Chapter VII: Section VI: The Beginnings of the Modern Age

All this suits ill the classical embroidery. Thomson's visible imitations of Vergil, his episodes inserted to fill up space, his invocations to spring, to the muse, to philosophy, all these pedantic relics and conventionalisms, produce incongruity. But the contrast is much more marked in another way. The worldly artificial life, such as Louis XIV had made fashionable, began to weary Europe. It was found meagre and hollow; people grew tired of always acting, submitting to etiquette. They felt that gallantry is not love, nor madrigals poetry, nor amusement happiness. They perceived that man is not an elegant doll, or a dandy the masterpiece of nature, and that there is a world beyond the drawing-room. A Genevese plebeian (J. J. Rousseau), a Protestant and a recluse, whom religion, education, poverty, and genius had led more quickly and further than others, spoke out the public secret aloud; and it was thought that he had discovered or rediscovered the country, conscience, religion, the rights of man, and natural sentiments. Then appeared a new personality, the idol and model of his time, the man of feeling who, by his grave character and liking for nature, contrasted with the man at court. Doubtless the man of feeling has not escaped the influence of the places he has frequented. He is refined and insipid, melting at the sight of the young lambs nibbling the newly grown grass, blessing the little birds, who give a concert to celebrate their happiness. He is emphatic and wordy, writes tirades about sentiment, inveighs against the age, apostrophizes virtue, reason, truth, and the abstract divinities, which are engraved in delicate outline on frontispieces. In spite of himself, he continues a man of the drawing-room and the academy; after uttering sweet things to the ladies, he utters them to nature, and declaims in polished periods about the Deity. But after all, it is through him that the revolt against classical customs begins; and in this respect, he is more advanced in Germanic England than in Latin France. Thirty years before Rousseau, Thompson had expressed all Rousseau's sentiments, almost in the same style. Like him, he painted the country with sympathy and enthusiasm. Like him, he contrasted the golden age of primitive simplicity with modern miseries and corruption. Like him, he exalted deep love, conjugal tenderness, the union of souls and perfect esteem animated by desire, paternal affection, and all domestic joys. Like him, he combated temporary frivolity, and compared the ancient republics with modern States:

"Proofs of a people, whose heroic aims Soared far above the little selfish sphere Of doubting modern life."[55]

Like Rousseau, he praised gravity, patriotism, liberty, virtue; rose from the spectacle of nature to the contemplation of God, and showed to man glimpses of immortal life beyond the tomb. Like him, in short, he marred the sincerity of his emotion and the truth of his poetry by sentimental vapidities, by pastoral billing and cooing, and by such an abundance of epithets, personified abstractions, pompous invocations and oratorical tirades, that we perceive in him beforehand the false and ornamental style of Thomas,[56] David,[57] and the first French Revolution.

Other authors follow in the same track. The literature of that period might be called the library of the man of feeling. First there was Richardson, the puritanic printer, with his Sir Charles Grandison, a man of principles, an accomplished model of a gentleman, a professor of decorum and morality, with a soul into the bargain. There is Sterne too, a refined and sickly blackguard, who, amidst his buffooneries and oddities, pauses to weep over an ass or an imaginary prisoner. There is, in particular, Henry Mackenzie, "the Man of Feeling," whose timid, delicate hero weeps five or six times a day; who grows consumptive through sensibility, dares not broach his love till at the point of death, and dies in broaching it. Naturally, praise induces satire; and in the opposite camp we see Fielding, a valiant roisterer, and Sheridan, a brilliant but naughty fellow, the one with Blifil, the other with Joseph Surface, two hypocrites, especially the second, not coarse, red-faced, and smelling of the vestry, like Tartuffe, but worldly, well-clad, a fine talker, loftily serious, sad and gentle from excess of tenderness, who, with his hand on his heart and a tear in his eye, showers on the public his sentences and periods whilst he soils his brother's reputation and debauches his neighbor's wife. When a man of feeling has been thus created, he soon has an epic made for him. A Scotsman, a man of wit, of too much wit, having published on his own account an unsuccessful rhapsody, wished to recover his expenses, visited the mountains of his country, gathered picturesque images, collected fragments of legends, plastered over the whole an abundance of eloquence and rhetoric, and created a Celtic Homer, Ossian, who with Oscar, Malvina, and his whole troop, made the tour of Europe, and, about 1830, ended by furnishing baptismal names for French _grisettes_ and _perruquiers._ Macpherson displayed to the world an imitation of primitive manners, not over-true, for the extreme rudeness of barbarians would have shocked the people, but yet well enough preserved or portrayed to contrast with modern civilization, and persuade the public that they were looking upon pure nature. A keen sympathy with Scottish landscape, so grand, so cold, so gloomy, rain on the hills, the birch trembling to the wind, the mist of heaven and the vague musing of the soul, so that every dreamer found there the emotions of his solitary walks and his philosophic sadness; chivalric exploits and magnanimity, heroes who set out alone to engage an army, faithful virgins dying on the tomb of their betrothed; an impassioned, colored style, affecting to be abrupt, yet polished; able to charm a disciple of Rousseau by its warmth and elegance: here was something to transport the young enthusiasts of the time; civilized barbarians, scholarly lovers of nature, dreaming of the delights of savage life, whilst they shook off the powder which the hairdresser had left on their coats.

Yet this is not the course of the main current of poetry; it runs in the direction of sentimental reflection; the greatest number of poems, and those most sought after, are emotional dissertations. In fact, a man of feeling breaks out in excessive declamations. When he sees a cloud, he dreams of human nature and constructs a phrase. Hence at this time among poets, swarm the melting philosophers and the tearful academicians; Gray, the morose hermit of Cambridge, and Akenside, a noble thinker, both learned imitators of lofty Greek poetry; Beattie, a metaphysical moralist, with a young girl's nerves and an old maid's hobbies; the amiable and affectionate Goldsmith, who wrote the "Vicar of Wakefield," the most charming of Protestant pastorals; poor Collins, a young enthusiast, who was disgusted with life, would read nothing but the Bible, went mad, was shut up in an asylum, and in his intervals of liberty wandered in Chichester cathedral, accompanying the music with sobs and groans; Glover, Watts, Shenstone, Smart, and others. The titles of their works sufficiently indicate their character. One writes a poem on "The Pleasures of Imagination," another odes on the "Passions" and on "Liberty"; one an "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" and a "Hymn to Adversity," another a poem on a "Deserted Village," and on the character of surrounding civilizations (Goldsmith's "Traveller"); one a sort of epic on "Thermopylæ," and the other the moral history of a young minstrel. They were nearly all grave, spiritual men, impassioned for noble ideas, with Christian aspirations or convictions, given to meditating on man, inclined to melancholy, to description, invocation, lovers of abstraction and allegory, who, to attain greatness, willingly mounted on stilts. One of the least strict and most noted of them was Young, the author of "Night Thoughts," a clergyman and a courtier, who, having vainly attempted to enter Parliament, then to become a bishop, married, lost his wife and children, and made use of his misfortunes to write meditations on "Life, Death, Immortality, Time, Friendship, The Christian Triumph, Virtue's Apology, A Moral Survey of the Nocturnal Heavens," and many other similar pieces. Doubtless there are brilliant flashes of imagination in his poems; seriousness and elevation are not wanting; we can even see that he aims at them; but we discover much more quickly that he makes the most of his grief, and strikes attitudes. He exaggerates and declaims, studies effect and style, confuses Greek and Christian ideas. Fancy an unhappy father, who says:

"Silence and Darkness! Solemn sisters! Twins From ancient Night! I to Day's soft-ey'd sister pay my court,...[58] (Endymion's rival!) and her aid implore; Now first implor'd in succour to the Muse."[59]

And a few pages further on he invokes heaven and earth, when mentioning the resurrection of the Saviour. And yet the sentiment is fresh and sincere. Is it not one of the greatest of modern ideas to put Christian philosophy into verse? Young and his contemporaries say beforehand that which Chateaubriand and Lamartine were to discover. The true, the futile, all is here forty years earlier than in France. The angels and the other celestial machinery long figured in England before appearing in Chateaubriand's "Génie du Christianisme" and the "Martyrs." Atala and Chactas are of the same family as Malvina and Fingal. If Lamartine read Gray's odes and Akenside's reflections, he would find there the melancholy sweetness, the exquisite art, the fine arguments, and half the ideas of his own poetry. And nevertheless, near as they were to a literary renovation, Englishmen did not yet attain it. In vain the foundation was changed, the form remained. They did not shake off the classical drapery; they write too well, they dare not be natural. They have always a patent stock of fine suitable words, poetical elegances, where each of them thought himself bound to go and pick out his phrases. It boots them nothing to be impassioned or realistic; like Shenstone, to dare to describe a schoolmistress, and the very part on which she whips a young rascal; their simplicity is conscious, their frankness archaic, their emotion formal, their tears academical. Ever at the moment of writing, an august model starts up, a sort of schoolmaster, weighing on each with his full weight, with all the weight which a hundred and twenty years of literature can give his precepts. Their prose is always the slave of the period: Dr. Johnson, who was at once the La Harpe and the Boileau of his age, explains and imposes on all the studied, balanced, irreproachable phrase; and classical ascendancy is still so strong that it domineers over nascent history, the only kind of English literature which was then European and original. Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon, were almost French in their taste, language, education, conception of man. They relate like men of the world, cultivated and well-informed, with charm and clearness, in a polished, rhythmic, sustained style. They show a liberal spirit, an unvaried moderation, an impartial reason. They banish from history all coarseness and tediousness. They write without fanaticism or prejudice. But, at the same time, they attenuate human nature; comprehend neither barbarism nor loftiness; paint revolutions and passions, as people might do who had seen nothing but decked drawing-rooms and dusted libraries; they judge enthusiasts with the coldness of chaplains or the smile of a sceptic; they blot out the salient features which distinguish human physiognomies; they cover all the harsh points of truth with a brilliant and uniform varnish. At last there started up an unfortunate Scotch peasant (Burns), rebelling against the world, and in love, with the yearnings, lusts, greatness, and irrationality of modern genius. Now and then, behind his plough, he lighted on genuine verses, verses such as Heine and Alfred de Musset have written in our own days. In those few words, combined after a new fashion, there was a revolution. Two hundred new verses sufficed. The human mind turned on its hinges, and so did civil society. When Roland, being made a minister, presented himself before Louis XVI in a simple dress-coat and shoes without buckles, the master of the ceremonies raised his hands to heaven, thinking that all was lost. In reality, all was changed.

[Footnote 1: Paul Louis Courier (1772-1825) says, "a lady's maid, in Louis XIV's time, wrote better than the greatest of modern writers."]

[Footnote 2: The Rev. Whitwell Elwin, in his second volume of the works of Alexander Pope, at the end of his introduction to "An Essay on Man," p. 338, says: "M. Taine asserts that from the Restoration to the French Revolution, from Waller to Johnson, from Hobbes and Temple to Robertson and Hume, all our literature, both prose and verse, bears the impress of classic art. The mode, he says, culminated in the reign of Queen Anne, and Pope, he considers, was the extreme example of it.... Many of the most eminent authors who flourished between the English Restoration wrote in a style far removed from that which M. Taine calls classical... The verse differs like the prose, though in a less degree, and is not 'of a uniform make, as if fabricated by a machine.'... Neither is the substance of the prose and verse, from the Restoration to the French Revolution, an invariable common-sense mediocrity.... There is much truth in his (M. Taine's) view, that there was a growing tendency to cultivate style, and in some writers the art degenerated into the artificial."--Tr.]

[Footnote 3: R. Carruthers, "Life of Alexander Pope," 2d ed. 1857. ch. I. 33.]

[Footnote 4: It is very doubtful whether Pope was not older than sixteen when he wrote the Pastorals. See on this subject, Pope's Works, ed. Elwin, London, 1871, I. 230 et passim.--Tr.]

[Footnote 5: Ibid. 233.]

[Footnote 6: Pope's Works, ed. Elwin, I. 242.]

[Footnote 7: Johnson, "Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets." 3 vols. ed. Cunningham, 1854. A. Pope, III. 96.]

[Footnote 8: Johnson. "Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets"; A. Pope, III. 99.]

[Footnote 9: Boswell's "Life of Johnson," ch. LXXI. 670.]

[Footnote 10: Carruthers's "Life of Pope," ch. X. 377.]

[Footnote 11: Carruthers's "Life of Pope," ch. IV. 164.]

[Footnote 12: Johnson, "The Lives of the English Poets"; Alexander Pope, III. 114.]

[Footnote 13: Ibid. III. 111.]

[Footnote 14: Ibid. III. 105.]

[Footnote 15: Rev. W. Elwin, in his edition of Pope's Works, II. 224, says: "The authenticity of the Latin letters has usually been taken for granted, but I have a strong belief that they are a forgery.... It is far more likely that they are the fabrication of an unconcerned romancer, who speaks in the name of others with a latitude which people, not entirely degraded, would never adopt towards themselves. The suspicion is strengthened when the second party to the correspondence, the chief philosopher of his generation, exhibits the same exceptional depravity of taste."--Tr.]

[Footnote 16: "Vale, unice."]

[Footnote 17: Pope's Works, ed. Elwin; "Eloisa to Abelard," II. 245, lines 141-160.]

[Footnote 18: Ibid. II. 240, lines 51-58.

"Heav'n first taught letters for some wretch's aid, Some banished lover, or some captive maid; They live, they speak, they breathe what love inspires, Warm from the soul, and faithful to its fires, The virgin's wish without her fears impart, Excuse the blush, and pour out all the heart, Speed the soft intercourse from soul to soul, And waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole."]

[Footnote 19: Ibid. II. 249, lines 207-222.]

[Footnote 20: Ibid. 255, line 317.]

[Footnote 21: "Eloisa to Abelard," II. 254, lines 297-302.]

[Footnote 22: M. Guillaume Guizot.]

[Footnote 23: Goethe sings: "Liebe sei vor alien Dingen, Unser Thema, wenn wir singen."]

[Footnote 24: See his "Epistle of the Characters of Women." According to Pope, this character is composed of love of pleasure and love of power.]

[Footnote 25: "Rape of the Lock," c. V. 181, line 141.]

[Footnote 26: Ibid. c. II. 153, lines 37-42.]

[Footnote 27: Ibid. c. IV. 169, line 52.]

[Footnote 28: Ibid. c. II. 156, line 107.]

[Footnote 29: Pope's Works, "The Dunciad," bk. I.]

[Footnote 30: Ibid. bk. II.]

[Footnote 31: "The Dunciad," bk. II.]

[Footnote 32: "The Dunciad," the end.]

[Footnote 33: Pope's Works, I. 352; "Windsor Forest," line 211. "Oft in her glass the musing shepherd spies The headlong mountains and the downward skies, The wat'ry landscape of the pendant woods, And absent trees that tremble in the floods."]

[Footnote 34: Ibid. I. 347; "Windsor Forest," lines 111-118.]

[Footnote 35: Ibid. II. 154; "The Rape of the Lock," c. 2, lines 47-68.]

[Footnote 36: Pope's Works, II. 160, "The Rape of the Lock," c. 3, 160, lines 37-44.]

[Footnote 37: "Peins-moi légèrement l'amant léger de Flore, Qu'un doux ruisseau murmure en vers plus doux encore."]

[Footnote 38: A tale of J. J. Rousseau, in which he tries to depict a philosophical clergyman.--Tr.]

[Footnote 39: The "Théodicée" was written in French, and published in 1710.--Tr.]

[Footnote 40: These words are taken from the "Design of an Essay on Man."]

[Footnote 41: Pope's Works, II.; "An Essay on Man," Ep. II. 375, lines 1-18.]

[Footnote 42: Prior's Works, ed. Gilfillan, 1851: "In the remotest wood and lonely grot, Certain to meet that worst of evils, thought."]

[Footnote 43: "Alma," canto II. lines 937-978: "Your nicer Hottentots think meet With guts and tripe to deck their feet; With downcast looks on Totta's legs The ogling youth most humbly begs, She would not from his hopes remove At once his breakfast and his love.... Before you see you smell your toast, And sweetest she who stinks the most."]

[Footnote 44: The same duke who was afterwards nicknamed "the Butcher."]

[Footnote 45: "Poems on Several Occasions," by Mr. John Gay, 1745, 2 vols. II. 141.]

[Footnote 46: Ibid. The Poem to "The Shepherd's Week." I. 6.]

[Footnote 47: Ibid. I. 66.]

[Footnote 48: Gay's Poems, "The Shepherd's Week"; first pastoral, "The Squabble," p. 80.]

[Footnote 49: "Epistle to Mrs. Blount, on Her Leaving the Town."]

[Footnote 50: A French pastoral writer (1717-1803), who wrote, in imitation of Thomson, "Les Saisons."--Tr.]

[Footnote 51: Poetical Works of T. Thomson, ed. R. Bell, 1855, 2 vols.; II. "Spring," 18.]

[Footnote 52: Ibid. 19.]

[Footnote 53: Ibid. 20.]

[Footnote 54: Ibid.]

[Footnote 55: Poetical Works of Thomson, "Liberty," part I. 102.]

[Footnote 56: Anthony Léonard Thomas (1732-1785) wrote memoirs and essays on the character of celebrated men in highly oratorical and pompous style.--Tr.]

[Footnote 57: See the paintings of David, called "Les Fêtes de la Révolution."]

[Footnote 58: Young's "Night Thoughts." Night the First: On Life, Death, and Immortality.]

[Footnote 59: Ibid. Night the Third: Narcissa.]