From Chaucer to Tennyson
poem in blank verse on English wool-growing, after the fashion of
Vergil's _Georgics_. The subject was unfortunate, for, as Dr. Johnson
said, it is impossible to make poetry out of serges and druggets. Dyer's
_Grongar Hill_, which mingles reflection with natural description in the
manner of Gray's _Elegy written in a Country Churchyard_, was composed
in the octosyllabic verse of Milton's _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_.
Milton's minor poems, which had hitherto been neglected, exercised a
great influence on Collins and Gray. Collins's _Ode to Simplicity_ was
written in the stanza of Milton's _Nativity_, and his exquisite unrimed
_Ode to Evening_ was a study in versification, after Milton's
translation of Horace's _Ode to Pyrrha_, in the original meters.
Shakspere began to be studied more reverently: numerous critical
editions of his plays were issued, and Garrick restored his pure text to
the stage. Collins was an enthusiastic student of Shakspere, and one of
his sweetest poems, the _Dirge in Cymbeline_, was inspired by the
tragedy of _Cymbeline_. The verse of Gray, Collins, and the Warton
brothers abounds in verbal reminiscences of Shakspere; but their genius
was not allied to his, being exclusively lyrical and not at all
dramatic. The Muse of this romantic school was Fancy rather than
Passion. A thoughtful melancholy, a gentle, scholarly pensiveness, the
spirit of Milton's _Il Penseroso_, pervades their poetry. Gray was a
fastidious scholar, who produced very little, but that little of the
finest quality. His famous _Elegy_, expressing a meditative mood in
language of the choicest perfection, is the representative poem of the
second half of the 18th century, as the _Rape of the Lock_ is of the
first. The romanticists were quietists, and their scenery is
characteristic. They loved solitude and evening, the twilight vale, the
mossy hermitage, ruins, glens, and caves. Their style was elegant and
academic, retaining a little of the stilted poetic diction of their
classical forerunners. Personification and periphrasis were their
favorite mannerisms: Collins's Odes were largely addressed to
abstractions, such as Fear, Pity, Liberty, Mercy and Simplicity. A poet
in their dialect was always a "bard;" a countryman was "the untutored
swain," and a woman was a "nymph" or "the fair," just as in Dryden and
Pope. Thomson is perpetually mindful of Vergil, and afraid to speak
simply. He uses too many Latin epithets, like _amusive_ and
_precipitant_, and calls a fish-line
The floating line snatched from the hoary steed.
They left much for Cowper and Wordsworth to do in the way of infusing
the new blood of a strong, racy English into our exhausted poetic
diction. Their poetry is impersonal, bookish, literary. It lacks
emotional force, except now and then in Gray's immortal _Elegy_, in his
_Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College_, in Collins's lines, _On the
Death of Thomson_, and his little ode beginning, "How sleep the brave."
The new school did not lack critical expounders of its principles and
practice. Joseph Warton published, in 1756, the first volume of his
_Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope_, an elaborate review of
Pope's writings _seriatim_, doing him certainly full justice, but
ranking him below Shakspere, Spenser, and Milton. "Wit and satire,"
wrote Warton, "are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion are
eternal....He stuck to describing modern manners; but those manners,
because they are familiar, artificial, and polished, are, in their very
nature, unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse. Whatever poetical
enthusiasm he actually possessed he withheld and stifled. Surely it is
no narrow and niggardly encomium to say, he is the great Poet of Reason,
the first of Ethical authors in verse." Warton illustrated his critical
positions by quoting freely not only from Spenser and Milton, but from
recent poets, like Thomson, Gray, Collins, and Dyer. He testified that
the _Seasons_ had "been very instrumental in diffusing a general taste
for the beauties of nature and landscape." It was symptomatic of the
change in literary taste that the natural or English school of landscape
gardening now began to displace the French and Dutch fashion of clipped
hedges, and regular parterres, and that Gothic architecture came into
repute. Horace Walpole was a virtuoso in Gothic art, and in his castle
at Strawberry Hill he made a collection of ancient armor, illuminated
manuscripts, and bric-a-brac of all kinds. Gray had been Walpole's
traveling companion in France and Italy, and the two had quarreled and
separated, but were afterward reconciled. From Walpole's private
printing-press at Strawberry Hill Gray's two "sister odes," the _Bard_,
and the _Progress of Poesy_, were first issued in 1757. Both Gray and
Walpole were good correspondents, and their printed letters are among
the most delightful literature of the kind.
The central figure among the English men of letters of that generation
was Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), whose memory has been preserved less by
his own writings than by James Boswell's famous _Life of Johnson_,
published in 1791. Boswell was a Scotch laird and advocate, who first
met Johnson in London, when the latter was fifty-four years old. Boswell
was not a very wise or witty person, but he reverenced the worth and
intellect which shone through his subject's uncouth exterior. He
followed him about, note-book in hand, bore all his snubbings patiently,
and made the best biography ever written. It is related that the doctor
once said that if he thought Boswell meant to write his life, he should
prevent it by taking Boswell's. And yet Johnson's own writings and this
biography of him have changed places in relative importance so
completely that Carlyle predicted that the former would soon be reduced
to notes on the latter; and Macaulay said that the man who was known to
his contemporaries as a great writer was known to posterity as an
agreeable companion.
Johnson was one of those rugged, eccentric, self-developed characters so
common among the English. He was the son of a Lichfield book-seller, and
after a course at Oxford, which was cut short by poverty, and an
unsuccessful career as a school-master, he had come up to London, in
1737, where he supported himself for many years as a book-seller's hack.
Gradually his great learning and abilities, his ready social wit and
powers as a talker, caused his company to be sought at the tables of
those whom he called "the great." He was a clubbable man, and he drew
about him at the tavern a group of the most distinguished intellects of
the time: Edmund Burke, the orator and statesman; Oliver Goldsmith, Sir
Joshua Reynolds, the portrait painter, and David Garrick, the great
actor, who had been a pupil in Johnson's school, near Lichfield. Johnson
was the typical John Bull of the last century. His oddities, virtues,
and prejudices were thoroughly English. He hated Frenchmen, Scotchmen,
and Americans, and had a cockneyish attachment to London. He was a high
Tory, and an orthodox churchman; he loved a lord in the abstract, and
yet he asserted a sturdy independence against any lord in particular. He
was deeply religious, but had an abiding fear of death. He was burly in
person, and slovenly in dress, his shirt-frill always covered with
snuff. He was a great diner out, an inordinate tea-drinker, and a
voracious and untidy feeder. An inherited scrofula, which often took the
form of hypochondria and threatened to affect his brain, deprived him of
control over the muscles of his face. Boswell describes how his
features worked, how he snorted, grunted, whistled, and rolled about in
his chair when getting ready to speak. He records his minutest traits,
such as his habit of pocketing the orange peels at the club, and his
superstitious way of touching all the posts between his house and the
Mitre Tavern, going back to do it, if he skipped one by chance. Though
bearish in his manners and arrogant in dispute, especially when talking
"for victory," Johnson had a large and tender heart. He loved his ugly,
old wife--twenty-one years his senior--and he had his house full of
unfortunates--a blind woman, an invalid surgeon, a destitute widow, a
negro servant--whom he supported for many years, and bore with all their
ill-humors patiently.
Among Johnson's numerous writings the ones best entitled to remembrance
are, perhaps, his _Dictionary of the English Language_, 1755; his moral
tale, _Rasselas_, 1759; the introduction to his edition of Shakspere,
1765, and his _Lives of the Poets_, 1781. Johnson wrote a sonorous,
cadenced prose, full of big Latin words and balanced clauses. Here is a
sentence, for example, from his _Visit to the Hebrides_: "We were now
treading that illustrious island which was once the luminary of the
Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived
the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion. To abstract the
mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavored,
and would be foolish, if it were possible." The difference between his
colloquial style and his book style is well illustrated in the instance
cited by Macaulay. Speaking of Villiers's _Rehearsal_, Johnson said, "It
has not wit enough to keep it sweet;" then paused and added--translating
English into Johnsonese--"it has not vitality sufficient to preserve it
from putrefaction." There is more of this in Johnson's _Rambler_ and
_Idler_ papers than in his latest work, the _Lives of the Poets_. In
this he showed himself a sound and judicious critic, though with
decided limitations. His understanding was solid, but he was a thorough
classicist, and his taste in poetry was formed on Pope. He was unjust to
Milton and to his own contemporaries, Gray, Collins, Shenstone, and
Dyer. He had no sense of the higher and subtler graces of romantic
poetry, and he had a comical indifference to the "beauties of nature."
When Boswell once ventured to remark that poor Scotland had, at least,
some "noble wild prospects," the doctor replied that the noblest
prospect a Scotchman ever saw was the road that led to London.
The English novel of real life had its origin at this time. Books like
De Foe's _Robinson Crusoe_, _Captain Singleton_, _Journal of the
Plague_, etc., were tales of incident and adventure rather than novels.
The novel deals primarily with character and with the interaction of
characters upon one another, as developed by a regular plot. The first
English novelist, in the modern sense of the word, was Samuel
Richardson, a printer, who began authorship in his fiftieth year with
his _Pamela_, 1740, the story of a young servant girl who resisted the
seductions of her master, and finally, as the reward of her virtue,
became his wife. _Clarissa Harlowe_, 1748, was the tragical history of a
high-spirited young lady who, being driven from her home by her family
because she refused to marry the suitor selected for her, fell into the
toils of Lovelace, an accomplished rake. After struggling heroically
against every form of artifice and violence, she was at last drugged and
ruined. She died of a broken heart, and Lovelace, borne down by remorse,
was killed in a duel by a cousin of Clarissa. _Sir Charles Grandison_,
1753, was Richardson's portrait of an ideal fine gentleman, whose
stately doings fill eight volumes, but who seems to the modern reader a
bore and a prig. All these novels were written in the form of letters
passing between the characters, a method which fitted Richardson's
subjective cast of mind. He knew little of life, but he identified
himself intensely with his principal character and produced a strong
effect by minute, accumulated touches. _Clarissa Harlowe_ is his
masterpiece, though even in that the situation is painfully prolonged,