A Brief History of the English Language and Literature Part 18

The year 1762 saw him with a pension from the Government of 300 a-year; and henceforth he was free from heavy hack-work and literary drudgery, and could give himself up to the largest enjoyment of that for which he cared most-- social conversation. He was the best talker of his time; and he knew everybody worth knowing-- Burke, Goldsmith, Gibbon, the great painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, and many other able men. In 1764 he founded the "Literary Club," which still exists and meets in London.

Oddly enough, although a prolific writer, it is to another person-- to Mr James Boswell, who first met him in 1763-- that he owes his greatest and most lasting fame. A much larger number of persons read +Boswell's Life of Johnson+-- one of the most entertaining books in all literature-- than Johnson's own works. Between the years 1779 and 1781 appeared his last and ablest work, +The Lives of the Poets+, which were written as prefaces to a collective edition of the English Poets, published by several London booksellers. He died in 1784.

3. Johnson's earlier style was full of Latin words; his later style is more purely English than most of the journalistic writing of the present day. His Rambler is full of "long-tailed words in _osity_ and _ation_;"

but his 'Lives of the Poets' is written in manly, vigorous, and idiomatic English. In verse, he occupies a place between Pope and Goldsmith, and is one of the masters in the "didactic school" of English poetry. His rhythm and periods are swelling and sonorous; and here and there he equals Pope in the terseness and condensation of his language.

The following is a fair specimen:--

"Of all the griefs that hara.s.s the distressed, Sure the most bitter is a scornful jest; Fate never wounds more deep the generous heart, Than when a blockhead's insult points the dart."

4. OLIVER GOLDSMITH (+1728-1774+), poet, essayist, historian, and dramatist, was born at Pallas, in the county of Longford, Ireland, in the year 1728. His father was an Irish clergyman, careless, good-hearted, and the original of the famous Dr Primrose, in +The Vicar of Wakefield+. He was also the original of the "village preacher" in +The Deserted Village+.

"A man he was to all the country dear, And pa.s.sing rich with forty pounds a-year."

Oliver was educated at Trinity College, Dublin; but he left it with no fixed aim. He thought of law, and set off for London, but spent all his money in Dublin. He thought of medicine, and resided two years in Edinburgh. He started for Leyden, in Holland, to continue what he called his medical studies; but he had a thirst to see the world-- and so, with a guinea in his pocket, one s.h.i.+rt, and a flute, he set out on his travels through the continent of Europe. At length, on the 1st of February 1756, he landed at Dover, after an absence of two years, without a farthing in his pocket. London reached, he tried many ways of making a living, as a.s.sistant to an apothecary, physician, reader for the press, usher in a school, writer in journals. His first work was 'An Inquiry into the State of Polite Learning in Europe,' in 1759; but it appeared without his name. From that date he wrote books of all kinds, poems, and plays. He died in his chambers in Brick Court, Temple, London, in 1774.

5. Goldsmith's best poems are +The Traveller+ and +The Deserted Village+,-- both written in the Popian couplet. His best play is +She Stoops to Conquer+. His best prose work is +The Vicar of Wakefield+, "the first genuine novel of domestic life." He also wrote histories of England, of Rome, of Animated Nature. All this was done as professional, nay, almost as hack work; but always in a very pleasant, lively, and readable style. Ease, grace, charm, naturalness, pleasant rhythm, purity of diction-- these were the chief characteristics of his writings.

"Almost to all things could he turn his hand"-- poem, essay, play, story, history, natural science. Even when satirical, he was good-natured; and his +Retaliation+ is the friendliest and pleasantest of satires. In his poetry, his words seem artless, but are indeed delicately chosen with that consummate art which conceals and effaces itself: where he seems most simple and easy, there he has taken most pains and given most labour.

6. EDMUND BURKE (+1730-1797+) was born at Dublin in the year 1730. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin; and in 1747 was entered of the Middle Temple, with the purpose of reading for the Bar. In 1766 he was so fortunate as to enter Parliament as member for Wendover, in Buckinghams.h.i.+re; and he sat in the House of Commons for nearly thirty years. While in Parliament, he worked hard to obtain justice for the colonists of North America, and to avert the separation of them from the mother country; and also to secure good government for India. At the close of his life, it was his intention to take his seat in the House of Peers as Earl Beaconsfield-- the t.i.tle afterwards a.s.sumed by Mr Disraeli; but the death of his son, and only child-- for whom the honour was really meant and wished-- quite broke his heart, and he never carried out his purpose. He died at Beaconsfield in the year 1797. The lines of Goldsmith on Burke, in his poem of "Retaliation," are well known:--

"Here lies our good Edmund, whose genius was such We scarcely can praise it or blame it too much; Who, born for the universe, narrowed his mind, And to party gave up what was meant for mankind; Who, too deep for his hearers, still went on refining, And thought of convincing while they thought of dining."

7. Burke's most famous writings are +Thoughts on the Cause of the present Discontents+, published in 1773; +Reflections on the Trench Revolution+ (1790); and the +Letters on a Regicide Peace+ (1797). His "Thoughts" is perhaps the best of his works in point of style; his "Reflections," are full of pa.s.sages of the highest and most n.o.ble eloquence. Burke has been described by a great critic as "the supreme writer of the century;" and Macaulay says, that "in richness of imagination, he is superior to every orator ancient and modern." In the power of expressing thought in the strongest, fullest, and most vivid manner, he must be cla.s.sed with Shakespeare and Bacon-- and with these writers when at their best. He indulges in repet.i.tions; but the repet.i.tions are never monotonous; they serve to place the subject in every possible point of view, and to enable us to see all sides of it.

He possessed an enormous vocabulary, and had the fullest power over it; "never was a man under whose hands language was more plastic and ductile." He is very fond of metaphor, and is described by an able critic as "the greatest master of metaphor that the world has ever seen."

8. EDWARD GIBBON (+1737-1794+), the second great prose-writer of the second half of the eighteenth century, was born at Putney, London, in 1737. His father was a wealthy landowner. Young Gibbon was a very sickly child-- the only survivor of a delicate family of seven; he was left to pa.s.s his time as he pleased, and for the most part to educate himself.

But he had the run of several good libraries; and he was an eager and never satiated reader. He was sent to Oxford at the early age of fifteen; and so full was his knowledge in some directions, and so defective in others, that he went there, he tells us himself, "with a stock of knowledge that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed." He was very fond of disputation while at Oxford; and the Dons of the University were astonished to see the pathetic "thin little figure, with a large head, disputing and arguing with the greatest ability." In the course of his reading, he lighted on some French and English books that convinced him for the time of the truth of the Roman Catholic faith; he openly professed his change of belief; and this obliged him to leave the University. His father sent him to Lausanne, and placed him under the care of a Swiss clergyman there, whose arguments were at length successful in bringing him back to a belief in Protestantism. On his return to England in 1758, he lived in his father's house in Hamps.h.i.+re; read largely, as usual; but also joined the Hamps.h.i.+re militia as captain of a company, and the exercises and manuvres of his regiment gave him an insight into military matters which was afterwards useful to him when he came to write history. He published his first work in 1761. It was an essay on the study of literature, and was written in French. In 1770 his father died; he came into a fortune, entered Parliament, where he sat for eight years, but never spoke; and, in 1776, he began his history of the +Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire+. This, by far the greatest of his works, was not completed till 1787, and was published in 1788, on his fifty-first birthday. His account of the completion of the work-- it was finished at Lausanne, where he had lived for six years-- is full of beauty: "It was on the day, or rather night, of June 27, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene. The silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not describe the first emotion of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame.

But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatever might be the future fate of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious." Gibbon died in 1794, about one year before the birth of another great historian, Grote, the author of the 'History of Greece.'

9. Gibbon's book is one of the great historical works of the world. It covers a s.p.a.ce of about thirteen centuries, from the reign of Trajan (98), to the fall of the Eastern Empire in 1453; and the amount of reading and study required to write it, must have been almost beyond the power of our conceiving. The skill in arranging and disposing the enormous ma.s.s of matter in his history is also unparalleled. His style is said by a critic to be "copious, splendid, elegantly rounded, distinguished by supreme artificial skill." It is remarkable for the proportion of Latin words employed. While some parts of our translation of the Bible contain as much as 96 per cent of pure English words, Gibbon has only 58 per cent: the rest, or 42 per cent, are words of Latin origin. In fact, of all our great English writers, Gibbon stands lowest in his use of pure English words; and the two writers who come nearest him in this respect are Johnson and Swift. The great Greek scholar, Professor Porson, said of Gibbon's style, that "there could not be a better exercise for a schoolboy than to turn a page of it into English."

10. +Poets.+-- The chief poets of the latter half of the eighteenth century belong to a new world, and show very little trace in their writings of eighteenth-century culture, ideas, or prejudices. Most of the best poets who were born in this half of the eighteenth century and began to write in it-- such as Crabbe and Wordsworth-- are true denizens, in the character of their minds and feelings, of the nineteenth. The greatest poets of the period are +Cowper+, +Crabbe+, and +Burns+; and along with these may be mentioned as little inferior, +Chatterton+ and +Blake+, two of the most original poets that have appeared in any literature.

11. WILLIAM COWPER (+1731-1800+), one of the truest, purest, and sweetest of English poets, was born at Great Berkhampstead, in Hertfords.h.i.+re, in 1731. His father, Dr Cowper, who was a nephew of Lord Chancellor Cowper, was rector of the parish, and chaplain to George II.

Young Cowper was educated at Westminster School; and "the great proconsul of India," Warren Hastings, was one of his schoolfellows.

After leaving Westminster, he was entered of the Middle Temple, and was also articled to a solicitor. At the age of thirty-one he was appointed one of the Clerks to the House of Lords; but he was so terribly nervous and timid, that he threw up the appointment. He was next appointed Clerk of the Journals-- a post which even the shyest man might hold; but, when he found that he would have to appear at the bar of the House of Lords, he went home and attempted to commit suicide. When at school, he had been terribly and persistently bullied; and, about this time, his mind had been somewhat affected by a disappointment in love. The form of his insanity was melancholia; and he had several long and severe attacks of the same disease in the after-course of his life. He had to be placed in the keeping of a physician; and it was only after fifteen months'

seclusion that he was able to face the world. Giving up all idea of professional or of public life, he went to live at Huntingdon with the Unwins; and, after the death of Mr Unwin, he removed with Mrs Unwin to Olney, in Buckinghams.h.i.+re. Here, in 1773, another attack of melancholia came upon him. In 1779, Cowper joined with Mr Newton, the curate of the parish, in publis.h.i.+ng the +Olney Hymns+, of which he wrote sixty-eight.

But it was not till he was past fifty years of age that he betook himself seriously to the writing of poetry. His first volume, which contained +Table-Talk+, +Conversation+, +Retirement+, and other poems in heroic metre, appeared in 1782. His second volume, which included +The Task+ and +John Gilpin+, was published in 1785. His translation of the +Iliad+ and +Odyssey+ of Homer-- a translation into blank verse, which he wrote at the regular rate of forty lines a-day-- was published in 1791. Mrs Unwin now had a shock of paralysis; Cowper himself was again seized with mental illness; and from 1791 till his death in 1800, his condition was one of extreme misery, depression, and despair. He thought himself an outcast from the mercy of G.o.d. "I seem to myself," he wrote to a friend, "to be scrambling always in the dark, among rocks and precipices, without a guide, but with an enemy ever at my heels, prepared to push me headlong." The cloud never lifted; gloom and dejection enshrouded all his later years; a pension of 300 a-year from George III. brought him no pleasure; and he died insane, at East Dereham, in Norfolk, in the year 1800. In the poem of +The Castaway+ he compares himself to a drowning sailor:--

"No voice divine the storm allayed, No light propitious shone, When, far from all effectual aid, We perished-- each alone-- But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in blacker gulfs than he."

12. His greatest work is +The Task+; and the best poem in it is probably "The Winter Evening." His best-known poem is +John Gilpin+, which, like "The Task," he wrote at the request of his friend, Lady Austen. His most powerful poem is +The Castaway+. He always writes in clear, crisp, pleasant, and manly English. He himself says, in a letter to a friend: "Perspicuity is always more than half the battle... A meaning that does not stare you in the face is as bad as no meaning;" and this direction he himself always carried out. Cowper's poems mark a new era in poetry; his style is new, and his ideas are new. He is no follower of Pope; Southey compared Pope and Cowper as "formal gardens in comparison with woodland scenery." He is always original, always true-- true to his own feeling, and true to the object he is describing. "My descriptions," he writes of "The Task," "are all from nature; not one of them second-handed. My delineations of the heart are from my own experience."

Everywhere in his poems we find a genuine love of nature; humour and pathos in his description of persons; and a purity and honesty of style that have never been surpa.s.sed. Many of his well-put lines have pa.s.sed into our common stock of everyday quotations. Such are--

"G.o.d made the country, and man made the town."

"Variety's the very spice of life That gives it all its flavour."

"The heart May give a useful lesson to the head, And Learning wiser grow without his books."

"Beware of desperate steps. The darkest day, Live till to-morrow, will have pa.s.sed away."

13. GEORGE CRABBE (+1754-1832+), the poet of the poor, was born at Aldborough, in Suffolk, on Christmas Eve of the year 1754. He stands thus midway between Goldsmith and Wordsworth-- midway between the old and the new school of poetry. His father was salt-master-- or collector of salt duties-- at the little seaport. After being taught a little at several schools, it was agreed that George should be made a surgeon. He was accordingly apprenticed; but he was fonder of writing verses than of attending cases. His memory for poetry was astonis.h.i.+ng; he had begun to write verses at the age of fourteen; and he filled the drawers of the surgery with his poetical attempts. After a time he set up for himself in practice at Aldborough; but most of his patients were poor people and poor relations, who paid him neither for his physic nor his advice. In 1779 he resolved "to go to London and venture all." Accordingly, he took a berth on board of a sailing-packet, carrying with him a little money and a number of ma.n.u.script poems. But nothing succeeded with him; he was reduced to his last eightpence. In this strait, he wrote to the great statesman, Edmund Burke; and, while the answer was coming, he walked all night up and down Westminster Bridge. Burke took him in to his own house and found a publisher for his poems.

14. In 1781 +The Library+ appeared; and in the same year Crabbe entered the Church. In 1783 he published +The Village+-- a poem which Dr Johnson revised for him. This work won for him an established reputation; but, for twenty-four years after, Crabbe gave himself up entirely to the care of his parish, and published only one poem-- +The Newspaper+. In 1807 appeared +The Parish Register+; in 1810, +The Borough+; in 1812, +Tales in Verse+; and, in 1819, his last poetical work, +Tales of the Hall+.

From this time, till his death in 1832-- thirteen years after-- he produced no other poem. Personally, he was one of the n.o.blest and kindest of men; he was known as "the gentleman with the sour name and the sweet countenance;" and he spent most of his income on the wants of others.

15. Crabbe's poetical work forms a prominent landmark in English literature. His style is the style of the eighteenth century-- with a strong admixture of his own; his way of thinking, and the objects he selects for description, belong to the nineteenth. While Pope depicted "the town," politics, and abstract moralities, Crabbe describes the country and the country poor, social matters, real life-- the lowest and poorest life, and more especially, the intense misery of the village population of his time in the eastern counties--

"the wild amphibious race With sullen woe displayed in every face."

He does not paint the lot of the poor with the rose-coloured tints used by Goldsmith; he boldly denies the existence of such a village as Auburn; he groups such places with Eden, and says--

"Auburn and Eden can be found no more;"

he shows the gloomy, hard, despairing side of English country life. He has been called a "Pope in worsted stockings," and "the Hogarth, of song." Byron describes him as

"Nature's sternest painter, yet the best."

Now and then his style is flat, and even coa.r.s.e; but there is everywhere a genuine power of strong and bold painting. He is also an excellent master of easy dialogue.

All of his poems are written in the Popian couplet of two ten-syllabled lines.

16. ROBERT BURNS (+1759-1796+), the greatest poet of Scotland, was born in Ayrs.h.i.+re, two miles from the town of Ayr, in 1759. The only education he received from his father was the schooling of a few months; but the family were fond of reading, and Robert was the most enthusiastic reader of them all. Every spare moment he could find-- and they were not many-- he gave to reading; he sat at meals "with a book in one hand and a spoon in the other;" and in this way he read most of the great English poets and prose-writers. This was an excellent education-- one a great deal better than most people receive; and some of our greatest men have had no better. But, up to the age of sixteen, he had to toil on his father's farm from early morning till late at night. In the intervals of his work he contrived, by dint of thrift and industry, to learn French, mathematics, and a little Latin. On the death of his father, he took a small farm, but did not succeed. He was on the point of embarking for Jamaica, where a post had been found for him, when the news of the successful sale of a small volume of his poems reached him; and he at once changed his mind, and gave up all idea of emigrating. His friends obtained for him a post as exciseman, in which his duty was to gauge the quant.i.ty and quality of ardent spirits-- a post full of dangers to a man of his excitable and emotional temperament. He went a great deal into what was called society, formed the acquaintance of many boon companions, acquired habits of intemperance that he could not shake off, and died at Dumfries in 1796, in his thirty-seventh year.

17. His best poems are lyrical, and he is himself one of the foremost lyrical poets in the world. His songs have probably been more sung, and in more parts of the globe, than the songs of any other writer that ever lived. They are of every kind-- songs of love, war, mirth, sorrow, labour, and social gatherings. Professor Craik says: "One characteristic that belongs to whatever Burns has written is that, of its kind and in its own way, it is a perfect production. His poetry is, throughout, real emotion melodiously uttered, instinct with pa.s.sion, but not less so with power of thought,-- full of light as well as of fire." Most of his poems are written in the North-English, or Lowland-Scottish, dialect. The most elevated of his poems is +The Vision+, in which he relates how the Scottish Muse found him at the plough, and crowned him with a wreath of holly. One of his longest, as well as finest poems, is +The Cottar's Sat.u.r.day Night+, which is written in the Spenserian stanza. Perhaps his most pathetic poem is that ent.i.tled +To Mary in Heaven+. It is of a singular eloquence, elevation, and sweetness. The first verse runs thus--

"Thou lingering star, with lessening ray, That lov'st to greet the early morn, Again thou usher'st in the day My Mary from my soul was torn.

O Mary! dear departed shade!

Where is thy place of blissful rest?

See'st thou thy lover lowly laid?

Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast?"

He is, as his latest critic says, "the poet of homely human nature;" and his genius shows the beautiful elements in this homeliness; and that what is homely need not therefore be dull and prosaic.

18. THOMAS CHATTERTON and WILLIAM BLAKE are two minor poets, of whom little is known and less said, but whose work is of the most poetical and genuine kind. --Chatterton was born at Bristol in the year 1752. He was the son of a schoolmaster, who died before he was born. He was educated at Colston's Blue-Coat School in Bristol; and, while at school, read his way steadily through every book in three circulating libraries.

He began to write verses at the age of fifteen, and in two years had produced a large number of poems-- some of them of the highest value. In 1770, he came up to London, with something under five pounds in his pocket, and his mind made up to try his fortune as a literary man, resolved, though he was only a boy of seventeen, to live by literature or to die. Accordingly, he set to work and wrote every kind of productions-- poems, essays, stories, political articles, songs for public singers; and all the time he was half starving. A loaf of bread lasted him a week; and it was "bought stale to make it last longer." He had made a friend of the Lord Mayor, Beckford; but before he had time to hold out a hand to the struggling boy, Beckford died. The struggle became harder and harder-- more and more hopeless; his neighbours offered a little help-- a small coin or a meal-- he rejected all; and at length, on the evening of the 24th August 1770, he went up to his garret, locked himself in, tore up all his ma.n.u.scripts, took poison, and died. He was only seventeen.

19. Wordsworth and Coleridge spoke with awe of his genius; Keats dedicated one of his poems to his memory; and Coleridge copied some of his rhythms. One of his best poems is the +Minstrel's Roundelay+--

"O sing unto my roundelay, O drop the briny tear with me, Dance no more on holy-day, Like a running river be.

My love is dead, Gone to his death-bed All under the willow-tree.