to the earlier and more primitive moods of earth. The breath
had scarcely left the body of the Grand Monarque before an
intrigue was set on foot to dispute the provisions of his will.
So with the critical testament of Pope. Within a few years of his
death we find Gray, Warton, Hurd and other disciples of the new
age denying to Pope the highest kind of poetic excellence, and
exalting imagination and fancy into a sphere far above the
Augustan qualities of correct taste and good judgment. Decentralization
and revolt were the new watchwords in literature.
We must eschew France and Italy and go rather to Iceland or the
Hebrides for fresh poetic emotions: we must shun academies
and classic coffee-houses and go into the street-corners or the
hedge-lanes in search of Volkspoesie. An old muniment chest
Change in poetic
spirit.
and a roll of yellow parchment were the finest incentives
to the new spirit of the picturesque. How else
are we to explain the enthusiasm that welcomed the
sham Ossianic poems of James Macpherson in 1760;
Percy’s patched-up ballads of 1765 (Reliques of Ancient Poetry);
the new enthusiasm for Chaucer; the “black letter” school of
Ritson, Tyrrwhitt, George Ellis, Steevens, Ireland and Malone;
above all, the spurious 15th-century poems poured forth in 1768–1769
with such a wild gusto of archaic imagination by a prodigy
not quite seventeen years of age? Chatterton’s precocious
fantasy cast a wonderful spell upon the romantic imagination
of other times. It does not prepare us for the change that was
coming over the poetic spirit of the last two decades of the
century, but it does at least help us to explain it. The great
masters of verse in Britain during this period were the three
very disparate figures of William Cowper, William Blake and
Robert Burns. Cowper was not a poet of vivid and rapturous
visions. There is always something of the rusticating city-scholar
about his humour. The ungovernable impulse and
imaginative passion of the great masters of poesy were not his
to claim. His motives to express himself in verse came very
largely from the outside. The greater part, nearly all his best
poetry is of the occasional order. To touch and retouch, he
says, in one of his letters—among the most delightful in English—is
the secret of almost all good writing, especially verse. Whatever
is short should be nervous, masculine and compact. In all
Cowper. Blake. Burns.
the arts that raise the best occasional poetry to the
level of greatness Cowper is supreme. In phrase-moulding,
verbal gymnastic and prosodical marquetry
he has scarcely a rival, and the fruits of his poetic
industry are enshrined in the filigree of a most delicate fancy
and a highly cultivated intelligence, purified and thrice refined
in the fire of mental affliction. His work expresses the rapid
civilization of his time, its humanitarian feeling and growing
sensitiveness to natural beauty, home comfort, the claims of
animals and the charms of light literature. In many of his short
poems, such as “The Royal George,” artistic simplicity is
indistinguishable from the stern reticence of genius. William
Blake had no immediate literary descendants, for he worked
alone, and Lamb was practically alone in recognizing what he
wrote as poetry. But he was by far the most original of the
reactionaries who preceded the Romantic Revival, and he caught
far more of the Elizabethan air in his lyric verse than any one
else before Coleridge. The Songs of Innocence and Songs of
Experience, in 1789 and 1794, sing themselves, and have a bird-like
spontaneity that has been the despair of all song-writers
from that day to this. After 1800 he winged his flight farther and
farther into strange and unknown regions. In the finest of these
earlier lyrics, which owe so little to his contemporaries, the ripple
of the stream of romance that began to gush forth in 1798 is
distinctly heard. But the first poetic genius of the century was
unmistakably Robert Burns. In song and satire alike Burns is
racy, in the highest degree, of the poets of North Britain, who
since Robert Sempill, Willy Hamilton of Gilbertfield, douce
Allan Ramsay, the Edinburgh periwig-maker and miscellanist,
and Robert Fergusson, “the writer-chiel, a deathless name,” had
kept alive the old native poetic tradition, had provided the
strolling fiddlers with merry and wanton staves, and had perpetuated
the daintiest shreds of national music, the broadest colloquialisms,
and the warmest hues of patriotic or local sentiment.
Burns immortalizes these old staves by means of his keener
vision, his more fiery spirit, his stronger passion and his richer
volume of sound. Burns’s fate was a pathetic one. Brief,
broken glimpses of a genius that could never show itself complete,
his poems wanted all things for completeness: culture, leisure,
sustained effort, length of life. Yet occasional, fragmentary,
extemporary as most of them are, they bear the guinea stamp
of true genius. His eye is unerring, his humour of the ripest,
his wit both fine and abundant. His ear is less subtle, except
when dialect is concerned. There he is infallible. Landscape
he understands in subordination to life. For abstract ideas about
Liberty and 1789 he cares little. But he is a patriot and an
insurgent, a hater of social distinction and of the rich. Of the
divine right or eternal merit of the system under which the poor
man sweats to put money into the rich man’s pocket and fights
to keep it there, and is despised in proportion to the amount of his
perspiration, he had a low opinion. His work has inspired the
meek, has made the poor feel themselves less of ciphers in the
world and given courage to the down-trodden. His love of
women has inspired some of the most ardently beautiful lyrics
in the world. Among modern folk-poets such as Jókai and
Mistral, the position of Burns in the hearts of his own people is
the best assured.
Bibliographical Note.—The dearth of literary history in England makes it rather difficult to obtain a good general view of letters in Britain during the 18th century. Much may be gleaned, however, from chapters of Lecky’s History of England during the 18th Century, from Stephen’s Lectures on English Literature and Society in the 18th Century (1904), from Taine’s History of English Literature (van Laun’s translation), from vols. v. and vi. of Prof. Courthope’s History of English Poetry, and from the second volume of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature (1902). The two vols. dealing respectively with the Age of Pope and the Age of Johnson in Bell’s Handbooks of English Literature will be found useful, and suggestive chapters will be found in Saintsbury’s Short History and in A. H. Thompson’s Student’s History of English Literature (1901). The same may, perhaps, be said of books v. and vi. in the Bookman Illustrated History of English Literature (1906), by the present writer. Sidelights of value are to be found in Walter Raleigh’s little book on the English Novel, in Beljame’s Le Publique et les hommes de lettres en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle, in H. A. Beers’ History of English Romanticism in the 18th Century (1899), and above all in Sir Leslie Stephen’s History of English Thought during the 18th Century; Stephen’s Hours in a Library, the monographs dealing with the period in the English Men of Letters series, the Vignettes and Portraits of Austin Dobson and George Paston, Elwin’s Eighteenth Century Men of Letters, and Thomas Wright’s Caricature History of the Georges, must also be kept in mind. (T. Se.)
VI. The 19th Century
We have seen how great was the reverence which the 18th century paid to poetry, and how many different kinds of poetic experiment were going on, mostly by the imitative efforts of revivalists (Spenserians, Miltonians, Shakespeareans, Ballad-mongers, Scandinavian, Celtic, Gothic scholars and the like), but also in the direction of nature study and landscape description, while the more formal type of Augustan poetry, satire and description, in the direct succession of Pope, was by no means neglected.
The most original vein in the 19th century was supplied by the Wordsworth group, the first manifesto of which appeared in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798. William Wordsworth himself represents, in the first place, a revolutionary movement against the poetic diction of study-poets since the first Wordsworth. acceptance of the Miltonic model by Addison. His ideal, imperfectly carried out, was a reversion to popular language of the utmost simplicity and directness. He added to this the idea of the enlargement of man by Nature, after Rousseau, and went further than this in the utterance of an essentially pantheistic desire to become part of its loveliness, to partake in a mystical sense of the loneliness of the mountain, the sound of falling water, the upper horizon of the clouds and the wind. To the growing multitude of educated people who were being pent in huge cities these ideas were far sweeter than the formalities of the old pastoral. Wordsworth’s great discovery, perhaps, was that popular poetry need not be imitative, artificial or condescending,
