A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 15

[27] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 233.

[28] "Essay on Pope."

[29] See _ante_, p. 114.

[30] "Life of Collins."

[31] Essay on "Pope."

[32] Mr. Perry enumerates, among English imitators, Falconer, T. Warton, James Graeme, Wm. Whitehead, John Scott, Henry Headly, John Henry Moore, and Robert Lovell, "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 391. Among foreign imitations Lamartine's "Le Lac" is perhaps the most famous.

[33] "Mason's Works," Vol. I. p. 179.

[34] _Ibid._, Vol. I. p. 114.

[35] _Cf_. Keats' unfinished poem, "The Eve of St. Mark,"

[36] Parnell's collected poems were published in 1722.

[37] Not the least interesting among the progeny of Gray's "Elegy" was "The Indian Burying Ground" of the American poet, Philip Freneau (1752-1832). Gray's touch is seen elsewhere in Freneau, _e.g._, in "The Deserted Farm-house."

"Once in the bounds of this sequestered room Perhaps some swain nocturnal courtship made: Perhaps some Sherlock mused amid the gloom, Since Love and Death forever seek the shade."

[38] _Spectator_, No. 489.

[39] No. 415.

[40] John Hill Burton, in his "Reign of Queen Anne" give a pa.s.sage from a letter of one Captain Burt, superintendent of certain road-making operations in the Scotch Highlands, by way of showing how very modern a person Carlyle's picturesque tourist is. The captain describes the romantic scenery of the glens as "horrid prospects." It was considerably later in the century that Dr. Johnson said, in answer to Boswell's timid suggestion that Scotland had a great many n.o.ble wild prospects, "I believe, sir, you have a great many, Norway, too, has n.o.ble wild prospects, and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious n.o.ble wild prospects.

But, sir, let me tell you, the n.o.blest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high-road that leads him to England."

[41] See also Gray's letter to Rev. James Brown (1763) inclosing a drawing, in reference to a small ruined chapel at York Minster; and a letter (about 1765) to Jas. Bentham, Prebendary of Ely whose "Essay on Gothic Architecture" has been wrongly attributed to Gray.

[42] To Mrs. Dorothy Gray, 1739.

[43] To Richard West, 1739.

[44] Gray, Walpole, and West had been schoolfellows and intimates at Eton.

[45] To West, 1740.

[46] To Mrs. Dorothy Gray, 1740.

[47] "Pearch's Collection" (VII. 138) gives an elegiac quatrain poem on "The Ruins of Netley Abbey," by a poet with the suggestive name of George Keate; and "The Alps," in heavy Thomsonian blank verse (VII. 107) by the same hand.

[48] "A soft and lulling sound is heard Of streams inaudible by day."

_The White Doe of Rylstone, Wordsworth_.

[49] "Samson Agonistes."

[50] "Essay on Pope" (5th ed.), Vol. II. p. 180.

[51] These were, in order of publication: "The Mountains and Lakes of c.u.mberland and Westmoreland" (2 vols.), 1789; "The Highlands of Scotland," 1789; "Remarks on Forest Scenery," 1791; "The Western Parts of England and the Isle of Wight," 1798; "The Coasts of Hampshire," etc., 1804; "Cambridge, Norfolk, Suffolk, Ess.e.x," etc., 1809. The last two were posthumously published. Gilpin, who was a prebendary of Salisbury, died in 1804. Pearch's "Collection" (VII. 23) has "A Descriptive Poem,"

on the Lake Country, in octosyllabic couplets, introducing Keswick, Borrowdale, Dovedale, Lodore, Derwent.w.a.ter, and other familiar localities.

CHAPTER VI.

The School of Warton

In the progress of our inquiries, hitherto, we have met with little that can be called romantic in the narrowest sense. Though the literary movement had already begun to take a retrospective turn, few distinctly mediaeval elements were yet in evidence. Neither the literature of the monk nor the literature of the knight had suffered resurrection. It was not until about 1760 that writers began to gravitate decidedly toward the Middle Ages. The first peculiarly mediaeval type that contrived to secure a foothold in eighteenth-century literature was the hermit, a figure which seems to have had a natural attraction, not only for romanticizing poets like Shenstone and Collins, but for the whole generation of verse writers from Parnell to Goldsmith, Percy and Beattie--each of whom composed a "Hermit"--and even for the authors of "Ra.s.selas" and "Tom Jones," in whose fictions he becomes a stock character, as a fountain of wisdom and of moral precepts.[1]

A literary movement which reverts to the past for its inspiration is necessarily also a learned movement. Antiquarian scholarship must lead the way. The picture of an extinct society has to be pieced together from the fragments at hand, and this involves special research. So long as this special knowledge remains the exclusive possession of professional antiquaries like Gough, Hearne, Bentham, Perry, Grose,[2] it bears no fruit in creative literature. It produces only local histories, surveys of cathedrals and of sepulchral monuments, books about Druidic remains, Roman walls and coins, etc., etc. It was only when men of imagination and of elegant tastes were enlisted in such pursuits that the dry stick of antiquarianism put forth blossoms. The poets, of course, had to make studies of their own, to decipher ma.n.u.scripts, learn Old English, visit ruins, collect ballads and ancient armor, familiarize themselves with terms of heraldry, architecture, chivalry, ecclesiology and feudal law, and in other such ways inform and stimulate their imaginations. It was many years before the joint labors of scholars and poets had reconstructed an image of medieval society, sharp enough in outline and brilliant enough in color to impress itself upon the general public. Scott, indeed, was the first to popularize romance; mainly, no doubt, because of the greater power and fervor of his imagination; but also, in part, because an ampler store of materials had been already acc.u.mulated when he began work. He had fed on Percy's "Reliques" in boyhood; through Coleridge, his verse derives from Chatterton; and the line of Gothic romances which starts with "The Castle of Otranto" is remotely responsible for "Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." But Scott too was, like Percy and Walpole, a virtuoso and collector; and the vast apparatus of notes and introductory matter in his metrical tales, and in the Waverley novels, shows how necessary it was for the romantic poet to be his own antiquary.

As was to be expected, the zeal of the first romanticists was not always a zeal according to knowledge, and the picture of the Middle Age which they painted was more of a caricature than a portrait. A large share of medieval literature was inaccessible to the general reader. Much of it was still in ma.n.u.script. Much more of it was in old and rare printed copies, broadsides and black-letter folios, the treasure of great libraries and of jealously h.o.a.rded private collections. Much was in dialects little understood-forgotten forms of speech-Old French, Middle High German, Old Norse, medieval Latin, the ancient Erse and Cymric tongues, Anglo-Saxon. There was an almost total lack of apparatus for the study of this literature. Helps were needed in the shape of modern reprints of scarce texts, bibliographies, critical editions, translations, literary histories and manuals, glossaries of archaic words, dictionaries and grammars of obsolete languages. These were gradually supplied by working specialists in different fields of investigation. Every side of medieval life has received ill.u.s.tration in its turn. Works like Tyrwhitt's edition of Chaucer (1775-78); the collections of mediaeval romances by Ellis (1805), Ritson (1802), and Weber (1810); Nares' and Halliwell's "Archaic Glossary" (1822-46), Carter's "Specimens of Ancient Sculpture and Paintings" (1780-94), Scott's "Demonology and Witchcraft" (1830), Hallam's "Middle Ages"

(1818), Meyrick's "Ancient Armour" (1824), Lady Guest's "Mabinogion"

(1838), the publications of numberless individual scholars and of learned societies like the Camden, the Spenser, the Percy, the Chaucer, the Early English Text, the Roxburgh Club,--to mention only English examples, taken at random and separated from each other by wide intervals of time,--are instances of the labors by which mediaeval life has been made familiar to all who might choose to make acquaintance with it.

The history of romanticism, after the impulse had once been given, is little else than a record or the steps by which, one after another, new features of that vast and complicated scheme of things which we loosely call the Middle Ages were brought to light and made available as literary material. The picture was constantly having fresh details added to it, nor is there any reason to believe that it is finished yet. Some of the finest pieces of mediaeval work have only within the last few years been brought to the attention of the general reader; _e.g._, the charming old French story in prose and verse, "Auca.s.sin et Nicolete," and the fourteenth-century English poem, "The Perle." The future holds still other phases of romanticism in reserve; the Middle Age seems likely to be as inexhaustible in novel sources of inspiration as cla.s.sical antiquity has already proved to be. The past belongs to the poet no less than the present, and a great part of the literature of every generation will always be retrospective. The tastes and preferences of the individual artist will continue to find a wide field for selection in the rich quarry of Christian and feudal Europe.

It is not a little odd that the book which first aroused, in modern Europe, an interest in Norse mythology should have been written by a Frenchman. This was the "Introduction a l'Histoire de Dannemarc,"

published in 1755 by Paul Henri Mallet, a native of Geneva and sometime professor of Belles Lettres in the Royal University at Copenhagen. The work included also a translation of the first part of the Younger Edda, with an abstract of the second part and of the Elder Edda, and versions of several Runic poems. It was translated into English, in 1770, by Thomas Percy, the editor of the "Reliques," under the t.i.tle, "Northern Antiquities; or a Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion, and Laws of the ancient Danes." A German translation had appeared a few years earlier and had inspired the Schleswig-Holsteiner, Heinrich Wilhem von Gerstenberg, to compose his "Gedicht eines Skalden," which introduced the old Icelandic mythology into German poetry in 1766. Percy had published independently in 1763 "Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, translated from the Icelandic Language."

Gray did not wait for the English translation of Mallet's book. In a letter to Mason, dated in 1758, and inclosing some criticisims on the latter's "Caractacus" (then in MS.), he wrote, "I am pleased with the Gothic Elysium. Do you think I am ignorant about either that, or the _h.e.l.l_ before, or the _twilight_.[3] I have been there and have seen it all in Mallet's 'Introduction to the History of Denmark' (it is in French), and many other places." It is a far cry from Mallet's "System of Runic Mythology" to William Morris' "Sigurd the Volsung" (1877), but to Mallet belongs the credit of first exciting that interest in Scandinavian antiquity which has enriched the prose and poetry not only of England but of Europe in general. Gray refers to him in his notes on "The Descent of Odin," and his work continued to be popular authority on its subject for at least half a century. Scott cites it in his annotations on "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805).

Gray's studies in Runic literature took shape in "The Fatal Sisters" and "The Descent of Odin," written in 1761, published in 1768. These were paraphrases of two poems which Gray found in the "De Causis Contemnendae Mortis" (Copenhagen, 1689) of Thomas Bartholin, a Danish physician of the seventeenth century. The first of them describes the Valkyrie weaving the fates of the Danish and Irish warriors in the battle of Clontarf, fought in the eleventh century between Sigurd, Earl of Orkney, and Brian, King of Dublin; the second narrates the descent of Odin to Niflheimer, to inquire of Hela concerning the doom of Balder.[4] Gray had designed these for the introductory chapter of his projected history of English poetry. He calls them imitations, which in fact they are, rather than literal renderings. In spite of a tinge of eighteenth-century diction, and of one or two Shaksperian and Miltonic phrases, the translator succeeded fairly well in reproducing the wild air of his originals. His biographer, Mr. Gosse, promises that "the student will not fail . . . in the Gothic picturesqueness of 'The Descent of Odin,' to detect notes and phrases of a more delicate originality than are to be found even in his more famous writings; and will dwell with peculiar pleasure on those pa.s.sages in which Gray freed himself of the trammels of an artificial and conventional taste, and prophesied of the new romantic age that was coming."

Celtic antiquity shared with Gothic in this newly around interest. Here too, as in the phrase about "the stormy Hebrides," "Lycidas" seems to have furnished the spark that kindled the imaginations of the poets.

"Where were ye, nymphs, when the remorseless deep Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas?

For neither were ye playing on the steep Where your old bards, the famous Druids lie, Nor on the s.h.a.ggy top of Mona high, Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream."

Joseph Warton quotes this pa.s.sage twice in his "Essay on Pope" (Vol I., pp. 7 and 356, 5th ed.), once to a.s.sert its superiority to a pa.s.sage in Pope's "Pastorals": "The mention of places remarkably romantic, the supposed habitation of Druids, bards and wizards, is far more pleasing to the imagination, than the obvious introduction of Cam and Isis." Another time, to ill.u.s.trate the following suggestion: "I have frequently wondered that our modern writers have made so little use of the druidical times and the traditions of the old bards. . . Milton, we see, was sensible of the force of such imagery, as we may gather from this short but exquisite pa.s.sage." As further ill.u.s.trations of the poetic capabilities of similar themes, Warton gives a stanza from Gray's "Bard" and some lines from Gilbert West's "Inst.i.tution of the Order of the Garter" which describe the ghosts of the Druids hovering about their ruined altars at Stonehenge:

"--Mysterious rows Of rude enormous obelisks, that rise Orb within orb, stupendous monuments Of artless architecture, such as now Oft-times amaze the wandering traveler, By the pale moon discerned on Sarum's plain."

He then inserts two stanzas, in the Latin of Hickes' "Thesaurus," of an old Runic ode preserved by Olaus Wormius (Ole Worm) and adds an observation upon the Scandinavian heroes and their contempt of death.

Druids and bards now begin to abound. Collins' "Ode on the Death of Mr.

Thomson," _e.g._, commences with the line

"In yonder grave a Druid lies."

In his "Ode to Liberty," he alludes to the tradition that Mona, the druidic stronghold, was long covered with an enchantment of mist--work of an angry mermaid:

"Mona, once hid from those who search the main, Where thousand elfin shapes abide."