The Age of Pope Part 6

'His azure ribbon and his radiant star,'

and the poet's breast 'glows with grateful fire' as he exclaims:

'The streams of royal bounty turned by thee Refresh the dry domains of poesy.

My fortune shows, when arts are Walpole's care, What slender worth forbids us to despair: Be this thy partial smile from censure free, 'Twas meant for merit, though it fell on me.'

Following in the steps of George Sandys, but with inferior power, and in a less racy diction, Young performed the vain task of paraphrasing part of the Book of Job, one of the n.o.blest poems the world possesses, and translated in our authorized version in language not to be surpa.s.sed for dignity and simplicity.

In 1719 his _Busiris_ was performed. _The Revenge_, a better known tragedy, written on the French model, followed in 1721, and kept the stage for some time. Seven years later _The Brothers_, his third and last tragedy, was in rehearsal, but the poet, who had lately taken holy orders, withdrew it at the last moment. These tragedies, which are full of sound and fury, are dest.i.tute of tragic power. _The Revenge_, in which Zanga acts the part of an Iago, has some forcible scenes, and so, despite much rant and fustian, has _Busiris_. Plenty of blood is shed, of course, and the heroines of the plays die by their own hands. Tragedy is supposed to exercise an elevating influence, but to counteract this happy result, _Busiris_ and _The Revenge_ are followed by indecent epilogues, in which the speakers jest at the feelings which the plays may have excited. For _The Brothers_ Young wrote his own epilogue. It is decent and dull. His genius was better fitted for satire than for the drama, and _The Universal Pa.s.sion_, which consists of seven satires published in a collected form in 1728, brought him reputation and money.

The poet Crabbe was never more surprised in his life than when John Murray (the famous 'My Murray' of Byron) gave him 3,000 for the copyright of his poems; Young received the same sum for work immeasurably inferior in value, and in a less legitimate way. Two thousand pounds, it is stated, was a gift from the Duke of Grafton, who said it was the best bargain he ever made, as the satires were worth 4,000. Young, it will be seen, preceded Pope as a satirist. He is more generous and humane, and has none of the venomous attacks on living persons by which Pope added piquancy to his verse. But he is a careless writer, and for the most part lacks the exquisite precision, the subtle wit, the rhythmical felicity, which make the couplets of Pope so memorable. _The Dunciad_, the _Moral Essays_, and the _Imitations_ are read by all lovers of literature, but _The Universal Pa.s.sion_ is forgotten. Of the six satires, the two on women are the most spirited, and may be compared with Pope's on the same subject. The different foibles, and faults worse than foibles of the women of that day are exhibited with a satirist's licence, and occasionally with a Pope-like terseness. Take the following, for example:

'There is no woman where there's no reserve, And 'tis on plenty your poor lovers starve.'

'Few to good breeding make a just pretence; Good breeding is the blossom of good sense.'

'A shameless woman is the worst of men.'

'Naked in nothing should a woman be, But veil her very wit with modesty.'

It was not until he was nearly fifty that Young, disappointed of the preferment he sought, took holy orders, and in 1730 accepted the college living of Welwyn, in Herts, which he held till his death.

In the following year the poet married Lady Elizabeth Lee, a daughter of the Earl of Lichfield, a union that lasted ten years. One son was the offspring of this marriage. Lady Elizabeth had a daughter by a former marriage, who was married to Mr. Temple, a son of Lord Palmerston, and shortly before her own death she lost both daughter and son-in-law, who, there can be little doubt, are the Philander and Narcissa of the _Night Thoughts_, the earlier books of which were published in 1742. This once celebrated poem, written in his old age, is the one effort of Young's genius that has enjoyed a great popularity. It suited well an age which, while far from moral, delighted in moral treatises and in didactic verse. In the _Night Thoughts_ Young remembers that he is a clergyman, and puts on his gown and bands. He puts on also his singing robes, and shows the reader what none of his earlier poems prove, that he is in the presence of a poet.

The _Night Thoughts_ is remarkable in its finest pa.s.sages for a strong, but sombre imagination, and for a command of his instrument that puts Young at times nearly on a level with the greatest masters of blank verse. On this height, however, he does not stay long. He is rich in great thoughts, but they do not fall unconsciously, as it were, while the poet pursues his argument. They are aphorisms uttered generally in single lines which are apt to break the continuity of the poem and to injure the harmony of its versification. The theme of Life, Death, and Immortality is not a narrow one, and affords ample s.p.a.ce for imaginative treatment. Young's treatment of it is too often declamatory; he drops the poet in the rhetorician and the wit. There is much of the false sublime in the poem, and much that reveals the hollow character of the writer. The first book is the finest, sparkling with felicitous expressions and rising frequently to true poetry. The poetical quality of that book, however, is lessened by the author's pa.s.sion for ant.i.thesis. The merit of the following pa.s.sage, for example, is not due to poetical inspiration:

'How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, How complicate, how wonderful is man!

How pa.s.sing wonder He, who made him such!

Who centered in our make such strange extremes From different natures, marvellously mixed, Connexion exquisite of distant worlds!

Distinguished link in being's endless chain!

Midway from nothing to the Deity; A beam etherial, sullied, and absorbt!

Though sullied and dishonoured still divine!

Dim miniature of greatness absolute!

An heir of glory! a frail child of dust!

Helpless immortal! insect infinite!

A worm! a G.o.d!--I tremble at myself, And in myself am lost. At home a stranger, Thought wanders up and down, surprised, aghast, And wondering at her own: How reason reels!

O what a miracle to man is man!

Triumphantly distressed! what joy! what dread!

Alternately transported and alarmed!

What can preserve my life? or what destroy?

An angel's arm can't s.n.a.t.c.h me from the grave: Legions of angels can't confine me there.'

The opening of the ninth and last book will give a more favourable ill.u.s.tration of Young's style:

'As when a traveller, a long day past In painful search of what he cannot find, At night's approach, content with the next cot, There ruminates awhile, his labour lost; Then cheers his heart with what his fate affords, And chants his sonnet to deceive the time, Till the due season calls him to repose; Thus I, long-travelled in the ways of men, And dancing with the rest the giddy maze Where Disappointment smiles at Hope's career; Warned by the languor of life's evening ray, At length have housed me in an humble shed, Where, future wandering banished from my thought, And waiting, patient, the sweet hour of rest, I chase the moments with a serious song.

Song soothes our pains, and age has pains to soothe.'

While moralizing on man's mortality Young is seldom a cheerful monitor, he dwells with too great persistence on the incidents of death and of bodily corruption, too little on life with which we have more to do than with death. Thus with a strange perversion he exclaims:

'This is the desart, this the solitude, How populous, how vital, is the grave!

This is creation's melancholy vault, The vale funereal, the sad cypress gloom, The land of apparitions, empty shades!

All, all on earth is shadow, all beyond Is substance; the reverse is folly's creed.'

and harping on the same theme in the ninth book, says:

'What is the world itself? Thy world--a grave.

Where is the dust that has not been alive?

The spade, the plough, disturb our ancestors; From human mould we reap our daily bread; The globe around earth's hollow surface shakes, And is the ceiling of her sleeping sons.

O'er devastation we blind revels keep; Whole buried towns support the dancer's heel.'

[Sidenote: Robert Blair (1699-1746).]

On laying down the _Night Thoughts_ the student may be advised to read Blair's _Grave_, a poem in less than 800 lines of blank verse, composed in a fresher and more rigorous style than the far larger work of Young, and rather moulded, as Mr. Saintsbury has observed, 'upon dramatic than upon purely poetical models.' _The Grave_, which was written before the publication of the _Night Thoughts_,[29] abounds with poetical felicities, and is pregnant with suggestions that seize the imagination, and appeal alike to the intellect and the heart. The brevity of the piece is in its favour; there is not a line that flags.

'Tell us, ye dead! will none of you, in pity To those you left behind, disclose the secret?

Oh! that some courteous ghost would blab it out,-- What 'tis you are and we must shortly be.

I've heard that souls departed have sometimes Forewarned men of their death. 'Twas kindly done To knock and give the alarm. But what means This stinted charity? 'Tis but lame kindness That does its work by halves. Why might you not Tell us what 'tis to die? Do the strict laws Of your society forbid your speaking Upon a point so nice?--I'll ask no more: Sullen, like lamps in sepulchres, your s.h.i.+ne Enlightens but yourselves. Well, 'tis no matter; A very little time will clear up all, And make us learn'd as you are, and as close.'

Blair, who was a Scotch clergyman, wrote also an _Elegy in Memory of William Law_, a Professor of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh, whose daughter he married. He writes in a masculine and homely style. His imagery is often more powerful than pleasing, but some of his similes win attention by their beauty. For example:

"Look how the fair one weeps! the conscious tears Stand thick as dewdrops on the bells of flowers."

Among the victims claimed by the grave is

'The long demurring maid, Whose lonely unappropriated sweets Smiled, like yon knot of cowslips on the cliff, Not to be come at by the willing hand.'

And the death of a good man is pictured in this musical couplet:

'Night dews fall not more gently to the ground Nor weary worn out winds expire so soft.'

Cowper, referring to the poets of his century, said that every warbler had Pope's tune by heart. But if they had the tune by heart, many of them did not make it a vehicle for their verse, and among these are poets of the weight and worth of Thomson and Young, of Gray and Collins.

Poets of a minor order, too, such as Somerville, Armstrong, Glover, Shenstone, Akenside, and John Dyer, either did not use the heroic distich which Pope crowned with such honour, or used it in their least significant poems.

[Sidenote: James Thomson (1700-1748).]

Thomson's influence, though less visible than Pope's, was probably as great. It was felt by the poets who loved Nature, and had no turn for satire. To pa.s.s to him from Prior, Gay, and Young is to leave the town for the country. English poetry owes much to the author of _The Seasons_, who was the first among the poets of his century to bring men back to 'Nature, the Vicar of the Almighty Lord.' He could not, indeed, shake off altogether the fetters of the conventional diction current in his day, and his style is often turgid and verbose. But Thomson had, to use a phrase of his own, 'a fine flame of imagination,' and when brought face to face with Nature he has the inspiration of a poet who discerns the lessons which Nature is ready to teach.

James Thomson was born at Ednam, on the banks of the Tweed, on September 11th, 1700, but his father removed to Jedburgh shortly afterwards, and there the future poet gained his first impression of rural scenes. He began to rhyme in boyhood, but, unlike most young poets, had the good sense to make an annual bonfire of his youthful effusions. At the early age of fifteen he was sent to the university at Edinburgh, his father, who was a Presbyterian minister, wis.h.i.+ng that his son should follow the same vocation. But Thomson was not destined to 'wag his head in a pulpit.' He had a friend at this time in David Mallet, a minor poet of more prudence than principle, and when Mallet had the good fortune to gain a tutors.h.i.+p in London, his companion also started for the metropolis in search of money and fame. It was a desperate venture, and the young poet's difficulties were increased by the loss of his letters of introduction. Scotchmen however have always countrymen willing to help them, and Thomson whose pedigree on the mother's side connected him with the famous house of Home, found temporary employment as tutor to a child of Lord Binning who belonged by marriage to the same family.

Afterwards he resided with Millan, a bookseller at Charing Cross, and then having finished _Winter_ (1726), on which he had been at work for some time, he sold it to the publisher for three guineas. Before long it was read and warmly praised by Aaron Hill, then a man of mark in the world of letters. Sir Spencer Compton, the Speaker, to whom the poem was dedicated, gave the poet twenty guineas for the compliment; Rundle, the Bishop of Derry, and several ladies of rank cheered him with their praise, and Thomson's success was a.s.sured. It was the age of patrons, and he practised without shame and without discrimination the art of flattery. Each book of _The Seasons_ had a dedication, and the honour was one for which some kind of payment was expected. _Summer_ appeared in 1727 and _Spring_ in the year following. In 1729 the appearance of _Britannia_ showed the popularity of the poet and of his theme, for three editions were sold. It is a distinctly party poem, and contains an attack upon Walpole--whom he had previously praised as the 'most ill.u.s.trious of patriots'--for submitting to indignities from Spain. The British Lion roars loudly in it, but there is more of fustian in the piece than of true patriotism. 'How dares,' the poet exclaims, 'the proud Iberian rouse to wrath the masters of the main:'

'Who told him that the big inc.u.mbent war Would not ere this have rolled his trembling ports In smoky ruin? and his guilty stores, Won by the ravage of a butchered world, Yet unatoned, sunk in the swallowing deep, Or led the glittering prize into the Thames?'

In February, 1729-30, Thomson's tragedy of _Sophonisba_, a subject previously chosen by Marston (1606), and by Lee (1676), was acted at Drury Lane. The play was dedicated to the queen, and on the opening night the house was crowded, but the success of the piece was slight.

Thomson's genius was not dramatic, and while his characters declaim, they do not act. His next play, _Agamemnon_ (1738), was not lost for want of labour or of friends. Pope appeared in the theatre on the first night, and was greeted with applause. The Prince and Princess of Wales were present on another occasion, but the play did not live long. His third attempt, _Edward and Eleanora_, was prohibited by the Lord Chamberlain, since it was supposed to praise the Prince of Wales at the expense of the Court. In 1740 the _Masque of Alfred_, by Thomson and Mallet, was performed. _Tancred and Sigismunda_ followed in 1745, and this tragedy, in which Garrick played the leading part, had at the time a considerable measure of success. The plot is more interesting than that of _Sophonisba_, and the characters are more life-like. Despite its effusive sentiment, Garrick's splendid acting would, no doubt, make the tragedy effective on the stage, but it does not add to the literary reputation of the poet. _Coriola.n.u.s_, Thomson's last drama, was not performed upon the stage until the year after his death.

Voltaire, who had met Thomson and liked him--the liking, indeed, seemed to be universal--praised his tragedies for being 'elegantly writ.' 'It may be,' he says, 'that his heroes are neither moving nor busy enough, but taking him all in all, methinks he has the highest claim to the greatest esteem.' The value of Voltaire's criticism of an English dramatist is best appreciated by remembering his ignorant judgment of Shakespeare.

Thomson's laurels were gained in another field of poetry. On the production of _Autumn_ in 1730, _The Seasons_ in its complete form was published by subscription in quarto. The four books, as we have already said, appeared at different times, _Winter_ being the first in order and _Autumn_ the latest. The Hymn with which the poem concludes may be compared, and will not greatly suffer in the comparison, with Adam's morning hymn in the fifth book of _Paradise Lost_, and with Coleridge's _Hymn in the Valley of Chamouni_. Like them it is raised, to use the poet's own words, to an 'Almighty Father.' A brief extract shall be given: