A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 5

But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore, Can charm an understanding age no more.

The long-spun allegories fulsome grow, While the dull moral lies too plain below, We view well pleased at distance all the sights Of arms and palfreys, battles, fields and fights, And damsels in distress and courteous knights, But when we look too near, the shades decay And all the pleasing landscape fades away."

Addison acknowledged to Spence that, when he wrote this pa.s.sage, he had never read Spenser! As late as 1754 Thomas Warton speaks of him as "this admired but neglected poet,"[20] and Mr. Kitchin a.s.serts that "between 1650 and 1750 there are but few notices of him, and a very few editions of his works."[21] There was a reprint of Spenser's works--being the third folio of the "Faerie Queene"--in 1679, but no critical edition till 1715. Meanwhile the t.i.tle of a book issued in 1687 shows that Spenser did not escape that process of "improvement" which we have seen applied to Shakspere: "Spenser Redivivus; containing the First Book of the 'Faery Queene.' His Essential Design Preserved, but his Obsolete Language and Manner of Verse totally laid aside. Delivered in Heroic Numbers by a Person of Quality." The preface praises Spenser, but declares that "his style seems no less unintelligible at this day than the obsoletest of our English or Saxon dialect." One instance of this deliverance into heroic numbers must suffice:

"By this the northern wagoner had set His sevenfold team behind the steadfast star That was in ocean waves yet never wet, But firm is fixed, and sendeth light from far To all that in the wide deep wandering are."

--_Spenser_.[22]

In 1715 John Hughes published his edition of Spenser's works in six volumes. This was the first attempt at a critical text of the poet, and was accompanied with a biography, a glossary, an essay on allegorical poetry, and some remarks on the "Faerie Queene." It is curious to find in the engravings, from designs by Du Guernier, which ill.u.s.trate Hughes'

volumes, that Spenser's knights wore the helmets and body armor of the Roman legionaries, over which is occasionally thrown something that looks very much like a toga. The lists in which they run a tilt have the facade of a Greek temple for a background. The house of Busyrane is Louis Quatorze architecture, and Amoret is chained to a renaissance column with Corinthian capital and cla.s.sical draperies. Hughes' glossary of obsolete terms includes words which are in daily use by modern writers: aghast, baleful, behest, bootless, carol, craven, dreary, forlorn, foray, guerdon, plight, welkin, yore. If words like these, and like many which Warton annotates in his "Observations," really needed explanation, it is a striking proof, not only of the degree in which our older poets had been forgotten, but also of the poverty to which the vocabulary of English poetry had been reduced by 1700.

In his prefatory remarks to the "Faerie Queene," the editor expresses the customary regrets that the poet should have chosen so defective a stanza, "so romantick a story," and a model, or framework for the whole, which appears so monstrous when "examined by the rules of epick poetry"; makes the hackneyed comparison between Spenser's work and Gothic architecture, and apologizes for his author, on the ground that, at the time when he wrote, "the remains of the old Gothick chivalry were not quite abolished." "He did not much revive the curiosity of the public," says Johnson, in his life of Hughes; "for near thirty years elapsed before his edition was reprinted." Editions of the "Faerie Queene" came thick and fast about the middle of the century. One (by Birch) was issued in 1751, and three in 1758; including the important edition by Upton, who, of all Spenser's commentators, has entered most elaborately into the interpretation of the allegory.

In the interval had appeared, in gradually increasing numbers, that series of Spenserian imitations which forms an interesting department of eighteenth-century verse. The series was begun by a most unlikely person, Matthew Prior, whose "Ode to the Queen," 1706, was in a ten-lined modification of Spenser's stanza and employed a few archaisms like _weet_ and _ween_, but was very unspenserian in manner. As early as the second decade of the century, the horns of Elfland may be heard faintly blowing in the poems of the Rev. Samuel Croxall, the translator of Aesop's "Fables." Mr. Gosse[23] quotes Croxall's own description of his poetry, as designed "to set off the dry and insipid stuff" of the age with "a whole piece of rich and glowing scarlet." His two pieces "The Vision,"

1715, and "The Fair Circa.s.sian," 1720, though written in the couplet, exhibit a rosiness of color and a luxuriance of imagery manifestly learned from Spenser. In 1713 he had published under the pseudonym of Nestor Ironside, "An Original Canto of Spenser," and in 1714 "Another Original Canto," both, of course, in the stanza of the "Faerie Queene."

The example thus set was followed before the end of the century by scores of poets, including many well-known names, like Akenside, Thomson, Shenstone, and Thomas Warton, as well as many second-rate and third-rate versifiers.[24]

It is noteworthy that many, if not most, of the imitations were at first undertaken in a spirit of burlesque; as is plain not only from the poems themselves, but from the correspondence of Shenstone and others.[25] The antiquated speech of an old author is in itself a challenge to the parodist: _teste_ our modern ballad imitations. There is something ludicrous about the very look of antique spelling, and in the sound of words like _eftsoones_ and _perdy_; while the sign _Ye Olde Booke Store_, in Old English text over a bookseller's door, strikes the public invariably as a most merry conceited jest; especially if the first letter be p.r.o.nounced as a _y_, instead of, what it really is, a mere abbreviation of _th_. But in order that this may be so, the language travestied should not be too old. There would be nothing amusing, for example, in a burlesque imitation of Beowulf, because the Anglo-Saxon of the original is utterly strange to the modern reader. It is conceivable that quick-witted Athenians of the time of Aristophanes might find something quaint in Homer's Ionic dialect, akin to that quaintness which we find in Chaucer; but a Grecian of to-day would need to be very Attic indeed, to detect any provocation to mirth in the use of the genitive in-oio, in place of the genitive in-ou. Again, as one becomes familiar with an old author, he ceases to be conscious of his archaism: the final _e_ in Chaucer no longer strikes him as funny, nor even the circ.u.mstance that he speaks of little birds as _smale fowles_. And so it happened, that poets in the eighteenth century who began with burlesque imitation of the "Faerie Queen" soon fell in love with its serious beauties.

The only poems in this series that have gained permanent footing in the literature are Shenstone's "Schoolmistress" and Thomson's "Cast of Indolence." But a brief review of several other members of the group will be advisable. Two of them were written at Oxford in honor of the marriage of Frederick, Prince of Wales in 1736: one by Richard Owen Cambridge;[26] the other by William Thompson, then bachelor of arts and afterward fellow of Queen's College. Prince Fred, it will be remembered, was a somewhat flamboyant figure in the literary and personal gossip of his day. He quarreled with his father, George II, who "hated boetry and bainting," and who was ironically fed with soft dedication by Pope in his "Epistle to Augustus"; also with his father's prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, "Bob, the poet's foe." He left the court in dudgeon and set up an opposition court of his own where he rallied about him men of letters, who had fallen into a neglect that contrasted strangely with their former importance in the reign of Queen Anne. Frederick's chief ally in this policy was his secretary, George Lord Lyttelton, the elegant if somewhat amateurish author of "Dialogues of the Dead" and other works; the friend of Fielding, the neighbor of Shenstone at Hagley, and the patron of Thomson, for whom he obtained the sinecure post of Surveyor of the Leeward Islands.

Cambridge's spousal verses were in a ten-lined stanza. His "Archimage,"

written in the strict Spenserian stanza, ill.u.s.trates the frequent employment of this form in occasional pieces of a humorous intention. It describes a domestic boating party on the Thames, one of the oarsmen being a family servant and barber-surgeon, who used to dress the chaplain's hair:

"Als would the blood of ancient beadsman spill, Whose hairy scalps he hanged in a row Around his cave, sad sight to Christian eyes, I trow."

Thompson's experiments, on the contrary, were quite serious. He had genuine poetic feeling, but little talent. In trying to reproduce Spenser's richness of imagery and the soft modulation of his verse, he succeeds only in becoming tediously ornate. His stanzas are nerveless, though not unmusical. His college exercise, "The Nativity," 1736, is a Christmas vision which comes to the shepherd boy Thomalin, as he is piping on the banks of Isis. It employs the pastoral machinery, includes a masque of virtues,--Faith, Hope, Mercy, etc.,--and closes with a compliment to Pope's "Messiah." The preface to his "Hymn to May," has some bearing upon our inquiries: "As Spenser is the most descriptive and florid of all our English writers, I attempted to imitate his manner in the following vernal poem. I have been very sparing of the antiquated words which are too frequent in most of the imitations of this author. . . His lines are most musically sweet, and his descriptions most delicately abundant, even to a wantonness of painting, but still it is the music and painting of nature. We find no ambitious ornaments or epigrammatical turns in his writings, but a beautiful simplicity which pleases far above the glitter of pointed wit." The "Hymn to May" is in the seven-lined stanza of Phineas Fletcher's "Purple Island"; a poem, says Thompson, "scarce heard of in this age, yet the best in the allegorical way (next to 'The Fairy Queen') in the English language."

William Wilkie, a Scotch minister and professor, of eccentric habits and untidy appearance, published, in 1759, "A Dream: in the Manner of Spenser," which may be mentioned here not for its own sake, but for the evidence that it affords of a growing impatience of cla.s.sical restraints.

The piece was a pendant to Wilkie's epic, the "Epigoniad." Walking by the Tweed, the poet falls asleep and has a vision of Homer, who reproaches him with the bareness of style in his "Epigoniad." The dreamer puts the blame upon the critics,

"Who tie the muses to such rigid laws That all their songs are frivolous and poor."

Shakspere, indeed,

"Broke all the cobweb limits fixed by fools";

but the only reward of his boldness

"Is that our dull, degenerate age of lead Says that he wrote by chance, and that he scare could read."

One of the earlier Spenserians was Gilbert West, the translator of Pindar, who published, in 1739, "On the Abuse of Travelling: A Canto in Imitation of Spenser."[27] Another imitation, "Education," appeared in 1751. West was a very tame poet, and the only quality of Spenser's which he succeeded in catching was his prolixity. He used the allegorical machinery of the "Faerie Queene" for moral and mildly satirical ends.

Thus, in "The Abuse of Traveling," the Red Cross Knight is induced by Archimago to embark in a painted boat steered by Curiosity, which wafts him over to a foreign sh.o.r.e where he is entertained by a bevy of light damsels whose leader "hight Politessa," and whose blandishments the knight resists. Thence he is conducted to a stately castle (the court of Louis XV. whose minister--perhaps Cardinal Fleury?--is "an old and rankled mage"); and finally to Rome, where a lady yclept Vertu holds court in the ruins of the Colosseum, among mimes, fiddlers, pipers, eunuchs, painters, and _ciceroni_.

Similarly the canto on "Education" narrates how a fairy knight, while conducting his young son to the house of Paidia, encounters the giant Custom and worsts him in single combat. There is some humor in the description of the stream of science into which the crowd of infant learners are unwillingly plunged, and upon whose margin stands

"A _birchen_ grove that, waving from the sh.o.r.e, Aye cast upon the tide its falling bud And with its bitter juice empoisoned all the flood."

The piece is a tedious arraignment of the pedantic methods of instruction in English schools and colleges. A pa.s.sage satirizing the artificial style of gardening will be cited later. West had a country-house at Wickham, in Kent, where, says Johnson,[28] "he was very often visited by Lyttelton and Pitt; who, when they were weary of faction and debates, used at Wickham to find books and quiet, a decent table and literary conversation. There is at Wickham, a walk made by Pitt." Like many contemporary poets, West interested himself in landscape gardening, and some of his shorter pieces belong to that literature of inscriptions to which Lyttelton, Akenside, Shenstone, Mason, and others contributed so profusely. It may be said for his Spenserian imitations that their archaisms are unusually correct[29]--if that be any praise--a feature which perhaps recommended them to Gray, whose scholars.h.i.+p in this, as in all points, was nicely accurate. The obligation to be properly "obsolete" in vocabulary was one that rested heavily on the consciences of most of these Spenserian imitators. "The Squire of Dames," for instance, by the wealthy Jew, Moses Mendez, fairly bristles with seld-seen costly words, like _benty_, _frannion_, etc., which it would have puzzled Spenser himself to explain.

One of the pleasantest outcomes of this literary fas.h.i.+on was William Shenstone's "Schoolmistress," published in an unfinished shape in 1737 and, as finally completed, in 1742. This is an affectionate half-humorous description of the little dame-school of Shenstone's--and of everybody's--native village, and has the true idyllic touch.

Goldsmith evidently had it in memory when he drew the picture of the school in his "Deserted Village."[30] The application to so humble a theme of Spenser's stately verse and grave, ancient words gives a very quaint effect. The humor of "The Schoolmistress" is genuine, not dependent on the more burlesque, as in Pope's and Cambridge's experiments; and it is warmed with a certain tenderness, as in the incident of the hen with her brood of chickens, entering the open door of the schoolhouse in search of crumbs, and of the grief of the little sister who witnesses her brother's flogging, and of the tremors of the urchins who have been playing in the dame's absence:

"Forewarned, if little bird their pranks behold, 'Twill whisper in her ear and all the scene unfold."

But the only one among the professed scholars of Spenser who caught the glow and splendor of the master was James Thomson. It is the privilege of genius to be original even in its imitations. Thomson took shape and hue from Spenser, but added something of his own, and the result has a value quite independent of its success as a reproduction. "The Castle of Indolence," 1748,[31] is a fine poem; at least the first part of it is, for the second book is tiresomely allegorical, and somewhat involved in plot. There is a magic art in the description of the "land of drowsy-head," with its "listless climate" always "atween June and May,"[32] its "stockdove's plaint amid the forest deep," its hillside woods of solemn pines, its gay castles in the summer clouds, and its murmur of the distance main. The nucleus of Thomson's conception is to be found in Spenser's House of Morpheus ("Faerie Queene," book i. canto i. 41), and his Country of Idlesse is itself an antic.i.p.ation of Tennyson's Lotus Land, but verse like this was something new in the poetry of the eighteenth century:

"Was nought around but images of rest: Sleep-soothing groves and quiet lawns between; And flowery beds that slumberous influence kest, From poppies breathed; and beds of pleasant green, Where never yet was creeping creatures seen.

"Meantime unnumbered glittering streamlets played And hurled everywhere their waters sheen; That, as they bickered through the sunny glade, Though restless still themselves, a lulling murmur made."

"The Castle of Indolence" had the romantic iridescence, the "atmosphere"

which is lacking to the sharp contours of Augustan verse. That is to say, it produces an effect which cannot be wholly accounted for by what the poet says; an effect which is wrought by subtle sensations awakened by the sound and indefinite a.s.sociations evoked by the words. The secret of this art the poet himself cannot communicate. But poetry of this kind cannot be translated into prose--as Pope's can--any more than music can be translated into speech, without losing its essential character. Like Spenser, Thomson was an exquisite colorist and his art was largely pictorial. But he has touches of an imagination which is rarer, if not higher in kind, than anything in Spenser. The fairyland of Spenser is an unreal, but hardly an unearthly region. He seldom startles by glimpses behind the curtain which hangs between nature and the supernatural, as in Milton's

"Airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and sh.o.r.es and desert wildernesses."

There is something of this power in one stanza, at least, of "The Castle of Indolence:"

"As when a shepherd of the Hebrid Isles, Placed far amid the melancholy main (Whether it be lone fancy him beguiles, Or that aerial beings sometimes deign To stand embodied to our sense plain), The whilst in ocean Phoebus dips his wain, A vast a.s.sembly moving to and fro, Then all at once in air dissolves the wondrous show."

It may be guessed that Johnson and Boswell, in their tour to the Hebrides or Western Islands, saw nothing of the "spectral puppet play" hinted at in this pa.s.sage--the most imaginative in any of Spenser's school till we get to Keats'

"Magic cas.e.m.e.nts opening on the foam Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn."

William Julius Mickle, the translator of the "Lusiad," was a more considerable poet than any of the Spenserian imitators thus far reviewed, with the exception of Thomson and the possible exception of Shenstone.

He wrote at least two poems that are likely to be remembered. One of these was the ballad of "c.u.mnor Hall" which suggested Scott's "Kenilworth," and came near giving its name to the novel. The other was the dialect song of "The Mariner's Wife," which Burns admired so greatly:

"Sae true his heart, sae smooth his speech, His breath like caller air, His very foot has music in't, As he comes up the stair, For there's nae luck about the house, There is nae luck at a', There's little pleasure in the house When our gudeman's awa',"[33]

Mickle, like Thomson, was a Scotchman who came to London to push his literary fortunes. He received some encouragement from Lyttelton, but was disappointed in his hopes of any substantial aid from the British Maecenas. His biographer informs us that "about his thirteenth year, on Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' falling accidentally in his way, he was immediately struck with the picturesque descriptions of that much admired ancient bard and powerfully incited to imitate his style and manner."[34]

In 1767 Mickle published "The Concubine," a Spenserian poem in two cantos. In the preface to his second edition, 1778, in which the t.i.tle was changed to "Syr Martyn," he said that: "The fullness and wantonness of description, the quaint simplicity, and, above all, the ludicrous, of which the antique phraseology and manner of Spenser are so happily and peculiarly susceptible, inclined him to esteem it not solely as the best, but the only mode of composition adapted to his subject."

"Syr Martyn" is a narrative poem not devoid of animation, especially where the author forgets his Spenser. But in the second canto he feels compelled to introduce an absurd allegory, in which the nymph Dissipation and her henchman Self-Imposition conduct the hero to the cave of Discontent. This is how Mickle writes when he is thinking of the "Faerie Queene":

"Eke should he, freed from fous enchanter's spell, Escape his false Duessa's magic charms, And folly quaid, yclept an hydra fell Receive a beauteous lady to his arms; While bards and minstrels chaunt the soft alarms Of gentle love, unlike his former thrall: Eke should I sing, in courtly cunning terms, The gallant feast, served up by seneschal, To knights and ladies gent in painted bower or hall."

And this is how he writes when he drops his pattern:

"Awake, ye west winds, through the lonely dale, And, Fancy, to thy faerie bower betake!

Even now, with balmy freshness, breathes the gale, Dimpling with downy wing the stilly lake; Through the pale willows faltering whispers wake, And evening comes with locks bedropt with dew; On Desmond's moldering turrets slowly shake The trembling rye-gra.s.s and the harebell blue, And ever and anon fair Mulla's plaints renew."

A reader would be guilty of no very bad guess who should a.s.sign this stanza--which Scott greatly admired--to one of he Spenserian pa.s.sages that prelude the "Lady of the Lake."

But it is needless to extend this catalogue any farther. By the middle of the century Spenserian had become so much the fas.h.i.+on as to provoke a rebuke from Dr. Johnson, who prowled up and down before the temple of the British Muses like a sort of cla.s.sical watch-dog. "The imitation of Spenser," said the _Rambler_ of May 14, 1751, "by the influence of some men of learning and genius, seems likely to gain upon the age. . . To imitate the fictions and sentiments of Spenser can incur no reproach, for allegory is perhaps one of the most pleasing vehicles of instruction.

But I am very far from extending the same respect to his diction or his stanza. His style was, in his own words and peculiarities of phrase, and so remote from common use that Jonson boldly p.r.o.nounces him _to have written no language_. His stanza is at once difficult and unpleasing: tiresome to the ear by its uniformity, and to the attention by its length. . . Life is surely given us for other purposes than to gather what our ancestors have wisely thrown away and to learn what is of no value but because it has been forgotten."[35] In his "Life of West,"

Johnson says of West's imitations of Spenser, "Such compositions are not to be reckoned among the great achievements of intellect, because their effect is local and temporary: they appeal not to reason or pa.s.sion, but to memory, and presuppose an accidental or artificial state of mind. An imitation of Spenser is nothing to a reader, however acute, by whom Spenser has never been perused."

The critic is partly right. The nice points of a parody are lost upon a reader unacquainted with the thing parodied. And as for serious imitations, the more cleverly a copyist follows his copy, the less value his work will have. The eighteenth-century Spenserians, like West, Cambridge, and Lloyd, who stuck most closely to their pattern, oblivion has covered. Their real service was done in reviving a taste for a better kind of poetry than the kind in vogue, and particularly in restoring to English verse a stanza form, which became so n.o.ble an instrument in the hands of later poets, who used it with as much freedom and vigor as if they had never seen the "Faerie Queene." One is seldom reminded of Spenser while reading "Childe Harold"[36] or "Adonais" or "The Eve of Saint Agnes"; but in reading West or Cambridge, or even in reading Shenstone and Thomson, one is reminded of him at every turn. Yet if it was necessary to imitate anyone, it might be answered to Dr.

Johnson that it was better to imitate Spenser than Pope. In the imitation of Spenser lay, at least, a future, a development; while the imitation of Pope was conducting steadily toward Darwin's "Botanic Garden."