English Literature
5. The romantic movement was the expression of individual genius rather
than of established rules. In consequence, the literature of the revival is
as varied as the characters and moods of the different writers. When we
read Pope, for instance, we have a general impression of sameness, as if
all his polished poems were made in the same machine; but in the work of
the best romanticists there is endless variety. To read them is like
passing through a new village, meeting a score of different human types,
and finding in each one something to love or to remember. Nature and the
heart of man are as new as if we had never studied them. Hence, in reading
the romanticists, who went to these sources for their material, we are
seldom wearied but often surprised; and the surprise is like that of the
sunrise, or the sea, which always offers some new beauty and stirs us
deeply, as if we had never seen it before.
6. The romantic movement, while it followed its own genius, was not
altogether unguided. Strictly speaking, there is no new movement either in
history or in literature; each grows out of some good thing which has
preceded it, and looks back with reverence to past masters. Spenser,
Shakespeare, and Milton were the inspiration of the romantic revival; and
we can hardly read a poem of the early romanticists without finding a
suggestion of the influence of one of these great leaders.[202]
There are various other characteristics of Romanticism, but these six--the
protest against the bondage of rules, the return to nature and the human
heart, the interest in old sagas and mediæval romances as suggestive of a
heroic age, the sympathy for the toilers of the world, the emphasis upon
individual genius, and the return to Milton and the Elizabethans, instead
of to Pope and Dryden, for literary models--are the most noticeable and
the most interesting. Remembering them, we shall better appreciate the work
of the following writers who, in varying degree, illustrate the revival of
romantic poetry in the eighteenth century.
THOMAS GRAY (1716-1771)
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day;
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea;
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.
So begins "the best known poem in the English language," a poem full of the
gentle melancholy which marks all early romantic poetry. It should be read
entire, as a perfect model of its kind. Not even Milton's "Il Penseroso,"
which it strongly suggests, excels it in beauty and suggestiveness.
LIFE OF GRAY. The author of the famous "Elegy" is the most scholarly and
well-balanced of all the early romantic poets. In his youth he was a
weakling, the only one of twelve children who survived infancy; and his
unhappy childhood, the tyranny of his father, and the separation from his
loved mother, gave to his whole life the stamp of melancholy which is
noticeable in all his poems. At the famous Eton school and again at
Cambridge, he seems to have followed his own scholarly tastes rather than
the curriculum, and was shocked, like Gibbon, at the general idleness and
aimlessness of university life. One happy result of his school life was his
friendship for Horace Walpole, who took him abroad for a three years' tour
of the Continent.
No better index of the essential difference between the classical and the
new romantic school can be imagined than that which is revealed in the
letters of Gray and Addison, as they record their impressions of foreign
travel. Thus, when Addison crossed the Alps, some twenty-five years before,
in good weather, he wrote: "A very troublesome journey.... You cannot
imagine how I am pleased with the sight of a plain." Gray crossed the Alps
in the beginning of winter, "wrapped in muffs, hoods and masks of beaver,
fur boots, and bearskins," but wrote ecstatically, "Not a precipice, not a
torrent, not a cliff but is pregnant with religion and poetry."
On his return to England, Gray lived for a short time at Stoke Poges, where
he wrote his "Ode on Eton," and probably sketched his "Elegy," which,
however, was not finished till 1750, eight years later. During the latter
years of his shy and scholarly life he was Professor of Modern History and
Languages at Cambridge, without any troublesome work of lecturing to
students. Here he gave himself up to study and to poetry, varying his work
by "prowlings" among the manuscripts of the new British Museum, and by his
"Lilliputian" travels in England and Scotland. He died in his rooms at
Pembroke College in 1771, and was buried in the little churchyard of Stoke
Poges.
WORKS OF GRAY. Gray's _Letters_, published in 1775, are excellent reading,
and his _Journal_ is still a model of natural description; but it is to a
single small volume of poems that he owes his fame and his place in
literature. These poems divide themselves naturally into three periods, in
which we may trace the progress of Gray's emancipation from the classic
rules which had so long governed English literature. In the first period he
wrote several minor poems, of which the best are his "Hymn to Adversity"
and the odes "To Spring" and "On a Distant Prospect of Eton College." These
early poems reveal two suggestive things: first, the appearance of that
melancholy which characterizes all the poetry of the period; and second,
the study of nature, not for its own beauty or truth, but rather as a
suitable background for the play of human emotions.
The second period shows the same tendencies more strongly developed. The
"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1750), the most perfect poem of
the age, belongs to this period. To read Milton's "Il Penseroso" and Gray's
"Elegy" is to see the beginning and the perfection of that "literature of
melancholy" which largely occupied English poets for more than a century.
Two other well-known poems of this second period are the Pindaric odes,
"The Progress of Poesy" and "The Bard." The first is strongly suggestive of
Dryden's "Alexander's Feast," but shows Milton's influence in a greater
melody and variety of expression. "The Bard" is, in every way, more
romantic and original. An old minstrel, the last of the Welsh singers,
halts King Edward and his army in a wild mountain pass, and with fine
poetic frenzy prophesies the terror and desolation which must ever follow
the tyrant. From its first line, "Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!" to the
end, when the old bard plunges from his lofty crag and disappears in the
river's flood, the poem thrills with the fire of an ancient and noble race
of men. It breaks absolutely with the classical school and proclaims a
literary declaration of independence.
In the third period Gray turns momentarily from his Welsh material and
reveals a new field of romantic interest in two Norse poems, "The Fatal
Sisters" and "The Descent of Odin" (1761). Gray translated his material
from the Latin, and though these two poems lack much of the elemental
strength and grandeur of the Norse sagas, they are remarkable for calling
attention to the unused wealth of literary material that was hidden in
Northern mythologv. To Gray and to Percy (who published his _Northern
Antiquities_ in 1770) is due in large measure the profound interest in the
old Norse sagas which has continued to our own day.
Taken together, Gray's works form a most interesting commentary on the
varied life of the eighteenth century. He was a scholar, familiar with all
the intellectual interests of his age, and his work has much of the
precision and polish of the classical school; but he shares also the
reawakened interest in nature, in common man, and in mediæval culture, and
his work is generally romantic both in style and in spirit. The same
conflict between the classic and romantic schools, and the triumph of
Romanticism, is shown clearly in the most versatile of Gray's
contemporaries, Oliver Goldsmith.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1728-1774)
Because _The Deserted Village_ is one of the most familiar poems in our
language, Goldsmith is generally given a high place among the poets of the
romantic dawn. But the _Village_, when we read it carefully, turns out to
be a rimed essay in the style of Pope's famous _Essay on Man_; it owes its
popularity to the sympathetic memories which it awakens, rather than to its
poetic excellence. It is as a prose writer that Goldsmith excels. He is an
essayist, with Addison's fine polish but with more sympathy for human life;
he is a dramatist, one of the very few who have ever written a comedy that
can keep its popularity unchanged while a century rolls over its head; but
greater, perhaps, than the poet and essayist and dramatist is Goldsmith the
novelist, who set himself to the important work of purifying the early
novel of its brutal and indecent tendencies, and who has given us, in _The
Vicar of Wakefield_, one of the most enduring characters in English
fiction. In his manner, especially in his poetry, Goldsmith was too much
influenced by his friend Johnson and the classicists; but in his matter, in
his sympathy for nature and human life, he belongs unmistakably to the new
romantic school. Altogether he is the most versatile, the most charming,
the most inconsistent, and the most lovable genius of all the literary men
who made famous the age of Johnson.
LIFE. Goldsmith's career is that of an irresponsible, unbalanced genius,
which would make one despair if the man himself did not remain so lovable
in all his inconsistencies. He was born in the village of Pallas, Ireland,
the son of a poor Irish curate whose noble character is portrayed in Dr.
Primrose, of _The Vicar of Wakefield_, and in the country parson of _The
Deserted Village_. After an unsatisfactory course in various schools, where
he was regarded as hopelessly stupid, Goldsmith entered Trinity College,
Dublin, as a sizar, i.e. a student who pays with labor for his tuition. By
his escapades he was brought into disfavor with the authorities, but that
troubled him little. He was also wretchedly poor, which troubled him less;
for when he earned a few shillings by writing ballads for street singers,
his money went oftener to idle beggars than to the paying of his honest
debts. After three years of university life he ran away, in dime-novel
fashion, and nearly starved to death before he was found and brought back
in disgrace. Then he worked a little, and obtained his degree in 1749.
Strange that such an idle and irresponsible youth should have been urged by
his family to take holy orders; but such was the fact. For two years more
Goldsmith labored with theology, only to be rejected when he presented
himself as a candidate for the ministry. He tried teaching, and failed.
Then his fancy turned to America, and, provided with money and a good
horse, he started off for Cork, where he was to embark for the New World.
He loafed along the pleasant Irish ways, missed his ship, and presently
turned up cheerfully amongst his relatives, minus all his money, and riding
a sorry nag called Fiddleback, for which he had traded his own on the
way.[203] He borrowed fifty pounds more, and started for London to study
law, but speedily lost his money at cards, and again appeared, amiable and
irresponsible as ever, among his despairing relatives. The next year they
sent him to Edinburgh to study medicine. Here for a couple of years he
became popular as a singer of songs and a teller of tales, to whom medicine
was only a troublesome affliction. Suddenly the _Wanderlust_ seized him and
he started abroad, ostensibly to complete his medical education, but in