Page images
PDF
EPUB

significant circumstance is the fashion of imitating Spenser, denounced by Johnson in the 'Rambler.' 'Life is surely given us for higher purposes,' says that incarnation of strong sense, 'than to gather what our ancestors have wisely thrown away, and to learn what is of no value but because it has been forgotten.'1 Spenser's poetry is indeed the precise antipodes of Pope's, and its tender romance aimed against all those canons of common sense in which Johnson was the sturdiest of believers. For that reason his fairyland was a delightful retreat for poets weary with the prevailing rigidity of form and coldness of sentiment. Steele had tried to bring Spenser into notice in the 'Tatler' and 'Spectator.' Thomson's charming 'Castle of Indolence' and Shenstone's "Schoolmistress' were popular echoes of Spenser's style; Beattie makes his Minstrel' confute Hume in Spenserian stanzas; William Thompson, Gilbert West, the defender of the Resurrection, Lloyd, the friend of Colman, Wilkie, of the Epigoniad,' Mickle, the translator of Camoens, and Cambridge, best known by the 'Scribleriad,' all wrote imitations of more or less elaborate kind; Collins loved Spenser, and Gray paid him a more discriminating homage than that of sheer imitation, for he never wrote a line himself without attuning his mind by first reading Spenser for a considerable time. Pope himself, it may be noticed, was a lover of Spenser in his boyhood, though a coarse burlesque seems to imply that he regarded him with no particular reverence. In fact, the poets of the eighteenth century, with one or two exceptions, show a disposition to edge away from the types which they professed to admit as ideally correct.

35. In spite, however, of such instinctive deviations towards a different type, the general characteristics so prominent in Pope are strongly marked upon all the chief poetical works of the time. Prior's 'Solomon' might be compared to Pope's 'Essay on Man,' to which it was greatly preferred by Wesley, as more in harmony with his theories of human corruption. The design, indeed, is more poetical, because less tending to the argumentative; though the inferior execution has prevented Prior from attaining the occasional success which redeems parts of Pope's poem from oblivion. Black'Rambler,' No. 121.

more's 'Creation' gives a system of natural theology in several thousand lines of blank verse, of which no phrase has survived, though Johnson's orthodoxy caused a reprint of the portentous mass in collections of English poets. Three poems not written by Pope, and of comprehensive design, made a considerable impression in the first half of the century, and two at least have still a certain vitality. Thomson's 'Seasons' appeared in 1726-30, Young's Night Thoughts' in 1742-6, and Akenside's 'Pleasures of the Imagination' (in its first form) in 1744. Each of these has a didactic purpose.

36. Thomson is generally noticed as an exception to the general tendency of eighteenth-century poetry, by reason of his original descriptions of natural scenery, and is, in this capacity, the forerunner of Cowper and Wordsworth. This part of his poetry has survived the rest, as genuine work must always survive mere second-hand conventionalities. It may fairly be said, too, that the power with which he represents nature—and there are few poems in which we can more distinctly hear the wind stirring the forests, and feel the sun striking upon the plains-makes him, in some degree, exceptional. He was an outsider of that brilliant society which delighted in the life of towns as in a new-found pleasure, which looked upon fox-hunting squires as the embodiment of rustic brutality, and could never sincerely prefer a hillside to a coffee-house. But the judgment probably exaggerates the indifference of the age to descriptive poetry, and certainly exaggerates the indifference of Thomson to the general thought of his time. The love of nature was not with Thomson, as with Cowper, a sign of any revolutionary tendency. He was a Whig, not a Radical, in poetry as in politics. He was given to pompous declamations about liberty, simplicity, integrity, and various excellent abstractions, such as fell in well enough with the general tone of the opponents of Walpole in the days of the long opposition. His poem upon 'Liberty,' which Johnson confesses that he had never read, appears-so far as I have inspected it to be a series of such sounding commonplaces as Bolingbroke was in the habit of embodying in his political essays. Doubtless, there was some sincerity in such declamation, but clearly there was little passion. It implied contempt for priestcraft, and dislike to the absolute rule of a despot;

but not the least desire to upheave and reconstruct society. It is the sentiment of a British Whig, not of Rousseau or Voltaire. The poem on Liberty' and the plays, in which he indulged the same vein, are as dead as Blackmore. The 'Seasons' survives by virtue of that genuine eye for open-air sights and sounds which excited Wordsworth's sympathy. But, if we ask what was Thomson's conception of nature, we shall see that it was substantially that of his age. The old pastoral poetry which filled the country with fauns and satyrs and semi-mythological rustics was extinct; its last breath was uttered in the faded sentimentalism of Phillips and Pope, and the dead form was only available for such pleasantry as that of Gay and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. In the previous century, Thomson would probably have adopted the form of Jonson's 'Sad Shepherd,' or Fletcher's 'Faithful Shepherdess,' or Milton's 'Comus.' But the mythology which they assumed in the Renaissance spirit was too extinct for serious poetry. In the succeeding century he might have adopted Wordsworth's lofty mysticism, and seen in nature the living embodiment of the great forces which pervade the universe, conformity with which constitutes the highest happiness of man, and a true insight into which makes him a genuine poet. Or, again, nature might have suggested to him that kind of misanthropy, or perhaps soured philanthropy, which breathes in the sentimentalism of Rousseau and Byron, and implies the revolt of passion against the ossified organisation of an effete society.

37. Thomson shared with such men, and, indeed, with poets of all ages, a vivid enjoyment of natural beauty, but it suggested to him a different set of reflections. He learns, as all thoughtful men must learn, the advantages of quiet and contemplation as a relief to the restlessness and excitement of town life. Contemplation with the true Thomson perhaps meant lying in bed till mid-day, and enjoying his bottle at night. In his poetical capacity, however, it meant an indulgence in the ordinary philosophising of the period. In Winter,' for example, he follows in one passage the general design of Milton's 'Allegro;' but, instead of in

[ocr errors]

1 See passage beginning :

1

Thus in some deep retirement would I pass.

dulging the romantic visions which seemed congenial to the retirement of the elder poet, he proposes to find time to discuss moral philosophy with Lyttelton, and to talk commonplaces about corruption with Chesterfield. Nature is not so much regarded as itself a living power, or animated by the forms projected from a poetic imagination, as the series of judicious arrangements which enabled the theologians of the day to confront sceptics. And, therefore, Thomson, though a most genuine lover of natural scenery, sees in it a comparatively lifeless series of phenomena. The pompous style is still more significant of the contemporary tendency; but it would be doing Thomson gross injustice to force him into the framework of a theory, or to overlook the fact that some men in the first half of the eighteenth century could feel the beauty of nature as deeply as Milton before them, or as Wordsworth afterwards. The rapture and the mystic glow is not, indeed, to be found, and too often we are jarred by conventional sentiment and mere prosaic argument. But a good healthy delight in natural beauty was never quite absent from our literature.

38. If Thomson's unfortunate tendency to didactic and bombastic declamation led to a lamentable waste of his powers in Liberty,' and injures parts of the 'Seasons,' it is unfortunately far more prominent in the other two writers I have named. Young was one of the cleverest men who ever wrote English verse, but the cleverness extinguishes the imagination. The Night Thoughts,' owing in great measure to its subject, has enjoyed a vast popularity, in spite of its offences against all literary canons of taste. It was intended by its author as a supplement to the 'Essay on Man :'

Man, too, he (Pope) sung; immortal man I sing.'

Young expresses, that is, those supplementary doctrines which constituted the difference between the religion of nature and Revelation. The design and form are equally characteristic of the time. Young sees no visions, but he argues with overstrained energy; he sets up an infidel man of straw in the ordinary fashion of the orthodox preacher; denounces him through several nights, and finally reclaims him 'Night the First.

by a battery of arguments for immortality. There is as little of really deep sentiment as of sincerity; for, in fact, Young's hatred of the world revealed the disappointed patronagehunter, rather than the religious enthusiast; and, instead of a uniform flow of poetry, or even of rhetoric, he lashes himself into a never-ending series of antitheses. The unnatural strain is felt in every line; each paragraph bristles with a number of points; witty epigrams take the place of imaginative images; and he resorts to an exuberant use of italics to enforce every smart saying upon the reluctant hearer. His ingenuity is so great, that we may fancy that he could have rivalled the farfetched conceits of Donne and Herbert; but the quaintness is not redeemed by simplicity, or a substratum of genuine earnestness. Every line shows us a very clever man labouring to be more clever than nature has made him, and eager to win applause by the skill with which he exposes the worthlessness of applause.

39. The substance is everywhere commonplace; and Young shows his inferiority to Pope by inventing phrases for copybooks, where Pope coins proverbs for cultivated thinkers. The love of gloom, of the imagery of the grave, and the awful mysteries of life, which animated our older writers, is not absent, but it is turned to account by this clever man of the world with such ingenuity, that we become aware of the shallowness of his feeling. How hollow are the enjoyments of this world, and how deep the surrounding mystery! is the ostensible sentiment. What a clever fellow I am, and what a shame it is that I was not made a bishop! is the sentiment plainly indicated in every line. Can I not say as many smart things about death and eternity as anybody that ever wrote ? Am I not a good orthodox reasoner, instead of a semi-deist like that sinner Pope? We see, as we read, the very type of the preacher of a period when the old mythology, no longer credible or really imposing to the imagination, is still regarded as capable of, at least, an ostensible demonstration, and may afford a sufficient excuse for any quantity of intellectual ingenuity. To serious minds, one would have thought, the exhibition must always have been repulsive, were it not that serious minds seem specially liable to be imposed upon by an affectation of religious unction; and are willing to

« PreviousContinue »