English Literature
Two later and better known volumes are _Songs of Innocence_ and _Songs of
Experience_, reflecting two widely different views of the human soul. As in
all his works, there is an abundance of apparently worthless stuff in these
songs; but, in the language of miners, it is all "pay dirt"; it shows
gleams of golden grains that await our sifting, and now and then we find a
nugget unexpectedly:
My lord was like a flower upon the brows
Of lusty May; ah life as frail as flower!
My lord was like a star in highest heaven
Drawn down to earth by spells and wickedness;
My lord was like the opening eye of day;
But he is darkened; like the summer moon
Clouded; fall'n like the stately tree, cut down;
The breath of heaven dwelt among his leaves.
On account of the chaotic character of most of Blake's work, it is well to
begin our reading with a short book of selections, containing the best
songs of these three little volumes. Swinburne calls Blake the only poet of
"supreme and simple poetic genius" of the eighteenth century, the one man
of that age fit, on all accounts, to rank with the old great masters.[207]
The praise is doubtless extravagant, and the criticism somewhat
intemperate; but when we have read "The Evening Star," "Memory," "Night,"
"Love," "To the Muses," "Spring," "Summer," "The Tiger," "The Lamb," "The
Clod and the Pebble," we may possibly share Swinburne's enthusiasm.
Certainly, in these three volumes we have some of the most perfect and the
most original songs in our language.
Of Blake's longer poems, his titanic prophecies and apocalyptic splendors,
it is impossible to write justly in such a brief work as this. Outwardly
they suggest a huge chaff pile, and the scattered grains of wheat hardly
warrant the labor of winnowing. The curious reader will get an idea of
Blake's amazing mysticism by dipping into any of the works of his middle
life,--_Urizen, Gates of Paradise, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, America,
The French Revolution_, or _The Vision of the Daughters of Albion_. His
latest works, like _Jerusalem_ and _Milton_, are too obscure to have any
literary value. To read any of these works casually is to call the author a
madman; to study them, remembering Blake's songs and his genius, is to
quote softly his own answer to the child who asked about the land of
dreams:
"O what land is the land of dreams,
What are its mountains and what are its streams?
--O father, I saw my mother there,
Among the lilies by waters fair."
"Dear child, I also by pleasant streams
Have wandered all night in the land of dreams;
But though calm and warm the waters wide,
I could not get to the other side."
MINOR POETS OF THE REVIVAL
We have chosen the five preceding poets, Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns,
and Blake, as the most typical and the most interesting of the writers who
proclaimed the dawn of Romanticism in the eighteenth century. With them we
associate a group of minor writers, whose works were immensely popular in
their own day. The ordinary reader will pass them by, but to the student
they are all significant as expressions of very different phases of the
romantic revival.
JAMES THOMSON (1700-1748). Thomson belongs among the pioneers of
Romanticism. Like Gray and Goldsmith, he wavered between Pseudo-classic and
the new romantic ideals, and for this reason, if for no other, his early
work is interesting, like the uncertainty of a child who hesitates whether
to creep safely on all fours or risk a fall by walking. He is "worthy to be
remembered" for three poems,--"Rule Britannia," which is still one of the
national songs of England _The Castle of Indolence_, and _The Seasons_. The
dreamy and romantic _Castle_ (1748), occupied by enchanter Indolence and
his willing captives in the land of Drowsyhed, is purely Spenserian in its
imagery, and is written in the Spenserian stanza. _The Seasons_ (1726-
1730), written in blank verse, describes the sights and sounds of the
changing year and the poet's own feelings in the presence of nature. These
two poems, though rather dull to a modern reader, were significant of the
early romantic revival in three ways: they abandoned the prevailing heroic
couplet; they went back to the Elizabethans, instead of to Pope, for their
models; and they called attention to the long-neglected life of nature as a
subject for poetry.
WILLIAM COLLINS (1721-1759). Collins, the friend and disciple of Thomson,
was of a delicate, nervous temperament, like Cowper; and over him also
brooded the awful shadow of insanity. His first work, _Oriental Eclogues_
(1742), is romantic in feeling, but is written in the prevailing mechanical
couplets. All his later work is romantic in both thought and expression.
His "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands" (1750) is an
interesting event in the romantic revival, for it introduced a new world,
of witches, pygmies, fairies, and mediæval kings, for the imagination to
play in. Collins's best known poems are the odes "To Simplicity," "To
Fear," "To the Passions," the little unnamed lyric beginning "How sleep the
brave," and the exquisite "Ode to Evening." In reading the latter, one is
scarcely aware that the lines are so delicately balanced that they have no
need of rime to accentuate their melody.
GEORGE CRABBE (1754-1832). Crabbe is an interesting combination of realism
and romanticism, his work of depicting common life being, at times, vaguely
suggestive of Fielding's novels. _The Village_ (1783), a poem without a
rival as a picture of the workingmen of his age, is sometimes like Fielding
in its coarse vigor, and again like Dryden in its precise versification.
The poem was not successful at first, and Crabbe abandoned his literary
dreams. For over twenty years he settled down as a clergyman in a country
parish, observing keenly the common life about him. Then he published more
poems, exactly like _The Village_, which immediately brought him fame and
money. They brought him also the friendship of Walter Scott, who, like
others, regarded Crabbe as one of the first poets of the age. These later
poems, _The Parish Register_ (1807), _The Borough_ (1810), _Tales in Verse_
(1812), and _Tales of the Hall_ (1819), are in the same strain. They are
written in couplets; they are reflections of nature and of country life;
they contain much that is sordid and dull, but are nevertheless real
pictures of real men and women, just as Crabbe saw them, and as such they
are still interesting. Goldsmith and Burns had idealized the poor, and we
admire them for their sympathy and insight. It remained for Crabbe to show
that in wretched fishing villages, in the lives of hardworking men and
women, children, laborers, smugglers, paupers,--all sorts and conditions
of common men,--there is abundant romantic without exaggerating or
idealizing their vices and virtues.
JAMES MACPHERSON (1736-1796). In Macpherson we have an unusual figure, who
catered to the new romantic interest in the old epic heroes, and won
immense though momentary fame, by a series of literary forgeries.
Macpherson was a Scotch schoolmaster, an educated man, but evidently not
over-tender of conscience, whose imagination had been stirred by certain
old poems which he may have heard in Gaelic among the Highlanders. In 1760
he published his _Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands_,
and alleged that his work was but a translation of Gaelic manuscripts.
Whether the work of itself would have attracted attention is doubtful; but
the fact that an abundance of literary material might be awaiting discovery
led to an interest such as now attends the opening of an Egyptian tomb, and
a subscription was promptly raised in Edinburgh to send Macpherson through
the Highlands to collect more "manuscripts." The result was the epic
_Fingal_ (1762), "that lank and lamentable counterfeit of poetry," as
Swinburne calls it, which the author professed to have translated from the
Gaelic of the poet Ossian. Its success was astonishing, and Macpherson
followed it up with _Temora_ (1763), another epic in the same strain. In
both these works Macpherson succeeds in giving an air of primal grandeur to
his heroes; the characters are big and shadowy; the imagery is at times
magnificent; the language is a kind of chanting, bombastic prose:
Now Fingal arose in his might and thrice he reared his voice. Cromla
answered around, and the sons of the desert stood still. They bent their
red faces to earth, ashamed at the presence of Fingal. He came like a cloud
of rain in the days of the sun, when slow it rolls on the hill, and fields
expect the shower. Swaran beheld the terrible king of Morven, and stopped
in the midst of his course. Dark he leaned on his spear rolling his red
eyes around. Silent and tall he seemed as an oak on the banks of Lubar,
which had its branches blasted of old by the lightning of heaven. His
thousands pour around the hero, and the darkness of battle gathers on the
hill.[208]
The publication of this gloomy, imaginative work produced a literary storm.
A few critics, led by Dr. Johnson, demanded to see the original
manuscripts, and when Macpherson refused to produce them,[209] the Ossianic
poems were branded as a forgery; nevertheless they had enormous success.
Macpherson was honored as a literary explorer; he was given an official
position, carrying a salary for life; and at his death, in 1796, he was
buried in Westminster Abbey. Blake, Burns, and indeed most of the poets of
the age were influenced by this sham poetry. Even the scholarly Gray was
deceived and delighted with "Ossian"; and men as far apart as Goethe and
Napoleon praised it immoderately.
THOMAS CHATTERTON (1752-1770). This "marvelous boy," to whom Keats
dedicated his "Endymion," and who is celebrated in Shelley's "Adonais," is
one of the saddest and most interesting figures of the romantic revival.
During his childhood he haunted the old church of St. Mary Redcliffe, in
Bristol, where he was fascinated by the mediæval air of the place, and
especially by one old chest, known as Canynge's coffer, containing musty
documents which had been preserved for three hundred years. With strange,
uncanny intentness the child pored over these relics of the past, copying
them instead of his writing book, until he could imitate not only the
spelling and language but even the handwriting of the original. Soon after
the "Ossian" forgeries appeared, Chatterton began to produce documents,
apparently very old, containing mediæval poems, legends, and family
histories, centering around two characters,--Thomas Rowley, priest and
poet, and William Canynge, merchant of Bristol in the days of Henry VI. It
seems incredible that the whole design of these mediæval romances should
have been worked out by a child of eleven, and that he could reproduce the
style and the writing of Caxton's day so well that the printers were
deceived; but such is the fact. More and more _Rowley Papers_, as they were
called, were produced by Chatterton,--apparently from the archives of the
old church; in reality from his own imagination,--delighting a large circle
of readers, and deceiving all but Gray and a few scholars who recognized
the occasional misuse of fifteenth-century English words. All this work was
carefully finished, and bore the unmistakable stamp of literary genius.
Reading now his "Ælla," or the "Ballad of Charite," or the long poem in
ballad style called "Bristowe Tragedie," it is hard to realize that it is a
boy's work. At seventeen years of age Chatterton went for a literary career
to London, where he soon afterwards took poison and killed himself in a fit
of childish despondency, brought on by poverty and hunger.
THOMAS PERCY (1729-1811). To Percy, bishop of the Irish church, in Dromore,