From Chaucer to Tennyson Part 10

The central figure among the English men of letters of that generation was Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), whose memory has been preserved less by his own writings than by James Boswell's famous _Life of Johnson_, published in 1791. Boswell was a Scotch laird and advocate, who first met Johnson in London, when the latter was fifty-four years old. Boswell was not a very wise or witty person, but he reverenced the worth and intellect which shone through his subject's uncouth exterior. He followed him about, note-book in hand, bore all his snubbings patiently, and made the best biography ever written. It is related that the doctor once said that if he thought Boswell meant to write his life, he should prevent it by taking Boswell's. And yet Johnson's own writings and this biography of him have changed places in relative importance so completely that Carlyle predicted that the former would soon be reduced to notes on the latter; and Macaulay said that the man who was known to his contemporaries as a great writer was known to posterity as an agreeable companion.

Johnson was one of those rugged, eccentric, self-developed characters so common among the English. He was the son of a Lichfield book-seller, and after a course at Oxford, which was cut short by poverty, and an unsuccessful career as a school-master, he had come up to London, in 1737, where he supported himself for many years as a book-seller's hack.

Gradually his great learning and abilities, his ready social wit and powers as a talker, caused his company to be sought at the tables of those whom he called "the great." He was a clubbable man, and he drew about him at the tavern a group of the most distinguished intellects of the time: Edmund Burke, the orator and statesman; Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the portrait painter, and David Garrick, the great actor, who had been a pupil in Johnson's school, near Lichfield. Johnson was the typical John Bull of the last century. His oddities, virtues, and prejudices were thoroughly English. He hated Frenchmen, Scotchmen, and Americans, and had a c.o.c.kneyish attachment to London. He was a high Tory, and an orthodox churchman; he loved a lord in the abstract, and yet he a.s.serted a st.u.r.dy independence against any lord in particular. He was deeply religious, but had an abiding fear of death. He was burly in person, and slovenly in dress, his shirt-frill always covered with snuff. He was a great diner out, an inordinate tea-drinker, and a voracious and untidy feeder. An inherited scrofula, which often took the form of hypochondria and threatened to affect his brain, deprived him of control over the muscles of his face. Boswell describes how his features worked, how he snorted, grunted, whistled, and rolled about in his chair when getting ready to speak. He records his minutest traits, such as his habit of pocketing the orange peels at the club, and his superst.i.tious way of touching all the posts between his house and the Mitre Tavern, going back to do it, if he skipped one by chance. Though bearish in his manners and arrogant in dispute, especially when talking "for victory," Johnson had a large and tender heart. He loved his ugly, old wife--twenty-one years his senior--and he had his house full of unfortunates--a blind woman, an invalid surgeon, a dest.i.tute widow, a negro servant--whom he supported for many years, and bore with all their ill-humors patiently.

Among Johnson's numerous writings the ones best ent.i.tled to remembrance are, perhaps, his _Dictionary of the English Language_, 1755; his moral tale, _Ra.s.selas_, 1759; the introduction to his edition of Shakspere, 1765, and his _Lives of the Poets_, 1781. Johnson wrote a sonorous, cadenced prose, full of big Latin words and balanced clauses. Here is a sentence, for example, from his _Visit to the Hebrides_: "We were now treading that ill.u.s.trious island which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion. To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavored, and would be foolish, if it were possible." The difference between his colloquial style and his book style is well ill.u.s.trated in the instance cited by Macaulay. Speaking of Villiers's _Rehearsal_, Johnson said, "It has not wit enough to keep it sweet;" then paused and added--translating English into Johnsonese--"it has not vitality sufficient to preserve it from putrefaction." There is more of this in Johnson's _Rambler_ and _Idler_ papers than in his latest work, the _Lives of the Poets_. In this he showed himself a sound and judicious critic, though with decided limitations. His understanding was solid, but he was a thorough cla.s.sicist, and his taste in poetry was formed on Pope. He was unjust to Milton and to his own contemporaries, Gray, Collins, Shenstone, and Dyer. He had no sense of the higher and subtler graces of romantic poetry, and he had a comical indifference to the "beauties of nature."

When Boswell once ventured to remark that poor Scotland had, at least, some "n.o.ble wild prospects," the doctor replied that the n.o.blest prospect a Scotchman ever saw was the road that led to London.

The English novel of real life had its origin at this time. Books like De Foe's _Robinson Crusoe_, _Captain Singleton_, _Journal of the Plague_, etc., were tales of incident and adventure rather than novels.

The novel deals primarily with character and with the interaction of characters upon one another, as developed by a regular plot. The first English novelist, in the modern sense of the word, was Samuel Richardson, a printer, who began authorship in his fiftieth year with his _Pamela_, 1740, the story of a young servant girl who resisted the seductions of her master, and finally, as the reward of her virtue, became his wife. _Clarissa Harlowe_, 1748, was the tragical history of a high-spirited young lady who, being driven from her home by her family because she refused to marry the suitor selected for her, fell into the toils of Lovelace, an accomplished rake. After struggling heroically against every form of artifice and violence, she was at last drugged and ruined. She died of a broken heart, and Lovelace, borne down by remorse, was killed in a duel by a cousin of Clarissa. _Sir Charles Grandison_, 1753, was Richardson's portrait of an ideal fine gentleman, whose stately doings fill eight volumes, but who seems to the modern reader a bore and a prig. All these novels were written in the form of letters pa.s.sing between the characters, a method which fitted Richardson's subjective cast of mind. He knew little of life, but he identified himself intensely with his princ.i.p.al character and produced a strong effect by minute, acc.u.mulated touches. _Clarissa Harlowe_ is his masterpiece, though even in that the situation is painfully prolonged, the heroine's virtue is self-conscious and rhetorical, and there is something almost ludicrously unnatural in the copiousness with which she pours herself out in gushing epistles to her female correspondent at the very moment when she is beset with dangers, persecuted, agonized, and driven nearly mad. In Richardson's novels appears, for the first time, that sentimentalism which now began to infect European literature.

_Pamela_ was translated into French and German, and fell in with the current of popular feeling which found fullest expression in Rousseau's _Nouvelle Heloise_, 1759, and Goethe's _Leiden des Jungen Werther_, which set all the world a-weeping in 1774.

Coleridge said that to pa.s.s from Richardson's books to those of Henry Fielding was like going into the fresh air from a close room heated by stoves. Richardson, it has been affirmed, knew _man_, but Fielding knew _men_. The latter's first novel, _Joseph Andrews_, 1742, was begun as a travesty of _Pamela_. The hero, a brother of Pamela, was a young footman in the employ of Lady b.o.o.by, from whom his virtue suffered a like a.s.sault to that made upon Pamela's by her master. This reversal of the natural situation was in itself full of laughable possibilities, had the book gone on simply as a burlesque. But the exuberance of Fielding's genius led him beyond his original design. His hero, leaving Lady b.o.o.by's service, goes traveling with good Parson Adams, and is soon engaged in a series of comical and rather boisterous adventures.

Fielding had seen life, and his characters were painted from the life with a bold, free hand. He was a gentleman by birth, and had made acquaintance with society and the town in 1727, when he was a handsome, stalwart young fellow, with high animal spirits and a great appet.i.te for pleasure. He soon ran himself into debt and began writing for the stage; married, and spent his wife's fortune, living for a while in much splendor as a country gentleman, and afterward in a reduced condition as a rural justice with a salary of five hundred pounds of "the dirtiest money on earth." Fielding's masterpiece was _Tom Jones_, 1749, and it remains one of the best of English novels. Its hero is very much after Fielding's own heart, wild, spendthrift, warm-hearted, forgiving, and greatly in need of forgiveness. The same type of character, with the lines deepened, re-appears in Captain Booth, in _Amelia_, 1751, the heroine of which is a portrait of Fielding's wife.

With Tom Jones is contrasted Blifil, the embodiment of meanness, hypocrisy, and cowardice. Sophia Western, the heroine, is one of Fielding's most admirable creations. For the regulated morality of Richardson, with its somewhat old-grannified air, Fielding subst.i.tuted instinct. His virtuous characters are virtuous by impulse only, and his ideal of character is manliness. In _Jonathan Wild_ the hero is a highwayman. This novel is ironical, a sort of prose mock-heroic, and is one of the strongest, though certainly the least pleasing, of Fielding's writings.

Tobias Smollett was an inferior Fielding with a difference. He was a Scotch ship-surgeon, and had spent some time in the West Indies. He introduced into fiction the now familiar figure of the British tar, in the persons of Tom Bowling and Commodore Trunnion, as Fielding had introduced, in Squire Western, the equally national type of the hard-swearing, deep-drinking, fox-hunting Tory squire. Both Fielding and Smollett were of the hearty British "beef-and-beer" school; their novels are downright, energetic, coa.r.s.e, and high-blooded; low life, physical life, runs riot through their pages--tavern brawls, the breaking of pates, and the off-hand courtship of country wenches. Smollett's books, such as _Roderick Random_, 1748; _Peregrine Pickle_, 1751, and _Ferdinand Count Fathom_, 1752, were more purely stories of broadly comic adventure than Fielding's. The latter's view of life was by no means idyllic; but with Smollett this English realism ran into vulgarity and a hard Scotch literalness, and character was pushed to caricature.

"The generous wine of Fielding," says Taine, "in Smollett's hands becomes brandy of the dram-shop." A partial exception to this is to be found in his last and best novel, _Humphrey Clinker_, 1770. The influence of Cervantes and of the French novelist, Le Sage, who finished his _Adventures of Gil Bias_ in 1735, are very perceptible in Smollett.

A genius of much finer mold was Lawrence Sterne, the author of _Tristram Shandy_, 1759-1767, and the _Sentimental Journey_, 1768. _Tristram Shandy_ is hardly a novel: the story merely serves to hold together a number of characters, such as Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, conceived with rare subtlety and originality. Sterne's chosen province was the whimsical, and his great model was Rabelais. His books are full of digressions, breaks, surprises, innuendoes, double meanings, mystifications, and all manner of odd turns. Coleridge and Carlyle unite in p.r.o.nouncing him a great humorist. Thackeray says that he was only a great jester. Humor is the laughter of the heart, and Sterne's pathos is closely interwoven with his humor. He was the foremost of English sentimentalists, and he had that taint of insincerity which distinguishes sentimentalism from genuine sentiment, like Goldsmith's, for example. Sterne, in life, was selfish, heartless, and untrue. A clergyman, his worldliness and vanity and the indecency of his writings were a scandal to the Church, though his sermons were both witty and affecting. He enjoyed the t.i.tillation of his own emotions, and he had practiced so long at detecting the latent pathos that lies in the expression of dumb things and of poor, patient animals, that he could summon the tear of sensibility at the thought of a discarded postchaise, a dead donkey, a starling in a cage, or of Uncle Toby putting a house fly out of the window, and saying, "There is room enough in the world for thee and me." It is a high proof of his cleverness that he generally succeeds in raising the desired feeling in his readers even from such trivial occasions. He was a minute philosopher, his philosophy was kindly, and he taught the delicate art of making much out of little.

Less coa.r.s.e than Fielding, he is far more corrupt. Fielding goes bluntly to the point; Sterne lingers among the temptations and suspends the expectation to tease and excite it. Forbidden fruit had a relish for him, and his pages seduce. He is full of good sayings both tender and witty. It was Sterne, for example, who wrote, "G.o.d tempers the wind to the shorn lamb."

A very different writer was Oliver Goldsmith, whose _Vicar of Wakefield_, 1766, was the earliest, and is still one of the best, novels of domestic and rural life. The book, like its author, was thoroughly Irish, full of bulls and inconsistencies. Very improbable things happened in it with a cheerful defiance of logic. But its characters are true to nature, drawn with an idyllic sweetness and purity, and with touches of a most loving humor. Its hero, Dr. Primrose, was painted after Goldsmith's father, a poor clergyman of the English Church in Ireland, and the original, likewise, of the country parson in Goldsmith's _Deserted Village_, 1770, who was "pa.s.sing rich on forty pounds a year." This poem, though written in the fashionable couplet of Pope, and even containing a few verses contributed by Dr. Johnson--so that it was not at all in line with the work of the romanticists--did, perhaps, as much as any thing of Gray or of Collins to recall English poetry to the simplicity and freshness of country life.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Johnson, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns.]

Except for the comedies of Sheridan and Goldsmith, and, perhaps, a few other plays, the stage had now utterly declined. The novel, which is dramatic in essence, though not in form, began to take its place, and to represent life, though less intensely, yet more minutely than the theater could do. In the novelists of the 18th century, the life of the people, as distinguished from "society" or the upper cla.s.ses, began to invade literature. Richardson was distinctly a _bourgeois_ writer, and his contemporaries--Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith--ranged over a wide variety of ranks and conditions. This is one thing which distinguishes the literature of the second half of the 18th century from that of the first, as well as in some degree from that of all previous centuries. Among the authors of this generation whose writings belonged to other departments of thought than pure literature may be mentioned, in pa.s.sing, the great historian, Edward Gibbon, whose _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ was published from 1776-1788, and Edmund Burke, whose political speeches and pamphlets possess a true literary quality.

The romantic poets had addressed the imagination rather than the heart.

It was reserved for two men--a contrast to one another in almost every respect--to bring once more into British song a strong individual feeling, and with it a new warmth and directness of speech. These were William Cowper (1731-1800) and Robert Burns (1759-1796). Cowper spoke out of his own life-experience, his agony, his love, his worship and despair; and straightway the varnish that had glittered over all our poetry since the time of Dryden melted away. Cowper had scribbled verses when he was a young law student at the Middle Temple in London, and he had contributed to the _Olney Hymns_, published in 1779 by his friend and pastor, the Rev. John Newton; but he only began to write poetry in earnest when he was nearly fifty years old. In 1782, the date of his first volume, he said, in a letter to a friend, that he had read but one English poet during the past twenty years. Perhaps, therefore, of all English poets of equal culture, Cowper owed the least impulse to books and the most to the need of uttering his inmost thoughts and feelings.

Cowper had a most unhappy life. As a child he was shy, sensitive, and sickly, and suffered much from bullying and f.a.gging at a school whither he was sent after his mother's death. This happened when he was six years old; and in his affecting lines written _On Receipt of My Mother's Picture_, he speaks of himself as a

Wretch even then, life's journey just begun.

In 1763 he became insane and was sent to an asylum, where he spent a year. Judicious treatment restored him to sanity, but he came out a broken man and remained for the rest of his life an invalid, unfitted for any active occupation. His disease took the form of religious melancholy. He had two recurrences of madness, and both times made attempts upon his life. At Huntingdon, and afterward at Olney, in Buckinghamshire, he found a home with the Unwin family, whose kindness did all which the most soothing and delicate care could do to heal his wounded spirit. His two poems _To Mary Unwin_, together with the lines on his mother's picture, were almost the first examples of deep and tender sentiment in the lyrical poetry of the last century. Cowper found relief from the black thoughts that beset him only in an ordered round of quiet household occupations. He corresponded indefatigably, took long walks through the neighborhood, read, sang, and conversed with Mrs.

Unwin and his friend, Lady Austin, and amused himself with carpentry, gardening, and raising pets, especially hares, of which gentle animals he grew very fond. All these simple tastes, in which he found for a time a refuge and a sheltered happiness, are reflected in his best poem, _The Task_, 1785. Cowper is the poet of the family affections, of domestic life, and rural retirement; the laureate of the fireside, the tea-table, the evening lamp, the garden, the green-house, and the rabbit-coop. He draws with elegance and precision a chair, a clock, a harpsichord, a barometer, a piece of needle-work. But Cowper was an outdoor as well as an indoor man. The Olney landscape was tame, a fat, agricultural region, where the sluggish Ouse wound between plowed fields and the horizon was bounded by low hills. Nevertheless Cowper's natural descriptions are at once more distinct and more imaginative than Thomson's. _The Task_ reflects, also, the new philanthropic spirit, the enthusiasm of humanity, the feeling of the brotherhood of men to which Rousseau had given expression in France, and which issued in the French Revolution.

In England this was the time of Wilberforce, the antislavery agitator; of Whitefield, the eloquent revival preacher; of John and Charles Wesley, and of the Evangelical and Methodist movements which gave new life to the English Church. John Newton, the curate of Olney and the keeper of Cowper's conscience, was one of the leaders of the Evangelicals; and Cowper's first volume of _Table Talk_ and other poems, 1782, written under Newton's inspiration, was a series of sermons in verse, somewhat intolerant of all worldly enjoyments, such as hunting, dancing, and theaters. "G.o.d made the country and man made the town," he wrote. He was a moralizing poet, and his morality was sometimes that of the invalid and the recluse. Byron called him a "coddled poet." And, indeed, there is a suspicion of gruel and dressing-gowns about him. He lived much among women, and his sufferings had refined him to a feminine delicacy. But there is no sickliness in his poetry, and he retained a charming playful humor--displayed in his excellent comic ballad _John Gilpin_; and Mrs. Browning has sung of him,

How, when one by one sweet sounds and wandering lights departed, He bore no less a loving face, because so broken-hearted.

At the close of the year 1786 a young Scotchman, named Samuel Rose, called upon Cowper at Olney, and left with him a small volume, which had appeared at Edinburgh during the past summer, ent.i.tled _Poems chiefly in the Scottish Dialect by Robert Burns_. Cowper read the book through twice, and, though somewhat bothered by the dialect, p.r.o.nounced it a "very extraordinary production." This momentary flash, as of an electric spark, marks the contact not only of the two chief British poets of their generation, but of two literatures. Scotch poets, like Thomson and Beattie, had written in southern English, and, as Carlyle said, _in vacuo_, that is, with nothing specially national in their work. Burns's sweet though rugged Doric first secured the vernacular poetry of his country a hearing beyond the border. He had, to be sure, a whole literature of popular songs and ballads behind him, and his immediate models were Allan Ramsay and Robert Ferguson; but these remained provincial, while Burns became universal.

He was born in Ayrshire, on the banks of "bonny Doon," in a clay biggin not far from "Alloway's auld haunted kirk," the scene of the witch dance in _Tam O'Shanter_. His father was a hard-headed, G.o.d-fearing tenant farmer, whose life and that of his sons was a harsh struggle with poverty. The crops failed; the landlord pressed for his rent; for weeks at a time the family tasted no meat; yet this life of toil was lightened by love and homely pleasures. In the _Cotter's Sat.u.r.day Night_ Burns has drawn a beautiful picture of his parents' household, the rest that came at the week's end, and the family worship about the "wee bit ingle, blinkin' bonnily." Robert was handsome, wild, and witty. He was universally susceptible, and his first songs, like his last, were of "the la.s.ses." His head had been stuffed, in boyhood, with "tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, s.p.u.n.kies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights," etc., told him by one Jenny Wilson, an old woman who lived in the family. His ear was full of ancient Scottish tunes, and as soon as he fell in love he began to make poetry as naturally as a bird sings. He composed his verses while following the plow or working in the stack-yard; or, at evening, balancing on two legs of his chair and watching the light of a peat fire play over the reeky walls of the cottage. Burns's love songs are in many keys, ranging from strains of the most pure and exalted pa.s.sion, like _Ae Fond Kiss_ and _To Mary in Heaven_, to such loose ditties as _When Januar Winds_, and _Green Grow the Rashes O_.

Burns liked a gla.s.s almost as well as a la.s.s, and at Mauchline, where he carried on a farm with his brother Gilbert, after their father's death, he began to seek a questionable relief from the pressure of daily toil and unkind fates, in the convivialities of the tavern. There, among the wits of the Mauchline Club, farmers' sons, shepherds from the uplands, and the smugglers who swarmed over the west coast, he would discuss politics and farming, recite his verses, and join in the singing and ranting, while

Bousin o'er the nappy And gettin' fou and unco happy.

To these experiences we owe not only those excellent drinking songs, _John Barleycorn_ and _Willie Brewed a Peck o' Maut_, but the headlong fun of _Tam O'Shanter_, the visions, grotesquely terrible, of _Death and Dr. Hornbook_, and the dramatic humor of the _Jolly Beggars_. Cowper had celebrated "the cup which cheers but not inebriates." Burns sang the praises of _Scotch Drink_. Cowper was a stranger to Burns's high animal spirits, and his robust enjoyment of life. He had affections, but no pa.s.sions. At Mauchline, Burns, whose irregularities did not escape the censure of the kirk, became involved, through his friendship with Gavin Hamilton, in the controversy between the Old Light and New Light clergy.

His _Holy Fair_, _Holy Tulzie_, _Twa Herds_, _Holy Willie's Prayer_, and _Address to the Unco Gude_, are satires against bigotry and hypocrisy.

But in spite of the rollicking profanity of his language, and the violence of his rebound against the austere religion of Scotland, Burns was at bottom deeply impressible by religious ideas, as may be seen from his _Prayer under the Pressure of Violent Anguish_, and _Prayer in Prospect of Death_.

His farm turned out a failure, and he was on the eve of sailing for Jamaica, when the favor with which his volume of poems was received stayed his departure, and turned his steps to Edinburgh. There the peasant poet was lionized for a winter season by the learned and polite society of the Scotch capital, with results in the end not altogether favorable to Burns's best interests. For when society finally turned the cold shoulder on him he had to go back to farming again, carrying with him a bitter sense of injustice and neglect. He leased a farm at Ellisland, in 1788, and some friends procured his appointment as exciseman for his district. But poverty, disappointment, irregular habits, and broken health clouded his last years, and brought him to an untimely death at the age of thirty-seven. He continued, however, to pour forth songs of unequaled sweetness and force. "The man sank," said Coleridge, "but the poet was bright to the last."

Burns is the best of British song-writers. His songs are singable; they are not merely lyrical poems. They were meant to be sung, and they are sung. They were mostly set to old Scottish airs, and sometimes they were built up from ancient fragments of anonymous popular poetry, a chorus, or stanza, or even a single line. Such are, for example, _Auld Lang Syne_, _My Heart's in the Highlands_, and _Landlady, Count the Lawin_.

Burns had a great, warm heart. His sins were sins of pa.s.sion, and sprang from the same generous soil that nourished his impulsive virtues. His elementary qualities as a poet were sincerity, a healthy openness to all impressions of the beautiful, and a sympathy which embraced men, animals, and the dumb objects of nature. His tenderness toward flowers and the brute creation may be read in his lines _To a Mountain Daisy_, _To a Mouse_, and _The Auld Farmer's New Year's Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare Maggie_. Next after love and good fellowship, patriotism is the most frequent motive of his song. Of his national anthem, _Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled_, Carlyle said: "So long as there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchman, or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war ode."

Burns's politics were a singular mixture of sentimental Toryism with practical democracy. A romantic glamour was thrown over the fortunes of the exiled Stuarts, and to have been "out" in '45 with the Young Pretender was a popular thing in parts of Scotland. To this purely poetic loyalty may be attributed such Jacobite ballads of Burns as _Over the Water to Charlie_. But his sober convictions were on the side of liberty and human brotherhood, and are expressed in _The Twa Dogs_, the _First Epistle to Davie_, and _A Man's a Man for a' that_. His sympathy with the Revolution led him to send four pieces of ordnance, taken from a captured smuggler, as a present to the French Convention, a piece of bravado which got him into difficulties with his superiors in the excise. The poetry which Burns wrote, not in dialect, but in the cla.s.sical English, is in the stilted manner of his century, and his prose correspondence betrays his lack of culture by its constant lapse into rhetorical affectation and fine writing.

1. James Thomson. The Castle of Indolence.

2. The Poems of Thomas Gray.

3. William Collins. Odes.

4. The Six Chief Lives from Johnson's Lives of the Poets.

Edited by Matthew Arnold. Macmillan, 1878.

5. Boswell's Life of Johnson [abridged]. Henry Holt & Co., 1878.

6. Samuel Richardson. Clarissa Harlowe.

7. Henry Fielding. Tom Jones.

8. Tobias Smollett. Humphrey Clinker.

9. Lawrence Sterne. Tristram Shandy.

10. Oliver Goldsmith. Vicar of Wakefield and Deserted Village.

11. William Cowper. The Task and John Gilpin. (Globe Edition.) London: Macmillan & Co., 1879.

12. The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns. (Globe Edition.) London: Macmillan & Co., 1884.

CHAPTER VII.

FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT.

1789-1832.

The burst of creative activity at the opening of the 19th century has but one parallel in English literary history, namely, the somewhat similar flowering out of the national genius in the time of Elizabeth and the first two Stuart kings. The later age gave birth to no supreme poets, like Shakspere and Milton. It produced no _Hamlet_ and no _Paradise Lost_; but it offers a greater number of important writers, a higher average of excellence, and a wider range and variety of literary work than any preceding era. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, and Keats are all great names; while Southey, Landor, Moore, Lamb, and De Quincey would be noteworthy figures at any period, and deserve a fuller mention than can be here accorded them. But in so crowded a generation, selection becomes increasingly needful, and in the present chapter, accordingly, the emphasis will be laid upon the first-named group as not only the most important, but the most representative of the various tendencies of their time.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Wordsworth, Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, Keats.]

The conditions of literary work in this century have been almost unduly stimulating. The rapid advance in population, wealth, education, and the means of communication has vastly increased the number of readers. Every one who has any thing to say can say it in print, and is sure of some sort of a hearing. A special feature of the time is the multiplication of periodicals. The great London dailies, like the _Times_ and the _Morning Post_, which were started during the last quarter of the 18th century, were something quite new in journalism. The first of the modern reviews, the _Edinburgh_, was established in 1802, as the organ of the Whig party in Scotland. This was followed by the London _Quarterly_, in 1808, and by _Blackwood's Magazine_, in 1817, both in the Tory interest.

The first editor of the _Edinburgh_ was Francis Jeffrey, who a.s.sembled about him a distinguished corps of contributors, including the versatile Henry Brougham, afterward a great parliamentary orator and lord chancellor of England, and the Rev. Sydney Smith, whose witty sayings are still current. The first editor of the _Quarterly_ was William Gifford, a satirist, who wrote the _Baviad_ and _Maeviad_ ridicule of literary affectations. He was succeeded in 1824 by John Gibson Lockhart, the son-in-law of Walter Scott, and the author of an excellent _Life of Scott_. _Blackwood's_ was edited by John Wilson, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, who, under the pen-name of "Christopher North," contributed to his magazine a series of brilliant imaginary dialogues between famous characters of the day, ent.i.tled _Noctes Ambrosianae_, because they were supposed to take place at Ambrose's tavern in Edinburgh. These papers were full of a profuse, headlong eloquence, of humor, literary criticism, and personalities interspersed with songs expressive of a roystering and convivial Toryism and an uproarious contempt for Whigs and c.o.c.kneys. These reviews and magazines, and others which sprang up beside them, became the _nuclei_ about which the wit and scholarship of both parties gathered. Political controversy under the Regency and the reign of George IV. was thus carried on more regularly by permanent organs, and no longer so largely by privateering, in the shape of pamphlets, like Swift's _Public Spirit of the Allies_, Johnson's _Taxation No Tyranny_, and Burke's _Reflections on the Revolution in France_. Nor did politics by any means usurp the columns of the reviews. Literature, art, science, the whole circle of human effort and achievement pa.s.sed under review.

_Blackwood's_, _Fraser's_, and the other monthlies published stories, poetry, criticism, and correspondence--every thing, in short, which enters into the make-up of our magazines to-day, except ill.u.s.trations.

Two main influences, of foreign origin, have left their trace in the English writers of the first thirty years of the 19th century, the one communicated by contact with the new German literature of the latter half of the 18th century, and in particular with the writings of Goethe, Schiller, and Kant; the other springing from the events of the French Revolution. The influence of German upon English literature in the 19th century was more intellectual and less formal than that of the Italian in the 16th and of the French in the 18th. In other words, the German writers furnished the English with ideas and ways of feeling rather than with models of style. Goethe and Schiller did not become subjects for literary imitation as Moliere, Racine, and Boileau had become in Pope's time. It was reserved for a later generation and for Thomas Carlyle to domesticate the diction of German prose. But the nature and extent of this influence can, perhaps, best be noted when we come to take up the authors of the time one by one.

The excitement caused by the French Revolution was something more obvious and immediate. When the Bastile fell, in 1789, the enthusiasm among the friends of liberty and human progress in England was hardly less intense than in France. It was the dawn of a new day; the shackles were stricken from the slave; all men were free and all men were brothers, and radical young England sent up a shout that echoed the roar of the Paris mob. Wordsworth's lines on the _Fall of the Bastile_, Coleridge's _Fall of Robespierre_ and _Ode to France_, and Southey's revolutionary drama, _Wat Tyler_, gave expression to the hopes and aspirations of the English democracy. In after life, Wordsworth, looking back regretfully to those years of promise, wrote his poem on the _French Revolution as it Appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement_.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive; But to be young was very heaven. O times In which the meager, stale, forbidding ways Of custom, law, and statute took at once The attraction of a country in romance.