he did not exactly invent the gods, turned them to account for the first time. 'He seems the first who brought them into a system of machinery for poetry, and such a one as makes its greatest importance and dignity.' Nobody has been able to improve upon his invention, and after all changes of time and religion 'his gods continue to this day the gods of poetry.' This indeed is, unluckily, too near the truth. The gods now became mere theatrical properties, which did not even affect to be more than cunningly devised masks, the secret of whose construction was fully understood by all. Unable to excite any true sentiment, the old spontaneity was to be replaced by the judicious code of rules about the fable and the machinery'-a most characteristic phrase-which recent critics defended by the authority of Aristotle. 33. The change was, in fact, the same which was taking place, though not so avowedly, in religion. There, too, the old supernatural agents were becoming parts of a cunningly devised machinery, intended to keep the wicked in order. The more cultivated classes did not wish to part with the old conceptions, but were content to use the old phrases, and explain them more or less distinctly to be merely conventional and allegorical. The palpable artificiality of these devices gave a hollowness and pomposity to the whole poetical school, which was faithfully reflected in the formal diction which excited Wordsworth's indignant rebellion. The poet, unable to use the vivid language of downright passion, lest the poor ghosts of old superstitions should be shrivelled into nothingness, di was forced to distinguish his work from prose by the adoption of conventional phrases. Like the ancient actors, he wore a mask which produced the effect of a speaking-trumpet, and gave a certain factitious dignity to his empty words. A man of real genius like Pope still might preserve, amidst his conventionalities, some genuine sense of large effects and vigour of style; but in the succeeding generation the pseudo-classicalism became hopelessly effete, and could oppose no resistance to the new reaction. The epic poems of the latter part of the century, which still obeyed the old canons, such as Glover's Leonidas' and Wilkie's 'Epigoniad,' have sunk irrecoverably into the deepest gulfs of oblivion. Pope, however, though he struts and mouths, is not yet puerile or affectedly sim ple. He is not consciously trying to ape the manner of simpler ages; and though his theory as to ancient poetry is grotesquely wrong, it still leaves him a certain freedom of motion. If he has not the independent daring with which the great poets of the Renaissance use the old materials where they find them, he is not a mere imitator of extinct forces of thought. There is just a flutter of life in these dying conventionalities. By the side of Pope's 'Homer' we may, perhaps, place Addison's 'Cato,' as the most successful attempt to transplant to the English stage something of the contemporary classicalism. Addison, however, was trying an unfortunate experiment. He had to lay aside that exquisite humour in which he was unrivalled, and had not the fire which could have given some animation to his lay figures. A few familiar quotations have survived the decay of the general fabric, to show that his elegance of style had not quite deserted him; but his characters are scarcely even shadows; they are nonentities. 34. Pope's influence remained, in a certain sense, predominant until the revolutionary era. His versification became the common form for all poets of the second order. He was placed by ordinary critics in the front rank of English poets; and the poetical revolution led by Wordsworth and Coleridge took the form of a protest against his authority. It must, however, be observed that the supremacy was never so complete as is sometimes assumed. There were many symptoms of revolt from the very beginning of the dynasty, and Pope is to be considered more accurately as marking the culmination of the tendencies which his writings embody than as inaugurating a new period. Like the Deism with which his poetical doctrines are correlated, the poetry of the true Pope school was a rather evanescent phenomenon, and was in full vigour for his own generation alone. The chief poetical writers of the century all deviate more or less from Pope's peculiar model. The divergence of form is significant. Thomson, Young, and Akenside, for example, discard the monotony of the heroic couplet in favour of blank verse, though their blank verse is of a stilted and constrained character. Collins and Gray express themselves in the lyrical form which is least adapted to Pope's calmer and more reasoning temperament. Another significant circumstance is the fashion of imitating Spenser,. denounced by Johnson in the 'Rambler.' 'Life is surely given us for higher purposes,' says that incarnation of strong sense, 'than to gather what our ancestors have wisely thrown away, and to learn what is of no value but because it has been forgotten.' Spenser's poetry is indeed the precise antipodes of Pope's, and its tender romance aimed against all those canons of common sense in which Johnson was the sturdiest of believers. For that reason his fairyland was a delightful retreat for poets weary with the prevailing rigidity of form and coldness of sentiment. Steele had tried to bring Spenser into notice in the 'Tatler' and 'Spectator.' Thomson's charming Castle of Indolence' and Shenstone's 'Schoolmistress' were popular echoes of Spenser's style; Beattie makes his 'Minstrel' confute Hume in Spenserian stanzas; William Thompson, Gilbert West, the defender of the Resurrection, Lloyd, the friend of Colman, Wilkie, of the 'Epigoniad,' Mickle, the translator of Camoens, and Cambridge, best known by the 'Scribleriad,' all wrote imitations of more or less elaborate kind; Collins loved Spenser, and Gray paid him a more discriminating homage than that of sheer imitation, for he never wrote a line himself without attuning his mind by first reading Spenser for a considerable time. Pope himself, it may be noticed, was a lover of Spenser in his boyhood, though a coarse burlesque seems to imply that he regarded him with no particular reverence. In fact, the poets of the eighteenth century, with one or two exceptions, show a disposition to edge away from the types which they professed to admit as ideally correct. 35. In spite, however, of such instinctive deviations towards a different type, the general characteristics so prominent in Pope are strongly marked upon all the chief poetical works of the time. Prior's 'Solomon' might be compared to Pope's 'Essay on Man,' to which it was greatly preferred by Wesley, as more in harmony with his theories of human corruption. The design, indeed, is more poetical, because less tending to the argumentative; though the inferior execution has prevented Prior from attaining the occasional success which redeems parts of Pope's poem from oblivion. Black'Rambler,' No. 121. 1726 1742 1744 more's Creation' gives a system of natural theology in several thousand lines of blank verse, of which no phrase has survived, though Johnson's orthodoxy caused a reprint of the portentous mass in collections of English poets. Three poems not written by Pope, and of comprehensive design, made a considerable impression in the first half of the century, and two at least have still a certain vitality. Thomson's 'Seasons' appeared in 1726-30, Young's 'Night Thoughts' in 1742-6, and Akenside's 'Pleasures of the Imagination' (in its first form) in 1744. Each of these has a didactic purpose. 36. Thomson is generally noticed as an exception to the general tendency of eighteenth-century poetry, by reason of his original descriptions of natural scenery, and is, in this capacity, the forerunner of Cowper and Wordsworth. This part of his poetry has survived the rest, as genuine work must always survive mere second-hand conventionalities. It may fairly be said, too, that the power with which he represents nature and there are few poems in which we can more distinctly hear the wind stirring the forests, and feel the sun striking upon the plains—makes him, in some degree, exceptional. He was an outsider of that brilliant society which delighted in the life of towns as in a new-found pleasure, which looked upon fox-hunting squires as the embodiment of rustic brutality, and could never sincerely prefer a hillside to a coffee-house. But the judgment probably exaggerates the indifference of the age to descriptive poetry, and certainly exaggerates the indifference of Thomson to the general thought of his time. The love of nature was not with Thomson, as with Cowper, a sign of any revolutionary tendency. He was a Whig, not a Radical, in poetry as in politics. He was given to pompous 4 declamations about liberty, simplicity, integrity, and various excellent abstractions, such as fell in well enough with the general tone of the opponents of Walpole in the days of the long opposition. His poem upon Liberty,' which Johnson 2 confesses that he had never read, appears—so far as I have inspected it to be a series of such sounding commonplaces as Bolingbroke was in the habit of embodying in his political essays. Doubtless, there was some sincerity in such declamation, but clearly there was little passion. It implied contempt for priestcraft, and dislike to the absolute rule of a despot; but not the least desire to upheave and reconstruct society. It is the sentiment of a British Whig, not of Rousseau or Voltaire. The poem on 'Liberty' and the plays, in which he indulged the same vein, are as dead as Blackmore. The 'Seasons' survives by virtue of that genuine eye for open-air sights and sounds which excited Wordsworth's sympathy. But, if we ask what was Thomson's conception of nature, we shall see that it was substantially that of his age. The old pastoral poetry which filled the country with fauns and satyrs and semi-mythological rustics was extinct; its last breath was uttered in the faded sentimentalism of Phillips and Pope, and the dead form was only available for such pleasantry as that of Gay and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. In the previous century, Thomson would probably have adopted the form of Jonson's 'Sad Shepherd,' or Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess,' or Milton's 'Comus.' But the mythology which they assumed in the Renaissance spirit was too extinct for serious poetry. In the succeeding century he might have adopted Wordsworth's lofty mysticism, and seen in nature the living embodiment of the great forces which pervade the universe, conformity with which constitutes the highest happiness of man, and a true insight into which makes him a genuine poet. Or, again, nature might have suggested to him that kind of misanthropy, or perhaps soured philanthropy, which breathes in the sentimentalism of Rousseau and Byron, and implies the revolt of passion against the ossified organisation of an effete society. 37. Thomson shared with such men, and, indeed, with poets of all ages, a vivid enjoyment of natural beauty, but it suggested to him a different set of reflections. He learns, as all thoughtful men must learn, the advantages of quiet and contemplation as a relief to the restlessness and excitement of town life. Contemplation with the true Thomson perhaps meant lying in bed till mid-day, and enjoying his bottle at night. In his poetical capacity, however, it meant an indulgence in the ordinary philosophising of the period. In Winter,' for example, he follows in one passage the general design of Milton's 'Allegro;'1 but, instead of inSee passage beginning Thus in some deep retirement would I pass. |