I.
Edward Young.
"Is it to the credit or discredit of Young, as a poet, that of his 'Night Thoughts' the French are particularly fond?" So asks Croft, the sardonic author of a notice on Young in Dr. Johnson's "Lives of the Poets". The preference is certainly not to the credit of the French! Born in Hampshire in 1683, the son of a clergyman, Young lived till 1765: writing much verse, and more prodigal of praises to "the Great" than any other poet of any age.
Young's father, in 1703, appears to have been poor, for the son, to save expense, was hospitably entertained in the lodges of the Warden of New College and the President of Corpus. A Fellowship was found for him at All Souls', and as he was chosen to make and speak the Latin oration at the founding of the fine Codrington Library, it may be supposed that, at All Souls', he was held to be more than mediocriter doctus (the qualifications for a Fellow were said to be "well born, well dressed, moderately learned").
Young's earlier poems, and his dedications always, seem bids for patronage and preferment. In his "Last Day" (1710),
An archangel eminently bright
From off his silver staff of wondrous height
Unfurls the Christian flag, which waving flies
And shuts and opens more than half the skies.
Angels are asked, on the annihilation of the universe, to say where Britannia is now?
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All, all is lost, no monument, no sign,
Where once so proudly blazed the great machine.
In the Dedication, which Young later suppressed, nothing was left but Queen Anne, whom the poet distinctly saw floating upwards, and leaving the fixed stars behind her. The clever but eccentric and unfortunate Jacobite Duke of Wharton was a patron of Young, and the defender of Atterbury. The Duke died, under arms for the exiled James III, or Chevalier de St. George, at Lerida; he was then composing a tragedy on Mary, Queen of Scots. Young suppressed, in later years, the dedication to Wharton of his successful tragedy, "The Revenge" (1721).
In 1725-1726 Young published his Satires, "The Universal Passion". They read like a poor imitation of Pope's satires, but in point of time they precede the "Dunciad".
Why slumbers Pope, who leads the tuneful train,
Nor hears that Virtue, which he loves, complain?
Pope was not slumbering, he was counting every groan of Virtue, to whom he was so devoted, and was about to lash Vice with the best of them. The Universal Passion which Young flogs, is the Love of Fame. Every one is the fool of Fame except this earl or that, at whom Young dedicates his strings of epigrams which remind us of Pope, with a difference. Sloane and Ashmole are derided for their Museums. Young even dedicated a satire to Sir Robert Walpole; he must smile, "or the Nine inspire in vain". He also adulated the Duke of Newcastle in 1745, when
a pope-bred princeling crawled ashore,
meaning,
The Prince who did in Moidart land
With seven men at his right hand,
And all to conquer kingdoms three.
Oh, he's the lad to wanton me!
as a poet of the opposite party exclaimed. The inglorious Duke is
Holles! immortal in far more than fame!
In 1727 Young became a clergyman, at the ripe age of 44.[Pg 424] His "Night Thoughts" in blank verse, are of 1741-1742, in Nine Nights
My song the midnight raven has outwinged,
and the midnight owl was outshrieked.
From short (as usual) and disturbed repose
I wake, how happy they who wake no more!
Yet that were vain, if dreams infest the grave.
We remember
In that sleep of death what dreams may come!
A few lines are in the common stock of quotations such as,
An undevout astronomer is mad.
There are good passages, here and there, but long sermons in a kind of blank verse which "does not overstimulate" are not immortal. "Young has the trick of joining the turgid with the familiar... but with all his faults he was a man of genius and a poet." He was not, as people, misled by the existence of one William Young, foolishly supposed, the original of Fielding's Parson Adams in "Joseph Andrews", But Young may be the original of Robert Montgomery, who added to the piety of Young the ebullitions of an unprecedented genius for nonsense.
James Thomson.
Romance secured a firm footing in English literature, after the artificialities of the eighteenth century had sunk into dotage, through the genius of a Borderer, Sir Walter Scott. But another Borderer, long before, had seen glimmerings and had heard strains of the fairy world and the fairy songs. This was James Thomson, son of the parish minister of Ednam in Roxburghshire. The father was presently translated to Southdean, in the Cheviots, and on the old line of Scottish marches: by that way they rode, as Froissart shows, to Otterbourne fight. Thomson's father died while trying to lay a ghost in a house near Southdean, when the son was at the University of Edinburgh. The haunted house was demolished. Thomson studied divinity, but abandoned the prospective pulpit for poetry, and went to London to seek his fortune in 1725. He lost his letters of introduction, and he needed a[Pg 425] pair of shoes; his only resource was the manuscript of his "Winter," in "The Seasons". A dedication brought to Thomson twenty guineas: the piece was praised by Aaron Hill and Malloch (or Mallet, Malloch is a Macgregor name); the poem was liked; "Spring" and "Summer" followed, and Thomson dallied over "Autumn" till 1730.
In 1730 he Had been successful with the moral tragedy of "Sophonisba": though in opposition to the Court party, Thomson had obtained several noble patrons, and they did their best for his drama. A long poem on Liberty was not a triumph: but the Prince of Wales gave the author a pension of ￡100 yearly. His tragedy of "Tancred and Sigismunda" was popular (1745), and a patent place brought to the poet ￡300 a year, which he did not long enjoy, dying on 27 August, 1748. Thomson was notoriously indolent, and his last, perhaps his best, work is "The Castle of Indolence" in the Spenserian stanza.
"The Seasons" are in blank verse, a welcome change from the eternal rhyming couplets, and prove that Thomson, unlike his contemporaries, wrote "with his eye on the object". He had been bred in "the wide places of the shepherds," among the lonely Border moors and hills; he had not always been a man of towns. In the sunless winter day
scarce
The bittern knows his time, with bill ingulpht
To shake the sounding marsh; or from the shore
The plovers when to scatter o'er the heath,
And sing their wild notes to the listening waste.
This was a new voice. Being a Borderer, Thomson was an angler, and describes fly-fishing well, though not better than Gay.
In that old theme of the Middle Ages "the symphony of spring," the songs of birds, he shows knowledge of their ways, and if he makes the hen nightingale the singer, so does Homer, following the myth. In "Summer," Thomson describes, with wonderful tact, sultry climes in which he never breathed, and adds the little idyll of Musidora.
"Autumn" includes a picture of fox-hunting, a sport which James probably did not indulge in, and celebrates the Argyll of[Pg 426] Malplaquet and Duncan Forbes of Culloden, and the water of Tweed,
Whose pastoral banks first heard my Doric reed.
Despite his power of rendering nature, the artificiality of his age is still strong with Thomson, and it cannot be said that "The Seasons" are very attractive to modern readers.
"The Castle of Indolence," by virtue of the poet's return to the measure of an author in his day despised, Spenser, yields a welcome change from the eternal rhymed couplets.
A pleasant land of drowsyhead it was.
like the land of the Lotus-eaters in Tennyson. The stanza beginning
And when a shepherd of the Hebrid isles,
Set far amid the melancholy main
is the voice of reviving poetry, and is immortal. Nobody has the slightest sympathy with
The Knight of arts and industry,
And his achievements fair;
That by his castle's overthrow
Secur'd and crowned were.
The castle is a very good castle, it is good to be there, where no cocks disturb the dawn, no dogs murder sleep, "no babes, no wives, no hammers" make a din,
But soft-embodied Fays through airy portals stream.
William Collins.
"The grandeur of wildness and the novelty of extravagance, were always desired by Collins, but not always attained," says Dr. Johnson. After half a century of tame poets, we are happy to meet with one who did not cultivate the trim parterre, and who sometimes did attain to being "exquisitely wild".
Collins was born at Chichester on Christmas Day, 1721, was educated at Winchester, and at Oxford was a "demy," or scholar of Magdalen, like Addison. About 1744 he came to London[Pg 427] with many literary projects in his mind, and very little money in his pockets. Johnson met him, while "immured by a bailiff". Collins cleared his debt with money advanced by a confiding bookseller on the credit of a contemplated translation of Aristotle's "Poetics," with a commentary. A legacy of ￡2000 from an uncle, Colonel Martin, was "a sum which Collins could scarcely think exhaustible, and which he did not live to exhaust". His mind weakened: he died in 1759: sane, but incapable of composition. His Odes (1746-1747) are the firm base of his renown: the little volume is extremely scarce; Collins is said to have burned, in disappointment, the greater part of the edition.
Of his "Persian Eclogues" (1742) Collins said that they were his "Irish Eclogues," being inadequately Oriental in local colour. The brief "Ode" (1746) "How Sleep the Brave" (of Fontenoy and Culloden) in ten lines has the magic of an elder day, and of all time. The "Ode to Evening," where the poet sees
hamlets brown and dim discovered spires
And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all
Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil,
has escaped from the manner of the eighteenth century, and preludes to Keats.
There are fine free passages in "The Ode to the Passions," and the "Dirge in Cymbeline" is not unworthy of its place. The "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands," was long lost, and did not receive the poet's final touches. He obtained his knowledge of the Second Sight from John Home, author of "Douglas," who was a Hanoverian volunteer in the Forty-five, and inspired in Collins an unfulfilled desire to visit Tay and Teviotdale and Yarrow. The conventions of his age sometimes disfigure Collins's poems, but his face was set towards the City of Romance. Tastes still vary as to the relative merit of Collins and Gray: Matthew Arnold being the advocate of Gray; Swinburne of Collins. There is no way of settling such disputes; each writer, at his best, was truly a poet; neither, at his best, is staled or dimmed by time; both were almost portentous exceptions, when really inspired, to the conventional rules of their age in England.
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Thomas Gray.
Nature occasionally brings into the world pairs of men destined to be distinguished in literature, and, without their own consent, to be pitted against each other as rivals. We have Scott and Byron, Dickens and Thackeray, Tennyson and Browning, and Collins and Gray. Gray was the elder, born in 1716 (Collins was born in 1721). If Collins's father was a hatter, Gray's mother was a bonnet-maker, if milliners make bonnets. Collins went to Oxford, after being at Winchester; Gray, before going to Peterhouse, Cambridge, was at Eton. Both poets wrote little: the health of Collins broke down; Gray, from his boyhood, was of a gentle morbid melancholy, and had humour enough to laugh at himself. Collins was neglected; Gray died, later, at the age of 54, beyond competition or dispute the foremost of English poets at the moment. Both men had their faces set to the North as the home of old poetry and poetic beliefs. Collins wrote his Ode on Highland Superstitions; Gray was delighted (at first) by Macpherson's "Ossian," he translated ancient Norse poems, visited Scotland, and appreciated the Highlands, and the lakes that Wordsworth was to make famous. Both men were scholars: Collins meant to translate Aristotle's "Poetics"; Gray meant to write a history of English Poetry. Both broke away from the tyranny of the rhymed heroic couplet; both especially cultivated the Ode.
There is no doubt as to which of the two is and always has been the more popular. Eton has made Gray her own. The great General Wolfe, before falling in the arms of Victory at Quebec, recited the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" to one of his officers, saying, "I would prefer being the author of that poem to the glory of beating the French to-morrow".
It is not easy to criticize Gray, because so many of his lines are household words, and have been familiar to us from childhood. It may perhaps be said that Gray never attains to the magical effect of Collins's "How Sleep the Brave," and of the "Ode to Evening". But there are cadences in "The Elegy," and sentiments noble, pure, pious, and modest in his poems which lend to[Pg 429] them an unspeakable charm, while the ideas are such as come home to men's bosoms. It is true that his habit of personifying abstract ideas is an unfortunate survival of the weary allegorical company of the "Romance of the Rose," and no more than Collins does he escape from the mannerisms of his age. But like Collins, and indeed like his friend Horace Walpole, he was passing towards the kingdom of Romance.
At Eton he acquired Walpole's friendship; and if, after leaving Cambridge, he and Walpole quarrelled in Italy, Walpole confessed that he was to blame, made the first steps to reconciliation, and cherished, admired, and at last regretted Gray with all the ardour of a heart devoted and constant in friendship.
For the rest, Gray's life was passed quietly, and in a melancholy way, at Cambridge, which he reckoned a bear garden, and a home of Indolence; and, with his mother and aunt at Stoke Pogis, where he wrote the Elegy. His poems distilled very slowly from his genius: the Eton Ode appeared, and was unnoticed, in 1747. In the same year were written, to Horace Walpole, the rather hard-hearted lines on Walpole's handsome cat,
'Twas on a lofty vase's side.
The Eton Ode was composed, with a beautiful sonnet commemorating a private sorrow, in 1742:—
In vain to me the smiling mornings shine.
Earlier in the same year the "Ode to Spring," marked "to be sent to Fav,"—to West, his friend commemorated in the sonnet,—had been written, "not knowing he was then dead". Again, in October, 1742, another death prompted "The Elegy," which lay unfinished for about eight years. Grief had shaken Gray out of causeless melancholy, and 1742 was his great poetic year. In 1750 he wrote the light and bright "Long Story," on an unexpected visit from some poet-hunting ladies. In 1753, Walpole had Gray's "Six Poems" published, in twenty-one pages, with illustrations by Bentley. In 1754 he began the "Pindaric Odes," of which "The Progress of Poesy" is the noblest, and displays most of
[Pg 430]
the pride and ample pinion
That the Theban eagle bear
Sailing with supreme dominion
Thro' the azure deep of air.
To compose "The Bard" (the Welsh Bard) took two years and a half, and neither the style nor the ideas of the Odes were thought pleasing, or comprehensible, by the public and Dr. Johnson. In his demure way the little poet was a rebel, and Dr. Johnson knew it. Gray never practised the adulation of "the great" that was customary; he asked for no places, he refused the Laureateship. Late in life a sinecure Professorship at Cambridge was given to him. The professor never lectured: not to lecture was the convention, and against this happy convention Gray did not rebel. He studied, made notes, learned Norse, translated, visited haunted Glamis, with the chamber where Malcolm II was murdered, visited the Lakes, wrote the most delightful letters, and died at 54 in 1771, the year of the birth of Sir Walter Scott, the year of Burns's twelfth birthday.
Gray had genius—not a great, but a new genius, and had many accomplishments. His satires were surprisingly sharp and fierce. He had the light French touch of the day in verses of society. There is something of the noble pensiveness and mysteriously appealing music of Virgil in his best poems: if he be "a second-rate poet" (an unkind way of saying that he is not a Shakespeare or Homer), he shares with first-rate poets the power of moving all readers; he is not the poet of a set of refined amateurs. He who moved and soothed the heart of James Wolfe in the crisis of his fortunes, and who has charmed every generation of the English race since Wolfe and Montcalm gloriously fell, has done more than enough for fame.
The Wartons.
Gray's taste for ancient Scandinavian poetry, itself a symptom of the tendency to study all poetry, however old, exotic, and unconscious of the rules of the eighteenth century, was not a new thing. We are apt to think of Swift's patron, Sir William Temple, as an example of mere gentlemanly and conventional ideas,[Pg 431] though happy in the gift of a pure and sometimes exquisite style in prose. But Temple in his essay "Of Heroic Virtue" shows that he was capable of taking sincere pleasure in old Norse poetry, though he knew it only through the Latin translations "by Olaus Wormius in his 'Literatura Runica' (who has very much deserved from the commonwealth of learning, and is very well worth reading by any that love poetry); and to consider the several stamps of that coin, according to several ages and climates". Temple speaks of "The Death Song" of Ragnar Lodbrog as a "sonnet" and applauds "An Ode of Scallogrim" (Skalagrim); but his remarks, "I am deceived if in this sonnet and ode there be not a vein truly poetical, and in its kind Pindaric, taking it with the allowance of the different climates, fashions, opinions, and languages of such different countries," though well meant, show a curious idea of the nature of the sonnet.
Here we have, before the end of the seventeenth century, the essence of historical comparative criticism of literature; and admiration for a kind of poetry as remote as possible from the standards of the eighteenth century. Temple handed on the torch to the elder Thomas Warton, Professor of Poetry at Oxford in his day, who himself translated from the Latin, as "a Runic ode," two stanzas of the Death Song of Regnar Lodbrog.[1]
One of Warton's sons, Thomas (born 1728), was Professor of Poetry, at Oxford (1757-1767), and, from 1774 onwards (he died in 1790), published a History of English Poetry, which may be unsystematic, but is both interesting and erudite. Warton had to read the earlier and later mediaeval poets, French and English, in the manuscripts, and he quoted profusely from sources then scarcely known. "Partly through the store of new matter that is provided for 'the reading public,' partly through the zest and enthusiasm of its students—the spirit of adventure which is the same in Warton as in Scott"—his book "did more than any theory to correct the narrow culture, the starved elegance, of the preceding age". The elder brother of Thomas, Joseph Warton, born 1722, was a schoolfellow of Collins, and published "Odes" in the same year[Pg 432] as he (1746). In his preface he boldly said that "the fashion of moralizing in verse has been carried too far," and "he looks upon invention and imagination to be the chief faculties of a poet". He preached what Collins practised; he wrote good criticism in Dr. Johnson's paper, "The Adventurer"; in his essay on Pope he tried "to impress on the reader that a clear head and acute understanding are not sufficient alone to make a Poet," "that it is a creative and glowing imagination... and that alone, that can stamp a writer with this exalted and very uncommon character...." These were to be the watchwords of the Romantic movement, into which Warton, dying in 1800, did not live to enter.
John Dyer.
Of John Dyer we know from his most famous poem, "Grongar Hill," that, on a certain occasion, he
Sate upon a flowery bed
With my hand beneath my head.
If he had lain upon a flowery bed the posture would have been more poetical. In blank verse, deserting Grongar Hill, he found
Lo, the resistless theme, imperial Rome.
His "Ruins of Rome" are less impressive than Spenser's sonnets translated from Du Bellay. His "Fleece," an instructive epic of the wool trade, though praised by the illustrious Akenside, proved no golden fleece to its publisher. The prose summaries are pleasing. "Disputes between France and England on the coast of Coromandel, censured".
Dyer, at his best, is less successful than Thomson. He was born in 1700, son of an eminent solicitor of Carmarthen, was educated at Westminster, attempted the painter's art, visited Italy, took holy orders, published "The Fleece," in 1757, and died in 1758.
Briefer notes must suffice for the Rev. Mr. Blair of Athelstaneford (1699-1746) who wrote "The Grave," later recommended to amateurs by Blake's illustrations; and Matthew Green, who wrote "The Spleen" (1696-1737), a somewhat lively subsatirical effort.
[Pg 433]
William Shenstone.
Shenstone was one of the many poets who owe their reputation to their luck in being contemporaries of their biographer, Dr. Johnson. No Johnson could keep records of all the versifiers of the nineteenth century who have occasionally written good things. William Shenstone was born in November, 1714, at the Leasowes, in Halesowen. His life was much devoted to landscape gardening; and his harmless taste made him a noted character in his day. "He learned to read of an old dame," and pleasantly described her, or some other old dame, in "The School Mistress," an agreeable idyll in the Spenserian measure.
In 1732 Shenstone went to Johnson's college, his "nest of singing birds," Pembroke, in Oxford. He took no degree, he rhymed, printed his rhymes, and "The School Mistress" appeared in 1742. Thenceforth he landscape-gardened, being so little of an angler that he was indignant, says Johnson, when asked if there were any trout in his purely ornamental water. His expenses in gardening brought the haunting forms of bailiffs into his groves, but Johnson informs us gravely that "his life was unstained by any crime". He died in February, 1763. Several of his innocent poems, such as
I have found out a gift for my fair,
I have found where the wood pigeons breed,
are still familiar to many memories: they are from the "Pastoral Ballad". He perceived the demerits of the rhyming heroic couplet (as it was then written), as "apt to render the expression either scanty or constrained," and preferred the verse of four lines with alternate rhymes. Thus, on the death of Pope
Now sadly lorn, from Twit'nam's widow'd bow'r
The drooping muses take their casual way,
And where they stop a flood of tears they pour,
And where they weep, no more the fields are gay.
Of such matter are Shenstone's Elegies composed: his ballad on Jemmy Dawson, a martyr of the Jacobite cause, was celebrated and popular; poor Jemmy's lady-love died of grief and horror at his execution.
[1] Posthumously published in 1748. See Mr. W. P. Ker's "Warton Lecture on English Poetry," "Proceedings of the British Academy," Vol. IV.