Chapter XII: Part 12

This we conceive is a grievous inherent error in Wordsworth. The poet of Nature he may perhaps be; but this sort of writing does justice to the proper worth and dignity neither of man _nor_ of Nature.

ON

THE FORMATION OF CLASSICAL ENGLISH:

AN EXTRACT FROM

A LECTURE ON DRYDEN.

Dryden, a true littérateur, simply reflects his epoch; the revolution he was intent upon, and which we are especially bound to consider, was that of English verse composition. While Newton was balancing the earth, and Locke weighing the intellect, Dryden was measuring syllables. While Penn and Locke were venturing experiments in government, he was making them in prosody. Political movements and agitations--the plot and the new plot--dissolutions and elections--falls of ministries and impeachments and deaths were to him chiefly of interest because he must mould the subject of his verse accordingly. To please the King as laureate he is in duty bound; and to serve his cause with rhyme to the purpose. Also prose.

Yet what side _should_ a littérateur of real excellence take if not that of the King and the court? who certainly had the best taste, were the most judicious critics as well as the most likely paymasters. Settle and Shadwell might suit the Aldermen and the Exclusionists, who knew no better. And nothing, I imagine, more completely suited Dryden, more exactly met his feelings, and gave freer scope to his talents, than the revolution in literature which the new King and court sought to naturalise in England. To guide the process of that change and to elevate a matter of mere passing court fashion into a permanent reformation of English literature; to dignify a mere slipslop aversion of pedantry by converting it into an appreciation of elegance and propriety of writing--this was his vocation. He devoted himself to it for forty years with infinite zeal and perseverance, laborious study, and patient carefulness. And certainly with some considerable success.

During the whole of the next century I suppose it was considered that our language first was written, so to speak, by him. For models of composition no one was recommended anterior to him. In English poetry he is for them the earliest name. Into Johnson’s collection Cowley and Butler, and one or two others coëval with Dryden, are admitted, but not Spenser. So too in prose it is only in our time that people have begun to talk of Jeremy Taylor and Milton as legitimate standards of English prose composition. Dryden was supposed to have commenced in the two kinds of writing what Pope and Addison made perfect. For style Shakespeare was dangerous and Hooker pernicious reading; Ben Jonson’s wit was ponderous and the wisdom of Bacon pedantic; the mirth of Fletcher was rude and vulgar, the elegance of Sidney formal and factitious.

Maxims of this kind prevailed from the days of Dryden to those of Byron and Scott. There are circles where they are still current, and there are possibilities of their again finding a more general acceptation. I incline to believe that there is a great deal of truth in them. Our language before the Restoration certainly was for the most part bookish, academical, and stiff. You perceive that our writers have first learnt to compose in Latin; and you feel as if they were now doing so in English. Their composition is not a harmonious development of spoken words, but a copy of written words. We are set to study ornate and learned periods; but we are not charmed by finding our ordinary everyday speech rounded into grace and smoothed into polish, chastened to simplicity and brevity without losing its expressiveness, and raised into dignity and force without ceasing to be familiar; saying once for all what we in our rambling talk try over and over in vain to say; and saying it simply and fully, exactly and perfectly.

This scholastic and constrained manner of men who had read more than they talked, and had (of necessity) read more Latin than English; of men who passed from the study to the pulpit, and from the pulpit back to the study--this elevated and elaborated diction of learned and religious men was doomed at the Restoration. Its learning was pedantry, and its elevation pretence. It was no way suited to the wants of the court, nor the wishes of the people. It was not likely that the courtiers would impede the free motions of their limbs with the folds of the cumbrous theological vesture; and the nation in general was rather weary of being preached to. The royalist party, crowding back from French banishment, brought their French tastes and distastes. James I. loved Latin and even Greek, but Charles II. liked French better even than English. In one of Dryden’s plays is a famous scene, in which he ridicules the fashionable jargon of the day, which seems to have been a sort of slipshod English, continually helped out with the newest French phrases.

Dryden then has the merit of converting this corruption and dissolution of our old language into a new birth and renovation. And not only must we thank him for making the best of the inevitable circumstances and tendencies of the time, but also praise him absolutely for definitely improving our language. It is true that he sacrificed a great deal of the old beauty of English writing, but that sacrifice was inevitable; he retained all that it was practicable to save, and he added at the same time all the new excellence of which the time was capable.

You may call it, if you please, a democratic movement in the language. It was easier henceforth both to write and to read. To understand written English, it was not necessary first to understand Latin; and yet written English was little less instructive than it had been, or if it was less elevating, it was on the other hand more refining.

For the first time, you may say, people found themselves reading words easy at once and graceful; fluent, yet dignified; familiar, yet full of meaning. To have organised the dissolving and separating elements of our tongue into a new and living instrument, perfectly adapted to the requirements and more than meeting the desires and aspirations of the age, this is our author’s praise. But it is not fully expressed until you add that this same instrument was found, with no very material modification, sufficient for the wants and purposes of the English people for more than a century. The new diction conquered, which the old one had never done, Scotland and Ireland, and called out American England into articulation. Hume and Robertson learnt it; Allan Ramsay and Burns studied it; Grattan spoke it; Franklin wrote it. You will observe that our most popular works in prose belong to it. So do our greatest orators. A new taste and a new feeling for the classics grew up with it. It translated, to the satisfaction of its time, Homer and Virgil.

Our present tongue, so far as it differs from this, cannot profess to have done nearly so much. Homer and Virgil no longer content us in Pope and Dryden, but we have not been able to get anything to content us. The English diction of the nineteenth century has no Burke or Chatham to boast of, nor any Hume or Johnson.

There may be some superiority in matter. We have had a good deal of new experience, both in study and in action--new books and new events have come before us. But we have not yet in England, I imagine, had any one to give us a manner suitable to our new matter. There has been a kind of dissolution of English, but no one writer has come to re-unite and re-vivify the escaping components. We have something new to say, but do not know how to say it. The language has been popularised, but has not yet vindicated itself from being vulgarised. A democratic revolution is effecting itself in it, without that aristocratic reconstruction which pertains to every good democratic revolution. Everybody can write, and nobody writes well. We can all speak, and none of us know how. We have forgotten or rejected the old diction of our grandfathers, and shall leave, it seems likely, no new diction for our grandchildren. With some difficulty we make each other understand what we mean, but, unassisted by personal explanations and comment, it is to be feared our mere words will not go far. Our grandfathers read and wrote books: our fathers reviews: and we newspapers; will our children and grandchildren read our old newspapers? Have we any one who speaks for our day as justly and appropriately as Dryden did for his? Have we anything that will stand wear and tear, and will be as bright and un-obsolete a hundred and fifty years hence, as ‘Alexander’s Feast’ is to-day?

LECTURE

ON THE

DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

FROM CHAUCER TO WORDSWORTH.

(1852.)

The subject of my lecture is the Development of English Literature. It were idle for me to attempt, and would be foolish in me to desire, to say anything strikingly new upon it. Anything strikingly original could be striking only because incorrect; and would in the end most likely be found not even original.

Some novelty indeed there would be--the novelty of a rarely attained success--could I, while passing in review the literature of our country, treat of every part in proper place and due proportion, without undervaluing, without overcolouring, without either omission or exaggeration.

Something interesting too, if not striking, there might be, could I, in following the development of English literature, indicate to you truly its connection with the development of English character, point out correctly why it was natural at particular epochs that particular things should be said; how the times affected the writers, and the writers express the times; and what sequence of changing words and deeds has brought down the England of history to the modern England of our own times in the East and in the West.

In commencing such a conspectus, I can have no hesitation in selecting the first name: English literature begins with Chaucer. The most substantive and dominant element in our blood and in our language is, it may be perfectly true, the Anglo-Saxon. But it cannot be said that either in our blood or language this element had established its permanent relations to other--to Celtic, Danish, Norman, immigrant, invasive, and rebellious elements--had taken amidst these and communicated to these a distinct direction of its own, before the era of King Edward III. and the close of the fourteenth century. The same (and this is much more important) may be affirmed of the English national mind. In the age of Chaucer it may be said that the English people, such as ever since then it has been (and such never it had been till then), had, for good or for evil, or more truly for both, entered in various ways--in religion, in morals, in domestic habits, in government, in social relations, in relations to other members of the European body--upon a definite and positive course. The position which we still hold as a northern, part Scandinavian, part German people, ever resisting and yet ever submitting most largely to accept the subtle influences of Southern civilisation and refinement--our position, too, of antagonism, in particular to the other great mixed nation, England’s immediate neighbour, was ours in the era of the first French wars. And the picture of all that pertains to those first exhibitions (for good or for evil, or for both) of our English genius and temper you may see surviving unfaded in the lively colouring of the ‘Canterbury Tales’; exhibitions, I have said, of genius and temper; of dispositions, inclinations, tendencies, it is true, rather than of any formed and rigidly fixed determination. It is our boyhood; but the man in looking back to it is conscious that that boyhood was his:--folded and compressed within the bud we detect the petals of the coming flower, the rudiment of the future fruit. What, for example, can be truer to permanent English likings and dislikings, what more exact to the nation’s habitual views and preferences in life, than these lines in the description of the monk? Let me premise that St. Maure, and St. Benett or Benedict, St. Austin or Augustin, are the great monastic legislators: that _wood_, as in Scotch, still means crazy, and _swink_, as in Shakespeare, _toil_:--

The rule of Saint Maure and of Saint Benett
Because that it was old and some deal straight,
This ilkĕ monk let oldĕ thinges pace,
And held after the newĕ world the trace.
He gave not for that text a pulled hen,
That saith that hunters be not holy men.

And I say his opinion was good.
What should he studie and make himselven wood,
Upon a book in cloistre alway to pore,
Or swinken with his handes and laboure,
As Austin bid? _How shall the world be served?_
Let Austin have his swink to him reserved.

I do not think that our countrymen in this generation have lost their distaste to devout seclusion and associate task-work, or their passion for individual enterprise; the hearty acceptance, so only indeed they do exist, of all existing things, good, bad, and indifferent; the desire to grapple with common facts, and the feeling, that some way or other the question--How shall the world be served? must receive an answer.

Certainly we may still find in Old England ladies--I quote Chaucer--paining themselves to counterfeit cheer of court, and be estately of manere, and to be held worthy of reverence; busy or busy-seeming lawyers:--

No where so busy a man as he, as he there n’was,
And yet he seemed busier than he was;

country gentlemen, great at the sessions, and greater at the dinner table; the tried soldier, silent and unpretending; the young soldier, much the reverse; the merchant, so discreet and stedfast,

There wistĕ no man that he was in debt;

religious and laborious parish-clergymen, and church dignitaries, not very religious, and not at all laborious. Such is the picture given by Chaucer of his fellow-travellers on the highway from London to Canterbury in the year 1383, as the old tradition of the Tabard Inn in Southwark records, as it might be any present Englishman’s description of his in the year 1852.

From boyhood we step to early manhood; from Chaucer pass to Shakespeare, and behold now, not temper, and tendency, and disposition, but thought, contemplation, doubt. In language less easy far and natural, but infinitely more pregnant, significant, and profound, in a style abounding in faults as in beauties, we hear, not, as from Chaucer, all that Englishmen in his time were like, but all that man in all times may be. As on the mount of vision, from whose secret summit were seen the kingdoms of the world and the glory thereof, so on the elevation of his own poised intellect stood the spirit of the Elizabethan dramatist, sweeping slowly the horizon of human will and action--all the possible varieties of which were delivered into its power, ‘to be or not to be.’ So shone concentrated in the being of one man, as into the form of some irradiant star, the collective intelligence of centuries gone by,--

the prophetic soul
Of the great world dreaming o’er things to come.

Into details of critical remark on Shakespeare I do not now purpose to carry you. Let me but mark one point. It is impossible, I should suppose, for any reader who does not come to the plays of Shakespeare with a judgment overborne by the weight of authority or the force of general sentiment--it is impossible, I should imagine, for any ingenuous, dispassionate reader not to find himself surprised, checked, disappointed, shocked, even revolted, by what in any other author--in an author of modern times--he would call gross defects in point of plot, flagrant inconsistencies of character. In ‘As You Like It,’ for example, who is not astounded to meet in Act V. the unnatural brother of Act I., by the rehabilitation of a most cursory _Deus-ex-machinâ_ sort of penitence, or shall I call it regret, qualified for the love, wedlock, and happiness which honest people had been working up to through the whole long drama? Whom does the marriage of Angelo and Mariana leave quite easy in his mind? Whose moral sensibilities are not a little ruffled by a strange phantasmagoria of good people becoming bad of a sudden, and all of a sudden good again; good and happy, too, after every sort of misconduct, after the wickedest and foulest actions, with one touch of the wand all made right; guilt converted to innocence, with not a stain left behind--long-suffering virtue shall wed quick repentant vice--and all, it would seem, simply to bring the play to a happy ending?

For the explanation of these apparent blemishes--these obvious incongruities in the comedies (for that is their region) of our great poet, I might refer you to M. Guizot’s criticism on Shakespeare. One element in it consists in the fact, which we are pretty safe in assuming, that with the story Shakespeare had little or nothing to do; he simply took what was given him, and made of it what he could--what he had occasion or time for. And yet that the taste of the time, and that he himself should acquiesce in such a representation, is a matter, I think, in some degree appertaining to that balanced, speculative character which I attempted but now to describe, natural to the age and characteristic of the writer.

Free and serene in youth, newly emancipated from teachers and directors, unfettered any longer by precept or injunction of others, unbound as yet by any self-imposed restriction, or even any formed determination--in the richness of a reflectiveness which even now is all but a malady, in the fulness of an almost premature maturity of thought--in a distant preconception or presentiment wandering undecided in the garden of the infinite choices; free as yet to select, loving much rather as yet to forbear; with a tranquil wistfulness, with a far-sighted consciousness, looking down those unnumbered, diverging, far-reaching avenues of future actuality, each one of which, but, if any _one_, then not any other, he may follow--such I venture to picture to myself the second poet of the English series--the second and the greatest--the creator of Othello and of Falstaff, of Hotspur and of Hamlet.

Not uncompromised, not uncommitted any longer, self-committed, strongly, deliberately, seriously, irreversibly committed; walking as in the sight of God, as in the profound, almost rigid conviction that this one, and no other of all those many paths is, or can be, for the just and upright spirit possible, self-predestined as it were, of his own will and foreknowledge, to a single moral and religious aim--such, I think, are we to imagine the writer of ‘Paradise Lost’ and of ‘Samson Agonistes,’ the third of the English poets. To what purpose these myriad phenomena, entering and traversing the field of that mighty object-glass of the speculative intellect? Is it life to observe? Is it a man’s service to know? As if it was a thing possible for us to forbear to act; as though there were not in God’s world, amidst ten thousand wrongs, one right, amidst the false choices that offend Him, the one that is His will. And yet, though in 1623, when the players put out the first collected edition, the first folio of the tragedies, comedies, and histories of William Shakespeare, Milton, aged sixteen, was translating psalms, to the second of these folios, in 1632, were prefixed the verses by John Milton, ‘What needs my Shakespeare.’ And among the productions of that pure protracted youth, ending, we may say, only in his thirty-third year, and devoted to books and letters,--though ‘Comus,’ it is true, seems prophetic of the stern and religious virtues of the after-manhood and old age--‘L’Allegro’ meantime, ‘Il Penseroso,’ and parts of ‘Comus’ itself show lineaments of a gentler and less positive, more natural and less merely moral character. Is there not here in these earlier poems, lingering still, and as yet undismissed, a little of that poetic hesitance, that meditative reluctance to take a part which I attributed but now as his characteristic to Shakespeare? Does not the youthful Milton, while in this immature period, pondering, examining, testing, as it were, upon his spiritual palate the viands of life, approximate, I will not determine how closely, to that personal undramatic Shakespeare, who sadly and almost remorsefully could say of himself?--

Alas! ’tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view.
Gored my own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear.

Or again,--

Oh! for my sake, do you with fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds.

Or in a graver tone still,--

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful Earth,
Fooled by those rebel powers that thee array.

Upon the broad brows and in the deep eyes of Shakespeare I could believe myself to see, during the inditing of records such as this, a mournful expression which might pass with ease into the fixed pure look of Milton, and could identify, under circumstances of no violent transmutation, the lips which uttered, ‘What! because thou art virtuous, shall there be no cakes and ale? aye, and ginger be hot in the mouth?’ with those of him who closed _his_ drama with the sentence that

If virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her.

But such a fleeting similarity of transition, if there were, in the thoughtful countenance of the youthful Milton, was soon and totally effaced. _He_ is a man of far different genius and character whom we see in the seventeen succeeding years of his prime, from his thirty-third to his fiftieth, teaching scholars and reforming education; married, and deserted, and propounding a new doctrine of divorce; taking a side in the great Civil War, joining in controversy with bishops and archbishops, acting as secretary to a republican government, and--

In Liberty’s defence, my noble task,
With which all Europe rings from side to side--

justifying the death of kings.

Or he again, who, blind and anon impoverished, neglected, imprisoned, persecuted in another and concluding space of seventeen years, bated nevertheless not one jot of heart and hope, and

On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness and with danger compassed round,

found in his lowest estate his highest inspiration, and converted his season of endurance and affliction into his period of most perfect and permanent achievement.

The spirit of Milton, no less than the spirit of Shakespeare, still lives and breathes in our native air; we imbibe it in the earliest and commonest influences that environ us; it has entered, for good, for evil, or for both, into the constituents of our national character.

Nevertheless, the proper manhood of the English nation dates, I believe, from the generation which rejected Milton. The Counter-Revolution of 1660 and the final Revolution of 1688 are the two critical convulsions which restored us to our proper natural course. It is impossible, after all, not to recognise in those seemingly senseless acclamations which welcomed back the exiled Stuart a real and important significance. It is impossible not to sympathise with the joy and exultation of people at throwing off the yoke of an iron system of morals, proved by experience not coextensive with facts, not true to the necessary exigencies and experiences of life.

Fain to return to that larger range from which for a while we had remained self-excluded, but incapable any longer of sustaining ourselves upon the unsupported elevation of speculative vision; eager again to see what in Shakespeare we had viewed, to feel ourselves again within the circle of those infinitely various relations, but too far engaged in actual things to be competent now of seeing merely, of feeling only; eager, were it possible--which it no longer is--to find satisfaction to adult impulses in the gratification of those old boyish instincts, dispositions, tempers, tendencies, left behind so far away as Chaucer; resolute, however, in any case, come what would or might, to face and confront, to acknowledge and accept the facts of that living palpable world which cannot for any long time be disowned or evaded, with the vision of the universe departed, with innocence and the untroubled conscience forfeited, behold us here at the close of the seventeenth century, embarking, in whose name we know not, and profess to ourselves that we care not, upon the seas of actual and positive existence.

You will observe that in the period commencing with the Restoration and continuing through the eighteenth century, literature, though gaining infinitely in variety, loses in elevation; its predominant and characteristic form is not, as hitherto, the highest, the _poetical_. What poetry does exist is by no means of the highest order, nor aims at the highest objects; it is rather as a source of elegant amusement, as an efficacious means towards refinement and polish, as an ally and auxiliary of carriage and high breeding, as an emollient of manners and antidote to brutality, that we are taught to regard it. What indeed the really instructive, the serious and significant form of literature is, were hard to say: it seems even doubtful at times whether it possesses at all any form deserving any such high-sounding epithets; at times we cannot refrain from the belief that the whole energy, moral, intellectual, and vital, of the nation has passed off into the common business, the ordinary hard work of individual everyday life; that what we see in the name of literature is but a mere dead and mechanical repetition, an aimless and meaningless observance of traditional habits. At times again, on the other hand, the abundance, and the variety, and the broad substantive character of what the Englishmen of this period wrote and have left for us, fill us with admiration while we contrast it with the poverty, narrowness, and uniformity of our preceding literature. The complexity of the picture is enhanced, and the embarrassment and doubt of our judgments and feelings aggravated, while we further observe how our national mind and literature begin to enter more now than ever before into intimate relations with the other great personal, national forces which have in the last hundred years sprung up into life and vigour on the Continent. Chaucer, it is true--and it is his praise--gave the final completion, by copious admissions of Norman-French vocables and phrases, to the transformation, shall I say, or new creation, of our homely, meagre, inarticulate semi-Saxon into a civilised and living speech, fit for the harmonious repetition to English ears of graceful Italian or classic story, and the enduring utterance of native thought and sentiment. By Italian cadence and rhythm Spenser tuned his docile ear, and learnt to remodulate, after an age of disuse, the language in which Shakespeare was to delineate the traditions of Verona and Venice, and give immortality to Florentine romances. The soul of Milton had dieted on ‘immortal notes and Tuscan airs,’ and been imbued with Italian scenes and Italian friendships, and had learnt in that converse to

Feed on thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers,

ere he thought them worthy to arise ‘to the height of that great argument.’

Nevertheless, this culture in classic grace, and this schooling in the nice accomplishment of verse which the English poets had sought with submission and deference from the descendants of Livy and Virgil, cannot, in any sort, be paralleled with that encounter and fusion which is now to come to pass with a national mind, single and original as our own, proved, chastened, and fortified by a long course of thought, action, and suffering. The French nation, marked from its original development, shall we say, in the era of the first and second Crusades, by a peculiar and distinct character, mingling in a wonderful compound the fervour of the south and the vigour of the north, heirs direct of an older civilisation, scene of the earliest resuscitation of thought, taking, in the later ages of religious contention, a separate and special position between the old, as in Italy and Spain, and the new, as in England and North Germany; with a readier understanding, with a more rapid and more immediate and seizing intellect; working out, by a logic of its own, conclusions, distinct from those of _any_, yet in relation to those of _every_ European community; free-thinking from the first in Montaigne, sceptically devout in Pascal, embellishing the ancient faith in Bossuet, and scaling the summit of the latest doubt in Descartes, the French nation obviously had much to communicate to its insular neighbours--the Puritan, or all-but Puritan, English people.

Yet, on the other hand, to pass into the region of mere imitation, to sit at the feet even of writers as great as Racine and Molière, to owe fealty to the dicta of Boileau, to fit on the literary court-costume of Louis XIV., and pick up the fine language of the Regency, would appear to carry somewhat of indignity to men that

Speak the tongue
That Shakspeare spoke; the faith and morals hold
That Milton held.

From this dangerous communion it may be said that the English mind returned with little loss of originality, and with a large accession of ideas and perceptions; it had offered as freely, if not as copiously, as it had taken; in the mass of imitation the native genius is still to be discerned, surviving and subsisting; in the prostration of ancient tenets and habits the old character remains upright, unoverthrown and unsubdued. One could really believe that we might have consented to learn yet more and got no harm by it. And, reappearing strangely disguised and metamorphosed, we shall still find the spirit of the Elizabethan age and of the Puritan; the high functions which Shakespeare and Milton performed will be performed in the new era less splendidly but more effectually by smaller men and humbler agencies.

Dryden, born in 1631 and dying in 1700, and Cowper, born and dying in the corresponding years of the following century, we may make the limits of our new period.

After the age of Shakespeare, Milton, and the translation of the Bible, that of Addison, Swift, and the translations of Homer and Virgil may seem degenerate. Dryden, who heads the list, after commencing panegyrist under Oliver Cromwell, and showing his good-will in the same capacity under the restored Charles II., presently proceeds as playwright, political satirist, theological controversialist, critical essayist, classical translator. We may take him as an earnest of what is to follow. Playwrights, in Dryden and Otway, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, assume first the pre-eminence. Classical translation, and almost at the same time the Essay, aspire next to supremacy, and claim Augustan honours in Pope and Addison. From 1740 to 1770 may be called the culmination of the novelists: from 1750 to 1790 is the period of the historians. The last decade of the century finds us restored to other and different poetry in Cowper and in Bums.

The items in the list may appear somewhat trivial. Yet you cannot fail to observe that they consist of names extremely well known; well known not there only or here, but wherever the English language is spoken or studied. It is to these that foreigners desirous of learning our language most naturally recur. They constitute our ordinary standard literature, and for models in English writing the tradition, not yet obsolete, of our fathers refers us imperatively hither. We cannot, with any safety, follow examples anterior to them; nor easily find any amongst their successors. Our own age is notorious for slovenly or misdirected habits of composition, while the seventeenth century wasted itself in the excesses of scholastic effort. English prose, before the age of Dryden, was in the hands, for the most part, of men who read and preached more than they talked, and had learnt to compose Latin before they set themselves to write the vernacular. But Latin is, by the inherent nature of its grammar and construction, a language singularly alien to the genius of a natural English style. French, which was the chief reading of the English writers after the Restoration, both as a living and as a modern language, was a far more useful auxiliary. And at their coffee-houses and clubs, the wits of our Augustan age were, even Addison included, fairly accustomed to lively conversation. And the study of French tended to save from vulgarity and meanness diction which conversational habits made thoroughly idiomatic. For manner, and for the subtle and potent impressions conveyed by manner, you may assuredly consult with great benefit the majority of these unpretending items.

I may further raise your estimate of these names if I remind you of their connection, at least in time, with workings of the human intellect not exactly included in the name of literature. The period of discoveries in Natural Philosophy begins with the reign of that restored Stuart whose picture looks down still, if I mistake not, with the title of founder on the meetings of the Royal Society. Newton’s ‘Principia’ is not, perhaps, a book pertaining to Belles Lettres; yet Newton and his fellow-discoverers have a good deal to do with the character of the age of Dryden. If I introduce, by the side of the translation of Virgil, the name of Locke on the ‘Human Understanding,’ I shall add, I suppose, some specific gravity to the close of the degenerate seventeenth century; and it will not be without some effect that I intercalate between Thomson’s ‘Seasons’ and Richardson’s ‘Pamela,’ at the date 1736, the title of Butler’s ‘Analogy of Religion.’ The advance of the century which presents us with the great histories of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon, gains additional seriousness also from Hume’s philosophical as from Johnson’s moral writing. And certainly, though the apparent results were less brilliant, our respect and attention are claimed quite as strongly by the mental and moral as by the natural or physical philosophy of this age.

The subject belongs properly to profounder lecturers; I shall merely touch upon it in connection with that literature which it serves more than could anything else to explain. It was our mental philosophy which, far more than our ordinary Belles Lettres, drew upon us the attention of Europe in general. Voltaire was indeed acquainted with Pope, Dryden, and Swift, but he declared himself openly the student of Newton and the pupil of Locke; and professed the mission of an apostle to his countrymen of the doctrines of the English philosophy; and in that philosophy only we can expect to find the fundamental convictions upon which, when the worst came to the worst, Englishmen of that age conceived they could retreat: it therefore must be considered as the substantial reality upon which the fleeting phenomena of plays, poetry, and novels are sustained. Its temper was, I suppose, narrow and material: bent upon the examination of phenomena, it admitted only such as present themselves to the lower and grosser senses; to the notices of the higher and purer it peremptorily refused its attention. We cannot live without the impalpable air which we breathe, any more than without the solid earth which we tread upon; the intimations of a spiritual world of which we cannot be rigidly, and, as it were, by all our senses, certified, constitute for our inner life an element as essential as the plain matter of fact without which nothing can be done. But it is certain also that without that matter of fact nothing can be done, and, moreover, very little can be thought: palpable things, by divine right, by inevitable necessity, and intelligent ordinance, claim our habitual attention; we are more concerned with our steps upon the ground than our inhalation of the atmosphere; stories of the apparition of ghosts may very likely be true, but even if they are it matters extremely little.

This austere love of truth; this righteous abhorrence of illusion; this rigorous, uncompromising rejection of the vague, the untestified, the merely probable; this stern conscientious determination without paltering and prevarication to admit, _if_ things are bad, that they are so; this resolute, upright purpose, as of some transcendental man of business, to go thoroughly into the accounts of the world and make out once for all how they stand: such a spirit as this, I may say, I think, claims more than our attention--claims our reverence.

We must not lose it--we must hold fast by it, precious to us as Shakespeare’s intellectual or Milton’s moral sublimities; while our eyes look up with them, our feet must stay themselves firmly here. Such, I believe, is the strong feeling of the English nation; the spirit of Newton and of Locke possesses us at least in as full measure as that of any one of their predecessors.

To trace that spirit working in the minds and morals of our fathers of the last century would be curiously instructive. Pure intellectual action is apt, no doubt, to be for the time so absorbing as to draw to itself all the agencies of our nature, as to suspend the just and fitting exercise of other, and it may be nobler, functions. Philosophers are frequently dim of sight for the phenomena of everyday life, a little hard of hearing for the calls of plain humanity. Let that moral purpose which should first embark, and through the whole voyage should accompany, the true philosopher be his justification. It is a special service that he undertakes, and he may be excused if, to execute it, he does not act wholly as others do, or as in itself would be best.

Such a pervading moral purpose is in England exhibited by the chief philosophers of the eighteenth century. Such a moral purpose, perhaps, we may claim for the century itself in general; admitting, however, at the same time, whether it be the fault of philosophy or of that particular style of philosophy which then prevailed, that, at any rate amongst the upper and more educated classes, both morality and religion seem to have held disadvantageous and precarious ground, to have maintained or struggled to maintain themselves in a position only just tenable. The maxim of the time appears to be that it is man’s duty to sustain himself upon a minimum of moral assumption; in point of fact, to strive to solve the problem of habituation to living on nothing. Morality survives, we know not well how, in Hume. Religion appears to be driven to its inmost line of defences, to be fighting from its encincture of fortification, in Butler’s analogical argument. And Johnson, in the last resort, can but confute Hume, as Berkeley--with a stamp upon the ground.

Of what dubious cogency, compared with ancient doctrine, is the morality implied in the summary of character with which Mary Queen of Scots is dismissed from the English History. How different from the idea of a religion meeting all the otherwise disappointed hopes, fulfilling all the profoundest and most secret needs of our spiritual nature, is the great argument of the ‘Analogy,’ which, nakedly stated, would seem to run, that we have no right to claim a religion according to our own fancies, that as the world of ordinary facts is full of difficulties, so also it is to be expected will be religion also. How matter-of-fact, and, as good people now would say, how low is the morality of Johnson; how indiscriminate, moreover, he is obliged, in his extreme need, to be in his religious faith and devotional observances.

Nevertheless, there is a cogency in this resting upon only the lowest grounds; the winter-vitality of the moral convictions of Hume is worth more than any summer exuberance of sentiment. Butler’s argument does hold water: Johnson’s character does prove something.

But by this time we are seeming to hear a sound as of very different voices, and it is well that we should begin to break off. Religious enthusiasm, wholly unconscious that amongst the upper classes it had been proved a chimera, awakening in all the extravagant force of youth at the touch of Wesley and Whitfield, had this long time, amongst the despised and neglected, been extending its dominions and augmenting its powers. Methodism, long plebeian, is attaining its literary patriciate in Cowper. We must listen, too, while in homely Scots vernacular we are told by an Ayrshire ploughman authentic tidings of living instincts, of spontaneous belief, which not all the philosophy in the brain of the intellectual can banish from the breast of the human being.

In France, also, even Parisian dilettanti are neglecting the persiflage of Voltaire for the sentiment of Rousseau, and the common people are ‘hearing him gladly.’

As men after long abstraction or too careful self-introspection need some sudden change to replace them in their ordinary attitude of life and action; or, as in the ancient Roman Empire, when the old civilisation, with its laws, its government, its intellectual superiority, its literary upper classes, was gradually sinking more and more into a sort of paralytic incapacity, the emergence from below of a plebeian, unintellectual, unrefined religion, and the inroad from without of Northern barbarian races, gave back life to the world--even so in England from the elements representable by Wesley and Burns, in France from what spoke by the mouth of the watchmaker’s son of Geneva, came strange renovation.

You observe, upon referring to a table of chronology, how as the stars, whose courses we have been contemplating, begin to disappear below, so already above the horizon there may be seen showing themselves the lights of a new generation. Before Johnson had left the world you see Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, Southey already entered upon it; entering it much about the time that Hume and Goldsmith quit it. Gibbon sees that last volume, which in his garden at Lausanne he rejoiced to lay down completed, issue from the press; and Byron is already born. The men whom we ourselves have seen, some of whom still survive--the men of whose careers some in this room may have been immediate witnesses, the impress from whose spirit is more immediately set upon us all, are already alive and even at work. Were I to pass over the momentous barrier of the great French Revolution, and look into the last decade of the eighteenth century, we should see there, while the light of Burns suddenly goes out, and the feeble spark which testifies to the existence of Cowper expires sadly with the expiring centenary, we should see there Coleridge and Wordsworth and Southey busy, and before the public, Coleridge and Southey planning as in a dream a Pantisocratic community on the banks of the smooth-sounding Susquehanna, Coleridge and Wordsworth presently writing in country seclusion together poems which the former never, the latter scarcely ever, improved upon.

But I shall be doing wrong, I feel and see, in overstepping this magic limit of the century. I am leading you unawares from a gallery of portraits of the dead through a door that opens upon a meeting of living, moving, and acting men. From history I am seducing you to self-observation; from the ripe and gathered sheaves I am diverting you to the field where good and bad, by no rash hand to be sundered, must grow together to an harvest which is not yet. Of the characteristics of this new epoch, of its purport and significance, let us not dream of seeking any analysis or giving any representation.

Twenty years hence, when the hot blood of Byron shall have cooled in the veins of the generation he addressed, and when Scott’s mountain excursions shall seem an exploded amusement, and Wordsworth’s evening walks a faded reverie, twenty years hence it will be time enough to meet together and discuss our past selves and the literature of the commencement of the nineteenth century.

REVIEW OF SOME POEMS

BY

ALEXANDER SMITH AND MATTHEW ARNOLD.

(Published in the ‘North American Review’ for July 1853,
Vol. lxxvii., No. 160.)

Poems by Alexander Smith, a volume recently published in London, and by this time reprinted in Boston, deserve attention. They have obtained in England a good deal more notice than is usually accorded there to first volumes of verse; nor is this by any means to be ascribed to the mere fact that the writer is, as we are told, a mechanic; though undoubtedly that does add to their external interest, and perhaps also enhances their intrinsic merit. It is to this, perhaps, that they owe a force of purpose and character which makes them a grateful contrast to the ordinary languid collectanea published by young men of literary habits; and which, on the whole, may be accepted as more than compensation for many imperfections of style and taste.

The models whom this young poet has followed have been, it would appear, predominantly, if not exclusively, the writers of his own immediate time, _plus_ Shakspeare. The antecedents of the ‘Life-Drama,’ the one long poem which occupies almost the whole of his volume, are to be found in the ‘Princess,’ in parts of Mrs. Browning, in the love of Keats, and the _habit_ of Shakspeare. There is no Pope, or Dryden,[22] or even Milton; no Wordsworth, Scott, or even Byron to speak of. We have before us, we may say, the latest disciple of the school of Keats, who was indeed no well of English undefiled, though doubtless the fountain-head of a true poetic stream. Alexander Smith is young enough to free himself from his present manner, which does not seem his simple and natural own. He has given us, so to say, his Endymion; it is certainly as imperfect, and as mere a promise of something wholly different, as was that of the master he has followed.

We are not sorry, in the meantime, that this Endymion is not upon Mount Latmos. The natural man does pant within us after _flumina silvasque_; yet really, and truth to tell, is it not, upon the whole, an easy matter to sit under a green tree by a purling brook, and indite pleasing stanzas on the beauties of Nature and fresh air? Or is it, we incline to ask, so very great an exploit to wander out into the pleasant field of Greek or Latin mythology, and reproduce, with more or less of modern adaptation--

the shadows
Faded and pale, yet immortal, of Faunus, the Nymphs, and the Graces?

Studies of the literature of any distant age or country; all the imitations and _quasi_-translations which help to bring together into a single focus the scattered rays of human intelligence; poems after classical models, poems from Oriental sources, and the like, have undoubtedly a great literary value. Yet there is no question, it is plain and patent enough, that people much prefer ‘Vanity Fair’ and ‘Bleak House.’ Why so? Is it simply because we have grown prudent and prosaic, and should not welcome, as our fathers did, the Marmions and the Rokebys, the Childe Harolds and the Corsairs? Or is it, that to be widely popular, to gain the ear of multitudes, to shake the hearts of men, poetry should deal, more than at present it usually does, with general wants, ordinary feelings, the obvious rather than the rare facts of human nature? Could it not attempt to convert into beauty and thankfulness, or at least into some form and shape, some feeling, at any rate, of content--the actual, palpable things with which our everyday life is concerned; introduce into business and weary task-work a character and a soul of purpose and reality; intimate to us relations which, in our unchosen, peremptorily appointed posts, in our grievously narrow and limited spheres of action, we still, in and through all, retain to some central, celestial fact? Could it not console us with a sense of significance, if not of dignity, in that often dirty, or at least dingy, work which it is the lot of so many of us to have to do, and which some one or other, after all, must do? Might it not divinely condescend to all infirmities; be in all points tempted as we are; exclude nothing, least of all guilt and distress, from its wide fraternisation; not content itself merely with talking of what may be better elsewhere, but seek also to deal with what _is_ here? We could each one of us, alas, be so much that somehow we find we are not; we have all of us fallen away from so much that we still long to call ours. Cannot the Divine Song in some way indicate to us our unity, though from a great way off, with those happier things; inform us, and prove to us, that though we are what we are, we may yet, in some way, even in our abasement, even by and through our daily work, be related to the purer existence?

The modern novel is preferred to the modern poem, because we do here feel an attempt to include these indispensable latest addenda--these phenomena which, if we forget on Sunday, we must remember on Monday--these positive matters of fact, which people, who are not verse-writers, are obliged to have to do with.

Et fortasse cupressum
Scis simulare; quid hoc, si fractis enatat exspes
Navibus, ære dato qui pingitur?

The novelist does try to build us a real house to be lived in; and this common builder, with no notion of the orders, is more to our purpose than the student of ancient art who proposes to lodge us under an Ionic portico. We are, unhappily, not gods, nor even marble statues. While the poets, like the architects, are--a good thing enough in its way--studying ancient art, comparing, thinking, theorising, the common novelist tells a plain tale, often trivial enough, about this, that, and the other, and obtains one reading at any rate; is thrown away indeed to-morrow, but is devoured to-day.

We do not at all mean to prepare the reader for finding the great poetic desideratum in this present Life-Drama. But it has at least the advantage, such as it is, of not showing much of the _littérateur_ or connoisseur, or indeed the student; nor is it, as we have said, mere pastoral sweet piping from the country. These poems were not written among books and busts, nor yet

By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

They have something substantive and lifelike, immediate and first-hand, about them. There is a charm, for example, in finding, as we do, continual images drawn from the busy seats of industry; it seems to satisfy a want that we have long been conscious of, when we see the black streams that welter out of factories, the dreary lengths of urban and suburban dustiness,

The squares and streets,
And the faces that one meets,

irradiated with a gleam of divine purity.

There are moods when one is prone to believe that, in these last days, no longer by ‘clear spring or shady grove,’ no more upon any Pindus or Parnassus, or by the side of any Castaly, are the true and lawful haunts of the poetic powers; but, we could believe it, if anywhere, in the blank and desolate streets, and upon the solitary bridges of the midnight city, where Guilt is, and wild Temptation, and the dire Compulsion of what has once been done--there, with these tragic sisters around him, and with pity also, and pure Compassion, and pale Hope, that looks like despair, and Faith in the garb of doubt, there walks the discrowned Apollo, with unstrung lyre; nay, and could he sound it, those mournful Muses would scarcely be able, as of old, to respond and ‘sing in turn with their beautiful voices.’

To such moods, and in such states of feeling, this ‘Life-Drama’ will be an acceptable poem. Under the guise of a different story, a story unskilful enough in its construction, we have seemed continually to recognise the ingenious, yet passionate, youthful spirit, struggling after something like right and purity amidst the unnumbered difficulties, contradictions, and corruptions of the heated and crowded, busy, vicious, and inhuman town. Eager for action, incapable of action without some support, yet knowing not on what arm to dare to lean; not untainted; hard pressed; in some sort, at times, overcome--still we seem to see the young combatant, half combatant, half martyr, resolute to fight it out, and not to quit this for some easier field of battle--one way or other to make something of it.