A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 4

[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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sage 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 sh.o.r.e 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 subst.i.tutes a new set of models as different as possible from those which it finds currently followed. In every country of Europe the cla.s.sical 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 pa.s.sages 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 ma.s.s 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 p.r.o.nunciation 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 "Auca.s.sin 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 ma.n.u.script and in unknown tongues, Old Norse, Old French, Middle High German, Middle English, Mediaeval Latin. It would be hazardous to a.s.sert 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 a.s.serted 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 cla.s.sical antiquity. That he has so is owing to the romantic movement. For the significant circ.u.mstance about the att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sages 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 fas.h.i.+ons"; 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 pa.s.sage, 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 s.h.i.+nes 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 att.i.tude 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 cla.s.sical 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 a.s.sume 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 "Oth.e.l.lo." 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 cla.s.sical 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 s.h.i.+pwrecks; 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 Sall.u.s.t, 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 "Coriola.n.u.s"--a play which Dennis "improved" for the new stage--he represents Menenius as a buffoon and introduces the rabble in a most undignified fas.h.i.+on.[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 att.i.tude 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 n.o.bler apartments, though we are often conducted to them by dark, odd and uncouth pa.s.sages. 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 ant.i.thesis 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--ant.i.thesis, 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 plat.i.tudes, 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sage 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, a.s.sured 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 a.s.sumed 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 ent.i.tled "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 c.o.c.kney," 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 cla.s.sical 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.