From Chaucer to Tennyson
draws with elegance and precision a chair, a clock, a harpsichord, a
barometer, a piece of needle-work. But Cowper was an outdoor as well as
an indoor man. The Olney landscape was tame, a fat, agricultural region,
where the sluggish Ouse wound between plowed fields and the horizon was
bounded by low hills. Nevertheless Cowper's natural descriptions are at
once more distinct and more imaginative than Thomson's. _The Task_
reflects, also, the new philanthropic spirit, the enthusiasm of
humanity, the feeling of the brotherhood of men to which Rousseau had
given expression in France, and which issued in the French Revolution.
In England this was the time of Wilberforce, the antislavery agitator;
of Whitefield, the eloquent revival preacher; of John and Charles
Wesley, and of the Evangelical and Methodist movements which gave new
life to the English Church. John Newton, the curate of Olney and the
keeper of Cowper's conscience, was one of the leaders of the
Evangelicals; and Cowper's first volume of _Table Talk_ and other poems,
1782, written under Newton's inspiration, was a series of sermons in
verse, somewhat intolerant of all worldly enjoyments, such as hunting,
dancing, and theaters. "God made the country and man made the town," he
wrote. He was a moralizing poet, and his morality was sometimes that of
the invalid and the recluse. Byron called him a "coddled poet." And,
indeed, there is a suspicion of gruel and dressing-gowns about him. He
lived much among women, and his sufferings had refined him to a feminine
delicacy. But there is no sickliness in his poetry, and he retained a
charming playful humor--displayed in his excellent comic ballad _John
Gilpin_; and Mrs. Browning has sung of him,
How, when one by one sweet sounds and wandering lights departed,
He bore no less a loving face, because so broken-hearted.
At the close of the year 1786 a young Scotchman, named Samuel Rose,
called upon Cowper at Olney, and left with him a small volume, which had
appeared at Edinburgh during the past summer, entitled _Poems chiefly in
the Scottish Dialect by Robert Burns_. Cowper read the book through
twice, and, though somewhat bothered by the dialect, pronounced it a
"very extraordinary production." This momentary flash, as of an electric
spark, marks the contact not only of the two chief British poets of
their generation, but of two literatures. Scotch poets, like Thomson and
Beattie, had written in southern English, and, as Carlyle said, _in
vacuo_, that is, with nothing specially national in their work. Burns's
sweet though rugged Doric first secured the vernacular poetry of his
country a hearing beyond the border. He had, to be sure, a whole
literature of popular songs and ballads behind him, and his immediate
models were Allan Ramsay and Robert Ferguson; but these remained
provincial, while Burns became universal.
He was born in Ayrshire, on the banks of "bonny Doon," in a clay biggin
not far from "Alloway's auld haunted kirk," the scene of the witch dance
in _Tam O'Shanter_. His father was a hard-headed, God-fearing tenant
farmer, whose life and that of his sons was a harsh struggle with
poverty. The crops failed; the landlord pressed for his rent; for weeks
at a time the family tasted no meat; yet this life of toil was lightened
by love and homely pleasures. In the _Cotter's Saturday Night_ Burns has
drawn a beautiful picture of his parents' household, the rest that came
at the week's end, and the family worship about the "wee bit ingle,
blinkin' bonnily." Robert was handsome, wild, and witty. He was
universally susceptible, and his first songs, like his last, were of
"the lasses." His head had been stuffed, in boyhood, with "tales and
songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks,
spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights," etc., told him by one
Jenny Wilson, an old woman who lived in the family. His ear was full of
ancient Scottish tunes, and as soon as he fell in love he began to make
poetry as naturally as a bird sings. He composed his verses while
following the plow or working in the stack-yard; or, at evening,
balancing on two legs of his chair and watching the light of a peat fire
play over the reeky walls of the cottage. Burns's love songs are in many
keys, ranging from strains of the most pure and exalted passion, like
_Ae Fond Kiss_ and _To Mary in Heaven_, to such loose ditties as _When
Januar Winds_, and _Green Grow the Rashes O_.
Burns liked a glass almost as well as a lass, and at Mauchline, where
he carried on a farm with his brother Gilbert, after their father's
death, he began to seek a questionable relief from the pressure of daily
toil and unkind fates, in the convivialities of the tavern. There, among
the wits of the Mauchline Club, farmers' sons, shepherds from the
uplands, and the smugglers who swarmed over the west coast, he would
discuss politics and farming, recite his verses, and join in the singing
and ranting, while
Bousin o'er the nappy
And gettin' fou and unco happy.
To these experiences we owe not only those excellent drinking songs,
_John Barleycorn_ and _Willie Brewed a Peck o' Maut_, but the headlong
fun of _Tam O'Shanter_, the visions, grotesquely terrible, of _Death and
Dr. Hornbook_, and the dramatic humor of the _Jolly Beggars_. Cowper had
celebrated "the cup which cheers but not inebriates." Burns sang the
praises of _Scotch Drink_. Cowper was a stranger to Burns's high animal
spirits, and his robust enjoyment of life. He had affections, but no
passions. At Mauchline, Burns, whose irregularities did not escape the
censure of the kirk, became involved, through his friendship with Gavin
Hamilton, in the controversy between the Old Light and New Light clergy.
His _Holy Fair_, _Holy Tulzie_, _Twa Herds_, _Holy Willie's Prayer_, and
_Address to the Unco Gude_, are satires against bigotry and hypocrisy.
But in spite of the rollicking profanity of his language, and the
violence of his rebound against the austere religion of Scotland, Burns
was at bottom deeply impressible by religious ideas, as may be seen from
his _Prayer under the Pressure of Violent Anguish_, and _Prayer in
Prospect of Death_.
His farm turned out a failure, and he was on the eve of sailing for
Jamaica, when the favor with which his volume of poems was received
stayed his departure, and turned his steps to Edinburgh. There the
peasant poet was lionized for a winter season by the learned and polite
society of the Scotch capital, with results in the end not altogether
favorable to Burns's best interests. For when society finally turned the
cold shoulder on him he had to go back to farming again, carrying with
him a bitter sense of injustice and neglect. He leased a farm at
Ellisland, in 1788, and some friends procured his appointment as
exciseman for his district. But poverty, disappointment, irregular
habits, and broken health clouded his last years, and brought him to an
untimely death at the age of thirty-seven. He continued, however, to
pour forth songs of unequaled sweetness and force. "The man sank," said
Coleridge, "but the poet was bright to the last."
Burns is the best of British song-writers. His songs are singable; they
are not merely lyrical poems. They were meant to be sung, and they are
sung. They were mostly set to old Scottish airs, and sometimes they were
built up from ancient fragments of anonymous popular poetry, a chorus,
or stanza, or even a single line. Such are, for example, _Auld Lang
Syne_, _My Heart's in the Highlands_, and _Landlady, Count the Lawin_.
Burns had a great, warm heart. His sins were sins of passion, and sprang
from the same generous soil that nourished his impulsive virtues. His
elementary qualities as a poet were sincerity, a healthy openness to all
impressions of the beautiful, and a sympathy which embraced men,
animals, and the dumb objects of nature. His tenderness toward flowers
and the brute creation may be read in his lines _To a Mountain Daisy_,
_To a Mouse_, and _The Auld Farmer's New Year's Morning Salutation to
his Auld Mare Maggie_. Next after love and good fellowship, patriotism
is the most frequent motive of his song. Of his national anthem, _Scots
wha hae wi' Wallace bled_, Carlyle said: "So long as there is warm blood
in the heart of Scotchman, or man, it will move in fierce thrills under
this war ode."
Burns's politics were a singular mixture of sentimental Toryism with
practical democracy. A romantic glamour was thrown over the fortunes of
the exiled Stuarts, and to have been "out" in '45 with the Young
Pretender was a popular thing in parts of Scotland. To this purely
poetic loyalty may be attributed such Jacobite ballads of Burns as _Over
the Water to Charlie_. But his sober convictions were on the side of
liberty and human brotherhood, and are expressed in _The Twa Dogs_, the
_First Epistle to Davie_, and _A Man's a Man for a' that_. His sympathy
with the Revolution led him to send four pieces of ordnance, taken from
a captured smuggler, as a present to the French Convention, a piece of
bravado which got him into difficulties with his superiors in the
excise. The poetry which Burns wrote, not in dialect, but in the
classical English, is in the stilted manner of his century, and his
prose correspondence betrays his lack of culture by its constant lapse
into rhetorical affectation and fine writing.
* * * * *
1. James Thomson. The Castle of Indolence.
2. The Poems of Thomas Gray.
3. William Collins. Odes.
4. The Six Chief Lives from Johnson's Lives of the Poets.
Edited by Matthew Arnold. Macmillan, 1878.
5. Boswell's Life of Johnson [abridged]. Henry Holt &
Co., 1878.
6. Samuel Richardson. Clarissa Harlowe.
7. Henry Fielding. Tom Jones.
8. Tobias Smollett. Humphrey Clinker.
9. Lawrence Sterne. Tristram Shandy.
10. Oliver Goldsmith. Vicar of Wakefield and Deserted
Village.
11. William Cowper. The Task and John Gilpin. (Globe
Edition.) London: Macmillan & Co., 1879.
12. The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns. (Globe
Edition.) London: Macmillan & Co., 1884.
CHAPTER VII.
FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT.
1789-1832.
The burst of creative activity at the opening of the 19th century has
but one parallel in English literary history, namely, the somewhat
similar flowering out of the national genius in the time of Elizabeth
and the first two Stuart kings. The later age gave birth to no supreme
poets, like Shakspere and Milton. It produced no _Hamlet_ and no
_Paradise Lost_; but it offers a greater number of important writers, a
higher average of excellence, and a wider range and variety of literary
work than any preceding era. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron,
Shelley, and Keats are all great names; while Southey, Landor, Moore,
Lamb, and De Quincey would be noteworthy figures at any period, and
deserve a fuller mention than can be here accorded them. But in so
crowded a generation, selection becomes increasingly needful, and in the
present chapter, accordingly, the emphasis will be laid upon the
first-named group as not only the most important, but the most
representative of the various tendencies of their time.
The conditions of literary work in this century have been almost unduly
stimulating. The rapid advance in population, wealth, education, and the
means of communication has vastly increased the number of readers. Every
one who has any thing to say can say it in print, and is sure of some
sort of a hearing. A special feature of the time is the multiplication
of periodicals. The great London dailies, like the _Times_ and the
_Morning Post_, which were started during the last quarter of the 18th
century, were something quite new in journalism. The first of the modern