A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 3

It was the same with the poetry of outward nature as with the poetry of human pa.s.sion.[31] In Addison's "Letter from Italy," in Pope's "Pastorals," and "Windsor Forest," the imagery, when not actually false, is vague and conventional, and the language abounds in cla.s.sical insipidities, epithets that describe nothing, and generalities at second hand from older poets, who may once, perhaps, have written with their "eyes upon the object." Blushing Flora paints the enameled ground; cheerful murmurs fluctuate on the gale; Erida.n.u.s through flowery meadows strays; gay gilded[32] scenes and shining prospects rise; while everywhere are balmy zephyrs, sylvan shades, winding vales, vocal sh.o.r.es, silver floods, crystal springs, feathered quires, and Phoebus and Philomel and Ceres' gifts a.s.sist the purple year. It was after this fashion that Pope rendered the famous moonlight pa.s.sage in his translation of the Iliad:

"Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise, A flood of glory bursts from all the skies," etc.

"Strange to think of an enthusiast," says Wordsworth, "reciting these verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having his raptures in the least disturbed by a suspicion of their absurdity." The poetic diction against which Wordsworth protested was an outward sign of the cla.s.sical preference for the general over the concrete. The vocabulary was Latinized because, in English, the _mot propre_ is commonly a Saxon word, while its Latin synonym has a convenient indefiniteness that keeps the subject at arm's length. Of a similar tendency was the favorite rhetorical figure of personification, which gave a false air of life to abstractions by the easy process of spelling them with a capital letter.

Thus:

"From bard to bard the frigid caution crept, Till Declamation roared whilst Pa.s.sion slept; Yet still did Virtue deign the stage to tread, Philosophy remained though Nature fled,. . .

Exulting Folly hailed the joyful day, And Pantomime and Song confirmed her sway."[33]

Everything was personified; Britannia, Justice, Liberty, Science, Melancholy, Night. Even vaccination for the smallpox was invoked as a G.o.ddess,

"Inoculation, heavenly maid, descend!"[34]

But circ.u.mstances or periphrasis was the capital means by which the Augustan poet avoided precision and attained n.o.bility of style. It enabled him to speak of a woman as a "nymph," or a "fair"; of sheep as "the fleecy care"; of fishes as "the scaly tribe"; and of a picket fence as a "spiculated paling." Lowell says of Pope's followers: "As the master had made it an axiom to avoid what was mean or low, so the disciples endeavored to escape from what was common. This they contrived by the ready expedient of the periphrasis. They called everything something else. A boot with them was

"'The shining leather that encased the limb.'

"Coffee became

"'The fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown.'"[35]

"For the direct appeal to Nature, and the naming of specific objects,"

says Mr. Gosse,[36] "they subst.i.tuted generalities and second-hand allusions. They no longer mentioned the gillyflower and the daffodil, but permitted themselves a general reference to Flora's vernal wreath.

It was vulgar to say that the moon was rising; the gentlemanly expression was, 'Cynthia is lifting her silver horn!' Women became nymphs in this new phraseology, fruits became 'the treasures of Pomona,' a horse became 'the impatient courser.' The result of coining these conventional counters for groups of ideas was that the personal, the exact, was lost in literature. Apples were the treasures of Pomona, but so were cherries, too, and if one wished to allude to peaches, they also were the treasures of Pomona. This decline from particular to general language was regarded as a great gain in elegance. It was supposed that to use one of these genteel counters, which pa.s.sed for coin of poetic language, brought the speaker closer to the grace of Latinity. It was thought that the old direct manner of speaking was crude and futile; that a romantic poet who wished to allude to caterpillars could do so without any exercise of his ingenuity by simply introducing the word 'caterpillars,'

whereas the cla.s.sical poet had to prove that he was a scholar and a gentleman by inventing some circ.u.mlocution, such as 'the crawling scourge that smites the leafy plain.'. . . In the generation that succeeded Pope really clever writers spoke of a 'gelid cistern,' when they meant a cold bath, and 'the loud hunter-crew' when they meant a pack of foxhounds."

It would be a mistake to suppose that the men of Pope's generation, including Pope himself, were altogether wanting in romantic feeling.

There is a marked romantic accent in the Countess of Winchelsea's ode "To the Nightingale"; in her "Nocturnal Reverie"; in Parnell's "Night Piece on Death," and in the work of several Scotch poets, like Allan Ramsay and Hamilton of Bangour, whose ballad, "The Braces of Yarrow," is certainly a strange poem to come out of the heart of the eighteenth century. But these are eddies and back currents in the stream of literary tendency.

We are always in danger of forgetting that the literature of an age does not express its entire, but only its prevailing, spirit. There is commonly a latent, silent body of thought and feeling underneath which remains inarticulate, or nearly so. It is this prevailing spirit and fashion which I have endeavored to describe in the present chapter. If the picture seems to lack relief, or to be in any way exaggerated, the reader should consult the chapters on "Cla.s.sicism" and "The Pseudo-Cla.s.sicists" in M. Pellisier's "Literary Movement in France,"

already several times referred to. They describe a literary situation which had a very exact counterpart in England.

[1] As another notable weakness of the age is its habit of looking, to the past ages--not understanding them all the while . . . so Scott gives up nearly the half of his intellectual power to a fond yet purposeless dreaming over the past; and spends half his literary labors in endeavors to revive it, not in reality, but on the stage of fiction: endeavors which were the best of the kind that modernism made, but still successful only so far as Scott put under the old armor the everlasting human nature which he knew; and totally unsuccessful so far as concerned the painting of the armor itself, which he knew _not_. . . His romance and antiquarianism, his knighthood and monkery, are all false, and he knows them to be false.--_Ruskin, "Modern Painters,"_ Vol. III. p. 279 (First American Edition, 1860).

[2] See also the sly hit at popular fiction in the _Nonne Prestes Tale_:

"This story is also trewe, I undertake, As is the book of Launcelot de Lake, That women hold in ful gret reverence."

[3] "History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century," Vol. II. chap xii, section vii.

[4] Sentimentalism approaches its subject through the feelings; romanticism through the imagination.

[5] Ruskin, too indicates the common element in romanticism and naturalism--a desire to escape from the Augustan formalism. I condense the pa.s.sage slightly: "To powder the hair, to patch the cheek, to hoop the body, to buckle the foot, were all part and parcel of the same system which reduced streets to brick walls and pictures to brown stains.

Reaction from this state was inevitable, and accordingly men steal out to the fields and mountains; and, finding among these color and liberty and variety and power, rejoice in all the wildest shattering of the mountain side, as an opposition to Gower Street. It is not, however, only to existing inanimate nature that our want of beauty in person and dress has driven us. The imagination of it, as it was seen in our ancestors, haunts us continually. We look fondly back to the manners of the age sought in the centuries which we profess to have surpa.s.sed in everything. . . This romantic love of beauty, forced to seek in history and in external nature the satisfaction it cannot find in ordinary life."--_Modern Painters_, Vol. III. p. 260.

[6] Although devout in their admiration for antiquity, the writers of the seventeenth century have by no means always clearly grasped the object of their cult. Though they may understand Latin tradition, they have certainly never entered into the freer, more original spirit of Greek art. They have but an incomplete, superficial conception of h.e.l.lenism. . . Boileau celebrates but does not understand Pindar. . .

The seventeenth century comprehended Homer no better than Pindar. What we miss in them is exactly what we like best in his epopee--the vast living picture of semi-barbarous civilization. . . No society could be less fitted than that of the seventeenth century to feel and understand the spirit of primitive antiquity. In order to appreciate Homer, it was thought necessary to civilize the barbarian, make him a scrupulous writer, and convince him that the word "a.s.s" is a "very n.o.ble" expression in Greek--_Pellisier: "The Literary Movement in France" (Brinton's translation, _1897), pp. 8-10. So Addison apologizes for Homer's failure to observe those qualities of nicety, correctness, and what the French call _bienseance_ (decorum,) the necessity of which had only been found out in later times. See _The Spectator_, No. 160.

[7] Preface to "Cromwell."

[8] "History of English Poetry," section lxi. Vol III. p. 398 (edition of 1840).

[9] See, for a fuller discussion of this subject, "From Shakspere to Pope: An Inquiry into the Causes and Phenomena of the Rise of Cla.s.sical Poetry in England," by Edmund Gosse, 1885.

[10] The cold-hearted, polished Chesterfield is a very representative figure. Johnson, who was really devout, angrily affirmed that his celebrated letters taught: "the morality of a wh.o.r.e with the manners of a dancing-master."

[11] "History of English Thought in the Eighteen Century," Vol. II. chap.

xii. Section iv. See also "Selections from Newman," by Lewis E. Gates, Introduction, pp. xlvii-xlviii. (1895).

[12] See especially _Spectator_, Nos. 185, 186, 201, 381, and 494.

[13] The cla.s.sical Landor's impatience of mysticism explains his dislike of Plato, the mystic among Greeks. Diogenes says to Plato: "I meddle not at present with infinity or eternity: when I can comprehend them, I will talk about them," "Imaginary Conversations," 2d series, Conversation XV.

Landor's contempt for German literature is significant.

[14] "Selections from Newman," Introduction, pp. xlvii-xlviii.

[15] Racine observes that good sense and reason are the same in all ages.

What is the result of this generalization? Heroes can be transported from epoch to epoch, from country to country, without causing surprise.

Their Achilles is no more a Greek than is Porus an Indian; Andromache feels and talks like a seventeenth-century princess: Phaedra experiences the remorse of a Christian.--_Pellissier, "Literary Movement in France,"_ p. 18.

In subst.i.tuting men of concrete, individual lives for the ideal figures of tragic art, romanticism was forced to determine their physiognomy by a host of local, casual details. In the name of universal truth the cla.s.sicists rejected the coloring of time and place; and this is precisely what the romanticists seek under the name of particular reality.--_Ibid._ p. 220. Similarly Montezuma's Mexicans in Dryden's "Indian Emperor" have no more national individuality than the Spanish Moors in his "Conquest of Granada." The only attempt at local color in "Aurungzebe"--an heroic play founded on the history of a contemporary East Indian potentate who died seven years after the author--is the introduction of the _suttee_, and one or two mentions of elephants.

[16] See "Les Orientales" (Hugo) and Nerval's "Les Nuits de Rhamadan" and "La Legende du Calife Hakem."

[17] The rules a nation, born to serve, obeys; And Boileau still in right of Horace sways.

--_Pope, "Essay on Criticism,"_

[18] These critical verse essays seem to have been particularly affected by this order of the peerage; for, somewhat later, we have one, "On Unnatural Flights in Poetry," by the Earl of Lansdowne--"Granville the polite."

[19] "Epistle to Sacheverel."

[20] "Essay on Addison."

[21] Sweet hour of twilight!--in the solitude Of the pine forest, and the silent sh.o.r.e Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood, Rooted where once the Adrian wave flowed o'er, To where the last Caesarian fortress stood, Evergreen forest! which Boccaccio's lore And Dryden's lay made haunted ground to me, How have I loved the twilight hour and thee!

--_Don Juan_

[22] I must entirely agree with Monsieur Boileau, that one verse of Vergil is worth all the _clinquant _or tinsel of Ta.s.so.--_Spectator_, No. 5.

[23] _Spectator_, No. 419.

[24] See his "Life of Collins."

[25] _Spectator_, No. 40.

[26] "The Verse": Preface to "Paradise Lost."

[27] Dedicatory epistle to "The Rival Ladies."