English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History Part 42

_Robert Pollok_, 1799-1827: a Scottish minister, who is chiefly known by his long poem, cast in a Miltonic mould, ent.i.tled _The Course of Time_. It is singularly significant of religious fervor, delicate health, youthful immaturity, and poetic yearnings. It abounds in startling effects, which please at first from their novelty, but will not bear a calm, critical a.n.a.lysis. On its first appearance, _The Course of Time_ was immensely popular; but it has steadily lost favor, and its highest flights are "unearthly flutterings" when compared with the powerful soarings of Milton's imagination and the gentle harmonies of Cowper's religious muse.

Pollok died early of consumption: his youth and his disease account for the faults and defects of his poem.

_Leigh Hunt_, 1784-1859: a novelist, a poet, an editor, a critic, a companion of literary men, Hunt occupies a distinct position among the authors of his day. Wielding a sensible and graceful rather than a powerful pen, he has touched almost every subject in the range of our literature, and has been the champion and biographer of numerous literary friends. He was the companion of Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, Keats, Lamb, Coleridge, and many other authors. He edited at various times several radical papers--_The Examiner_, _The Reflector_, _The Indicator_, and _The Liberal_; for a satire upon the regent, published in the first, he was imprisoned for two years. Among his poems _The Story of Rimini_ is the best. His _Legend of Florence_ is a beautiful drama. There are few pieces containing so small a number of lines, and yet enshrining a full story, which have been as popular as his _Abou Ben Adhem_. Always cheerful, refined and delicate in style, appreciative of others, Hunt's place in English literature is enviable, if not very exalted; like the atmosphere, his writings circulate healthfully and quietly around efforts of greater poets than himself.

_James Hogg_, 1770-1835: a self-taught rustic, with little early schooling, except what the shepherd-boy could draw from nature, he wrote from his own head and heart without the canons and the graces of the Schools. With something of the homely nature of Burns, and the Scottish romance of Walter Scott, he produced numerous poems which are stamped with true genius. He catered to Scottish feeling, and began his fame by the stirring lines beginning;

My name is Donald McDonald, I live in the Highlands so grand.

His best known poetical works are _The Queen's Wake_, containing seventeen stories in verse, of which the most striking is that of _Bonny Kilmeny_.

He was always called "The Ettrick Shepherd." Wilson says of _The Queen's Wake_ that "it is a garland of fresh flowers bound with a band of rushes from the moor;" a very fitting and just view of the work of one who was at once poet and rustic.

_Allan Cunningham_, 1785-1842; like Hogg, in that as a writer he felt the influence of both Burns and Scott, Cunningham was the son of a gardener, and a self-made man. In early life he was apprenticed to a mason. He wrote much fugitive poetry, among which the most popular pieces are, _A Wet Sheet and a Flowing Sea_, _Gentle Hugh Herries_, and _It's Hame and it's Hame_. Among his stories are _Traditional Tales of the Peasantry_, _Lord Roldan_, and _The Maid of Elwar_. His position for a time, as clerk and overseer of Chantrey's establishment, gave him the idea of writing _The Lives of Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects_. He was a voluminous author; his poetry is of a high lyrical order, and true to nature; but his prose will not retain its place in public favor: it is at once diffuse and obscure.

_Thomas Hope_, 1770-1831: an Amsterdam merchant, who afterwards resided in London, and who ill.u.s.trated the progress of knowledge concerning the East by his work ent.i.tled, _Anastasius, or Memoirs of a Modern Greek_.

Published anonymously, it excited a great interest, and was ascribed by the public to Lord Byron. The intrigues and adventures of the hero are numerous and varied, and the book has great literary merit; but it is chiefly of historical value in that it describes persons and scenes in Greece and Turkey, countries in which Hope travelled at a time when few Englishmen visited them.

_William Beckford_, 1760-1844: he was the son of an alderman, who became Lord Mayor of London. After a careful education, he found himself the possessor of a colossal fortune. He travelled extensively, and wrote sketches of his travels. His only work of importance is that called _Vathek_, in which he describes the gifts, the career, and the fate of the Caliph of that name, who was the grandson of the celebrated Haroun al Raschid. His palaces are described in a style of Oriental gorgeousness; his temptations, his lapses from virtue, his downward progress, are presented with dramatic power; and there is nothing in our literature more horribly real and terror-striking than the _Hall of Eblis_,--that h.e.l.l where every heart was on fire, where "the Caliph Vathek, who, for the sake of empty pomp and forbidden power, had sullied himself with a thousand crimes, became a prey to grief without end and remorse without mitigation." Many of Beckford's other writings are blamed for their voluptuous character; the last scene in _Vathek_ is, on the other hand, a most powerful and influential sermon. Beckford was eccentric and unsocial: he lived for some time in Portugal, but returned to England, and built a luxurious palace at Bath.

_William Roscoe_, 1753-1831: a merchant and banker of Liverpool. He is chiefly known by his _Life of Lorenzo de Medici_, and _The Life and Pontificate of Leo X._, both of which contained new and valuable information. They are written in a pleasing style, and with a liberal and charitable spirit as to religious opinions. Since they appeared, history has developed new material and established more exacting canons, and the studies of later writers have already superseded these pleasing works.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII.

WORDSWORTH, AND THE LAKE SCHOOL.

The New School. William Wordsworth. Poetical Canons. The Excursion and Sonnets. An Estimate. Robert Southey. His Writings. Historical Value.

S. T. Coleridge. Early Life. His Helplessness. Hartley and H. N.

Coleridge.

THE NEW SCHOOL.

In the beginning of the year 1820 George III. died, after a very long--but in part nominal--reign of fifty-nine years, during a large portion of which he was the victim of insanity, while his son, afterwards George IV., administered the regency of the kingdom.

George III. did little, either by example or by generosity, to foster literary culture: his son, while nominally encouraging authors, did much to injure the tone of letters in his day. But literature was now becoming independent and self-sustaining: it needed to look no longer wistfully for a monarch's smile: it cared comparatively little for the court: it issued its periods and numbers directly to the English people: it wrote for them and of them; and when, in 1830, the last of the Georges died, after an ill-spent life, in which his personal pleasures had concerned him far more than the welfare of his people, former prescriptions and prejudices rapidly pa.s.sed away; and the new epoch in general improvement and literary culture, which had already begun its course, received a marvellous impulsion.

The great movement, in part unconscious, from the artificial rhetoric of the former age towards the simplicity of nature, was now to receive its strongest propulsion: it was to be preached like a crusade; to be reduced to a system, and set forth for the acceptance of the poetical world: it was to meet with criticism, and even opprobrium, because it had the arrogance to declare that old things had entirely pa.s.sed away, and that all things must conform themselves to the new doctrine. The high-priest of this new poetical creed was Wordsworth: he proposed and expounded it; he wrote according to its tenets; he defended his ill.u.s.trations against the critics by elaborate prefaces and essays. He boldly faced the clamor of a world in arms; and what there was real and valuable in his works has survived the fierce battle, and gathered around him an army of proselytes, champions, and imitators.

WORDSWORTH.--William Wordsworth was the son of the law-agent to the Earl of Lonsdale; he was born at c.o.c.kermouth, c.u.mberland, in 1770. It was a gifted family. His brother, Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, was Master of Trinity College. Another, the captain of an East Indiaman, was lost at sea in his own s.h.i.+p. He had also a clever sister, who was the poet's friend and companion as long as she lived.

Wordsworth and his companions have been called the Lake Poets, because they resided among the English lakes. Perhaps too much has been claimed for the Lake country, as giving inspiration to the poets who lived there: it is beautiful, but not so surpa.s.singly so as to create poets as its children. The name is at once arbitrary and convenient.

Wordsworth was educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1787; but whenever he could escape from academic restraints, he indulged his taste for pedestrian excursions: during these his ardent mind became intimate and intensely sympathetic with nature, as may be seen in his _Evening Walk_, in the sketch of the skater, and in the large proportion of description in all his poems.

It is truer of him than perhaps of any other author, that the life of the man is the best history of the poet. All that is eventful and interesting in his life may be found translated in his poetry. Milton had said that the poet's life should be a grand poem. Wordsworth echoed the thought:

If thou indeed derive thy light from Heaven, Then to the measure of that Heaven-born light, s.h.i.+ne, Poet! in thy place, and be content.

He was not distinguished at college; the record of his days there may be found in _The Prelude_, which he calls _The Growth of a Poet's Mind_. He was graduated in 1791, with the degree of B.A., and went over to France, where he, among others, was carried away with enthusiasm for the French Revolution, and became a thorough Radical. That he afterwards changed his political views, should not be advanced in his disfavor; for many ardent and virtuous minds were hoping to see the fulfilment of recent predictions in greater freedom to man. Wordsworth erred in a great company, and from n.o.ble sympathies. He returned to England in 1792, with his illusions thoroughly dissipated. The workings of his mind are presented in _The Prelude_.

In the same year he published _Descriptive Sketches_, and _An Evening Walk_, which attracted little attention. A legacy of 900 left him by his friend Calvert, in 1795, enabled the frugal poet to devote his life to poetry, and particularly to what he deemed the emanc.i.p.ation of poetry from the fetters of the mythic and from the smothering ornaments of rhetoric.

In Nov., 1797, he went to London, taking with him a play called _The Borderers_: it was rejected by the manager. In the autumn of 1798, he published his _Lyrical Ballads_, which contained, besides his own verses, a poem by an anonymous friend. The poem was _The Ancient Mariner_; the friend, Coleridge. In the joint operation, Wordsworth took the part based on nature; Coleridge ill.u.s.trated the supernatural. The _Ballads_ were received with undisguised contempt; nor, by reason of its company, did _The Ancient Mariner_ have a much better hearing. Wordsworth preserved his equanimity, and an implicit faith in himself.

After a visit to Germany, he settled in 1799 at Grasmere, in the Lake country, and the next year republished the _Lyrical Ballads_ with a new volume, both of which pa.s.sed to another edition in 1802. With this edition, Wordsworth ran up his revolutionary flag and nailed it to the mast.

POETICAL CANONS.--It would be impossible as well as unnecessary to attempt an a.n.a.lysis of even the princ.i.p.al poems of so voluminous a writer; but it is important to state in substance the poetical canons he laid down. They may be found in the prefaces to the various editions of his _Ballads_, and may be thus epitomized:

I. He purposely chose his incidents and situations from common life, because in it our elementary feelings coexist in a state of simplicity.

II. He adopts the _language_ of common life, because men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions.

III. He a.s.serts that the language of poetry is in no way different, except in respect to metre, from that of good prose. Poetry can boast of no celestial _ichor_ that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose: the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both. In works of imagination and sentiment, in proportion as ideas and feelings are valuable, whether the composition be in prose or verse, they require and exact one and the same language.

Such are the princ.i.p.al changes proposed by Wordsworth; and we find Herder, the German poet and metaphysician, agreeing with him in his estimate of poetic language. Having thus propounded his tenets, he wrote his earlier poems as ill.u.s.trations of his views, affecting a simplicity in subject and diction that was sometimes simply ludicrous. It was an affected simplicity: he was simple with a purpose; he wrote his poems to suit his canons, and in that way his simplicity became artifice.

Jeffrey and other critics rose furiously against the poems which inculcated such doctrines. "This will never do" were the opening words of an article in the _Edinburgh Review_. One of the _Rejected Addresses_, called _The Baby's Debut, by W. W._, (spoken in the character of Nancy Lake, eight years old, who is drawn upon the stage in a go-cart,) parodies the ballads thus:

What a large floor! 'tis like a town; The carpet, when they lay it down, Won't hide it, I'll be bound: And there's a row of lamps, my eye!

How they do blaze: I wonder why They keep them on the ground?

And this, Jeffrey declares, is a flattering imitation of Wordsworth's style.

The day for depreciating Wordsworth has gone by; but calmer critics must still object to his poetical views in their entireness. In binding all poetry to his _dicta_, he ignores that _mythus_ in every human mind, that longing after the heroic, which will not be satisfied with the simple and commonplace. One realm in which Poetry rules with an enchanted sceptre is the land of reverie and day-dream,--a land of fancy, in which genius builds for itself castles at once radiant and, for the time, real; in which the beggar is a king, the poor man a Crsus, the timid man a hero: this is the fairy-land of the imagination. Among Wordsworth's poems are a number called _Poems of the Imagination_. He wrote learnedly about the imagination and fancy; but the truth is, that of all the great poets,--and, in spite of his faults, he is a great poet,--there is none so entirely devoid of imagination. What has been said of the heroic may be applied to wit, so important an element in many kinds of poetry; he ignores it because he was without it totally. If only humble life and commonplace incidents and unfigured rhetoric and bald language are the proper materials for the poetry, what shall be said of all literature, ancient and modern, until Wordsworth's day?

THE EXCURSION AND SONNETS.--With his growing fame and riper powers, he had deviated from his own principles, especially of language; and his peaceful epic, _The Excursion_, is full of difficult theology, exalted philosophy, and glowing rhetoric. His only attempt to adhere to his system presents the incongruity of putting these subjects into the lips of men, some of whom, the Scotch pedler for example, are not supposed to be equal to their discussion. In his language, too, he became far more polished and melodious. The young writer of the _Lyrical Ballads_ would have been shocked to know that the more famous Wordsworth could write

A golden l.u.s.tre slept upon the hills;

or speak of

A pupil in the many-chambered school, Where superst.i.tion weaves her airy dreams.

_The Excursion_, although long, is unfinished, and is only a portion of what was meant to be his great poem--_The Recluse_. It contains poetry of the highest order, apart from its mannerism and its improbable narrative; but the author is to all intents a different man from that of the _Ballads_: as different as the conservative Wordsworth of later years was from the radical youth who praised the French Revolution of 1791. As a whole, _The Excursion_ is accurate, philosophic, and very dull, so that few readers have the patience to complete its perusal, while many enjoy its beautiful pa.s.sages.

To return to the events of his life. In 1802 he married; and, after several changes of residence, he finally purchased a place called Rydal-mount in 1813, where he spent the remainder of his long, learned, and pure life. Long-standing dues from the Earl of Lonsdale to his father were paid; and he received the appointment of collector at Whitehaven and stamp distributor for c.u.mberland. Thus he had an ample income, which was increased in 1842 by a pension of 300 per annum. In 1843 he was made poet-laureate. He died in 1850, a famous poet, his reputation being due much more to his own clever individuality than to the poetic principles he a.s.serted.

His ecclesiastical sonnets compare favorably with any that have been written in English. Landor, no friend of the poet, says: "Wordsworth has written more fine sonnets than are to be met with in the language besides."