The Age of Pope Part 9

Aaron Hill, though he could write a sensible letter, was not a wise man.

He was 'everything by turns and nothing long.' Poetry was but one of his accomplishments, and we are told that he cultivated it 'as a relaxation from the study of history, criticism, geography, physic, commerce, agriculture, war, law, chemistry, and natural philosophy, to which he devoted the greatest part of his time.'

As a poet Hill has the facility in composition exhibited by so many of his contemporaries, and he has occasionally a pretty turn of fancy. His last labour was the successful adaptation of Voltaire's _Merope_ to the English stage (1749); sixteen years before he had adapted _Zara_ with equal success.

[Sidenote: Thomas Parnell (1679-1718).]

Among the minor poets of the period an honourable place must be given to Parnell, who possessed the soul of a poet, but gave limited expression to it, for it was only during the later years of a short life that he discovered where his genius lay. The friend of Pope, Arbuthnot, and Swift, his biography has been written by Johnson, and more discursively by his countryman Goldsmith.

Thomas Parnell was born in Dublin, 1679, entered Trinity College at the early age of thirteen, and in 1700 obtained the degree of Master of Arts. Having taken orders he gained preferment in the Church, became, in 1706, Archdeacon of Clogher, and through the recommendation of Swift obtained also a good living. Parnell was fond of society, and was accustomed as often as possible to join the wits in London. He was a member of the Scriblerus Club, wrote for the _Spectator_, preached eloquent sermons, and had the ambition of a poet. But the loss of his wife preyed upon his mind, and he is said, though I believe chiefly on Pope's authority, to have given way to intemperance. He died suddenly at Chester at the age of thirty-nine in 1718.

Parnell was one of the poets whose fortunes Swift did his best to promote. Writing in 1712, he says, 'I gave Lord Bolingbroke a poem of Parnell's. I made Parnell insert some compliments in it to his lordship.

He is extremely pleased with it, and read some parts of it to-day to Lord Treasurer, who liked it as much. And indeed he outdoes all our poets here a bar's length.' And a month later he writes, 'Lord Bolingbroke likes Parnell mightily, and it is pleasant to see that one who hardly pa.s.sed for anything in Ireland, makes his way here with a little friendly forwarding.'

_The Hermit_, the _Hymn to Contentment_, an _Allegory on Man_, and a _Night Piece on Death_, give Parnell his t.i.tle to a place among the poets. _The Rise of Woman_, and _Health, an Eclogue_, have also much merit, and were praised by Pope (but this was to their author) as 'two of the most beautiful things he ever read.' The story of _The Hermit_, written originally in Spanish, is given in _Howell's Letters_ (1645-1655), and is admirably told by Parnell, but much that he wrote, including a series of long poems on Scripture characters, is poetically worthless. His poems, published five years after his death, were edited by Pope, who wisely suppressed some pieces unworthy of the poet. Then, as now, literary scavengers were at work. In 1758 the suppressed poems were published, and called forth the comment from Gray, 'Parnell is the dunghill of Irish Grub Street.' To Parnell Pope was indebted for the _Essay on Homer_ prefixed to the translation, with which he does not seem to have been well pleased. He complained of the stiffness of the style, and said it had cost him more pains in the correcting than the writing of it would have done.

If Parnell's prose has the defect of stiffness, his lines glide with a smoothness that must have satisfied the ear of Pope. The higher harmonies of verse were unknown to him, but ease is not without a charm, and in ill.u.s.tration of Parnell's gift the final lines of _A Night Piece on Death_ shall be quoted:

'When men my scythe and darts supply, How great a king of fears am I!

They view me like the last of things, They make and then they draw my stings.

Fools! if you less provoked your fears, No more my spectre form appears.

Death's but a path that must be trod, If man would ever pa.s.s to G.o.d; A port of calms, a state to ease From the rough rage of swelling seas.

Why then thy flowing sable stoles, Deep pendent cypress, mourning poles, Loose scarfs to fall athwart thy weeds, Long palls, drawn hea.r.s.es, covered steeds, And plumes of black that as they tread, Nod o'er the scutcheons of the dead?

Nor can the parted body know, Nor wants the soul these forms of woe; As men who long in prison dwell, With lamps that glimmer round the cell, Whene'er their suffering years are run, Spring forth to greet the glittering sun; Such joy, though far transcending sense, Have pious souls at parting hence.

On earth and in the body placed, A few and evil years they waste; But when their chains are cast aside, See the glad scene unfolding wide, Clap the glad wing, and tower away, And mingle with the blaze of day.'

[Sidenote: Thomas Tickell (1686-1740).]

Tickell wished to be remembered as the friend of Addison, and with Addison his name is indissolubly a.s.sociated. The poem dedicated to the essayist's memory is perhaps over-praised by Macaulay when he says that it would do honour to the greatest name in our literature, but it proved incontestibly that Tickell, as a poet, was superior to the master whom he so loved and honoured. His reputation hangs upon this elegy, which Fox p.r.o.nounced perfect.[34] The _Prospect of Peace_, which pa.s.sed through several editions, had at one time a considerable reputation, not a.s.suredly for its poetry, but because it appealed to the spirit of the time The style of the poem may be judged from these lines:--

'Accept, great Anne, the tears their memory draws, Who n.o.bly perished in their sovereign's cause; For thou in pity bidd'st the war give o'er, Mourn'st thy slain heroes, nor wilt venture more.

Vast price of blood on each victorious day!

(But Europe's freedom doth that price repay.) Lamented triumphs! when one breath must tell That Marlborough conquered and that Dormer fell.'

His _Colin and Lucy_ called forth high praise from Goldsmith as one of the best ballads in our language, and Gray terms it the prettiest ballad in the world. Three stanzas from this once famous poem shall be quoted:--

'"I hear a voice you cannot hear, Which says I must not stay; I see a hand you cannot see, Which beckons me away.

By a false heart and broken vows, In early youth I die; Was I to blame because his bride Was thrice as rich as I?

'"Ah, Colin, give not her thy vows, Vows due to me alone; Nor thou, fond maid, receive his kiss, Nor think him all thy own.

To-morrow in the church to wed, Impatient, both prepare!

But know, fond maid, and know, false man, That Lucy will be there!

'"Then bear my corse, my comrades, bear, This bridegroom blithe to meet, He in his wedding trim so gay, I in my winding-sheet."

She spoke, she died; her corse was borne The bridegroom blithe to meet, He in his wedding trim so gay, She in her winding-sheet.'

There is some fancy but no imagination in the machinery of Tickell's long poem on _Kensington Gardens_, a t.i.tle which recalls Matthew Arnold's exquisite stanzas. But the pathetic beauty of Arnold's lines belongs to a world of poetry wholly unlike that in which even the best of the Queen Anne poets lived and moved.

Tickell's translation of the first book of the _Iliad_ led to the quarrel already mentioned in the account of Pope. He wrote, also, a rather lengthy poem on Oxford, in which there is some absurd criticism of insignificant poetasters, and, as a matter of course, an extravagant eulogium of Addison.

The few facts recorded of Tickell's life may be summed up in a paragraph. He was born in 1686 at Bridekirk, in c.u.mberland, and entered Queen's College, Oxford, in 1701. In 1708 he obtained his M.A. degree, and two years later was chosen Fellow. For sixteen years Tickell held his fellowship, but resigned it on his marriage in 1726. In a poem addressed to the lady before marriage, he asks whether

'By thousands sought, Clotilda, canst thou free Thy crowd of captives and descend to me?'

Praise which in those days would be regarded as fulsome secured the friendship and patronage of Addison, who employed him in public affairs, and when he became Secretary of State made Tickell Under-Secretary. To him Addison left the charge of editing his works, which were published by subscription, and appeared in four quarto volumes in 1721. In 1725 he was made secretary to the Lord Justices of Ireland, 'a place of great honour,' which he held until his death in 1740. The praise of Wordsworth, a poet always chary of expressing approbation, has been bestowed upon Tickell. 'I think him,' he said, 'one of the very best writers of occasional verses.'

[Sidenote: William Somerville (1692-1742).]

Tickell had written some lines on hunting, which he published as a fragment. His contemporary Somerville, selecting the same subject, wrote _The Chase_ (1735), a poem in blank verse. He was born at Edston, in Warwickshire, and was said, Dr. Johnson writes, 'to be of the first family in his county.' He was educated at Winchester and Oxford, and had the tastes of a scholar as well as of a country gentleman, which, among other accomplishments, included that of hard drinking. We know little about him, and what we do know is deplorable, for his friend Shenstone writes that he was plagued and threatened by low wretches, and 'forced to drink himself into pains of the body in order to get rid of the pains of the mind.' He died in 1742, the owner of a good estate, which, owing to a contempt for economy, he was never able to enjoy. 'I loved him for nothing so much,' said Shenstone, 'as for his flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money.'

In _The Chase_ Somerville had the advantage of knowing his subject, but knowledge is not poetry, and the interest of the poem is not due to its poetical qualities. He deserves some credit for his skill in handling a variety of metres as well as blank verse, in which his princ.i.p.al poem is written. In an address _To Mr. Addison_, the couplet,

'When panting Virtue her last efforts made, You brought your Clio to the virgin's aid,'

is praised by Johnson as one of those happy strokes which are seldom attained. In the same poem Shakespeare and Addison are brought together in a way that is far from happy:

'In heaven he sings; on earth your muse supplies Th' important loss, and heals our weeping eyes, Correctly great, she melts each flinty heart With equal genius, but superior art.'

Praise can be too strong even for a poet's digestion, and Somerville, who writes a great deal more nonsense in the same strain, should have remembered that he was not addressing a fool. If the poetical adulation of the time is to be excused, it must be on the ground that a poet had to live by patronage and not by the public. In a pecuniary point of view his subservience to men in high position was often successful. An almost universal custom, it was not regarded as degrading; but the poet must have been peculiarly const.i.tuted who was not degraded by it.

[Sidenote: John Dyer (1698(?)-1758).]

In the last century any subject was deemed suitable for poetry, and the Welsh poet, John Dyer, who was born about 1698, found in his later life poetical materials in _The Fleece_ (1757), a poem in four books of blank verse. His genius for descriptive poetry and his pa.s.sionate and intelligent delight in natural objects are seen more pleasantly in _Grongar Hill_ (published in the same year as Thomson's _Winter_), a poem not without grammatical inaccuracies, one of which deforms the first couplet, but full of poetical feeling. In an ease of composition which runs into laxity he reminds us occasionally of George Wither. His chief merit is, that while independent of Thomson, he was inspired by the same love, and wrote with the same aim. Dyer is not content with bare description, but likes to moralize on the landscape he surveys.

Thus, when looking on a ruined tower, the poet exclaims:

'Yet time has seen, that lifts the low, And level lays the lofty brow, Has seen this broken pile compleat, Big with the vanity of state; But transient is the smile of fate!

A little rule, a little sway, A sunbeam in a winter's day,'

Is all the proud and mighty have Between the cradle and the grave.'

Dyer who is best seen in the octosyllabic metre, chose it also for _The Country Walk_, a poem in which, notwithstanding an occasional lapse into the conventional diction of the period, the rural pictures are drawn from life. He takes the reader into the farm-yard and fields as he writes:

'I am resolved this charming day In the open field to stray, And have no roof above my head But that whereon the G.o.ds do tread.

Before the yellow barn I see A beautiful variety Of strutting c.o.c.ks, advancing stout, And flirting empty chaff about; Hens, ducks, and geese, and all their brood, And turkeys gobbling for their food; While rustics thrash the wealthy floor, And tempt all to crowd the door.

And now into the fields I go, Where thousand flaming flowers glow, And every neighbouring hedge I greet With honey-suckles smelling sweet; Now o'er the daisy meads I stray And meet with, as I pace my way, Sweetly shining on the eye A rivulet gliding smoothly by, Which shows with what an easy tide The moments of the happy glide.'

_An Epistle to a Friend in Town_, records his satisfaction with the country retirement in which his days are pa.s.sed. In a rather awkward stanza he says that he is more than content, and is indeed charmed with everything, and the lines close with the moralizing that was dear to Dyer's heart:

'Alas! what a folly that wealth and domain We heap up in sin and in sorrow!

Immense is the toil, yet the labour how vain!

Is not life to be over to-morrow?

Then glide on my moments, the few that I have, Smooth-shaded and quiet and even; While gently the body descends to the grave, And the spirit arises to heaven.'

Dyer was an artist as well as a poet, and visited Italy, which suggested a poem in blank verse, _The Ruins of Rome_ (1740). After his return to England he entered into holy orders, took a wife, who is said to have been a descendant of Shakespeare, and settled at Calthorp in Leicestershire, which he afterwards exchanged for a living in Lincolnshire. There is much to like in Dyer, and he has had the good fortune to win the applause of two great poets. Gray says, in a letter to Horace Walpole, that he had 'more of poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number,' and Wordsworth in a sonnet, _To the Poet, John Dyer_, writes:

'Though hasty Fame hath many a chaplet culled For worthless brows, while in the pensive shade Of cold neglect she leaves thy head ungraced, Yet pure and powerful minds, hearts meek and still, A grateful few, shall love thy modest Lay, Long as the shepherd's bleating flock shall stray O'er naked Snowdon's wide aerial waste; Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill!'

[Sidenote: William Shenstone (1714-1764).]