A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 12

The Miltonic Group

That the influence of Milton, in the romantic revival of the eighteenth century, should have been hardly second in importance to Spenser's is a confirmation of our remark that Augustan literature was "cla.s.sical" in a way of its own. It is another example of that curiously topsy-turvy condition of things in which rhyme was a mark of the cla.s.sic, and blank verse of the romantic. For Milton is the most truly cla.s.sical of English poets; and yet, from the angle of observation at which the eighteenth century viewed him, he appeared a romantic. It was upon his romantic side, at all events, that the new school of poets apprehended and appropriated him.

This side was present in Milton in a fuller measure than his completed works would show. It is well known that he, at one time, had projected an Arthuriad, a design which, if carried out, might have antic.i.p.ated Tennyson and so deprived us of "The Idyls of the King." "I betook me,"

he writes, "among those lofty fables and romances which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood."[1] And in the "Epitaphium Damonis" he thus apprised the reader of his purpose:

"Ipse ego Dardanais Rutupina per aequora puppes, Dicam, et Pandrasidos regnum vetus Inogeniae, Brennumque Arviragunque duces, prisc.u.mque Belinum, Et tandem Armoricos Britonum sub lege colonos; Tum gravidam Arturo fatali fraude Iorgernen; Mendaces vultus, a.s.sumptaque Gorlois arma, Merlini dolus."[2]

The "matter of Britain" never quite lost the fascination which it had exercised over his youthful imagination, as appears from pa.s.sages in "Paradise Lost"[3] and even in "Paradise Regained."[4] But with his increasing austerity, both religious and literary, Milton gravitated finally to Hebraic themes and h.e.l.lenic art forms. He wrote Homeric epics and Aeschylean tragedies, instead of masques and sonnets, of rhymed pieces on the Italian model, like "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," and of stanzaic poems, like the "Nativity Ode," touched with Elizabethan conceits. He relied more and more upon sheer construction and weight of thought and less upon decorative richness of detail. His diction became naked and severe, and he employed rhyme but sparingly, even in the choral parts of "Samson Agonistes." In short, like Goethe, he grew cla.s.sical as he grew old. It has been mentioned that "Paradise Lost" did much to keep alive the tradition of English blank verse through a period remarkable for its bigoted devotion to rhyme, and especially to the heroic couplet.

Yet it was, after all, Milton's early poetry, in which rhyme is used--though used so differently from the way in which Pope used it--that counted for most in the history of the romantic movement. Professor Ma.s.son contradicts the common a.s.sertion, that "Paradise Lost" was first written into popularity by Addison's Sat.u.r.day papers. While that series was running, Tonson brought out (1711-13) an ediction of Milton's poetical works which was "the ninth of 'Paradise Lost,' the eight of 'Paradise Regained,' the seventh of 'Samson Agonistes' and the sixth of the minor poems." The previous issues of the minor poems had been in 1645, 1673, 1695, 1705, and 1707. Six editions in sixty-eight years is certainly no very great showing. After 1713 editions of Milton multiplied rapidly; by 1763 "Paradise Lost" was in its forty-sixth, and the minor poems in their thirtieth.[5]

Addison selected an occasional pa.s.sage from Milton's juvenile poems, in the _Spectator_; but from all obtainable evidence, it seems not doubtful that they had been comparatively neglected, and that, although reissued from time to time in complete editions of Milton's poetry, they were regarded merely as pendents to "Paradise Lost" and floated by its reputation. "Whatever causes," says Dryden, "Milton alleges for the abolishing of rime . . . his own particular reason is plainly this, that rime was not his talent: he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the graces of it: which is manifest in his 'Juvenilia' or verses written in his youth; where his rime is always constrained and forced and comes hardly from him."

Joseph Warton, writing in 1756,[6] after quoting copiously from the "Nativity Ode," which, he says, is "not sufficiently read nor admired,"

continues as follows: "I have dwelt chiefly on this ode as much less celebrated than 'L'Allegro' and "Il Penseroso,"[7] which are now universally known,; but which, by a strange fatality, lay in a sort of obscurity, the private enjoyment of a few curious readers, till they were set to admirable music by Mr. Handel. And indeed this volume of Milton's miscellaneous poems has not till very lately met with suitable regard.

Shall I offend any rational admirer of Pope, by remarking that these juvenile descriptive poems of Milton, as well as his Latin elegies, are of a strain far more exalted than any the former author can boast?"

The first critical edition of the minor poems was published in 1785, by Thomas Warton, whose annotations have been of great service to all later editors. As late as 1779, Dr. Johnson spoke of these same poems with an absence of appreciation that now seems utterly astounding. "Those who admire the beauties of this great poem sometimes force their own judgment into false admiration of his little pieces, and prevail upon themselves to think that admirable which is only singular." Of Lycidas he says: "In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting. . . Surely no man could have fancied that he read 'Lycidas' with pleasure, had he not known its author." He acknowledges that "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" are "n.o.ble efforts of imagination"; and that, "as a series of lines," "Comus" "may be considered as worthy of all the admiration with which the votaries have received it." But he makes peevish objections to its dramatic probability, finds its dialogues and soliloquies tedious, and unmindful of the fate of Midas, solemnly p.r.o.nounces the songs--"Sweet Echo" and "Sabrina fair"--"harsh in their diction and not very musical in their numbers"! Of the sonnets he says: "They deserve not any particular criticism; for of the best it can only be said that they are not bad."[8] Boswell reports that, Hannah More having expressed her "wonder that the poet who had written 'Paradise Lost' should write such poor sonnets," Johnson replied: "Milton, madam, was a genius that could cut a colossus from a rock, but could not carve heads upon cherry stones."

The influence of Milton's minor poetry first becomes noticeable in the fifth decade of the century, and in the work of a new group of lyrical poets: Collins, Gray, Mason, and the brothers Joseph and Thomas Warton.

To all of these Milton was master. But just as Thomson and Shenstone got original effects from Spenser's stanza, while West and Cambridge and Lloyd were nothing but echoes; so Collins and Gray--immortal names--drew fresh music from Milton's organ pipes, while for the others he set the tune. The Wartons, indeed, though imitative always in their verse, have an independent and not inconsiderable position in criticism and literary scholarship, and I shall return to them later in that connection. Mason, whose "English Garden" has been reviewed in chapter iv, was a small poet and a somewhat absurd person. He aped, first Milton and afterward Gray, so closely that his work often seems like parody. In general the Miltonic revival made itself manifest in a more dispersed and indirect fashion than the Spenserian; but there was no lack of formal imitations, also, and it will be advisable to notice a few of these here in the order of their dates.

In 1740 Joseph Warton, then an Oxford undergraduate, wrote his blank-verse poem "The Enthusiast, or the Lover of Nature." The work of a boy of eighteen, it had that instinct of the future, of the set of the literary current, not uncommon in youthful artists, of which Chatterton's precocious verses are a remarkable instance. Composed only ten years later than the completed "Seasons," and five years before Shenstone began to lay out his miniature wilderness at the Leasowes, it is more distinctly modern and romantic in its preference of wild nature to cultivated landscape, and of the literature of fancy to the literature of reasons.

"What are the lays of artful Addison, Coldly correct, to Shakspere's warblings wild?"

asks the young enthusiast, in Milton's own phrase. And again

"Can Kent design like Nature?. . .

Though he, by rules unfettered, boldly scorns Formality and method, round and square Disdaining, plans irregularly great?. . .

"Versailles May boast a thousand fountains that can cast The tortured waters to the distant heavens; Yet let me choose some pine-topped precipice Abrupt and s.h.a.ggy, whence a foamy stream, Like Anio, tumbling roars; or some black heath Where straggling stands the mournful juniper, Or yew tree scathed."

The enthusiast haunts "dark forests" and loves to listen to "hollow winds and ever-beating waves" and "sea-mew's clang." Milton appears at every turn, not only in single epithets like "Lydian airs," "the level brine,"

"low-thoughted cares," "the light fantastic dance," but in the entire spirit, imagery, and diction of the poem. A few lines ill.u.s.trate this better than any description.

"Ye green-robed Dryads, oft at dusky eve By wondering shepherds seen; to forest brown, To unfrequented meads and pathless wilds Lead me from gardens decked with art's vain pomp. . .

But let me never fall in cloudless night, When silent Cynthia in her silver car Through the blue concave slides,. . .

To seek some level mead, and there invoke Old midnight's sister, contemplation sage (Queen of the rugged brow and stern-fixed eye), To lift my soul above this little earth, This folly-fettered world: to purge my ears, That I may hear the rolling planet's song And tuneful turning spheres."

Mason's Miltonic imitations, "Musaeus," "Il Bellicoso" and "Il Pacifico"

were written in 1744--according to the statement of their author, whose statements, however, are not always to be relied upon. The first was published in 1747; the second "surrept.i.tiously printed in a magazine and afterward inserted in Pearch's miscellany," finally revised and published by the author in 1797; the third first printed in 1748 in the Cambridge verses on the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. These pieces follow copy in every particular. "Il Bellicoso," _e.g._, opens with the invocation.

"Hence, dull lethargic Peace, Born in some h.o.a.ry beadsman's cell obscure!"

The genealogies of Peace and War are recited, and contrasted pictures of peaceful and warlike pleasures presented in an order which corresponds as precisely as possible to Milton's in "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso."

"Then, to unbend my mind, I'll roam Amid the cloister's silent gloom; Or, where ranged oaks their shades diffuse, Hold dalliance with my darling Muse, Recalling oft some heaven-born strain That warbled in Augustan reign; Or turn, well pleased, the Grecian page, If sweet Theocritus engage, Or blithe Anacreon, mirthful wight, Carol his easy love-lay light. . .

And joys like these, if Peace inspire Peace, with thee I string the lyre."[9]

"Musaeus" was a monody on the death of Pope, employing the pastoral machinery and the varied irregular measure of "Lycidas." Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, under the names of t.i.tyrus, Colin Clout, and Thyrsis, are introduced as mourners, like Camus and St. Peter in the original. t.i.tyrus is made to lament the dead shepherd in very incorrect Middle English. Colin Clout speaks two stanzas of the form used in the first eclogue of "The Shepherd's Calendar," and three stanzas of the form used in "The Faerie Queene." Thyrsis speaks in blank verse and is answered by the shade of Musaeus (Pope) in heroic couplets. Verbal travesties of "Lycidas" abound--"laureate hea.r.s.e," "forego each vain excuse," "without the loan of some poetic woe," etc.; and the closing pa.s.sage is reworded thus:

"Thus the fond swain his Doric oat essayed, Manhood's prime honors rising on his cheek: Trembling he strove to court the tuneful Maid, With stripling arts and dalliance all too weak, Unseen, unheard beneath an hawthorn shade.

But now dun clouds the welkin 'gan to streak; And now down dropt the larks and ceased their strain: They ceased, and with them ceased the shepherd swain."

In 1746 appeared a small volume of odes, fourteen in number, by Joseph Warton, and another by William Collins.[10] The event is thus noticed by Gray in a letter to Thomas Wharton: "Have you seen the works of two young authors, a Mr. Warton and a Mr. Collins, both writers of odes? It is odd enough, but each is the half of a considerable man, and one the counterpart of the other. The first has but little invention, very poetical choice of expression and a good ear. The second, a fine fancy, modeled upon the antique, a bad ear, a great variety of words and images with no choice at all. They both deserve to last some years, but will not." Gray's critical acuteness is not altogether at fault in this judgment, but half of his prophecy has failed, and his mention of Collins is singularly inappreciative. The names of Collins and Gray are now closely a.s.sociated in literary history, but in life the two men were in no way connected. Collins and the Wartons, on the other hand, were personal friends. Joseph Warton and Collins had been schoolfellows at Winchester, and it was at first intended that their odes, which were issued in the same month (December), should be published in a volume together. Warton's collection was immediately successful; but Collins'

was a failure, and the author, in his disappointment, burned the unsold copies.

The odes of Warton which most nearly resemble Milton are "To Fancy," "To Solitude," and "To the Nightingale," all in the eight-syllabled couplet.

A single pa.s.sage will serve as a specimen of their quality:

"Me, G.o.ddess, by the right hand lead Sometimes through the yellow mead, Where Joy and white-robed Peace resort And Venus keeps her festive court: Where Mirth and Youth each evening meet, And lightly trip with nimble feet, Nodding their lily-crowned heads; Where Laughter rose-lip'd Hebe leads," etc.[11]

Collins' "Ode to Simplicity" is in the stanza of the "Nativity Ode," and his beautiful "Ode to Evening," in the unrhymed Sapphics which Milton had employed in his translation of Horace's "Ode to Pyrrha." There are Miltonic reminiscences like "folding-star," "religious gleams," "play with the tangles of her hair," and in the closing couplet of the "Ode to Fear,"

"His cypress wreath my meed decree, And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee."

But, in general, Collins is much less slavish than Warton in his imitation.

Joseph Warton's younger brother, Thomas, wrote in 1745, and published in 1747, "The Pleasures of Melancholy," a blank-verse poem of three hundred and fifteen lines, made up, in nearly equal parts, of Milton and Akenside, with frequent touches of Thomson, Spenser, and Pope's "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard." Warton was a lad of seventeen when his poem was written: it was published anonymously and was by some attributed to Akenside, whose "Pleasures of Imagination" (1744) had, of course, suggested the t.i.tle. A single extract will suffice to show how well the young poet knew his Milton:

"O lead me, queen sublime, to solemn glooms Congenial with my soul; to cheerless shades, To ruined seats, to twilight cells and bowers, Where thoughtful Melancholy loves to muse, Her favorite midnight haunts. . .

Beneath yon ruined abbey's moss-grown piles Oft let me sit, at twilight hour of eve, When through some western window the pale moon _Pours her long-levelled rule streaming light:_ While sullen sacred silence reigns around, Save the lone screech-owl's note, who build his bower Amid the moldering caverns dark and damp;[12]

Or the calm breeze, that rustles in the leaves Of flaunting ivy, that with mantle green Invests some wasted tower. . .

Then when the sullen shades of evening close Where _through the room_ a blindly-glimmering gloom The _dying embers_ scatter, far remote From Mirth's mad shouts, that through the illumined roof Resound with festive echo, let me sit Blessed with the lowly cricket's drowsy dirge. . .

This sober hour of silence will unmask False Folly's smile, that like the dazzling spells Of wily Comus cheat the unweeting eye With _blear illusion,_ and persuade to drink That charmed cup which _Reason's mintage fair_ _ Unmoulds_, and stamps the monster on the man."

I italicize the most direct borrowings, but both the Wartons had so saturated themselves with Milton's language, verse, and imagery that they ooze out of them at every pore. Thomas Warton's poems, issued separately from time to time, were first published collectively in 1777. They are all imitative, and most of them imitative of Milton. His two best odes, "On the First of April" and "On the Approach of Summer," are in the familiar octosyllabics.

"Haste thee, Nymph! and hand in hand, With thee lead a buxom band; Bring fantastic-footed joy, With Sport, that yellow-tressed boy," etc.[13]

In Gray and Collins, though one can hardly read a page without being reminded of Milton, it is commonly in subtler ways than this. Gray, for example, has been careful to point out in his notes his verbal obligations to Milton, as well as to Shakspere, Cowley, Dryden, Pindar, Vergil, Dante, and others; but what he could not well point out, because it was probably unconscious, was the impulse which Milton frequently gave to the whole exercise of his imagination. It is not often that Gray treads so closely in Milton's footsteps as he does in the latest of his poems, the ode written for music, and performed at Cambridge in 1769 on the installation of the Duke of Grafton as Chancellor; in which Milton is made to sing a stanza in the meter of the "Nativity Ode";

"Ye brown o'er-arching groves That Contemplation loves, Where willowy Camus lingers with delight; Oft at the blush of dawn I trod your level lawn, Oft wooed the gleam of Cynthia, silver bright, In cloisters dim, far from the haunts of Folly, With Freedom by my side, and soft-eyed Melancholy."

Not only the poets who have been named, but many obscure versifiers are witnesses to this Miltonic revival. It is usually, indeed, the minor poetry of an age which keeps most distinctly the "cicatrice and capable impressure" of a pa.s.sing literary fashion. If we look through Dodsley's collection,[14] we find a _melange_ of satires in the manner of Pope, humorous fables in the manner of Prior, didactic blank-verse pieces after the fashion of Thomson and Akenside, elegiac quatrains on the model of Shenstone and Gray, Pindaric odes _ad nauseam_, with imitations of Spenser and Milton.[15]

To the increasing popularity of Milton's minor poetry is due the revival of the sonnet. Gray's solitary sonnet, on the death of his friend Richard West, was composed in 1742 but not printed till 1775, after the author's death. This was the sonnet selected by Wordsworth, to ill.u.s.trate his strictures on the spurious poetic diction of the eighteenth century, in the appendix to the preface to the second edition of "Lyrical Ballads." The style is n.o.ble, though somewhat artificial: the order of the rhymes conforms neither to the Shaksperian nor the Miltonic model. Mason wrote fourteen sonnets at various times between 1748 and 1797; the earlier date is attached, in his collected works, to "Sonnet I. Sent to a Young Lady with Dodsley's Miscellanies." They are of the strict Italian or Miltonic form, and abound in Miltonic allusions and wordings. All but four of Thomas Edwards' fifty sonnets, 1750-65, are on Milton's model. Thirteen of them were printed in Dodsley's second volume. They have little value, nor have those of Benjamin Stillingfleet, some of which appear to have been written before 1750. Of much greater interest are the sonnets of Thomas Warton, nine in number and all Miltonic in form. Warton's collected poems were not published till 1777, and his sonnets are undated, but some of them seem to have been written as early as 1750. They are graceful in expression and reflect their author's antiquarian tastes. They were praised by Hazlitt, Coleridge, and Lamb; and one of them, "To the River Lodon," has been thought to have suggested Coleridge's "To the River Otter--"

"Dear native stream, wild streamlet of the west--"

as well, perhaps, more remotely Wordsworth's series, "On the River Duddon."

The poem of Milton which made the deepest impression upon the new school of poets was "Il Penseroso." This little masterpiece, which sums up in imagery of "Attic choice" the pleasures that Burton and Fletcher and many others had found in the indulgence of the atrabilious humor, fell in with a current of tendency. Pope had died in 1744, Swift in 1745, the last important survivors of the Queen Anne wits; and already the reaction against gayety had set in, in the deliberate and exaggerated solemnity which took possession of all departments of verse, and even invaded the theater; where Melpomene gradually crowded Thalia off the boards, until sentimental comedy--_la comedie larmoyante_--was in turn expelled by the ridicule of Garrick, Goldsmith, and Sheridan. That elegiac mood, that love of retirement and seclusion, which have been remarked in Shenstone, became now the dominant note in English poetry. The imaginative literature of the years 1740-60 was largely the literature of low spirits. The generation was persuaded, with Fletcher, that

"Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy."

But the muse of their inspiration was not the tragic t.i.taness of Durer's painting: