VIII.

THE NEW ERA IN POETRY.

29

Percy's Reliques; War'on's "History of English Poetry;" Ossian, Chatterton, Shenstone, Beattie; Blake; Cowper; Burns; Crabbe; Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey; Byron, Shelley, Keats; Rogers, Hogg, Campbell, Moore.

HE influence of Pope over the poets of his own age and those who came after him was far-reaching and prolonged, but it must not be supposed that it was universal. Even during his lifetime poets arose who were not animated by the same spirit, to whom "the town" and its intellectual and moral atmosphere presented few attractions, and whose verse, even while hampered by artificial shackles and disfigured by poetic commonplaces and pseudo-classicalism, deals with an altogether different range of subjects from his, and has an altogether different inner meaning and substance. This is true of the poetry of Thomson, of Collins, of Gray, who have been mentioned in a previous chapter, and it is also true of the poetry of Allan Ramsay, not so great as any of these three, but still a very remarkable poetic phenomenon, considering the age in which he lived. A Scotchman, like Thomson, he stood alone, or almost alone, among the poets who flourished from 1680 to 1730, in having a genuine love for and pleasure in natural scenery. His pastoral drama, "The Gentle Shepherd," published in 1725. is, with its freshness and simplicity of style, and its picturesque and charming delineations of country life, an almost startling

The Poetical Renascence.

277

contrast to the frigid and unnatural pastoral poetry of Pope and his followers. But what perhaps tended as much as any single cause to overthrow Pope's influence, and to bring the couplet metre of which he was such a master into disgrace and almost total desuetude, was the crowd of imitators who arose during his lifetime and after his death. As Cowper says in his "Table Talk," Pope had

"Made poetry a mere mechanic art,

And every warbler had his tune by heart."

When smoothly turned and deftly rhymed couplets were used by every poetaster to give utterance to empty nothings, people began to get tired of that form of verse. But it lingered long and died hard. It was employed by Johnson, by Goldsmith, by Cowper, by Campbell, not to mention others; and its vitality clearly shows how popular it was at one time, and how well adapted it is for dealing with a certain class of subjects.

The decay of Pope's favourite metre, however, is but a secondary matter: much more important is the reaction which, during the last thirty or forty years of the eighteenth century, set in against the whole tone and character of the artificial school of poetry. Men began to turn with eager eyes to our older poets, too long neglected; ballads, which in Queen Anne's time would have incurred almost universal ridicule, were sought out and fondly pondered over; the great book of nature was studied with impassioned zeal; and poets, tired. of conventionality, begun to aspire to portray the deeper emotions and feelings of men. As time went on, the movement became more and more powerful; one great poet after another arose, different in many ways, it may be, from his brother bards, but alike them in singing from a natural impulse, and alike them in having little or nothing in common with the preceding generation of poets. Never, save in the Elizabethan era, was there such a gorgeous outburst of song as during the first thirty years of the nineteenth century. The causes of the new movement were various; but in great mea sure it must be attributed to the vast upheaval of men's minds,

which took place not in this country only, but in France and Germany, about the time of the French Revolution. During that stirring epoch, when old creeds and old modes of government were worn loosely for want of a better covering, a revolutionary spirit was abroad, not in poetry only, but in politics, in philosophy, in science, and in all forms of literary art. No doubt Mr. Palgrave is right in thinking that the French Revolution was only one result, and in itself by no means the most important, of that far wider and far greater spirit which, through inquiry and doubt, through pain and triumph, sweeps mankind round the circles of its greater development.1 But the French Revolution itself, attracting the profound attention, and, in its earlier stages, the fond sympathy, of all those aspiring young souls who, tired of effete and outworn formulas, were looking eagerly forward to the dawn of a better day, was unquestionably an important factor in the new literary renascence which produced such great results.

Of the general characteristics of the brilliant band of poets whom we shall have to deal with in this chapter, no better summary could be furnished than that given by Mr. Palgrave. They "carried to further perfection the later tendencies of the century preceding in simplicity of narrative, reverence for human passion and character in every sphere, and impassioned love of nature: whilst maintaining, on the whole, the advances in art made since the Restoration, they renewed the half-forgotten melody and depth of tone which marked the best Elizabethan writers; lastly, to what was thus inherited they added a richness in language and a variety in metre, a force and fire in narrative, a tenderness and bloom in feeling, an insight into the finer passages of the soul, and the inner meanings of the landscape, a larger and wiser humanity, hitherto hardly attained, and perhaps unattainable even by predecessors of not inferior individual genius." But before proceeding to the discussion of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and their compeers, we must go back to the more prominent sources of the magnificent stream of poetry whose course it is so pleasant 1 "Golden Treasury," p. 320.

and inspiring to trace. Only a few of the more significant can be mentioned here. Bishop Percy, by the publication in 1765 of his "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," revealed to many, to whom they had hitherto been unknown, the wealth of true poetry, of free, wild, natural feeling, which lay in our old ballads. The semi-apologetic tone of his preface shows how such things were generally regarded by the cultured society of his day. "In a polished age like the present," he says, "I am sensible that many of these reliques of antiquity will require great allowances to be made for them. . . . The editor hopes he need not be ashamed of having bestowed some of his idle hours on the ancient literature of our own country, or in regaining from oblivion some pieces (though but the amusements of our ancestors) which tend to place in a striking light their taste, genius, sentiments, or manners." Thomas Warton's "History of English Poetry" (1774-1778), which is still, despite its many inaccuracies, a useful and entertaining work, did good service by attracting the attention of cultured people to our old poets, which then, in most cases, if known at all, were only known at second hand. The same author's elaborate essay on the "Faerie Queen" answered a similar purpose. More important, however, than prose works, though these were largely efficacious in educating the public taste, were the poems which heralded the coming era. Of these, "Ossian," published in 1762, is one of the most remarkable. Whether the work of James Macpherson, or whether translated from ancient Gaelic manuscripts-a question which has led to discussions as eager, as interminable, and nearly as profitless, as those about the authorship of the letters of "Junius," "Ossian" may almost be called an epoch-making poem. It attracted profound attention both in this country and abroad, and the work, which has been admired by critics so keensighted and able as Goethe and Mr. Matthew Arnold, deserved better treatment at the hands of Macaulay than to be spoken of with ill-judging and unintelligent contempt. Descriptions of Nature in her wildest and stormiest aspects, as seen beneath a lowering and tempest-tossed sky, in the most barren and

desolate mountain solitudes, afforded quite a new sensation to readers of the Georgian era. Goethe, in the thirteenth book of his "Dichtung und Wahrheit," while recording the state of mind which led him to the composition of "Werther,” and which, being generally prevalent, brought about the great enthusiasm with which that book was received, says, speaking of the fondness for gloomy literature and the feeling of melancholy dissatisfaction which then pervaded many youthful minds: "And that to all this melancholy a perfectly suitable locality might not be wanting, Ossian had charmed us even to the Ultima Thule, where on a grey, boundless heath, wandering among prominent moss-covered gravestones, we saw the grass around us moved by an awful wind, and a heavily clouded sky above us. It was not till moonlight that the Caledonian night became day; departed heroes, faded maidens, floated around us, until at last we really thought we saw the spirit of Lodo in his fearful form." Something of the spirit of "Ossian" animates the pseudo-antique "Mediæval Romances" (1768) of Thomas Chatterton

"The marvellous boy,

The sleepless soul that perished in his pride,”—

the story of whose stormy and ill-regulated life and tragic death by suicide, at the age of seventeen, is one of the most touching and melancholy pages of literary history. How powerfully the tide was turning in the direction of our older literature is clearly proved by the fact that in no age has the imitation of Spenser been more common than during the eighteenth century.1 The "Schoolmistress" (1742), incomparably the finest poem of William Shenstone, and the "Minstrel" (1774) of James Beattie, at one time Professor of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen, are both written in the Spenserian stanza. Beattie was a genuine poet, though not a very great one, and his descriptions of natural scenery and of the more delicate human emotions are drawn with loving sympathy and

This fact is pointed out in an able and instructive article on "English Poetry from Dryden to Cowper" in the Quarterly Review for July 1862.