From Chaucer to Tennyson
directed that his tombstone should bear the inscription, _Ubi saeva
indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit_. "So great a man he seems to
me," wrote Thackeray, "that thinking of him is like thinking of an
empire falling." Swift's first noteworthy publication was his _Tale of a
Tub_, 1704, a satire on religious differences. But his great work was
_Gulliver's Travels_, 1726, the book in which his hate and scorn of
mankind, and the long rage of mortified pride and thwarted ambition
found their fullest expression. Children read the voyages to Lilliput
and Brobdingnag, to the flying island of Laputa and the country of the
Houyhnhnms, as they read _Robinson Crusoe_, as stories of wonderful
adventure. Swift had all of De Foe's realism, his power of giving
veri-similitude to his narrative by the invention of a vast number of
small, exact, consistent details. But underneath its fairy tales
_Gulliver's Travels_ is a satire, far more radical than any of Dryden's
or Pope's, because directed, not against particular parties or persons,
but against human nature. In his account of Lilliput and Brobdingnag,
Swift tries to show that human greatness, goodness, beauty disappear if
the scale be altered a little. If men were six inches high instead of
six feet, their wars, governments, science, religion--all their
institutions, in fine, and all the courage, wisdom, and virtue by which
these have been built up, would appear laughable. On the other hand, if
they were sixty feet high instead of six, they would become disgusting.
The complexion of the finest ladies would show blotches, hairs,
excrescences, and an overpowering effluvium would breathe from the pores
of the skin. Finally, in his loathsome caricature of mankind, as Yahoos,
he contrasts them, to their shame, with the beasts, and sets instinct
above reason.
The method of Swift's satire was grave irony. Among his minor writings
in this kind are his _Argument against Abolishing Christianity_, his
_Modest Proposal_ for utilizing the surplus population of Ireland by
eating the babies of the poor, and his _Predictions of Isaac
Bickerstaff_. In the last he predicted the death of one Partridge, an
almanac maker, at a certain day and hour. When the time set was past, he
published a minute account of Partridge's last moments; and when the
subject of this excellent fooling printed an indignant denial of his own
death, Swift answered very temperately, proving that he was dead and
remonstrating with him on the violence of his language. "To call a man a
fool and villain, an impudent fellow, only for differing from him in a
point merely speculative, is, in my humble opinion, a very improper
style for a person of his education." Swift wrote verses as well as
prose, but their motive was the reverse of poetical. His gross and
cynical humor vulgarized whatever it touched. He leaves us no illusions,
and not only strips his subject, but flays it and shows the raw muscles
beneath the skin. He delighted to dwell upon the lowest bodily functions
of human nature. "He saw blood-shot," said Thackeray.
1. History of Eighteenth Century Literature (1660-1780).
Edmund Gosse. London: Macmillan & Co., 1889.
2. Macaulay's Essay, The Comic Dramatists of the Restoration.
3. The Poetical Works of John Dry den. Macmillan &
Co., 1873. (Globe Edition.)
4. Thackeray's English Humorists of the last Century.
5. Sir Roger de Coverley. New York: Harpers, 1878.
6. Swift's Tale of a Tub, Gulliver's Travels, Directions to
Servants, Polite Conversation, The Great Question Debated,
Verses on the Death of Dean Swift.
7. The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope. London:
Macmillan & Co., 1869. (Globe Edition.)
CHAPTER VI.
FROM THE DEATH OF POPE TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.
1744-1789.
Pope's example continued potent for fifty years after his death.
Especially was this so in satiric and didactic poetry. Not only Dr.
Johnson's adaptations from Juvenal, _London_, 1738, and the _Vanity of
Human Wishes_, 1749, but Gifford's _Baviad_, 1791, and _Maeviad_, 1795,
and Byron's _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, 1809, were in the
verse and the manner of Pope. In Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_, 1781,
Dryden and Pope are treated as the two greatest English poets. But long
before this a revolution in literary taste had begun, a movement which
is variously described as the Return to Nature or the Rise of the New
Romantic School.
For nearly a hundred years poetry had dealt with manners and the life of
towns--the gay, prosaic life of Congreve or of Pope. The sole concession
to the life of nature was the old pastoral, which, in the hands of
cockneys like Pope and Ambrose Philips, who merely repeated stock
descriptions at second or third hand, became even more artificial than a
_Beggars Opera_ or a _Rape of the Lock_. These at least were true to
their environment, and were natural just because they were artificial.
But the _Seasons_ of James Thomson, published in installments from
1726-1730, had opened a new field. Their theme was the English
landscape, as varied by the changes of the year, and they were written
by a true lover and observer of nature. Mark Akenside's _Pleasures of
Imagination_, 1744, published the year of Pope's death, was written,
like the _Seasons_, in blank verse; and although its language had the
formal, didactic cast of the Queen Anne poets, it pointed unmistakably
in the new direction. Thomson had painted the soft beauties of a highly
cultivated land--lawns, gardens, forest-preserves, orchards, and
sheep-walks. But now a fresh note was struck in the literature, not of
England alone, but of Germany and France--romanticism, the chief element
in which was a love of the wild. Poets turned from the tameness of
modern existence to savage nature and the heroic simplicity of life
among primitive tribes. In France, Rousseau introduced the idea of the
natural man, following his instincts in disregard of social conventions.
In Germany Bodmer published, in 1753, the first edition of the old
German epic, the _Nibelungen Lied_. Works of a similar tendency in
England were the odes of William Collins and Thomas Gray, published
between 1747 and 1757; especially Collins's _Ode on the Superstitions of
the Highlands_, and Gray's _Bard_, a Pindaric in which the last survivor
of the Welsh bards invokes vengeance on Edward I., the destroyer of his
guild. Gray and Mason, his friend and editor, made translations from the
ancient Welsh and Norse poetry. Thomas Percy's _Reliques of Ancient
English Poetry_, 1765, aroused the taste for old ballads. Richard Kurd's
_Letters on Chivalry and Romance_, Thomas Warton's _History of English
Poetry_. 1774-1778, Tyrwhitt's critical edition of Chaucer, and Horace
Walpole's Gothic romance, the _Castle of Otranto_, 1765, stimulated this
awakened interest in the picturesque aspects of feudal life, and
contributed to the fondness for supernatural and mediaeval subjects.
James Beattie's _Minstrel_, 1771, described the educating influence of
Scottish mountain scenery upon the genius of a young poet. But the most
remarkable instances of this passion for wild nature and the romantic
past were the _Poems of Ossian_ and Thomas Chatterton's literary
forgeries.
In 1762 James Macpherson published the first installment of what
professed to be a translation of the poems of Ossian, a Gaelic bard,
whom tradition placed in the 3d century. Macpherson said that he made
his version--including two complete epics, _Fingal_ and _Temora_--from
Gaelic MSS., which he had collected in the Scottish Highlands. A fierce
controversy at once sprang up over the genuineness of these remains.
Macpherson was challenged to produce his originals, and when, many years
after, he published the Gaelic text, it was asserted that this was
nothing but a translation of his own English into modern Gaelic. Of the
MSS. which he professed to have found not a scrap remained: the Gaelic
text was printed from transcriptions in Macpherson's handwriting or in
that of his secretaries.
But whether these poems were the work of Ossian or of Macpherson, they
made a deep impression at the time. Napoleon admired them greatly, and
Goethe inserted passages from the "Songs of Selma" in his _Sorrows of
Werther_. Macpherson composed--or translated--them in an abrupt,
rhapsodical prose, resembling the English version of Job or of the
prophecies of Isaiah. They filled the minds of their readers with images
of vague sublimity and desolation; the mountain torrent, the mist on the
hills, the ghosts of heroes half seen by the setting moon, the thistle
in the ruined courts of chieftains, the grass whistling on the windy
heath, the gray rock by the blue stream of Lutha, and the cliffs of
sea-surrounded Gormal.
"A tale of the times of old!"
"Why, thou wanderer unseen! Thou bender of the thistle of Lora; why,
thou breeze of the valley, hast thou left mine ear? I hear no distant
roar of streams! No sound of the harp from the rock! Come, thou huntress
of Lutha, Malvina, call back his soul to the bard. I look forward to
Lochlin of lakes, to the dark billowy bay of U-thorno, where Fingal
decends from Ocean, from the roar of winds. Few are the heroes of Morven
in a land unknown."
Thomas Chatterton, who died by his own hand in 1770, at the age of
seventeen, is one of the most wonderful examples of precocity in the
history of literature. His father had been sexton of the ancient Church
of St. Mary Redcliff, in Bristol, and the boy's sensitive imagination
took the stamp of his surroundings. He taught himself to read from a
black-letter Bible. He drew charcoal sketches of churches, castles,
knightly tombs, and heraldic blazonry. When only eleven years old, he
began the fabrication of documents in prose and verse, which he ascribed
to a fictitious Thomas Rowley, a secular priest at Bristol in the 15th
century. Chatterton pretended to have found these among the contents of
an old chest in the muniment room of St. Mary Redcliff's. The Rowley
poems included two tragedies, _Aella_ and _Goddwyn_, two cantos of a
long poem on the _Battle of Hastings_, and a number of ballads and minor
pieces. Chatterton had no precise knowledge of early English, or even of
Chaucer. His method of working was as follows. He made himself a
manuscript glossary of the words marked as archaic in Bailey's and
Kersey's English dictionaries, composed his poems first in modern
language, and then turned them into ancient spelling, and substituted
here and there the old words in his glossary for their modern
equivalents. Naturally he made many mistakes, and though Horace Walpole,
to whom he sent some of his pieces, was unable to detect the forgery,
his friends, Gray and Mason, to whom he submitted them, at once
pronounced them spurious. Nevertheless there was a controversy over
Rowley hardly less obstinate than that over Ossian, a controversy made
possible only by the then almost universal ignorance of the forms,
scansion, and vocabulary of early English poetry. Chatterton's poems are
of little value in themselves, but they are the record of an industry
and imitative quickness marvelous in a mere child, and they show how,
with the instinct of genius, he threw himself into the main literary
current of his time. Discarding the couplet of Pope, the poets now went
back for models to the Elizabethan writers. Thomas Warton published in
1753 his _Observations on the Faerie Queene_. Beattie's _Minstrel_,
Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_, and William Shenstone's
_Schoolmistress_ were all written in the Spenserian stanza. Shenstone
gave a partly humorous effect to his poem by imitating Spenser's
archaisms, and Thomson reproduced in many passages the copious harmony
and luxuriant imagery of the _Faerie Queene_. John Dyer's _Fleece_ was a