachronisms and Bohemian shipwrecks; wrote hastily, did not blot enough, +and failed of the grand style. He was "untaught, unpractised in a +barbarous age"; a wild, irregular child of nature, ignorant of the rules, +unacquainted with ancient models, succeeding--when he did succeed--by +happy accident and the sheer force of genius; his plays were +"roughdrawn," his plots lame, his speeches bombastic; he was guilty on +every page of "some solecism or some notorious flaw in sense."[13] + +Langbaine, to be sure, defends him against Dryden's censure. But Dennis +regrets his ignorance of poetic art and the disadvantages under which he +lay from not being conversant with the ancients. If he had known his +Sallust, he would have drawn a juster picture of Caesar; and if he had +read Horace "Ad Pisones," he would have made a better Achilles. He +complains that he makes the good and the bad perish promiscuously; and +that in "Coriolanus"--a play which Dennis "improved" for the new +stage--he represents Menenius as a buffoon and introduces the rabble in a +most undignified fashion.[14] Gildon, again, says that Shakspere must +have read Sidney's "Defence of Posey" and therefore, ought to have known +the rules and that his neglect of them was owing to laziness. "Money +seems to have been his aim more than reputation, and therefore he was +always in a hurry . . . and he thought it time thrown away, to study +regularity and order, when any confused stuff that came into his head +would do his business and fill his house."[15] + +It would be easy, but it would be tedious, to multiply proofs of this +patronizing attitude toward Shakspere. Perhaps Pope voices the general +sentiment of his school, as fairly as anyone, in the last words of his +preface.[16] "I will conclude by saying of Shakspere that, with all his +faults and with all the irregularity of his _drama_, one may look upon +his works, in comparison of those that are more finished and regular, as +upon an ancient, majestic piece of Gothic architecture compared with a +neat, modern building. The latter is more elegant and glaring, but the +former is more strong and solemn. . . It has much the greater variety, +and much the nobler apartments, though we are often conducted to them by +dark, odd and uncouth passages. Nor does the whole fail to strike us +with greater reverence, though many of the parts are childish, ill-placed +and unequal to its grandeur." This view of Shakspere continued to be the +rule until Coleridge and Schlegel taught the new century that this child +of fancy was, in reality, a profound and subtle artist, but that the +principles of his art--as is always the case with creative genius working +freely and instinctively--were learned by practice, in the concrete, +instead of being consciously thrown out by the workman himself into an +abstract _theoria_; so that they have to be discovered by a reverent +study of his work and lie deeper than the rules of French criticism. +Schlegel, whose lectures on dramatic art were translated into English in +1815, speaks with indignation of the current English misunderstanding of +Shakspere. "That foreigners, and Frenchmen in particular, who frequently +speak in the strangest language about antiquity and the Middle Age, as if +cannibalism had been first put an end in Europe by Louis XIV., should +entertain this opinion of Shakspere might be pardonable. But that +Englishmen should adopt such a calumniation . . . is to me +incomprehensible."[17] + +The beginnings of the romantic movement in England were uncertain. There +was a vague dissent from current literary estimates, a vague discontent +with reigning literary modes, especially with the merely intellectual +poetry then in vogue, which did not feed the soul. But there was, at +first, no conscious, concerted effort toward something of creative +activity. The new group of poets, partly contemporaries of Pope, partly +successors to him--Thomson, Shenstone, Dyer, Akenside, Gray, Collins, and +the Warton brothers--found their point of departure in the loving study +and revival of old authors. From what has been said of the survival of +Shakspere's influence it might be expected that his would have been the +name paramount among the pioneers of English romanticism. There are +several reasons why this was not the case. + +In the first place, the genius of the new poets was lyrical or +descriptive, rather than dramatic. The divorce between literature and +the stage had not yet, indeed, become total; and, in obedience to the +expectation that every man of letters should try his hand at +play-writing, Thomson, at least, as well as his friend and disciple +Mallet, composed a number of dramas. But these were little better than +failures even at the time; and while "The Seasons" has outlived all +changes of taste, and "The Castle of Indolence" has never wanted +admirers, tragedies like "Agamemnon" and "Sophonisba" have been long +forgotten. An imitation of Shakspere to any effective purpose must +obviously have take the shape of a play; and neither Gray nor Collins nor +Akenside, nor any of the group, was capable of a play. Inspiration of a +kind, these early romanticists did draw from Shakspere. Verbal +reminiscences of him abound in Gray. Collins was a diligent student of +his works. His "Dirge in Cymbeline" is an exquisite variation on a +Shaksperian theme. In the delirium of his last sickness, he told Warton +that he had found in an Italian novel the long-sought original of the +plot of "The Tempest." It is noteworthy, by the way, that the +romanticists were attracted to the poetic, as distinguished from the +dramatic, aspect of Shakspere's genius; to those of his plays in which +fairy lore and supernatural machinery occur, such as "The Tempest" and "A +Midsummer Night's Dream." + +Again, the stage has a history of its own, and, in so far as it was now +making progress of any kind, it was not in the direction of a more poetic +or romantic drama, but rather toward prose tragedy and the sentimental +comedy of domestic life, what the French call _la tragedie bourgeoise_ +and _la comedie larmoyante_. In truth the theater was now dying; and +though, in the comedies of Goldsmith and Sheridan, it sent up one bright, +expiring gleam, the really dramatic talent of the century had already +sought other channels in the novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. + +After all, a good enough reason why the romantic movement did not begin +with imitation of Shakspere is the fact that Shakspere is inimitable. He +has no one manner that can be caught, but a hundred manners; is not the +poet of romance, but of humanity; nor medieval, but perpetually modern +and contemporaneous in his universality. The very familiarity of his +plays, and their continuous performance, although in mangled forms, was a +reason why they could take little part in a literary revival; for what +has never been forgotten cannot be revived. To Germany and France, at a +later date, Shakspere came with the shock of a discovery and begot +Schiller and Victor Hugo. In the England of the eighteenth century he +begot only Ireland's forgeries. + +The name inscribed in large letters on the standard of the new school was +not Shakspere but Spenser. If there is any poet who is _par excellence_ +the poet of romance, whose art is the antithesis of Pope's, it is the +poet of the "Faerie Queene." To ears that had heard from childhood the +tinkle of the couplet, with its monotonously recurring rhyme, its +inevitable caesura, its narrow imprisonment of the sense, it must have +been a relief to turn to the amplitude of Spencer's stanza, "the full +strong sail of his great verse." To a generation surfeited with Pope's +rhetorical devices--antithesis, climax, anticlimax--and fatigued with the +unrelaxing brilliancy and compression of his language; the escape from +epigrams and point (snap after snap, like a pack of fire-crackers), from +a style which has made his every other line a proverb or current +quotation--the escape from all this into Spenser's serene, leisurely +manner, copious Homeric similes, and lingering detail must have seemed +most restful. To go from Pope to Spenser was to exchange platitudes, +packed away with great verbal cunning in neat formulas readily portable +by the memory, for a wealth of concrete images: to exchange saws like, + + "A little learning is a dangerous thing," + +for a succession of richly colored pictures by the greatest painter among +English poets. It was to exchange the most prosaic of our poets--a poet +about whom question has arisen whether he is a poet at all--for the most +purely poetic of our poets, "the poet's poet." And finally, it was to +exchange the world of everyday manners and artificial society for an +imaginary kingdom of enchantment, "out of space, out of time." + +English poetry has oscillated between the poles of Spenser and Pope. The +poets who have been accepted by the race as most truly national, poets +like Shakspere, Milton, and Byron, have stood midway. Neither Spenser +nor Pope satisfies long. We weary, in time, of the absence of passion +and intensity in Spenser, his lack of dramatic power, the want of +actuality in his picture of life, the want of brief energy and nerve in +his style; just as we weary of Pope's inadequate sense of beauty. But at +a time when English poetry had abandoned its true function--the +refreshment and elevation of the soul through the imagination--Spenser's +poetry, the poetry of ideal beauty, formed the most natural corrective. +Whatever its deficiencies, it was not, at any rate, "conceived and +composed in his wits." + +Spenser had not fared so well as Shakspere under the change which came +over public taste after the Restoration. The age of Elizabeth had no +literary reviews or book notices, and its critical remains are of the +scantiest. But the complimentary verses by many hands published with the +"Faerie Queene" and the numerous references to Spenser in the whole +poetic literature of the time, leave no doubt as to the fact that his +contemporaries accorded him the foremost place among English poets. The +tradition of his supremacy lasted certainly to the middle of the +seventeenth century, if not beyond. His influence is visible not only in +the work of professed disciples like Giles and Phineas Fletcher, the +pastoral poet William Browne, and Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, +but in the verse of Jonson, Fletcher, Milton, and many others. Milton +confessed to Dryden that Spenser was his "poetical father." Dryden +himself and Cowley, whose practice is so remote from Spenser's, +acknowledged their debt to him. The passage from Cowley's essay "On +Myself" is familiar: "I remember when I began to read, and to take some +pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I know not +by what accident, for she herself never read any book but of +devotion--but there was wont to lie) Spenser's works. This I happened to +fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights +and giants and monsters and brave houses which I found everywhere there +(thought my understanding had little to do with all this), and, by +degrees, with the tinkling of the rime and dance of the numbers; so that +I think I had read him all over before I was twelve years old, and was +thus made a poet as irremediably as a child is made an eunuch." It is a +commonplace that Spenser has made more poets than any other one writer. +Even Pope, whose empire he came back from Fairyland to overthrow, assured +Spence that he had read the "Faerie Queene" with delight when he was a +boy, and re-read it with equal pleasure in his last years. Indeed, it is +too readily assumed that writers are insensible to the beauties of an +opposite school. Pope was quite incapable of appreciating it. He took a +great liking to Allan Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd"; he admired "The +Seasons," and did Thomson the honor to insert a few lines of his own in +"Summer." Among his youthful parodies of old English poets is one piece +entitled "The Alley," a not over clever burlesque of the famous +description of the Bower of Bliss.[18] + +As for Dryden, his reverence for Spenser is qualified by the same sort of +critical disapprobation which we noticed in his eulogies of Shakspere. +He says that the "Faerie Queene" has no uniformity: the language is not +so obsolete as is commonly supposed, and is intelligible after some +practice; but the choice of stanza is unfortunate, though in spite of it, +Spenser's verse is more melodious than any other English poet's except +Mr. Waller's.[19] Ambrose Philips--Namby Pamby Philips--whom Thackeray +calls "a dreary idyllic cockney," appealed to "The Shepherd's Calendar" +as his model, in the introduction to his insipid "Pastorals," 1709. +Steele, in No. 540 of the _Spectator_ (November 19, 1712), printed some +mildly commendatory remarks about Spenser. Altogether it is clear that +Spenser's greatness was accepted, rather upon trust, throughout the +classical period, but that this belief was coupled with a general +indifference to his writings. Addison's lines in his "Epistle to +Sacheverel; an Account of the Greatest English Poets," 1694, probably +represent accurately enough the opinion of the majority of readers: + + "Old Spenser next, warmed with poetic rage, + In ancient tales amused a barbarous age; + An age that, yet uncultivated and rude, + Wher'er the poet's fancy led, pursued, + Through pathless fields and unfrequented floods, + To dens of dragons and enchanted woods. + But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore, + Can charm an understanding age no more. + The long-spun allegories fulsome grow, + While the dull moral lies too plain below, + We view well pleased at distance all the sights + Of arms and palfreys, battles, fields and fights, + And damsels in distress and courteous knights, + But when we look too near, the shades decay + And all the pleasing landscape fades away." + +Addison acknowledged to Spence that, when he wrote this passage, he had +never read Spenser! As late as 1754 Thomas Warton speaks of him as "this +admired but neglected poet,"[20] and Mr. Kitchin asserts that "between +1650 and 1750 there are but few notices of him, and a very few editions +of his works."[21] There was a reprint of Spenser's works--being the +third folio of the "Faerie Queene"--in 1679, but no critical edition till +1715. Meanwhile the title of a book issued in 1687 shows that Spenser +did not escape that process of "improvement" which we have seen applied +to Shakspere: "Spenser Redivivus; containing the First Book of the 'Faery +Queene.' His Essential Design Preserved, but his Obsolete Language and +Manner of Verse totally laid aside. Delivered in Heroic Numbers by a +Person of Quality." The preface praises Spenser, but declares that "his +style seems no less unintelligible at this day than the obsoletest of our +English or Saxon dialect." One instance of this deliverance into heroic +numbers must suffice: + + "By this the northern wagoner had set + His sevenfold team behind the steadfast star + That was in ocean waves yet never wet, + But firm is fixed, and sendeth light from far + To all that in the wide deep wandering are." + --_Spenser_.[22] + +In 1715 John Hughes published his edition of Spenser's works in six +volumes. This was the first attempt at a critical text of the poet, and +was accompanied with a biography, a glossary, an essay on allegorical +poetry, and some remarks on the "Faerie Queene." It is curious to find +in the engravings, from designs by Du Guernier, which illustrate Hughes' +volumes, that Spenser's knights wore the helmets and body armor of the +Roman legionaries, over which is occasionally thrown something that looks +very much like a toga. The lists in which they run a tilt have the +facade of a Greek temple for a background. The house of Busyrane is +Louis Quatorze architecture, and Amoret is chained to a renaissance +column with Corinthian capital and classical draperies. Hughes' glossary +of obsolete terms includes words which are in daily use by modern +writers: aghast, baleful, behest, bootless, carol, craven, dreary, +forlorn, foray, guerdon, plight, welkin, yore. If words like these, and +like many which Warton annotates in his "Observations," really needed +explanation, it is a striking proof, not only of the degree in which our +older poets had been forgotten, but also of the poverty to which the +vocabulary of English poetry had been reduced by 1700. + +In his prefatory remarks to the "Faerie Queene," the editor expresses the +customary regrets that the poet should have chosen so defective a stanza, +"so romantick a story," and a model, or framework for the whole, which +appears so monstrous when "examined by the rules of epick poetry"; makes +the hackneyed comparison between Spenser's work and Gothic architecture, +and apologizes for his author, on the ground that, at the time when he +wrote, "the remains of the old Gothick chivalry were not quite +abolished." "He did not much revive the curiosity of the public," says +Johnson, in his life of Hughes; "for near thirty years elapsed before his +edition was reprinted." Editions of the "Faerie Queene" came thick and +fast about the middle of the century. One (by Birch) was issued in 1751, +and three in 1758; including the important edition by Upton, who, of all +Spenser's commentators, has entered most elaborately into the +interpretation of the allegory. + +In the interval had appeared, in gradually increasing numbers, that +series of Spenserian imitations which forms an interesting department of +eighteenth-century verse. The series was begun by a most unlikely +person, Matthew Prior, whose "Ode to the Queen," 1706, was in a ten-lined +modification of Spenser's stanza and employed a few archaisms like _weet_ +and _ween_, but was very unspenserian in manner. As early as the second +decade of the century, the horns of Elfland may be heard faintly blowing +in the poems of the Rev. Samuel Croxall, the translator of Aesop's +"Fables." Mr. Gosse[23] quotes Croxall's own description of his poetry, +as designed "to set off the dry and insipid stuff" of the age with "a +whole piece of rich and glowing scarlet." His two pieces "The Vision," +1715, and "The Fair Circassian," 1720, though written in the couplet, +exhibit a rosiness of color and a luxuriance of imagery manifestly +learned from Spenser. In 1713 he had published under the pseudonym of +Nestor Ironside, "An Original Canto of Spenser," and in 1714 "Another +Original Canto," both, of course, in the stanza of the "Faerie Queene." +The example thus set was followed before the end of the century by scores +of poets, including many well-known names, like Akenside, Thomson, +Shenstone, and Thomas Warton, as well as many second-rate and third-rate +versifiers.[24] + +It is noteworthy that many, if not most, of the imitations were at first +undertaken in a spirit of burlesque; as is plain not only from the poems +themselves, but from the correspondence of Shenstone and others.[25] The +antiquated speech of an old author is in itself a challenge to the +parodist: _teste_ our modern ballad imitations. There is something +ludicrous about the very look of antique spelling, and in the sound of +words like _eftsoones_ and _perdy_; while the sign _Ye Olde Booke Store_, +in Old English text over a bookseller's door, strikes the public +invariably as a most merry conceited jest; especially if the first letter +be pronounced as a _y_, instead of, what it really is, a mere +abbreviation of _th_. But in order that this may be so, the language +travestied should not be too old. There would be nothing amusing, for +example, in a burlesque imitation of Beowulf, because the Anglo-Saxon of +the original is utterly strange to the modern reader. It is conceivable +that quick-witted Athenians of the time of Aristophanes might find +something quaint in Homer's Ionic dialect, akin to that quaintness which +we find in Chaucer; but a Grecian of to-day would need to be very Attic +indeed, to detect any provocation to mirth in the use of the genitive +in-oio, in place of the genitive in-ou. Again, as one becomes familiar +with an old author, he ceases to be conscious of his archaism: the final +_e_ in Chaucer no longer strikes him as funny, nor even the circumstance +that he speaks of little birds as _smale fowles_. And so it happened, +that poets in the eighteenth century who began with burlesque imitation +of the "Faerie Queen" soon fell in love with its serious beauties. + +The only poems in this series that have gained permanent footing in the +literature are Shenstone's "Schoolmistress" and Thomson's "Cast of +Indolence." But a brief review of several other members of the group +will be advisable. Two of them were written at Oxford in honor of the +marriage of Frederick, Prince of Wales in 1736: one by Richard Owen +Cambridge;[26] the other by William Thompson, then bachelor of arts and +afterward fellow of Queen's College. Prince Fred, it will be remembered, +was a somewhat flamboyant figure in the literary and personal gossip of +his day. He quarreled with his father, George II, who "hated boetry and +bainting," and who was ironically fed with soft dedication by Pope in his +"Epistle to Augustus"; also with his father's prime minister, Sir Robert +Walpole, "Bob, the poet's foe." He left the court in dudgeon and set up +an opposition court of his own where he rallied about him men of letters, +who had fallen into a neglect that contrasted strangely with their former +importance in the reign of Queen Anne. Frederick's chief ally in this +policy was his secretary, George Lord Lyttelton, the elegant if somewhat +amateurish author of "Dialogues of the Dead" and other works; the friend +of Fielding, the neighbor of Shenstone at Hagley, and the patron of +Thomson, for whom he obtained the sinecure post of Surveyor of the +Leeward Islands. + +Cambridge's spousal verses were in a ten-lined stanza. His "Archimage," +written in the strict Spenserian stanza, illustrates the frequent +employment of this form in occasional pieces of a humorous intention. It +describes a domestic boating party on the Thames, one of the oarsmen +being a family servant and barber-surgeon, who used to dress the +chaplain's hair: + + "Als would the blood of ancient beadsman spill, + Whose hairy scalps he hanged in a row + Around his cave, sad sight to Christian eyes, I trow." + +Thompson's experiments, on the contrary, were quite serious. He had +genuine poetic feeling, but little talent. In trying to reproduce +Spenser's richness of imagery and the soft modulation of his verse, he +succeeds only in becoming tediously ornate. His stanzas are nerveless, +though not unmusical. His college exercise, "The Nativity," 1736, is a +Christmas vision which comes to the shepherd boy Thomalin, as he is +piping on the banks of Isis. It employs the pastoral machinery, includes +a masque of virtues,--Faith, Hope, Mercy, etc.,--and closes with a +compliment to Pope's "Messiah." The preface to his "Hymn to May," has +some bearing upon our inquiries: "As Spenser is the most descriptive and +florid of all our English writers, I attempted to imitate his manner in +the following vernal poem. I have been very sparing of the antiquated +words which are too frequent in most of the imitations of this +author. . . His lines are most musically sweet, and his descriptions +most delicately abundant, even to a wantonness of painting, but still it +is the music and painting of nature. We find no ambitious ornaments or +epigrammatical turns in his writings, but a beautiful simplicity which +pleases far above the glitter of pointed wit." The "Hymn to May" is in +the seven-lined stanza of Phineas Fletcher's "Purple Island"; a poem, +says Thompson, "scarce heard of in this age, yet the best in the +allegorical way (next to 'The Fairy Queen') in the English language." + +William Wilkie, a Scotch minister and professor, of eccentric habits and +untidy appearance, published, in 1759, "A Dream: in the Manner of +Spenser," which may be mentioned here not for its own sake, but for the +evidence that it affords of a growing impatience of classical restraints. +The piece was a pendant to Wilkie's epic, the "Epigoniad." Walking by +the Tweed, the poet falls asleep and has a vision of Homer, who +reproaches him with the bareness of style in his "Epigoniad." The +dreamer puts the blame upon the critics, + + "Who tie the muses to such rigid laws + That all their songs are frivolous and poor." + +Shakspere, indeed, + + "Broke all the cobweb limits fixed by fools"; + +but the only reward of his boldness + + "Is that our dull, degenerate age of lead + Says that he wrote by chance, and that he scare could read." + +One of the earlier Spenserians was Gilbert West, the translator of +Pindar, who published, in 1739, "On the Abuse of Travelling: A Canto in +Imitation of Spenser."[27] Another imitation, "Education," appeared in +1751. West was a very tame poet, and the only quality of Spenser's which +he succeeded in catching was his prolixity. He used the allegorical +machinery of the "Faerie Queene" for moral and mildly satirical ends. +Thus, in "The Abuse of Traveling," the Red Cross Knight is induced by +Archimago to embark in a painted boat steered by Curiosity, which wafts +him over to a foreign shore where he is entertained by a bevy of light +damsels whose leader "hight Politessa," and whose blandishments the +knight resists. Thence he is conducted to a stately castle (the court of +Louis XV. whose minister--perhaps Cardinal Fleury?--is "an old and +rankled mage"); and finally to Rome, where a lady yclept Vertu holds +court in the ruins of the Colosseum, among mimes, fiddlers, pipers, +eunuchs, painters, and _ciceroni_. + +Similarly the canto on "Education" narrates how a fairy knight, while +conducting his young son to the house of Paidia, encounters the giant +Custom and worsts him in single combat. There is some humor in the +description of the stream of science into which the crowd of infant +learners are unwillingly plunged, and upon whose margin stands + + "A _birchen_ grove that, waving from the shore, + Aye cast upon the tide its falling bud + And with its bitter juice empoisoned all the flood." + +The piece is a tedious arraignment of the pedantic methods of instruction +in English schools and colleges. A passage satirizing the artificial +style of gardening will be cited later. West had a country-house at +Wickham, in Kent, where, says Johnson,[28] "he was very often visited by +Lyttelton and Pitt; who, when they were weary of faction and debates, +used at Wickham to find books and quiet, a decent table and literary +conversation. There is at Wickham, a walk made by Pitt." Like many +contemporary poets, West interested himself in landscape gardening, and +some of his shorter pieces belong to that literature of inscriptions to +which Lyttelton, Akenside, Shenstone, Mason, and others contributed so +profusely. It may be said for his Spenserian imitations that their +archaisms are unusually correct[29]--if that be any praise--a feature +which perhaps recommended them to Gray, whose scholarship in this, as in +all points, was nicely accurate. The obligation to be properly +"obsolete" in vocabulary was one that rested heavily on the consciences +of most of these Spenserian imitators. "The Squire of Dames," for +instance, by the wealthy Jew, Moses Mendez, fairly bristles with +seld-seen costly words, like _benty_, _frannion_, etc., which it would +have puzzled Spenser himself to explain. + +One of the pleasantest outcomes of this literary fashion was William +Shenstone's "Schoolmistress," published in an unfinished shape in 1737 +and, as finally completed, in 1742. This is an affectionate +half-humorous description of the little dame-school of Shenstone's--and +of everybody's--native village, and has the true idyllic touch. +Goldsmith evidently had it in memory when he drew the picture of the +school in his "Deserted Village."[30] The application to so humble a +theme of Spenser's stately verse and grave, ancient words gives a very +quaint effect. The humor of "The Schoolmistress" is genuine, not +dependent on the more burlesque, as in Pope's and Cambridge's +experiments; and it is warmed with a certain tenderness, as in the +incident of the hen with her brood of chickens, entering the open door of +the schoolhouse in search of crumbs, and of the grief of the little +sister who witnesses her brother's flogging, and of the tremors of the +urchins who have been playing in the dame's absence: + + "Forewarned, if little bird their pranks behold, + 'Twill whisper in her ear and all the scene unfold." + +But the only one among the professed scholars of Spenser who caught the +glow and splendor of the master was James Thomson. It is the privilege +of genius to be original even in its imitations. Thomson took shape and +hue from Spenser, but added something of his own, and the result has a +value quite independent of its success as a reproduction. "The Castle of +Indolence," 1748,[31] is a fine poem; at least the first part of it is, +for the second book is tiresomely allegorical, and somewhat involved in +plot. There is a magic art in the description of the "land of +drowsy-head," with its "listless climate" always "atween June and +May,"[32] its "stockdove's plaint amid the forest deep," its hillside +woods of solemn pines, its gay castles in the summer clouds, and its +murmur of the distance main. The nucleus of Thomson's conception is to +be found in Spenser's House of Morpheus ("Faerie Queene," book i. canto +i. 41), and his Country of Idlesse is itself an anticipation of +Tennyson's Lotus Land, but verse like this was something new in the +poetry of the eighteenth century: + + "Was nought around but images of rest: + Sleep-soothing groves and quiet lawns between; + And flowery beds that slumberous influence kest, + From poppies breathed; and beds of pleasant green, + Where never yet was creeping creatures seen. + + "Meantime unnumbered glittering streamlets played + And hurled everywhere their waters sheen; + That, as they bickered through the sunny glade, + Though restless still themselves, a lulling murmur made." + +"The Castle of Indolence" had the romantic iridescence, the "atmosphere" +which is lacking to the sharp contours of Augustan verse. That is to +say, it produces an effect which cannot be wholly accounted for by what +the poet says; an effect which is wrought by subtle sensations awakened +by the sound and indefinite associations evoked by the words. The secret +of this art the poet himself cannot communicate. But poetry of this kind +cannot be translated into prose--as Pope's can--any more than music can +be translated into speech, without losing its essential character. Like +Spenser, Thomson was an exquisite colorist and his art was largely +pictorial. But he has touches of an imagination which is rarer, if not +higher in kind, than anything in Spenser. The fairyland of Spenser is an +unreal, but hardly an unearthly region. He seldom startles by glimpses +behind the curtain which hangs between nature and the supernatural, as in +Milton's + + "Airy tongues that syllable men's names + On sands and shores and desert wildernesses." + +There is something of this power in one stanza, at least, of "The Castle +of Indolence:" + + "As when a shepherd of the Hebrid Isles, + Placed far amid the melancholy main + (Whether it be lone fancy him beguiles, + Or that aerial beings sometimes deign + To stand embodied to our sense plain), + The whilst in ocean Phoebus dips his wain, + A vast assembly moving to and fro, + Then all at once in air dissolves the wondrous show." + +It may be guessed that Johnson and Boswell, in their tour to the Hebrides +or Western Islands, saw nothing of the "spectral puppet play" hinted at +in this passage--the most imaginative in any of Spenser's school till we +get to Keats' + + "Magic casements opening on the foam + Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn." + +William Julius Mickle, the translator of the "Lusiad," was a more +considerable poet than any of the Spenserian imitators thus far reviewed, +with the exception of Thomson and the possible exception of Shenstone. +He wrote at least two poems that are likely to be remembered. One of +these was the ballad of "Cumnor Hall" which suggested Scott's +"Kenilworth," and came near giving its name to the novel. The other was +the dialect song of "The Mariner's Wife," which Burns admired so greatly: + + "Sae true his heart, sae smooth his speech, + His breath like caller air, + His very foot has music in't, + As he comes up the stair, + For there's nae luck about the house, + There is nae luck at a', + There's little pleasure in the house + When our gudeman's awa',"[33] + +Mickle, like Thomson, was a Scotchman who came to London to push his +literary fortunes. He received some encouragement from Lyttelton, but +was disappointed in his hopes of any substantial aid from the British +Maecenas. His biographer informs us that "about his thirteenth year, on +Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' falling accidentally in his way, he was +immediately struck with the picturesque descriptions of that much admired +ancient bard and powerfully incited to imitate his style and manner."[34] +In 1767 Mickle published "The Concubine," a Spenserian poem in two +cantos. In the preface to his second edition, 1778, in which the title +was changed to "Syr Martyn," he said that: "The fullness and wantonness +of description, the quaint simplicity, and, above all, the ludicrous, of +which the antique phraseology and manner of Spenser are so happily and +peculiarly susceptible, inclined him to esteem it not solely as the best, +but the only mode of composition adapted to his subject." + +"Syr Martyn" is a narrative poem not devoid of animation, especially +where the author forgets his Spenser. But in the second canto he feels +compelled to introduce an absurd allegory, in which the nymph Dissipation +and her henchman Self-Imposition conduct the hero to the cave of +Discontent. This is how Mickle writes when he is thinking of the "Faerie +Queene": + + + "Eke should he, freed from fous enchanter's spell, + Escape his false Duessa's magic charms, + And folly quaid, yclept an hydra fell + Receive a beauteous lady to his arms; + While bards and minstrels chaunt the soft alarms + Of gentle love, unlike his former thrall: + Eke should I sing, in courtly cunning terms, + The gallant feast, served up by seneschal, + To knights and ladies gent in painted bower or hall." + +And this is how he writes when he drops his pattern: + + "Awake, ye west winds, through the lonely dale, + And, Fancy, to thy faerie bower betake! + Even now, with balmy freshness, breathes the gale, + Dimpling with downy wing the stilly lake; + Through the pale willows faltering whispers wake, + And evening comes with locks bedropt with dew; + On Desmond's moldering turrets slowly shake + The trembling rye-grass and the harebell blue, + And ever and anon fair Mulla's plaints renew." + +A reader would be guilty of no very bad guess who should assign this +stanza--which Scott greatly admired--to one of he Spenserian passages +that prelude the "Lady of the Lake." + +But it is needless to extend this catalogue any farther. By the middle +of the century Spenserian had become so much the fashion as to provoke a +rebuke from Dr. Johnson, who prowled up and down before the temple of the +British Muses like a sort of classical watch-dog. "The imitation of +Spenser," said the _Rambler_ of May 14, 1751, "by the influence of some +men of learning and genius, seems likely to gain upon the age. . . To +imitate the fictions and sentiments of Spenser can incur no reproach, for +allegory is perhaps one of the most pleasing vehicles of instruction. +But I am very far from extending the same respect to his diction or his +stanza. His style was, in his own words and peculiarities of phrase, and +so remote from common use that Jonson boldly pronounces him _to have +written no language_. His stanza is at once difficult and unpleasing: +tiresome to the ear by its uniformity, and to the attention by its +length. . . Life is surely given us for other purposes than to gather +what our ancestors have wisely thrown away and to learn what is of no +value but because it has been forgotten."[35] In his "Life of West," +Johnson says of West's imitations of Spenser, "Such compositions are not +to be reckoned among the great achievements of intellect, because their +effect is local and temporary: they appeal not to reason or passion, but +to memory, and presuppose an accidental or artificial state of mind. An +imitation of Spenser is nothing to a reader, however acute, by whom +Spenser has never been perused." + +The critic is partly right. The nice points of a parody are lost upon a +reader unacquainted with the thing parodied. And as for serious +imitations, the more cleverly a copyist follows his copy, the less value +his work will have. The eighteenth-century Spenserians, like West, +Cambridge, and Lloyd, who stuck most closely to their pattern, oblivion +has covered. Their real service was done in reviving a taste for a +better kind of poetry than the kind in vogue, and particularly in +restoring to English verse a stanza form, which became so noble an +instrument in the hands of later poets, who used it with as much freedom +and vigor as if they had never seen the "Faerie Queene." One is seldom +reminded of Spenser while reading "Childe Harold"[36] or "Adonais" or +"The Eve of Saint Agnes"; but in reading West or Cambridge, or even in +reading Shenstone and Thomson, one is reminded of him at every turn. Yet +if it was necessary to imitate anyone, it might be answered to Dr. +Johnson that it was better to imitate Spenser than Pope. In the +imitation of Spenser lay, at least, a future, a development; while the +imitation of Pope was conducting steadily toward Darwin's "Botanic +Garden." + +It remains to notice one more document in the history of this Spenserian +revival, Thomas Warton's "Observations on the Faerie Queen," 1754. +Warton wrote with a genuine delight in his subject. His tastes were +frankly romantic. But the apologetic air which antiquarian scholars +assumed, when venturing to recommend their favorite studies to the +attention of a classically minded public, is not absent from Warton's +commentary. He writes as if he felt the pressure of an unsympathetic +atmosphere all about him. "We who live in the days of writing by rule +are apt to try every composition by those laws which we have been taught +to think the sole criterion of excellence. Critical taste is universally +diffused, and we require the same order and design which every modern +performance is expected to have, in poems where they never were regarded +or intended. . . If there be any poem whose graces please because they +are situated beyond the reach of art[37] . . . it is this. In reading +Spenser, if the critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is transported." +"In analyzing the plan and conduct of this poem, I have so far tried it +by epic rules, as to demonstrate the inconveniences and incongruities +which the poet might have avoided, had he been more studious of design +and uniformity. It is true that his romantic materials claim great +liberties; but no materials exclude order and perspicacity." Warton +assures the reader that Spenser's language is not "so difficult and +obsolete as it is generally supposed to be;" and defends him against +Hume's censure,[38] that "Homer copied true natural manners . . . but the +pencil of the English poet was employed in drawing the affectations and +conceits and fopperies of chivalry." + +Yet he began his commentary with the stock denunciations of "Gothic +ignorance and barbarity." "At the renaissance it might have been +expected that, instead of the romantic manner of poetical +composition . . . a new and more legitimate taste of writing would have +succeeded. . . But it was a long time before such a change was effected. +We find Ariosto, many years after the revival of letters, rejecting truth +for magic, and preferring the ridiculous and incoherent excursions of +Boiardo to the propriety and uniformity of the Grecian and Roman models. +Nor did the restoration of ancient learning produce any effectual or +immediate improvement in the state of criticism. Beni, one of the most +celebrated critics of the sixteenth century, was still so infatuated with +a fondness for the old Provencal vein, that he ventured to write a +regular dissertation, in which he compares Ariosto with Homer." Warton +says again, of Ariosto and the Italian renaissance poets whom Spenser +followed, "I have found no fault in general with their use of magical +machinery; notwithstanding I have so far conformed to the reigning maxims +of modern criticism as to recommend classical propriety." +Notwithstanding this prudent determination to conform, the author takes +heart in his second volume to speak out as follows about the +pseudo-classic poetry of his own age: "A poetry succeeded in which +imagination gave way to correctness, sublimity of description to delicacy +of sentiment, and majestic imagery to conceit and epigram. Poets began +now to be more attentive to words than to things and objects. The nicer +beauties of happy expression were preferred to the daring strokes of +great conception. Satire, that bane of the sublime, was imported from +France. The muses were debauched at court; and polite life and familiar +manners became their only themes." + +By the time these words were written Spenser had done his work. Color, +music, fragrance were stealing back again into English song, and +"golden-tongued romance with serene lute" stood at the door of the new +age, waiting for it to open. + + +[1] A small portion of "The Canterbury Tales." Edited by Morell. + +[2] The sixteenth [_sic. Quaere_, seventeenth?] century had an instinctive +repugnance for the crude literature of the Middle Ages, the product of so +strange and incoherent a civilization. Here classicism finds nothing but +grossness and barbarism, never suspecting that it might contain germs, +which, with time and genius, might develop into a poetical growth, +doubtless less pure, but certainly more complex in its harmonies, and of +a more expressive form of beauty. The history of our ancient poetry, +traced in a few lines by Boileau, clearly shows to what degree he either +ignored or misrepresented it. The singular, confused architecture of +Gothic cathedrals gave those who saw beauty in symmetry of line and +purity of form but further evidence of the clumsiness and perverted taste +of our ancestors. All remembrances of the great poetic works of the +Middle Ages is completely effaced. No one supposes in those barbarous +times the existence of ages classical also in their way; no one imagines +either their heroic songs or romances of adventure, either the rich +bounty of lyrical styles or the naive, touching crudity of the Christian +drama. The seventeenth century turned disdainfully away from the +monuments of national genius discovered by it; finding them sometimes +shocking in their rudeness, sometimes puerile in their refinements. +These unfortunate exhumations, indeed, only serve to strengthen its cult +for a simple, correct beauty, the models of which are found in Greece and +Rome. Why dream of penetrating the darkness of our origin? Contemporary +society is far too self-satisfied to seek distraction in the study of a +past which it does not comprehend. The subjects and heroes of domestic +history are also prohibited. Corneille is Latin, Racine is Greek; the +very name of Childebrande suffices to cover an epopee with +ridicule.--_Pellissier_, pp. 7-8. + +[3] "Epistle to Augustus." + +[4] "Epistle of Augustus." + +[5] _I.e._, learning. + +[6] "Life of Dryden." + +[7] "Epistle to Augustus." + +[8] The tradition as to Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton is almost equally +continuous. A course of what Lowell calls "penitential reading," in +Restoration criticism, will convince anyone that these four names already +stood out distinctly, as those of the four greatest English poets. See +especially Winstanley, "Lives of the English Poets," 1687; Langbaine, "An +Account of the English Dramatic Poets," 1691; Dennis, "Essay on the +Genius and Writings of Shakspere," 1712; Gildon, "The Complete Art of +Poetry," 1718. The fact mentioned by Macaulay, that Sir Wm. Temple's +"Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning" names none of the four, is without +importance. Temple refers by name to only three English "wits," Sidney, +Bacon, and Selden. This very superficial performance of Temple's was a +contribution to the futile controversy over the relative merits of the +ancients and moderns, which is now only of interest as having given +occasion to Bentley to display his great scholarship in his "Dissertation +on the Epistles of Phalaris," (1698), and to Swift to show his powers of +irony in "The Battle of the Books" (1704). + +[9] Preface to the "Plays of Shakspere," 1765. + + +[10] Prologue, spoken by Garrick at the opening of Drury Lane Theater, +1747. + +[11] "The Tragedies of the Last Age Considered and Examined," 1678. + +[12] "Shakspere Illustrated," 1753. + +[13] See Dryden's "Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy" and "Defence of the +Epilogue to the Conquest of Granada." + +[14] "Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakspere," 1712. + +[15] "The Art of Poetry," pp. 63 and 99. _Cf_. Pope, "Epistle to +Augustus": + + "Shakspere (whom you and every play-house bill + Style the divine, the matchless, what you will) + For gain, not glory, winged his roving flight, + And grew immortal in his own despite." + +[16] Pope's "Shakspere," 1725. + +[17] For a fuller discussion of this subject, consult "A History of +Opinion on the Writings of Shakspere," in the supplemental volume of +Knight's Pictorial Edition. Editions of Shakspere issued within a +century following the Restoration were the third Folio, 1664; the fourth +Folio, 1685; Rowe's (the first critical edition, with a Life, etc.) 1709 +(second edition, 1714); Pope's, 1725 (second edition, 1728); Theobald's, +1733; Hanmer's 1744; Warburton-Pope's, 1747; and Johnson's 1765. +Meanwhile, though Shakspere's plays continued to be acted, it was mostly +in doctored versions. Tate changed "Lear" to a comedy. Davenant and +Dryden made over "The Tempest" into "The Enchanted Island," turning blank +verse into rhyme and introducing new characters, while Shadwell altered +it into an opera. Dryden rewrote "Troilus and Cressida"; Davenant, +"Macbeth." Davenant patched together a thing which he called "The Law +against Lovers," from "Measure for Measure" and "Much Ado about Nothing." +Dennis remodeled the "Merry Wives of Windsor" as "The Comical Gallant"; +Tate, "Richard II." as "The Sicilian Usurper"; and Otway, "Romeo and +Juliet," as "Caius Marius." Lord Lansdowne converted "The Merchant of +Venice" into "The Jew of Venice," wherein Shylock was played as a comic +character down to the time of Macklin and Kean. Durfey tinkered +"Cymbeline." Cibber metamorphosed "King John" into "Papal Tyranny," and +his version was acted till Macready's time. Cibber's stage version of +"Richard III." is played still. Cumberland "engrafted" new features upon +"Timon of Athens" for Garrick's theater, about 1775. In his life of Mrs. +Siddons, Campbell says that "Coriolanus" "was never acted genuinely from +the year 1660 till the year 1820" (Phillimore's "Life of Lyttelton," Vol. +I. p. 315). He mentions a revision by Tate, another by Dennis ("The +Invader of his Country"), and a third brought out by the elder Sheridan +in 1764, at Covent Garden, and put together from Shakspere's tragedy and +an independent play of the same name by Thomson. "Then in 1789 came the +Kemble edition in which . . . much of Thomson's absurdity is still +preserved." + +[18] "Faerie Queene," II. xii. 71 + +[19] "Essay on Satire." Philips says a good word for the Spenserian +stanza: "How much more stately and majestic in epic poems, especially of +heroic argument, Spenser's stanza . . . is above the way either of +couplet or alternation of four verses only, I am persuaded, were it +revived, would soon be acknowledged."--_Theatrum Poetatarum_, Preface, +pp. 3-4. + +[20] "Observations on the Faery Queene," Vol. II. p. 317. + +[21] "The Faery Queene," Book I., Oxford, 1869. Introduction, p. xx. + +[22] "Canto" ii. stanza i. + + "Now had Bootes' team far passed behind + The northern star, when hours of night declined." + --_Person of Quality_ + +[23] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 139. + +[24] For a full discussion of this subject the reader should consult +Phelps' "Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement," chap. iv., "The +Spenserian Revival." A partial list of Spenserian imitations is given in +Todd's edition of Spenser, Vol. I. But the list in Prof. Phelps' +Appendix, if not exhaustive, is certainly the most complete yet published +and may be here reproduced. 1706: Prior: "Ode to the Queen." 1713-21: +Prior(?): "Colin's Mistakes." 1713 Croxall: "An Original Canto of +Spenser." 1714: Croxall: "Another Original Canto." 1730 (_circa_): +Whitehead: "Vision of Solomon," "Ode to the Honorable Charles Townsend," +"Ode to the Same." 1736: Thompson: "Epithalamium." 1736: Cambridge: +"Marriage of Frederick." 1736-37: Boyse: "The Olive," "Psalm XLII." +1737: Akenside: "The Virtuoso." 1739: West: "Abuse of Traveling." 1739: +Anon.: "A New Canto of Spenser's Fairy Queen." 1740: Boyse: "Ode to the +Marquis of Tavistock." 1741 (_circa_): Boyse: "Vision of Patience." +1742: Shenstone: "The Schoolmistress." 1742-50: Cambridge: "Archimage." +1742: Dodsley: "Pain and Patience." 1743: Anon.: "Albion's Triumph." +1744 (_circa_): Dodsley: "Death of Mr. Pope." 1744: Akenside: "Ode to +Curio." 1746: Blacklock: "Hymn to Divine Love," "Philantheus." 1747: +Mason: Stanzas in "Musaeus." 1747: Ridley: "Psyche." 1747: Lowth: +"Choice of Hercules." 1747: Upton: "A New Canto of Spenser's Fairy +Queen." 1747: Bedingfield: "Education of Achilles." 1747: Pitt: "The +Jordan." 1748: T. Warton, Sr.: "Philander." 1748: Thomson: "The Castle +of Indolence." 1749: Potter: "A Farewell Hymn to the Country." 1750: T. +Warton: "Morning." 1751: West: "Education." 1751: T. Warton: "Elegy on +the Death of Prince Frederick." 1751: Mendes: "The Seasons," 1751: +Lloyd: "Progress of Envy." 1751: Akenside: "Ode." 1751: Smith: +"Thales." 1753: T. Warton: "A Pastoral in the Manner of Spenser." 1754: +Denton: "Immortality." 1755: Arnold: "The Mirror." 1748-58: Mendez: +"Squire of Dames." 1756: Smart: "Hymn to the Supreme Being." 1757: +Thompson: "The Nativity," "Hymn to May." 1758: Akenside: "To Country +Gentlemen of England." 1759: Wilkie: "A Dream" 1759: Poem in "Ralph's +Miscellany." 1762: Denton: "House of Superstition." 1767: Mickle: "The +Concubine." 1768: Downman: "Land of the Muses." 1771-74: Beattie: "The +Ministrel." 1775: Anon.: "Land of Liberty." 1775: Mickle: Stanzas from +"Introduction to the Lusiad." + +[25] See Phelps, pp. 66-68. + +[26] See the sumptuous edition of Cambridge's "Works," issued by his son +in 1803. + +[27] "Mr. Walpole and I have frequently wondered you should never mention +a certain imitation of Spenser, published last year by a namesake of +yours, with which we are all enraptured and enmarvelled."--_Letter form +Gray to Richard West_, Florence, July 16, 1740. There was no +relationship between Gilbert West and Gray's Eton friend, though it seems +that the former was also an Etonian, and was afterwards at Oxford, +"whence he was seduced to a more airy mode of life," says Dr. Johnson, +"by a commission in a troop of horse, procured him by his uncle." +Cambridge, however, was an acquaintance of Gray, Walpole, and Richard +West, at Eton. Gray's solitary sonnet was composed upon the death of +Richard West in 1742; and it is worth noting that the introduction to +Cambridge's works are a number of sonnets by his friend Thomas Edwards, +himself a Spenser lover, whose "sugared sonnets among his private +friends" begin about 1750 and reach the number of fifty. + +[28] "Life of West." + +[29] Lloyd, in "The Progress of Envy," defines _wimpled_ as "hung down"; +and Akenside, in "The Virtuoso," employs the ending _en_ for the singular +verb! + +[30] Cf. "And as they looked, they found their horror grew." + --Shenstone. + + "And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew." + --Goldsmith. + + "The noises intermixed, which thence resound, + Do learning's little tenement betray." + --Shenstone. + + "There in his noisy mansion, skilled to rule." etc. + --Goldsmith. + +[31] The poem was projected, and perhaps partly written, fourteen or +fifteen years earlier. + +[32] _Cf_. Tennyson's "land in which it seemed always afternoon."--_The +Lotus Eaters_. + +[33] Mickle's authorship of this song has been disputed in favor of one +Jean Adams, a poor Scotch school-mistress, whose poems were printed at +Glasgow in 1734. + +[34] Rev. John Sim's "Life of Mickle" in "Mickle's Poetical Works," 1806, +p. xi. + +[35] _Cf._ Joseph Warton's "Essay on Pope," Vol. II. p. 35. "It has been +fashionable of late to imitate Spenser; but the likeness of most of these +copies hath consisted rather in using a few of his ancient expressions +than in catching his real manner. Some, however, have been executed with +happiness, and with attention to that simplicity, that tenderness of +sentiment and those little touches of nature that constitute Spenser's +character. I have a peculiar pleasure in mentioning two of them, 'The +Schoolmistress' by Mr. Shenstone, and 'The Education of Achilles' by Mr. +Bedingfield. And also, Dr. Beattie's charming 'Minstrel.' To these must +be added that exquisite piece of wild and romantic imagery, Thomson's +'Castle of Indolence.'" + +[36] Byron, to be sure, began his first canto with conscious Spenserian. +He called his poem a "romaunt," and his valet, poor Fletcher, a "stanch +yeoman," and peppered his stanzas thinly with _sooths_ and _wights_ and_ +whiloms_, but he gave over this affectation in the later cantos and made +no further excursions into the Middle Ages. + +[37] Pope's, "Snatch a grace beyond the reach of art." + --_Essay on Criticism_. + +[38] "History of England," Vol. II. p. 739. + + + + +CHAPTER IV. + +The Landscape Poets + +There is nothing necessarily romantic in literature that concerns itself +with rural life or natural scenery. Yet we may accept, with some +qualification, the truth of Professor McClintock's statement, that the +"beginning and presence of a creative, romantic movement is almost always +shown by the love, study, and interpretation of physical nature."[1] Why +this should be true, at all events of the romantic movement that began in +the eighteenth century, is obvious enough. Ruskin and Leslie Stephen +have already been quoted, as witnesses to the fact that naturalism and +romanticism had a common root: the desire, namely, to escape into the +fresh air and into freer conditions, from a literature which dealt, in a +strictly regulated way, with the indoor life of a highly artificial +society. The pastoral had ceased to furnish any relief. Professing to +chant the praises of innocence and simplicity, it had become itself +utterly unreal and conventional, in the hands of cockneys like Philips +and Pope. When the romantic spirit took possession of the poetry of +nature, it manifested itself in a passion for wildness, grandeur, +solitude. Of this there was as yet comparatively little even in the +verse of Thomson, Shenstone, Akenside, and Dyer. + +Still the work of these pioneers in the "return to nature" represents the +transition, and must be taken into account in any complete history of the +romantic movement. The first two, as we have seen, were among the +earliest Spenserians: Dyer was a landscape painter, as well as a poet; +and Shenstone was one of the best of landscape gardeners. But it is the +beginnings that are important. It will be needless to pursue the history +of nature poetry into its later developments; needless to review the +writings of Cowper and Crabbe, for example,--neither of whom was romantic +in any sense,--or even of Wordsworth, the spirit of whose art, as a +whole, was far from romantic. + +Before taking up the writers above named, one by one, it will be well to +notice the general change in the forms of verse, which was an outward +sign of the revolution in poetic feeling. The imitation of Spenser was +only one instance of a readiness to lay aside the heroic couplet in favor +of other kinds which it had displaced, and in the interests of greater +variety. "During the twenty-five years," says Mr. Goss, "from the +publication of Thomson's 'Spring' ['Winter'] in 1726, to that of Gray's +'Elegy' in 1751, the nine or ten leading poems or collections of verse +which appeared were all of a new type; somber, as a rule, certainly +stately, romantic in tone to the extreme, prepared to return, ignorantly +indeed, but with respect, to what was 'Gothic' in manners, architecture, +and language; all showing a more or less vague aspiration towards the +nature, and not one composed in the heroic couplet hitherto so vigorously +imposed on serious verse. 'The Seasons,' 'Night Thoughts' and 'The +Grave' are written in blank verse: 'The Castle of Indolence' and 'The +Schoolmistress' in Spenserian stanza; 'The Spleen' and 'Grongar Hill' in +octosyllabics, while the early odes of Gray and those of Collins are +composed in a great variety of simple but novel lyric measures."[2] + +The only important writer who had employed blank verse in undramatic +poetry between the publication of "Paradise Regained" in 1672, and +Thomson's "Winter" in 1726, was John Philips. In the brief prefatory +note to "Paradise Lost," the poet of "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," +forgetting or disdaining the graces of his youthful muse, had spoken of +rhyme as "the invention of a barbarous age," as "a thing trivial and of +no true musical delight." Milton's example, of course, could not fail to +give dignity and authority to the majestic rhythm that he had used; and +Philips' mock-heroic "The Splendid Shilling" (1701), his occasional +piece, "Blenheim" (1705), and his Georgic "Cyder" (1706), were all avowed +imitation of Milton. But the well-nigh solitary character of Philips' +experiments was recognized by Thomson, in his allusion to the last-named +poem: + + "Philips, Pomona's bard, the second thou + Who nobly durst, in rime-unfettered verse, + With British freedom sing the British song."[3] + +In speaking of Philips' imitations of Milton, Johnson said that if the +latter "had written after the improvements made by Dryden, it is +reasonable to believe he would have admitted a more pleasing modulation +of numbers into his work."[4] Johnson hated Adam Smith, but when Boswell +mentioned that Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow University, +had given the preference to rhyme over blank verse, the doctor exclaimed, +"Sir, I was once in company with Smith and we did not take to each other; +but had I known that he loved rhyme as much as you tell me he does, I +should have hugged him." + +In 1725 James Thomson, a young Scotchman, came to London to push his +literary fortunes. His countryman, David Malloch,--or Mallet, as he +called himself in England,--at that time private tutor in the family of +the Duke of Montrose, procured Thomson introductions into titled society, +and helped him to bring out "Winter," the first installment of "The +Seasons," which was published in 1726. Thomson's friend and biographer +(1762) the Rev. Patrick Murdoch, says that the poem was "no sooner read +than universally admired; those only excepted who had not been used to +feel, or to look for anything in poetry beyond a _point_ of satirical or +epigrammatic wit, a smart antithesis richly trimmed with rhyme." This is +a palpable hit at the stronger contrast than between Thomson and Pope, +not alone in subject and feeling, but in diction and verse. Thomson's +style is florid and luxuriant, his numbers flowing and diffuse, while +Pope had wonted the English ear to the extreme of compression in both +language and meter. Pope is among the most quotable of poets, while +Thomson's long poem, in spite of its enduring popularity, has contributed +but a single phrase to the stock of current quotation: + + "To teach the young idea how to shoot." + +"Winter" was followed by "Summer" in 1727, "Spring" in 1728, and the +completed "Seasons" in 1730. Thomson made many changes and additions in +subsequent editions. The original "Seasons" contained only 3902 lines +(exclusive of the "Hymn"), while the author's final revision of 1746 gave +5413. One proof that "The Seasons" was the work of a fresh and +independent genius is afforded by the many imitations to which it soon +gave birth. In Germany, a passage from Brockes' translation (1745) was +set to music by Haydn. J. P. Uz (1742) and Wieland each produced a +"Fruehling," in Thomson's manner; but the most distinguished of his German +disciples was Ewald Christian von Kleist, whose "Fruhling" (1749) was a +description of a country walk in spring, in 460 hexameter lines, +accompanied, as in Thomson's "Hymn," with a kind of "Gloria in excelsis," +to the creator of nature. "The Seasons" was translated into French by +Madame Bontemps in 1759, and called forth, among other imitations, "Les +Saisons" of Saint Lambert, 1769 (revised and extended in 1771.) In +England, Thomson's influence naturally manifested itself less in direct +imitations of the scheme of his poem than in the contagion of his manner, +which pervades the work of many succeeding poets, such as Akenside, +Armstrong, Dyer, Somerville and Mallet. "There was hardly one verse +writer of any eminence," says Gosse,[5] "from 1725-50, who was not in +some manner guided or biased by Thomson, whose genius is to this day +fertile in English literature." + +We have grown so accustomed to a more intimate treatment and a more +spiritual interpretation of nature, that we are perhaps too apt to +undervalue Thomson's simple descriptive or pictorial method. Compared +with Wordsworth's mysticism, with Shelley's passionate pantheism, with +Byron's romantic gloom in presence of the mountains and the sea, with +Keats' joyous re-creation of mythology, with Thoreau's Indian-like +approach to the innermost arcana--with a dozen other moods familiar to +the modern mind--it seems to us unimaginative. Thomson has been likened, +as a colorist, to Rubens; and possibly the glow, the breadth, and the +vital energy of his best passages, as of Rubens' great canvases, leave +our finer perceptions untouched, and we ask for something more esoteric, +more intense. Still there are permanent and solid qualities in Thomson's +landscape art, which can give delight even now to an unspoiled taste. To +a reader of his own generation, "The Seasons" must have come as the +revelation of a fresh world of beauty. Such passages as those which +describe the first spring showers, the thunderstorm in summer, the +trout-fishing, the sheep-washing, and the terrors of the winter night, +were not only strange to the public of that day, but were new in English +poetry. + +That the poet was something of a naturalist, who wrote lovingly and with +his "eye upon the object," is evident from a hundred touches, like +"auriculas with shining meal"; + + "The yellow wall-flower stained with iron brown;" + +or, + + "The bittern knows his time, with bill engulfed, + To shake the sounding marsh."[6] + +Thomson's scenery was genuine. His images of external nature are never +false and seldom vague, like Pope's. In a letter to Lyttelton,[7] he +speaks of "the Muses of the great simple country, not the little +fine-lady Muses of Richmond Hill." His delineations, if less sharp and +finished in detail than Cowper's, have greater breadth. Coleridge's +comparison of the two poets is well known: "The love of nature seems to +have led Thomson to a cheerful religion, and a gloomy religion to have +led Cowper to a love of nature. . . In chastity of diction and the +harmony of blank verse, Cowper leaves Thomson immeasurably below him; yet +I still feel the latter to have been the born poet." + +The geologist Hugh Miller, who visited Lyttelton's country seat at Hagley +in 1845, describes the famous landscape which Thomson had painted in +"Spring": + + "Meantime you gain the height from whose fair brow + The bursting prospect spreads immense around, + And, snatched o'er hill and dale and wood and lawn, + And verdant field and darkening heath between, + And villages embosomed soft in trees, + And spiry town, by surging columns marked + Of household smoke, your eye extensive roams. . . + To where the broken landscape, by degrees + Ascending, roughens into rigid hills, + O'er which the Cambrian mountains, like far clouds, + That skirt the blue horizon, dusky rise." + +"That entire prospect," says Miller,[8]--"one of the finest in England, +and eminently characteristic of what is best in English scenery--enabled +me to understand what I had used to deem a peculiarity--in some measure a +defect--in the landscapes of the poet Thomson. It must have often struck +the Scotch reader that, in dealing with very extended prospects, he +rather enumerates than describes. His pictures are often mere +catalogues, in which single words stand for classes of objects, and in +which the entire poetry seems to consist in an overmastering sense of +vast extent, occupied by amazing multiplicity. . . Now the prospect from +the hill at Hagley furnished me with the true explanation of this +enumerative style. Measured along the horizon, it must, on the lowest +estimate, be at least fifty miles in longitudinal extent; measured +laterally, from the spectator forwards, at least twenty. . . The real +area must rather exceed than fall short of a thousand square miles: the +fields into which it is laid out are small, scarcely averaging a square +furlong in superficies. . . With these there are commixed innumerable +cottages, manor-houses, villages, towns. Here the surface is dimpled by +unreckoned hollows; there fretted by uncounted mounds; all is amazing, +overpowering multiplicity--a multiplicity which neither the pen nor the +pencil can adequately express; and so description, in even the hands of a +master, sinks into mere enumeration. The picture becomes a catalogue." + +Wordsworth[9] pronounced "The Seasons" "a work of inspiration," and said +that much of it was "written from himself, and nobly from himself," but +complained that the style was vicious. Thomson's diction is, in truth, +not always worthy of his poetic feeling and panoramic power over +landscape. It is academic and often tumid and wordy, abounding in +Latinisms like _effusive_, _precipitant_, _irriguous_, _horrific_, +_turgent_, _amusive_. The lover who hides by the stream where his +mistress is bathing--that celebrated "serio-comic bathing"--is described +as "the latent Damon"; and when the poet advises against the use of worms +for trout bait, he puts it thus: + + "But let not on your hook the tortured worm + Convulsive writhe in agonizing folds," etc. + +The poets had now begun to withdraw from town and go out into the +country, but in their retirement to the sylvan shades they were +accompanied sometimes, indeed, by Milton's "mountain nymph, sweet +Liberty," but quite as frequently by Shenstone's nymph, "coy Elegance," +who kept reminding them of Vergil. + +Thomson's blank verse, although, as Coleridge says, inferior to Cowper's, +is often richly musical and with an energy unborrowed of Milton--as +Cowper's is too apt to be, at least in his translation of Homer.[10] Mr. +Saintsbury[11] detects a mannerism in the verse of "The Seasons," which +he illustrates by citing three lines with which the poet "caps the climax +of three several descriptive passages, all within the compass of half a +dozen pages," viz.: + + "And Egypt joys beneath the spreading wave." + "And Mecca saddens at the long delay." + "And Thule bellows through her utmost isles." + +It would be easy to add many other instances of this type of climacteric +line, _e.g. _("Summer," 859), + + "And Ocean trembles for his green domain." + +For the blank verse of "The Seasons" is a blank verse which has been +passed through the strainer of the heroic couplet. Though Thomson, in +the flow and continuity of his measure, offers, as has been said, the +greatest contrast to Pope's system of versification; yet wherever he +seeks to be nervous, his modulation reminds one more of Pope's +antithetical trick than of Shakspere's or Milton's freer structure. For +instance ("Spring," 1015): + + "Fills every sense and pants in every vein." + +or (_Ibid._ 1104): + + "Flames through the nerves and boils along the veins." + +To relieve the monotony of a descriptive poem, the author introduced +moralizing digressions: advice to the husbandman and the shepherd after +the manner of the "Georgics"; compliments to his patrons, like Lyttelton, +Bubb Dodington, and the Countess of Hertford; and sentimental narrative +episodes, such as the stories of Damon and Musidora,[12] and Celadon and +Amelia in "Summer," and of Lavinia and Palemon[13] in "Autumn"; while +ever and anon his eye extensive roamed over the phenomena of nature in +foreign climes, the arctic night, the tropic summer, etc. Wordsworth +asserts that these sentimental passages "are the parts of the work which +were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general +notice."[14] They strike us now as insipid enough. But many coming +attitudes cast their shadows before across the page of "The Seasons." +Thomson's denunciation of the slave trade, and of cruelty to animals, +especially the caging of birds and the coursing of hares; his preference +of country to town; his rhapsodies on domestic love and the innocence of +the Golden Age; his contrast between the misery of the poor and the +heartless luxury of the rich; all these features of the poem foretoken +the sentimentalism of Sterne and Goldsmith, and the humanitarianism of +Cowper and Burns. They anticipate, in particular, that half affected +itch of simplicity which titillated the sensibilities of a corrupt and +artificial society in the writings of Rousseau and the idyllic pictures +of Bernardin de St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia." Thomson went so far in +this vein as to decry the use of animal food in a passage which recalls +Goldsmith's stanza:[15] + + "No flocks that range the valley free + To slaughter I condemn: + Taught by the power that pities me, + I learn to pity them." + +This sort of thing was in the air. Pope was not a sentimental person, +yet even Pope had written + + "The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, + Had he thy reason, would he skip and play? + Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food. + And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood."[16] + +It does not appear that Thomson was personally averse to a leg of mutton. +His denunciations of luxury, and his praise of early rising[17] and cold +bathing[18] sound rather hollow from the lips of a bard--"more fat than +bard beseems"-who used to lie abed till noon, and who, as Savage told +Johnson, "was perhaps never in cold water in his life." Johnson reports, +not without some spice of malice, that the Countess of Hertford, "whose +practice it was to invite every summer some poet into the country, to +hear her verses and assist her studies," extended this courtesy to +Thomson, "who took more delight in carousing with Lord Hertford and his +friends than assisting her ladyship's poetical operations, and therefore +never received another summons."[19] + +The romantic note is not absent from "The Seasons," but it is not +prominent. Thomson's theme was the changes of the year as they affect +the English landscape, a soft, cultivated landscape of lawns, gardens, +fields, orchards, sheep-walks, and forest preserves. Only now and then +that attraction toward the savage, the awful, the mysterious, the +primitive, which marks the romantic mood in naturalistic poetry, shows +itself in touches like these. + + "High from the summit of a craggy cliff, + Hung o'er the deep, such as amazing frowns + On utmost Kilda's shore, whose lonely race + Reigns the setting sun to Indian worlds."[20] + + "Or where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls, + Boils round the naked, melancholy isles + Of farthest Thule, and the Atlantic surge + Pours in among the stormy Hebrides."[21] + +Compare also the description of the thunderstorm in the mountains +("Summer," 1156-68), closing with the lines: + + "Far seen the heights of heathy Cheviot blaze, + And Thule bellows through her utmost isles." + +The Western Islands appear to have had a peculiar fascination for +Thomson. The passages above quoted, and the stanza from "The Castle of +Indolence," cited on page 94, gave Collins the clew for his "Ode on the +Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands," which contained, says Lowell, +the whole romantic school in the germ. Thomason had perhaps found the +embryon atom in Milton's "stormy Hebrides," in "Lycidas," whose echo is +prolonged in Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper"-- + + "Breaking the silence of the seas + Among the farthest Hebrides." + +Even Pope--he had a soul--was not unsensitive to this, as witness his + + "Loud as the wolves, on Orcas' stormy steep, + Howl to the roarings of the Northern deep."[22] + +The melancholy which Victor Hugo pronounces a distinguishing badge of +romantic art, and which we shall see gaining more and more upon English +poetry as the century advanced, is also discernible in "The Seasons" in a +passage like the following: + + "O bear me then to vast embowering shades, + To twilight groves and visionary vales, + To weeping grottos and prophetic glooms; + Where angel-forms athwart the solemn dusk + Tremendous sweep, or seem to sweep along; + And voices more than human, through the void, + Deep-sounding, seize the enthusiastic ear;"[23] + +or this, which recalls "Il Penseroso": + + "Now all amid the rigors of the year, + In the wild depth of winter, while without + The ceaseless winds blow ice, be my retreat + Between the groaning forest and the shore, + Beat by the boundless multitude of waves, + A rural, sheltered, solitary scene; + Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join + To cheer the gloom. There studious let me sit + And hold high converse with the mighty dead."[24] + +The revival again, of the preternatural and of popular superstitions as +literary material, after a rationalizing and skeptical age, is signalized +by such a passage as this: + + "Onward they pass, o'er many a panting height, + And valley sunk and unfrequented, where + At fall of eve the fairy people throng, + In various game and revelry to pass + The summer night, as village stories tell. + But far around they wander from the grave + Of him whom his ungentle fortune urged + Against his own sad breast to life the hand + Of impious violence. The lonely tower + Is also shunned, whose mournful chambers hold, + So night-struck fancy dreams, the yelling ghost." + +It may not be uninstructive to note the occurrence of the word _romantic_ +at several points in the poem: + + "glimmering shades and sympathetic glooms, + Where the dim umbrage o'er the falling stream + Romantic hangs."[25] + +This is from a passage in which romantic love once more comes back into +poetry, after its long eclipse; and in which the lover is depicted as +wandering abroad at "pensive dusk," or by moonlight, through groves and +along brooksides.[26] The word is applied likewise to clouds, "rolled +into romantic shapes, the dream of waking fancy"; and to the scenery of +Scotland--"Caledonia in romantic view." In a subtler way, the feeling of +such lines as these is romantic: + + "Breathe your still song into the reaper's heart, + As home he goes beneath the joyous moon;" + +or these, of the comparative lightness of the summer night: + + "A faint, erroneous ray, + Glanced from the imperfect surfaces of things, + Flings half an image on the straining eye." + +In a letter to Stonehewer (June 29, 1760), Gray comments thus upon a +passage from Ossian: + + "'Ghosts ride on the tempest to-night: + Sweet is their voice between the gusts of wind: + _Their songs are of other worlds._' + +"Did you never observe (_while rocking winds are piping loud_) that pause, +as the gust is re-collecting itself, and rising upon the ear in a shrill +and plaintive note, like the soul of an Aeolian harp? I do assure you, +there is nothing in the world so like the voice of a spirit. Thomson had +an ear sometimes; he was not deaf to this, and has described it +gloriously, but given it another, different turn, and of more horror. I +cannot repeat the lines: it is in his 'Winter.'" The lines that Gray had +in mind were probably these (191-94): + + "Then, too, they say, through all the burdened air, + Long groans are heard, shrill sounds and distant sighs + That, uttered by the demon of the night, + Warn the devoted wretch of woe and death." + +Thomson appears to have been a sweet-tempered, indolent man, constant in +friendship and much loved by his friends. He had a little house and +grounds in Kew Lane where he used to compose poetry on autumn nights and +loved to listen to the nightingales in Richmond Garden; and where, sang +Collins, in his ode on the poet's death (1748), + + "Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore, + When Thames in summer wreaths is drest, + And oft suspend the dashing oar + To bid his gentle spirit rest." + +Collins had been attracted to Richmond by Thomson's residence there, and +forsook the neighborhood after his friend's death. + +Joseph Warton, in his "Essay on Pope" (1756), testified that "The +Seasons" had been "very instrumental in diffusing a taste for the +beauties of nature and landscape." One evidence of this diffused taste +was the rise of the new or natural school of landscape gardening. This +was a purely English art, and Gray, writing in 1763,[27] says "It is not +forty years since the art was born among us; and it is sure that there +was nothing in Europe like it": he adds that "our skill in gardening and +laying out grounds" is "the only taste we can call our own, the only +proof of our original talent in matter of pleasure." "Neither Italy nor +France have ever had the least notion of it, nor yet do at all comprehend +it, when they see it."[28] Gray's "not forty years" carries us back with +sufficient precision to the date of "The Seasons" (1726-30), and it is +not perhaps giving undue credit to Thomson, to acknowledge him as, in a +great measure, the father of the national school of landscape gardening. +That this has always been recognized upon the Continent as an art of +English invention, is evidenced by the names _Englische Garten_, _jardin +Anglais_, still given in Germany and France to pleasure grounds laid out +in the natural taste.[29] Schopenhauer gives the philosophy of the +opposing styles as follows: "The great distinction between the English +and the old French garden rests, in the last analysis, upon this, viz., +that the former are laid out in the objective, the latter in the +subjective sense, that is to say, in the former the will of Nature, as it +manifests (_objektivirt_) itself in tree, mountain, and water, is brought +to the purest possible expression of its ideas, _i.e._, of its own being. +In the French gardens, on the other hand, there is reflected only the +will of the owner who has subdued Nature, so that, instead of her own +ideas, she wears as tokens of her slavery, the forms which he has forced +upon her-clipped hedges, trees cut into all manner of shapes, straight +alleys, arched walks, etc." + +It would be unfair to hold the false taste of Pope's generation +responsible for that formal style of gardening which prevailed when "The +Seasons" was written. The old-fashioned Italian or French or Dutch +garden--as it was variously called--antedated the Augustan era, which +simply inherited it from the seventeenth century. In Bacon's essay on +gardens, as well as in the essays on the same subject by Cowley and Sir +William Temple, the ideal pleasure ground is very much like that which Le +Notre realized so brilliantly at Versailles.[30] Addison, in fact, in +the _Spectator_ (No. 414) and Pope himself in the _Guardian_ (No. 173) +ridiculed the excesses of the reigning mode, and Pope attacked them again +in his description of Timon's Villa in the "Epistle to the Earl of +Burlington" (1731), which was thought to be meant for Canons, the seat of +the Duke of Chandos. + + "His gardens next your admiration call, + On every side you look, behold the wall! + No pleasing intricacies intervene, + No artful wildness to perplex the scene; + Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother, + And half the platform just reflects the other. + The suffering eye inverted nature sees, + Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees; + With here a fountain, never to be played; + And there a summer house, that knows no shade; + Here Amphitrite sails through myrtle bowers; + There gladiators fight, or die in flowers; + Unwatered see the drooping sea-horse mourn, + And swallows roost in Nilus' dusty urn." + +Still the criticism is not merely fanciful which discovers an analogy +between the French garden, with its trim regularity and artificial +smoothness, and the couplets which Pope wrote: just such an analogy as +exists between the whole classical school of poetry and the Italian +architecture copied from Palladio and introduced in England by Inigo +Jones and Christopher Wren. Grounds were laid out in rectangular plots, +bordered by straight alleys, sometimes paved with vari-colored sand, and +edged with formal hedges of box and holly. The turf was inlaid with +parterres cut in geometric shapes and set, at even distances, with yew +trees clipped into cubes, cones, pyramids, spheres, sometimes into +figures of giants, birds, animals, and ships--called "topiary work" +(_opus topiarium_). Terraces, fountains, bowling-greens (Fr. +_boulingrin_) statues, arcades, quincunxes, espallers, and artificial +mazes or labyrinths loaded the scene. The whole was inclosed by a wall, +which shut the garden off from the surrounding country. + +"When a Frenchman reads of the Garden of Eden," says Horace Walpole, in +his essay "On Modern Gardening" (written in 1770, published in 1785), "I +do not doubt but he concludes it was something approaching to that of +Versailles, with clipped hedges, _berceaux_ and trellis work. . . The +measured walk, the quincunx and the _etoile_ imposed their unsatisfying +sameness on every royal and noble garden. . . Many French groves seem +green chests set upon poles. . . In the garden of Marshal de Biron at +Paris, consisting of fourteen acres, every walk is buttoned on each side +by lines of flower-pots, which succeed in their seasons. When I saw it, +there were nine thousand pots of asters, or _la reine Marguerite_. . . +At Lady Orford's, at Piddletown, in Dorsetshire, there was, when my +brother married, a double enclosure of thirteen gardens, each I suppose +not much above a hundred yards square, with an enfilade of correspondent +gates; and before you arrived at these, you passed a narrow gut between +two stone terraces that rose above your head, and which were crowned by a +line of pyradmidal yews. A bowling green was all the lawn admitted in +those times: a circular lake the extent of magnificence."[31] + +Walpole names Theobalds and Nonsuch as famous examples of the old formal +style of garden; Stourhead, Hagley, and Stowe--the country seat of +Lyttelton's brother-in-law, Lord Cobham--of the new. He says that +mottoes and coats of arms were sometimes cut in yew, box, and holly. He +refers with respect to a recent work by the Rev. Thomas Whately, or +Wheatley, "Observations on Modern Gardening," 1770; and to a poem, then +and still in manuscript, but passages of which are given by Amherst,[32] +entitled "The Rise and Progress of the Present Taste in Planting Parks, +Pleasure Grounds, Gardens, etc. In a poetic epistle to Lord Viscount +Irwin," 1767. + +Gray's friend and editor, the Rev. William Mason, in his poem "The +English Garden," 1757, speaks of the French garden as already a thing of +the past. + + "O how unlike the scene my fancy forms, + Did Folly, heretofore, with Wealth conspire + To plant that formal, dull disjointed scene + Which once was called a garden! Britain still + Bears on her breast full many a hideous wound + Given by the cruel pair, when, borrowing aid + From geometric skill, they vainly strove + By line, by plummet and unfeeling shears + To form with verdure what the builder formed + With stone. . . + Hence the sidelong walls + Of shaven yew; the holly's prickly arms + Trimmed into high arcades; the tonsile box, + Wove in mosaic mode of many a curl + Around the figured carpet of the lawn. . . + The terrace mound uplifted; the long line + Deep delved of flat canal."[33] + +But now, continues the poet, Taste "exalts her voice" and + + "At the awful sound + The terrace sinks spontaneous; on the green, + Broidered with crisped knots, the tonsile yews + Wither and fall; the fountain dares no more + To fling its wasted crystal through the sky, + But pours salubrious o'er the parched lawn." + +The new school had the intolerance of reformers. The ruthless Capability +Brown and his myrmidons laid waste many a prim but lovely old garden, +with its avenues, terraces, and sun dials, the loss of which is deeply +deplored, now that the Queen Anne revival has taught us to relish the +_rococo_ beauties which Brown's imitation landscapes displaced. + +We may pause for a little upon this "English Garden" of Mason's, as an +example of that brood of didactic blank-poems, begotten of Phillips' +"Cyder" and Thomson's "Seasons," which includes Mallet's "Excursion" +(1728), Somerville's "Chase" (1734), Akenside's "Pleasures of +Imagination" (1742-44), Armstrong's "Art of Preserving Health" (1744), +Dyer's "Fleece" (1757) and Grainger's "Sugar Cane" (1764). Mason's blank +verse, like Mallet's, is closely imitative of Thomson's and the influence +of Thomson's inflated diction is here seen at its worst. The whole poem +is an object lesson on the absurdity of didactic poetry. Especially +harrowing are the author's struggles to be poetic while describing the +various kinds of fences designed to keep sheep out of his inclosures. + + "Ingrateful sure, + When such the theme, becomes the poet's task: + Yet must he try by modulation meet + Of varied cadence and selected phrase + Exact yet free, without inflation bold, + To dignify that theme." + +Accordingly he dignified his theme by speaking of a net as the +"sportsman's hempen toils," and of a gun as the + + "--fell tube + Whose iron entrails hide the sulphurous blast + Satanic engine!" + +When he names an ice-house, it is under a form of conundrum: + + "--the structure rude where Winter pounds, + In conic pit his congelations hoar, + That Summer may his tepid beverage cool + With the chill luxury." + +This species of verbiage is the earmark of all eighteenth-century poetry +and poets; not only of those who used the classic couplet, but equally of +the romanticizing group who adopted blank verse. The best of them are +not free from it, not even Gray, not even Collins; and it pervades +Wordsworth's earliest verses, his "Descriptive Sketches" and "Evening +Walk" published in 1793. But perhaps the very worst instance of it is in +Dr. Armstrong's "Economy of Love," where the ludicrous contrast between +the impropriety of the subject and the solemn pomp of the diction amounts +almost to _bouffe_. + +In emulation of "The Seasons" Mason introduced a sentimental love +story--Alcander and Nerina--into his third book. He informs his readers +(book II. 34-78) that, in the reaction against straight alleys, many +gardeners had gone to an extreme in the use of zigzag meanders; and he +recommends them to follow the natural curves of the footpaths which the +milkmaid wears across the pastures "from stile to stile," or which + + --"the scudding hare + Draws to her dew-sprent seat o'er thymy heaths." + +The prose commentary on Mason's poem, by W. Burgh,[34] asserts that the +formal style of garden had begun to give way about the commencement of +the eighteenth century, though the new fashion had but very lately +attained to its perfection. Mason mentions Pope as a champion of the +true taste,[35] but the descriptions of his famous villa at Twickenham, +with its grotto, thickets, and artificial mounds, hardly suggest to the +modern reader a very successful attempt to reproduce nature. To be sure, +Pope had only five acres to experiment with, and that parklike scenery +which distinguishes the English landscape garden requires a good deal of +room. The art is the natural growth of a country where primogeniture has +kept large estates in the hands of the nobility and landed gentry, and in +which a passion for sport has kept the nobility and gentry in the country +a great share of the year. Even Shenstone--whose place is commended by +Mason--Shenstone at the Leasowes, with his three hundred acres, felt his +little pleasance rather awkwardly dwarfed by the neighborhood of +Lyttelton's big park at Hagley. + +The general principle of the new or English school was to imitate nature; +to let trees keep their own shapes, to substitute winding walks for +straight alleys, and natural waterfalls or rapids for _jets d'eau_ in +marble basins. The plan upon which Shenstone worked is explained in his +"Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening"[36] (1764), a few sentences from +which will indicate the direction of the reform: "Landscape should +contain variety enough to form a picture upon canvas; and this is no bad +test, as I think the landscape painter is the gardener's best designer. +The eye requires a sort of balance here; but not so as to encroach upon +probable nature. A wood or hill may balance a house or obelisk; for +exactness would be displeasing. . . It is not easy to account for the +fondness of former times for straight-lined avenues to their houses; +straight-lined walks through their woods; and, in short, every kind of +straight line, where the foot has to travel over what the eye has done +before. . . To stand still and survey such avenues may afford some +slender satisfaction, through the change derived from perspective; but to +move on continually and find no change of scene in the least attendant on +our change of place, must give actual pain to a person of taste. . . I +conceived some idea of the sensation he must feel from walking but a few +minutes, immured between Lord D----'s high shorn yew hedges, which run +exactly parallel at the distance of about ten feet, and are contrived +perfectly to exclude all kind of objects whatsoever. . . The side trees +in vistas should be so circumstanced as to afford a probability that they +grew by nature. . . The shape of ground, the disposition of trees and +the figure of water must be sacred to nature; and no forms must be +allowed that make a discovery of art. . . The taste of the citizen and +of the mere peasant are in all respects the same: the former gilds his +balls, paints his stonework and statues white, plants his trees in lines +or circles, cuts his yew-trees, four-square or conic, or gives them what +he can of the resemblance of birds or bears or men; squirts up his +rivulets in _jets d'eau_; in short, admires no part of nature but her +ductility; exhibits everything that is glaring, that implies expense, or +that effects a surprise because it is unnatural. The peasant is his +admirer. . . Water should ever appear as an irregular lake or winding +stream. . . Hedges, appearing as such, are universally bad. They +discover art in nature's province." + +There is surely a correspondence between this new taste for picturesque +gardening which preferred freedom, variety, irregularity, and naturalness +to rule, monotony, uniformity, and artifice, and that new taste in +literature which discarded the couplet for blank verse, or for various +stanza forms, which left the world of society for the solitudes of +nature, and ultimately went, in search of fresh stimulus, to the remains +of the Gothic ages and the rude fragments of Norse and Celtic antiquity. + +Both Walpole and Mason speak of William Kent, the architect and landscape +painter, as influential in introducing a purer taste in the gardener's +art. Kent was a friend of Pope and a _protege_ of Lord Burlington to +whom Pope inscribed his "Epistle on the Use of Riches," already quoted +(see _ante_ p. 121), and who gave Kent a home at his country house. Kent +is said to have acknowledged that he caught his taste in gardening from +the descriptive passages in Spenser, whose poems he illustrated. Walpole +and Mason also unite in contrasting with the artificial gardening of +Milton's time the picture of Eden in "Paradise Lost:" + + "--where not nice art in curious knots, + But nature boon poured forth on hill and dale + Flowers worthy of Paradise; while all around + Umbrageous grots, and caves of cool recess, + And murmuring waters, down the slope dispersed, + Or held by fringed banks in crystal lakes. + Compose a rural seat of various hue." + +But it is worth noting that in "L'Allegro" "retired leisure," takes his +pleasure in "_trim_ gardens," while in Collins, + + "Ease and health retire + To breezy lawn or forest deep." + +Walpole says that Kent's "ruling principle was that nature abhors a +straight line." Kent "leaped the fence and saw that all nature was a +garden. He felt the delicious contrast of hill and valley, changing +imperceptibly into each other. . . and remarked how loose groves crowned +an easy eminence with happy ornament. . . The great principles on which +he worked were perspective and light and shade. . . But of all the +beauties he added to the face of this beautiful country, none surpassed +his management of water. Adieu to canals, circular basins, and cascades +tumbling down marble steps. . . The gentle stream was taught to +serpentine seemingly at its pleasure."[37] The treatment of the garden +as a part of the landscape in general was commonly accomplished by the +removal of walls, hedges, and other inclosures, and the substitution of +the ha-ha or sunken fence. It is odd that Walpole, though he speaks of +Capability Brown, makes no mention of the Leasowes, whose proprietor, +William Shenstone, the author of "The School-mistress," is one of the +most interesting of amateur gardeners. "England," says Hugh Miller, "has +produced many greater poets than Shenstone, but she never produced a +greater landscape gardener." + +At Oxford, Shenstone had signalized his natural tastes by wearing his own +hair instead of the wig then (1732) universally the fashion.[38] On +coming of age, he inherited a Shropshire farm, called the Leasowes, in +the parish of Hales Owen and an annuity of some three hundred pounds. He +was of an indolent, retiring, and somewhat melancholy temperament; and, +instead of pursuing a professional career, he settled down upon his +property and, about the year 1745, began to turn it into a _ferme ornee_. +There he wooed the rustic muse in elegy, ode, and pastoral ballad, +sounding upon the vocal reed the beauties of simplicity and the vanity of +ambition, and mingling with these strains complaints of Delia's cruelty +and of the shortness of his own purse, which hampered him seriously in +his gardening designs. Mr. Saintsbury has described Shenstone as a +master of "the artificial-natural style of poetry."[39] His pastoral +insipidities about pipes and crooks and kids, Damon and Delia, Strephon +and Chloe, excited the scorn of Dr. Johnson, who was also at no pains to +conceal his contempt for the poet's horticultural pursuits. "Whether to +plant a walk in undulating curves and to place a bench at every turn +where there is an object to catch the view; to make water run where it +will be seen; to leave intervals where the eye will be pleased, and to +thicken the plantation where there is something to be hidden, demands any +great powers of mind, I will not enquire." The doctor reports that +Lyttelton was jealous of the fame which the Leasowes soon acquired, and +that when visitors to Hagley asked to see Shenstone's place, their host +would adroitly conduct them to inconvenient points of view--introducing +them, _e.g._, at the wrong end of a walk, so as to detect a deception in +perspective, "injuries of which Shenstone would heavily complain."[40] +Graves, however, denies that any rivalry was in question between the +great domain of Hagley and the poet's little estate. "The truth of the +case," he writes, "was that the Lyttelton family went so frequently with +their company to the Leasowes, that they were unwilling to break in upon +Mr. Shenstone's retirement on every occasion, and therefore often went to +the principal points of view, without waiting for anyone to conduct them +regularly through the whole walks. Of this Mr. Shenstone would sometimes +peevishly complain." + +Shenstone describes in his "Thoughts on Gardening," several artifices +that he put in practice for increasing the apparent distance of objects, +or for lengthening the perspective of an avenue by widening it in the +foreground and planting it there with dark-foliaged trees, like yews and +firs, "then with trees more and more fady, till they end in the +almond-willow or silver osier." To have Lord Lyttelton bring in a party +at the small, or willow end of such a walk, and thereby spoil the whole +trick, must indeed have been provoking. Johnson asserts that Shenstone's +house was ruinous and that "nothing raised his indignation more than to +ask if there were any fishes in his water." "In time," continues the +doctor, "his expenses brought clamors about him that overpowered the +lamb's bleat and the linnet's song; and his groves were haunted by beings +very different from fawns and fairies;" to wit, bailiffs; but Graves +denies this. + +The fame of the Leasowes attracted visitors from all parts of the +country--literary men like Spence, Home, and Dodsley; picturesque +tourists, who came out of curiosity; and titled persons, who came, or +sent their gardeners, to obtain hints for laying out their grounds. +Lyttelton brought William Pitt, who was so much interested that he +offered to contribute two hundred pounds toward improvements, an offer +that Shenstone, however, declined. Pitt had himself some skill in +landscape gardening, which he exercised at Enfield Chase and afterward at +Hayes.[41] Thomson, who was Lyttelton's guest at Hagley every summer +during the last three or four years of his life, was naturally familiar +with the Leasowes. There are many references to the "sweet descriptive +bard," in Shenstone's poems[42] and a seat was inscribed to his memory in +a part of the grounds known as Vergil's Grove. "This seat," says +Dodsley, "is placed upon a steep bank on the edge of the valley, from +which the eye is here drawn down into the flat below by the light that +glimmers in front and by the sound of various cascades, by which the +winding stream is agreeably broken. Opposite to this seat the ground +rises again in an easy concave to a kind of dripping fountain, where a +small rill trickles down a rude niche of rock work through fern, +liverwort, and aquatic weeds. . . The whole scene is opaque and +gloomy."[43] + +English landscape gardening is a noble art. Its principles are sound and +of perpetual application. Yet we have advanced so much farther in the +passion for nature than the men of Shenstone's day that we are apt to be +impatient of the degree of artifice present in even the most skillful +counterfeit of the natural landscape. The poet no longer writes odes on +"Rural Elegance," nor sings + + "The transport, most allied to song, + In some fair valley's peaceful bound + To catch soft hints from Nature's tongue, + And bid Arcadia bloom around; + Whether we fringe the sloping hill, + Or smooth below the verdant mead; + Or in the horrid brambles' room + Bid careless groups of roses bloom; + Or let some sheltered lake serene + Reflect flowers, woods and spires, and brighten all the scene." + +If we cannot have the mountains, the primeval forest, or the shore of the +wild sea, we can at least have Thomson's "great simple country," subdued +to man's use but not to his pleasure. The modern mood prefers a lane to +a winding avenue, and an old orchard or stony pasture to a lawn decorated +with coppices. "I do confess," says Howitt, "that in the 'Leasowes' I +have always found so much ado about nothing; such a parade of miniature +cascades, lakes, streams conveyed hither and thither; surprises in the +disposition of woods and the turn of walks. . . that I have heartily +wished myself out upon a good rough heath." + +For the "artificial-natural" was a trait of Shenstone's gardening no less +than of his poetry. He closed every vista and emphasized every opening +in his shrubberies and every spot that commanded a prospect with come +object which was as an exclamation point on the beauty of the scene: a +rustic bench, a root-house, a Gothic alcove, a grotto, a hermitage, a +memorial urn or obelisk dedicated to Lyttelton, Thomson, Somerville,[44] +Dodsley, or some other friend. He supplied these with inscriptions +expressive of the sentiments appropriate to the spot, passages from +Vergil, or English or Latin verses of his own composition. Walpole says +that Kent went so far in his imitation of natural scenery as to plant +_dead_ trees in Kensington Garden. Walpole himself seems to approve of +such devices as artificial ruins, "a feigned steeple of a distant church +or an unreal bridge to disguise the termination of water." Shenstone was +not above these little effects: he constructed a "ruinated priory" and a +temple of Pan out of rough, unhewn stone; he put up a statue of a piping +faun, and another of the Venus dei Medici beside a vase of gold fishes. + +Some of Shenstone's inscriptions have escaped the tooth of time. The +motto, for instance, cut upon the urn consecrated to the memory of his +cousin, Miss Dolman, was prefixed by Byron to his "Elegy upon Thyrza": +"Heu quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse!" The +habit of inscription prevailed down to the time of Wordsworth, who +composed a number for the grounds of Sir George Beaumont at Coleorton. +One of Akenside's best pieces is his "Inscription for a Grotto," which is +not unworthy of Landor. Matthew Green, the author of "The Spleen," wrote +a poem of some 250 lines upon Queen Caroline's celebrated grotto in +Richmond Garden. "A grotto," says Johnson, apropos of that still more +celebrated one at Pope's Twickenham villa, "is not often the wish or +pleasure of an Englishman, who has more frequent need to solicit than +exclude the sun"; but the increasing prominence of the mossy cave and +hermit's cell, both in descriptive verse and in gardening, was +symptomatic. It was a note of the coming romanticism, and of that +pensive, elegiac strain which we shall encounter in the work of Gray, +Collins, and the Wartons. It marked the withdrawal of the muse from the +world's high places into the cool sequestered vale of life. All through +the literature of the mid-century, the high-strung ear may catch the +drip-drip of spring water down the rocky walls of the grot. + +At Hagley, halfway up the hillside, Miller saw a semi-octagonal temple +dedicated to the genius of Thomson. It stood in a grassy hollow which +commanded a vast, open prospect and was a favorite resting place of the +poet of "The Seasons." In a shady, secluded ravine he found a white +pedestal, topped by an urn which Lyttelton had inscribed to the memory of +Shenstone. This contrast of situation seemed to the tourist emblematic. +Shenstone, he says, was an egotist, and his recess, true to his +character, excludes the distant landscape. Gray, who pronounced "The +Schoolmistress" a masterpiece in its kind, made a rather slighting +mention of its author.[45] "I have read an 8vo volume of Shenstone's +letters; poor man! He was always wishing for money, for fame and other +distinctions; and his whole philosophy consisted in living, against his +will, in retirement and in a place which his taste had adorned, but which +he only enjoyed when people of note came to see and commend it." Gray +unquestionably profited by a reading of Shenstone's "Elegies," which +antedate his own "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751). He +adopted Shenstone's stanza, which Shenstone had borrowed from the love +elegies of a now forgotten poet, James Hammond, equerry to Prince +Frederick and a friend of Cobham, Lyttelton, and Chesterfield. "Why +Hammond or other writers," says Johnson, "have thought the quatrain of +ten syllables elegiac, it is difficult to tell. The character of the +elegy is gentleness and tenuity, but this stanza has been pronounced by +Dryden. . .to be the most magnificent of all the measures which our +language affords."[46] + +Next after "The Schoolmistress," the most engaging of Shenstone's poems +is his "Pastoral Ballad," written in 1743 in four parts and in a tripping +anapestic measure. Familiar to most readers is the stanza beginning: + + "I have found out a gift for my fair, + I have found where the wood-pigeons breed." + +Dr. Johnson acknowledged the prettiness of the conceit: + + "So sweetly she bade me adieu, + I thought that she bade me return;" + +and he used to quote and commend the well-known lines "Written at an Inn +at Henley: + + "Whoe'er has travell'd life's dull round, + Where'er his stages may have been, + May sigh to think he still has found + The warmest welcome at an inn." + +As to Shenstone's blank verse--of which there is not much--the doctor +says: "His blank verses, those that can read them may probably find to be +like the blank verses of his neighbors." Shenstone encouraged Percy to +publish his "Reliques." The plans for the grounds at Abbotsford were +somewhat influenced by Didsley's description of the Leasowes, which Scott +studied with great interest. + +In 1744 Mark Akenside, a north country man and educated partly in +Scotland, published his "Pleasures of Imagination," afterwards rewritten +as "The Pleasures of the Imagination" and spoiled in the process. The +title and something of the course of thought in the poem were taken from +Addison's series of papers on the subject (_Spectator_, Nos. 411-421). +Akenside was a man of learning and a physician of distinction. His poem, +printed when he was only twenty-three, enjoyed a popularity now rather +hard to account for. Gray complained of its obscurity and said it was +issued nine years too early, but admitted that now and then it rose "even +to the best, particularly in description." Akenside was harsh, formal, +and dogmatic, as a man. Smollett caricatured him in "Peregrine Pickle." +Johnson hated his Whig principles and represents him, when settled at +Northampton, as "having deafened the place with clamors for liberty."[47] +He furthermore disliked the class of poetry to which Akenside's work +belonged, and he told Boswell that he couldn't read it. Still he speaks +of him with a certain cautious respect, which seems rather a concession +to contemporary opinion than an appreciation of the critic's own. He +even acknowledges that Akenside has "few artifices of disgust than most +of his brethren of the blank song." Lowell says that the very title of +Akenside's poem pointed "away from the level highway of commonplace to +mountain paths and less dogmatic prospects. The poem was stiff and +unwilling, but in its loins lay the seed of nobler births. Without it, +the 'Lines Written at Tintern Abbey' might never have been." + +One cannot read "The Pleasures of Imagination" without becoming sensible +that the writer was possessed of poetic feeling, and feeling of a kind +that we generally agree to call romantic. His doctrine at least, if not +his practice, was in harmony with the fresh impulse which was coming into +English poetry. Thus he celebrates heaven-born genius and the +inspiration of nature, and decries "the critic-verse" and the effort to +scale Parnassus "by dull obedience." He invokes the peculiar muse of the +new school: + + "Indulgent _Fancy_, from the fruitful banks + Of Avon, whence thy rosy fingers cull + Fresh flowers and dews to sprinkle on the turf + Where Shakspere lies." + +But Akenside is too abstract. In place of images, he presents the reader +with dissertations. A poem which takes imagination as its subject rather +than its method will inevitably remain, not poetry but a lecture on +poetry--a theory of beauty, not an example of it. Akenside might have +chosen for his motto Milton's lines: + + "How charming is divine philosophy! + Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, + But musical as is Apollo's lute." + +Yet he might have remembered, too, what Milton said about the duty of +poetry to be simple, sensuous, and passionate. Akenside's is nothing of +these; it is, on the contrary obscure, metaphysical, and, as a +consequence, frigid. Following Addison, he names greatness and novelty, +_i.e._, the sublime and the wonderful, as, equally with beauty, the chief +sources of imaginative pleasure, and the whole poem is a plea for what we +are now accustomed to call the ideal. In the first book there is a +passage which is fine in spirit and--though in a less degree--in +expression: + + "Who that from Alpine heights his laboring eye + Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey + Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave + Through mountains, plains, through empires black with shade. + And continents of sand, will turn his gaze + To mark the windings of a scanty rill + That murmurs at his feet? The high-born soul + Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing + Beneath its native quarry. Tired of earth + And this diurnal scene, she springs aloft + Through fields of air; pursues the flying storm; + Rides on the vollied lightning through the heavens; + Or, yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast, + Sweeps the long trace of day." + +The hint for this passage was furnished by a paragraph in Addison's +second paper (_Spectator_, 412) and the emotion is the same to which +Goethe gives utterance in the well-known lines of "Faust"; + + "Doch jedem ist es eingeboren + Dass sein Gefuehl hinauf und vorwaerts dringt," etc. + +But how greatly superior in sharpness of detail, richness of invention, +energy of movement is the German to the English poet! + +Akenside ranks among the earlier Spenserians by virtue of his "Virtuoso" +(1737) and of several odes composed in a ten-lined variation on Spenser's +stanza. A collection of his "Odes" appeared in 1745--the year before +Collins' and Joseph Warton's-and a second in 1760. They are of little +value, but show here and there traces of Milton's minor poetry and that +elegiac sentiment, common to the lyrical verse of the time, noticeable +particularly in a passage on the nightingale in Ode XV, book i;, "To the +Evening Star." "The Pleasures of Imagination" was the parent of a +numerous offspring of similarly entitled pieces, among which are Joseph +Warton's "Pleasures of Melancholy," Campbell's "Pleasures of Hope," and +Rogers' "Pleasures of Memory." + +In the same year with Thomson's "Winter" (1726) there were published in +two poetical miscellanies a pair of little descriptive pieces, "Grongar +Hill" and "The Country Walk," written by John Dyer, a young Welshman, in +the octosyllabic couplet of Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Pensoroso." +("Grongar Hill," as first printed was a sort of irregular ode with +alternate rhyming; but it was much improvised in later editions, and +rewritten throughout in couplets.) + +Dyer was a landscape painter who had been educated at Westminster school, +studied under Richardson at London, and spent some time wandering about +the mountains of Wales in the practice of his art. "Grongar Hill" is, in +fact, a pictorial poem, a sketch of the landscape seen from the top of +his favorite summit in South Wales. It is a slight piece of work, +careless and even slovenly in execution, but with an ease and lightness +of touch that contrast pleasantly with Thomson's and Akenside's +ponderosity. When Dyer wrote blank verse he slipped into the Thomsonian +diction, "cumbent sheep" and "purple groves pomaceous." But in "Grongar +Hill"--although he does call the sun Phoebus--the shorter measure seems +to bring shorter words, and he has lines of Wordsworthian simplicity-- + + "The woody valleys warm and low, + The windy summit, wild and high." + +or the closing passage, which Wordsworth alludes to in his sonnet on +Dyer--"Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill": + + "Grass and flowers Quiet treads + On the meads and mountain heads. . . + And often, by the murmuring rill, + Hears the thrush while all is still, + Within the groves of Grongar Hill." + +Wordsworth was attracted by Dyer's love of "mountain turf" and "spacious +airy downs" and "naked Snowdon's wide, aerial waste." The "power of +hills" was on him. Like Wordsworth, too, he moralized his song. In +"Grongar Hill," the ruined tower suggests the transience of human life: +the rivers running down to the sea are likened to man's career from birth +to death; and Campbell's couplet, + + "'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view + And robes the mountain in its azure hue,"[48] + +is thought to owe something to Dyer's + + "As yon summits soft and fair, + Clad in colors 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." + +Dyer went to Rome to pursue his art studies and, on his return in 1740, +published his "Ruins of Rome" in blank verse. He was not very successful +as a painter, and finally took orders, married, and settled down as a +country parson. In 1757 he published his most ambitious work, "The +Fleece," a poem in blank verse and in four books, descriptive of English +wool-growing. "The subject of 'The Fleece,' sir," pronounced Johnson, +"cannot be made poetical. How can a man write poetically of serges and +druggets?" Didactic poetry, in truth, leads too often to ludicrous +descents. Such precepts as "beware the rot," "enclose, enclose, ye +swains," and + + "-the utility of salt + Teach thy slow swains"; + +with prescriptions for the scab, and advice as to divers kinds of wool +combs, are fatal. A poem of this class has to be _made_ poetical, by +dragging in episodes and digressions which do not inhere in the subject +itself but are artificially associated with it. Of such a nature is the +loving mention--quoted in Wordsworth's sonnet--of the poet's native +Carmarthenshire + + "-that soft tract + Of Cambria, deep embayed, Dimetian land, + By green hills fenced, by Ocean's murmur lulled." + +Lowell admired the line about the Siberian exiles, met + + "On the dark level of adversity." + +Miltonic reminiscences are frequent in Dyer. Sabrina is borrowed from +"Comus"; "bosky bourn" and "soothest shepherd" from the same; "the light +fantastic toe" from "L'Allegro"; "level brine" and "nor taint-worm shall +infect the yearning herds," from "Lycidas"; "audience pure be thy +delight, though few," from "Paradise Lost." + +"Mr. Dyer," wrote Gray to Horace Walpole in 1751, "has more of poetry in +his imagination than almost any of our number; but rough and +injudicious." Akenside, who helped Dyer polish the manuscript of "The +Fleece," said that "he would regulate his opinion of the reigning taste +by the fate of Dyer's 'Fleece'; for if that were ill received, he should +not think it any longer reasonable to expect fame from excellence." The +romantic element in Dyer's imagination appears principally in his love of +the mountains and of ancient ruins. Johnson cites with approval a +sentence in "The Ruins of Rome": + + "At dead of night, + The hermit oft, midst his orisons, hears + Aghast the voice of Time disparting towers."[49] + +These were classic ruins. Perhaps the doctor's sympathy would not have +been so quickly extended to the picture of the moldering Gothic tower in +"Grongar Hill," or of "solitary Stonehenge gray with moss," in "The +Fleece." + + +[1] W. D. McClintock, "The Romantic and Classical in English Literature," +_Chautauquan_, Vol. XIV, p. 187. + +[2] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 207. + +[3] "Autumn," lines 645-47. + +[4] "Life of Philips." + +[5] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 221 + +[6] _Cf_. Chaucer: "And as a bitoure bumbleth in the mire." + --_Wyf of Bathes Tale_. + +[7] Phillimore's "Life of Lyttelton," Vol. I, p. 286. + +[8] "First Impression of England," p. 135. + +[9] Appendix to Preface to the Second Edition of "Lyrical Ballads," + +[10] There are, of course, Miltonic reminiscences in "The Seasons." The +moon's "spotted disk" ("Autumn," 1091) is Milton's "spotty globe." The +apostrophe to light ("Spring" 90-96) borrows its "efflux divine" from +Milton's "bright effluence of bright essence increate" ("Paradise Lost," +III. 1-12) And _cf._ "Autumn," 783-84: + + "--from Imaus stretcht + Athwart the roving Tartar's sullen bounds," + +with P.L., III, 431-32; and "Winter," 1005-08. + + "--moors + Beneath the shelter of an icy isle, + While night o'erwhelms the sea." + +with P.L., I. 207-208. + +[11] "Ward's English Poets," Vol. III. p. 171. + +[12] There were originally _three_ damsels in the bathing scene! + +[13] It was to this episode that Pope supplied the lines (207-14) + +"Thoughtless of beauty, she was beauty's self," etc., + +which form his solitary essay in blank verse. Thomson told Collins that +he took the first hint of "The Seasons" from the names of the +divisions--Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter--in Pope's "Pastorals." + +[14] Appendix to Preface to Second Edition of "Lyrical Ballads." + +[15] "The Hermit." + +[16] "Essay on Man," Epistle I. + +[17] "Falsely luxurious, will not man awake?" etc. + --_Summer_, 67. + +[18] "Nor, when cold winter keens the brightening flood, + Would I, weak shivering, linger on the brink." + --_Ibid._ 1259-60. + +[19] "Life of Thomson." + +[20] "Spring," 755-58. + +[21] "Autumn," 862-65. + +[22] "Epistle of Augustus." + +[23] "Autumn," 1030-37. _Cf._ Cowper's + + "O for a lodge in some vast wilderness, + Some boundless contiguity of shade!" + +[24] "Winter," 424-32. + +[25] "Spring," 1026-28. + +[26] Shakspere's "broom groves whose shade the dismist bachelor loves;" + +Fletcher's + + "Fountain heads and pathless groves, + Places which pale passion loves," + +and his + + "Moonlight walks when all the fowls + Are safely housed, save bats and owls." + +[27] Letter to Howe, September 10. + +[28] Letter to Howe, November, 1763. + +[29] Alicia Amherst ("History of Gardening in England," 1896, p. 283) +mentions a French and an Italian work, entitled respectively "Plan de +Jardins dans le gout Anglais," Copenhagen, 1798; and "Del Arte dei +Giardini Inglesi," Milan, 1801. "This passion for the imitation of +nature," says the same authority, "was part of the general reaction which +was taking place, not only in gardening but in the world of literature +and of fashion. The extremely artificial French taste had long taken the +lead in civilized Europe, and now there was an attempt to shake off the +shackles of its exaggerated formalism. The poets of the age were also +pioneers of this school of nature. Dyer, in his poem of 'Grongar Hill,' +and Thomson, in his 'Seasons,' called up pictures which the gardeners and +architects of the day strove to imitate." See in this work, for good +examples of the formal garden, the plan of Belton House, Lincoln, p. 245; +of Brome Hall, Suffolk; of the orangery and canal at Euston, p. 201; and +the scroll work patterns of turf and parterres on pp. 217-18. + +[30] In Temple's gardens at Moor Park, Hertfordshire, _e.g._, there were +terraces covered with lead. Charles II. imported some of Le Notre's +pupils and assistants, who laid out the grounds at Hampton Court in the +French taste. The maze at Hampton Court still existed in Walpole's time +(1770). + +[31] It is worth noticing that Batty Langley, the abortive restorer of +Gothic, also recommended the natural style of landscape gardening as +early as 1728 in his "New Principles of Gardening." + +[32] "History of Gardening in England." + +[33] I. 384-404. + +[34] "The Works of William Mason," in 4 vols., London, 1811. + +[35] See Pope's paper in the _Guardian_ (173) for some rather elaborate +foolery about topiary work. "All art," he maintains, "consists in the +imitation and study of nature." "We seem to make it our study to recede +from nature, not only in the various tonsure of greens into the most +regular and formal shapes, but," etc., etc. Addison, too, _Spectator_ +414, June 25, 1712, upholds "the rough, careless strokes of nature" +against "the nice touches and embellishments of art," and complains that +"our British gardeners, instead of humoring nature, love to deviate from +it as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, globes, and pyramids. +We see the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush. I do not +know whether I am singular in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs +and branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical +figure." See also _Spectator_, 477, for a pretty scheme of a garden laid +out with "the beautiful wildness of nature." Gilbert West's Spenserian +poem "Education," 1751 (see _ante_, p. 90) contains an attack, in six +stanzas, upon the geometric garden, from which I give a single stanza. + + "Alse other wonders of the sportive shears, + Fair nature mis-adorning, there were found: + Globes, spiral columns, pyramids, and piers, + With sprouting urns and budding statues crowned; + And horizontal dials on the ground, + In living box by cunning artists traced; + And gallies trim, on no long voyage bound + But by their roots there ever anchored fast, + All were their bellying sails out-spread to every blast." + +[36] "Essays on Men and Manners," Shenstone's Works, Vol. II. Dodsley's +edition. + +[37] "On Modern Gardening," Works of the Earl of Orford, London, 1798, +Vol. II. + +[38] Graves, "Recollections of Shenstone," 1788. + +[39] "Ward's English Poets," Vol. III. 271. + +[40] "Life of Shenstone." + +[41] See _ante_, p. 90, for his visits to Gilbert West at Wickham. + +[42] See especially "A Pastoral Ode," and "Verses Written toward the Close +of the Year 1748." + +[43] "A Description of the Leasowes by R. Dodsley," Shenstone's Works, +Vol. II, pp. 287-320 (3d ed.) This description is accompanied with a +map. For other descriptions consult Graves' "Recollections," Hugh +Miller's "First Impressions of England," and Wm. Howitt's "Homes of the +Poets" (1846), Vol. I. pp. 258-63. The last gives an engraving of the +house and grounds. Miller, who was at Hagley--"The British Tempe"-and +the Leasowes just a century after Shenstone began to embellish his +paternal acres, says that the Leasowes was the poet's most elaborate +poem, "the singularly ingenious composition, inscribed on an English +hillside, which employed for twenty long years the taste and genius of +Shenstone." + +[44] See "Lady Luxborough's Letters to Shenstone," 1775, for a long +correspondence about an urn which _she_ was erecting to Somerville's +memory. She was a sister of Bolingbroke, had a seat at Barrels, and +exchanged visits with Shenstone. + +[45] "Letter to Nichols," June 24, 1769. + +[46] Dryden's "Annus Mirabilis," Davenant's "Gondibert," and Sir John +Davies' "Nosce Teipsum" were written in this stanza, but the universal +currency of Gray's poem associated it for many years almost exclusively +with elegiac poetry. Shenstone's collected poems were not published till +1764, though some of them had been printed in Dodsley's "Miscellanies." +Only a few of his elegies are dated in the collected editions (Elegy +VIII, 1745; XIX, 1743; XXI, 1746), but Graves says that they were all +written before Gray's. The following lines will recall to every reader +corresponding passages in Gray's "Churchyard": + + "O foolish muses, that with zeal aspire + To deck the cold insensate shrine with bays! + + "When the free spirit quits her humble frame + To tread the skies, with radiant garlands crowned; + + "Say, will she hear the distant voice of Fame, + Or hearing, fancy sweetness in the sound?" + --_Elegy II_. + + "I saw his bier ignobly cross the plain." + --_Elegy III_. + + "No wild ambition fired their spotless breast." + --_Elegy XV_. + + "Through the dim veil of evening's dusky shade + Near some lone fane or yew's funereal green," etc. + --_Elegy IV_. + + "The glimmering twilight and the doubtful dawn + Shall see your step to these sad scenes return, + Constant as crystal dews impearl the lawn," etc. + --_Ibid_. + +[47] "Life of Akenside." + +[48] "Pleasures of Hope." + +[49] _cf._ Wordsworth's + + "Some casual shout that broke the silent air, + Or the unimaginable touch of time." + --_Mutability: Ecclesiastical Sonnets_, XXXIV. + + + + +CHAPTER V. + +The Miltonic Group + +That the influence of Milton, in the romantic revival of the eighteenth +century, should have been hardly second in importance to Spenser's is a +confirmation of our remark that Augustan literature was "classical" in a +way of its own. It is another example of that curiously topsy-turvy +condition of things in which rhyme was a mark of the classic, and blank +verse of the romantic. For Milton is the most truly classical of English +poets; and yet, from the angle of observation at which the eighteenth +century viewed him, he appeared a romantic. It was upon his romantic +side, at all events, that the new school of poets apprehended and +appropriated him. + +This side was present in Milton in a fuller measure than his completed +works would show. It is well known that he, at one time, had projected +an Arthuriad, a design which, if carried out, might have anticipated +Tennyson and so deprived us of "The Idyls of the King." "I betook me," +he writes, "among those lofty fables and romances which recount in solemn +cantos the deeds of knighthood."[1] And in the "Epitaphium Damonis" he +thus apprised the reader of his purpose: + + "Ipse ego Dardanais Rutupina per aequora puppes, + Dicam, et Pandrasidos regnum vetus Inogeniae, + Brennumque Arviragunque duces, priscumque Belinum, + Et tandem Armoricos Britonum sub lege colonos; + Tum gravidam Arturo fatali fraude Ioergernen; + Mendaces vultus, assumptaque Gorloeis arma, + Merlini dolus."[2] + +The "matter of Britain" never quite lost the fascination which it had +exercised over his youthful imagination, as appears from passages in +"Paradise Lost"[3] and even in "Paradise Regained."[4] But with his +increasing austerity, both religious and literary, Milton gravitated +finally to Hebraic themes and Hellenic art forms. He wrote Homeric epics +and Aeschylean tragedies, instead of masques and sonnets, of rhymed +pieces on the Italian model, like "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," and of +stanzaic poems, like the "Nativity Ode," touched with Elizabethan +conceits. He relied more and more upon sheer construction and weight of +thought and less upon decorative richness of detail. His diction became +naked and severe, and he employed rhyme but sparingly, even in the choral +parts of "Samson Agonistes." In short, like Goethe, he grew classical as +he grew old. It has been mentioned that "Paradise Lost" did much to keep +alive the tradition of English blank verse through a period remarkable +for its bigoted devotion to rhyme, and especially to the heroic couplet. +Yet it was, after all, Milton's early poetry, in which rhyme is +used--though used so differently from the way in which Pope used it--that +counted for most in the history of the romantic movement. Professor +Masson contradicts the common assertion, that "Paradise Lost" was first +written into popularity by Addison's Saturday papers. While that series +was running, Tonson brought out (1711-13) an ediction of Milton's +poetical works which was "the ninth of 'Paradise Lost,' the eight of +'Paradise Regained,' the seventh of 'Samson Agonistes' and the sixth of +the minor poems." The previous issues of the minor poems had been in +1645, 1673, 1695, 1705, and 1707. Six editions in sixty-eight years is +certainly no very great showing. After 1713 editions of Milton +multiplied rapidly; by 1763 "Paradise Lost" was in its forty-sixth, and +the minor poems in their thirtieth.[5] + +Addison selected an occasional passage from Milton's juvenile poems, in +the _Spectator_; but from all obtainable evidence, it seems not doubtful +that they had been comparatively neglected, and that, although reissued +from time to time in complete editions of Milton's poetry, they were +regarded merely as pendents to "Paradise Lost" and floated by its +reputation. "Whatever causes," says Dryden, "Milton alleges for the +abolishing of rime . . . his own particular reason is plainly this, that +rime was not his talent: he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the +graces of it: which is manifest in his 'Juvenilia' or verses written in +his youth; where his rime is always constrained and forced and comes +hardly from him." + +Joseph Warton, writing in 1756,[6] after quoting copiously from the +"Nativity Ode," which, he says, is "not sufficiently read nor admired," +continues as follows: "I have dwelt chiefly on this ode as much less +celebrated than 'L'Allegro' and "Il Penseroso,"[7] which are now +universally known,; but which, by a strange fatality, lay in a sort of +obscurity, the private enjoyment of a few curious readers, till they were +set to admirable music by Mr. Handel. And indeed this volume of Milton's +miscellaneous poems has not till very lately met with suitable regard. +Shall I offend any rational admirer of Pope, by remarking that these +juvenile descriptive poems of Milton, as well as his Latin elegies, are +of a strain far more exalted than any the former author can boast?" + +The first critical edition of the minor poems was published in 1785, by +Thomas Warton, whose annotations have been of great service to all later +editors. As late as 1779, Dr. Johnson spoke of these same poems with an +absence of appreciation that now seems utterly astounding. "Those who +admire the beauties of this great poem sometimes force their own judgment +into false admiration of his little pieces, and prevail upon themselves +to think that admirable which is only singular." Of Lycidas he says: "In +this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for +there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and +therefore disgusting. . . Surely no man could have fancied that he read +'Lycidas' with pleasure, had he not known its author." He acknowledges +that "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" are "noble efforts of imagination"; +and that, "as a series of lines," "Comus" "may be considered as worthy of +all the admiration with which the votaries have received it." But he +makes peevish objections to its dramatic probability, finds its dialogues +and soliloquies tedious, and unmindful of the fate of Midas, solemnly +pronounces the songs--"Sweet Echo" and "Sabrina fair"--"harsh in their +diction and not very musical in their numbers"! Of the sonnets he says: +"They deserve not any particular criticism; for of the best it can only +be said that they are not bad."[8] Boswell reports that, Hannah More +having expressed her "wonder that the poet who had written 'Paradise +Lost' should write such poor sonnets," Johnson replied: "Milton, madam, +was a genius that could cut a colossus from a rock, but could not carve +heads upon cherry stones." + +The influence of Milton's minor poetry first becomes noticeable in the +fifth decade of the century, and in the work of a new group of lyrical +poets: Collins, Gray, Mason, and the brothers Joseph and Thomas Warton. +To all of these Milton was master. But just as Thomson and Shenstone got +original effects from Spenser's stanza, while West and Cambridge and +Lloyd were nothing but echoes; so Collins and Gray--immortal names--drew +fresh music from Milton's organ pipes, while for the others he set the +tune. The Wartons, indeed, though imitative always in their verse, have +an independent and not inconsiderable position in criticism and literary +scholarship, and I shall return to them later in that connection. Mason, +whose "English Garden" has been reviewed in chapter iv, was a small poet +and a somewhat absurd person. He aped, first Milton and afterward Gray, +so closely that his work often seems like parody. In general the +Miltonic revival made itself manifest in a more dispersed and indirect +fashion than the Spenserian; but there was no lack of formal imitations, +also, and it will be advisable to notice a few of these here in the order +of their dates. + +In 1740 Joseph Warton, then an Oxford undergraduate, wrote his +blank-verse poem "The Enthusiast, or the Lover of Nature." The work of a +boy of eighteen, it had that instinct of the future, of the set of the +literary current, not uncommon in youthful artists, of which Chatterton's +precocious verses are a remarkable instance. Composed only ten years +later than the completed "Seasons," and five years before Shenstone began +to lay out his miniature wilderness at the Leasowes, it is more +distinctly modern and romantic in its preference of wild nature to +cultivated landscape, and of the literature of fancy to the literature of +reasons. + + "What are the lays of artful Addison, + Coldly correct, to Shakspere's warblings wild?" + +asks the young enthusiast, in Milton's own phrase. And again + + "Can Kent design like Nature?. . . + Though he, by rules unfettered, boldly scorns + Formality and method, round and square + Disdaining, plans irregularly great?. . . + + "Versailles + May boast a thousand fountains that can cast + The tortured waters to the distant heavens; + Yet let me choose some pine-topped precipice + Abrupt and shaggy, whence a foamy stream, + Like Anio, tumbling roars; or some black heath + Where straggling stands the mournful juniper, + Or yew tree scathed." + +The enthusiast haunts "dark forests" and loves to listen to "hollow winds +and ever-beating waves" and "sea-mew's clang." Milton appears at every +turn, not only in single epithets like "Lydian airs," "the level brine," +"low-thoughted cares," "the light fantastic dance," but in the entire +spirit, imagery, and diction of the poem. A few lines illustrate this +better than any description. + + "Ye green-robed Dryads, oft at dusky eve + By wondering shepherds seen; to forest brown, + To unfrequented meads and pathless wilds + Lead me from gardens decked with art's vain pomp. . . + But let me never fall in cloudless night, + When silent Cynthia in her silver car + Through the blue concave slides,. . . + To seek some level mead, and there invoke + Old midnight's sister, contemplation sage + (Queen of the rugged brow and stern-fixed eye), + To lift my soul above this little earth, + This folly-fettered world: to purge my ears, + That I may hear the rolling planet's song + And tuneful turning spheres." + +Mason's Miltonic imitations, "Musaeus," "Il Bellicoso" and "Il Pacifico" +were written in 1744--according to the statement of their author, whose +statements, however, are not always to be relied upon. The first was +published in 1747; the second "surreptitiously printed in a magazine and +afterward inserted in Pearch's miscellany," finally revised and published +by the author in 1797; the third first printed in 1748 in the Cambridge +verses on the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. These pieces follow copy in +every particular. "Il Bellicoso," _e.g._, opens with the invocation. + + "Hence, dull lethargic Peace, + Born in some hoary beadsman's cell obscure!" + +The genealogies of Peace and War are recited, and contrasted pictures of +peaceful and warlike pleasures presented in an order which corresponds as +precisely as possible to Milton's in "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso." + + "Then, to unbend my mind, I'll roam + Amid the cloister's silent gloom; + Or, where ranged oaks their shades diffuse, + Hold dalliance with my darling Muse, + Recalling oft some heaven-born strain + That warbled in Augustan reign; + Or turn, well pleased, the Grecian page, + If sweet Theocritus engage, + Or blithe Anacreon, mirthful wight, + Carol his easy love-lay light. . . + And joys like these, if Peace inspire + Peace, with thee I string the lyre."[9] + +"Musaeus" was a monody on the death of Pope, employing the pastoral +machinery and the varied irregular measure of "Lycidas." Chaucer, +Spenser, and Milton, under the names of Tityrus, Colin Clout, and +Thyrsis, are introduced as mourners, like Camus and St. Peter in the +original. Tityrus is made to lament the dead shepherd in very incorrect +Middle English. Colin Clout speaks two stanzas of the form used in the +first eclogue of "The Shepherd's Calendar," and three stanzas of the form +used in "The Faerie Queene." Thyrsis speaks in blank verse and is +answered by the shade of Musaeus (Pope) in heroic couplets. Verbal +travesties of "Lycidas" abound--"laureate hearse," "forego each vain +excuse," "without the loan of some poetic woe," etc.; and the closing +passage is reworded thus: + + "Thus the fond swain his Doric oat essayed, + Manhood's prime honors rising on his cheek: + Trembling he strove to court the tuneful Maid, + With stripling arts and dalliance all too weak, + Unseen, unheard beneath an hawthorn shade. + But now dun clouds the welkin 'gan to streak; + And now down dropt the larks and ceased their strain: + They ceased, and with them ceased the shepherd swain." + +In 1746 appeared a small volume of odes, fourteen in number, by Joseph +Warton, and another by William Collins.[10] The event is thus noticed by +Gray in a letter to Thomas Wharton: "Have you seen the works of two young +authors, a Mr. Warton and a Mr. Collins, both writers of odes? It is odd +enough, but each is the half of a considerable man, and one the +counterpart of the other. The first has but little invention, very +poetical choice of expression and a good ear. The second, a fine fancy, +modeled upon the antique, a bad ear, a great variety of words and images +with no choice at all. They both deserve to last some years, but will +not." Gray's critical acuteness is not altogether at fault in this +judgment, but half of his prophecy has failed, and his mention of Collins +is singularly inappreciative. The names of Collins and Gray are now +closely associated in literary history, but in life the two men were in +no way connected. Collins and the Wartons, on the other hand, were +personal friends. Joseph Warton and Collins had been schoolfellows at +Winchester, and it was at first intended that their odes, which were +issued in the same month (December), should be published in a volume +together. Warton's collection was immediately successful; but Collins' +was a failure, and the author, in his disappointment, burned the unsold +copies. + +The odes of Warton which most nearly resemble Milton are "To Fancy," "To +Solitude," and "To the Nightingale," all in the eight-syllabled couplet. +A single passage will serve as a specimen of their quality: + + "Me, Goddess, by the right hand lead + Sometimes through the yellow mead, + Where Joy and white-robed Peace resort + And Venus keeps her festive court: + Where Mirth and Youth each evening meet, + And lightly trip with nimble feet, + Nodding their lily-crowned heads; + Where Laughter rose-lip'd Hebe leads," etc.[11] + +Collins' "Ode to Simplicity" is in the stanza of the "Nativity Ode," and +his beautiful "Ode to Evening," in the unrhymed Sapphics which Milton had +employed in his translation of Horace's "Ode to Pyrrha." There are +Miltonic reminiscences like "folding-star," "religious gleams," "play +with the tangles of her hair," and in the closing couplet of the "Ode to +Fear," + + "His cypress wreath my meed decree, + And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee." + +But, in general, Collins is much less slavish than Warton in his +imitation. + +Joseph Warton's younger brother, Thomas, wrote in 1745, and published in +1747, "The Pleasures of Melancholy," a blank-verse poem of three hundred +and fifteen lines, made up, in nearly equal parts, of Milton and +Akenside, with frequent touches of Thomson, Spenser, and Pope's "Epistle +of Eloisa to Abelard." Warton was a lad of seventeen when his poem was +written: it was published anonymously and was by some attributed to +Akenside, whose "Pleasures of Imagination" (1744) had, of course, +suggested the title. A single extract will suffice to show how well the +young poet knew his Milton: + + "O lead me, queen sublime, to solemn glooms + Congenial with my soul; to cheerless shades, + To ruined seats, to twilight cells and bowers, + Where thoughtful Melancholy loves to muse, + Her favorite midnight haunts. . . + Beneath yon ruined abbey's moss-grown piles + Oft let me sit, at twilight hour of eve, + When through some western window the pale moon + _Pours her long-levelled rule streaming light:_ + While sullen sacred silence reigns around, + Save the lone screech-owl's note, who build his bower + Amid the moldering caverns dark and damp;[12] + Or the calm breeze, that rustles in the leaves + Of flaunting ivy, that with mantle green + Invests some wasted tower. . . + Then when the sullen shades of evening close + Where _through the room_ a blindly-glimmering gloom + The _dying embers_ scatter, far remote + From Mirth's mad shouts, that through the illumined roof + Resound with festive echo, let me sit + Blessed with the lowly cricket's drowsy dirge. . . + This sober hour of silence will unmask + False Folly's smile, that like the dazzling spells + Of wily Comus cheat the unweeting eye + With _blear illusion,_ and persuade to drink + That charmed cup which _Reason's mintage fair_ +_ Unmoulds_, and stamps the monster on the man." + +I italicize the most direct borrowings, but both the Wartons had so +saturated themselves with Milton's language, verse, and imagery that they +ooze out of them at every pore. Thomas Warton's poems, issued separately +from time to time, were first published collectively in 1777. They are +all imitative, and most of them imitative of Milton. His two best odes, +"On the First of April" and "On the Approach of Summer," are in the +familiar octosyllabics. + + "Haste thee, Nymph! and hand in hand, + With thee lead a buxom band; + Bring fantastic-footed joy, + With Sport, that yellow-tressed boy," etc.[13] + +In Gray and Collins, though one can hardly read a page without being +reminded of Milton, it is commonly in subtler ways than this. Gray, for +example, has been careful to point out in his notes his verbal +obligations to Milton, as well as to Shakspere, Cowley, Dryden, Pindar, +Vergil, Dante, and others; but what he could not well point out, because +it was probably unconscious, was the impulse which Milton frequently gave +to the whole exercise of his imagination. It is not often that Gray +treads so closely in Milton's footsteps as he does in the latest of his +poems, the ode written for music, and performed at Cambridge in 1769 on +the installation of the Duke of Grafton as Chancellor; in which Milton is +made to sing a stanza in the meter of the "Nativity Ode"; + + "Ye brown o'er-arching groves + That Contemplation loves, + Where willowy Camus lingers with delight; + Oft at the blush of dawn + I trod your level lawn, + Oft wooed the gleam of Cynthia, silver bright, + In cloisters dim, far from the haunts of Folly, + With Freedom by my side, and soft-eyed Melancholy." + +Not only the poets who have been named, but many obscure versifiers are +witnesses to this Miltonic revival. It is usually, indeed, the minor +poetry of an age which keeps most distinctly the "cicatrice and capable +impressure" of a passing literary fashion. If we look through Dodsley's +collection,[14] we find a _melange_ of satires in the manner of Pope, +humorous fables in the manner of Prior, didactic blank-verse pieces after +the fashion of Thomson and Akenside, elegiac quatrains on the model of +Shenstone and Gray, Pindaric odes _ad nauseam_, with imitations of +Spenser and Milton.[15] + +To the increasing popularity of Milton's minor poetry is due the revival +of the sonnet. Gray's solitary sonnet, on the death of his friend +Richard West, was composed in 1742 but not printed till 1775, after the +author's death. This was the sonnet selected by Wordsworth, to +illustrate his strictures on the spurious poetic diction of the +eighteenth century, in the appendix to the preface to the second edition +of "Lyrical Ballads." The style is noble, though somewhat artificial: +the order of the rhymes conforms neither to the Shaksperian nor the +Miltonic model. Mason wrote fourteen sonnets at various times between +1748 and 1797; the earlier date is attached, in his collected works, to +"Sonnet I. Sent to a Young Lady with Dodsley's Miscellanies." They are +of the strict Italian or Miltonic form, and abound in Miltonic allusions +and wordings. All but four of Thomas Edwards' fifty sonnets, 1750-65, +are on Milton's model. Thirteen of them were printed in Dodsley's second +volume. They have little value, nor have those of Benjamin +Stillingfleet, some of which appear to have been written before 1750. Of +much greater interest are the sonnets of Thomas Warton, nine in number +and all Miltonic in form. Warton's collected poems were not published +till 1777, and his sonnets are undated, but some of them seem to have +been written as early as 1750. They are graceful in expression and +reflect their author's antiquarian tastes. They were praised by Hazlitt, +Coleridge, and Lamb; and one of them, "To the River Lodon," has been +thought to have suggested Coleridge's "To the River Otter--" + + "Dear native stream, wild streamlet of the west--" + +as well, perhaps, more remotely Wordsworth's series, "On the River +Duddon." + +The poem of Milton which made the deepest impression upon the new school +of poets was "Il Penseroso." This little masterpiece, which sums up in +imagery of "Attic choice" the pleasures that Burton and Fletcher and many +others had found in the indulgence of the atrabilious humor, fell in with +a current of tendency. Pope had died in 1744, Swift in 1745, the last +important survivors of the Queen Anne wits; and already the reaction +against gayety had set in, in the deliberate and exaggerated solemnity +which took possession of all departments of verse, and even invaded the +theater; where Melpomene gradually crowded Thalia off the boards, until +sentimental comedy--_la comedie larmoyante_--was in turn expelled by the +ridicule of Garrick, Goldsmith, and Sheridan. That elegiac mood, that +love of retirement and seclusion, which have been remarked in Shenstone, +became now the dominant note in English poetry. The imaginative +literature of the years 1740-60 was largely the literature of low +spirits. The generation was persuaded, with Fletcher, that + + "Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy." + +But the muse of their inspiration was not the tragic Titaness of Duerer's +painting: + + "The Melencolia that transcends all wit."[16] + +rather the "mild Miltonic maid," Pensive Meditation. + +There were various shades of somberness, from the delicate gray of the +Wartons to the funereal sable to Young's "Night Thoughts" (1742-44) and +Blair's "Grave" (1743). Goss speaks of Young as a "connecting link +between this group of poets and their predecessors of the Augustan age." +His poem does, indeed, exhibit much of the wit, rhetorical glitter, and +straining after point familiar in Queen Anne verse, in strange +combination with a "rich note of romantic despair."[17] Mr. Perry, too, +describes Young's language as "adorned with much of the crude ore of +romanticism. . . At this period the properties of the poet were but few: +the tomb, an occasional raven or screech-owl, and the pale moon, with +skeletons and grinning ghosts. . . One thing that the poets were never +tired of, was the tomb. . . It was the dramatic--can one say the +melodramatic?--view of the grave, as an inspirer of pleasing gloom, that +was preparing readers for the romantic outbreak."[18] + +It was, of course, in Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" +(1751), that this elegiac feeling found its most perfect expression. +Collins, too has "more hearse-like airs than carols," and two of his most +heartfelt lyrics are the "Dirge in Cymbeline" and the "Ode on the Death +of Mr. Thomson." And the Wartons were perpetually recommending such +themes, both by precept and example.[19] Blair and Young, however, are +scarcely to be reckoned among the romanticists. They were heavy +didactic-moral poets, for the most part, though they touched the string +which, in the Gothic imagination, vibrates with a musical shiver to the +thought of death. There is something that accords with the spirit of +Gothic ecclesiastical architecture, with Gray's "ivy-mantled tower"--his +"long-drawn aisle and fretted vault"--in the paraphernalia of the tomb +which they accumulate so laboriously; the cypress and the yew, the owl +and the midnight bell, the dust of the charnel-house, the nettles that +fringe the grave-stones, the dim sepulchral lamp and gliding specters. + + "The wind is up. Hark! how it howls! Methinks + Till now I never heard a sound so dreary, + Doors creak and windows clap, and night's foul bird, + Rocked in the spire, screams loud: the gloomy aisles, + Black-plastered and hung 'round with shreds of scutcheons + And tattered coats-of-arms, send back the sound, + Laden with heavier airs, from the low vaults, + The mansions of the dead."[20] + +Blair's mortuary verse has a certain impressiveness, in its gloomy +monotony, not unlike that of Quarles' "Divine Emblems." Like the +"Emblems," too, "The Grave," has been kept from oblivion by the art of +the illustrator, the well-known series of engravings by Schiavonetti from +designs by Wm. Blake. + +But the thoughtful scholarly fancy of the more purely romantic poets +haunted the dusk rather than the ebon blackness of midnight, and listened +more to the nightingale than to the screech-owl. They were quietists, +and their imagery was crepuscular. They loved the twilight, with its +beetle and bat, solitude, shade, the "darkening vale," the mossy +hermitage, the ruined abbey moldering in its moonlit glade, grots, +caverns, brooksides, ivied nooks, firelight rooms, the curfew bell and +the sigh of the Aeolian harp.[21] All this is exquisitely put in +Collins' "Ode to Evening." Joseph Warton also wrote an "Ode to Evening," +as well as one "To the Nightingale." Both Wartons wrote odes "To +Solitude." Dodsley's "Miscellanies" are full of odes to Evening, +Solitude, Silence, Retirement, Contentment, Fancy, Melancholy, Innocence, +Simplicity, Sleep; of Pleasures of Contemplation (Miss Whately, Vol. IX. +p. 120) Triumphs of Melancholy (James Beattie, Vol. X. p. 77), and +similar matter. Collins introduced a personified figure of Melancholy in +his ode, "The Passions." + + "With eyes upraised, as one inspired, + Pale Melancholy sat retired; + And from her wild, sequestered seat, + In notes by distance made more sweet, + Poured through the mellow horn her pensive soul; + And dashing soft from rocks around, + Bubbling runnels joined the sound; + Through glades and glooms the mingled measure stole, + Or o'er some haunted stream, with fond delay, + Round a holy calm diffusing + Love of peace and lonely musing, + In hollow murmurs died away." + +Collins was himself afflicted with a melancholia which finally developed +into madness. Gray, a shy, fastidious scholar, suffered from inherited +gout and a lasting depression of spirits. He passed his life as a +college recluse in the cloistered retirement of Cambridge, residing at +one time in Pembroke, and at another in Peterhouse College. He held the +chair of modern history in the university, but never gave a lecture. He +declined the laureateship after Cibber's death. He had great learning, +and a taste most delicately correct; but the sources of creative impulse +dried up in him more and more under the desiccating air of academic study +and the increasing hold upon him of his constitutional malady. +"Melancholy marked him for her own." There is a significant passage in +one of his early letters to Horace. Walpole (1737): "I have, at the +distance of half a mile, through a green lane, a forest (vulgar call it a +common) all my own, at least as good as so, for I spy no human thing in +it but myself. It is a little chaos of mountains and precipices. . . +Both vale and hill are covered with most venerable beeches and other very +reverend vegetables that, like most other ancient people, are always +dreaming out their old stories to the winds. . . At the foot of one of +these, squats ME, I, (il penseroso) and there grow to the trunk for a +whole morning."[22] To Richard West he wrote, in the same year, "Low +spirits are my true and faithful companions"; and, in 1742, "Mine is a +white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy, for the most part . . . but there +is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt." + +When Gray sees the Eton schoolboys at their sports, he is sadly reminded: + + "--how all around them wait + The ministers of human fate + And black Misfortune's baleful train."[23] + +"Wisdom in sable garb," and "Melancholy, silent maid" attend the +footsteps of Adversity;[24] and to Contemplation's sober eye, the race of +man resembles the insect race: + + "Brushed by the hand of rough mischance, + Or chilled by age, their airy dance + They leave, in dust to rest."[25] + +Will it be thought too trifling an observation that the poets of this +group were mostly bachelors and _quo ad hoc_, solitaries? Thomson, +Akenside, Shenstone, Collins, Gray, and Thomas Warton never married. +Dyer, Mason, and Joseph Warton, were beneficed clergymen, and took unto +themselves wives. The Wartons, to be sure, were men of cheerful and even +convivial habits. The melancholy which these good fellows affected was +manifestly a mere literary fashion. They were sad "only for wantonness," +like the young gentlemen in France. "And so you have a garden of your +own," wrote Gray to his young friend Nicholls, in 1769, "and you plant +and transplant, and are dirty and amused; are you not ashamed of +yourself? Why, I have no such thing, you monster; nor ever shall be +either dirty or amused as long as I live." Gray never was; but the +Wartons were easily amused, and Thomas, by all accounts, not unfrequently +dirty, or at least slovenly in his dress, and careless and unpolished in +his manners, and rather inclined to broad humor and low society. + +Romantically speaking, the work of these Miltonic lyrists marks an +advance upon that of the descriptive and elegiac poets, Thomson, +Akenside, Dyer, and Shenstone. Collins is among the choicest of English +lyrical poets. There is a flute-like music in his best odes--such as the +one "To Evening," and the one written in 1746--"How sleep the brave," +which are sweeter, more natural, and more spontaneous than Gray's. "The +Muse gave birth to Collins," says Swinburne; "she did but give suck to +Gray." Collins "was a solitary song-bird among many more or less +excellent pipers and pianists. He could put more spirit of color into a +single stroke, more breath of music into a single note, than could all +the rest of the generation into all the labors of their lives."[26] +Collins, like Gray, was a Greek scholar, and had projected a history of +the revival letters. There is a classical quality in his verse--not +classical in the eighteenth-century sense--but truly Hellenic; a union, +as in Keats, of Attic form with romantic sensibility; though in Collins, +more than in Keats, the warmth seems to comes from without; the statue of +a nymph flushed with sunrise. "Collins," says Gosse, "has the touch of a +sculptor; his verse is clearly cut and direct: it is marble pure, but +also marble cold."[27] Lowell, however, thinks that Collins "was the +first to bring back into poetry something of the antique flavor, and +found again the long-lost secret of being classically elegant without +being pedantically cold."[28] + +These estimates are given for what they are worth. The coldness which is +felt--or fancied--in some of Collins' poetry comes partly from the +abstractness of his subjects and the artificial style which he inherited, +in common with all his generation. Many of his odes are addressed to +Fear, Pity, Mercy, Liberty, and similar abstractions. The +pseudo-Pindaric ode, is, in itself, an exotic; and, as an art form, is +responsible for some of the most tumid compositions in the history of +English verse. Collins' most current ode, though by no means his best +one, "The Passions," abounds in those personifications which, as has been +said, constituted, in eighteenth century poetry, a sort of feeble +mythology: "wan Despair," "dejected Pity," "brown Exercise," and "Music +sphere-descended maid." It was probably the allegorical figures in +Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," "Sport that wrinkled care +derides," "spare Fast that oft with gods doth diet," etc., that gave a +new lease of life to this obsolescent machinery which the romanticists +ought to have abandoned to the Augustan schools. + +The most interesting of Collins' poems, from the point of view of these +inquiries, is his "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of +Scotland." This was written in 1749, but as it remained in manuscript +till 1788, it was of course without influence on the minds of its +author's contemporaries. It had been left unfinished, and some of the +printed editions contained interpolated stanzas which have since been +weeded away. Inscribed to Mr. John Home, the author of "Douglas," its +purpose was to recommend to him the Scottish fairy lore as a fit subject +for poetry. Collins justifies the selection of such "false themes" by +the example of Spenser, of Shakspere, (in "Macbeth"), and of Tasso + + "--whose undoubting mind + Believed the magic wonders which he sung." + +He mentions, as instances of popular beliefs that have poetic +capabilities, the kelpie, the will-o'-the-wisp, and second sight. He +alludes to the ballad of "Willie Drowned in Yarrow," and doubtless with a +line of "The Seasons" running in his head,[29] conjures Home to "forget +not Kilda's race," who live on the eggs of the solan goose, whose only +prospect is the wintry main, and among whose cliffs the bee is never +heard to murmur. Perhaps the most imaginative stanza is the ninth, +referring to the Hebrides, the chapel of St. Flannan and the graves of +the Scottish, Irish, and Norwegian kings in Icolmkill: + + "Unbounded is thy range; with varied skill + Thy muse may, like those feathery tribes which spring + From their rude rocks, extend her skirting wing, + Round the moist marge of each cold Hebrid isle, + To that hoar pile which still its ruins shows; + In whose small vaults a pygmy folk is found, + Whose bones the delver with his spade upthrows, + And culls them, wondering, from the hallowed ground; + Or thither, where, beneath the showery west, + The mighty kings of three fair realms are laid; + Once foes, perhaps, together now they rest, + No slaves revere them and no wars invade. + Yet frequent now at midnight's solemn hour, + The rifted mounds their yawning cells unfold, + And forth the monarchs stalk with sovereign power, + In pageant robes, and wreathed with sheeny gold, + And on their twilight tombs aerial council hold." + +Collins' work was all done by 1749; for though he survived ten years +longer, his mind was in eclipse. He was a lover and student of +Shakspere, and when the Wartons paid him a last visit at the time of his +residence with his sister in the cloisters of Chichester Cathedral, he +told Thomas that he had discovered the source of the "Tempest," in a +novel called "Aurelio and Isabella," printed in 1588 in Spanish, Italian, +French, and English. No such novel has been found, and it was seemingly +a figment of Collins' disordered fancy. During a lucid interval in the +course of this visit, he read to the Wartons, from the manuscript, his +"Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands"; and also a poem +which is lost, entitled, "The Bell of Arragon," founded on the legend of +the great bell of Saragossa that tolled of its own accord whenever a king +of Spain was dying. + +Johnson was also a friend of Collins, and spoke of him kindly in his +"Lives of the Poets," though he valued his writings little. "He had +employed his mind chiefly upon works of fiction and subjects of fancy; +and by indulging some peculiar habits of thought, was eminently delighted +with those flights of imagination which pass the bounds of nature, and to +which the mind is reconciled only by a passive acquiescence in popular +traditions. He loved fairies, genii, giants, and monsters; he delighted +to rove through the meanders of enchantment, to gaze on the magnificence +of golden palaces, to repose by the water-falls of Elysian gardens. This +was, however, the character rather of his inclination than his genius; +the grandeur of wildness and the novelty of extravagance were always +desired by him, but were not always attained."[30] + +Thomas Gray is a much more important figure than Collins in the +intellectual history of his generations; but this superior importance +does not rest entirely upon his verse, which is hardly more abundant than +Collins', though of a higher finish. His letters, journals, and other +prose remains, posthumously published, first showed how long an arc his +mind had subtended on the circle of art and thought. He was sensitive to +all fine influences that were in the literary air. One of the greatest +scholars among English poets, his taste was equal to his acquisitions. +He was a sound critic of poetry, music, architecture, and painting. His +mind and character both had distinction; and if there was something a +trifle finical and old-maidish about his personality--which led the young +Cantabs on one occasion to take a rather brutal advantage of his nervous +dread of fire--there was also that nice reserve which gave to Milton, +when _he_ was at Cambridge, the nickname of the "lady of Christ's." + +A few of Gray's simpler odes, the "Ode on the Spring," the "Hymn to +Adversity" and the Eton College ode, were written in 1742 and printed in +Dodsley's collection in 1748. The "Elegy" was published in 1751; the two +"sister odes," "The Progress of Poesy" and "The Bard," were struck off +from Horace Walpole's private press at Strawberry Hill in 1757. Gray's +popular fame rests, and will always rest, upon his immortal "Elegy." He +himself denied somewhat impatiently that it was his best poem, and +thought that its popularity was owing to its subject. There are not +wanting critics of authority, such as Lowell and Matthew Arnold, who have +pronounced Gray's odes higher poetry than his "Elegy." "'The Progress of +Poesy,'" says Lowell, "overflies all other English lyrics like an +eagle. . . It was the prevailing blast of Gray's trumpet that, more than +anything else, called men back to the legitimate standard."[31] With all +deference to such distinguished judges, I venture to think that the +popular instinct on this point is right, and even that Dr. Johnson is not +so wrong as usual. Johnson disliked Gray and spoke of him with surly +injustice. Gray, in turn, could not abide Johnson, whom he called _Ursa +major_. Johnson said that Gray's odes were forced plants, raised in a +hot-house, and poor plants at that. "Sir, I do not think Gray a +first-rate poet. He has not a bold imagination, nor much command of +words. The obscurity in which he has involved himself will not persuade +us that he is sublime. His 'Elegy in a Churchyard' has a happy selection +of images, but I don't like what are called his great things." "He +attacked Gray, calling him a 'dull fellow.' Boswell: 'I understand he +was reserved, and might appear dull in company; but surely he was not +dull in poetry.' Johnson: 'Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his +closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way and that made many +people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.' He then repeated +some ludicrous lines, which have escaped my memory, and said, 'Is not +that GREAT, like his odes?'. . . 'No, sir, there are but two good +stanzas in Gray's poetry, which are in his "Elegy in a Country +Churchyard." He then repeated the stanza-- + + "'For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,'" etc. + +"In all Gray's odes," wrote Johnson, "there is a kind of cumbrous +splendor which we wish away. . . These odes are marked by glittering +accumulations of ungraceful ornaments; they strike rather than please; +the images are magnified by affectation; the language is labored into +harshness. The mind of the writer seems to work with unnatural +violence. . . His art and his struggle are too visible and there is too +little appearance of ease and nature. . . In the character of his +'Elegy,' I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common +sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the +refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally +decided all claims to poetical honors. The 'Churchyard' abounds with +images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which +every bosom returns an echo." + +There are noble lines in Gray's more elaborate odes, but they do make as +a whole that mechanical, artificial impression of which Johnson +complains. They have the same rhetorical ring, the worked-up fervor in +place of genuine passion, which was noted in Collins' ode "On the +Passions." Collins and Gray were perpetually writing about the passions; +but they treated them as abstractions and were quite incapable of +exhibiting them in action. Neither of them could have written a ballad, +a play, or a romance. Their odes were bookish, literary, impersonal, +retrospective. They had too much of the ichor of fancy and too little +red blood in them. + +But the "Elegy" is the masterpiece of this whole "Il Penseroso" school, +and has summed up for all English readers, for all time, the poetry of +the tomb. Like the "Essay on Man," and "Night Thoughts" and "The Grave," +it is a poem of the moral-didactic order, but very different in result +from these. Its moral is suffused with emotion and expressed concretely. +Instead of general reflections upon the shortness of life, the vanity of +ambition, the leveling power of death, and similar commonplaces, we have +the picture of the solitary poet, lingering among the graves at twilight +(_hora datur quieti_), till the place and the hour conspire to work their +effect upon the mind and prepare it for the strain of meditation that +follows. The universal appeal of its subject and the perfection of its +style have made the "Elegy" known by heart to more readers than any other +poem in the language. Parody is one proof of celebrity, if not of +popularity, and the "sister odes" were presently parodied by Lloyd and +Colman in an "Ode to Obscurity" and an "Ode to Oblivion." But the +"Elegy" was more than celebrated and more than popular; it was the most +admired and influential poem of the generation. The imitations and +translations of it are innumerable, and it met with a response as +immediate as it was general.[32] One effect of this was to consecrate +the ten-syllabled quatrain to elegiac uses. Mason altered the sub-title +of his "Isis" (written in 1748) from "An Elegy" to "A Monologue," because +it was "not written in alternate rimes, which since Mr. Gray's exquisite +'Elegy in the Country Church-yard' has generally obtained, and seems to +be more suited to that species of poem."[33] Mason's "Elegy written in a +Church-yard in South Wales" (1787) is, of course, in Gray's stanza and, +equally of course, introduces a tribute to the master: + + "Yes, had he paced this church-way path along, + Or leaned like me against this ivied wall, + How sadly sweet had flowed his Dorian song, + Then sweetest when it flowed at Nature's call."[34] + +It became almost _de rigueur_ for a young poet to try his hand at a +churchyard piece. Thus Richard Cumberland, the dramatist, in his +"Memoirs," records the fact that when he was an undergraduate at +Cambridge in 1752 he made his "first small offering to the press, +following the steps of Gray with another church-yard elegy, written on +St. Mark's Eve, when, according to rural tradition, the ghost of those +who are to die within the year ensuing are seen to walk at midnight +across the churchyard."[35] Goldsmith testifies to the prevalence of the +fashion when, in his "Life of Parnell," he says of that poet's "Night +Piece on Death"[36] that, "with very little amendment," it "might be made +to surpass all those night-pieces and church-yard scenes that have since +appeared." But in this opinion Johnson, who says that Parnell's poem "is +indirectly preferred by Goldsmith to Gray's 'Churchyard,'" does not +agree; nor did the public.[37] + +Gray's correspondence affords a record of the progress of romantic +taste for an entire generation. He set out with classical +prepossessions--forming his verse, as he declared, after Dryden--and +ended with translations from Welsh and Norse hero-legends, and with an +admiration for Ossian and Scotch ballads. In 1739 he went to France and +Italy with Horace Walpole. He was abroad three years, though in 1741 he +quarreled with Walpole at Florence, separated from him and made his way +home alone in a leisurely manner. Gray is one of the first of modern +travelers to speak appreciatively of Gothic architecture, and of the +scenery of the Alps, and to note those strange and characteristic aspects +of foreign life which we now call picturesque, and to which every +itinerary and guidebook draws attention. Addison, who was on his travels +forty years before, was quite blind to such matters. Not that he was +without the feeling of the sublime: he finds, _e.g._, an "agreeable +horror" in the prospect of a storm at sea.[38] But he wrote of his +passage through Switzerland as a disagreeable and even frightful +experience; "a very troublesome journey over the Alps. My head is still +giddy with mountains and precipices; and you can't imagine how much I am +pleased with the sight of a plain." + +"Let any one reflect," says the _Spectator_,[39] "on the disposition of +mind he finds in himself at his first entrance into the Pantheon at Rome, +and how his imagination is filled with something great and amazing; and, +at the same time, consider how little, in proportion, he is affected with +the inside of a Gothic cathedral, though it be five times larger than the +other; which can arise from nothing else but the greatness of the manner +in the one, the meanness in the other."[40] + +Gray describes the cathedral at Rheims as "a vast Gothic building of a +surprising beauty and lightness, all covered over with a profusion of +little statues and other ornaments"; and the cathedral at Siena, which +Addison had characterized as "barbarous," and as an instance of "false +beauties and affected ornaments," Gray commends as "labored with a Gothic +niceness and delicacy in the old-fashioned way." It must be acknowledged +that these are rather cold praises, but Gray was continually advancing in +his knowledge of Gothic and his liking for it. Later in life he became +something of an antiquarian and virtuoso. He corresponded with Rev. +Thomas Wharton, about stained glass and paper hangings, which Wharton, +who was refitting his house in the Gothic taste, had commissioned Gray to +buy for him of London dealers. He describes, for Wharton's benefit, +Walpole's new bedroom at Strawberry Hill as "in the best taste of +anything he has yet done, and in your own Gothic way"; and he advises his +correspondent as to the selection of patterns for staircases and arcade +work. There was evidently a great stir of curiosity concerning +Strawberry Hill in Gray's coterie, and a determination to be Gothic at +all hazards; and the poet felt obliged to warn his friends that zeal +should not outrun discretion. He writes to Wharton in 1754: "I rejoice +to find you at last settled to your heart's content, and delight to hear +you talk of giving your house some _Gothic ornaments_ already. If you +project anything, I hope it will be entirely within doors; and don't let +me (when I come gaping into Coleman Street) be directed to the gentlemen +at the ten pinnacles, or with the church porch at his door." Again, to +the same (1761): "It is mere pedantry in Gothicism to stick to nothing +but altars and tombs, and there is no end to it, if we are to sit upon +nothing but coronation chairs, nor drink out of nothing but chalices or +flagons." Writing to Mason in 1758 about certain incongruities in one of +the latter's odes, he gives the following Doresque illustration of his +point. "If you should lead me into a superb Gothic building, with a +thousand clustered pillars, each of them half a mile high, the walls all +covered with fret-work, and the windows full of red and blue saints that +had neither head nor tail, and I should find the Venus de Medici in +person perked up in a long niche over the high altar, as naked as she was +born, do you think it would raise or damp my devotions?"[41] He made it +a favorite occupation to visit and take drawings from celebrated ruins +and the great English cathedrals, particularly those in the Cambridge +fens, Ely and Peterboro'. These studies he utilized in a short essay on +Norman architecture, first published by Mitford in 1814, and incorrectly +entitled "Architectura Gothica." + +Reverting to his early letters from abroad one is struck by the +anticipation of the modern attitude, in his description of a visit to the +Grande Chartreuse, which he calls "one of the most solemn, the most +romantic, and the most astonishing scenes."[42] "I do not remember to +have gone ten paces without an exclamation that there was no restraining. +Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with +religion and poetry. . . One need not have a very fantastic imagination +to see spirits there at noonday."[43] Walpole's letter of about the same +date, also to West,[44] is equally ecstatic. It is written "from a +hamlet among the mountains of Savoy. . . Here we are, the lonely lords +of glorious desolate prospects. . . But the road, West, the road! +Winding round a prodigious mountain, surrounded with others, all shagged +with hanging woods, obscured with pines, or lost in clouds! Below a +torrent breaking through cliffs, and tumbling through fragments of +rocks!. . . Now and then an old foot bridge, with a broken rail, a +leaning cross, a cottage or the ruin of an hermitage! This sounds too +bombast and too romantic to one that has not seen it, too cold for one +that has." Or contrast with Addison's Italian letters passages like +these, which foretoken Rogers and Byron. We get nothing so sympathetic +till at least a half century later. "It is the most beautiful of Italian +nights. . . There is a moon! There are starts for you! Do not you hear +the fountain? Do not you smell the orange flowers? That building yonder +is the convent of St. Isidore; and that eminence with the cypress-trees +and pines upon it, the top of Mt. Quirinal."[45] "The Neapolitans work +till evening: then take their lute or guitar and walk about the city, or +upon the sea shore with it, to enjoy the _fresco_. One sees their little +brown children jumping about stark naked and the bigger ones dancing with +castanets, while others play on the cymbal to them."[46] "Kennst dud as +Land," then already? The + + "small voices and an old guitar, + Winning their way to an unguarded heart"? + +And then, for a prophecy of Scott, read the description of Netley +Abbey,[47] in a letter to Nicholls in 1764. "My ferryman," writes Gray +in a letter to Brown about the same ruin, "assured me that he would not +go near it in the night time for all the world, though he knew much money +had been found there. The sun was all too glaring and too full of gauds +for such a scene, which ought to be visited only in the dusk of the +evening." + + "If thou woulds't view fair Melrose aright + Go visit it by the pale moonlight, + For the gay beams of lightsome day + Gild, but to flout, the ruins, Gray." + +In 1765, Gray visited the Scotch Highlands and sent enthusiastic +histories of his trip to Wharton and Mason. "Since I saw the Alps, I +have seen nothing sublime till now." "The Lowlands are worth seeing +once, but the mountains are ecstatic, and ought to be visited in +pilgrimage once a year. None but those monstrous creatures 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." + +Again in 1770, the year before his death, he spent six weeks on a ramble +through the western counties, descending the Wye in a boat for forty +miles, and visiting among other spots which the muse had then, or has +since, made illustrious, Hagley and the Leasowes, the Malvern Hills and +Tintern Abby. But the most significant of Gray's "Lilliputian travels," +was his tour of the Lake Country in 1769. Here he was on ground that has +since become classic; and the lover of Wordsworth encounters with a +singular interest, in Gray's "Journal in the Lakes," written nearly +thirty years before the "Lyrical Ballads," names like Grasmere, Winander, +Skiddaw, Helvellyn, Derwentwater, Borrowdale, and Lodore. What +distinguishes the entries in this journal from contemporary writing of +the descriptive kind is a certain intimacy of comprehension, a depth of +tone which makes them seem like nineteenth-century work. To Gray the +landscape was no longer a picture. It had sentiment, character, meaning, +almost personality. Different weathers and different hours of the day +lent it expressions subtler than the poets had hitherto recognized in the +broad, general changes of storm and calm, light and darkness, and the +successions of the seasons. He heard Nature when she whispered, as well +as when she spoke out loud. Thomson could not have written thus, nor +Shenstone, nor even, perhaps, Collins. But almost any man of cultivation +and sensibility can write so now; or, if not so well, yet with the same +accent. A passage or two will make my meaning clearer. + +"To this second turning I pursued my way about four miles along its +borders [Ulswater], beyond a village scattered among trees and called +Water Mallock, in a pleasant, grave day, perfectly calm and warm, but +without a gleam of sunshine. Then, the sky seeming to thicken, the +valley to grown more desolate, and evening drawing on, I returned by the +way I came to Penrith. . . While I was here, a little shower fell, red +clouds came marching up the hills from the east, and part of a bright +rainbow seemed to rise along the side of Castle Hill. . . The calmness +and brightness of the evening, the roar of the waters, and the thumping +of huge hammers at an iron forge not far distant, made it a singular +walk. . . In the evening walked alone down to the lake after sunset and +saw the solemn coloring of night draw on, the last gleam of sunshine +fading away on the hilltops, the deep serene of the waters, and the long +shadows of the mountains thrown across them till they nearly touched the +hithermost shore. At distance heard the murmur of many waterfalls not +audible in the day-time.[48] Wished for the moon, but she was dark to me +and silent, hid in her vacant inter-lunar cave."[49] + +"It is only within a few years," wrote Joseph Warton in 1782, "that the +picturesque scenes of our own country, our lakes, mountains, cascades, +caverns, and castles, have been visited and described."[50] It was in +this very year that William Gilpin published his "Observations on the +River Wye," from notes taken upon a tour in 1770. This was the same year +when Gray made his tour of the Wye, and hearing that Gilpin had prepared +a description of the region, he borrowed and read his manuscript in June, +1771, a few weeks before his own death. These "Observations" were the +first of a series of volumes by Gilpin on the scenery of Great Britain, +composed in a poetic and somewhat over-luxuriant style, illustrated by +drawings in aquatinta, and all described on the title page as "Relative +chiefly to Picturesque Beauty." They had great success, and several of +them were translated into German and French.[51] + + +[1] "An Apology for Smectymnuus." + +[2] Lines 162-168. See also "Mansus," 80-84. + +[3] "What resounds + In fable or romance of Uther's son, + Begirt with British and Armoric knights; + And all who since, baptized or infidel, + Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban, + Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond, + Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore + When Charlemain with all his peerage fell + By Fontarabbia." + --_Book I_, 579-587. + +[4] "Faery damsels met in forest wide + By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, + Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore." + --_Book II_, 359-361. + +[5] "Masson's Life of Milton," Vol. VI. P. 789 + +[6] "Essay on Pope," Vol. I. pp. 36-38 (5th edition). In the dedication +to Young, Warton says: "The Epistles (Pope's) on the Characters of Men +and Women, and your sprightly Satires, my good friend, are more +frequently perused and quoted than 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' of +Milton." + + +[7] The Rev. Francis Peck, in his "New Memoirs of the Life and Poetical +Works of Mr. John Milton," in 1740, says that these two poems are justly +admired by foreigners as well as Englishmen, and have therefore been +translated into all the modern languages. This volume contains, among +other things, "An Examination of Milton's Style"; "Explanatory and +Critical Notes on Divers Passages of Milton and Shakspere"; "The +Resurrection," a blank verse imitation of "Lycidas," "Comus," "L'Allegro" +and "Il Penserosa," and the "Nativity Ode." Peck defends Milton's rhymed +poems against Dryden's strictures. "He was both a perfect master of rime +and could also express something by it which nobody else ever thought +of." He compares the verse paragraphs of "Lycidas" to musical bars and +pronounces its system of "dispersed rimes" admirable and unique. + +[8] "Life of Milton." + +[9] "Il Pacifico: Works of William Mason," London, 1811, Vol. I. p. 166. + +[10] "Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects." + +[11] "To Fancy." + +[12] _Cf_. Gray's "Elegy," first printed in 1751: + + "Save that, from yonder ivy-mantled tower, + The moping owl does to the moon complain + Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, + Molest her ancient, solitary reign." + +[13] "On the Approach of Summer." The "wattled cotes," "sweet-briar +hedges," "woodnotes wild," "tanned haycock in the mead," and "valleys +where mild whispers use," are transferred bodily into this ode from +"L'Allegro." + +[14] Three volumes appeared in 1748; a second edition, with Vol. IV. added +in 1749, Vols. V. and VI. in 1758. There were new editions in 1765, +1770, 1775, and 1782. Pearch's continuations were published in 1768 +(Vols. VII. and VIII.) and 1770 (Vols. IX. and X.); Mendez's independent +collection in 1767; and Bell's "Fugitive Poetry," in 18 volumes, in +1790-97. + +[15] The reader who may wish to pursue this inquiry farther will find the +following list of Miltonic imitations useful: Dodsley's "Miscellany," I. +164, Pre-existence: "A Poem in Imitation of Milton," by Dr. Evans. This +is in blank verse, and Gray, in a letter to Walpole, calls it "nonsense." +II. 109. "The Institution of the Order of the Garter," by Gilbert West. +This is a dramatic poem, with a chorus of British bards, which is several +times quoted and commended in Joseph Warton's "Essay on Pope." West's +"Monody on the Death of Queen Caroline," is a "Lycidas" imitation. III. +214, "Lament for Melpomene and Calliope," by J. G. Cooper; also a +"Lycidas" poem. IV. 50, "Penshurst," by Mr. F. Coventry: a very close +imitation of "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso." IV. 181, "Ode to Fancy," by +the Rev. Mr. Merrick: octosyllables. IV. 229, "Solitude, an Ode," by Dr. +Grainger: octosyllables. V. 283, "Prologue to Comus," performed at Bath, +1756. VI. 148, "Vacation," by----, Esq.: "L'Allegro," very close-- + + "These delights, Vacation, give, + And I with thee will choose to live." + +IX. (Pearch) 199, "Ode to Health," by J. H. B., Esq.: "L'Allegro." X. 5, +"The Valetudinarian," by Dr. Marriott; "L'Allegro," very close. X. 97, +"To the Moon," by Robert Lloyd: "Il Penseroso," close. Parody is one of +the surest testimonies to the prevalence of a literary fashion, and in +Vol X. p 269 of Pearch, occurs a humorous "Ode to Horror," burlesquing +"The Enthusiast" and "The Pleasures of Melancholy," "in the allegoric, +descriptive, alliterative, epithetical, hyperbolical, and diabolical +style of our modern ode wrights and monody-mongers," form which I extract +a passage: + + "O haste thee, mild Miltonic maid, + From yonder yew's sequestered shade. . . + O thou whom wandering Warton saw, + Amazed with more than youthful awe, + As by the pale moon's glimmering gleam + He mused his melancholy theme. + O Curfew-loving goddess, haste! + O waft me to some Scythian waste, + Where, in Gothic solitude, + Mid prospects most sublimely rude, + Beneath a rough rock's gloomy chasm, + Thy sister sits, Enthusiasm." + +"Bell's Fugitive Poetry," Vol. XI, (1791), has a section devoted to +"poems in the manner of Milton," by Evans, Mason, T. Warton and a Mr. P. +(L'Amoroso). + +[16] See James Thomson's "City of Dreadful Night," xxi. Also the +frontispiece to Mr. E. Stedman's "Nature of Poetry" (1892) and pp. 140-41 +of the same. + +[17] "Eighteenth Century Literature," pp. 209, 212. + +[18] "English Literature in the Eighteenth Century," pp. 375, 379. + +[19] Joseph mentions as one of Spenser's characteristics, "a certain +pleasing melancholy in his sentiments, the constant companion of an +elegant taste, that casts a delicacy and grace over all his composition," +"Essay on Pope," Vol. II. p. 29. In his review of Pope's "Epistle of +Eloisa to Abelard," he says: "the effect and influence of Melancholy, who +is beautifully personified, on every object that occurs and on every part +of the convent, cannot be too much applauded, or too often read, as it is +founded on nature and experience. That temper of mind casts a gloom on +all things. + + "'But o'er the twilight grows and dusky caves,' etc." + --_Ibid_, Vol. I. p. 314. + +[20] "The Grave," by Robert Blair. + +[21] The aeolian harp was a favorite property of romantic poets for a +hundred years. See Mason's "Ode to an Aeolus's Harp" (Works, Vol. I. p. +51). First invented by the Jesuit, Kircher, about 1650, and described in +his "Musurgia Universalis," Mason says that it was forgotten for upwards +of a century and "accidentally rediscovered" in England by a Mr. Oswald. +It is mentioned in "The Castle of Indolence" (i. xl) as a novelty: + + "A certain music never known before + Here lulled the pensive melancholy mind"-- + +a passage to which Collins alludes in his verses on Thomson's death-- + + "In yon deep bed of whispering reeds + His airy harp shall now be laid." + +See "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" I. 341-42 (1805) + + "Like that wild harp whose magic tone + Is wakened by the winds alone." + +And Arthur Cleveland Coxe's (_Christian Ballads_, 1840) + + "It was a wind-harp's magic strong, + Touched by the breeze in dreamy song," + +And the poetry of the Annuals _passim_. + +[22] _Cf._ the "Elegy": + + "There at the foot of yonder nodding beech," etc. + +[23] "On a Distant Prospect of Eton College." + +[24] "Hymn to Adversity" + +[25] "Ode on the Spring." + +[26] "Ward's English Poets," Vol. III. pp. 278-82. + +[27] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 233. + +[28] "Essay on Pope." + +[29] See _ante_, p. 114. + +[30] "Life of Collins." + +[31] Essay on "Pope." + +[32] Mr. Perry enumerates, among English imitators, Falconer, T. Warton, +James Graeme, Wm. Whitehead, John Scott, Henry Headly, John Henry Moore, +and Robert Lovell, "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 391. Among +foreign imitations Lamartine's "Le Lac" is perhaps the most famous. + +[33] "Mason's Works," Vol. I. p. 179. + +[34] _Ibid._, Vol. I. p. 114. + +[35] _Cf_. Keats' unfinished poem, "The Eve of St. Mark," + +[36] Parnell's collected poems were published in 1722. + +[37] Not the least interesting among the progeny of Gray's "Elegy" was +"The Indian Burying Ground" of the American poet, Philip Freneau +(1752-1832). Gray's touch is seen elsewhere in Freneau, _e.g._, in "The +Deserted Farm-house." + + "Once in the bounds of this sequestered room + Perhaps some swain nocturnal courtship made: + Perhaps some Sherlock mused amid the gloom, + Since Love and Death forever seek the shade." + +[38] _Spectator_, No. 489. + +[39] No. 415. + +[40] John Hill Burton, in his "Reign of Queen Anne" give a passage from a +letter of one Captain Burt, superintendent of certain road-making +operations in the Scotch Highlands, by way of showing how very modern a +person Carlyle's picturesque tourist is. The captain describes the +romantic scenery of the glens as "horrid prospects." It was considerably +later in the century that Dr. Johnson said, in answer to Boswell's timid +suggestion that Scotland had a great many noble wild prospects, "I +believe, sir, you have a great many, Norway, too, has noble wild +prospects, and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. +But, sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever +sees is the high-road that leads him to England." + +[41] See also Gray's letter to Rev. James Brown (1763) inclosing a +drawing, in reference to a small ruined chapel at York Minster; and a +letter (about 1765) to Jas. Bentham, Prebendary of Ely whose "Essay on +Gothic Architecture" has been wrongly attributed to Gray. + +[42] To Mrs. Dorothy Gray, 1739. + +[43] To Richard West, 1739. + +[44] Gray, Walpole, and West had been schoolfellows and intimates at Eton. + +[45] To West, 1740. + +[46] To Mrs. Dorothy Gray, 1740. + +[47] "Pearch's Collection" (VII. 138) gives an elegiac quatrain poem on +"The Ruins of Netley Abbey," by a poet with the suggestive name of George +Keate; and "The Alps," in heavy Thomsonian blank verse (VII. 107) by the +same hand. + +[48] "A soft and lulling sound is heard + Of streams inaudible by day." + _The White Doe of Rylstone, Wordsworth_. + +[49] "Samson Agonistes." + +[50] "Essay on Pope" (5th ed.), Vol. II. p. 180. + +[51] These were, in order of publication: "The Mountains and Lakes of +Cumberland and Westmoreland" (2 vols.), 1789; "The Highlands of +Scotland," 1789; "Remarks on Forest Scenery," 1791; "The Western Parts of +England and the Isle of Wight," 1798; "The Coasts of Hampshire," etc., +1804; "Cambridge, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex," etc., 1809. The last two +were posthumously published. Gilpin, who was a prebendary of Salisbury, +died in 1804. Pearch's "Collection" (VII. 23) has "A Descriptive Poem," +on the Lake Country, in octosyllabic couplets, introducing Keswick, +Borrowdale, Dovedale, Lodore, Derwentwater, and other familiar localities. + + + + +CHAPTER VI. + +The School of Warton + +In the progress of our inquiries, hitherto, we have met with little that +can be called romantic in the narrowest sense. Though the literary +movement had already begun to take a retrospective turn, few distinctly +mediaeval elements were yet in evidence. Neither the literature of the +monk nor the literature of the knight had suffered resurrection. It was +not until about 1760 that writers began to gravitate decidedly toward the +Middle Ages. The first peculiarly mediaeval type that contrived to +secure a foothold in eighteenth-century literature was the hermit, a +figure which seems to have had a natural attraction, not only for +romanticizing poets like Shenstone and Collins, but for the whole +generation of verse writers from Parnell to Goldsmith, Percy and +Beattie--each of whom composed a "Hermit"--and even for the authors of +"Rasselas" and "Tom Jones," in whose fictions he becomes a stock +character, as a fountain of wisdom and of moral precepts.[1] + +A literary movement which reverts to the past for its inspiration is +necessarily also a learned movement. Antiquarian scholarship must lead +the way. The picture of an extinct society has to be pieced together +from the fragments at hand, and this involves special research. So long +as this special knowledge remains the exclusive possession of +professional antiquaries like Gough, Hearne, Bentham, Perry, Grose,[2] it +bears no fruit in creative literature. It produces only local histories, +surveys of cathedrals and of sepulchral monuments, books about Druidic +remains, Roman walls and coins, etc., etc. It was only when men of +imagination and of elegant tastes were enlisted in such pursuits that the +dry stick of antiquarianism put forth blossoms. The poets, of course, +had to make studies of their own, to decipher manuscripts, learn Old +English, visit ruins, collect ballads and ancient armor, familiarize +themselves with terms of heraldry, architecture, chivalry, ecclesiology +and feudal law, and in other such ways inform and stimulate their +imaginations. It was many years before the joint labors of scholars and +poets had reconstructed an image of medieval society, sharp enough in +outline and brilliant enough in color to impress itself upon the general +public. Scott, indeed, was the first to popularize romance; mainly, no +doubt, because of the greater power and fervor of his imagination; but +also, in part, because an ampler store of materials had been already +accumulated when he began work. He had fed on Percy's "Reliques" in +boyhood; through Coleridge, his verse derives from Chatterton; and the +line of Gothic romances which starts with "The Castle of Otranto" is +remotely responsible for "Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." But Scott too +was, like Percy and Walpole, a virtuoso and collector; and the vast +apparatus of notes and introductory matter in his metrical tales, and in +the Waverley novels, shows how necessary it was for the romantic poet to +be his own antiquary. + +As was to be expected, the zeal of the first romanticists was not always +a zeal according to knowledge, and the picture of the Middle Age which +they painted was more of a caricature than a portrait. A large share of +medieval literature was inaccessible to the general reader. Much of it +was still in manuscript. Much more of it was in old and rare printed +copies, broadsides and black-letter folios, the treasure of great +libraries and of jealously hoarded private collections. Much was in +dialects little understood-forgotten forms of speech-Old French, Middle +High German, Old Norse, medieval Latin, the ancient Erse and Cymric +tongues, Anglo-Saxon. There was an almost total lack of apparatus for +the study of this literature. Helps were needed in the shape of modern +reprints of scarce texts, bibliographies, critical editions, +translations, literary histories and manuals, glossaries of archaic +words, dictionaries and grammars of obsolete languages. These were +gradually supplied by working specialists in different fields of +investigation. Every side of medieval life has received illustration in +its turn. Works like Tyrwhitt's edition of Chaucer (1775-78); the +collections of mediaeval romances by Ellis (1805), Ritson (1802), and +Weber (1810); Nares' and Halliwell's "Archaic Glossary" (1822-46), +Carter's "Specimens of Ancient Sculpture and Paintings" (1780-94), +Scott's "Demonology and Witchcraft" (1830), Hallam's "Middle Ages" +(1818), Meyrick's "Ancient Armour" (1824), Lady Guest's "Mabinogion" +(1838), the publications of numberless individual scholars and of learned +societies like the Camden, the Spenser, the Percy, the Chaucer, the Early +English Text, the Roxburgh Club,--to mention only English examples, taken +at random and separated from each other by wide intervals of time,--are +instances of the labors by which mediaeval life has been made familiar to +all who might choose to make acquaintance with it. + +The history of romanticism, after the impulse had once been given, is +little else than a record or the steps by which, one after another, new +features of that vast and complicated scheme of things which we loosely +call the Middle Ages were brought to light and made available as literary +material. The picture was constantly having fresh details added to it, +nor is there any reason to believe that it is finished yet. Some of the +finest pieces of mediaeval work have only within the last few years been +brought to the attention of the general reader; _e.g._, the charming old +French story in prose and verse, "Aucassin et Nicolete," and the +fourteenth-century English poem, "The Perle." The future holds still +other phases of romanticism in reserve; the Middle Age seems likely to be +as inexhaustible in novel sources of inspiration as classical antiquity +has already proved to be. The past belongs to the poet no less than the +present, and a great part of the literature of every generation will +always be retrospective. The tastes and preferences of the individual +artist will continue to find a wide field for selection in the rich +quarry of Christian and feudal Europe. + +It is not a little odd that the book which first aroused, in modern +Europe, an interest in Norse mythology should have been written by a +Frenchman. This was the "Introduction a l'Histoire de Dannemarc," +published in 1755 by Paul Henri Mallet, a native of Geneva and sometime +professor of Belles Lettres in the Royal University at Copenhagen. The +work included also a translation of the first part of the Younger Edda, +with an abstract of the second part and of the Elder Edda, and versions +of several Runic poems. It was translated into English, in 1770, by +Thomas Percy, the editor of the "Reliques," under the title, "Northern +Antiquities; or a Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion, and Laws +of the ancient Danes." A German translation had appeared a few years +earlier and had inspired the Schleswig-Holsteiner, Heinrich Wilhem von +Gerstenberg, to compose his "Gedicht eines Skalden," which introduced the +old Icelandic mythology into German poetry in 1766. Percy had published +independently in 1763 "Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, translated from the +Icelandic Language." + +Gray did not wait for the English translation of Mallet's book. In a +letter to Mason, dated in 1758, and inclosing some criticisims on the +latter's "Caractacus" (then in MS.), he wrote, "I am pleased with the +Gothic Elysium. Do you think I am ignorant about either that, or the +_hell_ before, or the _twilight_.[3] I have been there and have seen it +all in Mallet's 'Introduction to the History of Denmark' (it is in +French), and many other places." It is a far cry from Mallet's "System +of Runic Mythology" to William Morris' "Sigurd the Volsung" (1877), but +to Mallet belongs the credit of first exciting that interest in +Scandinavian antiquity which has enriched the prose and poetry not only +of England but of Europe in general. Gray refers to him in his notes on +"The Descent of Odin," and his work continued to be popular authority on +its subject for at least half a century. Scott cites it in his +annotations on "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805). + + +Gray's studies in Runic literature took shape in "The Fatal Sisters" and +"The Descent of Odin," written in 1761, published in 1768. These were +paraphrases of two poems which Gray found in the "De Causis Contemnendae +Mortis" (Copenhagen, 1689) of Thomas Bartholin, a Danish physician of the +seventeenth century. The first of them describes the Valkyrie weaving +the fates of the Danish and Irish warriors in the battle of Clontarf, +fought in the eleventh century between Sigurd, Earl of Orkney, and Brian, +King of Dublin; the second narrates the descent of Odin to Niflheimer, to +inquire of Hela concerning the doom of Balder.[4] Gray had designed +these for the introductory chapter of his projected history of English +poetry. He calls them imitations, which in fact they are, rather than +literal renderings. In spite of a tinge of eighteenth-century diction, +and of one or two Shaksperian and Miltonic phrases, the translator +succeeded fairly well in reproducing the wild air of his originals. His +biographer, Mr. Gosse, promises that "the student will not fail . . . in +the Gothic picturesqueness of 'The Descent of Odin,' to detect notes and +phrases of a more delicate originality than are to be found even in his +more famous writings; and will dwell with peculiar pleasure on those +passages in which Gray freed himself of the trammels of an artificial and +conventional taste, and prophesied of the new romantic age that was +coming." + +Celtic antiquity shared with Gothic in this newly around interest. Here +too, as in the phrase about "the stormy Hebrides," "Lycidas" seems to +have furnished the spark that kindled the imaginations of the poets. + + "Where were ye, nymphs, when the remorseless deep + Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas? + For neither were ye playing on the steep + Where your old bards, the famous Druids lie, + Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high, + Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream." + +Joseph Warton quotes this passage twice in his "Essay on Pope" (Vol I., +pp. 7 and 356, 5th ed.), once to assert its superiority to a passage in +Pope's "Pastorals": "The mention of places remarkably romantic, the +supposed habitation of Druids, bards and wizards, is far more pleasing to +the imagination, than the obvious introduction of Cam and Isis." Another +time, to illustrate the following suggestion: "I have frequently wondered +that our modern writers have made so little use of the druidical times +and the traditions of the old bards. . . Milton, we see, was sensible of +the force of such imagery, as we may gather from this short but exquisite +passage." As further illustrations of the poetic capabilities of similar +themes, Warton gives a stanza from Gray's "Bard" and some lines from +Gilbert West's "Institution of the Order of the Garter" which describe +the ghosts of the Druids hovering about their ruined altars at Stonehenge: + + "--Mysterious rows + Of rude enormous obelisks, that rise + Orb within orb, stupendous monuments + Of artless architecture, such as now + Oft-times amaze the wandering traveler, + By the pale moon discerned on Sarum's plain." + +He then inserts two stanzas, in the Latin of Hickes' "Thesaurus," of an +old Runic ode preserved by Olaus Wormius (Ole Worm) and adds an +observation upon the Scandinavian heroes and their contempt of death. +Druids and bards now begin to abound. Collins' "Ode on the Death of Mr. +Thomson," _e.g._, commences with the line + + "In yonder grave a Druid lies." + +In his "Ode to Liberty," he alludes to the tradition that Mona, the +druidic stronghold, was long covered with an enchantment of mist--work of +an angry mermaid: + + "Mona, once hid from those who search the main, + Where thousand elfin shapes abide." + +In Thomas Warton's "Pleasures of Melancholy," Contemplation is fabled to +have been discovered, when a babe, by a Druid + + "Far in a hollow glade of Mona's woods," + +and borne by him to his oaken bower, where she + + "--loved to lie + Oft deeply listening to the rapid roar + Of wood-hung Menai, stream of druids old." + +Mason's "Caractacus" (1759) was a dramatic poem on the Greek model, with +a chorus of British bards, and a principal Druid for choragus. The scene +is the sacred grove in Mona. Mason got up with much care the description +of druidic rites, such as the preparation of the adder-stone and the +cutting of the mistletoe with a gold sickle, from Latin authorities like +Pliny, Tacitus, Lucan, Strabo, and Suetonius. Joseph Warton commends +highly the chorus on "Death" in this piece, as well as the chorus of +bards at the end of West's "Institution of the Garter." For the +materials of his "Bard" Gray had to go no farther than historians and +chroniclers such as Camden, Higden, and Matthew of Westminster, to all of +whom he refers. Following a now discredited tradition, he represents the +last survivor of the Welsh poetic guild, seated, harp in hand, upon a +crag on the side of Snowdon, and denouncing judgment on Edward I, for the +murder of his brothers in song. + +But in 1764 Gray was incited, by the publication of Dr. Evans' +"Specimens,"[5] to attempt a few translations from the Welsh. The most +considerable of these was "The Triumphs of Owen," published among Gray's +collected poems in 1768. This celebrates the victory over the +confederate fleets of Ireland, Denmark, and Normandy, won about 1160 by a +prince of North Wales, Owen Ap Griffin, "the dragon son on Mona." The +other fragments are brief but spirited versions of bardic songs in praise +of fallen heroes: "Caradoc," "Conan," and "The Death of Hoel." They were +printed posthumously, though doubtless composed in 1764. + +The scholarship of the day was not always accurate in discriminating +between ancient systems of religion, and Gray, in his letters to Mason in +1758, when "Caractacus" was still in the works, takes him to task for +mixing the Gothic and Celtic mythologies. He instructs him that Woden +and his Valhalla belong to "the doctrine of the Scalds, not of the +Bards"; but admits that, "in that scarcity of Celtic ideas we labor +under," it might be permissible to borrow from the Edda, "dropping, +however, all mention of Woden and his Valkyrian virgins," and "without +entering too minutely on particulars"; or "still better, to graft any +wild picturesque fable, absolutely of one's own invention, upon the Druid +stock." But Gray had not scrupled to mix mythologies in "The Bard," +thereby incurring Dr. Johnson's censure. "The weaving of the winding +sheet he borrowed, as he owns, from the northern bards; but their +texture, however, was very properly the work of female powers, as the art +of spinning the thread of life in another mythology. Theft is always +dangerous: Gray has made weavers of the slaughtered bards, by a fiction +outrageous and incongruous."[6] Indeed Mallet himself had a very +confused notion of the relation of the Celtic to the Teutonic race. He +speaks constantly of the old Scandinavians as Celts. Percy points out +the difference, in the preface to his translation, and makes the +necessary correction in the text, where the word Celtic occurs--usually +by substituting "Gothic and Celtic" for the "Celtic" of the original. +Mason made his contribution to Runic literature, "Song of Harold the +Valiant," a rather insipid versification of a passage from the "Knytlinga +Saga," which had been rendered by Bartholin into Latin, from him into +French by Mallet, and from Mallet into English prose by Percy. Mason +designed it for insertion in the introduction to Gray's abortive history +of English poetry. + +The true pioneers of the mediaeval revival were the Warton brothers. +"The school of Warton" was a term employed, not without disparaging +implications, by critics who had no liking for antique minstrelsy. +Joseph and Thomas Warton were the sons of Thomas Warton, vicar of +Basingstoke, who had been a fellow of Magdalen and Professor of Poetry at +Oxford; which latter position was afterward filled by the younger of his +two sons. It is interesting to note that a volume of verse by Thomas +Warton, Sr., posthumously printed in 1748, includes a Spenserian +imitation and translations of two passages from the "Song of Ragner +Lodbrog," an eleventh-century Viking, after the Latin version quoted by +Sir Wm. Temple in his essay "Of Heroic Virtue";[7] so that the romantic +leanings of the Warton brothers seem to be an instance of heredity. +Joseph was educated at Winchester,--where Collins was his +schoolfellow--and both of the brothers at Oxford. Joseph afterward +became headmaster of Winchester, and lived till 1800, surviving his +younger brother ten years. Thomas was always identified with Oxford, +where he resided for forty-seven years. He was appointed, in 1785, +Camden Professor of History in the university, but gave no lectures. In +the same year he was chosen to succeed Whitehead, as Poet Laureate. Both +brothers were men of a genial, social temper. Joseph was a man of some +elegance; he was fond of the company of young ladies, went into general +society, and had a certain renown as a drawing-room wit and diner-out. +He used to spend his Christmas vacations in London, where he was a member +of Johnson's literary club. Thomas, on the contrary, who waxed fat and +indolent in college cloisters, until Johnson compared him to a turkey +cock, was careless in his personal habits and averse to polite society. +He was the life of a common room at Oxford, romped with the schoolboys +when he visited Dr. Warton at Winchester, and was said to have a +hankering after pipes and ale and the broad mirth of the taproom. Both +Wartons had an odd passion for military parades; and Thomas--who was a +believer in ghosts--used secretly to attend hangings. They were also +remarkably harmonious in their tastes and intellectual pursuits, eager +students of old English poetry, Gothic architecture, and British +antiquities. So far as enthusiasm, fine critical taste, and elegant +scholarship can make men poets, the Wartons were poets. But their work +was quite unoriginal. Many of their poems can be taken to pieces and +assigned, almost line by line and phrase by phrase, to Milton, Thomson, +Spenser, Shakspere, Gray. They had all of our romantic poet Longfellow's +dangerous gifts of sympathy and receptivity, without a tenth part of his +technical skill, or any of his real originality as an artist. Like +Longfellow, they loved the rich and mellow atmosphere of the historic +past: + + "Tales that have the rime of age, + And chronicles of eld." + +The closing lines of Thomas Warton's sonnet "Written in a Blank Leaf of +Dugdale's Monasticon"[8]--a favorite with Charles Lamb--might have been +written by Longfellow: + + "Nor rough nor barren are the winding ways + Of hoar Antiquity, but strewn with flowers." + +Joseph Warton's pretensions, as a poet, are much less than his younger +brother's. Much of Thomas Warton's poetry, such as his _facetiae_ in the +"Oxford Sausage" and his "Triumph of Isis," had an academic flavor. +These we may pass over, as foreign to our present inquiries. So, too, +with most of his annual laureate odes, "On his Majesty's Birthday," etc. +Yet even these official and rather perfunctory performances testify to +his fondness for what Scott calls "the memorials of our forefathers' +piety or splendor." Thus, in the birthday odes for 1787-88, and the New +Year ode for 1787, he pays a tribute to the ancient minstrels and to +early laureates like Chaucer and Spenser, and celebrates "the Druid harp" +sounding "through the gloom profound of forests hoar"; the fanes and +castles built by the Normans; and the + + "--bright hall where Odin's Gothic throne + With the broad blaze of brandished falchions shone." + +But the most purely romantic of Thomas Warton's poems are "The Crusade" +and "The Grave of King Arthur." The former is the song which + + "The lion heart Plantagenet + Sang, looking through his prison-bars," + +when the minstrel Blondel came wandering in search of his captive king. +The latter describes how Henry II., on his way to Ireland, was feasted at +Cilgarran Castle, where the Welsh bards sang to him of the death of +Arthur and his burial in Glastonbury Abbey. The following passage +anticipates Scott: + + "Illumining the vaulted roof, + A thousand torches flamed aloof; + From many cups, with golden gleam, + Sparkled the red metheglin's stream: + To grace the gorgeous festival, + Along the lofty-windowed hall + The storied tapestry was hung; + With minstrelsy the rafters rung + Of harps that with reflected light + From the proud gallery glittered bright: + While gifted bards, a rival throng, + From distant Mona, nurse of song, + From Teivi fringed with umbrage brown, + From Elvy's vale and Cader's crown, + From many a shaggy precipice + That shades Ierne's hoarse abyss, + And many a sunless solitude + Of Radnor's inmost mountains rude, + To crown the banquet's solemn close + Themes of British glory chose." + +Here is much of Scott's skill in the poetic manipulation of place-names, +_e.g._, + + "Day set on Norham's castled steep, + And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep, + And Cheviot's mountains lone"-- + +names which leave a far-resounding romantic rumble behind them. Another +passage in Warton's poem brings us a long way on toward Tennyson's "Wild +Tintagel by the Cornish sea" and his "island valley of Avilion." + + "O'er Cornwall's cliffs the tempest roared: + High the screaming sea-mew soared: + In Tintaggel's topmost tower + Darkness fell the sleety shower: + Round the rough castle shrilly sung + The whirling blast, and wildly flung + On each tall rampart's thundering side + The surges of the tumbling tide, + When Arthur ranged his red-cross ranks + On conscious Camlan's crimsoned banks: + By Mordred's faithless guile decreed + Beneath a Saxon spear to bleed. + Yet in vain a Paynim foe + Armed with fate the mightly blow; + For when he fell, an elfin queen, + All in secret and unseen, + O'er the fainting hero threw + Her mantle of ambrosial blue, + And bade her spirits bear him far, + In Merlin's agate-axled car, + To her green isle's enameled steep + Far in the navel of the deep." + +Other poems of Thomas Warton touching upon his favorite studies are the +"Ode Sent to Mr. Upton, on his Edition of the Faery Queene," the "Monody +Written near Stratford-upon-Avon," the sonnets, "Written at Stonehenge," +"To Mr. Gray," and "On King Arthur's Round Table," and the humorous +epistle which he attributes to Thomas Hearne, the antiquary, denouncing +the bishops for their recent order that fast-prayers should be printed in +modern type instead of black letter, and pronouncing a curse upon the +author of "The Companion to the Oxford Guide Book" for his disrespectful +remarks about antiquaries. + + "May'st thou pore in vain + For dubious doorways! May revengeful moths + Thy ledgers eat! May chronologic spouts + Retain no cipher legible! May crypts + Lurk undiscovered! Nor may'st thou spell the names + Of saints in storied windows, nor the dates + Of bells discover, nor the genuine site + Of abbots' pantries!" + +Warton was a classical scholar and, like most of the forerunners of the +romantic school, was a trifle shame-faced over his Gothic heresies. Sir +Joshua Reynolds had supplied a painted window of classical design for New +College, Oxford; and Warton, in some complimentary verses, professes that +those "portraitures of Attic art" have won him back to the true taste;[9] +and prophesies that henceforth angels, apostles, saints, miracles, +martyrdoms, and tales of legendary lore shall-- + + "No more the sacred window's round disgrace, + But yield to Grecian groups the shining space. . . + Thy powerful hand has broke the Gothic chain, + And brought my bosom back to truth again. . . + For long, enamoured of a barbarous age, + A faithless truant to the classic page-- + Long have I loved to catch the simple chime + Of minstrel harps, and spell the fabling rime; + To view the festive rites, the knightly play, + That decked heroic Albion's elder day; + To mark the mouldering halls of barons bold, + And the rough castle, cast in giant mould; + With Gothic manners, Gothic arts explore, + And muse on the magnificence of yore. + But chief, enraptured have I loved to roam, + A lingering votary, the vaulted dome, + Where the tall shafts, that mount in massy pride, + Their mingling branches shoot from side to side; + Where elfin sculptors, with fantastic clew, + O'er the long roof their wild embroidery drew; + Where Superstition, with capricious hand, + In many a maze, the wreathed window planned, + With hues romantic tinged the gorgeous pane, + To fill with holy light the wondrous fane."[10] + +The application of the word "romantic," in this passage, to the mediaeval +art of glass-staining is significant. The revival of the art in our own +day is due to the influence of the latest English school of romantic +poetry and painting, and especially to William Morris. Warton's +biographers track his passion for antiquity to the impression left upon +his mind by a visit to Windsor Castle, when he was a boy. He used to +spend his summers in wandering through abbeys and cathedrals. He kept +notes of his observations and is known to have begun a work on Gothic +architecture, no trace of which, however, was found among his +manuscripts. The Bodleian Library was one of his haunts, and he was +frequently seen "surveying with quiet and rapt earnestness the ancient +gateway of Magdalen College." He delighted in illuminated manuscripts +and black-letter folios. In his "Observations on the Faery Queene"[11] +he introduces a digression of twenty pages on Gothic architecture, and +speaks lovingly of a "very curious and beautiful folio manuscript of the +history of Arthur and his knights in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, +written on vellum, with illuminated initials and head-pieces, in which we +see the fashion of ancient armour, building, manner of tilting and other +particulars." + +Another very characteristic poem of Warton's is the "Ode Written at +Vale-Royal Abbey in Cheshire," a monastery of Cistercian monks, founded +by Edward I. This piece is saturated with romantic feeling and written +in the stanza and manner of Gray's "Elegy," as will appear from a pair of +stanzas, taken at random: + + "By the slow clock, in stately-measured chime, + That from the messy tower tremendous tolled, + No more the plowman counts the tedious time, + Nor distant shepherd pens the twilight fold. + + "High o'er the trackless heath at midnight seen, + No more the windows, ranged in array + (Where the tall shaft and fretted nook between + Thick ivy twines), the tapered rites betray." + +It is a note of Warton's period that, though Fancy and the Muse survey +the ruins of the abbey with pensive regret, "severer Reason"--the real +eighteenth-century divinity--"scans the scene with philosophic ken," +and--being a Protestant--reflects that, after all, the monastic houses +were "Superstition's shrine" and their demolition was a good thing for +Science and Religion. + +The greatest service, however, that Thomas Warton rendered to the studies +that he loved was his "History of English Poetry from the Twelfth to the +Close of the Sixteenth Century." This was in three volumes, published +respectively in 1774, 1777, and 1781. The fragment of a fourth volume +was issued in 1790. A revised edition in four volumes was published in +1824, under the editorship of Richard Price, corrected, augmented, and +annotated by Ritson, Douce, Park, Ashby, and the editor himself. In 1871 +appeared a new revision (also in four volumes) edited by W. Carew +Hazlitt, with many additions, by the editor and by well-known English +scholars like Madden, Skeat, Furnivall, Morris, and Thomas and Aldis +Wright. It should never be forgotten, in estimating the value of +Warton's work, that he was a forerunner in this field. Much of his +learning is out of date, and the modern editors of his history--Price and +Hazlitt--seem to the discouraged reader to be chiefly engaged, in their +footnotes and bracketed interpellations, in taking back statements that +Warton had made in the text. The leading position, _e.g._, of his +preliminary dissertation, "Of the Origin of Romantic Fiction in +Europe"--deriving it from the Spanish Arabs--has long since been +discredited. But Warton's learning was wide, if not exact; and it was +not dry learning, but quickened by the spirit of a genuine man of +letters. Therefore, in spite of its obsoleteness in matters of fact, his +history remains readable, as a body of descriptive criticism, or a +continuous literary essay. The best way to read it is to read it as it +was written--in the original edition--disregarding the apparatus of +notes, which modern scholars have accumulated about it, but remembering +that it is no longer an authority and probably needs correcting on every +page. Read thus, it is a thoroughly delightful book, "a classic in its +way," as Lowell has said. Southey, too, affirmed that its publication +formed an epoch in literary history; and that, with Percy's "Reliques," +it had promoted, beyond any other work, the "growth of a better taste +than had prevailed for the hundred years preceding." + +Gray had schemed a history of English poetry, but relinquished the design +to Warton, to whom he communicated an outline of his own plan. The +"Observations on English Metre" and the essay on the poet Lydgate, among +Gray's prose remains, are apparently portions of this projected work. + +Lowell, furthermore, pronounces Joseph Warton's "Essay on the Genius and +Writings of Pope" (1756) "the earliest public official declaration of war +against the reigning mode." The new school had its critics, as well as +its poets, and the Wartons were more effective in the former capacity. +The war thus opened was by no means as internecine as that waged by the +French classicists and romanticists of 1830. It has never been possible +to get up a very serious conflict in England, upon merely aesthetic +grounds. Yet the same opposition existed. Warton's biographer tells us +that the strictures made upon his essay were "powerful enough to damp the +ardor of the essayist, who left his work in an imperfect state for the +long space of twenty-six years," _i.e._, till 1782, when he published the +second volume. + +Both Wartons were personal friends of Dr. Johnson; they were members of +the Literary Club and contributors to the _Idler_ and the _Adventurer_. +Thomas interested himself to get Johnson the Master's degree from Oxford, +where the doctor made him a visit. Some correspondence between them is +given in Boswell. Johnson maintained in public a respectful attitude +toward the critical and historical work of the Wartons; but he had no +sympathy with their antiquarian enthusiasm or their liking for old +English poetry. In private he ridiculed Thomas' verses, and summed them +up in the manner ensuing: + + "Whereso'er I turn my view, + All is strange yet nothing new; + Endless labor all along, + Endless labor to be wrong; + Phrase that time has flung away, + Uncouth words in disarray, + Tricked in antique ruff and bonnet, + Ode and elegy and sonnet." + +And although he added, "Remember that I love the fellow dearly, for all I +laugh at him," this saving clause failed to soothe the poet's indignant +breast, when he heard that the doctor had ridiculed his lines. An +estrangement resulted which Johnson is said to have spoken of even with +tears, saying "that Tom Warton was the only man of genius he ever knew +who wanted a heart." + +Goldsmith, too, belonged to the conservative party, though Mr. Perry[12] +detects romantic touches in "The Deserted Village," such as the line, + + "Where wild Altama murmurs to their woe," + +or + + "On Torno's cliffs or Pambamarca's side." + +In his "Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning" (1759) +Goldsmith pronounces the age one of literary decay; he deplores the vogue +of blank verse--which he calls an "erroneous innovation"--and the +"disgusting solemnity of manner" that it has brought into fashion. He +complains of the revival of old plays upon the stage. "Old pieces are +revived, and scarcely any new ones admitted. . . The public are again +obliged to ruminate over those ashes of absurdity which were disgusting +to our ancestors even in an age of ignorance. . . What must be done? +Only sit down contented, cry up all that comes before us and advance even +the absurdities of Shakspere. Let the reader suspend his censure; I +admire the beauties of this great father of our stage as much as they +deserve, but could wish, for the honor of our country, and for his own +too, that many of his scenes were forgotten. A man blind of one eye +should always be painted in profile. Let the spectator who assists at +any of these new revived pieces only ask himself whether he would approve +such a performance, if written by a modern poet. I fear he will find +that much of his applause proceeds merely from the sound of a name and an +empty veneration for antiquity. In fact, the revival of those _pieces of +forced humor, far-fetched conceit and unnatural hyperbole which have been +ascribed to Shakspere_, is rather gibbeting than raising a statue to his +memory." + +The words that I have italicized make it evident that what Goldsmith was +really finding fault with was the restoration of the original text of +Shakspere's plays, in place of the garbled versions that had hitherto +been acted. This restoration was largely due to Garrick, but Goldsmith's +language implies that the reform was demanded by public opinion and by +the increasing "veneration for antiquity." The next passage shows that +the new school had its _claque_, which rallied to the support of the old +British drama as the French romanticists did, nearly a century later, to +the support of Victor Hugo's _melodrames_.[13] + +"What strange vamped comedies, farcical tragedies, or what shall I call +them--speaking pantomimes have we not of late seen?. . . The piece +pleases our critics because it talks Old English; and it pleases the +galleries because it has ribaldry. . . A prologue generally precedes the +piece, to inform us that it was composed by Shakspere or old Ben, or +somebody else who took them for his model. A face of iron could not have +the assurance to avow dislike; the theater has its partisans who +understand the force of combinations trained up to vociferation, clapping +of hands and clattering of sticks; and though a man might have strength +sufficient to overcome a lion in single combat, he may run the risk of +being devoured by an army of ants." + +Goldsmith returned to the charge in "The Vicar of Wakefield" (1766), +where Dr. Primrose, inquiring of the two London dames, "who were the +present theatrical writers in vogue, who were the Drydens and Otways of +the day," is surprised to learn that Dryden and Rowe are quite out of +fashion, that taste has gone back a whole century, and that "Fletcher, +Ben Jonson and all the plays of Shakspere are the only things that go +down." "How," cries the good vicar, "is it possible the present age can +be pleased with that antiquated dialect, that obsolete humor, those +overcharged characters which abound in the works you mention?" +Goldsmith's disgust with this affectation finds further vent in his "Life +of Parnell" (1770). "He [Parnell] appears to me to be the last of that +great school that had modeled itself upon the ancients, and taught +English poetry to resemble what the generality of mankind have allowed to +excel. . . His productions bear no resemblance to those tawdry things +which it has, for some time, been the fashion to admire. . . His +poetical language is not less correct than his subjects are pleasing. He +found it at that period in which it was brought to its highest pitch of +refinement; and ever since his time, it has been gradually debasing. It +is, indeed, amazing, after what has been done by Dryden, Addison, and +Pope, to improve and harmonize our native tongue, that their successors +should have taken so much pains to involve it into pristine barbarity. +These misguided innovators have not been content with restoring +antiquated words and phrases, but have indulged themselves in the most +licentious transpositions and the harshest constructions; vainly +imagining that, the more their writings are unlike prose, the more they +resemble poetry. They have adopted a language of their own, and call +upon mankind for admiration. All those who do not understand them are +silent; and those who make out their meaning are willing to praise, to +show they understand." This last sentence is a hit at the alleged +obscurity of Gray's and Mason's odes. + +To illustrate the growth of a retrospective habit in literature Mr. +Perry[14] quotes at length from an essay "On the Prevailing Taste for the +Old English Poets," by Vicesimus Knox, sometimes master of Tunbridge +school, editor of "Elegant Extracts" and honorary doctor of the +University of Pennsylvania. Knox's essays were written while he was an +Oxford undergraduate, and published collectively in 1777. By this time +the romantic movement was in full swing. "The Castle of Otranto" and +Percy's "Reliques" had been out more than ten years; many of the Rowley +poems were in print; and in this very year, Tyrwhitt issued a complete +edition of them, and Warton published the second volume of his "History +of English Poetry." Chatterton and Percy are both mentioned by Knox. + +"The antiquarian spirit," he writes, "which was once confined to +inquiries concerning the manners, the buildings, the records, and the +coins of the ages that preceded us, has now extended itself to those +poetical compositions which were popular among our forefathers, but which +have gradually sunk into oblivion through the decay of language and the +prevalence of a correct and polished taste. Books printed in the black +letter are sought for with the same avidity with which the English +antiquary peruses a monumental inscription, or treasures up a Saxon piece +of money. The popular ballad, composed by some illiterate minstrel, and +which has been handed down by tradition for several centuries, is rescued +from the hands of the vulgar, to obtain a place in the collection of the +man of taste. Verses which, a few years past, were thought worthy the +attention of children only, or of the lowest and rudest orders, are now +admired for that artless simplicity which once obtained the name of +coarseness and vulgarity." Early English poetry, continues the essayist, +"has had its day, and the antiquary must not despise us if we cannot +peruse it with patience. He who delights in all such reading as is never +read, may derive some pleasure from the singularity of his taste, but he +ought still to respect the judgment of mankind, which has consigned to +oblivion the works which he admires. While he pores unmolested on +Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Occleve, let him not censure our obstinacy +in adhering to Homer, Virgil, Milton, and Pope. . . Notwithstanding the +incontrovertible merit of many of our ancient relics of poetry, I believe +it may be doubted whether any one of them would be tolerated as the +production of a modern poet. As a good imitation of the ancient manner, +it would find its admirers; but, considered independently, as an +original, it would be thought a careless, vulgar, inartificial +composition. There are few who do not read Dr. Percy's own pieces, and +those of other late writers, with more pleasure than the oldest ballad in +the collection of that ingenious writer." Mr. Percy quotes another paper +of Knox in which he divides the admirers of English poetry into two +parties: "On one side are the lovers and imitators of Spenser and Milton; +and on the other, those of Dryden, Boileau, and Pope"; in modern phrase, +the romanticists and the classicists. + +Joseph Warton's "Essay on Pope" was an attempt to fix its subject's rank +among English poets. Following the discursive method of Thomas Warton's +"Observations on the Faerie Queen," it was likewise an elaborate +commentary on all of Pope's poems _seriatim_. Every point was +illustrated with abundant learning, and there were digressions amounting +to independent essays on collateral topics: one, _e.g._, on Chaucer, one +on early French Metrical romances; another on Gothic architecture: +another on the new school of landscape gardening, in which Walpole's +essay and Mason's poem are quoted with approval, and mention is made of +the Leasowes. The book was dedicated to Young; and when the second +volume was published in 1782, the first was reissued in a revised form +and introduced by a letter to the author from Tyrwhitt, who writes that, +under the shelter of Warton's authority, "one may perhaps venture to avow +an opinion that poetry is not confined to rhyming couplets, and that its +greatest powers are not displayed in prologues and epilogues." + +The modern reader will be apt to think Warton's estimate of Pope quite +high enough. He places him, to be sure, in the second rank of poets, +below Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton, yet next to Milton and above +Dryden; and he calls the reign of Queen Anne the great age of English +poetry. Yet if it be recollected that the essay was published only +twelve years after Pope's death, and at a time when he was still commonly +held to be, if not the greatest poet, at least the greatest artist in +verse, that England had ever produced, it will be seen that Warton's +opinions might well be thought revolutionary, and his challenge to the +critics a bold one. These opinions can be best exhibited by quoting a +few passages from his book, not consecutive, but taken here and there as +best suits the purpose. + +"The sublime and the pathetic are the two chief nerves of all genuine +poesy. What is there transcendently sublime or pathetic in Pope?. . . +He early left the more poetical provinces of his art, to become a moral, +didactic, and satiric poet. . . And because I am, perhaps, unwilling to +speak out in plain English, I will adopt the following passage of +Voltaire, which, in my opinion, as exactly characteristizes Pope as it +does his model, Boileau, for whom it was originally designed. 'Incapable +peut-etre du sublime qui eleve l'ame, et du sentiment qui l'attendrit, +mais fait pour eclairer ceux a qui la nature accorda l'un et l'autre; +laborieux, severe, precis, pur, harmonieux, il devint enfin le poete de +la Raison.'. . . A clear head and acute understanding are not sufficient +alone to make a poet; the most solid observations on human life, +expressed with the utmost elegance and brevity, are morality and not +poetry. . . It is a creative and glowing imagination, _acer spiritus ac +vis_, and that alone, that can stamp a writer with this exalted and very +uncommon character." + +Warton believes that Pope's projected epic on Brutus, the legendary found +of Britain, "would have more resembled the 'Henriade' than the 'Iliad,' +or even the 'Gierusalemme Liberata'; that it would have appeared (if this +scheme had been executed) how much, and for what reasons, the man that is +skillful in painting modern life, and the most secret foibles and follies +of his contemporaries, is, THEREFORE, disqualified for representing the +ages of heroism, and that simple life which alone epic poetry can +gracefully describe. . . Wit and satire are transitory and perishable, +but nature and passion are eternal." The largest portion of Pope's work, +says the author's closing summary, "is of the didactic, moral, and +satiric kind; and consequently not of the most poetic species of poetry; +when it is manifest that good sense and judgment were his +characteristical excellencies, rather than fancy and invention. . . He +stuck to describing modern manners; but those manners, because they are +familiar, uniform, artificial, and polished, are in their very nature, +unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse. He gradually became one of the +most correct, even, and exact poets that ever wrote. . . Whatever +poetical enthusiasm he actually possessed, he withheld and stifled. The +perusal of him affects not our minds with such strong emotions as we feel +from Homer and Milton; so that no man of a true poetical spirit is master +of himself while he reads them. . . He who would think the 'Faerie +Queene,' 'Palamon and Arcite,' the 'Tempest' or 'Comus,' childish and +romantic might relish Pope. Surely it is no narrow and niggardly +encomium to say, he is the great poet of Reason, the first of ethical +authors in verse." + +To illustrate Pope's inferiority in the poetry of nature and passion, +Warton quotes freely by way of contrast, not only from Spenser and +Milton, but from such contemporaries of his own as Thomson, Akenside, +Gray, Collins, Dyer, Mason, West, Shenstone, and Bedingfield. He +complains that Pope's "Pastorals" contains no new image of nature, and +his "Windsor Forest" no local color; while "the scenes of Thomson are +frequently as wild and romantic as those of Salvator Rosa, varied with +precipices and torrents and 'castled cliffs' and deep valleys, with piny +mountains and the gloomiest caverns." "When Gray published his exquisite +ode on Eton College . . . little notice was taken of it; but I suppose no +critic can be found that will not place it far above Pope's 'Pastorals.'" + +A few additional passages will serve to show that this critic's literary +principles, in general, were consciously and polemically romantic. Thus +he pleads for the _mot precis_--that shibboleth of the nineteenth-century +romanticists--for "_natural, little_ circumstances" against "those who +are fond of _generalities_"; for the "lively painting of Spenser and +Shakspere," as contrasted with the lack of picturesqueness and imagery in +Voltaire's "Henriade." He praises "the fashion that has lately obtained, +in all the nations of Europe, of republishing and illustrating their old +poets."[15] Again, commenting upon Pope's well-known triplet, + + "Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join + The varying verse, the full-resounding line, + The long majestic march and energy divine!" + +he exclaims: "What! Did Milton contribute nothing to the harmony and +extent of our language?. . . Surely his verses vary and resound as much, +and display as much majesty and energy, as any that can be found in +Dryden. And we will venture to say that he that studies Milton +attentively, will gain a truer taste for genuine poetry than he that +forms himself on French writers and their followers." Elsewhere he +expresses a preference for blank verse over rhyme, in long poems on +subjects of a dignified kind.[16] + +"It is perpetually the nauseous cant of the French critics, and of their +advocates and pupils, that the English writers are generally incorrect. +If correctness implies an absence of petty faults, this perhaps may be +granted; if it means that, because their tragedians have avoided the +irregularities of Shakspere, and have observed a juster economy in their +fables, therefore the 'Athalia,' for instance, is preferable to 'Lear,' +the notion is groundless and absurd. Though the 'Henriade' should be +allowed to be free from any very gross absurdities, yet who will dare to +rank it with the 'Paradise Lost'?. . . In our own country the rules of +the drama were never more completely understood than at present; yet what +uninteresting, though faultless, tragedies have we lately seen!. . . +Whether or no the natural powers be not confined and debilitated by that +timidity and caution which is occasioned by a rigid regard to the +dictates of art; or whether that philosophical, that geometrical and +systematical spirit so much in vogue, which has spread itself from the +sciences even into polite literature, by consulting only reason, has not +diminished and destroyed sentiment, and made our poets write from and to +the head rather than the heart; or whether, lastly, when just models, +from which the rules have necessarily been drawn, have once appeared, +succeeding writers, by vainly and ambitiously striving to surpass +those . . . do not become stiff and forced." One of these uninteresting, +though faultless tragedies was "Cato," which Warton pronounces a +"sententious and declamatory drama" filled with "pompous Roman +sentiments," but wanting action and pathos. He censures the tameness of +Addison's "Letter from Italy."[17] "With what flatness and unfeelingness +has he spoken of statuary and painting! Raphael never received a more +phlegmatic eulogy." He refers on the other hand to Gray's account of his +journey to the Grande Chartreuse,[18] as worthy of comparison with one of +the finest passages in the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard." + +This mention of Addison recalls a very instructive letter of Gray on the +subject of poetic style.[19] The romanticists loved a rich diction, and +the passage might be taken as an anticipatory defense of himself against +Wordsworth's strictures in the preface to the "Lyrical Ballads." "The +language of the age," wrote Gray, "is never the language of poetry, +except among the French, whose verse . . . differs in nothing from prose. +Our poetry has a language peculiar to itself; to which almost everyone +that has written has added something, by enriching it with foreign idioms +and derivatives; nay, sometimes words of their own composition or +invention. Shakspere and Milton have been great creators in this +way . . . our language has an undoubted right to words of an hundred +years old, provided antiquity have not rendered them unintelligible. In +truth Shakspere's language is one of his principal beauties; and he has +no less advantage over your Addisons and Rowes in this, than in those +other great excellencies you mention. Every word in him is a picture." +He then quotes a passage from "Richard III.," and continues, "Pray put me +the following lines into the tongue of our modern dramatics. To me they +appear untranslatable, and if this be the case, our language is greatly +degenerated." + +Warton further protests against the view which ascribed the introduction +of true taste in literature to the French. "Shakspere and Milton +imitated the Italians and not the French." He recommends also the +reintroduction of the preternatural into poetry. There are some, he +says, who think that poetry has suffered by becoming too rational, +deserting fairyland, and laying aside "descriptions of magic and +enchantment," and he quotes, _a propos_ of this the famous stanza about +the Hebrides in "The Castle of Indolence."[20] The false refinement of +the French has made them incapable of enjoying "the terrible graces of +our irregular Shakspere, especially in his scenes of magic and +incantations. These _Gothic_ charms are in truth more striking to the +imagination than the classical. The magicians of Ariosto, Tasso, and +Spenser have more powerful spells than those of Apollonius, Seneca, and +Lucan. The enchanted forest of Ismeni is more awfully and tremendously +poetical than even the grove which Caesar orders to be cut down in Lucan +(i. iii. 400), which was so full of terrors that, at noonday or midnight, +the priest himself dared not approach it-- + + "'Dreading the demon of the grove to meet.' + +"Who that sees the sable plumes waving on the prodigious helmet in the +Castle of Otranto, and the gigantic arm on the top of the great +staircase, is not more affected than with the paintings of Ovid and +Apuleius? What a group of dreadful images do we meet with in the Edda! +The Runic poetry abounds in them. Such is Gray's thrilling Ode on the +'Descent of Odin.'" + +Warton predicts that Pope's fame as a poet will ultimately rest on his +"Windsor Forest," his "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard," and "The Rape of +the Lock." To this prophecy time has already, in part, given the lie. +Warton preferred "Windsor Forest" and "Eloisa" to the "Moral Essays" +because they belonged to a higher kind of poetry. Posterity likes the +"Moral Essays" better because they are better of their kind. They were +the natural fruit of Pope's genius and of his time, while the others were +artificial. We can go to Wordsworth for nature, to Byron for passion, +and to a score of poets for both, but Pope remains unrivaled in his +peculiar field. In other words, we value what is characteristic in the +artist; the one thing which he does best, the precise thing which he can +do and no one else can. But Warton's mistake is significant of the +changing literary standards of his age; and his essay is one proof out of +many that the English romantic movement was not entirely without +self-conscious aims, but had its critical formulas and its programme, +just as Queen Anne classicism had. + + +[1] Dr. Johnson had his laugh at this popular person: + + "'Hermit hoar, in solemn cell + Wearing out life's evening gray, + Strike thy bosom, sage, and tell + What is bliss, and which the way?' + + "Thus I spoke, and speaking sighed, + Scarce suppressed the starting tear: + When the hoary sage replied, + '_Come, my lad, and drink some beer._'" + +[2] "Grose's Antiquities of Scotland" was published in 1791, and Burns +wrote "Tam o'Shanter" to accompany the picture of Kirk Alloway in this +work. See his poem, "On the late Captain Grose's Peregrinations through +Scotland." + +[3] "Ragnaroek," or "Goetterdaemmerung," the twilight of the Gods + +[4] For a full discussion of Gray's sources and of his knowledge of Old +Norse, the reader should consult the appendix by Professor G. L. +Kittredge to Professor W. L. Phelps' "Selections from Gray" (1894, pp. +xl-1.) Professor Kittredge concludes that Gray had but a slight +knowledge of Norse, that he followed the Latin of Bartholin in his +renderings; and that he probably also made use of such authorities as +Torfaeus' "Orcades" (1697), Ole Worm's "Literatura Runica" (Copenhagen, +1636), Dr. George Hickes' monumental "Thesaurus" (Oxford, 1705), and +Robert Sheringham's "De Anglorum Gentis Origine Disceptatio" (1716). +Dryden's "Miscellany Poems" (1716) has a verse translation, "The Waking +of Angantyr," from the English prose of Hickes, of a portion of the +"Hervarar Saga." Professor Kittredge refers to Sir William Temple's +essays "Of Poetry" and "Of Heroic Virtue." "Nichols' Anecdotes" (I. 116) +mentions, as published in 1715, "The Rudiments of Grammar for the English +Saxon Tongue; with an Apology for the study of Northern Antiquities." +This was by Mrs. Elizabeth Elstob, and was addressed to Hickes, the +compiler of the "Thesaurus." + +[5] "Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards, translated +into English," by Rev. Evan Evans, 1764. The specimens were ten in +number. The translations were in English prose. The originals were +printed from a copy which Davies, the author of the Welsh dictionary, had +made of an ancient vellum MS. thought to be of the time of Edward II, +Edward III, and Henry V. The book included a Latin "Dissertatio de +Bardis," together with notes, appendices, etc. The preface makes mention +of Macpherson's recently published Ossianic poems. + +[6] "Life of Gray." + +[7] See Phelps' "English Romantic Movement," pp. 73, 141-42. + +[8] Wm Dugdale published his "Monasticon Anglicanum," a history of English +religious houses, in three parts, in 1655-62-73. It was accompanied with +illustrations of the costumes worn by the ancient religious orders, and +with architectural views. The latter, says Eastlake, were rude and +unsatisfactory, but interesting to modern students, as "preserving +representations of buildings, or portions of buildings, no longer in +existence; as, for instance, the _campanile_, or detached belfry of +Salisbury, since removed, and the spire of Lincoln, destroyed in 1547." + +[9] "Verses on Sir Joshua Reynolds' Painted Window." _Cf._ Poe, "To +Helen": + + "On desperate seas long wont to roam + Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, + Thy Naiad airs have brought me home + To the glory that was Greece, + And the grandeur that was Rome." + +[10] This apology should be compared with Scott's verse epistle to Wm +Ereskine, prefixed to the third canto of "Marmion." + + "For me, thus nurtured, dost thou ask + The classic poet's well-conned task?" etc. + +Scott spoke of himself in Warton's exact language, as a "truant to the +classic page." + +[11] See _ante_, pp. 99-101_._ + +[12] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 397. + +[13] Lowell mentions the publication of Dodsley's "Old Plays," (1744) as, +like Percy's "Reliques," a symptom of the return of the past. Essay on +"Gray." + +[14] "Eighteenth Century Literature," pp. 401-03. + +[15] It is curious, however, to find Warton describing Villon as "a pert +and insipid ballad-monger, whose thoughts and diction were as low and +illiberal as his life," Vol. II. p. 338 (Fifth Edition, 1806). + +[16] Warton quotes the follow bathetic opening of a "Poem in Praise of +Blank Verse" by Aaron Hill, "one of the very first persons who took +notice of Thomson, on the publication of 'Winter'": + + "Up from Rhyme's poppied vale! And ride the storm + That thunders in blank verse!" + --Vol. II. p. 186. + +[17] See _ante_, p. 57. + +[18] See _ante_, p. 181. + +[19] To Richard West, April, 1742. + +[20] See _ante_, p. 94. + + + + +CHAPTER VII. + +The Gothic Revival. + +One of Thomas Warton's sonnets was addressed to Richard Hurd, afterward +Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, and later of Worcester. Hurd was a +friend of Gray and Mason, and his "Letters on Chivalry and Romance" +(1762) helped to initiate the romantic movement. They perhaps owed their +inspiration, in part, to Sainte Palaye's "Memoires sur l'ancienne +Chevalerie," the first volume of which was issued in 1759, though the +third and concluding volume appeared only in 1781. This was a monumental +work and, as a standard authority, bears much the same relation to the +literature of its subject that Mallet's "Histoire de Dannemarc" bears to +all the writing on Runic mythology that was done in Europe during the +eighteenth-century. Jean Baptiste de la Curne de Sainte Palaye was a +scholar of wide learning, not only in the history of mediaeval +institutions but in old French dialects. He went to the south of France +to familiarize himself with Provencal: collected a large library of +Provencal books and manuscripts, and published in 1774 his "Histoire de +Troubadours." Among his other works are a "Dictionary of French +Antiquities," a glossary of Old French, and an edition of "Aucassin et +Nicolete." Mrs. Susannah Dobson, who wrote "Historical Anecdotes of +Heraldry and Chivalry" (1795), made an English translation of Sainte +Palaye's "History of the Troubadours" in 1779, and of his "Memoirs of +Ancient Chivalry" in 1784. + +The purpose of Hurd's letters was to prove "the pre-eminence of the +Gothic manners and fictions, as adapted to the ends of poetry, above the +classic." "The greatest geniuses of our own and foreign countries," he +affirms, "such as Ariosto and Tasso in Italy, and Spenser and Milton in +England, were seduced by these barbarities of their forefathers; were +even charmed by the Gothic romances. Was this caprice and absurdity in +them? Or may there not be something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly +suited to the view of a genius and to the ends of poetry? And may not +the philosophic moderns have gone too far in their perpetual ridicule and +contempt of it?" After a preliminary discussion of the origin of +chivalry and knight-errantry and of the ideal knightly characteristics, +"Prowess, Generosity, Gallantry, and Religion," which he derives from the +military necessities of the feudal system, he proceeds to establish a +"remarkable correspondency between the manners of the old heroic times, +as painted by their romancer, Homer, and those which are represented to +us in the books of modern knight-errantry." He compares, _e.g._, the +Laestrygonians, Cyclopes_, _Circes, and Calypsos of Homer, with the +giants, paynims, sorceresses encountered by the champions of romance; the +Greek aoixoi with the minstrels; the Olympian games with tournaments; and +the exploits of Hercules and Theseus, in quelling dragons and other +monsters, with the similar enterprises of Lancelot and Amadis de Gaul. +The critic is daring enough to give the Gothic manners the preference +over the heroic. Homer, he says, if he could have known both, would have +chosen the former by reason of "the improved gallantry of the feudal +times, and the superior solemnity of their superstitions. The gallantry +which inspirited the feudal times was of a nature to furnish the poet +with finer scenes and subjects of description, in every view, than the +simple and uncontrolled barbarity of the Grecian. . . There was a +dignity, a magnificence, a variety in the feudal, which the other wanted." + +An equal advantage, thinks Hurd, the romancers enjoyed over the pagan +poets in the point of supernatural machinery. "For the more solemn +fancies of witchcraft and incantation, the horrors of the Gothic were +above measure striking and terrible. The mummeries of the pagan priests +were childish, but the Gothic enchanters shook and alarmed all +nature. . . You would not compare the Canidia of Horace with the witches +in 'Macbeth.' And what are Virgil's myrtles, dropping blood, to Tasso's +enchanted forest?. . . The fancies of our modern bards are not only more +gallant, but . . . more sublime, more terrible, more alarming than those +of the classic fables. In a word, you will find that the manners they +paint, and the superstitions they adopt, are the more poetical for being +Gothic." + +Evidently the despised "Gothick" of Addison--as Mr. Howells puts it--was +fast becoming the admired "Gothic" of Scott. This pronunciamento of very +advanced romantic doctrine came out several years before Percy's +"Reliques" and "The Castle of Otranto." It was only a few years later +than Thomas Warton's "Observations on the Faerie Queene" and Joseph's +"Essay on Pope," but its views were much more radical. Neither of the +Wartons would have ventured to pronounce the Gothic manners superior to +the Homeric, as materials for poetry, whatever, in his secret heart, he +might have thought.[1] To Johnson such an opinion must have seemed flat +blasphemy. Hurd accounts for the contempt into which the Gothic had +fallen on the ground that the feudal ages had never had the good fortune +to possess a great poet, like Homer, capable of giving adequate artistic +expression to their life and ideals. _Carent vate sacro_. Spenser and +Tasso, he thinks, "came too late, and it was impossible for them to paint +truly and perfectly what was no longer seen or believed. . . As it is, +we may take a guess of what the subject was capable of affording to real +genius from the rude sketches we have of it in the old romancers. . . +The ablest writers of Greece ennobled the system of heroic manners, while +it was fresh and flourishing; and their works being masterpieces of +composition, so fixed the credit of it in the opinion of the world, that +no revolution of time and taste could afterward shake it. Whereas the +Gothic, having been disgraced in their infancy by bad writers, and a new +set of manners springing up before there were any better to do them +justice, they could never be brought into vogue by the attempts of later +poets." Moreover, "the Gothic manners of chivalry, as springing out of +the feudal system, were as singular as that system itself; so that when +that political constitution vanished out of Europe, the manners that +belonged to it were no longer seen or understood. There was no example +of any such manners remaining on the face of the earth. And as they +never did subsist but once, and are never likely to subsist again, people +would be led of course to think and speak of them as romantic and +unnatural." + +Even so, he thinks that the Renaissance poets, Ariosto and Spenser, owe +their finest effects not to their tinge of classical culture but to their +romantic materials. Shakspere "is greater when he uses Gothic manners +and machinery, than when he employs classical." Tasso, to be sure, tried +to trim between the two, by giving an epic form to his romantic +subject-matter, but Hurd pronounces his imitations of the ancients "faint +and cold and almost insipid, when compared with his original +fictions. . . If it was not for these _lies_ [_magnanima mensogna_] of +Gothic invention, I should scarcely be disposed to give the 'Gierusalemme +Liberata' a second reading." Nay, Milton himself, though finally +choosing the classic model, did so only after long hesitation. "His +favorite subject was Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. On this +he had fixed for the greater part of his life. What led him to change +his mind was partly, as I suppose, his growing fanaticism; partly his +ambition to take a different route from Spenser; but chiefly, perhaps, +the discredit into which the stories of chivalry had now fallen by the +immortal satire of Cervantes. Yet we see through all his poetry, where +his enthusiasm flames out most, a certain predilection for the legends of +chivalry before the fables of Greece." Hurd says that, if the "Faerie +Queene" be regarded as a Gothic poem, it will be seen to have unity of +design, a merit which even the Wartons had denied it. "When an architect +examines a Gothic structure by the Grecian rules he finds nothing but +deformity. But the Gothic architecture has its own rules by which; when +it comes to be examined, it is seen to have its merit, as well as the +Grecian." + +The essayist complains that the Gothic fables fell into contempt through +the influence of French critics who ridiculed and disparaged the Italian +romancers, Ariosto and Tasso. The English critics of the +Restoration--Davenant, Hobbes, Shaftesbury--took their cue from the +French, till these pseudo-classical principles "grew into a sort of a +cant, with which Rymer and the rest of that school filled their flimsy +essays and rumbling prefaces. . . The exact but cold Boileau happened to +say something about the _clinquant_ of Tasso," and "Mr. Addison,[2] who +gave the law in taste here, took it up and sent it about," so that "it +became a sort of watchword among the critics." "What we have gotten," +concludes the final letter of the series, "by this revolution, is a great +deal of good sense. What we have lost is a world of fine fabling, the +illusion of which is so grateful to the _charmed spirit_ that, in spite +of philosophy and fashion 'Faery' Spenser still ranks highest among the +poets; I mean with all those who are earlier come of that house, or have +any kindness for it." + +We have seen that, during the classical period, "Gothic," as a term in +literary criticism, was synonymous with barbarous, lawless, and tawdry. +Addison instructs his public that "the taste of most of our English +poets, as well as readers, is extremely Gothic."[3] After commending the +French critics, Bouhours and Boileau, for their insistence upon good +sense, justness of thought, simplicity, and naturalness he goes on as +follows: "Poets who want this strength of genius, to give that majestic +simplicity to nature which we so much admire in the works of the +ancients, are forced to hunt after foreign ornaments, and not to let any +piece of wit, of what kind soever, escape them. I look upon these +writers as Goths in poetry, who, like those in architecture, not being +able to come up to the beautiful simplicity of the old Greeks and Romans, +have endeavored to supply its place with all the extravagances of an +irregular fancy." In the following paper (No. 63), an "allegorical +vision of the encounter of True and False Wit," he discovers, "in a very +dark grove, a monstrous fabric, built after the Gothic manner and covered +with innumerable devices in that barbarous kind of sculpture." This +temple is consecrated to the God of Dullness, who is "dressed in the +habit of a monk." In his essay "On Taste" (No. 409) he says, "I have +endeavored, in several of my speculations, to banish this Gothic taste +which has taken possession among us." + +The particular literary vice which Addison strove to correct in these +papers was that conceited style which infected a certain school of +seventeenth-century poetry, running sometimes into such puerilities as +anagrams, acrostics, echo-songs, rebuses, and verses in the shape of +eggs, wings, hour-glasses, etc. He names, as special representatives of +this affectation, Herbert, Cowley, and Sylvester. But it is significant +that Addison should have described this fashion as Gothic. It has in +reality nothing in common with the sincere and loving art of the old +builders. He might just as well have called it classic; for, as he +acknowledges, devices of the kind are to be found in the Greek anthology, +and Ovid was a poet given to conceits. Addison was a writer of pure +taste, but the coldness and timidity of his imagination, and the maxims +of the critical school to which he belonged, made him mistake for +spurious decoration the efflorescence of that warm, creative fancy which +ran riot in Gothic art. The grotesque, which was one expression of this +sappy vigor, was abhorrent to Addison. The art and poetry of his time +were tame, where Gothic art was wild; dead where Gothic was alive. He +could not sympathize with it, nor understand it. "Vous ne pouvez pas le +comprendre; vous avez toujours hai la vie." + +I have quoted Vicesimus Knox's complaint that the antiquarian spirit was +spreading from architecture and numismatics into literature.[4] We meet +with satire upon antiquaries many years before this; in Pope, in +Akenside's Spenserian poem "The Virtuoso" (1737); in Richard Owen +Cambridge's "Scribleriad" (1751): + + "See how her sons with generous ardor strive, + Bid every long-lost Gothic art revive,. . . + Each Celtic character explain, or show + How Britons ate a thousand years ago; + On laws of jousts and tournaments declaim, + Or shine, the rivals of the herald's fame. + But chief that Saxon wisdom be your care, + Preserve their idols and their fanes repair; + And may their deep mythology be shown + By Seater's wheel and Thor's tremendous throne."[5] + +The most notable instance that we encounter of virtuosity invading the +neighboring realm of literature is in the case of Strawberry Hill and +"The Castle of Otranto." Horace Walpole, the son of the great prime +minister, Robert Walpole, was a person of varied accomplishments and +undoubted cleverness. He was a man of fashion, a man of taste, and a man +of letters; though, in the first of these characters, he entertained or +affected a contempt for the last, not uncommon in dilettante authors and +dandy artists, who belong to the _beau monde_ or are otherwise socially +of high place, _teste_ Congreve, and even Byron, that "rhyming peer." +Walpole, as we have seen, had been an Eton friend of Gray and had +traveled--and quarreled--with him upon the Continent. Returning home, he +got a seat in Parliament, the entree at court, and various lucrative +sinecures through his father's influence. He was an assiduous courtier, +a keen and spiteful observer, a busy gossip and retailer of social +tattle. His feminine turn of mind made him a capital letter-writer; and +his correspondence, particularly with Sir Horace Mann, English ambassador +at Florence, is a running history of backstairs diplomacy, court +intrigue, subterranean politics, and fashionable scandal during the +reigns of the second and third Georges. He also figures as an historian +of an amateurish sort, by virtue of his "Catalogue of Royal and Noble +Authors," "Anecdotes of Painting," and "Historic Doubts on Richard III." +Our present concern with him, however, lies quite outside of these. + +It was about 1750 that Walpole, who had bought a villa at Strawberry +Hill, on the Thames near Windsor, which had formerly belonged to Mrs. +Chenevix, the fashionable London toy-woman, began to turn his house into +a miniature Gothic castle, in which he is said to have "outlived three +sets of his own battlements." These architectural experiments went on +for some twenty years. They excited great interest and attracted many +visitors, and Walpole may be regarded as having given a real impetus to +the revival of pointed architecture. He spoke of Strawberry Hill as a +castle, but it was, in fact, an odd blend of ecclesiastical and +castellated Gothic applied to domestic uses. He had a cloister, a +chapel, a round tower, a gallery, a "refectory," a stair-turret with +Gothic balustrade, stained windows, mural scutcheons, and Gothic +paper-hangings. Walpole's mock-gothic became something of a +laughing-stock, after the true principles of medieval architecture were +better understood. Since the time when Inigo Jones, court architect to +James I., came back from Italy, where he had studied the works of +Palladio; and especially since the time when his successor, Sir +Christopher Wren, had rebuilt St. Paul's in the Italian Renaissance +style, after the great fire of London in 1664, Gothic had fallen more and +more into disuse. "If in the history of British art," says Eastlake, +"there is one period more distinguished than another for the neglect of +Gothic, it was certainly the middle of the eighteenth century." But +architecture had this advantage over other arts, it had left memorials +more obvious and imposing. Medieval literature was known only to the +curious, to collectors of manuscript romances and black-letter ballads. +The study of medieval arts like tempera painting, illuminating, +glass-staining, wood-carving, tapestry embroidery; of the science of +blazonry, of the details of ancient armor and costumes, was the pursuit +of specialists. But Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, Salisbury +Cathedral, and York Minster, ruins such as Melrose and Fountain Abbeys, +Crichton Castle, and a hundred others were impressive witnesses for the +civilization that had built them and must, sooner or later, demand +respectful attention. Hence it is not strange that the Gothic revival +went hand in hand with the romantic movement in literature, if indeed it +did not give it its original impulse. + +"It is impossible," says Eastlake,[6] speaking of Walpole, "to peruse +either the letters or the romances of this remarkable man, without being +struck by the unmistakable evidence which they contain of his medieval +predilections. His 'Castle of Otranto' was perhaps the first modern work +of fiction which depended for its interest on the incidents of a +chivalrous age, and it thus became the prototype of that class of novel +which was afterward imitated by Mrs. Radcliffe and perfected by Sir +Walter Scott. The feudal tyrant, the venerable ecclesiastic, the forlorn +but virtuous damsel, the castle itself with its moats and drawbridge, its +gloomy dungeons and solemn corridors, are all derived from a mine of +interest which has since been worked more efficiently and to better +profit. But to Walpole must be awarded the credit of its discovery and +first employment." + +Walpole's complete works[7] contain elaborate illustrations and ground +plans of Strawberry Hill. Eastlake give a somewhat technical account of +its constructive features, its gables, buttresses, finials, lath and +plaster parapets, wooden pinnacles and, what its proprietor himself +describes as his "lean windows fattened with rich saints." From this I +extract only the description of the interior, which was "just what one +might expect from a man who possessed a vague admiration for Gothic +without the knowledge necessary for a proper adaptation of its features. +Ceilings, screens, niches, etc., are all copied, or rather parodied, from +existing examples, but with utter disregard for the original purpose of +the design. To Lord Orford, Gothic was Gothic, and that sufficed. He +would have turned an altar-slab into a hall-table, or made a cupboard of +a piscine, with the greatest complacency, if it only served his purpose. +Thus we find that in the north bed-chamber, when he wanted a model for +his chimney-piece, he thought he could not do better than adopt the form +of Bishop Dudley's tomb in Westminster Abbey. He found a pattern for the +piers of his garden gate in the choir of Ely Cathedral." The ceiling of +the gallery borrowed a design from Henry VII.'s Chapel; the entrance to +the same apartment from the north door of St. Alban's; and one side of +the room from Archbishop Bourchier's tomb at Canterbury. Eastlake's +conclusion is that Walpole's Gothic, "though far from reflecting the +beauties of a former age, or anticipating those which were destined to +proceed from a re-development of the style, still holds a position in the +history of English art which commands our respect, for it served to +sustain a cause which had otherwise been well-nigh forsaken." + +James Fergusson, in his "History of the Modern Styles of Architecture," +says of Walpole's structures: "We now know that these are very +indifferent specimens of the true Gothic art, and are at a loss to +understand how either their author or his contemporaries could ever fancy +that these very queer carvings were actual reproductions of the details +of York Minster, or other equally celebrated buildings, from which they +were supposed to have been copied." Fergusson adds that the fashion set +by Walpole soon found many followers both in church and house +architecture, "and it is surprising what a number of castles were built +which had nothing castellated about them except a nicked parapet and an +occasional window in the form of a cross." That school of bastard Gothic +illustrated by the buildings of Batty Langley, and other early restorers +of the style, bears an analogy with the imitations of old English poetry +in the last century. There was the same prematurity in both, the same +defective knowledge, crudity, uncertainty, incorrectness, feebleness of +invention, mixture of ancient and modern manners. It was not until the +time of Pugin[8] that the details of the medieval building art were well +enough understood to enable the architect to work in the spirit of that +art, yet not as a servile copyist, but with freedom and originality. +Meanwhile, one service that Walpole and his followers did, by reviving +public interest in Gothic, was to arrest the process of dilapidation and +save the crumbling remains of many a half-ruinous abbey, castle, or +baronial hall. Thus, "when about a hundred years since, Rhyddlan Castle, +in North Wales, fell into the possession of Dr. Shipley, Dean of St. +Asaph, the massive walls had been prescriptively used as stone quarries, +to which any neighboring occupier who wanted building materials might +resort; and they are honey-combed all round as high as a pick-ax could +reach."[9] "Walpole," writes Leslie Stephen, "is almost the first modern +Englishman who found out that our old cathedrals were really beautiful. +He discovered that a most charming toy might be made of medievalism. +Strawberry Hill, with all its gimcracks, its pasteboard battlements and +stained-paper carvings, was the lineal ancestor of the new law-courts. +The restorers of churches, the manufacturers of stained glass, the modern +decorators and architects of all varieties, the Ritualists and the High +Church party, should think of him with kindness. . . That he was quite +conscious of the necessity for more serious study, appears in his +letters; in one of which, _e.g._, he proposes a systematic history of +Gothic architecture such as has since been often executed."[10] Mr. +Stephen adds that Walpole's friend Gray "shared his Gothic tastes, with +greatly superior knowledge." + +Walpole did not arrive at his Gothicism by the gate of literature. It +was merely a specialized development of his tastes as a virtuoso and +collector. The museum of curiosities which he got together at Strawberry +Hill included not only suits of armor, stained glass, and illuminated +missals, but a miscellaneous treasure of china ware, enamels, faience, +bronzes, paintings, engravings, books, coins, bric-a-brac, and +memorabilia such as Cardinal Wolsey's hat, Queen Elizabeth's glove, and +the spur that William III. wore at the Battle of the Boyne. Walpole's +romanticism was a thin veneering; underneath it, he was a man of the +eighteenth century. His opinions on all subjects were, if not +inconsistent, at any rate notoriously whimsical and ill-assorted. Thus +in spite of his admiration for Gray and his--temporary--interest in +Ossian, Chatterton, and Percy's ballads, he ridiculed Mallet's and Gray's +Runic experiments, spoke contemptuously of Spenser, Thomson, and +Akenside, compared Dante to "a Methodist parson in bedlam," and +pronounced "A Midsummer Night's Dream" "forty times more nonsensical than +the worst translation of any Italian opera-books."[11] He said that +poetry died with Pope, whose measure and manner he employed in his own +verses. It has been observed that, in all his correspondence, he makes +but a single mention of Froissart's "Chronicle," and that a sneer at Lady +Pomfret for translating it. + +Accordingly we find, on turning to "The Castle of Otranto," that, just as +Walpole's Gothicism was an accidental "sport" from his general +virtuosity; so his romanticism was a casual outgrowth of his +architectural amusements. Strawberry Hill begat "The Castle of Otranto," +whose title is fitly chosen, since it is the castle itself that is the +hero of the book. The human characters are naught. "Shall I even +confess to you," he writes to the Rev. William Cole (March 9, 1765), +"what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning in the +beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, +that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for +a head filled, like mine, with Gothic story), and that, on the uppermost +banister of a great staircase, I saw a gigantic hand in armor. In the +evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what +I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands. . . In short, I +was so engrossed with my tale, which I completed in less than two months, +that one evening I wrote from the time I had drunk my tea, about six +o'clock, till half an hour after one in the morning." + +"The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story," was published in 1765.[12] +According to the title page, it was translated from the original Italian +of Onuphrio Muralto--a sort of half-pun on the author's surname--by W. +Marshall, Gent. This mystification was kept up in the preface, which +pretended that the book had been printed at Naples in black-letter in +1529, and was found in the library of an old Catholic family in the north +of England. In the preface to his second edition Walpole described the +work as "an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and +the modern": declared that, in introducing humorous dialogues among the +servants of the castle, he had taken nature and Shakspere for his models; +and fell foul of Voltaire for censuring the mixture of buffoonery and +solemnity in Shakspere's tragedies. Walpole's claim to having created a +new species of romance has been generally allowed. "His initiative in +literature," says Mr. Stephen, "has been as fruitful as his initiative in +art. 'The Castle of Otranto,' and the 'Mysterious Mother,' were the +progenitors of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances, and probably had a strong +influence upon the author of 'Ivanhoe.' Frowning castles and gloomy +monasteries, knights in armor and ladies in distress, and monks, and +nuns, and hermits; all the scenery and characters that have peopled the +imagination of the romantic school, may be said to have had their origin +on the night when Walpole lay down to sleep, his head crammed full of +Wardour Street curiosities, and dreamed that he saw a gigantic hand in +armor resting on the banisters of his staircase." + +It is impossible at this day to take "The Castle of Otranto" seriously, +and hard to explain the respect with which it was once mentioned by +writers of authority. Warburton called it "a master-piece in the Fable, +and a new species likewise. . . The scene is laid in Gothic chivalry; +where a beautiful imagination, supported by strength of judgment, has +enabled the reader to go beyond his subject and effect the full purpose +of the ancient tragedy; _i.e._, to purge the passions by pity and terror, +in coloring as great and harmonious as in any of the best dramatic +writers." Byron called Walpole the author of the last tragedy[13] and +the first romance in the language. Scott wrote of "The Castle of +Otranto": "This romance has been justly considered, not only as the +original and model of a peculiar species of composition attempted and +successfully executed by a man of great genius, but as one of the +standard works of our lighter literature." Gray in a letter to Walpole +(December 30, 1764), acknowledging the receipt of his copy, says: "It +makes some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o' +nights." Walpole's masterpiece can no longer make anyone cry even a +little; and instead of keeping us out of bed, it sends us there--or +would, if it were a trifle longer. For the only thing that is tolerable +about the book is its brevity, and a certain rapidity in the action. +Macaulay, who confesses its absurdity and insipidity, says that no +reader, probably, ever thought it dull. "The story, whatever its value +may be, never flags for a single moment. There are no digressions, or +unreasonable descriptions, or long speeches. Every sentence carries the +action forward. The excitement is constantly renewed." Excitement is +too strong a word to describe any emotion which "The Castle of Otranto" +is now capable of arousing. But the same cleverness which makes +Walpole's correspondence always readable saves his romance from the +unpardonable sin--in literature--of tediousness. It does go along and +may still be read without a too painful effort. + +There is nothing very new in the plot, which has all the stock properties +of romantic fiction, as common in the days of Sidney's "Arcadia" as in +those of Sylvanus Cobb. Alfonso, the former lord of Otranto, had been +poisoned in Palestine by his chamberlain Ricardo, who forged a will +making himself Alfonso's heir. To make his peace with God, the usurper +founded a church and two convents in honor of St. Nicholas, who "appeared +to him in a dream and promised that Ricardo's posterity should reign in +Otranto until the rightful owner should be grown too large to inhabit the +castle." When the story opens, this prophecy is about to be fulfilled. +The tyrant Manfred, grandson of the usurper, is on the point of +celebrating the marriage of his only son, when the youth is crushed to +death by a colossal helmet that drops, from nobody knows where, into the +courtyard of the castle. Gigantic armor haunts the castle piecemeal: a +monstrous gauntlet is laid upon the banister of the great staircase; a +mailed foot appears in one apartment; a sword is brought into the +courtyard on the shoulders of a hundred men. And finally the proprietor +of these fragmentary apparitions, in "the form of Alfonso, dilated to an +immense magnitude," throws down the walls of the castle, pronounces the +words "Behold in Theodore the true heir of Alfonso," and with a clap of +thunder ascends to heaven. Theodore is, of course, the young peasant, +grandson of the crusader by a fair Sicilian secretly espoused _en route_ +for the Holy Land; and he is identified by the strawberry mark of old +romance, in this instance the figure of a bloody arrow impressed upon his +shoulder. There are other supernatural portents, such as a skeleton with +a cowl and a hollow voice, a portrait which descends from its panel, and +a statue that bleeds at the nose. + +The novel feature in the "Castle of Otranto" was its Gothic setting; the +"wind whistling through the battlements"; the secret trap-door, with iron +ring, by which Isabella sought to make her escape. "An awful silence +reigned throughout those subterraneous regions, except now and then some +blasts of wind that shook the doors she had passed, and which, grating on +the rusty hinges, were re-echoed through that long labyrinth of darkness. +The wind extinguished her candle, but an imperfect ray of clouded +moonshine gleamed through a cranny in the roof of the vault and fell +directly on the spring of the trap-door." But Walpole's medievalism was +very thin. He took some pains with the description of the feudal +cavalcade entering the castle gate with the great sword, but the passage +is incorrect and poor in detail compared with similar things in Scott. +The book was not an historical romance, and the manners, sentiments, +language, all were modern. Walpole knew little about the Middle Ages and +was not in touch with their spirit. At bottom he was a trifler, a +fribble; and his incurable superficiality, dilettantism, and want of +seriousness, made all his real cleverness of no avail when applied to +such a subject as "The Castle of Otranto."[14] + +Walpole's tragedy, "The Mysterious Mother," has not even that degree of +importance which secures his romance a niche in literary history. The +subject was too unnatural to admit of stage presentation. Incest, when +treated in the manner of Sophocles (Walpole justified himself by the +example of "Oedipus"), or even of Ford, or of Shelley, may possibly claim +a place among the themes which art is not quite forbidden to touch; but +when handled in the prurient and crudely melodramatic fashion of this +particular artist, it is merely offensive. "The Mysterious Mother," +indeed, is even more absurd than horrible. Gothic machinery is present, +but it is of the slightest. The scene of the action is a castle at +Narbonne and the _chatelaine_ is the heroine of the play. The other +characters are knights, friars, orphaned damsels, and feudal retainers; +there is mention of cloisters, drawbridges, the Vaudois heretics, and the +assassination of Henri III. and Henri IV.; and the author's Whig and +Protestant leanings are oddly evidenced in his exposure of priestly +intrigues. + +"The Castle of Otranto" was not long in finding imitators. One of the +first of these was Clara Reeve's "Champion of Virtue" (1777), styled on +its title-page "A Gothic Story," and reprinted the following year as "The +Old English Baron." Under this latter title it has since gone through +thirteen editions, the latest of which, in 1883, gave a portrait of the +author. Miss Reeve had previously published (1772) "The Phoenix," a +translation of "Argenis," "a romance written in Latin about the beginning +of the seventeenth century, by John Barclay, a Scotchman, and supposed to +contain an allegorical account of the civil wars of France during the +reign of Henry III."[15] "Pray," inquires the author of "The Champion of +Virtue" in her address to the reader, "did you ever read a book called, +'The Castle of Otranto'? If you have, you will willingly enter with me +into a review of it. But perhaps you have not read it? However, you +have heard that it is an attempt to blend together the most attractive +and interesting circumstances of the ancient romance and modern +novel. . . The conduct of the story is artful and judicious; and the +characters are admirably drawn and supported; the diction polished and +elegant; yet with all these brilliant advantages, it palls upon the +mind. . . The reason is obvious; the machinery is so violent that it +destroys the effect it is intended to excite. Had the story been kept +within the utmost _verge_ of probability, the effect had been +preserved. . . For instance, we can conceive and allow of the appearance +of a ghost; we can even dispense with an enchanted sword and helmet, but +then they must keep within certain limits of credibility. A sword so +large as to require a hundred men to lift it, a helmet that by its own +weight forces a passage through a court-yard into an arched +vault . . . when your expectation is wound up to the highest pitch, these +circumstances take it down with a witness, destroy the work of +imagination, and, instead of attention, excite laughter. . . In the +course of my observations upon this singular book, it seemed to me that +it was possible to compose a work upon the same plan, wherein these +defects might be avoided." + +Accordingly Miss Reeve undertook to admit only a rather mild dose of the +marvelous in her romance. Like Walpole she professed to be simply the +editor of the story, which she said that she had transcribed or +translated from a manuscript in the Old English language, a now somewhat +threadbare device. The period was the fifteenth century, in the reign of +Henry VI., and the scene England. But, in spite of the implication of +its sub-title, the fiction is much less "Gothic" than its model, and its +modernness of sentiment and manners is hardly covered with even the +faintest wash of mediaevalism. As in Walpole's book, there are a murder +and a usurpation, a rightful heir defrauded of his inheritance and reared +as a peasant. There are a haunted chamber, unearthly midnight groans, a +ghost in armor, and a secret closet with its skeleton. The tale is +infinitely tiresome, and is full of that edifying morality, fine +sentiment and stilted dialogue--that "old perfumed, powdered D'Arblay +conversation," as Thackeray called it--which abound in "Evelina," +"Thaddeus of Warsaw," and almost all the fiction of the last quarter of +the last century. Still it was a little unkind in Walpole to pronounce +his disciple's performance tedious and insipid, as he did. + +This same lady published, in 1785, a work in two volumes entitled "The +Progress of Romance," a sort of symposium on the history of fiction in a +series of evening conversations. Her purpose was to claim for the prose +romance an honorable place in literature; a place beside the verse epic. +She discusses the definitions of romance given in the current +dictionaries, such as Ainsworth's and Littleton's _Narratio +ficta--Scriptum eroticum--Splendida fabula_; and Johnson's "A military +fable of the Middle Ages--A tale of wild adventures of war and love." +She herself defines it as "An heroic fable," or "An epic in prose." She +affirms that Homer is the father of romance and thinks it astonishing +that men of sense "should despise and ridicule romances, as the most +contemptible of all kinds of writing, and yet expatiate in raptures on +the beauties of the fables of the old classic poets--on stories far more +wild and extravagant and infinitely more incredible." After reviewing +the Greek romances, like Heliodorus' "Theagenes and Chariclea," she +passes on to the chivalry tales of the Middle Ages, which, she maintains, +"were by no means so contemptible as they have been represented by later +writers." Our poetry, she thinks, owes more than is imagined to the +spirit of romance. "Chaucer and all our old writers abound with it. +Spenser owes perhaps his immortality to it; it is the Gothic imagery that +gives the principal graces to his work. . . Spenser has made more poets +than any other writer of our country." Milton, too, had a hankering +after the romances; and Cervantes, though he laughed Spain's chivalry +away, loved the thing he laughed at and preferred his serious romance +"Persiles and Sigismonda" to all his other works. + + +She gives a list, with conjectural dates, of many medieval romances in +French and English, verse and prose; but the greater part of the book is +occupied with contemporary fiction, the novels of Richardson, Fielding, +Smollett, Crebillon, Marivaux, Rousseau, etc. She commends Thomas +Leland's historical romance "Longsword, Earl of Salisbury" (1762), as "a +romance in reality, and not a novel:--a story like those of the Middle +Ages, composed of chivalry, love, and religion." To her second volume +she appended the "History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt," englished from the +French of Vattier, professor of Arabic to Louis XIV., who had translated +it from a history of ancient Egypt written in Arabic. This was the +source of Landor's poem, "Gebir." When Landor was in Wales in 1797, Rose +Aylmer-- + + "Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes, + May weep but never see"-- + +lent him a copy of Miss Reeve's "Progress of Romance," borrowed from a +circulating library at Swansea. And so the poor forgotten thing retains +a vicarious immortality, as the prompter of some of the noblest passages +in modern English blank verse and as associated with one of the tenderest +passages in Landor's life. + +Miss Reeve quotes frequently from Percy's "Essay on the Ancient +Minstrels," mentions Ossian and Chatterton and refers to Hurd, Warton, +and other authorities. "It was not till I had completed my design," she +writes in her preface, "that I read either Dr. Beattie's 'Dissertation on +Fable and Romance' or Mr. Warton's 'History of English Poetry.'" The +former of these was an essay of somewhat more than a hundred pages by the +author of "The Minstrel." It is of no great importance and follows +pretty closely the lines of Hurd's "Letters on Chivalry and Romance," to +which Beattie repeatedly refers in his footnotes. The author pursues the +beaten track in inquiries of the kind: discusses the character of the +Gothic tribes, the nature of the feudal system, and the institutions of +chivalry and knight-errantry. Romance, it seems, was "one of the +consequences of chivalry. The first writers in this way exhibited a +species of fable different from all that had hitherto appeared. They +undertook to describe the adventures of those heroes who professed +knight-errantry. The world was then ignorant and credulous and +passionately fond of wonderful adventures and deeds of valor. They +believed in giants, dwarfs, dragons, enchanted castles, and every +imaginable species of necromancy. These form the materials of the old +romance. The knight-errant was described as courteous, religious, +valiant, adventurous, and temperate. Some enchanters befriended and +others opposed him. To do his mistress honor, and to prove himself +worthy of her, he was made to encounter the warrior, hew down the giant, +cut the dragon in pieces, break the spell of the necromancer, demolish +the enchanted castle, fly through the air on wooden or winged horses, or, +with some magician for his guide, to descend unhurt through the opening +earth and traverse the caves in the bottom of the ocean. He detected and +punished the false knight, overthrew or converted the infidel, restored +the exiled monarch to his dominions and the captive damsel to her +parents; he fought at the tournament, feasted in the hall, and bore a +part in the warlike processions." + +There is nothing very startling in these conclusions. Scholars like +Percy, Tyrwhitt, and Ritson, who, as collectors and editors, rescued the +fragments of ancient ministrelsy and gave the public access to concrete +specimens of mediaeval poetry, performed a more useful service than mild +clerical essayists, such as Beattie and Hurd, who amused their leisure +with general speculations about the origin of romance and whether it came +in the first instance from the troubadours or the Saracens or the +Norsemen. One more passage, however, may be transcribed from Beattie's +"Dissertation," because it seems clearly a suggestion from "The Castle of +Otranto." "The castles of the greater barons, reared in a rude but grand +style of architecture, full of dark and winding passages, of secret +apartments, of long uninhabited galleries, and of chambers supposed to be +haunted with spirits, and undermined by subterraneous labyrinths as +places of retreat in extreme danger; the howling of winds through the +crevices of old walls and other dreary vacuities; the grating of heavy +doors on rusty hinges of iron; the shrieking of bats and the screaming of +owls and other creatures that resort to desolate or half-inhabited +buildings; these and the like circumstances in the domestic life of the +people I speak of, would multiply their superstitions and increase their +credulity; and among warriors who set all danger at defiance, would +encourage a passion for wild adventure and difficult enterprise." + +One of the books reviewed by Miss Reeve is worth mentioning, not for its +intrinsic importance, but for its early date. "Longsword, Earl of +Salisbury, An Historical Romance," in two volumes, and published two +years before "The Castle of Otranto," is probably the first fiction of +the kind in English literature. Its author was Thomas Leland, an Irish +historian and doctor of divinity.[16] "The outlines of the following +story," begins the advertisement, "and some of the incidents and more +minute circumstances, are to be found in some of the ancient English +histories." The period of the action is the reign of Henry III. The +king is introduced in person, and when we hear him swearing "by my +Halidome," we rub our eyes and ask, "Can this be Scott?" But we are soon +disabused, for the romance, in spite of the words of the advertisement, +is very little historical, and the fashion of it is thinly wordy and +sentimental. The hero is the son of Henry II. and Fair Rosamond, but his +speech is Grandisonian. The adventures are of the usual kind: the +_dramatis personae_ include gallant knights who go a-tilting with their +ladies' gloves upon their casques, usurpers, villains, pirates, a wicked +monk who tries to poison the hero, an oppressed countess, a distressed +damsel disguised as a page, a hermit who has a cave in a mountain side, +etc. The Gothic properties are few; though the frontispiece to the first +volume represents a cowled monk raising from the ground the figure of a +swooning knight in complete armor, in front of an abbey church with an +image of the Virgin and Child sculptured in a niche above the door; and +the building is thus described in the text: "Its windows crowded with the +foliage of their ornaments, and dimmed by the hand of the painter; its +numerous spires towering above the roof, and the Christian ensign on its +front, declared it a residence of devotion and charity." An episode in +the story narrates the death of a father by the hand of his son in the +Barons' War of Henry III. But no farther advantage is taken of the +historic background afforded by this civil conflict, nor is Simon de +Montfort so much as named in the whole course of the book. + +Clara Reeve was the daughter of a clergyman. She lived and died at +Ipswich (1725-1803). Walter Scott contributed a memoir of her to +"Ballantyne's Novelists' Library," in which he defended Walpole's frank +use of the supernatural against her criticisms, quoted above, and gave +the preference to Walpole's method.[17] She acknowledged that her +romance was a "literary descendant of 'Otranto';" but the author of the +latter, evidently nettled by her strictures, described "The Old English +Baron," as "Otranto reduced to reason and probability," and declared that +any murder trial at the Old Bailey would have made a more interesting +story. Such as it is, it bridges the interval between its model and the +novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, Lewis' "Monk" (1795), and Maturin's "Fatal +Revenge, or the Family of Montorio" (1807).[18] + +Anne Radcliffe--born Ward in 1764, the year of "Otranto"--was the wife of +an editor, who was necessarily absent from home much of the time until +late at night. A large part of her writing was done to amuse her +loneliness in the still hours of evening; and the wildness of her +imagination, and the romantic love of night and solitude which pervades +her books, are sometimes accounted for in this way. In 1809 it was +currently reported and believed that Mrs. Radcliffe was dead. Another +form of the rumor was that she had been insane by continually poring over +visions of horror and mystery. Neither report was true; she lived till +1823, in full possession of her faculties, although she published nothing +after 1797. The circulation of such stories shows how retired, and even +obscure, a life this very popular writer contrived to lead. + +It would be tedious to give here an analysis of these once famous +fictions _seriatim_.[19] They were very long, very much alike, and very +much overloaded with sentiment and description. The plots were +complicated and abounded in the wildest improbabilities and in those +incidents which were once the commonplaces of romantic fiction and which +realism has now turned out of doors: concealments, assassinations, duels, +disguises, kidnappings, escapes, elopements, intrigues, forged documents, +discoveries of old crimes, and identifications of lost heirs. The +characters, too, were of the conventional kind. There were dark-browed, +crime-stained villains--forerunners, perhaps of Manfred and Lara, for the +critics think that Mrs. Radcliffe's stories were not without important +influence on Byron.[20] There were high-born, penitent dames who retired +to convents in expiation of sins which are not explained until the +general raveling of clews in the final chapter. There were bravoes, +banditti, feudal tyrants, monks, inquisitors, soubrettes, and simple +domestics _a la_ Bianca, in Walpole's romance. The lover was of the type +adored by our great-grandmothers, handsome, melancholy, passionate, +respectful but desperate, a user of most choice English; with large black +eyes, smooth white forehead, and jetty curls, now sunk, Mr. Perry says, +to the covers of prune boxes. The heroine, too, was sensitive and +melancholy. When alone upon the seashore or in the mountains, at sunset +or twilight, or under the midnight moon, or when the wind is blowing, she +overflows into stanza or sonnet, "To Autumn," "To Sunset," "To the Bat," +"To the Nightingale," "To the Winds," "To Melancholy," "Song of the +Evening Hour." We have heard this pensive music drawing near in the +strains of the Miltonic school, but in Mrs. Radcliffe the romantic gloom +is profound and all-pervading. In what pastures she had fed is manifest +from the verse captions that head her chapters, taken mainly from Blair, +Thomson, Warton, Gray, Collins, Beattie, Mason, and Walpole's "Mysterious +Mother." Here are a few stanzas from her ode "To Melancholy": + + "Spirit of love and sorrow, hail! + Thy solemn voice from far I hear, + Mingling with evening's dying gale: + Hail, with thy sadly pleasing tear! + + "O at this still, this lonely hour-- + Thine own sweet hour of closing day-- + Awake thy lute, whose charmful power + Shall call up fancy to obey: + + "To paint the wild, romantic dream + That meets the poet's closing eye, + As on the bank of shadowy stream + He breathes to her the fervid sigh. + + "O lonely spirit, let thy song + Lead me through all thy sacred haunt, + The minster's moonlight aisles along + Where specters raise the midnight chant." + +In Mrs. Radcliffe's romances we find a tone that is absent from +Walpole's: romanticism plus sentimentalism. This last element had begun +to infuse itself into general literature about the middle of the century, +as a protest and reaction against the emotional coldness of the classical +age. It announced itself in Richardson, Rousseau, and the youthful +Goethe; in the _comedie larmoyante_, both French and English; found its +cleverest expression in Sterne, and then, becoming a universal vogue, +deluged fiction with productions like Mackenzie's "Man of Feeling," Miss +Burney's "Evelina," and the novels of Jane Porter and Mrs. Opie. +Thackeray said that there was more crying in "Thaddeus of Warsaw" than in +any novel he ever remembered to have read.[21] Emily, in the "Mysteries +of Udolpho" cannot see the moon, or hear a guitar or an organ or the +murmur of the pines, without weeping. Every page is bedewed with the +tear of sensibility; the whole volume is damp with it, and ever and anon +a chorus of sobs goes up from the entire company. Mrs. Radcliffe's +heroines are all descendents of Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, but under +more romantic circumstances. They are beset with a thousand +difficulties; carried off by masked ruffians, immured in convents, held +captive in robber castles, encompassed with horrors natural and +supernatural, persecuted, threatened with murder and with rape. But +though perpetually sighing, blushing, trembling, weeping, fainting, they +have at bottom a kind of toughness that endures through all. They rebuke +the wicked in stately language, full of noble sentiments and moral +truths. They preserve the most delicate feelings of propriety in +situations the most discouraging. Emily, imprisoned in the gloomy castle +of Udolpho, in the power of ruffians whose brawls and orgies fill night +and day with horror, in hourly fear for her virtue and her life, sends +for the lord of the castle,--whom she believes to have murdered her +aunt,--and reminds him that, as her protectress is now dead, it would not +be proper for her to stay any longer under his roof thus unchaperoned, +and will he please, therefore, send her home? + +Mrs. Radcliffe's fictions are romantic, but not usually mediaeval in +subject. In the "Mysteries of Udolpho," the period of the action is the +end of the sixteenth century; in the "Romance of the Forest," 1658; in +"The Italian," about 1760. But her machinery is prevailingly Gothic and +the real hero of the story is commonly, as in Walpole, some haunted +building. In the "Mysteries of Udolpho" it is a castle in the Apennines; +in the "Romance of the Forest," a deserted abbey in the depth of the +woods; in "The Italian," the cloister of the Black Penitents. The +moldering battlements, the worm-eaten tapestries, the turret staircases, +secret chambers, underground passages, long, dark corridors where the +wind howls dismally, and distant doors which slam at midnight all derive +from "Otranto." So do the supernatural fears which haunt these abodes of +desolation; the strains of mysterious music, the apparitions which glide +through the shadowy apartments, the hollow voices that warn the tyrant to +beware. But her method here is quite different from Walpole's; she tacks +a natural explanation to every unearthly sight or sound. The hollow +voices turn out to be ventriloquism; the figure of a putrefying corpse +which Emily sees behind the black curtain in the ghost chamber at Udolpho +is only a wax figure, contrived as a _memento mori_ for a former +penitent. After the reader has once learned this trick he refuses to be +imposed upon again, and, whenever he encounters a spirit, feels sure that +a future chapter will embody it back into flesh and blood. + +There is plenty of testimony to the popularity of these romances. +Thackeray says that a lady of his acquaintance, an inveterate novel +reader, names Valancourt as one of the favorite heroes of her youth. +"'Valancourt? And who was he?' cry the young people. Valancourt, my +dears, was the hero of one of the most famous romances which ever was +published in this country. The beauty and elegance of Valancourt made +your young grandmamma's' gentle hearts to beat with respectful sympathy. +He and his glory have passed away. . . Enquire at Mudie's or the London +Library, who asks for the 'Mysteries of Udolpho' now."[22] Hazlitt said +that he owed to Mrs. Radcliffe his love of moonlight nights, autumn +leaves and decaying ruins. It was, indeed, in the melodramatic +manipulation of landscape that this artist was most original. "The +scenes that savage Rosa dashed" seemed to have been her model, and +critics who were fond of analogy called her the Salvator Rosa of fiction. +It is here that her influence on Byron and Chateaubriand is most +apparent.[23] Mrs. Radcliffe's scenery is not quite to our modern taste, +any more than are Salvator's paintings. Her Venice by moonlight, her +mountain gorges with their black pines and foaming torrents, are not +precisely the Venice and the Alps of Ruskin; rather of the operatic +stage. Still they are impressive in their way, and in this department +she possessed genuine poetic feels and a real mastery of the art of +painting in distemper. Witness the picture of the castle of Udolpho, on +Emily's first sight of it, and the hardly less striking description, in +the "Romance of the Forest," of the ruined abbey in which the La Motte +family take refuge: "He approached and perceived the Gothic remains of an +abbey: it stood on a kind of rude lawn, overshadowed by high and +spreading trees, which seemed coeval with the building, and diffused a +romantic gloom around. The greater part of the pile appeared to be +sinking into ruins, and that which had withstood the ravages of time +showed the remaining features of the fabric more awful in decay. The +lofty battlements, thickly enwreathed with ivy, were half demolished and +become the residence of birds of prey. Huge fragments of the eastern +tower, which was almost demolished, lay scattered amid the high grass, +that waved slowly in the breeze. 'The thistle shook its lonely head: the +moss whistled to the wind.'[24] A Gothic gate, richly ornamented with +fretwork, which opened into the main body of the edifice, but which was +now obstructed with brushwood, remained entire. Above the vast and +magnificent portal of this gate arose a window of the same order, whose +pointed arches still exhibited fragments of stained glass, once the pride +of monkish devotion. La Motte, thinking it possible it might yet shelter +some human being, advanced to the gate and lifted a massy knocker. The +hollow sounds rung through the emptiness of the place. After waiting a +few minutes, he forced back the gate, which was heavy with iron-work, and +creaked harshly on its hinges. . . From this chapel he passed into the +nave of the great church, of which one window, more perfect than the +rest, opened upon a long vista of the forest, through which was seen the +rich coloring of evening, melting by imperceptible gradations into the +solemn gray of upper air." + +Mrs. Radcliffe never was in Italy or Switzerland or the south of France; +she divined the scenery of her romances from pictures and descriptions at +second hand. But she accompanied her husband in excursions to the Lakes +and other parts of England, and in 1794 made the tour of the Rhine.[25] +The passages in her diary, recording these travels, are much superior in +the truthfulness and local color of their nature sketching to anything in +her novels. Mrs. Radcliffe is furthermore to be credited with a certain +skill in producing terror, by the use of that favorite weapon in the +armory of the romanticists, mystery. If she did not invent a new +shudder, as Hugo said of Baudelaire, she gave at least a new turn to the +old-fashioned ghost story. She creates in her readers a feeling of +impending danger, suspense, foreboding. There is a sense of unearthly +presences in these vast, empty rooms; the silence itself is ominous; +echoes sound like footfalls, ghostly shadows lurk in dark corners, +whispers come from behind the arras, as it stirs in the gusts of +wind.[26] The heroine is afraid to look in the glass lest she should see +another face there beside her own; her lamp expires and leaves her in the +dark just as she is coming to the critical point in the manuscript which +she has found in an old chest, etc., etc., But the tale loses its +impressiveness as soon as it strays beyond the shade of the battlements. +The Gothic castle or priory is still, as in Walpole, the nucleus of the +story. + +Two of these romances, the earliest and the latest, though they are the +weakest of the series, have a special interest for us as affording points +of comparison with the Waverly novels. "The Castles of Athlin and +Dunbayne" is the narrative of a feud between two Highland clans, and its +scene is the northeastern coast of Scotland, "in the most romantic part +of the Highlands," where the castle of Athlin--like Uhland's "Schloss am +Meer"--stood "on the summit of a rock whose base was in the sea." This +was a fine place for storms. "The winds burst in sudden squalls over the +deep and dashed the foaming waves against the rocks with inconceivable +fury. The spray, notwithstanding the high situation of the castle, flew +up with violence against the windows. . . The moon shone faintly by +intervals, through broken clouds, upon the waters, illumining the white +foam which burst around. . . The surges broke on the distant shores in +deep resounding murmurs, and the solemn pauses between the stormy gusts +filled the mind with enthusiastic awe." Perhaps the description slightly +reminds of the picture, in "Marmion," of Tantallon Castle, the hold of +the Red Douglases on the German Ocean, a little north of Berwick, whose +frowning towers have recently done duty again in Stevenson's "David +Balfour." The period of the action is but vaguely indicated; but, as the +weapons used in the attack on the castle are bows and arrows, we may +regard the book as mediaeval in intention. Scott says that the scene of +the romance was Scotland in the dark ages, and complains that the author +evidently knew nothing of Scottish life or scenery. This is true; her +castles might have stood anywhere. There is no mention of the pipes or +the plaid. Her rival chiefs are not Gaelic caterans, but just plain +feudal lords. Her baron of Dunbayne is like any other baron; or rather, +he is unlike any baron that ever was on sea or land or anywhere else +except in the pages of a Gothic romance. + +"Gaston de Blondville" was begun in 1802 and published posthumously in +1826, edited by Sergeant Talfourd. Its inspiring cause was a visit which +the author made in the autumn of 1802 to Warwick Castle and the ruins of +Kenilworth. The introduction has the usual fiction of an old manuscript +found in an oaken chest dug up from the foundation of a chapel of Black +Canons at Kenilworth: a manuscript richly illuminated with designs at the +head of each chapter--which are all duly described--and containing a +"trew chronique of what passed at Killingworth, in Ardenn, when our +Soveren Lord the Kynge kept ther his Fest of Seynt Michel: with ye +marveylous accident that there befell at the solempnissacion of the +marriage of Gaston de Blondeville. With divers things curious to be +known thereunto purtayning. With an account of the grete Turney there +held in the year MCCLVI. Changed out of the Norman tongue by Grymbald, +Monk of Senct Marie Priori in Killingworth." Chatterton's forgeries had +by this time familiarized the public with imitations of early English. +The finder of this manuscript pretends to publish a modernized version of +it, while endeavoring "to preserve somewhat of the air of the old style." +This he does by a poor reproduction, not of thirteenth-century, but of +sixteenth-century English, consisting chiefly in inversions of phrase and +the occasional use of a _certes_ or _naithless_. Two words in particular +seem to have struck Mrs. Radcliffe as most excellent archaisms: _ychon_ +and _his-self_, which she introduces at every turn. + +"Gaston de Blondville," then, is a tale of the time of Henry III. The +king himself is a leading figure and so is Prince Edward. Other +historical personages are brought in, such as Simon de Montfort and Marie +de France, but little use is made of them. The book is not indeed, in +any sense, an historical novel like Scott's "Kenilworth," the scene of +which is the same, and which was published in 1821, five years before +Mrs. Radcliffe's. The story is entirely fictitious. What differences it +from her other romances is the conscious attempt to portray feudal +manners. There are elaborate descriptions of costumes, upholstery, +architecture, heraldic bearings, ancient military array, a tournament, a +royal hunt, a feast in the great hall at Kenilworth, a visit of state to +Warwick Castle, and the session of a baronial court. The ceremony of the +"voide," when the king took his spiced cup, is rehearsed with a painful +accumulation of particulars. For all this she consulted Leland's +"Collectanea," Warton's "History of English Poetry," the "Household Book +of Edward IV.," Pegge's "Dissertation on the Obsolete Office of Esquire +of the King's Body," the publications of the Society of Antiquaries and +similar authorities, with results that are infinitely tedious. Walter +Scott's archaeology is not always correct, nor his learning always +lightly borne; but, upon the whole, he had the art to make his cumbrous +materials contributory to his story rather than obstructive of it. + +In these two novels we meet again all the familiar apparatus of secret +trap-doors, sliding panels, spiral staircases in the thickness of the +walls, subterranean vaults conducting to a neighboring priory or a cavern +in the forest, ranges of deserted apartments where the moon looks in +through mullioned casements, ruinous turrets around which the night winds +moan and howl. Here, too, once more are the wicked uncle who seizes upon +the estates of his deceased brother's wife, and keeps her and her +daughter shut up in his dungeon for the somewhat long period of eighteen +years; the heroine who touches her lute and sings in pensive mood, till +the notes steal to the ear of the young earl imprisoned in the adjacent +tower; the maiden who is carried off on horseback by bandits, till her +shrieks bring ready aid; the peasant lad who turns out to be the baron's +heir. "His surprise was great when the baroness, reviving, fixed her +eyes mournfully upon him and asked him to uncover his arm." Alas! the +surprise is not shared by the reader, when "'I have indeed found my +long-lost child: that strawberry,'"[27] etc., etc. "Gaston de +Blondville" has a ghost--not explained away in the end according to Mrs. +Radcliffe's custom. It is the spirit of Reginald de Folville, Knight +Hospitaller of St. John, murdered in the Forest of Arden by Gaston de +Blondville and the prior of St. Mary's. He is a most robust apparition, +and is by no means content with revisiting the glimpses of the moon, but +goes in and out at all hours of the day, and so often as to become +somewhat of a bore. He ultimately destroys both first and second +murderer: one in his cell, the other in open tournament, where his +exploits as a mysterious knight in black armor may have given Scott a +hint for his black knight at the lists of Ashby-de-la-Zouche in "Ivanhoe" +(1819). His final appearance is in the chamber of the king, with whom he +holds quite a long conversation. "The worm is my sister," he says: "the +mist of death is on me. My bed is in darkness. The prisoner is +innocent. The prior of St. Mary's is gone to his account. Be warned." +It is not explained why Mrs. Radcliffe refrained from publishing this +last romance of hers. Perhaps she recognized that it was belated and +that the time for that sort of thing had gone by. By 1802 Lewis' "Monk" +was in print, as well as several translations from German romances; +Scott's early ballads were out, and Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." That +very year saw the publication of the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border." +By 1826 the Waverley novels had made all previous fiction of the Gothic +type hopelessly obsolete. In 1834 two volumes of her poems were given to +the world, including a verse romance in eight cantos, "St. Alban's +Abbey," and the verses scattered through her novels. By this time Scott +and Coleridge were dead; Byron, Shelley, and Keats had been dead for +years, and Mrs. Radcliffe's poesies fell upon the unheeding ears of a new +generation. A sneer in "Waverley" (1814) at the "Mysteries of Udolpho" +had hurt her feelings;[28] but Scott made amends in the handsome things +which he said of her in his "Lives of the Novelists." It is interesting +to note that when the "Mysteries" was issued, the venerable Joseph Warton +was so much entranced that he sat up the greater part of the night to +finish it. + +The warfare between realism and romance, which went on in the days of +Cervantes, as it does in the days of Zola and Howells, had its skirmished +also in Mrs. Radcliffe's time. Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey," written +in 1803 but published only in 1817, is gently satirical of Gothic +fiction. The heroine is devoted to the "Mysteries of Udolpho," which she +discusses with her bosom friend. "While I have 'Udolpho' to read, I feel +as if nobody could make me miserable. O the dreadful black veil! My +dear Isabella, I am sure there must be Laurentina's skeleton behind it." + +"When you have finished 'Udolpho,'" replies Isabella, "we will read 'The +Italian' together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of +the same kind for you. . . I will read you their names directly. Here +they are in my pocket-book. 'Castle of Wolfenbach,' 'Clermont,' +'Mysterious Warnings,' 'Necromancer of the Black Forest,' 'Midnight +Bell,' 'Orphan of the Rhine,' and 'Horrid Mysteries.'" + +When introduced to her friend's brother, Miss Morland asks him at once, +"Have you ever read 'Udolpho,' Mr. Thorpe?" But Mr. Thorpe, who is not a +literary man, but much given to dogs and horses, assures her that he +never reads novels; they are "full of nonsense and stuff; there has not +been a tolerably decent one come out since 'Tom Jones,' except the +'Monk.'" The scenery about Bath reminds Miss Morland of the south of +France and "the country that Emily and her father traveled through in the +'Mysteries of Udolpho.'" She is enchanted at the prospect of a drive to +Blaize Castle, where she hopes to have "the happiness of being stopped in +their way along narrow, winding vaults by a low, grated door; or even of +having their lamp--their only lamp--extinguished by a sudden gust of wind +and of being left in total darkness." She visits her friends, the +Tilneys, at their country seat, Northanger Abbey, in Glouchestershire; +and, on the way thither, young Mr. Tilney teases her with a fancy sketch +of the Gothic horrors which she will unearth there: the "sliding panels +and tapestry"; the remote and gloomy guest chamber, which will be +assigned her, with its ponderous chest and its portrait of a knight in +armor: the secret door, with massy bars and padlocks, that she will +discover behind the arras, leading to a "small vaulted room," and +eventually to a "subterraneous communication between your apartment and +the chapel of St. Anthony scarcely two miles off." Arrived at the abbey, +she is disappointed at the modern appearance of her room, but contrives +to find a secret drawer in an ancient ebony cabinet, and in this a roll +of yellow manuscript which, on being deciphered, proves to be a washing +bill. She is convinced, notwithstanding, that a mysterious door at the +end of a certain gallery conducts to a series of isolated chambers where +General Tilney, who is supposed to be a widower, is keeping his unhappy +wife immured and fed on bread and water. When she finally gains +admission to this Bluebeard's chamber and finds it nothing but a suite of +modern rooms, "the visions of romance were over. . . Charming as were +all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and charming even as were the works of all +her imitators, it was not in them, perhaps, that human nature, at least +in the midland counties of England was to be looked for." + + +[1] But compare the passage last quoted with the one from Warton's essay +_ante_, p. 219. + +[2] See _ante_, p. 49. + +[3] _Spectator_, No. 62. + +[4] See _ante_, p. 211. + +[5] "Works of Richard Owen Cambridge," pp. 198-99. Cambridge was one of +the Spenserian imitators. See _ante_, p. 89, _note_. In Lady +Luxborough's correspondence with Shenstone there is much mention of a Mr. +Miller, a neighboring proprietor, who was devoted to Gothic. On the +appearance of "The Scribleriad," she writes (January 28, 1751), "I +imagine this poem is not calculated to please Mr. Miller and the rest of +the Gothic gentlemen; for this Mr. Cambridge expresses a dislike to the +introducing or reviving tastes and fashions that are inferior to the +modern taste of our country." + +[6] "History of the Gothic Revival," p. 43. + +[7] "Works of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford," in five volumes, 1798. "A +Description of Strawberry Hill," Vol. II. pp. 395-516. + +[8] Pugin's "True Principles of Gothic Architecture" was published in 1841. + +[9] "Sketches of Eminent Statesmen and Writers," A. Hayward (1880). In a +note to "Marmion" (1808) Scott said that the ruins of Crichton Castle, +remarkable for the richness and elegance of its stone carvings, were then +used as a cattle-pen and a sheep-fold. + +[10] "Hours in a Library," Second Series: article, "Horace Walpole." + +[11] Letter to Bentley, February 23, 1755. + +[12] Five hundred copies, says Walpole, were struck off December 24, 1764. + +[13] "The Mysterious Mother," begun 1766, finished 1768. + +[14] "The Castle of Otranto" was dramatized by Robert Jephson, under the +title "The Count of Narbonne," put on at Covent Garden Theater in 1781, +and afterward printed, with a dedication to Walpole. + +[15] James Beattie, "Dissertation on Fable and Romance." "Argenius," was +printed in 1621. + +[16] "The Dictionary of National Biography" miscalls it "Earl of +Canterbury," and attributes it, though with a query, to _John_ Leland. + +[17] See also, for a notice of this writer, Julia Kavanagh's "English +Women of Letters." + +[18] Maturin's "Melmoth the Wanderer" (1820) had some influence on the +French romantic school and was utilized, in some particulars, by Balzac. + +[19] Following is a list of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances: "The Castles of +Athlin and Dunbayne" (1789); "Sicilian Romance" (1790); "Romance of the +Forest" (1791); "Mysteries of Udolpho" (1794); "The Italian" (1797); +"Gaston de Blondville" (1826). Collections of her poems were published +in 1816, 1834, and 1845. + +[20] See "Childe Harold," canto iv, xviii. + +[21] "Roundabout Papers," "A Peal of Bells." "Monk" Lewis wrote at +sixteen a burlesque novel, "Effusions of Sensibility," which remained in +MS. + +[22] "O Radcliffe, thou once wert the charmer + Of girls who sat reading all night: + They heroes were striplings in armor, + Thy heroines, damsels in white." + --_Songs, Ballads and Other Poems_. + +By Thos. Haynes Bayly, London, 1857, p. 141. + + "A novel now is nothing more + Than an old castle and a creaking door, + A distant hovel, + Clanking of chains, a gallery, a light, + Old armor and a phantom all in white, + And there's a novel." + --_George Colman, "The Will."_ + +[23] Several of her romances were dramatized and translated into French. +It is curious, by the way, to find that Goethe was not unaware of +Walpole's story. See his quatrain "Die Burg von Otranto," first printed +in 1837. + + "Sind die Zimmer saemmtlich besetzt der Burg von Otranto: + Kommt, voll innigen Grimmes, der erste Riesenbesitzer + Stuckweis an, and verdraengt die neuen falschen Bewohner. + Wehe! den Fliehenden, weh! den Bleibenden also geschiet es." + +[24] Ossian. + +[25] See her "Journey through Holland," etc. (1795) + +[26] _cf._ Keats, "The Eve of Saint Agnes": + + "The arras rich with hunt and horse and hound + Flattered in the besieging wind's uproar, + And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor." + +[27] "Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne." + +[28] See Julia Kavanagh's "English Women of Letters." + + + + +CHAPTER VIII. + +Percy and the Ballads. + +The regeneration of English poetic style at the close of the last century +came from an unexpected quarter. What scholars and professional men of +letters had sought to do by their imitations of Spenser and Milton, and +their domestication of the Gothic and the Celtic muse, was much more +effectually done by Percy and the ballad collectors. What they had +sought to do was to recall British poetry to the walks of imagination and +to older and better models than Dryden and Pope. But they could not jump +off their own shadows: the eighteenth century was too much for them. +While they anxiously cultivated wildness and simplicity, their diction +remained polished, literary, academic to a degree. It is not, indeed, +until we reach the boundaries of a new century that we encounter a Gulf +Stream of emotional, creative impulse strong enough and hot enough to +thaw the classical icebergs till not a floating spiculum of them is left. + +Meanwhile, however, there occurred a revivifying contact with one +department, at least, of early verse literature, which did much to clear +the way for Scott and Coleridge and Keats. The decade from 1760 to 1770 +is important in the history of English romanticism, and its most +important title is Thomas Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: +Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of our Earlier +Poets," published in three volumes in 1765. It made a less immediate and +exciting impression upon contemporary Europe than MacPherson's "Poems of +Ossian," but it was more fruitful in enduring results. The Germans make +a convenient classification of poetry into _Kunstpoesie_ and +_Volkspoesie_, terms which may be imperfectly translated as literary +poetry and popular poetry. The English _Kunstpoesie_ of the Middle Ages +lay buried under many superincumbent layers of literary fashion. +Oblivion had overtaken Gower and Occleve, and Lydgate and Stephen Hawes, +and Skelton, and Henryson and James I. of Scotland, and well-nigh Chaucer +himself--all the mediaeval poetry of the schools, in short. But it was +known to the curious that there was still extant a large body of popular +poetry in the shape of narrative ballads, which had been handed down +chiefly by oral transmission, and still lived in the memories and upon +the lips of the common people. Many of these went back in their original +shapes to the Middle Ages, or to an even remoter antiquity, and belonged +to that great store of folk-lore which was the common inheritance of the +Aryan race. Analogues and variants of favorite English and Scottish +ballads have been traced through almost all the tongues of modern Europe. +Danish literature is especially rich in ballads and affords valuable +illustrations of our native ministrelsy.[1] It was, perhaps, due in part +to the Danish settlements in Northumbria and to the large Scandinavian +admixture in the Northumbrian blood and dialect, that "the north +countrie" became _par excellence_ the ballad land: Lowland +Scotland--particularly the Lothians--and the English bordering counties, +Northumberland, Westmoreland, and Cumberland; with Yorkshire and +Nottinghamshire, in which were Barndale and Sherwood Forests, Robin +Hood's haunts. It is not possible to assign exact dates to these songs. +They were seldom reduced to writing till many years after they were +composed. In the Middle Ages they were sung to the harp by wandering +minstrels. In later times they were chanted or recited by ballad-singers +at fairs, markets, ale-houses, street-corners, sometimes to the +accompaniment of a fiddle or crowd. They were learned by ancient dames, +who repeated them in chimney corners to children and grandchildren. In +this way some of them were preserved in an unwritten state, even to the +present day, in the tenacious memory of the people, always at bottom +conservative and, under a hundred changes of fashion in the literary +poetry which passes over their heads, clinging obstinately to old songs +and beliefs learned in childhood, and handing them on to posterity. +Walter Scott got much of the material for his "Ministrelsy of the Border" +from the oral recitation of pipers, shepherds, and old women in Ettrick +Forest. Professor Child's--the latest and fullest ballad +collection--contains pieces never before given in print or manuscript, +some of them obtained in America![2] + +Leading this subterranean existence, and generally thought unworthy the +notice of educated people, they naturally underwent repeated changes; so +that we have numerous versions of the same story, and incidents, +descriptions, and entire stanzas are borrowed and lent freely among the +different ballads. The circumstance, _e.g._, of the birk and the briar +springing from the graves of true lovers and intertwisting their branches +occurs in the ballads of "Fair Margaret and Sweet William," "Lord Thomas +and Fair Annet," "Lord Lovel," "Fair Janet," and many others. The knight +who was carried to fairyland through an entrance in a green hillside, and +abode seven years with the queen of fairy, recurs in "Tam Lin," "Thomas +Rymer,"[3] etc. Like all folk-songs, these ballads are anonymous and may +be regarded not as the composition of any one poet, but as the property, +and in a sense the work, of the people as a whole. Coming out of an +uncertain past, based on some dark legend of heart-break or blood-shed, +they bear no author's name, but are _ferae naturae_ and have the flavor +of wild game. They were common stock, like the national speech; everyone +could contribute toward them: generations of nameless poets, minstrels, +ballad-singers modernized their language to suit new times, altered their +dialect to suit new places, accommodated their details to different +audiences, English or Scotch, and in every way that they thought fit +added, retrenched, corrupted, improved, and passed them on. + +Folk-poetry is conventional; it seems to be the production of a guild, +and to have certain well understood and commonly expected tricks of style +and verse. Freshness and sincerity are almost always attributes of the +poetry of heroic ages, but individuality belongs to a high civilization +and an advanced literary culture. Whether the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" +are the work of one poet or of a cycle of poets, doubtless the rhetorical +peculiarities of the Homeric epics, such as the recurrent phrase and the +conventional epithet (the rosy-fingered dawn, the well-greaved Greeks, +the swift-footed Achilles, the much-enduring Odysseus, etc.) are due to +this communal or associative character of ancient heroic song. As in the +companies of architects who built the mediaeval cathedrals, or in the +schools of early Italian painters, masters and disciples, the manner of +the individual artist was subdued to the tradition of his craft. + + +The English and Scottish popular ballads are in various simple stanza +forms, the commonest of all being the old _septenarius_ or "fourteener," +arranged in a four-lined stanza of alternate eights and sixes, thus: + + "Up then crew the red, red cock, + And up and crew the gray; + The eldest to the youngest said + ''Tis time we were away.'"[4] + +This is the stanza usually employed by modern ballad imitators, like +Coleridge in "The Ancient Mariner," Scott in "Jock o' Hazeldean," +Longfellow in "The Wreck of the Hesperus," Macaulay in the "Lays of +Ancient Rome," Aytoun in the "Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers." Many of +the stylistic and metrical peculiarities of the ballads arose from the +fact that they were made to be sung or recited from memory. Such are +perhaps the division of the longer ones into fits, to rest the voice of +the singer; and the use of the burden or refrain for the same purpose, as +also to give the listeners and bystanders a chance to take up the chorus, +which they probably accompanied with a few dancing steps.[5] Sometimes +the burden has no meaning in itself and serves only to mark time with a +_Hey derry down_ or an _O lilly lally_ and the like. Sometimes it has +more or less reference to the story, as in "The Two Sisters": + + "He has ta'en three locks o' her yellow hair-- + Binnorie, O Binnorie-- + And wi' them strung his harp sae rare-- + By the bonnie mill-dams of Binnorie." + +Again it has no discoverable relation to the context, as in "Riddles +Wisely Expounded"-- + + "There was a knicht riding frae the east-- + _Jennifer gentle and rosemarie_-- + Who had been wooing at monie a place-- + _As the dew flies over the mulberry tree._" + +Both kinds of refrain have been liberally employed by modern balladists. +Thus Tennyson in "The Sisters": + + "We were two sisters of one race, + _The wind is howling in turret and tree;_ +_ _She was the fairer in the face, + _O the earl was fair to see."_ + +While Rossetti and Jean Ingelow and others have rather favored the +inconsequential burden, an affectation travestied by the late Mr. C. S. +Calverley: + + "The auld wife sat at her ivied door, + (Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese) + A thing she had frequently done before; + And her spectacles lay on her aproned knees. + + "The farmer's daughter hath soft brown hair + (Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese), + And I met with a ballad, I can't say where, + Which wholly consisted of lines like these."[6] + +A musical or mnemonic device akin to the refrain was that sing-song +species of repetend so familiar in ballad language: + + "She had na pu'd a double rose, + a rose but only twa." + + "They had na sailed a league, a league, + A league but barely three. + + "How will I come up? How can I come up? + How can I come to thee?" + +An answer is usually returned in the identical words of the question; and +as in Homer, a formula of narration or a commonplace of description does +duty again and again. Iteration in the ballads is not merely for +economy, but stands in lieu of the metaphor and other figures of literary +poetry: + + "'O Marie, put on your robes o' black, + Or else your robes o' brown, + For ye maun gang wi' me the night, + To see fair Edinbro town.' + + "'I winna put on my robes o' black, + Nor yet my robes o' brown; + But I'll put on my robes o' white, + To shine through Edinbro town.'" + +Another mark of the genuine ballad manner, as of Homer and _Volkspoesie_ +in general, is the conventional epithet. Macaulay noted that the gold is +always red in the ballads, the ladies always gay, and Robin Hood's men +are always his merry men. Doughty Douglas, bold Robin Hood, merry +Carlisle, the good greenwood, the gray goose wing, and the wan water are +other inseparables of the kind. Still another mark is the frequent +retention of the Middle English accent on the final syllable in words +like contrie, baron, dinere, felawe, abbay, rivere, money, and its +assumption by words which never properly had it, such as lady, harper, +wedding, water, etc.[7] Indeed, as Percy pointed out in his +introduction, there were "many phrases and idioms which the minstrels +seem to have appropriated to themselves, . . . a cast of style and +measure very different from that of contemporary poets of a higher class." + +Not everything that is called a ballad belongs to the class of poetry +that we are here considering. In its looser employment the word has +signified almost any kind of song: "a woeful ballad made to his mistress' +eyebrow," for example. "Ballade" was also the name of a somewhat +intricate French stanza form, employed by Gower and Chaucer, and recently +reintroduced into English verse by Dobson, Lang, Goose, and others, along +with the virelay, rondeau, triolet, etc. There is also a numerous class +of popular ballads--in the sense of something made _for_ the people, +though not _by_ the people--are without relation to our subject. These +are the street ballads, which were and still are hawked about by +ballad-mongers, and which have no literary character whatever. There are +satirical and political ballads, ballads versifying passages in Scripture +or chronicle, ballads relating to current events, or giving the history +of famous murders and other crimes, of prodigies, providences, and all +sorts of happenings that teach a lesson in morals: about George Barnwell +and the "Babes in the Wood," and "Whittington and his Cat," etc.: ballads +like Shenstone's "Jemmy Dawson" and Gay's "Black-eyed Susan." Thousands +of such are included in manuscript collections like the "Pepysian," or +printed in the publications of the Roxburghe Club and the Ballad Society. +But whether entirely modern, or extant in black-letter broadsides, they +are nothing to our purpose. We have to do here with the folk-song, the +_traditional_ ballad, product of the people at a time when the people was +homogeneous and the separation between the lettered and unlettered +classes had not yet taken place: the true minstrel ballad of the Middle +Ages, or of that state of society which in rude and primitive +neighborhoods, like the Scottish border, prolonged mediaeval conditions +beyond the strictly mediaeval period. + +In the form in which they are preserved, a few of our ballads are older +than the seventeenth or the latter part of the sixteenth century, though +in their origin many of them are much older. Manuscript versions of +"Robin Hood and the Monk" and "Robin Hood and the Potter" exist, which +are referred to the last years of the fifteenth century. The "Lytel +Geste of Robyn Hode" was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1489. The +"Not-Brown Maid" was printed in "Arnold's Chronicle" in 1502. "The +Hunting of the Cheviot"--the elder version of "Chevy Chase"--was +mentioned by Philip Sidney in his "Defence of Poesie" in 1850.[8] The +ballad is a narrative song, naive, impersonal, spontaneous, objective. +The singer is lost in the song, the teller in the tale. That is its +essence, but sometimes the story is told by the lyrical, sometimes by the +dramatic method. In "Helen of Kirkconnell" it is the bereaved lover who +is himself the speaker: in "Waly Waly," the forsaken maid. These are +monologues; for a purely dialogue ballad it will be sufficient to mention +the power and impressive piece in the "Reliques" entitled "Edward." +Herder translated this into German; it is very old, with Danish, Swedish, +and Finnish analogues. It is a story of parricide, and is narrated in a +series of questions by the mother and answers by the son. The commonest +form, however, was a mixture of epic and dramatic, or direct relation +with dialogue. A frequent feature is the abruptness of the opening and +the translations. The ballad-maker observes unconsciously Aristotle's +rule for the epic poet, to begin _in medias res_. Johnson noticed this +in the instance of "Johnny Armstrong," but a stronger example is found in +"The Banks of Yarrow:" + + "Late at e'en, drinking the wine, + And ere they paid the lawing, + They set a combat them between, + To fight it in the dawing." + +With this, an indirect, allusive way of telling the story, which Goethe +mentions in his prefatory note to "Des Saengers Fluch," as a constant note +of the "Volkslied." The old ballad-maker does not vouchsafe explanations +about persons and motives; often he gives the history, not expressly nor +fully, but by hints and glimpses, leaving the rest to conjecture; +throwing up its salient points into a strong, lurid light against a +background of shadows. The knight rides out a-hunting, and by and by his +riderless horse comes home, and that is all: + + "Toom[9] hame cam the saddle + But never cam he." + +Or the knight himself comes home and lies down to die, reluctantly +confessing, under his mother's questioning, that he dined with his +true-love and is poisoned.[10] And again that is all. Or + + "--In behint yon auld fail[11] dyke, + I wot there lies a new-slain knight; + And naebody kens that he lies there, + But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair. + + "His hound is to the hunting game, + His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame, + His lady's ta'en another mate, + So we may mak our dinner sweet." + +A whole unuttered tragedy of love, treachery, and murder lies back of +these stanzas. This method of narration may be partly accounted for by +the fact that the story treated was commonly some local country-side +legend of family feud or unhappy passion, whose incidents were familiar +to the ballad-singer's audience and were readily supplied by memory. One +theory holds that the story was partly told and partly sung, and that the +links and expositions were given in prose. However this may be, the +artless art of these popular poets evidently included a knowledge of the +uses of mystery and suggestion. They knew that, for the imagination, the +part is sometimes greater than the whole. Gray wrote to Mason in 1757, +"I have got the old Scotch ballad [Gil Maurice] on which 'Douglas' +[Home's tragedy, first played at Edinburgh in 1756] was founded. It is +divine. . . Aristotle's best rules are observed in it in a manner which +shews the author never had heard of Aristotle. It begins in the fifth +act of the play. You may read it two-thirds through without guessing +what it is about; and yet, when you come to the end, it is impossible not +to understand the whole story." + +It is not possible to recover the conditions under which these folk-songs +"made themselves,"[12] as it were, or grew under the shaping hands of +generations of nameless bards. Their naive, primitive quality cannot be +acquired: the secret is lost. But Walter Scott, who was steeped to the +lips in balladry, and whose temper had much of the healthy objectivity of +an earlier age, has succeeded as well as any modern. Some of his ballads +are more perfect artistically than his long metrical romances; those of +them especially which are built up from a burden or fragment of old +minstrel song, like "Jock o' Hazeldean"[13] and the song in "Rokeby": + + "He turned his charger as he spake + Upon the river shore, + He gave the bride-reins a shake, + Said 'Adieu for evermore, + My love! + And adieu for evermore!'" + +Here Scott catches the very air of popular poetry, and the dovetailing is +done with most happy skill. "Proud Maisie is in the Wood" is a fine +example of the ballad manner of story-telling by implication.[14] + +As regards their subject-matter, the ballads admit of a rough +classification into the historical, or _quasi_-historical, and the purely +legendary or romantic. Of the former class were the "riding-ballad" of +the Scottish border, where the forays of moss-troopers, the lifting of +blackmail, the raids and private warfare of the Lords of the Marches, +supplied many traditions of heroism and adventure like those recorded in +"The Battle of Otterburn," "The Hunting of the Cheviot," "Johnnie +Armstrong," "Kinmont Willie," "The Rising in the North" and +"Northumberland Betrayed by Douglas." Of the fictitious class, some were +shortened, popularized, and generally degraded versions of the chivalry +romances, which were passing out of favor among educated readers in the +sixteenth century and fell into the hands of the ballad-makers. Such, to +name only a few included in the "Reliques," were "Sir Lancelot du Lake," +"The Legend of Sir Guy," "King Arthur's Death" and "The Marriage of Sir +Gawaine." But the substance of these was not of the genuine popular +stuff, and their personages were simply the old heroes of court poetry in +reduced circumstances. Much more impressive are the original folk-songs, +which strike their roots deep into the ancient world of legend and even +of myth. + +In this true ballad world there is a strange commingling of paganism and +Catholic Christianity. It abounds in the supernatural and the marvelous. +Robin Hood is a pious outlaw. He robs the fat-headed monks, but will not +die unhouseled and has great devotion to Our Blessed Lady; who appears +also to Brown Robyn, when he is cast overboard, hears his confession and +takes his soul to Heaven.[15] When mass has been sung and the bells of +merry Lincoln have rung, Lady Maisry goes seeking her little Hugh, who +has been killed by the Jew's daughter and thrown into Our Lady's +draw-well fifty fathom deep, and the boy answers his mother miraculously +from the well.[16] Birds carry messages for lovers[17] and dying +men,[18] or show the place where the body lies buried and the +corpse-candles shine.[19] The harper strings his harp with three golden +hairs of the drowned maiden, and the tune that he plays upon them reveals +the secret of her death.[20] The ghosts of the sons that have perished +at sea come home to take farewell of their mother.[21] The spirit of the +forsaken maid visits her false lover at midnight;[22] or "the dead comes +for the quick,"[23] as in Burger's weird poem. There are witches, +fairies, and mermaidens[24] in the ballads: omens, dreams, spells,[25] +enchantments, transformations,[26] magic rings and charms, "gramarye"[27] +of many sorts; and all these things are more effective here than in poets +like Spenser and Collins, because they are matters of belief and not of +make-believe. + +The ballads are prevailingly tragical in theme, and the tragic passions +of pity and fear find an elementary force of utterance. Love is strong +as death, jealousy cruel as the grave. Hate, shame, grief, despair speak +here with their native accent: + + "There are seven forsters at Pickeram Side, + At Pickeram where they dwell, + And for a drop of thy heart's bluid + They wad ride the fords of hell."[28] + + "O little did my mother think, + The day she cradled me, + What lands I was to travel through, + What death I was to dee."[29] + +The maiden asks her buried lover: + + "Is there any room at your head, Sanders? + Is there any room at your feet? + Or any room at your twa sides, + Where fain, fain would I sleep?"[30] + + "O waly, waly, but love be bonny + A little time while it is new;[31] + But when 'tis auld it waxeth cauld + And fades awa' like morning dew. . . + + "And O! if my young babe were born, + And set upon the nurse's knee, + And I mysel' were dead and gane, + And the green grass growing over me!" + +Manners in this world are of a primitive savagery. There are treachery, +violence, cruelty, revenge; but there are also honor, courage, fidelity, +and devotion that endureth to the end. "Child Waters" and "Fair Annie" do +not suffer on a comparison with Tennyson's "Enid" and Chaucer's story of +patient Griselda ("The Clerkes Tale") with which they have a common +theme. It is the medieval world. Marauders, pilgrims, and wandering +gleemen go about in it. The knight stands at his garden pale, the lady +sits at her bower window, and the little foot page carries messages over +moss and moor. Marchmen are riding through the Bateable Land "by the hie +light o' the moon." Monks are chanting in St. Mary's Kirk, trumpets are +blowing in Carlisle town, castles are burning; down in the glen there is +an ambush and swords are flashing; bows are twanging in the greenwood; +four and twenty ladies are playing at the ball, and four and twenty +milk-white calves are in the woods of Glentanner--all ready to be stolen. +About Yule the round tables begin; the queen looks over the castle-wall, +the palmer returns from the Holy Land, Young Waters lies deep in Stirling +dungeon, but Child Maurice is in the silver wood, combing his yellow +locks with a silver comb. + +There is an almost epic coherence about the ballads of the Robin Hood +cycle. This good robber, who with his merry men haunted the forests of +Sherwood and Barnsdale, was the real ballad hero and the darling of the +popular fancy which created him. For though the names of his confessor, +Friar Tuck; his mistress, Maid Marian; and his companions, Little John, +Scathelock, and Much the miller's son, have an air of reality,--and +though the tradition has associated itself with definite +localities,--there is nothing historical about Robin Hood. Langland, in +the fourteenth century, mentions "rhymes of Robin Hood"; and efforts have +been made to identify him with one of the dispossessed followers of Simon +de Montfort, in "the Barons' War," or with some still earlier +free-booter, of Hereward's time, who had taken to the woods and lived by +plundering the Normans. Myth as he is, he is a thoroughly national +conception. He had the English love of fair play; the English readiness +to shake hands and make up when worsted in a square fight. He killed the +King's venison, but was a loyal subject. He took from the rich and gave +to the poor, executing thus a kind of wild justice. He defied legal +authority in the person of the proud sheriff of Nottingham, thereby +appealing to that secret sympathy with lawlessness which marks a +vigorous, free yeomanry.[32] He had the knightly virtues of courtesy and +hospitality, and the yeomanly virtues of good temper and friendliness. +And finally, he was a mighty archer with the national weapons, the +long-bow and the cloth-yard shaft; and so appealed to the national love +of sport in his free and careless life under the greenwood tree. The +forest scenery give a poetic background to his exploits, and though the +ballads, like folk-poetry in general, seldom linger over natural +descriptions, there is everywhere a consciousness of this background and +a wholesome, outdoor feeling: + + "In somer, when the shawes be sheyne, + And leves be large and long, + Hit is full mery in feyre foreste + To here the foulys song: + + "To se the dere draw to the dale, + And leve the hillis hee, + And shadow hem in the leves grene, + Under the grene-wode tre."[33] + +Although a few favorite ballads such as "Johnnie Armstrong," "Chevy +Chase," "The Children in the Wood," and some of the Robin Hood ones had +long been widely, nay almost universally familiar, they had hardly been +regarded as literature worthy of serious attention. They were looked +upon as nursery tales, or at best as the amusement of peasants and +unlettered folk, who used to paste them up on the walls of inns, +cottages, and ale-houses. Here and there an educated man had had a +sneaking fondness for collecting old ballads--much as people nowadays +collect postage stamps. Samuel Pepys, the diarist, made such a +collection, and so did John Selden, the great legal antiquary and scholar +of Milton's time. "I have heard," wrote Addison, "that the late Lord +Dorset, who had the greatest wit tempered with the greatest candor, and +was one of the finest critics as well as the best poets of his age, had a +numerous collection of old English ballads, and a particular pleasure in +the reading of them. I can affirm the same of Mr. Dryden." Dryden's +"Miscellany Poems" (1684) gave "Gilderoy," "Johnnie Armstrong," "Chevy +Chase," "The Miller and the King's Daughter," and "Little Musgrave and +the Lady Barnard." The last named, as well as "Lady Anne Bothwell's +Lament" and "Fair Margaret and Sweet William,"[34] was quoted in Beaumont +and Fletcher's "Knight of the Burning Pestle," (1611). Scraps of them +are sung by one of the _dramatis personae_, old Merrythought, whose +speciality is a damnable iteration of ballad fragments. References to +old ballads are numerous in the Elizabethan plays. Percy devoted the +second book of his first series to "Ballads that Illustrate Shakspere." +In the seventeenth century a few ballads were printed entire in poetic +miscellanies entitled "Garlands," higgledy-piggledy with pieces of all +kinds. Professor Child enumerates nine ballad collections before +Percy's. The only ones of any importance among these were "A Collection +of Old Ballads" (Vols I. and II. in 1723, Vol III. In 1725), ascribed to +Ambrose Philips; and the Scotch poet, Allan Ramsay's, "Tea Table +Miscellany," (in 4 vols., 1714-40) and "Evergreen" (2 vols., 1724). The +first of these collections was illustrated with copperplate engravings +and supplied with introductions which were humorous in intention. The +editor treated his ballads as trifles, though he described them as +"corrected from the best and most ancient copies extant"; and said that +Homer himself was nothing more than a blind ballad-singer, whose songs +had been subsequently joined together and formed into an epic poem. +Ramsay's ballads were taken in part from a manuscript collection of some +eight hundred pages, made by George Bannatyne about 1570 and still +preserved in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh. + +In Nos. 70, 74, and 85, of the _Spectator_, Addison had praised the +naturalness and simplicity of the popular ballads, selecting for special +mention "Chevy Chase"--the later version--"which," he wrote, "is the +favorite ballad of the common people of England; and Ben Jonson used to +say he had rather have been the author of it than of all his works"; and +"the 'Two Children in the Wood,' which is one of the darling songs of the +common people, and has been the delight of most Englishmen in some part +of their age." Addison justifies his liking for these humble poems by +classical precedents. "The greatest modern critics have laid it down as +a rule that an heroic poem should be founded upon some important precept +of morality adapted to the constitution of the country in which the poet +writes. Homer and Virgil have formed their plans in this view." +Accordingly he thinks that the author of "Chevy Chase" meant to point a +moral as to the mischiefs of private war. As if it were not precisely +the _gaudium certaminis_ that inspired the old border ballad-maker! As +if he did not glory in the fight! The passage where Earl Percy took the +dead Douglas by the hand and lamented his fallen foe reminds Addison of +Aeneas' behavior toward Lausus. The robin red-breast covering the +children with leaves recalls to his mind a similar touch in one of +Horace's odes. But it was much that Addison, whose own verse was so +artificial, should have had a taste for the wild graces of folk-song. He +was severely ridiculed by his contemporaries for these concessions. "He +descended now and then to lower disquisitions," wrote Dr. Johnson," and +by a serious display of the beauties of 'Chevy Chase,' exposed himself to +the ridicule of Wagstaff, who bestowed a like pompous character on 'Tom +Thumb'; and to the contempt of Dennis, who, considering the fundamental +position of his criticism, that 'Chevy Chase' pleases and ought to please +because it is natural, observes that 'there is a way of deviating from +nature . . . by imbecility, which degrades nature by faintness and +diminution'. . . In 'Chevy Chase' . . . there is a chill and lifeless +imbecility. The story cannot possibly be told in a manner that shall +make less impression on the mind."[35] + +Nicholas Rowe, the dramatist and Shakspere editor, had said a good word +for ballads in the prologue to "Jane Shore" (1713): + + "Let no nice taste despise the hapless dame + Because recording ballads chant her name. + Those venerable ancient song enditers + Soared many a pitch above our modern writers. . . + Our numbers may be more refined than those, + But what we've gained in verse, we've lost in prose. + Their words no shuffling double meaning knew: + Their speech was homely, but their hearts were true. . . + With rough, majestic force they moved the heart, + And strength and nature made amends for art." + +Ballad forgery had begun early. To say nothing of appropriations, like +Mallet's, of "William and Margaret," Lady Wardlaw put forth her +"Hardyknut" in 1719 as a genuine old ballad, and it was reprinted as such +in Ramsay's "Evergreen." Gray wrote to Walpole in 1760, "I have been +often told that the poem called 'Hardicanute' (which I always admired and +still admire) was the work of somebody that lived a few years ago. This +I do not at all believe, though it has evidently been retouched by some +modern hand." Before Percy no concerted or intelligent effort had been +made toward collecting, preserving, and editing the _corpus poetarum_ of +English minstrelsy. The great mass of ancient ballads, so far as they +were in print at all, existed in "stall copies," _i.e._, single sheets of +broadsides, struck off for sale by balladmongers and the keepers of +book-stalls. + +Thomas Percy, the compiler of the "Reliques," was a parish clergyman, +settled at the retired hamlet of Easton Maudit, Northamptonshire. For +years he had amused his leisure by collecting ballads. He numbered among +his acquaintances men of letters like Johnson, Goldsmith, Garrick, +Grainger, Farmer, and Shenstone. It was the last who suggested the plan +of the "Reliques" and who was to have helped in its execution, had not +his illness and death prevented. Johnson spent a part of the summer of +1764 on a visit to the vicarage of Easton Maudit, on which occasion Percy +reports that his guest "chose for his regular reading the old Spanish +romance of 'Felixmarte of Hircania,' in folio, which he read quite +through." He adds, what one would not readily suspect, that the doctor, +when a boy, "was immoderately fond of reading romances of chivalry, and +he retained his fondness for them through life. . . I have heard him +attribute to these extravagant fictions that unsettled turn of mind which +prevented his ever fixing in any profession." Percy talked over his +project with Johnson, who would seem to have given his approval, and even +to have added his persuasions to Shenstone's. For in the preface to the +first edition of the "Reliques," the editor declared that "he could +refuse nothing to such judges as the author of the _Rambler_ and the late +Mr. Shenstone"; and that "to the friendship of Mr. Johnson he owes many +valuable hints for the conduct of his work." And after Ritson had +questioned the existence of the famous "folio manuscript," Percy's nephew +in the advertisement to the fourth edition (1794), cited "the appeal +publicly made to Dr. Johnson . . . so long since as in the year 1765, and +never once contradicted by him." + +In spite of these amenities, the doctor had a low opinion of ballads and +ballad collectors. In the _Rambler_ (No. 177) he made merry over one +Cantilenus, who "turned all his thoughts upon old ballads, for he +considered them as the genuine records of the natural taste. He offered +to show me a copy of 'The Children in the Wood,' which he firmly believed +to be of the first edition, and by the help of which the text might be +freed from several corruptions, if this age of barbarity had any claim to +such favors from him." "The conversation," says Boswell, "having turned +on modern imitations of ancient ballads, and someone having praised their +simplicity, he treated them with that ridicule which he always displayed +when that subject was mentioned." Johnson wrote several stanzas in +parody of the ballads; _e.g._, + + "The tender infant, meek and mild, + Fell down upon a stone: + The nurse took up the squealing child, + But still the child squealed on." + +And again: + + "I put my hat upon my head + And walked into the Strand; + And there I met another man + Whose hat was in his hand." + +This is quoted by Wordsworth,[36] who compares it with a stanza from "The +Children in the Wood": + + "Those pretty babes, with hand in hand, + Went wandering up and down; + But never more they saw the man + Approaching from the town." + +He says that in both of these stanzas the language is that of familiar +conversation, yet one stanza is admirable and the other contemptible, +because the _matter_ of it is contemptible. In the essay supplementary +to his preface, Wordsworth asserts that the "Reliques" was "ill suited to +the then existing taste of city society, and Dr. Johnson . . . was not +sparing in his exertions to make it an object of contempt": and that "Dr. +Percy was so abashed by the ridicule flung upon his labors . . . that, +though while he was writing under a mask he had not wanted resolution to +follow his genius into the regions of true simplicity and genuine pathos +(as is evinced by the exquisite ballad of 'Sir Cauline' and by many other +pieces), yet when he appeared in his own person and character as a +poetical writer, he adopted, as in the tale of 'The Hermit of Warkworth,' +a diction scarcely distinguishable from the vague, the glossy and +unfeeling language of his day." Wordsworth adds that he esteems the +genius of Dr. Percy in this kind of writing superior to that of any other +modern writer; and that even Buerger had not Percy's fine sensibility. He +quotes, in support of this opinion, two stanzas from "The Child of Elle" +in the "Reliques," and contrasts them with the diluted and tricked-out +version of the same in Buerger's German. + +Mr. Hales does not agree in this high estimate of Percy as a ballad +composer. Of this same "Child of Elle" he says: "The present fragment of +a version may be fairly said to be now printed for the first time, as in +the 'Reliques' it is buried in a heap of 'polished' verses composed by +Percy. That worthy prelate, touched by the beauty of it--he had a +soul--was unhappily moved to try his hand at its completion. A +wax-doll-maker might as well try to restore Milo's Venus. There are +thirty-nine lines here. There are two hundred in the thing called the +'Child of Elle' in the 'Reliques.' But in those two hundred lines all +the thirty-nine originals do not appear. . . On the whole, the union of +the genuine and the false--of the old ballad with Percy's tawdry +feebleness--makes about as objectionable a _mesalliance_ as in the story +itself is in the eyes of the father."[37] The modern ballad scholars, in +their zeal for the purity of the text, are almost as hard upon Percy as +Ritson himself was. They say that he polished "The Heir of Linne" till +he could see his own face in it; and swelled out its 126 lines to 216--"a +fine flood of ballad and water."[38] The result of this piecing and +tinkering in "Sir Cauline"--which Wordsworth thought exquisite--they +regard as a heap of tinsel, though they acknowledge that "these +additional stanzas show, indeed, an extensive acquaintance with old +balladry and a considerable talent of imitation." + +From the critical or scholarly point of view, these strictures are +doubtless deserved. It is an editor's duty to give his text as he finds +it, without interpolations or restorations; and it is unquestionable that +Percy's additions to fragmentary pieces are full of sentimentalism, +affectation, and the spurious poetic diction of his age. An experienced +ballad amateur can readily separate, in most cases, the genuine portions +from the insertions. But it is unfair to try Percy by modern editorial +canons. That sacredness which is now imputed to the _ipsissima verba_ of +an ancient piece of popular literature would have been unintelligible to +men of that generation, who regarded such things as trifles at best, and +mostly as barbarous trifles--something like wampum belts, or nose-rings, +or antique ornaments in the _gout barbare et charmant des bijoux goths_. +Percy's readers did not want torsos and scraps; to present them with +acephalous or bobtailed ballads--with _cetera desunt_ and constellations +of asterisks--like the manuscript in Prior's poem, the conclusion of +which was eaten by the rats--would have been mere pedantry. Percy knew +his public, and he knew how to make his work attractive to it. The +readers of that generation enjoyed their ballad with a large infusion of +Percy. If the scholars of this generation prefer to take theirs without, +they know where to get it. + +The materials for the "Reliques" were drawn partly from the Pepys +collection at Magdalen College, Cambridge; from Anthony Wood's, made in +1676, in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford; from manuscript and printed +ballads in the Bodleian, the British Museum, the archives of the +Antiquarian Society, and private collections. Sir David Dalrymple sent a +number of Scotch ballads, and the editor acknowledged obligations to +Thomas Warton and many others. But the nucleus of the whole was a +certain folio manuscript in a handwriting of Charles I.'s time, +containing 191 songs and ballads, which Percy had begged, then still very +young, from his friend Humphrey Pitt, of Prior's-Lee in Shropshire. When +he first saw this precious document, it was torn, unbound, and mutilated, +"lying dirty on the floor under a bureau in the parlor, being used by the +maids to light the fire." The first and last leaves were wanting, and +"of 54 pages near the beginning, half of every leaf hath been torn +away."[39] Percy had it bound, but the binders trimmed off the top and +bottom lines in the process. From this manuscript he professed to have +taken "the greater part" of the pieces in the "Reliques." In truth he +took only 45 of the 176 poems in his first edition from this source. + +Percy made no secret of the fact that he filled _lacunae_ in his +originals with stanzas, and, in some cases, with nearly entire poems of +his own composition. But the extent of the liberties that he took with +the text, although suspected, was not certainly known until Mr. Furnivall +finally got leave to have the folio manuscript copied and printed.[40] +Before this time it had been jealously guarded by the Percy family, and +access to it had been denied to scholars. "Since Percy and his nephew +printed their fourth edition of the 'Reliques' from the manuscript in +1794," writes Mr. Furnivall in his "Forewords," "no one has printed any +piece from it except Robert Jamieson--to whom Percy supplied a copy of +'Child Maurice' and 'Robin Hood and the Old Man' for his 'Popular Ballads +and Songs' (1806)--and Sir Frederic Madden, who was allowed--by one of +Percy's daughters--to print 'The Grene Knight,' 'The Carle of Carlisle' +and 'The Turk and Gawin' in his 'Syr Gawaine' for the Bannatyne Club, +1839." Percy was furiously assailed by Joseph Ritson for manipulating +his texts; and in the 1794 edition he made some concessions to the +latter's demand for a literal rescript, by taking off a few of the +ornaments in which he had tricked them. Ritson was a thoroughly +critical, conscientious student of poetic antiquities and held the right +theory of an editor's functions. In his own collection of early English +poetry he rendered a valuable service to all later inquiries. These +included "Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry," 1791; "Ancient Songs," 1792; +"Scottish Songs," 1794; "Robin Hood," 1795; besides editions of Laurence +Minot's poems, and of "Gammer Gurton's Needle," as well as other titles. +He was an ill-tempered and eccentric man: a vegetarian, a free-thinker, a +spelling reformer,[41] and latterly a Jacobin. He attacked Warton as +well as Percy, and used to describe any clerical antagonist as a +"stinking priest." He died insane in 1803. Ritson took issue with the +theory maintained in Percy's introductory "Essay on the Ancient +Minstrels," viz.: that the minstrels were not only the singers, but +likewise the authors of the ballads. But Ritson went so far in his rage +against Percy as to deny the existence of the sacred Folio Manuscript, +until convinced by abundant testimony that there was such a thing. It +was an age of forgeries, and Ritson was not altogether without +justification in supposing that the author of "The Hermit of Warkworth" +belonged in the same category with Chatterton, Ireland, and MacPherson. + +Percy, like Warton, took an apologetic tone toward his public. "In a +polished age, like the present," he wrote, "I am sensible that many of +these reliques of antiquity will require great allowances to be made for +them. Yet have they, for the most part, a pleasing simplicity and many +artless graces, which, in the opinion of no mean critics, have been +thought to compensate for the want of higher beauties." Indeed how +should it have been otherwise? The old ballads were everything which the +eighteenth century was not. They were rough and wild, where that was +smooth and tame; they dealt, with fierce sincerity, in the elementary +passions of human nature. They did not moralize, or philosophize, or +sentimentalize; were never subtle, intellectual, or abstract. They were +plain English, without finery or elegance. They had certain popular +mannerisms, but none of the conventional figures of speech or rhetorical +artifices like personifications, periphrasis, antithesis, and climax so +dear to the Augustan heart. They were intent on the story--not on the +style--and they just told it and let it go for what it was worth. + +Moreover, there are ballads and ballads. The best of them are noble in +expression as well as feeling, unequaled by anything in our medieval +poetry outside of Chaucer; unequaled by Chaucer himself in point of +intensity, in occasional phrases of a piercing beauty: + + "The swans-fethers that his arrowe bar + With his hart-blood they were wet."[42] + + "O cocks are crowing a merry mid-larf, + A wat the wild fule boded day; + The salms of Heaven will be sung, + And ere now I'll be missed away."[43] + + "If my love were an earthly knight, + As he's an elfin gray, + A wad na gie my sin true love + For no lord that ye hae."[44] + + "She hang ae napkin at the door, + Another in the ha, + And a' to wipe the trickling tears, + Sae fast as they did fa."[45] + + "And all is with one chyld of yours, + I feel stir at my side: + My gowne of green, it is too strait: + Before it was too wide."[46] + +Verse of this quality needs no apology. But of many of the ballads, +Dennis' taunt, repeated by Dr. Johnson, is true; they are not merely +rude, but weak and creeping in style. Percy knew that the best of them +would savor better to the palates of his contemporaries if he dressed +them with modern sauces. Yet he must have loved them, himself, in their +native simplicity, and it seems almost incredible that he could have +spoken as he did about Prior's insipid paraphrase of the "Nut Brown +Maid." "If it had no other merit," he says of that most lovely ballad, +"than the having afforded the ground-work to Prior's 'Henry and Emma,' +this ought to preserve it from oblivion." Prior was a charming writer of +epigram, society verse, and the humorous _conte_ in the manner of La +Fontaine; but to see how incapable he was of the depth and sweetness of +romantic poetry, compare a few lines of the original with the "hubbub of +words" in his modernized version, in heroic couplets: + + "O Lord, what is this worldes blisse + That changeth as the mone! + The somer's day in lusty May + Is derked before the none. + I hear you say farewel. Nay, nay, + We departe not so soon: + Why say ye so? Wheder wyle ye goo? + Alas! what have ye done? + Alle my welfare to sorrow and care + Shulde change if ye were gon; + For in my minde, of all mankynde, + I love but you alone." + +Now hear Prior, with his Venus and flames and god of love: + + "What is our bliss that changeth with the moon, + And day of life that darkens ere 'tis noon? + What is true passion, if unblest it dies? + And where is Emma's joy, if Henry flies? + If love, alas! be pain, the pain I bear + No thought can figure and no tongue declare. + Ne'er faithful woman felt, nor false one feigned + The flames which long have in my bosom reigned. + The god of love himself inhabits there + With all his rage and dread and grief and care, + His complement of stores and total war, + O cease then coldly to suspect my love + And let my deed at least my faith approve. + Alas! no youth shall my endearments share + Nor day nor night shall interrupt my care; + No future story shall with truth upbraid + The cold indifference of the nut-brown maid; + Nor to hard banishment shall Henry run + While careless Emma sleeps on beds of down. + View me resolved, where'er thou lead'st, to go: + Friend to thy pain and partner of thy woe; + For I attest fair Venus and her son + That I, of all mankind, will love but thee alone." + +There could be no more striking object lesson than this of the plethora +from which English poetic diction was suffering, and of the sanative +value of a book like the "Reliques." + +"To atone for the rudeness of the more obsolete poems," and "to take off +from the tediousness of the longer narratives," Percy interspersed a few +modern ballads and a large number of "little elegant pieces of the lyric +kind" by Skelton, Hawes, Gascoigne, Raleigh, Marlowe, Shakspere, Jonson, +Warner, Carew, Daniel, Lovelace, Suckling, Drayton, Beaumont and +Fletcher, Wotton, and other well-known poets. Of the modern ballads the +only one with any resemblance to folk-poetry was "The Braes o' Yarrow" by +William Hamilton of Bangour, a Scotch gentleman who was "out in the +forty-five." The famous border stream had watered an ancient land of +song and story, and Hamilton's ballad, with its "strange, fugitive +melody," was not unworthy of its traditions. Hamilton belongs to the +Milton imitators by virtue of his octosyllabics "Contemplation."[47] His +"Braes o' Yarrow" had been given already in Ramsey's "Tea Table +Miscellany," The opening lines-- + + "Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny bride, + Busk ye, busk ye, my winsome marrow"-- + +are quoted in Wordsworth's "Yarrow Unvisited," as well as a line of the +following stanza: + + "Sweet smells the birk, green grows, green grows the grass, + Yellow on Yarrow's bank the gowan: + Fair hangs the apple frae the rock, + Sweet the wave of Yarrow flowin'." + +The first edition of the "Reliques" included one acknowledged child of +Percy's muse, "The Friar of Orders Grey," a short, narrative ballad made +up of song snatches from Shakspere's plays. Later editions afforded his +longer poem, "The Hermit of Warkworth," first published independently in +1771. + +With all its imperfections--perhaps partly in consequence of its +imperfections--the "Reliques" was an epoch-making book. The nature of +its service to English letters is thus stated by Macaulay, in the +introduction to his "Lays of Ancient Rome": "We cannot wonder that the +ballads of Rome should have altogether disappeared, when we remember how +very narrowly, in spite of the invention of printing, those of our own +country and those of Spain escaped the same fate. There is, indeed, +little doubt that oblivion covers many English songs equal to any that +were published by Bishop Percy; and many Spanish songs as good as the +best of those which have been so happily translated by Mr. Lockhart. +Eighty years ago England possessed only one tattered copy of 'Child +Waters' and 'Sir Cauline,' and Spain only one tattered copy of the noble +poem of the 'Cid.' The snuff of a candle, or a mischievous dog, might in +a moment have deprived the world forever of any of those fine +compositions. Sir Walter Scott, who united to the fire of a great poet +the minute curiosity and patient diligence of a great antiquary, was but +just in time to save the precious reliques of the Minstrelsy of the +Border." + +But Percy not only rescued, himself, a number of ballads from +forgetfulness; what was equally important, his book prompted others to +hunt out and publish similar relics before it was too late. It was the +occasion of collections like Herd's (1769), Scott's (1802-03), and +Motherwell's (1827), and many more, resting on purer texts and edited on +more scrupulous principles than his own. Futhermore, his ballads helped +to bring about a reform in literary taste and to inspire men of original +genius. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Scott, all acknowledged the +greatest obligations to them. Wordsworth said that English poetry had +been "absolutely redeemed" by them. "I do not think there is a writer in +verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his +obligations to the 'Reliques.' I know that it is so with my friends; +and, for myself, I am happy that it is so with my friends; and, for +myself, I am happy in this occasion to make a public avowal of my +own."[48] Without the "Reliques," "The Ancient Mariner," "The Lady of +the Lake," "La Belle Dame sans Merci," "Stratton Water," and "The +Haystack in the Floods" might never have been. Perhaps even the "Lyrical +Ballads" might never have been, or might have been something quite unlike +what they are. Wordsworth, to be sure, scarcely ranks among romantics, +and he expressly renounces the romantic machinery: + + "The dragon's wing, + The magic ring, + I shall not covet for my dower."[49] + +What he learned from the popular ballad was the power of sincerity and of +direct and homely speech. + +As for Scott, he has recorded in an oft-quoted passage the impression +that Percy's volumes made upon him in his school-days: "I remember well +the spot where I read these volumes for the first time. It was beneath a +huge plantain tree in the ruins of what had been intended for an +old-fashioned arbor in the garden I have mentioned. The summer day 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. To read and to remember was, +in this instance, the same thing; and henceforth I overwhelmed my +school-fellows, and all who would hearken to me, with tragical +recitations from the ballads of Bishop Percy. The first time, too, I +could scrape a few shillings together, I bought unto myself a copy of +these beloved volumes; nor do I believe I ever read a book so frequently, +or with half the enthusiasm." + +The "Reliques" worked powerfully in Germany, too. It was received in +Lessing's circle with universal enthusiasm,[50] and fell in with that +newly aroused interest in "Volkslieder" which prompted Herder's "Stimmen +der Voelker" (1778-79).[51] Gottfried August Buerger, in particular, was a +poet who may be said to have been made by the English ballad literature, +of which he was an ardent student. His poems were published in 1778, and +included five translations from Percy: "The Child of Elle" ("Die +Entfuehrung"), "The Friar of Orders Grey" ("Graurock"), "The Wanton Wife +of Bath" ("Frau Schnips"), "King John and the Abbot of Canterbury" ("Der +Kaiser und der Abt"), and "Child Waters" ("Graf Walter"). A. W. Schlegel +says that Burger did not select the more ancient and genuine pieces in +the "Reliques"; and, moreover, that he spoiled the simplicity of the +originals in his translations. It was doubtless in part the success of +the "Reliques" that is answerable for many collections of old English +poetry put forth in the last years of the century. Tyrwhitt's "Chaucer" +and Ritson's publications have been already mentioned. George Ellis, a +friend and correspondent of Walter Scott, and a fellow of the Society of +Antiquaries, who was sometimes called "the Sainte Palaye of England," +issued his "Specimens of Early English Poets" in 1790; edited in 1796 G. +L. Way's translations from French _fabliaux_ of the twelfth and +thirteenth centuries; and printed in 1805 three volumes of "Early English +Metrical Romances." + +It is pleasant to record that Percy's labors brought him public +recognition and the patronage of those whom Dr. Johnson used to call "the +great." He had dedicated the "Reliques" to Elizabeth Percy, Countess of +Northumberland. Himself the son of a grocer, he liked to think that he +was connected by blood with the great northern house whose exploits had +been sung by the ancient minstrels that he loved. He became chaplain to +the Duke of Northumberland, and to King George III.; and, in 1782, Bishop +of Dromore in Ireland, in which see he died in 1811. + +This may be as fit a place as any to introduce some mention of "The +Minstrel, or the Progress of Genius," by James Beattie; a poem once +widely popular, in which several strands of romantic influence are seen +twisted together. The first book was published in 1771, the second in +1774, and the work was never completed. It was in the Spenserian stanza, +was tinged with the enthusiastic melancholy of the Wartons, followed the +landscape manner of Thomson, had elegiac echoes of Gray, and was perhaps +not unaffected, in its love of mountain scenery, by MacPherson's +"Ossian." But it took its title and its theme from a hint in Percy's +"Essay on the Ancient Minstrels."[52] Beattie was Professor of Moral +Philosophy in the University of Aberdeen. He was an amiable, sensitive, +deeply religious man. He was fond of music and of nature, and was easily +moved to rears; had "a young girl's nerves," says Taine, "and an old +maid's hobbies." Gray, who met him in 1765, when on a visit to the Earl +of Strathmore at Glammis Castle, esteemed him highly. So did Dr. +Johnson, partly because of his "Essay on Truth" (1770), a shallow +invective against Hume, which gained its author an interview with George +III. and a pension of two hundred pounds a year. Beattie visited London +in 1771, and figured there as a champion of orthodoxy and a +heaven-inspired bard. Mrs. Montagu patronized him extensively. Sir +Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait, with his "Essay on Truth" under his +arm, and Truth itself in the background, an allegoric angel holding the +balances in one hand, and thrusting away with the other the figures of +Prejudice, Skepticism, and Folly. Old Lord Lyttelton had the poet out to +Hagley, and declared that he was Thomson come back to earth, to sing of +virtue and of the beauties of nature. Oxford made him an LL.D.: he was +urged to take orders in the Church of England; and Edinburgh offered him +the chair of Moral Philosophy. Beattie's head was slightly turned by all +this success, and he became something of a tuft-hunter. But he stuck +faithfully to Aberdeen, whose romantic neighborhood had first inspired +his muse. The biographers tell a pretty story of his teaching his little +boy to look for the hand of God in the universe, by sowing cress in a +garden plot in the shape of the child's initials and leading him by this +gently persuasive analogy to read design in the works of nature. + +The design of "The Minstrel" is to "trace the progress of a Poetical +Genius, born in a rude age," a youthful shepherd who "lived in Gothic +days." But nothing less truly Gothic or medieval could easily be +imagined than the actual process of this young poet's education. Instead +of being taught to carve and ride and play the flute, like Chaucer's +squire who + + "Cowde songes make and wel endite, + Juste and eek daunce, and wel purtraye and write," + +Edwin wanders alone upon the mountains and in solitary places and is +instructed in history, philosophy, and science--and even in Vergil--by an +aged hermit, who sits on a mossy rock, with his harp beside him, and +delivers lectures. The subject of the poem, indeed, is properly the +education of nature; and in a way it anticipates Wordsworth's "Prelude," +as this hoary sage does the "Solitary" of "The Excursion." Beattie +justifies his use of Spenser's stanza on the ground that it "seems, from +its Gothic structure and original, to bear some relation to the subject +and spirit of the poem." He makes no attempt, however, to follow +Spenser's "antique expressions." The following passage will illustrate +as well as any the romantic character of the whole: + + "When the long-sounding curfew from afar + Loaded with loud lament the lonely gale, + Young Edwin, lighted by the evening star, + Lingering and listening, wandered down the vale. + There would he dream of graves and corses pale, + And ghosts that to the charnel-dungeon throng, + And drag a length of clanking chain, and wail, + Till silenced by the owl's terrific song, + Or blast that shrieks by fits the shuddering aisles along. + + "Or when the settling moon, in crimson dyed, + Hung o'er the dark and melancholy deep, + To haunted stream, remote from man, he hied, + Where fays of yore their revels wont to keep; + And there let Fancy rove at large, till sleep + A vision brought to his entranced sight. + And first a wildly murmuring wind gan creep + Shrill to his ringing ear; then tapers bright, + With instantaneous gleam, illumed the vault of night. + + "Anon in view a portal's blazing arch + Arose; the trumpet bids the valves unfold; + And forth a host of little warriors march, + Grasping the diamond lance and targe of gold. + Their look was gentle, their demeanor bold, + And green their helms, and green their silk attire; + And here and there, right venerably old, + The long-robed minstrels wake the warbling wire, + And some with mellow breath the martial pipe inspire."[53] + +The influence of Thomson is clearly perceptible in these stanzas. "The +Minstrel," like "The Seasons," abounds in insipid morality, the +commonplaces of denunciation against luxury and ambition, and the praise +of simplicity and innocence. The titles alone of Beattie's minor poems +are enough to show in what school he was a scholar: "The Hermit," "Ode to +Peace," "The Triumph of Melancholy," "Retirement," etc., etc. "The +Minstrel" ran through four editions before the publication of its second +book in 1774. + + +[1] Svend Grundtvig's great collection, "Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser," was +published in five volumes in 1853-90. + +[2] Francis James Child's "English and Scottish Popular Ballads," issued +in ten parts in 1882-98 is one of the glories of American scholarship. + +[3] _Cf._ The Tannhaeuser legend and the Venusberg. + +[4] "The Wife of Usher's Well." + +[5] It should never be forgotten that the ballad (derived from +_ballare--to dance)_ was originally not a written poem, but a song and +dance. Many of the old tunes are preserved. A number are given in +Chappell's "Popular Music of the Olden Time," and in the appendix to +Motherwell's "Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern" (1827). + +[6] "A Ballad." One theory explains these meaningless refrains as +remembered fragments of older ballads. + +[7] Reproduced by Rossetti and other moderns. See them parodied in Robert +Buchanan's "Fleshly School of Poets": + + "When seas do roar and skies do pour, + Hard is the lot of the sailor + Who scarcely, as he reels, can tell + The sidelights from the binnacle." + +[8] "I never heard the old song of Percie and Douglas that I found not my +heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some +blind crouder, with no rougher voice than rude style; which being so evil +apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, what would it +work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar!" + +[9] Empty: "Bonnie George Campbell." + +[10] "Lord Randall." + +[11] Turf: "The Twa Corbies." + +[12] I use this phrase without any polemic purpose. The question of +origins is not here under discussion. Of course at some stage in the +history of any ballad the poet, the individual artist, is present, though +the precise ration of his agency to the communal element in the work is +obscure. For an acute and learned view of this topic, see the +Introduction to "Old English Ballads," by Professor Francis B. Gummere +(Atheneum Press Series), Boston, 1894. + +[13] From "Jock o' Hazel Green." "Young Lochinvar" is derived from +"Katherine Janfarie" in the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border." + +[14] "Scott has given us nothing more complete and lovely than this little +song, which unites simplicity and dramatic power to a wildwood music of +the rarest quality. No moral is drawn, far less any conscious analysis +of feeling attempted: the pathetic meaning is left to be suggested by the +mere presentment of the situation. Inexperienced critics have often +named this, which may be called the Homeric manner, superficial from its +apparent simple facility."--_Palgrave: "Golden Treasury"_ (Edition of +1866), p. 392. + +[15] "Brown Robyn's Confession." Robin Hood risks his life to take the +sacrament. "Robin Hood and the Monk." + +[16] "Sir Hugh." _Cf._ Chaucer's "Prioresse Tale." + +[17] "The Gay Goshawk." + +[18] "Johnnie Cock." + +[19] "Young Hunting." + +[20] "The Twa Sisters." + +[21] "The Wife of Usher's Well." + +[22] "Fair Margaret and Sweet William." + +[23] "Sweet William's Ghost." + +[24] "Clerk Colven." + +[25] "Willie's Lady." + +[26] "Kemp Owyne" and "Tam Lin." + +[27] "King Estmere." + +[28] "Johnnie Cock." + +[29] "Mary Hamilton." + +[30] "Sweet William's Ghost." + +[31] "The Forsaken Bride." _Cf._ Chaucer: + + "Love is noght old as when that it is newe." + --_Clerkes Tale._ + +[32] What character so popular as a wild prince--like Prince Hal--who +breaks his own laws, and the heads of his own people, in a democratic way? + +[33] "Robin Hood and the Monk." + +[34] For a complete exposure of David Mallet's impudent claim to the +authorship of this ballad, see Appendix II. to Professor Phelps' "English +Romantic Movement." + +[35] "Life of Addison." + +[36] Preface to second edition of the "Lyrical Ballads." + +[37] "Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript" (1867), Vol. II. Introductory +Essay by J. W. Hales on "The Revival of Ballad Poetry in the Eighteenth +Century." + +[38] _Ibid._ + +[39] "Advertisement to the Fourth Edition." + +[40] In four volumes, 1867-68. + +[41] Spelling reform has been a favorite field for cranks to disport +themselves upon. Ritson's particular vanity was the past participle of +verbs ending in _e; e.g., perceiveed._ _Cf._ Landor's notions of a +similar kind. + +[42] "The Hunting of the Cheviot." + +[43] "Sweet William's Ghost." + +[44] "Tam Lin." + +[45] "Fair Annie." + +[46] "Child Waters." + +[47] See Phelps' "English Romantic Movement," pp. 33-35. + +[48] Appendix to the Preface to the 2nd edition of "Lyrical Ballads." + +[49] "Peter Bell." + +[50] Scherer: "Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur," p. 445. + +[51] In his third book Herder gave translations of over twenty pieces in +the "Reliques," besides a number from Ramsay's and other collections. +His selections from Percy included "Chevy Chase," "Edward," "The Boy and +the Mantle," "King Estmere," "Waly, Waly," "Sir Patric Spens," "Young +Waters," "The Bonny Earl of Murray," "Fair Margaret and Sweet William," +"Sweet William's Ghost," "The Nut-Brown Maid," "The Jew's Daughter," +etc., etc.; but none of the Robin Hood ballads. Herder's preface +testifies that the "Reliques" was the starting-point and the kernel of +his whole undertaking. "Der Anblick dieser Sammlung giebts offenbar dass +ich eigentlich von _Englishchen_ Volksliedern ausging und auf sie +zurueckkomme. Als vor zehn und mehr Jahren die 'Reliques of Ancient +Poetry' mir in die Haende fielen, freuten mich einzelne Stuecke so sehr, +dass ich sie zu uebersetzen versuchte."--_Vorrede zu den Volksliedern. +Herder's Saemmtlichee Werke_, Achter Theil, s. 89 (Carlsruhe, 1821). + +[52] Stanzas 44-46, book i. bring in references to ballad literature in +general and to "The Nut-Brown Maid" and "The Children in the Wood" in +particular. + +[53] Book I. stanzas 32-34. + + + + +CHAPTER IX. + +Ossian + +In 1760 appeared the first installment of MacPherson's "Ossian."[1] +Among those who received it with the greatest curiosity and delight was +Gray, who had recently been helping Mason with criticisms on his +"Caractacus," published in 1759. From a letter to Walpole (June 1760) it +would seem that the latter had sent Gray two manuscript bits of the as +yet unprinted "Fragments," communicated to Walpole by Sir David +Dalrymple, who furnished Scotch ballads to Percy. "I am so charmed," +wrote Gray, "with the two specimens of Erse poetry, that I cannot help +giving you the trouble to inquire a little farther about them; and should +wish to see a few lines of the original, that I may form some slight idea +of the language, the measures and the rhythm. Is there anything known of +the author or authors; and of what antiquity are they supposed to be? Is +there any more to be had of equal beauty, or at all approaching it?" + +In a letter to Shonehewer (June 29,) he writes: "I have received another +Scotch packet with a third specimen . . . full of nature and noble wild +imagination."[2] And in the month following he writes to Wharton: "If +you have seen Stonehewer, he has probably told you of my old Scotch +(rather Irish) poetry. I am gone mad about them. They are said to be +translations (literal and in prose) from the _Erse_ tongue, done by one +MacPherson, a young clergyman in the Highlands. He means to publish a +collection he has of these specimens of antiquity, if it be antiquity; +but what plagues me, is, I cannot come at any certainty on that head. I +was so struck, so _extasie_ with their infinite beauty, that I writ into +Scotland to make a thousand enquiries." This is strong language for a +man of Gray's coolly critical temper; but all his correspondence of about +this date is filled with references to Ossian which enable the modern +reader to understand in part the excitement that the book created among +Gray's contemporaries. The letters that he got from MacPherson were +unconvincing, "ill-wrote, ill-reasoned, calculated to deceive, and yet +not cunning enough to do it cleverly." The external evidence disposed +him to believe the poems counterfeit; but the impression which they made +was such that he was "resolved to believe them genuine, spite of the +Devil and the Kirk. It is impossible to convince me that they were +invented by the same man that writes me these letters. On the other +hand, it is almost as hard to suppose, if they are original, that he +should be able to translate them so admirably." + +On August 7 he writes to Mason that the Erse fragments have been +published five weeks ago in Scotland, though he had not received his copy +till the last week. "I continue to think them genuine, though my reasons +for believing the contrary are rather stronger than ever." David Hume, +who afterward became skeptical as to their authenticity, wrote to Gray, +assuring him that these poems were in everybody's mouth in the Highlands, +and had been handed down from father to son, from an age beyond all +memory and tradition. Gray's final conclusion is very much the same with +that of the general public, to which the Ossianic question is even yet a +puzzle. "I remain still in doubt about the authenticity of these poems, +tho' inclining rather to believe them genuine in spite of the world. +Whether they are the inventions of antiquity, or of a modern Scotchman, +either case is to me alike unaccountable. _Je m'y perds._" + +We are more concerned here with the impression which MacPherson's books, +taking them just as they stand, made upon their contemporary Europe, than +with the history of the controversy to which they gave rise, and which is +still unsettled after more than a century and a quarter of discussion. +Nevertheless, as this controversy began immediately upon their +publication, and had reference not only to the authenticity of the +Ossianic poems, but also to their literary value; it cannot be altogether +ignored in this account. The principal facts upon which it turned may be +given in a nut-shell. In 1759 Mr. John Home, author of the tragedy of +"Douglas," who had become interested in the subject of Gaelic poetry, met +in Dumfriesshire a young Scotchman, named James MacPherson, who was +traveling as private tutor to Mr. Graham of Balgowan. MacPherson had in +his possession a number of manuscripts which, he said, were transcripts +of Gaelic poems taken down from the recital of old people in the +Highlands. He translated two of these for Home, who was so much struck +with them that he sent or showed copies to Dr. Hugh Blair, Professor of +Rhetoric in the University of Edinburgh. At the solicitation of Dr. +Blair and Mr. Home, MacPherson was prevailed upon to make further +translations from the materials in his hands; and these, to the number of +sixteen, were published in the "Fragments" already mentioned, with a +preface of eight pages by Blair. They attracted so much attention in +Edinburgh that a subscription was started, to send the compiler through +the Highlands in search of more Gaelic poetry. + +The result of the researches was "Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six +Books: Together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of +Fingal. Translated from the Gaelic language by James MacPherson," +London, 1762; together with "Temora, an Ancient Epic Poem in Eight +Books," etc., etc., London, 1763. MacPherson asserted that he had made +his versions from Gaelic poems ascribed to Ossian or Oisin, the son of +Fingal or Finn MacCumhail, a chief renowned in Irish and Scottish song +and popular legend. Fingal was the king of Morven, a district of the +western Highlands, and head of the ancient warlike clan or race of the +Feinne or Fenians. Tradition placed him in the third century and +connected him with the battle of Gabhra, fought in 281. His son, +Ossian, the warrior-bard, survived all his kindred. Blind and old, +seated in his empty hall, or the cave of the rock; alone save for the +white-armed Malvina, bride of his dead son, Oscar, he struck the harp and +sang the memories of his youth: "a tale of the times of old." + +MacPherson translated--or composed--his "Ossian" in an exclamatory, +abrupt, rhapsodical prose, resembling somewhat the English of Isaiah and +others of the books of the prophets. The manners described were heroic, +the state of society primitive. The properties were few and simple; the +cars of the heroes, their spears, helmets, and blue shields; the harp, +the shells from which they drank in the hall, etc. Conventional compound +epithets abound, as in Homer: the "dark-bosomed" ships, the "car-borne" +heroes, the "white-armed" maids, the "long-bounding" dogs of the chase. +The scenery is that of the western Highlands; and the solemn monotonous +rhythm of MacPherson's style accorded well with the tone of his +descriptions, filling the mind with images of vague sublimity and +desolation: the mountain torrent, the dark rock in the ocean, the mist on +the hills, the ghosts of heroes half seen by the setting moon, the +thistle in the ruined courts of chieftains, the grass whistling on the +windy heath, the blue stream of Lutha, and the cliffs of sea-surrounded +Gormal. It was noticed that there was no mention of the wolf, common in +ancient Caledonia; nor of the thrush or lark or any singing bird; nor of +the salmon of the sealochs, so often referred to in modern Gaelic poetry. +But the deer, the swan, the boar, eagle, and raven occur repeatedly. + +But a passage or two will exhibit the language and imagery of the whole +better than pages of description. "I have seen the walls of Balclutha, +but they were desolate. The fire had resounded in the halls, and the +voice of the people is heard no more. The stream of Clutha was removed +from its place by the fall of the walls. The thistle shook there its +lonely head; the moss whistled to the wind. The fox looked out from the +windows, the rank grass of the wall waved round its head. Desolate is +the dwelling of Moina, silence is in the house of her fathers. Raise the +song of mourning, O bards, over the land of strangers. They have but +fallen before us; for, one day, we must fall. Why dost thou build the +hall, son of the winged days? Thou lookest from thy towers to-day; yet a +few years, and the blast of the desert comes; it howls in thy empty +court, and whistles round thy half-worn shield."[3] "They rose rustling +like a flock of sea-fowl when the waves expel them from the shore. Their +sound was like a thousand streams that meet in Cona's vale, when, after a +stormy night, they turn their dark eddies beneath the pale light of the +morn. As the dark shades of autumn fly over hills of grass; so, gloomy, +dark, successive came the chiefs of Lochlin's[4] echoing woods. Tall as +the stag of Morven, moved stately before them the King.[5] His shining +shield is on his side, like a flame on the heath at night; when the world +is silent and dark, and the traveler sees some ghost sporting in the +beam. Dimly gleam the hills around, and show indistinctly their oaks. A +blast from the troubled ocean removed the settled mist. The sons of Erin +appear, like a ridge of rocks on the coast; when mariners, on shores +unknown are trembling at veering winds."[6] + +The authenticity of the "Fragments" of 1760 had not passed without +question; but MacPherson brought forward entire epics which, he asserted, +were composed by a Highland bard of the third century, handed down +through ages by oral tradition, and finally committed--at least in +part--to writing and now extant in manuscripts in his possession, there +ensued at once a very emphatic expression of incredulity. Among the most +truculent of the disbelievers was Dr. Johnson. He had little liking for +Scotland, still less for the poetry of barbarism. In his tour of the +Western Islands with Boswell in 1773, he showed an insensibility, and +even a kind of hostility, to the wild beauties of Highland scenery, which +gradually affects the reader with a sense of the ludicrous as he watches +his sturdy figure rolling along on a small Highland pony by sequestered +Loch Ness, with its fringe of birch trees, or between the prodigious +mountains that frown above Glensheal; or seated in a boat off the Mull of +Cantyre, listening to the Erse songs of the rowers: + + "Breaking the silence of the seas + Among the farthest Hebrides." + +"Dr. Johnson," says Boswell, "owned he was now in a scene of as wild +nature as he could see; but he corrected me sometimes in my inaccurate +observations. 'There,' said I, 'is a mountain like a cone.' Johnson: +'No, sir. It would be called so in a book, but when a man comes to look +at it, he sees it is not so. It is indeed pointed at the top, but one +side of it is larger than the other.' Another mountain I called immense. +Johnson: 'No; it is no more than a considerable protuberance.'" + +Johnson not only disputed the antiquity of MacPherson's "Ossian," but he +denied it any poetic merit. Dr. Blair having asked him whether he +thought any man of a modern age could have written such poems, he +answered: "Yes, sir: many men, many women and many children." "Sir," he +exclaimed to Reynolds, "a man might write such stuff forever, if he would +_abandon_ his mind to it." To Mr. MacQueen, one of his Highland hosts, +he said: "I look upon MacPherson's 'Fingal' to be as gross an imposition +as ever the world was troubled with." Johnson's arguments were mostly _a +priori_. He asserted that the ancient Gael were a barbarous people, +incapable of producing poetry of the kind. Long epics, such as "Fingal" +and "Temora," could not be preserved in memory and handed down by word of +mouth. As to ancient manuscripts which MacPherson pretended to have, +there was not a Gaelic manuscript in existence a hundred years old. + +It is now quite well established that Dr. Johnson was wrong on all these +points. To say nothing of the Homeric poems, the ancient Finns, +Scandinavians, and Germans were as barbarous as the Gael; yet they +produced the Kalewala, the Edda, and the Nibelungen Lied. The Kalewala, +a poem of 22, 793 lines--as long as the Iliad--was transmitted orally +from a remote antiquity and first printed in 1849. As to Gaelic +manuscripts, there are over sixty in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh, +varying in age from three hundred to five hundred years.[7] There is, +_e.g._, the "Glenmasan Manuscript" of the year 1238, containing the story +of "Darthula,"[8] which is the groundwork of the same story in +MacPherson's "Ossian." There is the important "Dean of Lismore's Book," +a manuscript collection made by Dean MacGregory of Lismore, Argyleshire, +between 1512 and 1529, containing 11,000 lines of Gaelic poetry, some of +which is attributed to Ossian or Oisin. One of the poems is identical in +substance with the first book of MacPherson's "Temora;" although Mr. +Campbell says, "There is not one line in the Dean's book that I can +identify with any line in MacPherson's Gaelic."[9] + +Other objections to the authenticity of MacPherson's translations rested +upon internal evidence, upon their characteristics of thought and style. +It was alleged that the "peculiar tone of sentimental grandeur and +melancholy" which distinguishes them, is false to the spirit of all known +early poetry, and is a modern note. In particular, it was argued, +MacPherson's heroes are too sensitive to the wild and sublime in nature. +Professor William R. Sullivan, a high authority on Celtic literature, +says that in the genuine and undoubted remains of old Irish poetry +belonging to the Leinster or Finnian Cycle and ascribed to Oisin, there +is much detail in descriptions of arms, accouterments, and articles of +indoor use and ornament, but very little in descriptions of outward +nature.[10] On the other hand, the late Principal Shairp regards this +"sadness of tone in describing nature" as a strong proof of authenticity. +"Two facts," he says, "are enough to convince me of the genuineness of +the ancient Gaelic poetry. The truthfulness with which it reflects the +melancholy aspects of Highland scenery, the equal truthfulness with which +it expresses the prevailing sentiment of the Gael, and his sad sense of +his people's destiny. I need no other proofs that the Ossianic poetry is +a native formation, and comes from the primeval heart of the Gaelic +race."[11] And he quotes, in support of his view, a well-known passage +from Matthew Arnold's "Study of Celtic Literature": "The Celts are the +prime authors of this vein of piercing regret and passion, of this +Titanism in poetry. A famous book, MacPherson's 'Ossian,' carried, in +the last century, this vein like a flood of lava through Europe. I am +not going to criticise MacPherson's 'Ossian' here. Make the part of what +is forged, modern, tawdry, spurious in the book as large as you please; +strip Scotland, if you like, of every feather of borrowed plumes which, +on the strength of MacPherson's 'Ossian,' she may have stolen from that +_vetus et major Scotia_--Ireland; I make no objection. But there will +still be left in the book a residue with the very soul of the Celtic +genius in it; and which has the proud distinction of having brought this +soul of the Celtic genius into contact with the nations of modern Europe, +and enriched all our poetry by it. Woody Morven, and echoing Lora, and +Selma with its silent halls! We all owe them a debt of gratitude, and +when we are unjust enough to forget it, may the Muse forget us! Choose +any one of the better passages in MacPherson's 'Ossian,' and you can see, +even at this time of day, what an apparition of newness and of power such +a strain must have been in the eighteenth century." + +But from this same kind of internal evidence, Wordsworth draws just the +opposite conclusion. "The phantom was begotten by the snug embrace of an +impudent Highlander upon a cloud of tradition. It traveled southward, +where it was greeted with acclamation, and the thin consistence took its +course through Europe upon the breath of popular applause.[12]. . . Open +this far-famed book! I have done so at random, and the beginning of the +epic poem 'Temora,' in eight books, presents itself. 'The blue waves of +Ullin roll in light. The green hills are covered with day. Trees shake +their dusky heads in the breeze. Gray torrents pour their noisy streams. +Two green hills with aged oaks surround a narrow plain. The blue course +of a stream is there. On its banks stood Cairbar of Atha. His spear +supports the king: the red eyes of his fear are sad. Cormac rises on his +soul with all his ghastly wounds. . .' Having had the good fortune to be +born and reared in a mountainous country, from my very childhood I have +felt the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon the world under +the name of Ossian. From what I saw with my own eyes, I knew that the +imagery was spurious. In nature everything is distinct, yet nothing +defined into absolute, independent singleness. In MacPherson's work it +is exactly the reverse: everything (that is not stolen) is in this manner +defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened, yet nothing distinct. It will +always be so when words are substituted for things. To say that the +characters never could exist; that the manners are impossible; and that a +dream has more substance than the whole state of society, as there +depicted, is doing nothing more than pronouncing a censure which +MacPherson defied. . . Yet, much as these pretended treasures of +antiquity have been admired, they have been wholly uninfluential upon the +literature of the country. No succeeding writer appears to have caught +from them a ray of inspiration; no author in the least distinguished has +ventured formally to imitate them, except the boy Chatterton, on their +first appearance. . . This incapability to amalgamate with the +literature of the Island is, in my estimation, a decisive proof that the +book is essentially unnatural; nor should I require any other to +demonstrate it to be a forgery, audacious as worthless. Contrast, in +this respect, the effect of MacPherson's publication with the 'Reliques' +of Percy, so unassuming, so modest in their pretensions." + +Other critics have pointed out a similar indistinctness in the human +actors, no less than in the landscape features of "Fingal" and "Temora." +They have no dramatic individuality, but are all alike, and all extremely +shadowy. "Poor, moaning, monotonous MacPherson" is Carlyle's +alliterative description of the translator of "Ossian"; and it must be +confessed that, in spite of the deep poetic feeling which pervades these +writings, and the undeniable beauty of single passages, they have +damnable iteration. The burden of their song is a burden in every sense. +Mr. Malcolm Laing, one of MacPherson's most persistent adversaries, who +published "Notes and Illustrations to Ossian" in 1805, essayed to show, +by a minute analysis of the language, that the whole thing was a +fabrication, made up from Homer, Milton, the English Bible, and other +sources. Thus he compared MacPherson's "Like the darkened moon when she +moves, a dim circle, through heaven, and dreadful change is expected by +men," with Milton's + + "Or from behind the moon, + In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds + On half the nations, and with fear of change + Perplexes monarchs." + +Laing's method proves too much and might be applied with like results to +almost any literary work. And, in general, it is hazardous to draw hard +and fast conclusions from internal evidence of the sort just reviewed. +Taken altogether, these objections do leave a strong bias upon the mind, +and were one to pronounce upon the genuineness of MacPherson's "Ossian," +as a whole, from impressions of tone and style, it might be guessed that +whatever element of true ancient poetry it contains, it had been +thoroughly steeped in modern sentiment before it was put before the +public. But remembering Beowulf and the Norse mythology, one might +hesitate to say that the songs of primitive, heroic ages are always +insensible to the sublime in nature; or to admit that melancholy is a +Celtic monopoly. + +The most damaging feature of MacPherson's case was his refusal or neglect +to produce his originals. The testimony of those who helped him in +collecting and translating leaves little doubt that he had materials of +some kind; and that these consisted partly of old Gaelic manuscripts, and +partly of transcriptions taken down in Gaelic from the recitation of aged +persons in the Highlands. These testimonies may be read in the "Report +of the Committee of the Highland Society," Edinburgh, 1805.[13] It is +too voluminous to examine here, and it leaves unsettled the point as to +the precise use which MacPherson made of his materials, whether, _i.e._, +he gave literal renderings of them, as he professed to do; or whether he +manipulated them--and to what extent--by piecing fragments together, +lopping, dove-tailing, smoothing, interpolating, modernizing, as Percy +did with his ballads. He was challenged to show his Gaelic manuscripts, +and Mr. Clerk says that he accepted the challenge. "He deposited the +manuscripts at his publishers', Beckett and De Hondt, Strand, London. He +advertised in the newspapers that he had done so; offered to publish them +if a sufficient number of subscribers came forward; and in the _Literary +Journal_ of the year 1784, Beckett certifies that the manuscripts had +lain in his shop for the space of a whole year."[14] + +But this was more than twenty years after. Mr. Clerk does not show that +Johnson or Laing or Shaw or Pinkerton, or any of MacPherson's numerous +critics, ever saw any such advertisement, or knew where the manuscripts +were to be seen; or that--being ignorant of Gaelic--it would have helped +them if they had known; and he admits that "MacPherson's subsequent +conduct, in postponing from time to time the publication, when urged to +it by friends who had liberally furnished him with means for the +purpose . . . is indefensible." In 1773 and 1775, _e.g._, Dr. Johnson +was calling loudly for the production of the manuscripts. "The state of +the question," he wrote to Boswell, February 7, 1775, "is this. He and +Dr. Blair, whom I consider as deceived, say that he copied the poem from +old manuscripts. His copies, if he had them--and I believe him to have +none--are nothing. Where are thee manuscripts? They can be shown if +they exist, but they were never shown. _De non existentibus et non +apparentibus eadem est ratio._" And during his Scotch trip in 1773, at a +dinner at Sir Alexander Gordon's, Johnson said: "If the poems were really +translated, they were certainly first written down. Let Mr. MacPherson +deposit the manuscripts in one of the colleges at Aberdeen, where there +are people who can judge; and if the professors certify their +authenticity, then there will be an end of the controversy. If he +does not take this obvious and easy method, he gives the best reason to +doubt." + +Indeed the subsequent history of these alleged manuscripts casts the +gravest suspicion on MacPherson's good faith. A thousand pounds were +finally subscribed to pay for the publication of the Gaelic texts. But +these MacPherson never published. He sent the manuscripts which were +ultimately published in 1807 to his executor, Mr. John Mackenzie; and he +left one thousand pounds by his will to defray the expense of printing +them. After MacPherson's death in 1796, Mr. Mackenzie "delayed the +publication from day to day, and at last handed over the manuscripts to +the Highland Society,"[15] which had them printed in 1807, nearly a half +century after the first appearance of the English Ossian.[16] These, +however, were not the identical manuscripts which MacPherson had found, +or said that he had found, in his tour of exploration through the +Highlands. They were all in his own handwriting or in that of his +amanuenses. Moreover the Rev. Thomas Ross was employed by the society to +transcribe them and conform the spelling to that of the Gaelic Bible, +which is modern. The printed text of 1807, therefore, does not represent +accurately even MacPherson's Gaelic. Whether the transcriber took any +further liberties than simply modernizing the spelling cannot be known, +for the same mysterious fate that overtook MacPherson's original +collections followed his own manuscript. This, after being at one time +in the Advocates' Library, has now utterly disappeared. Mr. Campbell +thinks that under this double process of distillation--a copy by +MacPherson and then a copy by Ross--"the ancient form of the language, if +it was ancient, could hardly survive."[17] "What would become of +Chaucer," he asks, "so maltreated and finally spelt according to modern +rules of grammar and orthography? I have found by experience that an +alteration in 'spelling' may mean an entire change of construction and +meaning, and a substitution of whole words." + +But the Gaelic text of 1807 was attacked in more vital points than its +spelling. It was freely charged with being an out-and-out fabrication, a +translation of MacPherson's English prose into modern Gaelic. This +question is one which must be settled by Gaelic scholars, and these still +disagree. In 1862 Mr. Campbell wrote: "When the Gaelic 'Fingal,' +published in 1807, is compared with any one of the translations which +purport to have been made from it, it seems to me incomparably superior. +It is far simpler in diction. It has a peculiar rhythm and assonance +which seem to repel the notion of a mere translation from English, as +something almost absurd. It is impossible that it can be a translation +from MacPherson's English, unless there was some clever Gaelic poet[18] +then alive, able and willing to write what Eton schoolboys call +'full-sense verses.'" The general testimony is that MacPherson's own +knowledge of Gaelic was imperfect. Mr. Campbell's summary of the whole +matter--in 1862--is as follows: "My theory then is, that about the +beginning of the eighteenth century, or the end of the seventeenth, or +earlier, Highland bards may have fused floating popular traditions into +more complete forms, engrafting their own ideas on what they found; and +that MacPherson found their works, translated and altered them; published +the translation in 1760;[19] made the Gaelic ready for the press; +published some of it in 1763,[20] and made away with the evidence of what +he had done, when he found that his conduct was blamed. I can see no +other way out of the maze of testimony." But by 1872 Mr. Campbell had +come to a conclusion much less favorable to the claims of the Gaelic +text. He now considers that the English was first composed by MacPherson +and that "he and other translators afterward worked at it and made a +Gaelic equivalent whose merit varies according to the translator's skill +and knowledge of Gaelic."[21] On the other hand, Mr. W. F. Skene and Mr. +Archibald Clerk, are confident that the Gaelic is the original and the +English the translation. Mr. Clerk, who reprinted the Highland Society's +text in 1870,[22] with a literal translation of his own on alternate +pages and MacPherson's English at the foot of the page, believes +implicitly in the antiquity and genuineness of the Gaelic originals. +"MacPherson," he writes, "got much from manuscripts and much from oral +recitation. It is most probable that he has given the minor poems +exactly as he found them. He may have made considerable changes in the +larger ones in giving them their present form; although I do not believe +that he, or any of his assistants, added much even in the way of +connecting links between the various episodes." + +To a reader unacquainted with Gaelic, comparing MacPherson's English with +Mr. Clerk's, it certainly looks unlikely that the Gaelic can be merely a +translation from the former. The reflection in a mirror cannot be more +distinct than the object it reflects; and if Mr. Clerk's version can be +trusted (it appears to be more literal though less rhetorical than +MacPherson's) the Gaelic is often concrete and sharp where MacPherson is +general; often plain where he is figurative or ornate; and sometimes of a +meaning quite different from his rendering. Take, _e.g._, the closing +passage of the second "Duan," or book, of "Fingal." + +"An arrow found his manly breast. He sleeps with his loved Galbina at +the noise of the sounding surge. Their green tombs are seen by the +mariner, when he bounds on the waves of the north."--_MacPherson_. + + "A ruthless arrow found his breast. + His sleep is by thy side, Galbina, + Where wrestles the wind with ocean. + The sailor sees their graves as one, + When rising on the ridge of the waves." + --_Clerk_ + +But again Mr. Archibald Sinclair, a Glasgow publisher, a letter from whom +is given by Mr. Campbell in his "Tales of the West Highlands," has "no +hesitation in affirming that a considerable portion of the Gaelic which +is published as the original of his [MacPherson's] translation, is +actually translated back from the English." And Professor Sullivan says: +"The so-called originals are a very curious kind of mosaic, constructed +evidently with great labor afterward, in which sentences or parts of +sentences of genuine poems are cemented together in a very inferior +word-paste of MacPherson's own."[23] + +It is of course no longer possible to maintain what Mr. Campbell says is +the commonest English opinion, viz., that MacPherson invented the +characters and incidents of his "Ossian," and that the poems had no +previous existence in any shape. The evidence is overwhelming that there +existed, both in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands traditions, tales, +and poems popularly attributed to Oisin, the son of Finn MacCumhail. But +no poem has been found which corresponds exactly to any single piece in +MacPherson; and Sullivan cites, as one proof of the modern and spurious +character of these versions, the fact that they mingle names from the +ancient hero-cycle, like Darthula, Cuthullin, and Conlach, with names +belonging to the Finnian cycle, as is never the case in the authentic and +undoubted remains of Celtic poetry. Between 1760, the date of +MacPherson's "Fragments," and 1807, the date of the Highland Society's +text, there had been published independently nine hundred lines of +Ossianic verse in Gaelic in Gillie's collection, 1786, and Stewart's, +1804. In 1780 Dr. Smith had published his "Ancient Lays," a free +translation from Gaelic fragments, which he subsequently printed (1787) +under the title "Sean Dana," Smith frankly took liberties with his +originals, such as we may suppose that MacPherson took with his; but he +made no secret of this and, by giving the Gaelic on which his paraphrase +rested, he enabled the public to see how far his "Ancient Lays," were +really ancient, and how far they were built up into poetic wholes by his +own editorial labors.[24] + +Wordsworth's assertion of the failure of MacPherson's "Ossian" to +"amalgamate with the literature of this island" needs some +qualifications. That it did not enter into English literature in a +formative way, as Percy's ballads did, is true enough, and is easy of +explanation. In the first place, it was professedly a prose translation +from poetry in another tongue, and could hardly, therefore, influence the +verse and diction of English poetry directly. It could not even work +upon them as directly as many foreign literatures have worked; as the +ancient classical literatures, _e.g._, have always worked; or as Italian +and French and German have at various times worked; for the Gaelic was +practically inaccessible to all but a few special scholars. Whatever its +beauty or expressiveness, it was in worse case than a dead language, for +it was marked with the stigma of barbarism. In its palmiest days it had +never been what the Germans called a _Kultursprache_; and now it was the +idiom of a few thousand peasants and mountaineers, and was rapidly +becoming extinct even in its native fastnesses. + +Whatever effect was to be wrought by the Ossianic poems upon the English +mind, was to be wrought in the dress which MacPherson had given them. +And perhaps, after all, the tumid and rhetorical cast of MacPherson's +prose had a great deal to do with producing the extraordinary enthusiasm +with which his "wild paraphrases," as Mr. Campbell calls them, were +received by the public. The age was tired of polish, of wit, of +over-civilization; it was groping toward the rude, the primitive, the +heroic; had begun to steep itself in melancholy sentiment and to feel a +dawning admiration of mountain solitudes and the hoary past. Suddenly +here was what it had been waiting for--"a tale of the times of old"; and +the solemn, dirge-like chant of MacPherson's sentences, with the peculiar +manner of his narrative, its repetitions, its want of transitions, suited +well with his matter. "Men had been talking under their breath, and in a +mincing dialect so long," says Leslie Stephen, "that they were easily +gratified and easily imposed upon by an affectation of vigorous and +natural sentiment." + +The impression was temporary, but it was immediate and powerful. +Wordsworth was wrong when he said that no author of distinction except +Chatterton had ventured formally to imitate Ossian. A generation after +the appearance of the "Fragments" we find the youthful Coleridge alluding +to "Ossian" in the preface[25] to his first collection of poems (1793), +which contains two verse imitations of the same, as _ecce signum_: + + "How long will ye round me be swelling, + O ye blue-tumbling waves of the sea? + Not always in caves was my dwelling, + Nor beneath the cold blast of the tree," etc., etc.[26] + +In Byron's "House of Idleness" (1807), published when he was a Cambridge +undergraduate, is a piece of prose founded on the episode of Nisus and +Euryalus in the "Aeneid" and entitled "The Death of Calmar and Orla--An +Imitation of MacPherson's Ossian." "What form rises on the roar of +clouds? Whose dark ghost gleams in the red stream of tempests? His +voice rolls on the thunder. 'Tis Orla, the brown chief of Orthona. . . +Lovely wast thou, son of blue-eyed Morla," etc. After reading several +pages of such stuff, one comes to feel that Byron could do this sort of +thing about as well as MacPherson himself; and indeed, that Johnson was +not so very far wrong when he said that anyone could do it if he would +abandon his mind to it. Chatterton applied the Ossianic verbiage in a +number of pieces which he pretended to have translated from the Saxon: +"Ethelgar," "Kenrick," "Cerdick," and "Gorthmund"; as well as in a +composition which he called "Godred Crovan," from the Manx dialect, and +one from the ancient British, which he entitled "The Heilas." He did not +catch the trick quite so successfully as Byron, as a passage or two from +"Kenrick" will show: "Awake, son of Eldulph! Thou that sleepest on the +white mountain, with the fairest of women; no more pursue the dark brown +wolf: arise from the mossy bank of the falling waters: let thy garments +be stained in blood, and the streams of life discolor thy girdle. . . +Cealwulf of the high mountain, who viewed the first rays of the morning +star, swift as the flying deer, strong as a young oak, fiery as an +evening wolf, drew his sword; glittering like the blue vapors in the +valley of Horso; terrible as the red lightning bursting from the +dark-brown clouds, his swift bark rode over the foaming waves like the +wind in the tempest." + +In a note on his Ossianic imitation, Byron said that Mr. Laing had proved +Ossian an impostor, but that the merit of MacPherson's work remained, +although in parts his diction was turgid and bombastic.[27] A poem in +the "Hours of Idleness," upon the Scotch mountain "Lachin Y Gair," has +two Ossianic lines in quotation points-- + + "Shades of the dead! have I not heard your voices + Rise on the night-rolling breath of the gale?" + +Byron attributed much importance to his early recollections of Highland +scenery, which he said had prepared him to love the Alps and "blue +Friuli's mountains," and "the Acroceraunian mountains of old name." But +the influence of Ossian upon Byron and his older contemporaries was +manifested in subtler ways than in formal imitations. It fell in with +that current of feeling which Carlyle called "Wertherism," and helped to +swell it. It chimed with the tone that sounds through the German _Sturm +und Drang_ period; that impatience of restraint, that longing to give +full swing to the claims of the elementary passions, and that desperation +when these are checked by the arrangements of modern society, which we +encounter in Rousseau and the young Goethe. Hence the romantic gloom, +the Byronic _Zerrissenheit_, to use Heine's word, which drove the poet +from the rubs of social life to waste places of nature and sometimes to +suicide. In such a mood the mind recurred to the language of Ossian, as +the fit expression of its own indefinite and stormy griefs. + +"Homer," writes Werther, "has been superseded in my heart by the divine +Ossian. Through what a world does this angelic bard carry me! With him +I wander over barren wastes and frightful wilds; surrounded by whirlwinds +and hurricanes, trace by the feeble light of the moon the shades of our +noble ancestors; hear from the mountainous heights, intermingled with the +roaring of waves and cataracts, their plaintive tones stealing from +cavernous recesses; while the pensive monody of some love-stricken +maiden, who heaves her departing sighs over the moss-clad grave of the +warrior by whom she was adored, makes up the inarticulate concert. I +trace this bard, with his silver locks, as he wanders in the valley and +explores the footsteps of his fathers. Alas! no vestige remains but +their tombs. His thought then hangs on the silver moon, as her sinking +beams play upon the rippling main; and the remembrance of deeds past and +gone recurs to the hero's mind--deeds of times when he gloried in the +approach of danger, and emulation nerved his whole frame; when the pale +orb shone upon his bark, laden with the spoils of his enemy, and +illuminated his triumphant return. When I see depicted on his +countenance a bosom full of woe; when I behold his heroic greatness +sinking into the grave, and he exclaims, as he throws a glance at the +cold sod which is to lie upon him: 'Hither will the traveler who is +sensible of my worth bend his weary steps, and seek the soul-enlivening +bard, the illustrious son of Fingal; his foot will tread upon my tomb, +but his eyes shall never behold me'; at this time it is, my dear friend, +that, like some renowned and chivalrous knight, I could instantly draw my +sword; rescue my prince from a long, irksome existence of languor and +pain; and then finish by plunging the weapon into my own breast, that I +might accompany the demi-god whom my hand had emancipated."[28] + +In his last interview with Charlotte, Werther, who had already determined +upon suicide, reads aloud to her, from "The Songs of Selma," "that tender +passage wherein Armin deplores the loss of his beloved daughter. 'Alone +on the sea-beat rocks, my daughter was heard to complain. Frequent and +loud were her cries. What could her father do? All night I stood on the +shore. I saw her by the faint beam of the moon,'" etc. The reading is +interrupted by a mutual flood of tears. "They traced the similitude of +their own misfortune in this unhappy tale. . . The pointed allusion of +those words to the situation of Werther rushed with all the electric +rapidity of lightning to the inmost recesses of his soul." + +It is significant that one of Ossian's most fervent admirers was +Chateaubriand, who has been called the inventor of modern melancholy and +of the primeval forest. Here is a passage from his "Genie du +Christianisme":[29] "Under a cloudy sky, on the coast of that sea whose +tempests were sung by Ossian, their Gothic architecture has something +grand and somber. Seated on a shattered altar in the Orkneys, the +traveler is astonished at the dreariness of those places: sudden fogs, +vales where rises the sepulchral stone, streams flowing through wild +heaths, a few reddish pine trees, scattered over a naked desert studded +with patches of snow; such are the only objects which present themselves +to his view. The wind circulates among the ruins, and their innumerable +crevices become so many tubes, which heave a thousand sighs. Long +grasses wave in the apertures of the domes, and beyond these apertures +you behold the flitting clouds and the soaring sea-eagle. . . Long will +those four stones which mark the tombs of heroes on the moors of +Caledonia, long will they continue to attract the contemplative traveler. +Oscar and Malvina are gone, but nothing is changed in their solitary +country. 'Tis no longer the hand of the bard himself that sweeps the +harp; the tones we hear are the slight trembling of the strings, produced +by the touch of a spirit, when announcing at night, in a lonely chamber, +the death of a hero. . . So when he sits in the silence of noon in the +valley of his breezes is the murmur of the mountain to Ossian's ear: the +gale drowns it often in its course, but the pleasant sound returns again." + +In Byron's passion for night and tempest, for the wilderness, the +mountains, and the sea, it is of course impossible to say how large a +share is attributable directly to MacPherson's "Ossian," or more +remotely, through Chateaubriand and other inheritors of the Ossianic +mood. The influence of any particular book becomes dispersed and blended +with a hundred currents that are in the air. But I think one has often a +consciousness of Ossian in reading such passages as the famous apostrophe +to the ocean in "Childe Harold"-- + + "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!"-- + +Which recalls the address to the sun in Carthous--"O thou that rollest +above, round as the shield of my fathers,"--perhaps the most hackneyed +_locus classicus_ in the entire work; or as the lines beginning, + + "O that the desert were my dwelling place;"[30] + +or the description of the storm in the Jura: + + "And this is in the night: Most glorious night! + Thou wert not sent for slumber. Let me be + A sharer in thy fierce and far delight + A portion of the tempest and of thee."[30] + +Walter Scott, while yet a lad, made acquaintance with Ossian through Dr. +Blacklock, and was at first delighted; but "the tawdry repetitions of the +Ossianic phraseology," he confesses, "disgusted me rather sooner than +might have been expected from my age." He afterward contributed an essay +on the authenticity of the poems to the proceedings of the Speculative +Club of Edinburgh. In one sense of the word Scott was the most romantic +of romanticists; but in another sense he was very little romantic, and +there was not much in his sane, cheerful, and robust nature upon which +such poetry as Ossian could fasten.[31] It is just at this point, +indeed, that definitions diverge and the two streams of romantic tendency +part company. These Carlyle has called "Wertherism" and "Goetzism"[32] +_i.e._ sentimentalism and mediaevalism, though so mild a word as +sentimentalism fails to express adequately the morbid despair to which +"Werther" gave utterance, and has associations with works of a very +different kind, such as the fictions of Richardson and Sterne. In +England, Scott became the foremost representative of "Goetzism," and Byron +of "Wertherism." The pessimistic, sardonic heroes of "Manfred," "Childe +Harold," and "The Corsair" were the latest results of the "Il Penseroso" +literature, and their melodramatic excesses already foretokened a +reaction. + +Among other testimonies to Ossian's popularity in England are the +numerous experiments at versifying MacPherson's prose. These were not +over-successful and only a few of them require mention here. The Rev. +John Wodrow, a Scotch minister, "attempted" "Carthon," "The Death of +Cuthullin" and "Darthula" in heroic couplets, in 1769; and "Fingal" in +1771. In the preface to his "Fingal," he maintained that there was no +reasonable doubt of the antiquity and authenticity of MacPherson's +"Ossian." "Fingal"--which seems to have been the favorite--was again +turned into heroic couplets by Ewen Cameron, in 1776, prefaced by the +attestations of a number of Highland gentlemen to the genuineness of the +originals; and by an argumentative introduction, in which the author +quotes Dr. Blair's _dictum_ that Ossian was the equal of Homer and Vergil +"in strength of imagination, in grandeur of sentiment, and in native +majesty of passion." National pride enlisted most of the Scotch scholars +on the affirmative side of the question, and made the authenticity of +Ossian almost an article of belief. Wodrow's heroics were merely +respectable. The quality of Cameron's may be guessed from a half dozen +lines: + + "When Moran, one commissioned to explore + The distant seas, came running from the shore + And thus exclaimed--'Cuthullin, rise! The ships + Of snowy Lochlin hide the rolling deeps. + Innumerable foes the land invade, + And Swaran seems determined to succeed.'" + +Whatever impressiveness belonged to MacPherson's cadenced prose was lost +in these metrical versions, which furnish a perfect _reductio ad +absurdum_ of the critical folly that compared Ossian with Homer. Homer +could not be put in any dress through which the beauty and interest of +the original would not appear. Still again, in 1786, "Fingal" was done +into heroics by a Mr. R. Hole, who varied his measures with occasional +ballad stanzas, thus: + + "But many a fair shall melt with woe + At thy soft strain in future days, + And many a manly bosom glow, + Congenial to thy lofty lays." + +These versions were all emitted in Scotland. But as late as 1814 +"Fingal" appeared once more in verse, this time in London, and in a +variety of meters by Mr. George Harvey; who, in his preface, expressed +the hope that Walter Scott would feel moved to cast "Ossian" into the +form of a metrical romance, like "Marmion" or "The Lay of the Last +Minstrel." The best English poem constructed from MacPherson is "The Six +Bards of Ossian Versified," by Sir Egerton Brydges (dated in 1784).[33] +The passage selected was the one which Gray so greatly admired,[34] from +a note to "Croma," in the original "Fragments." Six bards who have met +at the hall of a chieftain, on an October night, go out one after another +to observe the weather, and return to report their observations, each +ending with the refrain "Receive me from the night, my friends." The +whole episode is singularly arresting, and carries a conviction of +reality too often wanting in the epic portions of MacPherson's collection. + +Walpole, at first, was nearly as much charmed by the "Fragments" as Gray +had been. He wrote to Dalrymple that they were real poetry, natural +poetry, like the poetry of the East. He liked particularly the synonym +for an echo--"son of the rock"; and in a later letter he said that all +doubts which he might once have entertained as to their genuineness had +disappeared. But Walpole's literary judgments were notoriously +capricious. In his subsequent correspondence with Mason and others, he +became very contemptuous of MacPherson's "cold skeleton of an epic poem, +that is more insipid than 'Leonidas.'" "Ossian," he tells Mason, in a +letter dated March, 1783, has become quite incredible to him; but Mrs. +Montagu--the founder of the Blue Stocking Club--still "holds her feast of +shells in her feather dressing-room." + +The Celtic Homer met with an even warmer welcome abroad than at home. He +was rendered into French,[35] German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, +and possibly other languages. Bonaparte was a great lover of Ossian, and +carried about with him a copy of Cesarotti's Italian version. A +resemblance has been fancied between MacPherson's manner and the +grandiloquent style of Bonaparte's bulletins and dispatches.[36] In +Germany Ossian naturally took most strongly. He was translated into +hexameters by a Vienna Jesuit named Michael Denis[37] and produced many +imitations. Herder gave three translations from "Ossian" in his "Stimmen +der Voelker" (1778-79) and prefixed to the whole collection an essay +"Ueber Ossian und die Lieder alter Voelker" written in 1773. Schiller was +one of the converts; Klopstock and his circle called themselves "bards"; +and an exclamatory and violent mannerism came into vogue, known in German +literary history as _Bardengebruell_. MacPherson's personal history need +not be followed here in detail. In 1764 he went to Pensacola as +secretary to Governor Johnston. He was afterward a government +pamphleteer, writing against Junius and in favor of taxing the American +colonies. He was appointed agent to the Nabob of Arcot; sat in +Parliament for the borough of Camelford, and built a handsome Italian +villa in his native parish; died in 1796, leaving a large fortune, and +was buried in Westminster Abbey. In 1773 he was ill-advised enough to +render the "Iliad" into Ossianic prose. The translation was overwhelmed +with ridicule, and probably did much to increase the growing disbelief in +the genuineness of "Fingal" and "Temora." + + +[1] "Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland, +and translated from the Gaelic or Erse language." Edinburgh, MDCCLX. 70 +pp. + +[2] This was sent him by MacPherson and was a passage not given in the +"Fragments." + +[3] From "Carthon." + +[4] Scandinavia + +[5] An unconscious hexameter. + +[6] From "Fingal" book ii. + +[7] See the dissertation by Rev. Archibald Clerk in his "Poems of Ossian +in the Original Gaelic, with a literal translation into English." 2 +vols., Edinburgh, 1870. + +[8] This story as been retold, from Irish sources, in Dr. R. D. Joyce's +poem of "Deirdre," Boston, 1876. + +[9] See "Leabhar na Feinne, Heroic Gaelic Ballads, Collected in Scotland, +chiefly from 1512 to 1871. Arranged by J. F. Campbell," London, 1872. +Selections from "The Dean of Lismore's Book" were edited and published at +Edinburgh in 1862, by Rev. Thomas MacLauchlan, with a learned +introduction by Mr. W. F. Skene. + +[10] Article on "Celtic Literature" in the "Encyclopedia Britannica." + +[11] "Aspects of Poetry," by J. C. Shairp, 1872, pp. 244-45 (American +Edition). + +[12] Appendix to the Preface to the Second Edition of "Lyrical Ballads." +Taine says that Ossian "with Oscar, Malvina, and his whole troop, made +the tour of Europe; and, about 1830, ended by furnishing baptismal names +for French _grisettes_ and _perruquiers_."--_English Literature_, Vol. +II. p. 220 (American Edition). + +[13] The Committee found that Gaelic poems, and fragments of poems, which +they had been able to obtain, contained often the substance, and +sometimes the "literal expression (the _ipsissima verba_)" of passages +given by MacPherson. "But," continues the "Report," "the Committee has +not been able to obtain any one poem the same in title and tenor with the +poems published by him. It is inclined to believe that he was in use to +supply chasms and to give connection, by inserting passages which he did +not find; and to add what he conceived to be dignity and delicacy to the +original composition, by striking out passages, by softening incidents, +by refining the language: in short, by changing what he considered as too +simple or too rude for a modern ear." + +[14] "Dissertation on the Authenticity of the Poems." See _ante_, p. 313. + +[15] Clerk. + +[16] "The Poems of Ossian in the Original Gaelic, with a Literal +Translation into Latin by the late Robert Macfarland, etc., Published +under the Sanction of the Highland Society of London," 3 vols., London, +1807. The work included dissertations on the authenticity of the poems +by Sir Jno. Sinclair, and the Abbe Cesarotti (translated). Four hundred +and twenty-three lines of Gaelic, being the alleged original of the +seventh book of "Temora," had been published with that epic in 1763. + +[17] "Popular Tales of the West Highlands," J. F. Campbell, Edinburgh, +1862. Vol. IV. P. 156. + +[18] He suggests Lachlan MacPherson of Strathmashie, one of MacPherson's +helpers. "Popular Tales of the West Highlands." + +[19] "Fragments," etc. + +[20] Seventh book of "Temora." See _ante_, p. 321. + +[21] "Leabhar Na Feinne," p. xii. + +[22] See _ante_, p. 313, note. + +[23] "Encyclopaedia Britannica": "Celtic Literature." + +[24] For a further account of the state of the "authenticity" question, +see Archibald McNeil's "Notes on the Authenticity of Ossian's Poems," +1868; and an article on "Ossian" in _Macmillan's Magazine_, XXIV. 113-25. + +[25] "The sweet voice of Cona never sounds so sweetly as when it speaks of +itself." + +[26] "The Complaint of Ninathoma." + +[27] For some MS. Notes of Byron in a copy of "Ossian," see Phelps' +"English Romantic Movement," pp. 153-54. + +[28] "Sorrows of Werther," Letter lxviii. + +[29] "Caledonia, or Ancient Scotland," book ii. chapter vii. part iv. + +[30] "Childe Harold," canto iii. + +[31] The same is true of Burns, though references to Cuthullin's dog +Luath, in "The Twa Dogs"; to "Caric-thura" in "The Whistle"; and to +"Cath-Loda" in the notes on "The Vision," show that Burns knew his Ossian. + +[32] From Goethe's "Goetz von Berlichingen." + +[33] See "Poems by Saml. Egerton Brydges," 4th ed., London, 1807. pp. +87-96. + +[34] See _ante_, p. 117. + +[35] There were French translations by Letourneur in 1777 and 1810: by +Lacaussade in 1842; and an imitation by Baour-Lormian in 1801. + +[36] See Perry's "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 417. + +[37] One suspects this translator to have been of Irish descent. He was +born at Schaerding, Bavaria, in 1729. + + + + +CHAPTER X. + +Thomas Chatterton. + +The history of English romanticism has its tragedy: the life and death of +Thomas Chatterton-- + + "The marvelous boy, + The sleepless soul that perished in his pride."[1] + +The story has been often told, but it may be told again here; for, aside +from its dramatic interest, and leaving out of question the absolute +value of the Rowley poems, it is most instructive as to the conditions +which brought about the romantic revival. It shows by what process +antiquarianism became poetry. + +The scene of the story was the ancient city of Bristol--old Saxon +_Bricgestowe_, "place of the bridge"--bridge, namely, over the Avon +stream, not far above its confluence with the Severn. Here Chatterton +was born in 1752, the posthumous son of a dissipated schoolmaster, whose +ancestors for a hundred and fifty years had been, in unbroken succession, +sextons to the church of St. Mary Redcliffe. Perhaps it may be more than +an idle fancy to attribute to heredity the bent which Chatterton's genius +took spontaneously and almost from infancy; to guess that some mysterious +ante-natal influence--"striking the electric chain wherewith we are +darkly bound"--may have set vibrating links of unconscious association +running back through the centuries. Be this as it may, Chatterton was +the child of Redcliffe Church. St. Mary stood by his cradle and rocked +it; and if he did not inherit with his blood, or draw in with his +mother's milk a veneration for her ancient pile; at least the waters of +her baptismal font[2] seemed to have signed him with the token of her +service. Just as truly as "The Castle of Otranto" was sprung from +Strawberry Hill, the Rowley poems were born of St. Mary's Church. + +Chatterton's father had not succeeded to the sextonship, but he was a +sub-chanter in Bristol Cathedral, and his house and school in Pile Street +were only a few yards from Redcliffe Church. In this house Chatterton +was born, under the eaves almost of the sanctuary; and when his mother +removed soon after to another house, where she maintained herself by +keeping a little dame's school and doing needle work, it was still on +Redcliffe Hill and in close neighborhood to St. Mary's. The church +itself--"the pride of Bristowe and the western land"--is described as +"one of the finest parish churches in England,"[3] a rich specimen of +late Gothic or "decorated" style; its building or restoration dating from +the middle of the fifteenth century. Chatterton's uncle by marriage, +Richard Phillips, had become sexton in 1748, and the boy had the run of +the aisles and transepts. The stone effigies of knights, priests, +magistrates, and other ancient civic worthies stirred into life under his +intense and brooding imagination; his mind took color from the red and +blue patterns thrown on the pavement by the stained glass of the windows; +and he may well have spelled out much of the little Latin that he knew +from "the knightly brasses of the tombs" and "cold _hic jacets_ of the +dead." + +It is curious how early his education was self-determined to its peculiar +ends. A dreamy, silent, solitary child, given to fits of moodiness, he +was accounted dull and even stupid. He would not, or could not, learn +his letters until, in his seventh year, his eye was caught by the +illuminated capitals in an old music folio. From these his mother taught +him the alphabet, and a little later he learned to read from a +black-letter Bible. "Paint me an angel with wings and a trumpet," he +answered, when asked what device he would choose for the little +earthenware bowl that had been promised him as a gift.[4] Colston's +Hospital, where he was put to school, was built on the site of a +demolished monastery of Carmelite Friars; the scholars wore blue coats, +with metal plates on their breasts stamped with the image of a dolphin, +the armorial crest of the founder, and had their hair cropped short in +imitation of the monkish tonsure. As the boy grew into a youth, there +were numbered among his near acquaintances, along with the vintners, +sugar-bakers, pipe-makers, apothecaries, and other tradesmen of the +Bristol _bourgeoisie_, two church organists, a miniature painter, and an +engraver of coats-of-arms--figures quaintly suggestive of that mingling +of municipal life and ecclesiastical-mediaeval art which is reproduced in +the Rowley poems. + +"Chatterton," testifies one of his early acquaintances, "was fond of +walking in the fields, particularly in Redcliffe meadows, and of talking +of his manuscripts, and sometimes reading them there. There was one spot +in particular, full in view of the church, in which he seemed to take a +peculiar delight. He would frequently lay himself down, fix his eyes +upon the church, and seem as if he were in a kind of trance. Then on a +sudden he would tell me: 'That steeple was burnt down by lightning: that +was the place where they formerly acted plays.'" "Among his early +studies," we are told, "antiquities, and especially the surroundings of +medieval life, were the favorite subjects; heraldry seems especially to +have had a fascination for him. He supplied himself with charcoal, +black-lead, ochre, and other colors; and with these it was his delight to +delineate, in rough and quaint figures, churches, castles, tombs of +mailed warriors, heraldic emblazonments, and other like belongings of the +old world."[5] + +Is there not a breath of the cloister in all this, reminding one of the +child martyr in Chaucer's "Prioresse Tale," the "litel clergeon, seven +yeer of age"? + + "This litel child his litel book lerninge, + As he sat in the scole at his prymer, + He 'Alma redemptoris' herde singe, + As children lerned hir antiphoner." + +A choir boy bred in cathedral closes, catching his glimpses of the sky +not through green boughs, but through the treetops of the Episcopal +gardens discolored by the lancet windows of the clear-stories; dreaming +in the organ loft in the pauses of the music, when + + "The choristers, sitting with faces aslant, + Feel the silence to consecrate more than the chant." + +Thus Chatterton's sensitive genius was taking the impress of its +environment. As he pored upon the antiquities of his native city, the +idea of its life did sweetly creep into his study of imagination; and he +gradually constructed for himself a picture of fifteenth-century Bristol, +including a group of figures, partly historical and partly fabulous, all +centering about Master William Canynge. Canynge was the rich Bristol +merchant who founded or restored St. Mary Redcliffe's; was several times +mayor of the city in the reigns of Henry VI. and Edward IV., and once +represented the borough in Parliament. Chatterton found or fabled that +he at length took holy orders and became dean of Westbury College. About +Canynge Chatterton arranged a number of _dramatis personae_, some of +whose names he discovered in old records and documents, such as +Carpenter, Bishop of Worcester, and Sir Theobald Gorges, a knight of +Wraxhall, near Bristol; together with others entirely of his own +invention--as John a Iscam, whom he represents to have been a canon of +St. Augustine's Abbey in Bristol; and especially one Thomas Rowley, +parish priest of St. John's, employed by Canynge to collect manuscripts +and antiquities. He was his poet laureate and father confessor, and to +him Chatterton ascribed most of the verses which pass under the general +name of the Rowley poems. But Iscam was also a poet and Master Canynge +himself sometimes burst into song. Samples of the Iscam and the Canynge +muse diversify the collection. The great Bristol merchant was a +mediaeval Maecenas, and at his house, "nempned the Red Lodge," were +played interludes--"Aella," "Goddwyn," and "The Parliament of +Sprites"--composed by Rowley, or by Rowley and Iscam collaborating. +Canynge sometimes wrote the prologues; and Rowley fed his patron with +soft dedication and complimentary verses: "On Our Lady's Church," "Letter +to the dygne Master Canynge," "The Account of W. Canynges Feast," etc. +The well-known fifteenth-century poet Lydgate is also introduced into +this literary _cenacle_, as John Ladgate, and made to exchange verse +epistles with Rowley in eighteenth-century fashion. Such is the +remarkable fiction which the marvelous boy erected, as a scaffolding for +the fabric of sham-antique poetry and prose, which he build up during the +years 1767 to 1770, _i.e._, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth year of +his age. + +There is a wide distance between the achievements of this untaught lad of +humble birth and narrow opportunities, and the works of the great Sir +Walter, with his matured powers and his stores of solid antiquarian lore. +But the impulse that conducted them to their not dissimilar tasks was the +same. In "Yarrow Revisited," Wordsworth uses, _a propos_ of Scott, the +expression "localized romance." It was, indeed, the absorbing local +feeling of Scott, his patriotism, his family pride, his attachment to the +soil, that brought passion and poetry into his historical pursuits. With +Chatterton, too, this absorption in the past derived its intensity from +his love of place. Bristol was his world; in "The Battle of Hastings," +he did not forget to introduce a Bristowan contingent, led by a certain +fabulous Alfwold, and performing prodigies of valor upon the Normans. +The image of mediaeval life which he succeeded in creating was, of +course, a poor, faint _simulacrum_, compared with Scott's. He lacked +knowledge, leisure, friends, long life--everything that was needed to +give his work solidity. All that he had was a creative, though +undisciplined imagination, together with an astonishing industry, +persistence, and secretiveness. Yet with all his disadvantages, his +work, with all its imperfections, is far more striking than the imitative +verse of the Wartons, or the thin, diffused medievalism of Walpole and +Clara Reeve. It is the product of a more original mind and a more +intense conception. + +In the muniment room over the north porch of St. Mary Redcliffe's were +several old chests filled with parchments: architectural memoranda, +church-wardens' accounts, inventories of vestments, and similar parish +documents. One of these chests, known as Master Canynge's coffer, had +been broken open some years before, and whatever was of value among its +contents removed to a place of safety. The remainder of the parchments +had been left scattered about, and Chatterton's father had carried a +number of them home and used them to cover copy-books. The boy's eye was +attracted by these yellow sheep-skins, with their antique script; he +appropriated them and kept them locked up in his room. + +How early he conceived the idea of making this treasure-trove responsible +for the Rowley myth, which was beginning to take shape in his mind, is +uncertain. According to the testimony of a schoolfellow, by name +Thistlethwaite, Chatterton told him in the summer of 1764 that he had a +number of old manuscripts, found in a chest in Redcliffe Church, and that +he had lent one of them to Thomas Philips, an usher in Colston's +Hospital. Thistlethwaite says that Philips showed him this manuscript, a +piece of vellum pared close around the edge, on which was traced in pale +and yellow writing, as if faded with age, a poem which he thinks +identical with "Elinoure and Juga," afterward published by Chatterton in +the _Town and Country Magazine_ for May, 1769. One is inclined to +distrust this evidence. "The Castle of Otranto" was first published in +December, 1764, and the "Reliques," only in the year following. The +latter was certainly known to Chatterton; many of the Rowley poems, "The +Bristowe Tragedie," _e.g._, and the ministrel songs in "Aella," show +ballad influence[6]; while it seems not unlikely that Chatterton was +moved to take a hint from the disguise--slight as it was--assumed by +Walpole in the preface to his romance.[7] But perhaps this was not +needed to suggest to Chatterton that the surest way to win attention to +his poems would be to ascribe them to some fictitious bard of the Middle +Ages. It was the day of literary forgery; the Ossian controversy was +raging, and the tide of popular favor set strongly toward the antique. A +series of avowed imitations of old English poetry, however clever, would +have had small success. But the discovery of a hitherto unknown +fifteen-century poet was an announcement sure to interest the learned and +perhaps a large part of the reading public. Besides, instances are not +rare where a writer has done his best work under a mask. The poems +composed by Chatterton in the disguise of Rowley--a dramatically imagined +_persona_ behind which he lost his own identity--are full of a curious +attractiveness; while his acknowledged pieces are naught. It is not +worth while to bear down very heavily on the moral aspects of this kind +of deception. The question is one of literary methods rather than of +ethics. If the writer succeeds by the skill of his imitations, and the +ingenuity of the evidence that he brings to support them, in actually +imposing upon the public for a time, the success justifies the attempt. +The artist's purpose is to create a certain impression, and the choice of +means must be left to himself. + +In the summer of 1764 Chatterton was barely twelve, and wonderful as his +precocity was, it is doubtful whether he had got so far in the evolution +of the Rowley legend as Thistlethwaite's story would imply. But it is +certain that three years later, in the spring of 1767, Chatterton gave +Mr. Henry Burgum, a worthy pewterer of Bristol, a parchment emblazoned +with the "de Bergham," coat-of-arms, which he pretended to have found in +St. Mary's Church, furnishing him also with two copy-books, in which were +transcribed the "de Bergham," pedigree, together with three poems in +pseudo-antique spelling. One of these, "The Tournament," described a +joust in which figured one Sir Johan de Berghamme, a presumable ancestor +of the gratified pewterer. Another of them, "The Romaunte of the +Cnyghte," purported to be the work of this hero of the tilt-yard, "who +spent his whole life in tilting," but notwithstanding found time to write +several books and translate "some part of the Iliad under the title +'Romance of Troy.'" + +All this stuff was greedily swallowed by Burgum, and the marvelous boy +next proceeded to befool Mr. William Barrett, a surgeon and antiquary who +was engaged in writing a history of Bristol. To him he supplied copies +of supposed documents in the muniment room of Redcliffe Church: "Of the +Auntiaunte Forme of Monies," and the like: deeds, bills, letters, +inscriptions, proclamations, accounts of churches and other buildings, +collected by Rowley for his patron, Canynge: many of which this +singularly uncritical historian incorporated in his "History of Bristol," +published some twenty years later. He also imparted to Barrett two +Rowleian poems, "The Parliament of Sprites," and "The Battle of Hastings" +(in two quite different versions). In September, 1768, a new bridge was +opened at Bristol over the Avon; and Chatterton, who had now been +apprenticed to an attorney, took advantage of the occasion to send +anonymously to the printer of _Farley's Bristol Journal_ a description of +the mayor's first passing over the old bridge in the reign of Henry II. +This was composed in obsolete language and alleged to have been copied +from a contemporary manuscript. It was the first published of +Chatterton's fabrications. In the years 1768-69 he produced and gave to +Mr. George Catcott the long tragical interude "Aella," "The Bristowe +Tragedie," and other shorter pieces, all of which he declared to be +transcripts from manuscripts in Canynge's chest, and the work of Thomas +Rowley, a secular priest of Bristol, who flourished about 1460. Catcott +was a local book-collector and the partner of Mr. Burgum. He was +subsequently nicknamed "Rowley's midwife." + +In December, 1768, Chatterton opened a correspondence with James Dodsley, +the London publisher, saying that several ancient poems had fallen into +his hands, copies of which he offered to supply him, if he would send a +guinea to cover expenses. He inclosed a specimen of "Aella." "The +motive that actuates me to do this," he wrote, "is to convince the world +that the monks (of whom some have so despicable an opinion) were not such +blockheads as generally thought, and that good poetry might be wrote in +the dark days of superstition, as well as in these more enlightened +ages." Dodsley took no notice of the letters, and the owner of the +Rowley manuscripts next turned to Horace Walpole, whose tastes as a +virtuoso, a lover of Gothic, and a romancer might be counted on to enlist +his curiosity in Chatterton's find. The document which he prepared for +Walpole was a prose paper entitled "The Ryse of Peyncteynge yn Englande, +wroten by T. Rowleie, 1469, for Mastre Canynge," and containing _inter +alia_, the following extraordinary "anecdote of painting" about Afflem, +an Anglo-Saxon glass-stainer of Edmond's reign who was taken prisoner by +the Danes. "Inkarde, a soldyer of the Danes, was to slea hym; onne the +Nete before the Feeste of Deathe hee founde Afflem to bee hys Broder +Affrighte chanynede uppe hys soule. Gastnesse dwelled yn his Breaste. +Oscarre, the greate Dane, gave hest hee shulde bee forslagene with the +commeynge Sunne: no tears colde availe; the morne cladde yn roabes of +ghastness was come, whan the Danique Kynge behested Oscarre to arraie hys +Knyghtes eftsoones for Warre. Afflem was put yn theyre flyeynge +Battailes, sawe his Countrie ensconced wyth Foemen, hadde hys Wyfe ande +Chyldrenne brogten Capteeves to hys Shyppe, ande was deieynge wythe +Soorowe, whanne the loude blautaunte Wynde hurled the battayle agaynste +an Heck. Forfraughte wythe embolleynge waves, he sawe hys Broder, Wyfe +and Chyldrenne synke to Deathe: himself was throwen onne a Banke ynne the +Isle of Wyghte, to lyve hys lyfe forgard to all Emmoise: thus moche for +Afflem."[8] + +This paper was accompanied with notes explaining queer words and giving +short biographical sketches of Canynge, Rowley, and other imaginary +characters, such as John, second abbot of St. Austin's Minster, who was +the first English painter in oils and also the greatest poet of his age. +"Take a specimen of his poetry, 'On King Richard I.': + + "'Harte of Lyone! Shake thie Sworde, + Bare this mortheynge steinede honde,' etc." + +The whole was inclosed in a short note to Walpole, which ran thus: + +"Sir, Being versed a little in antiquitys, I have met with several +curious manuscripts, among which the following may be of Service to you, +in any future Edition of your truly entertaining Anecdotes of +Painting.[9] In correcting the mistakes (if any) in the Notes, you will +greatly oblige + Your most humble Servant, + Thomas Chatterton." + +Walpole replied civilly, thanking his correspondent for what he had sent +and for his offer of communicating his manuscripts, but disclaiming any +ability to correct Chatterton's notes. "I have not the happiness of +understanding the Saxon language, and, without your learned notes, should +not have been able to comprehend Rowley's text." He asks where Rowley's +poems are to be found, offers to print them, and pronounces the Abbot +John's verses "wonderful for their harmony and spirit." This +encouragement called out a second letter from Chatterton, with another +and longer extract from the "Historie of Peyncteynge yn Englande," +including translations into the Rowley dialect of passages from a pair of +mythical Saxon poets: Ecca, Bishop of Hereford, and Elmar, Bishop of +Selseie, "fetyve yn Workes of ghastlienesse," as _ecce signum_: + + "Nowe maie alle Helle open to golpe thee downe," etc. + +But by this time Walpole had begun to suspect imposture. He had been +lately bitten in the Ossian business and had grown wary in consequence. +Moreover, Chatterton had been incautious enough to show his hand in his +second letter (March 30). "He informed me," said Walpole, in his history +of the affair, "that he was the son of a poor widow . . . that he was +clerk or apprentice to an attorney, but had a taste and turn for more +elegant studies; and hinted a wish that I would assist him with my +interest in emerging out of so dull a profession, by procuring him +someplace." Meanwhile, distrusting his own scholarship, Walpole had +shown the manuscripts to his friends Gray and Mason, who promptly +pronounced them modern fabrications and recommended him to return them +without further notice. But Walpole, good-naturedly considering that it +was no "grave crime in a young bard to have forged false notes of hand +that were to pass current only in the parish of Parnassus," wrote his +ingenious correspondent a letter of well-meant advice, counseling him to +stick to his profession, and saying that he "had communicated his +transcripts to much better judges, and that they were by no means +satisfied with the authenticity of his supposed manuscripts." Chatterton +then wrote for his manuscripts, and after some delay--Walpole having been +absent in Parish for several months--they were returned to him. + +In 1769 Chatterton had begun contributing miscellaneous articles, in +prose and verse, to the _Town and Country Magazine_, a London periodical. +Among these appeared the eclogue of "Elinoure and Juga,"[10] the only one +of the Rowley poems printed during its author's lifetime. He had now +turned his pen to the service of politics, espousing the side of Wilkes +and liberty. In April, 1770, he left Bristol for London, and cast +himself upon the hazardous fortunes of a literary career. Most tragical +is the story of the poor, unfriended lad's struggle against fate for the +next few months. He scribbled incessantly for the papers, receiving +little or no pay. Starvation confronted him; he was too proud to ask +help, and on August 24 he took poison and died, at the age of seventeen +years and nine months. + +With Chatterton's acknowledged writings we have nothing here to do; they +include satires in the manner of Churchill, political letters in the +manner of Junius, squibs, lampoons, verse epistles, elegies, "African +eclogues," a comic burletta, "The Revenge"--played at Marylebone Gardens +shortly after his death--with essays and sketches in the style that the +_Spectator_ and _Rambler_ had made familiar: "The Adventures of a Star," +"The Memoirs of a Sad Dog," and the like. They exhibit a precocious +cleverness, but have no value and no interest today. One gets from +Chatterton's letters and miscellanies an unpleasant impression of his +character. There is not only the hectic quality of too early ripeness +which one detects in Keats' correspondence; and the defiant swagger, the +affectation of wickedness and knowingness that one encounters in the +youthful Byron, and that is apt to attend the stormy burst of irregular +genius upon the world; but there are things that imply a more radical +unscrupulousness. But it would be harsh to urge any such impressions +against one who was no more than a boy when he perished, and whose brief +career had struggled through cold obstruction to its bitter end. The +best traits in Chatterton's character appear to have been his proud +spirit of independence and his warm family affections. + +The death of an obscure penny-a-liner, like young Chatterton, made little +noise at first. But gradually it became rumored about in London literary +coteries that manuscripts of an interesting kind existed at Bristol, +purporting to be transcripts from old English poems; and that the finder, +or fabricator, of the same was the unhappy lad who had taken arsenic the +other day, to anticipate a slower death from hunger. It was in April, +1771, that Walpole first heard of the fate of his would-be _protege_. +"Dining," he says, "at the Royal Academy, Dr. Goldsmith drew the +attention of the company with an account of a marvelous treasure of +ancient poems lately discovered at Bristol, and expressed enthusiastic +belief in them; for which he was laughed at by Dr. Johnson, who was +present. I soon found this was the _trouvaille_ of my friend Chatterton, +and I told Dr. Goldsmith that this novelty was known to me, who might, if +I had pleased, have had the honor of ushering the great discovery to the +learned world. You may imagine, sir, we did not all agree in the measure +of our faith; but though his credulity diverted me, my mirth was soon +dashed; for, on asking about Chatterton, he told me he had been in London +and had destroyed himself." + +With the exception of "Elinour and Juga," already mentioned, the Rowley +poems were still unprinted. The manuscripts, in Chatterton's +handwriting, were mostly in the possession of Barrett and Catcott. They +purported to be copies of Rowley's originals; but of these alleged +originals, the only specimens brought forward by Chatterton were a few +scraps of parchment containing, in one instance, the first thirty-four +lines of the poem entitled "The Storie of William Canynge"; in another a +prose account of one "Symonne de Byrtonne," and, in still others, the +whole of the short-verse pieces, "Songe to Aella" and "The Accounte of W. +Canynge's Feast." These scraps of vellum are described as about six +inches square, smeared with glue or brown varnish, or stained with ochre, +to give them an appearance of age. Thomas Warton had seen one of them, +and pronounced it a clumsy forgery; the script not of the fifteenth +century, but unmistakably modern. Southey describes another as written, +for the most part, in an attorney's regular engrossing hand. Mr. Skeat +"cannot find the slightest indication that Chatterton had ever seen a MS. +of early date; on the contrary, he never uses the common contractions, +and he was singularly addicted to the use of capitals, which in old MSS. +are rather scarce." + +Boswell tells how he and Johnson went down to Bristol in April, 1776, +"where I was entertained with seeing him inquire upon the spot into the +authenticity of Rowley's poetry, as I had seen him inquire upon the spot +into the authenticity of Ossian's poetry. Johnson said of Chatterton, +'This is the most extraordinary young man that has encountered my +knowledge. It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things.'" + +In 1777, seven years after Chatterton's death, his Rowley poems were +first collected and published by Thomas Tyrwhitt, the Chaucerian editor, +who gave, in an appendix, his reasons for believing that Chatterton was +their real author, and Rowley a myth.[11] These reasons are convincing +to any modern scholar. Tyrwhitt's opinion was shared at the time by all +competent authorities--Gray, Thomas Warton, and Malone, the editor of the +_variorum_ Shakspere, among others. Nevertheless, a controversy sprang +up over Rowley, only less lively than the dispute about Ossian, which had +been going on since 1760. Rowley's most prominent champions were the +Rev. Dr. Symmes, who wrote in the _London Review_; the Rev. Dr. Sherwin, +in the _Gentleman's Magazine_; Dr. Jacob Bryant,[12] and Jeremiah Milles, +D.D., Dean of Exeter, who published a sumptuous quarto edition of the +poems in 1782.[13] These asserters of Rowley belonged to the class of +amateur scholars whom Edgar Poe used to speak of as "cultivated old +clergymen." They had the usual classical training of Oxford and +Cambridge graduates, but no precise knowledge of old English literature. +They had the benevolent curiosity of Mr. Pickwick, and the +gullibility--the large, easy swallow--which seems to go with the +clerico-antiquarian habit of mind. + +Nothing is so extinct as an extinct controversy; and, unlike the Ossian +puzzle, which was a harder nut to crack, this Rowley controversy was +really settled from the start. It is not essential to our purpose to +give any extended history of it. The evidence relied upon by the +supporters of Rowley was mainly of the external kind: personal +testimony, and especially the antecedent unlikeliness that a boy of +Chatterton's age and imperfect education could have reared such an +elaborate structure of deceit; together with the inferiority of his +acknowledged writings to the poems that he ascribed to Rowley. But +Tyrwhitt was a scholar of unusual thoroughness and acuteness; and, having +a special acquaintance with early English, he was able to bring to the +decision of the question evidence of an internal nature which became more +convincing in proportion as the knowledge necessary to understand his +argument increased; _i.e._, as the number of readers increased, who knew +something about old English poetry. Indeed, it was nothing but the +general ignorance of the spelling, flexions, vocabulary, and scansion of +Middle English verse, that made the controversy possible. + +Tyrwhitt pointed out that the Rowleian dialect was not English of the +fifteenth century, nor of any century, but a grotesque jumble of archaic +words of very different periods and dialects. The orthography and +grammatical forms were such as occurred in no old English poet known to +the student of literature. The fact that Rowley used constantly the +possessive pronominal form _itts_, instead of _his_; or the other fact +that he used the termination _en_ in the singular of the verb, was alone +enough to stamp the poems as spurious. Tyrwhitt also showed that the +syntax, diction, idioms, and stanza forms were modern; that if modern +words were substituted throughout for the antique, and the spelling +modernized, the verse would read like eighteenth-century work. "If +anyone," says Scott, in his review of the Southey and Cottle edition, +"resists the internal evidence of the style of Rowley's poems, we make +him welcome to the rest of the argument; to his belief that the Saxons +imported heraldry and gave armorial bearings (which were not known till +the time of the Crusades); that Mr. Robert [_sic_] Canynge, in the reign +of Edward IV., encouraged drawing and had private theatricals." In this +article Scott points out a curious blunder of Chatterton's which has +become historic, though it is only one of a thousand. In the description +of the cook in the General Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales," Chaucer +had written: + + "But gret harm was it, as it thoughte me, + That on his schyne a mormal hadde he, + For blankmanger he made with the beste." + +_Mormal_, in this passage, means a cancerous sore, and _blankmanger_ is a +certain dish or confection--the modern _blancmange_. But a confused +recollection of the whole was in Chatterton's mind, when among the +fragments of paper and parchment which he covered with imitations of +ancient script, and which are now in the British Museum,--"The Yellow +Roll," "The Purple Roll," etc.,--he inserted the following title in "The +Rolls of St. Bartholomew's Priory," purporting to be old medical +prescriptions; "The cure of mormalles and the waterie leprosie; the rolle +of the blacke mainger"; turning Chaucer's innocent _blankmanger_ into +some kind of imaginary _black mange_. + +Skeat believes that Chatterton had read very little of Chaucer, probably +only a small portion of the Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales." "If he +had really taken pains," he thinks, "To _read_ and _study_ Chaucer of +Lydgate or any old author earlier than the age of Spenser, the Rowley +poems would have been very different. They would then have borne some +resemblance to the language of the fifteenth century, whereas they are +rather less like the language of that period than of any other. The +spelling of the words is frequently too late, or too bizarre, whilst many +of the words themselves are too archaic or too uncommon."[14] But this +internal evidence, which was so satisfactory to Scott, was so little +convincing to Chatterton's contemporaries that Tyrwhitt felt called upon +to publish in 1782 a "Vindication" of his appendix; and Thomas Warton put +forth in the same year an "Enquiry," in which he reached practically the +same conclusions with Tyrwhitt. And yet Warton had devoted the +twenty-sixth section of the second volume of his "History of English +Poetry" (1778,) to a review of the Rowley poems, on the ground that "as +they are held to be real by many respectable critics, it was his duty to +give them a place in this series": a curious testimony to the uncertainty +of the public mind on the question, and a half admission that the poems +might possibly turn out to be genuine.[15] + +Tyrwhitt proved clearly enough that Chatterton wrote the Rowley poems, +but it was reserved for Mr. Skeat to show just _how_ he wrote them. The +_modus operandi_ was about as follows: Chatterton first made, for his +private use, a manuscript glossary, by copying out the words in the +glossary to Speght's edition of Chaucer, and those marked as old in +Bailey's and Kersey's English Dictionaries. Next he wrote his poem in +modern English, and finally rewrote it, substituting the archaic words +for their modern equivalents, and altering the spelling throughout into +an exaggerated imitation of the antique spelling in Speght's Chaucer. +The mistakes that the he made are instructive, as showing how closely he +followed his authorities, and how little independent knowledge he had of +genuine old English. Thus, to give a few typical examples of the many in +Mr. Skeat's notes: in Kersey's dictionary occurs the word _gare_, defined +as "cause." This is the verb _gar_, familiar to all readers of +Burns,[16] and meaning to cause, to make; but Chatterton, taking it for +the _noun_, cause, employs it with grotesque incorrectness in such +connections as these: + + "Perchance in Virtue's gare rhyme might be then": + "If in this battle luck deserts our gare." + +Again the Middle English _howten_ (Modern English, _hoot_) is defined by +Speght as "hallow," _i.e._, halloo. But Kersey and Bailey misprint this +"hollow"; and Chatterton, entering it so in his manuscript list of old +words, evidently takes it to be the _adjective_ "hollow" and uses it thus +in the line: + + "Houten are wordes for to telle his doe," _i.e._, + Hollow are words to tell his doings. + +Still again, in a passage already quoted,[17] it is told how the "Wynde +hurled the Battayle"--Rowleian for a small boat--"agaynste an Heck." +_Heck_ in this and other passages was a puzzle. From the context it +obviously meant "rock," but where did Chatterton get it? Mr. Skeat +explains this. _Heck_ is a provincial word signifying "rack," i.e., +"hay-rack"; but Kersey misprinted it "rock," and Chatterton followed him. +A typical instance of the kind of error that Chatterton was perpetually +committing was his understanding the "Listed, bounded," _i.e., edged_ (as +in the "list" or selvage of cloth) for "bounded" in the sense of +_jumped,_ and so coining from it the verb "to liss"=to jump: + + "The headed javelin lisseth here and there." + +Every page in the Rowley poems abounds in forms which would have been as +strange to an Englishman of the fifteenth as they are to one of the +nineteenth century. Adjectives are used for nouns, nouns for verbs, past +participles for present infinitives; and derivatives and variants are +employed which never had any existence, such as _hopelen_=hopelessness, +and _anere_=another. Skeat says, that "an analysis of the glossary in +Milles's edition shows that the genuine old English words correctly used, +occurring in the Rowleian dialect, amount to only about _seven_ per cent, +of all the old words employed." It is probable that, by constant use of +his manuscript glossary, the words became fixed in Chatterton's memory +and he acquired some facility in composing at first hand in this odd +jargon. Thus he uses the archaic words quite freely as rhyme words, +which he would not have been likely to do unless he had formed the habit +of thinking to some degree, in Rowleian. + +The question now occurs, apart from the tragic interest of Chatterton's +career, from the mystery connected with the incubation and hatching of +the Rowley poems, and from their value as records of a very unusual +precocity--what independent worth have they as poetry, and what has been +the extent of their literary influence? The dust of controversy has long +since settled, and what has its subsidence made visible? My own belief +is that the Rowley poems are interesting principally as literary +curiosities--the work of an infant phenomenon--and that they have little +importance in themselves, or as models and inspirations to later poets. +I cannot help thinking that, upon this subject, many critics have lost +their heads. Malone, _e.g._, pronounced Chatterton the greatest genius +that England had produced since Shakspere. Professor Masson permits +himself to say: "The antique poems of Chatterton are perhaps as worthy of +being read consecutively as many portions of the poetry of Byron, +Shelley, or Keats. There are passages in them, at least, quite equal to +any to be found in these poets."[18] Mr. Gosse seems to me much nearer +the truth: "Our estimate of the complete originality of the Rowley poems +must be tempered by a recollection of the existence of 'The Castle of +Otranto' and 'The Schoolmistress,' of the popularity of Percy's +'Reliques' and the 'Odes' of Gray, and of the revival of a taste for +Gothic literature and art which dates from Chatterton's infancy. Hence +the claim which has been made for Chatterton as the father of the +romantic school, and as having influenced the actual style of Coleridge +and Keats, though supported with great ability, appears to be +overcharged. So also the positive praise given to the Rowley poems, as +artistic productions full of rich color and romantic melody, may be +deprecated without any refusal to recognize these qualities in measure. +There are frequent flashes of brilliancy in Chatterton, and one or two +very perfectly sustained pieces; but the main part of his work, if +rigorously isolated from the melodramatic romance of his career, is +surely found to be rather poor reading, the work of a child of exalted +genius, no doubt, yet manifestly the work of a child all through."[19] + +Let us get a little closer to the Rowley poems, as they stand in Mr. +Skeat's edition, stripped of their sham-antique spelling and with their +language modernized wherever possible; and we shall find, I think, that +tried by an absolute standard, they are markedly inferior not only to +true mediaeval work like Chaucer's poems and the English and Scottish +ballads, but also to the best modern work conceived in the same spirit: +to "Christabel" and "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "Jock o'Hazeldean" and +"Sister Helen," and "The Haystack in the Flood." The longest of the +Rowley poems is "Aella," "a tragycal enterlude or discoorseynge tragedie" +in 147 stanzas, and generally regarded as Chatterton's masterpiece.[20] +The scene of this tragedy is Bristol and the neighboring Watchet Mead; +the period, during the Danish invasions. The hero is the warden of +Bristol Castle.[21] While he is absent on a victorious campaign against +the Danes, his bride, Bertha, is decoyed from home by his treacherous +lieutenant, Celmond, who is about to ravish her in the forest, when he is +surprised and killed by a band of marauders. Meanwhile Aella has +returned home, and finding that his wife has fled, stabs himself +mortally. Bertha arrives in time to hear his dying speech and make the +necessary explanations, and then dies herself on the body of her lord. +It will be seen that the plot is sufficiently melodramatic; the +sentiments and dialogue are entirely modern, when translated out of +Rowleian into English. The verse is a modified form of the Spenserian, a +ten-line stanza which Mr. Skeat says is an invention of Chatterton and a +striking instance of his originality.[22] It answers very well in +descriptive passages and soliloquies; not so well in the "discoorseynge" +parts. As this is Chatterton's favorite stanza, in which "The Battle of +Hastings," "Goddwyn," "English Metamorphosis" and others of the Rowley +series are written, an example of it may be cited here, from "Aella." + + _Scene_, Bristol. Celmond, _alone_. + The world is dark with night; the winds are still, + Faintly the moon her pallid light makes gleam; + The risen sprites the silent churchyard fill, + With elfin fairies joining in the dream; + The forest shineth with the silver leme; + Now may my love be sated in its treat; + Upon the brink of some swift running stream, + At the sweet banquet I will sweetly eat. + This is the house; quickly, ye hinds, appear. + + _Enter_ a servant. + + _Cel._ Go tell to Bertha straight, a stranger waiteth here. + +The Rowley poems include, among other things, a number of dramatic or +quasi-dramatic pieces, "Goddwyn," "The Tournament," "The Parliament of +Sprites"; the narrative poem of "The Battle of Hastings," and a +collection of "eclogues." These are all in long-stanza forms, mostly in +the ten-lined stanza. "English Metamorphosis" is an imitation of a +passage in "The Faerie Queene," (book ii. canto x. stanzas 5-19). "The +Parliament of Sprites" is an interlude played by Carmelite friars at +William Canynge's house on the occasion of the dedication of St. Mary +Redcliffe's. One after another the _antichi spiriti dolenti_ rise up and +salute the new edifice: Nimrod and the Assyrians, Anglo-Saxon ealdormen +and Norman knights templars, and citizens of ancient Bristol. Among +others, "Elle's sprite speaks": + + "Were I once more cast in a mortal frame, + To hear the chantry-song sound in mine ear, + To hear the masses to our holy dame, + To view the cross-aisles and the arches fair! + Through the half-hidden silver-twinkling glare + Of yon bright moon in foggy mantles dressed, + I must content this building to aspere,[23] + Whilst broken clouds the holy sight arrest; + Till, as the nights grow old, I fly the light. + Oh! were I man again, to see the sight!" + +Perhaps the most engaging of the Rowley poems are "An Excelente Balade of +Charitie," written in the rhyme royal; and "The Bristowe Tragedie," in +the common ballad stanza, and said by Tyrwhitt to be founded on an +historical fact: the excecution at Bristol, in 1461, of Sir Baldwin +Fulford, who fought on the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses. +The best quality in Chatterton's verse is its unexpectedness,--sudden +epithets or whole lines, of a wild and artless sweetness,--which goes far +to explain the fascination that he exercised over Coleridge and Keats. I +mean such touches as these: + + + "Once as I dozing in the witch-hour lay." + + "Brown as the filbert dropping from the shell." + + "My gorme emblanched with the comfreie plant." + + "Where thou may'st here the sweete night-lark chant, + Or with some mocking brooklet sweetly glide." + + "Upon his bloody carnage-house he lay, + Whilst his long shield did gleam with the sun's rising ray." + + "The red y-painted oars from the black tide, + Carved with devices rare, do shimmering rise." + + "As elfin fairies, when the moon shines bright, + In little circles dance upon the green; + All living creatures fly far from their sight, + Nor by the race of destiny be seen; + For what he be that elfin fairies strike, + Their souls will wander to King Offa's dyke." + + +The charming wildness of Chatterton's imagination--which attracted the +notice of that strange, visionary genius William Blake[24]--is perhaps +seen at its best in one of the minstrel songs in "Aella." This is +obviously an echo of Ophelia's song in "Hamlet," but Chatterton gives it +a weird turn of his own: + + "Hark! the raven flaps his wing + In the briared dell below; + Hark! the death owl loud doth sing + To the nightmares, as they go. + My love is dead. + Gone to his death-bed + All under the willow tree. + + "See the white moon shines on high,[25] + Whiter is my true-love's shroud, + Whiter than the morning sky, + Whiter than the evening cloud. + My love is dead," etc. + +It remains to consider briefly the influence of Chatterton's life and +writings upon his contemporaries and successors in the field of romantic +poetry. The dramatic features of his personal career drew, naturally, +quite as much if not more attention than his literary legacy to +posterity. It was about nine years after his death that a clerical +gentleman, Sir Herbert Croft, went to Bristol to gather materials for a +biography. He talked with Barrett and Catcott, and with many of the +poet's schoolmates and fellow-townsmen, and visited his mother and +sister, who told him anecdotes of the marvelous boy's childhood and gave +him some of his letters. Croft also traced Chatterton's footsteps in +London, where he interviewed, among others, the coroner who had presided +at the inquest over the suicide's body. The result of these inquiries he +gave to the world in a book entitled "Love and Madness" (1780).[26] +Southey thought that Croft had treated Mrs. Chatterton shabbily, in +making her no pecuniary return from the profits of his book; and +arraigned him publicly for this in the edition of Chatterton's works +which he and Joseph Cottle--both native Bristowans--published in three +volumes in 1803. This was at first designed to be a subscription edition +for the benefit of Chatterton's mother and sister, but, the subscriptions +not being numerous enough, it was issued in the usual way, through "the +trade." + +It was in 1795, just a quarter of a century after Chatterton's death, +that Southey and Coleridge were married in St. Mary Redcliffe's Church to +the Misses Edith and Sara Fricker. Coleridge was greatly interested in +Chatterton. In his "Lines on Observing a Blossom on the First of +February, 1796," he compares the flower to + + "Bristowa's bard, the wondrous boy, + An amaranth which earth seemed scarce to own, + Blooming 'mid poverty's drear wintry waste." + +And a little earlier than this, when meditating his pantisocracy scheme +with Southey and Lovell, he had addressed the dead poet in his indignant +"Monody on the Death of Chatterton," associating him in imagination with +the abortive community on the Susquehannah: + + "O Chatterton, that thou wert yet alive! + Sure thou would'st spread thy canvas to the gale, + And love with us the tinkling team to drive + O'er peaceful freedom's undivided dale; + And we at sober eve would round thee throng, + Hanging enraptured on thy stately song, + And greet with smiles the young-eyed poesy + All deftly masked as hoar antiquity. . . + Yet will I love to follow the sweet dream + Where Susquehannah pours his untamed stream; + And on some hill, whose forest-frowning side + Waves o'er the murmurs of his calmer tide, + Will raise a solemn cenotaph to thee, + Sweet harper of time-shrouded ministrelsy." + +It might be hard to prove that the Rowley poems had very much to do with +giving shape to Coleridge's own poetic output. Doubtless, without them, +"Christabel," and "The Ancient Mariner," and "The Darke Ladye" would +still have been; and yet it is possible that they might not have been +just what they are. In "The Ancient Mariner" there is the ballad strain +of the "Reliques," but _plus_ something of Chatterton's. In such lines +as these: + + "The bride hath paced into the hall + Red as a rose is she: + Nodding their heads before her, goes + The merry minstrelsy;" + +or as these: + + "The wedding guest here beat his breast + For he heard the loud bassoon:" + +one catches a far-away reverberation from certain stanzas of "The +Bristowe Tragedie:" this, _e.g._, + + "Before him went the council-men + In scarlet robes and gold, + And tassels spangling in the sun, + Much glorious to behold;" + +and this: + + "In different parts a godly psalm + Most sweetly they did chant: + Behind their backs six minstrels came, + Who tuned the strung bataunt."[27] + +Among all the young poets of the generation that succeeded Chatterton, +there was a tender feeling of comradeship with the proud and passionate +boy, and a longing to admit him of their crew. Byron, indeed, said that +he was insane; but Shelley, in "Adonais," classes him with Keats among +"the inheritors of unfulfilled renown." Lord Houghton testifies that +Keats had a prescient sympathy with Chatterton in his early death. He +dedicated "Endymion" to his memory. In his epistle "To George Felton +Mathew," he asks him to help him find a place + + "Where we may soft humanity put on, + And sit, and rhyme, and think on Chatterton."[28] + +Keats said that he always associated the season of autumn with the memory +of Chatterton. He asserted, somewhat oddly, that he was the purest +writer in the English language and used "no French idiom or particles, +like Chaucer." In a letter from Jane Porter to Keats about the reviews +of his "Endymion," she wrote: "Had Chatterton possessed sufficient +manliness of mind to know the magnanimity of patience, and been aware +that great talents have a commission from Heaven, he would not have +deserted his post, and his name might have been paged with Milton." + +Keats was the poetic child of Spenser, but some traits of manner--hard to +define, though not to feel--he inherited from Chatterton. In his +unfinished poem, "The Eve of St. Mark," there is a Rowleian accent in the +passage imitative of early English, and in the loving description of the +old volume of saints' legends whence it is taken, with its + + "--pious poesies + Written in smallest crow-quill size + Beneath the text." + +And we cannot but think of the shadow of St. Mary Redcliffe falling +across another young life, as we read how + + "Bertha was a maiden fair + Dwelling in th' old Minster-square; + From her fireside she could see, + Sidelong, its rich antiquity, + Far as the Bishop's garden-wall"; + +and of the footfalls that pass the echoing minster-gate, and of the +clamorous daws that fall asleep in the ancient belfry to the sound of the +drowsy chimes. Rossetti, in so many ways a continuator of Keats' +artistry, devoted to Chatterton the first of his sonnet-group, "Five +English Poets,"[29] of which the sestet runs thus: + + "Thy nested home-loves, noble Chatterton; + The angel-trodden stair thy soul could trace + Up Redcliffe's spire; and in the world's armed space + Thy gallant sword-play:--these to many an one + Are sweet for ever; as thy grave unknown + And love-dream of thine unrecorded face." + +The story of Chatterton's life found its way into fiction and upon the +stage. Afred de Vigny, one of the French romanticists, translator of +"Othello" and "The Merchant of Venice," introduced it as an episode into +his romance, "Stello ou les Diables Bleus," afterward dramatized as +"Chatterton," and first played at Paris on February 12, 1835, with great +success. De Vigny made a love tragedy out of it, inventing a sweetheart +for his hero, in the person of Kitty Bell, a role which became one of +Madame Dorval's chief triumphs. On the occasion of the revival of De +Vigny's drama in December, 1857, Theophile Gautier gave, in the +_Moniteur_,[30] some reminiscences of its first performance, twenty-two +years before. + +"The parterre before which Chatterton declaimed was full of pale, +long-haired youths, who firmly believed that there was no other worthy +occupation on earth but the making of verses or of pictures--art, as they +called it; and who looked upon the bourgeois with a disdain to which the +disdain of the Heidelberg or Jena 'fox' for the 'philistine' hardly +approaches. . . As to money, no one thought of it. More than one, as in +that assembly of impossible professions which Theodore de Banville +describes with so resigned an irony, could have cried without falsehood +'I am a lyric poet and I live by my profession.' One who has not passed +through that mad, ardent, over-excited but generous epoch, cannot imagine +to what a forgetfulness of material existence the intoxication, or, if +you prefer, infatuation of art pushed the obscure and fragile victims who +would rather have died than renounce their dream. One actually heard in +the night the crack of solitary pistols. Judge of the effect produced in +such an environment by M. Afred Vigney's 'Chatterton'; to which, if you +would comprehend it, you must restore the contemporary atmosphere."[31] + + +[1] Wordsworth, "Resolution and Independence." + +[2] January 1, 1753. + +[3] "The Poetical Works of Thos. Chatterton. With an Essay on the Rowley +Poems by the Rev. Walter W. Skeat and a Memoir by Edward Bell"; in two +volumes. London, 1871, Vol. I. p. xv. + +[4] Willcox's edition of "Chatterton's Poetical Works," Cambridge, 1842, +Vol. I. p. xxi. + +[5] "Memoir by Edward Bell," p. xxiv. + +[6] _Cf._ ("Battle of Hastings," i. xx) + + "The grey-goose pinion, that theron was set, + Eftsoons with smoking crimson blood was wet" + +With the lines from "Chevy Chase" (_ante_, p. 295). To be sure the +ballad was widely current before the publication of the "Reliques." + +[7] See _ante_, p. 237. + +[8] Walter Scott quotes this passage in his review of Southey and Cottle's +edition of Chatterton in the Edinburgh _Review_ for April, 1804, and +comments as follows: "While Chatterton wrote plain narrative, he imitated +with considerable success the dry, concise style of an antique annalist; +but when anything required a more dignified or sentimental style, he +mounted the fatal and easily recognized car of the son of Fingal." + +[9] Publication begun 1761: 2d edition 1768. Chatterton's letter was +dated March 25 [1769]. + +[10] See _ante_, p. 346. + +[11] "Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and +others in the fifteenth century. The greatest part now first published +from the most authentic copies, with engraved specimens of one of the +MSS. To which are added a preface, an introductory account of the +several pieces, and a glossary. London: Printed for T. Payne & Son at +the Mews Gate. MDCCLXXVII." + +[12] "Observations upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley," 2 vols. 1781. + +[13] Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol in the fifteenth +century by Thomas Rowley, Priest, etc. With a commentary in which the +antiquity of them is considered and defended. + +[14] "Essay on the Rowley Poems:" Skeat's edition of "Chatterton's +Poetical Works," Vol. II. p. xxvii. + +[15] For a bibliography of the Rowley controversy, consult the article on +Chatterton in the "Dictionary of National Biography." + +[16] "Ah, gentle dames! It gars me greet." + --_Tam o'Shanter_ + +[17] _Ante_, p. 350. + +[18] "Chatterton. A Story of the Year 1770," by David Masson London, 1874. + +[19] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 334. + +[20] A recent critic, the Hon. Roden Noel ("Essays on Poetry and Poets," +London, 1886), thinks that "'Aella' is a drama worthy of the +Elizabethans" (p. 44). "As to the Rowley series," as a whole, he does +"not hesitate to say that they contain some of the finest poetry in our +language" (p. 39). The Choric "Ode to Freedom" in "Goddwyn" appears to +Mr. Noel to be the original of a much admired passage in "Childe Harold," +in which war is personified, "and at any rate is finer"! + +[21] See in Wm. Howitt's "Homes of the Poets," Vol. I. pp. 264-307, the +description of a drawing of this building in 1138, done by Chatterton and +inserted in Barrett's "History." + +[22] For some remarks on Chatterton's metrical originality, see "Ward's +English Poets," Vol. III, pp. 400-403. + +[23] Look at. + +[24] Blake was an early adherent of the "Gothic artists who built the +Cathedrals in the so-called Dark Ages . . . of whom the world was not +worthy." Mr. Rossetti has pointed out his obligations to Ossian and +possibly to "The Castle of Otranto." See Blake's poems "Fair Eleanor" +and "Gwin, King of Norway." + +[25] Chatterton's sister testifies that he had the romantic habit of +sitting up all night and writing by moonlight. Cambridge Ed. p. lxi. + +[26] Other standard lives of Chatterton are those by Gregory, 1789, +(reprinted and prefixed to the Southey and Cottle edition): Dix, 1837; +and Wilson, 1869. + +[27] Rowleian: there is no such instrument known unto men. The romantic +love of _color_ is observable in this poem, and is strong everywhere in +Chatterton. + +[28] See also the sonnet: "O Chatterton, how very sad thy fate"--Given in +Lord Houghton's memoir. "Life and Letters of John Keats": By R. Monckton +Milnes, p. 20 (American Edition, New York, 1848). + +[29] Chatterton, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley. "The absolutely +miraculous Chatterton," Rossetti elsewhere styles him. + +[30] "Historie du Romantisme," pp. 153-54. + +[31] "Chatterton," a drama by Jones and Herman, was played at the +Princess' Theater, London, May 22, 1884. + + + + +CHAPTER XI. + +The German Tributary + +Up to the last decade of the eighteenth century the romantic movement in +Great Britain had been self-developed and independent of foreign +influence, except for such stimulus as it had found, once and again, in +the writings of continental scholars like Sainte Palaye and Mallet. But +now the English literary current began to receive a tributary stream from +abroad. A change had taken place in the attitude of the German mind +which corresponds quite closely to that whose successive steps we have +been following. In Germany, French classicism had got an even firmer +hold than in England. It is well-known that Frederick the Great +(1740-86) regarded his mother-tongue as a barbarous dialect, hardly fit +for literary use. In his own writings, prose and verse, he invariably +employed French; and he boasted to Gottsched that from his youth up he +had not read a German book.[1] + +But already before the middle of the century, and just about the time of +the publication of Thomason's "Seasons," the so-called Swiss school, +under the leadership of the Zuericher, Johann Jacob Bodmer, had begun a +national movement and an attack upon Gallic influences. Bodmer fought +under Milton's banner, and in the preface to his prose translation of +"Paradise Lost" (1732), he praised Shakspere as the English Sophocles. +In his "Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren" ("Treatise on the Marvelous," +1740) he asserted the claims of freedom, nature, and the inspired +imagination against the rules of French critics, very much as the Wartons +and Bishop Hurd did a few years later in England. _Deutscheit, +Volkspoesie_, the German past, the old Teutonic hero-age, with the +_Kaiserzeit_ and the Middle Ages in general, soon came into fashion. "As +early as 1748 Bodmer had published specimens from the Minnesingers, in +1757 he had brought out a part of the Nibelungenlied, in 1758 and 1759 a +more complete collection of the Minnesingers, and till 1781, till just +before his death, he continued to produce editions of the Middle +High-German poems. Another Swiss writer, Christian Heinrich Myller, a +pupil of Bodmer's . . . published in 1784 and 1785 the whole of the +Nibelungenlied and the most important of the chivalrous epics. Lessing, +in his preface to Gleim's 'War-songs,' called attention to the Middle +High German poets, of whom he continued to be throughout his life an +ardent admirer. Justus Moeser took great interest in the Minnesingers. +About the time when 'Goetz' appeared, this enthusiasm for early German +poetry was at its strongest, and Buerger, Voss, Miller, and Hoeltz wrote +Minnesongs, in which they imitated the old German lyric poets. In 1773 +Gleim published 'Poems after the Minnesingers,' and in 1779 'Poems after +Walther von der Vogelweide.' Some enthusiasts had already hailed the +Nibelungenlied as the German Iliad, and Buerger, who vied hard with the +rest, but without much success, in turning Homer into German, insisted on +dressing up the Greek heroes a little in the Nibelungen style. He and a +few other poets loved to give their ballads a chivalrous character. +Fritz Stolberg wrote the beautiful song of a German boy, beginning, 'Mein +Arm wird stark und gross mein Muth, gib, Vater, mir ein Schwert'; and the +song of the old Swabian knight--'Sohn, da hast du meinen Speer; meinem +Arm wird er zu schwer.' Lessing's 'Nathan,' too, appealed to this +enthusiasm for the times of chivalry, and must have strengthened the +feeling. An historian like the Swiss, Johannes Mueller, began to show the +Middle Ages in a fairer light, and even to ascribe great merits to the +Papacy. But in doing so, Johannes Mueller was only following in Herder's +steps. Herder . . . had written against the self-conceit of his age, its +pride in its enlightenment and achievements. He found in the Middle Ages +the realization of his aesthetic ideas, namely, strong emotion, stirring +life and action, everything guided by feeling and instinct, not by morbid +thought: religious ardor and chivalrous honor, boldness in love and +strong patriotic feeling."[2] + +When the founders of a truly national literature in Germany cut loose +from French moorings, they had an English pilot aboard; and in the +translations from German romances, dramas, and ballads that were made by +Scott, Coleridge, Taylor, Lewis, and others, English literature was +merely taking back with usury what it had lent its younger sister. +Mention has already been made of Buerger's and Herder's renderings from +Percy's "Reliques,"[3] an edition of which was published at Goettingen in +1767; as well as of the strong excitement aroused in Germany by +MacPherson's "Ossian."[4] This last found--besides the Viennese +Denis--another translator in Fritz Stolberg, who carried his medievalism +so far as to join the Roman Catholic Church in 1800. Klopstock's +"Kriegslied," written as early as 1749, was in the meter of "Chevy +Chase," which Klopstock knew through Addison's _Spectator_ papers. +Through Mallet, the Eddaic literature made an impression in Germany as in +England; and Gerstenberg's "Gedicht eines Skalden" (1766), one of the +first-fruits of the German translation of the "Historire de Dannemarc," +preceded by two years the publication--though not the composition--of +Gray's poems from the Norse. + +But the spirit which wrought most mightily upon the new German literature +was Shakspere's. During the period of French culture there had been +practically no knowledge of Shakspere in Germany. In 1741 Christian von +Borck, Prussian ambassador to London, had translated "Julius Caesar." +This was followed, a few years later, by a version of "Romeo and Juliet." +In 1762-66 Wieland translated, in whole or in part, twenty-two +Shakspere's plays. His translation was in prose and has been long +superseded by the Tieck-Schlegel translation (1797-1801-1810). Goethe +first made acquaintance with Shakspere, when a student at Leipsic, +through the detached passages given in "Dodd's Beauties of Shakspere."[5] +He afterward got hold of Wieland's translation, and when he went to +Strassburg he fell under the influence of Herder, who inspired him with +his own enthusiasm for "Ossian," and the _Volkslieder_, and led him to +study Shakspere in the original. + +Young Germany fastened upon and appropriated the great English dramatist +with passionate conviction. He became an object of worship, an article +of faith. The Shakspere _cultus_ dominated the whole _Sturm- und +Drangperoide_. The stage domesticated him: the poets imitated him: the +critics exalted him into the type and representative (_Urbild_) of +Germanic art, as opposed to and distinguished from the art of the Latin +races, founded upon a false reproduction of the antique.[6] It was a +recognition of the essential kinships between the two separated branches +of the great Teutonic stock. The enthusiastic young patriots of the +Goettinger _Hain_,--who hated everything French and called each other by +the names of ancient bards,--accustomed themselves to the use of +Shaksperian phrases in conversation; and on one occasion celebrated the +dramatist's birthday so uproariously that they were pounced upon by the +police and spent the night in the lockup. In Goethe's circle at +Strassburg, which numbered, among others, Lenz, Klinger, and H. L. +Wagner, this Shakspere mania was _de rigueur_. Lenz, particularly, who +translated "Love's Labour's Lost," excelled in whimsical imitations of +"such conceits as clownage keeps in pay."[7] Upon his return to +Frankfort, Goethe gave a feast in Shakspere's honor at his father's house +(October 14, 1771), in which healths were drunk to the "Will of all +Wills," and the youthful host delivered an extravagant eulogy. "The +first page of Shakspere's that I read," runs a sentence of this oration, +"made me his own for life, and when I was through with the first play, I +stood like a man born blind, to whom sight has been given by an instant's +miracle. I had a most living perception of the fact that my being had +been expanded a whole infinitude. Everything was new and strange; my +eyes ached with the unwonted light."[8] + +Lessing, in his onslaught upon the French theater in his "Hamburgische +Dramaturgie" (1767-69), maintained that there was a much closer agreement +between Sophocles and Shakspere in the essentials of dramatic art than +between Sophocles and Racine or Voltaire in their mechanical copies of +the antique. In their own plays, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller all took +Shakspere as their model. But while beginning with imitation, they came +in time to work freely in the spirit of Shakspere rather than in his +manner. Thus the first draught of Goethe's "Goetz von Berlichingen" +conforms in all externals to the pattern of a Shaksperian "history." The +unity of action went overboard along with those of time and place; the +scene was shifted for a monologue of three lines or a dialogue of six; +tragic and comic were interwoven; the stage was thronged with a motley +variety of figures, humors, and conditions--knights, citizens, soldiers, +horse-boys, peasants; there was a court-jester; songs and lyric passages +were interspersed; there were puns, broad jokes, rant, Elizabethan +metaphors, and swollen trunk-hose hyperboles, with innumerable +Shakesperian reminiscences in detail. But the advice of Herder, to whom +he sent his manuscript, and the example of Lessing, whose "Emilia +Galotti" had just appeared, persuaded Goethe to recast the piece and give +it a more independent form. + +Scherer[9] says that the pronunciamento of the new national movement in +German letters was the "small, badly printed anonymous book" entitled +"Von Deutscher Art und Kunst, einige fliegende Blaetter" ("Some Loose +Leaves about German Style and Art"), which appeared in 1773 and contained +essays by Justus Moeser, who "upheld the liberty of the ancient Germans as +a vanished ideal"; by Johann Gottfried Herder, who "celebrated the merits +of popular song, advocated a collection of the German _Volkslieder_, +extolled the greatness of Shakspere, and prophesied the advent of a +German Shakspere"; and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who praised the Strassburg +Minster and Gothic architecture[10] in general, and "asserted that art, +to be true, must be characteristic. The reform, or revolution, which +this little volume announced was connected with hostility to France, and +with a friendly attitude toward England. . . This great movement was, in +fact, a revulsion from the spirit of Voltaire to that of Rousseau, from +the artificiality of society to the simplicity of nature, from doubt and +rationalism to feeling and faith, from _a priori_ notions[11] to history, +from hard and fast aesthetic rules to the freedom of genius. Goethe's +'Goetz' was the first revolutionary symptom which really attracted much +attention, but the 'Fly-sheets on German Style and Art' preceded the +publication of 'Goetz,' as a kind of programme or manifesto." Even +Wieland, the mocking and French-minded, the man of consummate +talent but shallow genius, the representative of the _Aufklaerung_ +(_Eclaircissement_, Illumination) was carried away by this new stream of +tendency, and saddled his hoppogriff for a ride _ins alte romantische +Land_. He availed himself of the new "Library of Romance" which Count +Tressan began publishing in France in 1775, studied Hans Sachs and +Hartmann von Aue, experiments with Old German meters, and enriched his +vocabulary from Old German sources. He poetized popular fairy tales, +chivalry stories, and motives from the Arthurian epos, such as "Gandalin" +and "Geron der Adeliche" ("Gyron le Courteois"). But his best and +best-known work in this temper was "Oberon" (1780) a rich composite of +materials from Chaucer, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and the French +romance of "Huon of Bordeaux."[12] + +From this outline--necessarily very imperfect and largely at second +hand--of the course of the German romantic movement in the eighteenth +century, it will nevertheless appear that it ran parallel to the English +most of the way. In both countries the reaction was against the +_Aufklaerung_, _i.e._, against the rationalistic, prosaic, skeptical, +common-sense spirit of the age, represented in England by deistical +writers like Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Bolingbroke, and Tindal in the +department of religious and moral philosophy; and by writers like +Addison, Swift, Prior, and Pope in polite letters; and represented most +brilliantly in the literatures of Europe by Voltaire. In opposition to +this spirit, an effort was now made to hark back to the ages of faith; to +recover the point of view which created mythology, fairy lore, and +popular superstitions; to _believe_, at all hazards, not only in God and +the immortal soul of man, but in the old-time corollaries of these +beliefs, in ghosts, elves, demons, and witches. + +In both countries, too, the revolution, as it concerned form, was a break +with French classicism and with that part of the native literature which +had followed academic traditions. Here the insurrection was far more +violent in Germany than in England,[13] partly because Gallic influence +had tyrannized there more completely and almost to the supplanting of the +vernacular by the foreign idiom, for literary uses; and partly because +Germany had nothing to compare with the shining and solid achievements of +the Queen Anne classics in England. It was easy for the new school of +German poets and critics to brush aside _perruques_ like Opitz, +Gottsched, and Gellert--authors of the fourth and fifth class. But Swift +and Congreve, and Pope and Fielding, were not thus to be disposed of. We +have noted the cautious, respectful manner in which such innovators as +Warton and Percy ventured to question Pope's supremacy and to recommend +older English poets to the attention of a polite age; and we have seen +that Horace Walpole's Gothic enthusiasms were not inconsistent with +literary prejudices more conservation than radical, upon the whole. In +England, again, the movement began with imitations of Spenser and Milton, +and, gradually only, arrived at the resuscitation of Chaucer and medieval +poetry and the translation of Bardic and Scaldic remains. But in Germany +there was no Elizabethan literature to mediate between the modern mind +and the Middle Age, and so the Germans resorted to England and Shakspere +for this. + +In Germany, as in England, though for different reasons, the romantic +revival did not culminate until the nineteenth century, until the +appearance of the _Romantische Schule_ in the stricter sense--of Tieck, +Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Wackenroder, Fouque, Von Arnim, Brentano, +and Uhland. In England this was owing less to arrested development than +to the absence of genius. There the forerunners of Scott, Coleridge, and +Keats were writers of a distinctly inferior order: Akenside, Shenstone, +Dyer, the Wartons, Percy, Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, "Monk" Lewis, the boy +Chatterton. If a few rise above this level, like Thomason, Collins, and +Gray, the slenderness of their performance, and the somewhat casual +nature of their participation in the movement, diminish their relative +importance. Gray's purely romantic work belongs to the last years of his +life. Collins' derangement and early death stopped the unfolding of many +buds of promise in this rarely endowed lyrist. Thomson, perhaps, came +too early to reach any more advanced stage of evolution than Spenserism. +In Germany, on the contrary, the pioneers were men of the highest +intellectual stature, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller. But there the +movement was checked for a time by counter-currents, or lost in broader +tides of literary life. English romanticism was but one among many +contemporary tendencies: sentimentalism, naturalism, realism. German +romanticism was simply an incident of the _sturm- und Drangperiode_, +which was itself but a temporary phase of the swift and many-sided +unfolding of the German mind in the latter half of the last century; one +element in the great intellectual ferment which threw off, among other +products, the Kantian philosophy, the "Laocooen," "Faust," and "Wilhelm +Meister"; Winckelmann's "Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums" and +Schiller's "Wallenstein" and "Wilhelm Tell." Men like Goethe and +Schiller were too broad in their culture, too versatile in their talents, +too multifarious in their mental activities and sympathies to be +classified with a school. The temper which engendered "Goetz" and "Die +Raeuber" was only a moment in the history of their _Entwickelung_; they +passed on presently into other regions of thought and art. + +In Goethe especially there ensued, after the time of his _Italienische +Reise_, a reversion to the classic; not the exploded pseudo-classic of +the eighteenth-century brand, but the true Hellenic spirit which +expressed itself in such work as "Iphigenie auf Tauris," "Hermann und +Dorothea," and the "Schoene Helena" and "Classische Walpurgis-Nacht" +episodes in the second part of "Faust." "In his youth," says Scherer, "a +love for the historical past of Germany had seized on the minds of many. +Imaginative writers filled the old Teutonic forests with Bards and Druids +and cherished an enthusiastic admiration for Gothic cathedrals and for +the knights of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century. . . In +Goethe's mature years, on the contrary, the interest in classical +antiquity dwarfed all other aesthetic interests, and Germany and Europe +were flooded by the classical fashion for which Winckelmann had given the +first strong impulse. The churches became ancient temples, the +mechanical arts strove after classical forms, and ladies affected the +dress and manners of Greek women. The leaders of German poetry, Goethe +and Schiller, both attained the summit of their art in the imitation of +classical models."[14] Still the ground recovered from the Middle Age +was never again entirely lost; and in spite of this classical +prepossession, Goethe and Schiller, even in the last years of the +century, vied with one another in the composition of romantic ballads, +like the former's "Der Erlkonig," "Der Fischer," "Der Todtentanz," and +"Der Zauberlehrling," and the latter's "Ritter Toggenburg," "Der Kampf +mit dem Drachen," and "Der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer." + +On comparing the works of a romantic temper produced in England and in +Germany during the last century, one soon becomes aware that, though the +original impulse was communicated from England, the continental movement +had greater momentum. The _Gruendlichkeit_, the depth and thoroughness of +the German mind, impels it to base itself in the fine arts, as in +politics and religion, on foundation principles; to construct for its +practice a theoria, an _aesthetik_. In the later history of German +romanticism, the medieval revival in letters and art was carried out with +a philosophic consistency into other domains of thought and made +accessory to reactionary statecraft and theology, to Junkerism and +Catholicism. Meanwhile, though the literary movement in Germany in the +eighteenth century did not quite come to a head, it was more critical, +learned, and conscious of its own purposes and methods than the kindred +movement in England. The English mind, in the act of creation, works +practically and instinctively. It seldom seeks to bring questions of +taste or art under the domain of scientific laws. During the classical +period it had accepted its standards of taste from France, and when it +broke away from these, it did so upon impulse and gave either no reasons, +or very superficial ones, for its new departure. The elegant +dissertations of Hurd and Percy, and the Wartons, seem very dilettantish +when set beside the imposing systems of aesthetics propounded by Kant, +Fichte, and Schelling; or beside thorough-going _Abhandlungen_ like the +"Laocooen," the "Hamburgische Dramaturgie," Schiller's treatise "Ueber +naive and sentimentalische Dichtung," or the analysis of Hamlet's +character in "Wilhelm Meister." There was no criticism of this kind in +England before Coleridge; no Shakspere criticism, in particular, to +compare with the papers on that subject by Lessing, Herder, Gerstenberg, +Lenz, Goethe, and many other Germans. The only eighteenth-century +Englishman who would have been capable of such was Gray. He had the +requisite taste and scholarship, but even he wanted the philosophic +breadth and depth for a fundamental and _eingehend_ treatment of +underlying principles. + +Yet even in this critical department, German literary historians credit +England with the initiative. Hettner[15] mentions three English critics, +in particular, as predecessors of Herder in awakening interest in popular +poetry. These were Edward Young, the author of "Night Thoughts," whose +"Conjectures on Original Composition" was published in 1759: Robert Wood, +whose "Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer" (1768) was +translated into German, French, Spanish, and Italian; and Robert Lowth, +Bishop of Oxford, who was Professor of Poetry at Oxford delivered there +in 1753 his "Praelectiones de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum," translated into +English and German in 1793. The significance of Young's brilliant little +essay, which was in form a letter addressed to the author of "Sir Charles +Grandison," lay in its assertion of the superiority of genius to learning +and of the right of genius to be free from rules and authorities. It was +a sort of literary declaration of independence; and it asked, in +substance, the question asked in Emerson's "Nature": "Why should not we +also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" Pope had said, in his +"Essay on Criticism,"[16] "follow Nature," and in order to follow Nature, +learn the rules and study the ancients, particularly Homer. "Nature and +Homer were the same." Contrariwise, Young says: "The less we copy the +renowned ancients, we shall resemble them the more. . . +Learning . . . is a great lover of rules and boaster of famed +examples . . . and sets rigid bounds to that liberty to which genius +often owes its supreme glory. . . Born _originals_, how comes it to pass +that we die _copies_?. . . Let not great examples or authorities +browbeat thy reason into too great a diffidence of thyself. . . While +the true genius is crossing all public roads into fresh untrodden ground; +he [the imitative writer], up to the knees in antiquity, is treading the +sacred footsteps of great examples with the blind veneration of a bigot +saluting the sacred toe." Young asserts that Shakspere is equal in +greatness to the ancients: regrets that Pope did not employ blank verse +in his translation of Homer, and calls Addison's "Cato" "a piece of +statuary." + +Robert Wood, who visited and described the ruins of Balbec and Palmrya, +took his Iliad to the Troad and read it on the spot. He sailed in the +track of Menelaus and the wandering Ulysses; and his acquaintance with +Eastern scenery and life helped to substitute a fresher apprehension of +Homer for the somewhat conventional conception that had prevailed through +the classical period. What most forcibly struck Herder and Goethe in +Wood's essay was the emphasis laid upon the simple, unlettered, and even +barbaric state of society in the heroic age: and upon the primitive and +popular character (_Urspruenglichkeit, Volksthuemlichkeit_) of the Homeric +poems.[17] This view of Homer, as essentially a minstrel or +ballad-maker, has been carried so far in Professor Newman's translations +as to provoke remonstrance from Matthew Arnold, who insists upon Homer's +"nobility" and "grand style."[18] But with whatever exaggeration it may +have latterly been held, it was wholesomely corrective and stimulating +when propounded in 1768. + +Though the final arrival of German romanticism, in its fullness, was +postponed too late to modify the English movement, before the latter had +spent its first strength, yet the prelude was heard in England and found +an echo there. In 1792 Walter Scott was a young lawyer at Edinburgh and +had just attained his majority. + + "Romance who loves to nod and sing + With drowsy head and folded wing, + To _him_ a painted paroquet + Had been--a most familiar bird-- + Taught _him_ his alphabet to say, + To lisp his very earliest word."[19] + +He had lain from infancy "in the lap of legends old," and was already +learned in the antiquities of the Border. For years he had been making +his collection of _memorabilia_; claymores, suits of mail, Jedburgh axes, +border horns, etc. He had begun his annual raids into Liddesdale, in +search of ballads and folk lore, and was filling notebooks with passages +from the Edda, records of old Scotch law-cases, copies of early English +poems, notes on the "Morte Darthur," on the second sight, on fairies and +witches; extracts from Scottish chronicles, from the Books of Adjournal, +from Aubrey, and old Glanvil of superstitious memory; tables of the +Moeso-Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, and Runic alphabets and transcripts relating +to the history of the Stuarts. In the autumn or early winter of that +year, a class of six or seven young men was formed at Edinburgh for the +study of German, and Scott joined it. In his own account of the matter +he says that interest in German literature was first aroused in Scotland +by a paper read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in April, 1788, by +Henry Mackenzie, the "Addison of the North," and author of that most +sentimental fictions, "The Man of Feeling." "The literary persons of +Edinburgh were then first made aware of the existence of works of genius +in a language cognate with the English, and possessed of the same manly +force of expressions; they learned at the same time that the taste which +dictated the German compositions was of a kind as nearly allied to the +English as their language; those who were from their youth accustomed to +admire Shakspere and Milton became acquainted for the first time with a +race of poets who had the same lofty ambition to spurn the flaming +boundaries of the universe and investigate the realms of Chaos and old +Night; and of dramatists who, disclaiming the pedantry of the unities, +sought, at the expense of occasional improbabilities and extravagance, to +present life on the stage in its scenes of wildest contrast, and in all +its boundless variety of character. . . Their fictitious narratives, +their ballad poetry, and other branches of their literature which are +particularly apt to bear the stamp of the extravagant and the +supernatural, began also to occupy the attention of the British +literati." Scott's German studies were much assisted by Alexander Frazer +Tytler, whose version of Schiller's "Robbers" was one of the earliest +English translations from the German theater.[20] + +In the autumn of 1794 Miss Aikin, afterward Mrs. Barbauld, entertained a +party at Dugald Stewart's by reading a translation of Buerger's ghastly +ballad "Lenore." The translation was by William Taylor of Norwich; it +had not yet been published, and Miss Aikin read it from a manuscript +copy. Scott was not present, but his friend Mr. Cranstoun described the +performance to him; and he was so much impressed by his description that +he borrowed a volume of Burger's poems from his young kinswoman by +marriage, Mrs. Scott of Harden, a daughter of Count Bruehl of Martkirchen, +formerly Saxon ambassador at London, who had a Scotchwoman for his second +wife, the dowager Countess of Egremont. Scott set to work in 1795 to +make a translation of the ballad for himself, and succeeded so well in +pleasing his friends that he had a few copies struck off for private +circulation in the spring of 1796. In the autumn of the same year he +published his version under the title "William and Helen," together with +"The Chase," a translation of Buerger's "Der Wilde Jaeger." The two poems +made a thin quarto volume. It was printed at Edinburgh, was anonymous, +and was Walter Scott's first published book. Meanwhile Taylor had given +his rendering to the public in the March number of the _Monthly +Magazine_, introducing it with a notice of Burger's poems; and the very +same year witnessed the appearance of three other translations, one by J. +T. Stanley (with copperplate engravings), one by Henry James Pye, the +poet laureate, and one by the Hon. William Robert Spencer,--author of +"Beth Gelert." "Too Late I Stayed," etc.,--with designs by Lady Diana +Beauclerc. (A copy of this last, says Allibone, in folio, on vellum, +sold at Christie's in 1804 for L25 4s.) A sixth translation, by the Rev. +James Beresford, who had lived some time in Berlin, came out about 1800; +and Schlegel and Brandl unite in pronouncing this the most faithful, if +not the best, English version of the ballad.[21] + +The poem of which England had taken such manifold possession, under the +varied titles "Lenore," "Leonore," "Leonora," "Lenora," "Ellenore," +"Helen," etc., was indeed a noteworthy one. In the original, it remains +Buerger's masterpiece, and in its various English dresses it gained +perhaps as many graces as it lost. It was first printed at Goettingen in +Boie's "Musen Almanach" in 1773. It was an uncanny tale of a soldier of +Frederick the Great, who had perished in the Seven Years' War, and who +came at midnight on a spectral steed to claim his ladylove and carry her +off a thousand miles to the bridal bed. She mounts behind him and they +ride through the phantasms of the night till, at cock-crow, they come to +a churchyard. The charger vanishes in smoke, the lover's armor drops +from him, green with the damps of the grave, revealing a skeleton within, +and the maiden finds that her nuptial chamber is the charnel vault, and +her bridegroom is Death. "This poem," says Scherer, "leaves on us, to +some degree, the impression of an unsolved mystery; all the details are +clear, but at the end we have to ask ourselves what has really happened; +was it a dream of the girl, a dream in which she died, or did the ghost +really appear and carry her away?"[22] The story is managed, indeed, +with much of that subtle art which Coleridge used in "The Ancient +Mariner" and "Christabel"; so that the boundary between the earthly and +the unearthly becomes indefinite, and the doubt continually occurs +whether we are listening to a veritable ghost-story, or to some finer +form of allegory. "Lenore" drew for its materials upon ballad motives +common to many literatures. It will be sufficient to mention "Sweet +William's Ghost," as an English example of the class. + +Scott's friends assured him that his translation was superior to +Taylor's, and Taylor himself wrote to him: "The ghost nowhere makes his +appearance so well as with you, or his exit so well as with Mr. Spencer." +But Lewis was right in preferring Taylor's version, which has a wildness +and quaintness not found in Scott's more literal and more polished +rendering, and is wonderfully successful in catching the _Grobheit_, the +rude, rough manner of popular poetry. A few stanzas from each will +illustrate the difference: + + [From Scott's "William and Helen."] + + "Dost fear? dost fear? The moon shines clear:-- + Dost fear to ride with me? + Hurrah! Hurrah! the dead can ride"-- + "O William, let them be!" + + "See there! see there! What yonder swings + And creaks 'mid whistling rain?" + "Gibbet and steel, the accursed wheel; + A murd'rer in his chain. + + "Halloa! Thou felon, follow here: + To bridal bed we ride; + And thou shalt prance a fetter dance + Before me and my bride." + + And hurry! hurry! clash, clash, clash! + The wasted form descends,[23] + And fleet as wind through hazel bush + The wild career attends.[23] + + Tramp, tramp! along the land they rode, + Splash, splash! along the sea: + The scourge is red, the spur drops blood, + The flashing pebbles flee. + + [From Taylor's "Lenora."] + + Look up, look up, an airy crewe + In roundel dances reele. + The moone is bryghte and blue the night, + May'st dimly see them wheel.[24] + + "Come to, come to, ye ghostlie crewe, + Come to and follow me. + And daunce for us the wedding daunce + When we in bed shall be." + + And brush, brush, brush, the ghostlie crew + Come wheeling o'er their heads, + All rustling like the withered leaves + That wyde the whirlwind spreads. + + Halloo! halloo! Away they goe + Unheeding wet or drye, + And horse and rider snort and blowe, + And sparkling pebbles flye. + + And all that in the moonshine lay + Behynde them fled afar; + And backward scudded overhead + The skye and every star. + + Tramp, tramp across the land they speede, + Splash, splash across the sea: + "Hurrah! the dead can ride apace, + Dost fear to ride with me?" + +It was this stanza which fascinated Scott, as repeated from memory by Mr. +Cranstoun; and he retained it without much change in his version. There +is no mention of the sea in Buerger, whose hero is killed in the battle of +Prague and travels only by land. But Taylor nationalized and +individualized the theme by making his William a knight of Richard the +Lion Heart's, who had fallen in Holy Land. Scott followed him and made +his a crusader in the army of Frederic Barbarossa. Buerger's poem was +written in an eight-lined stanza, but Taylor and Scott both chose the +common English ballad verse, with its folkloreish associations, as the +best vehicle for reproducing the grewsome substance of the story; and +Taylor gave an archaic cast to his diction, still further to heighten the +effect. Lewis considered his version a masterpiece of translation, and, +indeed, "far superior, both in spirit and in harmony, to the German." +Taylor showed almost equal skill in his rendering of Buerger's next most +popular ballad, "Des Pfarrer's Tochter von Taubenhain," first printed in +the _Monthly Magazine_ for April, 1796, under the somewhat odd title of +"The Lass of Fair Wone." + +Taylor of Norwich did more than any man of his generation, by his +translations and critical papers in the _Monthly Magazine_ and _Monthly +Review_, to spread a knowledge of the new German literature in England. +When a lad of sixteen he had been sent to study at Detmold, Westphalia, +and had spent more than a year (1781-82) in Germany, calling upon Goethe +at Weimar, with a letter of introduction, on his way home to England. +"When his acquaintance with this literature began," wrote Lucy Aikin, +"there was probably no English translation of any German author but +through the medium of the French, and he is very likely to have been the +first Englishman of letters to read Goethe, Wieland, Lessing, and Buerger +in the originals."[25] Some years before the publication of his "Lenora" +he had printed for private distribution translations of Lessing's "Nathan +der Weise" (1791) and Goethe's "Iphigenie auf Tauris" (1793). In 1829-30 +he gathered up his numerous contributions to periodicals and put them +together in a three-volume "Historic Survey of German Poetry," which was +rather roughly, though not disrespectfully, handled by Carlyle in the +_Edinburgh Review_. Taylor's tastes were one-sided, not to say +eccentric; he had not kept up with the later movement of German thought; +his critical opinions were out of date, and his book was sadly wanting in +unity and a proper perspective. Carlyle was especially scandalized by +the slight space accorded to Goethe.[26] But Taylor's really brilliant +talent in translation, and his important service as an introducer and +interpreter of German poetry to his own countrymen, deserve always to be +gratefully remembered. "You have made me hunger and thirst after German +poetry," wrote Southey to him, February 24, 1799.[27] + +The year 1796, then, marks the confluence of the English and German +romantic movements. It seems a little strange that so healthy a genius +as Walter Scott should have made his _debut_ in an exhibition of the +horrible. Lockhart reports him, on the authority of Sir Alexander Wood, +as reading his "William and Helen" over to that gentleman "in a very slow +and solemn tone," and then looking at the fire in silence and presently +exclaiming. "I wish to Heaven I could get a skull and two crossbones." +Whereupon Sir Alexander accompanied him to the house of John Bell, +surgeon, where the desired articles were obtained and mounted upon the +poet's bookcase. During the next few years, Scott continued to make +translations of German ballads, romances, and chivalry dramas. These +remained for the present in manuscript; and some of them, indeed, such as +his versions of Babo's "Otto von Wittelsbach" (1796-97) and Meier's +"Wolfred von Dromberg" (1797) were never permitted to see the light. His +second publication (February, 1799) was a free translation of Goethe's +tragedy, "Goetz von Berlichingen mit der Eisernen Hand." The original was +a most influential work in Germany. It had been already twenty-six years +before the public and had produced countless imitations, with some of +which Scott had been busy before he encountered this, the fountain head +of the whole flood of _Ritterschauspiele_.[28] Goetz was an historical +character, a robber knight of Franconia in the fifteenth century, who had +championed the rights of the free knights to carry on private warfare and +had been put under the ban of the empire for engaging in feuds. "It +would be difficult," wrote Carlyle, "to name two books which have +exercised a deeper influence on the subsequent literature of +Europe"--than "The Sorrows of Werther" and "Gotz." "The fortune of +'Berlichingen with the Iron Hand,' though less sudden"--than +Werther's--"was by no means less exalted. In his own country 'Goetz,' +though he now stands solitary and childless, became the parent of an +innumerable progeny of chivalry plays, feudal delineations, and +poetico-antiquarian performances; which, though long ago deceased, made +noise enough in their day and generation; and with ourselves his +influence has been perhaps still more remarkable. Sir Walter Scott's +first literary enterprise was a translation of 'Goetz von Berlichingen'; +and if genius could be communicated, like instruction, we might call this +work of Goethe's the prime cause of 'Marmion' and 'The Lady of the Lake,' +with all that has since followed from the same creative hand. . . How +far 'Goetz von Berlichingen' actually affected Scott's literary +destination, and whether without it the rhymed romances, and then the +prose romances of the author of Waverly, would not have followed as they +did, must remain a very obscure question; obscure and not important. Of +the fact, however, there is no doubt, that these two tendencies, which +may be named Goetzism and Wertherism, of the former of which Scott was +representative with us, have made and are still in some quarters making +the tour of all Europe. In Germany, too, there was this affectionate, +half-regretful looking-back into the past: Germany had its buff-belted, +watch-tower period in literature, and had even got done with it before +Scott began."[29] + +Elsewhere Carlyle protests against the common English notion that German +literature dwells "with peculiar complacency among wizards and ruined +towers, with mailed knights, secret tribunals, monks, specters, and +banditti. . . If any man will insist on taking Heinse's 'Ardinghello' +and Miller's 'Siegwart,' the works of Veit Weber the Younger, and above +all the everlasting Kotzebue,[30] as his specimens of German literature, +he may establish many things. Black Forests and the glories of +Lubberland, sensuality and horror, the specter nun and the charmed +moonshine shall not be wanting. Boisterous outlaws also, with huge +whiskers and the most cat-o'-mountain aspect; tear-stained +sentimentalists, the grimmest man-haters, ghosts and the like suspicious +characters will be found in abundance. We are little read in this +bowl-and-dagger department; but we do understand it to have been at one +time rather diligently cultivated; though at present it seems to be +mostly relinquished. . . What should we think of a German critic that +selected his specimens of British literature from 'The Castle Specter,' +Mr. Lewis' 'Monk,' or the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' and 'Frankenstein, or +the Modern Prometheus'?. . . 'Faust,' for instance, passes with many of +us for a mere tale of sorcery and art magic. It would scarcely be more +unwise to consider 'Hamlet' as depending for its main interest on the +ghost that walks in it."[31] + +Now for the works here named, as for the whole class of melodramas and +melodramatic romances which swarmed in Germany during the last quarter of +the century and made their way into English theaters and circulating +libraries, in the shape of translations, adaptations, imitations, two +plays were remotely responsible: Goethe's "Goetz" (1773), with its robber +knights, secret tribunal, imperialist troopers, gypsies, and insurgent +peasants; and Schiller's "Die Raeuber" (1781), with its still more violent +situations and more formidable _dramatis personae_. True, this spawn of +the _Sturm- und Drangzeit_, with its dealings in banditti, monks, +inquisitors, confessionals, torture and poison, dungeon and rack, the +haunted tower, the yelling ghost, and the solitary cell, had been +anticipated in England by Walpole's "Castle of Otranto" and "Mysterious +Mother"; but this slender native stream was now quite overwhelmed in the +turbid flood of sensational matter from the Black Forest and the Rhine. +Mrs. Radcliffe herself had drunk from foreign sources. In 1794 she made +the tour of the Rhine and published a narrative of her journey in the +year following. The knightly river had not yet become hackneyed; +Brentano had not invented nor Heine sung the seductive charms of the +Luerlei; nor Byron mused upon "the castled crag of Drachenfels." The +French armies were not far off, and there were alarums and excursions all +along the border. But the fair traveler paused upon many a spot already +sacred to legend and song: the Mouse Tower and Rolandseck and the Seven +Mountains. She noted the peasants, in their picturesque costumes, +carrying baskets of soil to the steep vineyard terraces: the ruined keeps +of robber barons on the heights, and the dark sweep of the romantic +valleys, bringing in their tributary streams from north and south. + +Lockhart says that Scott's translations of "Goetz" should have been +published ten years sooner to have had its full effect. For the English +public had already become sated with the melodramas and romances of +Kotzebue and the other German _Kraftmaenner_; and the clever parody of +"The Robbers," under the title of "The Rovers," which Canning and Ellis +had published in the _Anti-Jacobin_, had covered the entire species with +ridicule. The vogue of this class of fiction, the chivalry romance, the +feudal drama, the robber play and robber novel, the monkish tale and the +ghost story (_Ritterstueck, Ritteroman, Raeuberstuck, Raeuberroman, +Klostergeschichte, Gespensterlied_) both in Germany and England, +satisfied, however crudely, the longing of the time for freedom, +adventure, strong action, and emotion. As Lowell said of the +transcendental movement in New England, it was a breaking of windows to +get at the fresh air. Laughable as many of them seem today, with their +improbable plots and exaggerated characters, they met a need which had +not been met either by the rationalizing wits of the Augustan age or by +the romanticizing poets who followed them with their elegiac refinement, +and their unimpassioned strain of reflection and description. They +appeared, for the moment, to be the new avatar of the tragic muse whereof +Akenside and Collins and Warton had prophesied, the answer to their +demand for something wild and primitive, for the return into poetry of +the _Naturton_, and the long-absent power of exciting the tragic +emotions, pity and terror. This spirit infected not merely the +department of the chivalry play and the Gothic romance, but prose fiction +in general. It is responsible for morbid and fantastic creations like +Beckford's "Vathek," Godwin's "St. Leon" and "Caleb Williams," Mrs. +Shelley's "Frankenstein," Shelley's "Zastrozzi" and "St. Irvine the +Rosicrucian," and the American Charles Brockden Brown's "Ormond" and +"Wieland," forerunners of Hawthorne and Poe; tales of sleep-walkers and +ventriloquists, of persons who are in pursuit of the _elixir vitae_, or +who have committed the unpardonable sin, or who manufacture monsters in +their laboratories, or who walk about in the Halls of Eblis, carrying +their burning hearts in their hands. + +Lockhart, however, denies that "Goetz von Berlichingen" had anything in +common with the absurdities which Canning made fun of in the +_Anti-Jacobin_. He says that it was a "broad, bold, free, and most +picturesque delineation of real characters, manners, and events." He +thinks that in the robber barons of the Rhine, with "their forays upon +each other's domains, the besieged castles, the plundered herds, the +captive knights, the brow-beaten bishop and the baffled liege-lord," +Scott found a likeness to the old life of the Scotch border, with its +moss-troopers, cattle raids, and private warfare; and that, as Percy's +"Reliques" prompted the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," so "Goetz" +prompted the "Lay of the Last Minstrel" and "Marmion." He quotes the +passage from "Goetz" where Selbiss is borne in, wounded, by two troopers +who ascend a watch-tower and describe to their leader the further +progress of the battle; and he asks "who does not recognize in Goethe's +drama the true original of the death scene in 'Marmion' and the storm in +'Ivanhoe'?" + +A singular figure now comes upon our stage, Matthew Gregory Lewis, +commonly nicknamed "Monk" Lewis, from the title of his famous romance. +It is a part of the irony of things that so robust a muse as Walter +Scott's should have been nursed in infancy by a little creature like +Lewis. His "Monk" had been published in 1795, when the author was only +twenty. In 1798 Scott's friend William Erskine meet Lewis in London. +The latter was collecting materials for his "Tales of Wonder," and when +Erskine showed him Scott's "William and Helen" and "The Wild Huntsman," +and told him that he had other things of the kind in manuscript, Lewis +begged that Scott would contribute to his collection. Erskine +accordingly put him in communication with Scott, who felt highly +flattered by the Monk's request, and wrote to him that his ballads were +quite at his service. Lewis replied, thanking him for the offer. "A +ghost or a witch," he wrote, "is a _sine qua non_ ingredient in all the +dishes of which I mean to compose my hobgoblin repast." Later in the +same year Lewis came to Edinburgh and was introduced to Scott, who found +him an odd contrast to the grewsome horrors of his books, being a +cheerful, foppish, round-faced little man, a follower of fashion and an +assiduous tuft-hunter. "Mat had queerish eyes," writes his _protege_: +"they projected like those of some insects, and were flattish on the +orbit. His person was extremely small and boyish--he was indeed the +least man I ever saw, to be strictly well and neatly made. . . This +boyishness went through life with him. He was a child and a spoiled +child, but a child of high imagination; and so he wasted himself on ghost +stories and German romances. He had the finest ear for rhythm I ever met +with--finer than Byron's." + +Byron, by the way, had always a kindly feeling for Lewis, though he +laughed at him in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers": + + "O wonder-working Lewis, Monk or Bard, + Who fain would'st make Parnassus a churchyard; + Lo! wreaths of yew, not laurel, bind thy brow; + Thy muse a sprite, Apollo's sexton thou; + Whether on ancient tombs thou tak'st thy stand, + By gibbering specters hailed, thy kindred band, + Or tracest chaste descriptions on thy page, + To please the females of our modest age-- + All hail, M. P.,[32] from whose infernal brain + Thin-sheeted phantoms glide, a grisly train; + At whose command grim women thron in crowds, + And kings of fire, of water and of clouds, + With 'small gray men,' wild yagers and what not, + To crown with honor thee and Walter Scott!" + +In 1816, while on his way to Italy, Lewis sojourned for a space with +Byron and Shelley in their Swiss retreat and set the whole company +composing goblin stories. The most remarkable outcome of this queer +symposium was Mrs. Shelley's abnormal romance, "Frankenstein." The +signatures of Byron and Shelley are affixed, as witnesses, to a codicil +to Lewis' will, which he drew at this time and dated at Maison Diodati, +Geneva; a somewhat rhetorical document in which he provided for the +protection of the slaves on his Jamaica plantations. It was two years +after this, and on his return voyage from a visit to these West Indian +estates, that Lewis died of yellow fever and was buried at sea. Byron +made this note of it in his diary: + + "I'd give the lands of Deloraine + Dark Musgrave were alive again," + +that is, + + "I would give many a sugar cane + Monk Lewis were alive again." + +Scott's modesty led him to depreciate his own verses as compared with +Lewis', some of which he recited to Ballantyne, in 1799, speaking of +their author, says Lockhart, "with rapture." But however fine an ear for +rhythm Lewis may have had, his verse is for the most part execrable; and +his jaunty, jiggling anapaests and pragmatic manner are ludicrously out +of keeping with the horrors of his tale, increasing the air of bathos +which distinguishes his poetry: + + "A toad still alive in the liquor she threw, + And loud shrieked the toad as in pieces it flew: + And ever, the cauldron as over she bent, + She muttered strange words of mysterious intent:" + +or this from the same ballad:[33] + + "Wild laughing, the Fiend caught the hand from the floor, + Releasing the babe, kissed the wound, drank the gore; + A little jet ring from her finger then drew, + Thrice shrieked a loud shriek and was borne from their view." + +Lewis would appear to have inherited his romantic turn from his mother, a +sentimental little dame whose youthful looks caused her often to be taken +for Mat's sister, and whose reading was chiefly confined to novels. The +poor lady was something of a blue-stocking and aspired, herself, to +literary honors. Lewis' devotion to her is very charming, and the +elder-brotherly tone of his letters to her highly amusing. But he had a +dislike of "female authorship": and the rumor having reached his ear that +his mother had written a novel and a tragedy and was preparing to print +them, he wrote to her in alarm, begging her to stay her hand. "I hold +that a woman has no business to be a public character, and that, in +proportion as she acquires notoriety, she loses delicacy. I always +consider a female author as a sort of half-man." He was also, quite +properly, shocked at some gossip which attributed "The Monk," to his +mother instead of to his mother's son. + +We read in the "Life and Correspondence of Matthew Gregory Lewis" (2 +vols., London, 1839), that one of Mrs. Lewis' favorite books was "Glanvil +on Witches." Glanvil was the seventeenth-century writer whose "Vanity of +Dogmatizing,"[34] and "Sadduceismus Triumphatus" rebuked the doubter and +furnished arguments for Cotton Mather's "Wonders of the Invisible World" +(1693), an apology for his share in the Salem witchcraft trials; and +whose description of a ghostly drum, that was heard to beat every night +in a Wiltshire country house, gave Addison the hint for his comedy of +"The Drummer." Young Lewis gloated with a pleasing horror over Glanvil's +pages and the wonderful copperplates which embellished them; particularly +the one which represents the devil beating his airy tympanum over Mr. +Mompesson's house. In the ancient mansion of Stanstead Hall, belonging +to a kinsman of his father, where the boy spent a part of his childhood, +there was a haunted chamber known as the cedar room. "In maturer years," +says his biographer, "Lewis has frequently been heard to declare that at +night, when he was conducted past that gloomy chamber, on the way to his +dormitory, he would cast a glance of terror over his shoulder, expecting +to see the huge and strangely carved folding doors fly open and disclose +some of those fearful shapes that afterward resolved themselves into the +ghastly machinery of his works." + +Lewis' first and most celebrated publication was "Ambrosio, or the Monk" +(1795), a three-volume romance of the Gothic type, and a lineal +descendant of Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe. He began it at Oxford in 1792, +describing it in a letter to his mother as "a romance in the style of +'The Castle of Otranto.'" But in the summer of the same year he went to +Germany and took up his residence at Weimar, where he was introduced to +Goethe and made eager acquaintance with the bizarre productions of the +_Sturm- und Drangperiode_. For years Lewis was one of the most active +intermediaries between the German purveyors of the terrible and the +English literary market. He fed the stage with melodramas and operas, +and stuffed the closet reader with ballads and prose romances.[35] +Meanwhile, being at The Hague in the summer of 1794, he resumed and +finished his "Monk," in ten weeks. "I was induced to go on with it," he +wrote to his mother, "by reading the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' which is, in +my opinion, one of the most interesting books that has ever been +published. . . When you read it, tell me whether you think there is any +resemblance between the character given of Montoni . . . and my own. I +confess that it struck me." This innocent vanity of fancying a likeness +between Anne Radcliffe's dark-browed villain and his own cherubic +personality recalls Scott's story about the picture of Lewis, by +Saunders, which was handed round at Dalkeith House. "The artist had +ingeniously flung a dark folding-mantle around the form, under which was +half-hid a dagger, a dark lantern, or some cut-throat appurtenance; with +all this, the features were preserved and ennobled. It passed from hand +to hand into that of Henry, Duke of Buccleuch, who, hearing the general +voice affirm that it was very like, said aloud, 'Like Mat Lewis! Why, +that picture's like a man.'" "The Monk" used, and abused, the now +familiar apparatus of Gothic romance. It had Spanish grandees, heroines +of dazzling beauty, bravoes and forest banditti, foolish duennas and +gabbling domestics, monks, nuns, inquisitors, magic mirrors, enchanted +wands, midnight incantations, sorcerers, ghosts, demons; haunted +chambers, wainscoated in dark oak; moonlit castles with ruined towers and +ivied battlements, whose galleries rang with the shrieks and blasphemies +of guilty spirits, and from whose portals issued, when the castle clock +tolled one, the specter of a bleeding nun, with dagger and lamp in hand. +There were poisonings, stabbings, and ministrations of sleeping potions; +beauties who masqueraded as pages, and pages who masqueraded as wandering +harpers; secret springs that gave admittance to winding stairs leading +down into the charnel vaults of convents, where erring sisters were +immured by cruel prioresses and fed on bread and water among the +loathsome relics of the dead. + +With all this, "The Monk" is a not wholly contemptible work. There is a +certain narrative power about it which puts it much above the level of +"The Castle of Otranto." And though it partakes of the stilted dialogue +and false conception of character that abound in Mrs. Radcliffe's +romances, it has neither the excess of scenery nor of sentiment which +distinguishes that very prolix narrator. There is nothing strictly +mediaeval about it. The knight in armor cuts no figure and the +historical period is not precisely indicated. But the ecclesiastical +features lend it a semblance of mediaevalism; and one is reminded, though +but faintly, by the imprisonment of the offending sister in the sepulcher +of the convent, of the scene in "Marmion" where Constance is immured in +the vaults of Lindisfarne--a frank anachronism, of course, on Scott's +part, since Lindisfarne had been in ruins centuries before the battle of +Flodden. The motto from Horace on the title page of "The Monk" sums up +its contents, and indeed the contents of most of its author's writings, +prose and verse-- + + "Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas, + Nocturnos lemures portentaque." + +The hero Ambrosio is the abbot of St. Francis' Capuchin monastery in +Madrid; a man of rigid austerity, whose spiritual pride makes him an easy +prey to the temptations of a female demon, who leads him by degrees +through a series of crimes, including incest and parricide, until he +finally sells his soul to the devil to escape from the dungeons of the +Inquisition and the _auto da fe_, subscribing the agreement, in approved +fashion, upon a parchment scroll with an iron pen dipped in blood from +his own veins. The fiend, who enters with thunder and lightning, over +whose shoulders "waved two enormous sable wings," and whose hair "was +supplied by living snakes," then snatches up his victim and soars with +him to a peak of the Sierra Morena, where in a Salvator Rosa landscape of +torrents, cliffs, caverns, and pine forests, by the light of an opera +moon, and to the sound of the night wind sighing hoarsely and "the shrill +cry of mountain eagles," he drops him over a precipice and makes an end +of him. + +A passage from the episode of Agnes de Medina, the incarcerated nun, will +illustrate Lewis' wonder-working arts: "A faint glimmering of light +which strained through the bars permitted me to distinguish the +surrounding horrors. I was oppressed by a noisome, suffocating smell; +and perceiving that the grated door was unfastened, I thought that I +might possibly effect my escape. As I raised myself with this design, my +hand rested upon something soft. I grasped it and advanced it toward the +light. Almighty God! what was my disgust! my consternation! In spite of +its putridity and the worms which preyed upon it, I perceived a corrupted +human head, and recognized the features of a nun who had died some months +before. . . A sepulchral lamp was suspended from the roof by an iron +chain and shed a gloomy light through the dungeon. Emblems of death were +seen on every side; skills, shoulder-blades, thigh-bones and other relics +of mortality were scattered upon the dewy ground. . . As I shrunk from +the cutting wind which howled through my subterraneous dwelling, the +change seemed so striking, so abrupt, that I doubted its reality. . . +Sometimes I felt the bloated toad, hideous and pampered with the +poisonous vapors of the dungeon, dragging his loathsome length along my +bosom; sometimes the quick, cold lizard roused me, leaving his slimy +track upon my face, and entangling itself in the tresses of my wild and +matted hair. Often have I, at waking, found my fingers ringed with the +long worms which bred in the corrupted flesh of my infant." + +"The Monk" won for its author an immediate and wide celebrity, assisted +no doubt by the outcry against its immorality. Lewis tried to defend +himself by pleading that the outline and moral of his story were borrowed +from "The History of Santon Barsisa" in the _Guardian_ (No. 148). But +the voluptuous nature of some of the descriptions induced the Attorney +General to enjoin the sale of the book, and Lewis bowed to public opinion +so far as to suppress the objectionable passages in later editions. +Lewis' melodrama "The Castle Specter" was first performed December 14, +1797, at Drury Lane, ran sixty nights and "continued popular as an acting +play," says the biographer, "up to a very recent period."[36] This is +strong testimony to the contemporary appetite for nightmare, for the play +is a trumpery affair. Sheridan, who had a poor opinion of it, advised +the dramatist to keep the specter out of the last scene. "It had been +said," explains Lewis in his preface, "that if Mr. Sheridan had not +advised me to content myself with a single specter, I meant to have +exhibited a whole regiment of ghosts." The prologue, spoken by Mr. +Wroughton, invokes "the fair enchantress, Romance": + + "The moonstruck child of genius and of woe," + +who + + "--Loathes the sun or blazing taper's light: + The moonbeamed landscape and tempestuous night + Alone she loves; and oft with glimmering lamp + Near graves new opened, or midst dungeons damp, + Drear forests, ruined aisles and haunted towers, + Forlorn she roves and raves away the hours." + +The scene of the drama is Conway Castle in Wales, where abides Earl +Osmond, a feudal tyrant of the "Otranto" type, who is planning an +incestuous marriage with his own niece, concerning which he thus +soliloquizes: "What though she prefer a basilisk's kiss to mine? Because +my short-lived joy may cause her eternal sorrow, shall I reject those +pleasures sought so long, desired so earnestly? That will I not, by +Heaven! Mine she is, and mine she shall be, though Reginald's bleeding +ghost flit before me and thunder in my ear 'Hold! Hold!'--Peace, stormy +heart, she comes." Reginald's ghost does not flit, because Reginald is +still in the flesh, though not in very much flesh. He is Osmond's +brother and Angela's father, and the wicked Earl thought that he had +murdered him. It turns out, however, that, though left for dead, he had +recovered of his hurts and has been kept unbeknown in solitary +confinement, in a dungeon vault under the castle, for the somewhat long +period of sixteen years. He is discovered in Act V., "emaciated, in +coarse garments, his hair hanging wildly about his face, and a chain +bound round his body." + +Reginald's ghost does not flit, but Evelina's does. Evelina is +Reginald's murdered wife, and her specter in "white and flowing garments, +spotted with blood," appears to Angela in the oratory communicating with +the cedar room, which is furnished with an antique bedstead and the +portrait of a lady on a sliding panel. In truth, the castle is +uncommonly well supplied with apparitions. Earl Herbert rides around it +every night on a white horse; Lady Bertha haunts the west pinnacle of the +chapel tower; and Lord Hildebrand may be seen any midnight in the great +hall, playing football with his own head. So says Motley the jester, who +affords the comedy element of the play, with the help of a fat friar who +guzzles sack and stuffs venison pasties, and a soubrette after the +"Otranto" pattern. + +A few poems were scattered through the pages of "The Monk," including a +ballad from the Danish, and another from the Spanish. But the most +famous of these was "Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene," original +with Lewis, though evidently suggested by "Lenore." It tells how a lover +who had gone to Palestine presented himself at the bridal feast of his +faithless fair one, just as the clock struck one and the lights burned +blue. At the request of the company, the strange knight raises his visor +and discloses a skeleton head: + + "All present then uttered a terrified shout; + All turned with disgust from the scene; + The worms they crept in and the worms they crept out, + And sported his eyes and his temples about + While the spectre addressed Imogene." + +He winds his arms about her and sinks with his prey through the yawning +ground; and + + "At midnight four times in each year does her sprite, + When mortals in slumber are bound. + Arrayed in her bridal apparel of white, + Appear in the hall with a skeleton knight + And shriek as he whirls her around. + + "While they drink out of skulls newly torn from the grave, + Dancing round them pale spectres are seen. + Their liquor is blood, and this horrible stave + They how: 'To the health of Alonzo the Brave + And his consort, the Fair Imogene!'" + +Lewis' own contributions to his "Tales of Terror" and "Tales of Wonder," +were of his same raw-head and bloody-bones variety. His imagination +rioted in physical horrors. There are demons who gnash with iron fangs +and brandish gore-fed scorpions; maidens are carried off by the Winter +King, the Water King, the Cloud King, and the Sprite of the Glen; they +are poisoned or otherwise done to death, and their wraiths revisit their +guilty lovers in their shrouds at midnight's dark hour and imprint clammy +kisses upon them with livid lips; gray friars and black canons abound; +requiem and death knell sound through the gloom of the cloisters; echo +roars through high Gothic arches; the anchorite mutters in his mossy +cell; tapers burn dim, torches cast a red glare on vaulted roofs; the +night wind blows through dark aisles; the owl hoots in the turret, and +dying groans are heard in the lonely house upon the heath, where the +black and tattered arras molders on the wall. + +The "Tales of Wonder" included translations by Lewis from Goethe's +"Fisher" and "Erl-King," and from German versions of Runic ballads in +Herder's "Stimmen der Voelker." Scott's "Wild Huntsman," from Buerger, was +here reprinted, and he contributed, in addition, "Frederick and Alice," +paraphrased from a romance-fragment in Goethe's opera "Claudina von Villa +Bella"; and three striking ballads of his own, "The Fire King," a story +of the Crusades, and "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of St. John," Scottish +tales of "gramarye." There were two or three old English ballads in the +collection, such as "Clerk Colvin" and "Tam Lin"; a contribution from +George Colman, Jr., the dramatist, and one from Scott's eccentric friend +Leyden; and the volume concluded with Taylor's "Lenora."[37] + +It is comical to read that the Monk gave Scott lectures in the art of +versification and corrected the Scotticisms and false rhymes in his +translations from Buerger; and that Scott respectfully deferred to his +advice. For nothing can be in finer contrast with Lewis' penny dreadful, +than the martial ring of the verse and the manly vigor of the style in +Scott's part of the book. This is how Lewis writes anapaests, _e.g._: + + "All shrouded she was in the garb of the tomb, + Her lips they were livid, her face it was wan; + A death the most horrid had rifled her bloom + And each charm of beauty was faded and gone." + +And this is how Scott writes them: + + "He clenched his set teeth and his gauntleted hand, + He stretched with one buffet that page on the sand. . . + For down came the Templars like Cedron in flood, + And dyed their long lances in Saracen blood." + +It is no more possible to take Monk Lewis seriously than to take Horace +Walpole seriously. They are both like children telling ghost-stories in +the dark and trying to make themselves shudder. Lewis was even frivolous +enough to compose paradies on his own ballads. A number of these +_facetiae_--"The Mud King," "Giles Jollup the Grave and Brown Sally +Green," etc.--diversify his "Tales of Wonder." + +Scott soon found better work for his hands to do than translating German +ballads and melodramas; but in later years he occasionally went back to +these early sources of romantic inspiration. Thus his poem "The Noble +Moringer" was taken from a "Sammlung Deutscher Volkslieder" published at +Berlin in 1807 by Busching and Von der Hagen. In 1799 he had made a +_rifacimento_ of a melodrama entitles "Der Heilige Vehme" in Veit Weber's +"Sagen der Vorzeit." This he found among his papers thirty years after +(1829) and printed in "The Keepsake," under the title of "The House of +Aspen." Its most telling feature is the description of the Vehm-Gericht +or Secret Tribunal, but it has little importance. In his "Historic +Survey," Taylor said that "Goetz von Berlichingen" was "translated into +English in 1799 at Edinburgh, by Wm. Scott, Advocate; no doubt the same +person who, under the poetical but assumed name of Walter, had since +become the most extensively popular of the British writers"! This +amazing statement is explained by a blunder on the title-page of Scott's +"Goetz," where the translator's name is given as _William_ Scott. But it +led to a slightly acrimonious correspondence between Sir Walter and the +Norwich reviewer.[38] + +The tide of German romance had begun to ebb before the close of the +century. It rose again a few years later, and left perhaps more lasting +tokens this second time; but the ripple-marks of its first invasion are +still discernible in English poetry and prose. Southey was clearly in +error when he wrote to Taylor, September 5, 1798: "Coleridge's ballad, +'The Ancient Mariner' is, I think, the clumsiest attempt at German +sublimity I ever saw."[39] The "Mariner" is not in the least German, and +when he wrote it, Coleridge had not been in Germany and did not know the +language. He had read "Die Rauber," to be sure, some years before in +Tytler's translation. He was at Cambridge at the time, and one night in +winter, on leaving the room of a college friend, carelessly picked up and +took away with him a copy of the tragedy, the very name of which he had +never heard before. "A winter midnight, the wind high and 'The Robbers' +for the first time. The readers of Schiller will conceive what I felt." +He recorded, in the sonnet "To Schiller" (written December, 1794, or +January, 1795), the terrific impression left upon his imagination by + + --"The famished father's cry + From the dark dungeon of the tower time-rent," + +and wish that he might behold the bard himself, wandering at eve-- + + "Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood." + +Coleridge was destined to make the standard translation of "Wallenstein"; +and there are motives borrowed from "The Robbers" and "The Ghost-Seer" in +his own very rubbishy dramas, "Zapolya"--of which Scott made some use in +"Peveril of the Peak"--and "Osorio" (1797). The latter was rewritten as +"Remorse," put on at Drury Lane January 23, 1813, and ran twenty nights. +It had been rejected by Sheridan, who expressed a very proper contempt +for it as an acting play. The Rev. W. L. Bowles and Byron, who had read +it in manuscript and strangely overvalued it, both made interest with the +manager to have it tried on the stage. "Remorse" also took some hints +from Lewis' "Monk." + +But Coleridge came in time to hold in low esteem, if not precisely "The +Robbers" itself, yet that school of German melodrama of which it was the +grand exemplar. In the twenty-third chapter of the "Biographia +Literaria" (1817) he reviewed with severity the Rev. Charles Robert +Maturin's tragedy "Bertram, or the Castle of St. Aldobrand,"[40] and +incidentally gave the genesis of that whole theatric species "which it +has been the fashion, of late years, at once to abuse and to enjoy under +the name of the German Drama. Of this latter Schiller's 'Robbers' was +the earliest specimen, the first-fruits of his youth. . . Only as _such_ +did the maturer judgment of the author tolerate the play." Coleridge +avows that "The Robbers" and its countless imitations were due to the +popularity in Germany of the translations of Young's "Night Thoughts," +Hervey's "Meditations," and Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe." "Add the +ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap-doors, the skeletons, the +flesh-and-blood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine of a modern +author[41] (themselves the literary brood of the 'Castle of Otranto,' the +translations of which, with the imitations and improvements aforesaid, +were about that time beginning to make as much noise in Germany as their +originals were making in England), and, as the compound of these +ingredients duly mixed, you will recognize the so-called _German_ Drama," +which "is English in its origin, English in its materials, and English by +readoption; and till we can prove that Kotzebue, or any of the whole +breed of Kotzebues, whether dramatists or romantic writers or writers of +romantic dramas, were ever admitted to any other shelf in the libraries +of well-educated Germans than were occupied by their originals . . . in +their mother country, we should submit to carry our own brat on our own +shoulders." + +Germany, rather than Italy or Spain, became under these influences for a +time the favored country of romance. English tale-writers chose its +forests and dismantled castles as the scenes of their stories of +brigandage and assassination. One of the best of a bad class of +fictions, _e.g._, was Harriet Lee's "The German's Tale: Kruitzner," in +the series of "Canterbury Tales" written in conjunction with her sister +Sophia (1797-1805). Byron read it when he was fourteen, was profoundly +impressed by it, and made it the basis of "Werner," the only drama of his +which had any stage success. "Kruitzner" is conceived with some power, +but monotonously and ponderously written. The historic period is the +close of the Thirty Years' War. It does not depend mainly for its effect +upon the time-honored "Gothic" machinery, though it makes a moderate use +of the sliding panel and secret passage once again. + +We are come to the gate of the new century, to the date of the "Lyrical +Ballads" (1798) and within sight of the Waverly novels. Looking back +over the years elapsed since Thomson put forth his "Winter," in 1726, we +ask ourselves what the romantic movement in England had done for +literature; if indeed that deserves to be called a "movement" which had +no leader, no programme, no organ, no theory of art, and very little +coherence. True, as we have learned from the critical writings of the +time, the movement, such as it was, was not all unconscious of its own +aims and directions. The phrase "School of Warton" implies a certain +solidarity, and there was much interchange of views and some personal +contact between men who were in literary sympathy; some skirmishing, too, +between opposing camps. Gray, Walpole, and Mason constitute a group, +encouraging each other's studies in their correspondence and occasional +meetings. Shenstone was interested in Percy's ballad collections, and +Gray in Warton's "History of English Poetry." Akenside read Dyer's +"Fleece," and Gray read Beattie's "Minstrel" in MS. The Wartons were +friends of Collins; Collins a friend and neighbor of Thomson; and Thomson +a frequent visitor at Hagley and the Leasowes. Chatterton sought to put +Rowley under Walpole's protection, and had his verses examined by Mason +and Gray. Still, upon the whole, the English romanticists had little +community; they worked individually and were scattered and isolated as to +their residence, occupations, and social affiliation. It does not appear +that Gray ever met Collins, or the Wartons, or Shenstone or Akenside; nor +that MacPherson, Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Chatterton ever saw +each other or any of those first mentioned. There was none of that +united purpose and that eager partisanship which distinguished the +Parisian _cenacle Romantische Schule_ whose members have been so +brilliantly sketched by Heine. + +But call it a movement, or simply a drift, a trend; what had it done for +literature? In the way of stimulus and preparation, a good deal. It had +relaxed the classical bandages, widened the range of sympathy, roused a +curiosity as to novel and diverse forms of art, and brought the literary +mind into a receptive, expectant attitude favorable to original creative +activity. There never was a generation more romantic in temper than that +which stepped upon the stage at the close of the eighteenth century: a +generation fed upon "Ossian" and Rousseau and "The Sorrows of Werther" +and Percy's "Reliques" and Mrs. Radcliffe's romances. Again, in the +department of literary and antiquarian scholarship much had been +accomplished. Books like Tyrwhitt's "Chaucer" and Warton's "History of +English Poetry" had a real importance, while the collection and +preservation of old English poetry, before it was too late, by scholars +like Percy, Ritson, Ellis, and others was a pious labor. + +But if we inquire what positive additions had been made to the modern +literature of England, the reply is disappointing. No one will maintain +that the Rowley poems, "Caractacus," "The Monk," "The Grave of King +Arthur," "The Friar of Orders Gray," "The Castle of Otranto," and "The +Mysteries of Udolpho" are things of permanent value: or even that "The +Bard," "The Castle of Indolence," and the "Poems of Ossian" take rank +with the work done in the same spirit by Coleridge, Scott, Keats, +Rossetti, and William Morris. The two leading British poets of the _fin +du siecle_, Cowper and Burns, were not among the romanticists. It was +left for the nineteenth century to perform the work of which the +eighteenth only prophesied. + + +[1] Scherer's "History of German Literature," Conybeare's Translation, +Vol. II, p. 26. + +[2] Scherer, Vol. II. pp. 123-24. + +[3] See _ante_, pp. 300-301. + +[4] See _ante_, pp. 337-38. + +[5] "The Beauties of Shakspere. Regularly selected from each Play. With +a general index. Digesting them under proper heads." By the Rev. Wm. +Dodd, 1752. + +[6] "Es war nicht blos die Tiefe der Poesie, welche sie zu Shakespeare +zog, es war ebenso sehr das sichere Gefuehl, das hier germanische Art und +Kunst sei."--_Hettner's Geschichte der deutschen Literatur_, 3.3.1. s. +51. "Ist zu sagen, dass die Abwendung von den Franzosen zu den +stammverwandten Englaendern . . . in ihrem geschichtlichen Ursprung und +Wachsthum wesentlich die Auflehnung des erstarkten germanischen +Volksnaturells gegen die erdrueckende Uebermacht der romanischen +Formenwelt war," etc.--_Ibid._ s. 47. See also, ss. 389-95, for a review +of the interpretation of the great Shaksperian roles by German actors +like Schroeder and Fleck. + +[7] "Wir hoeren einen Nachklang jener froehlichen Unterhaltungen, in denen +die Freunde sich ganz und gar in Shakepear'schen Wendungen und Wortwitzen +ergingen, in seiner Uebersetzung von Shakespeare's 'Love's Labour's +Lost'"--_Hettner_, s. 244. + +[8] See the whole oration (in Hettner, s. 120,) which gives a most vivid +expression of the impact of Shakspere upon the newly aroused mind of +Germany. + +[9] "German Literature," Vol. II. pp. 82-83 + +[10] "Unter allen Menschen des Achtzehnten Jahrhunderts war Geothe wieder +der Erste, weicher die lang verachtete Herrlichkeit der gothischen +Baukunst empfand und erfasste."--_Hettner_, 3.3.1., s. 120. + +[11] _Construirtes Ideal_. + +[12] Scherer, II. 129-31. "Oberon" was englished by William Sotheby in +1798. + +[13] "Vor den classischen Dichtarten faengt mich bald an zu ekeln," wrote +Buerger in 1775. "Charakteristiken": von Erich Schmidt (Berlin, 1886) s. +205. "O, das verwuenschte Wort: Klassisch!" exclaims Herder. "Dieses +Wort war es, das alle wahre Bildung nach den Alten als noch lebenden +Mustern verdrangte. . . Dies Wort hat manches Genie unter einen Schutt +von Worten vergraben. . . Es hat dem Vaterland bluehende Fruchtbaeume +entzogen!"--_Hettner_ 3.3.1. s. 50. + +[14] "German Literature," Vol. II. p. 230. + +[15] "Literaturegeschichte," 3.3.1. s. 30-31. + +[16] See _ante_, p. 48. + +[17] "Our polite neighbors the French seem to be most offended at certain +pictures of primitive simplicity, so unlike those refined modes of modern +life in which they have taken the lead; and to this we may partly impute +the rough treatment which our poet received from them"--_Essay on Homer_ +(Dublin Edition, 1776), p. 127. + +[18] See Francis W. Newman's "Iliad" (1856) and Arnold's "Lectures on +Translating Homer" (1861). + +[19] "Romance," Edgar Poe. + +[20] "Lockhart's Life of Scott," Vol. I. p. 163. + +[21] For full titles and descriptions of these translations, as well as +for the influence of Buerger's poems in England, see Alois Brandl: "Lenore +in England," in "Charakteristiken," by Erich Schmidt (Berlin, 1886) ss. +244-48. Taylor said in 1830 that no German poem had been so often +translated: "eight different versions are lying on my table and I have +read others." He claimed his to be the earliest, as written in 1790, +though not printed till 1796. "Lenore" won at once the honors of +parody--surest proof of popularity. Brandl mentions two--"Miss Kitty," +Edinburgh, 1797, and "The Hussar of Magdeburg, or the Midnight Phaeton," +Edinburgh, 1800, and quotes Mathias' satirical description of the piece +("Pursuits of Literature," 1794-97) as "diablerie tudesque" and a "'Blue +Beard' story for the nursery." The bibliographies mention a new +translation in 1846 by Julia M. Cameron, with illustrations by Maclise; +and I find a notice in Allibone of "The Ballad of Lenore: a Variorum +Monograph," 4to, containing thirty metrical versions in English, +announced as about to be published at Philadelphia in 1866 by Charles +Lukens. _Quaere_ whether this be the same as Henry Clay Lukens ("Erratic +Enrico"), who published "Lean 'Nora" (Philadelphia, 1870; New York, +1878), a title suggestive of a humorous intention, but a book which I +have not seen. + +[22] "History of German Literature," Vol. II. p. 123. + +[23] These are book phrases, not true ballad diction. + +[24] _Cf_. The "Ancient Mariner": + + "The feast is set, the guests are met, + May'st hear the merry din." + +[25] "Memoir of Wm. Taylor of Norwich," by J. W. Robberds (1843), Vol. II. +p. 573. + +[26] For Taylor's opinion of Carlyle's papers on Goethe in the _Foreign +Review_, see "Historic Survey," Vol. III. pp. 378-79. + +[27] "Memoir of Taylor," Vol. I. p. 255. + +[28] Among the most notable of these was "Maler" (Friedrich) Mueller's +"Golo und Genoveva" (written 1781; published 1811); Count Toerring's +"Agnes Bernauerin" (1780); and Jacob Meyer's "Sturm von Borberg" (1778), +and "Fust von Stromberg" (1782). Several of these were very successful +on the stage. + +[29] "Essay on Walter Scott." + +[30] Kotzebue's "The Stranger" ("Menschenhass und Reue") still keeps the +English stage. Sheridan's "Pizarro"--a version of Katzebue's "Spaniards +in Peru"-was long a favorite; and "Monk" Lewis made another translation +of the same in 1799, entitled "Rolla," which, however, was never acted. + +[31] "State of German Literature." + +[32] Lewis sat in Parliament for Hindon, Wilts, succeeding Beckford of +"Vathek" and Fonthill Abbey fame. + +[33] "The Grim White Woman," in "Tales of Wonder." + +[34] Matthew Arnold's lovely "Scholar Gypsy" was suggested by a passage in +this. + +[35] The following is a list of his principal translations: "The Minister" +(1797), from Schiller's "Kabale and Liebe"; played at Covent Garden in +1803, as "The Harper's Daughter." "Rolla" (1799), from Kotzebue's +"Spaniards in Peru." "Adelmorn, or the Outlaw" (1800), played at Drury +Lane, 1801. "Tales of Terror" (1801) and "Tales of Wonder" (1801). +(There seems to be some doubt as to the existence of the alleged Kelso +editions of these in 1799 and 1800, respectively. See article on Lewis +in the "Dict. Nat. Biog.") "The Bravo of Venice" (1804), a prose +romance, dramatized and played at Covent Garden, as "Rugantino," in 1805. +"Feudal Tyrants" (1807), a four-volume romance. "Romantic Tales" (1808), +4 vols. From German and French. + +[36] The printed play had reached its eleventh edition in 1803. + +[37] The "Tales of Terror," and "Tales of Wonder" are reprinted in a +single volume of "Morley's Universal Library," 1887. + +[38] See "Memoir of Wm. Taylor," Vol. II. Pp. 533-38. + +[39] "Memoir of Taylor," Vol. I. p. 223. + +[40] This was one of the latest successes of the kind. It was played at +Drury Lane in 1816 for twenty-two nights, bringing the author 1000 +pounds, and the printed play reached the seventh edition within the year. +Among Maturin's other works were "The Fatal Revenge" (1807), "Manuel" +(Drury Lane, 1817) "Fredolfo" (Covent Garden, 1817), and his once famous +romance, "Melmoth the Wanderer" (1820), see _ante_, p. 249. + +[41] Mrs. Radcliffe. + + + + +BIBLIOGRAPHY + +[This bibliography is intended to give practical aid to any reader who +may wish to follow up the history of the subject for himself. It by no +means includes all the books and authors referred to in the text; still +less, all that have been read or consulted in the preparation of the +work.] + + Addison, Joseph. Works. New York, 1856. 6 vols. + Akenside, Mark. Poetical Works. Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1837. + Amherst, Alicia. "History of Gardening in England." London, 1896. + Arnold, Matthew. "The Study of Celtic Literature," and "Lectures on + Translating Homer." London, 1893. + Austen, Jane. "Northanger Abbey," London, 1857. + + Bagehot, Walter. "Literary Studies." London, 1879. 2 vols. + Beattie, James. Poetical Works. Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1854. + Beckford, William. "History of the Caliph Vathek." New York, 1869. + Bell, John. "Classical Arrangement of Fugitive Poetry." London, + 1790-97. 18 vols. + Blair, Robert. Poetical works. Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1854. + Boswell, James. "Life of Samuel Johnson." Fitzgerald's ed. London, + 1874. 3 vols. + Boswell, James. "Life of Samuel Johnson." Abridged ed. New York, 1878. + Boyesen, H.H. "Essays on German Literature." New York, 1892. + Brandl, Alois. "Lenore in England," in "Characteristiken," by Erich + Schmidt. Berlin, 1886. + Brunetiere, Ferdinand. "Etudes Critiques." Troisieme Serie. Tome III. + Paris, 1890. + Bryant, Jacob. "Observations upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley." London, + 1781. 2 vols. + Brydges, Samuel Egerton. Poems. 4th ed. London, 1807. + Buerger, Gottfriend August. "Saemmtliche Werke." Gottingen, 1844. + 4 vols. + Byron, Geo. Gordon Noel. Works. London, 1832-33. 15 vols. + + Cambridge, Richard Owen. Works. London, 1803. + Cameron, Ewen. "The Fingal of Ossian, rendered into Heroic Verse," + Warrington, 1776. + Campbell, J. F. "Leabhar na Feinne." London, 1872. + Campbell, J. F. "Popular Tales of the West Highlands." Edinburgh, + 1862. 4 vols. + Canning, George, Ellis, and Frere. "The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin." + London, 1890. (Carisbrooke Library, Vol. VI.) + Carlyle, Thomas. Works. London, 1869-72. 31 vols. + Chateaubriand, F. A. R. de. "The Beauties of Christianity." Translation + of F. Shoberl. Philadelphia, 1815. + Chatterton, Thomas. Poetical Works. Skeat's ed. London, 1871. 2 vols. + Chatterton, Thomas. "The Rowley Poems." Tyrwhitt's ed. London, 1777. + Chatterton, Thomas. "The Rowley Poems." Mille's ed. London, 1782. + Chatterton, Thomas. "A Story of the Year 1770." By David Masson. + London, 1874. + Chatterton, Thomas. 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("Deutsche National Litteratur"). + Hettner, Hermann J. T. "Litteraturgeschichte." Theil III. + Braunschweig, 1872. + Hickes, George. "Thesaurus Linguarum Vett. Septentrionalium." Oxford, + 1703-05. 3 vols. Folio. + Highland Society. "Report on the Poems of Ossian." Edinburgh, 1805. + Hole, R. "Fingal Rendered into Verse." London, 1786. + Howitt, William. "Homes of the Poets." New York, 1846. 2 vols. + Hugo, Victor Marie. "Preface to Cromwell" in Vol. I., "Oeuvres + Completes." Paris, 1863. + Hurd, Richard. Works. London, 1811. 8 vols. + + Johnson, Samuel. "Lives of the Poets." Hale's ed. London, 1890. + 3 vols. + Johnson, Samuel. "Lives of Milton, Dryden, Swift, Addison, Pope, and + Gray." Arnold's ed. New York, 1878. + Johnson, Samuel. "Preface to Shakspere," in vol. II., Works. Murphy's + ed. London, 1816. + + Kavanagh, Julia. "English Women of Letters." London, 1863. 2 vols. + Keats, John. "Life and Letters." By R. Monckton Milnes. New York, + 1848. + Keats, John. "Poetical Works." Rossetti's ed. London. 1876. + Knight, Charles. "Pictorial Shakspere." London, 1867. 2d ed. 8 vols. + Knox, V. "Essays." London, 1803. 15th ed. 3 vols. + Kotzebue, A. F. F. von. "The Stranger," in "Sargent's Modern Standard + Drama." New York, 1847. 2 vols. + + Laing, Malcolm. "Dissertation on Ossian's Poems." Appendix to "History + of Scotland." London, 1804. 2d ed. 4 vols. + Langbaine, Gerard. "An Account of the English Dramatic Poets." Oxford, + 1691. + Lee, Harriet. "Canterbury Tales." New York, 1857. 2 vols. + Leland, Thomas. "Longsword, Earl of Salisbury." London, 1762. 2 vols. + Lennox, Charlotte. "Shakspere Illustrated." London, 1753-54. 3 vols. + Lessing, G. E. "Saemmtliche Schriften." Berlin, 1838-44. 13 vols. + Lewis, M. G. Poems. London, 1812. + Lewis, M. G. "Tales of Terror and Wonder." Morley's Universal Library. + London, 1887. + Lewis, M. G. "The Monk." London, 1796. 3 vols. + Lockhart, J. G. "Life of Scott." 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London, 1832. 2d ed. 2 vols. + Robberds, J. W. "Memoir of Wm. Taylor of Norwich." London, 1843. + 2 vols. + + Ruskin, John. "Modern Painters." New York, 1857-60. 5 vols. + Rymer, Thomas. "The Tragedies of the Last Age Considered and Examined." + London, 1692. 2d ed. + + Sainte Palaye, J. B. de la Curne de. "Memoires sur 'Ancienne + Chevalerie." Paris, 1759. 3 vols. + Scherer, Wilhelm. "History of German Literature." (Conybeare's trans.) + New York, 1886. 2 vols. + Schiller, Friedrich. "Die Raeuber," in Vol. II., Saemmtliche Werke. + Stuttgart and Taebingen, 1838. + Schiller, Friedrich. "Uber naive und sentimentale Dichtung," Vol. XII., + Saemmtliche Werke. + Schlegel, A. W. von. "Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature." + (Black's trans.) London, 1846. + Scott, Walter. "Critical and Miscellaneous Essays." Philadelphia, 1841. + 3 vols. + Scott, Walter. Poetical Works. Dennis' ed. London, 1892. 5 vols. + Shairp, J. C. "Aspects of Poetry." Boston, 1882. + Shelley, Mary. "Frankenstein." Philadelphia, 1833. + Sheridan, R. B. "Pizarro." Works. London, 1873. + Shenstone, William. Poetical Works. Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1854. + Stendhal, de (Marie Henri Beyle). "Racine et Shakespere." Paris, 1854. + New ed. + Stephen, Leslie. "History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century." + New York, 1876. 2 vols. + Stephen, Leslie. "Hours in a Library." 2d Series. London, 1876. + Stillingfleet, Benjamin. "Literary Life and Select Works." London, + 1811. 2 vols. + Sullivan, Wm. R. Article on Celtic Literature in "Encyclopedia + Britannica." + + Taylor, William. "Historical Survey of German Poetry." London, 1830. + 3 vols. + Thompson, William. "Poems on Several Occasions." Oxford, 1757. + Thomson, James. Poetical Works. Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1853. + + Vigny, Alfred de. "Stello," Vol. IV. Oeuvres. Paris, 1836. 3d ed. + + Walpole, Horace. "The Castle of Otranto." Philadelphia, 1840. + Walpole, Horace. Works. London, 1798. 5 vols. + Ward, T. H. "The English Poets." London, 1880-81. 4 vols. + Warton, Joseph. "Essay on Pope." London, 1806. 5th ed. 2 vols. + Warton. Joseph. Poems, in "Chalmers' Poets," Vol. XVIII. 1810 + Warton, Thomas, Sr. "Poems on Several Occasions." London, 1748. + Warton, Thomas, Jr. "History of English Poetry." Ed. Hazlitt. + London, 1871. 4 vols. + Warton, Thomas. "Observations on the Faery Queene." London, 1870. + 2 vols. New ed. + Weber, H. W. "English Metrical Romances." Edinburgh, 1810. 3 vols. + West, Gilbert. Poetical Works in "Chalmers' Poets," Vol. XIII. 1810. + Wilkie, William. Poetical Works in "Chalmers' Poets," Vol. XVI., 1810. + Winstanley, William. "Lives of the English Poets." London, 1687. + Wodrow, John. "Carthon, etc. Attempted in English Verse." Edinburgh, + 1769. + Wodrow, John. "Fingal Translated into English Heroic Rhyme." Edinburgh, + 1771. 2 vols. + Wood, Robert. "Essay on Homer." Dublin, 1776. + Wordsworth, William. Poetical Words. Centenary ed. London, 1870. + 6 vols. + + Young, Edward. "The Complaint; or, Night Thoughts." Gilfillan's ed. + Edinburgh, 1853. + Young, Edward. Works in Prose. London, 1765. + + + + + INDEX. + + Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren, 374 + Abuse of Traveling, The, 84, 89 + Account of the English Dramatic Poets, An, 69 + Account of the Greatest English Poets, An, 80 + Account of Wm. Canynge's Feast, 344, 355 + Adams, Jean, 95 + Addison, Joseph, 35, 37, 40-42, 45, 46, 49-52, 55-57, 80, 120, + 126, 139, 141, 148, 152, 178, 179, 181, 210, 218, 219, 223, + 226-28, 283-85, 377, 382, 388, 408 + Adelmorn, 409 + Adonais, 98, 370 + Adventurer, The, 207 + Adventures of a Star, 353 + Aella, 344, 346, 349, 363-65, 367 + Aeneid, The, 56, 328 + Aesop's Fables, 84 + Agamemnon, 75 + Agnes Bernauerin, 399 + Aiken, Lucy, 391, 397 + Akenside, Mark, 52, 75, 84, 85, 91, 102, 106, 124, 136, 139-42, + 145, 157, 159, 168, 215, 228, 235, 403, 422, 423 + Albion's Triumph, 85 + Alfieri, Vittorio, 3 + Alley, The, 80 + Allibone's Dictionary of Authors, 392, 393 + Alonzo the Brave, 415 + Alps, The, 182 + Ambrosio, see the Monk. + Amherst, Alicia, 119, 123 + Amis et Amile, 64 + Ancient Armor, 189 + Ancient Lays, 326 + Ancient Mariner, The, 18, 262, 269, 299, 369, 394, 419 + Ancient Songs, 293 + Anecdotes of Painting, 230, 351 + Annus Mirabilis, 137 + Another Original Canto, 84 + Anti-Jacobin, The, 402, 403 + Antiquities of Scotland, 187 + Apology for Smectymnuus, 146 + Apuleius, Lucius, 16, 220 + Arcadia, The Countess of Pembroke's, 239 + Archimage, 84 + Architectura Gothica, 181 + Ardinghello, 400 + Argenis, 241, 242 + Argument against Abolishing Christianity, 42 + Ariosto, Lodovico, 25, 100, 219, 222, 225, 226 + Aristotle, 19, 38, 51, 55, 274, 276 + Arme Heinrich, Der, 64 + Armstrong, Jno., 106, 124 + Arnold's Chronicle, 274 + Arnold, Matthew, 71, 173, 315, 389, 408 + Ars Poetica, 47 + Art of Preserving Health, 124 + Art Poetique, L', 47 + Aspects of Poetry, 315 + Atalanta in Calydon, 35 + Athalie, 217 + Atlantic Monthly, The, 11 + Aucassin et Nicolete, 64, 189, 221 + Austen, Jane, 263 + Aytoun, Wm. E., 269 + + Babes in the Wood, see Children in the Wood. + Babo, Joseph M., 398 + Bacon, Francis, 8, 120 + Bagehot, Walter, 17 + Bailey's Dictionary, 360 + Ballads that Illustrate Shakspere, 284 + Ballantyne's Novelist's Library, 249 + Balzac, Honore de, 249 + Banks of Yarrow, The, 274 + Bannatyne, Geo., 284 + Banville, Theodore F. de, 373 + Baour-Lormian, P. M. F. L., 337 + Barbauld, Anna L., 391 + Barclay, Jno., 241 + Bard, The, 173, 193, 194, 196, 424 + Barrett, Wm., 348, 354, 364, 367 + Bartholin, Thos., 191, 196 + Battle of Hastings, The, 345, 346, 348, 364, 365 + Battle of Otterburn, The, 278 + Bayly, T. H., 254 + Beattie, Jas., 85, 97, 166, l86, 242, 245-47, 251, 302-05, 422 + Beaumont and Fletcher, 284 + Beauties of Shakspere, The, 377 + Beckford, Wm., 403, 405 + Bedingfield, Thos., 85, 97, 215 + Bell, Edward, 340, 342 + Bell of Arragon, The, 172 + Belle Dame sans Merci, La, 299 + Bell's Fugitive Poetry, 159, 161 + Bentham, Jas, 180 + Beowulf, 25, 318 + Beresford, Jas., 391 + Berkeley, Geo., 31 + Bernart de Ventadour, 64 + Bertram, 420 + Both Gelert, 391 + Biographia Literaria, 59, 420 + Black-eyed Susan, 57, 273 + Blacklock, Thos., 85, 333 + Blair, Hugh, 309, 313, 320. 335 + Blair, Robert, 163, 164, 251 + Blake, Wm., 28, 164, 365, 366, 372 + Blenheim, 104 + Boccaccio, Giovanni, 28, 29, 49 + Bodmer, J. J., 374, 375 + Boiardo, M. M., 25, 100 + Boileau-Despreaux, N., 35, 38, 47, 49, 65, 212, 214, 226, 227 + Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount, 41, 135, 382 + Bonny Earl of Murray, The, 300 + Bonny George Campbell, 275 + Borck, C. von, 377 + Bossuet, J. B., 38 + Boswell, Jas., 94, 105, 139, 150, 174, 288, 312, 320, 355 + Botanic Garden, The, 99 + Bouhours, Dominique, 49, 227 + Bowles, W. L., 420 + Boy and the Mantle, The, 300 + Boyesen, H. H., 23 + Braes of Yarrow, The, 61, 297 + Brandl, Alois, 391-93 + Bravo of Venice, The, 409 + Brentano, Clemens, 384, 402 + Bristowe Tragedy, The, 346, 349, 366, 370 + Brockes, B. H., 106 + Brown, "Capability," 124, 130 + Brown, Chas. B., 403 + Brown Robyn's Confession, 278 + Browne, Sir Thos., 40, 66 + Browne, Wm., 79 + Browning, Robert, 43 + Brunetiere, Ferdinand, 2, 5, 11, 14 + Bryant, Jacob, 356 + Brydges, Saml. Egerton, 336 + Buchanan, Robt., 272 + Buerger, G. A., 279, 289, 301, 375, 376, 382, 389-97, 416, 417 + Burney, Francis, 252 + Burning Babe, The, 41 + Burns, Robt., 57, 95. 112, 187, 334, 360, 424 + Burton, J. H., 178 + Burton, Robt., 162 + Byron, Geo. Gordon, Lord, 5, 16, 24, 36, 49, 78, 98, 107, 135, + 181, 222, 229, 238, 250, 255, 262, 328-30, 333, 353, 362, 370, + 402, 405, 406, 420, 421 + + Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 25 + Caleb Williams, 403 + Calverley. C. S., 270 + Cambridge, R. O., 84, 89, 92, 98, 151, 228, 229 + Cameron, Ewen, 335 + Cameron, Julia M., 393 + Campbell, Thos., 142, 143 + Campbell, J. F., 314, 322, 323, 325, 327 + Canning, Geo., 402, 403 + Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 27, 63, 358, 359 + Canterbury Tales (Lee), 421 + Caractacus, 190, 194, 195, 306, 424 + Caradoc, 195 + Carew, Thos., 66 + Carey, Henry, 57 + Caric-thura, 334 + Carle of Carlisle, The, 293 + Carlyle, Thos., 317, 330, 334, 397-400 + Carmen Seculare, 35 + Carter, Jno., 189 + Carthon, 311, 333, 335 + Castle of Indolence, the, 75, 85, 92-94, 97, 104, 114, 165, + 219, 424 + Castle of Otranto, The, 188, 211, 215, 223, 129, 231, 236-43, + 247, 249, 253, 255, 340, 346, 362, 367, 401, 409, 411, + 414, 415, 421, 424 + Castle Spectre, The, 401, 413-15 + Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, The, 250, 258, 261 + Cath-Loda, 334 + Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors, 230 + Cato, 51, 218, 388 + Celtic Literature (Sullivan), 315, 325 + Celtic Literature, on the Study of (Arnold), 315 + Cerdick, 329 + Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 244 + Cesarotti, M., 321, 337 + Champion of Virtue, The, 241-43 + Chanson de Roland, The, 27, 64 + Chappell, Wm., 270 + Charakteristiken, 382, 391 + Chase, The (Scott), 391 + Chase, The (Somerville), 124 + Chateaubriand, F. A. de., 255, 332, 333 + Chatterton (Jones and Herman), 373 + Chatterton (Masson), 362 + Chatterton (Vigny), 372, 373 + Chatterton, Thos., 152, 188, 211, 235, 245, 294, 317, 328, + 339-73, 384, 422, 423 + Chaucer, Geoffrey, 27, 28, 30, 63, 66, 69, 108, 154, 188, 199, + 212, 213, 244, 266, 272, 279, 280, 294, 301, 304, 322, 342, + 358-60, 363, 371, 382, 383, 433 + Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of, 40, 50, 137 + Chevy Chase, 274, 283-86, 300, 346, 377 + Child, F. J., 267, 284 + Child Maurice, 292 + Child of Elle, The, 289, 290, 301 + Child Waters, 281, 295, 298, 301 + Childe Harold, 98, 250, 333, 334, 364 + Children in the Wood, The, 273, 283, 285, 288, 302 + Choice of Hercules, The, 85 + Chrestien de Troyes, 27 + Christabel, 363, 369, 394 + Christian Ballads, 165 + Christ's Kirk o' the Green, 66 + Churchill, Chas., 353 + Cibber, Colley, 74, 176 + Cid, The, 298 + City of Dreadful Night, The, 162 + Clarissa Harlowe, 352, 421 + Classic and Romantic, 11 + Classiques et Romantiques, 2 + Classische Walpurgisnacht, 385 + Claudina von Villa Bella, 417 + Clerk, Archibald, 313, 320, 321, 323, 324 + Clerk Colvin, 279, 417 + Clerkes Tale, The, 280, 281 + Coleridge, S. T., 59, 66, 73, 108, 110, 161, 188, 262, 265, + 269, 299, 328, 363, 366, 368, 369, 372, 376, 387, 388, 394, + 419-21, 424 + Colin's Mistakes, 84 + Collins, Wm., 25, 75, 104, 110, 112, 114, 118, 129, 136, 142, + 151, 155, 156, 158, 163, 165, 166, 168-72, 175, 184, 186, 193, + 197, 215, 251, 279, 281, 384, 403, 422, 423 + Collection of Old Ballads, A., 284 + Colman, Geo., Jr., 176, 254, 417 + Colvin, Sidney, 16-18 + Companion to the Oxford Guide Book, 202 + Complaint of Ninathoma, The, 328 + Complete Art of Poetry, The, 69, 72 + Comus, 16, 144, 149, 150, 215 + Conan, 195 + Concubine, The, 85, 95 + Conjectures on Original Composition, 387 + Conquest of Granada, The, 44 + Contemplation, 297 + Cooper's Hill, 39 + Coriolanus, 72, 74 + Corneille, Pierre, 38, 65, 67 + Corsair, The, 334 + Cottle, Joseph, 350, 358, 368 + Count of Narbonne, The, 240 + Country Walk, The, 142 + Cowley, Abraham, 37, 38, 53, 66, 79, 120, 228 + Cowper, Wm., 53, 57, 103, 108, 110, 112, 115, 424 + Coxe, A. C., 165 + Crabbe, Geo., 103 + Crashaw, Richard, 41 + Croft. Herbert, 367, 368 + Croma, 336 + Cromwell, 19, 35 + Croxall, Saml., 84 + Crusade, The, 199 + Cumberland, Richard, 74, 177 + Cumnor Hall, 94 + Cyder, 104, 124 + + Dacier, Anne L., 49 + Dalrymple, Sir David, 291, 306, 336 + Danmarks Gamie Folkeviser, 266 + Dante Alighieri, 22, 28, 29, 64, 235 + Darke Ladye, The, 369 + Darthula, 314, 335 + Darwin, Erasmus, 99 + Davenant, Wm., 67, 74, 137, 226 + David Balfour, 258 + Davies, John, 137 + De Anglorum Gentis Origine, 192 + De Causis Contemnendae Mortis, 191 + De Imitatione Christi, 64 + Dean of Lismore's Book, The, 314 + Death of Calmar and Orla, The, 328 + Death of Cuthullen, The, 335 + Death of Hoel, The, 195 + Death of Mr. Pope, 85 + Defence of Poesy, 72, 274 + Defence of the Epilogue to the Conquest of Granada, 71 + De Foe, Daniel, 40 + Demonology and Witchcraft, 42, 189 + Demosthenes, 3 + Deirdre, 314 + Denham, Sir Jno., 39 + Denis, Michael, 337, 377 + Dennis, Jno., 49, 62, 69, 72, 74, 285 + Descent of Odin, The, 191, 192, 220 + Deschanel, Emile, 2 + Description of the Leasowes, 133, 139 + Descriptive Poem, A, 185 + Deserted Farm-house, The, 177 + Deserted Village, The, 91, 207 + Deutscher Art und Kunst, Einige Fliegende Blaetter, von, 380, 381 + Dictionary of French Antiquities, 221 + Dictionary of National Biography, 359 + Dies Irae, 64 + Dirge in Cymbeline, The, 75, 163 + Dissertatio de Bardis, 195 + Dissertation on Fable and Romance, 242, 245-47 + Dissertation on the Authenticity of Ossian, 320 + Divine Comedy, The, 27 + Divine Emblems, 164 + Dobson, Austin, 272 + Dobson, Susannah,221 + Dodd, Wm., 377 + Doddington, Geo. Bubb, 111 + Dodsley, Jas., 349 + Dodsley, Robert, 84, 85, 132, 133, 135, 139, 209 + Dodsley's Miscellany, 137, 159, 165 + Don Juan, 5, 49 + Donne, Jno., 28, 37, 66 + Dorset, Chas. Sackville, Earl of, 283 + Douglas, 170, 276, 308 + Dream, A, 85 + Dream of Gerontius, The, 41 + Drummer, The, 408 + Dryden, Jno., 27, 41, 44, 49, 50-53, 62, 63, 66-68, 70, 71, 74, + 79, 80, 104, 137, 148, 149, 177, 192, 209, 210, 212, 213, 216, + 265, 283 + Dugdale, Wm., 198 + Dunciad, The, 34, 56 + Duerer, Albrecht, 162 + D'Urfey, Thos., 74 + Dyer, Jno., 75, 102, 103, 106, 119, 124, 142-45, 168, 215, 422 + + Early English Metrical Romances, 301 + Eastlake, Sir Chas., 54, 55, 199, 231-33 + Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 145 + Edda, The, 64, 190, 196, 220, 313, 390 + Edinburgh Review, The, 350, 397 + Education, 85, 89, 90, 126 + Education of Achilles, The, 85, 97 + Edward, 274, 300 + Edwards, Thos., 53, 89, 161 + Effusions of Sensibility, 250 + Eighteenth Century Literature (Gosse), 84, 104, 106, 163, + l69, 362 + Elegant Extracts, 211 + Elegies (Shenstone's), 137, 138 + Elegy on the Death of Prince Frederick, 85 + Elegy to Thyrza, 135 + Elegy Written in a Churchyard in South Wales, 176 + Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 103, 137, 157, + 163, 167, 173-77, 204 + Elinoure and Juga, 346, 352, 354 + Ellis, Geo., 188, 301, 402, 423 + Elstob, Elizabeth, 192 + Emerson, R, W., 66, 388 + Emilia Galotti, 380 + Endymion, 370 + English and Scottish Popular Ballads, The, 267 + English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 405 + English Garden, The, 123-27, 151 + English Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Perry), 7, 163, + 307, 211, 337 + English Metamorphosis, 364, 365 + English Romantic Movement, The (Phelps), 84, 85, l97, + 283, 297, 329 + English Women of Letters, 249, 262 + Enid, 281 + Enquiry into the Authenticity of the Rowley Poems, 359 + Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning, 208 + Enthusiast, The, 151-53, 160 + Epigoniad, the, 89 + Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard, 56, 157, 163, 218, 220 + Epistle to Augustus, 66, 69, 72, 115 + Epistle to Mathew, 370 + Epistle to Sacheverel, 80 + Epistle to the Earl of Burlington, 120, 129 + Epitaphium Damonis, 146 + Epithalamium, 84 + Erl-King, The, 386, 416 + Erskine, Wm., 203, 404 + Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 68, 70 + Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning, 69 + Essay on Criticism, 47, 50, 388 + Essay on Gothic Architecture, 180 + Essay on Gray (Lowell), 209 + Essay on Homer, 387, 389 + Essay on Man, 34, 41, 113, 175 + Essay on Poetry, 47 + Essay on Pope (Lowell), 60, 169, 173 + Essay on Pope (Warton), 97, 118, 149, 160, 163, 185, 193, + 206, 212-20, 224 + Essay on Satire, 47, 80 + Essay on Scott, 400 + Essay on Shakspere, 69, 72 + Essay on the Ancient Minstrels, 245, 293, 302 + Essay on the Rowley Poems, 359 + Essay on Truth, 303 + Essays on German Literature, 23 + Essays on Men and Manners, 127 + Essays on Poetry and Poets, 363 + Ethelgar, 328 + Etherege, Geo., 38 + Evans, Evan, 195 + Eve of St. Agnes, The, 98, 257, 363 + Eve of St. John, The, 417 + Eve of St. Mark, The, 177, 371 + Evelina, 243, 252 + Evelyn, Jno., 7 + Evergreen, The, 284, 286 + Excellente Ballade of Charitie, An, 366 + Excursion, The (Mallet), 134 + Excursion, The (Wordsworth), 304 + + Fables, (Aesop), 84 + Fables (Dryden), 63 + Faerie Queene, The, 16, 37, 66, 77-101, 154, 215, 225, 365 + Fair Annie, 281, 295 + Fair Circassian, The, 84 + Fair Eleanor, 367 + Fair Janet, 268 + Fair Margaret and Sweet William, 268, 279, 283, 286, 300 + Farewell Hymn to the Country, A, 85 + Fatal Revenge, The, 249, 420 + Fatal Sisters, The, 191 + Faust, 27, 141, 384, 385, 401 + Fergusson, Jas., 233 + Feudal Tyrants, 409 + Fichte, J. G., 387 + Fielding, Henry, 26, 40, 76, 383 + Filicaja, Vincenzio, 49 + Fingal, 309, 311, 313, 317, 322, 324, 335, 336, 338 + Fire King, The, 417 + First Impressions of England, 109, 133 + Fischer, Der, 386 + Fisher, The, 416 + Five English Poets, 372 + Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, 190 + Flaming Heart, The, 41 + Fleece, The, 124, 144, 145, 422 + Fleshly School of Poets, The, 272 + Fletcher, Giles, 78 + Fletcher, Jno., 25, 51, 79, 117, 162, 210 + Fletcher, Phineas, 78 + Ford, Jno., 241 + Foreign Review, The, 398 + Forsaken Bride, The, 280 + Fouque, F. de la M., 4, 26, 384 + Fragments of Ancient Poetry, 306, 307, 309, 311, 323, 326, + 328, 336 + Frankenstein, 401, 403, 406 + Frederick and Alice, 416 + Frederick, Prince of Wales, 84, 137 + Fredolfo, 420 + Freneau, Philip, 177 + Friar of Orders Grey, The, 298, 301, 424 + Froissart, Jean, 27, 64, 236 + From Shakspere to Pope, 39, 60 + Fruehling, Der, 106 + Fuller, Thos., 28 + Furnivall, F. J.,292 + Fust von Stromberg, 399 + + Gammer Gurton's Needle, 293 + Gandalin, 381 + Gang nach dem Eisenhammer, Der, 386 + "Garlands," The, 284 + Garrick, David, 162, 209, 287 + Gaston de Blondville, 250, 259-62 + Gates, L. E., 41, 44 + Gautier, Theophile, 372, 423 + Gay Goshawk, The, 279 + Gay, Jno., 35, 57, 273 + Gebir, 18, 245 + Gedicht eines Skalden, 190, 377 + Genie du Christianisme, Le, 332 + Gentle Shepherd, The, 79 + Georgics, The, 111 + German's Tale, The, 421 + Geron der Adeliche, 381 + Gerstenberg, H. W. von, 190, 377, 387 + Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur (Hettner) 300, 378, 387 + Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, 384 + Ghost-Seer, The, 419 + Gierusalemme Liberata, 214, 225 + Gilderoy, 283 + Gildon, Chas., 49, 62, 69, 72 + Giles Jollop, 418 + Gil Maurice, 276 + Gilpin, Wm., 185 + Glanvil, Joseph, 390, 408 + Gleim, J. W. L., 375 + Glenfinlas, 417 + Goddwyn, 344, 363-65 + Godred Crovan, 329 + Godwin, Wm., 403 + Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 3, 4, 11, 31, 141, 252, 255, 275, + 330, 334, 377-81, 384-87, 389, 397-99, 404, 409, 416, 417 + "Goettinger Hain," The, 378 + Gotz von Berlichingen, 334, 375, 380, 381, 385, 398-404, 418 + Golden Ass, The, 16 + Golden Treasury, The, 57, 277 + Golo und Genoveva, 399 + Goldsmith, Oliver, 76, 91, 112, 113, 162, 177, 186, 207-11, + 287, 354 + Gondibert, 137 + Gorthmund, 329 + Gosse, Edmund, 39, 53, 60, 84, 103, 106, 163, 169, 192, 272, 362 + Gottfried of Strassburg, 3, 64 + Gottsched, J. C., 374, 383 + Gower, Jno., 266, 272 + Grainger, James, 124, 287 + Granville, Geo., 47 + Grave, The, 104, 163, 164, 175 + Grave of King Arthur, The, 199-201, 424 + Graves, Richard, 130-33, 137 + Gray, Thos., 25, 32, 52, 53, 75, 89, 103, 117-19, 123, 136, + 137, 139, 145, 151, 155, 157-60, 163, 164, 166-69, 172-85, + 190-206, 199, 201, 204, 206, 209, 211, 215, 2l6, 2l8, 220, + 221, 229, 235, 238, 251, 276, 286, 302, 306-08, 336, 352, + 356, 362, 377, 384, 387, 422, 423 + Green, Matthew, 136 + Grene Knight, The, 293 + Grim White Woman, The, 407 + Grongar Hill, 104, 119, 142, 143, 145 + Grose, Francis, 187 + Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy, The, 71 + Grundtvig, Svend, 266 + Guardian, The, 120, 126, 413 + Guest, Lady Charlotte, 189 + Gulliver's Travels, 26 + Gummere, F. B., 276 + Gwin, King of Norway, 367 + + Hagley, 108, 109, 122, 127, 131, 133, 136, 183, 303, 422 + Hales, J. W., 289, 290 + Hallam, Henry, 189 + Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 379, 387 + Hamilton, Wm., 61, 279 + Hamlet, 387, 401 + Hammond, Jas., 137 + Hardyknut, 286 + Harper's Daughters, The, 409 + Hartmann von Aue, 64, 381 + Harvey, Geo., 336 + Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 403 + Haystack in the Flood, The, 299, 363 + Hayward, A., 234 + Hazlitt, Wm., 161, 254 + Hazlitt, W. C., 205 + Hearne, Thos., 201 + Hedge, F. H., 11, 14, 16 + Heilas, The, 329 + Heilige Vehm, Der, 418 + Heine, Heinrich, 2, 24, 330, 409, 423 + Heir of Lynne, The, 290 + Helen of Kirkconnell, 274 + Heliodorus, 244 + Hellenics, 3 + Henriade, The, 50, 214, 216, 217 + Henry and Emma, 295, 296 + Herbert, Geo., 28, 66, 228 + Herd, David, 299 + Herder, J. G. von, 274, 300, 301, 337, 376, 378, 380, 384, + 387, 389, 416 + Hermann und Dorothea, 4, 385 + Hermit of Warkworth, The, 186, 289, 294, 298 + Hermit, The (Beattie), 186, 305 + Hermit, The (Goldsmith), 113, 186 + Hermit, The (Parnell), 186 + Herrick, Robert, 66 + Hervarer Saga, The, 192 + Hervey, Jas., 421 + Hettner, H. J. T., 378, 379, 38l, 383, 387 + Hicks, Geo., 192, 193 + Hill, Aaron, 217 + Hind and the Panther, The, 41 + Histoire de Dannemarc, 190, 221, 377 + Histoire des Troubadours, 221, 222 + Histoire du Romantisme, 372 + Historical Anecdotes of Heraldry, and Chivalry, 221 + Historic Doubts, 230 + Historic Survey of German Poetry, 397, 398, 418 + Historic of Peyncteynge in England, 351 + History of Architecture, 233 + History of Bristol, 348, 364 + History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt, 245 + History of England (Hume), 100 + History of English Literature (Taine), 316 + History of English Poetry (Warton), 36, 205, 206, 211, 245, + 260, 359, 422, 423 + History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 32, 41 + History of Gardening, 119, 123 + History of German Literature (Scherer), 374, 380, 382, 385, 394 + History of Opinion on the Writings of Shakspere, 74 + History of Santon Barsisa, 413 + History of the Gothic Revival, 54, 55, 231 + Hobbes, Thos., 226 + Hoelty, L. H. C., 375 + Hole, R., 336 + Home, Jno., 132, 170, 276, 308, 309 + Homer, 3, 25, 35, 37, 50, 55, 100, 110, 215, 222-24, 271, 284, + 285, 310, 313, 318, 330, 335, 376, 387-89 + Homes of the Poets, 133, 364 + Horace, 38, 47, 55, 72, 156, 223, 285, 411 + Houghton, J. Monckton Milnes, Lord, 370 + Hours in a Library, 235 + Hours of Idleness, 329 + House of Aspen, The, 418 + House of Superstition, The, 85 + "How Sleep the Brave," 168 + Howitt, Wm., 133, 134, 364 + Hugo, Victor Marie, 3, 19, 35, 36, 77, 115, 209 + Hume, Robert, 100, 303, 308 + Hunting of the Cheviot, The, 274, 278.295 + Huon of Bordeaux, 382 + Hurd, Richard, 221-26, 245, 246, 375, 387 + Hussar of Magdeburg, The, 393 + Hymn (Thomson), 106 + Hymn to Adversity, 167, 173 + Hymn to Divine Love, 85 + Hymn to May, 85 + Hymn to the Supreme Being, 85 + Hypenon, 35 + + Idler, The, 207 + Idyls of the King, The, 146 + Il Bellicoso, 153 + Il Pacifico, 153, 154 + Il Penseroso, 104, 115, 142, 147, 149, 150, 154, 162, 170, + 175, 334 + Iliad, The, 16, 36, 56, 58, 214, 269, 313, 338, 388, 389 + Imaginary Conversations, 18, 43 + Immortality, 85 + Indian Burying Ground, The, 177 + Indian Emperor, The, 44 + Ingelow, Jean, 270 + Inscription for a Grotto, 136 + Institution of the Order of the Garter, 159, 193, 194 + Introduction to the Lusiad, 85 + Iphigenie auf Tauris, 3, 385, 397 + Ireland, Wm. H., 77, 294 + Irene, 51 + Isis, 176 + Italian, The, 250, 252, 263 + Italienische Reise, 385 + Ivanhoe, 4, 23, 188, 237, 262, 404 + + Jamieson, Robert, 292 + Jane Shore, 286 + January and May, 63 + Jemmy Dawson, 273 + Jephson, Robert, 240 + Jew's Daughter, The, 300 + Jock o' Hazeldean, 269, 277, 363 + Johnnie Armstrong, 274, 278, 283 + Johnnie Cock, 279, 280 + Johnson, Saml., 37, 40, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56, 59, 66, 68, 70, 71, + 89, 90, 94, 97, 99, 104, 105, 113, 131, 132, 136-39, 144, 145, + 150, 151, 172-75, 177, 179, 186, 196-98, 207, 224, 243, 274, + 285, 287-89, 295, 302, 303, 312, 313, 320, 328, 354, 355 + Joinville, Jean Sire de, 27, 64 + Jones, Inigo, 121, 230 + Jonson, Ben, 25, 50, 71, 79, 97, 210, 285 + Jordan, The, 85 + Journal in the Lakes, 183, 184 + Journey through Holland, 257 + Joyce, R. D., 314 + Julius Caesar, 377 + Junius, Letters of, 353 + + Kabale mid Liebe, 409 + Kalewala, The, 313 + Kampf mit dem Drachen, Der, 386 + Kant, Immanuel, 31, 387 + Katharine Janfarie, 277 + Kavanagh, Julia, 249, 262 + Keate, Geo., 182 + Keats. Jno., 18, 35, 94, 107, 169, 177, 257, 263, 265, 353, 362, + 363, 370-72, 434 + Keepsake, The, 418 + Kemp Owen, 279 + Kenilworth, 94, 260 + Kenrick, 329 + Kent, Wm., 129, 135, 152 + Kersey's Dictionary, 360, 361 + King Arthur's Death, 278 + King Estmere, 279, 300 + King John and the Abbot, 301 + Kinmont Willie, 278 + Kittridge, G. L., 191, 192 + Kleist, E. C. von, 106 + Klinger, F. M., 379 + Klopstock, P. G., 338, 377 + Knight, Chas., 74 + Knight of the Burning Pestle, The, 284 + Knox, V., 211, 212, 228 + Knythinga Saga, The, 196 + Kotzebue, A. F. F. von, 400, 409, 421 + Kriegslied, 377 + Kruitzner, 421, 423 + + La Bruyere, Jean de, 138 + La Calprenede, G. de C. Chevalier de, 6 + Lachin Y Gair, 329 + Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament, 283 + Lady of the Lake, The, 96, 299, 399 + La Fontaine, Jean de, 38 + Laing, Malcolm, 318, 320, 329 + L'Allegro, 104, 129, 142, 144, 147, 149, 150, 154, 158, 170 + Lamartine, A. M. L. de, 176 + Lamb, Chas., 28, 161, 199 + Land of Liberty, 85 + Land of the Muses, The, 85 + Landor, W. S., 3, 18, 34, 42, 136, 245, 293 + Lang, Andrew, 272 + Langbaine, Gerard, 49, 62, 69, 71 + Langley, Batty, 54, 121, 233 + Lansdowne, Geo. Granville, Earl of, 47, 74 + Laocooen, 384, 387 + Lass of Fair Wone, The, 397 + Lay of the Last Minstrel, The, 165, 191, 336, 404 + Lays of Ancient Rome, 269, 298 + Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, 269 + Leabhar na Feinne, 314, 323 + Lear, 217 + Leasowes, The, 127, 130-37, 139, 152, 183, 213, 422 + Le Bossu, Rene, 49 + Lectures on Translating Homer, 389 + Legend of Sir Guy, 278 + Legenda Aurea, 3 + Lee, Harriet and Sophia, 421 + Le Lac, 176 + Leiand, Thos., 244, 247 + Leland's Collectanea, 260 + Lenora, 391-97, 415, 417 + Lenox, Charlotte, 70 + Lenz, J. M. R., 379, 387 + Leonidas, 337 + Lessing, G. E., 56, 300, 375, 376, 379, 380, 384, 387, 397 + Letourneur, Pierre, 337 + Letter from Italy, 57, 218 + Letter to Master Canynge, 344 + Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 221-26, 245 + Letters to Shenstone, Lady Luxborough's, 135, 229 + Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet, 18-22 + Lewis, M. G., 249, 252, 262, 376, + 394, 396, 400, 401, 404-18, 420 + Leyden, Jno., 417 + Library of Romance, 381 + Life of Lyttelton (Phillimore), 74, 108 + Lines on Observing a Blossom, 368 + Lines Written at Tintern Abbey, 140 + Literary Movement in France, The, 35, 44, 61 + Literatura Runica, 191 + Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, 283 + Lives of the English Poets (Winstanley), 69 + Lives of the Novelists (Scott), 262 + Lives of the Poets (Johnson), 51, 68, 90, 97, 105, 114, 131, + 139, 150, 172, 196, 286 + Lloyd, Robert, 85, 91, 98, 151, 176 + Lockhart, J. G., 298, 391, 398, 402, 403, 406 + Longfellow, H. W., 198, 199, 269 + Longinus, 38 + Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, 244, 247, 248 + Lord Lovel, 268 + Lord Randall, 275 + Lord Thomas and Fair Annet, 268 + Lotus Eaters, The, 18, 92 + Love and Madness, 368 + Love's Labour's Lost, 379 + Lowell, J. R., 27, 59, 114, 139, 144, 169, 173, 206, 209, 403 + Lowth, Robert, 85, 387 + Luerlei, Die, 402 + Lukens, Chas., 393 + Lusiad, The, 85, 94 + Lycidas, 37, 115, 145, 149, 150, l54, 192 + Lydgate, Jno., 206, 266, 344, 359 + Lyrical Ballads, 58, 109, 112, 160, 183, 218, 288, 299, 316, 422 + Lytel Geste of Robyn Hode, The, 274 + Lyttelton, Geo. Lord, 90, 91, 95, 108, 111, 121, 127, 131, 132, + 135-37, 303 + + Mabinogion, The, 189 + Macaulay, T. B., 69, 238, 269, 272, 298 + Macbeth, 223 + McClintock, W. D., 102 + Mackenzie, Henry, 252, 390 + Mackenzie. Jno., 321 + McLauchlan, Thos., 314 + Macmillan's Magazine, 326 + McNeil, Archibald, 326 + MacPherson, Jas., 24, 195, 294, 302, 306-38, 377, 423 + Madden, Sir Frederick, 292 + Malherbe, Francois de, 38 + Mallet, David, 75, 105, 106, 124, 235, 283, 286 + Mallet, P. H., 190, 191, 196, 221, 374, 377 + Malone, Edmond, 32, 356, 362 + Malory, Sir Thos., 27 + Manfred, 334 + Man of Feeling, The, 352, 390 + Mansus, 146 + Manuel, 420 + Map, Walter, 27 + Marbie Faun, The, 23 + Mariner's Wife, The, 95 + Marlowe, Christopher, 66 + Marmion, 203, 234, 258, 336, 399, 404, 411 + Marriage of Frederick, 84 + Marriage of Gawaine, The, 278 + Mary Hamilton, 280 + Mason, Wm., 85, 91, 123-27, 129, 151, 153-55, 160, 165, 167, + 176, 180, 183, 190, 194-96, 211, 213, 215, 221, 251, 276, 306, + 307, 337, 352, 422, 423 + Masson, David, 148, 362 + Mather, Cotton, 408 + Mathias, Thos. J., 393 + Maturin, Chas. Robert, 249, 420 + Meditations (Harvey), 421 + Melmoth the Wanderer, 249, 420 + Memoires sur l'ancienne Chevalerie, 221, 222 + Memoirs of a Sad Dog, 353 + Mendez, Moses, 85, 91, 159 + Menschenhass und Reue, 400 + + Merchant of Venice, The, 372 + Meyrick, Sir Saml. R., 189 + Michael, 4 + Mickle, Wm. J., 85, 94-96 + Middle Ages, The (Hallam) 189 + Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 76, 235, 382 + Miller and the King's Daughter, The, 283 + Miller, Johann M., 375, 400 + Miller, Hugh, 108, 109, 130, 133, 136 + Milles, Jeremiah, 356, 361 + Milnes, R. Monckton, 370 + Milton, Jno., 16, 34, 37, 40, 52, 53, 55, 56, 63, 66, 69,78, + 79, 94, 104, 110, 111, 115, 129, 140, 142, 144, 146-62, 170, + + 173, 193, 199, 212, 213, 215, 216, 218, 219, 222, 225, 244, + 265, 283, 297, 318, 371, 374, 391 + Miltonic Imitations in Dodsley, List of, 159-61 + Minister, The, 409 + Minnesingers, The, 375 + Minot, Lawrence, 293 + Minstrel, The, 85, 97, 345, 302-05, 422. + Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern, 270 + Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 262, 267, 377, 299, 404. + Mirror, The, 85 + Miscellany Poems (Dryden), 192, 283 + Miss Kitty, 393 + Modern Painters, 26, 34 + Moeser, Justus, 375, 380 + Moliere, J. B. P., 38 + Monasticon, Anglicanum, 198 + Monk, The, 249, 262, 263, 401, 404, 407-13, 420, 424 + Monody on the Death of Chatterton, 368 + Monody Written near Stratford-upon-Avon, 201 + Monologue, A, 176 + Montagu, Elizabeth R., 303, 337 + Monthly Magazine, The, 391, 392 + Monthly Review, The, 397 + Moral Essays, 220 + More, Hannah, 151 + Morning, 85 + Morris, Wm., 191, 203, 424 + Morte Artus, 64, 390 + Motherwell, Wm., 270, 299 + Mud King, The, 418 + Muetler, Friedrich, 399 + Mueller, Johannes, 376 + Mulgrave, Jno. Sheffield, Earl of, 47, 63 + Murdoch, Patrick, 105 + Musaeus, 85, 153-55 + Musen Almanach, 393 + Musset, Alfred de, 18-22 + Myller, C. H., 375 + Mysterious Mother, The, 237, 238, 241, 251, 253, 401, 409 + Mysteries of Udolpho, The, 250, 252-55, 262, 263, 401, 424 + + Nares' and Halliwell's Glossary, 189 + Nathan der Weise, 376, 397 + Nativity, The, 85 + Nature, 388 + Nature of Poetry, The, 162 + New Canto of Spenser's Fairy Queen, A, 84, 85 + Newman, F. W., 389 + Newman, J. H., 41 + New Memoirs of Milton, 149 + New Principles of Gardening, 121 + Nibelungen Lied, The, 25, 64, 313, 375, 376 + Nichols' Anecdotes, 192 + Night Piece on Death, 61, 177 + Night Thoughts, 104, 163, l75, 387, 421 + Noble Moringer, The, 418 + Nocturnal Reverie, 57, 61 + Noel, Roden. 363 + Nonne Prestes Tale, The, 28 + Northanger Abbey, 263, 264 + Northern Antiquities, 190 + Northumberland Betrayed by Douglas, 278 + Nosce Teipsum, 137 + Not-brown Maid, The, 274, 295, 296, 300, 302 + Notes and Illustrations to Ossian, 318 + Notes on the Authenticity of Ossian's Poems, 326 + Notre Dame de Paris, 3 + Nouvelle Heloise, La, 31 + Novalis, 384 + + Oberon, 382 + Observations on English Meter, 206 + Observations on Modern Gardening (Whately), 123 + Observations on The Faery Queene, 99-101, 204, 213, 223 + Observations on The Scenery of Great Britain, 185 + Observations upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley, 356 + Odes, (Akenside's), 142 + Odes, (Collins'), 142, 155, 156 + Odes, (Gray's), 362 + Odes, (J. Warton's), 142, 155, 156 + Odes, For the New Year, 199. On a Distant Prospect of Eton + College, 167, 173, 216. On His Majesty's Birthday, 199. + On the Approach of Summer, 158. On the Death of Thomson, 163, + 165, 194. On the First of April, 158. On the Installation of + the Duke of Grafton, 159. On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, + 147, 149, 150, 156. On the Passions, 166, 169, 175. On the + Spring, 167, 173. On the Superstitions of the Scottish + Highlands, 25, 114, 170-72. Sent to Mr. Upton, 201. To a + Grecian Urn, 18. To a Nightingale (Keats) 18. To an Aeolus + Harp, 165. To Curio, 85. To Evening (Collins), 156, 165, 168. + To Evening (Warton), 165. To Fear, 156. To Freedom, 363. + To Liberty, 194. To Oblivion, 176. To Obscurity, 176. To + Peace, 305. To Pyrrha, 156. To Simplicity, 156. To Solitude, + 165. To the Hon. Charles Townsend, 84. To the Marquis of + Tavistock, 84. To the Nightingale (Warton), 165. To the + Queen, 84. Written at Vale Royal Abbey, 204 + Odyssey, The, 16, 269 + Oedipus Rex, 3, 19, 241 + Of Heroic Virtue, 192, 197 + Of Poetry, 192 + Old English Ballads, 276 + Old English Baron, The, 241-43, 249 + Oldmixon, Jno., 62 + Old Plays (Dodsley) 209 + + Olive, The, 84 + On King Arthur's Round Table, 201 + On Modern Gardening (Walpole), 123, 130 + On Myself, 79 + On Our Lady's Church, 344 + On the Prevailing Taste for the Old English Poets, 211 + On the River Duddon, 162 + On Witches (Glanvil), 408 + Opie, Amelia, 252 + Orcades, 191 + Origin of Romantic Fiction, The, 205 + Original Canto of Spenser, An, 84 + Ormond, 403 + Osorio, 420 + Ossian (MacPherson's), 25, 117, 178, 195, 235, 245, 256, 302, + 306-38, 355, 356, 377, 378, 423, 424 + Ossian, Poems of, in the Original Gaelic (Clerk), 313 + Ossian, Poems of, in the Original Gaelic (In Gillie's + Collection), 326 + Ossian, Poems of, in the Original Gaelic (Highland Society's + Text), 321, 324, 326 + Ossian, Poems of, in the Original Gaelic (In Stewart's + Collection), 326 + Othello, 372 + Otto von Wittelsbach, 398 + Otway, Thos., 74, 210 + Ovid, 25 + Oxford Sausage, The, 199 + + Pain and Patience, 84 + Palamon and Arcite, 28, 215 + Palgrave. F. T., 57, 277 + Pamela, 252 + Paradise Lost, 50, 52, 55-57, 104, 110, 129, 145, 147, 148, + 151, 217, 375 + Paradise Regained, 147, 148 + Parliament of Sprites, The, 344, 365 + Parnell, Thos., 58, 61, 177, 186, 210 + Parzival, 64 + Pastoral Ballad, A., 138 + Pastoral in the Manner of Spenser, A., 85 + Pastoral Ode, A., 133 + Pastorals (Philips'), 80 + Pastorals (Pope's), 57, 112, 193, 215, 216 + Pater, Walter, 7, 8, 16 + Paul and Virginia, 22, 112 + Pearch's Collection, 159, i82, 185 + Peck, F., 149 + Pellissier, George, 35, 44, 61, 65 + Pepys, Saml., 283, 291 + Percy Folio MS., The, 288, 290-93 + Percy, Thos., 186, 196, 212, 235, 246, 272, 284, 306, 319, + 326, 383, 387, 422. See also Reliques. + Perigrine Pickle, 139 + Perle, The, 189 + Perry, T. S., 7, 163, 176, 211, 212, 251, 337 + Persiles and Sigismonda, 244 + Peter Bell, 299 + Petrarca, Francesco, 29 + Peveril of the Peak, 420 + Pfarrers Tochter, Des, 396 + Phelps, W. L., 84, 85, 191, 197, 283, 297, 329 + Philander, 85 + Philantheus, 85 + Philips, Ambrose, 80, 102, 284 + Philips, Edward, 67, 80 + Philips, Jno., 104, 124 + Phillimore's Life of Lyttelton, 74, 108 + Phoenix, The, 241 + Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry, 293 + Pilgrim's Progress, The, 5 + Pindar, 35, 54, 89 + Pitt, Christopher, 85 + Pitt, Wm., 90, 132, 133 + Pizarro, 400 + Plato, 42, 47 + Pleasures of Hope, The, 142, 143 + Pleasures of Imagination, The, 124, 139-42, 157 + Pleasures of Melancholy, The, 142, 156-58, 160, 161, 194 + Pleasures of Memory, The, 142 + Poe, Edgar A., 202, 356, 390, 403 + Poem in Praise of Blank Verse, 217 + Poems after the Minnesingers, 375 + Poems after Walther von der Vogelweide, 375 + Pope, Alexander, 33, 36, 39, 41, 47, 50-54, 56-59, 61, 63, 65, + 66, 69, 72, 75, 77-79, 92, 93, 99, 102, 105, 108, 111-13, 115, + 120, 121, 126, 129, 136, 149, 150, 154, 157, 159, 162, 163, + 193, 210, 212-20, 228, 235, 265, 382, 383, 388 + Popular Ballads and Songs (Jamieson), 292 + Popular Tales of the West Highlands, 322, 323, 325 + Porter, Jane, 252, 371 + Portuguese Letters, The, 22 + Praelectiones de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum, 387 + Preface to Johnson's Shakspere, 70 + Preface to Pope's Shakspere, 72 + Prelude, The, 304 + Price, Richard, 205 + Prior, Matthew, 35, 57, 63, 84, 159, 291, 295, 296, 382 + Prioresse Tale, The, 279, 342 + Progress of Envy, The, 85, 91 + Progress of Poesy, The, 173 + Progress of Romance, The, 243-45 + Prologue at the Opening of Drury Lane, 59, 70 + Proud Maisie, 277 + Psalm XLII., 84 + Psyche,85 + Pugin, A. N. W., 234 + Pure, Ornate and Grotesque Art, 17 + Pursuits of Literature, 393 + Pye, H. J., 392 + + Quarles, Francis, 164 + + Racine, J. B., 38, 44, 65, 379 + Radcliffe, Anne, 232, 237, 249-64, 402, 408, 409, 411, 421, 423 + Rambler, The, 97, 287, 288, 353 + Ramsay, Allan, 61, 79, 284, 286, 297, 300 + Rape of the Lock, The, 36, 220 + Rapin, Rene, 49 + Rasselas, 186 + Raeuber, Die. See Robbers. + Reeve, Clara, 241-45, 247, 249-64, 423 + Regnier, Mathurin, 38 + Reliques of Ancient English + Poetry, 139, 188, 190, 206, 209, 211, 223, 265, 274, 278, + 287-302, 317, 346, 362, 369, 376, 423 + Remorse, 420 + Report of the Committee of the Highland Society on Ossian, 319 + Resolution and Independence, 339 + Retirement, 305 + Revenge, The, 353 + Revival of Ballad Poetry in the Eighteenth Century, 290 + Revolt of Islam, The, 5 + Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 202, 303 + Richardson, Saml., 31, 32, 40, 76, 252, 421 + Riddles Wisely Expounded, 270 + Ridley, G., 85 + Rime of Sir Thopas, The, 28 + Rising in the North, The, 278 + Ritson, Joseph, 188, 205, 246, 287, 290, 293, 294, 301, 423 + Ritter Toggenburg, 386 + Robbers, The, 385, 391, 402, 417, 418, 420 + Robin Hood and the Monk, 273, 278, 283 + Robin Hood and the Old Man, 292 + Robin Hood and the Potter, 273 + Robin Hood Ballads, The, 281-83, 301 + Robin Hood (Ritson's), 292 + Robinson Crusoe, 5, 26 + Rogers, Saml., 142, 181 + Rokeby, 277 + Rolla, 400, 409 + Rolls of St. Bartholomew's Priory, The, 358 + Roman de la Rose, The, 37, 64 + Romance, 390 + Romance of the Forest, The, 250, 253, 255, 256 + Romancero, The, 64 + Romantic and Classical in English Literature, The, 102 + Romantic Tales, 409 + Romanticism (Pater), 7 + Romantische Schule, Die, 2, 423 + Romaunt of the Rose, The, 27 + Romaunte of the Cnyghte, The, 348 + Romeo and Juliet, 377 + Ronsard, Pierre de, 22 + Roscommon, W. Dillon, Earl of, 47 + Ross, Thos., 321, 333 + Rossetti, D. G., 4, 270, 272, 367, 372, 424 + Roundabout Papers, 252 + Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 31, 112, 252, 330, 381, 423 + Rovers, The, 402 + Rowe, Nicholas, 210, 219, 286 + Rowley Poems, The, 211, 339-67, 424 + Rudiments of Anglo-Saxon Grammar, 192 + Rugantino, 409 + Ruins of Netley Abbey, The, 182 + Ruins of Rome, The, 144, 145 + Ruskin, Jno., 26, 34, 102, 255 + Rymer, Thos., 49, 62, 70 + Reyse of Peyncteynge yn Englande, The, 349 + + Sachs, Hans, 381 + Sadduceismus Triumphatus, 408 + Sagen der Vorzeit, 418 + Saengers Fluch, Der, 275 + Saint Alban's Abbey, 262 + Sainte-Beuve, C. A, 56 + Sainte Palaye, J. B. de la C., 221, 222, 374 + St. Irvine the Rosicrucian, 403 + Saint Lambert, C. F., 106 + St. Leon, 403 + St. Pierre, J. H. B. de, 112 + Saintsbury, Geo., 111, 131 + Saisons, Les, 106 + Sally in our Alley, 57 + Salvator Rosa, 255 + Sammlung Deutscher Volkslieder, 418 + Samson Agonistes, 148, 184 + "Saturday Papers," Addison's, 148 + Schelling, F. W. J. von, 387 + Scherer, Wilhelm, 300, 374, 376, 380, 382, 394 + Schiller, J. C. F. von, 11, 76, 379, 384-87, 391, 401, 409, + 419, 420 + Schlegel, A. W. von, 14, 73, 301, 377, 384, 392 + Schmidt, Erich, 382, 392 + Schoene Helena, Die, 385 + Scholar Gypsy, The, 408 + Schoolmistress, The, 84, 91, 92, 97, 104, 130, 136, 138, 362 + Schopenhauer, Arthur, 119 + Scott, Sir Walter, 3, 16, 24, 26, 27, 42, 94, 96, 139, 187-89, + 191, 200, 203, 223, 232, 234, 238, 248, 249, 258, 260, 262, + 267, 269, 277, 298-301, 333, 334, 344, 350, 358, 359, 376, + 389-96, 398-400, 402, 404-06, 410, 411, 416-18, 420, 424 + Scottish Songs (Ritson's), 293 + Scribleriad, The, 228, 229 + Scudery, Madeleine de, 6 + Sean Dana, 326 + Seasons, The (Mendez), 85 + Seasons, The (Thomson), 52, 75, 79, 103, 105-20, 124, 170, 152, + 305, 374 + Selden, John, 283 + Selections from Gray (Phelps), 191 + Selections from Newman (Gates), 41, 44 + Seven Champions of Christendom, The, 37 + Shadwell, Thos., 74 + Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of, 41, 62, 226, 382 + Shairp, J. C., 315 + Shakspere Alterations, List of, 74 + Shakspere Editions, List of, 74 + + Shakspere Illustrated, 70 + Shakspere, Wm., 18, 25, 40, 50, 51, 63, 68-78, 89, 111, 117, + 140, 170, 171, 198, 208-10, 213, 216-19, 225, 237, 298, 362, + 375, 377-80, 383, 391 + Shelley, Mary, 403, 406 + Shelley, P. B., 5, 43, 107, 241, 362, 370, 372, 403, 406 + Shenstone, Wm., 75, 84, 91, 97, 98, 102, 103, 110, 127, 130-39, + 151, 152, 159, 162, 168, 184, 186, 215, 229, 273, 287, 422, 423 + Shepherd's Calendar, The, 154 + Sheridan, R. B., 76, 162, 400, 413, 420 + Sheridan, Thos., 74 + Sheringham, Robert, 192 + Sicilian Romance, The, 250, 253 + Sidney, Sir Philip, 25, 71, 72, 239, 274 + Siegwart, 400 + Sigurd the Volsung, 191 + Sim, Jno., 94 + Sinclair, Archibald, 325 + Sinclair. Sir Jno., 321 + + Sir Cauline, 289, 200, 298 + Sir Charles Grandison, 388 + Sir Hugh, 279 + Sir Lancelot du Lake, 278 + Sir Patrick Spens, 300 + Sister Helen, 363 + Sisters, The, 270 + Six Bards of Ossian Versified, The, 336 + Skeat, W. W., 340, 355, 358-61, 364 + Skene, W. F., 314, 323 + Sketches of Eminent Statesmen, 234 + Smart, Christopher, 85 + Smith, Adam, 105 + Smollett, Tobias, 76, 139 + Solitary Reaper, The, 115 + Somerville, Wm., 106, 124, 135 + Song of Harold the Valiant, 196 + Song of Ragner Lodbrog, 197 + Song to Aella, 355 + Songs of Selma, The, 331 + Sonnet to Chatterton, 370 + Sonnet to Mr. Gray, 201 + Sonnet to Schiller, 419 + Sonnet to the River Lodon, 161 + Sophocles, 3, 19, 241, 379 + Sophonisba, 75 + Sorrows of Werther, The, 31, 330-32, 399, 423 + Sotheby, Wm., 382 + Southey, Robert, 206, 299, 350, 355, 358, 368, 398, 419 + Southwell, Robert, 41 + Spaniards in Peru, The, 400, 409 + Specimens of Ancient Sculpture, 189 + Specimens of Early English Poets, 301 + Specimens of the Welsh Bards, 195 + Spectator, The, 35, 37, 42, 49, 51, 55, 62, 120, 126, 139, + 141, 148, 178, 227, 284, 353, 377 + Speght's Chaucer, 360 + Spence, Joseph, 132 + Spencer, W. R., 392, 394 + Spenser, Edmund, 16, 25, 33, 37, 63, 68, 69, 77-101, 129, 151, + 154, 157, 159, 163, 170, 198, 199, 212, 213, 216, 219, 222, + 224-26, 235, 244, 265, 279, 304, 359, 371 + Spleen, The, 104, 136 + Splendid Shilling, The, 104 + Squire of Dames, The, 85, 91 + Stanley, J. T., 392 + State of German Literature, The, 401 + Stedman, E. C., 162 + Steevens, Geo., 32 + Stello, 372 + Stephen, Leslie, 32-34, 40, 102, 234, 237, 327 + Sterne, Lawrence, 31, 32, 252 + Stevenson, R, L., 258 + Stillingfleet, Benjamin, 53, 161 + Stimmen der Voelker, 300, 337, 416 + Stolberg, Friedrich Leopold, Count, 376, 377 + Storie of William Canynge, The, 355 + Stranger, The, 400 + Stratton Water, 299 + Strawberry Hill, 173, 179, 229, 230, 232, 234, 236, 340 + Sturm von Borberg, 399 + Suckling, Sir Jno., 57 + Sugar Cane, The, 124 + Sullivan, Wm. R., 314, 325 + Sweet William's Ghost, 279, 280, 295, 300, 394 + Swift, Jonathan, 40, 42, 162, 382 + Swinburne, A. C., 35, 168 + Syr Gawaine, 293 + Syr Martyn, 95, 96 + System of Runic Mythology, 191 + + Taine, H. A., 302, 316 + Tale of a Tub, 42 + Tales of Terror, 409, 417 + Tales of Wonder, 404, 409, 416-18 + Talisman, The, 188 + Tam Lin, 268, 279, 295, 417 + Tam o'Shanter, 187, 360 + Tannhaeuser, 268 + Tasso, Torquato, 25, 49, 50, 170, 319, 222-26 + Tate, Nahum, 74 + Tatler, The, 62 + Taylor, Jeremy, 40 + Taylor, Wm., 376, 391-98, 417-18 + Tea Table Miscellany, The, 284, 297 + Temora, 309, 313, 314, 316, 321, 323, 338 + Tempest, The, 70, 76, 171, 215 + Temple, Sir Wm., 69, 120, 192, 197 + Tennyson, Alfred, 18, 27, 35, 92, 93, 146, 200, 270, 28l + Thackeray, W. M., 56, 80, 252, 254 + Thaddeus of Warsaw, 243, 252 + Thales, 85 + Theagenes and Chariclea, 244 + Theatrum Poetarum, 67, 81 + Theocritus, 36 + Thesaurus (Hicks'), 192, 193 + Thomas a Kempis, 64 + Thomas Rymer, 268 + Thompson, Wm., 84 + Thomson, Jas., 52, 74, 75, 79, 84, 85, 92-95, 97, 98, 102-19, + 124, 133-36, 142, 151, 157, 159, 168, 184, 198, 215, 235, 251, + 302, 303, 305, 374, 384, 422 + Thomson, Jas. (2d), 162 + Thoreau, H. D., 107 + Tieck, Ludwig, 22, 377, 384 + To Country Gentlemen of England, 85 + Todtentanz, Der, 386 + To Helen, 202 + To Melancholy, 251 + Tom Jones, 186, 263 + Tom Thumb, 285 + "Too Late I Stayed," 392 + Torfaeus Thormodus, 191 + To the Nightingale (Lady Winchelsea), 61 + To the Nightingale (Mrs. Radcliffe), 251 + To the Nightingale. See Odes. + To the River Otter, 161 + Tournament, The, 348, 365 + Town and Country Magazine, The, 346, 352 + Tragedies of the Last Age Considered, The, 70 + Tressan, L. E. de L., Comte de, 381 + Triumph of Isis, The, 199 + Triumph of Melancholy, The, 305 + Triumphs of Owen, The, 195 + Tristan und Isolde, 3, 64 + Trivia, 35 + Troilus and Cresseide, 28 + True Principles of Gothic Architecture, 234 + Turk and Gawin, The, 293 + Twa Corbies, The, 275 + Two Sisters, The, 270, 279 + Tyrwhitt, Thos., 63, 188, 211, 213, 246, 30l, 355-57, 359, 423 + Tytler, Sir A. F., 391, 419 + + Ueber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, 11, 387 + Ueber Ossian und die Lieder alter Voelker, 338 + Uhland, Ludwig, 384 + Ulysses, 18, 35 + Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening, 127, 132 + Universal Prayer, The, 41 + Unnatural Flights in Poetry, 47 + Upton, John, 85 + Uz, J. P., 106 + + + Vanity of Dogmatizing, The, 408 + Vathek, 403, 405 + Vergil, 25, 37, 49, 50, 55, 110, 223, 285, 335 + Verses to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 202 + Verses Written in 1748, 133 + Vicar of Wakefield, The, 209 + Vigny, Alfred Victor, Comte de, 372, 373 + Villehardouin, Geoffrey de, 27, 64 + Villon, Francois, 64, 216 + Vindication (Tyrwhitt's), 359 + Virtuoso, The, 84, 91, 141, 228 + Vision, The (Burns), 334 + Vision, The (Croxall), 84 + Vision of Patience, The, 84 + Vision of Solomon, The, 84 + Voltaire, F. M. A. de, 214, 216, 237, 379, 381, 382 + Von Arnim, Achim (L. J.), 384 + Voragine, Jacobus de, 3 + Vorlesungen ueber dramatische Kunst und Literatur, 14 + Voss, J. H., 375 + + Wackenroder, W. H., 384 + Wagner, H. L., 379 + Waking of Angantyr, The, 192 + Wallenstein, 385, 419 + Waller, Edmund, 38, 39, 52, 53, 80, 216 + Walpole, Horace, 32, 89, 120, 122, 129, 130, 135, 145, 159, + 166, 173, 178, 179, 181, 229-43, 249-55, 258, 286, 306, 336, + 337, 349-52, 354, 383, 401, 408, 417, 422 + Walsh, Wm., 50, 53 + Walther von der Vogelweide, 64 + "Waly, Waly," 374, 300 + Wanton Wife of Bath, The, 301 + Warburton, Wm., 237 + Wardlaw, Lady, 286 + Ward's English Poets, 53, 111, 131, 169, 364 + Warton, Joseph, 32, 75, 118, 142, 149, 151-53, 155, 156, l60, + 163, 168, 171, 185, 193, 197-99, 206, 207, 212-20, 223, 226, + 262, 302, 355, 375, 383, 387, 422, 423 + Warton, Thos., Jr., 32, 36, 53, 75, 84, 85, 99-101, 150, 151, + 156-58, 161, 163, 168, 171, 194, 197-207, 211, 213, 221, + 224, 226, 245, 251, 260, 291, 293, 294, 302, 356, 359, 375, + 387, 403, 422, 423 + Warton, Thos., Sr., 85, 197 + Waverley Novels, The, 188, 258, 262, 400, 422 + Way, G. L., 301 + Weber's Metrical Romances, 188 + Weber, Veit, 400, 418 + Webster, Jno., 66 + Werner, 421 + Wesley, Jno., 31 + West, Gilbert, 84, 85, 89-91, 98, 126, 133, 151, 160, 193, 194 + Whately, Thos., 122 + Whistle, The, 334 + White Doe of Rylstone, The, 184 + Whitefield, Geo., 31 + Whitehead, Wm., 84, 197 + Whittington and his Cat, 273 + Wieland, 403 + Wieland, C. M., 106, 377, 378, 381, 397 + Wife of Usher's Well, The, 269, 279 + Wilde Jaeger, Der, 391 + Wild Huntsman, The, 404, 416 + Wilkie, Wm., 85 + Wilhelm Meister, 384, 387 + Wilhelm Tell, 385 + William and Helen, 391, 398, 404 + Willie Drowned in Yarrow, 170 + Willie's Lady, 279 + Wilson's Life of Chatterton, 368 + Winchelsea, Anne Finch, Countess of, 57, 61 + Winckelmann, J. J., 384, 385 + Windsor Forest, 57, 58, 2l5, 220 + Winstanley, William, 62, 69 + Winter, 103-106, 142, 422 + Wither, Geo., 57 + Wodrow, Jno., 334, 335 + Wolfram von Eschenbach, 64 + Wolfred von Dromberg, 398 + Wonders of the Invisible World, 408 + Wood, Anthony, 291 + Wood, Robert, 387-89 + Worde, Wynkyn de, 274 + Wordsworth, Wm., 4, 5, 43, 58, 103, 107, 109, 112, 115, 135, + 143-45, 160, 162, 183, 184, 218, 220, 288-90, 298, 299, 304, + 316, 326, 328, 339, 344 + Worm, Ole, 191, 193 + Wreck of the Hesperus, The, 269 + Wren, Sir Christopher, 121, 230 + Written at an Inn at Henley, 138 + Written at Stonhenge, 201 + Written in Dugdale's Monasticon, 198 + + Yarrow Revisited, 344 + Yarrow Unvisited, 298 + Young, Edward, 56, 149, 163, 213, 387, 388, 421 + Young Hunting, 279 + Young Lochinvar, 277 + Young Waters, 300 + + Zapolya, 420 + Zastrozzi, 403 + Zauberlehrling, Der, 386 + Zauberring, Der, 4 + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM IN +THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY*** + + +******* This file should be named 15447.txt or 15447.zip ******* + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/4/4/15447 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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